Race and Seven Mile Road
The racial demographics of those attending Seven Mile Road on a Sunday morning is not representative of the racial demographics of Malden/just north of Boston.
True.
Seven Mile Road is the most diverse congregation in Malden.
This is quite possibly true as well.
Say what?
I will explain.
But first, the stats.
As the chart shows out of 115 adults currently banging with us at Seven Mile, most are ‘white.’ (I hate that blanket category. My mom is Puerto Rican, my dad is German-English. And yet I am ‘white’. Why? I am as hispanic as I am white technically. But I digress.) 13% are Hispanic. (Puerto Rican, Dominican, Guatemalan, El Salvadorian, Brazlian.) 7% are Asian. (Indian, Korean.) 2% are African (Gordon and Ilsa in the house.) Others come and go, but this is a decent snapshot.
Malden demographics are quite different. A little over half of Malden is ‘white’. (Again, an almost meaningless category at this point.) Over 20% are Chinese. 10% or so are black. And the rest are a veritable United Nations, it’s awesome. The surrounding just-north-of-Boston cities are similar, only instead of being 20% Chinese the various ethnic groups congregate in the same neighborhoods/zip codes. But diversity reigns, with ‘whites’ constantly shrinking in numbers.
If you hang at the YMCA, as the Kruses often do, you will right away notice the melting pot going on.
And so naturally there is a periodic rumbling/uncertainty/discontentment/questioning/frustration with our ‘whiteness’. Why doesn’t our church look more like the gym at the Y or the caf at Malden High or the Celebrate Malden parade? Is Seven Mile Road doing church in a way that excludes those of others ethnicities? Are we failing to be missional because we are not diverse enough? Are we doing something sinful/selfish/wrong that is resulting in our ‘whiteness’?
They are important questions.
And so, a few thoughts.
1, if the answers to any of those questions is yes, the other churches in Malden are in really bad shape. We are a bastion of multi-ethnicity for a Sunday worship gathering here in town. The ethnic churches in Malden are almost exclusively ethnic. Their pie charts would look much worse than ours, with the majority making up 95%+. The Vietnamese Church is all Vietnamese, Chinese all Chinese, Hatian all Hatian, Black all Black (Ferryway School), Brazilian all Brazlian, you get the point. And the white churches are way more white than we are. None of this justifies us in anything, and I am not ripping any of them, but the point not to miss is that multi-ethnic church is not happening anywhere in Malden. And if it is happening anywhere, it is with us and some others with similar pie charts.
2, comparing our Sunday gathering to the gym at the Y is comparing apples and oranges. Folks who can swim together at the Y, go to public school together, recycle their trash together, etc., have a much harder time worshiping together. There are language barriers for one. Huge cultural barriers exist as well. And while I gladly play ball with Morrocans, for example, they are not coming anywhere near our Sunday gathering. This is true across the globe, not just here. I am not saying I like it. I am saying that the reality is that, except in cases where there is a massive move of God’s Spirit and grace, Sunday worship services necessarily tend toward homogeneousness (is that a word?). Multi-ethnic church is a beautiful exception. For example, Christ the King in Cambridge tried its hardest upon its founding to say ‘we are going to be a Brazilian-White church!’ but couldn’t pull it off and so have moved over the years to 2 congregations, morning and evening. Is this necessarily sinful? They would say no. I would agree.
3, making judgments on a church’s commitment to racial diversity by counting ethnic heads on a Sunday morning is unfair. Sunday gathering is one part of a much bigger life of Jesus’ church. The bigger questions here need to be: are the people of Seven Mile Road daily loving their neighbors of different races? One gander at our people and the answer is yes. We have people who have given their lives for North Africans. We have teachers and principals and nurses working daily with minority populations, loving them in the name of Christ. We ave served minorities through mercy ministry many times. We need to keep that central to our life together, realizing that even if those folks never worship Jesus on a Sunday at Seven Mile, it’s ok.
Anyway, I am in prayer that God would help us redeem just-north-of-Boston in whatever ways he intends, and would love for that to be a broadening of not only who we are serving but who is worshiping with us.
Leave a Reply