Crossroads Megachurch in Cincinnati, Ohio, Tries to Confront Racism Through Small-Group Course

Hahrie Han’s new book, “Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church” (Knopf), examines a single congregation rather than a broad survey. Han, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, follows four congregants at Crossroads, a megachurch in Cincinnati. The book is a short, close account, and Han makes no claim that her four subjects are statistically representative, even of Crossroads members.

Crossroads is among the largest and fastest-growing churches in the country, with eight campuses in Ohio and Kentucky that together host more than thirty-five thousand people a week, plus thousands more online. The church was founded in 1995 by eleven employees of Procter & Gamble and was intended, in the book’s account, for people “who didn’t like church.” Its members organize into hundreds of smaller groups that meet in homes, cafés, conference rooms, and parks. Han writes that the church has used the motto “Belonging comes before belief,” and it hosts affinity groups ranging from rock climbers to foster families, as well as, beginning in 2015, members committed to racial justice.

That year, Crossroads pastor Chuck Mingo preached about race relations after the fatal shooting of Samuel DuBose, an unarmed Black man, by Ray Tensing, a white University of Cincinnati police officer. According to Han, Tensing had occasionally attended Crossroads and was related to one of its founding members. Tensing was charged with murder and voluntary manslaughter. After two mistrials, the charges were dropped. Mingo helped develop a course on racism in the Church and the country more broadly, and the book takes its title from it. Twelve hundred Crossroads members signed up for the first session, which committed them to six weeks of dialogue.

The course, called Undivided, organized members into small, racially diverse groups that followed a handful of ground rules: expect to be offended, give grace, take risks, listen for God, and get honest. Han reports that the content was designed by Crossroads members for their own community rather than purchased from an outside provider. Participants described their experiences of race and racism, then examined bias, studied empathy, and prayed for repentance and healing. The final session included every group sharing a meal in someone’s home. The format now includes day-long workshops and seven-week discussion cohorts, and other churches around the country have adopted it. Practising reconciliation across racial lines, Han’s account suggests, was the central aim of the work (2 Corinthians 5:18).

Han places the church within a longer history. She describes Cincinnati’s nineteenth-century growth, the enforcement of Ohio’s “Black Laws” in 1829, and later civil unrest, including protests in 2001 after a white police officer killed an unarmed Black man, Timothy Thomas. Han also argues that the current racial politics of American evangelicalism, often associated with the MAGA movement and Christian nationalism, are neither universal nor inevitable. She points to the National Association of Evangelicals, founded in 1942, which resolved to shun bigotry and hypocrisy, and to Billy Graham, who initially advocated integration but, according to Han, kept his distance from the civil-rights movement, and who declined to attend the 1963 March on Washington.

Two of Han’s subjects are Jess and Grant, both white. Jess grew up in a family that held racist views, and she later struggled with addiction and served a prison sentence for burglary and forgery. After her release, she attended Crossroads and joined the Undivided program. By the end of the book, she has left her restaurant job to become a social worker with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Grant, a twenty-nine-year-old who was raised by conservative Methodists, volunteered to lead an Undivided group because his family is interracial; his parents adopted a Black boy when Grant was eleven.

Han describes Grant’s first session with a Black participant, whom she calls Sandra. “As he spoke, he became uncharacteristically nervous,” Han writes. “He had never before been apprehensive speaking about his relationship with his brother—but he realized he had never had this kind of conversation with Black people, let alone Black people he didn’t know.” Even after Sandra nodded as Grant finished sharing a story about his adopted brother, Grant was too afraid to make eye contact with her.

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