Read an Excerpt
Posture One
Valuing Multiethnicity
I (Helen) remember a morning when I was teaching in my church’s Sunday school program. My class of kindergarteners through fifth graders was majority white, with my youngest the only person of Asian descent at the table, and I was leading the kids through an exercise in understanding their ethnic roots. When it was my son’s turn to share about his connection to Korea, one of the other children interjected, “That’s the same as China, right?”
“No, Korea is a different country,” I explained.
“China, Korea—whatever. It’s all the same,” he said.
In his third-grade understanding, the word Asian had come to represent a variety of ethnic groups without distinction. It was also clear that he didn’t place value on identifying the differences between Korea and China. I had to patiently help him see that these were two distinct countries and people groups with their own identities and cultures. I knew the boy’s parents, both of whom were well educated and culturally sensitive, but this was a detail of multiethnic understanding that had apparently never been covered in their home. If there hadn’t been a Sunday school teacher who herself was the daughter of Korean immigrants, this young child may never have learned that day that China and Korea aren’t at all the same.
When the Bible refers to people of “every nation, tribe, people and language” (Revelation 7:9), it is acknowledging details about God’s intentionally created humanity that many Christians still might be overlooking. We live in a beautifully diverse world, and the biblical understanding of multiethnicity is foundational to becoming race-wise Christians. Often ignorance, discrimination, and ethnic or racial hatred come down to simply not valuing multiethnic voices and experiences.
In this chapter, we’ll take a deeper dive into what multiethnicity means, why it matters (especially within the body of Christ), and how families can play a special role in reflecting this value. We have chosen the word multiethnicity intentionally because valuing multiethnicity is a biblical principle, one that reflects the heart of God toward his people, seen first in his selection of a particular ethnic group—the Israelites—and seen now in his open arms to people of all ethnic backgrounds, who are given the opportunity through God’s grace and mercy to be adopted into his spiritual family (Galatians 3:26–29).
We also want to clarify that multiethnicity in and of itself isn’t the goal. While Revelation 7 presents a complete vision of the redeemed in its glorious diversity—unified in a posture of worship—the focus of the celebration is our God in the highest, and knowing him is our chief goal. In other words, pursuing multiethnicity is an extension of our worship of God. Nevertheless, throughout Scripture, God clearly acknowledges and values diversity, both for his own pleasure and for the spread of the gospel, as we will explore in this chapter.
Defining Terms
Let’s first pause to address several terms that will be helpful to define as we move into this chapter, namely ethnicity, multiethnicity, diversity, and representation.
Ethnicity, from the Greek word ethnos, is defined as “a social group that shares a common and distinctive culture, religion, language, or the like.” Korean, Italian, and Haitian are all examples of ethnicities. In the Bible, you will often find the Greek word ethnos translated as “nation” or “people,” such as in Acts 2:5: “There were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation [ethnos] under heaven.”
Multiethnicity refers to a collection of more than one ethnic group in contrast to monoethnicity, which means only one ethnic group. God is the creator of all the ethnic groups in this world, and when we reach the end of time, individuals—from all these groups—who have embraced a saving knowledge of Jesus will celebrate him.
Another term you may hear frequently in conversations about race is diversity. When we talk about diversity, we mean the full range of all of God’s creation, everything listed in Genesis 1, including stars and planets, birds and animals, vegetation and humans. By itself, diversity isn’t a negative or positive idea. For our purposes here, it just means that a particular group or context reflects a range of different kinds of people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.
Representation refers to the idea that the multiethnic range of people whom God has created should be reflected throughout relevant social systems and structures. The goal of representation isn’t for every space to be representative of every distinct ethnic and cultural group that exists; that wouldn’t be practical or even feasible. In South Korea, for example, it’s not realistic to expect that people from, say, China or Italy or Nigeria should be represented in the country’s leadership. Rather, the goal of representation is for any given space to reflect the people in its community and/or country. In this book, we are focusing on North America, where there is no justification for why significant imbalances exist, especially given our increasingly diverse demographics. For example, if you look at the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, you’ll find that 86 percent of them are white men even though that group represents only 35 percent of the American population. So, in the US, representation refers to the intentional inclusion of underrepresented voices. We will be focusing on ethnic and cultural representation in our discussion, although the term can be used in other contexts with regard to other categories.
A God who Values Multiethnicity
One of my (Helen’s) favorite hobbies is bird-watching. The Bible does, after all, say, “Consider the birds” (Matthew 6:26, csb)! On a beautiful day, I can spend hours of Sabbath time sitting outside and watching all manner of feathered friends enjoy the multiple forms of bird food I supply. (For now, let’s put aside the fact that the Bible doesn’t say, “Feed the birds,” as my husband regularly teases me!) I absolutely marvel at the variety of flying creatures that frequent my yard, ranging from large hawks swooping overhead to miniscule hummingbirds whizzing by, their wings in constant motion. I often reflect on how much enjoyment God found in creating each one. I don’t think it was a chore; I think it was an overflow of his creative spirit.
Unsurprisingly, God’s creative spirit is manifest in the way he designed humanity. As the Bible says, “Are you not much more valuable than [the birds]?” (verse 26). There is a reason God created humankind with so much wondrous variety as opposed to making all of us the same. In our different ethnicities, appearances, languages, and more, God’s value of diversity is on display. As Old Testament professor Bruce Waltke said of the creation account in Genesis 1–2, “All created species follow God’s master design and appointed purposes.” Whether we are talking about the birds of the air, every kind of flower and tree, or people, the opening chapters of the Bible declare that God delights in a universe that reflects his incredible creativity, especially as “all his works everywhere in his dominion” praise him in full submission and worship (Psalm 103:22).
In Scripture, God also repeatedly demonstrates his love for humankind as a multiethnic body. From the creation mandate for humans to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28; 9:7, nlt) to the diversification of people into numerous tribes and languages at the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9), we see God’s commitment to humans flourishing as a multiethnic group. Creating human beings who reflect multiethnic diversity was God’s idea from the very beginning, and it is also part of what it means to be made in God’s own image—the Godhead itself is three diverse, unique persons in one. Moreover, from God’s promise to Abraham, which included a name change such that he became “the father of many nations” (Genesis 17:5), to God’s willingness to save the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in the book of Jonah, to the multiple ways that Jesus showed love to people groups whom the Jews thought of as outside God’s mercy and grace (i.e., Samaritans and Gentiles of various ethnic backgrounds), God showed that he embraces people from every nation (Acts 10:34–35) even when human beings don’t do the same for one another.
