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March 8 - March 28, 2020
But as I walked with Jesus, somehow my “growth” had been coupled with increasingly stronger opinions about the “right” way to be a follower. I started keeping people I didn’t enjoy or agree with at arm’s length. I managed to avoid most of the Bens in my life by locating them, categorizing them and gracefully shunning them, all while appearing to be both spiritual and community-oriented. Further, I could do all of this without wasting any of my precious brainpower. I was quite good.
Over time, when I met other Christians, I found myself asking them what church they attended. Some answers were more acceptable than others. The way I saw it, there were two types of Christians: the wrong kind of Christian and the right kind of Christian.
For the most part, I was happy to keep Wrong Christian at bay. There was just one cosmic problem. As I got to know Jesus, I began to realize that this was not exactly what he had in mind when he invited us to participate in his kingdom on earth.
“You’re not a Christian,” he insisted, vigorously shaking his head for extra effect. “How’s that?” I asked. I was confused. “You’re not like other Christians, Christena,” he told me. “You’re not judgmental and ignorant and dogmatic and anti-intellectual. Don’t call yourself a Christian.”
The trick is to wisely use our Christian friends’ ideology to humble us, strengthen us and enhance our understanding of God and the role we’re called to play in his kingdom.
During that summer, Ben showed me what it looks like to relativize differences in order to love each other in sacrificial ways. As a member of the family of God, Ben uniquely demonstrates the character of Jesus. Ben is essential to me, and I would never have recognized this if I had forever cast him as Wrong Christian. This revelation about Ben makes me wonder if our understanding of Jesus (and by extension, our role as his followers) is limited by our inability to see him represented in the diversity of the body of Christ. I wonder how much Christ’s heart is broken when we denigrate followers
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What often begins as an effective and culturally specific way to reach people for Christ ends up stifling their growth as disciples. Perhaps this is because we often fail to make a distinction between evangelism and discipleship. People can meet God within their cultural context but in order to follow God, they must cross into other cultures because that’s what Jesus did in the incarnation and on the cross.
For this reason, I believe that churches and Christian organizations should strive for cultural diversity. Regardless of ethnic demographics, every community is multicultural when one considers the various cultures of age, gender, economic status, education level, political orientation and so on.
Political scientists Naomi Cahn and June Carbone have noted that in the 1960s, geographic boundaries rather than culture and ideology largely determined church membership.
Today’s churchgoers, by contrast, tend to shop for churches that express their individual values and are culturally similar. We often drive by dozens of churches en route to our church, the one that meets our cultural expectations.
These days, Christians can easily go their entire lives without spending time with those who are different from them. Unfortunately, the more we spend time with people who are essentially identical to us, the more we become convinced that our way of relating to both Jesus and the world is the correct way.
Social psychologists call this phenomenon group polarization. In the absence of diverse influences, homogenous group members tend
to adopt more extreme and narrow-minded thinking as time passes.
As Cahn and Carbone have noted, American churches are increasing in ethnic, cultural and theological homogeneity despite the fact that America is becoming increasingly diverse.
Martin Luther King’s famous assessment that “At 11 a.m. Sunday morning . . . we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation” is, sadly, as true as ever.
Research on interpersonal attraction suggests that familiarity is the most powerful predictor of friendship.
Sir Peter Ustinov writes, “Contrary to popular belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.”
Confession: I love it when the people around me agree with my opinions and values and applaud me for simply being me. Research suggests that we all love this. In addition to liking familiar others, we like similar others because they affirm our worldviews, behaviors and experiences.
Research shows that sharing an experience with another person—sometimes called “I-sharing”—causes people to feel a profound sense of connection with others, even others who are otherwise dissimilar.
This idea of shared experiences can help us understand why Christians often form strong bonds with people who share their very specific experiences and keep even slightly different others at bay. Christians are so good at erecting divisions that we don’t stop at the major ones (e.g., race/ethnicity, class and gender); we also create divisions within divisions. For example, while the body of Christ experiences significant intergender (man vs. woman) division, it is also plagued by intragender (woman vs. woman and man vs. man) division.
Pinel and her colleagues believe that shared experiences can be a powerful unifier, rather than a divider.
In fact, most people don’t see homogeneity as a problem so long as it’s not motivated by explicit prejudice.
However, research on group processes shows that group separation and prejudice have a bidirectional relationship—that is, prejudice tends to result in division between groups and division between groups tends to result in prejudice. What begins as seemingly harmless homogeneity often snowballs into distrust, inaccurate perceptions of other groups, prejudice and hostility. Before long and without even knowing it, we become like the man in the joke; we have no problem saying, “Die, heretic” while pushing them off the bridge with our words and deeds.
Exposure to Christian concepts, however, also increases aggression toward nonmembers, willingness to exact revenge on nonmembers and support for violence toward nonmembers. One would hope that Christians who are reminded of their Christian identity would love all others more. However, that is not the case. Being reminded of Christian identity leads people to love their fellow group members well, but hate those who do not share their core values, attitudes and experiences.
Humans naturally create group categories that distinguish us versus them.
Original sin
the people who belong to our homogenous church group and interact with us on a regular basis (our “us”) are the people with whom we most closely associate the term Christian. As a result, we automatically apply the term Christian exclusively to “us” and
not to the broader, diverse body of Christ.
