Timothy Paul Jones, Perspectives on Family Ministry: 3 Views, pages 218-221.
Practicing the Discipline of Diversity
So how can we lead our churches to practice the discipline of diversity? I now serve as one of the pastors in an inner-city congregation where we have set our sights on pursuing kingdom diversity, and I can tell you from personal experience that the process is far from easy. It is painful and costly and complicated. Over the past several years in my context, the process has consisted primarily of four steps, repeated over and over and over:
(1) Learn your place. Know the demographics of the neighborhoods around the places where your congregation gathers, and be aware of socioeconomic strata or ethnic groups that your ministries may be overlooking.
(2) Listen to your place. Humbly hear the challenges that people in your neighborhood face; learn to see life from their perspective. Listen to them long enough to know the barriers that would keep them from feeling welcomed in your church.
(3) Love your place. When you walk through your neighborhood, do you feel a surge of affection for these people? Do you become choked up as you recognize how much you want the people in this place to hear the gospel? When you look into people’s eyes as you pass by them, do you love these people? Stop wishing that your context looked more like someone else’s context. Quit whispering to yourself, If only we had this, then we could really do ministry well. God will provide all that is needed to accomplish the task that he has given to you in the place where you are. Love the people and the place where God has positioned you and your church. In a multiethnic context, that will mean developing multiethnic relationships. You cannot grow a multiethnic church while leading a mono-ethnic life.
(4) Develop leadership that looks like your place. If you want to see older believers mentoring younger believers but everyone who leads your church is in their twenties or thirties, your church will struggle to gather mature men and women to disciple younger generations. If your context is multiethnic but your leadership isn’t, your congregation will remain mono-ethnic. Diversifying leadership doesn’t require your congregation to develop a large staff. What it requires is gospel-centered leaders who reflect the beautiful diversity of your community and who are placed in visible positions of authority. It means submitting yourself to their wisdom and making yourself accountable to them. In time, it will mean releasing your authority and giving it to people whose perspective and background may be quite different from your own. If you do not raise up diverse leadership, you will never move toward diverse fellowship.
These steps are not flashy or fast; they are incremental and mundane. I do not pretend that following these steps provides a quick or easy solution to the problems of segmentation and segregation in the church. That is primarily because I do not believe there are any quick or easy solutions to these problems.
Lasting transformation happens through tiny actions repeated over years and decades—through “liturgies,” in the best sense of the word—not through massive shifts that happen in moments or days or months. The most difficult aspect of implementing this process is simply staying focused on the same commitment for the long term. And yet, I do believe that, over time, these simple steps can multiply the diversity of our congregation and provide a more effective witness to the watching world.
From time to time, someone with children or youth visits the church and asks one of the leaders, “What do you have for my children?”
Typically, the leader’s response is a recitation of activities that the church offers for children and youth. This isn’t necessarily wrong, and it’s probably the response that the potential attender is expecting. And yet, here’s what I prayerfully envision: I long for a church culture in which the first response to this question is a sweeping glance across the entire congregation accompanied by the words, “All of this! We have all of this for your children—older people, younger people, places to serve, words that build them when they are broken, answers when they wonder, corrections when they wander. Here in this multitude of languages and ethnicities and generations and socioeconomic backgrounds, we have all this and more for your children. Oh, and here are some activities that might interest them as well . . .”
Even if we don’t use these precise words as a response, this is the attitude that I long to see in every aspect of our discipleship as we learn to practice the discipline of diversity.
Regardless of which model of family ministry God guides your church to follow, be certain to include practices in that model that prepare your people to pursue the discipline of diversity.
Because of the reconciling work of Christ’s cross, unity in diversity is not so much a goal to be achieved as it is a gift to be received. God has already broken down the barriers between his people through the blood of Jesus Christ.
Practicing the way of life that prepares you for the gift of unity expressed in diversity isn’t easy. And yet, whenever a church pursues this reality, the resulting kaleidoscope of colors and cultures shouts out the supernatural power of the gospel to the watching world.
Through unity in diversity, the people of God testify visibly to the capacity of the gospel to accomplish a reality that the world cannot.
