brenc1 Resources

Chad shares about his background in "the mostly-white suburbs", the Middle East, and Queens. He presents five types of obstacles that keep Christians divided by ethnicity: cultural differences, sociological, historical, political, and theological. He explains how the early church demonstrates that it is possible to overcome all of these obstacles through the power and leading of the Holy Spirit.

One pastor pointed out that merely because we had achieved diversity in the pews didn’t mean we had achieved integration. Segregation might still exist. It’s still easy to avoid people of another race. Many churches have a variety of races represented in the congregation, but they do not interact outside of church. Some have successfully mixed racially in a structured environment—small groups, ministry teams, outreach events. A few churches have held progressive dinners that have had families of various races meeting at each others' homes to eat.

As drum majors, Drs. Perkins and Metzger want to inspire people across the nation to pursue a biblical vision of love, truth, and justice where the all-consuming love of Jesus revealed in the Bible consumes those things that divide us, like race and class barriers. They will be speaking in different locations nationally, working with churches and community groups to raise up well-trained and educated Christian leaders who are passionately engaged in proclaiming the whole gospel of the kingdom in word and deed through the church, to the whole person, in the whole community.

"We have developed a program called the Voorhees Ave. Leadership House. This is a joint program with Seattle Pacific University. At the house we are taking young black men and adding young white men, primarily from Seattle, who come down and go to school at Jackson State. Jackson State is an all-black school and so the white students become a minority. What we have at the Voorhees Ave. House is a sort of a reconciling community. We are supporting those young blacks and also helping them to overcome their own inferiority, and of course we are helping the whites to overcome their superiority. That’s what that house is for. It is an experiment; it takes time."