"If God made each of us unique, why isn't diversity all it's cracked up to be?"

Who wants to be a part of an ACTS 2 church?

I just love coming to the HONOLULU conferences! It is really a huge family reunion. We had such an amazing morning, didn't we? And last night! Whooo! Well I would like to begin in the tradition we learned for prayer using hymn lyrics, but we're going to use a praise chorus. Let's pray:
Give me Your eyes for just one second
Give me Your eyes so I can see everything that I keep missing
Give me Your love for humanity
Give me Your arms for the broken hearted,
Ones that are far beyond my reach.
Give me Your heart for the ones forgotten,
Give me Your eyes so I can see
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. Amen.

And my scripture for this talk are words that Paul shared with some Christians from Greece:

1 Thessalonians 2:8 "We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel God but our lives as well, because you have become so dear to us." Amen.

And I'm here to share not only the gospel, but my life as well. There is one way that I am unique from many of my brother and sister presenters at this conference. They can all pretty much stand up in front of a group with a Bible, and with power point, or with a sheet from Kmart and cover it with chalk - wasn't that awesome? But when I try to stand up in front of a group of people without a printed text in front of me, I pretty much knock myself out from embarrassment. So I have to stay close to my printed text, and I'm really apologetic for that but it's just who you're dealing with. I don't want to embarrass the HIM staff because they are all precious to me. So if it seems that I am not as spontaneous as Tony Campolo, you are right. Have you noticed that most of the really good presenters are bald? I mean seriously, should I do something with my look? Maybe that would help me!

Well our Creator has covered the earth with a very diverse population of people, languages, races and cultures.

I come from a proud neighborhood where we experienced that reality deeply. I grew up in Ewa. No, not Ewa Beach, Ewa sugar plantation. Established in 1890 with 11,000 acres of land from Honouliuli to Ewa, we were surrounded by Lahaina seed cane. Today most folks know that part of this island as "Kapolei." We never heard of "Kapolei" when I was growing up. But we were proud that the laborers had come from Japan, China, Portugal and the Philippines and they work together to make it the best sugar plantation on the island of Oahu. I'm not kidding. And I was privileged to play with their children and grandchildren. Now there were several laborers' camps, (and no a camp doesn't mean a cabin in the woods). In the center of town was the Ewa Shopping Basket with Ewa 1, a real locomotive engine that was out front that we could play on while our parents shopped. And our school, which was between the protestant church and the catholic church with a statue of young Abraham Lincoln on the front lawn. We played in the irrigation ditches and rode our bicycles like maniacs behind the DDT trucks every evening when they were spraying to keep the mosquitoes down. Are you with me? Some of you may remember this. And some of us may might end up with cancer, or a third eye, or something but we were never bitten by mosquitoes when we were behind that DDT truck!

I understand that the same thing happens to some children with parents who are missionaries. Some might call us culturally confused. I have another word: blessed. I was raised in a stewpot of culture made from some of the most beautiful ingredients that God has ever made. My husband went bathe in a shower. I grew up to go bocha in a furo. Our children went auau in a pakini. But all of us had bathe before dinner.

God has used my neighborhood and friends, past and present, to give me an insight into culture and the church. But at Ewa Community Church we were all together. Now I know you are all here in response to that intriguing title that I made up, and my question for this seminar is "If God made each of us unique, why isn't diversity all that it's cracked up to be?" It has a simple answer and for those of you who are type A and who are waiting to fill in some sort of blank. The simple answer is: Each of us mostly want OUR uniqueness to be the norm.

But back to Ewa Community Church. The Kojimas, the Mokulehuas, and the Goldermans all worshiped at the same time and the same place and the same Lord. And little Lynette was too young to recognize that there were differences because of class, race, language, or economic status. All I knew was that Sunday school was fun and I knew that God was there. Our differences didn't get in the way; in fact it made for some really good potlucks! As a child, the differences did not matter. God was there, we were together and that started little Lynette learning about the Kingdom of God as a new order breaking in upon and overturning old ways, old ideas, old patterns. Jesus taught if you want to get in to that Kingdom you have to come as a child.

