Should all churches be multiethnic? Is there still a place for homogenous or ethnic-specific churches?
To help us think through these questions, SOLA Editorial Board member Moses Y. Lee interviewed Thabiti Anyabwile, lead pastor of Anacostia River Church and founding president of the Crete Network, a ministry dedicated to planting churches in Black and Brown communities, as well as Dr. Alexander Jun, a professor of higher education at Azusa Pacific University and also serves as a coordinator of KALI, the Korean American Leadership Initiative in the PCA.
See below for their conversation or listen to the audio here.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Moses Y. Lee: Welcome to the SOLA Network. My name is Moses and I serve on the SOLA editorial team. Today I have the great privilege to introduce you to you today’s guests. First, we have Dr. Alex Jun. He’s a professor of higher education at Azusa Pacific University and also serves as a coordinator of KALI, the Korean American Leadership Initiative, which is a ministry of the PCA. He’s also a ruling elder at New Life Presbyterian Church in Orange County. Finally, he’s served as the moderator of the 45th General Assembly of the PCA in 2017.
Second, we have Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile, the lead pastor at Anacostia River Church in southeast Washington DC. He’s the author of several books, including The Gospel for Muslims, The Decline of African American Theology, and The Faithful Preacher. Most recently, he helped launch the Crete Network, a ministry dedicated to planting churches in Black and Brown communities and serves as the board president.
Now, today’s conversation was initially inspired by the launch of the Crete Network, which started a conversation amongst Asian American pastors over at the “Off the Pulpit” podcast that eventually evolved into a SOLA article, and now this conversation. Both of you brothers have been invited to sit at the table at the highest level with prominent multiethnic, national organizations. And many minorities would say you’ve made it — you’re on the varsity team of ministry. But instead of continuing to charge forward within the multiethnic ministry spaces, you both, as well as many other Black, Brown, and Asian American leaders, are choosing to focus instead on ethnic-specific ministries — what many would consider to be the junior varsity of ministry. So Thabiti, since the Crete Network was the most recent catalyst for this conversation, would you mind sharing with us why you see the need for a ministry that focuses on distressed and neglected Black and Brown communities?
Thabiti Anyabwile: Well, first, it’s a joy to be with you guys to have this conversation. I’m looking forward to seeing where the Spirit of the Lord takes us. The Crete Collective exists because there are neighborhoods that are not being evangelized, where contextualized apologetics is not being developed, where new church works, if they’re happening at all, are happening adjacent to these neighborhoods.
There’s an implicit critique that with all of the wonderful work that’s happening with church planting, and we don’t wish any of it to be diminished, that there are sizable neighborhoods and communities made up predominantly Black, Brown, and Yellow people in distressed neighborhoods that get almost zero investment or attention. So we exist, because we think there’s a gap there, we think there’s a hole there.
Secondly, we exist, because we also think that there are things that need to happen in the course of disciple-making and teaching, theological reflection, that is not happening in so-called multiethnic spaces, and in fact, there are significant barriers to those conversations happening in those spaces.
So where does an African American or an Asian American, who is traumatized by some racist encounters or repeated encounters that they have had, go to process that? Where do they go to get faithful biblical shepherding that takes their embodied selves and the experience of that embodiment seriously in a world that is hostile to that environment? Where do they go for repair? Where do they go to be bound up, to be cared for? Where do they go to be helped to think constructively, not only about their Christian identity, but also about their ethnic identity, which, at least according to Acts 17 and other places, is not a mistake? Where do they go to get both an affirming and critical perspective on their cultural selves?
It’s not in multiethnic spaces. In fact, I want to challenge the notion that multiethnic spaces are the varsity: They’re not. They are places where often there are a lot of resources and a lot of attention. But it’s not the varsity of ministry. It is, in fact, the elementary school of ministry in so far as it actively seeks to avoid these difficult conversations. Almost all the spaces that we could name that people think of as the 800-pound gorillas of multiethnic ministry are places that actually actively avoid these conversations in any constructive way beyond just saying, “Hey, we’re all Christians.” I think that’s an entirely inadequate response for people who believe that the Scripture is sufficient for helping us to live as Christians in the context of actually embodied lives.
Moses Y. Lee: Alex, from your side, in what ways do you believe Asian American ministries should follow the lead of the Black church? And in what ways do you think the Asian American situation is different? And maybe even adding to the question: Where do ministries like KALI fit into that?
