Most people agree that the church should welcome everyone. Far fewer churches actually look like their communities. People shop at the same grocery stores and wait in the same hospital rooms, then drive to different churches on Sunday morning.
A church where people of every race worship together does not happen by accident. If “can’t we all just get along” were enough, every church would already be there. It takes intention, and it takes instruction from Scripture.
The Vision: Christ Is All, and in All
Paul describes the kind of community the gospel creates: “Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:11). The categories that divide people everywhere else do not get the final word in the church. Paul goes on to tell believers to put on compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience, “bearing with one another,” and above all to “put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony” (Colossians 3:14).
What Racism Is, and What It Isn’t
When most people hear the word racism, they think of overt hatred: explicit, racially motivated acts. That is racism, but it is not all of it. A helpful working definition says racism is prejudice or discrimination based on race, expressed not only through open hostility but also through attitudes, assumptions, policies and systems, often without conscious intent.
That last phrase matters. Much of what affects how people are treated happens without anyone meaning it.
Here is an honest place to start: every person is prejudiced to some degree. Not just one group. Everyone makes snap judgments about people based on what they have seen and experienced over a lifetime. Pull up to a drive-through window and see a teenager, and most people have already decided how the service will go before a word is spoken. That young worker starts at a deficit. The same kind of snap judgment happens with race.
Admitting that is not an accusation. It is the first step.
Not Where We Used to Be, Not Where We Need to Be
A local church cannot fix every large-scale problem in society, but it can deal with its own attitudes, its own welcome and its own people.
One useful way to describe where things stand is “symptomatic racism”: some things that still affect people today are a by-product of what happened historically. Things are not where they used to be, and they are not yet where they need to be.
So what can a church actually do? Scripture points to three commitments.
1. A Commitment to Listen
James writes, “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19). When the subject is race, many people do the opposite. They are quick to speak, quick to anger and slow to hear.
Part of the reason is defensiveness. For many white Christians especially, conversations about race can feel like an accusation, so the guard goes up before the other person has finished talking. But when there is a ready defense for everything someone says, there is no listening happening.
The commitment is simple, though not easy: when a person or a group of people tells you what it is like to live through something you cannot identify with, believe them, or at the very least, do not argue with them. Do not pick one person who seems to defy the pattern and use them to dismiss everyone else’s experience. Do not respond with “Well, it isn’t easy for anyone.” Listening is not a competition.
When something sounds wrong or even feels like an attack, try one question: “I hear you say this. Help me understand.”
2. A Commitment to Cover
Paul compares the church to a human body: “On those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty” (1 Corinthians 12:23). We cover what is exposed.
When someone walks into a room and looks different from everyone else in it, they feel exposed. Anyone who has been the only one of their kind in a room knows the worry about saying the wrong thing.
Covering someone with greater modesty means taking the attention off the things that make them different. That is often the opposite of our instinct. Excited churchgoers sometimes treat a new guest of a different race as a spectacle, as if to prove how welcoming they are. Good hearts can still leave someone feeling put on display. Play it cool. Make people feel relaxed, because relaxed people can receive, and embarrassed people retreat.
Covering is not pretending to be colorblind. Saying “I don’t see color” can be deeply offensive, especially to black Americans who have long felt unseen. The goal is not to ignore who someone is. It is to keep them from feeling exposed.
3. A Commitment to Greater Honor
Paul continues: God has composed the body, “giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another” (1 Corinthians 12:24-25). The answer to division is greater honor.
In the South, race, culture and heritage are tangled together, and the Confederate flag is a familiar example. To some, it means Southern pride. To others, it is family legacy, or simply a memory of watching the General Lee on television. But to many others, it is a reminder of slavery, oppression and being treated as property rather than as a person.
It is easy to honor people when nothing is at stake. Greater honor costs something when there is real tension. It might mean taking the flag off the wall or the truck, folding it with respect and keeping it in a box for private moments of remembrance. It might mean choosing where and when a symbol gets worn. What is no big deal to one person can be a very big deal to someone else, and greater honor chooses the other person.
Transformed, Not Just Informed
Paul writes, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2). He follows with a call not to think of ourselves “more highly than he ought to think” (Romans 12:3), and then: “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another” (Romans 12:15-16).
This is not a contest of who has the best statistics or the sharpest argument. Numbers can be found to support almost any position. What Scripture asks for is different: to see people, hear them and stand with them, even before fully understanding them.
The body of Christ is one of the few places where people of every race, class and age come together under one banner, the finished work of Jesus Christ. The church’s job is to make the path to the gospel straight, not harder than it needs to be.
A church for all people takes a commitment to listen, a commitment to cover and a commitment to greater honor. It may even mean praying for God to send people who stretch us, so that He can change us.