Newsletter #53
On (Maybe) Looking Like Your Community
Be sure that if you decide to mishandle some classified documents, leave them inside your sports car. They’ll be more secure that way.
“Our churches ought to reflect our communities” has become an incredibly common trope among Christians. As far as I can tell, this sentiment isn’t confined to the conservative evangelical world. It’s just as likely to be found in progressive, mainline churches, too, albeit for different reasons. Perhaps for that reason alone it should give us pause.
First, “ought to” is a rather strong expression. It refers to some kind of moral obligation, not just ministry preference. We’re not talking about what would merely happen in an ideal world. People are prescribing what a healthy, effective, and/or faithful church looks like. That’s no small claim.
Second, over the last century we’ve seen the emergence of massive population centers on both coasts. Granted, cities in the heart of the country (especially in Texas) continue to flourish, and arguably the transition of large swaths of people to large cities has been taking place for over a century. Nevertheless, this movement, accompanied by mostly unfettered immigration, globalization, and other social forces, has meant the diversification of suburban and urban America. Consequently, the savviest and most attentive of churchmen and parachurch leaders have spoken and written more about the need for diversity in the church.
Third, in a time when everyone is much more “race-conscious” for all kinds of reasons, it isn’t surprising that rhetoric about diversity would be more prominent, even if diversity pertains to more than skin color.
I certainly don’t want automatically to disparage any effort to diversify our churches. I’d readily concede that much of the rhetoric and effort surrounding this stems from a truly biblical perspective. Whether one points to the Great Commission, Acts 1:8, or the heavenly assembly of worshipers from every tribe, nation, and tongue (Rev. 5), there’s plenty of biblical material to support and illustrate a kind of “Kingdom Diversity.”
But I wonder, is there a better way to speak of this than the outright assertion that “our churches should reflect our communities”?
On the face of it, this statement is obviously true and false. It’s true because we have a hard time imagining that a church has been faithful if the composition of the membership in no way reveals persons who populate the community within which the church has been providentially placed. But it’s false because, in a different way, the last thing a church should look like is its community. How can you help the lost world if you look exactly like the lost world? The church should be known for its distinctiveness from its community, not its similarity to it.
Discerning readers will observe that I’ve shifted my meaning in the prior paragraph. On the first count, we’re talking about things that mostly go skin deep—skin color, ethnic background, first language, etc. On the second count, I’m referring to the deeper qualities of human character. After all, we’re told not to be “of the world.” I juxtapose these two understandings of identity, similarity, and representation to point to a deeper claim: the diversity of the church must arise from a deeply spiritual orientation. Our concern must be that (1) we’re reaching out to all in love, and (2) we’re seeking the transformation that the Gospel alone brings.
This is where I think the impetus for my thinking on this subject of late may be helpful.
At the 2022 Free Will Baptist National Convention in Birmingham, delegates adopted a resolution of repentance. The entire resolution can be found here, and it’s certainly worth reading in full. I’ve been preaching through some of the themes contained within it, including the following portion:
“Whereas God has created all peoples in His image for His glory and called us to love them and reach them with the Gospel, regardless of race, ethnicity or socio-economic status, we have instead failed in our attitudes and actions, particularly by failing to evangelism and disciple all peoples in our communities…”
Such an acknowledgment of ministry failure is significant and humbling. What we’re really saying is, “We’ve been guilty of the sin of partiality.” We must come to grips with this in order to engage in full repentance and to start to better reflect God’s heart in our outreach and discipleship.
Some of my thinking on this topic has also been stimulated by the Know Your Community reports made possible by a partnership between Church Answers and the NAFWB Executive Office.
Another less helpful contributor to my thinking on this topic is the way DEI initiatives (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) have overrun corporate America, American education, and generally anywhere that has a Human Resources department. They clearly stem from some secular assumptions about human identity and rights that are problematic from a biblical worldview.
I’m upfront about these influences because I think they collectively point to an opportunity but also an obstacle. The Know Your Community reports, for example, help churches collect some fairly robust and helpful demographic and psychographic information on their surrounding community—and for a very nominal fee. Granted, many of our initial impressions of our communities are simply confirmed, but I suspect most pastors who have received these reports will point to some findings that were less obvious. There were two or three new details that stood out to me. The key, of course, is to operationalize the new information you receive.
More information about context can provide opportunities for churches to be more attentive to the unique people God has placed around them. For example, if you learn of a sizable deaf population in your town, God may use that to make us more mindful of the spiritual needs of this group. Perhaps you now would look quite differently at how to deploy the two people in your church who know sign language, or what kind of technology upgrades might be most prudent.
There are, however, some obstacles when it comes to the focus on diversity and representation. I’ll identify four.
