56 Lessons For Pastors On Creating Multi-Ethnic Churches

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Brian Dodd on October 24, 2015 in Church Leadership

This weekend at Fellowship Bible Church in Roswell, GA, we will be honoring our Senior Pastor Dr. Crawford Loritts on his 10th anniversary at the church.  As part of our weekend activities, his son Bryan Loritts met with members of the church leadership team this morning to discuss the importance and Biblical model for ethnically-diverse churches.
If you are not familiar with Bryan, you need to.  He is the Founder of The Kainos Movement and Pastor of Preaching and Mission of Trinity Grace Church and its 12 locations in New York City.  Our time was challenging and stretching.
The following are 56 Leadership Lessons From Bryan Loritts on the subject of diversity and becoming a multi-ethnic church:

1. Every church doesn’t need to be multi-ethnic. But every church needs to reflect its community.
2. The community is 10X more diverse than the churches in their area. The schools are 20X more diverse.
3. The greatest proponents of the Civil Rights Movement were Christians. The greatest opponents of the Civil Rights Movement were Christians.
4. Why doesn’t your orthodoxy blend in to your orthopraxy?
5. The only thing worse than white-hot hatred is indifference.
6. Righteousness in the Bible is seen as how we steward the tangible blessings of God in a justice bent to others.
7. A Christian who does not do justice is an oxymoron.
8. The two most powerful words in all of Scripture – “But God”.
9. Most evangelical seminaries who have been around any length of time at one time did not let in people of color.
10. In the Kingdom there is no such thing as merit-based scholarships. It is grace by faith.
11. Grace means you didn’t eat your dinner but you still get desert. – Matt Chandler
12. Adoption is not 2^nd class citizenship. It is 1^st class security.
13. When Paul walks into a city he asks two questions. Where are the synagogues? I want to hang out with the Jews. When he finishes with them, he then asks, “Where do the Gentiles hang out?”
14. Homogenous Unit Principle is easier to grow a church. It’s just not biblical.
15. The New Testament model for multi-ethnic churches is the norm.
16. Multi-ethnic churches are not new. We’ve just deviated and we’re trying to arc back to our first century roots.
17. Multi-ethnic churches can be headaches. But it’s so worth it.
18. In Christ’s death, His death demolished the dividing wall of hostility.
19. In man’s hands, the temple became one of the last institutions of segregation.
20. The church is very good at resurrecting stuff God has demolished – the dividing wall of hostility.
21. Basically every African-American church was started in response to white churches resurrecting what God has demolished – the dividing wall of hostility.
22. Your church qualifies as multi-ethnic when no one ethnic group makes up 80% or more of the church. 20% is the tipping point when minorities feel valued, heard and seen.
23. When minorities walk into a context like this (Fellowship Bible Church) they are looking for permission for how to act.
24. “White” is not a four-letter word. Steward it well.
25. Integrated churches give mutual submission to preferences and norms in relation to the cross.
26. A hyper-honor culture leads to deification of the pastor.
27. An integrated multi-ethnic church is not a box to be checked but a tension to be managed.
28. 10 years ago, only 2% of churches met the 80/20 Rule for being a multi-ethnic church. Today, 10% of churches are.
29. Kainos – the idea of something new related to kind, not time. It relates to a new invention.
30. If Henry Ford only gave people what they wanted, he would have given them a faster horse.
31. A multi-ethnic church is a powerful evangelical witness.
32. A multi-ethnic church is an issue of justice as well. A minority who attends a multi-ethnic church, after attending, make 20% more in salary. People primarily get jobs out of relationships.
33. Multi-ethnic churches happen through intentionality.
34. What about organically? America’s historical sin is racism.
35. Alexander the Great did not want to just capture territory. He wanted to put the Greek imprint on every culture.
36. There is a difference between ethnicity and culture. There are a lot of churches that are mono-cultural.
37. Within every ethnicity are at least three different cultures.
38. Preach a Gospel big enough that you can take it into both an A.M.E. church and also a Southern Baptist church.
39. You can float out of different contexts, relate to people in different contexts, and be who they are.
40. C2 Leaders (leaders who relate to all ethnicities) are never at home in any homogeneous setting.
41. C2 Leaders are made and not born. You don’t become a C2 by reading books. You become a C2 by immersing yourselves in different ethnicities and settings.
42. Show me any successful minority by the world’s metrics, I will show you a minority who has mastered “I Have Become”.
43. You must immerse yourself in the story of others.
44. If people primarily come to churches out of relationships, I have to have multi-ethnic sanctuaries and dinner tables.
45. Leadership 101 says I cannot take people to a place I am not journeying to myself.
46. Are you bought in? What do your relationships look like?
47. You cannot program your kids’ relationships. You can orchestrate their social matrix so they are in contact with people of different ethnicities.
48. It takes a lot of sacrifice and intentionality to craft this new normal.
49. Every church needs to develop their own minor league farm system. Churches are going to have to develop their own C2 leaders. It is discipleship. This is what Jesus does.
50. You do not have multi-ethnic movements unless you go against people’s idols of comfort.
51. If you sing every song I like, they way I liked it, then I failed you…Stretch with us.
52. You have to cast vision for discomfort. You have to talk about it constantly.
53. A measurement for success is does the demographics within the church reflect the demographics of your community? If you’re in Compton, CA you’re probably not going to have a lot of white people coming to your church.
54. The hardest hill to climb is the class hill, not the race hill.
55. One of the problems I have with my tribe is people are louder on diversity than the Gospel…What drives it all is Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
56. The church in the African-American community is the only thing that has traditionally been ours. Traditionally, it has been the only day of the week we could exhale.

If you want to learn more from this incredible leader, click HERE to follow Bryan on Twitter.