Ethnicity

According to Alyssa Mercante at video game site Kotaku, many gamers today lament what they perceive to be woke culture running amok. According to them, the multiethnic casting of central characters must be a result of diversity consultants forcing racial quotas on otherwise uninterested creators. If not for these overly aggressive interlopers, goes the thinking, the characters would hew more closely to their established norm (which just happens to be mostly male and/or white).

This is especially the case with Sweet Baby, Inc., a creative firm that works with game studios like Remedy Entertainment, publisher of titles like Control, Quantum Break, and Alan Wake 2. Mercante says that there’s a group on Steam, the main PC-gaming marketplace, with 100,000 members, dedicated to detecting which games that Sweet Baby has consulted on. Many such gamers think that Sweet Baby’s influence led to Remedy casting a black actress in one of protagonist roles.

“It’s absolutely not true,” said Kyle Rowley, Remedy game director for Alan Wake 2, when asked on X whether Sweet Baby mandated the casting. And when Mercante spoke to people at both Remedy and Sweet Baby, she found the opposite to be true.

Kim Belair, CEO of Sweet Baby, Inc., said, “Sweet Baby is, at its core, a narrative development company. That means anything from script writing to narrative design to narrative direction, to story reviews. One of the things that we do offer is cultural consultations or authenticity consultations … but the perspective is never that we’re coming in and injecting diversity. For the most part, it’s the reverse. It’s that a company has created a character, and they want to make that character more representative and more interesting.”

Sweet Baby co-founder David Bedard insists that the diversity of representation in video games is a byproduct of developers wanting to make the game better for all players. Blair said, “We are not censors. We have no interest in false diversity or in tokenization. We have an interest in making stories better, and making characters more interesting, and in developing a stronger language around narrative design…Those are the things that we are really passionate about.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

You don’t have to be politically liberal or woke or whatever to consider the needs of others as more important than your own. That’s the kind of life that Jesus modeled and that the Apostle Paul wrote about.

These days, Americans seem divided by almost everything. But you know what has proved successful at bringing Americans of different backgrounds together? Unlimited soup, salad, and breadsticks. Also, riblets, onion rings, chicken crispers, and other crowd-pleasers from affordable chain restaurants such as Olive Garden and Applebee’s.

Though sometimes banned by municipalities wanting to "preserve neighborhood character” or slow gentrification, these chains actually provide a hidden social service: They promote much more socioeconomic integration than do independently owned commercial businesses—or, for that matter, traditional public institutions.

That’s according to a provocative new paper from Maxim Massenkoff and Nathan Wilmers. The authors analyzed a massive trove of geolocation data to assess where Americans come into contact with people of different income classes than themselves—if they do at all.

Sadly, the paper also found that many public institutions we might associate with facilitating encounters across class lines instead reinforce seclusion. Parks, schools, libraries, and churches. There are exceptions, but on average, each of these establishments leads to less socioeconomic mixing, more within-income-group hobnobbing, and even more class isolation.

When George Liele set sail for Jamaica in 1782, he didn’t know he was about to become America’s first overseas missionary. And when Rebecca Protten shared the gospel with slaves in the 1730s, she had no idea some scholars would someday call her the mother of modern missions.

These two people of color were too busy surviving—and avoiding jail—to worry about making history. But today they are revising it. Their stories are helping people rethink a missionary color line. As National African American Missions Council (NAAMC) president Adrian Reeves said at a Missio Nexus conference in 2021, challenging the idea that “missions is for other people and not for us.” African Americans today account for less than one percent of missionaries sent overseas from the US. But they were there at the beginning.

British missionary William Carey is often called the father of modern missions. Adoniram Judson has been titled the first American missionary to travel overseas. But both Liele and Protten predated them.

Former missionary Brent Burdick now believes African Americans are a “sleeping giant” with an important part to play in the proclamation of the gospel. “They have a lot to offer to the world.”

Evangelicalism is now the largest religious demographic in Central America, according to a poll of about 4,000 people in five countries. More than a third of people from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica told researchers that they are evangelical, while another 29 percent said they are “nondenominational believers.”

Only about a third of people in the region said they were Catholic—down from about 60 percent in the 1970s. Some scholars have attributed the shift to internal Catholic conflict and the long fallout from the church’s political affiliations on the extreme right and left, along with the disruptions of urbanization.

