There are historical precedents for this in Upstate New York. 

In the industrial cities and towns fifty years ago it was not unusual for groups of the same faith to have separate churches and to want to keep it that way.

Therefore in Schenectady, NY, the Catholic Church was subdivided into Irish, Italian, Polish, German churches and so on.

In Hudson Falls, NY, in the 1970s, two Catholic churches stood side by side, about 200 feet apart, on the town square.  One was ethnically French Canadian and the other Irish, if I remember correctly.  One church burned down and the the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Albany decided to combine the two congregations in the remaining church which could easily hold both.  There was a revolt against this decision because both congregations wanted to remain separate.

This separatism has also existed among the protestant denominations such as the Swedish Lutherans and the German Lutherans.

The Anglicans have been known to divide themselves over class lines and from my reading of history reasons for the early rejection by the English Anglicans of John Wesley’s movement and of the Methodists in general smacked heavily of English class prejudice.  Unfortunately this prejudice was carried over into the American Colonies and then into the United States. 

Rejection from the Body of Christ on the basis of class, to me,  is a serious transgression.  But so is rejection on the basis of ethnicity or race. 

It is good to remember the phrase “So that we all may be one.”

Built by Norwegians… Methodists? Did the Latino congregation buy the building? Anyway, the Gospel they are preaching isn’t reaching people. As a religious Darwinian I’d say that the dwindling Latino congregation and the vibrant growing BIBLICALLY BASED Chinese congregation need to make an accommodation to reality and switch roles, with the Latino congregation, obviously fated to die off, taking the part of the junior partner. The Chinese congregation must be sensitive to the dying partner’s needs, as one really ought to do in any death-and-dying situation.

The Methodist Episcopal Church sought out new immigrants in New York City in the late 19th and early 20th Cs and had considerable success—at one time in the late 1880s, there were more Methodist Italians than Catholics in the area.  That effort was engulfed by heavier immigration and a shortage of Italian speaking clergy, but predominantly Italian-American Methodist congregations endured for decades after.  So, it wouldn’t be surprising if the Norwegians were Methodists—it was less of a leap from low-church Lutheranism than it was from Italian Catholicism.

OK, if this has always been a Methodist church, then what I wrote stands. This is just a further step in the evolution of the body of inhabitants of the building.

A similar thing happened at Trinity Cathedral in San Jose, California in the 1980s,  when a separate Hispanic congregation began to assert control…..until they left for their own property.