they all look the same in their racial ethnicity, they will be viewed as a cult. For that reason, a multi-colored church is a strong, compelling rationale for believing the gospel. Diversity was the testimony of the gospel in the New Testament church.
Theme 3: A Consistent Pattern of Race
The Difficulty of Race Conversations
Although the initiatives for diversity discourse were well-intentioned at Park Street, they could sometimes be awkward and messy. Claude, a Black church leader at Park Street, shares,
I can remember one time when our Lead Pastor, Pastor Louie, had us in a meeting in the gathering place that was really intentional. In fact, I want to say, a lot of deacons were there. It was a leadership meeting, volunteer leadership, and leadership. We were there to kind of talk about these racial tensions. And it was a little weird, I’m going to say. But like all things like that, like they can be a little bit weird. He had gathered us literally to talk about something that a lot of people felt like wasn’t an issue. He had gathered us in the room, and we talked about the differences in our culture, the way we may relate to different things. It was just really awkward and weird. To illustrate this, let me say that I was actually in agreement with the 75 year old White man who was with me. He said to me, “Why do we need to do this?” And in my mind, I’m thinking, like, “yea why do we need to do this?” Because for us, it didn’t seem like there was an issue here. It was like, somebody’s trying to cause a conflict, coming up to us and saying, “Hey, let’s talk about the differences between our different cultures,” and stuff like that and see where there may be a
misunderstanding between us. Yeah, but what if we are just fine with each other?
As much as the leaders preferred to be proactive in these conversations, often, the interaction became reactive. Referring to the meetings when the leaders of the church would discuss the racial incidents in the news, Claude recalls,
Though these things were happening all across the country, they were all incidences that felt like they were happening right next to you. Following the shootings and racial violence and all of these different things and really all of these different events being highlighted, our church did a really good job, and Pastor Louie, our leadership team, did a good job of having a race conversation toward racial reconciliation. It was a panel that was a reaction to the George Floyd murder and the Amoud Aubrey situation, and really the goal was to have a moment of solidarity, really kind of thinking, what does all this mean for us? So, we brought in Dexter Hardy and his wife, who are a Black couple, Black family, and asked them, “What’s your reaction to that?” And then we also brought in somebody else who was White and somebody else who was Black and so we had a mixed panel of people from different races the goal was solidarity to show our support not only for each other but to really kind of humanize the whole thing.
George Yancey states, “The way we talk to each other matters. It does not matter if we’re right if we cannot communicate our perspective to those who disagree.”10 Yancey’s point is that a regular pattern of talking about race can only happen if we have
10 George A. Yancey, Beyond Racial Division (Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2022),
mutual respect for those with whom we disagree. Thus, the conversations with the church leaders revealed that having productive racial discourse was not always easy. Isaac Adams writes,
One reason that conversations about race are so hard is because too many American evangelicals lack thinking with biblical nuance. Sadly, when it comes to using our God-given brains, evangelicals often have only two speeds. For the evangelical, if something is not essential for salvation, it’s often regarded as unimportant. Issues, then, are either of speed 1: ultimate importance, or speed 2: no importance . . . . This either/or mental proclivity is why evangelicals often pit two good things against each other . . . . It’s why we often see those who disagree with us as a part of the faithful or as a full-blown heretic–we only have two speeds.11
To help their church avoid these two extremes, Perimeter took the initiative to bring the church leaders and members together to ask questions and share their individual perspectives on racial injustices after they occurred. As an example of this, Barry recalls,
We asked each other tons of questions. And it just created a dynamic where people who were already processing alone, but now it’s like they’re not processing in isolation. It was an open time of saying “here’s what I think about this. Here’s what, in my experience, this has been about. I’ve heard this term.” And it was just a lot of conversations that I found myself in amongst the staff members, and really just coaching.
