Labeling church with a loaded word like segregation seems an unfit pairing.

But the reality is the people perched in the pews of any given church often share the same skin color.

“It’s the quote that was said by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his ‘Drum Major Instinct’ speech that 11 o’clock on Sunday mornings is the most segregated hour in America,” said Ramona Curtis, director of the Academy for Leader Development and Civic Engagement at Baylor University. “If we don’t self-reflect and challenge that, then it won’t get any better.”

Ramona Curtis shakes hands with Pastor Lori Cotton at the Lake Shore United Methodist Church. Curtis is spearheading a church swap project with the Community Race Relations Coalition to address racial relations and self-segregated church services.
Rod Aydelotte / Tribune-Herald

Curtis is a member of Waco’s Community Race Relations Coalition. She is spearheading a project the organization will begin next spring called a church swap to encourage people to examine why such widespread separation still exists on Sunday mornings.

“It’s really challenging the idea of can you really say we have reached a comfort zone in terms of moving race relations forward if we are still self-segregated at that 11 o’clock hour?” Curtis said.

The coalition was recently awarded a $10,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation to fund the project, as well as a $2,000 grant from the Waco Foundation.

The church swap will partner people who share the same denomination but who attend churches made up of predominantly one race, and they rotate church services.

For example, a white Baptist could end up attending a black Baptist church, or a black Catholic may go to mass at an Hispanic Catholic church.

The project will last for three months, time to allow participants to absorb the similarities and differences in the church services and congregations. Curtis said the participants will also be required to record their experiences in a journal.

Curtis herself has done a major swap in her weekly worship services. Her father was a minister in a black United Methodist church, and she grew up anchored in the black church experience.

But a few years ago, she moved to a new neighborhood and began attending a church closer to her home. Her new church, Lake Shore United Methodist, has members of different races but is a largely white congregation.

Though the switch has meant adapting to some style changes, such as different music selections, Curtis found the fellowship, bible study and overall Christian experience remained the same. It was her experiences in embracing her new church family that first inspired the idea of doing a church swap.

“As Christians we are called to love each other, and that’s loving someone who looks like you or doesn’t look like you,” Curtis said.

The project will also include a book study and discussion of “Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America” and its sequel, “United by Faith: The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race.”

Michael Emerson, the Allyn and Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology at Rice University and the books’ co-author, will discuss the books at a forum with the race coalition in February.

While the swap is using church services as the vehicle to open up race discussions, Curtis insists the project is not advocating churchgoers switch to multicultural congregations. Rather, the point is to further break down barriers in how people of different races interact with each other.

“People of different cultures sometimes fear each other, and that’s because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they’re so separated from each other,” said Jo Welter, board member of the race relations coalition. “The main function of the project is to bring people together.”

Selecting segregation

Mia Moody-Ramirez, assistant professor of journalism and media arts at Baylor University, said the Sunday morning separation is a result of people, including minorities, actively choosing to be among members of their own race only.

It’s a departure from the institutionalized segregation that was eventually outlawed with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which used separation as a way to punish minorities and prevent them from receiving the same rights and privileges as whites.

“You have many African Americans who live in the suburbs or predominantly Anglo neighborhoods and drive into the city to go to a predominantly African American church by choice,” Moody-Ramirez said.

The decision to worship only with one’s own race can stem from a need for comfort and familiarity. Moody-Ramirez points out that people often interact with other races throughout their work weeks and may live in mixed neighborhoods.

Frequently, minorities may find they are one of few people of color within their office or school settings.

“I think we really feel church is a place that is home,” Curtis said. “I think about the black church and how emotional it was for me, and how I thought it was important that my son be raised in an African-American church with people who look like me to mentor him.”

In “Divided by Faith,” Emerson traces the separation back to the post-Civil War era, when former slaves had to develop their own churches and identities separate from their old masters. The result was a religious and cultural experience that created a vastly different perspective on the world than whites.

Whereas the white church believed free will and personal choice were the reasons for one’s suffering or success, the black church developed with the concept that oppression and unfairness in society exists and could drastically impact one’s quality of life.

“These separate cultures that got developed lead people to understand the world in a very different way,” Emerson said by phone Thursday from his office at Rice University.

In comparing the racial makeup of churches to their neighborhoods and local schools, churches tend to be 10 times less integrated than the communities they are located in, and 20 times more segregated than public schools, Emerson said.

But the continued self-separation can be detrimental to improving racial relations.

Moody-Ramirez is the author of “Black and Mainstream Press’ Framing of Racial Profiling: A Historical Perspective,” and she has done extensive research on the portrayal of women and minorities in the media. She said often a negative report about a person of color can reinforce negative stereotypes that paint all minorities as criminals or untrustworthy.

“When you’re not exposed to other races or other groups, you begin to believe the stereotypes that you see on TV or hear about because you don’t have anything to compare them to,” Moody-Ramirez said.

Bigger disconnect

Emerson’s research also showed that black and white Christians were further disconnected racially than black and white non-Christians.

Ramona Curtis talks to Lake Shore United Methodist Church members. Curtis is spearheading a church swap project with the Community Race Relations Coalition to address self-segregated church services.
Rod Aydelotte / Tribune-Herald

“We always hear that we’re all human, we’re all alike, or we’re all Christian and we serve the same God, but humans are overwhelmingly shaped by culture,” Emerson said. “Cultural differences strike the ultimate core of our identity, what we think is right and wrong . . . so it can be a big problem.”

Curtis said she hopes the project will transform people into her vision of “bicultural,” which she defines as being comfortable with your own racial identity as well as accepting others.

“When you can say and do the same things in the front stage of life as you do on the back stage, when you’re with people who look like you, when those two things are the same, that’s when you know we’ve overcome,” Curtis said.

In addition to the journals that participants will keep, Moody-Ramirez is working to develop a website and blogs to chronicle the project.

She also will videotape interviews with participants at the start of the swap and do follow-ups throughout the project, archiving the footage for a documentary.

Curtis said part of the grant funds will be used to create models for other groups to duplicate the project.

Rice’s Emerson said while he believes the swap has great merits, the true success will be in what happens once the project is over.

The next step should be discussions on how to further create connections between these different congregations, whether it’s blending two churches into one or having churches partner together to continue the swap.

“I tell every group that I talk to, if we created our traditions, that means we can change them,” Emerson said.

rdennis@wacotrib.com

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