This is the last of a four-part blog series on racial and cultural diversity. The material here is excerpted from a book I have coming out next year called Gaining by Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches that Send. Be sure to read part 1, part 2, and part 3.
Multi-culturalism is not a weekend show; it is a way of life.
This one starts personal. Do you have friends who are not like you? Are you seeking to embrace, and learn from, other cultures? Do you have relationships that would make a watching world wonder why you are friends, when you seem to have so much that separates you?
This interpersonal connection is more important than finding a worship style that white, black, and Hispanic will all like. God did not call us to put on a multi-cultural display on the weekend, but to live out a multi-cultural wonder throughout the week. When we begin to live multi-cultural lives, our events will very naturally take on a multi-cultural flavor.
Some of us should consider multi-cultural engagement a “calling.” Multi-cultural engagement, like international missions, is something that all believers are expected to participate in, but God often moves certain believers to pursue that calling with focused intentionality. The Apostle Paul would go in that category. Some of us (under the leadership of the Spirit) need to make diversity our cause. After all, it makes no sense to send people 10,000 miles across the globe to reach people of other cultures when we won’t send people 10 miles across our own city to reach people from different neighborhoods.
In chapter three I brought up our “Dwell” initiative, in which singles and families from our church uproot from one neighborhood and move to a different, less-culturally-familiar neighborhood for the purpose of integrating their lives and living out the gospel there. It is a beautiful picture of Jesus’ power in action and a powerful testimony to our community. Perhaps God will send you, or many people from your church, into the community this way.
But even if you’re not specially “called” to focus on this, like Paul was, we are all commanded to intentionally form relationships with people outside of our comfort zones. In that way, Paul said, we model Christ (Phil 2:1–5) and declare the multi-faceted, richly beautiful wisdom of God (Eph 3:10–11).
We Are At a Kairos Moment Regarding Race
The United States’ Declaration of Independence made the greatest declaration about the equality of races that any government has ever made: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Yet before the ink on the page was dry, many of its framers had returned home to their slaves.
Our country has always had the highest aspirations on this issue, but we’ve never been able to achieve the racial harmonization we desire. Even today.
I saw a recent article in The Atlantic that showed how even those individuals who say they prefer mixed-race neighborhoods still gravitate toward neighbors of their own race once they move into those mixed-race neighborhood.[1] Racial integration for us has worked better as a theory and a law than a sociological reality.
What the world wants, the gospel can accomplish. In Romans Paul said, “For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son…” (Romans 8:3). The Declaration of Independence, like all laws, is sufficient to tell us how we should be, but insufficient to make us that way. For fallen human nature, the law functions like railroad tracks that lay out the path we ought to travel on, but proves powerless to move us along those tracks.
The gospel is the engine that moves us toward fulfillment of the law.
What our society has yearned for in theory, we have the power through Christ to accomplish in the church. When the church demonstrates the unity between races our society yearns for, we will show that there is only one God who can save, only one God who accomplishes what our hearts most desire.
Sadly, however, it seems like the majority of the Western church is behind the world in racial integration. We all know Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous statement, “Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.” Movies frequently depict churches as racist and bigoted. Some of that may be unwarranted, but much of it is based in truth.
The racial unity our nation thinks it is achieving frequently reveals itself to be an illusion, however, and most sociologists recognize that. In the last decade numerous events have revealed the deep divide remaining between whites and blacks in the United States—the Duke Lacrosse case, the Trayvon Martin shooting, and the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
That’s why I say we are in a kairos moment regarding race. “Kairos” is a Greek word for time that implies a specially appointed moment in history. I believe that God has appointed this moment in the world for the church to rise up and demonstrate a unity in Christ that the world yearns for but has been unable to accomplish. What the flesh is unable to do through the law, God does in the gospel.
Rodney Stark, in his The Rise of Christianity, points to the multi-cultural unity of the early church as one of the primary factors that led to its growth explosion. The Roman Empire brought various cultures into close proximity in cities for the first time in human history. Unprecedented racial strife plagued these cities. Local churches, Stark says, were the one place in the Roman Empire where the races got along without social hierarchies and where various cultures submitted to, honored, and served one another.[2] As the Roman world watched in amazement, these Christians explained that their unity came from the fact that Jesus was not raised from the dead for their sins as a Jew, or a Greek, or a Roman, but as the Lord of all humanity and the Savior of all races.
I believe we are in just such a kairos moment today. Humanity has a common problem, sin, and a common Savior, Jesus. Multi-culturalism in the church puts on display our common humanity and common salvation, and it glorifies the firstborn of all creation.
Multi-Culturalism 2.0: Church Planting
Maybe you are wondering how all this applies to the theme of this book: The future belongs to churches that send.
In at least two ways: first, as Bill Hybels said, you may have to sometimes choose (temporarily, at least) between a numbers surge you can achieve through homogenous ministry and building a multi-cultural community of faith.
With Bill Hybels, I believe the long-term evangelistic effectiveness of a multi-cultural church will be greater than the temporary jolt of a numbers surge brought on by homogenous ministry. A group of 25,000 white people gathering to listen to great music and an entertaining speaker is not really a demonstration of the power of God. It happens in a Justin Bieber concert. A group of people who come together around Christ when they have little else in common declares that God has the power to save.
Second, the greatest displays of multi-cultural unity will probably come from the churches we plant, churches that will write this into their DNA. This is not to say we established churches should not be pursuing it too, just that it will come more naturally to our “children.” As I noted, our church, The Summit Church, is a large, majority-white church trying to achieve cultural diversification. And by God’s grace, we are making progress. But we are trying to break the inertia of “what has been” in order to create “what should be.”
The churches we plant can write multi-culturalism into their leadership and their DNA from the beginning. As many parents realize, our “children” can be greater than us. They can learn from our mistakes and stand on our shoulders to achieve heights we could only dream of.
Civil rights activist John Perkins, now 84 years old, after preaching at our church, recently said to me,
The American church will probably soon achieve the levels of diversity many of us have always yearned for, and always knew were possible… but mostly likely not through majority churches diversifying themselves—though they can and should pursue that. It will come through the planting of new, deliberately multi-cultural churches.
So, even in this, the future belongs to churches that send.
[2] Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 161.
