Ministry Under Hybridized Hyperdiversity: Insights from Subcontinental Migrants to Australia

Globalization has normalized the mixing of diverse ethnicities, cultures, and communities within a broader society in ways which public policy terms multiculturality and which Vertovec (2014) described as superdiversity or hyperdiversity. The consequent constant proximity of diverse forms of difference creates the opportunity and challenge of discovering or creating shared values which can adequately form the kind of trust and goodwill necessary for communal harmony. Christianity counterintuitively claims to form this kind of global peace through the uniquenesses of the gospel. This paper will provide examples of the real, lived instantiation of that kind of peace in the lives of Christians who migrated from India or Sri Lanka to Australia. It will use the concept of cultural hybridity as discussed inter alia by Spivak (1988), Bhabha (1994), Pieterse (2003) Kraidy (2006), and Burke (2009), and the sociological tools of positioning theory as initially developed by Holloway (1984) and Harre et. al. (1990) and refined by Slocum-Bradley (2009), to provide detailed analysis of how these migrants exercised their personal agency to knit together – i.e., hybridize – their native and migrant ethno-national identities with their religious, Christian identity to create ways of life which facilitated their flourishing as bicultural Christians. It will then use these examples of real-life evangelically-motivated peace to suggest forms of practical ministry which facilitate similar intrapersonal, interpersonal, and communal peace – the kinds of peace which are genuinely good in today’s hyperdiverse, hybridized world, and which thereby testify to the eternal, supernatural peace which Christ uniquely establishes with God.