I saw a post asking if it was proper for churches to “promote” themselves as multi-ethnic. The author gave away his own position in his follow-up question, when he asked, if to do so, was “virtue-signaling and buying into the spirit of the age.” The questions set the tone for the comments that followed, sending me even deeper into vexation.
The first commenter suggested that, while it is proper to embrace people of all ethnicities, we should not make it a point to be multi-ethnic. This seemed paradoxical to me. If we were intentional about “embracing” people of all ethnicities, would that not indeed be making a point to be multi-ethnic. His point only makes sense if he has a passive evangelism in mind, and I suspect he does. If they come we will embrace them, but we will not pursue people of ethnic diversity. Well, the haunting of our history is that they have not, they do not, and they will not simple come. And we get what we’ve always gotten, the segregated hour.
Virtue-Signaling?
His second question was, “is this virtue-signaling?” Terms get their meaning from the context in which they’re used, and, in our context, virtue-signaling has a decidedly bad connotation. However, what is called virtue-signaling can be an expression of the church’s values. Why would we question a church for “promoting” their multi-ethnicity, unless we had determined that multi-ethnic was a “virtue” not worth valuing? Would we dare question a church which “promotes” itself as missional? No, ethnic diversity simply does not rise to the same level of importance. I believe this has more to do with the haunting of our history than legitimate biblical values. Any emphasis on multi-ethnicity in the church shines a light on the dark and historic reality that our history lives in our ethnic huddles on Sunday.
Nation, People, Tribe, and Tongue
The argument we make is that race is a social construct and is therefore not real, not biblical, and thus to be ignored. But when the Bible stacks these synonyms, though slightly different in meaning, it does so to emphasize the range of diversity that will be unified in the Kingdom. These are not technical terms used to limit kinds of diversity to the exclusion of socially constructed diversity like race, but a rhetorical device to stretch the scope of diversity. The point is that any and all kinds of peoples including those defined by race, will be unified in the Kingdom. This work of the Kingdom is not reserved for the end alone, but it began with the coming together of the Jew and Gentile in the first century, as described in Ephesians. If, according to the Apostle, their unity displays the multicolored wisdom of God in bring diverse and often historically hostile peoples together, what does our segregated hour display.
Facing Our Ghosts
I attended a Dad’s Breakfast at my son’s school when he was young. It was a Christian School, and like so many, there was a notable lack of diversity. I was one of two African American dads present that morning, and there were less than a handful who didn’t attend.
The speaker was a professor from a local Christian University. Ironically, he had chosen to speak from Ephesians 2. Already feeling alone in a full room, the loneliness was exacerbated when the speaker limited his talk to our individual unity to each other and to God, when the passage is clearly the unity of peoples and not people.
I felt compelled to ask the speaker about the exclusion of ethnicity from the passage and its usefulness in our context, even in that room, that morning. And as you might expect, I made everyone who heard the question immediately uncomfortable. I remember the Head of School asking me incredulously if I “really” saw ethnicity in the passage. In the eyes of many, I had brought disunity into a unified room.
This is simply bad biblical scholarship. In some cases, for the sake of conscience, we have been taught to ignore ethnicity in the scriptures. In other cases we have been blind to it by the lack of diversity in our lives. But it’s there in the scriptures, and it’s not incidental. It’s central to the glory of the Lord who brings the diverse together. In fact, it is so central that He Himself mentions the diversity of the Kingdom, even after our unity has been fully realized. He is no tribal God and our unity in diversity manifests His glory.
I have long believed that we have not learned to live well with our history. Our racial history has left us deeply scarred and emotionally damaged, so much so, that we have decided that the only way to move forward is to be colorblind. This despite the fact that we see color.
That we are one in Christ does not wipe away our ethnic diversity. The discomfort we feel is not an indication that we are not to pursue the glory of the Kingdom. No, it is against this very backdrop, of our ethnic diversity and racial past, that the manifold wisdom of God and the unifying work of Christ is made more glorious, even now.
The Point of Reflection 