Churches Still Divided by Race...Mostly

DixieDestroyer

Hall of Famer
Joined
Jan 19, 2007
Messages
9,464
Location
Dixieland
There should be ALOT more of this IMO. I don't want any part of a Christian church that embraces "diversity" (aka - cultural marxism).


Houses of worship"¨ still divided by race

By Christopher Quinn

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Eleven o'clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1963.

If churches want to repent and move into the arena of social reform, King said, they must first "remove the yoke of segregation"Â￾ from their own bodies.

More than 40 years after King's death, Protestant churches are still one of the most prominent social institutions that remain monochromatic. There are exceptions, from the Mennonite church's effort in the 1960s to form an interracial congregation to the recent growth of a mixed congregation at the church of Southern Baptist stalwart the Rev. Charles Stanley.

But few have made the kind of effort, sometimes costly, that Pastor John Fichtner of Liberty Church in Marietta has. He knows well the tripwires of church integration. He slowly lost about half of his 1,600-member congregation when he began moving his white church toward a racial mix 13 years ago.

Liberty is an independent charismatic church where worship services exude a homey and emotional warmth. The Book of Acts told Fichtner that the early church was "incredibly multicultural."Â￾ Fichtner, 52 and white, says God impressed him to lead his church the same way.

He began by preaching about issues of race. But he knew sermons would be empty words until he hired a diverse staff in positions of authority.

He now has three white assistant pastors, three black pastors, a Latino pastor and a black worship leader. The congregation, growing again, is close to 2,000 people. The church is 40 percent white, 40 percent black, and 20 percent is Latino and immigrant.

Fichtner tells other pastors seeking to emulate Liberty's success "to get some people on your staff who don't look like you, and in five years your church will change."Â￾

And he warns them of the coming problems. A handful of white families left for racial issues in the early days. Many others left for more subtle reasons, and Fichtner learned the difficulties of spanning the cultural divide. It took a lot of trial-and-error and a few years before the turnaround took hold.

Roy Craft knows churches like Liberty are the exception. He has visited close to 500 churches in the region. On occasion Craft, the director of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College, sees a handful of blacks in white mainstream Protestant congregations. More rarely, whites will be a minority in a black church.

There are reasons for the divide that have nothing to do with hate, he said. Worship is an intimate act. Learning to share that with people who are different raises a complex set of questions about style, expectation and comfort.

Integration on a meaningful scale doesn't "just happen"Â￾ without intention, said Margaret Aymer, professor of New Testament at Atlanta's Interdenominational Theological Center.

Things have come a long way since the center sent out black seminarians in the 1960s to try to visit white churches. Many were turned away. Today, churches are not segregated intentionally, as much as by economics, custom, culture, social comfort and geography.

White and black churches grew up apart and developed their own sacred traditions, styles of worship and music, theology and power structures, Aymer said. The complex sets of religious social rules and regulations rising from that has grounded many good intentions.

Michelle Tanner, 29, grew up in integrated schools in Louisiana and called some black students friends. But an unplumbed racial tension remained.

When she and her husband Will moved to Cobb County about five years ago, they visited Liberty Church. When they saw faces of every color in the seats and on stage, it wasn't jarring, it just blended in with the newness of Georgia.

She describes herself as conservative and Republican. She did not vote for President Barack Obama but was able to talk about and experience the joy of her black friends when he was elected.

"I think my relationship with our friends now gets me to see their side of things,"Â￾ Tanner said.

Such change is critical if churches are going to play a role in leading, rather than following society, Morehouse's Craft said.

"I think [King] would say you have got to do more than build monuments and celebrate my birthday,"Â￾ he said. "You have to practice it Sunday morning."Â￾


***Reference article...
 

Colonel_Reb

Hall of Famer
Joined
Jan 9, 2005
Messages
13,987
Location
The Deep South
What is the world is a "subtle reason?"

"Churches" like this make me want to puke, because the false guilt fueled white "minister" intentionally set out to change something because he wants it to be that way, not because God called him to do so. What arrogant rubbish!
 

newguy

Guru
Joined
Dec 7, 2008
Messages
129
The Pastor also made the change against the will of the people who supported him and gave him money. People of all races know that a church will not turn them away. They are fully capable of making a decision about were they would like to worship without a pastor championing the decision for them.

It amazes me how these weak pastors make no stance on just about every social issue in society ( except for perhpas abortion), but this pastor decided he was going to preach about race and purposely make his church racially mixed. I hope his reward is that he loses his position at the church to a non-white person.

