Proclaimer Blog
Diversity and God
I’ve been thinking a lot about diversity, not least because I’m leading a seminar on it at the EMA. We tend to talk about diversity in terms of completion: i.e. diversity somehow and in some way completes us, or even – we sometimes imply – completes God. Have you ever stopped to think about this? Why does God love diversity? Is it because we need each other in all our multi-faceted differences in order to be the people God wants us to be?
Logically, that doesn’t stack up as a primary reason. Is a white-only church in a white-only area which can never hope of being multi-racial (at least at present) somehow substandard to one which is cosmopolitan? That hardly seems right, even if there are benefits to being sharpened by people with different cultural expectations.
So how does diversity work, then? What – primarily – is its function and usefulness? I’ve just been reading Garry Williams’ excellent book “His love endures for ever” – possibly the stand out book of the last twelve months for me. This is what he says:
“God does not love the diversity because it brings him something he does not already have. He does not need the rich life of creation, because he himself lacks it richness. The necessity runs the other way; creation needs its rich life because its creator already has the richest life. If the creation is to reflect God properly then it needs to have a rich diversity for the very reason his divine life is already so rich and full.”