A warning I might add is to be careful we do not make multi-cultural churches a new idolatry or works-righteousness in reaction to the present reality in the church in the USA.

Thanks

Pete Scazzero

We are called to Christ first, community with others out of that relationship to Him, and finally, to mission to and in the world. I have been pastoring and leading our NLF church community for almost 22 years. That Benedictine “stability” has been an enormous gift. (Like marriage it has brought out my immaturities and been a source of profound transformation). I think EHS offers an “alone/together” community that does not diminish people but rather enables us to appreciate our differences. It also calls people to authenticity, integrity and truth-telling. Yesterday, a leader in a neighboring church shared with me that she did not think it would be a good idea if their church did the EHS church-wide initiative because it would cause people to get real about what was going on inside them. And they weren’t ready for that kind of church at this point. I didn’t quite know what to say.

Nonetheless, EHS assumes community, but I may now add it under one of my 12 points to ensure that it is clear.

Revelation makes mention of the idea that all nations will one day rejoice, and I think the Greek term used is “ethnos” which means “ethnicity” or “people group.” So there seems to be biblical support for there being multiple people groups in heaven.

Now, this isn’t to say that we should only worship in single-ethnic congregations. All it’s saying is that single-ethnic congregations have their place. The main reason single-ethnic congregation churches exist isn’t because of the way people look. They exist because culture affects how we view God and how we worship him. For some people, that culture is more important than for others and I don’t see why these cultural differences can’t be accommodated.

Keep in mind that folks in these congregations don’t, for the most part, have a problem with multi-ethnic congregations. So it is not clear to me why people would say to a congregation, “Your method of worshiping God is wrong. Ours is better.”

Doesn’t that wind up being a kind of “colonialism”?

I propose that we look that your 400,000 different churches in a different light. Couldn’t we look at the same situation and say, “How awesome! Our God is great enough to have 400,000 churches all worship him within their unique styles of praise!”

Just a thought.

Good post. Here is one point that will make this a difficult discussion:

Roh argues that the next evangelicalism will require white Christians be willing to submit to the authority and leadership of nonwhite Christians.

The biggest issue for mainline denominational churches is doctrine. You do not find a large racial diversity in the Southern Baptist Convention, Presbyterian Church in America, PCUSA, etc.

The doctrinal differences between the US and Latin America, Africa, Asia churches is too much of a divide at this point. While I have not read this book, when you compare what Philip Jenkins described in his books, you can see the doctrinal divide.

Chris

Thanks for your thoughtful comments but I believe I got to defend the “ugly head” of the reverse racism argument which I don’t think my point of view fully identifies itself with. I am not sure if there is a difference between a church that is able to officially exclude others with protection of the law (segregation era) or a church of today that doesn’t have the ability to exclude others or desire (because of new laws).

Where we disagree is more at the micro level which creates a macro problem for the Christian church at the end. I believe when we get to heaven, there won’t different groups like the Baptist over here and the Methodist over there, the same reflects on the view that everyone will be together, no matter what race you identify yourself with.

You say that your church will not actively discourage Whites from attending, and that is good, but passively, by churches calling themselves an “ethnicity” church, division has already been created. I would call it “passive segregation”. You know them well and we see it in the hiring process for the job market all the time (men get paid more than women, whites make more money than other races, etc).

As the world becomes more globalized and barriers are broken, our grandchildren will see how foolish we were by having 40,000 different Christian denominations and many more different churches that are fragmented by ethnicity not necessarily because of language barriers but because of what we look like physically, I find that as a very sad thing.

Regards.

I think there are reasons to prefer ethnic specific over multi-ethnic congregations for non-Whites. But to be clear, we have to understand the context in which single-ethnic faith communities developed in the United States both for Whites and non-Whites. In the South, there was a tradition of exclusion of non-Whites that led non-Whites to develop their own congregations. Immigrant communities also tend to form their own congregations because of language (as you have noted). But for the most part, non-Whites have not had the ability (nor, for the most part, desire) to OFFICIALLY exclude Whites from their congregations, which makes things vastly different. I go to a predominately Asian church, but there are White members, too. And we would never actively discourage Whites from attending our services.

As for the argument that people want to be comfortable, that seems reasonable to me. If people are more comfortable in a single-ethnic setting, that doesn’t bother me so much, so long as there is no official policy of exclusion. Then, such congregations aren’t single-ethnic because of “segregation,” they are single-ethnic because people are exercising the right to “free association.” There’s a vast difference between the two and the difference is often not well understood.

Hope this is helpful….