Pierre’s Blog

Lately there’s has been many articles and news on diversity. This one, I found it on NYT describing how there’s diversity in the TV Political pundits (Like the Candidates, TV’s Political Pundits Show Signs of Diversity). On the side, I met with a pastor of a Chinese Church who has the same vision of planting a multicultural church. It’s very encouraging to see that the issue of diversity is being recognized more and more by people around me. Here’s the intro of the article.

The historic and long-running presidential campaigns of Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton have injected issues of race and gender into politics as never before. With campaign coverage center stage on the cable channels, producers and critics are again assessing the diversity among pundits, who talk (and talk) about things like Mr. Obama’s pastor, the Hispanic vote, Iraq and the economy.

As you can see from the previous, I confess that I’m obsessed with multiracial and multicultural churches. Browsing through the web, I came across another article on “Christianity Today” titled “All Churches Should Be Multiracial“.

In Divided by Faith: Evangelicals and the Problem of Race in America (2000), sociologists Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith argued that much of the racial dysfunction in the American church today is the result of an individualized theological worldview that blinds white evangelicals to certain societal injustices.

Furthermore,

Race, as it always has, plays a significant part in the lives of people living in the United States. It shapes where people live and whom they live with, where people send their children to school, with whom they can most easily become friends, their likelihood of having access to wealth and health, whom they marry, how they think about themselves, and their cultural tastes. Race also shapes how people value others, how much they trust others, provides quick stereotypes by which to classify people, and shapes fears of crime.

Building a multiracial church is quite an uphill battle, but one that is worth the fight.

Omaba’s speech on race is causing quite a stir on mixed race issues. This article is the second one in two weeks about the rising number of mixed people in the US. What was once a taboo, it is becoming a normal part of our lives. Read the rest of the article here.  Also there’s a blog that deals with multiracial issues: www.racialicious.com. I hope this interest can continue to grow for the betterment of our society. Life is constantly changing but racism hasn’t changed much in the last four decades. What’s encouraging is that little things, such as a speech, an article can move us towards seeing the problem for what it is. This is the beginning of something positive.  

The 2000 Census counted 3.1 million interracial couples, or about 6 percent of married couples.