Why Multi-ethnic Churches

The American Church Research Project © 2010 by David T. Olson

www.TheAmericanChurch.org

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Why MultiEthnic ChurchesWhy MultiEthnic Churches??



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The Big Idea

Monoethnic Christianity has the tendency to subtly diminish the powerful Gospel.



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The Challenge

Christianity is losing ground in the United States. Why?



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51,420,697

-

10,000,000

20,000,000

30,000,000

40,000,000

50,000,000

60,000,000

Church Attendance 1990 Church Attendance 2009 Population Growth 1990-2009

Attendance Vs. Population Growth for all Christian Churches 1990 - 2009



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51,420,697 51,867,237

-

10,000,000

20,000,000

30,000,000

40,000,000

50,000,000

60,000,000





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51,420,697 51,867,23756,819,471

-

10,000,000

20,000,000

30,000,000

40,000,000

50,000,000

60,000,000





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446,5406

56,819,471

-

10,000,000

20,000,000

30,000,000

40,000,000

50,000,000

60,000,000

Attendance Growth 1990-2009 Population Growth 1990-2009




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What is the Challenge?

Our country is becoming postmodern, postChristian and multiethnic. These 3 forces are like an earthquake striking the church. The ground under us has shifted, undulating like a snake held by its tail. The previously stable culture which formed the basis for ministry is now precarious. What worked in the 1990’s now produces a smaller harvest. The church faces an uncertain future.



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What is the Solution?

While the Solution is Multifaceted, Three Factors Stand out as Most Critical for the Restoration of American Church:



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The Three Most Critical Factors for the Restoration of the American Church:

• Churches need to recover the powerful Gospel, replacing the anemic Gospel that many Evangelicals rely on.

• 20% of American churches need to become intentionally multiethnic.

• Evangelicals need to deal honestly with the corrosive effect of affluence in our personal lives, as well as in our culture.



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The New Multiethnic People of God

Israel was a __________ people.

The Day of Pentecost shows clearly that the new people of God were to be ___________.



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Currently, 93% of American churches are segregated. What are the unintended consequences of

this monoethnicity?

• They reproduce inequality;• They encourage oppression;• They strengthen racial division;• They heighten political separation.

(According to Michael Emerson)



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Introduction to LukeThe Message, Eugene Peterson

Most of us, most of the time, feel left out – misfits. We don’t belong. Others seem to be so confident, so sure of themselves, “insiders” who know the ropes, old hands in a club from which we are excluded. One of the ways we have of responding to this is to form our own club, or join one that will have us. Here is at least one place where we are “in” and the others “out.”



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But the one thing they have in common is the principle of exclusion. Identity or worth is achieved by excluding all but the chosen. The terrible price we pay for keeping all those other people out so that we can savor the sweetness of being insiders is a reduction of reality, a shrinkage of life.



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Nowhere is this price more terrible than when it is paid in the cause of religion. But religion has a long history of doing just that, of reducing the huge mysteries of God to the respectability of club rules, of shrinking the vast human community to a “membership.” But with God there are no outsiders.



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Luke is a most vigorous champion of the outsider. An outsider himself, the only Gentile in an all-Jewish cast of New Testament writers, he shows how Jesus includes those who typically were treated as outsiders by the religious establishment of the day: women, common laborers (sheepherders), the racially different (Samaritans), the poor.



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He will not countenance religion as a club. As Luke tells the story, all of us who have found ourselves on the outside looking in on life, with no hope of gaining entrance (and who of us hasn’t felt it?) now finds the door open, found and welcomed by God in Jesus.



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-1.1%

-1.8%

4.0%

5.2%

-1.0%

-2.0%

-1.0%

0.0%

1.0%

2.0%

3.0%

4.0%

5.0%

6.0%

Rural Small Town Large Town Suburban Urban

2000-2009 Evangelical Growth Rate Based on Location



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-4.3%

-1.9%

-0.5%

7.0%

17.6%

-5.0%

0.0%

5.0%

10.0%

15.0%

20.0%

Under $30,000 $30,000-$39,999 $40,000-$49,999 $50,000-$59,999 Over $60,000

2000-2009 Evangelical Growth Rate Based on Median Household Income



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-2.7%

-1.3%

5.9%

8.4%

1.4%

-4.0%

-2.0%

0.0%

2.0%

4.0%

6.0%

8.0%

10.0%

Under 12.0 12.0-12.9 13.0-13.9 14.0-14.9 Over 15.0

2000-2009 Evangelical Growth Rate Based on Median Educational Level



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-1.7%-2.1%

4.5%4.7%

0.5%

-3.0%

-2.0%

-1.0%

0.0%

1.0%

2.0%

3.0%

4.0%

5.0%

Under 50% 50%-79% 80%-89% 90%-94% 95%-100%

2000-2009 Evangelical Growth Rate Based on Percent of Zipcode Anglo



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81

103

143

183

215

-

50

100

150

200

250

Under $30,000 $30,000-$39,999 $40,000-$49,999 $50,000-$59,999 Over $60,000

2008-2009 Evangelical Average Size Based on Median Household Income



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-0.2%

-0.3%

-0.8%

-1.0%

-1.1%

-1.2%

-1.0%

-0.8%

-0.6%

-0.4%

-0.2%

0.0%

200

4 -

200

5 G

row

th R

ate

Under 5.0% 5.0%-9.9% 10.0%-14.9% 15.0%-24.9% Over 25.0%

Percentage of People in Poverty

2004 - 2005 United States Church Attendance Growth Rate Based on Percentage of People in Poverty in Church's Zipcode



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What is Happening Here?

