Last Sunday, Legacy Church, hosted our third annual Cultural Fair that celebrates the world in our backyard. Plano has become a multi-cultural community; especially in our neighborhood (75024). We have committed to embrace this change rather than relocate or huddle together in our own ethnic conclave.We can't call ourselves technically a multi-ethnic congregation a la' Mark Deymaz and others, but if you join us on Sunday, you will see that we are not a "homogeneous unit" gathered to escape our changing world. We look something like the mission field in which we find ourselves.
During our worship Sunday morning of the Cultural Fair, we observed Communion. We celebrate it differently at times, and this week we chose to have people come and receive the elements at five different stations. We took the bread, and the server said, "The Body of Christ broken for you." We dipped the bread in the cup, and the server said, "The Blood of Christ shed for you."
What was
so wonderful this time is that the Legacy members (not imported folks to complete the picture) who served the elements said those words in their native language. We heard the reminder of Jesus' suffering, sacrificial love for us by people from Nigeria, Taiwan, China, Brazil, and Korea.I could not contain my emotions as I heard the good news of Jesus' sacrifice in Mandarin and looked around to see others tearfully receiving the symbols of Christ's love and this tiny taste of heaven!
Revelation 7:9, 10 is God's promise and vision for the church. We experienced some of what heaven will be like as we worshiped as one Sunday morning.
That afternoon twenty-one countries were represented at tables scattered throughout the Legacy Center. The voices, food, dress, smells, dances, stories, and scavenger hunt created a festival of the nations for whom Christ died.
Our English Language Program hosted the event. June Zheng, its director, and her team also had a table of free literature and Bibles in the languages represented in our ESL program that meets at Legacy Church on Sundays from 4:00 to 6:00. All but a few items were gone at the end of the event. We pray the seeds sown through the literature and conversations will grow to bear the fruit of faith.Our prayer continues to be as the lyrics of the song says, "Our heart, our desire is to see the nations worship you."
If you would like to hear my message, "All People Matter to God," you can hear it here.
For more pictures of the Cultural Fair, you can see John Hubber's photos here.