It might be a little late for this comment, but I only just found your site from Chris Brooks' blog.

I'm finally following my curiosity about emerging/emergent churches and I appreciate you indentifying Solomon's Porch as quintessential. That helps me, literally, to get a picture of what the movement is.

The question is this. The young woman in the turquoise shirt and black beads said that you better believe that if Christ had been incarnated today, he would have cared about racism. She lists several other issues but racism is the first off her tongue.

Where are the black people in Solomon's Porch? The picture I saw of the quintessential Emergent church was all white. I'm not being inflammatory; I'm sincerely curious. Maybe it's a bigger question. How does the issue of racial reconciliation get addressed in the Emergent church?

Hey Rebecca,

I'm afraid I can't speak for Solomon's Porch as I've never been there, and have only hung out with Doug on a couple of occasions. However, I will be rubbing shoulders with some folks from SP this weekend at a women's retreat my wife is putting on (I'm leading a seminar), so if I have an opportunity I'll raise your question with one of them.

As for racial reconciliation in the broader emerging church, it's a big deal. One major stream of the EC is the whole progressive/social justice movement (e.g. Sojourners and the like). Obviously included in this is the effort for racial justice and reconciliation, and it's something that gets addressed a lot - in every larger gathering I've been a part of so far anyway.

Whether or not this leads to specifically multicultural churches, I don't know. I'm sure it does in some cases. However, as I'm sure you know, there are all kinds of hurdles and issues with trying to create truly multi-racial faith communities that affect all churches, not just the EC - issues of geography, economics, style, theology, structure, etc. Even in the EC I would guess that these hurdles still require a lot of work.

(For instance, our church is limited by simple demographics. Our community is 93% white, and most of the rest are Hispanics. A goal of ours is to build bridges among races, but when you're only talking about a few hundred minorities in the whole town, and our 1-year-old church of 30 people, it's just not that likely that we're going to be truly multi-racial at this point. Give us a few years.)

I feel I need to add .02 here. I don't know why, but I am uneasy not doing it. I know I'm late but oh well. First thought:
You say that Solomon's Porch is Quintessential of the Emerging Church. I think there needs to be some clarity here. The Emerging church is a very broad spectrum of Christians who are reforming their theology and living their faith in an 'emerging' or progressive way. Inside this vast spectrum is a small portion called Emergent. Solomon's porch may be typical of that, but of the Emerging Church? Not hardly. First if you ask 95% of emerging churches if Heaven and Hell are physical, they will correctly answer yes. They will correctly tell you that truth is not fluid as Solomon's Porch(SP) believes. He makes mention of leaving people alone and not bothering them where they are if they don't want to be. This is ridiculous. Jesus bothered everyone he came in contact with. He came to show that the traditions that they had made law were wrong. He bothered them though they probably didn't want him to. My point is that to label SP as quintessential to the Emerging Church is very misleading. I would be considered to be emerging but disagree with 90% of what is in this video. You can't change scripture to make people feel nice about themselves so that we can all get along. We might as well resurrect John Lennon and make him our leader. "Imagine" that.