In the church today, teams need to be as broad and powerful as their mission. If you have a narrow mission (Reach out to everyone who looks just like me), then your team can be narrow in its variety too. But if you are aiming broader and higher (Reach my city; show that Jesus has something to say to everyone), then your team needs to be up to the task.

What does it take to create an effective, multi-ethnic church leadership team to reach a culture that’s increasingly diverse? EFCA Today spoke with several Evangelical Free Church leaders who are at different points in the process but passionate about their pursuit.

Jim Kallam, senior pastor of Church at Charlotte (N.C.) and chairman of the EFCA board of directors, admits to being the new kid on the block when it comes to multi-ethnic teams. For Jim, the process started about eight years ago, simply with the idea of “team.”

“I’m a strong leader,” he says. “I bring certain skills to the table that are important. But as the ministry grew and the church changed, I realized, It can’t all be totally driven by me.”

Once his church leadership started working as a team (in 1998), he recognized the need to go further. “I’m 52,” he says, “and I don’t want my staff to be a bunch of 50-year-old white guys who move this forward. I want younger folks to bring their passion; I want men and women. But the bigger piece for me is the idea of ethnic diversity.”

Church at Charlotte is a typical white suburban church in a predominantly white part of the city. So members have had to intentionally reach beyond their normal borders to touch the nonwhite community.

“For years,” Jim says, “my prayer has been that God would bring ethnic diversity. Yet if you were to look out over our congregation, you would say that my prayers have been unanswered. I eventually realized that if we’re going to see diversity, the team that leads this ministry has to be the picture of diversity we want for the congregation.”

And so the church’s leadership took the next step: hiring the first ethnically different staff member. In January 2006, Cedric Lundy, a 28-year-old African American, joined the team to give oversight to student ministries. (“Of course, it’s not like we’ve made one hire and now we’re done,” Jim says.)

Cedric walked into a team environment that was already bathed in authenticity as a core value. “And he tested it,” Jim says. When Cedric saw that his opinion would be valued and would bring change, he knew that the core value was real.

For example, Cedric felt the freedom to say that even the way Jim greeted visitors could make them uncomfortable. After introducing himself, Jim’s first question often was, “What do you do for a living?” That felt comfortable for most of the visitors to the primarily upper middle-class congregation. But Cedric clarified: “For a black man, that question immediately comes across as a threat: Are you sizing me up to see if I fit here?”

Cedric’s input is giving the leadership team greater sensitivity to everyone who visits Church at Charlotte. “While we’re celebrating,” Jim says, “we don’t want to stand back and think we’ve crossed a finish line. We have so much further to go.”

Two other EFCA leaders are ongoing examples to Jim in his church’s journey toward a multi-ethnic team and multi-ethnic impact in his city. Pastor Lincoln Washington and Glen Kehrein serve as teammates in their city: Lincoln leading Rock Church and Glen directing Circle Urban Ministries, both in Chicago.

Glen started the partnership with Lincoln’s brother, Raleigh, in the mid-‘80s, and it’s continued under Lincoln’s pastorate. “It’s a faith-and-works teamwork to accomplish the mission of building the kingdom of God,” Glen says. “We recognize that, individually, neither one of us can accomplish what we can accomplish together.”

All three men will quickly dispel one common misconception. “The natural response to wanting diversity on a team,” says Lincoln, “is to accessorize the team. Yet just putting a person of color on the team is not going to mean we’re diverse and multi-ethnic now. To see lasting change, the foundation—the core values—of the church have to be addressed first.”

“The point he’s making is absolutely critical,” Glen says quickly, “because multi-ethnic teams are for what reason? So that we can reflect our community better? I don’t see that necessarily as a biblical value. But it’s to reach our community and reach those who are forgotten. In the early church, the leaders had to be reminded to not forget the poor.”

Lincoln agrees. “It’s necessary for a church to have a heart for the poor and the oppressed. That’s biblical. And there’s a great likelihood that if they hold that core value, they will run into a group that’s racially different. That alone will cause them to develop a strategy to be effective in that area of ministry. That core value has to be there for the church to understand why it’s necessary to build teams around that.”

Even when the core value is in place, building a team that’s equipped for multi-ethnic ministry might well involve some serious internal changes.

“There are a lot of examples of evangelical organizations that brought people of color onto their staff,” Glen explains. “But they didn’t do what Jim Kallam is doing in the process: valuing all members and what they bring to the table. “They basically didn’t change the power structure—the access to decision making—and so when people of color thought they were joining a team in order to really contribute what God had gifted them with, too often they found that their input was seen instead as a hindrance.

“When a person of color [points out] things that are culturally insensitive,” Glen says as an example, “those [conversations] tend to slow down the process. People who are results-oriented grind against this because they see it as slowing down the train: This meeting is taking three hours. It only used to take one-half hour when we were all the same.

“Initially, those experiences of broadening a team can bring in a whole lot of conflict. It’s akin to if you’re single and living alone with your dog, Fluffy. There’s not a lot of conflict at home. But if you get married, conflict happens as you share life. Working though those conflicts [hinders] what you would ‘normally’ be doing. (If I hadn’t married you, I’d be watching a basketball game right now instead of having a conflict about leaving the toilet seat up.)

“We come to understand [these conflicts & conversations] as necessary in our family environment. But in issues of race and ethnicity, we [are tempted to] see them as hindrances rather than as valuable. Multi-ethnic teams won’t work unless we believe that our mission is to become something different than what we have been.”

Even when a church is committed to reaching its diverse culture; even when a church is committed to creating teams and doing the hard work of slowly making a difference; even then, multi-ethnic teamwork is a challenge.

“One of the harder issues,” Lincoln admits, “is when you don’t know what you don’t know, but your racially diverse team members do know, because they have experienced it. You have to—by a faith that seems almost blind—trust their perspective and adopt it as your own.”

Other difficulties? “When all members of the team don’t embrace the need for their personal change,” Glen says. “They are good with a multiethnic team; they’re good with ethnic brothers or sisters saying their piece of mind; but they themselves are not on any journey toward change. They see it as, ‘That’s just your thing.’ That will hinder the process.

“The most accomplished people in other areas are infants in this area,” Glen continues. “In fact, I was just at a meeting with a high profile pastor who is on this journey himself. He’s an extremely accomplished leader, but when he started addressing this area of race and multi-ethnicity, he said, ‘I have a lot to learn.’ His other ministry and life experiences were totally outside this realm.”

Yet even with the challenges that come from living by a new paradigm, the rewards are great. “When we’re working together, respecting each other, sharing leadership,” Glen adds, “it sends a powerful, powerful message of what the body of Christ is supposed to be about. People are drawn to that.

“I’d also like to say that this is not burdensome. I do not believe—I think statistics back this up—that the EFCA will grow if we don’t become proficient at reaching all people. Those churches that embrace that will experience a richness, a breadth of life experience and the vastness of God’s creative energy. We become transformed, and it’s exciting to be transformational leaders.”

Join Jim, Lincoln and Glen—and others across the EFCA—in building strong, multi-ethnic teams, with a vision big enough to reach entire communities.