The Beauty of Contrast – How Our Differences Strengthen the Church - Daniel Willis

We're not trying to build walls to keep people out. Our ladies love fulfilling God's order of taking care of the home and raising godly children. They're honored to be adorned for the King.

Good morning. Welcome to all the visitors. Today we're going to be talking about when cultures collide, bridging the great divide, understanding where we all came from. This here is such a beautiful place. It is just a special place. And I don't mean this building. I mean the people. I mean the Church, this body of Christ. And I'm so proud to be a part of this body.

And some people take offense that I'm proud of our Church. They think that's bad to be prideful. But when we think of each other as the actual body of Christ, Christ is something to have pride in. And when we're lubricated and functioning well, we can have pride in this body. And it doesn't mean that we think of other churches as less than our Church. We're just happy to be a part of this body.

And obviously, Christ is the head. Cultures colliding is a huge thing. And we have—we've come from many places. And obviously, I don't mean other countries. But we have a very distinct upbringing. We have different experiences of what Christianity is. And we have gone through our own journeys. And somehow we have all met here in this place.

And so let's go over a little bit of where we came from. I've called some people and WhatsApped some people. And I'm probably missed a lot of the different places we're from. But I made a little list. Where did we come from? Our backgrounds.

Some of us have Catholic backgrounds, Old Order Amish backgrounds, River Brethren, Church of Christ, Christian Church, Pentecostal, Jehovah Witness, Southern Baptist, Independent Baptist, Anglican, Lutheran. That's a lot. Hope Fellowship, Washington County, Whistler Mennonite, community churches, Calvinist backgrounds, megachurches, house churches, non-denominational churches, Lone Rangers, people who don't really have a church, but they—yeah.

We have people from Shippensburg and St. Thomas and Cumberland Valley Conference, Liberal Mennonite, Presbyterian, Fundamental Baptist, Tennessee churches, Eastern Mennonite, Melita Fellowship, Beachy churches, New Order Amish, non-believing backgrounds, Charity, Methodist, Old Order Mennonite. What did I miss? I probably didn't miss some.

There's a lot of potential for misunderstanding and division in a group like this. So to have a group this diverse and not only survive but thrive is truly amazing. It's a gift from God. But it makes me beg to ask the question, how does this work? And is it reproducible? How does it work? How can this work? How can we make sure this keeps happening, this keeps working? One thing that I've realized is Christ is obviously all of our backgrounds. Our foundation is the Bible and Scriptures. But one thing that solidifies us and makes us work in unison is following those principles that Jesus teaches us, like the Sermon on the Mount and non-resistance and forgiving as Christ forgave.

And this forgiving is so important. We're to forgive 70 times 7. God knew that us brothers are going to have—or offend each other. We're going to—there's going to be things that we always have to forgive one another for. And we got to keep doing it. If we do all the things in this list, plus all the other principles of the Bible, we can remain on this path to not—to try not to offend others and to prefer one another. This is huge that a lot of us from the evangelical church has never heard of.

Being patient with one another, not complaining or arguing, putting aside anger and malice and filthy language, fleeing from gossip, giving each other the benefit of the doubt. And those are just some of the core principles that unite us. You'd think that all churches would have these principles in common, and so no churches would divide. But the problem is—one of the problems is doctrine and theology does divide. So why aren't we divided?

We are also united in doctrine and theology. How is it possible that so many different people from so many different backgrounds can agree on these things? It is because we don't rely on our own understanding or interpretation of Scriptures. We have the best commentary on Scripture to guide us. The complete faith once delivered to the saints that was earnestly contended for from the beginning. We view these Scriptures through the lens of those saints mentioned in Jude, the perspective of the early church.

And because of this, we can know with certainty that Christ's teachings are for today. I mean, they wrote about the Sermon on the Mount more than almost anything. We're not wrestling with that. We're not fighting about that. The salvation involves multiple steps. We're not fighting about that. That baptism and communion are more than symbols. We understand that something supernatural is taking place. So we're not bickering about these different things. We see that the church in Corinth wore head coverings. And then from then all the way to the late 1800s, most places wore head coverings. So we knew it was passed on. We're not fighting about those things. By standing on what was once and for all delivered to the saints, we ourselves find solid ground.

