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Ethnic Blends?

How do you develop a racially diverse leadership team? Are quotas the right recipe?

In the spring of 2006, I received a call from the local NBC affiliate wanting to feature our church in a segment on people and institutions of faith making a difference in the lives of Arkansans. They wanted to describe the diversity of our church—a story of interest, in part, because we are located only three miles from Little Rock's Central High School where, in 1957, nine black students (the Little Rock Nine) were denied entrance, despite a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court ordering the desegregation of public schools throughout the United States.

When I inquired into the producer's interest in Mosaic, she said, "I want others to know that your church is not just diverse on the outside but diverse on the inside as well." In other words, what had caught her attention was the fact that our leadership—indeed, our pulpit itself—is fully integrated.

The leadership at the church in Antioch (Acts 11:19—25; 13:1) serves as a model for enlisting diverse leadership within ...

March
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