KNU International English Church
Josh Broward
September 13, 2009
VISION MONTH: WEEK 3
MULTICULTURAL COMMUNITY
Embracing our Diversity as God Brings Us Together Through Christ
Ephesians 2:11-22; John 10:1-18; Jeremiah 29:1-11
Our world is fractured, separated, segregated, split, divided. And this cuts to the core of our hearts, for deep down our souls know our world and our hearts are designed for wholeness and harmony.
Globalization pushes us together and forces the essential fragmentation of humanity into eyes. We see this theme emerge again and again in our movies and stories. Consider just a few examples:
· Shakespeare's classic story of Romeo and Juliet. The tragic lovers from two divided families shine a light on the brokenness of their world.
· The Lord of the Rings series is asking the question of whether we can overcome our differences to make the world safe and whole.
· Remember the Titans tells the story of a championship football team when the black high school suddenly merges with the white high school. The fundamental question is whether we really can get along.
· Beauty and the Beast challenges the cultural fragmentation that happens when we place too high a value on external beauty.
· The Little Mermaid – amid all its cuteness and fun songs – deals with the serious theme of cross-cultural marriages.
In his book, Sex God, Rob Bell argues that our world is designed to be whole, one … diverse – yes! - but sharing a fundamental unity, soaked with loving relationships. But
So when we see people who come together out of brokenness and find wholeness and peace, it touches something deep in our souls. It connects with our deepest longings and our deepest hopes. We need peace. We need wholeness. We need community amid our diversity. It is a deep, deep craving of our soul, and without it we will forever be malnourished.
Lately, globalization and multiculturalism have become major themes here in Korea. Korea is traditionally seen as one of the most homogeneous nations on earth. Sameness and group unity are very deep values here. However, this is changing very quickly.
Korea now has 1.1 million resident “foreigners.” That is a little more than 2% of the population. By the way, the largest groups are Chinese, Philippinos and Vietnamese.
Everyone agrees that Korea is bound to get more and more foreigners who live long-term in Korea. Conservative estimates are that foreigners will make up 5% of the Korean population by 2020 , 8% by 2030, and 10% by 2050.
This diversification of Korea is fueled by several trends.
· First and foremost, Korea's population is aging, and Korea's birthrate is declining. More older Koreans and less younger Koreans, means that
· Second, as Korea's economy and education system improves, more and more of Korean workers are moving to “white collar” jobs or desk jobs, leaving more and more openings for factories, farms, and other manual labor jobs.
· Third, English education and global commerce are bringing in more educators and business people.
· Fourth, Korea is becoming an educational hot-spot for Asia. More and more international students are studying in Korea.
· Fifth, nowadays, 1 in 7 marriages in Korea involve one person who is not ethnically Korean. In some rural provinces, that ratio is as high as 1 in 3.
These trends are not temporary. They are likely to increase in pace and magnitude. The population of foreigners in Korea has quadrupled in the past 10 years. If Korea's foreign population continues to grow anywhere near that pace, then Korea will diversify even faster than the experts are predicting. My unprofessional guess is that the foreign population will reach 5-10% by 2020 and 15-20% by 2030. If you add in the children born from those multicultural marriages, these numbers go even higher.
Let me stir the pot just a little more. Historically, whenever the demographics of a community or a nation change quickly, there is conflict. Every nation that has experienced mass immigration has experienced a variety of racial conflicts, sometimes exploding into mass riots. It happened in the USA in many places and times throughout our history. It happened in Paris a few years ago. It happened in Australia a few years ago and again just recently.
Some people are calling Korea's changing demographics a “time bomb.” Some cultural analysts expect a variety of explosive conflicts centered around the themes of ethnicity and cultural change. Think about the protests about Mad Cow Disease and the take over of the SsangYong auto-plant. Now imagine if huge numbers of Korean workers were loosing their jobs because Korean companies could pay half as much to workers from Southeast Asia. Imagine the kinds of riots and protests and conflict that might happen then.
Representative Chin Young has recently introduced the first ever “anti-racism” bill to the Korean parliament. So far, we don't know whether this bill will pass or not, but we do know that the best thinkers here are trying to make plans for how to make this transition in the most positive way.
Now, you might be thinking, “Josh, this is all interesting, but what does this have to do with us? We are in a church worship service, not a political rally or an anthropology class.”
Well, all of this is important for us as a church because we are right on the cutting edge of Korea's cultural change. Nearly every institution in Korea will become more and more diverse, but international churches in Korea are probably the most diverse communities that currently exist in Korea. We are early indicators of Korea's future. In very small ways, we are helping to establish the patterns for Korea's adaptation to a multicultural society.
As we think about our role as cultural trend setters, we need to think on two levels: theology and practices. We need to consider the foundational theology that guides us as Christians and as the Church. And we need to move on to consider how we can live out this theology in our daily practices.
Let's think about the theology first. Like any good preacher, I have three points here.
First, God has made us one in Christ. The work is already done. When we talk about being or becoming a multicultural community, we often talk like we have to do the work. But really, that's not how it is.
We read in Ephesians today that we have already “been united with Christ … For Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us” (2:13-14). “Together as one body, Christ reconciled both groups to God by means of his death on the cross, and our hostility toward each other was put to death” (2:16). It is already done.
