My friend Hilary helps lead an annual ceremony of blessing for the Native American students she works with. After listening to different Native speakers describe their journeys of healing cultural trauma and receiving an invitation to embrace the way our Creator made them Native, students are given blankets that are wrapped around them by a minister and elders as a symbol of blessing. When asked how that was received, given that “gifts” of smallpox-infested blankets had been used to decimate the Native people, Hilary replied, “We’re pretty up front in acknowledging what blankets have represented in the past for Native people. But instead of using it to curse, we’re using it to bless. As we pray over them and celebrate who they are, we are redeeming the meaning of the blankets. The students think it’s pretty cool, and a lot of them have described the ‘blanket ceremony’ as their favorite thing about that gathering.”
Jesus’ people also faced the potential wiping out of their people and story. But Jesus acted as a culture re-creator, a maker of new culture, as he invited his people and others into redemption. Jesus did not come to dismantle Jewishness. He came to help the Jewish people become fully Jewish. The Jews were liberated from Egypt in order to be a priesthood nation to all of their neighbors. But without the Holy Spirit writing the law on their hearts, they could not. Once they were sent to be disciplemakers of every nation, they were invited to be the priesthood people. Paul, the rabidly ethnocentric Pharisee supremacist, became the unlikely carrier of the gospel to all nations. He thought he was embodying what it meant to be a true Israelite, but he could not do so without Jesus. Instead of being a culture preserver or destroyer (and indeed, he was very destructive before meeting Jesus), Paul was invited to become a re-creator, a culture-maker in Jesus’ name.
My friend worked at a Covenant church named Jesus the Re-creator, and I can’t think of a better way to name what Jesus does at the cross and through his resurrection. The cross marks Jesus’ defeat of death and sin and heralds his eventual defeat over all death in the world to come. The broken world is being re-created by a good healer and redeemer as he invites us into his work of re-creating our culture.
As we talk about ethnicity, we’re not just talking about remembering cultural heritage. We’re talking about creating new culture that builds off of ethnic history and knowledge and, in Jesus’ name, helps create something new that blesses the nations and helps others come to know him. Creating new culture means having a powerful and relevant impact on the arts, on justice, in the thought world, and in society as whole. And new culture pays homage to the roots from which it came, recognizing both the good and the bad.
When we are ethnically aware of our beauty and scars, and when we are aware of the imago Dei and pain in others, we have the opportunity to be culture re-creators, much like the early church that saved the dying and orphaned babies during the plagues and much like Martin Luther King Jr. and all those who marched for freedom. When Christians are divorced from understanding their secular context, they become ineffective and exclusive communities that have no real impact on the world around them. Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making, calls the church to move beyond condemning, critiquing, copying, or consuming culture.1 He writes that culture is not just simply how we think; it is what we make of the world. And he invites Christians to become culture makers.
Being ethnically aware helps us re-create culture without dismissing the past. It helps us avoid appropriating the stories of others because the ethnically aware self aims to be cognizant of beauty and brokenness, scars and tears, in its learning of all stories. And it helps us avoid wandering as houseless vagabonds who keep searching for home in the stories of others while avoiding being in touch with our own roots. Culture re-creation honors heritage.
In 2001, a young rapper faced off against Hassan, the reigning champion of the Freestyle Friday rap battle competition on Black Entertainment Television (BET). Hassan had won six victories and was on his way to BET’s hall of fame.
His opponent was MC Jin, a nineteen-year-old Chinese American who filled thirty seconds with confident rhymes and unabashed references to his ethnicity, including telling Hassan, “If you make one joke about rice or karate, NYPD be in Chinatown searchin’ for your body.”
Hassan gave up with more than fifteen seconds left after delivering some limp lines about wontons and sexual inexperience, meant to poke fun at Jin’s ethnic background. Jin stole the show, won six more battles, and landed in the BET hall of fame.
