Tell me: What happens to us as a family, a community, a nation—or a world—when the only people we talk with are people who think, act, and believe the same way that we do?
How do we break out of our small, provincial worlds if we never really sit down and talk with people who disagree with us—if we never have a heart-to-heart conversation with people who have dramatically different perspectives on faith and life?
Sure, it’s easier—and far more comforting—to restrict our interactions to people who are just like us, but what do we learn? How do we grow?
Some of the greatest learning experiences that I have had came from conversations with people who, rather than reinforcing my own personal perspectives, challenged me to look at things from a different angle.
Take my seminary experience, for example. Thirty-five years ago, when it was time for me to chose a seminary, I chose as a United Methodist to go to Princeton Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian seminary. One of the reasons that I chose to go there was that there were over fifty-five different denominations represented on campus.
There were Coptic Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Pentecostal Holiness, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Assembly of God, American Baptists, and more kinds of Presbyterians than I could shake a stick at. There were Christians from Ireland, Japan, Germany, and South Africa. There were Jews studying at the seminary—and people who weren’t sure what they were.
It was an amazing collection of people.
Talking with all these students, studying with them, reflecting on faith and life together, challenged me in sometimes joyous and sometimes painful ways. But looking back, I realized that, given the small, insulated world that I had grown up in, I needed to be pushed and challenged and questioned. As a result, those three years were a transforming experience for me.
One of the most significant seminary experiences came from a course that caught me completely off-guard. The class was being taught by a woman who had served in the East Harlem Protestant Parish. I went to the first class with pen and notebook in hand ready to take notes. But instead of hearing a well-prepared and well-crafted lecture, we were given a tape recorder and given a series of assignments.
For our first assignment we were to take our tape recorders and record the story of the poorest family that we could find. We were to sit down with them and continue to listen and to record until we felt that we genuinely understood what it felt like to be truly poor—and understood the variety of factors that contributed to their poverty.
I discovered very quickly that almost everything that I thought that I knew about poverty was wrong.
For our second assignment, we had to record the stories of women who felt called to ordained ministry but who were barred from ordination in their denomination.
The third assignment was to invite a gay or lesbian person to sit down and tell us about what it felt like to grow up gay or lesbian.
We were never required to endorse, support or approve any of the stories that we heard. But we were required to listen—and all of us agreed that listening, really listening, was something that we had done far too rarely.
Because of this, I have worked hard throughout my ministry to create opportunities for people to talk and learn from one another.
When I was the Chaplain at Ferrum College I sponsored “town meetings” where students, faculty, and staff could come together to talk about divisive issues like homosexuality and abortion. The ground rules were simple: When someone else was talking you were not allowed to interrupt. You had to listen, earnestly listen, to what they were saying—and you had to listen not just to the words, but to the feelings and emotions.
Then, when it was your turn to talk, you were only allowed to speak in the first-person—“I think…,” “I feel…,” “I have come to believe, because…” I felt that, even if people never came to any consensus, it was important for people to learn to listen to one another—with their hearts as well as their ears.
When I was the Chaplain at Shenandoah University, I took teams of students from the nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy and physician assistant schools on mission trips to Mexico and Nicaragua. I took them not just so that they could roll up their sleeves and put what they learned into practice, but also so that they would have the chance to see the world through a different set of eyes.
As the pastor of a church in Charlottesville, I participated in a group of Christians, Jews, and Muslims called “The Children of Abraham.” We looked at each other’s holy books and talked openly and honestly about what we read and thought. I was never asked to give up anything that I believed, but I learned more than I can say from the members of the group.
And maybe that is one of the reasons that I value the Wednesday Downtown Noonday Services offered by the downtown churches. It is wonderful to hear a Baptist woman say that coming to the Wednesday service gave her her first opportunity to hear a sermon from a Roman Catholic priest—or to hear someone say that he had never heard a woman preach until he came to the noonday services. We need to have experiences that build bridges of understanding rather than walls of isolation.
I believe that we have to take Paul’s words very seriously: “Now we see through a glass darkly (1 Corinthians 13:12).” No matter how enlightened, how well-read, or how well-schooled we may be, all of our perspectives are partial and limited.
I have come to realize that there are people who see things that I do not see and understand things that I do not understand. There are people whose perspective I badly need if my own vision and understanding is to be more complete and encompassing.
For those of us in the Christian tradition, that should come as no surprise. Paul has told us that we are all part—but only part—of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12). The body of Christ is not made up of only eyes or ears or noses or mouths. Each of us has something unique and important to contribute. That means, as Paul has warned us, that none of us can cavalierly say to another, “I have no need of you (1 Cor. 12:21).” We do need each other. We need both our similarities and our differences. I need to own and celebrate the hard-won insights that have come through my lifetime of experiences, but I also need to be open to the hard-won insights of others.
I have become convinced that whether we are liberal or conservative, Roman Catholic or Protestant, male or female, black or white, denominational or non-denominational, we all need to come out of our well-insulated and protected shells to talk, to listen, and to learn for one another, for God has so much that God wants to teach us.
Gary Robbins is the pastor of Greene Memorial and an active participant in the Wednesday Downtown Noonday Services. Visit them on the web at: www.gmumc.org.