Valuing our Differences

by John V. Upton, Executive Director

I think there is an important question that needs to be addressed in church life today.  It’s an uncomfortable question but one which forces itself on us whether we like it or not.  The question is:  Do people with strong differing commitments and styles need each other for balance and completion? 

What I’ve learned is the answer to that question is “yes”.  One group needs the other because the other group has qualities that the first group lacks and needs to learn from; and without vital relationship between the two, each group succumbs to its worst tendencies and becomes a distortion.

I also know there are limits.  Differing commitments don’t always allow for relationship.  What could a committed humanitarian learn from a committed Nazi?  No real partnerships are possible between people whose differences are total and virulent.  And by other means, too, we may find that certain ways of being different can cancel the possibility of constructive relationship.  Would you mind me admitting on behalf of all of us that some folk are just plain crazy in ways that make meaningful relationship impossible?  So I’m not about to make a romantic case that all our differences are potentially helpful – they’re not – or that we all can be friends – we can’t. 

But that point is as minor as it is obvious.  The larger point that we keep missing is how so many of the bewildering and sometimes maddening differences between us are indispensable for our good.

That’s what I think Paul meant in I Corinthians 12: 1-11.  If you were to ask the members of that church to describe the issue they would answer:  “Incompatibility!  We’ve got serious differences of opinion and commitment and styles here that are tearing us apart.”  But ask that same question of Paul and he answers, “No. Your problem is not that you differ, but that you fail to regard your differences as mutual gifts.”

Paul’s response is both gentle and relentless.  Your differences, he says, are actually gifts from God.  Your diversity is not a problem, it’s a bonanza!”  What else would you expect from a God who creates giraffes and humpback whales and amoebas and rose-breasted grosbeaks, and who paints the world in unnecessary colors?  The Creator irrepressibly diversifies.  God just endlessly spins out beauty and boggling variety.  And it shows up on us.

Here is what I know.  Each gift God gives is linked to a particular kind of personality.  Whatever gift the Spirit can grow in any of us will not be unconnected from our essential way of being in the world.  Which means that whoever has a gift very different from mine will generally have a personality and disposition very different from mine.  And there, as they say, is the rub.  That’s what makes it hard – that the differing attributes scripture celebrates as spiritual gifts are invariably attached to differing personalities that, when they rub against each other, cause friction.  And who wants friction?  So we cluster to our types, avoid sustained relationship with our opposites, and hang out with the occupants of our comfort zones.  And why not?

Well, Paul insists that these differences have a purpose; they are gifts given for “the common good” (v. 7).  They are not for isolation but for integration.  These differences are necessary for you to learn from and to be completed by and to balance what you bring.  They are necessary for growing us up.  Apart from honest, vulnerable interaction with people unlike ourselves, we will never know the meaning of community or the real meaning of family; and we lose our chance to become a whole human being.

Many of us who marry come to realize through the years that this was the ultimate point of the partnership we made.  Apparently we unconsciously knew that the spouse we found was different from us in precisely such a way that we would have to learn from them and find balance in them and grow by them, or just go crazy.  On some days our differences are our dismay.  Understanding our differences as bearing life-changing gifts, they become and remain our delight.

This, according to Paul, is largely the meaning of being a church or a state convention.  Don’t wish for a church where we’re all alike and we all vote the same and believe the same and apply our convictions the same.  If you’re looking for lockstep, try looking in hell.  If you’re looking for the Spirit, head for the people who are willing to be various together, people who bring differing notes and who lean toward each other and listen to each other and work at making it a harmony.  A church is a people who for love of Christ learn not to tolerate each other’s differences but who celebrate them because they are being forged to wholeness as the body of Christ.

In writing this I found myself embarrassed.  I am recalling feelings of judgment against people whose way and whose gifts differ from my own.  I am embarrassed and am working at my repentance.  If you have, like me, disparaged the necessary differences in people around you, may I invite you also to be embarrassed, and to make your own repentance by thanking God for what they give that you cannot.  While you’re at it, thank God for what you and only you can bring to them from the same irrepressibly generous Spirit.