At 11 a.m. each Sunday — labeled by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as one of the most segregated hours in Christian America — an Appalachian church goes live on YouTube and Facebook. Organ chords and a rat-a-tat drum beat kick in. Then, in a city that’s 91 percent white, a Black pastor leads a congregation in a theme song that sums up his ministry. “One Lord, one faith, one baptism and I’ll tell it everywhere I go,” the Rev. Darrell Cummings sings in a voice grown gravelly after four decades of preaching, 31 years of that at Bethlehem Apostolic Temple in Wheeling, W.Va.

How the service unfolds — both in-person and during the broadcast segment — hints at that telling. A white choir member sings backup. Instrumentalists are Black. Songs include “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” — a hymn many evangelicals would know by heart — and “I Don’t Know Why Jesus Loved Me” from the late gospel artist Andraé Crouch. When it’s time for prayer and scripture reading, both are led by a soberly suited Black deacon and a white woman whose tattoos peek out from her dress. They stand side by side at the front of the church.

Despite the ways the pandemic has made attendance difficult, that diverse mix repeats among the people in the pews at the historically Black church — founded by a Black elder from Philadelphia when West Virginia’s split from Confederate Virginia was still a living memory. Before the global health crisis, the Pentecostal ministry’s 50-some weekly attendees were about 60 percent Black and 40 percent white, according to Cummings’s estimates.

Cummings notes that such things don’t happen by accident. From choosing songs to guest speakers, he says he deliberately forges a worship experience intended to build interracial connections. “We’re not a Black church or a white church,” he explains. “We’re just a church.”

His intentional approach is not an isolated one in America, but his racially diverse congregation is a rare outcome among historically Black churches, says Michael Emerson, who has studied church demographics for two decades. He co-wrote a 2020 data analysis of the National Congregations Study, which collected statistics in 1998, 2006-07, 2012 and 2018-19 from more than 5,000 congregations. Although the analysis found multiracial congregations — where no single racial or ethnic group makes up more than 80 percent of membership — have nearly tripled in the nation over the span of 21 years, most of that diversity comes from the addition of people of color to churches with white pastors, not white churchgoers attending Black churches.

Only 2.5 percent of U.S. congregations are both multiracial and have a Black pastor, Emerson says. When it does happen, that combination is generally connected to either attendees who are in interracial marriages or a “superstar” pastor, a known and well-regarded leader in the community like Cummings.

But, Emerson says, both those factors are more likely to be present in metropolitan centers with diverse populations. Which means that Bethlehem Apostolic — a diverse Black church in a mostly white, nonurban area — may well be nationally unique.

Cummings’s faith philosophy is not limited to his Sunday service. Bethlehem Apostolic floods social services into the community, with the recipients reflecting the population outside the church’s modest Main Street building. It is mostly white people who are getting coronavirus vaccines, attending youth sports clinics, picking up backpacks loaded with school supplies and standing in line for holiday food baskets. “We’re just showing love,” Cummings explains.