The Color of Faith

From Time magazine via TitusOneNine:

Monday, Jan. 11, 2010

By DAVID VAN BIEMA
One Sunday last fall, Bill Hybels, founder and senior pastor at the Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago's northwest suburbs, was preaching on the logic and power of Jesus' words "Love thine enemy." As is his custom, Hybels was working a small semicircle of easels arrayed behind his lectern, reinforcing key phrases. Hybels' preaching is economical, precise of tone and gesture. Again by custom, he was dressed in black, which accentuated his pale complexion, blue eyes and hair, once Dutch-boy blond but now white. Indeed, if there is a whiter preacher currently running a megachurch, that man must glow.

Yet neither Hybels' sermon, nor his 23,400-person congregation, is as white as he is. Along with Jesus, he invoked Martin Luther King Jr. Then he introduced Shawn Christopher, a former backup singer for Chaka Khan, who offered a powerhouse rendition of "We Shall Overcome." As the music swelled, Larry and Renetta Butler, an African-American couple in their usual section in the 7,800-seat sanctuary, exchanged glances. Since Hybels decided 10 years ago to aggressively welcome minorities to his lily-white congregation, Renetta says, few sermons pass without a cue that he is still at it. "He always throws in something," she says. She's been around long enough to recall when this wasn't the case.

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. famously declared that "11 o'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week ... And the Sunday school is still the most segregated school." That largely remains true today. Despite the growing desegregation of most key American institutions, churches are still a glaring exception. Surveys from 2007 show that fewer than 8% of American congregations have a significant racial mix.

Since Reconstruction, when African Americans fled or were ejected from white churches, black and white Christianity have developed striking differences of style and substance. The argument can be made that people attend the church they are used to; many minorities have scant desire to attend a white church, seeing their faith as an important vessel of cultural identity. But those many who desire a transracial faith life have found themselves discouraged--subtly, often unintentionally, but remarkably consistently. In an age of mixed-race malls, mixed-race pop-music charts and, yes, a mixed-race President, the church divide seems increasingly peculiar. It is troubling, even scandalous, that our most intimate public gatherings--and those most safely beyond the law's reach--remain color-coded.

But in some churches, the racial divide is beginning to erode, and it is fading fastest in one of American religion's most conservative precincts: Evangelical Christianity. According to Michael Emerson, a specialist on race and faith at Rice University, the proportion of American churches with 20% or more minority participation has languished at about 7.5% for the past nine years. But among Evangelical churches with attendance of 1,000 people or more, the slice has more than quadrupled, from 6% in 1998 to 25% in 2007.

Call it the desegregation of the megachurches--and consider it a possible pivotal moment in the nation's faith. Such rapid change in such big institutions "blows my mind," says Emerson. Some of the country's largest churches are involved: the very biggest, Joel Osteen's Lakewood Community Church in Houston (43,500 members), is split evenly among blacks, Hispanics and a category containing whites and Asians. Hybels' Willow Creek is at 20% minority. Megachurches serve only 7% of American churchgoers, but they are extraordinarily influential: Willow Creek, for instance, networks another 12,000 smaller congregations through its Willow Creek Association. David Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame studying the trend, says that "if tens of millions of Americans start sharing faith across racial boundaries, it could be one of the final steps transcending race as our great divider"--and it could help smooth America's transition into a truly rainbow nation.

Hybels and his Willow Creek church are already headed down that path. Though Willow is not the most advanced example of multiracial church, it makes an excellent window into the new desegregation because of its size, its influence and the ferocious purposefulness with which Hybels has deconstructed his all-white institution. Willow may also be emblematic in that Hybels appears to have stopped short of creating a fully color-blind church. His efforts illustrate both the possibilities and the challenges that smaller churches may face as they attempt to move beyond black and white.

The Making of a (White) Megachurch

Willow Creek Community Church's main complex, in South Barrington, does not tower so much as sprawl: eight low-slung buildings, landscaped on a swampy and thus underdeveloped grassland amid Chicago's bustling, affluent northwest suburbs. As the church has grown--especially with the 2004 completion of a new sanctuary building with an escalator and interior waterfall--it has become more self-consciously handsome. But like Hybels himself, it abandons pious overstatement for corporate efficiency: church as conceived by Jack Welch.

