I live in a
very diverse city. Anchorage, AK boasts
the most diverse census tract in the United States (1) and two of the more diverse
High Schools in America (2). In the
Anchorage School District 93 different languages are spoken (3). I could go on with stats, but I think Russian
Orthodox Archpriest Michael Oleksa sums it up when he noted, “The world
has come to Anchorage.” (4)
I have been thinking about my cities amazing diversity today as well as
an event that happened over fifty years ago.
In 1963, just months after delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at Western Michigan University. Following the address was a question and
answer session. In that session the
President of the University asked Dr. King a series of questions. It is this exchange from the question and
answer section that has been on my mind today:
“President Miller:
Don't you feel that integration can
only be started and realized in the Christian church, not in schools or by
other means? This would be a means of seeing just who are true Christians.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:
As a preacher, I would certainly
have to agree with this. I must admit that I have gone through those moments
when I was greatly disappointed with the church and what it has done in this
period of social change. We must face
the fact that in America, the church is still the most segregated major
institution in America. At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing and
Christ has no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this
nation. This is tragic. Nobody of honesty can overlook this. Now, I'm sure
that if the church had taken a stronger stand all along, we wouldn't have many
of the problems that we have. The first way that the church can repent, the
first way that it can move out into the arena of social reform is to remove the
yoke of segregation from its own body. Now, I'm not saying that society must
sit down and wait on a spiritual and moribund church as we've so often seen. I
think it should have started in the church, but since it didn't start in the
church, our society needed to move on. The church, itself, will stand under the
judgement of God. Now that the mistake of the past has been made, I think that
the opportunity of the future is to really go out and to transform American
society, and where else is there a better place than in the institution that
should serve as the moral guardian of the community. The institution that
should preach brotherhood and make it a reality within its own body.” (5)
The
reason this has been on my mind is the simple fact that Dr. King’s words are
true in my life. The lease diverse place
I go each week is my church. My work
life is very diverse, my neighborhood places me (a white middle-age male) in
the minority, and the shops I frequent are reflections of the city at
large. However, my church – while well
intentioned (diversity is one of our stated goals), and not entirely without
diversity – is the least diverse place in my life.
While Dr.
King’s words over 50 years ago should have been a wake up call for the American
church I am not sure that in the following years much was done on a large scale
to make his statement not just as true today as it was when he first uttered
it. In fact I think that the Church
Growth movement begun by Donald McGavran in the 1950’s and continuing into our
present day relied on principle of homogeneity that made matters worse.
McGavran wrote, “People like to
become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers.” His protégé, C. Peter Wagner, stated it
even more directly when he wrote, “segregation
is a desired end.” (6) While the
leaders of the Church Growth movement had the spread of the gospel in mind, the
end result was the American church looking less like Dr. King’s dream, or the
church in the Book of Acts, and more like a niche marketed product devised to
segregate people.
Our human
nature may make McGavran’s statement that “People
like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers”
true, but neither the theory, or the practice of segregation, is what we see
in the Bible. Ray Bakke notes in his
book A Theology as Big as the City” (7)
that in Acts 1-12 we see Pentecost unfold as the church moves from being multi-lingual to multi-cultural. By the time
we get to chapter 11 and we read about the church in Antioch and see a group of
Jesus followers in a very divers city (3rd largest city in the Roman
empire divided into Greek, Syrian, Jewish, Latin and African sectors) that has
a pastoral leadership team of 5 pastors from 3 continents. The church in Antioch is very diverse and it
is in this context – a diverse church, in a diverse city, with a diverse
leadership team – where the followers of Jesus are first called
Christians. Could it be that it is this
type of incarnation that finally fulfills what begins on the day of
Pentecost?
So today
as Dr. King’s observations ring in our ears from over 50 years ago and the
legacy of Antioch echoes down from the early days of the faith, all of us who
desire to follow Jesus should take a long hard look in the mirror and ask a few
questions about how we are doing in our “Institution(s)
that should preach brotherhood and make it a reality within its own body.”
(3) About the Anchorage School District, Anchorage School District, http://asdk12.org/aboutasd/, (accessed
18 June 2014).
(4) Communicating Across Cultures with Father Oleksa, Alaska Staff Development Network, 30 October
2013 – 2 November 2013, BP Energy Center, Anchorage, Alaska.
(6) Donald McGavran and C. Peter Wagner
taken from citations in Slow Church: Cultivating a Community in the patient
Way of Jesus by C. Christopher Smith & John Pattison. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books. 2014. Pg. 47 (Chapter 2, Terroir: Taste and See contains a good summery of the Church Growth
Movement).
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