Against All Odds: The Struggle for Racial Integration in Religious Organizations

5. Embrace and Division

Embrace and Division 9:30 a.m. As I enter the sanctuary of Brookside Community Church in suburban Los Angeles, sounds of a traditional hymn played on an organ fill the air. A friendly middle-aged white man greets me with an outstretched hand and a warm smile. The pews are filled mostly with middle-aged white people, quiet and focused on the front of the church. The service begins with a prayer, and a guitar player leads the worship band, which includes a keyboard player, drummer, flute player, and backup vocalists. All but the keyboard player are white. The congregation stands and sings heartfelt choruses shown on the large video screens up above the pulpit. The “worship time” ends with the congregation belting out the choruses of “How Great Thou Art,” a favorite Protestant hymn of the twentieth century . A few announcements are read, followed by a prayer and the beginning of this week’s sermon by Mike Van Egan, the head pastor of Brookside . The congregation is attentive and focused on the words of the preacher as he delivers a clear, coherent message on the responsibility of Christians to love people around them who are different. 11:00 a.m. The experience of entering the sanctuary at this time is remarkably different . An African American man greets me warmly and hands me a program . Church members laugh and hug each other as they enter the sanctuary . At the front of the sanctuary, a racially mixed gospel-style choir is swaying back and forth to the smooth tones of the music, as people in the pews lift their hands and move to the beat. Some are visibly moved by the 5 80 singing and have tears in their eyes. A middle-aged black man and a middle -aged white man hold their hands together above their bowed heads in a show of spiritual unity. The sanctuary is now filled with a diverse group that includes Latinos, African Americans, and whites of all ages, from small children to elderly men and women. As the song ends in a rousing crescendo, the congregation claps and the keyboard player shouts praises to God. The words to the next song are in Spanish, but the upbeat tones are decidedly African American gospel. Following the final song, an African American man leads the congregation in prayer for several minutes . His voice rises and falls as he invites God to visit the congregation this morning. The congregation responds with clapping and with affirming statements of “yes Lord” and “Amen.” Preceding the sermon this time, a Latino man gives announcements and a Latino woman reads today’s Bible verse in Spanish. Mike Van Egan then delivers the same sermon that he delivered at 9:30, but he seems a little more animated and expressive. Following the service, Mike and one of the other white pastors at Brookside stand toward the back of the church and warmly greet members as they file out of the church, grabbing hands and giving hugs. Others stick around and laugh with each other. These two church services at Brookside are so strikingly different that they seem like two different churches. A History of Ethnic Transformations The history of Brookside is the story of a church continually striving to adapt to a community undergoing successive ethnic transformations throughout the twentieth century. This suburb of Los Angeles began as a predominantly Dutch community in the early part of the century, a community which at that time was on the edge of urban development. During the postwar expansion of suburbs in southern California, housing tracts emerged and the population became less Dutch and more assimilated Euro-American. During the 1970s the Latino and black populations grew, and white flight to more distant suburbs began; this exodus accelerated in the 1980s. Over time, the suburb was transformed from a middle -class white enclave to a working- and lower-class Hispanic and black community. According to Mike Van Egan, the Rand Corporation, which conducted a study of U.S. cities in 1982, declared this suburb an “urban Embrace and Division | 81 disaster area” and placed it among the ten worst cities in the nation in terms of urban decay. Since then, the suburb has stabilized, but it remains decidedly working - and lower-class. It has also become more and more Latino: its census 2000 population was 72 percent Latino, 13 percent black, and...