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—Bill Hybels

What were your "aha" moments on this issue?

Hybels: Alvin Bibbs is an African American who leads our extension ministry and helps us with our inner-city partnerships. A few years back, when I was leaving to go on a family vacation, I said to Alvin as I was walking out the door, "God's stirring in me about the reconciliation issue. If you can give me one book on the issue to take with me, I'll read it while I'm gone." He grabbed the book Divided by Faith, and I took it with me on that week-long vacation. And that book just wrecked me.

I was like the stereotypical person that Divided by Faith talked about. I didn't view myself as being racist in any way. I therefore felt that there was no issue I was responsible for. If it was okay with me and my individual multiracial friendships, then it was all okay. And when I got to the section about the ongoing structural inequities, it devastated me. I thought, How could I have not seen this? And that was the beginning of my journey. I felt so badly about being a pastor for 25 years and having been as oblivious as I was to these kinds of issues. It was embarrassing. But these days I'm trying to make up for lost time.

Reid: One moment came in 1990 when Taylor Branch, a white author of two acclaimed books on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., spoke to our congregation. We developed a friendship. And he said to me after about the third month of visiting, "Frank, I love the preaching. I love the work of the church. But you're so Afro-centric that, while my wife and I would love to join the church, I'm afraid our children will get nothing of their cultural heritage here." My internal response was, Well, all these years black people in America have had to accept the white Jesus and white angels and a Euro-centric view of Christianity, so that's your problem.

Shortly after that, though, we had a black member who is interracially married, but I didn't know it. So, in one of my sermons I regrettably made a negative reference to interracial marriages, and shortly thereafter she left the church. I saw her in a supermarket sometime later and asked her, as any pastor would, "Where are you now? How are you doing? Why did you leave?"

She said, "Pastor, you offended me because you were insensitive to people like my husband." Those two events led me to meet with Curtiss Paul DeYoung, one of the coauthors of this book, to talk about reconciliation and how to start a movement for multiracial Christianity.

While the authors recognize different types of multicultural churches, they hold up "integration" as the ideal. What does true integration look like to you?

Rah: One image that most of us have discarded by now is the "melting pot," because what it ends up becoming is a soupy mixture that has no flavor at all. A second metaphor is the "salad bowl," where you have all these different vegetables that sort of make up different flavors. But it turned out that the dressing was still creamy ranch, and it smothered everything else.

So we've got to start looking for other models that point to what we hope to become in a multicultural ministry. Are we looking to boil everybody down into one unrecognizable mass? Or are we trying to smother everything with one culture so that everybody is the same flavor? We need to be honest about this.

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April 2005, Vol. 49, No. 4