Church Experience #3 – Jan 16, 2011
New Covenant Fellowship Church
A Place for Every Race
With Martin Luther King, Jr. Day being celebrated the day after this week’s Sunday worship, I decided to choose a church based on the potential for insight into ethnicity and race in American Christianity. A few weeks ago while browsing different churches online, I ran across New Covenant Fellowship, a Chattanooga church that actually brands itself as a “multi-ethnic” church. The banner on their website proclaims “A Place 4 Every Race” with multi-color letters of blue, green, yellow, red, and purple. I found it very interesting that a church would go out of its way to place a label on itself, and knew right then that I needed to go there at some point. It seems that so many churches these days try to avoid any labels for fear of scaring away potential visitors, and by announcing up front that they are a multi-racial congregation, New Covenant Fellowship definitely risks exactly that. There are probably still individuals who are very uncomfortable around large groups of people of a different ethnicity, and if you’ve never been to this church before, you have no way of knowing how balanced the representation of each race will be. I personally could care less about a person’s race. Other than contributing to your personality, I think race/color/ethnicity has very little consequence elsewhere in our lives. Racism still exists in today’s world, but my experience has been that it comes from all races, not just one. I’ve been the victim of racism…I’ve been threatened and called “cracker”, but I know that was the voice of the enemy, not of that race. I also have lifelong friends from many different races…black, hispanic, asian, european. People are people…period. The only people I discriminate against are those who are filled with hate, and even though I choose to love all people, I certainly won’t call racist people my friends.