White as Snow? Guilty as Sin?

Racial Reconciliation in Churches and the Restoration Movement

Darrel Rowland examines why Christian churches and churches of Christ have often remained predominantly white despite a biblical call to unity. Through voices from pastors, educators, families, and church leaders, the article explores the need for intentional racial reconciliation in congregations and leadership.

• Several leaders argue that churches must move beyond being “not prejudiced” and become intentionally multicultural.
• Families and ministers describe the personal cost of worshiping in predominantly white spaces where few people share their racial or cultural experience.
• Churches in changing neighborhoods are challenged to stay, adapt, and practice New Testament unity across racial barriers.

By Darrel Rowland

Some 50 years ago Martin Luther King Jr. pierced the church’s soul by pointing out that the most segregated hour in America was 11:00 Sunday morning.

Things sure have changed in the five decades since, haven’t they? I mean, we gather at all sorts of hours other than 11 am Sunday these days.

But about that other part . . .

Let’s just ask ourselves a brutally honest question: Why are Christian churches and churches of Christ among the last bastions of society to remain predominantly white?

Once we answer that one, we must tackle an even tougher question: Is God OK with that?

Keeping Up with Culture

Of course no one keeps official statistics on the racial or culture breakdown of Restoration Movement congregations. But if you look at our major gatherings or talk to those who have visited many of our local churches, the generalization that we’re a substantially white fellowship rings true—with some notable exceptions.

“America’s culture is more open to diversity and multiculturalism than ever before. Blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos can be found together side by side with one another in our society,” said Daryl Reed, lead minister of DC Regional Church of Christ near Washington. “Churches and various church families for the most part haven’t kept up with our culture.”

Mike Bowling, pastor of Englewood Christian Church just east of downtown Indianapolis, said, “We’re a suburban and rural movement. And because we’re a suburban and rural movement, we just don’t relate well to urban and ethnic people . . . and it’s sad because our movement has something to say to other churches.”

Still, even the most ardent critics readily concede that Restoration Movement churches are not filled with blatant racists or segregationists. So what’s causing the problem?

Ben Cachiaras, senior minister with Mountain Christian church near Baltimore said some leaders fear taking an active role because they think the issue is political or have grown weary of talk about tolerance, playing the race card, affirmative action, immigration policies, or sensitivity training.

But the real problem is more basic: Many of us are failing to intentionally reach out to people of other races and cultures.

“Leaders have to go beyond saying, ‘I would welcome a church that had African-Americans in it if it would happen,’” said Cachiaras, who has begun an exchange program with Reed and DC Regional.

“This is an issue that’s near to the heart of God. And I’m not sure we’ve been convinced of that . . . a unity movement really ought to be a racially diverse movement. You can’t pretend you’re a unity movement if everybody’s the same skin color or nationality or gender.”

Not Prejudiced, Not Intentional

A passionate advocate for multiculturalism in our churches, Dudley Rutherford, senior pastor of Shepherd of the Hills Church north of Los Angeles and president of next year’s NACC, said he knows most of the leaders in the Christian church.

“I don’t think there’s a prejudiced bone in their bodies. But they’re not intentional. . . . If week after week after week after week, everyone on your stage is white, you’re not being intentional,” he said.

“So you can be someone who’s not prejudiced, but your church will never be diverse. Having no prejudices is not enough. It takes being not prejudiced, plus intentionality for your church to begin to take on a different color.”

At Shepherd, an insistence on multicultural greeters, worship team members, prayer leaders, and publication covers has paid off. “Now what happens is a snowball effect.

“I’ve got people leaving all-African-American churches and coming here because they like the diversity,” Rutherford said. “There comes a point when you’re intentional long enough it just takes over and it becomes a part of your identity.”

‘Not Like Us’

Even children notice.

By the time Ron and Terri Foltz returned home after nearly five years working in a Philippine orphanage, they had grown accustomed to the feeling of being a minority. So when the two elementary-school-age Filipino children they adopted remarked about how few people in their Ohio church looked like them, they could understand.

