“You cannot tell
Millennials that your church welcomes everybody – that all can come to Jesus –
and then, when they come, what they find are few mixed races or no mixed
couples. You cannot say, “Everybody is
welcome here if, by that, you really mean, so long as you’re like the rest of
us, straight and in a traditional family.”
There are a
couple of issues here, but I’ll address one of the obvious ones, the issue
having to do with race. As late as the 1970s, Martin Luther King Jr. said the
most segregated day in the United States is Sunday. Why? There are a number of
reasons, but I’ll provide two that I think are tenable: People feel more
comfortable with people who look like them and the socio-economic divide has
unfairly divided communities, so that with so many churches available in their
own communities, whites are not flocking to leave suburbia on Sunday and
blacks, who may not have the means to get out of their communities.
So when the Mt.
Pleasant Baptist Church and Milledge
Avenue Baptist Church started in 2012 to advertise “experiments” regarding race mixing where black and white
congregations come together to celebrate one another’s styles, I have to wonder
if this is a genuine expression that has staying power or simply a bandage addressing a much larger wound that
started some time ago (one may say even in the New Testament itself).[2]
See, in the New
Testament, Paul was regularly confronted by manufactured crises in mixed
communities in which Jews or Romans or Greeks were upset that such and such a
group was getting preferential treatment over another.
So I question if
all of this is a failure on the part of churches to “welcome everybody,” or if
it isn’t imbedded deep in our human psyche, something that not even the New
Testament could resolve. A typical Christian, socially economically divided
from his white brethren may not feel the need to walk into an all-white
community and vice versa. Perhaps
challenging Millennials who have a better relationship in between races is the
key necessary to shame the churches where the gray-haired population has
dutiful attended church but not understood the radicality of Jesus’ message
whose “Hellenizing tendencies” in welcoming his Jewish oppressors (the Romans)
to the table of salvation was unwelcomed in his day by the majority.
The problem is
that youth are often considered second-class citizens, and where they are not,
pastors most likely have a hard time handing over the reigns while balancing
the needs of their older clientele as well. And what has been the response you
ask? Divide the church even more, for example, into a traditional and contemporary
worship service. I don’t have the answer, and I’m not sure there is one,
because I’ve been in many churches, both contemporary and traditional, and my
own neighborhood is more racially intermingled than my churches, both
conservative and liberal.
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