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Notes -
On Free Association vs. Exclusion, or: can white people just do stuff together?
Yesterday I went to church. I would estimate that there are about 150 people at my church. There are exactly three people of color there:
One black teenaged girl, who I believe is the adoptive daughter of a white couple there.
One old guy called Antonio, who I think came from Argentina a long time ago.
A Hispanic woman who is the wife of an old white guy.
The demographics of this church are, basically, the demographics of the immediately surrounding neighborhoods and of this demonination nationally: the people who go there go there because A.) they live close by and B.) they think the EFCA has good teachings to offer about God, the world etc. Everyone comes there of their own free will; all are explicitly welcome. We have never turned anyone away - I am one of the greeters and I try to take seriously my responsibility to make anyone that arrives feel welcome.
Still, when thinking about this, something apparent to me is that this church has no racial diversity. Are we under a moral obligation to try and change that?
If we are: why is that? How did we incur it? Is it not enough to be welcoming, do we need to actively change our demographic composition? What if, as seems to be the case, there are hardly any non-white people that want to come to our church?
If we are not: why is that? Other voluntary organizations come under pressure to diversify, all the time - see "knitting too white," "hiking too white," etc. Would our church not qualify because it's too small? Because it isn't a business? Because we do not have any status to award? Because we have no social media presence?
There is a black church less than four miles away - I cannot imagine them ever coming under pressure to diversify, even though they have the same level of diversity as my church does. Why should that be? I can already think of the Conflict Theory explanation - but what would the Mistake Theory explanation for that be?
I guess what I'm wondering about or driving at is, as my title indicates - is there any limiting principle to the drive for making groupings reflect the population distribution of the country as a whole? Are there organizations for which it would be unreasonable to ask this - or are there simply only organizations whose undiversity hasn't been noticed? I'm not asking this out of any animosity towards any racial group; we would really just like for everyone to come to our church. I just find myself wondering why similar bodies, who didn't choose their racial composition at all, nevertheless come under criticism for that, and some don't.
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.
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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