That may seem like a land and time far away. But in 1978, which is also a land and a time far away for many of you, when we were called to Molokai, the Del Monte pineapple plantation, which was formerly California Packing Corporation, CPC, was still in full production. And we still had Filipino camp, Japanese camp and haole camp and we all worshiped together in one church…all 10 of us.

I must confess now. This is pretty serious. It was 1978, there was a resurgence of pride & joy in Hawaiian culture and music. And Grace Church is located right in the middle of Hawaiian Homestead of Ho'olehua. It had been 10 years since that fellowship had a priest until I was called there. And it had dwindled from the proud families of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Hawaiian families that originally started the church in 1954. And here is my confession. I almost killed Grace Church. For the first season, I forgot my roots and tried to make them a Hawaiian church, know what I mean? One day one of our members came to me and she told me something that God used to pierce my heart and send me to my knees. She said something very simple, "Lynette, we're not all Hawaiian here." That's all she said. And it's all she had to say. God used her to change my ministry and my life. I began to focus on the rich heritage that we ALL have in Christ and focus on the Word of God that is expressed so amazingly at our fingertips.

Because to stress any one group to the exclusion of another would not be embracing all that God is, for as Paul said,

Acts 17:26-28, "From one man He made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. 'For in Him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are His offspring.'"

I thank the Lord for giving me a second chance at Grace Church and that our people were so forgiving to me. I thank Him for allowing me to serve there over 31 years this September. And that He used the tools that He gave to that little girl from Ewa. Nothing is wasted that God does in our lives. And I especially thank God that my dear sister in Christ is still an active member of our fellowship today.

I'd like you to get up and move right now. I know you're expecting a lecture, and you may have even come in here for a nap - but I'd like you to go to the back corner of the room please. Stand up, if you are able. You won't need any notes. This is a brief exercise. If it is difficult, you don't have to do this. I'm going to ask a question, and if the answer applies to you, I would like you to move over where the door is, so we have a complete picture. :

• OK so among us who meets for worship in a traditional church building?
  
• When you pray, those who stand to pray, come this way
  
• And those people who kneel to pray, go over there
  
• If you sit to pray, come up in front of me
  
• If you do them all, you can dance! Just move!
  
• Who loves to sing? We can use hands for that. Everybody clap
  
• And who raises their hands to pray? You can raise your hands
  
• Who dances to praise God? Go to the back wall, the dancers…cause you can move more than the rest of us
  
• Those whose primary language for prayer is English, this side of the room… uh no other languages? Any other languages for prayer?
  
• Any tongues speakers?
  
• OK now Bible translations: those who prefer KJ on that wall or New King James, you can be together. NIV? In the middle aisle. NAS? Holman? New Living?
  
• How long is your average sermon? 5 minutes, against the wall. Oh I'm so glad to see you all moving away from the wall. That's cool.
  
• What kind of bread do you break together? Unleavened on this side. Leavened on this, which is to say real bread. Wafers that side, real bread this side.
  
• How often do you take communion? Every week on this side. Every day on that side. Less frequently in the middle.
  
• Anybody here talk back when the message is given? Are you interactive in another way? Worship team leaders? Dancers? Against that wall.
  
• Do we have any Pentecostal, muffin-eating, tea-drinking, stand-while-they-pray, sit-while-they-sing hymns, Arabic speaking, Mediterranean food eating, King James reading, but New Living Translation preaching born-again believers here today? NO? Well none of you are real Christians! Good thing you came to HIM to learn the TRUTH

Thank you so much. Please take your seats. I'm not making light, but I just wanted you to see how various we are. Poikolos. Polka dotted. We are many and various. Even in this small sample of this huge conference, there are a variety of ways and languages and styles we use to worship God, which is the whole point, right? But it's all directed at giving Him all the praise and all the glory.

Now I honestly don't think it would have mattered if we knelt when we prayed or stood when we sang when I was a child. It matters tremendously now because I have 2 knee replacements!

