Church and Race

Today I ran across an article on CNN’s web page Why Many Americans Prefer Their Sundays Segregated and I found it quite interesting.  There is a wonderful quote:

“But interracial church advocates say the church was never meant to be segregated. They point to the New Testament description of the first Christian church as an ethnic stew — it deliberately broke social divisions by uniting groups that were traditionally hostile to one another, they say.”

The ‘first Christian church’ was the only Church there was, so of course everyone worshiped together!  This is one of my pet peeves.  People look at something in the New Testament and then try to make it fit their preconceived notions of what is right and wrong without taking into account a) the first century was a radically different culture than we have today and b) 2000 years has passed since then.  When people forget that Jesus lived in history, and that the Church has had a whole lot of history, they end up with very bad ideas of how things ought to be.  This is a wonderful case in point.

First of all, the “ethnic stew” didn’t work.  There were two people groups, Jews and non-Jews.  Guess what?  The non-Jews ended up excluding the Jews from the Church (it is a bit more complicated than that, but essentially that’s what happened over a five to seven hundred year period).

Second, we now live in a world that has churches separated by race.  This means that, of course people are going to attend racial churches.  Racial churches exist.  Now they may have been born out of systemic sin, but they exist nonetheless, and we can’t force that to change.

I personally don’t understand the hoopla over the issue, anyway.  I am a part of a denomination that is continually apologizing for racism and is ever-seeking new ways to be inclusive (to the point of excluding pictures of white males on its website homepage, because everyone knows that to be inclusive means excluding “the man”) and things don’t change.  We still have congregations that prefer to worship in styles in which they are accustomed and with people who look like them.

That is not systemic racism.  That is the human condition.

The first church I served was a 99.99% retired congregation.  They intentionally cut ties with the preschool that was using its facility because they were a “retired church.”  Was this age-ism?  Perhaps.  Was it sin?  I’ll leave that for God to decide.  The point for them was that they wanted people around with whom they could relate.  Society (and the denominational hierarchy) was constantly giving them the message that “old people don’t matter…we want young people because they have more life to give.”  They liked traditional worship, both liturgical and informal, camp-meeting style.  And they liked their organ music.

When we look at it from an age perspective, it seems logical that people would want to congregate with others like them with similar preferences in worship style.  But when we start talking about the color of people’s skin, all of a sudden it is systemic sin and institutional racism.

Now why is that?

~ by stevebruns on August 4, 2008.