Sorry I haven’t blogged in so long! I’ve worked on this post for a while, and I wanted it to be just right. Thank you all for reading and supporting me!
of the most challenging parts about the Race for me, so far, has been diversity. It hasn’t been the diversity of the countries I’ve visited, the people I’ve met, or the cultures I’ve come to love. It’s been the diversity of the one thing that was supposed to be constant in every person on my squad and every organization we serve. The diversity I’ve struggled the most with has been the diversity of Christianity.
Here’s a little bit of my background so you have some context for my lack of experience with diversity:
I’m from a rural town in middle Tennessee by the name of Centerville. We got our first traffic-light a few years ago, and we still don’t have a Walmart in our whole county. It’s an incredibly beautiful and charming town. It’s just a small, southern town, and, like most of the rural southern United States, we aren’t known for our diversity in people or opinion.
In Centerville, diversity came in the form of whether you thought Chevy or Ford made better pickups. Just about everyone was white, republican, and middle class. If you were a Christian, and most people were, you were pretty much limited to conservative Baptist churches, conservative church of Christ churches, or conservative Methodist churches. I’m not even sure I can attest to the diversity of the gene pool. I’m pretty positive I heard the phrase “anything after third cousin doesn’t count” more than once growing up. Just kidding… But really. I did hear that.
I went to college only about an hour down the road from home, but Nashville was a whole new world to me. During my college career, I made my first friend from another country, met my first Muslim person, left the country for the first time, and started attending a “liberal” church. Even though my new church taught me a lot, it was still the same denomination that I had been a part of all my life. My view of the church as a whole was very limited, and that’s where a lot of my struggle with its diversity stemmed from.
squad is made up of ex-mennonites and new Christians, preachers kids and Pentecostals, Quakers and Catholics, and so much more. We worship in different ways. Our prayers don’t sound the same. We interpret our bibles differently. Some of us speak in tongues. Some prophesy. Some have stories of witnessing miracles. Some have heard the audible voice of God. Others have had prophetic visions.
In an attempt to reconcile some of the differences of opinion, belief, and doctrine within the church, I’ve sought out conversations, read books and blogs, and done some research. If my journey with this topic has taught me anything so far, it is there is A LOT of diversity in the church, both in America and all over the world.
At first, the diversity in belief, opinion, and practice made me uneasy. I tried my best to figure out who was “right” in almost every situation, but that proved practically impossible. We were all reading the same bible and following the same God, but I still saw so much diversity in how people interpreted what it meant to be a follower of Christ.
During my second month of the Race, in Thailand, I started reading a book called The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns. The book changed the way I looked at the Bible, Christianity, and what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Here’s a passage that really helped me understand the diversity of the church and that has really stuck with me:
“Some think the presence of diversity in the church is a problem that needs correcting: “they” haven’t gotten the memo yet that “we” are right, and as soon as “they” fall into line, God’s will will finally be done on earth as it is in heaven, amen. For any one group today to think it has the best grasp on the creator of the universe is a form of insanity. Run away— far and quickly— when you see this. The presence of diverse points of view in the church is unavoidable, seeing that people of faith, including those we read about in the Bible, are always meeting God where they are, asking their questions within their contexts. Who we are always affects our spiritual perceptions. Maybe God likes the diversity. If he doesn’t, we’d have to conclude that he hasn’t done a good job of controlling it. But maybe diversity tells us something about what God is like.”
I can’t put into words the peace I’ve found after realizing the truth behind this passage. My questions didn’t stop coming, but I became a lot more okay with accepting that maybe there isn’t a clear and cut answer. I became more open to hearing about how other people experience God and started joining them in it.
I found a lot of joy from dancing in worship with little African kids in Rwanda to songs I don’t understand. I’ve started praying big prayers – prayers for miraculous healing of physical and mental ailments and more. Ive come to God with difficult questions and a lot of doubt, and I was okay with it. I’ve taken part in “listening prayer,” where we spend time in silence listening for what God is telling us.
I’ve never witnessed a miracle. I don’t speak in tongues. I’ve never had a prophetic vision. But I have taken God out of the box I had him in for a long time. I’ve found him in Buddhists in Asia and Muslims in Africa. I’ve experienced him hiking in the mountains of Vietnam and rafting the Nile in Uganda. I’ve seen Him in Moses, a little African boy on the verge of death.
Through all of this I’ve realized that being a Christian means one thing: following Christ. Serving the poor. Loving your enemies. Seeking good in everyone you come into contact with and everything you do. That can look different from time to time, culture to culture, context to context, and person to person.
Though it’s been a challenging journey, I can confidently say that the diversity in the kingdom of God is one of my favorite things about being a follower of Christ. With a little over 6 months of the World Race left to go, I’m looking to the future with anticipation of all of the ways I can experience God in the diversity of the world, his people, and what it means to be a follower of Him.