For those who can remember, life on a plantation was hard. Not for my generation, but for the elders of the community. And it was anything but perfect. Race and class usually meant neighbors didn't cross the streets between the haole homes, the Japanese homes, and the Filipino homes. I was blessed because I could just come and go as I liked, everywhere.

But here is the lesson that God grew in us as I began to serve with a changed heart.We all knew at Grace Church that everyone was unique.We knew that God made and loved each and every one of us.
We also knew that nobody had all the gifts needed in the Church.
The only way we were going to make it as the Body of Christ was with Jesus as the captain and with all of us serving on the boat with Him together. To survive and to grow we needed each other, and we really needed to be focused on His Word.

But here is the other part of that lesson. Being in Christ is not like being a robot. It's even not being like a zombie painted like those blue men in Las Vegas. God made us different. We are black and white and brown and yellow and even a few shades pink after a good sunburn, because our Father loves diversity. No galaxy, no planet, no snowflake, and no 2 people are exactly alike - not even my husband and his identical twin brother, thank God! But unity in Christ means that we don't let race, or culture, or diet, or language separate us. We heard that this morning from Rafanzel and Kathy her Australian sponsor: there was no race, no distance, no language barrier for these two sisters in Christ.

I have spent much of my ministry trying to live that on our small island. And we are blessed that the faithful on Molokai truly see ONE church on our island. Yeah we meet in different locations, and there are different styles of worship. We do lots together: pastors' prayer every Wednesday, we have singspiration rallies once a month at different host church locations, we have joint Easter sunrise service, and joint outreach issues and many of us come to events like this so we can get the really big picture and that taste of heaven, which is the Church.

Last night we were so moved and challenged by Francis Chan's heart for the Acts 2 church. I want to go back to the Word together.

Acts 2:42-47 "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved."

Who wants to be a part of an Acts 2 church?
An Acts 2 church is a growing church. A growing church is an exciting church! It doesn't matter if you have special music, or a choir. It doesn't matter if you have drama, or hula or sign dance. It doesn't matter if you stand up or sit down when you sing. It doesn't matter if you raise your hands or use them even to hold a book when you pray. When Jesus is in the house, the church rocks. People get saved and touched by the Holy Spirit and you can feel the presence of God busting out!

I just read an article about how quickly you can tell a healthy church today. The author is a pastor who visits churches all over the mainland. He has observed two quick litmus tests for when you go into a church to see if it's healthy or if it's an Acts 2 kind of church. The first is exuberant singing. And he says it doesn't matter what they're singing - if they pour their whole heart and soul into it, that's a real good indicator that that is a healthy church. The second is obvious affection between the pastor and the people. When people of the church love Jesus and love each other, their joy is evident and contagious. I shared this at Grace last Sunday and my husband Scotty jumped up a gave me a huge hug and a kiss saying, "I love our Kahu!" I love obvious affection, don't you? You want to talk interactive!

Back to the lesson…the Holy Spirit is poured out, miracles happen, lives are changed, and the church explodes with growth, inside individuals and among the whole body. But as the early church grew, we read a few chapters later in Acts, something happened.....

Acts 6:1-5 "In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Grecian Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, "It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables. Brothers, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word." This proposal pleased the whole group."

As you can see grumbling broke out. The Greeks felt that the Hebrews were getting preferential treatment in the food department.

Now, if you remember, everyone in the early church had sold all their possessions and put the money in a common fund to be shared by all as any had need. So the Greek Christians had just as much right to be at the front of the buffet line as the Hebrews. When the Greek widows came through and found out the crab legs and prime rib were gone, they had a good reason to be irritated.

Imagine if the church had responded this way… "O boy! It's those crybaby Greeks! Why can't they just be satisfied with what God has given them and be quiet? They're lucky anyway. Before Jesus, they would have been fuel for hell's fire. They aren't real Jews like us. If they had been fortunate enough to been born a Hebrew, well God would have taken care of them. Besides, Greeks don't like kosher food do they?"

