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Reporting the Truth.
Restoring the Church.

This North Carolina Church Used To Be Multiracial. Then Came Jan. 6.

By Yonat Shimron
chapel hill
Musicians perform during a Palm Sunday service at Chapel Hill Bible Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on April 2, 2023. (RNS photo by Yonat Shimron)

Sandy Wong still cries when she tells the story.

A few years ago, she registered to attend a women’s retreat at her church, Chapel Hill Bible Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she had worshipped for close to 20 years. A Taiwanese immigrant and a mother of three adult children, she often volunteered to help care for children during services and other events. “I love kids,” she said. “They make me happy.”

But on the day of the retreat, the mostly white attendees asked if she would look after their children instead of participating in the gathering.

It wasn’t the first such humiliation for Wong, who often felt as if her race prompted fellow church members to think of her as the “help.” She was so distressed, she moved temporarily to Rockville, Maryland, where she and her husband, Tin-Lup Wong, own a townhouse. In December she moved back, and in early March the couple penned a letter of resignation to the congregation.

”Now we realize what we experienced was racial discrimination,” the Wongs wrote.

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wong chapel hill
Sandy and Tin-Lup Wong resigned from Chapel Hill Bible Church in March, saying the church racially discriminated against them. They are pictured in their Chapel Hill home on March 14, 2023. (RNS photo by Yonat Shimron.)

The Wongs are among as many as 200 people who have left Chapel Hill Bible Church in recent months — more than 20% of this once flourishing nondenominational congregation in the university town. Several have shared stories similar to the Wongs’.

They say church leadership over the past several years has turned inward, drawing boundaries around orthodox beliefs and dismissing or demeaning members’ concerns. That has led to the departures of many families of all races who complained of the church leadership’s lack of transparency and care.

But the loss of nonwhite members has been especially pronounced, especially since white evangelical Christian congregations have made efforts in recent years to repent of the sin of racism and court a younger, more multiracial generation. A 2020 study found that the proportion of evangelical congregations that were multiracial nearly tripled, to 22%, in 2018-19, up from 7% in 1998.

“There’s an absolutely sincere desire to get this right,” said Molly Worthen, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who writes frequently about evangelicals. “A large swath of conservative evangelicals are engaged in this conversation. My sense was that Chapel Hill Bible Church was in that mix.”

The Bible church seemed perfectly positioned to attract a diverse membership, and for many years it did, boasting that 20% of people attending were nonwhite. Jay Thomas, hired as pastor in 2011, is himself biracial; he was born in India and came to the U.S. as a boy. 

Many of those nonwhite members were Asian, reflecting Chapel Hill’s demographics: 13% of the town’s residents are of Asian origin, according to the U.S. Census, making them the town’s largest minority group. (Blacks constitute 10% of the population).

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

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Young and Sarah Whang were members at Chapel Hill Bible Church for more than 20 years. (RNS photo by Yonat Shimron)

“Sadly, we came to the realization that our church gives lip service to diversity but fails to engage and empathize in a real way with people of color,” Young and Sarah Whang, a Korean American couple, wrote in their resignation letter last year.

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.

The Bible church follows the standard evangelical handbook. Services are a mix of praise songs and hymns followed by a weighty sermon. (Thomas is a graduate of Wheaton College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. His wife, Rebecca, is the daughter of former Wheaton College President Duane Litfin.)

On its website, the church declares it is “a multi-racial, multicultural, multi-generational” congregation, and that diversity is one of its five “DNA components.” But after Thomas’ arrival, members began noticing that programs engaging the wider community — whether blood drives or a children’s choir that drew from neighborhood children — quietly disappeared.

chapel hill bible church
People mingle outside Chapel Hill Bible Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on April 2, 2023. (RNS photo by Yonat Shimron)

Congregants began to worry that the withdrawal from the community signaled a waning commitment to inclusion. “Over the years, many programs that brought in people from the community were canceled by the pastors,” said Lisa McConnell, who resigned from the church in February. “We witnessed the church becoming more homogeneous.”

