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Reviews
| Crossing the Ethnic Divide: The Multiethnic Church on a Mission. By Kathleen Garces-Foley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 182 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00 (cloth).
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Kathleen Garces-Foley's excellent ethnography, Crossing the Ethnic Divide, recounts the transformation of Evergreen Baptist Church of Los Angeles as a congregation seeking to become inclusively multiethnic. Crossing the Ethnic Divide details the hopes and pitfalls of diversifying the church while contextualizing this case study within the sociohistorical and religious context of Los Angeles in the post–Rodney King, post–September 11 era. Garces-Foley questions why and how religious institutions adapt to modern discourses of multiculturalism, particularly when Sunday morning remains the most segregated half day in America. Evergreen is unique in being a primarily pan-Asian congregation that is now reaching out to post–1965 immigrant generations and to its surrounding Latino neighborhood. |
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In seeking to understand how such an institution might become more multiethnic, Garces-Foley chose Evergreen because it has explicitly taken a color-conscious rather than a color-blind approach to addressing ethnicity. With a historically Japanese American, then pan-Asian, evangelical congregation, it had grown exponentially in the 1980s and 1990s while employing the "homogeneous unit principle." This church's growth model assumes that churches evangelize more effectively when they target single ethnic groups. However, Evergreen pastor Ken Fong became convinced that his church's vision needed to incorporate racial reconciliation so that all groups would feel welcome and be restored to proper relationships with each other. |
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