As such, my working thesis is this: given that the PCA was structured and built around the homogenous unit principle it is unlikely to ever have much success moving deeply into black and Hispanic communities unless outlier minorities socially conform by adopting the same cultural values of white socio-political conservatives and/or white city center elites.

Part Two: Analysis of the Premise can be found here: http://bit.ly/eHyTnE

A few years ago I was invited to speak at a presbytery-level Mission to North America sub-committee to discuss race and church planting. I spoke about the opportunities to plant multi-ethnic churches, predominantly ethnic churches, and the like.

Afterwards, I was told that someone remarked something like, “hey, the PCA is a denomination most successful at reaching middle-class white people there’s no sense in trying to reach populations outside of that demographic.”

When I first learned of this I was outraged and thought, “I can’t believe this guy only wants the PCA to be denomination of white folks.” Several years later, after being introduced to new research and data on religious patterns in America, I realize that I, in fact, may have been the biggest fool in the room that day. Because of her historical and cultural situation the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) is primarily a place to gather people who share similar cultural norms that fit within white conservative political and social customs and, in city centers, the norms of white and Asian elites.

As such, my working thesis is this: given that the PCA was structured and built around the homogenous unit principle it is unlikely to ever have much success moving deeply into black and Hispanic communities unless outlier minorities socially conform by adopting the same cultural values of white socio-political conservatives and/or white city center elites.

(The PCA will likely maintain among 2nd and 3rd generation Asians because of the lack of needed discussions about subordination and functionally being considered “the model minority.” For a discussion of Asian American subordination, see “Critical Thoughts on Asian American Assimilation in the Whitening Literature” Nadia Y. Kim, Loyola Marymount University; also see the book Yellow, by Frank Wu)

The black church in America is brow beaten with regularity over its cultural captivity. This happens whenever I get asked, “Why do conservative black Christians tend to vote for Democrats?” Imbedded in the question is the assumption that “they” (black Christians) have sociological influences whereas we (the white elites) do not.

While many PCA leaders believe theology was paramount in importance during the PCA’s growth years in terms of drawing new members, the glaring blind spot in the PCA self-assessment is its own self-aggrandizing triumphalism that refuses to recognize that God allowed the PCA to grow in concert with the white social, cultural, and political flight in America. The PCA is a “Big Sort” denomination.

The PCA was built on the homogeneous unit principle which took advantage of social networks of shared social values geographically sorted. Friendship evangelism and the small group movement are organized around the principle of gathering people “like ourselves.”

As such, the homogeneous unit principle (HUP) that built and grew the denomination will permanently constrain her ability to reach those who have not adopted white political and social conservative and/or city center elitist social norms. The PCA is in cultural captivity as a “Big Sort” denomination to HUP unless many are willing to make courageous and tough changes.

Let me make the following qualifications of this thesis:

(1) I don’t hate the PCA. I don’t discuss things I don’t care about. Martin Luther King, Jr. was misunderstood to be anti-American and a communist because of the questions he raised about the social and political conservatives of his day so I’m not surprised by the accusations of “not loving the PCA” that are said about me.

Dr. King actually loved America and wanted to see her live up to her potential for all of her citizens. I became a member of the PCA in 1994, naively unaware of the trade-offs I was making, the emotional costs that would bear challenging fruit later, or the friends that I would lose in the process

But I remain committed to the PCA’s flourishing because of covenant theology which, I believe, as expressed in the Reformed creeds and confessions, are far more liberating and biblical, than anything else Protestants have produced. More importantly, being Presbyterian has all sorts of wonderful ecclesial and social implications and it puzzles me why any PCA church would declare, “We’re evangelical first and Presbyterian second.”

As I see it, if you want to be “Presbyterian second” go somewhere else. Being Presbyterian affects how you understand marriage, family, society, and so on.

