SYC and JMarrow are on point. Everyone's cultural impacts their theology. So Julie's question of "does race trump theology" is a mute point. Racial reconciliation is intertwined in the theology of most ethnic minority churches and Christians. They cannot be separated. It is Jesus and living him.

I think, really, that many people who are captive to white western culture (whether white themselves or not) simply will not get it until they invest, truly dive in and commit long-term, to an ethnic minority church as SCR suggests. Because most ethnic minority churches are aware of the captivity and are throwing it off piece by piece.

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As far as whether ethnic churches are "emergent"…I think SCR's point is that if people are really saying, "sure, we all are emergent, emergent is me, emergent is you…", than why is the focus on white emergents? Saying "we are in this new movement" is saying that they haven't been already fighting mainstream white captivity to western theology for decades.

I'm not really sure what the point of that whole conversation was as I just noticed my name and figured I better respond but there you go. There are indeed charismatics in the EC, lots of Vineyard folks in fact and quite a few Assemblies of God.

So, please don’t make claims saying that focusing on theology is more important than race issues

Not sure if you were addressing me with this (since your next paragraph does, I'll assume you were). But let me just clarify that I didn't say theology was "more important". What I said is that I'd really like to have BOTH racial and theological diversity. Not (as you accused me of) focusing on racial diversity only sometimes, and theology the rest of the times, but BOTH of them ALL of the time.

I apologize if I gave the impression that I was saying something different. I thought I was pretty clear when I said in comment #23:

I guess I’m just worried that racial/ethnic diversity doesn’t always go hand in hand with theological diversity, and I’d really, really like to have both.

…but perhaps I was not.

Sure you can say “come over to our table and join the discussion” but then you’ve already made the statement that its your table.

No, that definitely NOT what I said. What I specifically said was

"The emerging church is all of us, including you."

In other words, I'm saying it's our table. All of ours. No one owns it. We're creating it together.

"One other question I have that has be gnawing at me in this discussion. Should race trump theology? Should submitting to the spiritual leadership of other races be more important than the theology one believes?"

Julie, does your comment pertain more to this specific issue, or have you been wrestling with this in other contexts as well? I must say it feels like a false dichotomy to me. So many of our theological stances can't be neatly separated from social and cultural issues. Issue driven agendas shouldn't have to supplant relationships across social boundaries or dictate their limits. It's alittle like asking, should we have spirituality or social justice? Should we be progressive or conservative? Should we pray or work? Should we do outreach or inreach? The emerging answer to me has always been: Both/And. But don't get me wrong I don't want to underestimate how hard this is to put in action.

I've found that even when we think "conservative" or "progressive" are the prevailing ideologies in ethnic minority churches, there are always stories of persons and communities who go against the grain of our assumptions and present counter testimonies. It helps as well to closely study Church history and ethnic histories to catch on to those counter testimonies. Typically minority churches have to find unique/alternative ways of dealing with traditional theological divides as they are understood in the majority culture. One example comes to mind from the Civil Rights movement in which eastern educated black clergy (like MLK) who were introduced to the kind of biblical criticism and theologies that would be considered "progressive" for their day. They returned to pulpits having to form a community with many who would be considered biblicists by today's standards. It's not that there weren't stark differences between them, but the racial climate of the culture forced these two sides to work together. There were few ideological sanctuaries to flee to. Many of the strategies and feats of that came from that movement were the result of a synthesis between biblicist and progressive views. It's from that kind of cauldron that we'll find examples of people on the margins producing fruit worthy of our consideration and even emulation.

My hunch is that teachers like Soong-Chan are trying to encourage us to look for these kinds of examples throughout the global church. But to do so we have to look with a very different set of eyes, realizing that emerging may not exactly look, sound, or feel the same in other cultural contexts as in our own. Nonetheless it's still there and waiting for us.

Mike Clawson: I feel you since several comments back. But I would point out that just adding our voice to the mix is not that easy. Sure you can say "come over to our table and join the discussion" but then you've already made the statement that its your table.