DMcFadden
Puritanboard Commissioner
. . . I have no intention of purposefully evangelizing certain sections of our community just so we won't be so white. That kind of guilt-driven evangelism I left behind in the mainlines.
Duh.
Misreading of my post, Ben? If you phrase it that way, the answer is too obvious to warrant any response. My 50+ years in the mainlines found me fighting ethnic quotas at the local, regional, and national levels as well. But, does anybody believe that Biblical evangelism of a true Gospel should produce lily white congregations in communities that are radically mixed racially? When I was an American Baptist, our big libs pushing "race" pastored congregations that were 99% white while calling some of us anti-quota people racists even though we were in racially mixed congregations with no single ethnic majority. If the geographic reach of your church is a population that is 99% white, fine. But, if it is nearly 50% Chinese and nearly 40% Hispanic like mine, then a "white" church would strike me as missing the point somewhere.
Nate is an example of what I was thinking. My experience with church people is that we get all too comfortable with our own group of close friends and seldom reach out to people at all -- of any color!
Nate pastors a congregation in one of the "less than gigantic" Reformed groups. If his fairly small congregation can reach and assimilate a "Chilean, a number of Mexican-Americans, a Philipino, an Indian (India) family, an Israeli married to a Mexican, a family from the UK and the husband is Ukranian and the wife is Coptic Egyptian, a family from the Netherlands, people from Singapore," then he would be an exemplar of what I was calling for in my post.
If Calvinism is true, you would think that it would to be represented by more than upper middle class white people.