Alex Jun: Yes, it is an absolutely different experience. Years ago, a scholar John Ogbu talked about voluntary versus involuntary migration. The histories are different for Asian Americans within Asian American context, as well as how Asian American history is different from Black history in the United States.
For Asian Americans, we have to think of immigration and voluntary immigration, and that’s a long history. Chinese American history is fundamentally different from Taiwanese or Korean American Immigration patterns.
Part of the challenge is the short history of [modern] immigration in the United States from the mid-1960s. Immigrants from South Korea were allowed to come to the United States as a result of the Civil Rights Movement. Our Black brothers and sisters really pushed for civil rights and Asian Americans were beneficiaries in the mid-1960s.
So what we have is a relatively short history [of modern immigration]. You’ve got language, as well as culture, embedded in this post-immigrant experience. And so if you’re a Korean American listening to this and watching this podcast, you know that many of our experiences in the church were tied to Korean Ministry, Korean language, and culture. And oftentimes, our worship was embedded and tied to language and culture that we [as second-generation Americans] were trying to break free from.
This is not new. In terms of ethnic-specific churches in the United States, the Dutch went through this several hundred years ago, as did other groups of Germans, etc. One of the differences is that over time, the Dutch church became more Americanized. They looked more American in many ways whereas Asian Americans continue to struggle with this idea of the perpetual foreigner. So you could be fourth-generation Chinese American and Christian and still be considered a foreigner. And we’ve seen this time and again.
So those are two different contexts. I think, why Asian American churches or pan Asian churches exist, where it’s still a language in English, but the culture is to be appointed to so eloquently, the culture is still also being addressed. And that is not a mistake, because we are made in God’s image. And we should take the totality of both our Christian identity and our ethnic identity, perhaps in that order, but we are still recognizing our ethnic society.
In many ways, a lot of minorities are still sojourners in this world, where we are constantly reminded where we don’t belong. So there is a place to be able to speak freely and openly about some of the challenges that are going around in the world as it pertains to ethnic-related racism and, of course, [having] solid, biblical Christ-centered preaching, teaching, and fellowship.
Moses Y. Lee: How do you think that ministries like KALI fit into that?
Alex Jun: KALI exists primarily to address the issues of Korean American English-speaking pastors who came out of a Korean church or KM context. They very quickly discovered that either they’ve got to learn Korean very quickly and do Korean Ministry or make this leap into what they thought was varsity and go into a multiethnic church or White church.
In our own ideology, we said, “Well, that’s the regular church,” and even Korean American pastors would say, “I don’t think I’ve made it until I can go into a White church and until I can minister to White people and be respected by them.” “I can’t be in a Korean American church.”
But there are still plenty of [Korean American churches] because that’s the transition. It’s only been 40-50 years of Koreans who speak English who are doing ministry in English-speaking contexts inside of a Korean church. So it’s gonna take time, if we had as much time as perhaps the Dutch or the, or the Germans, right? We’re talking about a couple hundred years, but it’s only been 40-50 years for Koreans.
I know some people are very anxious to see this move forward and for us to evolve. But the reality is that there’s a ministry niche that we need to address. Oftentimes, leaders who are Korean American who are working in spaces feel unsupported, so KALI exists to provide this type of space, ministering to them in their very unique cultural contexts.
Moses Y. Lee: Martin Luther King has been attributed to saying that 11 a.m. on Sunday is our most segregated hour. So what does that quote mean to both of you guys?
Thabiti Anyabwile: Well, I think he’s right. Not only is it still the one of the most segregated hours, but actually 11 a.m. on Sunday is nowadays the best opportunity for a more integrated experience, and the fact that it remains segregated is telling us something about the self-selection that’s going on in people’s lives. It is also telling us something about the cultural thickness, if you will, that exists in most of our churches that makes it hard for the ethnic other, to integrate, penetrate, be healthy, be themselves, be welcomed, and be accepted.
This is not the same thing as saying there’s open hostility. When Dr. King said that in the 1960s, he was talking about a very different social context where to be an African American and going to a White church could literally get you killed or where being in a Black congregation across town might find you inside of a church that’s being bombed or burned. That’s a very different social context, and we praise God for the progress that’s been made. But there is still a kind of selection that’s happening that continues the desegregation.
