But, any way you slice it, my denomination has a bad racial history. As one pastor told me, "At Birmingham, we were the ones holding the hoses." But, progress has been made.

Now, before you tell me that I am just parroting the party line, that is not my style. As many Southern Baptists can tell you, I try to tell the truth even when it hurts (the Dallas Morning News says I am, "one of the more plainspoken SBC figures on the challenges the denomination faces in what many are calling a post-denominational age." (For example, see our analysis of young leaders here.)

So, I am always willing to tell the truth as I see it (and I have learned that telling the truth can be controversial). But, on the racial diversity issue, we have made, and continue to make, some real progress. We have a growing diversity in our convention, though we do have real systemic racial issues and some racists still in our midst. The difference is that now we have adopted a faith statement that actually says, "In the spirit of Christ, Christians should oppose racism” (BFM 2000).

Now, the challenge is to make that less of a statement and more of a practice.

Speaking of statements, here is a list of all the SBC resolutions on race.

The article continued:

Southern Baptists are starting churches in black communities and, while they insist they don't recruit from predominantly black denominations, the outreach strategy includes welcoming black preachers from those bodies and offering them multi-day "boot camps" -- intensive teaching in starting Southern Baptist churches.

I have taught dozens of these "boot camps" and they are really just basic training for church planters-- where Anglo, African American, Latino, Hispanic, Asian, and all other church planters get their training. The article makes it sound a bit contrived with the "while they insist" they don't recruit, they still offer "boot camps." Maybe I am reading too much into it... but that seems a little smarmy.

More from the article:

"I wish it was all just spiritual, but some of it is pragmatic as well," said the Rev. Frank S. Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention. "Our highest growth is coming in ethnic congregations, so it's very important for the growth of our convention . . . If we're going to reach our nation, we're going to need to reach ethnic groups."

Frank Page hits it on the head (at least in the second part of his quote). This is one of the reasons that the North American Mission Board created the North American People Groups Project and its site www.peoplegroups.info.

NAMB is aggressively focused on people group ministry.

So What is the SBC Ethnic Situation?

I wrote an article a few years ago with a racial double entendre in the title, "Guess Who Is Coming to Potluck." I thought it was quite clever at the time, but I don't think many people picked up on the racial overtone in the title (see the Wikipedia article on the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner). I hate it when I am trying to be clever and it does not work!

In the article, I explained a few things about the increasing diversity of the denomination. I wrote:

Word Tabernacle Baptist Church is excited about being part of the Southern Baptist family. Pastor Gailliard explains, "We're glad to be a part because of the Kingdom mindset of the Convention .... The connection with the Convention is so solid because of the theology and the cooperation we found there."

This church is like most of the new congregations reporting on the Annual Church Profile for the first time — it is primarily made up of non-Anglos; it is aggressively reaching out to its community; and it is excited about being a part of the Southern Baptist Convention family of churches.

Note that the majority of new SBC churches were not predominantly Anglo.

The over 48,000 SBC churches and missions tend to look different from the 1,600+ new congregations which appeared on the ACP list in 2002 (the most recent year that full statistics are available). The new congregations tend to be more ethnically diverse and more effective in outreach, but they still work together with other Southern Baptists to reach the world.

Ethnicity. New Southern Baptist churches are much more ethnically diverse than the larger pool of existing churches. Today, more and more Southern Baptists speak other languages, worship using other cultural forms, and fellowship over different foods. As our churches become more diverse, we look more like heaven with men and women from every tongue tribe and nation (Revelation 7:9).

The chart compares the existing churches (which is better than most expect) to the new churches (which is remarkable). Click on this link to get the original article which gives a better view of the graph.

Now, we have a very long way to go. For example, one very influential SBC leader has indicated that the reason revival tarries is because all these immigrants out there have not become good Americans so they can hear the gospel. Sigh.

But, things are changing.

More on Eric

Eric and I recently contributed to a 9 Marks forum on race. You can read it here.

My contribution to the forum was focused on if race really mattered:

Race matters.

I planted my first church among the urban poor in Buffalo. Having been raised in a racially isolated community near New York City, I never thought much about race—but in Buffalo we had little choice. We were forced to address issues of race because our community was a multicultural milieu. It forced us to read the Scriptures with more awareness of race—and an acknowledgement of its challenges.

