Pastors Rod Hairston and Jim Eaton, co-directors of Converge’s Biblical Diversity initiative, lead a vital conversation about the significance of biblical diversity, exploring its deep roots in God’s Word. They begin by examining the role of diversity in the Old Testament, highlighting how it is woven into God’s creation, tracing it back to the Table of Nations in Genesis, and debunking historical misinterpretations that have been used to marginalize racial groups. They then discuss Jesus’ call in the Great Commission to transcend tribalism and cross cultural boundaries.
Together, they emphasize that true biblical diversity isn’t just about cultural awareness—it’s about embracing God’s redemptive plan for all people. They also offer specific prayer points to cultivate the humility and heart for others that are essential to fulfilling our biblical mandate to bridge divides and pursue reconciliation.
This conversation not only sheds light on the biblical foundation for diversity but also challenges us to step outside of our comfort zones and embrace the beauty of God’s vision for a reconciled and diverse body of believers.
Transcript
Rod: So I think a great question for us to tackle is the question of why biblical diversity?
Jim: Let’s do it.
Rod: Yeah. And what a great question, right?
Jim: Yeah. Yeah.
Rod: We’ve heard a lot in this new role. People want to know why biblical diversity, like why not just diversity? And what does diversity have to do with the Bible? And so yeah, I think we should tackle that question.
Jim: So what we’re going to do is, Pastor Rod’s gonna start us out in the Old Testament, and then I’m gonna take us into the New Testament and we’ll just kind of have a conversation on this.
Rod: Yeah, yeah. So when we think of diversity and the Bible, it is impossible to read the scriptures with integrity and not see that the God of creation created diversity. So, there was not only diversity in the garden in terms of the things that were created there, but we can’t get far out of Genesis before we see with the Table of Nations, Noah’s three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, who become the progenitors of the ethnic groups that would cover the globe.
Jim: Yes.
Rod: And so from Shem, we have the Semitic people. From Ham, we have people of African descent, dark-skinned people like me. From Japheth, we have people mostly of European, white, light-skinned people who will cover the globe. And so we see this diversity right away. But a lot of times when we read the Bible, we sort of look over that and we don’t observe that. And I think that’s easy, Jim, to do when you are, especially if you are the dominant culture, because I think we do tend to read the Bible through the lenses of our own culture, our own teaching, and oftentimes read it without culture ethnicity in mind.
Jim: I think that’s especially true if you’re the dominant culture. Because you just tend to not see it as vividly because you’re in it, like the Chinese proverb, if you want to know what water is, don’t ask a fish, because the fish just swims in that. So, I think about in the New Testament where Jesus was ready to depart after his resurrection. And so the final words he gives are like the greatest, best words you’re going to hear him give his disciples. And he says to them, in Acts 1:8, he says, now the Holy Spirit will come on you. So there’s going to be supernatural power here, and everything’s gonna be about the proclamation of Jesus. The gospel’s at the center of everything we’re doing. But then when he describes where he’s sending them, often we misread the text. So we simply say, there are geographical places. But what he’s really doing is he’s giving sort of touchstones of geographical places that speak to cultural realities. And so Jerusalem and Judea were the homeland of the Jewish people. And so they were the comfort zone of his disciples. And then when he speaks to Samaria, he’s essentially saying, I want you to go across the tracks and be among mixed race people whom your parents said stay away from. But the gospel, embedded in the gospel, is taking every one of us cross-culturally into a place that at first seems uncomfortable. Then when he says now the uttermost parts of the world, he’s not just simply saying, spread out. He’s saying, go to the Gentile communities, the people who believe in other gods, who speak other languages, whose practices are very different from yours. And so I’ve often heard people say to me, well, Jim, this is wonderful, this vision that you have of all the peoples of the world and the church being a place of reconciliation and diversity, because you grew up over there. And I’ll say to them, no, that was a seed bed God used to plant these seeds. But what has really propelled me all these years, and my wife as well, has been the word of God, has been the call of Jesus, the call of the Spirit for all of us to move in these arenas instead of simply saying, I’m just gonna stay in my own sweet spot, my own silo. And I’m going to just minister as best I can. And I’ll pray that God sends people to those other people. Instead say, all right, spirit of God, stretch my life. Change me. Take me into the paths of other people because that’s part of this great commission, Jesus, that you gave. And I wanna be faithful. And I just wanna say to somebody that the yield, the reward is so much greater than the pain. There is great pain because every culture in every nation like ours has a lot of pain in our story. And so don’t be surprised that there will be times there’ll be setbacks, there’ll be adversity. You’re gonna walk in other people’s deep pain. But there’s so much richness and so much beauty in life because this is part of God’s heart and Jesus’ calling.
