In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. said that “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday.” Almost sixty years later and his words continue to ring mostly true. Even congregations that pride themselves on diversity are rarely multi-cultural. In Becoming All Things, Michelle Ami Reyes gives a blueprint for true multiculturalism in the church, one that values and upholds all people and all cultures. I recently had the chance to talk with Dr. Reyes and the conversation was really quite incredible.The Conversation | Michelle Ami ReyesThis excerpt is lightly edited for conciseness and clarityJosh Olds: Now, I want to start personally with your story. How did you come to write this book?Michelle Ami Reyes: Yeah, well, so my my husband and I—His name is Aaron, he’s a second generation Mexican American and I myself am second generation Indian American. We are church planters in Austin, Texas. And, you know, Oh, goodness, you know, over a decade ago we felt the call to church plant. We planted Hope Community Church in 2014, here on the east side, and we just feel passionate about the call to speak into spaces of culture and race and justice through vocational ministry and advocacy.I feel like through church planting in East Austin, which is a historically disadvantaged Black and Brown community, you can still see the effects of segregation today. And even just day to day vocational ministry entails crossing cultures between African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, immigrants, and we just have a passion for all of those demographics being represented in our church, being represented in the leadership of our church, impacting how we do ministry because we love the church. And we long to see it live out its calling and witness in the world.We can look at Revelation Josh Olds: Bringing cultures together and building diversity. I mean, that was one of the major issues of the early church, if you go back to, you know, the book of Acts and the Gentile and Jewish communities trying to figure out how to be believers together. I find it so interesting that 2000 years later, we are really having some of the same conversations and working out the same things. Building diversity is so difficult, whether that’s ethnic background, cultural background, language differences, socio-economic differences. There are just so many barriers to building a diverse church body. How has your church tried to navigate those challenges?Michelle Ami Reyes: Yeah. There’s humility and love certainly. But you know, I think that there are some intentional ways that you can go about building multicultural—not just multi ethnic—but a multicultural church. It’s important to differentiate between those. Multi-ethnic does not translate to multicultural automatically. Multicultural means the existence and equal treatment of different cultural values, ideas, communication, style, different forms of worship, even different forms of leadership. And, by nature of that, if that truly exists in your church, that sort of multicultural body, it should be very uncomfortable. People will always be in a semi-state of discomfort.The majority of multicultural churches fail to fully live out a true multicultural expression in terms of an equal presence of values, thoughts, and communication, because they are limited to the extent that they can only be as diverse as their white congregants are comfortable....