As Told to Jessica Hanewinckel
Multiethnic is a very clear benchmark that sociologists use to define certain churches. Churches are supposed to be called multiethnic only if they meet an 80/20 rule—no single ethnicity makes up more than 80% of the church body. Using that benchmark, 7% of all evangelical churches in 1998 were multiethnic. In 2020, that number grew to 22%, according to Democracy in Dark Times, the 2020 edition of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture’s Survey of American Political Culture series. I’m encouraged that number tripled, but that also means 78% of churches in evangelical spaces are still homogenous.
Not all multiethnic churches are the same. And there’s a big difference between diversity and unity. You can be ethnically diverse, but that doesn’t mean you’re ethnically unified. Getting ethnically diverse people in the room together is not the goal. The real goal is that they would walk in the oneness and the unity that Jesus Christ prayed for. The verdict of Acts 15 is essentially that in the church of Jesus Christ there is no ethnic homogeny. And I think that’s the message that many of our churches need to send.
What we really want is an integrated multiethnic church. In this kind of church, there’s an equilibrium where there’s no master culture at work. One of the ways you can tell is in the singing in the church. There should be this sense of equilibrium, like, Oh, this song is my heart language, and the next song is, That’s not my cup of tea, but it’s honoring and blessing the person next to me, and because it exalts Christ, I can get with that.
Korie Little Edwards is a Jesus-loving Black woman who is Distinguished Professor of sociology at Ohio State University. She argues that homogenous churches entrench racism, and multiethnic churches are the primary vehicle God uses to deconstruct racism. Her argument is that we all have biases, so we need people in our lives who see things differently. That’s what the multiethnic church offers.
The average community that a church sits in, Little Edwards says, is 10 times more diverse than the church itself. The average school in a church’s community is 20 times more diverse than the church. So while I don’t believe every church should be multiethnic, I do think that with the diversification of our communities and schools, our churches should look like our communities and schools.
The church started out multiethnic. The apostle Paul didn’t start two separate churches, one for the Jews and one for the Gentiles. He started one church, put both groups in one church and called them to work out horizontally what God in Christ already accomplished for them vertically, which is reconciliation. And so the vision for discipleship must not be just individual-vertical. We need a robust discipleship vision that encompasses the individual-vertical and the communal-horizontal.
Bryan C. Loritts is teaching pastor at The Summit Church in Durham, North Carolina, and vice president for regions for the Send Network. His latest book is The Offensive Church: Breaking the Cycle of Ethnic Disunity (IVP).