stories on Diversity

The solution to gender, race and social divisions is not to eradicate our differences but to see them in light of Jesus. The Pentecostal movement in the United States in the early twentieth century wa...

Lamin Sanneh, the African theologian who would be pivotal in the development of missional theology, was raised in an orthodox Muslim household in Gambia. He found himself drawn to Christianity after e...

I had a memorable lunch a few years ago with my friends Mike and Claudia, who had recently returned from Malawi, a small country in southeastern Africa. We were sitting in a booth at one of those chai...

When I went to seminary to prepare for the ministry, I met an African-American student, Elward Ellis, who befriended both my future wife, Kathy Kristy, and me. He gave us gracious but bare-knuckled me...

A classic mission dilemma: The chief of a village in a remote area, whose people practice a tribal religion, becomes a believer and declares the whole village is now Christian. Most of the leading m...

It was a cold December weekend in Chicago, and I was excited. One of my best friends was getting married, and to top it off, he had asked me to officiate the wedding. I was honored by the invitation, ...

Almost every African Bantu dialect includes the saying, “I am because we are,” which is captured by the term Ubuntu. The word literally means “human-ness” and roughly translates to “human kindness.” T...

In Mendenhall, where the schools have actually integrated, we are seeing real equality form in the hearts of members of this new generation, and it is enriching for the entire community. When the scho...

Author Drew Hart tells the story of meeting up for sweet tea with a friendly white suburban pastor, who placed his foam cup on the table between them and decided to make a racial analogy. The white pa...

Desegregation was one of the big goals of the civil rights movement. “Separate but equal” in the South became “separate and unequal.” The disparities were in things as small as water fountains and as ...

A close friend who started a financial loan business took thirty of his executives to the poverty- and violence-filled section of Montreal where he grew up in order to introduce them to the section of...

My sister and her husband have lived in Asia for close to eight years. Whenever I visit, I notice the ideal for beauty is different there from where I live in Texas. For instance, women in Asia seemin...

When my grandparents were in their eighties, their television developed a fault that made the screen permanently bright green. It was good for viewing garden shows or nature programs, but it was prett...

In his book Reconstructing the Gospel , pastor Jonathan WIlson-Hartgrove tells a story that occurred shortly after he and his family, white ethnically, decided to move into a historically African A...

Each one of us is called to live the truth of our unrepeatable uniqueness. We are not meant to model ourselves after others, however wonderful they may be. A delightful Jewish parable makes this point...

Belonging can be such a fickle and painful process in life. As the popular researcher and writer Brené Brown describes in her book, Braving the Wilderness, she struggled to fit in after moving to New ...

No writer has had a greater impact on my understanding of cultural identity than Dr. Beverly Tatum. …When introducing cultural identity (or racial identity, a term she uses synonymously), Tatum tells...

Richard Mouw, the former president of Fuller Seminary and a professor of philosophy, shares an amusing anecdote from a lecture by the esteemed Catholic ethicist Charles Curran. During his talk, Curran...

In the fall of 2009, I was invited to go on a month-long speaking tour throughout Africa. During the trip, a CEO from South Africa named Salim took me to Soweto, a township just outside of Johannesbur...

In 1970 John Perkins, an African American pastor and community organizer who lived on “the black side” of rural Mendenhall, Mississippi, was nearly beaten to death by white state police officers. The ...

The difference between collectivist and individualist cultures is not a surface value, such as “some people eat more rice than we do.” Individualism and collectivism describe two very different ways p...

I remember playing a game as a child in which we would bend one knee and grab our foot behind us and then try to race—limping, stumbling and falling over as we struggled across the grass toward a fini...

Talking about affluence and privilege is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. I am continually grateful for the perspectives of people outside my own fold. Like Dr. Martin Luther King, for instance, who t...

One day while drinking coffee, laughing, and sharing stories with one of my best friends, who is white, an unexpected question about race came up. It just popped up out of nowhere as we were talking a...

When I was in Germany speaking at a church, a blind woman named Elizabeth served as my interpreter. You can imagine the two of us on stage—me with my wheelchair and Elizabeth with her white cane. Duri...

My kids love the movie Remember the Titans . It’s the story of the integration of the TC WIlliams High School Football Team in Alexandria, Virginia, in the 1960s Civil Rights era. The white players a...

Have you ever noticed that we often see ourselves, specifically our bodies, our facial features differently? In 2013 the soap company Dove decided to explore this phenomenon by hiring an FBI-trained f...

There's a humorous, apocryphal story about a man standing by a river. On the opposite bank, a woman calls out, "How do I get to the other side of the river?" The man replies, "YOU A...

Impostors draw their identity not only from achievements but from interpersonal relationships. They want to stand well with people of prominence because that enhances a person’s résumé and sense of se...

I remember playing a game as a child in which we would bend one knee and grab our foot behind us and then try to race—limping, stumbling and falling over as we struggled across the grass toward a fini...