Willow Creek is a paradigmatic religious success story. In 1974, Hybels was a youth pastor whose meetings outdrew the church he worked for by a factor of three. In '75, he and several friends founded Willow, aiming at people with little Christian affiliation, informally dubbed "unchurched Harry and Mary." The congregation boomed--the word megachurch was reputedly coined to describe it--and Hybels became the poster boy for the new movement of exurban big-box churches.

Yet Harry and Mary were white: Willow attracted almost nobody of color. The gurus of the megachurch explosion were church-growth consultants, who endorsed the "homogeneous unit principle": people like to worship with people who are similar to them--in age, wealth and race. Hybels, while denying intentional exclusivity, says that "in the early days, we were all young, white, affluent, college-educated suburbanites, and we all understood each other. When we reached out to our friends, it became self-reinforcing."

In 1999, however, that changed. Hybels was leaving on vacation when Willow's only African-American pastor, Alvin Bibbs, passed him a book titled Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, by a then obscure academic named Michael Emerson. The book's polls showed that Evangelicals tended to "believe that their faith ought to be a powerful impetus for bringing people together across race." Yet they had fewer minority acquaintances than non-Evangelicals. Most regarded racial inequality as either illusory or the wages of personal sin, rather than as a societal flaw. This and other buried assumptions created church climates that unofficially discouraged minority participation. Far from reconciling the races, Emerson concluded, Evangelicalism acted to "drive them apart [and] contribute to the racial fragmentation of American society."

Hybels, a former chaplain for the Chicago Bears with many black friends, says, "I thought I was gonna faint." He was stunned to realize that racism is "not just an individual issue but a justice issue" with "structural and [systemic] aspects" violating dozens of biblical admonitions. "I went from thinking 'I don't have a race problem' to 'There is a huge problem in our world that I need to be part of resolving.'"

The catch was that "I hadn't [preached] about it in 24 years." So he promised his congregation, "I'm not going to overwhelm you." Yet he persisted, sermonizing repeatedly about America's racial history and continuing inequities. He pledged to open Willow to every ethnicity. In 2003, he recalls, he threw down the gauntlet, telling his flock that the church's racial outreach was "part of who we are, and if it can't be part of who you are, you probably need to find a church that doesn't talk about this issue."

How Willow Got Religion

Larry Butler first visited Willow Creek in the 1970s and left fast. "I liked the teaching, but I didn't see anybody like me," says Butler, 57, a solidly built, hazel-eyed African-American pharmacist from Oklahoma. "I didn't have any problem with the people, but I didn't know if they had a problem with me. So I thought, 'I'll go elsewhere.'" Other minorities who sampled the church felt similarly uncomfortable. Yet Butler returned to Willow in the early '80s, later inviting his wife Renetta and, as he says, "hoping things would change."

And they did, as Hybels and Bibbs re-engineered the church to match its preaching. They built "Bridging the Racial Divide" gatherings into Willow's massive grid of laity-led "small groups." The meetings were essential, says Renetta, who ended up running five: they were a ground-level "safe haven" where congregants could express and dispel received stereotypes. At the very first, in 2001, a well-meaning white woman kept using the phrase "you people." "Do you people want to be called blacks?" she asked. "Or African Americans? I never know what to call you people." Eventually it became too much, and Larry, along with Renetta and his brother Garnett, explained to the woman and eight other white congregants in the room that "every time you say 'you people,' you're holding us back--it's like we're not included," Renetta said. The woman burst into tears and asked, "Well, what do you like to be called?" Renetta quipped in response, "I personally like to be a brownie with nuts." She says, "It broke the ice."

There were also larger race-oriented seminars and reconciliation-themed book clubs. Bibbs founded an annual "Justice Journey," busing Willow staff and black Chicago pastors together to bloodstained civil rights pilgrimage sites. Hybels added black, Hispanic and Asian performers to Willow's music and worship teams. In 2006, Willow introduced a Spanish-language service for Latinos, who were streaming into the area.