Mixed chruchs will just lead to more racial mixing in marriage and dating and will speed up the elimination of the white race. Below is a quote from the landmark interracial marrigage decision "Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)[1], was a landmark civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court" Perhaps the pastor should be more familar with the following quote below, which I believe was god's true intentions for people of different races.

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
 

white is right

Hall of Famer
Joined
Feb 16, 2006
Messages
10,022
Colonel_Reb said:
What is the world is a "subtle reason?""Churches" like this make me want to puke, because the false guilt fueled white "minister" intentionally set out to change something because he wants it to be that way, not because God called him to do so. What arrogant rubbish!
They probably made up bs excuses for why they were going to another church. Ie the drive was too far, etc, etc. Everything but the truth. I have a lot more respect for people that state the truth, than spineless worms.
 

Bear Backer

Mentor
Joined
Jan 23, 2007
Messages
658
Location
Illinois
The end result in such experiments is usually that the church splits apart or gradually drives away whites until it is a black church. Whites and blacks generally don't even like to worship the same way. These cultural experimenters just can't seem to get it through their thick heads that there is nothing wrong with that either. Whites don't generally want to go to churches where the ministers and choir are bopping around like a someone in voodoo ritual, and blacks generally don't like the more serene atmosphere of worship that attracts whites. Most are probably well meaning liberal buffoons that just fail to make this connection to reality in their desire to bring people together. I have heard many stories about ministers just simply not understanding how their church was destroyed due to this type of thing. Some however, have a more sinister motive of promoting cultural Marxism and miscegenation like Newguy pointed out. These ministers are likely atheists themselves who have infiltrated the seminaries.

I once knew a Methodist minister who was an avowed atheist. I was surprised to find this out when I sought him out for spiritual guidance at a time in my life when I was first becoming disillusioned by organized religion, and he basically told me that to find God, I had to find God in myself. Shocked, I said to him "Do you mean to tell me you don't believe God in a literal sense?" and he replied that I was correct, and that he didn't believe in God as a biblical Father, Son and Holy spirit, but that God existed only as a divine spark within each of us. So I asked him why he then played this at this whole minister thing and he said I was missing the point. He said that people needed spiritual and moral guidance and that his ministry was a vehicle in which he could use to achieve those ends.
 

moose

Guru
Joined
Jul 16, 2005
Messages
406
this wont keep me out of church on sunday, the mass is a prayer in itself, the highest prayer of all,you must go to church on sundays, attendance is mandatory, extra ecclesium nulas salas.
 

Colonel_Reb

Hall of Famer
Joined
Jan 9, 2005
Messages
13,987
Location
The Deep South
Great posts, new guy, white is right, and Bear Backer. The chances are this church will become overwhelmingly black and eventually a black pastor will take over. The only kind of church I know of where there are a lot of similarities between how whites and blacks worship is in charismatic denominations, of which this church is one. Watch some "worship" clips on youtube and you'll see what I mean. It's no more than an in-the-flesh, dance and hollerin' show, imho. There is nothing Biblical about waiting your turn to do the jig in front of everyone in the "dance line." That kind of man-made religion turns me off big time. It's no surprise that this false guilt filled white minister would be so out of God's will as to go against his white flock by denouncing "racism" from the pulpit and bringing in tons of negroes. It's just a sign of how far away from God many churches and people are, and not just charismatic ones. The lack of holding to Biblical teachings on the individual, church, and/or denominational level is the main reason that mainline churches have declined and lost any semblance of a witness for Christ over the last few decades. When Christians trade living in God's will for modernism, compromise, and cultural Marxism, you can expect nothing but failure.
 

Menelik

Mentor
Joined
Apr 6, 2007
Messages
1,175
Location
Georgia
Colonel Reb I'm Pentecostal. Whats your religion if I might ask?
 

Colonel_Reb

Hall of Famer
Joined
Jan 9, 2005
Messages
13,987
Location
The Deep South
Menelik, as I stated above, I'm not issuing a blanket condemnation of
charismatics. I'm simply pointing out the fact that black and White
charismatics tend to have more similar worship styles than any other
churches I've been around. I know not all Pentecostals are
ultra-charismatic, as I have Pentecostal relatives who go to a church
that doesn't do the un-Biblical dance line "drawing attention to one's
self instead of God" thing. I'm a born-again Christian first and
foremost, as I believe having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ
is the most important issue of one's faith; and I'm a Baptist second. I
don't hold to a lot of new Baptist teachings, as modernism/jewish
influence and compromise have changed things in Baptist churches and
seminaries, but to a lesser degree than in other once strong, Bible-believing
churches.
 

