Why We Pursue Multi-Ethnicity, Part 1

I'm going to try to get back in the blogging saddle this week. Thanks for sticking with me!

Last Thursday I gave my 13th "Welcome to InterVarsity" talk. This year I wanted to take a couple minutes to really explain why we sing song in different languages and have speakers of different ethnicities and partner with minority student groups on campus.

Since last January I've been thinking about how to better talk about the value of multi-ethnicity to culturally and politically conservative white students. Especially white males. Often when we talk about the values of multi-ethnicity in a Christian context it sounds very much like the secular university with Christian words around it...at least, that's how your average religiously/culturally/politically conservative student would hear it.

So here's a snippet of my talk from Thursday night, attempting to communicate why we sing songs in different languages and invite different speakers and partner with minority groups on campus:

This part is a stretch for many of us who come from culturally and often politically conservative, white churches. Multi-ethnicity and pluralism can sound like very threatening terms, like some liberal agenda, especially to those of us who are white folks and often especially to white males, right?

If you’re a white male in a class focused on women’s issues or the minority experience in America, you can often feel attacked or demonized, like you’re always the bad guy, you can feel like you’re being attacked.

Here in InterVarsity we are passionate about exploring multi-ethnicity, and we hope that we’re going to go about it a little bit differently than how you’ve experienced it in other places.

We believe deeply in a number of things that shape our commitment to engaging cross-culturally in as many ways as we can. The first is that the God that we worship in and through Jesus Christ is the one true God over all the earth. He is not just the God of white people, but he is worshipped all over the world in nearly all cultures.

We believe that God loves all peoples and their cultures, including white people and white culture, and at the same time that all cultures are a mixture of both good and bad. We believe that all cultures are fallen and have parts of the culture that are reflect God’s image and all cultures have parts of that culture that are in need of redemption, healing, and forgiveness.

So as white folks, we do have issues on our culture that need to be addressed. And part of our job as white Christians is to begin to recognize and own the sins of our people, to call our fellow white folks to see areas where our culture is jacked up and deal with those issues!

This isn’t a shock to us, is it? That our culture has sin in it? As Christians we say that sin is a part of all our lives and so yes, of course, it’s a part of our culture.

But we refuse to say that white people are the cause of all the world’s problems. No one culture is the root of all problems. Every culture has its’ own issues, its’ own evils that must be addressed.

Scripture refuses to let any of us off the hook. All of us, and all of our cultures, are in need of forgiveness, repentance, healing, and grace.