Where Differing Cultures Meet

Tim Button-Harrison, Northern Plains District Executive, Church of the Brethren

The eye cannot say to the hand,”I have no need of you,” 

nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.”

1 Corinthians 12:21

The Church of the Brethren, my religious tribe, which I sometimes refer to as being kind of like liberal Amish, has a bit of an heirloom streak – an impulse to restore and preserve what is believed to be a more perfect past.  In contrast, my theology and view of scripture and the church has become more hybrid or mixed in nature.  I now see God working not so much at the center of groups, where sameness and familiarity tends to rule, but more on the edges of groups, or even in the space between, where different kinds of persons and cultures meet.

I grew up in a racially mixed family in, otherwise, all white Grundy County, Iowa.  The derogatory and racist comments I heard as a child, from the mid 1960s, about my Korea-born brother and sister, cured me of any purity streak I might have entertained.  Then, as a young adult, I, from a long line of Brethren farmers and preachers, fell in love not with a Brethren woman, but a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) woman.  But curiously, when I told my mother this woman’s name and her parent’s names, all my mother said was, “That’s very interesting.”  And when Mary Jane told her dad the same, his response was an identical, “That’s very interesting.”  Then we discovered her dad and my mom, over several years, and unbeknownst to us, had been meeting on a regular basis in Des Moines, respectively as the Church of the Brethren and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) representatives on the Board of Directors of the Iowa Inter-Church Forum.

I have experienced the awful distortions of God and scripture and church when one group says to another “I have no need of you.”  But where strangers become brothers and sisters and where a new family is created from different backgrounds, there I see wonder and beauty and hope for the future.

 This personal reflection was shared on March 20, 2012 at the Ankeny Forum, an ecumenical gathering of Central Iowa ministers at Resurrection Lutheran Church, Ankeny Iowa.