Demographics, Diversity, Leadership and the Church–Mega and Mini

This morning, I read with interest Time Magazine’s David Van Biema’s article, “Can Megachurches Bridge the Racial Divide?”  It’s a positive look at Bill Hybels’ and Willow Creek‘s efforts at diversifying a once all-white suburban congregation.  The article gives great attention to Hybels’ leadership on this issue at Willow, his steady “drum beat” approach to identifying racial issues, the work of small groups in building community across racial lines, and so on. Hybels has apparently shown a level of repentance and leadership that few have.

“I hadn’t [preached] about it in 24 years.” So he promised his congregation, “I’m not going to overwhelm you.” Yet he persisted, sermonizing repeatedly about America’s racial history and continuing inequities. He pledged to open Willow to every ethnicity. In 2003, he recalls, he threw down the gauntlet, telling his flock that the church’s racial outreach was “part of who we are, and if it can’t be part of who you are, you probably need to find a church that doesn’t talk about this issue.”

Amen.  I was encouraged with the read, and I hope you will be also.  Still, the article raises a number of questions worthy of further consideration.

Is It Demographics and Probability, or Is It Leadership and Gospel Change?

For example, why should “megachurches” be lauded as the possible bridge over troubled racial waters?  Is there something “mega” about their teaching and Christian ethic, or is the apparent ability of megachurches to achieve some diversity simply reflect economies of scale?  If you grow a church large enough (20,00+ in this case), are you bound to have some measure of diversity as a matter of probability if not intent?  Willow’s history teaches that you can be a big church and not be diverse at all.  Indeed, that history could be cited in other megachurches, I’m sure.  So, leadership matters.

But I’m still left wondering whether the success at Willow has more to do with the Chicago-area demographics, the church’s size, and the probability that if you’re even a bit friendly and welcoming the church will start to “brown.”  More impressive, in my opinion, would be to see this same kind of leadership and dynamic occur in small town churches, historically and socially bifurcated along ethnic lines.  Megachurches tend to be in “megacities” or at least in significant metropolitan statistical areas where cross-ethnic interaction is at least more probable and generally more frequent.  Leave the urban hubs, how effective is the church at crossing these lines?  I tend to think there are a handful of smaller churches in smaller areas doing about as good as Willow.  And it’s clearer in many of those examples that what’s at work isn’t probabilities but gospel sanctification.  I’m not saying that the gospel isn’t at work at Willow (please don’t misunderstand me), just that it seems clearer in a different setting with a different racial history.  So, the work of God among the saints at Redeemer Presbyterian in Jackson seems more brilliant in its power and display among that band of Christians than in this article.

I’m thankful for the work of God on this issue wherever it occurs.  But I wonder if there aren’t some confounds in this article and in the assumption that megachurches are the “saviors” on this issue.

What Is the Best Measure of Congregational Diversity?

Van Biema cites Emerson’s 20% as the threshold for diversity.  He writes:

By February 2009, Willow had hit the 20%-minority threshold that signifies an integrated congregation. Today its membership is 80% Caucasian, 6% Hispanic, 4% Asian, 2% African American and 8% “other” ethnicities. Says Bibbs: “The church would never be the same again.”

In an area like Chicago, would you call this an integrated congregation?  For the record, I think most African Americans and Hispanic and Asian brethren and the 8% other might say that this is not feeling like a terribly diverse experience.  If 80% are white, chances are the variegated others are still feeling very much like “minorities.”

Using an arbitrary percentage as the measure of “diversity” is all the more troubling because it doesn’t work everywhere.  There are still places where certain ethnic communities barely exist.  A flat statistic like this is imposing and perhaps unattainable.  And in other areas, like Chicagoland, one suspects the ethnic percentages to be more diverse than Willow’s congregation.  A better measure for how well we’re doing might be to suggest that a church should look like the community it lives in.  If the community is 50/50 black and white, the congregation should be 50/50 black and white.  If the community is 30% white, 20% African American, 35% Hispanic, and 15% Asian, the church should look that way.  We should expect that the gospel raches the nations without prejudice, and that the church created by the gospel would know the same tendency.

It’s great to celebrate the work at Willow.  I certainly do.  Hybels could have continued on his 1975 track, and no one would have criticized him one bit.  I think the Lord has done a gracious work in our brother’s heart.  But sociology shouldn’t define this for us.  Theology should.  And the heart of God beats for all the nations.  If all our friends look just like us such that we’re not connected enough with the nations to reach the nations, then we’re shamefully off mission.  We need the grace of repentance the Lord appears to have given Hybels, and we need to work for a church that includes all the nations in its location.

