Diversity is awesome; it brings blessings to church environment, like culture, styles of worship and creative food. Nevertheless, diversity has its challenges. First, how do you affirm all ethnicities and value them within an American culture? Second, how do your deal with different perspectives they have of worship, church, and gospel? Third, how do you bring them together in order to accomplish Gods mission, when most of them work long hours every day? 

We started by observing what was relevant and not relevant to the people who were in and outside of our church.

First, we developed a culture of acceptance. Acceptance of our place of origin whether country or social status yet also acceptance of people-appearance. Second, we approached diversity directly, like filtering it into ministry and leadership as well as faith. Third, we became part of Team One, a new project hosted by Rocky Mountain Conference; it provides a governance structure.

Developing a culture of acceptance had a holistic approach. We trained leaders through a book called Spiritual Body Building by Kim Johnson. The book created good discussion among the leaders and a more healthy vision of Gods church. We also worked hard at the pulpit emphasizing the beauty of being different yet one body (discovering your spiritual gifts).

We came up with a celebration day called "Taste of the Nations", and from there we brought diversity into our leadership and ministries, so the people felt valued by culture and skill. We created a worship service that was sensitive to the cultures' needs since our community reflected the same diversity.

With our new governance structure we accomplished two goals. One, we eliminated the old church board. Reason: we only met once a month for two hours and we mostly spoke about problems, no vision or mission. Our new structure allowed the governance team to work with vision and mission, connected us with the needs of our community, and helped the staff to manage ministries as they are empowered to make decisions, while the pastor trains and leads.

Secondly, we decided to become an externally focused church. It helped us get more people involved with less time in their hands. We stick with our surrounding culture and did not copy what other successful churches were doing. We asked ourselves, what do people need in our community, what works, what catches their attention? What pushes them away? These questions helped us wrestle with the real issues and work with reality, not just an idea.