Intentionality means love. When I say that I love my wife, it doesn’t mean much until I actually do something about it. I made a public vow to never leave her. That’s a start. I make an effort to spend quality time with her. I give her significant gifts as well as provide for her needs. I do acts of service and show affection. That’s demonstrating that my words are backed up with action to show that it’s true.
This is an important concept in ministering across cultures. I can say that we care about breaking down walls, stereotypes, and institutional racism, but if I fail to demonstrate it, then it’s all just talk. Intentionality plays a big part in my job. I choose music (both the short term -”what are we singing this week” and the long term – “what is in our repertoire”) based on an intentional balance of styles. This is not an attempt to “make everybody happy” but instead to make sure that we are all making sacrifices to the community as an act of intentional love. I also have to choose the line-up every Sunday. The skin color, gender, and age of everyone on the team becomes the face of our church for that Sunday.
You might think that a multicultural church would attempt to be “color blind”. In fact, the only reason you would want that is if there was something specifically negative about color. Actually, who we are is a beautiful collection of believers who reflect different aspects of God’s image. If God is the light, then we, his image bearers, might be considered a rainbow, each reflecting a different aspect of his character. Therefore, we try to reflect our convictions in a visual representation every Sunday by who is up front leading. Is that tokenism? Is that exploitation? No, I believe that it’s love demonstrated intentionally.
This past weekend was a reminder to me that intentionality still matters. Due to a set of unintended circumstances (or unintentional circumstances) we had a team that reflected a 7 to 1 ratio of white folk to black folk (technically, one singer is half Chinese but you get the point.) I actually had 4 separate people mention to me that they noticed this fact. If there were 4 that said something to my face, how many noticed, but were not likely to confront me about it? Now, I realize that we can’t have a perfect track record of being a full “rainbow” every weekend. But, it did remind me that intentionality matters when you want to be a multicultural fellowship of believers.