Washington Post — April 8, 2023

Michael Emerson, professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, said that church racial inclusion efforts suffered under President Donald Trump, who often made incendiary comments about immigrants and Blacks.

Many church leaders faced a dilemma, Emerson said: “Do I repudiate it and risk losing many of my White members who may be the biggest donors and who pay my salary? Or do I say, ‘That’s politics, I’m not going to talk about it,’ and try to just skirt the issue?”

[In the Chapel Hill NC Bible Church, this influence crystallized in early 2021]:

When some elders approached the pastor [Jay Thomas] to ask him to publicly respond to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, Thomas drafted and made public his response.

“[P]olitical affiliation, policy commitments, political parties, the details of the election, how to interpret the details and meaning of the raid on the Capitol, and the like are not so clear and straight-lined from Scripture that this is the moment to say A is right and B is wrong, or vice-versa,” he wrote. 

The statement landed like a bomb.
“

It was the kind of Trump language of ‘good people on both sides,’” said Walker Hicks, a White man whose three adopted children are Black. “It just provoked all sorts of distress and dismay and trauma among congregants of color and made them feel more alienated and confused and unsupported.” He and his family left the church in February.

The church dealt with the fallout by dedicating a few hearings to the subject of race, but the congregation was by then embroiled in another leadership crisis involving the executive pastor, who was alleged to have bullied and emotionally abused employees and members.

Two additional external reviews were undertaken, including one by GRACE, a leading nonprofit that investigates church abuses, to assess how leadership communicated with congregants.
When the 64-page GRACE review was released in November, church leaders, citing privacy, pared it down to an 18-page summary. That summary nonetheless included a section devoted to race, laying out numerous complaints from people of color without citing identifying information or quotes.

The review noted that leaders of the Chinese fellowship felt the church had “stopped supporting the ministry.” It cited an elder who brought forth a survey he had personally conducted on racial attitudes at the church. His survey, the report said, was met with “silence” from the lead pastor, staff and other elders.

In 2022, church leadership asked members of a Sunday school class meeting online to discuss race and faith to stop meeting.

“The Chapel Hill Bible church had turned from a church that celebrated diversity to a church that had become inhospitable and unwelcoming to non-majority-culture people,” said Young Whang, an associate professor at the UNC School of Medicine who served as a deacon, chair of the deacon board and elder for three terms before resigning in 2022.

Young and his wife, Sarah, built up a Korean fellowship at Chapel Hill Bible Church during their 20-plus years as members. He posed with a church anniversary book showing the fellowship. Most of its members have now left the church; so have the Whangs.

Young and Sarah, a family physician, joined the church in 1999. Despite limited Korean-language skills (both grew up in the United States), the couple took it upon themselves to build a Korean-language fellowship. They pleaded for help in ministering to these newer Christians. They even sought out Korean ministry candidates they hoped the church might hire. The church leadership passed on their recommendations.

Several months after their resignation, the church hired an Argentine of Korean heritage as the college minister.

But the Korean ministry is no more; the Chinese fellowship has been decimated by departures. One of 18 lay elders listed on the website is a Chinese American. The rest are White.

It took Sandy and Tin-Lup Wong a little longer to leave. They had been alienated from the church ever since Sandy was asked to care for the children at the women’s retreat. But there were many other insults.

Sandy Wong said church leaders routinely ignored her, walking away as she was talking to them.

One day when she was playing outdoors with the children, she fell and fainted. None of the adults also supervising the children came to her aid.

“I was so hurt, not just by the way they treated me but because they are doing God’s work,” she said.

On March 25, 2023 a group of 50, mostly ex-members of the Bible Church, gathered in the sanctuary of a Methodist church in Chapel Hill for a “service of lament and healing for those wounded by the church.”

Many people of color who had left the church attended.

The group told the Methodist minister who hosted them they did not want any preaching. That might be too triggering. They read psalms and scriptures and sang songs instead. The Methodist church arranged for a few prayer ministers to be on hand.

The service concluded with “It Is Well With My Soul.” Old friends then embraced and prayed for each other’s healing. They vowed to support one another in lieu of the church that had failed them. Then they began talking of organizing more services for those wounded by the church.

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. . . Jay Thomas, hired as pastor in 2011, is himself biracial; he was born in India and came to the United States as a boy.
Many of (the church’s) non-White members were Asian, reflecting Chapel Hill’s demographics: 13 percent of the town’s residents are of Asian origin, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, making them the town’s largest minority group. (Blacks constitute 10 percent of the population).

But during Thomas’s time as pastor, Chapel Hill Bible has reversed years of interracial progress. . . .

[The church declined to respond to a reporter’s inquiries.
“We do not feel it would be beneficial to God’s work in our church or the good of former members who are brothers and sisters in Christ to participate in your inquiry,” Thomas wrote in an email.]
— Religion News Service