Diversity is not Enough

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Rev. Fred D. Robinson critiques the appeal to diverse churches and pleads for a deeper repentance. I would respond by saying churches can be the place where that deeper diversity can occur first as a witness to the gospel.

(CNN) – On day five after the shooting death of unarmed black teen Michael Brown at the hands of police, I was on the phone with a white Christian and fellow preacher concerning the racial cauldron that has become Ferguson, Missouri.

During our conversation, he spent more time decrying rioting and calling for calm and prayer than lamenting the modern-day lynching by law enforcement of innocent black bodies that are piling up across the nation.

But most frustrating was his solution to the racial powder keg that has produced the Fergusons across the nation: a call for more racially diverse churches.

I get tired of that one. His unrelenting insistence reminded me — in the most stark terms — of James Baldwin’s prophetic quip: “Racial progress in America is measured by how fast I become white.”

Simply having diverse congregations without addressing the weightier matters of social justice and structural racism is not better church practice. It is possibly subterfuge….

It ignores the fact that we have to do more than call sinners to repentance, we have to call societies, systems and structures to repentance as well.

Indeed, simply baptizing an institution in diversity—whether they are churches, the police force or corporate America — without transforming the injustice on which the institution is built, doesn’t make it holy.

No — it just makes it integrated injustice. John Wesley was right about one thing when he penned this line: “The Bible knows no holiness except social holiness.”