Curious Christian

Reflections on culture, nature, and spirituality from a Christian perspective

White Noise?

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Matt Stone

2007-10-22

This is just a question I want to throw out there. How much of the emerging / missional conversation is just “white people yakking”?

Over the years I have witnessed a number of people raise concerns about the disparity in female participation in the emerging church. Now, that’s not hard to notice, it’s pretty easy to discern just from the names of people. Yes, yes, some names are ambiguous. I must sheepishly confess that I wondered whether Dan and Phil McCredden were a homosexual couple the first time I came across their blog at Signposts. But discerning ethnic disparities of participants just from their names and writing style is a much riskier prospect indeed. Some are obvious. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that anyone named Moses will be African, and anyone named Jesus will be South American, and anyone named Singh will be Sikh, but beyond that, who knows?

With the advent of Facebook however a clearer picture is emerging and I can see my own “friends” list seems very shaded towards the white end of the spectrum indeed. Out of my hundred and fifty plus contacts, I can now see only two are Asian and only one is Afro-American. Yikes! I don’t know about you but I find that disturbing. My real life situation is far more diverse. So I have some questions. For those of you who are also on Facebook, how are your contacts lists looking? For those of you who are bloggers, do you know much about the ethnic diversity of your readers? For those of you who are visitors, where do you fit in with this picture? For all of you, how many blogs do you visit regularly of people who share a different ethnicity from your own?

Tags Diversity

6 responses to “White Noise?”

cindy

2007-10-22

what if i just say your question shames me? i had never thought about it. now that i have- i’m dismayed.

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sally

2007-10-22

mine looks much the same as yours Matt. A sad fact… how and where do we broaden the conversation- or are we simply indulging in a rich western luxury???

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Matt Stone

2007-10-22

Maybe we could try some affirmative action to begin with? Turn this into meme to unearth non-Anglo emerging church bloggers? Karen Ward is an obvious person to begin with. Many of us know her. Can you find or suggest another non-Anglo blogger (Asian, Hispanic, Afro-American, whatever) that you think may warrant some attention and add their name to this list?
Maybe the best way to go about this is to write a post on your site, highlighting what we are trying to do, add your suggestion to the growing list, then pass the request onto a few more people? As the list grows it could get quite interesting. I’d only ask that you drop a comment back down the chain so I can put together a master list at the end of this. I’ll add the top suggestions to my permanent links and suggest you consider doing the same.

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Jeff M. Miller

2007-10-22

I’m a “white” guy, even though my heritage says otherwise. But since I look like whitebread walking down the street I get pegged with the title.
That being said, nearly all of my real life friends and acquaintances are “white,” but that’s more a product of where I live than anything else Compare that to my myspace/facebook/blogging friends/etc., my circle is very diverse. It still weighs on the “white” side, but not by much.
Good question.

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Steve Hayes

2007-10-24

It seems to me that the “emerging church conversation” takes place largely in the blogosphere (at least that’s where I first found it, and I haven’t seen it in many other places).
And the blogosphere is largely white, as I noted in a post on my blog a few months ago

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Matt Stone

2007-10-25

Thanks Jeff, I’ll have to check out your blog and facebook network.
Steve, I realize there is a socio-economic bias to facebook and the emerging church conversation in general, but I wonder if the ethnic bias is fully explainable by it. After all, I know plenty of Asian IT workers. I sit next to some. So I expect to see some online too. But strangely … nothing. I wonder how much the neoceltic emphasis of certain strands of the emerging church plays into this. I am wondering if there are neotribal forces at work here that go beyond mere socio-economics.

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