Christian Compassion without Culture Wars, episode 1 transcript
www.CrossCulturalVoices.org
Sam Chacko: And the hard part is even in today's political climate where everything is polarized, everything's weaponized. Race is one of those conversations that just becomes a challenging conversation, and people are afraid. What happens if I say the wrong things? What if happens if I misunderstand? What if I become a social media reel because of something I said that was taken out of context? And so people are like, I'm just gonna avoid the conversation altogether.
John Yoder: Hi everybody! I'm John Yoder, and I'm your host for this podcast, Cross-Cultural Voices. Today is the start of a new series, and it's called Christian Compassion without Culture Wars. My wish for you through this series is that you will be filled with encouragement and hope, that despite all the constant arguing about racism out there, that there are millions of Americans who are building healthy cross-cultural friendships and families and churches.
In this series, you are going to hear the voices of some of the friends of this ministry, men and women, African American, Chinese American, Indian American, Mexican American, and what they all have in common is building those healthy cross-cultural relationships.
If you're listening into this podcast, I'm going to make two assumptions about you. Number one, you want to follow the example of Jesus in esteeming people of every ethnicity, every culture to be of equal and infinite worth, because they are all created in the image of God. And I believe that one of your goals is to see all of those peoples live together in harmony and love.
The second assumption I want to make about you is that you are sick and tired of the incessant arguing about racism, DEI, CRT, intersectionality, microaggressions, and a whole lot more. In the months after the murder of George Floyd, there was an explosion of conversations about racism. That gradually trickled off. But in the last two years, this issue has become highly divided, highly polarized, to the place where most people just want to avoid the conversation altogether.
Michelle Ami Reyes is an author, professor, and cultural coach. Here is what she writes in a blog dated January of 2025.
Michelle Ami Reyes: Part of the problem was that folks only knew how to talk about cross-cultural relationships through a racialized lens. People raged and protested because all they were concerned about was issues of hierarchies, superiority, inferiority based on phenotypes, oppression. Justice. This approach was fueled by a desire to find faults. It led to people seeing evil everywhere, taking down anyone and everyone in the name of justice.
More than that, the end goal for many wasn't a healing of one-to-one or one many relationships. It was simply to topple current systems and replace them with new ones. Engaging in culture. Conversations started to feel like hand-to-hand combat with a swarm of hornets, and people were tired of being stung.
There was a rising dread that we were losing ourselves as we chased after a morality dictated by right terminology. If you said the wrong thing, you were liable to offend everyone. In 2024, people's anger over cultural issues deflated and gave way to fatigue. Instead of drawing strong lines in the sand on everything and anything, it became more common to see people throw their hands up, stay silent and disengage.
John Yoder: One of the voices you are going to hear quite a bit in this series is our friend Sam Chacko. Sam is a second-generation Indian American. He pastors Loft City Church in Richardson, Texas, and he shares with us that in church as well as in broad society, people are just tired of arguing about race. They're afraid that they will say the wrong thing and they just want to avoid the issue altogether.
Sam Chacko: And the hard part is even in today's political climate where everything is polarized, everything's weaponized. Race is one of those conversations that just becomes a challenging conversation, and people are afraid.
What happens if I say the wrong things? What if happens if I’m misunderstood? What if I become a social media reel because of something I said that was taken out of context? And so people are like, I'm just gonna avoid the conversation altogether.
John Yoder: I think most of you can identify with what Michelle and with what Sam just shared--our media, both Christian and secular, amplify the voices of those on both the left and the right who are very angry about this issue. But quietly, out of the headlines, are millions of Christians building marvelous cross-cultural friendships, marriages, and churches, and that is what we are going to share with you in this series.
As we start, I want to let you know that this series is being released on seven consecutive Thursdays. At the same time, on seven consecutive Tuesdays, we're releasing two series that are stories.
The first is called “Friendship in Black and White”. It's a story of two women who began their relationship at polar opposite sides of the spectrum on the social justice debate. But they were committed to each other as sisters in Christ. They persevered, they worked through their issues. They became fast friends, and together wrote the book, “Walking in Unity”.
The second series is called “Unseen”. It focuses on the story of a Korean American woman who was the only Asian kid in a class of 300. She was picked on for her appearance, but she came to peace with her multi-ethnic identity.
All of our podcasts, their transcripts, and if you're not into podcasts, if you just want a blog summary, all of that is available on our website, www.CrossCulturalVoices.org.
In this series, “Christian Compassion without Culture Wars”, we are not going to focus on modern vocabulary like DEI, CRT, intersectionality, and microaggressions. We are going to focus on timeless principles that Jesus and his followers taught. These principles have been working for 2000 years. They still work today.
