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"My oldest daughter was married from that church; my husband was buried from that church." The voice on the radio was choking up with emotion. "I put a lot of money, a lot of hard work, a lot of time into that church, and I hate the idea of people of that ..." the speaker paused "... moving in like that. And I don't feel like it's my home church anymore."

In my living room, I listened with a mixture of fear and fascination to the words being broadcast by WAMU. "That church" was Calvary Presbyterian in Alexandria, the congregation I served as pastor from 1989 to 2000, and the speaker was a woman who has been a member of the congregation since 1955. I had spoken with her privately about her concerns, but it was startling to hear her anguish aired publicly, as part of a 1996 National Public Radio feature on Calvary's changing racial and cultural identity.

We were a formerly all-white church with 125 Ghanaian immigrants in a congregation of 350 adults, and our changing composition had altered the way we worshiped. One particular African-style service had deeply offended my parishioner's sense of dignity. Offerings were brought forward with song and swirling dance, accompanied by drums, synthesizer, and electric guitar. "If they want to worship that way," I heard her say, "fine with me. But don't bring it into my sanctuary. They were running up and down the aisle, hollering 'I'm happy, I'm happy,' waving a white flag. Well, as I say, if they want to do that, that's their business. But why do I have to sit and listen to it?"

Across America, immigrants are coming to church, just as they always have, and congregations such as Calvary are trying to find room for them in God's house. But where previous waves of immigrants were largely European, these new arrivals are coming from non-western countries with cultures and skin colors more discomforting to white Americans than that of Europeans. The missionaries our churches sent to Africa, Asia, and Latin America were successful beyond their wildest dreams: Those who heard their preaching are now coming to the United States and starting or joining churches here. These newcomers are often more openly passionate about the faith than are native-born Americans, and they shake up established churches by introducing new worship styles and beliefs.

It's been my experience that some American church members love these changes, and they celebrate the liberation of the church from racial segregation and traditional European worship styles. One of our elders said at the African-style service that he had "never felt the presence of the Spirit so strongly." But others feel a profound sense of loss, and are driven by an obligation to maintain the traditional terms of their relationship with God. My parishioner on the radio was clearly experiencing loss of comfort, tradition, and control in the church in which she had long worshiped, and she mourned the corruption of what must have been, for her, a pure form of traditional worship.

Diversity versus purity is yet another way to describe the liberation-obligation dichotomy, and it is one that creates a particularly tricky balancing act for leaders of the church. An enormous challenge for pastors today is to provide quality pastoral care to members who are threatened by change, even as we help our congregations incorporate the immigrants who increasingly will fill our pews.

Economic and political chaos in Africa has led to an increase in emigration, a trend that will surely continue. By the mid-90s in Alexandria, three Ghanaian groups were worshiping within a two-mile radius: one Pentecostal, one Seventh-day Adventist, one Presbyterian. These immigrants bring with them true evangelistic zeal, sparked by the phenomenal growth of the church in Africa. That continent's Christian population rose from 8.5 million in 1900 to 285.7 million in 1993, according to David Barrett, a statistician specializing in churches. He estimates that the number of African Christians will reach 760.1 million by 2025.

In the next generation, we may see a flow of missionaries not to Africa, but out of Africa. Stephen Nkansah, an evangelist trained in Ghana who joined Calvary in 1993, started the Ghanaian Presbyterian Fellowship, which was responsible for most of Calvary's African growth. In the American Catholic Church, fewer and fewer men are answering the call to the priesthood, but in Africa, the number of seminarians has almost quadrupled over the past 25 years.

Our country continues to hold a strong attraction for Latin Americans as well. There are now 26 million Hispanics in the United States, many of whom are Catholic. David Early, a spokesman for the United States Catholic Conference, predicts that "by 2010, the majority of Catholics in the United States will be of Hispanic descent." Many parishes now have Spanish-speaking priests to meet this demand, and Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles requires all new priests in his archdiocese to be able to speak Spanish. The St. Anthony of Padua parish in Northern Virginia offers six masses: three in English, three in Spanish. Mariachi bands contribute to the liturgy in many congregations.

Christians are also pouring in from Asia. After Latinos, Filipinos are the largest immigrant group in the American Catholic Church. Korean churches are popping up all over, often sharing space with American congregations but maintaining a separate identity (witness the number of Korean signs in front of Protestant churches in urban areas). Christianity in Korea is a real Presbyterian success story: American missionaries took the gospel to the country in the 1800s, and by 1997 there were between six million and eight million Presbyterians in Korea -- twice the number in America.

