Compelling Read, Part 4

Church Segregation
Sider speaks about the racial segragation prevelant in American churches today and offers statistics from George Barna and the Pew Institute that indicate that those people who identify themselves as "born-again" Christians (by his definition this includes many nominal Christians) are more apt to be racist than those that do not identify themselves as such.

But why are our churches so segregated? Is it deep seeded prejudice? Is it fear of someone different from us? Is it about worship styles and saying "amen" during the sermon? Yes to all three I'm sure. But could there be another factor as well, one less often explored? I think so. I think that church segregation has as much to do with financial status as with race.

I think the segregation often appears to be exclusively a racial issue because there are a disproportionate number of African Americans and Hispanics (to name just two minorities) in lower economic classes and, on the other end of the scale, a disproportionate number of Caucasians at the upper end. In reality I think many of our churches are simply economically homogenous.

We've already looked at how we don't like to give. Jesus' teaching on sharing what we have, giving out of our abundance to the poor and taking care of the orphan and widow isn't very appealing to us. It flies in the face of our consumer culture. We don't want to do what he asks and don't want to think about the fact of our disobedience. So how do we avoid our guilt? We remove ourselves from "the problem". We don't allow ourselves to be confronted. We surround ourselves with people who are like us so we don't have to think about the existence of poor and needy people -- i.e. we segregate ourselves from such people. We've done that in our choice of where to live (see "white flight"). We've also done it in our choice of where to worship.

So, rather than looking at it as White churches, Hispanic churches and African-American churches, might we also look at it as rich churches, middle class churches and poor churches? Might we expect to see some minorities in a rich church? Certainly. I have. Might we expect to see a lot of minorities in a poor church -- especially in a poor, urban church? Definitely. I have seen that too. I would classify my present church as low middle class, and it's the most diverse church I've ever attended.

I think our default setting (e.g. sin nature) is to flock to people who are most like us economically, and that this is our first and most important factor in choosing a community (whether that be neighborhood or church), simply because we don't want to be confronted with needs that we might feel compelled to meet in Jesus' name.

As a correlary, I think we've developed a problem with anonymity. We are less likely to respond to anonymous problems, and, in our sin, we have tried to make many of Jesus' challenges into anonymous ones. I'll speak more about this next time.