Ten Essential Strategies for Becoming a Multiracial Congregation

Jacqueline J. Lewis, John Janka

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780664263386
• eBook ISBN: 9781611648553
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

How do churches build immunity from racial and ethnic tensions that threaten to divide rather than unite congregations? Jacqui Lewis and John Janka believe that the answer lies in the development of multiracial, multicultural communities of faith.

Born of the authors' work with The Middle Project, an institute that prepares ethical leaders for a more just society, The Pentecost Paradigm is a collection of wisdom and best practices. Here you will find lessons, questions for conversation, and spaces for journaling. Use the workbook with your planning team, board members, lay leaders, and staff.

Ten essential strategies are presented to help build communities that celebrate racial/ethnic and cultural diversity:

• Embracing Call and Commitment
• Casting the Vision
• Managing Change and Resistance
• Creating Congregational Identity
• Building Capacity
• Cultivating Community
• Celebrating in Worship
• Understanding Congregational Conflict
• Communicating and Organizing
• Collaborating in the Public Square

In welcoming communities of faith where everyone is accepted just as they are, we can lead the way toward racial reconciliation and dismantle the prejudices that segregate our houses of worship.

Chapter 1

Embracing Call and Commitment

On April 16, 1963, in his Letter from a Birmingham City Jail, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice.”¹

We are issuing a particular call to the white church. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, numerous black clergy, including Dr. King, appealed to the white church for support and active engagement. The movement hoped for financial, political, and moral support from the white church. Much of the white church responded with either silence or outright disdain that King and other civil rights leaders were threatening the status quo. This is not to ignore the courageous engagement by some whites who marched, sat-in, and spoke out publicly for the cause. Some white clergy, moved by the call to prophetic involvement, paid the ultimate price, losing their lives at the hands of white supremacists. Others lost their livelihoods when their congregations took opposing positions and fired their minister for involvement in the cause for civil rights.

Much of the white church, however, hunkered down in fear and anger, disoriented by the social upheaval challenging the assumptions of white privilege. Reading the climate in their congregations, many clergy chose to steer clear of a prophetic role in favor of maintaining a comfortable relationship with their congregations.

And where is the white church now? Many churches have abandoned addressing controversial social justice issues altogether in the cause of congregational peace, leaving the work to advocacy groups and the legal system. Many congregations have focused on noncontroversial mission endeavors that tend to be at some geographical distance from them and have avoided lending their voices and presence to the hard stuff of economic injustice, Black Lives Matter, and confronting hate speech and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Too many white churches busy themselves with activities that include raising money to fight malaria in Africa or volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, all good causes but far too safe for the needed social change on the high-stakes issues at our doorstep.

Many whites occupying the pews in worship on Sunday mornings take issue with the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” insisting that “all lives matter,” and accusing the Black Lives Matter movement of being racist itself. Such arguments and attitudes constitute a fault line that has run deeply in our American culture, stretching back to this nation’s founding and laying bare this manifestation of racial bigotry. This is an example of white denial and, often enough, an intentional strategy to suppress and camouflage the realities of race-based injustice that permeate our society. Accusing the victims of racism of being racist themselves for calling attention to the blatant discrimination in our nation reveals the desperation found in a transparent lie. For these white accusers, “black lives matter” implies that white lives somehow are diminished in value when black lives matter at least as much as white lives. The historical proposition that white lives are intrinsically superior to black lives is at play here. But insisting that all lives matter dilutes the claim that black lives matter even in the current context of a rash of hate crimes and police killings of unarmed African Americans. The reality is that all lives will matter only when black lives matter, native peoples’ lives matter, immigrants’ lives matter, and LGBTQ lives matter. When all are as free from bias, violence, and discrimination as are the majority of white people, then it can be said that all lives matter.

A Call to All Congregations

We believe God calls all of the church to the work of inclusion, justice, and peacemaking. And we believe that every monocultural congregation is called to dismantle racism and xenophobia. That means embracing the diversity in our communities and leading the larger culture on issues of inclusion. These might be challenging words for some African American congregations that were historically forced out of white churches to become exclusively monocultural congregations of color. Such congregations became and still serve as islands of safety and cultural survival in a sea of hostility. But the one we follow into mission and ministry—Jesus the Christ—was an avowed boundary crosser, a reformer of the religious and secular culture of his time. We are in good company when we lead the way on radical inclusion of those different from ourselves. In some contexts that might mean a black church reaching out to Korean neighbors, a Latino congregation starting a ministry to immigrant families from North Africa, or a Chinese church hosting an afterschool program for African American junior high students. It will also require that all of us be open to shifting our worship culture to include a wider range of music, multiple voices in leadership, and incorporating spiritual practices valued in other cultural settings. We believe the commitment to inclusion and diversity is a high calling, issued to all who count themselves as Christians, no matter what our ethnicity or culture.

