Michael Emerson Quotes About Church

• I meet almost no one that goes to an African-American church or thinks, "I'm going to do that." Now there are whites in African-American churches. They're interracially married. They're highly committed. Maybe there's a professor or two, or a student.

  Michael Emerson

  Thinking, Two, African American

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• Downsides, yeah, and when there are more downsides when churches first start - they go through stages of transforming to becoming multiracial. So in the beginning stages there's often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, a lot of people leave.

  Michael Emerson

  Pain, Confusion, People

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• Once in a while you get people that maybe because of economic reasons, or have a social network, they get attracted. But it's a very tiny percent so that when we look at, you know, who are pastors and who are the head clergy of these congregations, they're overwhelmingly white, just a few African Americans, and those folks are usually called to what were formerly white congregations, or they started interracial church from the get-go.

  Michael Emerson

  White, People, African American

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• And again, this connection that you get: I meet Joe at church. Joe's connected to a whole network of people I don't know. Joe likes me. He invites me over to his son's birthday party, and I meet his whole family. I meet his friends. I get to know his neighborhood. That happens all the time.

  Michael Emerson

  Party, Son, People

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• I never meet a church that wishes they didn't do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn't do it. They will all say, to the person, it's hard. It's difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion as you're trying to go across cultures, and you don't understand, you didn't mean to offend somebody but you've offended somebody. But they will all say it just does something.

  Michael Emerson

  Mean, Confusion, Leader

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• I think it's going to open up a wider place for a discussion about we ought to come together in our churches, in our neighborhoods, in our work places, in our clubs and our networks. I think it'll be more acceptable to talk about it. We'll see what happens. It'll take some time. But I think it will.

  Michael Emerson

  Thinking, Together, Church

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• There are three things, and it depends on the group that we're talking about, but there's history, there's culture, and then there's social networks. So, you know, historically black and white, they worship together until about the end of slavery, and people started moving out into separate churches. But it was because of discrimination and racism and such that blacks began to establish their own denominations and their own churches.

  Michael Emerson

  Moving, Black And White, Talking

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• I certainly think so, and I argue so, and I give talks on that. Are there risks by putting people together? Absolutely. Is there value in the black church? Absolutely. Is there value in having immigrant churches? Absolutely. But if we don't have congregations gathering with people of different races, what we're doing is we are redefining racial division, a racial inequality.

  Michael Emerson

  Pensamiento, Raza, Gente

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• And different traditions stress different - so then there's that. I talked to an African American who says before she goes into an interracial church, she sits in her car and she listens to gospel music to get her fill, and she goes into an interracial church where they don't do gospel music, and she's ready to accept the other sorts of ways of worshipping. So there's that.

  Michael Emerson

  Stress, Car, African American

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• So it may be a language that separates you - again, social networks. But second-generation Asian and Hispanics, second, and third and fourth and so on, they are much more likely to be in integrated churches than are blacks or whites.

  Michael Emerson

  Church, Asian, Generations

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• It happens a little bit more in the West, where there's more fluid - where everybody's originally from somewhere else. So they have a little bit more permission to do it. It happens the least, at the individual level at least, in the South, because the South has very strong, you know, set up black churches and white churches and a long history of that, and so it's a bigger social cost.

  Michael Emerson

  Strong, Somewhere Else, White

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• There's one denomination in particular, though, that has pushed very hard to be multiracial in its denomination - not only its denomination but, I mean, in its congregations, and it's called the Evangelical Covenant Church, http://www.covchurch.org/ which is headquartered in Chicago. Their whole goal is that's the kind of churches they start, multiracial, and I think they say now 20 percent of their churches are that.

  Michael Emerson

  Medio, Pensar, Objetivo

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• But what we found in the study is that churches are ten times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in. So there's something more going on than just reflecting the neighborhood, yeah.

  Michael Emerson

  Church, Study, Yeah

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• What's happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures.

  Michael Emerson

  Two, White, Black

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• Scripture is vast, and people can pick and choose what they emphasize, and so for hundreds of years verses that said that you are to welcome the stranger, that with Christ there's neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, we've broken down the dividing wall with the original church, where Christians were first called Christian was the church of Antioch in which for the first time you had Jews, Gentiles of all different ethnicities come together as one people. That's when they were called Christians.

  Michael Emerson

  Christian, Wall, Ethnicity

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• Preaching styles and people being slain in the spirit and things like that. Now it doesn't happen in all black churches, and it happens sometimes in white churches, right? But on average they're quite a bit different.

  Michael Emerson

  Average, White, People

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• Era una iglesia de blancos. Estaba empezando a decaer. Tenían que contratar a un nuevo pastor, y lo contrataron. Pero vino con la condición de que "quiero y estoy llamado a hacer de esta una iglesia multiétnica". Así que lo sabían. Él es interesante porque es parte asiático, parte blanco. Está casado con una mujer hispana, así que esa es su familia y esa es su visión.

  Michael Emerson

  White, Interesting, Vision

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• I think whites are used to being in power, so when whites think we ought to have integrated churches they think, "People ought to come to our church. What can we do to get them to come?"

  Michael Emerson

  Thinking, People, Church

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

• I mean, so if I've talked to whites in City of Refuge, sometimes they'll wonder, "Why do we do things a certain way, and why do we make a big deal out of events?" And what's happening is they're falling back on their understanding of the way that church should work. It's not always working exactly like that, and they feel frustration or confusion. Sometimes people leave. That's certainly common in mixed churches.

  Michael Emerson

  Fall, Mean, Frustration

  Fuente: www.pbs.org

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