What was a Chinese American doing in an arena dominated by black Americans? Though Jin had a promising start because of the BET show, his first album in the United States flopped. He was guided by well-intentioned people who didn’t know how to help a Chinese American break into a market with almost no other Asian Americans. Years went by and then he received an invitation to record and remake himself in Hong Kong. Jin became a celebrity in Asia and then became a Christian who helped lead other well-known celebrities in Hong Kong to faith.2
I grew up watching many Asian Americans gravitate toward hip-hop and rap, and I’ve heard Asian Americans lament and criticize that they lack their own distinct style of music: “Why can’t we have our own? Why do we need to borrow or steal from black culture?”
To those critics, I’d say that for many Asian Americans, the expression of the black struggle, of not being white and being mistreated as a person of color, is something that resonates with Asian Americans. Especially for those who grew up as children of poor immigrants, rap music talks about the struggle of poverty and having a hard life, which provides connection in ways that are not available in other music genres. Plus, rap is in English, a language they can understand, as opposed to the disconnection they may have with their parents’ mother tongue. To have a different language from your parents means that one cannot fully communicate one’s struggles, emotions, or experiences. Rap music provides Asian Americans a way to describe experiences and emotions that may never be understood by their parents. I understand why they gravitate toward music rooted in centuries of a developed black consciousness. To deny them that connection is dangerously close to saying that they cannot be American. Hip-hop is American. They are Asian American.
But there is a second reason why Asian Americans gravitate to rap, and it’s more complicated. In many Asian cultures, rhythm, dancing, song, spoken word, and improvisation are a part of their arts and cultures, spanning back for more than one thousand years. Many Asian Americans are cut off from understanding the language that is the backbone of these musical and artistic practices. Hip-hop was often the closest equivalent to the rhythm, drums, and dance that is a part of Chinese, Korean, Indian, and other Asian cultures. Perhaps without even knowing it, Asian Americans that gravitate toward hip-hop and rap are gravitating toward the closest equivalent to their ancestral heritage’s artistic soul.
Missiologist Lamin Sanneh writes that language is a “living expression of culture” and that Christian mission helped “strengthen vernacular languages in their diverse particularity and enormous multiplicity.”3 Though missionaries often brought Western colonization, Sanneh notes that their insistence on translating the Bible into the local language helped preserve the culture, especially in cultures that had no written language. He contrasts this with Islam’s spread in Africa. Islam has a central language (Arabic) with an accompanying centralized culture that replaces local culture and language. Sanneh argues that language is the preserver of culture. Think about the nuance and variety of vocabulary, slang, grammar, and accents in English (in different parts of the United States, in England, Ireland, Australia, etc.) or in the Spanish or French spoken all around the world. Spoken words contain so much of the culture.
My mother’s side of the family is descended from a line of artists, philosophers, and senators who spoke up against the government and were banished. They are known for their artistic flair and musical ability. There is a Korean folk song titled “Arirang” that has a sweet pentatonic scale and peaceful rhythm. Every Korean province plays a slightly altered version. My mother’s relatives turn it into a rhythmic, minor-scaled song full of flair, claps, and syncopation, sounding more like an old black American spiritual or a Native American song than the original.
When my mother’s youngest sister got married, my grandparents gathered their village in Jindo, Jeolla Province, to celebrate. People drummed and sang, and after the chorus of “Arirang,” each person made up their own rhyming lines of spoken word and song celebrating the marriage, expressing joy that all five of my grandparents’ children were married, and wishing many grandchildren upon them. My father, who is not from that province, marveled and said afterward, “I understand now what they mean by the glory of Jindo’s people.”
Spoken word, drums, and rhythm are a deep part of my ethnic cultural heritage. Many Asian Americans don’t know their cultural heritage because such knowledge is lost with language. When immigrant children come to a new country and try to survive and thrive, the price paid for their successful assimilation into American life is losing the language that binds them to their ancestral culture.
This is one of the gifts of the black community: the arts, particularly music, became the primary vehicles and carriers of their ethnic story—of resistance against slavery and racism, of remembering history, and pointing toward hope. Black Americans spent much of the past four centuries without power, and their songs captured their fight against injustice and stories of pain that white-dominated history books and stories could not. And it’s in English. Black stories and culture are passed down in the same language, though in evolving musical forms. Black culture produces musical, artistic revolution amid their suffering. They refuse to let brokenness have the final say. They refuse to buy into a cheapened gospel.
