In America, it’s difficult to know who made our things. And aside from a hidden tagline somewhere, we generally aren’t aware of where our things are coming from either.
For the last three months, I have been an itinerant staff with InterVarsity at Penn State University, visiting every other week and meeting with a small group of students eager to plant a new fellowship on campus. This past Tuesday when I visited Penn State, a different type of energy welcomed me.
Too often, communities of color find it difficult to differentiate between white Christians and white non-Christians when it comes to issues of racial justice.
Where on campus do you see white, black, Asian American, Latino, biracial, and international students together? At Occidental College in Los Angeles, it’s in Lower Herrick chapel where InterVarsity holds the most diverse student meetings on campus.
I’ve been thinking recently about the issues of race and racial reconciliation and the struggles that white people have when it comes to these issues. One of the major hurdles to a fruitful (and genuinely Christian) approach to the issue is that white people often don’t understand that McDonald’s is ethnic food.
Drug lords run rampant in Mexico. Iraqi civilians pay the ultimate price in a war into which they were thrust without any choice. Nation rises up against nation. One people group rises up against another. Our world is plagued by lines of division between peoples.
“I’m not lost. My pa always says, ‘You’re not lost unless you meet three criteria: (1) You don’t know where you are, (2) you don’t know how to get to where you want to go and (3) you don’t know how to get back to where you came from.’ OK, maybe I’m lost.”
Nate Schutt is an InterVarsity Campus Staff Member at the University at Buffalo in New York. He is a part of the 44-member InterVarsity/USA delegation at the World Assembly of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, taking place in Krakow, Poland, from July 26-August 3, 2011.
I’ve been thinking a lot about money lately. Mostly how I’m a dirty, rotten spender. I have tremendous guilt surrounding the mismanagement of funds that I blame solely on growing up in a church focused on a lot of rules.
