“In an age of mixed-race malls, mixed-race pop-music charts and, yes, a mixed-race President, the church divide seems increasingly peculiar. It is troubling, even scandalous, that our most intimate public gatherings — and those most safely beyond the law’s reach — remain color-coded.”
(David van Biema, TIME magazine, January 11, 2010, in an article on Willow Creek Community Church’s efforts in standing against racism and re-making itself as a racially-mixed congregation)
I’ll be writing more this year on racism in the church, but it’s nice to begin the New Year with something that made me cry in recognition of something really great that evangelicalism is doing. I attend a very small church in Moscow; about a third of my church family was born outside of the U.S., or their parents were. Others have worked in Africa with the Peace Corps, and my next blog post will describe an incident from my 11 or so years of working with undocumented Mexican immigrants. Our diversity is entirely unconscious, although appreciated, but if we were all affluent, native-born Anglos, I think it would concern us.
That’s as it should be. There is an obligation for Christ’s Church to seek healing of the racial divide in the United States and to rend its khakis and golf shirts in repentance for being, in past decades and in some parts still today, the primary enabler of society’s racial prejudices. Beyond the obligation of truth-telling — the Gospel knows of no proper role for racial or ethnic (or gender or class) stratification — there’s an even greater burden for those of us in North Idaho, a place still haunted by memories of violent, backwoods “separatists” and neo-Nazis and grappling today with the reality of educated, affluent racists and defenders of the Confederacy. People expect us to be knuckledragging racists, and as pastors in North Carolina, for example, might discern a greater call to rail against an economy based on tobacco, the pastor and his congregants in North Idaho ought to be especially sensitive in dealing with race, avoiding questionable rhetoric and seeking to reach out to and learn from other cultures.
Dr. King’s observation that 11 a.m. Sundays is the most segregated hour in America is still true, to the shame of the Church, but it’s heartening, with so much wrong in evangelicalism, to read of Willow Creek’s work in combating the cancer of racial bigotry. I knew WC was a leader on issues of gender justice, and while I cringe at the whole mega-church concept, I acknowledge that most of them are racially diverse. There may not be an enormous catalog of lessons we need from the mega-church movement, but on this one, they’re right on.