The arts, and the arts particularly from the black American experience, have shaped culture in the United States, and music produced by the black community has profoundly shaped many American cultural revolutions. Awareness of ethnic story has been passed on from generation to generation. Awareness of its beauty and pain has allowed for the powerful creation of poetry, literature, spoken word, music, rap, and other art that often incorporates gospel hope into its notes and words. Contrast this with immigrant communities who don’t share the same language or racial awareness that they could pass on to their children.
When I reflect on the version of “Arirang” from my mother’s village and I hear its minor, rhythmic turns, I hear the sound of a people who were oppressed, who used the arts and words to protest and continue to use them—just like the black community in the United States. Hearing the old songs about hope and freedom from the black tradition helps me hear those notes of hope in the songs of my own people. I notice when it’s present, and I notice when it’s missing. Much of non-Christian Asian understanding of self is cyclical: life is suffering, and you will be reborn into another life, hopefully to suffer less. The Christian understanding of self is linear: this is the one life we have, and there is assurance of triumph at the end of God’s story. What turned a tiny half-peninsula country such as Korea into the one of the largest missionary sending bases of the world?4 Something about the story of the gospel tapped into the real awareness of pain and struggle of the Korean people and released it for a new story of sharing hope with the rest of the world.
Moses, who represents both the powerful and the oppressed as an adopted Egyptian prince of Hebrew origins, killed an Egyptian in order to protect the Hebrews. He was repudiating his Egyptian background. When the people he considered his own rejected him, Moses fled far away from both Egypt and Israel to Midian, repudiating his Jewishness. He sought to erase his past. But God had other plans for him. He wove together Moses’ Hebrew heritage and his Egyptian upbringing as a prince to deliver the Israelites from slavery.
Left to our own devices, we can be like Moses. We can become destroyers of culture or reject our own people. We can consume or dismiss the ethnic culture of others. A colorblind society eager to run from the past can try to dismiss ethnic culture in many ways. But Jesus doesn’t do that.
My friend Sherami, a German American from Iowa, talked with me about the difficulty of trying to recover the culture of the German heritage in her family. For many German Americans, it was tricky to be German during and after World War II. You represented the enemy and those who were responsible for the Holocaust. In order to show that you were a loyal American, many German-descended Americans stopped speaking German and tried to assimilate as much as possible to what they considered to be mainstream culture. Sherami’s family was no exception.
In her campus ministry, Sherami has been helping white men and women enter into conversations about race and ethnicity. She encountered confusion, emotions, and defensiveness in her fellow white people. She asked me mournfully, “How do I recover what was not explicitly taught to me? How do I teach other people to learn what was never taught to them?” She wrestled with the poverty of knowledge, with how her family had been affected by the pressures to assimilate and as a result lost part of their ethnic story. This is not just an issue for her family or just German Americans. Many European immigrants lost the connection to their ethnic heritage stories in the forced or voluntary assimilation to whiteness.
We prayed that God would open doors for Sherami to recover the culture that was never passed down to her. A year later, a distant cousin sent her a recording of her grandfather’s voice. As she sat listening to his accented immigrant voice, she wept. “His voice! That German accent, so unmistakable! I understand now why my aunts and uncles talk a certain way, say certain things,” she said. Sherami connected with a part of her ethnic story that had been closed to her. As she learned about her grandfather’s immigrant story, she discovered that he opposed Hitler’s rhetoric. She began understanding her German American heritage and herself as a white woman in new ways. And she got an answer to her prayers as Jesus showed that he cared about her ethnic heritage.
Sherami is acquiring stories and experiences that will help her invite others into their own compelling journey to embrace their ethnic identity. This is especially important for white people because lack of self-knowledge in terms of ethnic history is a serious impediment for navigating multiethnic community.
We cannot help re-create culture if we do not know who we are or where we come from. With a deficit of self-knowledge, we don’t have the building blocks necessary to create beauty, to honor the past, or to point to hope. We’re at the mercy of those who know more or claim to know more, who can pick and choose and decide to tell us what to be.