Here’s what I want to say to folks who are listening and thinking that opting toward a more ethnic-specific context is going backwards and is moving contrary to the civil rights ethos that we imagine when we hear a quote like that from a Dr. King: Being in ethnic-specific context is not only permissible, it’s actually quite necessary for a lot of Christians to receive the comfort and discipleship that that’s needed. Because in these spaces that still remain largely segregated, you still still encounter the cultural shibboleths that guard the gate as to who’s acceptable and who’s an outsider. You still deal with microaggression and sometimes outright aggression. You still deal with, and we saw the worst forms of it last week, a kind of civic religion, a kind of God-and-country religion, which in many cases is anti the concerns of your own ethnic community. Those are not friendly spaces, and so it becomes necessary to have places where we opt to be with people who accept us in Christ and worship with us in Christ.
Here’s the other reason this is necessary, and I’ll stop here. Let’s do a thought experiment real quickly. What if we imagined that all the evangelism that had to happen in predominantly Black and Brown and Yellow neighborhoods had to happen through the agency of White evangelical churches? How many Black and Brown and Yellow people would come to Christ and would be brought into contact with the Gospel?
If you take out things like radio or television ministries and you use personal evangelism like crossing the street to talk to your neighbor, then I’m going to argue that the vast majority of Black, Brown, and Yellow folks who don’t know the Lord who live in predominantly Black, Brown, and Yellow neighborhoods, especially if they’re poor neighborhoods, are not going to come in within earshot of the Gospel. So our missional concern, the way Paul did, longing for his kinsmen according to the flesh, to come to know Christ, is a godly, biblical missional concern. That’s necessary if we want to see our families and our neighborhoods evangelized. Because given the way we are self-segregating, which is happening, not just ecclesiologically, in terms of membership in churches, but it’s happening, missiologically, in terms of who we go to with the gospel. If we just ride that wave, we’ll be riding that wave away from our people, taking the Gospel with us, and that is not a win for team Jesus. We should not coast that way.
Alex Jun: I could add just a little bit to this absolutely spot-on analysis. As an equity scholar, you have to understand the context. At the time Dr. King was saying this, segregation was a legal mandate to say that White churches would not have fellowship, and the Black church existed because the White church wouldn’t extend fellowship to Black Christians.
What we’re talking about today is that you’re not robbed of the choice. That’s a distinction between segregation and separation, and it’s an important distinction because you’re not robbed of the choice of being able to go to ethnic-specific ministries, multiethnic ministries, or predominantly White ministries. We need to recognize that’s what it is.
And just building on this idea that Thabiti was talking about, I’ve seen the results of oftentimes what happens through colonialized mission work, well-intended they may be. But the impact of this is that we have a westernized version of Christianity, even among Asian Americans. The problem that emerges is even the icons of a white Jesus are displayed in Asian churches and in Asia. How did that happen? I mean, it’s a violation of one of the most fundamental commandments that we don’t make God in our image, and that’s exactly what’s happened in the West and we’ve embraced it without much criticality.
You see a generation of Asian Americans and Black and Brown Christians as well, perhaps, who haven’t really thought about this. It’s becoming an issue increasingly, for us to rethink how the dominant ideology and culture has impacted our faith. It’s syncretized, American Christianity or Western Christianity that’s important for us to address.
On a personal note, I came to faith through a Korean campus mission in my first year in college. It was a group of Korean Americans who reached out to other Korean Americans and shared the Gospel with me. It was interesting, because I didn’t have to detach my ethnic identity and culture from this conversation, and every time I brought up an issue about immigration or assimilation, it was understood, and I got just the Gospel.
Whereas I remember talking earlier with some of my White brothers and sisters in the Lord and I would bring up issues of racism, and they would come from their lens and say, “Well, you know, I don’t see color.” That’s really difficult for a young Korean American Christian, to reconcile. They were speaking with all authority as a Christian but didn’t recognize their own Whiteness as they were saying that. They simply conflated their whiteness and their Americanness with their Christianity, which is unbiblical.
So it’s important to have spaces where we have people who look like you and might think like you, but fundamentally different because we’re able to share the Gospel and share eternal truths.
Moses Y. Lee: Thabiti, are there things ethnic-specific churches and ministries can do in service to the gospel — apologetics and discipleship — that multiethnic churches can’t do as well?
