The secret to the PCA’s multi-year decline may be primarily external to a denomination that is losing its ability to connect and lead an American culture that is increasingly multi-ethnic and non-white, as many are now arguing.

The internal issues of new generations, missional emphasis vs. traditionalists, and so on may, in fact, be more tangential to a larger external reality: the PCA primarily appeals to a dying demographic and is, therefore, being left behind by global Christianity.

Is the PCA’s cultural captivity to white, Western culture (including Southern white culture) going to make it increasingly irrelevant to a global Christian world that is primarily African, Asian, and Latin American?

Using Soong-Chan Rah’s book The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity, below is a list of issues that the PCA and other confessional predominantly white denominations must address if they want to expand their reach beyond white people.

After reading Rah’s book I wondered, “What would Rah say to my denomination?” This list below is an attempt at conjecture if Rah was brought in to assess the PCA to answer this question: “Is the PCA being held hostage by white, Western (and Southern) cultural captivity?”

By “captivity,” Rah means it in the way Martin Luther used the word to define cultural problems in Catholicism in his tract “On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” or the way R.C. Sproul wrote about the “Pelagian Captivity of the Evangelical Church.”

Using Rah’s analysis one would likely conclude that the PCA is destined for continued decline (even if giving increases) unless Asians, Latin Americans, and communities connected to Africa and the Caribbean, are handed the leadership baton to direct the denomination now and in the future.

Rah might conclude, that if the PCA is not freed from its white, Western (and Southern) culture and norms the denomination will follow national demographic changes among whites. What else might Rah say?

A summary sample of external problems based on Rah’s book if applied to the PCA:

(1) Global Christianity is no longer centered in Europe nor North America. The center of global Christianity is now in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In 1900, Europe and North America comprised 82 percent of the World’s Christian population. In 2005, Europe and North America comprised 39 percent of the World’s Christian population. To date, 60 percent of world’s Christians are in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The PCA remains primarily Eurocentric in its understanding of Christianity and the gospel and looks primarily to Eurocentric norms for analysis and perspective which are often conflated with being “biblical,” as some minorities would argue.

(2) As America becomes increasingly non-white, the PCA will continue to decline. The denomination was built on the “white-flight” cultural movement of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The homogenous unit principle drove church planting for decades. Some call it planned apartheid. White-flight has ended and the once celebrated homogeneity that grew the denomination may now lead to its demise, using Rah’s analysis. By 2023, half of America’s children will be non-white. A church predominantly made of white people is church that will likely close its doors within the next generation. “White-flight” cannot sustain confessional denominations in the future.

(3) The growing and vibrant churches in America are primarily Asian, Latino, and immigrant churches. Because ethnic churches are not a part of white evangelicalism they are often overlooked and ignored leaving the impression that regions of the country (especially cities) are spiritually dead. This is untrue.

Christianity is growing and vibrant among non-whites. The PCA, to date, is ill-equipped and has yet to successfully reach non-whites and immigrants, using Rah’s analysis, because of its cultural captivity to white, Southern and Eurocentric culture.

(4) Enmeshment with white, Western cultural norms drives the PCA’s primary frame of reference. As such, confessional denominations like the PCA establish a context where the only acceptable and celebrated blacks, Latino, and Asians are those who tend to be what some might call “Oreos” and “Twinkies”–that is, those who are culturally white and tend to denigrate and mock their own ethnic communities. The more an ethnic person adopts white cultural norms, while leaving their ethnic heritage behind and/or denigrating it, the more a person is embraced as a representative of “diversity.”

(5) Confusing racial tokenism with progress. Having an Asian, Latino, or black person sitting in a room, thrown on a committee, is different than ethnic members leading and determining future direction. This type of transition requires whites to submit to the authority of non-whites. For most in the PCA, non-white leadership would be a new experience. What Rah’s research shows is that a denomination’s understanding of the gospel and Kingdom is substandard, deficient, and handicapped unless it is also crafted by the theological contributions of Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans.

For more also read Phillip Jenkins book The Next Cristendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.

Specific challenges to the PCA’s cultural captivity to white, Western Culture using Rah (in parenthesis are page number references to Rah’s book):

(1) Should the “separate-but-equal” Korean presbytery system of a “denomination within a denomination” be abolished? Asians and Asian Americans are essential as key leaders of the denomination’s future, as well as the direction of Presbyterianism in United States and the rest of the world. Whatever pragmatic rationalizations are constructed for maintaining the “separate-but-equal” racial bifurcation needs to be challenged with John 17, the books of Acts and Revelation, and so on (12-18).