It happens like this in wars sometimes. The leaders meet together and make peace, but the soldiers are scattered around the country or around the world, and it takes time for the soldiers to get the good news that peace has been made. In the meantime, they keep fighting.
The good news is that God has made peace for us all. When we we embrace our diversity, we are only trying to actualize what God has already done. We are one people. We share a common humanity. We are all equally loved by God, so let's BE one in our day to day life.
Here's the second theological point: Diversity is fundamental to humanity and to theology. We understand ourselves in our experience of the other, and we understand God in our experience of the other. We have all had the experience of learning about our home culture as we compare it to other cultures. This is just the beginning. That is just a surface comparison.
When we open our hearts and our lives to others, that changes us on a deeper level. When the “other” has a genuine place in our hearts, our hearts expand and grow. When the “other” is part of our genuine heartfelt pursuit of God and longing for transformation, we learn more about God and more about ourselves. We desperately need multicultural community so that we can be genuinely Christian, genuinely human, and genuinely us.
The final theological point is that the church is a picture of the finale, God's end goal for humanity. The church is a picture of the healing of the world. When John the prophet sees heaven, he sees: “a vast crowd, too great to count, from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing in front of the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9). And he sees a beautiful river with trees of life on each side, and “the leaves of the tree are used for medicine to heal the nations” (Revelation 22:2). In the end, God will heal all our conflict. In the end, we will be united in the worship and joy of God our healer and savior. In the end, we will be made whole and healthy, and the deep longing of our souls will be satisfied in the wholeness of God and a perfectly united multicultural community in heaven.
So now, before heaven, we, the church – especially here in our church – we are a sign, a prophetic display, of this future. When we embrace our diversity by embracing each other, when we hug, we become prophets. When we welcome an “other” into our home and into our hearts, we become time-travelers, bringing the future-reality of heaven into present reality here.
O.K. Now lets talk practics. How can we do this time travel? How can we live out the multicultural community that God has already created among us? We need to come together.
First, come out together. We must come out from the attitudes that divide us. We need to come out of our nationalistic identities. We are not first of all Americans or Koreans or Philippinos. We are first of all citizens of the world and people loved by God. Our home nationality will always be part of us, and that is good. That is part of our diversity, but it cannot take the priority for us.
· Westerners, you know those times when someone had a bad day at school or at the market, and they start telling their culture shock story. It can turn ugly really fast, with everyone ragging on Korea. We need to come out from that. We need to step in with a positive voice and remind people of our common humanity and the great privilege that we have in living in Korea.
· Koreans, there will be times when your friends or coworkers will be prejudiced against foreigners. There will be times when you are standing in a line and someone in front of you will start talking in Korean about the weigookin (외국인) in the same line. At those times, we need for you to speak up. We need for you to remind your peers that we know when you are talking about us. Every foreigner quickly learns the word weigookin. We may not know much else, but we learn that quickly! We need for you to be cultural leaders, guiding people in your sphere of influence toward a healthy multiculturalism.
We need to come out together.
Second, we need to come in together. We need to commit ourselves to each other and to this church. Remember the passage from Jeremiah. We are all like those exiles. We are living in a strange place or engaging in a strange church. Many of us need to hear God say to us: “Build homes, and plan to stay. Plant gardens … Marry and have children … [I know some of you are working on that!] … And work for the prosperity of the city where I sent you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, for its welfare will determine your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:4-7).
Don't just be a stranger passing through. Put down roots. Commit yourself to this church and to this community. Become a member here. Our membership class is next week right after the service. If you want to come, it's not too late. Just talk to me. We need to come in together.
Finally, we need to come eat together. Years ago, I read part of a book called Where Resident Aliens Live by Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas. I don't even have the book anymore, but I still remember one of the stories.
There was a mostly white church in a medium sized town deep in the Southeast part of the USA. The old South is the most ethnically segregated part of the USA, and Sunday morning is the single most segregated time in all of America. Black people mostly go to all-black churches. White people mostly go to all-white churches. Latino people mostly go to Latino churches.
So this new pastor goes to a mostly white, middle class church in the deep South. And he starts preaching about racial reconciliation and multiculturalism. For years, he told people that we are all one in Jesus so we ought to be all one in church, too. Well, that didn't go over so well in his church. First, people started complaining. Then, they started leaving. Then, a lot of people left.
Years later, the pastor said, “Well, I preached that church down to three people before things started to change. … But once we we were all together committed to being one people along the lines that the Bible talks about, then we were able to start growing again.”
Willimon and Hauerwas visited that church and saw people of every shade of skin: brown people, white people, black people. It was like a human rainbow, and they were all laughing and singing and praising God. After the worship service, they interviewed some of the church members. They asked one of the church board members if this multicultural community was for real or if it was kind of just for show on Sunday mornings.
That deacon said, “Oh, no. I know it's for real because we eat together, and not just on Sunday neither. We are in each other's homes. We are in each other's lives. We go cheer for each other's kids. We bring soup when somebody's sick. This is deep, and it's real.”
Church, this is the most important thing I am going to say all day today: EAT TOGETHER. If you want to have a real multicultural community, eat together with people of other cultures. Eat together often. This will change our lives. This will change our church, and it will change our world.
1 comment:
Hi, Josh. Thanks for your interesting post. I just tweeted part of it. I'm llhargrove on twitter.com. Keep up the good work here on Humble Future.
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