July 2013 Newsletter Article

July 2013 Newsletter Article

Join hands, disciples of the faith,

whate’er your race may be.

All children of the living God

are surely kin to me.

-          John Oxenham, “In Christ There Is No East or West,” ELW 650

I’ll be honest: I find the hymn verse above to be overly simplistic. Yes, people of every race are children of God, sisters and brothers in Christ. No, race should not be a barrier to our life together as followers of Jesus. In practice, however, building community among people of different cultures is a whole lot more challenging than simply joining hands and acknowledging a common faith.

In the past month, members of Lutheran Church of the Savior have engaged in our annual Book Club, and this year we have been reading Rev. Eric Law’s TheWolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb, subtitled A Spirituality for Leadership in a Multicultural Community. I have found this book to be incredibly helpful in illuminating how cultural differences can affect the way we communicate, especially with people from different cultures.

The title of the book refers to a vision found in the eleventh chapter of Isaiah, where seeming enemies such as the wolf and the lamb live together in peace in God’s holy place. He calls this “The Peaceable Realm,” drawing an analogy to peoples of different cultures. In our lives, people from some cultures are naturally more like wolves, some like lambs, and typically their interactions play out in such a way that one group dominates the other.

Rev. Law explains how white people tend to dominate multicultural conversations because in general they (we, as I am one) are culturally expected to be powerful people. In intercultural interactions across racial lines, white people tend to have power, or take power, while people of color tend to have, or take, less power. In order to build community and increase the effectiveness of communication across cultures, participants even in simple conversation must be aware of power dynamics in a given situation. This is very difficult, to say the least.

The book’s argument is much more complex and nuanced than the above, and this is not the place to restate his entire argument. The book challenges some of the assumptions people make about race and power, and suggests methods to give and take power in a helpful and sustainable manner, particularly in a group setting. The strength of this book is the way in which it honestly describes the difficulty of building multicultural community and also offers concrete and hopeful ways forward for communities willing to do the hard work of recognizing cultural power dynamics and expectations, and taking steps to challenge those expectations.

If anyone would like to learn more about this book or the discussion our book club group has had about it, I would be happy to talk with folks about that, as would other members of the book club discussion. Part of the difficulty of following Jesus is that we follow him in an incredibly complicated world, where even the best of intentions can bring hurtful results. This book is a great place to start a conversation about the kind of work we need to do as a congregation in order to be successful in engaging and partnering with people outside our dominant white Lutheran culture. As this is one of the goals we have set forth for the next three years of our life together as Lutheran Church of the Savior, I hope you will join me in this work.

Thanks,

Pastor Andrew