We found that race matters in scripture. Even though few Anglo churches seem to notice, Scripture frequently demonstrates God’s concern for race and ethnicity.

Luke illustrates the coming of the Spirit with diverse expressions of tongues (Acts 2), even identifying the languages being spoken. And a glimpse of eternity in Revelation shows that men and women from every tongue, tribe, and nation make up the choir of eternal praise (Rev. 7:9). If the writers of Scripture take notice of ethnicity, so should we.

Scripture not only identifies race and ethnicity, but John hints at prejudice concerning Jesus in John 1:46, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Furthermore, Jesus intentionally offends ethnic and racial sensibilities with both the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) and the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10). Why go to so much trouble to emphasize their ethnicity if it does not matter?

Yet the same Spirit that inspired the Scripture to identify race also provides the strength to overcome its challenges. Both our worship and our witness are made more perfect when we model gospel-centered diversity.

At the cross, there is "no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female." Yet at the throne there are men and women from "every tongue, tribe, and nation." We would do well to remember both.

Eric was much more articulate and is worth reading in its entirety here. Eric explained:

There is a race problem in the American church, if for no other reason than the fact that there is a race problem in America, and the evangelical church’s progress on race has, historically, mirrored America’s progress on race. The great gulf that exists between the gatherings of Whites and African Americans on Sunday morning, often reflecting the great gulf that exists between white exurbia and African American suburbia or cityscape, exemplifies the mirroring of the culture by the church.

My white brothers of the faith often miss the race problem. I don’t feel that this is due to overt racism on the part of many. Instead, it’s because my white brothers must work at seeing life though the eyes of an African or Hispanic or Asian or Native American—all of whom are naturally and daily race-conscious. This is inevitable when you are:

-the only minority in the board room or on the faculty,

-the one being profiled by security cameras or stereotyped as a class below white cultural and class standards,

-the potential victim of discrimination by mortgage lenders and human resource hiring specialists,

-a parent concerned about his/her child being mistreated as the only minority in a classroom or at a teen camp—even a Christian teen camp.

In addition, unless one works very hard to do so, my white brothers cannot feel what it is like to live in a society dominated by another ethnic culture (in a society in which ethnic distinctions matter greatly) and to adjust to the dominant culture’s preferences, norms, and mores daily—from the time one leaves home in the morning until returning home in the evening. This can even be the case at one’s church, fraternal organization or civic group. This practical ignorance of the minority experience lends itself to omissions of thought—i.e., "insensitivity"—on issues of race.

He takes a not-so-subtle swipe at a new book edited by a friend of mine, Danny Akin. You should get the book, it is good... but Eric points out:

A recently published systematic theology—A Theology for the Church (B&H, 2007)—provides the contemporary pastor and layman with a solid work that has the potential to become a standard seminary classroom or personal pastoral reference text for years to come. In this collaborative effort, each chapter on a specific doctrine has three great features: (i) a brief look at the history of the specified doctrine, (ii) a selective summary of Baptist teaching on the doctrine, and (iii) a consideration of the practical implications and outworking of the doctrine in the life of the church.

However, in Theology there is not one mention of racism, racial-reconciliation, injustice, slavery, or genocide. (I am aware that the topics included may seem imbalanced since the work is a collaborative effort, drawing from the expertise of several men.) By omitting such discussions in a tome of this type—one that is compiled by some of the most well-known conservative Baptist scholars in this generation—we have, by de facto, said that issues related to "race" are not for theological discussions, or at least not a discussion at the level of Openness Theology, Intelligent Design, and the extent of the Atonement. If this text begins to serve our seminaries in a manner similar to Erickson's and Grudem's systematics, many of our younger men and women will study theology without a critical reference work on race. Apparently, that discussion is left for the African Americans, Hispanics, and Liberation Theologians. This unintentional omission in Theology allows for an unintentional omission in the theology coming from our pulpits...

Moreover, if "race" is not important enough for the theologians to discuss, it will not be important enough for those who actually believe in (conservative) theology to consider it as part of their theology.

Eric blogs here.

Here are a few questions to ponder / discuss regarding denominations and racism:

-What can denominations do to build bridges across the racial divide? What about churches?
-What are the systemic racial issues that need to be addressed in my, your, and other denominations and churches?
-How should other churches respond when they hear of active or passive racism in churches in their denomination?

Feel free to weigh in on your comments below.

By the way, February is Black History Month.