I went on my first short-term mission trip to a Native American reservation this past summer. One afternoon, a Native American elder from a neighboring reservation shared his story of generational trauma. He recounted how his tribe endured decades of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse in church-run boarding schools—places led exclusively by white Christian leaders across almost every denomination. These institutions, cloaked in Christian language and symbols, were often tools of cultural erasure and assimilation. Their chapels weren’t havens of gospel renewal but instruments to abolish Native identity under the guise of Christian formation.
But then the elder told us something remarkable: since those schools shut down, his tribe has seen a dramatic reversal. Once gripped by an almost 90% alcoholism rate among adults, they’re now closer to a 10% alcoholism rate after two generations. What changed? Native American Christians began leading their own churches. They reclaimed their dignity and their discipleship. The gospel didn’t disappear—it deepened. It took root in culturally resonant soil. The healing that followed can only be explained by the grace of Jesus Christ.
The irony, of course, is that the original boarding schools claimed to be Christian. But in erasing the distinctiveness of Native American culture and forcing them to assimilate into the broader white American culture, they ended up burying the very gospel they hoped to preach. In suppressing this affinity group, they suppressed Kingdom growth.
This raises a timely question: why do some Christians continue to resist race-based affinity groups?
1. Are Some Race-Based Affinity Groups Acceptable but Not Others?
Native American reservations are themselves legally protected affinity groups—sovereign enclaves carved out by federal treaties. Churches on these reservations are often almost entirely Native, just as many historically Black churches are predominantly African American. Are these churches inherently sinful because of their homogeneity? Where are the calls to disobey federal treaties (cf. Rom 13:5) that “segregate” reservation churches so that they can integrate with neighboring majority-white churches if this is a “gospel” issue?
We generally don’t question the legitimacy of Korean heritage or Chinese heritage churches even when the majority speak English and they essentially serve only one ethnic or racial group. In fact, we celebrate them as strategic and faithful expressions of gospel contextualization. But why do we get so upset about race-based affinity groups when white worshipers are the majority? Why does the room grow uncomfortable when minorities gather intentionally around their respective racial or cultural identities for spiritual formation and mutual care when white Christians aren’t included?
There’s an inconsistency here. If national origin is a justifiable reason for cultural affinity in churches, why is racial experience—particularly when racial trauma is prominently featured—treated differently, particularly when white Christians are present?
2. Weep with Those Who Weep
In Romans 12:15, Paul exhorts the church to “weep with those who weep.” This isn’t a metaphorical suggestion—it’s a pastoral imperative. When trauma runs deep, particularly generational trauma tied to racial injustice and ecclesial complicity, healing often requires intentional space. We don’t require abuse victims to worship alongside people that look like their abusers. We don’t pressure someone with PTSD to relive their memories in the spaces they were traumatized just to prove they’ve forgiven their offenders. So why do we expect racial trauma to operate differently?
Race-based affinity groups aren’t about exclusion—they’re about restoration. These gatherings allow space to grieve without needing to explain, to lament without being edited, and to heal without the constant emotional labor of translating one’s wounds for others. They’re theological triage units for the bruised and battered body of Christ. And just as with any type of generational trauma, some family members will require more time than others to heal. It’s not our place to set deadlines nor is it pastorally wise to project our rate of recovery on others for taking too long.
Additionally, these groups aren’t replacements for Sunday worship. They’re rooms within the house of God for recovery and renewal—places where wounded believers can encounter Jesus in ways shaped by their lived experience. They’re Acts 15 moments that resist uniformity, where we learn again that Gentiles don’t need to become Jews and people of color don’t need to become white to follow Jesus faithfully.¹ They’re temporary stepping stones to what the 19th-century theologian Herman Bavinck calls pluriformity.