Rod: Yeah, you know, I’m listening to you, one of the things that comes to mind is what makes this hard is that it requires a stretch. Right? A serious stretch, right? Culturally, it requires a serious stretch theologically, and not really a stretch like outside of orthodoxy, but being stretched from what we’ve been taught about so much of our journey of faith. I want to go back to in the Old Testament that when we see this diversity happening, right, the Table of Nations and then the Tower of Babel, right, we have to recognize that this diversity now exists in an atmosphere or milieu of sin and division and greater complexity and pain. But God is a redeemer. So, so many people, we don’t see this as a part of God’s redemption story, right? This biblical diversity. Because we’re in the part of, Lord, help us to be a part of the redemption story.
Jim: That’s right. That’s right.
Rod: Right? So that we bring people whom God loves into the fold. But it can’t just be, just preach the gospel.
Jim: That’s it.
Rod: Because a gospel just preached without concern for who people are can be a gospel unclear, at the very least, right? So, you know, when I read the Bible, Jim, I see diversity. I can’t read the Bible without seeing David watching Bathsheba. The word Bathsheba points towards the fact that she is a dark-skinned woman. I can’t read the Bible without seeing that Rahab the Harlot was a descendant of Ham. And so she is of Hamitic descent, which means that she’s a dark-skinned woman, which also reminds us, right, she’s in the lineage of Jesus.
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: Right? And so there’re dark skinned people in his lineage. So this old narrative that, you know, all of the descendants of Ham were cursed gets crushed right there.
Jim: That’s right. That’s right.
Rod: So, what does this have to do with biblical diversity? It’s important that we develop an understanding biblically of God’s redemption story. Of people from Shem and Ham and Japheth. You talked about the pain involved. And I think that’s where a big stretch is for people. One, we don’t like to feel ignorant. That’s painful. We don’t like to feel like we don’t know, like we were talking to somebody the other day who said sometimes I don’t say anything because I don’t want to look ignorant. Right? I don’t want to look like I don’t know. Or I don’t want to-
Jim: Say the wrong thing.
Rod: Yeah, but this whole need for biblical diversity, I think we have so much credibility. Probably more than any corporate initiative on diversity. Because we can point to God’s creative hand. We can point to the reason why there’s so much division in our nation, in our world. Why there’s so much anger and animosity. It’s because of sin. But we can also point to his redemption story and his restoration story. Because when we get to, I don’t want to steal your New Testament thunder, but when we get to the end of Revelation, right? The declaration is that, and the leaves are for the healing of the nations.
Jim: Of the nations.
Rod: The Ethnos.
That’s right.
Rod: The ethnic groups. God is about healing the nations. He’s about redeeming what he began so that it begins to look like and be experienced as he envisioned.
Jim: That’s right. That’s so good. And when we were raising our children, we have three children, and they’re adults now, and they’re just the delight of our lives. But we would often say to them, because we lived in different places, we would say, you know, God wants you to develop cultural eyes. And what that simply meant was, as you’re reading the word, notice where it speaks of things that have a cultural dimension. When you’re out shopping, when you’re with your friends at school, just keep aware of the cultural realities as well as everything else. And that’s where I think the scripture is so full of this. For example, Acts 6, where they have the crisis in the early church. And it was a crisis of a cultural dimension because the Hellenistic Jews and the Hebraic Jews were two different cultural entities. And they saw life differently. They processed life differently. And so when you have the one group that says, our widows are being neglected, then when the apostles come together and say, choose seven, they don’t simply just arbitrarily choose seven. They choose seven from the marginalized group. And I’m thinking, what if that had happened in our country? What if early in our nation’s history when white churches were worshiping and they were relegating black people to the balconies, or saying, you can be here, but you can’t pray with us, what if the crisis was mounting, and instead of a division occurring, which then continued on for generations, what if the white leadership at that time had said, you know what, we were reading in our bibles the other day in Acts 6, I think God has given us a cultural answer. Let’s find seven godly leaders in the black community in our church, and let them talk to us about how they see the situation. We will all submit and see what God does. So there are so many relevant things around biblical diversity that come straight out of the word of God. And as you were saying, our society right now is desperate for answers. And we really do have the answers. We have a beautiful calling that is filled with adversity, it’s filled with challenges. And we can talk more about that on another conversation.
Rod: We got a lot of videos.
Jim: We do. We’re gonna be making a few of them.
Rod: You know what I’m loving? As you describe the situation in Acts 6 is the dignifying. Right, I think that’s where we’re really struggling in our nation and in our churches, right? Because we have been so exposed to a narrative of who’s better, who’s brighter. And those people over there are not, and they should stop this or stop that. But when we come to the scriptures and in the Book of Acts where the Holy Spirit is taking over, what we see is dignifying every group.