I raise these questions as stewardship concerns about the PCA’s financial and human capital. The PCA has wasted a lot of money and burned many brothers by pursuing initiatives deeply and tragically lacking in cultural intelligence. I know many black and Latino bruthas either out of ministry altogether or walking around with chronic limps because of hasty and anserine decisions made by people with good intentions.

(2) I’m not making this up. I didn’t see the PCA as a “big sort” denomination until recently. What I’ve been describing is pretty common knowledge in history, sociology, and political science about denomination’s like the PCA. The PCA, in the 1980s and 1990s, became first and foremost a shire for social and political conservatives gathered around like minded others sharing political allegiances lived out in church life in distinction from liberal Protestants (esp. after they began to racially integrate).

This explains fully the use of the homogeneous unit principle, church planting strategies centered on small groups, doing demographic analysis to plant churches in neighborhoods where the PCA’s social conservative culture already is, “relational evangelism,” and so on.

I’m not saying this was intentional or planned. Much of it was inadvertent by many trying to do their best with what they had. We acknowledge this good faith effort and are indebted to those founders and builders for their labors. We need to move forward but in order to do so we must look at what holds us back.

When social conservatives sorted themselves in the suburbs the discourse isolation simply made this inevitable and we can certainly say that God worked within the cultural shifts to bless many social and political conservatives with the doctrines of grace, fantastic preaching, good community, and a right way to think about covenant children; and the same goes for today’s city center elite Christians gentrifying cities all over America pouring into new church plants.

To see that the PCA as essentially a clustered and sorted social subculture, I’d recommend the following books: (1) Open Friendship in a Closed Society: Mission Mississippi and a Theology of Friendship, by Peter Slade, (2) Religion and Race: Southern Presbyterians, 1946 to 1983, by Joel Alvis, (3) Race and Religion in Early Nineteenth Century America: 1800-1850 : Constitution, Conscience, and Calvinist Compromise, by Joseph R. Washington, (4) Anti-Blackness in English Religion 1500-1800, by Joseph R. Washington, (5) The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church From Western Cultural Captivity, by Soong-Chan Rah, and by far, the most devastating and eye-opening is (6) The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, by Bill Bishop.

An historian friend of mine also recommends that people read some of the books listed below for a reality check. One of the biggest weaknesses in the PCA cultural is the limitation of reducing all problems to issues of theological precision as if humans are not primarily social beings. This limited scope of self-understanding creates a veil of ignorance. To lift the veil of ignorance these books should prove helpful: (1)The Rapture of Politics: The Christian Right as the United States Approaches the Year 2000, by Steve Bruce, et al. (2) White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, Alan Lichtman, (3)Right Face: Organizing the American Conservative Movement, 1945-65 by Niels Bjerre-Poulson’s, (4) Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right by Lisa McGirr, and (5) Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism, by Angela Lahr, and (6) because the PCA is located its national offices in the Atlanta area, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, by Kevin Kruse.

It will be very difficult for the PCA to move beyond clustering white socio-political conservatives and clustering white urban elites until leaders gain greater cultural intelligence and abandon the homogeneous mindset by transitioning into focusing on bringing the gospel to neighborhoods all over America through Reformed Presbyterianism.

There is far more going on than what Tim Keller theologically described in his fantastic description of what I call, “the PCA’s tripartite cold war”. There are many, many good things there but the cold war does not include the non-theological, sociological, external constraints on the PCA’s future. The PCA continues to fail to address many issues because of its idolatrous assumption that all problems are such because of theological imprecision. We are human beings with complex influences–theology is only one variable in the complex equation of Christianity practiced in community. (Having said that, I am not suggesting that the PCA does not have underdeveloped theological categories in many places that need to be corrected and worked out, esp. the doctrinal error of the spirituality of the church).

Editor’s Note: In Part Two, Anthony uses one of the books he mentions as a model to analyze his premise.

Anthony Bradley is an Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics at The King’s College, NYC. This commentary is taken from Bradley’s blog, The Institute, and was also published in the Commentary section of WorldMag.com and is used with permission of the author. http://bradley.chattablogs.com