“When you are a multiracial family, it changes how you perceive things,” said Terri, an attorney who is now superintendent of a Christian school.

Ron noted that even though he was the principal of another Christian school and a deacon, on several occasions they found out about birthday parties that their sons had not been invited to—after the fact.

The Foltzes’ older son was a teenager at the time of the 2001 terrorist attacks. While he and Terri were standing in line at a grocery store on 9/11, a woman in line in front of them called him a “raghead” and wanted to know how he felt about what “his people” did.

That’s when a key shortcoming of a mostly white church hit home.

“There’s no one he could relate that experience to,” Terri said. “It’s not that anybody at church did anything wrong, it’s just that your kid is saying no one looks like us.”

Nobody looked like John M. Fuller when he entered St. Louis Christian College. Fuller, now 56, became the school’s first black full-time student.

He later served at Westlane Christian Church in Indianapolis, which had a blend of races, and in 1992 founded New Paradigm Christian Church on the city’s north side as a more deliberate attempt to reach a multicultural audience.

New Paradigm used billboards with the theme “this is not the church you grew up in” with pictures of a black male and white female. Leaders discovered that when they went door to door with a racially mixed team it piqued people’s interest in the church, which eventually grew to about 250.

But Fuller has found the push for racial reconciliation a lonely, often frustrating path, and he readily admits to becoming “tired of grinding the same ax.”

“Many people are surprised I’m with the Christian church because they don’t know any black Christian church preachers,” he said.

Yet Fuller grew up in the Christian church and has a brother and two sons in full-time ministry. His heart burns with Jesus’ prayer in John 17 that believers become one so the world will know God sent his Son.

“One of the reasons we don’t have a more convincing witness is because of the racism and the separation,” Fuller said.

“Our church has shown historically a choice to do the easy pickin’s when it comes to the harvest. If I want to grow a church to 1,000, the fastest way to do it is through a homogeneous church, black or white. That’s been one of the church growth principles, and it’s really a principle of the unredeemed nature of man. It should never have been a principle and a practice of church growth.”

Ironically, Fuller now serves Washington Shores Church of Christ in Orlando—an almost-all-black church that is loving but reluctant to reach out to whites.

“If this movement survives, it will survive like our church buildings have ‘survived’ in the city: Our people have moved out and other people have moved in,” he said.

“I don’t have a problem with a church out in the boonies that represents their community. But I do have a problem with a movement that intentionally targets going to the boonies and leaving the city. (People say), ‘Well I don’t have any people of color in our area.’ Yeah, but why are you in that area?”

Uncomfortable Words

These are uncomfortable words for many of us. A workshop on racial relations at this year’s NACC went even further, talking about the need for white Christians to come to grips with such concepts as institutional racism and white privilege.

Marque Jensen, founding pastor of North Minnesota Christian Fellowship who is now with Sanctuary Covenant Church in Minneapolis, said if he acknowledges the inherent benefits he’s enjoyed by being white, he gets “a lot of grace” from black believers. Whites need to take time to listen to the stories of blacks’ struggles; otherwise, it’s akin to telling a rape victim to just get over it.

Jensen said that growing up in a safe neighborhood, he was always taught the police were his friends. But when he began working with people from predominantly black neighborhoods, he quickly realized that is far from a universal perception.

The coleader of the workshop, former Sanctuary senior pastor Efrem Smith, said even those trying to be a New Testament church must “understand how socially conditioned we are about race and class.”

But he added that he also has to help his fellow African-Americans work through displaced anger and tell them they “can’t force white people to walk on eggshells.”

After Smith spoke to a main session of the NACC, dozens stood to accept his invitation to lead on racial reconciliation.

Developing Leaders

But how can church leaders commit to diversifying their staffs when it’s so hard to find minority graduates of our Bible colleges? And how can Bible colleges diversify their student body when few churches send them minority students?

