Many people of color who attend predominantly white churches and Christian colleges/seminaries talk about feeling explicitly welcomed by the majority group but implicitly excluded. On the surface (and for the most part), members of the well-intentioned white majority are really, really nice to them. People of color are greeted warmly in the hallways, on the bike path, and in the pews. They are explicitly told that they are welcome at the church or school. They are even invited into the homes of colleagues, classmates and fellow church members. However, despite these welcoming individual actions, people of color often report that their experience at these Christian organizations is marked by feelings of loneliness, marginalization, exclusion and misunderstanding. This response both befuddles and discourages the well-intentioned white people and leads people of color to experience a seemingly-unshakeable feeling of what theologian Miroslav Volf calls “psychological homelessness.”[i] They feel out of place, on the edge of the circle, disconnected from the life-giving heartbeat of the community.
Unfortunately, the well-intentioned efforts of the majority group are not working.
When talking about diversity and reconciliation in the church, American Christians (who tend to be highly individualistic[ii]) often focus on the explicit actions that individuals can take to make different others feel welcome. However, a focus on explicit, individual actions can easily lead people in the majority group to ignore the implicit, collective actions that communicate to people of color that they are not at all welcome. Even though these actions often go unnoticed by the majority group, they sound loud and clear in people of color’s ears, like a noisy alarm that you can’t turn off.
Nancy Schlossburg introduced the concepts of mattering and marginality to talk about the subtle but powerful ways in which a group of people can include or exclude different others. Mattering and marginality exist on opposite ends of a continuum, such that the more an individual feels like she matters, the less she feels marginalized and vice versa.
Individuals tend to feel like they matter when their experience in an organization is marked the presence of all of the factors listed below.
| Identification |
Feeling that other people will be proud of your accomplishments or saddened by your failures |
| Attention | Feeling that you command the sincere attention or interest of people in the group |
| Importance | Believing that another person cares about what you want, think, and do, or is concerned about your fate |
| Appreciation | A feeling of being highly regarded and acknowledged by others |
| Dependence | Feeling integrated in the community such that your behaviors/actions are based on how others depend on you |
Individuals tend to feel like marginalized when their experience in an organization is marked by the absence of one or more of the factors listed above. For example, the vast majority of the students in my introductory psychology course are 18-year old first year students. In order to teach well to this specific group, I use lots of examples that resonate in their teenage world. However, two non-traditional students, both of whom were over 50 years old, recently joined the class. I was ecstatic to have more age diversity in the class and I explicitly welcomed the two older students. But I continued to use only teenage examples in class and pose class discussion questions that related more to a teenage world. Of course, my 18-year old students were perfectly content; the class catered to their concerns, needs and experiences. But by the third week of the semester, each of the older students approached me separately and told me that they felt “out of place” and disconnected in class. Uh-oh! I had meant well and had explicitly told the older students that they were welcomed and important members of the class. And then I implicitly showed them that they weren’t. Actions speak louder than words.
Do different others in your church feel like they matter? How do you know?
(For a helpful exercise on mattering and marginality, click here.)[iii]
(For an example on how multicultural worship can help people feel like they matter, read this recent Christianity Today article.)
[i] Volf, Exclusion and Embrace
[ii] See Soong-chan Rah’s The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity for a more in-depth treatment of this idea.
[iii] This exercise was created to help majority members think about how they make non-majority members feel. However, it can easily be adapted for a group that includes both majority and non-majority members or only includes non-majority members.
That’s a really good example from your class. One of the most embarrassing things about reading Stuff White People Like is realizing that half of my sermon illustrations sound like NPR stories.
This is great! Thank you!
[...] Nice post with a detailed list on some of what is behind feeling out of place when you are not part of the majority culture in an organization. [...]
Wow !!! Thank You.You have helped us to nail down what it is we are feeling at our current multi-cultural church. Everybody is nice & polite enough, and it is a wonderful mix of cultures, but my wife and I definitely feel alone, marginalized and excluded. Particularly when it comes to our participation and service on the music worship team.
The preponderance of participants are 20 & 30 somethings, who are not familiar with the black gospel music tradition we come from, and as a result are uncomfortable with it’s execution, but unwilling to allow those with the experience to lead.
As a result, those of us who desire a broader, more familiar cultural music experience, are sometimes left feeling excluded. This exclusion permeates the rest of our experience and has led us to start considering attending church elsewhere.
The definitely needs to be intentional effort in the area of reconciliation at our church which to be fair is only a few years old. But having brought this up to the Pastor previously in the spirit of love to no avail, what should we do?
Damon, I hear ya!
I think it’s really difficult for people (in the majority culture) who have not yet experienced “psychological homelessness” to understand the subtle but powerful ways that different others feel excluded. It might be helpful for your pastor to spend some time as an “outsider” in a church setting, perhaps by participating in an all-black church for an extended period of time, etc. The goal is for him/her to acquire the ability to take the perspective of the Other. I’ve written about this in more detail here: http://www.christenacleveland.com/2012/06/overcoming-divisions-one-mile-at-a-time/
Whether your pastor/church leadership “get/s” it or not, it would be worth discerning whether God is calling you to stay psychologically homeless for a while longer with the goal of slowly changing the culture of the church so that the next people don’t have to experience what you’ve experienced. Or, whether God is calling you to move on. A sincere and God-given calling to stay would help to give you hope as you weather the ups-and-downs of being in a multicultural church that is still very much in process.
Blessings!
[...] People of color often say that the difference between mattering and marginality in multi-ethnic contexts is not determined by blatant overtures and verbal words of welcome. It’s determined by the little things, like listening well, learning about the history, experiences and concerns of people whose lives bear little resemblance to your own and then caring about them as if they’re your own. People feel like they matter when they know that their successes are your successes, their problems …. [...]
[...] why is it that many people of color feel marginalized by privileged Christians? In his devastatingly accurate account of a common black experience in white evangelical America, [...]