Former church members said they noticed church leadership began to value people of high net worth or social standing, who tended to be white. Adherence to doctrine (the church views the Bible as infallible; women cannot serve as elders or lead pastors) became more important than congregational care, they said.

jay thomas chapel hill
Pastor Jay Thomas of Chapel Hill Bible Church. (Video screen grab)

When the church did address the killings of young unarmed Black people by police, especially in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, or the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes that began in 2021, it was fleeting and cautious.

In this, the Chapel Hill Bible Church was not unique. 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.”

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

“ … political 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.

Whang and his wife, Sarah, a family physician, joined the church in 1999. Despite limited Korean language skills (both grew up in the U.S.), the couple took it upon themselves to build a Korean-language fellowship.

chapel hill
Young Whang 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. (RNS photo by Yonat Shimron)

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, a group of 50, mostly ex-Bible church members, 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.

Yonat ShimronYonat Shimron is a national reporter and senior editor for Religion News Service.

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31 Responses

  1. It’s not clear to me what the problem is with drawing lines around orthodox beliefs, as this article seems to imply. It’s something the New Testament repeatedly insists on. I spent over 10 years in a church where it wasn’t really done well and nothing good came from it.

    Honestly, I worry about the direction the Roy’s Report seems to be taking lately.

    1. Gordon, first of all, I hope that isn’t your main takeaway from the article.

      Second, as described in the article, this church sounds like it’s all kinds of unorthodox (not to mention its heteropraxy).

      1. I don’t trust the articles clear bias against the church to accurately represent what is going on there in an objective manner. Therefore, I can’t say that the churches practice is heterodox. It would be helpful if, instead of making nebulous claims about “all kinds of unorthodox”, you named what specifically you think the article reveals to be unorthodox.

        Frankly, I hope that when some of the commenters on this site stand in judgement one day, they receive more grace than they seem to be willing to give to the church.

        1. The article’s “clear bias against the church?” Huh? So you think the multiple people it quotes and their experiences are… lies? Or half-truths? On what basis? What experiences do you have discerning such things that could help ensure you are right here?

          “All kinds of unorthodox” seemed self-evident to me from the article. But, sure, I’ll bite. Some examples:

          1. The pastor saying “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”—serious misreading of Scripture, in my view.

          2. Posting a redaction (!) of an investigation—that’s admittedly more bad practice than belief, but don’t you think there is bad belief under that practice? Like, “The call to be honest in Jesus’s name does not apply to us.”

          3. Ethnocentrism.

          4. “Sandy Wong said church leaders routinely ignored her, walking away as she was talking to them.” What about, “Whatever you did to the least of these…”? Or, “Love your neighbor?” Doesn’t pass the sniff test.

          5. Their “women cannot serve as elders or lead pastors.”

          Again, your initial comment risks minimizing the real harm that is being done in Jesus’s name there. Do the leaders *claim* to be drawing lines around “orthodox beliefs?” And yet the experience people describe having there is just unbiblical red flag after red flag. Hope you (and others) can see that. Jesus calls all churches to do better.

          1. I don’t find 1 and 2 very compelling examples. 3 and 4 are compelling, and, if true, are both issues the church needs to address, 3 being especially serious. I don’t find 5 compelling at all. It’s been a majority position for most of church history and is a legitimate interpretation of scripture. The fact that you even included it in your list makes me question where you’re really coming from.

            As I mentioned earlier, I spent many years in emergent/progressive leaning church environments and what I saw there left me very unimpressed, so perhaps I’m reacting out of that.

      1. Thanks Christopher. This site seems to be more and more just another gathering place for those who want to perpetually criticize, complain, and accuse, and for those who hate the church and the apostolic faith and wish to undermine it and justify themselves at every turn. It’s disheartening.

        1. I love the church, Gordon, and that’s why I report, sincerely believing that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Also, I don’t believe the controversy reported in this article has anything to do with orthodox beliefs. There’s one brief mention of the church drawing clear lines around orthodox beliefs. But the issues named by those leaving have to do with the church’s response to concerns regarding race issues and Donald Trump. I don’t see any of them saying they left because the church stood for orthodoxy. I’m not sure why you would make such sweeping, negative comments as you have made in this thread. That’s not like the Gordon I know.

