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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44989 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I think the desire to have a more diverse body of Christ is good. However, if your demographic reflects the demographic of the neighborhood, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think diversity becomes a problem when you have an historically white church in a predominately black neighborhood with practically no racial diversity. One of the things I've experienced with churches is that unless you're in a university or sort of cosmopolitan setting, you're just not going to cater to everyone always. For instance, a pipe organ will run off some people while contemporary music will scare off others (such as myself), frequently due to its lack of meatiness. There have been some attempts to create more robust contemporary music (such as Reformed University Fellowship, which has put classical hymns to more modern instrumentation), though, that serves the function of hitting both crowds.

If your church does want to make an effort to diversify, it might be worth talking to non-white individuals who have visited your congregations or others like it to see what made them feel welcome and what did not make them feel welcome and to see if adjusting that or making your church more broadly appealing would be wise. I know there's a lot of things that white folk don't just realize are off putting to non-white individuals and vice versa and merely starting conversations may be more enlightening.

Although, funny enough, the Catholic Church from what I've seen often tends to have more diverse populations that mainline Protestant denominations. And, the Catholics tend to be pretty rigid by comparison.

I sense the faint scent of pipe tobacco on this post. Another Reformed?

Hahaha, I am quite knowledgeable of Reformed traditions but I myself am more broadly Evangelical.

Diversity of what sort?

1 Corinthians 5:11 would exclude many, welcomed by many denominations today.

An abundance of diversity and pride has fractured many churches.

Diverse ethnically ala Acts 2:8-11. I agree that you have to draw some thick doctrinal lines, which modern mainline denominations are not doing very well

If we want the ethnically linguistically diverse to hear in their own tounges we still may be in seperate congregations. Though I've no principled objection to an organic ethnically diverse congregation.

My objection is that many mainline denominations fail to expel the wicked from among them.

Catholic churches have more diverse congregations to the point of legitimately needing to set language policies, something it doesn't have a lengthy institutional memory of doing because historically it was all done in Latin.

A shortage of Spanish and- in some dioceses- Vietnamese and Tagalog speaking priests is a major problem for the Catholic church in the USA.

Is it? My Irish Catholic church ended up with an Hispanic priest.

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