Just after the 2004 election, I was having a discussion with one of my co-workers in Bellingham. He was obviously upset about the re-election of George W. Bush and could not come to terms with the fact that W had won. The reason for his frustration finally became clear when he blurted out: I have no idea how he won, I don’t know one person who voted for him. I just told him: maybe you need to make some new friends.
This points to a reality of the world we live in: defining people as Us vs. Them and group-think mentality go together. We are naturally drawn to people who think like we do and it tends to put us in little groups who believe roughly the same thing. They feed off of one another. As we get into groups of people like us, we tend to tighten down and get more specific about what is most right about us and most wrong with everyone else. This narrows the people who are like us and we have to be even more exclusive with who we spend our time with, which makes us dig even deeper, and you can see how this goes.
This is a very real problem in the church, evidenced by splintering denominations and exclusivity. There are a lot of proposed solutions to this, most having to do with either pretending that we have no differences (that differences don’t matter) or working to create homogeneity of beliefs. Jesus gives us a different calling in John 17, when He says:
They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 16-18
Jesus answer to be sanctified in truth and sent into the world. We are not to gather in our cliques to protect our beliefs, but we are called to engage in the world, to see ourselves as sent into it. As you hang with people different than you, as you get outside of your comfort zone, it forces you to change your firmly held presuppositions. You can’t think that everyone agrees with you when everyone around you does not.
For Christians, this is scary. What if we are influenced negatively by all of these different ideas? This is why a continued pursuit of God’s truth is necessary; God’s truth will never conflict with experience. The truth WILL prevail. Our understanding of God will be built up and refined as we allow other beliefs to be weighed against Scripture to find: whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise (Philippians 4.8)…the goodness of God expands as we see it in all of its varied forms.
This is one of the reasons why David Platt ends his book Radical with a call to: read through the whole Bible, pray for the whole world, sacrifice our money for a specific purpose, spend time in a different context, and commit to a local church family. Spending your time in a different context always stood out to me as the one of these things that is not like the other. It is not a spiritual discipline or a specific command of Scripture, but in a world of subcultures and simplified thinking, it is an important part of allowing God to conform us in our sentness. We need to be intentional with this because our culture is set up to sort us by similarities.
Find some people who are not like you, strike up a conversation, struggle through the awkward moments and the quiet pauses, and find how God is present in people who you don’t always agree with.