Some white congregants left. But total attendance kept climbing--and people of different races now clasped one another's hands during prayer. When Bibbs disclosed that he had booked speaking engagements elsewhere on Martin Luther King Jr. Day because Willow did not observe it at the time, Hybels inaugurated an annual 48-hour celebration, and Bibbs recalls breaking down as the entire Willow staff joined in on "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the "black national anthem." In 2008 an 18-minute multimedia presentation on the King holiday received a deafening 20,000-person standing ovation. "I've never been so proud of the church," Bibbs says. "It was like everybody had crossed over."

By February 2009, Willow had hit the 20%-minority threshold that signifies an integrated congregation. Today its membership is 80% Caucasian, 6% Hispanic, 4% Asian, 2% African American and 8% "other" ethnicities. Says Bibbs: "The church would never be the same again."

Stalled Out?

Yet in the past few years, desegregation proponents have wondered whether Willow's commitment extends to giving minorities a truly representative voice. Organizational shifts in the church resulted in the disbanding of many small groups, including those concerned with race. Hybels, with his convert's zeal on the topic and unique authority, left the main pulpit for several years. Most disturbing, according to about a dozen minority congregants, was that Hybels never promoted a nonwhite member to a pulpit pastorship or senior staff position at the main Willow campus. (Bibbs, never a "teaching pastor," now advises other churches on multiculturalism at the Willow Creek Association.) An African American recently joined Willow's elder board. Curtis Sallee, a black 15-year "Creeker," comments that while "what Bill has done racially has been nothing less than miraculous, there needs to be someone who speaks for the church, a teaching pastor or staff, who's a minority. That's the next step. I don't know whether they are ready to take it. But they're going to have to address it sooner or later."

Hybels acknowledges the situation as "extremely frustrating" and attributes it to the fact that paid leadership is drawn from the longest-serving church volunteers, who are still mostly white. The argument, however, doesn't account for the homogeneity of Willow's pulpit pastors, the past several of whom have been out-of-church hires.

Willow's predicament is hardly surprising. To some white congregants, naming a person of another color to tell you what Scripture means, week in and week out, crosses an internal boundary between "diversity" (positive) and "affirmative action" (potentially unnerving). Daniel Hill, a former Willow young-adult pastor who founded his own fully multicultural River City Community Church in Chicago, says, "There's a tipping point where the dominant group feels threatened." Consciously or unconsciously, Hybels stands at that point.

Still, observers inside and outside Willow applaud him. David Anderson, founder of the multicultural Bridgeway Community Church in Columbia, Md., says, "I bet they've done it faster and better than anyone else with a church that large starting off as all white." When I ask Hybels how important racial reconciliation is to Christianity, he says, "It's absolutely core to the Gospel. It speaks to whether all humans are made in the image of God and have the capability of being redeemed and used by God to perform his work. I'm going to persevere on this for the rest of my life." In December, Willow announced that 80% of its Hispanic attendees were undocumented and had a speaker give a talk explaining "God's heart on immigrants," a positive biblical analysis. Harvey Carey, pastor to a vibrant mixed-race congregation in Detroit, did a stint as a guest preacher.

Some think the integration of American churches is inevitable. Willow Creek Association head Jim Mellado cites the Census Bureau projection that by 2050 the U.S. will contain no racial majority. "Every church will have to deal with that or find itself on the side of the road," he says. Hybels differs, saying that "there will still be people who will only want to worship amongst their own kind."

Yet there is one part of Willow already living 2050. It is not the sanctuary. At Promiseland, Willow's vast Sunday-school complex, Jim and Ellen Strasma wrangle a band of 2-year-olds: seven Caucasians, a Caucasian-Asian, six Hispanics, an Indian American and an African American. A boy in a T-shirt and sporty maroon track pants shares a miniature plastic baguette with a ponytailed Latina. He looks like a preschool Bill Hybels, yet one of his parents is Asian American. The Indian-American girl and the African-American girl dance together. As pickup time approaches, Ms. Ellen explains that Jesus loves everyone. Sixteen small faces of various hues gaze up at her. God wants them all to be friends, she concludes--but the message seems superfluous. Here, today, Martin Luther King Jr.'s observation about Sunday school is finally refuted. In one room of one huge church striving to do the right thing, the harmony of His kingdom has already arrived.