Evangelical theologian Samuel Escobar, noting the trend in an interview in 2006, said Catholics who moved to Central American cities found empowerment in their evangelical conversion. He said, “Their decision to accept Christ meant a change in patterns of behavior which helped people to reorient their lives.”

The 2010s were a tipping point for global Christianity. Now, in 2020, more than half the world’s Christians live in Africa and Latin America, according to a new report from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. The portion of Christians in Europe has also fallen below 25% for the first time since the Middle Ages.

The change was predicted by historian Philip Jenkins, among others. Jenkins wrote in 2007, “We are living through one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide, as the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably . . . southward.” The demographic trends are expected to continue into this decade.

Percentage of the world’s Christians 2010 compared to 2020:

USA & Canada: Down from 12% to 9%

Europe: Down from 25% to 23%

Asia: Up from 15% to 16%

Latin America: Up from 24% to 25%

Africa: Up from 22% to 26%

In her novel The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver's main character is a missionary to Africa named Nathan Price. According to one review of the book, "[Price] is meant to represent the patronizing attitude of white colonialists toward Africa—and the devastating legacy of violence [Christian missionaries] bequeathed to regions like the Congo." Although Kingsolver may have written a fine novel, Nathan Price does not represent the legacy of most missionaries.

Robert Woodbury, from UNC Chapel Hill, did a landmark study of countries where Victorian-era Christian missionaries worked. The current thinking (particularly in academic circles) today is that Christian missionaries destroyed the local culture, religions, and overall were a bad thing wherever they went.

However, when Woodbury studied the economic, educational, medical, family relationships, and other markers in these countries, he discovered that the most successful African countries today were countries where Victorian-era Christian missionaries worked. And the opposite was also true: The countries today that are wracked by chaos, financial instability, poor healthcare, and other negative markers were countries Victorian-era Christian missionaries never went. This remarkable study confirms that even though things may be difficult right now, we actually can turn this around and begin to restore our credibility in today's culture based on our strategy.

The first missionary from North America was George Liele, a former slave who left the American colonies for Jamaica in 1782 and began a ministry of preaching in 1783, nearly a full decade before William Carey sailed for India from England. Liele was born a slave (circa 1750) in the colony of Virginia. He launched his preaching career in 1773, and a year later he gathered slaves for what could be considered the first African-American church in America. After the Revolutionary War, the recently freed Liele fled to Jamaica to escape being re-enslaved.

George Liele arrived in Jamaica as an indentured servant, but would serve as a missionary-evangelist to the island. Liele became the first Christian to win a significant number of slaves on the Island to Christ, and the first to plant a church composed of slaves. He preached in private homes and public settings drawing crowds of slaves. In a letter written in 1791, Liele reported 500 converts and 400 baptisms. In 1789 Liele's congregation had organized and by 1793 they had completed the Windward Road Chapel, the first Baptist church on the island.

Liele achieved these successful evangelistic and church planting efforts despite opposition from a powerful constituency on the island. White slave owners feared the impact upon the slave population if the slaves were to embrace Christianity. Concern arose that "if their minds are considerably enlightened by religion, or otherwise, that it would be attended with the most dangerous consequences."

Despite Liele's numerous efforts to appease the slave owners, he still faced stiff opposition. He was charged with sedition and jailed on numerous occasions on trumped-up charges. Despite these obstacles, Liele was able to baptize new converts as well as plant and organize new churches. His evangelistic and church-planting efforts led to the establishment of the Baptist denomination on the island, with slaves, freedmen, and whites joining churches started by Liele. The impact of Liele's ministry continues to this day; however, Liele himself is buried in an unmarked grave in Jamaica.

Global missions expert Paul Borthwick was invited to speak at a local church known for its hospitality to international students and its vision to adopt unreached people groups, including the Miao people from southern China. Borthwick tells what happened when he visited the church:

All over the church there were posters inviting people to "Pray for the Miao." The posters had statistics about the people group, population information, how many known Christians there are in the area, where the Miao are located and which missionaries are working with these people. Every member of the church was committed to pray for the Miao people.

As I was standing outside the banquet hall, a young man approached me and asked, "Excuse me, sir, are you from this church?" "No, I'm not from this church," I said. "This is my first time here."

