Me and Rachel went to see the movie Crash on Saturday night. We’ve been wanting to see it for a while really so we were glad to catch it whilst it was still on. What a powerful movie. It really got me thinking about my own attitudes towards people of other cultural and ethnic backgrounds. I was struck with the thought that our levels of patience are far higher when it comes to people of our own culture and we are much quicker to not give people the benefit of the doubt when they are different from us.

I’d already been thinking for the last week or so about why I believe so strongly in the church being a place where different cultural and ethnic groups come together under the banner of Christ. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve primarily held onto this vision biblically because of passages in Revelation which talk about all tribes and tongues being together. What I’ve been dwelling on a lot more lately is that the vision for ethnic groups coming together must really flow from the cross. The cross is the foundation for reconciliation - between man and God but also man and fellow man.

The movie really got me thinking that part of the evidence of the power of the cross is when different ethnicities come together and get along. And what a tragedy that most western churches, despite the diversity of their cities, operate along homogenous lines. The very fact that there is so little ethnic diversity in most churches – to me at least – just seems to shout to the world that the cross doesn’t make that big a difference. Even if every church planting manual says that the best way to grow a church is to be homegenous, I think that if there is cultural and ethnic diversity in the city, then the church is not faithfully showing Christ’s work on the cross if it only has one cultural group in it.

The solution to the problem of racism as portrayed so strongly in Crash is found in Christ. And the church is Christ’s body. So if the church doesn’t offer something that brings together diversity under the common banner of Christ, then isn’t Christ being misrepresented by His church?

S.

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