When Exclusion is Beautiful

So one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter is Conan O’Brian. About once a day he crams a funny, ironic statement all into 140 characters.For example, this is one of my favorites: “Jewish fun fact: If you celebrate Passover on top of an overpass, you go back in time.”  But that’s not the only reason I like him. A few months ago, Conan decided to try a social experiement. He would follow only one person, to be chosen at random from his list of 800,000 followers. He wanted to see if it would change their life.

It did.

A few days later Sarah Killen (pictured above), a young lady from Michigan, who’d previously only had 3 followers found herself with almost 30,000 followers who were waiting to hear what she had to say.

Which can be a bit intimidating.

A few years ago some researchers from Carnegie Mellon University came up with a study that I think is pretty interesting. They gathered a group of people and told them that they were there to do a survey for technological research, and that it paid $5 apiece. But the real point of the survey was to make sure each participant had cash on hand for the real survey…about generosity.

Because from there, the researchers gave the participants a letter requesting funds for people in Africa who had less than they did. But they went about it two different ways. For one group they gave the statistics about the massive problems that a child in Africa faces growing up in an impoverished area. They were told about how every 6 second a child between the ages of 4-6 dies of malnutrition and the how illiteracy, government corruption, and general lack of resources keeps the cycles of poverty continuing. They then asked the participants if they would like to give anything to help combat poverty in Africa, and they did. They gave over $1 apiece on average.

But for the other group, the researchers did something different. They didn’t show them pie-charts or graphs, they showed them a picture of a little girl. A girl with a name, Rokia. They told the participants that this little girl was hungry and then asked if they would like to give to help her. And they did. But this group doubled the average of the previous group. In fact, most of them gave close to half of the money they had to help her.

This phenomenon is called the “Drop in the Bucket” syndrome. We were wired up to make a difference, and most of the time what motivates us isn’t a general sense of responsibility to humanity but a calling to a specific group of people or person.

And this is something that I think our churches can learn from.

Historically, I think churches have gotten a lot of criticism for being exclusive in all the wrong arenas. We’ve gotten the reputation of not welcoming people who are different than us, or drawing the circle of the Kingdom of God way too small, and mainly around ourselves. I think most of us have heard horror stories about churches failing to swim upstream during the civil rights era only to be forced to close their doors a few decades later.

In a very real sense, I think that if churches aren’t willing to accept people of all stripes and colors than Jesus will take our candlestick away. But there is a sense in which I think God is calling his people to be very exclusive.

Last night I was at one of our elders meetings, sitting around with these men that I have grown to love and have a ton of respect for. And it struck me that one  of the things I appreciate about the church where I am at is that they’ve learned how to say no. They’ve learned that where everything is important, nothing is important. And to say yes to one thing is to say no to a million others.

The problem with this is that it’s hard to say no to really good, or even great things. But God didn’t make us to do everything, but to do only some things as best as we can. In the DFW area there are a thousand churches, with a thousand different missions, but God didn’t call RHCC into existence for their mission. He called us for ours.

I know this can become a slippery slope. But it’s not only the way God operates, it’s how he started off the redemptive history of his people. When the world was headed downhill. It was filled with floods and people building towers and looking upon their father’s nakedness (Because we all know exactly what that means) God doesn’t call a tribe. He calls a man. More specifically, God calls Abraham and tells him that through him he’s going to redeem the world.

Flash forward a thousand years and this choice that God made to call Abraham had become elevated to national idolatry. Abraham’s descendants began to celebrate their choseness and forgot the reason they were chosen went beyond themselves. Now chances are, you’ve seen this firsthand. You know of churches who like to talk about their “in-ness” and others “out-ness” or maybe you’ve seen religious people so focused on themselves they have developed tunnel vision that excludes anyone outside their circle. But that’s not what God intended for his people.

And that brings me back to Conan O’Brian and hist one Twitter friend, Sarah Killen.

When Sarah turned into a web celebrity overnight, she knew that she had been given a great opportunity, and she could use it to either tell a small county of people what she had for breakfast or for something beyond herself. So Sarah sprang into action. He mom had just gone through a bout with cancer and so now she knew the kind of pain that those families go through. So she knew if she was going to have any kind of public platform she wanted to leverage for the sake of others.

And within hours it was working. Her twitter account began to raise thousands and thousands of dollars for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. And this, I think, is a great example of the potential beauty for exclusivity, and a great example of what God was up to when he called Abraham.

He could have called anybody, (though to be honest the song Father Gary wouldn’t be as catchy) the choice of God was his to sovereignly make. But it wasn’t about His choice, but the purposes behind it. If you are a Christian, than there is a very good chance that you have a sense of God’s choosing you. And rightfully so. God wired you up in a way to do some unique things, things someone else can’t do. But God’s purposes for choosing us haven’t changed.

Because God blessed Abraham to be a blessing.

And that, of course, was meant for all.