Embracing Diversity How do we do it Reflection

Embracing Diversity How do we do it?

Reflection Questions 1. When you walk downtown and see a poor person begging on the street what are the first two thoughts that cross your mind? 2. Who are your friends? Who are the people that you feel most comfortable around and why? 3. When was the last time you felt or witnessed discrimination due to your or someone’s race or ethnicity? What was your reaction?

Critical Question How can we as Christ followers embrace diversity that goes beyond what is politically correct but is rooted in the heart and character of the God?

Key Components needed to Embrace Diversity 1. Develop a Biblical Theology of Diversity 2. Understand Institutional Racism and White Privilege 3. Understand your Cultural Context and the importance of good cultural exegesis 4. Be intentional about creating an inclusive community

Create An Integrated Perspective of Diversity Theology Personal Initiatives +Structural Change = biblically centered, culturally sensitive, racially diverse faith communities.

Developing a Biblical Theology of Diversity • • • Revelation 5: 9, 10 Ephesians 2: 11 -22 James 2: 1 -13

Thinking Theologically Vs. Politically Insight Number One: God is the author of diversity- not man. Insight Number Two: Heaven is the place where the walls between races will be permanently dismantled.

Insight Number Three: Christ came to tear down the walls between both the races and to create one new man in Christ. Insight Number Four: Partiality is not just politically wrong it is sin according to James 2: 1 -13.

Defining Terms • Thinking theologically and not politically simply means that I am more concerned about the voice of God than I am about the voice of people.

Institutional Racism • An intentional and/or unintentional system of excluding individuals based on race, color, ethnic background from shared participation within the institution through covert, usually subtle means.

White Privilege • White privilege (or white skin privilege) is a term for societal privileges that benefit people identified as white in Western countries, beyond what is commonly experienced by non-white people under the same social, political, or economic circumstances. Academic perspectives such as critical race theory and whiteness studies use the concept of "white privilege" to analyze how racism and racialized societies affect the lives of white or white-skinned people. Wikipedia

Understanding One’s Context Culture is not sinful; humankind is sinful. Must understand a person’s cultural context and background to create a strategy for embracing diversity. If not, we will be hindered from being able to break down barriers of racial miscasting which are reinforced due to our isolation. Significant reduction of this isolation creates an ability to look at life through the lens of that other person’s culture.

Definition “Culture is that integrated pattern of socially acquired knowledge -- particularly ideas, beliefs, and values mediated through language, which a people uses to interpret experience and generate patterns of behavior (technological, economic, social, political, religious, and artistic) so that it can survive by adapting to relentlessly changing circumstances. ” William Larkin

How do we begin to understand another’s context? All of us preach heresy? We are all a product of our own cultural conditioning. We approach life and it’s experiences not in a vacuum, but from within the context of our culture. We are biased and influenced by our cultural context and to a large degree, we are the sum total of our cultural context.

Appreciation and Affirmation of Others’ Cultural Framework We must begin to see ourselves and our belief systems as a reflection of our cultural motif and not solely a reflection of absolute truth. Truth is not relative, however our understanding of truth is culturally-conditioned.

Cultural Framework con’t Good cultural exegesis comes from the point of view that our interpretations of life are going to be skewed because of culturally conditioned worldview. We always approach the text of life knowing that our applications are being bathed in our presuppositions.

Goal • • To identify our presuppositions and identify the presuppositions of others within another culture. For example: Time vs. Event Orientation

Awareness of Context We operate with a great deal of cultural insensitivity and arrogance when we maintain our own cultural presuppositions as correct regardless of our context. Form and methodology become the normative value of truth versus “true truth”, which transcends time, people and culture.

Awareness of Context Morris Inch suggests that a practical way of viewing culture is as “context in which we may encounter the living God. ” as a means rather than a goal. (Breckenridge, p. 73) Instead of being threatened by outsiders, we need to view other cultures as vehicles through which the Gospel may be expressed.

How to do Good Cultural Exegesis 1. Pay close attention to smallest details of the people you are seeking to understand 2. Find out where people gather 3. Pay attention to external customs 4. Interact with people from that culture 5. Analyze core values of culture

Structural Implications to Embracing Diversity 1. Believers need to become informed regarding the growing cultural diversity of our society. 2. Identify those areas in our own Christian traditions that have been affected by culture. 3. Identify and discourage organizational approaches that are ethnocentric in nature.

Embracing Diversity, Continued 4. Initiate organizational strategies that promote reciprocal relationships with similar institutions of color. 5. Model and encourage others to develop and maintain positive interethnic relationships. 6. Develop cross cultural skills of communication.

Embracing Diversity, Continued 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Help persons integrate their social/ethnic culture within the majority culture. Empower members of minority groups. Teach and preach a Christian commitment to justice. Magnify and celebrate diversity. Integrate into the teaching of the local church on a regular basis a world view that celebrates and reinforces the value of diversity.

Revelations 7: 9 • “After these things I looked, and behold a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands; and they cry out with a loud voice saying, “Salvation to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb. ”