Four of them that we will focus on in this series are: love one another, listen to one another, forgive one another, and center Christ. If we did that, wars would end. Divorce would end. Abuse would end. There would be a whole new phase of society. In fact, most of our racial tensions would go away if we simply obeyed one command of Jesus Christ.
Matthew 7:12 “So whatever you want others to do to you do also to them for this is the law and the prophets”.
Following that command of Jesus means that each one of us takes responsibility for our own actions, that we treat people the way that we want to be treated. And that's not the normal human response. The normal response is to find behaviors in others we don't like. We want other people to change. But insisting that other people do the changing doesn't produce reconciliation, it produces hostility and further division.
One of the voices you will hear in our series, “Friendship in Black and White” is Monique Duson. She and Krista Bontrager co-wrote a book “Walking In Unity”, and in page 53 of that book, Monique says this:
Monique Duson: in my experience, these calls to racial reconciliation seem to lead to more division and separation. Research gathered from the Barna group in 2020 indicates that churchgoers have grown increasingly reluctant to address racial issues within their congregations since the racial reconciliation model's advent.
John Yoder: So friends, doesn't that sound like a contradiction to you? Doesn't it even sound like an oxymoron? Monique is saying that the reconciliation movement, instead of creating reconciliation, creates division.
There's a reason for that. In genuine reconciliation, two parties come together confessing their own faults and bringing their willingness to change. But in a lot of reconciliation meetings, what happens is each group points the finger at the other and tells them what they need to change. That rarely produces reconciliation. It usually just produces more division and hostility.
Now Monique is a very wise woman. She has learned from all of this. So as a black woman, when she gives a lecture to a mixed audience, she knows how to open to lower the temperature in the room. In page 213 of their book, “Walking In Unity”, Monique says this:
Monique Duson: In my first video, questioning some of the tenets of the racial reconciliation model, I referred to white people as my brothers and sisters as family for the first time. A year later, I addressed a crowd of nearly 2000 people on the topic of race, starting with the words, “Hey, family!” You could feel the tension break. I believe those words help to put us all on the same level.
John Yoder: Now, folks, that quote is simply taken from a book and read by an AI. But if you know Monique, you know that she is flamingly emotional. And when you hear those two words, “Hey, family”, when she says it, it's something more like,”HEEEEEY FAMILYYY!” In other words, she's telling an audience who expects her to open with something like, “You people need to lament, repent, and dismantle”, but instead she welcomes them as family and she lets everybody know regardless of the color, their skin, their gender, how they vote, that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ and we are all loved and wanted and valued.
Monique is one example of a lot of people out there who are building healthy cross-cultural friendships. So if you just listen to the media, you would think that we are all at each other's throats and constantly arguing. But right now, I want to share with you testimonies from three friends of our ministry. They are from very different cultural backgrounds, but all of them, day in and day out, see people building healthy cross-cultural partnerships.
The first is Pastor Moses Saldivar. Pastor Moses is a second generation Mexican American. He's pastored in multicultural and bilingual settings, and he deploys Latin Americans for foreign missions. And I asked him during the time that racial tensions and arguments increased, have the number of cross-cultural friendships increased or decreased? And he was very clear that the number of cross-cultural friendships remains very strong.
Moses Saldivar: So those friendships and those relationships have continued to last (at least the ones that we're entered into with I think the right heart). And you've seen some great partnerships that have come out of that.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the narratives that we tend to hear are the loudest voices that sometimes I would say, or I would probably argue, are more in the minority on both sides of the spectrum. Those are the things that help the algorithms in social media. Those are the things that get the clicks online, or even get people to tune in when it comes to news, whatever variety that you tend to lean towards.
And, and even what I'm seeing now, not just in the church space, but even in a holistic mission space where you're seeing, I think an even more openness to partnership in general. That that is still there. I feel like there are people that are very hungry for that. We just don't hear those stories as often. And sometimes I think we don't hear the stories because they're too busy doing the work and they don't really honestly have the time to go out here and get involved in a lot of these narratives that have been perpetuated one way or the other.
So I've been really encouraged to see not only those conversations continue, but even new pathways opened since then.
John Yoder: Earlier in this episode, you heard from Pastor Sam Chacko. In addition to pastoring Loft City Church, Sam also coaches church planters through Stadia Church Planting. Sam is encouraged by the number of new multicultural churches whose focus is on building healthy relationships across cultural boundaries.
Sam Chacko: I'm encouraged by church planters wanting to build, Hey, we're a church that's called to shepherd and care for our people. Like they want to build deeper meaningful communities where people are known and, and in that process, churches are becoming, we're seeing churches become diverse. They’re not just interested in how many people are in our pews, we're interested in, Who are these people? Like, they want to be known and loved.
