Parham contrasts ABC, SBC on racial diversity

[Haruo]

[David Flick]

[joel]

David, here in the deep south, there are no African-American SBC churches. Many SBC churches now accept membership from all ethnic groups, but I don't know of a church that is exclusively black and SBC. Predominantly white SBC churches have Latino mission programs and the churches that evolve from those missions naturally join SBC. I don't know of any mission work done by predominantly white SBC churches in black communities. Most of the black churches here in Georgia are AME churches with some National Baptists.

[Big Daddy Weaver]

There are indeed African-American SBC churches in the deep south. And there are African-American SBC churches in Georgia. In the small south Georgia town where I grew up, I know of at least one such congregation that was affiliated with the SBC. A friend of mine who is the pastor of a small Southern Baptist church outside of the Atlanta-area has a regular golf game with two African-American pastors whose churches align with the SBC.

For years, the SBC has been considered the most ethnically diverse historically anglo Protestant body in the United States - more ethnically diverse than the Lutherans (ELCA), Presbyterians (PC-USA), Methodists (UMC) and Congregationalists (UCC). Assemblies of God is second.

Bottom line is that in the 80s and into the 90s, folks like Emmanuel McCall and the Home Mission Board did a good job of luring African-American Baptist congregations to affiliate with the Southern Baptist Convention. The truth here is that MANY of these African-American congregations are dually-aligned. Their original affiliation (and perhaps primary affiliation) is with one of the historically African-American Baptist groups such as NBC USA, NBC of America, PNBC, NMBC, etc. Pretty sure that Dwight McKissic's congregation in the DFW area is one such example of a dually-aligned primarily African-American congregation.

That's not the whole story obviously. But the SBC over the past couple decades, maybe three decades, been planting Korean, Hispanic, Chinese and even African-American churches. So, the ethnic diversity in the SBC is primarily a combination of relatively new church starts and older dually-aligned churches.

In Georgia as in most Deep South states, Baptists are the largest Christian group among African-Americans. The combination of Black Baptists from NBC USA, NBC of America, NMBC, PNBC and the unaffiliated is much greater than the number of African-Americans in AME churches. The Church of God in Christ would be second behind Baptists among African-Americans.

I don't know where Joel lives. But where I grew up in south Georgia there was a LARGE Black Baptist community and of course there remains a large Black Baptist community in the Atlanta area. Although in recent years, the number of African-Americans who attend non-denominational megachurches in urban areas has skyrocketed. See the success of megachurches pastored by Creflo Dollar and Eddie Long.

[Mike Stidham]

[Haruo]

[Mike Stidham]