Now remember Greeks and Jews didn't usually mix things up socially outside of the church in those days. But these men and women had something deeper in common than blood. They had all been given a new heart and a new life through their relationship with Jesus. So these were Greek Jewish Christians who were at odds with Hebrew Jewish Christians. This was in fighting in the family of God. And this infighting threatened to destroy the Acts 2 church…

Stop for a moment and think: do you think the church would be different today if that had been the response of the Hebrew Christians? Or they had ignored this problem, pretended it wasn't really a problem. Let's not address it. Just keep on going. Everything's fine.

OK. Moment over. And the answer is…

We can never truly be an Acts 2 church until we have worked through the Acts 6 challenges.
I want to repeat that.

We can never be all that Francis called us to be last night until we have worked through our Acts 6 challenges.

No matter how big the church grows, or how many lives are changed, we can never be the Family of Christ that He meant for us to be until we are one in Him, truly loving each other by the way we treat one another - across racial, ethnic, economic and cultural lines. So please join me again:

Galatians 3:28 "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

For all our talk about being one in Christ, about being united in Him, we are uncomfortable with people who look different, sound different, or worship differently from us. So we "shop" for churches where people are just like us, where they worship like us, where they think like us, where we have the same political views, where we have the same economic level. We use high falutin' words like diversity, and tolerance, and reconciliation, and then we go back to the most segregated time in America - Sunday morning worship.

I know there are very real and very distinct reasons for having worship in the language and the culture of the people. In fact the Episcopal Church formed that way, to have the Mass in English versus Latin. We all know there are good reasons for being separated. But so does Satan. And he is using those differences to harm the Body if we only stay in our insular groups. And we keep separating from each other. We have a row of churches on Molokai called "church row." It's a long line of churches. Many of those churches were formed by breakages in fellowship. They all met here. Then poof! There was a problem. So they built a church next door. And then poof! There was another breakage and they built a church next door. So you've got this long line of division. And that keeps us from learning the depths of God's mercy. Satan is using each of those reasons to block people from being saved, every minute.

The only place the Hawaiian Church, or the Black Church, the Haole Church, or the African Church exist is in the minds of the people in that community. The Lord doesn't look down on us and say, "Oh! that Korean church is so much better than that Mexican church."

There is only one church with one Head and His name is Jesus. And our Head walked the earth as a Hebrew but He put His touch on every culture, and every language. There is only one color that God looks at. He looks at each of us to see if we are covered with the red blood of His Son, the blood that covers our sin and gives us eternal life with Him.

And He doesn't care much about the name of our churches as much as He cares about whether the people in that body have names that are written in the Book of Life.

I learned at a very early age that God created all of us different and yet each in His own image. So this talk isn't about tolerance or celebrating diversity while practicing prejudice. This is about being so filled with the Holy Spirit and so filled with the love of Jesus that you will not get sidetracked by things that are not essential…

Romans 14:1-3, 7-8 "Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. One man's faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him… For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.

Why do you think God created us in His image, but not the same? He loves variety. And He calls us to be conformed to His image as we grow to be more like Jesus in that tapestry that we just heard about. But as we draw closer, He uses our different cultures and our gifts to bring His message to the entire world by using our uniqueness.

I know in my marriage to Scotty that God couldn't have brought two more different beings together than He did. There are plenty of people here who knew us then and now! Scotty and I were polar opposites. But in our 30 plus years our differences have stretched us and somehow we have truly become one flesh. Our imagined preferences, our comfort zones, our being proud of being who we were just as we were, have all faded as we each submitted to Jesus and to one another. And I truly believe with all my heart that that's why God made us so different… so we would rub up against one another, you know? To meet resistance and turn to Him, humbling ourselves. But as the Lord built us to be one, He has drawn out the best from both of our lives and cultures.

