Articles like this make me want to celebrate and cringe. Change can be a very difficult, painful process. The desegregation of the church and a deeper and theologically rooted understanding of ethnicity, race, and culture demands current systems, institutions, and communities to change. I want to celebrate the steps taken at mega-churches like Willow Creek that acknowledge and recognize the world isn't as White as their congregations have often been, but I can't help but feel a teeeeeny bit annoyed.
Why? Well, maybe it's because the arctic blast in the Midwest makes me annoyed at everything because I forget how fortunate I am to have heat in a house full of food and warm clothing. And, I'm a bit prickly. How does a congregation that is only 20% minority count as being integrated? (The Time magazine article cites 20% as "the quantitative threshold of a truly integrated congregation.") It feels like some odd application of the one-drop rule. Maybe someone out there can help me understand the significance of the numbers and specifically the 20% threshold.
And then if you read on in the article, there is this:
Call it the desegregation of the megachurches -- and consider it a possible pivotal moment in the nation's faith. Such rapid change in such big institutions "blows my mind," says Emerson. Some of the country's largest churches are involved: the very biggest, Joel Osteen's Lakewood Community Church in Houston (43,500 members), is split evenly among blacks, Hispanics, and a category containing whites and Asians. Hybels' Willow Creek is at 20% minority. Megachurches serve only 7% of American churchgoers, but they are extraordinarily influential: Willow Creek, for instance, networks another 12,000 smaller congregations through its Willow Creek Association. David Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame studying the trend, says that "if tens of millions of Americans start sharing faith across racial boundaries, it could be one of the final steps transcending race as our great divider" -- and it could help smooth America's transition into a truly rainbow nation.
Go back. I do hope I'm reading this incorrectly: "and a category containing whites and Asians"? Um. Are we, and I think Asian here means Asian American, lumped together in a category with whites?
I'm not White.
And my parents would argue I'm not Asian either.
Sometimes words and labels matter because assumptions are going to be made. Asians are not white. Asian Americans are not white. If we were, my answer to "Where are you from?" would never be followed by "No, I mean where are you really from? You know. Like where were you born?"
My prickly response here is to get us thinking (and to remind me to think) critically about the statistics, initiatives, and innovations. What are we celebrating here? And how can we appropriately celebrate, re-group, look critically, and then respond accordingly?
For example, if we stop too long in amazement over the racial make-up of the congregation, we forget that according to the article, the up front leadership at WC, by and large, remains white (the article does not mention gender). Where and from whom are the white leaders of churches like WC going to learn about the non-white experience? How will congregations that are 80% white experience multiethnic leadership if they never see it, hear it, and submit to it at their own church?
Press "publish." Holding breath
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