Diversity in Church

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on diversity today:
"Robert Putnam, the Harvard don who in the controversial bestseller "Bowling Alone" announced the decline of communal-mindedness amid the rise of home-alone couch potatoes, has completed a mammoth study of the effects of ethnic diversity on communities. His researchers did 30,000 interviews in 41 U.S. communities. Short version: People in ethnically diverse settings don't want to have much of anything to do with each other. "Social capital" erodes. Diversity has a downside.
...
'Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.' The diversity nightmare gets worse: They have little confidence in the 'local news media.' This after all we've done for them.

Colleagues and diversity advocates, disturbed at what was emerging from the study, suggested alternative explanations. Prof. Putnam and his team re-ran the data every which way from Sunday and the result was always the same: Diverse communities may be yeasty and even creative, but trust, altruism and community cooperation fall. He calls it 'hunkering down.' "

Turns out there is one exception:
"Robert Putnam has a possible assimilation model. Hold onto your hat. It's Christian evangelical megachurches. 'In many large evangelical congregations,' he writes, 'the participants constituted the largest thoroughly integrated gatherings we have ever witnessed.'"

Neither Putnam, nor the WSJ author (Daniel Henninger) seems to know why that exception exists, but to me it's duh-obvious: whatever their skin color etc., participants in such churches have important shared values in following Jesus, who commands us to love one another regardless of race, gender, age. health, wealth, or any other Earthly differences.

I don't mean to suggest such churches have it all together when it comes to race relations. But I'm glad to see they are finally at least on the solution side of the equation. As our pastor likes to say, the local church, when it's working right, is the hope of the World.