I grew up in the cradle of American Evangelicalism: suburban Atlanta.
As a white, upper-middle-class American male in a Southern Baptist
church, my upbringing typifies all of the privilege and power that
Soong-Chan Rah points to, in his The Next Evangelicalism, as the
source of the Western, white captivity of the church. Like most of my
peers, I took my experience as normative. I didn't see anything wrong
with growing up where I did, when I did, like I did. I certainly did
not look at my culture's theology and ecclesiology as something
oppressive or as that which was holding other expressions of the
Christian faith captive.

It wasn't until well after I graduated college and was working in
campus ministry in Philadelphia that I started critically examining my
faith upbringing in light of different cultural expressions of
Christianity. In 2005, I took a course on the role of Christianity in
the American Civil Rights movement. It was offered as a continuing
education option as part of my campus ministry organization's annual
Spring Institute. Honestly, the reason that I took it was two-fold: I
wasn't terribly interested in taking another course on evangelism or
discipleship among college students, and this course included a
week-long Civil Rights Tour that would take me back to the land of my
youth.

As part of the course we read Free at Last? by Carl Ellis, Divided by
Faith by Emerson and Smith, A White Preacher's Memoir by Bob Graetz,
The Debt by Randall Robinson. Each of these books challenged me in new
ways, forcing me to reexamine my upbringing and ask whether or not my
experience was normative, and if not, why that was not so. At times I
was saddened by what I read, at other times heartbroken, and yet other
times angered (particularly by Robinson's book, which I still have
problems with - but that could constitue an entirely different post).
The net result of those readings and subsequent conversations with the
fellow campus ministers in the course was that I became aware, for the
first time, that I had been born into a position of great power and
privilege merely as a result of my nationality, gender, and color of
my skin. The level playing field was exposed as a caustic myth and I
was forced to rethink all my previously held opinions on success,
achievement, poverty, immigration, education, and, especially, the
church.

The Civil Rights Tour was not the homecoming I'd expected. Rather I
was thrust into a nearly alien land that bore little resemblance to
the South of my childhood. We visited places like the Woolworth's in
Greensboro, NC, site of the sit-in that unofficially birthed the Civil
Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s. We meandered through Georgia,
Alabama, Arkansas, Ohio, and Tennessee. Along the way we had the
incredible opportunity to hear from aged leaders of the Civil Rights
movement, people like John Perkins, Fred Shuttlesworth, Minnijean
Brown, Elizabeth Eckard, Chris McNair and others. We visited Ebenezer
Baptist Church, 16th St. Baptist Church, Little Rock Central High
School. I'd learned nothing of these people or places in my history
courses in grade school.

What was driven home so clearly through that experience was the
disparity between the faith of my upbringing and the faith of the
Civil Rights leaders. Even a cursory reading of Martin Luther King
Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and "A Call for Unity," the
article written by white clergy to which King was responding, shows
that white Christians and African-American Christians may be
worshipping the same God and same Christ, but share very little of
their faith in common.

I was shocked by the hateful actions, unjust legislation, and
institutional violence perpetrated in the name of Christ by whites
toward non-whites. And I was a byproduct of those actions. My family
taught tolerance and the equality of all in God's eyes, but we were
participants on a culture dominated by white privilege nonetheless.

Later I would return on the Civil Rights Tour, but as one of the
course instructors and tour leaders. That course and tour changed the
trajectory of my life and ministry. My wife and I moved from a nice,
safe, hip area of Philadelphia into the poorer, less safe Frankford
area. We went from a white neighborhood to a largely black and
Hispanic neighborhood. We left a white Presbyterian church to join a
small, urban Mennonite church led by an African American pastor and
comprised of a beautiful blend of white, Latino, and black families.

Rah's book is an excellent primer for what is wrong with American
evangelicalism and why it is perceived as declining. Pointing to the
damage done by captivity to the Western, white church, Rah masterfully
implicates consumerism, individualism, and racism as the primary
forces shaping American evangelicalism, the same forces which are now
squeezing the life out of the church as Western whites know it. He
urges the power brokers of this dying expression to look to immigrant
communities for the future of evangelicalism in America.

Some of my colleagues have been angered by Rah. Certainly the book
takes an adversarial tone in places. Rah is no fan of the legacy of
the white church. I can't say that I blame him. And I wager that some
of the visceral reactions are not to Rah's assessments, but to his
tone. But perhaps if Rah is getting a rise out of white males, that's
a good thing. At least they're paying attention.

But he falls flat. In his sweeping denouncement of Western, white
culture he forgets that it is a culture. Flawed though it may be, the
Western, white church will not go away so long as there are Western,
white people. His solutions hint at the need for more second and third
culture churches as models for American evangelicalism, but nowhere
does he directly address how Western, white folk are to help make that
happen. Several times he wonders whether or not white people would
submit to the spiritual authority of a non-white leader. But he never
insists that this must be part of future changes. Perhaps he should.

What is lacking from Rah's book is any concrete movement that would
elevate ethnic and culturally diverse models of church in America,
while at the same time finding room for appropriate expressions of
white culture within those. Instead, he comes off sounding like whites
have no culture or should be willing to give up their culture and
adopt that of another ethnicity.

This is an important book. Rah is spot on in nearly everything he
writes. But in application it lacks teeth. Perhaps that is forthcoming
in his new book. As for me, I continue to look for ways I can put
others in my "seat at the table." People who don't look like me. And
I'm seeking out new tables at which to sit. I'm incredibly fortunate
that I have the opportunity to work alongside people like Randy
Woodley and Byoungchul Joseph Jun. It is my hope that as a Western,
white male I can find ways of appropriately weaving my culture, my
faith heritage into that broader tapestry of global Christianity.