My hometown consists of less than four thousand people. Growing up, our community events, schools, sports teams and church all seemed to share a common demographic with little to no variation. The perceived lack of diversity, I assume, is probably not much different than that of your own cities. Yet, not all perceptions are reliable, and my perception was terribly mistaken. While it's true that the hard statistics aren’t comparable to larger metropolitan regions, even my hometown is a home to the nations, and I missed it time and time again.
Great Commission-minded believers — which many of us would claim to be — often posit, “The nations have come to us!” If that is the case, and I agree it is, I overlooked that reality for far too long. How could I have neglected the beauty of God expressed in the diversity of humanity right before my eyes?
The reality is that I neglected the Chinese family running their business. I neglected the migrant workers five minutes from my home. To my shame, I even neglected the Hispanic congregation my church shared a building with. I missed serving, loving, and encouraging them. I missed being loved and encouraged by them. I missed a reflection of the eternal throne room of Christ as I buried my eyes in temporal convenience.
Just maybe, I succumbed to believing the stereotype that my hometown didn’t have the nations —that there were no foreigners to love and no cross-cultural relationships to build because the very notion of “cultural diversity” in small-town Appalachia was supposedly laughable. I excused myself from my cross-cultural responsibility based on a blinded mind and a perpetuated ignorance. Read More
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