It's important to note that not all immigrants are diversity-hungry proponents of the exodus; many are as concerned with purity of worship and community as the most passionate American covenant-keepers at Calvary Presbyterian Church. When immigrant Christians reach the United States, they either form a new congregation or join an established church; the former is the Protestant norm, the latter more common among Catholics. There are an estimated 7,000 Latino congregations in the United States, and as many as 3,000 Korean immigrant churches. This number could easily soar into the tens of thousands, however, since these churches are often informally organized and hard to count. Calvary has a small, Spanish-speaking Pentecostal church meeting in its basement, and I doubt it appears on any "official" list of churches.

The desire to worship in their own language is what first motivates purity-conscious newcomers to form separate congregations. A second motivation is cultural transmission: Making a church is a way of creating a community within which children can be brought up in the traditions their parents want to pass on. Of course, when these traditions run counter to American sensibilities, conflict can arise. In the early 1990s, Calvary rejected a request to share its space with a Korean Presbyterian congregation, in large part because the Koreans refused to ordain women as elders.

Concerns arise on the immigrant side as well. For example, the theologies of American Protestant Christianity often seem excessively modernized to these foreigners. African Christians are puzzled by discussions of issues such as the ordination of gays and lesbians. They were raised to think of homosexuality as an abomination, and they wonder why the American Church would even consider being open to such a sexual orientation. At Silver Spring Presbyterian Church in Silver Spring, Maryland, the church's desire to be inclusive of gays and lesbians has created tension between African immigrants (who now make up more than eighty percent of the congregation) and progressive white members, who include gays and parents of gay children. The African concern for purity is not easily reconciled with ever-increasing American tolerance of sexual diversity.

There are other differences as well. As immigrants arrive in large numbers, they are "creating a younger, more colored, and more conservative Protestant Christianity," according to Stephen Warner, a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied immigrant churches. Their conservatism is theological, not political; they do not necessarily agree with American conservatives on social policy. Warner observes that Catholic parishes are "becoming more Hispanicized -- more devotional. The statues that were removed from churches after Vatican II are returning."

Sadly, immigrants sometimes form separate churches because many established churches will not accept them. They go looking for a congregation that is charitable and comfortable with cultural diversity, but then they run into barriers set up by clarity-obsessed cultural purists. Nkansah tells the story of a cab driver friend who took a fare to Potomac, in Montgomery County, Maryland, and then decided to attend a service at a Baptist Church in that area. He walked in -- and the congregation phoned the police, describing him as a trespasser. He said, "No, I am a Baptist, from Ghana." They insisted he was trespassing. Cameroonian Sam Takunchung recalls that the First Christian Church of Lubbock, Texas, refused to serve him communion, even though the pastor had just intoned the words, "This is Jesus Christ's table, people shall come from everywhere to it."

More subtle forms of rejection occur when an American Church misunderstands -- with all good intentions -- what immigrants want. "I know and love Africans," says the Reverend Thomas Rook, former missionary in Cameroon and associate pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, but "to know Africans is to know people with problems -- money problems, family issues, passport and visa concerns." In his eyes, Africans are defined by what they need. Yet some Africans leave churches like Fourth Presbyterian because they are not given sufficient opportunity to serve -- they want to give as well as receive. James Acquaah left Fourth Presbyterian to become part of Ebenezer, a church formed in the mid-90s for Africans, because he thought he could better help an immigrant church. "If you are in a church, and you don't have much to do," he reflects, "eventually you get bored. But here I am very much involved."

So, what hope is there for the successful incorporation of immigrants into American Churches? Can exodus-inspired diversity ever overcome covenant-keeping purity? At Calvary, our Ghanaian Presbyterian Fellowship brought newcomers into full active membership in the church, but we continued to meet resistance whenever an African-style offering was proposed. We had better results inviting Ghanaian pastors to assist me with communion, recruiting Africans to teach church school and serve as elders, and occasionally using conga drums to call the congregation to worship. On Easter 1997, our sanctuary choir was joined by the Ghanaian singing band, Nkansah helped me to lead worship, and the service was followed by an international potluck dinner. Perhaps one way to racial and cultural harmony is through the stomach.

The challenge for integrated churches is to create rituals and symbols that incorporate both the native and the immigrant experience, notes sociologist Nancy Ammerman of Hartford Seminary, and to help immigrants move into positions where they have the power to make decisions. The Catholic Church has been a leader in doing this. Years ago, parishes were established along ethnic lines, and worshipers would attend either a German Church, an Italian Church, or an Irish Church. Purity was seen as being more important than diversity, and it was certainly more satisfying to members of the immigrant groups themselves. Today, however, bishops are working to bring newcomers into established parishes, and pastors are putting immigrants on parish councils so that their churches will be forced to deal with ethnic differences and, with any luck, be enriched by them.

