Diversity

I first encountered the issues of diversity a lifetime ago, it seems, when I was a single mom looking for a career that would enable me to support myself and my two children. There was a brief period when I considered being a teacher, and I took a few classes at a local university to get certification, until I decided that I didn't have the financial or emotional resources and just plain didn't want to be a teacher badly enough to put myself through several years of education in courses that seemed fairly irrelevant, especially since I had a master's degree in English and several years' teaching experience in private schools.

The class that made me decide my career in education was finished was on diversity in the classroom, in which we prospective teachers were taught how to manage a classroom where there were students of different races, learning abilities, socio-economic backgrounds, and even sexual orientations. I, a white, middle-class girl from a small town in northwestern Ohio with above-average intelligence, came into the class thinking that as a Christian, I should treat all people with dignity, respect, and charity--regardless of color and intellectual ability, whether they were rich or poor, gay or straight--because they were made in the image of God, and this is what I was called to do.

But this was the wrong approach. It wasn't enough to acknowledge that there were differences and respect others in spite of them. It was necessary to understand the differences, to somehow enter into the experiences of others; it would be possible to respect them only if we could understand their holidays, eat their foods, feel whatever it felt like to be female/male; Hispanic/African American/Chinese American/etc.; wheelchair bound/deaf/blind; ADHD/dyslexic; and on and on. The class met one evening a week for a couple of hours for a semester. After spending two entire class sessions listening to the miserable plight of a young gay man who grew up in a Christian home here in Grand Rapids, I decided that this approach wasn't working for me. It was easier for me to be charitable and respectful toward him when I just thought of him as another person made in God's image and didn't have to walk through the details of what it was like to be a young gay man growing up in a Christian home in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

One Christian workplace addressed the matter of diversity by offering training that focused on white racism in American history and then divided employees up into committees that considered the diversity that exists among different sexes, people of different religious denominations, people who worked in the office and people who worked in the plant, and, of course, people of different races. Again, I wonder whether it was really necessary to spend so much time exploring differences. The workers all professed to be Christians, and shouldn't they be focusing on what bound them together rather than on what made them different from each other? As humans, we all fall prey to the sin of insensitivity sometimes, and we might be guilty of saying or doing something that could hurt another, but were committees devoting hours of work time exploring the differences really the solution?

And now I work in a truly unique environment where the issue of diversity is a non-issue. The offices of Reformation Heritage Books are housed in the Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary building, so I have the unique privilege of watching as people of different colors and traditions, with varying academic abilities, of different religious denominations, some with very little of this world's possessions and some with more, and even different sexes live and study together. I overhear a conversation between two men, one from Brazil and one from the Netherlands, talking about their wives and how they're adjusting to this strange, but warm place. I watch as a young man from Scotland helps an older brother from Malawi study his Hebrew. Students and their families from Ethiopia, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, Canada, and America--elect from every nation, it seems--gather here without regard for language and cultural differences and live together in various apartment complexes near the seminary. I hear the students who have been here longer say to the new ones, "We're in 226. Come by if you need anything. We'll get together soon."  People refer to others as brothers and sisters here, and they really mean it. And the interesting thing is that this all happens without committees, without training, without sessions that make us all aware of one another's experiences and traditions. It happens because the bonds of Christ that unite are far more powerful than the things that can divide--languages, traditions, foods, wealth, poverty, male or female.

And I am confident that there will be no diversity training in heaven.