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Accepted Paper:

"From every tribe and nation": multiculturalism in Christian churches in suburban Melbourne  
Natalie Swann (University of Melbourne)

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses migration stories from Christians in suburban Melbourne. It describes three multicultural churches and explores the faith-ful way in which my participants think about ethnicity and migration, and how these migrants recreate a sense of home in a new environment.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses everyday multiculturalism in Christian churches in suburban Melbourne. It focuses on how migrants recreate a sense of home in a new church setting. In particular, it explores how they prioritise the values they bring with them and open themselves up to new values through the migration process.

Social science exhibits a tendency to limit studies to a particular ethnic group as a convenient way of limiting scope, which reinforces the assumption that ethnicity is people's primary organising principle. This is confounded by denominational commitment among migrants and the ensuing multicultural congregations this commitment can result in. In contrast, my project is a local Australian ethnography, not one oriented to people of a particular ethnic background.

I participated in worship at three churches in Preston, a middle ring suburb in the north of Melbourne; a multicultural Catholic congregation that worshiped in English, a multicultural Seventh-day Adventist congregation that worshiped in English, and an Arabic Baptist church that worshiped in Arabic and was home to people from a range of countries but mostly Iraq and Egypt. This project describes these multicultural churches and the intertwined lives and loves of people from different cultural backgrounds is uncommon in the literature. I consider the faith-full way in which my participants think about ethnicity and migration. While not always explicitly theologised, this tendency reflects a deeply-embedded 'theological disposition' that results from Christian liturgical formation. The effect of such formation raises tantalising questions about the moral valuation of the migration experience.

Panel P16
The migration of value and the value of migration
  Session 1 Tuesday 3 December, 2019, -