Thabiti Anyabwile: My brother was putting his hands on some of the things already. It’s counterintuitive for many people, but what he just said about the fact that in an ethnic-specific context, we can often have so many things in common that it frees you to focus on the Gospel and to evangelize in that context, that’s spot on.
If I don’t have to argue with you about my priors, in terms of the reality of racism or what have you, I can just get to Jesus just much more effectively and quickly than in the multiethnic context where my priors or your priors may not be taken for granted. We find ourselves arguing about those things rather than focusing on the Lord and the necessity of faith in the Lord.
The other thing that I think is enabled in an ethnic-specific context that is perhaps more effectively done than in the multiethnic context is that we actually get to do a more thorough and more widespread leadership development. There are people who look to us like leaders in our context who are never recognized as leaders in a multiethnic context.
So one of the things that I’m constantly having pastors ask me is, “We want more diverse leadership. How do we improve diversity? How we find folks who are leaders?” I say, “I know this guy. Have you thought about this guy?” [They respond], “But he doesn’t fit this or doesn’t do this.”
But if I put him over in a predominately African American context, he’s Paul or Peter. So the lenses that we wear even when we’re thinking about leadership and who we invest in is different in an ethnic-specific context versus multiethnic context.
Here’s the third thing that can be an advantage to ethnic-specific context. There are apologetic issues that we deal with in inner-city Washington D.C. that aren’t the apologetic issues of Iowa, or Southern California. I go downtown by the stadium, and on most nights when there’s a game, there’s a gaggle of 30 Black Hebrew Israelites shouting all manner of abusive speech and propagating their views. I’ve got to develop an apologetic for that kind of religious, Black nationalist, racist kind of perspective that can be that can feel so attractive to people who are hurt and embittered about their racial experience. That’s not something that folks in most of the multiethnic contexts that I’ve been in think is really that important or big an issue, but it’s massive in my community.
There are apologetic issues from which we need biblical resources and responses that don’t get any play in a multiethnic context. So being in an ethnic-specific context enables us to do that work more effectively.
Those would be three things that I would say: more effective evangelism of our neighborhood, more effective apologetic resources and responses for our context, and more effective leadership development and identification in our context that are better abled by an ethnic-specific experience than they are oftentimes in a multiethnic situation.
Alexander Jun: Now, isn’t it interesting — all churches seem to do that already, right? We have ministries for business people because they can bypass some of the things that non-business-people wouldn’t understand. There are ministries for athletes in all levels, in churches, and in universities, and whatnot. We’ve got ministries for moms who stay at home. I mean, we recognize this for chaplains in the military because there’s already an assumed social position that they’re dealing with.
So for people who might critique why we have ethnic-specific ministries, I’m pretty sure we have all these other ministries within our churches that we would recognize, support, pray for, and fund. But when it comes to ethnic-specific ministries, we don’t, because we haven’t thought about it in those ways, and you give some great examples. But why not?
The other part of this would be when people say, “Well, we all need to be one,” and they don’t like the specific ministries. When my White brothers and sisters might say that to me as a critique, I say, “Great! When are you going to come to my church? You are welcome to come. We are sharing the Gospel. Every Sunday, we preach Christ, and you’re welcome to come.”
But when you say, “Let’s become one,” you mean, from your perspective, “Let’s sprinkle in Black, Brown, Asian into this mix, rich and poor.” I want to do the same thing. But that’s just not the lens you’re coming from, because that’s multiethnic, too. We’re not just Koreans at our church, but I would still recognize this as being a predominantly Korean church.
Thabiti Anyabwile: That’s so good, and this is why the multiethnic spaces, from what we can tell from some of the more recent research, is more effective at assimilating people to Whiteness and White cultural standards than it is at creating a rich, pluralistic, multiethnic, cultural, political, name-your-diversity-category space where those things are welcomed and engaged in a healthy way.
Alexander Jun: You alluded to this earlier, but we’re not a monolithic group. So even in a predominantly Korean space, we’ve got class issues and we’ve got political differences there. You know, there’s a lot of White supremacy ideology that is embedded and embodied in Korean American people, so it’s not that we all think alike. Some people don’t even like kimchi (really if there was a sin, but that’s a different story for a different time). We’re not monolithic. So you have that diversity, even within a Korean ethnic-specific church.
