Essay on The book “This Side of Heaven: Race, Ethnicity, and Christian Faith”

The final part of the book “This Side of Heaven: Race, Ethnicity, and Christian Faith” is called “Engaging Racial and Ethnic Realities in Congregational Settings”. Since it relates to practical actions concerning racial and ethnic disparity, my aim was to choose the essay that offers objective and generalized strategy rather than the essay discussing particular issues of minority problems. Thus, I have chosen the last essay called “An Applied Research Strategy for Christian Organizations” by Alvaro L. Nieves. For me personally, the issues of racism and ethnocentrism seem very global and the ideas how to address these problems in practice would be very valuable, at least from theoretical point of view.
However, the content of this essay appeared to be partly disillusioning for me, since the essay in fact presents a brief compilation of project-like approach to research discussed from a Christian perspective, with emphasis to the local communities and related research. The beginning of the article was very similar to my personal thoughts: racial and ethnic issues are very deeply rooted, and after realizing how deep they are, and how global the problems appear, it seems that nothing can be done by one person or one community to improve this situation.
The idea to build a research strategy for local churches is actually a fruitful one, in my opinion, since the only approach to work with such global problems might be to address them locally, point after point. Thus, the beginning of the paper and its logical plan were of great interest for me. Unfortunately, the expectations caused by a promising title were not satisfied, since the described strategy is, in my opinion, mostly evident. However, there were several issues that contributed to my vision of what churches should do, and what information they need.
In the first part of the essay the strategy of gathering data (from primary and secondary resources) is discussed. Possible applications of collecting and analyzing data to racial and ethical issues are listed. The main of them are situations when (Nieves, 2007):
 A church is opened in a new area
 The neighborhood of an existing church is changing and it is necessary to analyze the changes
 When new attendees from the minorities have joined the church
 When racial or ethnic justice is disclosed in the neighborhood
Indeed, in real life churches might not be aware of ongoing problems, because of the lack of information and the lack of proper methods of analyzing this information. From this point of view, the strategy suggested in the essay is applicable and can easily be used in virtually any church. The overall goal proclaimed by Alvaro Nieves can be formulated as studying the needs of existing congregation, working in order to increase social justice. “I see the promotion of justice as the primary tool of evangelism in approaching a skeptical world” (Nieves, 2007).
Furthermore, the essay contains an outline of a plan for churches how to solve a particular problem. I absolutely agree that to approach to Christ’s kingdom on Earth churches need to act, and to plan their actions thoroughly. However, the description of the strategy described in the essay is very generic, and for the churches, details of the strategy will still have to be elaborated individually.
The steps of the implementation are quite reasonable. Firstly, Nieves suggests collecting background information, and analyses possible sources of information, such as Internet, local sources of information, U.S. Bureau of the Census, public libraries, and governmental entities. Secondly, the author states that goals, needs and objectives have to be identified. In my opinion, this is the most useful part of the article, since it presents clear steps, with examples.
The broad goal is determined as “the desire to enhance the role of a local church or organization in the promotion of social justice” (Nieves, 2007). There might be other goals; however, this one corresponds to the aims of the strategy proclaimed before. Furthermore, the needs should be identified, i.e. where the injustice or potential injustice exists. Next, the objectives have to be determined. According to Nieves, it is best to determine objectives as (Nieves, 2007):
 The condition to be remedied
 A finite population in which the condition exists
 A time frame in which change is to occur
 The amount and direction of change sought
Also, the need to take into account possible limitations and constraints is described. The process of determining objectives is quite detailed. It seems to be obvious, but it might be useful to those who are not used to implementing any projects or ideas.
In the remaining part of the article the author sets several examples of research analysis and using information for determining the problem. The examples are considered in detail. However, in my opinion, the practical use of such examples is very low, because they refer to specific examples and will not generally help those people who are not used to working with information. On the other hand, those who possess information processing skills will not benefit much form this article as well. It gives a structured list of steps that need to be done when identifying a problems and searching how to implement its solution. In general, I believe that this article can be useful to a very limited circle of readers, unlike the other three articles. For me it was useful as a means of structuring own thoughts and ideas, and presented a clear classification of problem solving steps. However, the usefulness of these steps for churches and for solving racial and ethnical problems is questionable. From a scientific point of view, though, this essay contributes to overall structured perception of the world, and might have a certain scholarly value.

References
Nieves, Alvaro L. (2007). An Applied Research Strategy for Christian Organizations, in Robert J. & Nieves, Alvaro L. This side of heaven: race, ethnicity, and Christian faith (ch. 19). Oxford University Press.