“All of them look alike.”
“They should probably shower before they come back here again.”
“What are you?”
These are not lines from popular movies or catchphrases that have some type of humorous implication.
These are comments made inside United Methodist churches, and they are only the tip of the iceberg.
A group of United Methodists discussed diversity and the harmful consequences of offensive words and actions during a workshop at the 2010 West Michigan Annual Conference, sharing personal experiences and developing a broader sense of what it means to be open to building relationships with all kinds of people.
The workshop was headed by Scott Manning, the chair of the conference’s Committee on Religion and Race, and a pastor at White Pigeon FUMC and Constantine UMC.
His primary focus was encouraging participants to figure out who they were before trying to determine who other people are and taking a hard look how congregations can draw a bridge from discrimination in the church and apply positive welcoming techniques to make amends for those.
“The greatest failure of our conference is the churches haven’t transformed in makeup in the same way our communities have,” he said.
The workshop began with an exercise where Manning made hypothetical statements regarding race and local churches. Participants stood up if they felt offended by the statement, and remained seated if it did not bother them.
Some people were irked by almost every question, while others were up and down throughout the process.
A clear consensus in the room though, had to do with how Christians and churches can get beyond these hurtful, severing behaviors.
Manning said it all starts with forming relationships on the most basic level and letting God water the seeds planted by his people.
“Evangelism is focusing on transforming people for and through Jesus Christ,” he said. “But we also seek relationships with Jews or Muslims even if they’re not on that track, just as Jesus was simply in relationship with the ‘woman at the well’ or the Good Samaritan.”
Michigan State student Kelly Wozniak echoed those sentiments.
“At the Wesley Foundation at MSU we meet with other faith and while we all have different beliefs, we all agree on how to treat each other,” she said. “And if you can’t have a relationship first, how can you ever evangelize?”
Rev. Jeremy Williams of the FUMC of Albion took it a step further, saying a fundamental respect should be the starting point of any potential conversation we have with un-churched or re-churched people.
“Sometimes you see people who you want to respect and sometimes you see people you want to help,” he said. “Sometimes you also straddle the line — you might respect someone who lives on the street, but I also want to help them if they would allow it.”
Manning also mentioned how some people talk like it’s almost sac religious to have a church with a church that is nearly 100 percent one ethnicity group, but people have to consider the lack of diversity in some of the communities churches are a part of. He thinks the church would do better to just look at the millions and millions of people in Michigan who don’t have church homes and consider them as brothers and sisters in Christ, instead of labeling them prematurely.
For more information on the topic Manning recommended the book Many Faces, One Church by Ernest S. Lyght.
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