Thankfully, this cycle is being broken. During an NACC breakfast for Dream of Destiny—a multipronged effort to bring multiculturalism to New Testament churches—several college leaders reported not only record enrollment but record numbers of minority students studying to become ministers.

D. Clay Perkins, president of Mid-Atlantic Christian University in North Carolina, has decided to worship with a black congregation, Rehoboth Victory Christian Church.

“There is a shortage of preachers, especially African-American preachers,” he said. “So if I can nudge one or two young men into ministry by attending an African-American church, then so be it.”

Byron Davis, who leads Dream of Destiny, said building multicultural church staffs will become even more important in coming decades as whites become a minority in the United States.

“We no longer have the excuse of saying we can’t find students of color,” he said.

But as this first new wave of multicultural students nears graduation, college leaders wonder if Christian churches or churches of Christ will hire them.

“How do we recruit any of these students with any kind of promise they’ll get a job?” asked David Faust, president of Cincinnati (Ohio) Christian University and executive editor of The Lookout.

He and other presidents say they don’t think our churches know what’s coming.

Changing Neighborhoods

But churches in rapidly changing areas had better realize what’s coming; their neighborhoods’ demographics are shifting. Should the church move on, wait to die, or take the more difficult route—change?

Steven C. Chapman, senior minister of First Christian Church of Chicago, has watched his neighborhood transform. Because of Chicago’s residency requirement, municipal workers must live within the city limits, so they often wind up in First Christian’s neighborhood in the southwestern corner of the city.

“As communities transitioned, we found ourselves behind the eight ball,” he said. The church already had moved once, in the 1950s. But this time, the elders declared that “white flight” would be a sin.

“We were forced to become a multiracial church,” Chapman said.

From a virtually all-white congregation in the early 1990s, First Christian is now about 50 percent African-American, 30 percent white, and 20 percent Latino.

“The church in the city is a good case in point for what will happen to the church (as a whole) if we don’t reach across racial barriers for the sake of the kingdom,” he said. “As whites fled the cities in the ’50s, the churches soon followed. That exodus left the city in the hands of declining churches or ill-equipped storefront pastors.”

At one of our movement’s early megachurches, Bowling’s 115-year-old Englewood church in Indianapolis, attendance dropped from more than 1,000 in the early 1970s to less than 200 in the next 20 years. For a time the area around Englewood was among the national leaders in home foreclosures and state leaders for abandoned housing.

But the church, located in what was once a Ku Klux Klan stronghold, decided to stay put and transform itself even as the neighborhood around it was radically changing.

“They never moved, never even had a discussion about moving when a lot of churches did,” Bowling said. “They just looked each other in eye and said this is where we need to be.”

Currently, the congregation of about 200 collects an offering of about $200,000 annually, but its nonprofit community development corporation’s budget is $1.4 million. The church is completing a $6.5 million conversion of an adjacent school building into 32 units of housing—including many designed for people with serious mental illness, low income, or those who need social services. The church, which is about 30 percent minority, also operates a large day-care center, preschool, and kindergarten.

“When it comes to racial reconciliation, we’ve just always said we are reconciled in Christ, and if there’s a problem, it’s a problem that brothers and sisters have,” Bowling said.

Reed of DC Regional said church leaders must be proactive in a rapidly changing world. “Local congregations and assemblies should prepare in advance for different types of people moving into their community, and not wait until their community changes its complexion.”

“Leaders must develop awareness first. If a church’s leadership is apathetic to this concern, it will not happen.

“Leaders must change the way they think about this issue. If it’s important to God, it should be important to them.”

So, bottom line, what’s the way forward?

“It’s easy and difficult at the same time. All we have to do is start practicing New Testament Christianity,” said Fuller of the Washington Shores church in Orlando. “God will take care of the rest.”

Darrel Rowland is an adult Bible fellowship teacher at Worthington (Ohio) Christian Church and public affairs editor of The Columbus Dispatch.

Author: Darrel Rowland