By Michael Peabody –
On a Sabbath morning, the story often starts before anyone opens a Bible. It starts in the hallway. People arrive carrying the week on their faces. Someone looks tired from a night shift. Someone else looks nervous because they are new, and because the language in the lobby is not the language at home. A greeter smiles anyway, points them toward a class, and stays close enough to help again.
In churches like this, diversity is not a slogan. It is a shared weekly reality. It can feel tender. It can also feel fragile.
Pew Research Center’s profile of Seventh-day Adventists in the United States reported that no single racial or ethnic group forms a majority. Pew’s breakdown was 37% White, 32% Black, 15% Hispanic, 8% Asian, and 8% another race or mixed race. (Pew Research Center, November 3, 2015.) (pewresearch.org)
Pew also compared racial and ethnic diversity across major U.S. religious groups and found Seventh-day Adventists ranked as the most diverse among the groups it analyzed. (Pew Research Center, July 27, 2015.) (pewresearch.org)
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