thought exercise on Multi-Ethnic Relationships

Read any study on human satisfaction and you will see the paramount role of relationships with others. And yet, so many of us readily exchange friendship and community for success and achievement, onl...

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 ...

There are three ways to eat a salad: the American Way; the Weird Way, and the Right Way. The American Way of eating a salad is to fill your bowl with some iceberg lettuce or some spinach leaves, some ...

Most men and women fall in love with individuals of the same ethnic, social, religious, educational and economic background, those of similar physical attractiveness, a comparable intelligence, simila...

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...

Cultural diversity was built into the Christian faith…in Acts 15, which declared that the new gentile Christians didn’t have to enter Jewish culture…. The converts had to work out…a Hellenistic way of...

One development of the exile was an additional language for the Jewish people. The Babylonians and Persians spoke Aramaic, and out of necessity the Jews learned it. Some even became more conversant in...

What exactly is racial reconciliation? If you asked ten different people, it’s likely you’d get ten different answers! At a gathering I attended of national multiethnic leaders—pastors, professors, di...

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...

In a 2009 stand-up special, Chris Rock made a funny, and perhaps true, statement: “All my black friends have a bunch of white friends. And all my white friends have one black friend.” It turns out, R...

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...

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, ...

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...

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...

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...

Regarding the average human’s awareness of their own culture, career anthropologist Darrell Whiteman has said that “it is scarcely a fish who would discover water.” This is a reliable statement. Human...

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...

The concept of humanity’s being divisible into different races has no scientific validity. This has always been the case, even before the advent of rapid global travel enabled the further mixing of pe...

Whenever I lead a training session on cultural identity—particularly when there’s a strong white presence—I begin with this question: “Describe the first encounter you remember having with race.” Most...

As a black man, I pause when I see that Jesus was taken to Africa as a baby for refuge (Matthew 2:13–18). My blackness will not allow me to gloss over the Ethiopian man whom Philip cozies up to in Act...

So if we want to get the church right, we have to learn to see it as a salad in a bowl, made the Right Way of course. For a good salad is a fellowship of different tastes, all mixed together with the ...

While I was sitting at a stoplight a few blocks from my [Emerson’s] home in Minneapolis, reflecting on the recent rash of drive-by shootings in the area, three African-American teens clad in the urban...

In his insightful work, Beyond Racial Gridlock, George Yancey provides a multi-faceted picture of both the brokenness of American race-relations, as well as a response couched in the gospel. In this e...

“If there’s just one kind of folks, why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other?”

One of the gravest dangers to the Christian faith is its wholesale appropriation of the larger culture. When this happens, the citizens of those places cannot recognize the difference between their cu...

A few years ago Christian friends of ours, after several years of marriage, came to see Esther and me to explain that their relationship had reached an impasse and that they could see no alternative b...

Many minorities actually try to change their appearance to look more light-skinned or white. Eliza Noh, assistant professor of Asian American studies at California State University of Fullerton descri...

Our culture is still stuck on viewing marriage through the lens of happiness first and foremost—defining happiness by romantic intensity and sexual chemistry. Since the 1960s, sociologists have found ...

Many of us live in two worlds when it comes to relationships. In one world we have friendly conversations in which we avoid all disagreements; in the other we have major conflict-type conversations th...

Contact Theory proposes that if diverse groups spend extended time together, their intergroup conflict and the negative effects of racism and ethnocentrism will gradually decrease and possibly even di...