When cultures collide from the outside looking in, so when people look at this type of church, an obedient church, an Anabaptist church, from the outside without rubbing shoulders with us, without talking to us, they see us as legalistic, as Pharisees. They think that we don't experience freedom and that we keep people out of church by building unnecessary walls. And we're cult-like because of our dress and all the different dress patterns and head coverings and things like that. This brings up on our comments on YouTube. They often will say stuff about our dresses and dress pattern and how when they first saw it, or even now they think this way, some of them, that they just think it's cult-like and weird.

But the thing is, is when all of culture moves one way and modesty is lost and women start dressing like men and men start dressing like women and all those different things, whenever you have a passion for Christ and you realize the stores don't sell things that are modest and the mothers pass down their ability to sew dresses to their children and their children then pass it down to their children, it's actually a very beautiful thing. There was a comment on a video of a Kingdom Christian Church that was so proud that they had all of these different head coverings and all these different patterned dresses and they can just buy their dresses at the stores.

And I think that's okay. But I'm more proud if we have a tradition that is a biblical principle that we pass on to our children. They look at us as bizarre. Women forced to submit and are oppressed. It seems like we are trying to earn our salvation.

And they pity us. And they genuinely are concerned about us. From the inside, this is what we feel. We don't think we can earn our salvation. We know it's a gift from God. But we do know if we don't abide by Him and we don't produce fruit, He can and will cut us off the vine.

We do experience freedom. But it's not freedom to sin. It's freedom to flee from sin and to be free from Satan. We want people to join us. We're not trying to build walls to keep people out. Our ladies love fulfilling God's order of taking care of the home and raising godly children. They're honored to be adorned for the King.

No one is forced to stay. People can leave whenever they want. It's not some cult. Like if you don't want to be here, I'm not saying like it can come off. I won't even finish that sentence.

We do not think that we're the only church and that we're the only way. We believe that there are many faithful Christians and many different denominations. Let's watch this short clip. I'm going to play a recording of a football team chanting that is embarrassing. I'll play it four times. After the fourth time, ask yourself, what did you hear?

That is imbursing. That is imbursing. That is imbursing. That is imbursing. Now I'm going to play it again. This time, pay attention to the words on the screen. That is imbursing. That is imbursing. That is imbursing. That is imbursing.

That is imbursing.

Now think about this. You heard the same thing every single time. But did your perception change? That's because our eyes and ears don't just take in reality. They take in electrical signals. Our brains then interpret those signals, not based on pure objectivity, but on our expectations and prior experiences. We don't see reality as it truly is.

We see our reality. This video, it's a—you might have seen this, so I don't have to explain it too much. But if you haven't, there's a chant that happened at a soccer match, I think. And it seems like it's another language. But people were all trying to figure out what it meant. And people put what they thought it meant. And then it became this thing that some people heard it saying, that is embarrassing. Some people heard it saying all kinds of random things. And whatever he puts on the screen, if you watch this, I'll put it on our WhatsApp group later. Whatever he puts on the screen, you hear that. And it was just random things.

And in the Protestant church, understanding the outside, where a lot of us came from, we were taught what the Bible meant. And we were taught it over and over that this passage doesn't actually mean this. It means something else.

And to the point where even when I was in China, I would be reading the Chinese scriptures and say, oh, this is a terrible translation. They got this wrong. And then I'd go open the English Bible and realize it actually says that. How in my whole life I've read this so many times and never noticed that it said that. Because I was always told that it meant the opposite of what I was reading. And so when I read it, I literally saw—like when we think, how can the people be so crazy to think we can't obey Christ? They literally read it and see that in the scriptures. And they've been taught these things. And so we need to have compassion on that most—there are some Protestants that are twisting scriptures.

But most of them aren't trying to twist scriptures. They're just repeating what has been handed down to them. So another example of this, a story when I was being robbed. Not long ago, my son and I were here for six hours. And we were waiting on the internet to be installed. And we parked right across the street facing that way.

And the very next evening, we had like a singing. All the church got together and recorded people singing the songs. Justin and Dale and other people were here. I don't know. Were you here? You weren't here. Your family was here.

