This is part 2 of a four-part blog series on racial and cultural diversity. The material here is excerpted from a book I have coming out next year called Gaining by Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches that Send. Be sure to read part 1, part 3, & part 4.
A church can achieve remarkable unity-in-diversity when each member elevates his or her “third race.” [1] Think of your “first race” as whatever race or ethnicity you happen to be, and the “second race” as whatever races you are not. The third race is the new man that God has made you in Christ.
When you become a Christian, you don’t cease to be your first race, but you become a part of a new race, a third race. In that third race you find a unity with others who share it that supersedes any differences that come from your first races. In Christ, Paul says, there is no “Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” (Gal 3:28). He did not mean we cease to be Jews or Greeks any more than males cease to be males or that freemen cease to be free. Paul is saying that our identity in Christ becomes weightier than any distinctions of gender, culture, or socioeconomic status.
God is not color blind, and neither should we be. In the vision he gives us of heaven, we see him celebrating the multitudes of diverse and colorful people he has made. Revelation 21:26 says that he brings into heaven the “wealth and the honor” of the nations, which means the rich varieties of culture. God is not a vanilla God. He is a God of 31,000 flavors. All races find their unity in the fact they have one Creator, God; one problem, sin; one solution, the blood of Jesus; one baptism, Christ’s death; one hope, the resurrection of Christ; one fellowship, the Holy Spirit; and one love, the God of glory and salvation. That we will celebrate, and demonstrate, for eternity.
When our third race becomes our weightiest identity, unity becomes a possibility. We’ll always have ethnic preferences, of course, and there is nothing wrong with those. I don’t need to hide the fact that I was born in West Virginia to a white family of Scottish descent. I grew up in central North Carolina, and that shaped my tastes in music, food, clothing, what I see as proper and appealing etiquette. I can appreciate those things bestowed upon me by my parents, but those preferences are simply not as weighty to me as being “in Christ.”
The Apostle Paul, a “Jew of the Jews,” learned to wear his Jewishness lightly. In 1 Corinthians he said that to the Jews he “became a Jew” (9:20). Think about that statement for a minute: Wasn’t Paul already a Jew? Why would he need to become a Jew if he already was one? Evidently, Paul no longer saw his ethnicity as primary to his identity. He was still Jewish, and would never deny that, but his Jewishness was something so “light” to him that he could take it on and off, like a garment. His third race—being in Christ—was more permanent, more central, and weightier to him than his Jewish racial, ethnic, or cultural identity.
Recently a non-white friend and member of our church told me that our music, service length, and behavior in church are much different than what he is accustomed to. “But I so resonate with the gospel and mission here,” he said, “that all those other distinctions don’t seem that important anymore.” His third race hasn’t eliminated his first preferences, only overshadowed them.
We Must Balance Multi-Culturalism with the Need to Reach the Majority Culture
Multi-culturalism is a wonderful and inevitable product of the gospel, but it is not the only assignment, or even primary assignment given to the church. As we have discussed, making disciples of all nations is the core of the Great Commission. Thus, we must balance our efforts at diversification in our church with the need to reach whomever is around us. To do that, Paul says, we must adopt the cultural patterns of those around us, becoming a “Greek to the Greeks.”
You reach Greeks best when you put the gospel into Greek clothes, Greek expressions, and Greek styles (1 Cor 9:19-21). He didn’t expect the lost Greeks to become multi-cultural before they were saved, so he said he would adapt himself as closely as he could to the culture of the Greeks in order to reach those Greeks.
Certain outreaches are best done on homogenous grounds—athletes reaching athletes, professors reaching professors, and yes, one ethnic group reaching those of their own group. That’s not wrong. It’s recognizing a characteristic of human nature and accommodating yourself to it, just as Paul did.
So we must balance our pursuit of multi-cultural unity with another of God’s commands to us: to make disciples of whatever majority culture of “Greeks” is around us. I’ve seen a lot of ministries put so much emphasis on a good thing (multi-culturalism) that it distracted them from some other really important things—namely, making disciples.
Local churches this side of heaven can only be a pale reflection of the multi-cultural unity we will one day experience in heaven, a sign of the coming kingdom. At our very best, our reflection will be partial, like looking through a glass darkly. Diversification will always have some limits—if for no other reason, we don’t all speak the same language! Language is the most basic element of a culture, and church services, for the most part, can only be conducted in one language!
Furthermore, geography makes certain kinds of multi-culturalism impractical. To judge a church in Northern Ireland for not being multi-cultural when their entire community for miles around is white is unfair. Only in heaven will we experience the fulfillment of multi-culturalism. Can any church on earth say it truly “looks like heaven”? I know several multi-cultural churches that have achieved remarkable diversity, but no one church has them all. I personally don’t know any churches that feature both Arabic and Eskimo music in their services, even though both of those groups will be worshipping side by side around the throne one day. Maybe one exists. But you get the point: churches are a reflection of the coming unity, not its complete fulfillment.
Thus we must balance our pursuit of multi-culturalism with the need to adapt our message into the cultural forms of the community around us. Let me give you an example: We have a Hispanic campus at our church that reaches hundreds of Hispanics. These Hispanic brothers and sisters don’t join in with the English-speakers for most services, because they wouldn’t be edified by a message they can’t even understand. But the Hispanic leadership in our church has chosen not to launch out as their own church (even though we gave them that option), because they want to remain in corporate unity with their English-speaking brothers and sisters as a sign to our community of the gospel. So each week our Hispanic pastor takes whatever text we are preaching and preaches it to those brothers and sisters in Spanish. We are one body, under one government, worshipping in two different languages.
Furthermore, we must never confuse multi-culturalism with the gospel itself. Multi-culturalism is the fruit of the gospel, not its substance. I’ve heard people talk about “the gospel of racial reconciliation.” And while I understand their heart, I think that’s deadly dangerous nomenclature. (As a general rule of thumb, anytime you hear “the gospel of…” and what follows is something other than Christ’s finished work on the cross, chances are a fruit of salvation is being substituted for the means of it!) The gospel declares God’s reconciliation of man in Christ (a vertical reconciliation), and the fruit of that reconciliation with God is reconciliation with everything else (horizontal reconciliations), including reconciliations between races.
[1] Some refer to this concept as “transcultural.” See, for example, Leonce Crump in http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/tapestry-a-vision-for-trans-cultural-church. I prefer the term “third race,” because being “in Christ” does not remove our first ethnicity and culture; it redeems it.