          1. I apologize, Julie. I let my emotions and frustrations get the best of me. After spending a lot of years in more left-leaning Christian environments where I often felt personally out of place, where conservative evangelicals were often caricatured and unfairly represented, and where I watched a lot of people go off the rails of orthodoxy, I’ve become more defensive than I should be.

            I do think there’s a cottage industry that thrives on criticizing the evangelical church and that some of the commenters here seem stuck in that mode, but I should not have implied that you or the entire site is like that.

          2. Apology accepted. I spent time with you in one of those churches. And I share your frustration, as well as your conviction that compromising the truth never yields good fruit.

            I wish there weren’t so much to criticize in the evangelical church. I used to think it was mainly liberals leading the church astray. But now I see that tone-deaf and hypocritical conservatives are equally destructive. We must get back to being people who emulate Jesus, full of grace and truth.

        2. Mr. Hackman, I spent 15 years in one of the most liberal denominations in the country, and I too have a keen sensitivity to criticisms of what I would call the catholic orthodoxy of the early, undivided Church. (I understand you are an evangelical Protestant but in this we share some commonalities, I believe.) The issue of ordained women (not women in significant roles using their gifts to build up the Body of Christ) is definitely important and tentacular in its impact on other issues.

    2. The quest for “Orthodoxy” seems to be the latest claim of evangelicals and fundamentalists these past 20 years. Orthodoxy is in the eye of the beholder. Plenty of Greek, Russian, Roman Catholic and Anglican’s consider themselves to be the “Orthodox” ones and would consider a protestant, anabaptist type to be laughably unorthodox.
      IMHO, too many Christians of a conservative ilk spend an inordinate amount of time trying to out-Jesus everybody else. The “We’re the Only True Christians™” in the game kind of thing.

      1. The quest for orthodoxy is as old as the church itself and it is something New Testament has plenty to say about. Nearly every book of the New Testament warns against false teaching and admonishes it’s readers/hearers to stay true to the apostolic teachings. Orthodoxy is most certainly not in the eye of the beholder. To say it is is to reveal that you don’t understand the Christian faith.

  2. Francis Schaffer says it best, “Biblical orthodoxy without compassion is surely the ugliest thing in the world.”

    1. I agree with you and Schaeffer, I just feel like the article presents the issue in a biased way, as if it were automatically a problem to focus on orthodoxy, which is under constant attack in our day. The article also strikes me as having a definite bias against the church.

      1. Gordon, I am sorry but based on your comment to me and others I would say you neither agree with me or the quote from Schaffer.

        First, I don’t see a bias against the church in this article. What I interpret is the author pointing out the dangers of authoritarianism in leadership. It has basically crushed this church in the pursuit of biblical orthodoxy. Yes, creeds and doctrines are important but they are secondary issues. If the pastor, elders, deacons and church are not known for being loving then your orthodoxy is useless.

        Secondly, I love one of the great leaders of the Apostolic faith, St. Francis’s approach to leadership. He thought of himself and called himself mother. He told they other monks they already have a Father in heaven and he was their to love and nurture their faith and daily walk.

        1. See my interaction with Julie above to understand where I’m coming from. I overreacted, but I’ve spent a lot of time in environments where orthodoxy didn’t always seem like a high value and looking down on more conservative Christians was common. As a result, I’ve gotten jumpy about these matters.

          1. I’m not sure you overreacted, Gordon. When I read “The Bible church follows the standard evangelical handbook”, I think I had similar reactions to yours. It didn’t seem like a necessary or particularly helpful statement, but more of a divisive one. Which is very ironic given the theme of the article.

      2. Gordon
        I was a member of that church for a total of 10 years and this article reflects my own experience at that church which used to be a wonderful, biblically Orthodox Church with a great love for diversity. It changed and we left.

