The eCrozier

Recent research reported in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin analyzed personal choice in the distance between people when they sat together (the link is here: http://psp.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/04/05/0146167211402094.abstract

The researchers discovered people tend to sit closer to others who look like them or have similar traits. For example, people who wear glasses often choose to sit closer to others who are wearing glasses. Likewise, people with longer hair tend to sit closer to other people with similar length in hair. The researchers postulated that people who were in the research group assumed that others with similar physical traits would also share their attitudes and so they could more comfortably sit closer to them. Drawing this conclusion out, we might say we assume that we’re more likely to be accepted by people like us.

A lot of church growth strategy picks up on this. Such strategies direct us to discover who is already in our churches and then target growth by reaching out to folks who look like us, share our traits, and have similar attitudes. The thinking here goes something like this: when people visit our churches they want to see people who look like them so they will be more comfortable and will be more likely to stay as members (and maybe sit close to us, but not too close to us, in the pew). This has been the central strategy of the mega-church movement, particularly in the small groups they form to build up the church. That is why it is not uncommon to find such groups comprised, for example, of divorced fathers in their late thirties each with two children.

In some ways, this is just common sense. It stands to reason that people would be more comfortable around people that looked like them, shared a similar dress code and appearance, and had similar attitudes and convictions about the world. In such places, we get confirmation for how we are, who we have made ourselves into, and what we have chosen to display to others. We get affirmed by who we are and the outward stance we have adopted to the rest of the world.

If this research accurately describes our human condition, then the Gospel of Jesus is even more counter-cultural than we might have previously thought. For the Gospel is the radical message that all people, no matter what they’ve become or how they’ve chosen to be in the world, have been loved and forgiven by God through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ on the cross. The cultural overlay of appearance does not matter to God, “for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:26-28).

So then to bring it home to our own day, whether we are “clothed” in glasses or long hair, whether we are “clothed” with black skin or white skin, whether we are “clothed” in a Brooks Brothers suit or something off the rack at Wal-Mart, none of that matters to God. And, here is where it hits home to our own stuff, it better not matter to us.

+Scott