Jim: That’s right. That’s right.
Rod: And I think that’s what God does, right? He gives dignity to us. So, biblical diversity is powerful diversity, right? It is with the hand of God. And reminding us that to help someone else win doesn’t mean that I lose.
Jim: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.
Rod: To help someone else grow doesn’t mean that I lose. To empower other people, to be a part of God’s story, and what he’s doing, doesn’t mean that I lose. And I think that’s-
Jim: And that’s right at the heart of Jesus’ message, because he said, you see all over the Roman world that the way to lead is to push people down. And you demand them to serve you. But he said, I’m coming to be the one who serves. And that’s really at the heart of all of this, because when you take a posture, because I’ve heard this from many of my friends in the white community, I’m not sure what to say because I don’t want to sound racist, or I don’t want to say the wrong thing. Let me just put your mind at rest, you will say the wrong thing.
Rod: Yes.
Jim: There will be times you, I’ve said dumb things thousands of times through my life, but people are wonderful, people are gracious. They’ll forgive you, they’ll coach you, and you move to a much deeper place. And so if you take the posture, I wanna be like Jesus, and I just want to learn to serve more than I currently am. So if there’s a community of people I don’t know, but they’re moving into my community, then I want to move closer to them because proximity plus the spirit of God and relationship is very, very powerful.
Rod: Oh man. Oh man. You know, you describe, I’m listening, and the word that comes to mind to me is humility, right? We can’t do biblical diversity without real humility. We have to humble ourselves because it’s a learning journey. It’s a journey of surrender to the Holy Spirit. It’s a journey of discovering, I’ve made some mistakes. I’ve had some assumptions along the way. But to humble ourselves is to open ourselves, to avail ourselves to what God wants to do.
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: Right? It is a very diverse world that we live in, and there are extraordinary opportunities for us to learn from other people. And the process of displaying the gospel, right? I remember sharing with someone recently that when you read the New Testament, for example, I’m gonna come back, I know you had the New Testament, but I remember sharing with them, like, when you read the New Testament, one of the things that you will discover is people like Simon of Cyrene who carried Jesus’ cross. And I’ve been through the Stations of the Cross in Jerusalem. It was a powerful idea to see that here is a man of African descent who is carrying Jesus’ cross. When you read the Gospel of Mark, you realize that, oh, this guy’s from North Africa. That this is a black man in the Bible. When we go to Acts and we see the Ethiopian eunuch who takes the gospel back to Ethiopia in all likelihood. Because while I was in Jerusalem, I’m watching these people in this church worshiping God, and they’re all Ethiopian.
Jim: Yeah. Yeah.
Rod: And I started talking to some of them, they’re like, oh yeah, we love the Lord. I got some amazing images just seeing them worshiping Jesus and in prayer. The gospel has gone out into all the world.
Jim: That’s right. That’s right.
Rod: And so why biblical diversity, is because diversity is in the Bible.
That’s it.
Rod: And God’s heart is for all the nations.
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: And we get to be a part of his redemption story as a movement here.
Jim: Amen. I was thinking when I was growing up in Bangladesh, Bangladesh is a part of the subcontinent of India, and it was India, and then the British came in and ruled as a colony for 200 years. And so what is now Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan was all India at one time. And so when you meet people from whatever part of those regions that are now three separate countries, they all have relative stories and ancestral stories that crisscrossed all over the place. And you know, Thomas was one of the early disciples who went to India. And so I remember growing up and just think, well, the gospel did come here generations before. And then of course it came through the European missionary, William Carey, and then the heroes of my life, the missionaries who raised me, who just did amazing work and through all kinds of adversities and sacrifices and translated the Bible into a common language of today. But just to think how God is the source of all of these things. And one of the things that I’m so eager to try to share wherever I can is yes, the journey’s painful. Yes, you will go into the stories of others and you will learn of unbelievable pain and wounding and hardship. And at times you’re going to feel like, what can I possibly do other than lament? And lament is a crucial piece of our journey as believers. But also to realize that God is the God of new beginnings. And when Jesus said, I’m going to bring the church together, Jews and Gentiles were not getting along.
Rod: They were not.
Jim: The rich and poor were not getting along. So he said, I’m going to create a new entity here. It’s a real thing. And we’ve seen it happen. We’ve seen it where you go into situations where you think there’s no solution, and then the spirit of God creates a way. And to see the ways people’s lives change. Natalie and I have often said we would never try to redo our lives because for the different painful episodes, we just feel like God continues to expand and bless and move. And he always has such a powerful redemptive story wherever he goes.
