Multicultural Church in GA: NY Times Article
Middle Church
as well.
Interestingly, it singles out evangelical churches as multicultural
gatherings, based on some researcher's findings.
-------------------------------
The World Comes to Georgia, and an Old Church Adapts
By WARREN ST. JOHN
CLARKSTON, Ga., Sept. 21 - When the Rev. Phil Kitchin steps into the
pulpit of the Clarkston International Bible Church on Sunday mornings,
he stands eye to eye with the changing face of America. In the pews
before him, alongside white-haired Southern women in their Sunday
best, sit immigrants from the Philippines and Togo, refugees from war-
scarred Liberia, Ethiopia and Sudan, even a convert from Afghanistan.
"Jesus said heaven is a place for people of all nations," Mr. Kitchin
likes to say. "So if you don't like Clarkston, you won't like heaven."
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once noted that 11 a.m. on Sunday
was the beginning of the most segregated hour of the week in America,
and for the better part of 120 years, that certainly applied to this
church. From 1883 until a few years ago, anyone on the pulpit would
have gazed out at a congregation that was exclusively white. The
church is a member of the Southern Baptist Convention, a group that in
1995 renounced its racist past.
But an influx of immigrants and refugees transformed this town in a
little over a decade, and in the process sparked a battle within this
church over its identity and its faithfulness to the Bible, one that
led it to change not just its name but its mission.
The Clarkston International Bible Church, which sits along an active
freight rail line down the road from the former Ku Klux Klan bastion
of Stone Mountain, is now home to parishioners from more than 15
countries. The church also houses congregations of Ethiopians,
Sudanese, Liberians and French West Africans who worship separately,
according to their own traditions. The church's Sunday potluck lunch
features African stews and Asian vegetable dishes alongside hot dogs,
sweet tea and homemade cherry pie.
The transformation of what was long known as the Clarkston Baptist
Church speaks to a broader change among other American churches. Many
evangelical Christians who have long believed in spreading their
religion in faraway lands have found that immigrants offer an
opportunity for church work within one's own community. And many
immigrants and refugees are drawn by the warm welcome they get from
the parishioners, which can stand in stark contrast to the more
competitive and alienating nature of workaday America.
Indeed, evangelical churches have begun to stand out as rare centers
of ethnic mixing in a country that researchers say has become more
culturally fragmented, in part because of immigration.
A recent study by the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam
underscored the practical complications of diversity. In interviews
with 30,000 Americans, the study found that residents of more diverse
communities "tend to withdraw from collective life," voting less and
volunteering less than those in more homogeneous communities.
The study noted a conspicuous exception.
"In many large evangelical congregations," the researchers wrote, "the
participants constituted the largest thoroughly integrated gatherings
we have ever witnessed."
Change Comes to Town
Diversity came to Clarkston like a bolt from the blue. The community,
just east of the Atlanta Beltway and 11 miles from downtown, was
settled by white farmers and railroad workers in the late 1800s.
Clarkston remained rural and mostly white until the 1970s, when
developers began to build apartment complexes for middle-class workers
drawn to Atlanta after the international airport here opened. In the
next decade, many of those workers began to move to new suburbs
farther from town. Vacancies increased, rents fell and crime rose.
In the 1990s, aid agencies that contract with the federal government
to resettle refugees pegged Clarkston as the perfect place for these
vulnerable newcomers. The town had cheap housing: those empty
apartments. It had public transportation - few refugees could afford
cars. And Clarkston was within commuting distance of downtown
Atlanta's booming economy.
>From 1996 to 2001, more than 19,000 refugees were resettled in
Georgia, many in Clarkston or surrounding DeKalb County.
The change to Clarkston was profound. The schools became crowded with
children who spoke little English. Locals learned not to drive down
Indian Creek Drive on Friday afternoons because of traffic from Friday
prayers at the mosque. A third to a half of Clarkston's 7,100
residents are now foreign-born, most of them refugees.
Some older residents left town, alienated and concerned over the
quality of education at the overburdened schools.
Many of those families had attended the Clarkston Baptist Church,
leaving empty pews. By the end of the decade the church had canceled
one of its two Sunday services. The congregation had dwindled to fewer
than 100 from 600.
Concerned about its survival, the church commissioned a study that
found blacks and immigrants would soon outnumber whites in the area.
William S. Perrin, 75 and a member of the church since 1948, said that
at one meeting on the issue, a deacon stood up to express his anger.
"If you think black folks are going to come in here and take our
church away from us," Mr. Perrin remembers the man saying, "you got
another thing coming."
Reaching Out
William Perrin was no stranger to such attitudes. A retired Army
lieutenant colonel who survived a midair collision over Vietnam, he
grew up in Clarkston before the civil rights era. Some old ideas about
race were embedded in his own psyche.
He recalled that while in the Army he once used a racial epithet in
front of a black pilot he admired. When he realized what he had done,
Mr. Perrin said, he broke down, hugged the pilot and begged for
forgiveness.
"I'm ashamed of myself," he said he told the man. "That's just my
white upbringing in Georgia."
The pilot forgave Mr. Perrin, who then vowed never to disrespect
another person because of race or ethnicity.
With his church failing, Mr. Perrin and other longtime members looked
to the Scriptures for guidance and found what they believed was a
mandate from Jesus to diversify their church.
"We realized that what the Lord had in store for that old Clarkston
Baptist Church was to transition into a truly international church and
to help minister to all these ethnic groups moving into the county,"
Mr. Perrin said.
To offset costs during the lean years, the Clarkston Baptist Church
had leased space to congregations of Filipinos, Vietnamese and
Africans for their own services. Mr. Perrin and other members of the
church proposed that they invite these congregations to join them as a
single multiethnic church.
