Cross-Cultural
Photo by Jed Villejo on Unsplash
By Scott Yi
When I was younger, I had learned in school about segregation. About the U.S.'s shameful past of exclusion and intolerance. About the Civil Rights Era, about the genocide of Native Americans, about the “Yellow Peril” of Chinese immigrants. About the desire within humanity to destroy those who are different from them. I remember learning about how such a pervasive miasma of hate could only happen in a time period of vast ignorance, and I was told how fortunate we are to be living in a society that now knows better.
Segregation & Divisiveness
It’s time to update the history books. The United States has never abandoned segregation. Institutions of power, political and otherwise, have only become more clever in hiding their intentions to maintain social disparities. In fact, according to researchers who study the racial composition of neighborhoods over time, 80% of metropolitan areas have become MORE segregated over the past 30 years (and contrary to what many assume, the most segregated cities are in the North) [1]. Demographic divisions have widened not just across racial lines, but across income classes, education levels, geographic locations, and political ideologies.
This comes as a surprise to no one who’s actually been alive for the past four years. Hate crimes are at their highest levels since 2008. Anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers are willfully extending the COVID death toll under the delusion of “personal freedoms.” The alt-right movement continues to grow while many parents are demanding like never before that their children receive a whitewashed education. On the other side, cancel culture has made it so that people are now okay with reducing the sum total of a human being, fearfully and wonderfully made and created in God’s image, to 140 characters they wrote offhandedly eight years ago (i.e., the length of a tweet back then). We seem to be approaching the extreme limits of postmodernism, which says that truth is relative. Because no one can lay claim to absolute truth, everyone thinks what they’re saying is right and it’s everyone else who’s wrong.
The poet William Yeats, reflecting on the twilight of civilization, famously wrote: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold… The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” [2] Yeats published that poem in 1920, but it was clearly meant to be delivered to us a hundred years later. Call it segregation, call it echo chambers or divisions or bubbles or tribalism. People want to condemn and conquer those who are different from them. Disunity reigns and there seems to be no solution in sight.
Church Division
To our detriment, the wider church culture in America is not really different at all. When it comes to modern-day Christians, that same desire to condemn and conquer just transfers to a religious context, and is perhaps all the more contentious for it. Through the so-called culture wars, theological debates, presidential elections, and traumatic church splits, Christians are as divided as everyone else.
So what is it that we’ve forgotten about the Gospel? About the knowledge and wisdom of God? What we’ve forgotten is that to be Christian is to be cross-cultural. Jesus calls on us to go beyond what's familiar. He calls on us to defy our preferences. It’s not enough to be multicultural, which is merely the mental affirmation of diversity and inclusiveness. To be cross-cultural means to put those principles into action, in word and deed. In fact, Jesus calls on us to become a family of opposites. If our desire is Christlikeness, we cannot forget that everywhere Jesus went, he was shattering cultural boundaries as he sought to love and connect with people very different from him, even those he was taught were his enemies. You are not fully living into the Gospel lifestyle if you are not willing to cross over into cultures and personalities and worldviews that are different from your own. If we want to emulate the compassion of Jesus, that's what our love has got to look like.
Disconnected from One Another
Like I wrote in the beginning, I have never in my lifetime experienced Americans to be as segregated and as disconnected as we are right now. It sometimes seems hopeless as “things fall apart” in ways we never imagined could be possible. But there is a solution. The cure for a segregation this radical is a Gospel that’s even more radical—the biblical Gospel that commands us to lose our need to always be right, to love our enemies who are ruining this country, to forgive those unworthy of forgiveness “seventy times seven.” What we see in Scripture is that the more we free ourselves from the tyranny of our own self-centeredness, we learn what it means to have God-centeredness. We become centered on the heart of Jesus, on the counsel of the Holy Spirit, and on the justice of God’s Kingdom. And then God-centeredness leads to other-centeredness as Jesus transforms us into his ambassadors and peacemakers in the world.
Learning from Antioch
Acts Chapter 11 describes the church in Antioch and gives us a model to follow. Antioch, we find out, was the first ever multicultural church. It all started here. Antioch was basically ground zero for diversity and inclusion—because it was at Antioch where the world first saw people from different races worshipping the same God. People from different cultures and from different classes were worshipping together, and this sight was so strange, it was so unusual, that the outsiders who saw this didn’t know what to call it. You couldn’t call it Judaism anymore. And so, in verse 26, people in Antioch came up with a new term to describe these worshippers: “Christian.” The word “Christian” actually stems from an incident of racial reconciliation! To be Christian is to be cross-cultural.
We find out in the following chapters that it was at Antioch where the Apostle Paul formalizes his ministry to the Gentiles and launches his missionary travels. But Paul wasn’t the one who first preached the Gospel at Antioch. Verse 20 says that some people from Cyrene traveled to this city to evangelize. Cyrene was a region in North Africa. So that means before Paul, even before Barnabas, these were the people who first answered the Great Commission. They were ordinary Christians, like you and me. If you were to look at a map of this time period, you would see that Cyrene is nowhere close to Antioch. They’re on opposite ends of the Mediterranean Sea. These nameless folks from Africa had no reason to travel so far, except that God had given them a mission to love and reach out to people different from them, and they took that mission seriously.
A couple of chapters later, we actually do find out some of the names of a few people who started the Gospel community in Antioch. In Acts 13:1, one of them is called “Lucius of Cyrene.” The other one is “Simeon called Niger.” Now if you know a bit of Spanish or Latin, then you would know that Niger means Black. So this guy's name was literally Simeon the Black. He was a dark-skinned African. But think about this: he would also have been known as Simeon, of Cyrene. Another name for Simeon, back in those days, is Simon. Therefore, this man would have also gone by the name “Simon of Cyrene.” Simon of Cyrene, if you recall, is the man who carried Jesus’ cross. In other words, it is very likely the man who carried the cross of Christ was a Black man. It was a Black man who alone stood next to Jesus, in his darkest moment. And it was this little-known Black man who helped change the course of history at Antioch. The New Testament is brimming with diverse peoples and communities who carried each other’s burdens despite their differences. We are called to bring people together.
To Be Christian
To be Christian is to be cross-cultural. Having freedom in Christ doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want. It’s actually the opposite: the truest expression of your Christian freedom is to give up your power so that those at the bottom may be raised to the top. To be Christian is to have the willingness to change yourself, to decrease, to deny one’s own privilege, to reach for the poverty of Jesus. A so-called Christian who is unwilling to do those things has pledged allegiance to an incomplete gospel, which is no Gospel. To be sure, it’s uncomfortable to adapt our lives and our congregations to make room for others. If there’s one thing our churches need to get better at, it’s teaching us how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. But that discomfort, if we stick with it, leads to newfound riches as we grow ourselves in ways we never imagined. The early church never could have imagined the global phenomenon that our faith would become. So let’s encourage each other to never get too comfortable. Scripture is not meant to order our lives, it’s not meant to create a pleasing little shelter for us to hide inside of. Scripture is supposed to disorder our lives, to disrupt our self-centeredness, it’s supposed to challenge us with Christ’s love and thrust us forward into a new way of living. Let’s be ready to let God change us.
Sources
[2] Yeats, William. "The Second Coming." Poetry Foundation, 2020, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming. Accessed 24 September 2021.
Scott Yi lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he writes and teaches literacy to underserved populations. Scott is also the director of the Youth Collaborative, a nonprofit that equips urban teens for success through entrepreneurial training and mentoring.