When we accept the notion that God is not ambivalent about any of this; when we acknowledge that the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures repeatedly advocate for those left out, the stranger, the poor and oppressed, only then will we be able to draw on our faith tradition as a resource for truth telling that contributes to national healing.

God has not called the church to circle the wagons in the interest of the status quo or avoid issues that challenge dominant thought; nor has God called the church into community for comfort alone. It is the faith community that must question conventional wisdom. The church is uniquely called to confront injustice, exclusion, and fear. The truth is that much of the church has not done the work it needs to do on issues of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender. It is also true that much of the church has too often avoided difficult conversations in the interest of congregational harmony. In so doing, congregations create a culture of silence on these issues. Rather than create discomfort, congregations have accepted the false social construct of “race” and embraced an underdeveloped theology that reinforces the siloing of human community into separateness. Addressing racism and xenophobia should be viewed by faith communities as an essential spiritual practice.

Except for 8 to 10 percent of Protestant churches, congregations continue to be as racially segregated and exclusive as they were reaching back to this nation’s founding. In this regard, much of the larger culture is moving beyond these outdated constructs, sometimes at breakneck speed, leaving the church in the dust of its settled ways. Any congregation—white, black, or otherwise—that is “more devoted to order than to justice”² and disengaged from “breaking down the dividing walls of hostility” (cf. Ephesians 2:14) has lost its way.

While much has changed since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, much has not. In fact, it can be argued that ground has been lost in the fight for justice and equality. Voter suppression, the gerrymandering of voting districts, school resegregation, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the broad-brush demonization of immigrants, refugees, and non-Christian populations are battle lines in the fight for justice and equality. Addressing the potentially controversial issues of race, class, gender, national origin, and religious practice is urgent work.

This book is a call to the noninvolved, play-it-safe church to engage in its own work of education, dialogue, advocacy, and action to set right the divisions cutting across this country. It is also a call to every congregation to work for inclusion and equality; to respect and value the uniqueness of every person and culture; and to commit to reaching across the dividing lines separating us all into groups based on the color of our skin, the accents in our speech, and our national origins. In our current political climate, there is a real threat of being dragged backward from our vision of a just, free, and inclusive society. The church must have a voice that advocates for justice, equality, and inclusion. Prayer will not be nearly enough.

Since the Civil Rights Movement, we have seen legislation passed and subverted, progress made and reversed. We have seen the “Stop-and-Frisk” and “Stand Your Ground” policies take their toll on people of color. We have awakened to the prejudicial application of drug laws resulting in far higher incarceration rates for people of color than whites for the same offense, and we have had the curtain pulled back on the school-to-prison pipeline.

If we ever questioned the depth of division in this country, we need do so no longer. The nation’s demographic shift and accompanying backlash coupled with economic anxiety among lower-class and middle-class whites has fomented what can be argued as a crisis in race relations, class, and cultural differences. Some feel that white supremacy is now on full display in many parts of the country. There is a rise in hate speech and hate crimes against Muslims, Mexicans, Jews, and the LGBTQ community. A culture of violence against minorities, especially against people of color, has become normative in the minds of many, as unprovoked police shootings of unarmed African Americans has led the news cycle on too many days alongside the hate-filled, sickening attacks on police officers.

There is strong evidence that, as we have neared the tipping point toward becoming a society with no ethnic majority, we see a rising up of political populism, a call for the abandonment of “political correctness,” and a crisis of national identity based on race and xenophobia. Some are asking, “Who are we if we are not a predominantly white, Christian nation free of the burden of having t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1.  Embracing Call and Commitment
• 2.  Casting the Vision
• 3.  Managing Change and Resistance
• 4.  Creating Congregational Identity
• 5.  Building Capacity
• 6.  Cultivating Community
• 7.  Celebrating in Worship
• 8.  Understanding Congregational Conflict
• 9.  Communicating and Organizing
• 10.  Collaborating in the Public Square
• Conclusion
• Notes