National Collegiate Week promoting racial unity. Ironic? I can't decide.

I'm personally challenged with reaching specific people-groups without further isolating them at the same time. I'm sure I'm not alone in struggling with that balance. For instance, National Collegiate Week is all about recognizing that college students are a unique group within society and as such should be addressed, trained, outreached to, and even perhaps allowed to worship separately in their own environment. Many churches have worship services intended specifically for unique peoples (young adults, traditional-music-lovers, cowboys, whatever).

Yet on the other hand we talk about the necessity of a racially diverse congregation as if race were a "special case" of people-groups that should be integrated together while most other people-groups are being more and more divided and segmented.

The irony for me is that an incredibly segregated group of people (college students) are being challenged to desegregate by race ("the college students we are segregating from the rest of the church need to be desegregating among themselves, racially-speaking").

Revelation repeatedly speaks of unity between every tribe and language and people and nation. The more I reflect on those passages and on current Christian culture the more I like the push for racial diversity and become more and more uncertain about efforts to further segment (and essentially define ourselves) based on anything other than our mere Christianity.

Are we being intentional to worship among a racially diverse peoples yet at the same time trying to segment ourselves based on other, equally trivial, preferences and demographics such as age or worship styles? It sounds inconsistent at best and hypocritical at worst.

I know there are issues with this attitude such as, "So do I speak Korean to a bunch of Anglo-Saxons and do I speak 'modern' to a bunch of 'postmoderns'?" and I get that. Jesus, Paul, and others seemed to know their audiences very well and interact with them accordingly. However, they interacted with children, elderly, Samaritan, Jew, gentile, women, men, shepherds, and kings. They accepted everyone. They interacted with everyone. They worshipped with everyone. I'm not sure that "demographic-based" churches or churches that segment themselves along these demographic lines are mimicking this all-inclusive attitude. Seems very much a "separate but equal" mentality.

That said, I totally understand and appreciate the very difficult challenge college ministers have of balancing between relevant ministry and segmented ministry.