Published Saturday | March 1, 2008
With congregations shrinking, churches find room for racial diversity
THE WASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON — Seven years ago, the Rev. Eric Redmond never imagined himself leading a congregation in the overwhelmingly white Southern Baptist Convention.

Now, the young Temple Hills, Md., minister is the highest-ranking black person in the 16 million-member denomination. He represents the changing times confronting Southern Baptists and other mostly white Protestant denominations.

Faced with a crisis of aging and departing members, the nation's largest non-Catholic Christian bodies — Southern Baptists, United Methodists, Lutherans and Presbyterians — are reaching out to minorities in ways they never have before.

While local churches often remain predominantly black or white, the outreach does result in a more diverse national organization.

By establishing churches in minority communities, changing worship practices, electing minorities to leadership positions and purging racism from their language and attitudes, the faiths are seeking to draw in communities of color as a way to boost stagnating or falling membership. The consequences of ignoring those communities, they warn, are dire.

"You can almost calculate the time when we close the door and turn off the lights if we don't become a more diverse church," said Sherman Hicks, executive director of multicultural ministries for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a 4.9 million-member denomination that is 97 percent white.

But of all the denominations seeking to diversify, many agree that the Southern Baptist Convention — an association of about 40,000 congregations that make up the nation's largest Protestant denomination — has the longest way to go.

From its 1845 birth in Georgia as a haven for white Baptists who supported slavery, the SBC has had troubled relations with blacks. For 150 years, by its own admission, it was hostile to black progress, often speaking in favor of Jim Crow laws.

But in 1995, the Southern Baptists did an about-face, issuing a public apology for their history of bigotry and vowing to "eradicate racism in all its forms" from its ranks.

These days, the faith that was once proudly white now touts the fact that almost 20 percent of its congregations are predominantly black, Latino or Asian. Hundreds of minorities serve in leadership posts in its state conventions, seminaries and other organizations.

The SBC Mission Board estimates that the number of black members has doubled, to about 1 million, since the 1995 apology.

Southern Baptists are starting churches in black communities and, while they insist they don't recruit from predominantly black denominations, the outreach strategy includes welcoming black preachers from those bodies and offering them multi-day "boot camps" — intensive teaching in starting Southern Baptist churches.

"I wish it was all just spiritual, but some of it is pragmatic as well," said the Rev. Frank Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention. "Our highest growth is coming in ethnic congregations, so it's very important for the growth of our convention."

The SBC encourages new pastors to network with other black Southern Baptist leaders, offering them names and contact information. A recent publication details blacks' involvement in the SBC since its founding, although it omits any mention of past racism and the 1995 apology.

From an average of 250 worshipers before Redmond came, Hillcrest now draws an average of 375 worshippers on Sundays.

Redmond, 40, and other black Southern Baptists say they are pushing the denomination to address issues of concern to black people, such as the plight of poor, urban Americans, out-of-wedlock births, civil rights and racial injustice.

"The most important thing for the Southern Baptist Convention to do socially is to attempt to move away from addressing only upper-middle-class, conservative issues," said Redmond. "We have to stop thinking of ourselves as trying to hedge a June Cleaverish class of Christianity."

Since coming to Hillcrest, Redmond has revamped the worship style to add black church traditions. Redmond said there was "dead silence" when he preached, and hymns were sung only to piano or organ.

But now services at Hillcrest are a mix of worship traditions. They include such staid Baptist hymns as "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" as well as a swaying, clapping choir, accompanied by drums and electric keyboards, and worshippers who call out "amen," "mmm-hmm" and "preach, pastor" to his sermons.

"We had to make changes that were appropriate for reaching a contemporary African-American culture," he said. "People are free to express themselves — to cry aloud, to clap and to have other emotions displayed in the service."

But despite Redmond's enthusiasm, skeptics say it will take more than gospel singing and dynamic young preachers to make Southern Baptists more diverse.

Forrest Harris, president of the American Baptist College and professor of practical theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School, said that Southern Baptists have shown no interest in taking on issues that have long been the focus of black Baptist denominations, such as social justice and improving black communities.

The diversity effort, said Harris, "doesn't seek to change or transform the way in which injustice and the problems of (black) communities need to be addressed."

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1 ... d=10271615