Should all churches be multiethnic? Is there still a place for ethnic-specific churches or are they outdated?
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.
We will be premiering a video of their interview and publishing a transcript on Monday, but we wanted to give a sneak preview to our SOLA audience. Watch the clip below or listen to the audio here.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
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 Blak 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.