(2) “Me-centered” Western norms of Christianity, primarily reducing the Christian faith to concerns about personal salvation and person edification, function at the expense of understanding a faith matured through the corporate engagement of the Word and sacraments as a covenant people renewing and redeeming culture (34).

(3) The PCA norms of individualism leads to a narcissism where people “church hop” to find preaching that speaks to them personally, where they “feel fed,” or can have their personal, felt-needs met (37-39). What is often celebrated in the PCA, then, are men with the most appealing sermons to white people. Those are ones who become the leaders.

(4) The PCA may be driven by materialism and consumerism. “White-flight” suburban churches grew as a place of refuge from the “bad” culture of “liberals” and racial minorities. Comfort, safety, and ease-of-life preaching with drive-thru ministry options drew families who wanted a “safe” place to raise families as not be polluted by the world (46-63). Additionally, when people feel safe they tend to give more money.

(5) The PCA is a denomination that functions on the basis of what Rah calls “white privilege.” Dominant cultures attempt to construct the world in their own image. White privilege is the system that places white culture in American society at the center with all other cultures on the fringes, says Rah. As Virgilio Elizondo writes, “whites set the norms and projects the image of success, achievement, acceptability, normalcy, and status.” There must be an honest conversation of how white privilege renders the denomination incapable of having Asians, Latinos, African and Caribbean immigrants, and blacks as heads of agencies, chairing committees, and determining denominational direction locally and globally (72). What’s considered common ground for some is not “common” for others in a world of white privilege.

(6) The “white-flight” based growth in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s never should have been celebrated and provided the denomination a false sense of triumphalism about the future. “White flight” growth was no less faddish than the new focus on “justice.” The PCA is paying a heavy price for not seeking more aggressive Black and Latino church partnerships in building a Reformed evangelicalism in the 1970s and 1980s (157-163). The denomination is in jeopardy of missing another opportunity if the future direction is not lead and crafted by Asians, Latinos, Africans, and other non-white ethnic groups. The denomination’s preference for conserving homogeneity culturally (white, Western culture) will not sustain it in the future, according to Rah’s analysis.

(7) The Great Commandment has been sacrificed on the altar of the Great Commission. This resulted in evangelism understood as the church’s central local mission because the “liberals” were too involved in social issues and justice. Social issues are not seen as central to “the gospel.” Loving your neighbor is outsourced to the diaconate and “mercy ministries” and is not central to “Word and sacrament” ministry; nor the work of the Kingdom (95-96).

(8) If a denomination wants to become culturally irrelevant in the United States and globally its primarily theological learning and books should only come from white, Southern and Western, Eurocentric culture. Not learning from Africans, Asians, and Latino, scholars keeps one in cultural captivity (116-119).

(9) Moving on from “post-modernity.” The rhetoric about post-modernism, and its threats to the church, is nothing less than passé. The PCA must deal with now scientific realism which internationally includes more ethnic voices (116-119).

(10) GenXers and Millennials are no less captive to white, Western cultural norms than their baby boomer (and Builder) predecessors. Those leaders who considered the “next generation” who tend to care more about cultural renewal and cultural transformation are still captive to viewing culture in ways that fit white bohemian and/or white urban, “hipster” norms (this will be exposed in the forthcoming book Hipster Christianity by Brett McCracken). Reading a different group of Western white males than a previously generation continues to promote cultural captivity to white Western Christianity (Wendell Berry, James Davidson Hunter, etc.) and does not necessarily represent progress (116-119). We see this in Rev. Howard Brown’s response to Rev. Jeremy Jones during the denominational renewal conversations a few years ago.

(11) Racial tokenism. Decorating agencies, committees, and staffs with different racial minorities (like ornaments on a Christmas tree as Thomas Sowell warns against) to give the appearance of progress should not be accepted. Tokens are people of color who are invited to strengthen existing systems and further the captivity of the dominant culture, says Rah (120). There is a difference between being invited to sit on a committee as a token representative and being asked to lead the committee, staff, or agency with whites submitting to the authority of people of color, according to Rah.