In our nation’s past, many Native Americans were tragically forced to give up their language and culture in the Christian boarding schools where Native children were sent after they were taken away from their parents. There is a growing awareness and movement to reclaim this lost Native culture. The body of Christ must be an important voice that affirms the embrace of Native history and culture. But the gospel won’t be achieved by just reclaiming Native culture. We must also invite Native American Christians to be culture re-creators and makers who bring the beauty of their story and share the gospel through that lens.
Supaman is a Montana-based rapper descended from the Crow Nation. He is also a Christian who weaves references to faith and Jesus into his art. He performs as a dancer, rapper, and musician all over the world, and he often speaks to Native American youth about the value and beauty of their culture and heritage, which stands in stark contrast to how many Native youth view their ethnic selves. In a song called “Prayer Loop Song,” he takes the tracks of old civil rights songs and overlays them with Native sounds and songs while rapping and borrowing from the hip-hop tradition that describes many realities of the inner city that parallel reservation life. Supaman is re-creating culture, paying homage to the old and telling the story of his people and of Jesus in a new way.
When we are rooted in our story, we become better receptacles of others’ stories. Instead of culture destroyers, we become culture re-creators. We can make art that honors our stories and the stories of the other. Culture re-creation reveals the existing or hidden beauty in ourselves and in the other.
We need to remember and learn cultural and ethnic histories instead of resorting to shallow appropriation, in which people take or make use of something for one’s own use, without authority or right.
For example, appropriation of Asian culture may include buying cultural artifacts such as a Chi-Pao gown, enjoying sushi or kimchi, learning a greeting in Chinese or Korean, or learning an Asian martial art, and then congratulating oneself as multicultural. But it’s important to go deeper than that. We must take care in learning about the ethnic and provincial diversity of China and its people and take time to learn about the complexities, pain, and depth behind the immigrant stories of Asian Americans.
The celebration of Cinco de Mayo and St. Patrick’s Day in the United States are other examples of cultural appropriation. These events are celebrated with drinking and the wearing of stereotyping costumes instead of with an understanding of their actual histories (Mexico’s victory over France at the Battle of Puebla and the legacy of Saint Patrick, who served his former ethnic enemies as a spiritual leader).
In 2015, Annie Lennox, a white singer, was criticized for singing Billie Holiday’s critically acclaimed song “Strange Fruit” because she refrained from explicitly discussing the song’s significance in US history. The song is about lynching and how the South documented the violent act as if it were a sport; the “strange fruit” is the hanging bodies of black men, women, and children.
If we are unwilling to understand the history of something, then we can’t do justice to its story. We end up appropriating, taking what is convenient. Appropriation is hurtful because it consumes the beauty of something without acknowledging, honoring, and addressing the pain. We use the N-word thinking it will make us cool or that we will gain more swagger, when we should be sensitive and aware of what the word has meant through our country’s history. If we thought about it, we wouldn’t use it. We can play music created by black artists because we like the rhythms or the beats without understanding the actual story behind the music. Consumerism lets us pick and choose what we want. We become gluttons of what feels good and deniers of pain and scars.
The beauty of the blues, soul, Motown, hip-hop, and rap music comes out when it’s paying homage to history, crying out against suffering, and asking the existential and theological questions of “When will this end?” Spirituals were not just talking about heaven itself but also of the lands of promise on this side of heaven, where black men and women could be free before death came.
We can’t understand the meaning behind the lyrics of black rapper Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” if we don’t understand what the song is referencing—the appropriation of black culture, the execution and destruction of black Americans, the self-hatred that results, and also the breathtakingly beautiful life of blackness and black culture. If we love the music of black people and yet do little to care about the things they sing about, we fail to treat black Americans with care, honor, and respect.
The opposite of appropriation is homage and remembrance. Appropriation is partial, shallow savoring that destroys memory. Re-creation of culture remembers the beauty and the broken. Culture creation without homage to the past is appropriation of others’ ethnic histories and the dismissal of our own. If we do not know our ethnic story, the past, we are rootless. You cannot find a home for yourself if you don’t know the home from which you came. And you will certainly be a poor guest in the house of others. A wise Asian American colleague said to me once, “If we do not know who we are, we just end up taking from others.”