Is Diverse Preaching Leadership the Litmus Test?

A while back, the venerable, Puritan-reading, cross-over dribbling, golf-club-swinging, church-planting Tony Carter observed that genuine integration and diversity wouldn’t be possible until white brethren submitted to the leadership of men from ethnic backgrounds.  Carter: “Most of my white evangelical and Reformed brothers and sisters speak positively and eloquently on racial diversity. For this, I commend them. However, until we see white men and women doing what black men and women have long learned to do—namely, sitting under and submitting to the leadership and authority of those who are ethnically different—we will not see real diversity.” (see here)

Add prophet to Tony’s list of titles and achievements (honestly, though, I don’t really know how good his cross-over is; one day, we’ll see).  The Willow article illustrates Tony’s observation:

Most disturbing, according to about a dozen minority congregants, was that Hybels never promoted a nonwhite member to a pulpit pastorship or senior staff position at the main Willow campus. (Bibbs, never a “teaching pastor,” now advises other churches on multiculturalism at the Willow Creek Association.) An African American recently joined Willow’s elder board. Curtis Sallee, a black 15-year “Creeker,” comments that while “what Bill has done racially has been nothing less than miraculous, there needs to be someone who speaks for the church, a teaching pastor or staff, who’s a minority. That’s the next step. I don’t know whether they are ready to take it. But they’re going to have to address it sooner or later.”

Hybels acknowledges the situation as “extremely frustrating” and attributes it to the fact that paid leadership is drawn from the longest-serving church volunteers, who are still mostly white. The argument, however, doesn’t account for the homogeneity of Willow’s pulpit pastors, the past several of whom have been out-of-church hires.

Do you find it difficult to believe that among a 20,000+ member congregation, with networked resources of hundreds of like-minded churches, there is not one qualified ethnic minority who could participate in the pulpit ministry at Willow?  I do.  Especially when among the teaching pastors of Willow there is, contrary to Scripture, a woman listed.  Willow’s failure to find gifted and qualified ethnic teaching pastors is all the more disappointing when Van Biema points out that “the past several [pulpit pastors] have been out-of-church hires.”  One wonders if a deeper dynamic isn’t at work.  The article maintains:

Willow’s predicament is hardly surprising. To some white congregants, naming a person of another color to tell you what Scripture means, week in and week out, crosses an internal boundary between “diversity” (positive) and “affirmative action” (potentially unnerving). Daniel Hill, a former Willow young-adult pastor who founded his own fully multicultural River City Community Church in Chicago, says, “There’s a tipping point where the dominant group feels threatened.” Consciously or unconsciously, Hybels stands at that point.

I’d be curious to know what some of you think about this last quote as an explanation for the absence of ethnic leadership in the pulpits of predominantly White congregations.  Rutland, Vermont figured this out in the late 1700s and early 1800s in the ministry of Lemuel Haynes.  And again, churches like Redeemer Presbyterian with its pastor Mike Campbell, an outstanding preacher, seem to be doing a good job at cross this “tipping point.”  And to date, we’ve not experienced an exodus of white members here at FBC.  Quite the contrary, whites join this church in numbers comparable to other ethnic groups even though both of the main preaching pastors here are black men.

I’m hesitant to conclude that having ethnic representation among the teaching pastors ought to be the marker or “tipping point” of genuine diversity.  Obviously, the Scripture places emphasis on godliness.  But I’m also hesitant to conclude that there are no godly, qualified, gifted and interested men from Willow’s ethnic membership or in the larger Chicago-area who could not serve faithfully among Willow’s teaching team.  So, the work goes on.

Conclusion

I couldn’t agree more with Van Biema’s assessment of the scandal of ethnically-segregated churches.

[T]hose many who desire a transracial faith life have found themselves discouraged — subtly, often unintentionally, but remarkably consistently. In an age of mixed-race malls, mixed-race pop-music charts and, yes, a mixed-race President, the church divide seems increasingly peculiar. It is troubling, even scandalous, that our most intimate public gatherings — and those most safely beyond the law’s reach — remain color-coded.

And yet, there is much to be encouraged by in this day of the Lord’s grace and work.

But in some churches, the racial divide is beginning to erode, and it is fading fastest in one of American religion’s most conservative precincts: Evangelical Christianity. According to Michael Emerson, a specialist on race and faith at Rice University, the proportion of American churches with 20% or more minority participation has languished at about 7.5% for the past nine years. But among Evangelical churches with attendance of 1,000 people or more, the slice has more than quadrupled, from 6% in 1998 to 25% in 2007.

We dare not despise the day of small things, even as we pray for a fuller communion with God and with all His people.