Did you know that only 5.5% of all Christian congregations are considered multi-racial*? So what is a multi-racial church, you ask? According to one study (footnoted below), to qualify as a multi-racial church, no more than one race makes up 80% or more of your congregation. So you can be 79.9% black or 79.9% white and technically be considered multi-racial. Are you getting this? Only 5.5% of churches in the U.S. meet this criteria....which is pretty generous, in my opinion. We all know that segregation in the Christian church is a fundamental problem, but so few are talking about this. That's what I like about this guy.
Scott Williams is the pastor of the NW campus of lifechurch.tv in Oklahoma. He delivers some straight talk about church diversity in this 9-minute video talk from a worldwide video conference called The Nines. It was a full day of talks by various church leaders given 9 minutes to speak their peace. In this talk Scott tackles racial diversity. I think it is excellent. Tell me what you think. Click here to watch.
*Figures obtained from calculations using the 1998 National Congregations Study directed by Mark Chaves
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3 comments:
excellent word!
Thank you for blogging about this issue. It can be frustrating to try to have diversity conversations with other believers who either don't understand, don't care or both. We need to be discussing this but I also think we need a "safe community of believers" to turn to when we are left speechless. Do you know of any such group? Thanks again!
Good stuff. One thought to add to the mix: when most ppl talk 'diversity', they mean 'race'. Diversity also means more than that: nationality, gender, age, background, political affiliation, even weight can be considered a 'diversity' issue (which is good news for us big guys!) The challenge is to be inclusive without being permissive. I could go on, but I think that should do it for now...
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