Get in groups of 2 or 3 and explain these charts to each other.



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In the mono-ethnic world, Christians, pastors, and churches only had to understand their own culture. Ministering in a homogenous culture is easier, but mono-ethnic Christianity can gradually become culture-bound. The worldview and values of a particular culture can be transferred to Christianity. Where I live in Minnesota, Jesus can easily become a Scandinavian, with fair skin and blue eyes, instead of a Middle Eastern Jew. The culturally acceptable part of Christianity is embraced, but the culturally unacceptable part is ignored.



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Miroslav VolfThe practice of 'embrace', with its

concomitant (accompanying) struggle against deception, injustice and violence, is intelligible only against the backdrop of a powerful, contagious and destructive evil I call ‘exclusion’, and is for Christians only possible if, in the name of God’s crucified Messiah, we distance ourselves from ourselves and our cultures in order to create a space for the other.”

Exclusion and Embrace



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Walter Brueggemann

The force of homogeneity is immense –

partly seductive, partly coercive, partly the irresistible effect of

affluence. (Prophetic Imagination)



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Two Challenges

1. Has your expression (both personal and denominational) of Christianity subtly diminished the powerful Gospel?

2. Are you willing to reject exclusion and create a space for embrace? How will you actually go to where the poor are in your city?



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PowerPoint Presentations…A free copy of this PowerPoint is

available at:

www.theamericanchurch.org/ME.zip

Contact Dave at:

[email protected]

http://www.theamericanchurch.org/ME.zip



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Information on the Information

• The spiritual health of churches is multifaceted, and is obviously much more complex than an attendance trend can portray. However, following the example of St. Luke in the Book of Acts, who used the number of people who showed up at various events as a sign documenting the health and growth of the early church, I would suggest that attendance is the single most helpful indicator of health, growth and decline.

• Information has been compiled only for orthodox Christian groups – Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox. The Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, Unitarian-Universalists and the International Churches of Christ have not been included. In addition, information about non-Christian groups has not been compiled.

• African American denominations publish very little that is statistical – often not even a list of current churches. This study used data from the 1990 Glenmary study on Black Baptist estimates and AME Zion churches, the average African American worship attendance (from the Barna Research Group), and a statistical model based on the population of African Americans in each county in 1990 and 2000. This was combined with the known attendance at about 10,000 African Americans churches to come up with as accurate an estimate as possible for each county.

• Independent church data is difficult to obtain. (There are actually many fewer totally independent churches than is assumed. Most are part of some voluntary association, which typically keeps some records.) Data from the 1990 & 2000 Glenmary study on larger Independent churches (limited to over 300 in attendance) was used along with a statistical model to estimate the attendance at smaller independent churches.

• In Catholic churches, the definition of what constitutes membership varies with diocese and church, making numbers sometimes inconsistent from state to state and county to county. In addition to actual mass counts from 1/3rd of Catholic parishes, membership information has been merged with attendance patterns from similar dioceses based on the size of the diocese and the region in which it is located.

• Orthodox Churches are included in Totals, but not included as a separate group because of smallness of size nationwide. Division into Evangelical and Mainline categories is based on the division by the Glenmary Study.

• This study only looks at how many people attend a Christian church on any given Sunday. The term ‘regular attender’ can be designated to mean someone who attends a Christian church on a consistent basis. Using a simple definition for ‘regular attender’ (attends at least 3 out of every 8 Sundays), between 21% and 23% of Americans would fit this category. Adding ‘regular attenders’ of non-orthodox Christian churches and other religions to the totals would increase the percentage to 24% – 26%.



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This Presentation is based on a nationwide study of American church

attendance, as reported by churches and denominations. The database currently has average worship attendances for each of the last 15 years for over 200,000 individual churches.

It also uses supplementary information (actual membership numbers correlated with accurate membership to attendance ratios) to project the attendances of all other denominational and independent churches. All told, accurate information is provided for all 305,000 orthodox Christian churches.1

1 This presentation looks only at people attending orthodox Christian churches. Approximately 3 million people attend non-orthodox Christian churches, and perhaps 3 million attend a religious service of another religion. Those ‘houses of worship’ would add another 35,000 churches in the United States and increase the 2008 percentage to 19.3%.



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For More Information . . . • Presentations such as this are available for

the largest 90 Metropolitan Areas in the United States, for each State and for the Nation as a whole. Presentations can be downloaded immediately. A Combo Pack for each state is also available, which includes the National, State and any Metro PowerPoints from that state. For ordering information, please go to

www.theamericanchurch.org

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