3. The Deeper Issue: Power and Control
In my humble opinion, the greater part of the resistance to race-based affinity groups, especially in majority-white evangelical spaces, is a theological smokescreen that masks a sociological discomfort: loss of narrative control. When minorities gather to discuss their pain, share their perspective, and seek contextualized discipleship, some white Christian leaders and their followers feel excluded or falsely accused. But such interpretations mistake solidarity for separatism and contextual ministry for compromise.
In truth, race-based affinity groups do pose a threat, not to orthodoxy but to the hegemony of white American experience as normative. They decentralize control and shift the interpretive authority of how the gospel speaks to suffering. And for those long accustomed to being the narrators of American Christianity using biblicist arguments against these spaces, this feels destabilizing. Some even criticize these spaces as the fruit of CRT, but naming systemic sin is orthodox regardless of any parallels with CRT. Even Herman Bavinck identified the reality of “family sins, societal sins, national sins…there is also ‘corporate guilt and the corporate action of sin’ (Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3, p. 175).”
The backlash, in this light, is telling. It’s not unlike the emergence of slogans like All Lives Matter in response to Black Lives Matter—not because white lives were ever in question but because Black pain temporarily took center stage. All Lives Matter functioned not as a plea for justice but as a protest against perceived displacement. In the same way, objections to race-based affinity spaces often arise not from theological misgivings but from the unease that comes when theological authority shifts. When minority voices begin to narrate the gospel from the margins rather than the center, those at the center may feel uncomfortable—even if what’s actually happening is a Spirit-led, poly-centering of the body of Christ.
But gospel power isn’t threatened by the sharing of power. In fact, it’s revealed in relinquishing it. Jesus didn’t cling to His position but made Himself nothing (Phil 2:6–7). If Christ could divest Himself for our sake, surely majority cultures can make space for others to tell their story.
Conclusion: Gospel Healing Results in Unity-in-Diversity
The Native American elder concluded his talk with remarkable grace: “Just as Jews don’t blame today’s Germans for the sins of the Nazis, we shouldn’t blame today’s white American Christians for the sins of their great grandfathers.” Then he thanked the white American Christian missionary running the reservation’s VBS program for the opportunity to share his testimony. That’s the fruit of the gospel-driven affinity groups: not resentment but reconciliation. And yet that healing could only come when space was first made for Native American believers to walk together, grieve together, and be discipled together.
Race-based affinity groups then aren’t threats to Christian unity; they actually strengthen it. Though Christians ought not identify themselves primarily by race but by Christ, our identity in Christ nevertheless redeems our secondary identities, including that of race and ethnicity. Indeed, our unity in Christ enriches, not erases, our ethnic identities (cf. Rev 7:9).
Finally, just as Jesus entered our world in a physical body of a particular ethnic group, affinity groups make space for the embodied realities of race, history, and culture—all under the lordship of Christ. If the gospel can take root in every tribe and tongue, then surely it can also flourish when those tribes and tongues gather to encounter Christ in ways that speak most deeply to them. Yet, it’s only after Christ speaks deeply to them can we organically live out the unity-in-diversity we all desire.
¹In Acts 15, the early church faced a monumental cultural and theological question: must Gentile believers adopt Jewish customs, particularly circumcision, to be truly part of the Christian community? The Jerusalem Council concluded that such requirements shouldn’t be imposed, affirming that faith in Christ, not cultural assimilation, was the basis for inclusion. This decision preserved gospel unity without demanding uniformity. In the same way, race-based affinity groups resist the impulse to flatten cultural distinctiveness in the name of a false neutrality. They reflect the spirit of Acts 15 by affirming that discipleship doesn’t require minorities to shed their ethnic or racial identities to belong. Instead, they create a space where gospel faithfulness and cultural particularity can coexist, leading to healing, dignity, and deeper inclusion within the body of Christ.
Moses Y. Lee is the lead pastor of Rosebrook Presbyterian Church in Rockville, Maryland, and a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, where he is conducting research on Herman Bavinck, J.H. Bavinck, and Harvie Conn.
