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Justice for All

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One of the big stories making the rounds this week is Time magazine's major report on Willow Creek and the progress being made in evangelical megachurches to bridge the racial divide. Time religion reporter David Van Biema uses Willow Creek's journey, and senior pastor Bill Hybel's personal spiritual awakening on the issue of race in America, as a window to how the larger evangelical church is doing in this arena. Recounting the American church's long struggle to overcome its complicated racial history, Van Biema writes:

Since Reconstruction, when African Americans fled or were ejected from white churches, black and white Christianity have developed striking differences of style and substance. The argument can be made that people attend the church they are used to; many minorities have scant desire to attend a white church, seeing their faith as an important vessel of cultural identity. But those many who desire a transracial faith life have found themselves discouraged -- subtly, often unintentionally, but remarkably consistently. 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.

Should church small groups be filed exclusively under the rubric of "Stuff White People Like"? That's the provocative question that Leadership Journal's Out of Ur blog recently posed. Riffing off an interview with leaders from River City Community Church, a multiethnic congregation in Chicago, writer Sam O'Neal wondered aloud if small groups are primarily "a white way to do church." And the conversation among River City's leaders does raise some interesting questions about the role that culture plays in shaping our ecclesiological practices.  

"The fact is small groups aren't as important to other ethnicities as they are to white people," says Arloa Sutter, River City's pastor of community life.

Adds senior pastor Daniel Hill: "White people rely on small groups to connect. Other ethnicities form community more organically, more relationally." 

A Chicago-area church is bringing a new twist to the "prosperity gospel." According to the Chicago Tribune, Lighthouse Church of All Nations in Alsip, Illinois, awards weekly cash prizes to lucky churchgoers who are sitting in the right seat.

On a sad but pivotal day in the late 1780s, several of the African American members of Philadelphia's St. George's Methodist Church were thrown out of the church by the congregation's white leaders because of their refusal to sit in a blacks-only gallery area. Those African American Christians eventually went on to form what would become the first congregation of the African American Methodist Episcopal Church, Mother Bethel A.M.E.

Now, 200 years after racism divided black from white at St. George's Methodist, members of the modern-day congregations of St. George's and Mother Bethel have reunited.

Last week, I had the privilege of traveling to Cincinnati for the annual conference of the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA), a network of over 500 non-profit ministries ranging from grassroots, community-based groups to large relief and development organizations. The common bond for CCDA members is their shared mission to serve under-resourced communities and marginalized people through holistic ministries that address both physical and spiritual needs.