Then of course there are bigger things that matter, like who do I see up there in the congregation? Do I see myself up there? Well, I don't.

We've done a lot of studies to see when they do happen, why, and I mean there's a variety of reasons. But one, it starts with a commitment where they decide this is going to be who we are. Maybe it's out of their faith, a new way of looking at their faith, that we must be integrated across race.

I think of myself as a problem-solver. I want to go in and help the director and the writer to get the best they can out of the text they're working with.

We go where our family goes. We go where our friends are, and because our social networks are so segregated by race, we end up with what we have. We also find that, you know, if you're immigrants, you're not part of that history.

Scripture is vast, and people can pick and choose what they emphasize, and so for hundreds of years verses that said that you are to welcome the stranger, that with Christ there's neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, we've broken down the dividing wall with the original church, where Christians were first called Christian was the church of Antioch in which for the first time you had Jews, Gentiles of all different ethnicities come together as one people. That's when they were called Christians.

So different groups have different definitions, and then they clash on those. So it takes adept leadership to say we're going to work through these.

I think it's easier, I really do, because of not having that similar history, so that's why I think two-thirds of these mixed congregations are either white with Asian and Hispanic, or black with Asian and Hispanic.