I think the average Anglo churchgoer lacks awareness of the difference in distance minority Christians have to travel in order to all meet at "the one table."
Last Sunday when Ozark Atolls hosted a thank you luncheon for our congregation, I mentioned during the sermon how important it was for our congregation to simply attend because the Marshallese have traveled so much farther, so very far, to prepare an amazing meal of their own foods and simply thank us (a thanks we hardly deserve, given all of our complicity in the harm done to the Marshallese Islands from nuclear testing and climate change).
I think we often think of nuclear testing and climate change and other systemic evils as far off things about which we have little control. And in a way that's true.
But in a local congregation the decision whether to help repair the damage done to other communities begins not with big social justice gestures but small steps, small steps like attending a lunch to which you are invited.
A couple of members in our congregation (very active ones, the kind who show up every Sunday and weekdays too) mentioned that they had not planned to attend the lunch because they didn't deserve a thank you or because honestly Marshallese food is foreign to them and they don't have a taste for it.
The message about the different distances traveling to the one table changed their minds, and they came, even if they didn't know how to eat the food and even if they were afraid they didn't deserve a thank you meal.
I know now from long experience that cultures coming together is hard work on both sides. Our Marshallese neighbors don't necessarily want to come into predominately Anglo spaces all the time either. We all tend toward our own, for a variety of reasons from simple comfort to habit to embarrassment or basic shyness.
What many Christians who have not traveled into other cultures may not know is how central hospitality is to other peoples. This isn't to say that Anglo Christians lack hospitality altogether, but our hospitality is largely optional and often tepid. I've visited many Anglo households where I wasn't even offered a glass of water.
By comparison, when I have lived in Eastern Europe and spent a day grape picking at a family garden, or visited places like a Druze village or Crow Indigenous community or a Swahili congregation, there is an elaborate process for hospitality that verges on the obligatory (this is expected, we aren't doing what we should do if we don't do this) mixed with unadulterated joy (it is so amazing to get to welcome this person/these people to our community).
This is one reason among many why missionaries often receive long training before spending time in another culture. There are approaches to accompanying other cultures that are more or less moral, more or less effective, and at a baseline there are ways to be prepared for cross-cultural immersion that facilitate those crossing the culture to feel more ready.
But when cultures come to us, when they arrived right in the neighborhoods where we live, the sign-posts for cross-cultural immersion are put up in our front yard. You don't have to book a flight or get a passport. There's no six month language tutorial. It's just suddenly, you find that your culture is layered in and with another culture, and it is the tiny decisions (I will or will not accept the invitation to this potluck) that become the Christian decisions.
This is made even more complicated by the reality that bringing congregations of different ethnicities together is different from sending a few missionaries. When you send missionaries, or do cross-cultural immersion, it's a select few who make the journey.
But when you bring whole congregations together from different cultures, everyone is along for the ride. Everyone plays a part, even if that part is simply a willingness to try taro for the first time or wait patiently for an event to start when you thought you'd be heading to Starbucks after worship.
I admire those parishioners who have helped me understand what a challenge it is travel the distance we're asking them to travel to meet our Marshallese neighbors. I admire all the more our Marshallese neighbors who have had to travel so far, so very far, to meet us where we are. They have traveled so much farther down the road in order to greet us warmly than we have a right to expect.
I invite anyone reading this to consider our local journey a synecdoche for the whole. Mutatis mutandi every community meeting another one across ethic boundaries and with massive justice disparities between them is going to encounter these struggles and challenges, and it will rarely be the massive righteous gestures that make for healing. It will be the small decisions of showing up, exercising patience, willingness to try things, simple caring, that will make for healing.
And all of this, interestingly enough, IS the gospel in action, because the entire gospel of Jesus Christ articulated in the New Testament hinges around a key concept, Christ's bringing together Jews and Gentiles: "For Jesus is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us" (Ephesians 2:14).
Our entire walk as Christians can be evaluated based on the extent to which we participate in Christ's continuing breaking down of those walls. And some of us have the responsibility of traveling farther than others, if there is going to be true equity and peace.
If you wish to work for racial healing in your communities, start here.