Children of immigrants are usually told what it means to be their ethnic background. Their parents have very insistent perspectives on what it means to be Polish, Korean, or Chinese. But that definition is the way Poland, Korea, or China was when their parents left that country, sometimes decades ago—not the way it is now. Immigrants carry with them a time capsule impression from their parents of what it means to be their ethnicity, even though, of course, their hometowns and people change over time. Back in my parents’ day in South Korea, most women married by age twenty-four. Nowadays, people don’t get married until they are close to or older than thirty, and many women are choosing to be single because they wish to avoid the restrictions that might be placed onto them as daughters-in-law. It’s a different world than the one my parents left in 1985.
Many churches, immigrant and not, hold on to traditions that are culturally normal for them. The conservative values of the previous generation don’t necessarily appeal to the younger generations, and churches fail to change alongside our ever-evolving world. Churches that don’t pay attention to changing cultural norms stand in danger of being inhospitable, irrelevant, and fossilized in a time capsule that no longer connects with the present day. Cultural preservation without theological reflection and challenge leads to fossilization. And fossilized churches become spaces that are defined by social gatherings instead of spaces to experience the real living presence of God.
As Christians, all of us are tasked with creating new spiritual families as we join with former strangers. Israel and later the church were invited to be a people of cultural re-creators, bringing life and bearing the image of God to those around them to form the new family of God. Likewise, as we form spiritual communities of support, love, and care, we are called to care for those outside our immediate family. We need to care for single people who are unmarried by choice or circumstance, as well as those who are going through the difficult pain of divorce. Every ethnic culture ostracizes such people; we can welcome their gifts, friendship, and presence. As mentors and friends of different ethnicities and life stages become dear parts of our lives, we learn more deeply how to love the other. Our spiritual families become radically hospitable and countercultural spaces as we grow in understanding ethnic beauty as well as witness together the healing from God.
My husband, Shin, was a youth group leader several years ago. We learned that two teenagers in his group were from families that had recently gone through difficult divorces. Wanting to give the parents a break from cooking, we invited them over for Shin’s peach-whiskey-BBQ chicken on a Saturday night. The group included John, his mom, and his younger sister, who are black, and Anna, her younger sister (adopted Latina), and their white father. Given the mix of tweens, teens, and parents who didn’t know each other too well, we thought it could be pretty awkward. We worried that they’d cancel when snow started to fall, but everyone came, bundled up against the cold. We had a great time, with my extroverted and artistic husband entertaining the party with YouTube videos of artists, dancers, and singers of every ethnic background. Everyone talked and shared, even the shyer tweens. We were a multiethnic, multi-life-stage group of people who stayed together in communion until almost midnight. One parent said it was a treat to not have to cook, while the other whispered to me that this was the first time he’d seen his daughter smile and laugh in a year. “Thank you,” he said, giving us hugs.
After everyone left, my husband and I stood still, savoring the beauty of the night we’d just experienced. It’s one of our favorite memories from our time in Boston. We felt like we had hosted angels. Jesus was expanding our understanding of community, and he continues to teach us how to be a spiritual family to married and single persons, divorcees and widows, to the parent overwhelmed by his kids or the couple struggling with infertility, across ethnic boundaries and differences.
As for creating new culture in biological families, there is no right formula. You could end up marrying someone of the same or different ethnic background, but what matters is how you live out your marriage as an ethnically aware couple. Those who think ethnic-specific marriages are the answer to preserving culture might be concerned about ethnic purity and conservancy. But that can lead to fossilizing and a lack of culture creation, which is needed to challenge idols and assumptions of norms in that culture. On the flip side, those who think mixed marriages are the only answer could be running away from or denying their ethnic histories instead of thoughtfully reflecting on who they are as ethnic people—beauty, complications, and all.
Both mixed-race marriages and marriages between people who share ethnic heritage are needed in an ethnicity-aware society and church community in order for us to understand our stories better and reconcile across differences. Ethnic-specific marriages can focus on bringing the best of their culture together to their community and explore regional variances in their shared ethnicity (my parents are both Korean, but they hail from two different provinces with different values). A white man with mostly German roots and a white woman with Irish and Norwegian roots can steward their whiteness together while sharing their different heritage stories and values with their spouse. A black woman married to a white man will together need to be intentional in recognizing the beauty as well as the scars in both sides so that they can address conflict in an ethnically aware manner and raise their children to honor both sides of the family. An Asian woman and a Latino man will marvel in the similarities as well as differences in how their cultures understand honoring their parents and creating a new family together. A family that adopts a child can help the child understand both her own ethnic heritage as well as the traditions of the family in which she is growing up.