But the doctrines of the Trinity and the cross required that I reconsider my exclusive lifestyle of sticking to my “neighborhood” and those who are like me. Basically, to the extent that I accept the work of the cross as my invitation to participate in the self-giving intimacy of the Trinity, I must be prepared to embrace self-giving intimacy with the “other.”
Theologian Miroslov Volf points out that loving, knowing and embracing Wrong Christian is the only appropriate response to the loving work of the cross: “When God sets out to embrace the enemy, the result is the cross. . . . Having been embraced by God, we must make space for others in ourselves and invite them in—even our enemies. This is what we enact as we celebrate the Eucharist. In receiving Christ’s broken body and spilled blood, we, in a sense, receive all those whom Christ received by suffering.”
Jesus pursues us despite theological differences; his theology is more comprehensive and accurate than any of ours. He also pursues us despite cultural differences; he’s holy, we’re sinful—that’s a pretty significant “cultural” difference. Finally, the incarnation is evidence that he pursues us despite physical differences. His actions and words suggest that he is serious about connecting, in spite of physical, cultural and theological differences.
In the household of faith, our relationship with God takes priority over our relatedness to family, race, culture, nation, gender, or any other group we belong to. This reordering also transforms how we relate to each other. The concept of family was reconstrued in the household of God. The terms sister,
brother, mother, father, friend, and neighbor were all reinterpreted and redefined by Jesus. As Jesus said, “For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12:50). . . . The household of God is an image that beckons the community of Jesus Christ to be a place of convergence for the great rivers of humanity. People of all cultures, races, languages, nations, tribes, and clans reside in the household of faith.
If this diversity is not effectively coordinated in the body, the body fails to function as it should. The same is true for Christians. To respond to God’s call fully, we need to express our interdependent diversity in individual churches, denominations and organizations as well as in the worldwide body of Christ. We must be connected to those who are different within our respective churches and we must be connected to those who are different in the larger body of Christ.
Organizational researchers Bantel and Jackson assessed the diversity of top management teams at 199 banks and found that teams that were more diverse with respect to age, education and length of time on the team were better able to create innovative solutions to administrative challenges.
Organizational experts also believe that nondiverse groups find it harder to keep learning because each member is bringing less and less unique information to the table.
However, there is one important caveat: Leaders hoping to build diverse teams should be aware that in order to fully utilize the wider range of resources and increased learning that diversity offers, each member of the diverse group must be of equal status.
Groupthink happens when the group members are so pressured into putting forth a united front while making a decision that they fail to voice legitimate differences in opinion.
the typical homogenous church that has very little meaningful contact with other diverse churches is going to be a sucker for groupthink.
The voices in the world have become increasingly diverse and interconnected; churches should be ready to welcome and engage individuals who represent all aspects of this diversity. Unfortunately, due to cultural isolation, most churches are not in a position to do this well. As churches have maintained and even increased cultural segregation, their ability to operate in and impact the diverse world has diminished.
I think millenials recognize this, and which is why many of them have concluded that the organized church is ineffective.
By focusing on their own specific, insular cultures rather than actively welcoming those who lie beyond ethnic, gender, economic, ideological and cultural lines, churches are at great risk of engaging in groupthink as they make decisions on how to best impact society. The more we interact with those who are different, the more we can respond to the needs of those who are different.
Social psychologists Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske coined the term cognitive miser to describe our natural tendency to conserve cognitive resources.
We can conserve our valuable and limited cognitive energy by spending time with people who are like us and whose behavior we can easily predict. Conversely, our interactions with people who are different from us or who violate our expectations are laden with uncertainty and are cognitively taxing.
By the time I had interacted with these guys for about three minutes, I had reached the conclusion that all frat boys from this particular mid-Atlantic university were preppy lacrosse players. Period.
What can I say? I’m an expert at becoming an expert on groups to which I do not belong.
We can create categories of groups so easily that we often do it without even thinking. We have a natural ability to do so.
Whether we are trained in psychology or not, we have a strong need to make sense of our confusing world so that we can exert control in our lives and make informed choices about the future.
Research on minimal groups—groups that are formed based on an inconsequential characteristic such as whether an individual underestimated or overestimated how many marbles were in a jar—suggests that simply putting people into groups (e.g., overestimators and underestimators) increases the likelihood that they will focus on the specific factor that divides them (their estimation tendency) and disregard the more significant factors that unite them (being students at the same university).
By focusing on smaller, distinct categories for church groups, we erect and fixate on divisions that are far less important than the larger, diverse group of members of the body of Christ.
By simply categorizing, we often create subcategories that detract from the more important, all-inclusive category of the body of Christ. Before we know it, whether people are pro-life or pro-choice, Calvinist or Arminian, or black or white is more important than whether they are part of the family of God. Further, these subcategory distinctions may start out as mere descriptive labels (such as pro-life or pro-choice), but they often deteriorate into value labels (Right Christian and Wrong Christian) that afford our group higher status.
The simple act of using us/them distinctions leads us to prefer us over them. Charles Perdue and colleagues found that simply creating distinctions between the ingroup and the outgroup increases bias toward the outgroup.
