Cultural Experiences

DAILY BYTE

This week, we’ll explore the challenge and joy of Christian hospitality in the diverse world in which we live. It’s a heck of a challenge, but the scriptures also tell us that when we engage in it, a whole new world is opened up to all of us!

One of my tutors from seminary was a guy named Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and he and his wife, Leah, were very concerned with issues of hospitality, social justice, and reconciling with people across racial lines. So, when they moved to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina so that Jonathan could start his studies in theology, they asked around to find out where the dividing lines between black and white people were in the community.

It didn’t take them long to figure it out, as Durham has an often stark and deeply rooted history of racial division – so much so that many African American folk who work at Duke today still call it the ‘plantation’…. So, it didn’t take Jonathan and Leah very long to figure out where the white folk lived and where the black folk lived. As it turned out (as it so often does) they lived in communities sandwiched next to each other, and so Jonathan and Leah took an opportunity to go live on the border – on the street that acts as a dividing line between the two neighborhoods. And they did more than just eat and sleep there. They started attending a black Baptist church named St. John’s in a predominantly black neighborhood named Walltown.

When they arrived, they were, unquestionably, a bit of an anomaly, but in the book he’s written about his experiences – Free to be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line – he also says that the people were used to white visitors. They weren’t all that surprised that he and Leah had pitched up for a while.

It’s very en vogue isn’t it, for us to have “cross-cultural experiences.” Many believe and profess that the way to break down cultural and racial barriers is to start relationships with people who are different from ourselves. We preach this often, and in many ways, it is true – we certainly can’t have reconciliation without relationship.

But Jonathan goes one step further, challenging us to remember that in Durham, North Carolina – and I believe his challenge can be translated to most any context (you may just need to change the names of the races or cultural groups) – “whites and blacks…have never suffered a lack of relationship.”

“Residents of Walltown who have for three or four generations cleaned toilets, swept floors, and changed bedsheets at Duke University know a lot about relating to white folk. What they know more than anything is that white folks don’t stick around. However generous and kind they may be on their visits, white folks are always ‘just visiting’” (91-92). I find myself in similar “visiting” situations often – do you? I find myself “experiencing” other cultures and then going home often - Do you?

FOCUS READING

Galatians 3:28 (NIV)

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.