Pastor of a multi-ethnic church shares three potential dangers to consider before planting a multi-ethnic organization.

When I planted a multi-ethnic church in Portland, Oregon, in 2006, I received many discouraging comments from church-planting organizations and denominations. Comments like:

You are doing a disservice to the gospel.

This can never work.

You have to pick a specific people group; stop trying to have a church that ministers to completely different ethnicities and cultures. You will reach fewer people, and that makes you a bad steward of the church God has entrusted to you.

I really don’t understand why this is so important to you. If it happens, great. But why would you put so much effort into something that’s so difficult to do and so slow to grow?

In the 11 years since, planting multi-ethnic churches has become more accepted, and multi-ethnic churches themselves have become sexy in many ministry circles. I see multi-ethnic churches as both the New Testament norm and the most powerful evangelistic tool the American church has today, so I rejoice over their growing acceptance and popularity. But as one who knows what planting and pastoring such a church requires, I worry that we may be pursuing the right thing in the wrong way.

Specifically, I worry about three things.

1. I worry that many who desire to lead multi-ethnic churches continue to live mono-ethnic lives.

I’m regularly contacted by white pastors and planters who desire to have a multi-ethnic church and are seeking counsel on how to get there. I consider such requests a personal honor and a wonderful opportunity to serve. Yet at the same time, I consider them to be evidence of a larger problem. In nearly every case, the fact that they’re contacting me, another white pastor, reveals that they don’t have many relationships of trust with people of color.

This is concerning because becoming a multi-ethnic church isn’t like becoming a church that does Sunday school. It’s not a program change; it’s a whole-life change. If your life isn’t multi-ethnic it will be difficult, and potentially damaging, to try to lead a church to be multi-ethnic.

Sociologists like Michael Emerson define a multi-ethnic church as a church with a minimum of 20 percent of members who don’t identify with the dominant racial group. I would apply the same rule to the life of the pastor. If a minimum of 20 percent of a pastor’s personal relationships don’t consist of people of another racial group, he’s unable to effectively lead a multi-ethnic church. (By the way, I should add that not every multi-ethnic group is truly multi-cultural. The kind of multi-ethnic community I’m envisioning in this article is one that represents not just various colors but also various cultures coming together under the banner of Jesus Christ.)

Africa may soon be home to the world’s largest Christian populations. This book addresses the theological and cultural realities.

Named one of the top religion books of 2002 by USA Today, Philip Jenkins’s phenomenally successful The Next Christendom permanently changed the way people think about the future of Christianity. In that volume, Jenkins called the world’s attention to the little noticed fact that Christianity’s center of gravity was moving inexorably southward, to the point that Africa may soon be home to the world’s largest Christian populations. Now, in this brilliant sequel, Jenkins takes a much closer look at Christianity in the global South, revealing what it is like, and what it means for the future.
The faith of the South, Jenkins finds, is first and foremost a biblical faith. Indeed, in the global South, many Christians identify powerfully with the world portrayed in the New Testament–an agricultural world very much like their own, marked by famine and plague, poverty and exile, until very recently a society of peasants, farmers, and small craftsmen. In the global South, as in the biblical world, belief in spirits and witchcraft are commonplace, and in many places–such as Nigeria, Indonesia, and Sudan–Christians are persecuted just as early Christians were. Thus the Bible speaks to the global South with a vividness and authenticity simply unavailable to most believers in the industrialized North.
More important, Jenkins shows that throughout the global South, believers are reading the Bible with fresh eyes, and coming away with new and sometimes startling interpretations. Some of their conclusions are distinctly fundamentalist, but Jenkins finds an intriguing paradox, for they are also finding ideas in the Bible that are socially liberating, especially with respect to women’s rights. Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, such Christians are social activists in the forefront of a wide range of liberation movements.
It’s hard to overstate how interesting, how eye-opening, how frequently surprising (and sometimes disturbing) Jenkins’ findings are. Anyone interested in the implications of these trends for the major denominations, for Muslim-Christian conflict, and for global politics will find The New Faces of Christianity provocative and incisive–and indispensable.

Documentary provides a comprehensive survey of Chinese history and culture from its origin until today.

Christian leaders respond to the words and dreams of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In April 1963, the great American civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., was unjustly thrown into jail at the hands of a malevolent system, oppressing those who dared to expose the evils of its racial iniquities. King’s exercise of his rights to decry oppression landed him in a cold jail in Birmingham. While imprisoned, he saw a headline in the local newspaper entitled, “White Clergyman Urge Local Negroes to Withdraw from Demonstrations.” Using the margins of a newspaper, King scribbled a response, which became his prophetic piece, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” This letter became one of the most critical texts in the burgeoning American civil rights movement. Some fifty years later, a team of racially diverse evangelical ministers has come together to offer a new generation needed reflection on this historic prison epistle. Under the leadership of editor Bryan Loritts, these men compiled various chapters that formed the present book.