Menelik

Mentor
Joined
Apr 6, 2007
Messages
1,175
Location
Georgia
No offense at all, just asking. We all have differences of opinion and belief. Some would argue that we are superstitious for believing but we know that to be wrong don't we?
smiley2.gif
 

Colonel_Reb

Hall of Famer
Joined
Jan 9, 2005
Messages
13,987
Location
The Deep South
Yes we do, Menelik.
 

Poacher

Mentor
Joined
Jul 30, 2005
Messages
943
Articles like this are set pieces for the MSM. Slow news day? No problem, just scrawl out an article on white people going to white churches. Or white people doing anything without blacks for that matter.
 

DixieDestroyer

Hall of Famer
Joined
Jan 19, 2007
Messages
9,464
Location
Dixieland
Good points on the differences between a "traditional" White church and a black one. Just flip the ol' "Hellivision" dial one weekend morning or late night to see how the bruvahz & sistuhz like to worship. I grew up in the Church of God, but my Grandad's side was Baptist & I "converted" to fundemental Baptist about five years ago. I don't care for modern/contemporary "pop" or "rock" music on Sunday mornings. My church is pretty old-school...signing hymns with the choir & a piano (sometimes organ). We don't hop in the aisles or jump around like a rap concert...and that's the way it should be (IMO). Our Pastor is strictly KJV and sticks to the Word pretty well. I couldn't handle a mega-chuch/"entertainment center" with a "motivational speaker" masquerading as a preacher....that just isn't my "style".
smiley2.gif
 

FootballDad

Hall of Famer
Joined
Oct 19, 2009
Messages
5,134
Location
Somewhere near Kansas City, MO
I've been to plenty of churches in my time, and I've found that most of the time, efforts to "diversify" a churches attendance mix artificially is normally a disaster. The only church that I've been, and that I would attend is Sunrise Church is Rialto, CA, which had an excellent mix of folks that mirrored the surrounding community extremely well. It is approximately 50% white, 30% black, and the other 20% Latino and "other". The pastor preaches chapter-and-verse, no selling out, the music, although led by a black music pastor, is a great blend of traditional hymns, contemporary Christian music, and "lite" Gospel. The staff is majority white, and it is run like a white house of God, and the "minority" church population has integrated and not tried to take over. Now if the country could only run like this! Perhaps we should nominate the pastor (Jay Pankratz) to run for POTUS!
 

guest301

Hall of Famer
Joined
Jan 7, 2006
Messages
4,246
Location
Ohio
FootballDad said:
I've been to plenty of churches in my time, and I've found that most of the time, efforts to "diversify" a churches attendance mix artificially is normally a disaster.  The only church that I've been, and that I would attend is Sunrise Church is Rialto, CA, which had an excellent mix of folks that mirrored the surrounding community extremely well.  It is approximately 50% white, 30% black, and the other 20% Latino and "other".  The pastor preaches chapter-and-verse, no selling out, the music, although led by a black music pastor, is a great blend of traditional hymns, contemporary Christian music, and "lite" Gospel.  The staff is majority white, and it is run like a white house of God, and the "minority" church population has integrated and not tried to take over.  Now if the country could only run like this!  Perhaps we should nominate the pastor (Jay Pankratz) to run for POTUS!



I went to a similar pentecostal-charismatic type church in Dallas that was run much like the one you described above, Football Dad. So it can be done. Heaven won't be lily white as far as who is there and who is not there. I don't like contrived artificial race mixing in churches but if it is done naturally and reflects the community that you are in,no problem.
 

Bronk

Mentor
Joined
Apr 13, 2005
Messages
962
Location
Texas
Very good comments here.

One interesting cultural thing is that black protestants from the Caribbean generally prefer the "white style" of worship to the rollicking showbiz style of the traditional black church.

People of all races tend to prefer to be with their own kind, it's a natural thing.
 

white is right

Hall of Famer
Joined
Feb 16, 2006
Messages
10,022
Speaking of hijacking of churches. In Canada some Protestant denominations have been taken over by gay minsters and gay civil rights advocates. In downtown Toronto one church in the gay ghetto had a coup where an openly gay minister defied the head of the national leadership and refused to step down as the minister of his church. And of course they had follow up interviews with gay civil rights advocates versus conservative older family orientated members. Edited by: white is right
 
Top