The people who may most feel the tension and need of reconciliation in a diverse society are multiracial children. At a recent ministry conference, mixed-race people shared painful stories of being rejected by different sides of their communities. Domenic spoke about how the Italian side of his family would use ethnic slurs and say disparaging things about his Mexican mother’s people. Whether on the playground or in his high school or college classroom, whenever he attempted to connect with Latinos, they rejected him because he could not speak Spanish. “I grew up hating who I was, on every side,” he said. Others shared about navigating playgrounds, neighborhoods, and classrooms while being rejected by both of their sides or singled out as the other. One twenty-one-year-old man, both Haitian and Guatemalan, shared that the first time he had felt accepted was at a recent intentional dinner space for multiracial, multiethnic people. He had spent the first two decades of his life meandering from un-acceptance to confusion to isolation. These painful stories are not new. But hearing about the pain of multiracial people helped those who represented the different sides of those stories say to them, “We are sorry, brother. We love you, sister. You are part of our family.”
These brothers and sisters hold the reality of different communities and ethnic stories living in one person. Our multiracial brothers and sisters have the difficult challenge of living out reconciliation and creating new culture every day as they navigate competing messages from different sides. But they may be the people to lead us in the repairing and restoring of broken connections between communities. Will we honor them as part of us while also encouraging them to seek the Lord in creating new culture? Our challenge is to say, “Look at the glory God put in you. Learn and own your story, and then teach me,” instead of saying, “Well, we’re all just human anyway.”
Leah, who has a Polish mother and a father who is Puerto Rican and Italian, grew to embrace her Latino heritage after spending most of her childhood being rejected by Latinos because she didn’t speak enough Spanish. In college, she was loved and encouraged to grow in her identity as a multiracial Latina. She read, prayed, and made space for Jesus to bring healing and wholeness to her journey. God grew her heart to reach out to Latinos who were not being reached by her college fellowship. Before her self-acceptance, she would have questioned her role and authority given her biracial heritage. But because she had experienced healing, she said yes to this call. She is now able to help both Latinos and multiracial persons own their stories because of the work God has done in her.
We need hope in order to be culture re-creators and re-shapers of society, justice, and reform. We need the Christian story of hope in order to write stories, paint masterpieces, and create musical scores that make us say yes to the home we long for. God’s character and his story of hope in the cross and resurrection help us understand what is beautiful.
My husband and I are both artists. As part of an InterVarsity project, we created The Story Project, a large manga-style mural depicting stories of people being healed and restored by Jesus throughout the Scriptures: the man with leprosy, the blind man, the man possessed by Legion, the Samaritan woman at the well, the raising of Lazarus, and more (see http://2100.intervarsity.org/overview/story-project). The mural is six feet high and nine feet wide with brilliant colors and faces of every ethnicity. Jesus is depicted in six different ways: black, possibly Asian or Native, white, possibly Latino or Middle Eastern, wearing crowns of thorns, and breathing out living water. The mural was created to start spiritual conversations with people of every ethnicity and spiritual background. When we first tested it in Boston, students flocked to the mural—black Caribbean American women, young Latino students, white punk rockers with aqua-dyed blond hair, older Vietnamese American students, and Muslim Middle Eastern American women wearing headscarves. They were drawn to the colors and ethnic diversity of the mural, to the stories of people who looked like them. Young black students exclaimed, “There are people who look like me in this drawing!”
I met a woman who was an agnostic international student from Saudi Arabia. When I asked her what made her stop at the mural, she pointed at the ethnically diverse faces of Jesus. “I want to know why,” she said.
As we shared the stories of Jesus bringing healing and restoration to the different characters, we also shared how Jesus brought healing and hope to our own stories, pointing to the stake in Jesus’ wrist from which flows living water. We invited people to receive healing in places of brokenness and invited them to say yes to Jesus.