The book opens with a powerful chapter by the renowned racial reconciliation leader John Perkins, which reads as a personal letter to Dr. King. Rather candidly and vulnerably, Perkins shares his own story as one who was victimized by the evils of racism in our country. His testimony shatters the romanticism of those who would anachronistically Christianize American history, exposing the injustices of white oppression in our land and history, while providing readers with an optimistic hope of the power of the gospel to grant forgiveness in our hearts toward oppressors and also renew society. In the second chapter, the format of the book transitions: all subsequent chapters start with a brief letter to Dr. King (following Perkins’s lead), and then transition into the pastoral reflections of the given author of the chapter.

In the second chapter, John Piper frankly shares with King his sincere desire that the civil rights leader “had made the biblical gospel clearer” (p. 56) in his works. Piper thanks the civil rights leader for his sacrifices and moves into his own pastoral reflections on how the power of King’s theology combined with the centrality of God, Scripture and the gospel stands today as a means for experiencing genuine ethnic/racial diversity and justice. In the third chapter, Crawford Loritts Jr.—an African American pastor of a predominantly white church—speaks of his “profound debt of gratitude” (p. 74) to King and offers readers his personal “progress report” (p. 76) of what has transpired since the famous letter from Birmingham. Loritts’s stories are heart-wrenching, recounting evils of white oppression in our country and the silence of white churches in decrying racism. The ensuing chapters likewise share this sentiment, further unpacking through personal stories the evils of the past and the current blindness of the majority culture.

In addition to the blindness of the majority culture, the authors challenge the readers to see the impaired vision of the evangelical church. In chapter four, John Bryson observes that, “We live in an incredibly racialized society . . . . Ugly parts of American history need to be owned, acknowledged, and ought to lead us to ask for forgiveness and repent” (109). Bryan Loritts writes in the fifth chapter about how “the church of Jesus Christ has been entrenched in homogeneity” (p. 124), failing to not only see the scars of racism, but also the power of Christ to transform the church. In the sixth chapter Sandy Willson thanks King for the “trails you blazed” (p. 132) and unpacks the long journey ahead, given the current reality of racialization in our country and in our churches. Albert Tate’s chapter then opens by quoting King’s comment that Sundays “[on] the 11a.m. hour is the most segregated hour of the week” (p. 152) and moves to recount stories of utter blindness among his white peers in Christian college and in local church ministry. In the eighth chapter, Charlie Dates calls on readers to see how “American evangelicalism . . . is yet unrepentant of its sin of segregation” (p. 171). In the ninth chapter, Matt Chandler offers readers a theology of diversity for the church in light of the gospel of Jesus. The book closes in the tenth chapter by addressing the challenge of multiethnic ministry in light of the current context of American evangelicalism, where the homogenous unit principle (HUP) seems to have given evangelicals permission to function under de facto segregation.

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Author addresses some of the most challenging race-related isssues of our day from a biblical perspective.

Can it ever get better? This is the question Benjamin Watson is asking. In a country aflame with the fallout from the racial divide—in which Ferguson, Charleston, and the Confederate flag dominate the national news, daily seeming to rip the wounds open ever wider—is there hope for honest and healing conversation? For finally coming to understand each other on issues that are ultimately about so much more than black and white?

An NFL tight end for the New Orleans Saints and a widely read and followed commentator on social media, Watson has taken the Internet by storm with his remarkable insights about some of the most sensitive and charged topics of our day. Now, in Under Our Skin, Watson draws from his own life, his family legacy, and his role as a husband and father to sensitively and honestly examine both sides of the race debate and appeal to the power and possibility of faith as a step toward healing.

Diverse group of leaders in the Presbyterian Church in America share helpful experiences and insights on race.

Most Christians would say they believe all people are made in the image of God and are equal before him. They would say red, brown, yellow, black, and white, they are precious in his sight. But do they have any friends of another race? Is there anyone at their church who does not look like them? Does this matter to God? The majority of American Christians do not have significant relationships with anyone who does not look like them, which makes them susceptible to cultural blind spots and less effective as ambassadors for biblical justice. The thirty church leaders who contributed to Heal Us, Emmanuel desire racial reconciliation, representation, and supernatural unity in all the churches of Christ.

Introduction

No doubt, churches in America continue to be largely monoethnic, without much mingling of races either within or between churches. This book is written by church leaders who would like to see that changed. It is a way for those in the church to hopefully wake up and speak up so we may more fully be God’s ambassadors of the Gospel on earth.

Many of the contributors to this book are Caucasian, theologically conservative, Presbyterian pastors and church leaders. Their stories are of their eyes being opened to what their brothers and sisters of color experience every day. How could they not see the inequity before? How could they be so behind in such a basic concept? It is the essence of White privilege. They are asking God to help them listen better to the experiences of others.

