On June 19, 1865, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston Bay with Union soldiers to announce the emancipation of 250,0000 enslaved people in Texas. Though President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier, it wasn’t enforceable until the Civil War ended. This event became known as Juneteenth or Freedom Day and was celebrated in African American communities before being recognized as a federal holiday in 2021.
Next year, the United States will commemorate its 250th birthday, relatively young for a country compared to our European allies. Although we’ve experienced growing pains as a nation across the centuries, the Church is an area that has made gains. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. remarked in the 1960s, “We must face the sad fact that at 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand to sing, ‘In Christ there is no East or West,’ we stand in the most segregated hour of America.” I found this to be true even in 1990 when I returned from sea duty in Japan and joined First Baptist Church of Norfolk, which some parishioners at my dad’s small, black church called “that big, white church.”
Fast forward to 2025. I attend Family Church Sherbrooke, where I serve on the worship team. I’m delighted on Sunday mornings to see a cross-section of ages and ethnicities in our congregation. And I’m gratified to teach at Palm Beach Atlantic University whose commitment to God-honoring diversity has existed since 1968. The next year, founding president Dr. Jess Moody spoke to the Southern Baptist Convention—a denomination founded in 1845 because members didn’t want to give up their slaves—and told fellow pastors, “It takes the black and the white keys to play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ and you can’t do it without both. We must solve the problem of racial hatred within the next 10 years or prepare to become the dinosaurs of the Twenty-First Century.”
Diversity in Christ isn’t about grievance or identity politics but embracing our differences and celebrating our shared purpose as Christ-followers. In 1 Corinthians 12:12, the apostle Paul wrote, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” We haven’t completely solved racial hatred in the American Church, but we’ve made strides. To quote my favorite play, Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, “We’ve learned. We’re learning.”
Dr. Thomas Parham is a professor of Communication and Media Studies and chairs the Department of Visual and Media Arts.
