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One thing is sure: None of us is born a racist.

We are, however, born with the ability to perceive differences—in sounds, colors, shapes, and sizes. Noticing those differences (I'm taller than you; you have white skin and I have brown) is an inherent capability, but forming attitudes about them (It's better to be tall; it's better to be white) is imparted. Our friends, family, and culture teach us these attitudes. And while progress has been made in changing the prejudices that all of us have, a rift still exists. The nation—and the church—still finds itself divided by race.

We live in the same towns, share the same schools, eat at the same restaurants, and shop at the same stores; but our homes and churches are in different neighborhoods. While our country has an ugly history of racial oppression, today the lack of harmony is more the result of isolation and ignorance.

Believers are given "the ministry of reconciliation," according to the apostle Paul (2 Cor. 5:18-21). But what does that mean for race relations in the 21st-century church? The journeys of three Christian leaders suggest at least three keys.

"There are many people, evangelical Christians among them, who think racial divides no longer exist in our country," says Michael Emerson, professor of sociology at Rice University in Texas and coauthor of the seminal Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America.

"Because we live so separated from each other, people become blind to it. If I turn to my neighbor on my left and my neighbor on my right, who are both like me, and ask, 'There's not a race problem, is there?' and they say, 'No, there's not,' then we just reinforce it with each other."

Emerson and coauthor Christian Smith conducted nationwide surveys of white evangelicals for their groundbreaking book. After attending a Promise Keepers event in 1994, Emerson was "led to a conviction that something about race in our country mattered and grieved God."

When he returned home, he had a chance to act on his convictions. His job necessitated moving his family (3-year-old son Anthony and pregnant wife Joni) from St. Cloud, Minnesota, to Minneapolis. "Typically, we would just find a nice house in a nice suburb, but for some reason I felt like God was saying not to do that," Emerson says. "So after a lot of pain and rejections from our family and friends, we moved to an inner-city section of Minneapolis. It opened up a whole new world to us—the church we were in, the school the kids went to—it was all so fundamentally different from anything we had ever known."

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