On Racial Diversity

One of the areas that God has called our congregation to pay attention to in a more intentional way over the past couple of years has been to develop a more racially diverse church. This is based on several key principles from Scripture:

1. From God's perspective there are only two people groups on the earth. The apostle Paul writes, So it is written, the first man, Adam, became a living being; the last Adam, a life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45). Each of us is seen by God as being a member of either the family lineage of Adam, who fell into sin, or the family lineage of Christ, whose righteousness is imputed to all those who trust in him. By birth we are in Adam; by faith we are in Christ.

2. In God's eyes all Christians are of the same race. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light; for you were once not a people, but now you are the people of God (1 Peter 2:9-10). God has only one family. All of his children fall into one race: the race of those who have been adopted by God through the atoning death of Jesus Christ.

3. In Christ all physical, social, and economic characteristics by which believers can be categorized are done away with. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise. (Gal. 3:28-29). In sum, if we are, as Scripture clearly teaches, one race, then the walls of separation among Christians must come down. As Christians, we cannot love God and at the same time not embrace all of the people in whom God lives. We cannot prefer certain people (people who look like us) to other people (people who don't look like us or don't speak our language).

Toward the end of encouraging racial diversity, Vineyard Columbus had the wonderful privilege of hosting Pastor LaFayette Scales from Rhema Christian Center as our weekend speaker on July 12-13. In August, I will be speaking at Rhema's main services. Vineyard Columbus has also been working very closely with a number of other African American churches for the purpose of building unity in the city. I will be hosting another roundtable for pastors of Central Ohio's largest churches this fall again to bring together charismatics and evangelicals, Blacks and whites, to further deepen our relationships in Christ.

Married to God's call upon this church towards growing racial diversity has been a call upon our church to plant churches. Vineyard Columbus is now planting churches more rapidly than any of the 1200 Vineyards worldwide. By December we will have planted our 17th church. Because of how prolific Vineyard Columbus has been in church planting, Leadership Network, a national organization of large churches, has contacted us about giving grant money to Vineyard Columbus to assist our church planting efforts. One of the areas we have applied for grant money concerns developing a Spanish-speaking track within our VLI (Vineyard Leadership Institute) training program, and to assist us with domestic cross-cultural (Hispanic) church planting.

Please pray for blessing upon our grant application. We'd love to see the kingdom of God extended through our church to the growing Hispanic community here in Columbus, Ohio.

We get to participate in God's awesome plan for the ages: reconciling people with each other and reconciling people to God. What a marvelous privilege we share in this church, together to make an impact on this world for Christ!