The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era

by Jesse Curtis

C. Peter Wagner’s 1976 book, Your Church Can Grow, devoted a chapter to an “autopsy of a dead church.” Zion Evangelical Free Church, a white congregation of several hundred in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago, closed in the summer of 1969. It had appeared healthy just a few years before. What went wrong? Wagner declared that he had examined the “corpse” and had the “diagnosis” in hand. Zion Free Church came to a sorry end because of a terminal case of “ethnikitis.” Church leaders had failed to “understand and apply the homogeneous unit principle” before it was too late. As a result, the church became a “victim” of the changing racial demographics of the Austin neighborhood. As white residents moved out, the church’s attendance rapidly dwindled from 350 to 30. In a desperate bid to save itself, Zion partnered with Circle Church, a new multiracial church in the neighborhood. This effort was doomed, Wagner informed his readers, because it involved a mixing of homogeneous units. Trying to merge a young, hip, multicultural church and a staid, traditional, white church produced “symptoms” of disease “almost as inevitably” as a blood transfusion mixing type A and B. A worship leader with sideburns showed up at Zion, causing offense. Some young women from Circle Church arrived in miniskirts, causing an uproar. And “the heaviest donor in the church left as soon as he heard that blacks would be welcome.”96 Wagner grouped all these phenomena together as examples of cultural incompa...

20 years later the remains of Circle church became Rock of Our Salvation EV Fee Church and th pastor would leave 10 years later to lead Promise Keepers racial reconciliation focus