Rod: Yeah man. You know, Jim, I know your story, right? You moved into this space of biblical diversity long before anybody was talking about biblical diversity. And you have borne, you and Natalie, your family have borne the pain of what we talked about. This humility, this, you know, this dignifying of different people. Like, why is biblical diversity so hard from what you have seen?
Jim: It’s a great question. I think there’s several levels to it. I think one is that for every person, it’s difficult to step outside of your own comfort place, your own place of culture and ethnicity. And what you’re used to is very comforting. People, we like to feel comfort, and all of that brings us security. So when you start to go into another arena, like when we first moved to South Africa, when we first moved to Germany, there are times you feel very alienated. You feel awkward. You feel like I just can’t get this right. But when you persist through it, you discover the rewards are so immeasurable on the other side. So I think on one level, it’s just human nature. I think another factor, however, is that our country, we are an interesting contradiction. We are simultaneously the country with the greatest ideals and the greatest promise, as Dr. Martin Luther King would often say, that we have the promise of these ideals that literally any person can come from any part of the world and become an American. And we see these stories all the time. But the contradiction is, at the same time, we have aspects of our country that are very xenophobic, that are very insular and isolationist. And so at times, we back down inside what Abraham Lincoln would call the demons of our nature. And he would appeal for the better angels of our nature to try to aspire to the higher ideals as opposed to, and usually this happens in times of fear, that we then retract. And so then when that happens, people do not see the best of the gospel in us. It’s like we become schizophrenic. And on a Sunday, we’re praising the name of Jesus and talking about the beauty of the gospel. And it reaches everywhere in the whole world. And then on Tuesday, we’re having a difficult time with the people moving into our community.
Rod: Wow.
Jim: But I think if we’re really just saying, this is the call of Jesus, it is for all of us. I’m going to trust him with my life. I’m gonna trust him with my family. I’m gonna trust him with my security, God will bless you. And the blessing on the other side is immeasurably greater than retracting into your own place.
Rod: And I can trust him as I stretch out beyond my comfort zone, embrace other ethnic groups and cultural experiences.
Jim: That’s right.
Rod: You don’t have to disregard your faith life while you’re embracing.
Jim: And you don’t have to disregard your own culture.
Rod: Yes.
Jim: This is something I will often say to my own white brothers and sisters, this journey is not calling you to cancel your culture. It is calling you to be humble with your culture. There are going to be things you face that are discomforting. But everyone has been given a gift of culture, including white people.
Rod: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Man, I love this. I keep coming back to, this is going to call for great humility on the part of us as believers, right? That we learn how to see much more broadly than we’re accustomed to.
Jim: Yes.
Rod: Seeing beyond the boundaries of our own comforts, the boundaries of bad narratives. I think sometimes we don’t discern the narratives that have been so powerfully reiterated in our culture so that they begin to overpower the gospel that we read. And so we have to open our eyes with broader lenses as we read the scriptures and as we apply our faith in the midst of culture. And open our hearts to people who don’t look like us, don’t think like us, don’t believe like us, because we are confident that God has a plan. And we see it in his word. So, why biblical diversity? If I could give my summary, it would be, we can’t be credible in our proclamation of the gospel without really engaging people with humility and with a sense of dignity. I would add, even a sense of equity, right? As we think about people from different ethnic and racial expressions.
Jim: Yes. Amen. And I would just say in my summary that there are multiple reasons for biblical diversity. You can come at it from demographics. What is the future of our nation going to look like? So if you’re starting a business, it’s just smart for you to become culturally intelligent because all of your business is going to proliferate in arenas that you’re not familiar with. And so if you already take a proactive stance, you’ll be further ahead with your business. If you’re going to be working in government, or you’re a teacher, or you’re a plumber, if you can learn cultural diversity and cultural intelligence, you’ll be further ahead than other people. And so there are all those reasons, but where I keep coming back to is, the heart for me of biblical adversity is this is the heart of God.
Rod: Yes.
Jim: He made us. We know this passage in Psalm 139. I praise you because I’m fearfully and wonderfully made. Every cultural expression is an expression of the image and likeness of God. And so it’s so beautiful. And to try to retract from that is really an insult to God’s creative character and his ingenious mind and his holy way. And so I just keep coming back, this is the heart of God. It’s embedded in the gospel. It’s embedded in the great commission. It’s embedded in what the church should be. It’s all throughout the Old Testament. And so I just, I go, yeah, if you want to be smart in your business, if you want to be smart wherever you’re going, this is a pathway. But come back to where the heart of God is, and that will hold you in the tough times.
Rod: Oh man. That’s so good. I’m glad we had this chat, man.
Jim: Yeah, same here.
Rod: Yeah.