I want to share a story. 16 years after we moved to Molokai the men of our congregation reached out across church lines and invited men from other fellowships to come to Honolulu for a Promise Keepers event at the Blaisdell Center. Molokai went to PK with a planeload of men from our churches: Assembly of God, Church of God, Door of Faith, Friendly Isle Christian Fellowship, Southern and Independent Baptists, Roman Catholics, and Grace Church, and a few un-churched men. They actually looked more like the posters from America's Most Wanted than like Leonardo DaVinci's Last Supper. Literally we had cops and robbers that came together in Christ. Come to think of it, some of their rap sheets were a whole lot longer than any verses of scripture that any of them had memorized. But they were the united Church of Jesus Christ from Molokai and they were blessed that weekend. It was amazing to see them all traveling and worshiping together. They were taught some amazing things - but the best from my point of view was that they needed to pray for their pastors and love their wives. And I was just totally blessed, since I am both! They needed to form relationships with each other to form accountability as Paul and Barnabas and Timothy did. And the Spirit of God moved.

Well I was just so taken with this and with how they continued when they returned that when I heard of a pastors' conference being given by Promise Keepers in San Diego in 1998, I decided to sign up and go. Now remember, Promise Keepers was a MEN'S movement. It was designed to get MEN to keep their promises and to grow in Christ. It was led by men, and focused on men. And the pastors they focused on were… MEN. Yes, exactly. Amen.

But since I was culturally confused, I mean blessed, I decided if the teaching was that good, I wanted to hear it. I wanted in. So I registered and flew to the mainland for the conference. And I thought "I'll take our niece, Rachael, who we love like our own, and we'll go to this conference together!"

Well we entered the parking lot, and the poor ticket attendant leaned down and she looked into the car and she narrowed her eyes as she looked at us and she said, "Well girls, I think you're in the wrong place. There's a meeting here for pastors." I said yes, I know, I'm a pastor. And you could have knocked her over with a feather. But she directed us to the entrance. And each time we entered a new place, we had to go through the same thing. So where does a culturally blessed, woman pastor, who thinks she is Japanese, sit at a predominantly white male pastor's conference? As high up as you can go in the corner of the bleachers with a group of African-American pastors, of course.

Now here is where God really kicked things into high gear.
Just as we sat down for the teaching, Rachael became agitated. Rachael had been interpreting for the deaf in Southern California for a good long time. She had even been the director for a deaf play and a variety show. Her sign language skills were great! So what immediately caught her eye as we sat down was she looked down at a group of deaf pastors with someone signing. And she leaned over to me and said, "Auntie, he is terrible. He doesn't know what he is doing."

Now Rachael doesn't have a mean bone in her body. She wasn't being critical. She told me that the interpreter had only elementary sign language skills, if even that.

And she kept twitching in her seat for a few minutes and then she finally said "Auntie, I have to go." Next thing I knew, I looked down and there is my hapa niece interpreting. And these pastors are going "YAY!!"

Now usually interpreters get changed out every hour or so because it is exhausting work. And when the words are technical or complicated, like using phrases about standing in the gap or holding each other accountable, interpreters are switched out every 30 minutes. She interpreted for the hearing impaired pastors for the entire day, the whole enchilada.

It seems the venue or the stadium is usually responsible for providing the interpreters, and no one showed up. So here were a group of brothers in Christ who were different from all of us there. They couldn't hear the Word of God like we do. Still they braved through any and all fears to come to PK to get blessed by the same teaching that we were all receiving. But there was no one to share God's Word with them in a way that they could understand. Somehow they found this poor guy who had said "Well I can help" as an act of love and bravery he stood in front of thousands and tried but he wasn't equipped. When Rachael walked down to the stage, she asked if they needed help.

After the break, we heard the back-story. Apparently Bill McCartney and the other leaders had been praying for an interpreter. As they walked from behind the stage they looked up and were amazed that God had answered their prayers so quickly.

As I looked around the stadium that day I was impressed with the peculiar variety of people God had assembled. We were all shapes and sizes. The speakers challenged us to look beyond appearances and reach across denominational, racial and ethnic lines to truly be ONE in Christ. They spoke of the need to be intentional in moving past our barriers.

