Lifeway: Pastors Encourage Racial Reconciliation, Churchgoers Want More Diversity in the Church

Why not just give the gospel to anyone/everyone and let the Lord take care of the ethnic diversity?

For me, the key thing to watch is that other things do not get in the way of the Gospel. There are times when I’ve noted to others on our church’s praise team “do that, and you will appear very, very white”. I would guess that a lot of the matter is simply developing sensitivity to cultural cues that say either “you are welcome here” or “you are not welcome here.” Lots of cultural expectations—music, attire, etc..—can be part of this.

Why not just give the gospel to anyone/everyone and let the Lord take care of the ethnic diversity?

It sounds so simple, but once people come to Christ is when it gets pretty complicated and difficult. This shouldn’t surprise us because we can see in Acts with the early church, which began multi-lingual and multi-ethnic at Pentecost, had to intentionally work through several cultural issues. In Acts 6, when Hellenist Widows brought up the fact that they were being ignored by the majority of Hebraic Jews in the daily distribution of food, the Apostles didn’t dismiss their concerns or ignore them, but rather addressed the issue head on by appointing Godly Hellenist men to serve the Hellenist Widows. When the issue of Circumcision, Food Laws, Sabbath, etc… came up as Gentiles became followers of Jesus and joined the church, the Apostles determined not to burden redeemed Gentiles with Circumcision, Kosher, and etc… They intentionally addressed these religious/cultural issues head on rather than dismissing them or ignoring them.

From my 30 plus years as an urban missionary in diverse communities partnering with several predominantly white churches that desired to reach their diverse communities, the churches that dismissed or ignored the cultural issues (because they didn’t want to offend certain long-time members) weren’t able to sustain their Black, Asian, and Latino converts. They either left the church for another church (with a lot of frustration) or dropped out and never went back to church. The few churches that intentionally addressed the cultural issues, which made them feel included and welcome were able to make their churches ethnically/culturally diverse.

[Joel Shaffer] The few churches that intentionally addressed the cultural issues, which made them feel included and welcome were able to make their churches ethnically/culturally diverse.

Joel, what were the issues that churches needed to address? How were they addressed to make people feel included and welcome?

I am not against addressing cultural concerns which may create problems. I am against focusing so much on cultural concerns that the result is less focus on the gospel and more focus on “whiteness”, “blackness”, or whatever racial/cultural label you wish to use.

There were several, depending on whether it was youth or their entire families.

One situation involved assimilating about 10 black children brought to the church through a few white members. Four of the kids had recently become Christians. These children were neighbors of the white members who invited them and also had relationships with the parents of the children. When one of the black kids bullied a white kid from the church, and when the kid’s program leader didn’t know how to handle the situation, the pastoral leadership reacted by prohibiting all the neighborhood kids from coming instead of addressing the one child’s bad behavior, which would also include talking to her parents. Also, rather than equip the kid’s program leader and her husband to deal with behavior issues, the pastor felt that they would lose the couple from leading the kids program, which would cause more problems. There was also an assumption that the black kids were worse behaved and that it was a matter of time before the other black kids would act up too because of “their culture.” A few parents that complained feared their child would be picked on next. Because the pastor felt that there were too many problems with bringing the 10 or so kids, he prohibited all of them from coming. So when the parents of the black children found out that their kids could no longer come to the program, even though church member kids could come, it became a barrier for the church for the neighbors to reach these families with the gospel.

On the positive side, the urban multi-racial church I helped start (and where I am currently the outreach deacon) actually talks more about racial issues (not less) in our culture while stressing our unity in Christ. We can’t ignore the issues, especially when our black members share experiences of being racially profiled by a police officer or store clerk or dealing with the subtle superiority attitude of progressive white social workers or teachers who unknowingly act as if blacks are helpless without them. Forming deep relationships of trust is the foundation. But in my experience, those deep relationships of trust will inevitably mean talking about the current racial divide, including justice issues that affect black Americans, which most conservative Christians have poorly educated themselves about. By the way, progressive Christians or progressive “nones” don’t do much better at understanding the black experience either, especially when so many have embraced the Kendi or DIAngelo definition and philosophy of anti-racism without any discernment.

But for our church, we’re not talking only about black folks. We have several Korean-American folks in our church who were unjustly singled out on several occasions during the first 18 months of COVID. One of our young ladies was yelled at and blamed for COVID by a White middle-aged man at Home Depot because he thought she was Chinese. And our Koreans have a fear of being assaulted on the street because of the rapid rise of random assaults in urban communities against Asians in America. Several of our black folks have been especially very loving and empathetic and have ministered to our Koreans during this time as they also realize that majority of these Asians were assaulted by African-Americans (several of whom turned out to be mentally ill). We also incorporate different cultural expressions of worship, utilizing elements of black gospel and hip-hop (like we did last week) and Latin Folk music to go along with our CCM-like praise music and hymns (some of which we write ourselves), but that’s not the main driving force of what it means make Blacks, Latinos, and Asians feel more welcome.

Also, Unity at our church doesn’t mean uniformity. For example, our church currently has people who voted for Trump, Never Trumpers and Independents that voted for 3rd party candidates, and pro-life democrats that voted for 3rd party candidates and Biden. We’ve had several White conservatives leave our church because they couldn’t handle this tension when it comes to politics. And as it turned out they were being discipled by secular far-right news commentators and news outlets (i.e. Tucker Carlson, Fox News, News Max) rather than the local church. They’ve become functional Pelagianists that act as though only the progressive left have been corrupted by their sin nature leading to evil politics while their own politics or views haven’t been touched by their sin nature and haven’t been corrupted by evil.