The Price of Diversity

In my recent post, I wrote that the Church must take the initiative to break the boundaries of race, language and culture by bringing people of such differences together into one faith community. Amusingly, it only dawned upon me on last Thursday that this is actually happening right here in my seminary!

Every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, students of different races, languages, cultures and nationalities gather here as one faith community to worship the same God. The services are conducted bilingually, either two of English, Mandarin and Bahasa Malaysia. Although the services are conducted bilingually, the languages that are being used are not alien to me. Thus, I never felt impatient for having to listen to the message and the interpretation, because the interpretation was beneficial in reinforcing my understanding of the message.

Yet, it was not until last Thursday that I finally felt the inconvenience of diversity. The speaker, who was from Hong Kong, spoke in Cantonese (a Chinese dialect), a language that was unintelligible to me. Each time after the speaker said something, I had to wait for the interpreter to finish her sentence before I could understand what was being preached. It was a test of patience and concentration for me as it was naturally frustrating to listen to a language that I could not understand. This experience also gave me a foretaste of the inconveniences that will emerge within a diverse faith community. Although this was a rare experience for me, such is not the case for many other students who could only understand English or Mandarin. My Thursday experience helped me to realize that they are constantly paying the price of diversity each time they attend these bilingual services.

Other than that, it is noteworthy that during that Thursday service, there were students who could not understand both Cantonese and English (e.g. Indonesian Chinese). Thus, the message that was being preached was totally unintelligible to them. How beautiful it would have been if there was not only one, but two interpreters to interpret the Cantonese message into English and Mandarin. The service would have been much longer, but it would have been a beautiful picture of the Kingdom, where the whole community is willing to sit through the lengthy service, appreciating the languages and cultures of one another in spite of their inability to understand.

Having said that, is the Church willing to pay this hefty price of diversity, bringing people of such differences together into one faith community, thus reflecting the borderless Kingdom of God?