A Rumor of the "Other" (part 1)

by David Wesley

“Race”, when referring to people and ethnicity is normally not used in a positive sense. If you have watched any news in the past couple of months, issues of racial tension fueled by immigration issues, and never ending black/white conflict are as real today as they were 50 years ago. Ethnicity and race is a current and troublesome issue in any part of the globe that you travel. In a sense the problem is like a fire that has started and we have the option of throwing water or gasoline on the fire. The church has done both. I am going to post several posts under the title: “A Rumor of the “other”. I welcome your thoughts.
Polemic and volatile are two words that would describe issues of “race” and ethnicity in 2010. Even after a history of violence, human abuse and destruction, and even after nearly a century of working toward civil rights, social justice, and greater understanding of the nature of the human race, the struggle to live alongside the “other” is a major part of daily news, and the cause of daily mistreatment of human kind as well as large scale, global ethnic killing.
There is perhaps, no greater contribution that the church can make to modern society, but to be a source of healing in this current environment which has a distorted view of the “other”. Too often, however, the church has lost site of the substance of the Gospel as it strives toward structures which are efficient and quantifiable.
The calling to make Christ-like disciples is different from making religious customers of our particular organization or denomination. Large numbers of people coming to know Christ is a great thing, and we are to be about God’s task of redemption. We must, however, remember that the goal is not simply more people for a larger organization. The primary goal is always about making Christ like disciples.
In the past, there were times in which many Christian groups formed strategies in order to grow faster which focused on principles of church growth such as the homogeneous unit principle which built on the fact that a church will grow faster if the people in the congregation are similar in ethnicity or other aspects. The balance in which we work is that our primary identity as Christians is not ethnicity, skin color or political affiliation. Ethnicity as a social construct which if formed from within a group of people instead of by others, on the other hand should not be ignored and we need to celebrate the unique aspects of people groups which serve to give self identity and historical trajectory of culture. These aspects of ethnicity, however, should always be influenced by and subservient to the values of the Kingdom of God which we inherit as a new ethnic identity. “The issue is not how to make the world safe for cultural homogeneity. It is how to balance or rightly order two different identities –our social identity created by our culture, history, and social location and our spiritual identity informed by values of the Kingdom of God.”(Whiteman 2006:60) Too often we are more American, Korean, Kikuyu or Telugu than we are Christian. The challenge in our current global context is to be about forming Christ-like disciples whose ethnic identities is to be followers of Christ which redeems our social ethnicities.
In recent history we have seen what happens when ethnic specific religion degenerates into tribalism and racism as we have seen in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in many places around the globe.
If anything these examples from recent history reminds us that that the great commission is to make disciples, not just converts, and that these disciples must grow deep in understanding Jesus’ mandate to love and forgive our enemies. The disciple in a territorialized world must not only be taught to look upward to Jesus but also outward in love to those around them whom Jesus loves. If any group has a response to the terrorized and war torn sections of our globe, it is the body of Christ as it proclaims the optimistic and radical Gospel of reconciliation and relationship with God and with “others”.
“Tribalism” challenges us to build up holy disciples who know how to break down the barriers, the “dividing walls of hostility” through Christ.
The sent church must be first and foremost engaged in making Christ-like disciples who gather around Christ and not around marketing strategies or ethnicity.
It is to this focus of the church’s response to ethnicity in an environment of racial tension and misunderstanding that I will turn to next.