Referring to ways that Urban Hope would encourage conversation about race, Warren states,
We’ve had roundtables, we’ve had panel discussions, and we’ve done a podcast, and we will also just get a zoom together, and we’ll lead out in prayer, and we’ll just ask people, what are they feeling, so that we can actually get some feedback, because we don’t want to make assumptions about what people should be feeling. There’s a level of transparency that we don’t get about what people are really thinking and feeling unless we open up certain doors. You know, we’ll get a group of people together, and then sometimes we’ll do these podcasts or interact with the ideas in front of the people that we’ll just send it out. Like, here’s a conversation that we had when we dealt with three or four of the tough questions they may have come out of this particular situation. The Black/White dynamic and having regular conversations about how we typically feel or approach a given topic–that is a regular exchange, that we have to have.
11 Isaac Adams, Talking about Race: Urban Hope for Hard Conversations (Grand Rapids, MI:
Zondervan, 2022), 141-142.
Diversity of Views on Racial Problems
A regular pattern of race conversations does not imply that all churches have the same views on racial problems. Two churches can be committed to open discourse about race, but each is not similar in understanding the problems. Okuwobi separates the leadership in these types of churches into structuralist and opportunist categories. These two archetypes illustrate how different attitudes about race shape how organizations talk about race. From her research, Okuwobi shows that structuralist church leaders have well-developed and structural conceptions of racial inequality. They are vocal in
communicating with their congregations, and perhaps the broader community, concerning issues of race.
Conversely, she discovered that “opportunist church leaders have a prominent diversity discourse but lack the expected underlying racial attitudes. Such leaders appear to manipulate diversity to gain market advantage over other churches. Their actions most closely reflect broader society in that they hold diversity as a sacred value while ignoring ideas of racial inequality underlying it.”12
In terms of racial discourse and concepts of racial inequality, each of the three churches in this research seemed to lean heavily toward the structuralist archetype of leadership. This meant that discussions on or about racial issues were not mere
opportunities to give the appearance of openness and hospitality, but rather the leadership team engaged in these conversations regularly and naturally. Consequently, the authentic conversations among the leadership team was an example to the rest of the church
members.
Pressures That Affect Racial Discourse
Even with a structuralist view of racial problems, these churches had various pressures that determined where they fell on the spectrum of racial discourse. Okuwobi
12 Okuwobi, “‘Keep Race on the Table,’” 20.
writes that leaders’ attitudes about structural racism “cannot be evaluated without an eye towards their context. Even when leaders hold structural views of race and racial
inequality, and want to reflect those in diversity discourse, they may be hindered from or encouraged to do so by several factors.”13 For example, while the leadership at Urban Hope was committed to publicly addressing racial issues, they were also careful not to allow the racially focused headlines of the day set the agenda of their preaching and teaching. Warren speaks to this when he shares,
What we did not want to do, is let the pulpit get hijacked by social issues. While we will do a special message series on certain things, we just didn’t want our pulpit to become a news desk where we felt obligated to react to every single thing. But we felt that to not say anything made us irresponsible.
Urban Hope is also careful not to let race conversations drive everything. Even though diversity discourse is a value of theirs, they are careful not to allow the emphasis of it to overshadow other priorities of greater importance, like the church’s mission. Speaking of how the church should stay unified, McCamack adds,
Sometimes we think, “Hey, we need to get unified, so that we can get our mission.”
I would say that’s the wrong tack. I would say you got to get on mission so that you can get unified. Missional movement creates unity in the church, and the reason there’s so much infighting or division in even churches that value open and diverse conversations about race, is because they’re not pushing the mission ball forward.
Because when you get people moving together, they stop looking at all the things that separate them and they start looking at the thing that unites them.
Urban Hope illustrates that a church must maintain a careful balance between diversity discourse and missional movement. A regular pattern of race conversation does not necessarily mean that multi-racial discourse, where the conversation is focused on the racial dynamics of the situation, is the priority of every gathering. It means there is a healthy rhythm or pattern to the race conversations, but not so much that diversity
discourse becomes the church’s mission. This balance is difficult to maintain and requires much accountability and open discussion among the church’s leaders.
13 Okuwobi, “‘Keep Race on the Table,’” 20.
Theme 4: The Substantive Presence of Racial