First, we sometimes reduce diversity to one or two identity markers and exclude others from our consideration. For example, when people say diversity I suspect the majority of them immediately think of skin-color (race) and/or ethnicity. However, why not think of people of different income levels? Or educational attainments? Why don’t we think of the disabled? Why not people of different political persuasions? Do these not represent forms of diversity which exist in our communities? I realize some of these qualities are products of birth while some are products of choice. (Nurture comes into the picture, too.) Yet these still constitute legitimate differences that aren’t fully appreciated in our church’s outreach efforts.
Second, once we broaden our definition of diversity, we realize that certain forms of diversity are more prevalent in our communities. You may have many (relative to the national average) who are widows or widowers. Sounds like loneliness and unresolved grief could be a substantial factor in the cultural makeup.
Conversely, your community may be very racially homogenous. For example, nearly 96% of the county in which I live and primarily minister is white/Caucasian. The numbers change if I head north, but our church is mostly living in the former setting. Is it reasonable for that to mean that my church, even if faithful, is likely to be more racially homogenous?
If I’m right in implying what I’m implying here, I’m happy to be consistent on this point. The county in which I was raised and worshiped the first 18 years of my life is 46% black/African-American. I can assure you that the evangelical church scene in my home county, regrettably, doesn’t bear out this racial diversity.
Third, focus on diversity can inevitably lead us to focus on groups of people, not individuals. The last time I checked, individuals will stand before Christ at the Judgment Seat. Individuals must choose to respond to or reject the call to repentance. Group dynamics are real and could influence the way we share, but we typically encounter people one at a time in specific situations. We certainly should share the Gospel with groups (especially households), but I submit that the average church member will most frequently deal with their neighbors on an individual basis. We should be slow, then, to try to universalize and attribute very specific qualities to entire groups of people.
Fourth, a final obstacle in our growing attention to diversity may be that we lose sight of our principal ministry obligation: obedience. We are responsible for obedience, not outcomes.
This is the same concern I have about baptismal goals. Isn’t it the case that besides teaching new converts about baptism and intentionally preparing them for it, the need for baptism stems from something almost entirely outside our control? Of course, I’m speaking of conversion. Only converted people need to be baptized, and we convert no one. We do, however, evangelize. And only evangelized people (people who heard the Word somehow) are converted, and thus, stand in need of baptism. Might it be better, under this example, to have a goal of Gospel presentations? Presumably if we set goals in that area, and hold our feet to the fire, the baptismal numbers will gradually follow. I think this same line of thinking has relevance to our aims at diversity in the church.
I wonder if it would be more constructive to say, “Our church’s efforts to evangelize and disciple should extend to the full range of persons whom we encounter in our community. And perhaps we need to work harder at ‘encountering’ more than just those in our immediate peer group.” The reason the Homogenous Unit Principle was so influential is partly because it’s kind of true. Birds of a feather do flock together. But this is a terrible way of thinking about the family which God is building, the people for whom Christ shed His blood.
This God, Paul says, has determined the boundaries and periods of our dwelling. Coupled with the geographical progression of Acts 1:8, I think it makes total sense that we see an immediate priority on our communities as they are, not as we might imagine them to be. However, we then are obligated to scrutinize our relationships. Is it possible that we’ve so limited our social circle that the only people we’d ever dare evangelize and disciple look like us, sound like us, shop where we shop, and share our educational level? We will have to be much more intentional and aware if our churches are to be sufficiently representative of our communities.
This leads to a couple of final, practical observations. I want to say that our churches, over time, will more likely represent a cross-section of our communities if we faithfully witness and disciple people. We guarantee no spiritual outcomes; obedience is our job. We must not make an idol out of diversity. We must remember that “Gentile,” “the weak,” “the wise,” and other biblical categories are fairly elastic.
As for me, I probably need to be spending more time with 60-year-old, white, lapsed Catholics who grew up voting Democrat (due to labor union influence), but are generally more conservative—though not religious. In the meantime, I need to love everyone whom God has already placed in my diverse, weekly path, and give them Jesus.
Follow-Up:
In last week’s newsletter I reflected on dying and death, especially in the context of the value of attending funerals. Just this week, a dear brother in our church invited me over to show me something. He took me down into his basement woodshop and presented the casket he had built for himself. Now there’s a brother who takes death seriously!
Currently Reading:
Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
Quote of the Week:
For a great many people, the burden of childlessness is a cross not of their own making. Those who prate about how young people are turning away from children are often the same people who filled those young people with upper-middle-class expectations, and demanded they get the college degrees to meet them, adding physical and financial obstacles to family formation. It is not surprising that a generation of Protestant Christians who had no patience for the celibacy of Jesus in their theology of marriage now have no accounting for the (biological) childlessness of Jesus in their theories of procreation.
Matthew Lee Anderson, “Is There a Right to Have Children?” Plough.