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In their study of race and American Christianity, Divided by Faith, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith observed that 90 percent of American churches are 90 percent composed of people of the same race. Brenda Salter McNeil helps churches beat the odds. With her colleagues at Salter McNeil and Associates, she works intensively with congregations and institutions that want to make a successful transition to multiethnic leadership and membership. In such an intrinsically countercultural line of work, hopefulness and a sense of humor are priceless assets, and Brenda possesses both in abundance. In this response to our year-long exploration of the question, How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?, Brenda outlines some reasons cultural isolation is no longer viable for Christians who want to serve a society where soon no ethnic group will be a majority.

In 1986, I discovered that the world was changing. That year my husband and I traveled to England, along with a team of seminary students and pastors from Fuller Theological Seminary, to lecture at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies on the history of the black church in America.

Then as now, the Church of England was facing unprecedented institutional challenges and numerical decline. Beautiful gothic churches were closing their doors as places of worship and being used as office spaces, turned into libraries, or simply left vacant. The staff of the Oxford Centre, convinced that these changes were occurring in part because of urbanization, wanted to learn from churches that thrived in these conditions. They had discovered that the black church in America excelled at dealing with the challenges of the urban environment, growing strong, vibrant churches in the midst of the city.

So they invited us to come to teach on everything we knew about the black church. The students took copious notes. It was the first time in my life that anyone had expressed a sincere interest in understanding my experience as an African American Christian. I had no idea that my life as a black, Pentecostal female had any relevance to anyone else. No one had ever asked.

I left that trip convinced that God was getting ready to do something extraordinary, and that this "new thing" was going to unite people from all over the world who didn't look like one another. For the first time it occurred to me that this "new thing" was going to uniquely and strategically include people of color. People who had previously been marginalized and minimized would now be used by God to provide prophetic leadership as agents of reconciliation and renewal.

There are times in history when people must accurately recognize what God is doing. These times are not determined or controlled by human beings. In the New Testament, Paul uses the word kairos, which means the right time, the set time, the opportune time, the strategic time, or the decisive time. If you will allow me the analogy, it is the "pregnant" time. When a man and woman conceive a child, they wait for months in anticipation of their child's birth. Even in the age of ultrasound, when they're able to determine the gender of the child and cherish grainy photos from the womb, they can only guess at what their child will look like. So they wait, hope, and pray in eager expectation, and perhaps also some anxiety. Then one night, usually when she least expects it, the woman starts to feel something different in her body. She turns to her husband, nudges him gently but firmly and says, "Honey, wake up. It's time!" She doesn't want him to tell her the time on his watch. She wants him to get up and spring into action, because "kairos time" is a decisive time that demands a response.

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November 2006, Vol. 50, No. 11