Word: racializing
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...Problem of Race in America, by a then obscure academic named Michael Emerson. The book's polls showed that Evangelicals tended to "believe that their faith ought to be a powerful impetus for bringing people together across race." Yet they had fewer minority acquaintances than non-Evangelicals. Most regarded racial inequality as either illusory or the wages of personal sin, rather than as a societal flaw. This and other buried assumptions created church climates that unofficially discouraged minority participation. Far from reconciling the races, Emerson concluded, Evangelicalism acted to "drive them apart [and] contribute to the racial fragmentation of American...
...catch was that "I hadn't [preached] about it in 24 years." So he promised his congregation, "I'm not going to overwhelm you." Yet he persisted, sermonizing repeatedly about America's racial history and continuing inequities. He pledged to open Willow to every ethnicity. In 2003, he recalls, he threw down the gauntlet, telling his flock that the church's racial outreach was "part of who we are, and if it can't be part of who you are, you probably need to find a church that doesn't talk about this issue...
...they did, as Hybels and Bibbs re-engineered the church to match its preaching. They built "Bridging the Racial Divide" gatherings into Willow's massive grid of laity-led "small groups." The meetings were essential, says Renetta, who ended up running five: they were a ground-level "safe haven" where congregants could express and dispel received stereotypes. At the very first, in 2001, a well-meaning white woman kept using the phrase "you people." "Do you people want to be called blacks?" she asked. "Or African Americans? I never know what to call you people." Eventually it became too much...
Still, observers inside and outside Willow applaud him. David Anderson, founder of the multicultural Bridgeway Community Church in Columbia, Md., says, "I bet they've done it faster and better than anyone else with a church that large starting off as all white." When I ask Hybels how important racial reconciliation is to Christianity, he says, "It's absolutely core to the Gospel. It speaks to whether all humans are made in the image of God and have the capability of being redeemed and used by God to perform his work. I'm going to persevere on this...
Some think the integration of American churches is inevitable. Willow Creek Association head Jim Mellado cites the Census Bureau projection that by 2050 the U.S. will contain no racial majority. "Every church will have to deal with that or find itself on the side of the road," he says. Hybels differs, saying that "there will still be people who will only want to worship amongst their own kind...