How good is God? He used a culturally blessed woman to walk across the pastor gender line so that He could bless a wonderful group of pastors with her driver!

Only God can work like that as He pours out His blessings like that when we are willing to lay those man-made barriers down. And when we bring all our differences to God, He blends them together in a sound of worship and of praise that floats through the heavens.

Kahu Abraham Kahikina Akaka, was my hero when I was growing up. He was a dynamic Hawaiian leader and long-time pastor of Kawaiaha'o Church. He was appointed the first chairman of the Hawaii Advisory Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and joined the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during King's famous march on Washington in 1963. Kahu Akaka once said, "God is aloha... We do not do good only to those who do good to us. One of the sweetest things about the love of God," he said, "about aloha, is that it welcomes the stranger and seeks his good." Kahu Akaka often used his ukulele to teach. He said the uke has 4 different and individual strings, each with a particular sound, tuned to different notes. Together they can be blended into music. He said that we each need to tune ourselves to the Lord in 4 ways like those 4 ukulele strings. We need to tune our heart, our mind, our soul, our body to Jesus to play His music to the lost. If we are each ukulele, I would suggest the church could be a guitar. So let's use a 6-string image of how to tune our churches to the Lord.

Let's tune our
1. cultures to the Sovereignty of God
2. our languages to the Word of God
3. our lifestyles to the Holiness of God
4. our feelings to the Love of God
5. our thoughts to the grace of God
6. our memories to the mercy of God.

It is time to look deeply into your heart and our body and put any racial or cultural stereotyping away. Let's go out of our way to listen, to share and to give. Let us never be slow to apologize and let our hearts ring with the forgiveness that we have received. Let's never stop loving and always keep giving.

And now Scotty will help me close.

Scotty Schaefer, her dynamic and handsome and brilliant husband gave the next portion. (Want to guess which dynamic and brilliant husband is Grace Church's webmaster?)

"We really are very different. Lynette can't talk without notes and I wouldn't know what to do if there was a note in front of me. As we were talking about this message, we wanted to come up with an image that we could all take with us… Let's see what we can do. I want to do is divide the room into four parts.

We're going to start with group 4. Since this is a HIM conference and this is all about Him. When I give you the signal, I want you all to say "GOD." OK Amen, see you next week.

But because this is about diversity, I notice there are mainland people here and there are local people here. Now there's something that happened last Sunday on the mainland that confuses all local people beyond words. Thank you. Daylight Savings Time. What do you mean the time is different? How does that work? But mainland people who grew up in that culture, they get used to it. Since we're talking about different cultures and diversity and how God can blend us, how much do you move your clocks? An hour. I want you folks to say "HOUR."

Is there anybody else here who is from Ewa, like my wife? Ewa Beach? When she was growing up everybody wrote songs about different beaches, but Lynette was pretty proud of her beach. She learned to surf at a pretty popular beach. Anybody heard of Hau Bush? You can have Waikiki. You can take Bellows. Hau Bush is the place in Ewa, right? So since we have a mainland contingent. I thought we'd have a leeward contingent. So when I point to you, I'd like you to say "HAU" Ready? HAU! Hau, now how did the bush get there?

Our host culture is the Hawaiian culture. And probably in my mind there's been one significant Hawaiian entertainer who has touched the hearts of millions of people around the world. No, not Don Ho. More big. Israel Kamakawiwaole. He was great. So when I point to you, say "GREAT IZ!"

Now everyone say your part at the same time. Oh yeah, that was pretty confusing

We're obviously not intentional enough about overcoming this diversity, so we have to try and do it harder. That means you have to do it louder. So when I say 3 shout out your part again…. 3.

That's what we do in our own flesh. We get louder; we get stupider… but Jesus says, come let me lead. Come, sing… we could write a song together if we follow His lead..

Hau

Great IZ

Hour

God

And then together we sang the chorus of "How Great Is Our God" with our different voices and harmonies blending in praise to our Great Lord.

Amen.

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