Thabiti Anabwile: We’re about to launch some Be the Bridge groups in our church via Tasha Morrison’s wonderful ministry on reconciliation. We’re in a community that’s 92-94% African American. We identify ourselves as predominantly Black, but within that, we’ve got first and second-generation Caribbean immigrants, we’ve got first and second-generation African folks, we’ve got Black folk who come from the largely poor neighborhood, we got Black folk who are Southern and middle class in their sensibilities, and one or two affluent folks.
So you have class, you have culture, and all that diversity beneath the general label of Black, and we still have to learn how to deal with that and to process that stuff biblically, graciously, and winsomely toward unity.
I think you’re absolutely right to say that “we’re Black, Brown, and Yellow, or what have you” is not to say that we’re just one thing and we all think alike.
Alexander Jun: It’s too superficial of a level especially if we’re talking multiethnic spaces, that’s about as deep as you can go. When you start getting into Afro-Caribbean experiences being fundamentally different from fourth-generation Black Americans, that’s just too deep of a level. You can only go there when your group is at a critical mass.
This is true for Asian Americans and immigration patterns, language, culture and those types of things. There are benefits and challenges, but certainly, this is an area that we can explore deeper within our groups.
Moses Y. Lee: How are ethnic-specific churches any different from an all-White church then? Or is there even a difference? Isn’t there a danger that ethnic-specific ministries become ethnocentric ministries? How would you respond to those objections?
Alexander Jun: Yeah, I would say absolutely. Anytime you’re in dominant spaces, you have blind spots and you’re not able to see what’s dominant. It’s not just ethnic-specific or, in my church, a Korean dominant ideology. But it’s also Southern California, and it’s also class. It’s an extremely upper-middle-class type of church; we’re Presbyterians after all. That’s part of the challenge that we need to recognize, but at least we can recognize it and we should be able to address it.
The danger with a White church is the normativity — that they would assume that being White and being American and being Christian is all the same and it’s conflated. For Korean Americans, we know we are not seen as Americans. That then informs some of our eschatological assumptions — we know that this world is not our home, spiritually and physically. But it is something that we need to address within groups that we recognize because we know what it feels like.
But I think another distinction that I’ve recognized in some Korean American churches (I have to be a little bit more specific with my own experiences), is that we struggle with our own internalized oppression. Even while you’re attending an ethnic-specific church, you don’t feel like you can share and invite people into your church.
I’ve heard that when people say, “Elder Alex, I want to bring my neighbor or my coworker, but we’re Korean church.” And I said, “But we’re sharing the gospel, aren’t we? We’re not watching K-dramas on Sundays. We’re sharing the Gospel!”
But I realized what’s embedded in that is this internalization that even as you attend one of these churches, you don’t feel comfortable in that space, and you can’t invite Black, Brown, or White non Christians into this space. But that’s more of a “you” problem. I think we need to address that.
But I don’t find White brothers and sisters do that. When they invite a non-White person to their church, they celebrate it: “Look! More diversity.” But for whatever reason, in an ethnic-specific churches, or the Korean church in my context, we don’t see that as diversity. We see that almost as though we’re ashamed. That’s something that we need to address in our own groups.
Thabiti Anyabwile: My guess is there will be some people who listen to this conversation, maybe who are coming from predominantly White churches, and their ears have been burning because they’ve heard terms like Whiteness, dealing with White supremacy, White superiority, internalized oppression — and they don’t really have categories for it.
One of the unfortunate consequences of the Civil Rights Movement, and it was not the intent of the Civil Rights Movement, is that we’ve stumbled into this place where we think the mere mention of Whiteness or Blackness, much less to separate into these groups, is exactly the same thing as the forced legalized segregation of the 1950s and 60s.
Many people have picked up this allergy to what we’re talking about and a further allergy to the things that we’ve been saying that are pastoral necessities in spiritual formation: the discussion of the ways in which we internalized racism, White supremacy, and White superiority kinds of ideas.
For example, I’ll never forget having a conversation with a young African American man, his pastor, and a couple of other families who are just having dinner. His pastor looks at me and says, “Hey, talk to this guy for me.” And I said, “About what?”
He says, “This guy says that he will only marry a White woman.” Now after I picked myself up off the floor, I asked him, “Is he joking? What’s going on right now?” And he says, “No, that’s just what I want. That’s what I want to do. “Okay,” I said, “Are you even open to marrying a Black woman?” “No, not really,” he said, and then he gave me all these stereotypes about Black women.
