I’ve come across some churches I know teaching something like this in relation to what we’ve all started calling ‘diversity.’ I think it’s nonsense.
By ‘diversity’ we mean specifically racial diversity, which is one of those funny quirks of language which I think I’ve noticed stops people from seeing other kinds of diversity. Which, particularly in an England that is more divided by class than it is by race, is a big blind spot to have. The Lord is particularly keen that we notice the foreigner, the orphan, the widow, and the barren amongst us. We’d use different words for many of those now, but that’s where our attention to see the least should be.
To return to the title quote: as I understand it this gets used to imply that for someone to grow, they have to see someone else visibly growing into the things that they do. It seems to be used to argue for why it’s important that someone would do something publicly (preach, lead worship etc) not because of gifting or character, but because of their intersectional characteristics.
It does seem like intersectional thinking ends up in an endless loop of smaller characteristics until we’re so divided we’re all in a grand solipsistic soup. Putting that aside though this seems like a strange thing for churches to think.
There’s a good principle that if your church has a significant minority population you should be trying to raise up people from that population into various levels of leadership. You may need to work with them to help them grow in gifting and character; not letting them do things before they’re ready but working hard to help them be ready. The aim here is for your ‘leadership’ in its various guises to represent the church as best is possible. There’s no rush here though and your aim is to best represent that the church is one new man in Christ, rather than because of a diversity mindset. The mindset matters because it changes where you’re aiming. You can get caught on representing the congregation as though that’s the aim, whereas the aim is representing Jesus’ vision for the Church with the people that you have.
You may even want to think the same if your neighbourhood has a significant population that your church doesn’t, but this would be much slower work. If you’re in a Muslim neighbourhood you’d love having an ex-Muslim elder, but it’s reasonable to assume that’s going to take decades.
Can you only be what you can see? This feels like a failure of imagination. It’s an implicitly egalitarian idea—any complementarian is going to be comfortable with the idea that women can learn from men even though they might often be much too blasé about this—but with that egalitarianism pushed to its extreme. It assumes that you can’t imagine yourself somewhere you haven’t seen someone like you be, it also assumes that all Christian growth requires an analogue ‘up the front.’ Both assumptions are wrong.
Coaching can raise others into what God makes them to be, not just what the one coaching is themselves. Any elder in the church, and any deacon, should be able to do this. If we commit to “you can only be what you can see” it stymies Christian growth.
I’ve heard this applied to preaching rotas, especially in settings that have lots of people who aren’t the elders of the church preaching. I do think this is one reason that the majority of preaching being from your elders is helpful, you realise you can’t do this and so need to think differently, though it’s not the reason to do so: you get the elders to do most of the preaching because that’s what they’re for, it’s fitting, and I don’t really know why you’d want anything else.
I once heard Andrew Wilson quip that it’s “a preaching rota not a preaching quota.” He was making a slightly different point to me, but the quip applies here too at least. You don’t need to stack your preaching with people who look like others. First, if you do think you do need to do that then I’d suggest you need to make sure your number of foreigners, orphans, widows, and the barren is complete in your quota rather than just thinking about skin colour. I hope that sounds absurd enough you’d just stop. Second, we should ask people to preach based firstly on their good godly character and secondly on their gifting. If they aren’t gifted readers of the Bible and communicators, don’t ask them to preach.
Of course, you might choose to train those you’d like to use to be good at those things. That’s wonderful, and you should look at who you’re training carefully. It’s true that we find it easiest to see gifting in people like us and hardest in people different to us, so you need to explore your own blind spots within your own church. How can we show that the church is one new man in Christ? Still, train people before you let them loose.
Someone let me preach when I was 21. Mad, really, but they did work with me on my message—including rewriting it significantly—before they let me loose on the congregation. I was trained and continued to receive training for many years. That should be normal.
Finally, you aren’t trying to be the person on the stage. You’re trying to be Jesus. You can only be what you can see? Great. Look at Jesus.
Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash
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