Becoming Diverse
by Lenn Zeller, Director of Conference Care
“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28
John Blake, CNN writer, said the following in a blog some time back: “ ‘Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of Christian America.’ That declaration, which has been attributed to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., used to startle listeners. Now it’s virtually become a cliché.” Most of us know that to be true. Not all, but most of our congregations are very homogenous. We might even say that they are segregated. The article, “Race, Diversity, and Membership Duration in Religious Congregations,” said that nine out of ten congregations in the U.S. are segregated— a single racial group accounts for more than 80 percent of their membership.2
This should not be so in the Church of Jesus Christ. Our seventh guiding value of “A Membership Reflective of the Harvest Field’s Diversity” says that we do not want it to be so in the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference. And history tells us that it was not always so. As the IVP Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels explains, “The Twelve [disciples] displayed a remarkable diversity in background, including businessmen (Peter, Andrew, James and John), a tax collector (Matthew), and a zealous revolutionary (Simon the Zealot).3 They also came from a variety of tribes and locations. They were not a uniform group by any means.
After the Resurrection, when the church began to grow and blossom, it brought together a wide variety of folks … Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, Greek and Hebrew (see Galatians 3:28, 1 Corinthians 12: 13, and others). Somewhere along the way, however, it became easier to simply segregate than to work out our cultural differences. Our seventh guiding value declares that we wish to change that reality and find a new norm of diversity and unity of faith in Christ.
But how do we do that? I confess that it has not been easy for us at St. Paul’s Church in Stowe, PA. God has blessed us with an open door into the local elementary school, where we have ministered through an after school Bible club for several years now. Our connections with those families, many of them minority or racially mixed, have grown over those years. Trust has developed and deepened, and we have been able to relate to some of those families on a variety of levels.
But it has not been easy to bridge that gap in the worship setting. There have been some successes. Through the Bible club ministry, Janeen and I have a much more culturally and racially varied circle of influence than we have ever had in 35 years of ministry. We are working hard to develop those relationships. A few of our new friends have come to visit our worship service from time to time, though regular, ongoing worship attendance is rare. A handful of the Bible Club children participate in Church School. We have tried hard to be enthusiastically welcoming. But … so far … it has not resulted in a numerically significant diversity in our congregation. I am coming to grips with the reality that it will take intense prayer, great patience, much time and ongoing intentionality. The segregation did not happen overnight. I guess neither will the breaking down of those walls. Let’s keep praying and trying and seeking the grace and guidance of God as we become more reflective of the harvest’s diversity in the CCCC.
1 John Blake CNN News Belief Blog, October 6, 2010; http://religion.blogs.cnn.com
2 “Race, Diversity, and Membership Duration in Religious Congregations,” by Christopher P. Scheitle and Kevin D. Dougherty. Sociological Inquiry, Volume 80, Issue 3, pages 405–423, August 2010
3 Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, 2nd Edition, The IVP Bible Dictionary Series. Edited by Joel B. Green, Prof. Jeannine K. Brown and Nicholas Perrin.
