Last week, The Gospel Coalition published an article describing how to determine if your church is multiethnic. At the behest of the ever-gentlemanly Justin Taylor, Summer read the article several times but remained confused. We are told “how” to determine if your church is maintaining a “spirit” of diversity but we are never told why pastors should spend time analyzing census data to determine if their church is reaching this goal. What is the goal? What is the practical outworking of determining who your church should reach based on skin color? If it’s not tokenism, then what is it?
We hope this episode provides some healthy pushback on some ambiguous presuppositions regarding the make-up of our churches, keeping in mind that those to whom we are responding are our brothers in Christ. But, to quote our friend Darrell Harrison, “The ethnic diversity of those who, by God’s grace, will populate heaven (Rev. 7:9), is secondary to the reality that, likewise by God’s grace, they are first and foremost believers in Him. In other words, it is by faith, not by face, that you and I will live eternally with God (Eph. 2:8-9).”
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Sheologians Homework
This topic is creating quite a bit of chatter right now, particularly in the Reformed world. Here are some articles and podcasts we highly recommend sinking your eyeballs into this week.
I would add… our reaction should be even stronger than it is. What I see happening is David Platt or Thabiti Anyabwile will say something, and then people come forward to explain the problems with that something, and that’s good – we should also be saying “and can you not see where this racial lens you are implicitly endorsing naturally leads?” Last night, after people pointed out that Jemar Tisby was mourning the death of Cone, I went and read some of his, and other, articles on The Witness – formerly the Reformed African American Network remember – and frankly there is some awful stuff there. Race is made the measure of all things. White people are generally the enemy, oppressors, they have been taught and promote white supremacy whether they know it or not, except for those few who have chosen to become “allies”. Near as I can tell “allyship” is shown by commitment to certain political beliefs like the goodness of Black Lives Matters, and if you have a problem with BLM you’re probably a white supremacist. Blacks are praised for withdrawing from white institutions where their “full humanity” is not respected, so they can be their “ethnically-true selves”. Frankly the racial situation in the Church isn’t 1/10 as bad as you’d think from reading articles like those on The Witness, but if we start talking about race like they do there, I can tell you the situation will become much WORSE, not better. Yet people like Tisby have been regular guests places like TGC when race is discussed.