And so I said, “Is your mama Black?
He said, “Yeah.”
“So you have any sisters?”
“I got two sisters.”
“Are your sisters Black?”
“Yeah.”
“Are they women worthy to be loved and worthy to be sought after?”
Then he kind of paused. He saw the trap and the noose tightening around his neck a little bit. But that’s an example of the kind of internalized racism that’s happening.
And I don’t want to be misunderstood because I think interracial marriages model the Gospel in a really profound and beautiful way, so this is not an argument against that. But if what you’ve internalized is Black women are undesirable in any number of ways and I should be seeking after a white woman, or you’re fetishizing Asian women, for example, that’s racism. That’s internalized racism. That’s the kind of stuff that needs to be exhumed, examined and expunged if we’re going to be healthy people.That’s the kind of stuff that just does not happen in multiethnic settings because the call to unity there is often so superficial and the pushback against the conversations we’re having are often pretty aggressive.
Now, that’s a long winded way to get into the answer of your question. Is there a possibility that ethnic-specific churches become basically like White churches in different skin tones? Well, that’s always a possibility, right? So the short answer to that is yes. A more interesting question to me is, “What’s the likelihood of that?”
I think it’s less likely because, as my brother pointed out a moment ago, we don’t enjoy the majority status here. We don’t have that kind of cultural power to make our own ethnic experiences normative. The moment we leave our churches, we begin to engage the broader White culture. In fact, inside of our churches, even if we’re predominantly Black and Brown, and this is a challenge with multiethnic spaces too, without intentionality, you begin to bend, for example, the worship style towards CCM. You begin to bend toward contemporary, you bend toward the Gettys — all great stuff. But where’s the stuff that is reflecting the culture of the neighborhood that you’re in and the people that you’re with?
If you’re in a Hispanic culture, where are those Hispanic influences on music? Asian, African American Gospel? So I actually think the likelihood is significantly lower, even though the possibility is there.
And as my brother said a moment ago, the fact that we have been sensitized to what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that alienation makes us sensitive to including and working against the tendency toward marginalizing others because we know it’s wrong, we have suffered it, and we have been fighting for a more egalitarian and more inclusive society for all of our sojourn here. I would bet my money on ethnic-specific churches being more hospitable than I would the idea that they’re going to become just like White churches and repeat the problem in the opposite direction.
Alexander Jun: I would add that again, for a Korean American church leader in my spaces, we are ready for what [Pastor Timothy] Keller talks about when he says how idolatry is a good thing that becomes an ultimate thing. So in that space, where you’re comfortable with other Asian Americans and ethnic-specific ministries, we’ve got baggage on both sides. It’s the twofold baggage.
We see the Korean church or the Chinese church and the immigrant church, and we think, “Oh, that’s my parents. I have lots of issues with that.” Then we make the mistake of throwing out what was good and what was spiritual because it was tied to some of these cultural baggages of an immigrant family. And then we’ve got issues because of White supremacy and racism that some of us have suffered in the world outside of the church and sometimes in the church. So we celebrate that space and we welcome it, but then we take it too far.
So we’ve got to recognize, as leaders, where we’re actually pushing that to say, “If you’re too comfortable, we need to challenge you.” And if you’ve been too challenged, then we need to comfort you. But it’s always looking for that and it’s there.
It’s there because Satan would love to see this dismantled and [to have] the witness of ethnic-specific church become ethnocentric — that the priority and the order is reversed [so] that we’re more ethnically identifying than we are as children of God. So the leaders need to be guarding against that, and we’re aware of it. But who’s more aware of it than people who are in that space?
Moses Y. Lee: Alex, what’s the definition of a multiethnic church? Or what makes the church transition from ethnic-specific to multiethnic?
Alexander Jun: Somebody came up with this idea that it’s when 20% of the church is a non-dominant group. But it’s interesting because that applies [to] perhaps what was predominantly a White church that sprinkled in Black, Brown, and Yellow.
My church is a Korean church, but we’re Pan-Asian. We also have White brothers and sisters, and we have a small number of Black and Latinx. By that standard, we’re coming close to a multiethnic church, and I’m pretty sure anyone who looks at our church would say, “No, it’s a Korean church.” So it’s a bias that we need to implicitly recognize when we talk about 80%-20%. We’ve got to talk about who the 80% is.