"We of European descent can learn from immigrants' beliefs and practices," says Early, of the U.S. Catholic Conference, "and how they see faith and life as a whole. Their faith colors their entire existence." The newcomers deliver a challenge to Americans who see religious devotion as a Sunday-morning-only phenomenon, or as a limited commitment. Certainly the Hispanics who meet in Calvary's basement would worship seven nights a week if they were allowed to do so.

As difficult as it is to incorporate immigrants gracefully into established churches, doing so holds great promise for vital Christianity in the twenty-first century. Predominantly white mainline churches are declining in membership, but growth can come if they open their doors to the Africans, Latinos, and Asians moving into their neighborhoods. Of course, churches must set aside their attachment to cultural purity and be open to change -- and to a more spirited style of worship -- if they want to keep these newcomers. I'm convinced that the united congregations of every denomination will stand the best chance of holding onto the second generation of immigrants, a group that sees itself not as Ghanaian or Salvadoran or Korean, but as American.

Unfortunately, Calvary Presbyterian did not remain united long enough to provide ministry to this Americanized second generation. Concerns about purity, from both the African and the American perspectives, ended up trumping the desire for diversity. By 1999, Calvary's average attendance was close to 200 at the English-language morning service (up from 120 in 1989), and at least that number at the afternoon Ghanaian gathering, which was conducted in the Twi language and led by seminarian Nkansah, and the congregation began to wrestle with the question of whether to remain one congregation or split into two. Calvary tried to maintain some unity, with its "education hours," for example, but this led to overcrowding in the building and parking problems caused by the tripling or quadrupling of attendees on Sundays.

It would be disingenuous to suggest, though, that the tensions we began to experience were caused only by traffic snarls and scheduling snafus. We were drifting into separate camps, not pushed apart by hostility, but instead pulled apart by a natural human hunger for community with people of similar interests and background -- in other words, purity. These were tensions I didn't fully appreciate when I first became excited about the growing diversity of the church, and I have to admit that I was loath to see the congregation divide.

But it wasn't something I knew how to stop -- or even whether I should stop. Those who wanted to worship in English attended only the upstairs morning service, while those who desired the Twi experience showed up exclusively for what some African worshipers began to call "the downstairs church" -- a phrase that not only reflected the location of the gathering, but also, I suspect, a keen sense of being under the authority of the established church.

So what was wrong with this picture? Nothing, some would say. Plenty of big Protestant Churches have two different services -- or more. With the resources to offer a wide range of distinctive programs, some large congregations are doing very well. In the year 2000, more than one-half of America's Protestant worshipers were meeting in fourteen percent of the churches in the land, and the number of congregations that average more than 1,000 in attendance had grown to more than 8,000 (from only 93 in 1965).

Still, these so-called megachurches make up a tiny percentage of the nation's churches. According to the Barna Research Group, which publishes poll-based studies on contemporary church life, the majority of Protestant congregations remain small neighborhood churches. Another 25 percent, including Calvary, have between 200 and 400 members.

What bothered me at Calvary was the sense that I had failed in the multicultural goals that I had shared with many members of the congregation. One threat to our unity had been, quite simply, the differences in schedules between recent immigrants and long-term church members. Many of the newcomers take service jobs with evening hours, often working unpredictable shifts, sometimes on weekends. That means there is less chance that significant relationships will develop between newcomers and old-timers. "I am not an expert in multiculturalism," says Ken Pilkenton, an airline pilot who was a very active member of Calvary, "but have always found better understanding of others comes primarily from one-on-one and small-group contact."

Another even more important challenge stemmed from differing styles. New arrivals from Ghana brought with them the spirited Pentecostal style of worship that is sweeping a broad range of African denominations, as well as an organizational system that didn't always match our American form of church leadership. This tension was heightened for us by the fact that a Ghanaian "steering committee" had become a kind of shadow governing body within the church -- doing good work among Ghanaians, to be sure, but not always communicating effectively with Calvary's elders. Not that we American-born church members were always clear in our messages to them, either.

Halfway through 1999, our board of elders and I decided that Calvary was no longer functioning as one community, and made the decision to create a "daughter congregation" called the Ghanaian Presbyterian "Mission" -- the technical term for the first stage in the creation of any Presbyterian Church. I had come to think that two pure, healthy Presbyterian Churches would be better for the cause of Christianity than one diverse, unhappy congregation, and the majority of elders -- American and African -- agreed. The Ghanaian group, which began to meet at a nearby elementary school and gained the status of "church" in June 2003, is still being led by Nkansah, who is now a seminary graduate and ordained Presbyterian pastor.

Still, it was a painful move, especially for those Ghanaians who had to decide whether to stay at Calvary or go to the new mission church. American members who had worked hard for diversity thought it was a retreat or even a defeat. I began to feel strained relationships with many of the members I admire the most -- people I had worked with for years, side by side, to make Calvary a more welcoming and inclusive place. "In my life, it was the greatest missed opportunity I have ever seen," reflected Peggy Severson, who had been a member of the church for twenty years. "God led the Ghanaians here for a reason. God wanted us to figure it out."

