Racism and Segregated Sundays: What We Need to Talk About (A Guest Post)
Melinda Quivik is an ordained ELCA pastor who served churches in three states, including a merged UCC/Presbyterian congregation in northern Michigan. A former professor of liturgy and preaching and past president of the North American Academy of Liturgy, she is now the Editor-in-Chief of Liturgy, a mentor with Backstory Preaching, and a liturgical and homiletical scholar whose books include Serving the Word: Preaching in Worship (2009), Leading Worship Matters (2017), and Worship at a Crossroads: Racism and Segregated Sundays (2023), scholar’s contributions to Sundays & Seasons: Preaching, and other publications.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.”
He was right then, and he is still correct.
Church people of good will in the United States have agonized over this for a long time, and not much has changed.
A PEW Research study within the last ten years found that:
The least diverse churches are the National Baptist Convention, Lutheran Churches (ELCA and Missouri Synod), African Methodist Episcopal, United Methodists, and Hindus. The Lutherans and Methodists are more than 90% White.
The National Baptist Convention and the African Methodist Episcopal Church have almost exclusively Black members.
The most diverse are the Seventh-day Adventists, Muslims, Jehovah’s Witness, and Buddhists because they each have about 20% of each of the five racial and ethnic groups. (DATA from Lipka, “Most and Least Racially Diverse,” paras. 10, 3, fig. 1.)
We face experiential and informational divides
Some preachers work hard to address racism, to speak the gospel words that in Christ “there is no longer Jew or Greek. . . slave or free. . . male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
We preachers and church leaders want to encourage church communities to welcome strangers, people who are migrants, those of different skin colors from the majority, and anyone who wants to join us.
Preachers struggle with what to do to respond to the needs of our society and our churches.
We want to see justice prevail.
We also know there are Christians who encourage segregation. It was true during slavery and Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and it is increasingly being heard today.
That makes it all the more important for those of us who want to see an end to racism to put our heads together and ponder options instead of wringing our hands over those who encourage segregation.
I live in the city where George Floyd was murdered—as well as Amir Locke and Daunte Wright and Philando Castile and too many others, and I hear and see the effects of systemic racism on all people.
We are so divided from each other that when I was working on my book, Worship at a Crossroads: Racism and Segregated Sundays, I learned from Dr. Richard Perry, a Black Lutheran sociologist who read my writing and gave me helpful guidance, that in the 1980s he participated in a conference in Zimbabwe of Black North American and African Lutherans to explore what being Black and being Lutheran was about. It wasn’t an easy identity.
The main conference organizer, Dr. Albert Pero, said it was common to regard oneself as “Black by day and Lutheran by night.”
As a White person, I never learned about that conference or the resulting book of essays, Theology and the Black Experience: The Lutheran Heritage Interpreted by African & African-American Theologians, edited by Albert Pero and Ambrose Moyo (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1988).
Often, we don’t even know what we don’t know about each other’s experiences.
A Case Study in the Challenges of moving toward Inclusive Worship
When I was teaching worship and preaching in a Lutheran seminary and in charge of chapel worship, I was pressured to make worship available and welcoming to all students: White and Black, Episcopalian and Pentecostal, Disciples of Christ and Lutheran and more.
My book was written to discover why it seemed impossible.
If the preacher, for example, used the Revised Common Lectionary for the scripture text, those who considered pre-appointed readings to be unfaithful to the movement of the Holy Spirit would not feel at home.
If the musician led a hymn that was unfamiliar to the majority of attendees and did not provide sheet music, those who had become accustomed to opening a hymnal felt unable to sing well.
When we consider the great chasms that exist between different worshipping communities, it is easy to think of how different Quaker worship is from Russian Orthodox, two extremes in terms of . . . everything.
But with some of our communities, the difference is not just silence versus chanting and incense but different goals for worship.
Being Black and Lutheran (or Black and another predominantly White Protestant denomination) is still difficult—or Lenny Duncan, a Black Lutheran pastor, would not have written Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in America forty years after the Zimbabwe conference.
Lenny Duncan’s book Dear Church was the impetus for my writing because Dear Church called the Lutheran church (the ELCA) racist and cried out for changes in worship.
Duncan named several aspects of worship that are problematic for Black worshipers, including:
language that uses the imagery of light (good) and dark (not so good)
symbols that express Whiteness
white pastoral robes that for Black people can be reminiscent of the KKK
stained glass windows with White Apostles
certain kinds of prayer
White people singing spirituals because it is seen as cultural appropriation
use of hymnals as racist
I embrace Duncan’s call—to the ELCA and other White Protestant churches—to serious conversation about worship.
My book is an exploration of the two ways of worship most relevant to segregated Sundays: Black church patterns and what I call the “second-century pattern,” which is the worship pattern of many White mainline Protestant churches and Roman Catholics. The differences of each are a response to the different histories and cultures of their congregants.
For the book, I researched worship practices with the hope of understanding what makes it so hard to do away with segregation on Sunday mornings.
The Necessary Conversation
As a student and professor of liturgy, preaching, and worship, I am interested in helping us think about these things:
what our different ways of worship do to distinguish one community from another
what our different aims in worship do to draw people in or to send them away
what our different aims in preaching mean to listeners’ choices about where to worship
I want to increase and broaden our understanding of these foundational differences so we have tools for assessing what keeps us in the situation Dr. King named and seeing if we can mend things.
If we want to address segregated Sunday mornings, we need to look in detail at what might welcome those who are not yet part of our congregations.
We also need to look at the ramifications of changes we make in worship.
This is detailed thinking because changes in worship can change theology.
Preaching expresses theological convictions in what is said, what it aims to engender, and the worship context in which it is situated.
How we address God in prayer, for instance, reflects theological understanding of who God is. Do we say “Father God” or “Holy One” or “Almighty and Merciful God”? They call up different images of God.
I want the conversation to involve everyone talking together, asking:
What needs to change?
What can be changed?
Which of Duncan’s concerns can be addressed without abandoning a church’s theology?
What cannot change?
What will specific changes mean to the worshippers?
This conversation could be fruitful in bringing understanding to the problem of segregated Sundays.
Let’s begin the exploration together.
Interested in Exploring this Conversation?
Melinda Quivik will present "Worship at a Crossroads: Racism and Segregated Sundays" to The Collective+ on July 20, 2:00 CT.
In order to respond to the problem of our churches being so segregated on Sunday mornings, preachers and congregations are called to scrutinize changes that might welcome a greater diversity of worshippers.
This talk will point to the ways in which what is done in worship—what gets preached, what is sung, how the space is arranged, what the prayers include, etc.—all express the history, the culture, and the theology of a people.
This understanding will help preachers facilitate change in an informed and fruitful way.
We’d love for you to join us.