Myopia is a medical term for nearsightedness. Sadly, many Christians suffer from social and spiritual myopia.
We can see the things and people that are close to us very clearly. The people that are further from us culturally or ethnically, or by wealth or education we don’t see as clearly. Sometimes we walk right past them and don’t see them. Sometimes we look around our community and only see people like ourselves.
In this short but excellent video Russell Moore encourages mono-cultural churches to ask why they’re monocultural. But don’t look around a room and ask people like yourself. You need to go outside the church building, into the community and have those conversations with people of other races. Is there a reason that a Black, Hispanic, or Chinese family wouldn’t come to this church?
Is it possible that churches filled with white Americans have come to view ourselves as the definition of a Christian? That our standards should be universal standards? That our beliefs should be universal beliefs? That our “way” of doing church is the “right way”?
This mindset decreases the likelihood that a church will make changes in order to accommodate others. We’re more likely that even when we acknowledge different perspectives of time flexibility between cultures we’ll still demand that African or Latin-Americans keep a schedule that we’re comfortable with, rather than adopting looser start and finish times. Because the way we do things is the right way.
We might convince ourselves that four-part harmony is the “reverent” way to worship God, oblivious to the roots this style of music has in European culture. Because this is the right way to worship, we expect others to become like us, rather than us learn to appreciate Japanese or Indian musical worship genres.
The way we define “normal” is crucial for churches wrestling with the challenges of multiculturalism. Life in a multi-ethnic church must challenge our myopia. We also need to acknowledge our tendency toward myopia and be alert for its symptoms.
I’ll leave my commentary there and I hope you enjoy this video.