While an outspoken advocate for diversity within his church, Mr.
Perrin is quick to point out that he is no liberal. He voted twice for
President Bush. Mr. Perrin said he advocated for an international
church because the Bible told him to.
That view is growing more common among conservative Christians, said
Mark DeYmaz, a leading proponent of multicultural churches and the
pastor of the Mosaic Church of Central Arkansas, in Little Rock, a
congregation of 700 from some 30 countries.
In the Book of John, Mr. DeYmaz points out, Jesus is portrayed after
the Last Supper as praying for unity among his followers, a message he
said runs counter to the notion of an ethnically homogeneous church.
The idea of combining their old Baptist church with congregations of
Filipinos and Africans appalled some older white members of the
Clarkston Baptist Church, who feared giving up their ways of worship.
Some threatened to leave.
"They struggled," said Allen Hill, the pastor at the time and now an
official with the Georgia Baptist Convention. "It's something Southern
Baptists have to struggle with more than others because of our
history."
That history stretches back to 1845, when the Southern Baptist
Convention was formed by a group that seceded from a larger national
Baptist organization after that group decreed it would not appoint
slaveholders as missionaries.
In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention apologized for its failure to
support civil rights and for its congregations that "intentionally and/
or unintentionally" excluded blacks. To this day, the overwhelming
majority of its members are white, said Michael O. Emerson, a
professor of sociology at Rice University who has studied the group.
In 2004, the Clarkston Baptist Church adopted the changes proposed by
elders like Mr. Perrin, and merged with the Filipino and Nigerian
congregations.
They renamed their church the Clarkston International Bible Church.
That change was too much for many of the older members, like Brenda
and Robert White. They left after more than 20 years as members.
"I really resented that," Mrs. White said of the name change. "I know
it's the 21st century and we have to change and do things differently.
But I don't think it's fair that we had to cater to the foreign people
rather than them trying to change to our way of doing things."
"It just wasn't Baptist church anymore," she said.
A New Church Thrives
Rosa Paige, a 79-year-old Alabama native and member of the church for
46 years, winced and put her fingers in her ears. The staid Baptist
hymns of her old church have been replaced by "praise music,"
contemporary Christian songs, played by teenagers on electric guitars,
that church leaders thought would appeal to new congregants.
"It's a little loud for me sometimes," Mrs. Paige said.
Merging congregations has meant compromise for everyone. The
immigrants who join the main congregation have to give up worshiping
in their native languages. Older Southern Baptist parishioners have
given up traditional hymns and organ music.
Other areas, like the potluck lunch in the gym every Sunday, have
required little adjustment. "Everybody likes everybody else's food,"
Mr. Perrin said.
The pastor, Mr. Kitchin, a North Carolina native, joined the church in
2006 and learned quickly to keep his sermons simple because so many in
his new congregation were just learning English.
"I'd say, 'You can take it to the bank,' and nobody had a clue what I
was talking about," he said in a thick drawl.
Mr. Kitchin described his job as part minister, part cultural
translator. Church members seek his advice and help.
Recently, Mr. Kitchin said, a Liberian refugee asked him to sponsor a
child's visa so the man's family could be reunited. Mr. Kitchin
declined.
"If I do it for him, I have to do it for everyone in the church who
wants their children to come in," he said. "To tell this man no rips
your heart out."
There are other problems beyond the church's front doors. Not everyone
in the community has appreciated the church's efforts to proselytize
among Clarkston's newcomers. Salahadin Wazir, the imam at al-Momineen
mosque here, said he frequently heard from Muslim refugees and
immigrants who say they attended a community outreach program
administered by the church where conversation quickly turned to the
teachings of Jesus.
"It's inappropriate," Mr. Wazir said. "Playing on the minds of small
children or desperate, needy people - that's not the way to preach."
Mr. Kitchin said he heard such complaints frequently, but he does not
apologize.
"I'm a believer in Jesus Christ, and I am commanded by him to go and
tell everybody who he is," he said. "And because we're in a free
country you have the freedom to choose."
"How can you choose if you don't know what's available?"
Despite those tensions, Mr. Kitchin's church is now thriving. The
congregation has grown to more than 300 from 100 a few years ago, and
the 10:45 a.m. service on Sundays, which Mr. Kitchin leads, is well
attended.
Ultimately, Mr. Kitchin hopes, the groups who worship separately will
join the larger congregation as the Filipino and Nigerian
congregations did; many of the youngest members, who prefer church in
English, already have.
But those congregations face the same tough choices as did the old
white Baptist church. Some have been torn between a desire to
assimilate and a fear of giving up their own identities.
That is the case with the Liberian congregation led by the Rev. Peter
Nehsahn. His flock had considered joining the larger group but decided
against it for now, for fear of losing elements of their worship
style, which includes drumming and singing African hymns.
"Our people might get lost in the mix," Mr. Nehsahn said.
But even worshiping separately within the church gives some of the
newcomers a sense of connection to the Clarkston community they would
not get if they worshiped alone.
For many of those who have joined the main congregation, the
experience has been life changing. Marcelle Bess, a white American and
a lifelong member of the church, said two of her daughters were dating
young Filipino men they had met through the church. She hopes they
will marry, she said.
Mr. Perrin said the impact of the church on his life hit him when he
and his wife were traveling through the Midwest. They stopped to
worship at whatever Baptist church they could find.
"Every church that we walked into was pure white Caucasian," he said.
"My wife and I really felt uncomfortable, because, we realized, here
in Clarkston is what the world is all about."
Mr. Kitchin thinks that in the not-so-distant future many more
American churches will face the sort of questions his church has. He
said he was frequently asked for advice.
"I tell people, 'America is changing,' " he said. " 'Get over it.' "