Clarence Shuler says God’s creation of humans in varied hues demonstrates a divine endorsement of diversity — but not all of God’s followers agree.

Now he’s providing Christian organizations with diversity training, something that could have helped him during his life of many firsts.

In the 1970s, he was the first Black player and co-captain on the basketball team at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute.

“Students would not talk to me,” he said of his early days on a campus as one of a dozen Black students in an 1,100-member student body. “But when my freshman basketball season started, I went from the outhouse to penthouse.”

In Colorado Springs in the 1990s, he was the first to manage a department ministering to Black families at Focus on the Family. In 2007, he became the first Black member of the pastoral staff in First Presbyterian Church’s century-long history.

Shuler now works to eliminate racism in churches and Christian organizations, a mission he says likely will remain unfinished until one of two things happen: Christians are renewed by the transforming of their minds, or Jesus returns.

Calls for help

Some ministries call Shuler for help after an incident of alleged racial discrimination. Others call out of a desire to make their organizations more representative of the diverse people they employ and/or serve.

One local international mission agency hired Shuler to present his “biblical diversity training” to employees as part of its strategic plan for the coming years:

“It’s our hope that this training will equip us to empathetically understand our nation’s multicultural context, more effectively come alongside and serve the body of Christ in its various forms, be more culturally sensitive and equipped to engage in authentic friendship with people from diverse backgrounds, and expand (our) welcoming of others in shared global mission.”

In a session this month, he reminded the agency’s employees of the Apostle Paul’s teaching that believers should transcend sinful divisions over culture, race and sex. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

“Diversity is God’s gift to the church,” says Shuler, who came to faith through the ministry of bestselling author Gary Chapman. As The Gazette previously reported, the two still work and write books together half a century later. Their latest is 2022’s “Life-Changing Cross-Cultural Friendships: How You Can Help Heal Racial Divides, One Relationship At A Time.”

“But white Christians,” he says, “have done a poor job of talking about racism, justice and oppression, and showing care and concern for marginalized people compared to secular groups and the business community.”

Marriage counseling to diversity training

Since 1983, Shuler has done marriage counseling and training through his nonprofit ministry Building Lasting Relationships. In 1999, he did his first diversity training with employees of Moody, which published the first of his dozen books.

He says his marriage and diversity work share a common challenge: to embrace and work through conflict by understanding the other person’s uniqueness and listening to their concerns.

“Most of us want everyone to be like us,” says Shuler, a chaplain with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, “but they’re not like us. God’s answer is: I want genders, cultures and races to learn from each other as students of each other’s journey.”

His diversity training typically hits a number of key points:

• God created many varieties of skin color, but race is a human creation, a social construct that societies invent and enforce.

• Racism has been part of the American story from the beginning.

• Most minorities in the U.S. experience racism as a part of daily life, while members of the majority don’t experience it this way and give it less thought.

• People in the majority need to value the lived experiences of minorities, as Jesus did with the Samaritan woman, even if it this sometimes makes them uncomfortable.

• Fear of “the Other” — particularly as American demographics become more multi-hued — reveals a lack of faith in God. Jesus taught that “perfect love casts out all fear.”

Shuler says some of these insights come from critical race theory, a once-abstract academic discipline that has become a culture war battleground. Focus on the Family, his former employer, distribute a five-part video series claiming CRT promotes “lies perpetuated by spiritual darkness” and “wokeness.”

Shuler said he had never heard much about CRT until white Christians who hadn’t read any of the material told him how evil and “socialist” it was.

He never studied CRT texts until whites in his Christian writers group asked him to explain it to them. Doing so took months of study.

Shuler doesn’t buy 100% of CRT but says Christians who are serious about addressing America’s racial issues should study it for themselves and see what it has to offer.

“CRT questions the lines of division and wants those lines removed,” he said. “That’s what Jesus wants.”

Clarence Shuler presents his biblical diversity training to Denver Rescue Mission employees.

Courtesy photo

Book cover for “Life-Changing Cross-Cultural Friendships: How You Can Help Heal Racial Divides, One Relationship At A Time” by Gary Chapman and Clarence Shuler.

Clarence Shuler