Unlike You

• Nobody is like you. You are not like anybody else. At least not in some ways.

The more we try to be like everybody else, the less like ourselves we usually become in the process. In our childhood, rejection is painful when we are not like whatever is currently popular in our group of neighbors at home or school. The wrong clothes, the wrong accent, the wrong skin color, ignorance of the jargon or the handshakes. Some people never stop trying to win approval of other people. Even when they don’t like the people they are surrendering their lives to.

You need to be different to be the best you. But you need to be able to associate with those not like you. Congregations of the body of Jesus are very monocultural, usually. So are most other families.

Some families are multicultural, and so are some congregations. People who are not multicultural don’t feel comfortable in meetings that mix cultures. People of one strong culture don’t feel comfortable in environments influenced by a different strong culture.

We need to value the power of unity both within culture and between cultures. For new believers, we need to identify their culture, and find them a congregation that is similar to it. Culture is familial and tribal. God sets the solitary in families when we get the correct gifts around new believers in a context they are comfortable with culturally. When we connect them to mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters, when we have equipped pastors and teachers and prophets to surround them in their new family, we will inSpire them to stay and to be encouraged and equipped and assembled into the body in effective ways.

Our score at getting it right is currently about 4 out of 100 become effective parts of the family of God when we evangelize them and they become believers. The unity of all the parts working together and the unity of being assembled into a cultural expression of Heaven will be powerful in making disciples of the nations – the ethnicities. One day Jesus will gather the nations to judge their responses to our attempts to make disciples of them. Work together. Do good work.