  3. A well written report, both moving and interesting. I think that the metaphors of “leadership …. [which has] … turned inward” and “drawing boundaries around orthodox beliefs”, are illuminating and fairly applied (at source and in reporting). Equally the observations about pulling back from community outreach and the dissolution of entities representing ethnic diversity. We needn’t then take sides or view what is reported as an end point. Rather we might seek to better understand all parties to a situation which is clearly causing deep grief and hurt to some. Why do we “turn inward” why do we “draw boundaries around our beliefs” why do we withdraw from the “community” around us.

  4. I think the problem is that they only considered that without considering shepherding.

    In other words, they were obsessed with just making sure people believed right in a harsh manner to the point where it wasn’t important that leadership cared for and shepherded people.

    Kind of again the under siege mentality where everyone is your enemy and you must win instead of being able to clearly and firmly hold to orthodoxy while having a compassionate heart to lead those who are in error to truth and caring about their struggles and weaknesses instead of assuming they are enemies and going on the attack to “defend” orthodoxy

    1. The Schaffer quote by Glen Gordon was right on. And the Bible also says that no matter what gifts we have if we don’t have love they are worthless.

      1 Corinthians 13:2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and **all knowledge***, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

      Knowledge and truth without love is empty.

      Orthodoxy without love is not Christianity, it is simply intellectual belief not a transformed mind and heart in humility knowing that we too were lost and going astray until God enlightened our hearts and rescued us.

      At least this is how I interpreted it. I realize this was not explicitly stated, but given what we commonly see happen and given the contrasting of truth with shepherding, I think this is a strong probability that was the problem.

      1. The quote from Schaeffer carries weight because he actually cared strongly about orthodoxy. One of the differences I see today is that often the church’s harshest critics don’t seem to have the concern for orthodoxy that Schaeffer had and in fact often seem to dismiss it as unimportant or actively work against it.

        Truth without love is indeed ugly, as Schaeffer observed, but love without truth ends up being false love and, in it’s own way, just as ugly.

  5. Sociologically, its useful to consider that orthodoxy is simply established collective understanding or belief, subscribed to by members of a community. So a dynamic allowing community coherence and occurrence. An aspect of religious or faith or political orthodoxy, is that subscription can and perhaps tends to, morph into conviction that the orthodoxy identifies truth and reality, perhaps exclusive truth and reality. The juxtaposition reported here, is between a particular orthodoxy able to be subscribed to by one ethnicity, and what orthodoxy would allow for wider inclusion of diverse ethnicities. The question or questions around orthodoxy, in this instance and generally, need not be a tightly tied to rightful theology, as some appear to imagine. Rather the issue of orthodoxy appears to have more to do with congregating or community.

  6. Enough with the January 6th references! I would not be surprised if some will want to add that day to the liturgical calendar. It’s like that one day has become a holy day to some. The pearl clutching has gone on long enough! It was not a good day for our country. MoveOn dot org!!

    1. I am not 100% sure why no mention of Jan 6 ought to be made. To me, that day places us before a choice: as Christ body, are we Christian Nationalists in Trump’s image or the furthest thing from it.
      Today, Fox News wrote a big check for having entertained for too long Trump-related right-wing falsehoods in the name of profit-making. Much, much more importantly, American Church in its search for power, has let Trumpism+ lead it astray. The Body and the congregations need to find their way back to Jesus before it’s too late.

  7. I am appalled that this happened in Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill of all places! Not Sparta, not Rocky Mount, not Chocowinity, but Chapel Hill, the uni capital of North Carolina.I didn’t believe the problem was Orthodoxy with out love, but I am beginning to see the problem.

  8. Here’s your problem…

    “The group told the Methodist minister who hosted them they did not want any preaching. That might be too triggering.”

    When followers of Jesus are triggered by the teaching of God’s Word, there’s a problem. If the Methodist minister wasn’t a qualified or gifted teacher (in other words did not have the gift of teaching) the group should have found a qualified and gifted teacher so the Holy Spirit could have ministered to them through the teaching of God’s Word.

    This last description of the group provides all the insight needed.

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