Breaking the Racial Barrier at Church

Great article in TIME magazine on Willow Creek Community Church is taking proactive steps in bridging the racial divide in an attempt to address Dr. Martin Luther King's devastating yet true assertion 40 years ago that "11 o’clock on Sunday morning, when we stand to sing… we stand in the most segregated hour in America." I couldn't help but reading the article and juxtapose the metamorphosis at Willow Creek with what has (and hasn't) happened at churches I've been to or am presently going to.

Bill Hybels, founder and senior pastor at Willow Creek, has led his congregation through a litany of intentional actions aimed towards racial reconciliation within his own church, ranging from organizing race-related small group meetings and seminars to adding black, Hispanic and Asian to roles at the church where they were prominent and visible. Hybels was also intentional in ensuring that the topic didn't escape his preaching.

The change wasn't without its challenges and certainly wasn't a case of "sticking with what's worked". From the outset, Willow Creek grew largely under an umbrella of homogeneity:

The gurus of the megachurch explosion were church-growth consultants, who endorsed the "homogeneous unit principle": people like to worship with people who are similar to them — in age, wealth and race. Hybels, while denying intentional exclusivity, says that "in the early days, we were all young, white, affluent, college-educated suburbanites, and we all understood each other. When we reached out to our friends, it became self-reinforcing."

And change for a congregation which is used to a certain way of preaching, a certain flavor of praise and worship, or certain types of human interaction can be threatening:

To some white congregants, naming a person of another color to tell you what Scripture means, week in and week out, crosses an internal boundary between "diversity" (positive) and "affirmative action" (potentially unnerving). Daniel Hill, a former Willow young-adult pastor who founded his own fully multicultural River City Community Church in Chicago, says, "There's a tipping point where the dominant group feels threatened."

And if there was any grumbling from the congregation that Hybels was trying to "multi-culturalize" the church stealthily, that was dispelled when he pretty much told the congregants to either get on the bus or find another church:

(Hybels) threw down the gauntlet, telling his flock that the church's racial outreach was "part of who we are, and if it can't be part of who you are, you probably need to find a church that doesn't talk about this issue."

Having been part of three different Redeemer churches, I'd say that the challenge still very much exists, and it's not clear to me that much is being done - and as a member of the Session in one of those churches, I personally don't get a free pass if criticism is warranted. Even when I was at my InterVarsity chapter, I remember being in an Exec Meeting where we were having an argument on whether we needed to diversify our almost exclusively Asian worship team to include an African-American member who was sporadically involved, but who had a great voice and was slowly starting to develop a friendship with one of our IV staff members. I argued against her inclusion (and 'won'), and can now say that I was horribly wrong, having missed the forest from the trees.

A common refrain around the frustrations of intentional church racial integration is "We are who we are." (or said more spiritually, "This is how God has uniquely gifted us"). If I'm an Ivy-league educated white man who grew up in the midwestern United States, I'm not going to try to preach like T.D. Jakes, because I'd come off as ridiculous. You can't tell a bunch of Asian people to try to play gospel, because they'd stink at it. Case closed. The result is essentially saying (for example), "Welcome to our church my black friend, I hope that you enjoy our overwhelmingly college-educated white and Asian congregation, sermons and praise & worship style. Hope you stick around."

The other action that usually given as an "peace (or guilt) offering" alternative is "we can reach out to blacks and Hispanics in other ways, such as in partnerships with predominantly black or Hispanic churches or through our 'mercy ministries'" (ouch... the implication is at best condescending and at worst, racist). To be clear, most if not all of these actions are well intentioned - and some effort is better than no effort at all, but maybe we can do better.

Another argument is one that the article touches on. Even if a pastor was so bold as to try to cater his delivery and content to a different demographic, and church leadership made a conscious effort to shift its praise and worship style, isn't there a risk that (gasp!) people will leave the church to find one that's more (ahem) comfortable? And if they lose those people and the attempts to cross cultural boundaries fail, then will we left with a church without people? You can't make everyone happy, right? In the end, this fear ends up paralyzing churches into non-action.

There's plenty of room to be defensive about this topic. "Racial reconciliation is not the chief end of the church... (growth and evangelism of people leading to) worship is!" some will argue. Some will insist that racial reconciliation progress shouldn't be narrowly defined as "diverse people going to the same church", but instead how the churches can inspire diverse peoples to love, respect and support each other outside the church. Other will insist indignantly that they feel no need to apologize for homogeneous congregations who are making disciples and growing in number due to the "comfort" provided in a, well, homogeneous environment.

Maybe. But I think a little soul-searching in this area will probably do us all some good.