I think God must detest sameness. At least he has gone to great lengths to avoid it. Every snowflake, every cloud, every flower is unique. He has created and continues to create an endless variety of trees, bugs, sunsets, and beasts. He has created billions of human beings, every one an original. All of nature is an infinite array of individually designed organisms interacting in harmonious praise to its Maker. And humans, created in the very image of their Maker, are given the high privilege of being cocreators with God.
I suspect that one of the results of the fall for humanity was the loss of some of our creativity. Not all of it, of course. We are still quite capable of creating symphonies and paintings and children and other beautiful things. But I think that sin brought with it sameness. Boredom. Monotony. Instead of remaining cocreators with God, we opted for making molds. We began making people in our own image, forcing them into conformity. We traded creativity for cloning. We found that we could accomplish certain ends more efficiently by eliminating faces and personalities and replacing them with numbers and uniforms. Regimentation became our method. We seperated human beings into categories by tasks, colors, intellect, health, age, sex, and cultural definitions of what is beautiful.
Soon bondage and drudgery choked out much of the fun of living. We became isolated from the rich, dynamic interation in which all creation was to participate. We became so accomplished in efficiency that we didn't have time to stop and see the loveliness of snowflakes.
The city. A melting pot. Variety packed together in one place. A collage of humanity. A nightmare to economists. A fright to social engineers. A curse to many.
But the church-- how does it view the city? Church growth experts see the city as a problem because its diversity makes homogeneous grouping difficult to achieve on a large scale. Denominations aren't able to replicate their traditional church models here very well. And keeping alive their traditional church is quite a drain on our resources. The city is making us realize that sameness is a failure.
Maybe, just maybe, God will use the city to remind us that all his unique individual masterpieces clustered together in high rises and housing projects and neighboorhoods bear a reflection of his original design. Perhaps it will be in the city that the church will rediscover the richness of diversity interacting in hard-earned unity.
I wonder why God has selected for our place of final destiny the City of God!
My closing thought: Perhaps God makes each of us differently so that we may not only enjoy his infinite creativity but also learn to love all that He loves.
I suspect that one of the results of the fall for humanity was the loss of some of our creativity. Not all of it, of course. We are still quite capable of creating symphonies and paintings and children and other beautiful things. But I think that sin brought with it sameness. Boredom. Monotony. Instead of remaining cocreators with God, we opted for making molds. We began making people in our own image, forcing them into conformity. We traded creativity for cloning. We found that we could accomplish certain ends more efficiently by eliminating faces and personalities and replacing them with numbers and uniforms. Regimentation became our method. We seperated human beings into categories by tasks, colors, intellect, health, age, sex, and cultural definitions of what is beautiful.
Soon bondage and drudgery choked out much of the fun of living. We became isolated from the rich, dynamic interation in which all creation was to participate. We became so accomplished in efficiency that we didn't have time to stop and see the loveliness of snowflakes.
The city. A melting pot. Variety packed together in one place. A collage of humanity. A nightmare to economists. A fright to social engineers. A curse to many.
But the church-- how does it view the city? Church growth experts see the city as a problem because its diversity makes homogeneous grouping difficult to achieve on a large scale. Denominations aren't able to replicate their traditional church models here very well. And keeping alive their traditional church is quite a drain on our resources. The city is making us realize that sameness is a failure.
Maybe, just maybe, God will use the city to remind us that all his unique individual masterpieces clustered together in high rises and housing projects and neighboorhoods bear a reflection of his original design. Perhaps it will be in the city that the church will rediscover the richness of diversity interacting in hard-earned unity.
I wonder why God has selected for our place of final destiny the City of God!
My closing thought: Perhaps God makes each of us differently so that we may not only enjoy his infinite creativity but also learn to love all that He loves.
Thank you Robert Lupton for your incredible insight. I would encourage all of you to read his book "Theirs is the Kingdom: Celebrating the Gospel in Urban America" (If you didn't catch it, this was my inspiration for the blog title!). It will challenge you, change you, and its worth it. It's a short read, just 120 pages. The book is just a bunch of short memories and reflections on Lupton's 18 years of mission work in an inner city.
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