The Diversity Project

Uptown Baptist Church, Chicago, Illinois (Tom M. Maluga, pastor, 773-784-5271), began in the late 1970s as a Bible study run by Anglos wanting to reach out to the highly diverse Uptown community, traditionally a "port of entry" area for immigrant groups arriving in Chicago. The group became a recognized congregation in 1981 and purchased its building in 1983. Very quickly lay leaders began to emerge from within the community.

In the 1970s Uptown residents spoke over sixty languages and filled an income spectrum from indigent to middle class. Now there are more than eighty languages and some upper-middle-class professionals are moving in.

Today Uptown Baptist is a vibrant center of urban ministry with 400 members in its English-speaking congregation. Over thirty different nationality groups were represented on a recent Sunday morning. The English congregation is 50 percent Anglo (mostly in their twenties and from many different nationalities) and 50 percent people of color (African-Americans, ten Caribbean nations, ten African nations, six Hispanic nations, and a dozen Asian nations). The pastoral leadership team is all Anglo and male.

Uptown Baptist has six sub-congregations that meet in the building and worship in Spanish, Bulgarian, Russian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and African (Swahili/English). The elder team for the wider Uptown Baptist ministries is very diverse: four men from USA (Anglo and African-American) and Nigeria, and four women from Belize, Jamaica, and the USA. Uptown Baptist is presently planting two new churches in Chicago, an Asian-Indian ministry on Devon Avenue and a Bosnian church plant in Uptown.

Senior Pastor Tom Maluga says, "Celebrate diversity! It’s a foretaste of heaven that we can relish right here and now! . . . The urban reality is multicultural and the church must not lag behind the world’s diversity, but instead demonstrate a healthy model of unity in diversity in Christ to the world. . . . People must know why Biblically we should have multicultural churches (see Rev. 7:9-12; Acts 6:1-7; 11:19-26; 13:1-3; Matt. 28:19-20; Eph. 2:14-22; Gal. 3:26-27)."

Rev. Paul Pim in Boston (email: PKbbc@aol.com) heads the Multicultural Church Network of the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board. He says the group began in 1999 and has little experience with planting multicultural churches but plans to have regular gatherings of the many Baptist congregations with ethnicities other than European-American.

Cedar Grove and Northwoods UM churches in Atlanta, Georgia, have been studied in detail as examples of multicultural churches which have had a high degree of intentionality about embracing diverse cultures. See Charles Foster and Theodore Brelsford, We Are the Church Together: Cultural Diversity in Congregational Life (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press, 1996).

Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in Atlanta is a frequently cited example of a multicultural Presbyterian congregation. See Sue M. Mote, "The Church of Many Colors," Presbyterian Today, October 1996, and Charles Foster, Embracing Diversity (Alban Institute, 1997).

Good News Evangelical Covenant Church in Portland, Oregon (Henry Gremige, pastor, 503-287-5226), began in 1990 when five interracial couples started meeting as a Bible study group led by Henry Gremige, an African-American. The neighborhood was predominantly white middle class. The church now has a membership of three hundred: 60 percent Anglo, 40 percent African-American, and a smattering of Asians and Hispanics. There is quite a bit of economic diversity present in the congregation—poor, working class, and middle-class professionals. They worship primarily with Vineyard style praise choruses, with a few hymns and rap from the youth thrown in occasionally.

According to Joey Ekberg, Assistant Director for Church Growth in the Evangelical Covenant Church, "ECC has not really had any success at multicultural church planting. However one-third to one-half of all ECC church plants over the last five years have been ethnic nonwhite."

Evangelical Lutheran Church of America

Mike Rothar, Director of Congregational Ministries at ELCA headquarters in Chicago, reports he is aware of no real success stories of multicultural church planting, though there are some multicultural ELCA churches.

According to Captain Janet Love, Director of Multicultural Ministries for the Central Territory of the Salvation Army (10 W. Algonquin Rd., Des Plaines, IL 60016), the Salvation Army has many examples of multicultural churches but no successful examples of multicultural church plants. She says SA church planting among minorities has focused on male heads of families: "If you get the father in African-American and Hispanic cultures, you get the whole family." Blended worship styles have been important for them.

Rock of Our Salvation Church in Chicago, Illinois, (Lincoln Washington, pastor, 773-854-1623), began in 1984 as a congregation associated with Circle Community Center (now Circle Urban Ministries) on the far west side of Chicago. African-American pastor Raleigh Washington was recruited to start a church by Glen Kehrein, the white director of Circle. The deepening respect and relationship between these two leaders was key to the emergence of a sizeable interracial congregation in the years following. Other important factors were the strong relationship between Circle’s many social services and Rock’s evangelistic outreach; the substantial connections with the (mostly white) wider denomination; and the enriching involvement with John Perkins’ Christian Community Development Association. This story is told in Breaking Down Walls: A Model for Reconciliation in an Age of Racial Strife (Chicago: Moody Press, 1993). By the late 1990s, the congregation had perhaps three hundred worshipers, of whom about 70 percent were African-American and 30 percent white.

Covenant Church of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Joseph Garlington, pastor, 412-731-6221), began in 1971 under the leadership of African-American pastor Joseph Garlington. It now numbers about 2,500 members, of whom about 60 percent are African-American, 35 percent white, and the remainder a mix of Asian, Jewish and other believers. It is part of a wider network of large multicultural congregations, many of which have a strong emphasis on the theology of blessing.