To that end, this book also includes stories from African American, Asian American, and Latino pastors and leaders from the same theologically conservative denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America. Many of them are tired of talking about racial issues without seeming to get anywhere and wonder why it has taken so many Caucasian Christians so long to wake up. Some have considered retreating to churches and denominations where more people look like them and think like them. Yet they remain faithful to stand in the uncomfortable role of speaking up and speaking into the need to break down dividing walls, of which race is the most substantial and enduring in the United States. These brothers do not give a comprehensive voice to the issue, but they do provide valuable perspectives.

Waking up is painful and difficult. It is startling. Many times, it rubs people the wrong way. But it is important. The hope of the contributors to this book— whatever their race— is that racial reconciliation would occur not only in their own denomination but in all the churches of Christ. They realize their union with Christ compels them to pursue reunion and reconciliation across the ethnic lines that divide us outside of Christ.

This book was originally born out of discussions among a group of pastors and elders in the Presbyterian Church in America who desired reconciliation, representation, and unity in their individual churches and in their denomination as a whole. Many of them supported a call for their denomination to repent of its churches’ inaction in standing for the rights of African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. Though they write from their context, their words apply to any monoethnic church or denomination seeking to become more representative of the body of Christ, welcoming the sojourner among them and seeking justice for all of God’s children.

The Pew Research Center reports that Protestant churches— whether in the mainline tradition, the Evangelical tradition, or in the historically Black tradition— are not ethnically diverse in any substantive way. Their 2007 survey indicates that 81 percent of Evangelical Protestant church members are White, 91 percent of mainline Protestant church members are White, and 92 percent of historically Black Protestant church members are Black. 2

The 2014 LifeWay Research survey, American Views on Church Segregation, found that 66 percent of Americans have never regularly attended a place of worship where they were an ethnic minority. 3 Korie Edwards, in her book on interracial churches, calls religious racial integration a dubious enterprise. 4 She notes that, “Churches are most successful within the American context (where ‘success’ is measured by the number of attendees) when they appeal to one group.” 5

While people may prefer sameness, “God apparently loves difference; he created so much of it.” 6 The abundance of human differences can become a source of difficulty because we have to navigate our differences in the context of relationships with others. Thus, our comfort with God’s preference can only occur when we desire to embrace and understand difference.

We all have much to confess. We all have much to be thankful for. It is all grace and mercy. None of us would be anything or anyone or anywhere without the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to whom all things work for his glory and honor.

Jesus says the dividing wall is coming down. It’s been up far too long. We grieve that we are so late to the party. We have finally arrived at the troubling conclusion that there is brokenness in the way that we value and treat one another on the basis of skin color. We praise God that he is patient and gracious with us as we slowly come around to the reality that so many of our neighbors, brothers, and sisters have known their entire lives. We pray they would forgive our blindness to their suffering as we move forward, seeking to learn and grow toward racial reconciliation.

Rev. Dr. Irwyn Ince and Rev. Doug Serven

White woman shares personal stories about her journey to understand racism and promote racial justice.

Waking Up White is the book Irving wishes someone had handed her decades ago. By sharing her sometimes cringe-worthy struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, she offers a fresh perspective on bias, stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As Irving unpacks her own long-held beliefs about colorblindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, she reveals how each of these well-intentioned mindsets actually perpetuated her ill-conceived ideas about race. She also explains why and how she’s changed the way she talks about racism, works in racially mixed groups, and understands the antiracism movement as a whole. Exercises at the end of each chapter prompt readers to explore their own racialized ideas. Waking Up White’s personal narrative is designed to work well as a rapid read, a book group book, or support reading for courses exploring racial and cultural issues.

Book exposes white supremacy mindsets in the church and suggestions for those pursuing racial justice.

What if racial reconciliation doesn’t look like what you expected? The high-profile killings of young black men and women by white police officers, and the protests and violence that ensued, have convinced many white Christians to reexamine their intuitions when it comes to race and justice.

In this provocative book, theologian and blogger Drew G. I. Hart places police brutality, mass incarceration, anti-black stereotypes, poverty, and everyday acts of racism within the larger framework of white supremacy. He argues that white Christians have repeatedly gotten it wrong about race because dominant culture and white privilege have so thoroughly shaped their assumptions. He also challenges black Christians about neglecting the most vulnerable in their own communities. Leading readers toward Jesus, Hart offers concrete practices for churches that seek solidarity with the oppressed and are committed to racial justice.

What if all Christians listened to the stories of those on the racialized margins? How might the church be changed by the trouble they’ve seen?

“This book is a gift from the heart of one of the sharpest young theologians in the United States. Hold it carefully, and allow it to transform you–and our blood-stained streets.”–Shane Claiborne, author of The Irresistible Revolution