When I was a kid my Mom had a knack for creating banners for different societies & she would earn extra cash doing it. A church close to us asked her to make a Christmas banner of the birth of Christ. She made very elaborate 3-D sculptures from fabric and sewed them together into structures that looked like wall quilts. So she made Mary & Joseph & the baby faces out of brown nylons and made the hair out of black doll hair. The furniture and drapery swatches she used to create the background and clothing were lush & rich, the overall effect was as glorious as a stained glass window. We marveled over the results in our house, considering it her finest piece. The banner hung in the church initially over Christmas week and about a week after that my Mom called the minister to check in on the response. Apparently there had been some stir created over whether or not the three black faces of the holy family represented the actual congregation. The minister invited her to the next week's sermon so we all went & listened as he discoursed over the true nature of the man that would be Jesus, and the true nature of the man & woman who would have potty trained him & all that. Without being overtly preachy he outlined to the white congregation the fact that a child born in Bethlehem and living an entire life in a certain part of the world would no doubt bear the physical traits of that region as well as the race he was born into. Smart enough he was to bring into the context that even if one was to perceive God to have a race & to assume the race was Caucasian, the child also came from a mother who would not be and therefore no matter the perception of God's physical looks the child's looks could be surmised to have been dark in skin tone, and why, he concluded would it change any thoughts of God's gift to humanity and the Christian ability to love his child....
That was 1978.
The banner still hangs in the church with the little brown Jesus baby & his brown mum & dad.
My Mom & that minister continued a friendship built around endless hours of philosophical discussion until his death in the early 90's.