Earlier in their ministry, you might never have paired Jamaal E. Williams and Timothy Paul Jones to lead a congregation. Williams pastored a historic African American church in Louisville, Kentucky; Jones once led a white congregation in rural Missouri. But their experiences have shaped their understanding of ministry as Christ intended, and they both now serve at Sojourn Church Midtown in Louisville. Williams, who is lead pastor, and Jones, who is preaching pastor, work together with a larger team to bring God’s kingdom down to earth by cultivating a true multiethnic, multigenerational and socioeconomically diverse church in their neighborhood of Shelby Park.
In June, they release their first book together, In Church as It Is in Heaven: Cultivating a Multiethnic Kingdom Culture (IVP), in which they talk about the experiences, personally and ministerially, that have informed their understanding of multiethnic ministry, and how Sojourn has worked to bring that culture to its people and community. In this interview with Outreach, they share what’s worked (and what hasn’t) during that journey, and what other church leaders might consider when it comes to analyzing their own congregation’s willingness to reach across the cultural and ethnic aisle.
Can you both share briefly where your hearts are when it comes to multiethnic ministry, and how you came to that place?
Jamaal E. Williams: For me, this is a calling. It’s something I felt the Lord burden my heart for years ago, even before I realized how it would play out. It’s first a desire to shepherd our own church, and then to help pastors in our network to go about pursuing this in a healthy way. And it’s birthed out of a lot of pain too. There are a lot of personal stories. I came from a historic African American church experience to a majority white space not having a lot of experience and thinking, Hey, this will work out like this. But there were a lot of deeper issues at play.
Timothy Paul Jones: A lot of what we’re doing is for the sake of this church, Sojourn, which we love and where God has called us. I would say that for me also, part of it is from when I was a pastor in Missouri. We had an incident where an African American couple visited our church, and a couple of the older [white] men in the church asked them not to come back. That whole experience was jarring, and it opened my eyes to a whole lot of things. And then I ended up in a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where we worked with the Lakota people in South Dakota establishing churches there. And that experience really opened my eyes in a new way to how we can have cultural assumptions that, without meaning to, kind of push people out. It made me sensitive to how we can unintentionally (or sometimes, intentionally) make spaces where people are not welcomed in.
In the early 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. made famous the statement that 11 a.m. on a Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hour, in Christian America. Has the church become less segregated since then?
Williams: Sociological data shows that we’re not much better. There was a study done in 2019 that shows churches have become more multiethnic. Unfortunately, what that [actually] means is that white churches grew in diversity. It’s normally Black and brown people who are going into white spaces, as opposed to majority white Americans going into Black and brown spaces. So it still is pretty lopsided. If that is happening, we want to make sure we equip leadership teams to do the work to address that issue where they are not creating cultures that simply assimilate and cause further harm to Black and brown people. It’s a complex issue that not only touches on race, but it also involves classism as well.
When different ethnicities and cultures come together and just share a meal and sit around the same table with their Bibles open, they’re able to read the Scripture and take away different truths because of their experiences and the way in which their cultures shape them. That actually helps us all to see Jesus more fully and more beautifully.
As leaders of an economically and ethnically diverse church, how do you make it happen, practically speaking?
Williams: There’s a temptation to build a multiethnic church for the sake of building a multiethnic church to say, Look, I’m not racist. But don’t build a multiethnic church without addressing issues of justice. In order to have racial solidarity, you have to bear one another’s burdens. As a pastor, I had to learn to root my identity in Jesus and not to find my identity in us becoming a diverse church, because if the primary goal is us looking a certain way or hitting a certain quota, I’m going to become unhealthy pretty quickly. The goal is to disciple our people to Christlikeness. One of the ways to be like Christ is to be welcoming of all peoples, and adapting culturally to people in order to bring the truth of the gospel. So that was first.
Second was bringing along our pastors and pastors’ wives. We needed to make sure we were using the same language, that we understood the gospel and the gospel implications, and that we had a healthy framework to go about it. That way, as we were starting to speak up and shape the church, and as people were leaving upset and confused, it wasn’t all falling on me as an African American pastor. It was tight at the core. We did that by reading books together, by spending time together, by studying other churches that did it well. We took our staff on a field trip to a church we thought was ahead of us and met with their leaders.
Then you bring it to the congregational level, and you root it in Scripture and make space for people to have conversations about it. That could mean panels after the service, small group classes, things within community groups, as well as preaching on it appropriately. Now, I think we can make the mistake of making it the main issue. This is one of our core values, and so we don’t want to burn people out where for two years this is all we’re talking about. You’ve got to give people space to grow, to think, to contemplate, to pray, to press in, to apply.
Breonna Taylor lived just nine miles from your church when she was shot and killed by white police officers in early 2020. What was it like leading a church, and the larger community, through the last several years of racial injustice?
Williams: That was a difficult time. You had a lot of dynamics going on politically and socially. Our city was on fire. We are a politically diverse church, and there were a lot of emotions. We had Black and brown people who were really hurt, as were many of our white congregants. One thing we did was a Call to Lament service led by Black and brown members. They read prayers, they sang songs. We made space for dialogue. I think it was powerful for the whole body to sit in that together and for those voices to be able to express their frustration and pain. I was proud that members of our church pretty much led our responses to everything happening in our community. We went early in the morning and served coffee to protestors as well as National Guard members, and we were a faithful presence there to encourage. We cleaned up after protests.
It’s long, hard, tedious, messy work. This is something you’re not going to undo in 5, 10, 15 years when it’s been systemic and a stronghold in this nation for over 400 years, right? And so it’s being patient with the work, it’s nuancing well, it’s making sure we are setting ourselves up so people know we don’t have it all figured out.
What does it look like to create a more welcoming, diverse congregation across different contexts? Not everyone may have a primarily Black/white community. Their diversity might be among different ethnicities or demographics, or maybe there’s little diversity to speak of at all.
Jones: The first question to ask isn’t, How do we get more ethnicities in here? It is rather, As I look at my neighborhood, who is in my neighborhood that’s not in my church, and what are the barriers keeping them from feeling welcome? Now, not every church in every context is called to pursue a multiethnic church in quite the way we’re describing. Every church can reach across ethnic and social and cultural lines to be more reflective of God’s kingdom diversity. That’s what every church needs to do, even though each church may do it very differently based on their context.
Williams: John Stott once said that the more mixed a congregation is, especially in class and color, the greater the opportunity to demonstrate the power of Christ. And we believe that. We also believe it’s the church’s responsibility to disciple its people to reach the nations, and so every church, I think, has a responsibility to help those kids who are in their Sunday school classrooms to be equipped to cross cultures.
Now in a majority context of North America, I do think it is important for minority churches in majority spaces to make sure those who are in their church are discipled in their own culture. Because outside of their own culture, what they’re getting is majority culture heroes and literature and celebrating those people. But no matter the ethnicity, it’s important for us to be careful of ethnocentrism.
And pay attention to who you quote as you preach from the pulpit. If the only people you’re quoting are dead white men, then your people will be discipled to think that dead white men are holier than any other person. Also, church leaders have to build their own relationships with people across different ethnicities and cultures. Modeling that for your church is huge. So, if you’re a white pastor, having Black and brown friends coming into your church to guest preach the Bible regularly sends an important message.
It’s really about doing your best to identify who is in your community, educating your people on that culture, helping them to build relationships with those persons, and then saying, How do we help our church feel like home when they come through the door?