And so there's a huge desire for being known and valued and being part of a community where people know you. So, what excites me is more and more folks are planting churches where people are known and loved and cared for. So that's super exciting, encouraging for me.
John Yoder: The third person I want to introduce to you is Sai Wang. Now, many of you already know her. If you are on our email subscription and you get weekly updates about new episodes coming out, you already hear from her. Sai is a native of Shenzhen, China. She came to the US at the age of 20, as a junior in college. When she was here, she not only got her master's degree from the University of Minnesota, but while she was here, she also came to faith in Christ.
Today, Sai is the Director of International Student Ministries for Westgate Church. So I asked her perspective as an outsider coming into the US for the last 10 years, what she sees in terms of cross-cultural friendships. Here's what Sai has to say.
Sai Wang: I have observed interracial marriages that have promoted a lot of the friendship. For example, a friend of mine who is from China, who is married to a Latino, and because of her marriage, I got to know his family and him particularly, and now they're raising a mixed child, Chinese and Latino. And my love for the little guy has just grown so much. So I do think that the trend of many interracial marriages are promoting friendships like that.
I personally have experienced warm welcome from people outside of my race to my people. And that is a beautiful thing, to hear about people being curious about China and wanting to see photos of my city after I had come back from a trip.
God has blessed me with now many friends from India and students that are from different parts of Asia, plus in Africa. God has broadened my view on these cultures through beautiful people from these countries who have taught me so much about the nature of God and his love for the nations.
John Yoder: So friends, I hope that you are encouraged by what you hear. Yes, there are always going to be angry voices arguing about race. But quietly, out of the limelight, are marvelous people like these, day in and day out, building healthy cross-cultural relationships.
So let's be clear. Let's have appropriate expectations. This will not fix the problems in society. Most of the people in any country are not followers of Christ. They do not share Jesus' value of loving others as oneself. And here is what Jesus tells us that we ought to expect at the national level.
Matthew chapter 24:6-7 “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed. For this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places”.
There's an Egyptian proverb: “Me against my brothers, me and my brothers against my cousins, me and my cousins against the world”. In other words, everybody's selfish. And that could be at the personal level, me against you. Or my country against your country, my people against your people, my family against your family.
The bottom line is that when people do not embrace Christ as Lord, self is Lord. Selfishness is king. And loving others as oneself is not valued. Forgiving one's enemies is not valued. The kingdom of God, the Church of Jesus Christ, lives by a completely different set of rules than those who do not follow Christ.
The ethic of the kingdom of God is that we regard all people of equal worth before God, regardless of their ethnicity, citizenship, gender, denomination, political affiliation, or anything else.
But there's a problem with that. If you advocate for people of all ethnicities being of equal worth, others of your ethnic group will brand you as a traitor. They will say things like, “You ought to be standing up for us! Why are you standing up for them”? When they use language of us-versus-them, they're asking you to choose your primary affiliation, and they're saying that your primary affiliation should be with other people of your same skin color, or gender identity, or political identity or citizenship, or whatever else it might happen to be.
If you are a follower of Jesus Christ. Your primary identity is being a child of God, and your secondary identity is being a brother or sister of every other born again Christian on the planet. Anything else that goes on that throne is an idol, whether that's your skin color, your citizenship, your language, your culture. Anything else that takes the place of Jesus Christ becomes an idol.
So as Christians, if we use language of us-versus-them, our primary us are not people of our same skin color, or citizenship, or denomination, or political party. Our primary “us” are our brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. Here's how the Apostle Peter says it:
1 Peter 2:9-10: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy”.
Peter says we are a holy nation. We are God's chosen people. Peter is not talking about church members. He's talking about born again Christians. They are united not by a theological statement, a commitment to a moral code, or membership in a church. They are united by a new birth.
I am related to my family members by birth because I share their DNA. Born again Christians are related to one another, not because of church membership, but because the blood of Jesus Christ flows through their veins. And that is what creates the foundation for us to build wonderful relationships across cultural lines.
Unfortunately, many of us who follow Jesus Christ are just as angry, just as divided, and just as racist as culture around us. And the reason is we may have believed on Christ, but we have not placed him on the throne of our lives, and we are not following his command to love one another. We have laid aside God's priority of sharing the gospel with others, planting churches, bringing the good news of Christ to the ends of the earth, with other agendas that can be cultural, ethnic, or sociopolitical.
In this series, we are going to unpack what it means to love one another. Next week, we are going to talk about a very foundational skill: listening to one another. I'll see you then.
