Intercultural Ministries

Intercultural Ministries (IM) supports immigrant leaders' work in grassroots organizations tuned in to community needs. We leverage our volunteer and church networks, offering thought partnership as our partners share their concerns and make strategic connections to support our partners' priorities. We network, train, and consult to promote effective intercultural ministry and international mission networks in and out of Greater Boston.

Often, majority-culture churches and individuals lack connection to and awareness of immigrant-led initiatives. This often leads to duplication of efforts, inefficiencies in funding, or programming that misses the mark. Leaders from a particular community are the ones who can best identify what is working well and what is needed. IM serves as a bridge to immigrant leadership and innovation.  

Some churches and volunteers come from a similar immigrant background; for those who do not, effective training and preparation help volunteers become more power-aware and deferential as they take action. IM's training and coaching are designed to help these volunteers examine their posture, nurturing a commitment to listen and learn first.

Current Projects

Taller de Narrativa
Taller de Narrativa is a collaborative storytelling project in partnership with Agencia Alpha, funded by a Mass Humanities grant. It provides a forum where immigrants can share their stories and co-create public story products that will be shared in fall 2023.

Diaspora Missions Applied Research Project
Diaspora Christians comprise some of North America's most vital parts of the Church. They utilize their communities' rich relational networks with their people in the U.S. and their homelands, building a missional bridge between the two communities. Too often, these diaspora-led mission efforts are unseen or unacknowledged by majority-culture churches and North American mission leaders, even when diaspora mission practitioners are part of their churches or organizations. Additionally, diaspora mission leaders often do their work in an isolated fashion, unaware of the initiatives of other diaspora mission leaders. This two-year applied research project brings together diaspora mission practitioners and majority-culture mission leaders from New England to understand better and strengthen this dynamic missions activity. The project involves one-on-one interviews and multiple consultations, which center diaspora mission practitioners in telling about their work.

Past Projects

Afghan Support
Following the evacuation of 76,000 Afghans to the US in August 2021, IM approached our partners at the Refugee and Immigrant Assistance Center (RIAC) to see what supports would be needed to successfully resettle new arrivals in the Boston area. In response to RIAC’s request and in partnership with local churches, 

• IM trained and mobilized volunteers to assist approximately 200 individuals from Afghanistan through food deliveries, neighborhood orientations. 

• Churches held coat drives, diaper drives, backpack drives, sheets & blankets drives.

• Churches raised money, IM raised money (Afghan fund raised approx $60K).

• Family teams of volunteers supported 14 family units, many continue today in friendship

• Host homes provided temporary shelter to about 60 Afghans during their early weeks in the US.

COVID Collaborations
During the height of COVID, Intercultural Ministries raised funds through donations and grants to help supply our partners at Agencia ALPHA, the Boston Missionary Baptist Community Center, and the Fellowship of Haitian Evangelical Pastors of New England with goods and equipment needed to support food distribution and community care.

Greater Boston Refugee Ministry and Converge Partnership
From 2015-2020, Intercultural Ministries supported churches and volunteers across the Boston area as they reached out to welcome refugees in their communities. 

City Without Walls Initiative
This initiative is an outgrowth of the 2010 Ethnic Ministries Summit: A City Without Walls, hosted in Boston in April 2010. The aim of the initiative is to continue to nurture intercultural relationships and ministry partnerships as a means of expressing and advancing the Kingdom of God. 

Intergenerational Dynamics in Immigrant Churches
The City Without Walls leadership team conducted a series of interviews and group discussions in 2014 and 2015 with both emerging leaders and elder leaders from a number of immigrant and minority culture churches. They shared heartfelt stories of their own journeys as leaders within immigrant churches and beyond. These leaders explored questions about the needs and the barriers for developing healthy intergenerational relationships that allow faith and leadership to continue from one generation to the next. From the input we collected from these forums, our CWW team developed a systems diagram that seeks to identify some of these underlying causes of conflict as well as the processes of maturation in this transitional process. This remains an area for future investigation and work.

Sharing Worship Space on a Higher Level
We offer trainings for congregations that want to share worship space well, helping churches to cross cultural lines and develop healthy relationships with each other.

The Sharing Worship Space trainings emerged out of our research project, Shared Worship Space - an Urban Challenge and a Kingdom Opportunity. This research sought to better understand and explore different models of churches sharing space as well as the opportunities and challenges that come with such arrangements. 

Boston-Berlin Partnership
Building relationships and creating learning environments are essential to IM’s work. Among its networks with urban ministries globally, Emmanuel Gospel Center is connected with Gemeinsam für Berlin (Together for Berlin) a ministry organization in Germany since 2006, whose mission statement is: “Through a growing unity among believers in committed prayer and coordinated action, the Gospel of Jesus Christ shall reach all areas of society and people of all cultures in Berlin, so that the evidence of the Kingdom of God will increase, thus causing a higher quality of life in the city.”

New England's Book of Acts
New England's Book of Acts is a publication of the Emmanuel Gospel Center in Boston, MA, and is modeled after the book of Acts in the Bible.  The book of Acts is in a narrative form and tells about how God was working to grow and advance the churches of the first century through key leaders and events. But God is still working today! New England's Book of Acts captures the stories of how God is growing churches among many people groups and ethnic groups. Emmanuel Gospel Center collaborated with various groups within the church to compile stories, articles, and resources from numerous people groups and ministries that help tell the story of what God is doing in New England.

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