Diversity with Justice

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. once famously said: “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.” And while Christian people of all varieties have repeated this quote over the years, King’s sentiment is still applicable to the U.S. church of 2017.

LifeWay Research, a firm with Southern Baptist roots, performed a study on the problem of segregated worship. According to LifeWay, two-thirds of Americans have never regularly attended a place of worship where they are an ethnic minority. And the secular Pew Research Center states that eight out of 10 U.S. churchgoers worship where a single racial or ethnic group makes up at least 80 percent of the congregation.

For those who desire to change this reality, Intercultural Ministry: Hope for a Changing World serves as an encouraging anthology. Editors Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Jann Aldredge-Clanton have assembled 15 diverse voices in ministry to give their contributions to the conversation on increasing diversity and intercultural worship in the American church.

This book of essays is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Building Theological Foundations for Intercultural Churches and Ministries,” provides five sharp and insightful essays centering around the book’s thesis: the need for the church to champion diversity while dismantling the segregation the church was built on during the United States’ precarious racial past.

Part 2, “Strategies for Building Intercultural Churches and Ministries,” provides the building blocks for the intercultural church by providing five different takes on enhancing intercultural church practices from experienced ministers with on-the-ground experience. In Chapter 6, Rev. Sheila Sholes-Ross recalls leading an intercultural worship experience on Resurrection Sunday, or Easter, at the First Baptist Church in Pittsfield, Mass. Sholes-Ross describes a service that combined “black contemporary music” and “traditional Eurocentric anthems.” She also describes how the service took careful and intentional planning and marketing to attract an intercultural crowd.

In Part 3, “Future Possibilities of Intercultural Churches and Ministries,” we are left with five visions of the church’s intercultural future from five ministers who seem truly called to take up the task of integrating the church in an authentic and meaningful way. Each person expresses the challenges of the mission along with stories of practical implementations of change.

The contributing essays each convey the importance of true interculturalism, meaning a church experience that welcomes and includes different cultural expressions of worship. In years past, the problem of segregation in the church has been addressed by an emphasis on assimilation and reconciliation. However, these writers seem to understand that there can be no reconciliation without first finding justice and inclusion. The prescription seems to be to tear down the American church’s faulty foundation and rebuild on a foundation of inclusion and oneness while keeping racial, ethnic, and cultural distinctions and identity.

Near the conclusion of the book, Karen Hernández-Granzen, a Trenton, N.J. Presbyterian minister, concludes that achieving the goal of creating truly culturally diverse worshiping bodies requires both chronos (the time that passes as the clock ticks away) and kairos (the right season or moment for change to take place). Intercultural Ministry is full of hope that the kairos the church needs will arrive sooner than later.