:CCO's Cross-Culture Exchange:

Mother Teresa when asked about her call to the poor said she wasn’t called to the poor but she was called to follow Jesus who led her to the poor.  As we follow Jesus on our college campuses I am convinced He will lead us to the “others”, the outsiders, the minorities, those different than us in culture and ethnicity and in the process we will rediscover a greater expression of God’s Kingdom whose joy will transform us and others.

Jesus’ tells two very short parables in Matthew 13:44-46.  One is about a field hand, the other about a merchant.  The first is probably a peasant working for a wealthy landowner and while plowing the field he turns up a box of coins.  So the field hand sells everything he has in order to buy the field containing the valuable coins.  The discovery of the valuable coins causes his actions.  The merchant is probably a man of more significant wealth as he is in the business of buying pearls.  But he too invests everything he has in order to possess these pearls of great price and his discovery, likewise, causes his actions.  Jesus says that both the coins and the pearls are like the Kingdom of Heaven and the discovery of it caused the men to act.  They were literally carried away by their joy.  Fredrick Dale Bruner in his commentary on Matthew says, “The point, expanded, is this: joy is the engine of change”. [1] The discovery transformed the lives of the peasant field hand and the wealthy merchant forever, having sold everything to buy the new reality.  Neither the field hand nor the merchant was told to do anything, the treasure tells it all.  The discovery of God’s Kingdom brings joyous responses not joyless duties.

However, the joy of the discovery is diminished when the true multi-cultural nature of God’s Kingdom is not revealed.  When our ministries remain homogenous (the same) and exclude the heterogeneity (the other) of God’s Kingdom we hinder our mission of transforming college students.  Cross cultural ministry actually enhances the transformation process by discovering a fuller picture of God’s multi-ethnic Kingdom.  We need to rediscover a new reality of God’s Kingdom on our college campuses; a reality which opens the door to change our world, students and us.  It is a reality found in scripture and the person of Jesus and experientially when divergent sides of God’s people seek it together in the power of the Holy Spirit.

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[1] Fredrick Dale Bruner, Matthew, A Commentary, Vol. 2 (Dallas, TX: Word Publishing, 1990), 511.  My understanding of these parables is credited to Bruner’s commentary on Mathew.

From 1995 to 2005 minority student enrollment on U.S. college campuses rose 50% – 5 million students.  Yet in Pennsylvania 70% of African-American students who go to college will not graduate.

Integration forced some people to change their behavior. Reconciliation invites the changing of hearts.

Spencer Perkins

In Miroslav Volf’s book, Exclusion and Embrace, the idea of “double vision” seems to be one of the most important instructions in loving others who are different than us including our enemies.  Volf says we must allow others and those we are in conflict with to “readjust our perspective as we take into account their perspective”.  This takes great humility, as it requires the recognition we have not cornered the market on truth.  Our reversal of perspectives is what keeps us from perverting justice or what Amos calls “turning justice into poison” (Amos 6:12).  This theological exploration of identity, otherness and reconciliation is deep but practical for cross cultural ministry.  Double vision involves a self-giving love whose “weakness is stronger than social concern and foolishness is wiser than rational thought” (pg. 28).  Cross cultural ministry rarely produces the immediate results that we think our efforts deserve.  That was the great scandal of the cross as both God and those Jesus ministered to abandoned Him.  The real results are the joy and healing found in the embrace of the other regardless of their appreciative response.

Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace, A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.

His mother had to bargain with her sister to conceive him and his father declared that he was a lazy dumb ass who would accept a subservient role in life.[1] Even though his name sounded like the Hebrew word for “reward”, Jacob evidently saw no potential in Issachar.  Yet generations later King David describes the sons of Issachar as men who understood the times and knew what the nation of Israel needed to do.[2]

What keeps a young person from internalizing such rejection and low expectations?  What makes the difference between failure and success in such demoralizing circumstances?  How do we keep such predictions from visiting the third and fourth generations?  History fails to tell us the details of this turnaround.  It could have been Issachar’s tenacious mother Leah or his older brother Judah.

Whoever was involved, author Robert Lupton suggests it was a person who was capable of seeing Issachar’s positives instead of his negatives.  Some influential person along the way saw an image different than his father pronounced.

It was the kind of person that epitomizes our campus staff at the CCO.  Someone who sees a student’s potential and invests time, instruction, encouragement and even heartache with no guarantee they will see immediate fruit from their labors.  It is a person who counteracts society’s pronouncement that a student will never make anything of themselves because of the color of their skin, their economic status or some other cultural difference.

If we ever have any hope of transforming our world to the point where next generations understand the times and know which direction we should go it will be because of people like our CCO staff who see what others cannot see in the lives of students different then their own.

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[1] Genesis 30:16-18, 49:14-15

[2] 1 Chronicles 12:32