DALLAS (ABP) — Caucasian students continue to primarily populate college evangelical organizations, but ethnic minority students have started to join them in increasing numbers.
Two of the nation's largest parachurch campus evangelical organizations, Campus Crusade for Christ and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, stress building ethnically diverse communities in their mission statements. And recent statistics cited in the San Francisco Chronicle and Christianity Today suggest that their goals for diversity are slowly starting to become a reality.
According to InverVarsity's annual national field report trends, membership rates have increased for African Americans, Asian Americans and Latino Americans by 3 percent, 16 percent and 22 percent, respectively, over the past five years. In the same time period, Caucasian membership declined by 9 percent.
Paula Fuller, the InterVarsity vice president and director of multiethnic ministries, said there is not a direct correlation between the increase in minority membership and the decrease in non-minority membership. But — in a move away from the norm — she said her organization has also focused on the concept of “white identity” lately.
“We've started to realize that in order to have a multiethnic conversation, our white students and our white staff need to have a strong sense of their own ethnic identity,” Fuller said.
According to AFR trends, African-American InterVarsity membership increased by 48 percent over the past decade, more than any other ethnic group. Fuller said she doesn't know the exact reason for the spike in African-American membership, but she cited a possible explanation.
“A couple of recent studies show that African-Americans students coming to college tend to be more spiritual on average in terms of regular church attendance, prayer or thinking about spiritual issues,” Fuller said. “That would indicate a higher percentage of them might be more inclined to seek out a Christian group on campus.”
At certain colleges, some national minority groups are in the majority in their campus evangelical groups. Asian Americans outnumber all other ethnic groups by a wide margin in campus evangelical groups at the University of California at Berkley and many Ivy League schools, according to Rebecca Kim, author of God's New Whiz Kids.
Kim says her research shows that Yale's chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ is 90 percent Asian American. And even though Asian Americans account for only 40 percent of UC Berkley's enrollment, they make up 80 percent of the campus evangelical groups.
Many parachurch organizations, including InterVarsity, have established ethnicity-specific branches to compensate for the lack of diversity within many multiethnic ministries.
Tommy Dyo, national director of the Epic Movement, which is Campus Crusade for Christ's Asian-American ministry, said his organization hasn't reached its diversity goals because it still hasn't achieved representative population numbers on a national level. However, he said, he's seen an attitude shift within the organization that makes reaching the goal seem feasible.
Jim Lundgren, the InterVarsity vice president and director of collegiate ministries, said non-Asian minority groups have a majority membership stake in campus evangelical groups at other colleges. He mentioned the University of Texas-Pan American as an example of a school with a Latino majority in evangelical groups and a predominately Latino-American enrollment.
LaFe, or Latino Fellowship, is the national Latino-American ministry of InterVarsity that reaches schools with large Latino-American populations. Orlando Crespo, LaFe national director, said the organization started as a strategic outreach to Latino students within the larger chapter because InterVarsity wasn't attracting or retaining Latino students, even though it desired diversity.
Crespo said the ethnic-specific strategy is showing some signs of success.
“We're seeing greater numbers at some of these chapters that traditionally have not had a lot of Latino student involvement,” Crespo said. “These groups are having prayer meetings and Latino cultural events that are evangelistic outreach events, which use culture to draw and attract Latino students.”
Crespo said there shouldn't be a debate between multiethnic ministry and ethnic-specific ministry because they go hand-in-hand.
“True multiethnic ministry happens when ethnic specific groups are able come together with everybody's ethnic differences and strengths in order to make the ministry stronger,” he said.
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