The need for multi-racial churches
One thing that struck me about Obama’s recent speech was his pronouncement that the most segregated hour in America is church-hour on Sunday morning. Provocative, sad and true. As a multi-racial person, I don’t feel completely comfortable in either all-White or all-Black environments, and so I’ve struggled looking for a church where I could feel I belong. Our relationship with God is one of the most intimate in our lives — how telling that we refuse to share that, most of all, with people from different backgrounds.
So, I was very glad to read this article about one Christian group’s efforts to create and maintain multi-racial churches. This gave me a lot of hope. And it also came from, for me, an unlikely source. I’m pretty vehemently opposed to Creationism. It’s one of the few topics that can really get me frustrated; and so I have a blind-spot in my attempts to be tolerant of people. This article not only gave me hope about the goal of multi-racial churches, but reminded me to be more open-minded to people who I may disagree with on one topic — because we may share common ground in other areas.
July 30th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
I have shared your struggle to find a church with the right mix. I’m black (from deep south Mississippi), wife’s white from rural Missouri (no black people out there), and our son is almost a year old. Needless to say, that church been an interesting environment. Speaking of church, when my motive was to suit myself, rather than going to church to serve & worship, then I was more focused on what music is or wasn’t there. However, the more I serve, (now my wife & I are leaders in the college class), I don’t think about it nearly as much. I would love for churches to be more of a truer representation of what I suspect heaven to be in terms of people groups there, but I just don’t think it will happen on this side of heaven. I lived in Montgomery, AL for a short time: man that was hard. That town is 48% black, 48% white, & 4% “other”. But churches don’t mix at all (not enough to make a statistical difference anyway). I hope that you search out why you get vehemently opposed to creationism. I got my undergrad degree in Zoology, and they force fed me evolution in every upper level course. But since finishing, I have taken courses that evaluates the science that supports both views, and I was blown away by how much overwhelming evidence there is that suggests a younger earth rather than a million & billion year old earth. They look at stuff like fossil records: if there was a global flood, then we would expect to see alot of dead things burried all over the world in the same layers (which is what has been found), but evolution suggests that older things are on the bottom & younger things on top, but that’s not found. Many more examples, can’t get into that stuff now, but Answers in Genesis are pretty much one of the best sources on this topic that would at least attempt to give a fair hearing of what each view holds and the evidence for both. I hope you are not angry with me for suggesting them.