Know. Own. Change: Journeying Towards God's Heart for ReconciliationMuestra

Own The Story Through Cultural Humility

Imagine walking into the surgery hall of your local hospital and insisting on performing surgery. You scrub your hands vigorously for 5 minutes. You put on a sterile gown and gloves. You make your way into the OR and approach the operating table and call out “scalpel…”

If you got that far… which would be a stretch… How would that go? You would be endangering your freedom and the patient's life.

But many of us approach the conversation of race this way. We walk into the room and demand to lead, insisting that you know the lived experiences of others. Insisting that we know the solutions.

Beloved, we need to slow down and go low and take on the humility of Christ. We need to Know the Story of race and the Church. And we need to know the story of those that are different from us. We need to understand. We need to hear and see the problem clearly. Then we can own the story..

The only way we can own the story of race and racism in the church is by going low in humility, yes. But we too need cultural humility.

We must acknowledge that each of us has a culture and that culture often prohibits us from connecting cross-culturally. Cultural humility will open the door and is the glue that binds us together.

We must slow down and really hear. We must slow down to really see. We must slow down and deconstruct our native culture, so that we might live into reconciliation and change the story.

Cultural humility means that we honor the Imago Dei in all people. No one is superior, no one is inferior, all are created to reflect the beauty of God. And we all realize that in the Kingdom of God there is shared power among all people as Jesus is the King and we are his family.

Consider Romans 12:10.

We too must go the way of cultural humility. Realizing that everything that we've been taught actively and passively isn't sanctified. This is how we own the story before God and with each other.