"Me too," he replied. "This is my first time in any church. I am from the People's Republic of China. I heard there was food, so I came." I welcomed him to the United States and to the church, and he continued, "I need to ask another question. What is this sign?" He pointed to one of the signs that read, "Pray for the Miao."

I tried my best to explain: "Well, these people are followers of Jesus and they're trying to help other people know about the love of Jesus," I began. "So they've invited their church to pray for this ethnic minority group from south China."

"It is amazing!" he said.

"What is amazing?" I replied, a little confused.

"I am Miao!" he said earnestly. "These are my people."

"Well, this church has been praying for you," I answered. I introduced him to church leaders as the young man they had been praying for. God is at work.

To help explain the challenges people in the West face reading the Bible, authors E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O'Brien refer to a social experiment in "The Forgotten Famine" by Mark Allan Powell.

Powell had twelve students in a seminary class read the story of the prodigal son from Luke's Gospel, then close their Bibles and retell the story as faithfully as possible to a partner. None of the twelve American seminary students mentioned the famine in Luke 15:14, which precipitates the son's eventual return. Powell then had one hundred people participate in the same experiment and the results revealed that only six of the one hundred mentioned the famine. The "famine-forgetters," as Powell called them, had only one thing in common: they were from the United States.

Later Powell tried the experiment in St. Petersburg, Russia. He gathered fifty participants to read and retell the prodigal son story. This time an overwhelming forty-two of the fifty participants mentioned the famine. Why? Just seventy years before, 670,000 people died of starvation after a Nazi German siege of the capital city began a three-year famine. Famine was very much a part of the history and imagination of the Russian participants.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Interpretation; Bible study—Our experiences and cultural perspectives will not change the meaning of the text, but they will alter what we see in the text. As we interpret the text, it's important to keep in mind our hidden assumptions and biases. (2) Cross-cultural Ministry—This story shows the need for careful listening and communicating across cultural lines in the body of Christ; (3) Poverty—This example shows how experiences of poverty have a profound impact on people—even years later.

In his book Strangers Next Door, J.D. Payne argues that through immigration God has been moving the nations of the world right into our neighborhoods. Payne says, "We must continue to go to the nations, but we must also remember that the nations have come to us." He tells the following story about how God is at work through the immigrants in his neighborhood:

My wife Linda and I lived in downtown Toronto in a condominium for three years. When Linda needed to find a hairdresser she started going to a hair salon run by a Filipino lady. As they started talking, Linda discovered that this vivacious woman was a genuine Christian. A few months later, Linda ended up getting her hair done by a Chinese lady at the shop. When Linda mentioned that her husband was pastoring the English-speaking congregation of a Chinese church in the city, the woman exclaimed, "That's great! I'm a Christian too. My boss [the Filipino woman] led me to faith in Christ."

One day, when Linda returned to the shop, a new hairdresser was at work, and since all the other operators were busy, Linda ended up with the new lady. Linda knew enough about features to discern that this beautiful woman was Somali. She asked, "Are you Somali?" Surprised, the woman blurted out, "Yes!" Knowing that Somalians are, for the most part, Muslim, Linda was well into a friendly conversation that would lead to an opportunity to share her faith. But the Somali lady declared, "Don't worry. I believe in Jesus too. That lady introduced me to the Savior," pointing to her Chinese colleague.

We ought not be like players on the NFL all-star team. Every year the NFL has the all-star selection. They choose the best players from the league, and they are appointed to their respective division's teams. It's interesting that each division team wears the same colored jersey. So the NFC has on, say, blue, and the AFC has on white. But it's striking that though they all wear the same jersey, they don't really play for that team. They all have different helmets. They wear the helmets of the team they really play for, the folks who pay them the big contract. So when they come to the all-star game, they don't really hit hard or run hard. They play gingerly because they don't want to "mess up my contract." They really play for the team they came from.

It strikes me that so often we're like NFL players on the all-star team. We wear jerseys that say "Christ," but we wear a helmet that says "Ethnic culture." That's the team we play for. That's the side we're on. "After we finish this little thing, I'm gonna go back and play with my squad. I'm not gonna run hard with those not on my squad." We need to flip that, and it is the gospel that enables us to do that.