I think one more question and then we'll do a couple follow-up questions here. Jason George asked," I am part of an ethnic, race-based church. What are the best steps to broadening the membership of this church and spread the gospel further?" Yeah, I was actually in this situation, and I'm guessing from your name that you're Malayali. So we have that in common. So Kerala is a state in southern India. Malayalam is a language that's spoken by 30 to 50 million people there.
And I was part of a Malayali church for many years, and they wanted to do exactly this. And I'll say that most of the time, it's an abysmal failure. And it doesn't work at all. I think there's a good way to do it. I can tell a lot of stories about this. But in this particular Malayali church where I was, many of the people would speak Malayalam, which is a very difficult language to learn.
They dressed in ethnic clothes, the food, they would often have food afterwards, and it would be Biryani and Shore and you know all these ethnic foods there. And hey, for me, I've grown up in this, right? But if you're not from that background, I mean, you walk in, you just feel like, whoa, I don't fit here at all. And I highly recommend for all of us who are thinking in this situation, for us to go to a different ethnicity church and to see how we feel in that, it's just not comfortable, right?
It's very difficult for us to feel like this is home. I could really put my roots down here. The particular pastor at this Malayali Church that I was at, he really wanted to get the membership broader. And it just bombed. It didn't work at all. Because it was not because people didn't have good intention, but the barriers were so strong there that people thought, okay, are my children going to be able to blend in here? I don't know the food. I don't know the language.
Half the time when I hear things, it's talking about some cousin. A lot of people have this inside track on who's related to who, and you don't have any of those things if you're an outsider. If someone is truly serious about doing that, the way to do that is you have to do a break off where you send no more than two.
And I stress here, this is where two would be not a floor, but a ceiling, no more than two people to start almost a separate group that would be maybe under the umbrella of the parent group where they're not going to talk about cousins. They're not ever going to switch into Malayalam. They're not ever going to do these kinds of things that are off-putting. And you're going to be able to out of that beachhead bring in other people.
And your first person to bring in has to be a non-Malayali or somebody outside of that ethnicity. So it's difficult. It can be done. But I'll just say right now that most of these efforts just don't go very well. Would you say this is like almost a Paul said that I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.
Is this basically that context, that question is basically the gist of it, like sacrificing things that make us comfortable knowing that they're making other people uncomfortable. Exactly, exactly. And we've all felt that on the uncomfortable, on the discomfort side, right? We've all been in situations where everyone's laughing at the joke. You don't know the joke. Everybody knows what you're talking about. You don't know. It doesn't feel good. You don't feel like that's home to you.
And we need to have that perspective of putting ourselves in the position of being the outsider and trying to make an environment that truly is welcoming. So yeah, I think that 1 Corinthians 9 passage is appropriate.
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