The Story Project has been used across the country and in sister organizations across the globe. We took pains to reflect the kingdom diversity each student group desired. When it was used by mostly white students in an artistic community, black students that had never before connected to the group approached the white leaders and asked, “What is this? Tell me about this drawing.”
In his commencement address to Biola University students in 2012, Makoto Fujimura, a brilliant Japanese American abstract painter known for his use of traditional Japanese painting techniques, said the following:
So today I ask you . . . “What do you want to make today?” It’s a question posed to those leaving a school instead of being asked as you enter one. . . . Would you make today a future that is worth beholding? Will you choose to dedicate your days to creating a world that is worth passing onto your children?
Do not be washed away in apathy, entropy and decay. Instead of threatening the world with terrorism, and deny the fundamental endowed capacity to create in love, we need, in the quiet of your daily service, give sacrifice so that others may live. Art and love are fundamentally the same act, operating on the same sphere of our lives. You see, art is not a frivolous, peripheral activity, but it has to do with the deepest core of existence; it is to love yourself, and your neighbors. Art defines what makes us human; and fully human, we will be making things.5
We may not all be painters, but we all make things: friendships, families, cultures, careers, and memories. Each of us is called to create and re-create in that process.
In the summer of 2015, I gathered a multiethnic group of evangelistic InterVarsity staff from different parts of the country who ranged in age from twenty-three to forty. We explored and shared our ethnic stories, making space to reflect on how God made us well and also to lament and weep over how we were broken by sin. We studied the Scriptures and prayed blessings and forgiveness over one another. We washed one another’s feet. In ethnically diverse pairs, we practiced preaching about how God brought healing to our ethnic stories and invited our listeners to follow Jesus the reconciler and become a Christian. We were commissioned to go and do preaching in pairs for the following year.
As each pair went out to preach, they started to see conversion, repentance, confession, healing, and new life. Native American students who heard that Jesus wanted to bless their culture and bring healing to the cracks in their stories said yes to Jesus. Andrew and Brent, respectively white and black Southerners, preached together and saw not only conversion but also healing and release from emotional bitterness, wounds, and spiritual oppression. As others incorporated ethnically aware teaching into their communities, they saw their leadership grow and change, their fellowships grow in diversity, and real reconciliation happen. They would speak up and speak out against injustice, host dinners for Muslim students, plant ministries to unreached ethnic groups, and help white students learn how they were created well and being restored in Jesus. Many of the stories you read in this book come from the experiences of those women and men. These experiences were changing us just as much as they were transforming our communities. We had front row seats to glory, even amid the rising racial tensions in the United States. And we are so grateful for a God whose story and message of hope makes this possible.
Hope can feel paltry and weak in a time when sin and brokenness seem to be normative in our world. But hope isn’t a tool of the feeble-hearted. It’s the food of those who have known suffering, who know the difference between comfort and yearning for the complete reversal of all things broken. Art without hope might be beautiful or intriguing or a nice mental exercise. But the stories, music, and paintings that tap into that place of hope in us hit a different chord. They are the most beloved of stories, like The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, and they help us live in hope.
Hope is what keeps us going. We, in our ethnic stories and selves, are called to live in hope and to pursue that hope. We live in the here and not yet. In the hope of the final resurrection, where God himself will wipe away every tear from every eye, we are called to proclaim the kingdom with all that we have. It is in doing so that we become culture re-creators.
1.What are ways Jesus might be inviting you to remember your ethnic heritage?
2.How is Jesus inviting you to become a culture re-creator?
3.Where is Jesus inviting you to hope in how you practice community, reconciliation, crossing cultures, or justice?
4.What are some personal and communal next steps you can take after reading this book?
The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts edited by Daniel J. Treier, Mark Husbands, and Roger Lundin
The Black Church and Hip Hop Culture: Toward Bridging the Generational Divide edited by Emmett G. Price III
Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for Our Common Life by Makoto Fujimura
Multicultural Ministry Handbook: Connecting Creatively to a Diverse World edited by David A. Anderson and Margarita R. Cabellon
Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing by Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice