Quotes about Diversity

As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God's name. (p. 68, Church: Why Bother?)

Many churches offer more entertainment than worship, more uniformity than diversity, more exclusivity than outreach, more law than grace.

God reproduces and lives out His image in millions of ordinary people like us. It is a supreme mystery. We are called to bear that image as a Body because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted, like a single glass chip hacked from a mirror. But collectively, in all our diversity, we can come together as a community of believers to restore the image of God in the world. (In His Image, Philip Yancey and Dr. Paul Brand, p. 40)

My identity in Christ is more important than my identity as an American or as a Coloradan or as a white male or as a Protestant. Church is the place where I celebrate that new identity and work it out in the midst of people who have many differences but share this one thing in common. We are charged to live out a kind of alternative society before the eyes of the watching world, a world that is increasingly moving toward tribalism and division.

Democracy requires us to recognize others' rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them. It requires a civility in which I respect a person's ultimate worth and seek to persuade but not to coerce. For this reason modern democracy grew out of Christian soil.

Apart from the requirement that we be authentic before God, there is no prescribed way to pray. Each of us presents a unique mix of personality, outlook, training, gifts, and weaknesses, as well as a unique history with church and with God. As Roberta Bondi says, "If you are praying, you are already 'doing it right.

It takes no grace to relate to someone who looks, thinks, and acts just like me.

If God's kingdom had a "No Oddballs Allowed" sign posted, none of us could get in.

Democracy requires us to recognize others' rights even when we fundamentally disagree with them.

Authentically Me I will accept and celebrate my uniqueness, and will esteem and encourage the distinctions I admire in others.

The fissures ran too deep. The haughtiness and hostility were too ingrained. No one had ever run for office on a Jew-and-Gentile reconciliation platform. They hated the ground the other had walked on. Their aims and desires were mutually exclusive. By a country mile.

If you want to have everybody agreeing with you, join a club or program or church that agrees with you.