LITERATURE REVIEW
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Preparation
Second, a list of open-ended interview questions was prepared for use by each participating management team. Interview questions were developed from a synthesis of information gathered from the survey questions and the literature review.
Data Collection
Through a predetermined set of standardized questions, the researcher captured real-life experiences of the ups and downs of Black/White team leadership. After all individual interviews were completed, the data was organized and used to guide a final conversation with the entire leadership team a week later. Information was gathered through direct observation of team interaction and narratives were formed to illustrate the dynamics of Black/White team leadership experience.
Data Analysis
ANALYSIS OF FINDINGS
Urban Hope Church
The mission of the church is to make disciples who grow in the gospel as a family during the mission. I give credit to the Holy Spirit for working in the hearts of people who are sensitive to the gospel. 1. He recalled, “This idea of seeing all these multicultural names in the church and how the church just grew outside of Jerusalem was not just about you in particular.
So we had to start thinking about what is a good balance in the flow of preaching. Initially, there was a season at the beginning where the members had to build trust, but it wasn't because they were going from mono-ethnicity to multi-ethnicity. What is now, because these layers of other people who knew nothing about the dynamics of our past have also come in, now it's not an active distinction in the way they look at the church.
And even in who leads the church, and in groups and things like that.
Park Street Baptist Church
One way the church has changed its approach to ministry is to offer more services to different ethnicities. Louie believes that the church's decline over the years is also due to what he called mission drift. Now the priest is the supreme visionary, he works through the structure of the deacons spiritually through the ministry that serves the church.
Louie's vision paid off and became a reality as the church embraced the multiracial team. A deep conviction about the authority and relevance of the Bible was instrumental in the transformation of the church into a multiracial community of believers. Although the other team members are dedicated and loyal, the church's ethos reflects the head pastor.
To illustrate this, one of the other priests tells how important the presence of the head priest is in the church.
Perimeter Community Church
CONCLUSIONS
A High Degree of Racial Awareness
Each participating team member in the survey demonstrated a high level of understanding of the diversity reality of their team. The following report on the findings of racial consciousness will be divided into three areas of consideration—racial identity, racial history, and racial intelligence. The white community is oblivious to the black experience, mainly because the white community is the majority culture.
That said, the attention of the multiracial leaders interviewed was focused on the history of racial injustice experienced by the black person. It was clear that although each of the leaders was raised in the same country, they were not equally exposed to the same racial history in their country. For me, being black is still a learning experience because of the lack of knowledge and awareness that we had growing up in Miami.
And if you don't even have the dimensions of the debates, it will be impossible.
A High Commitment to Substantive Diversity
Of course we would.” But while the question in his majority culture mind is "Why not?", the question in my minority culture mind is "Well, because that's not the only way to look at it." If you're in the majority culture, that's all you know. Diversity wasn't just something to show from the stage; it was embedded in the DNA of every church's ethos. The longer we were here, the more we learned that the culture of the church was not quite as diverse as its reflection in the Sunday experience.
Minority groups are not merely present; their presence is felt in the way the organization functions.”6. Much has been written about the value of team leadership in the church and about the biblical model of the plurality of elders. We want to be a church where these Black and White people in the center feel at home.
When you don't have a multi-ethnic, multi-colored, congregation, you lose the blessing of all those non-racist voices in the middle, and you're left with the voices on the extreme ends.
A Consistent Pattern of Race Conversations
Referring to meetings when church leaders discussed racial incidents in the news, Claude recalls. It doesn't matter if we're right if we can't communicate our point of view to those who disagree.”10 Yancey's point is that an orderly pattern of talking about race can only happen if we have. This is why we often see those who disagree with us as part of the believers or as a complete heretic – we only have two speeds. 11.
You know, we get a group of people together and sometimes we do these podcasts or interact with those ideas in front of people that we just send it out. Like, here's a conversation that we had as we addressed three or four of the difficult questions that they may have come out of this particular situation. Therefore, the authentic conversations among the leadership group were an example for the rest of the church.
A regular pattern of racial conversation does not necessarily mean that multiracial discourse, where the conversation is focused on the racial dynamics of the situation, is the priority of every encounter.
The Substantive Presence of Racial Representation
Each of the churches in this study was aware of their level of cultural connection and how racial representation played into it. To the extent that racial representation is important at Perimeter Community Church, adds White pastor Brady. Because of the way their church began with the merger of two churches, Urban Hope has a healthy balance of racial representation.
But even with many diverse leaders, they must be conscious of maintaining a balance of racial representation. To illustrate the challenges of having racial representation in worship without having racial representation in planning, Andy admits. The concept of racial representation is difficult to pin down, and much of the challenge in understanding its application has to do with the idea of motivation.
However, it was evident in interviews with participating church leaders that portraying racial representation can be difficult if it does not come from a genuine heart for true diversity.
An Ongoing Experience of Meaningful Collaboration
All of these past experiences of the top-down church leadership model had a formative effect on these participating leaders. Their lives were directly affected by the failures of the leaders at the top. So a lot of these personalities are big, the people who sit on the board of the NAACP.
A black person in a multi-ethnic team will tend to wait, hold back and not be as friendly and open about their view and their perspective because of the conditioning that happened from being in the minority culture . We strongly agreed that we should write a statement of where the church stands culturally and biblically on some of the current racial issues. The most intense pain was to agree on the wording of the statement.
If multi-racial management teams want to find solutions that serve everyone's interests, each member of the team must listen to everyone.
A Genuine Willingness toward Methodological Compromise
And so we're going to do both, because both are valuable.” Speaking of the value of different environments, William continues: One of the things I've had to learn from a ministry perspective is that silence is not a bad thing. In multiracial church leadership teams, differences in historical conditions create different perspectives on the methodologies of the churches they lead.
A team can default to people-pleasing just because of the context we live in. Kent says: “You have to be able to let go of some things, let go of the 'golden calves'. But it's not easy because you have to be willing to make sacrifices and make those decisions for the greater good and health of the church.
Multiracial management teams must have a sacrifice due to the presence of different backgrounds and preferences.
The Clear Existence of Shared Core Beliefs
Kent says that the process of diverging from another cultural expression creates something in your heart that begins to love the beauty of diversity more than your monoethnic preferences. Although racial diversity on their team was not a source of tension, the conversations revealed racial perspectives that the team had to learn. We believe that the church has a spiritual responsibility to lead the way and exemplify the unity and oneness that Jesus prayed for.
If the church does, then we believe that society will follow the example of the church and that the church can take its rightful position to be an agent of change in the community. One aspect of the mission is to get involved with the economic and legislative structures in our community to change the laws. Yes, you can send money all day long, but at the end of the day, people move to certain neighborhoods because they know it's a good neighborhood.
Finally, when a racially diverse leadership team works together toward a common mission, then ego is not part of the conversation and the mission moves forward.
The Sustained Headwinds of Personal Disappointment
It is one that only the Church, through the power of the Holy Spirit, can heal. From my perspective, this is the core of the White issue that we have to deal with. One of the ways the leaders dealt with attrition was to recognize that there is always a cost to telling the truth.
Looking back on the journey of the past few years, Kent says: There was a lot of tension that was not pleasant. Along with White flight came the unexpected dynamic of White people who stayed with the church because they believed in the power and application of the gospel, and they were committed to the church and to seeing it the way the Lord desires . This comment is one of the realities that multiracial leadership teams constantly find themselves in.
Because of this daunting dynamic, leading in a diverse environment requires a certain expectation of challenge.
The Moral Character of Relational Leadership
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
QUANTITATIVE SURVEY QUESTIONS
QUALITATIVE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