The bottom line for me is that no church can make its worshipers want what they don't want. Ghanaians who desire a Ghanaian-Church experience will seek out such a congregation, no matter how hospitable and multicultural a liberation-oriented American Church tries to be. American Presbyterians who crave traditional American worship will look for an obligation-oriented congregation that offers such a service, regardless of how spirit-filled are the praises of a Ghanaian singing band. Purity is a powerful draw, especially in the midst of a larger culture that is becoming increasingly diverse, unpredictable, amoral, and chaotic.

Size also matters, and I'm beginning to believe that "thinking small" is the key to healthy church life in the future, regardless of whether a congregation is segregated or multicultural. There is evidence that megachurches are now experiencing slower growth rates, due in part to their lack of personal connection and intimacy. Some of them are responding by looking for ways to become more intimate internally -- establishing sub-groups, redesigning worship spaces to facilitate conversation, and, like Calvary, setting up offshoot churches. "As the church grows larger, the church must grow smaller," reflects Pierce Klemmt, rector of Christ Church in Alexandria, a 3,000-member Episcopal congregation that averages 1,200 worshipers each Sunday. "Whatever you do," he says, "meet in small groups" -- groups that can act like small churches.

In retrospect, I feel a sense of peace with Calvary's solution. I'm aware of one Florida congregation, the Orlando Community Church, that now intentionally establishes a new church whenever its membership reaches 340. It's a "multichurch" instead of a megachurch, operating on the assumption that a number of intimate communities of faith can do as much good as one large, program-rich corporate congregation.

But does this mean that we have given in to the often-lamented tribalism that is sweeping our world today? I hope not. I can only say that these types of choices are going to continue to shape the church in the new century. Diversity of cultures and disparity in lifestyles and schedules are going to force people to make more and more decisions about the character, time, and language of their worship services, and along with these choices will come concern about purity -- and divisions along cultural lines. Recently, a group of Korean Churches pulled out of our regional church body -- National Capital Presbytery -- to form their own Korean-language presbytery, and other immigrant churches are being planted in this country as mission churches of their home denominations -- not as American congregations. Whether their tribe is American or Ashanti, most people are looking for familiarity and a certain amount of purity when they come to church.

The good news is that attendance at Calvary's English-language worship service did not drop when the Ghanaian congregation was created, which told me that we had already become two distinct groups. And despite the fact that Twi-language worship and education was being offered at a new location, a good number of Ghanaians stayed at Calvary, preserving its multicultural identity. A visitor had to be comfortable with diversity to feel at home there, and someone who desired a more homogeneous group would do better elsewhere. But with strong and committed members in both locations, the future was looking bright not only for Calvary, but for its daughter congregation as well.

Churches that want to work with immigrants have a choice to make: Follow Moses on the path of liberation, or Abraham on the road of obligation. Followers of Moses will have to embrace the fact that they are participating in a true exodus, and that they will be walking a rough and rocky road toward the promised land of racial and cultural diversity. Practical steps for these congregations include: Inviting immigrant pastors to participate in the leadership of worship; finding ways to eat together and share cultures at international potluck dinners; electing immigrants to positions of leadership; and building understanding through one-on-one and small group contact. This is an exciting ride through the wilderness, and it's one that can expand an American congregation's appreciation of the richness of the universal body of Christ. In addition, it can help them to understand, perhaps for the first time, that the American Church belongs not to Americans, but to God.

Moses is not the only leader to consider when looking for guidance in this area. Followers of Abraham can also work across racial and cultural boundaries, but their focus needs to be on covenant-keeping and true respect for the purity of each community's worship and theology. American Churches that take this path should consider hosting an immigrant congregation within their building, or giving financial support to a "daughter congregation" that offers worship in another language. According to the theory that the church can grow larger, externally, by growing smaller, internally, there is no reason to believe that a healthy Christian community cannot be made up of several cultural groups. As long as acceptance of another Christian group is genuine, and communication across racial and cultural boundaries is strong, it is entirely possible that several distinctive congregations will be able to serve God in a complementary fashion.

In fact, many Christians -- whether they were born in Africa or Asia or America -- are claiming that they must preserve their distinctive cultures if they are to worship God with integrity. The church in America is, for them, a salad bowl instead of a melting pot, meaning that individual ingredients will keep their flavor and remain separate and distinct, instead of losing their individual qualities and becoming blended and indistinguishable. Finding room in God's house suddenly requires an expanded vision of what this house looks like, and it calls us to remember that Jesus said, "In my Father's house there are many dwelling places" (John 14:2).

Clearly, we want to share the same house. But that doesn't always mean that we have to occupy the same room.