Week 5 Part II: One Body

Inside the crowded auditorium, faces representing just about every single major ethnicity in the world stand together, singing praises to the same God. The worship team features a mix of Americans, Africans, and Southeast Asians. The pastor is from Oregon, the lady he brings on stage to share a testimony from Hong Kong. Having gone to Asian American churches my entire life, it's pretty funny that God took me to China, a land with a largely homogenous population, to truly experience the global church for the first time.

Culturally, I’ve found a melting pot community more vivid and unique than the relatively easy to ignore hodgepodge of original ethnicities that have now formed mainstream American. Beyond partaking in different cultural foods and dabbling into foreign affairs and cultural differences, we don’t usually have a chance to truly understand what being in the midst of a melting pot means in the U.S. I feel that people that have been in the states for a long time are more similar to the "typical American" than they might care to admit. I admit that I'm guilty myself of diregarding certain newcomers seen as "fobs" as they are easily ignored unless you go out of your way to form friendships. Here, in the Beijing International Christian Fellowship community, I’ve discovered what it means to interact with different peoples and exchange culture equally, because there's no other choice. Everyone has a different story and different background, and together I like to think that it creates the image of one body under God that the Bible talks about so frequently in the new testament.

Granted, this is not the typical China experience either, as a large portion of Chinese (especially away from the big city) never experience a melting pot culture of any kind, at all. But I'm glad that I've been able to experience this unique international environment, something that you definitely can't appreciate in the U.S. I'm beginning to experience the value of diversity first-hand - as opposed to UCI which was predominantly Californian and I hung out with people predominantly from the same types of backgrounds - and it's much more interesting and valuable than I originally anticipated.