Segregation in the Church
I came back from a Campus Crusade retreat today, and the speaker talked a great deal about unity within the church. He touched on this issue quickly, but it was such an issue for me that I had to write something about it. This is the discrepancy.
==The Church in the Bible==
“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
- John 17:20-21
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
- Galatians 3:28
“For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.”
- Ephesians 2:14-16
==The Church in Reality==
“The church has become notoriously good at alienation.”
- Gary Parrett
“Eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Multiracial Congregations Project, stationed at Rice University, conducted a study in 1999. If a multiracial church is defined as a church in which no one racial group is more than 80% of the church, 92% of all American churches are not multiracial.
- Larry
agreed, it was a good point, and worthy of a post. one thing i think is a huge testament to the world around us, especially as college students, is not only racial (jew-gentile) or socio-economic (slave-free) diversity, but age diversity. the idea that college kids would want to hang out with little kids and men and women decades older than us is not something you see much in the world.
one note on the non-multiracial thing: i wonder how many of the mono-racial churches in the MCP’s survey are such because of true segregation within the community, or because the area they live in is also mono-racial.
walt
09.28.2009 at 12:54pm
good thing to think about for sure. i do go to a korean church in sac with my family and see its helpful points though, especially since majority of koreans go to church to be with koreans and some do meet God there. i think this is my family’s case.
I also think Walt’s last point is insightful and definitely see more layers to this than just ‘mono-racial is not good.” thanks for the entry, larry!
sandy
09.28.2009 at 10:47pm