Loneliness. That’s the word that comes to mind when I (Michelle) think back to eating lunch in my school’s cafeteria as a kid. I was that girl; the girl who no one wanted to sit with; the girl who people made fun of; the girl who, perhaps, people feared.

While everyone else was eating PB&J sandwiches and apple slices, I brought my delicious leftover Indian food. Whether it was chicken curry or aloo gobi and rotis, I would pull it out with a sense of pride, eager to eat my mom’s homemade dishes. But what smelled and tasted like heaven to me was a disgust to my peers. I remember the boys calling it “throw up” and the girls whispering to each other, while pointing and laughing.

My ethnic otherness, from the food I ate to the clothes my family wore and the color of my skin, made me an outsider. I didn’t have many friends at school. But, oh, how I longed for people to step outside of their culture and enter into my own. I longed for people to cross their culture to me, to extend a hand of friendship and to love me for who I was – an East Indian gal with dark hair and brown skin.

Some of you here know exactly what I’m talking about. Many of y’all have pains of your own. You too know what it’s like to be rejected because of the way you look, the color of your skin, the food you eat or the things your family does. But you don’t need to be a minority to know rejection. All of us have been made fun of at some point; all of us have been judged, unheard, condescended to, and spoken ill of. Perhaps some of us have also been the ones speaking the pains and causing the hurts.

But this is not what God intended. Each and every one of us was created by God for relationship, to love and be loved, to live in community with each other, and not just to live but to thrive and to flourish in all of our God-created diversity.

This is where cross-cultural friendships come in. God created cross-cultural friendships for our good, for our healing, for our joy and for His glory. These beautiful, complex, messy relationships are 1) part of His intent from the very beginning of creation, 2) part of what it means for us live missionally right now, and 3) they inform who we are in Christ. Cross-cultural friendships reflect God’s heart for the nations and the medium through which we are to live a life on mission, among other things.

Today, I want to unpack a theology of cross-cultural friendships, so that we can see God’s purpose in them from Genesis all the way to Revelation. Our hope is that today’s ideas provide the necessary theological framework in which to open up rich and diverse discussions throughout the rest of this month in our series on cross-cultural friendships.

1) We need cross-cultural friendships so we can see God’s beauty in all cultures. 

The entire scope of human diversity reflects the vastness of God. We are all made in His reflection; we are all His image bearers. 
Genesis 1:26 states, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’” God has made every single person to have His likeness and, as such, every different culture, with its unique bodies, voices, thoughts and actions are all to be equally valued and praised.

Each one of you has inherent dignity and worth because you have been made in the Imago Dei. Every one of you, regardless of skin color, ethnicity or heritage, reflects a piece of God Himself, and this truth must ground our thinking about diversity. One way we see the rich and vibrant vastness of our God – His size, His essence, His heart – on great display, beyond the dazzling wonders of His natural creation, is in the people He created.

This is why we need cross-cultural friendships. God doesn’t want us to change people to conform more to our own way of thinking or lifestyle. Instead, He desires for us to learn from others and, in doing so, gain a better understanding (and more importantly appreciation!) for how God created them to think, act and feel; for perhaps in learning through the eyes of another, we also see more clearly through God’s eyes as well.

And let us just say, on a side note, since we’re talking about God’s design for diversity, that some of you may not fully embrace your ethnic identity yet. Some of y’all may have grown up like me, a single minority in a white community, and you feel more white than brown. Or, some of y’all may be feeling guilty or have been told that you should feel guilty for being white. For the majority and the minority person, hear this: God made you on purpose. He made you brown or black or white on purpose. In the terms of my friend and fellow pastor’s wife, Dorena Williamson, he made you chocolate, caramel, and vanilla; and we see in Genesis 1 that God looks upon you and says “you are good”. 

Some of you may know who Malcolm X is. One of his most powerful sayings to give dignity to the black community is this: “in a world where people said the color of their skin made them less,” Malcolm X said, “black is beautiful”. And he’s right! And if I can add to that: Brown is beautiful. White is beautiful. We are all equally beautiful because we are all made in the image of God.

Perhaps some of you need to spend some time this week in prayer and reflection of who God made you to be. Some of you need time to think about your ethnic background, your family, your values and traditions, and begin to lean into that, to take pride in it because God has given you great worth and value just as you are.

Each and every one of us was created by God for relationship, to love and be loved, to live in community with each other, and not just live but to thrive and to flourish in all of our God-created diversity.

– Dr. Michelle Reyes

2) We need cross-cultural friendships for the sake of our Christian mission.

Since it was Jesus’ mission to reconcile all peoples to himself, to accomplish this, Jesus crossed borders; he crossed cultures, he spanned divides to accomplish this mission. He sought out people that were unloved, forsaken, mistreated, and forgotten all for the sake of the gospel. And we must do the same.

I’m not saying that people of other cultures are inferior to you. Don’t hear that. You are not the Christian Savior, stepping in to another person’s culture, and leading them into the path of everlasting light. Don’t think that. 

Rather, see yourself the way Paul does in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23. Paul became all things to all peoples, and that is a humbling thing to do. It is selfless. To do this, he had to be willing to let go of his own preferences, his own ways of doing things, his ideals. He didn’t judge people, instead he became like them. He was a chameleon, if you will.

What I’m trying to say here is that seeking out cross-cultural friendships for the sake of the gospel is not easy. We will have awkward moments. We won’t always know what to say. We’ll feel silly at times. But we must do it because we are doing it for the sake of Christ and his kingdom. 

God made you on purpose. He made you brown or black or white on purpose.

– Dr. Michelle Reyes

3) We need cross-cultural friendships to fulfill God’s purpose of unity.

God desires all peoples to be united in Christ. God’s mission is for all the peoples of the earth, who He created, to find unity in their diversity through faith in Jesus Christ. 

We see this reality achieved in Revelation 7:9-12 in the depiction of the New Jerusalem. Here we see all peoples, tribes, tongues and nations living together and worshipping God, and this is incredible! This picture is the ideal. This is God’s future intent; for all of us, all of our cultures, to be united in Christ in the New Jerusalem.

For us as Christians, our aim should be to live out that future reality now. That is, in fact, the purpose of apocalyptic literature like Revelation. In this book, we get a view from outside time and space of a different reality, which is supposed to inform our current reality now.

If our future is a cross-cultural future, then we should strive for an inter-cultural world right now, and we begin with seeking that out in our own life first. Amen?

God desires all peoples to be united in Christ. God’s mission is for all peoples of the earth, who He created, to find unity in their diversity through faith in Jesus Christ. Our aim as Christians should be to live out that future… Click To Tweet