Cornerstone Community Church united by faith

It’s about 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning, still the most segregated hour in America. Here, though, in this one spot tucked away off U.S. 29 just south of Lynchburg, the arms raised in praise range in hue from alabaster to mahogany.

More than 100 congregants of Cornerstone Community Church have gathered in His name. They sway to the church band’s music as the choir sings harmony. Morning light shines through blue, red and yellow stained glass onto the varied hues below.

Cornerstone members meet these days in borrowed space in Lynchburg Seventh Day Adventist Church while awaiting construction of their new church off Old Graves Mill Road. They had to leave their old one,
rented space in a former supermarket, because it was part of an Old Forest Road shopping center slated for demolition to make way for a Walmart.

Wherever the Cornerstone family meets, it does what congregations generally do: sing, pray, and listen to scripture and the pastor’s message.

Today, as usual, Pastor Willie Taylor takes the microphone. The middle-aged black man, widely known as a former E.C. Glass High School basketball coach, was called 12 years ago to lead what was then still a predominantly white congregation.

Quiet transformation

Church estimates put the 200-member congregation’s mix between 60 percent to 70 percent white and 30 to 40 percent black. On this Sunday, the ratio appears to hover somewhere close to 60/40.

This is not the only congregation in Lynchburg where people of different ethnicities worship together. It remains, nonetheless, far from the norm, in Central Virginia and nationwide.

Curtiss Paul DeYoung is a university professor who helped write the book on racially mixed congregations, “United By Faith.” He says the observation made by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. more than 40 years ago that 11 a.m. on Sundays was the most segregated hour in the country remains true today.

“We are seeing some improvement,” DeYoung told The News & Advance, although not enough yet to shift statistics significantly.

He estimates 5 percent or fewer of the country’s Christian congregations could be called truly multicultural. By multicultural, he means no one group represents more than 80 percent of a congregation.

Of the 5 percent, DeYoung says he and his colleagues believe that maybe half are congregations in neighborhoods in transition. So, while mixed now, the congregations might not remain multicultural.

Cornerstone, meanwhile, has gone about its business, slowly growing increasingly diverse with little notice in a town where most outside attention tends to focus on megachurches.

There has been no mandate at Cornerstone to achieve any particular mix, the pastor says. The church does make efforts, though, to recognize its diversity and to maintain it.

“We choose to believe it can happen,” Taylor says. “We open the door to it happening.”

There is hope for true multiculturalism, he says, because God can heal.

“People want hope,” he says. “We offer hope.”

In the beginning

The church was founded in the 1970s as Faith Christian Fellowship, meeting in the basement of a music business and other borrowed spaces until it found its first real church home on Park Avenue. Somewhere along the line, the church changed its theological outlook and its name.

It looked like an all-white congregation to Sam Dolsey and his mother Annie when they began attending sometime in the mid-1980s.

Dolsey thought he and his mother were the only people of color. They didn’t realize one woman in the congregation was light-skinned, Dolsey says.

He says he joined the nearly all-white church because it was a teaching church rather than a preaching church. Preaching churches had been the norm in his experience.

Initially, Dolsey says he was criticized for going to the white church. His response wasn’t to quit, but to get others to come, too. One of those he invited happened to be Taylor, who later became the pastor.

Dolsey believes “the church has the answer to racism.”

Years later as he contemplates the truly mixed church Cornerstone has become, he says, “God has really blessed us as a group.”

Some people now come to the charismatic church because they want the diversity, he says.

“Cornerstone Community Church has a unique flavor that appeals to many who have grown tired of meaningless tradition and racial antagonism,” the church’s Web site states. “When you visit, you will quickly become aware of the atmosphere of friendliness and acceptance.”

Liberty University professor David Earley knows leaders of several congregations around the country that have become truly multicultural. He cites several factors that could play parts in a church becoming multicultural, including the principal factor: “Jesus loved and accepted people.”

If love and acceptance are part of a church’s DNA, it will be primed to welcome all, he says.

Other factors he lists include an outward focus and being able to offer hope to those who need it, hope that can be offered because God is present.

Earley notes that in the Bible’s book of Acts, the church spreads to Antioch, a first-century multicultural city. True multicultural churches have a commitment to reach out to every person, just as happened in Antioch.

Building bridges

Elder John Dateo found himself at Cornerstone when a spiritual group that met in someone’s home decided to start going to the church instead. He was drawn initially to the singing and praise, so different from the somber tones he had once known as church worship.

“You could express yourself,” he says, much the way one can release one’s feelings while part of a crowd at a football game.

As he stayed on, Dateo says he found he could ask questions of people from backgrounds quite different from his own without fear of offending.

One person he could ask was the pastor himself. Just as Dateo, who comes from Pittsburgh, grew up in a predominantly white world, Taylor, a North Carolinian, grew up in a predominantly black world.

The church has smaller groups for people with shared interests or circumstances. The groups, which meet each week, have varied interests, such as fostering discipleship and living in later years.

The groups offer a chance for people to get to know one another better in more casual settings.

Maybe knowing that those who choose to be there have a bias toward understanding one another helps smooth over cultural differences that can range from worship to music to food. Such differences are inevitable and tend to present some of the biggest challenges to multicultural churches, according to another book on mixed churches, “We Are the Church Together.”

To keep it from seeming as though any one culture is favored at Cornerstone, the leadership is mixed. Of the three elders, two are black and one is white, while the elders in training and all other leaders are mixed, too.

The leadership works out, Dateo estimates, to 50/50.

Family values

Dateo says of Taylor, “He has a true pastor’s heart.”

The caring value permeates church culture, Dateo says. “All of a sudden you don’t see color anymore,” he says.

“There should be no color in Christ,” says Minerva Taylor, the pastor’s wife.

She believes God gives people gifts that can be used for His purposes. Her husband’s is as a coach.

As a pastor, she says, “He’s coaching, but it’s a different kind of coaching.”

Dateo says when he first began going to Cornerstone, “I was in shock at the love people demonstrated.”

They reached out in a number of ways, he says. The pastor and his wife, for example, invited others to their home for meals.

Dateo remembers seeing others come into the church, people who were troubled. Over time, he says their countenances would brighten.

“I thought, ‘This stuff is real,’” he says.

“People respond when you love them,” Dateo says. “Our leader is an example of that.”

The result, fellow elder Dolsey says, is that people who would once have never known one another have been friends now for 10 or 20 years. They have become a church family.