Megachurches Desegregate Worship

Christian Post article

Sundays at the evangelical Grace Chapel megachurch look like the American ideal of race relations: African-American, Haitian, white, Chinese and Korean families sing along with a white, guitar-playing pastor...
A study by Thumma and the Leadership Network, a Dallas group that works with pioneering churches, found that minorities make up 20 percent or more of worshippers in nearly one-third of the nation's 1,200 megachurches. More than half of the megachurches say they are intentionally working to attract different ethnic groups, according to the 2005 study, part of a book that Thumma and network executive Dave Travis will publish in July....
Researchers have found that whites and nonwhites join megachurches for the same reasons: great guitar-and-drum worship bands, strong programs for kids and a message of Bible-based self-betterment. For anyone who feels isolated in a sea of white faces, the small communal groups that megachurches form for their members provide support....

Location matters. The Rev. David Anderson, founding pastor of Bridgeview Community Church in Columbia, Md., which has about 2,000 members, conducts what he calls the "Wal-Mart test" by driving to malls or Wal-Marts within a 20-mile radius of his church to see who's shopping.

"If the Wal-Mart is diverse," he says, "then your church can be diverse."

Anderson's megachurch is unique in that he started it specifically to be multicultural. He estimates that Bridgeview, more than a decade old, is now 55 percent African-American and about one-quarter white, with Asians, Hispanics and others making up the rest.

He also stands out because he is African-American. Most integrating megachurches are led by whites, and white Christians generally don't stay at black-led congregations, Emerson says....

perhaps we are seeing the desegregation of the most segregated hour in America every week. cool article. reminds me of one of my earliest blog posts about two churches named Mosaic