“Many Americans prefer their Sundays segregated”

Why many Americans prefer their Sundays segregated

(CNN)—The Rev. Paul Earl Sheppard had recently become the senior pastor of a suburban church in California when a group of parishioners came to him with a disturbing personal question.

They were worried because the racial makeup of their small church was changing. They warned Sheppard that the church’s newest members would try to seize control because members of their race were inherently aggressive. What was he was going to do if more of “them” tried to join their church? “One man asked me if I was prepared for a hostile takeover,” says Sheppard, pastor of Abundant Life Christian Fellowship in Mountain View, California.

The nervous parishioners were African-American, and the church’s newcomers were white. Sheppard says the experience demonstrated why racially integrated churches are difficult to create and even harder to sustain. Some blacks as well as whites prefer segregated Sundays, religious scholars and members of interracial churches say.
Americans may be poised to nominate a black man to run for president, but it’s segregation as usual in U.S. churches, according to the scholars. Only about 5 percent of the nation’s churches are racially integrated, and half of them are in the process of becoming all-black or all-white, says Curtiss Paul DeYoung, co-author of “United by Faith,” a book that examines interracial churches in the United States.
DeYoung’s numbers are backed by other scholars who’ve done similar research. They say integrated churches are rare because attending one is like tiptoeing through a racial minefield. Just like in society, racial tensions in the church can erupt over everything from sharing power to interracial dating.
DeYoung, who is also an ordained minister, once led an interracial congregation in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that eventually went all-black. He defines an interracial church as one in which at least 20 percent its membership belongs to a racial group other than that church’s largest racial group.
“I left after five years,” DeYoung says. “I was worn out from the battles.”
The men and women who remain and lead interracial churches often operate like presidential candidates. They say they live with the constant anxiety of knowing that an innocuous comment or gesture can easily mushroom into a crisis that threatens their support…

One such issue is interracial dating. Some scholars and leaders who deal with interracial issues say it’s not unusual for parents in racially-mixed churches to leave when their teenage kids begin dating.
Woo saw that exodus at Wilcrest. Some parents talked about the importance of a multiracial church, until their kid became attracted to someone from another race within the church.
“As kids began to date, some things get revealed,” he says. “They didn’t want their kids involved in interracial dating—and that’s not just whites.”
Accepting black leadership is another touchy subject. Most interracial churches are led by white pastors. A congregation typically becomes all-black if a black pastor is hired, says DeYoung, the “United by Faith” co-author.
“As long as the top person, the senior pastor, is white, power sort of resides with whites,” DeYoung says. “But when that shifts, it does something psychologically to people. People usually leave.”

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Also see:

Kinism Forum: Afro-Americans don’t like multicultural churches

They say integrated churches are rare because attending one is like tiptoeing through a racial minefield. Just like in society, racial tensions in the church can erupt over everything from sharing power to interracial dating.

Having attended a megachurch that prided itself on its diverse character for a number of years before I got smart, I can vouch for the racial minefield thing. Also, the interracial dating/marriage mindset is very prominent as some folks think it is the only way to get rid of the minefield.

There is always tension when a church becomes multiracial; even adoption of children of other ethnicities brings awkwardness to communication as people ponder how to talk to the family that has adopted so.

God bless,
Laurel

Kriegerwulff,

Very true.

Kriegerwulff - 06 August 2008 11:48 AM

Fascinating…it is what Kinism has said for a long time now.

We might look at the case the of AME church and remember many cases it was blacks who refused to belong to majority white churches. Black Freeman quite a Liberal Methodist in Philadelphia because they wanted religious autonomy.

The AMEC grew out of the Free African Society (FAS) which Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and others established in Philadelphia in 1787… members of St. George’s (MEC) made plans to transform their mutual aid society into an African congregation. Although most wanted to affiliate with the Protestant Episcopal Church, Allen led a small group who resolved to remain Methodists. In 1794 Bethel AME was dedicated with Allen as pastor. To establish Bethel’s independence from interfering white Methodists, Allen, a former Delaware slave, successfully sued in the Pennsylvania courts in 1807 and 1815 for the right of his congregation to exist as an independent institution. Because black Methodists in other middle Atlantic communities encountered racism and desired religious autonomy, Allen called them to meet in Philadelphia to form a new Wesleyan denomination, the AME.

Laurel,

A comment from another forum on such topic.

As one person wrote, these whites who adopt black babies are the real white supremacists. They believe they can provide a better upbringing than a black family. And the congregation goes oooh and aaaah over these black babies… My prediction is most of these white adopted blacks will reject whites and the white culture and rebel against their adopted parents and find some tribe to move in with.1

More trouble in PCA…
Does Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church Have a Race Problem? (PCA Megachurch Fires Black Minister)

Basically whites try to run the Church in a non-racial way; but Asians and Blacks want racial quotas and spoils to be the order of the day… foolish white liberals… The author who claims to be a Conservative Calvinist but quotes radical Afro-American Sodomite James Baldwin and Stalinist Marxist W. E. B. Du Bois.

Anyone who has any management experience knows that “fit” is code language for not having sufficient reason for termination. It is a catch-all category that justifies any human resource decision. Also “fit” is code language for cultural dissonance. When predominant white management becomes uncomfortable with the presence and reasoning of Blacks, this usually creates what Du Bois famously critiqued, “the Negro problem.” In this case, Whites perceive Blacks as standing in the way of their cultural practices and economic progress. In other words, “the Negro problem” is really a White problem – a so-called problem for White folks. James Baldwin insightfully points out: “what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror.”