A course I took in seminary was on the social sources of denominationalism with a book by that title. A general finding in the book and in our studies was that among Protestant churches, the non-liturgical ones tended to attract lower social class people and the liturgical ones tended to attract higher social class people. (Even your illustration about Lutherans being more like Episcopalians follows this logic.)
Using this classification, where would you place the large population American racial minorities?
As I recall, and it was over 40 years ago, the economic and education status is what they primarily looked at. Affluent minorities are likely to be in the more liturgical church bodies, like Episcopalians. The less affluent in the less liturgical churches - and even among them, Pentecostals are generally less structured than Baptist who are less structured than Methodists.
The Black man who joined my home congregation many years ago, was a medical doctor.
Since 40 years have passed, can you comment on whether there is any truth to this theory? Ultimately my point here is answering the question whether predominantly white denominations like the ELCA are intentionally excluding minorities, like some of our shrill voices who decry our demographics and demand quotas to "correct" it, or minorities are simply not attracted to our style of church, for whatever reason.
From that study, it is our style of worship that does not attract the lower socio-economic and less educated population. For a simple example, our worship services pretty much assume that the worshipers can read and understand English. (Consider that the NRSV is written at about a 10th grade level, it requires a good education to understand the scripture readings if that translation is used. I don't use it.) Consider how different our liturgies might be if we assumed that most of the gathered people couldn't read? How Lutheran would a liturgy be without hymnals or bulletins or projection?
Rick Warren in
The Purpose Driven Church talks about his target audience, "Saddleback Sam and Sally." They turn out to be pretty much the same type of people as Rick Warren: college educated, listen to the same radio station, watch the same TV programs, etc. In most congregations, the people that they can best reach and minister to are just like the people they already have reached and minister to.
Other statistics indicate that about 80% of new members came because a friend or relative invited them. Who are the friends of our members? They will be people who are pretty much like our members.
It seems likely to me that changes to our style of worship that would be more attractive to minorities are likely to be changes that the members don't particularly like. The members are members because they like what the church is doing.
I think that declining congregations continue to decline and refuse to make changes, because what they are doing is meeting the needs of the people who gather for worship. They are fearful that changes means that it will no longer be their worship or meet their needs. Unfortunately, the attitude is one about "me" rather than one about reaching out to the neighbor.
