It’s black history month, and my wife inspired me with her bulletin board she made at her school (Jennifer is a guidance counselor) for black history month with bios and pictures etc., to do some posts this month that are in line with black history month.
Also, my baby son (really he’s about to turn 12 so not a baby but will always be my baby), is African-American, and we work hard to teach about African-American history and important figures and culture. So, this is a bit near and dear to my heart. So, I hope you learn some things and are challenged a bit.
This right here! And thank you to Pastor Joseph Colston for sharing this with me…This video below really says so much, but we’ll focus on one aspect…multi-ethnic or “trans-ethnic” church. Usually when I have conversations with people about multi-ethnic church, or as Pastor Crump says, “trans-ethnic” church, folks have a tendency to hear me saying that they are supposed to lose their culture. They don’t hear the actual biblical mandate I’m trying to communicate. I’ll confess it could be me and an abject failure to make Ephesians 2 and the implications clear, that we are to learn the culture of the kingdom and be diverse while unified in the kingdom as the one new man (see Ephesians 2). We can be who we are in Christ while being transformed while being the one new man who is made up of many cultures in unity and, we can do this together. We have to begin to make practical sense out of Ephesians 2…Just like we have to make practical sense out of the Great Commission applied to every Christian. We must hear and obey not merely hear. Jesus said that house will fall down when hit by hard stuff.
A fascinating post would be mining out why people fear loosing their cultural identity and an unwillingness to learn the culture of the kingdom of God. But I’ll have to do that later. For now…
We simply don’t have a framework for this in our post-Christian southern bible belt mentality, and we don’t read our bibles well enough to glean it from the text, although it’ll poke you in the eye if you pay close enough attention. It’s all over the Manual.
This video is loaded with oodles of good stuff from how to best strategically plant a church and, pertinent to this post, working toward being a trans-ethnic church.
Enjoy and be challenged.
Theology in the Dirt 