“The rules of the table have already been set and there’s not a whole lot of room but come sit at our table. We won’t change the way we interact with one another and we will need to maintain the white majority, but it still would be nice to have an Asian face or a black face to sit at our table. If the places at the table are already set, and ethnic minorities are asked to put aside their comfort to join an already existing power dynamic and structure, then we are not engaging in genuine ethnic diversity. Ethnic minorities are being asked to play the role of token minority who should be seen but not heard, rather than those who have wisdom and experience to transfer to the . . . community” (121).

This has been the experience of many blacks, Latinos, and Asians in the PCA for a number of years but few have spoken up.

(12) In the PCA, for example, theology and preaching are derived from men who have spent entire lives benefiting from America culture of “white privilege” in contexts of abundance, cultural dominance and social ease and are incapable of effectively applying the gospel to people whose stories arise out of poverty, suffering and marginalization, suggests Rah. When one’s understanding of God emerges out of affluence and privilege your ability to relate and communicate to people not from that context is hindered (143-155).

The cultural privilege that white Christians have had in America is foreign to the experience of Christians in the New Testament and the early church. Africans, Asians, Latinos, blacks, and Slavs in Eastern Europe, have a cultural experience most closely connected to the first Christians and Christians in the early church. PCA preaching and teaching is generally void, then, of a theology of suffering (146-151). For example, White privilege preaching reduces and limits man’s basic problem to idolatry instead of also reflecting how sinful responses to pain, suffering, and marginalization can also drive sin.

(13) There must be a willingness to, and practice of, submitting to the authority and leadership of nonwhites (195). The PCA will decline in the US, and will have less and less global influence as an institution, if the leaders do not reflect the leaders in America’s Christianity who are predominantly Asian, Latino, African, Afro-Caribbean, and black. The face of the PCA will need to multi-ethnic, using Rah’s analysis. The PCA can’t be a leader denomination unless the face of the denomination is multi-ethnic.

(14) Church-planting should not be based on homogenous affinity groups but neighborhoods and communities, regardless of who resides in those communities. Churches should look like their neighborhoods. Churches in neighbors that do not fit the neighborhoods demographic may need to consider reorganization (198).

Sample Implications and Applications of Rah’s analysis

(15) If Rah and others are correct that the Asian, African, and Latin American are the face of the global church, as well as the face of the America church in the near future, their should be no distinction between Mission to North America and Mission to the World. Mission to North America would be collapsed into Mission to World with the expectant new heads and leaders to be Asians, Africans, and Latinos in the future as a truly “glocal” agency of the church.

(16) If the denomination’s youth and college ministries continue to be the most celebrated aspect of the denomination campus ministries should be encouraged to increase the ethnic diversity within their mainstream ministry contexts. Rah would ask if those ministries are also held captive to white, Western culture in terms of the students reached on campuses. College campuses, for example, tend to have higher concentrations of future Asian, African, and Latin American leaders than most places. Youth tend to be more open to diverse relationships when opportunities to do so are available. As such, what, if any, steps could be taken to see that university and student ministries are lead by African, Asian, and Latin American Christian students as well as multi-ethnic leaders on predominantly white campuses (205-208)?

There would be nothing more progressive and representative of global Christianity than, for example, for an Asian to be the campus minister at large football school in the Southeast. That would provide an incredible witness of the gospel (Rev. 5:9).

(17) Will Asians, Latinos, and Africans have the same opportunities to plant new kinds of churches when they are marginalized from the networks of white privilege in terms of support raising and expectations?

(18) Issues of “racial reconciliation” must move beyond the limited and antiquated categories of whites and blacks.
(19) Having whites in positions of power over ethnic minorities of lower social and economic classes will not be celebrated as accomplishing “diversity” or seen as progress. One black TE in the PCA told me once that he sees these are nothing more than “plantation churches” because white people continue to make all of the decisions.

(20) Asian Americans currently in the PCA should be encouraged, and challenged, to speak more openly about their marginalization from leadership and the current separatism.

Using Rah’s categories these are just a few challenges facing the PCA, and other white denominations, if they truly intend to expand beyond their current demographic and have future. Rah provides a helpful series of questions in asking new questions as we seek the Lord’s wisdom for the future reality of his church locally and around the world.

It’s also possible to reject Rah’s analysis completely which would render the above list null and void and nothing more than a thought experiment.

Anthony Bradley has recently been named Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics at The King’s College, NYC. This commentary is taken from Bradley’s blog, The Institute, and is used with permission of the author.