Thabiti Anyabwile: It’s almost a definition that centers Whiteness again. There’s the White majority experience as a main experience and then how many sprinkles can we put on that cupcake to give it a slightly different appearance? Yet, if you ask yourself, “What does multiethnicity look like in the Bible?”, you have to arrive at some different metrics that have to do with the “one another’s” and other things in the text that ought to be plentifully there across the division.
If you look at someone like the Apostle Paul, who traveled and served with these multiethnic mission teams, and you say, “What’s the secret to Paul’s success?” — read, for example the final greetings and salutations in Colossians 4 — note the diversity of persons that he mentions there. It says, “Hey, I only got two or three people who are Jewish with me. Everybody else has forsaken me. Greet these folks; they’re Colossians like you. You got Onesimus, a former slave.”
Paul seems to diversify the center by bringing in the margins. He goes out, grabs folks on the margins, brings them to the middle, and that’s how that’s how he diversifies the church. We seem to think that you can arrive at a diverse church by just actually noting a few people on the margins and putting them on your publicity material. That’s not how that works, not biblically.
Biblically, there’s got to be a sharing in the church. This implicit question or notion of ownership — who owns the church, who’s in the middle of the church — that gets kind of exploded in a New Testament biblical understanding of the church, and yet we [in the present] leave it intact and then build around it. We’ve got radical work to do even in multiethnic contexts in reconceptualizing what it means to be multiethnic.
Moses Y. Lee: To wrap it up: If someone is attending an ethnic-specific church, should that person feel guilty at all for not attending a multiethnic church?
Thabiti Anyabwile: Um, no. (Laughter.) No, I think that person should praise God there is a church there. The miracle is dead people have been brought to life through the preaching of the Gospel, adopted into the family of God, assembled there as a visible representation of God’s people, of his kingdom, in the earth, and the witness of the gospel is being held forth there in that community. That’s a miracle. We take it for granted, but that’s a miracle! Somebody spoke to dead bones and the bones rose up in life. Rejoice in that.
The only question is: Are we in a healthy, ethnic-specific church, right? So be there and work for biblical health. Be there and work for biblical zeal in mission, evangelism, disciple-making, and neighbor love. Be there and push for not just a doctrinal understanding of what it means to be a church, but be there and push for an ethical understanding of what it means to be the church.
To be in the faith is not simply to believe the right things: It is to be in the faith; it is to be in a way of living together as a people, and that’s getting short shrift. That’s not accomplished just by being over here across town at a church driving through three or four or five neighborhoods that need Gospel witness, just so somebody over there can say their church is diverse. That’s not a win for Team Jesus.
Alexander Jun: The listening audience might think, “Oh, when you say ethnic-specific, we’re talking about Black, Brown and Asian.” But White churches have to apply this to say you have ethnicity and culture. There’s stuff that White brothers and sisters like that I don’t, and that’s okay!
I wrote about this in one of my books, this concept of “White 22”. You’re White if you do, you’re White if you don’t. It’s based off of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. So if we’re a White church, then it’s White supremacist? No, don’t say that. But if I’m trying to do a multiethnic church and I’m hearing all this criticism, then I’m still being racist?
But I think there’s grace, and grace has to be a part of this, as we think about your spaces and as the Gospel is being preached. So no, you shouldn’t feel bad because your church is all White. If your community is all White, there are deeper sociological issues and legal issues that may have created these communities. But if your church is that way, I don’t think it helps to leave to go to a multiethnic church simply because you want to be in multiethnic spaces because they’ve got their problems too as we’ve just talked about.
But you’re welcome to come to a Korean church. We’ll post an address on the bottom here and you can just go online. If you’re at a church right now, that’s fine. Please stay with your local church.
So we have to be able to be gracious to one another and not live in guilt or shame about where we are. We can all change and we can all grow in a Korean-specific church. We should not simply be satisfied with where we are because we need to always ask, “Are we reaching our community? Are we being intentional and sharing the gospel with everybody that we can?
Moses Y. Lee: Thank you guys both for just sharing such pastoral wisdom through such a sticky and often controversial topic. This is such a helpful conversation. I hope our listeners will also be as blessed as I was today. So thank you again for your time and I hope we can do this again.