And so after the singing was over, I walked out. And I walked right over across the street with my son to our van. And I get on the sidewalk. And I'm standing there. And there's this man grabbing stuff out of our car and putting it in his pocket. And I'm like, look at William. I look at him. And I get closer. And I'm like, is this really happening? And then he turns around and he looks at me all guilty.

And I'm like, my adrenaline's pumping. I'm like, sir, I would really appreciate it. And my voice is loud because I'm—and I would really appreciate it if you give me whatever you took out of the car. And I mentioned something like that multiple times. And then I grab the door and start opening the side door to put my bag in. And then he puts his hand on the door and doesn't let me open it. And he's looking at me. He's still all guilty and confused looking. And then suddenly Chantel goes, hey, Dan, is that your car over there?

And I'm looking around. And I see the van. It's the same color, make and model. I'm looking at this car. And my brain still can't figure this out. And I go around the back. And it's got Maryland license plate. And this other Hispanic guy comes up. And he's like, yeah, you have a Honda Odyssey 2010 as well, don't you? I see what was going on now. And I was like, I am so sorry. And I kept walking. I was confused, still confused, because I knew this was my van. And so I go back. And I give the guy a hug. And the other guy a hug. And I'm like, I'm so sorry. And the reason that one guy was so guilty looking was because he had no idea what he was saying, what I was saying.

He didn't speak English. This white guy is standing there talking to him and is like wondering what he's doing. And he just looks so guilty that it just proved to me that it was my car. And even when we opened the door, it had our car seats in there. It looked—it was dark. But it was car seats. And it looked like ours.

And so all this to say is that we can be 100% convinced we are right about something. And we can be 100% wrong about it. And that is where we all have come from, I think, at some point in our life. And that's where a lot of Protestants and evangelicals are now. They don't think they're wrong about these things. They're completely convinced they're right. And they're not trying to be evil. And anyway, we'll keep moving on. So moving on to the body of Christ. Paul's teachings in 1 Corinthians reminds us that the body of Christ needs every part: hands, feet, eyes, ears to work together. We all need each other. But sometimes even our gifts reveal our weaknesses.

And gifts, if you only have one gift, if this whole church was only one gifted, it would look much like this. And this is what—sorry if you came from a Pentecostal background. What I think about when I see this is Pentecostals and a bunch of speaking in tongues going on. But this would just be really loud and obnoxious. And this would be if all of the gifts were an eye. And it would be kind of useless. It couldn't get around. Like this is what I think about visionaries. If the whole church was visionaries, like this is what it would look like.

This is a picture of a beach. And so contrast, some of our gifts are so contrasted to one another that sometimes I might think someone else's problem or something that's wrong. I wish that person had my gift. And they can see things how I see it. But actually, they have a gift that is just so contrasting that it seems in opposition. But they're actually gifts. We need everything. For example, the nose keeps us breathing and filters the air coming in and warms the air. And it has to do with our immune system. And our armpits cool us off. But if you put the nose under the armpits, I don't think the nose appreciates the armpits too much or the feet or other parts.

And sometimes the gifts that other people have may be so contrasting that we can't see them as gifts. And I really do think Paul was talking about this because he's saying like not everybody's the hand, not everybody's the eye. Everybody has different gifts. I think that some people were discounting others because they weren't gifted the same way they were. And this is a picture of a beach. And I took all the highlights and all the midtones and crushed them with the shadows. And this is if everything was dark, this is what the picture looks like. It's not very beautiful if all the gifts are the same on one side. And this is the exact opposite.

You would think, well, maybe this would look really good. But this is if you take all the shadows and the midtones and bring them up and blow them out and the highlights. And then this is a very not very contrasted picture. But this is whenever you bring some of the shadows and some of the highlights in together, you can start to see that it's maybe something beautiful. But then if you don't, if you get rid of the midtones and you add too much contrast, it's kind of harsh and hard to look at. But then whenever you bring it to the right contrast, it's pretty beautiful. But my mind is if we're all working together with our gifts and we're following all those principles of Jesus, we can really stay united.

And not only united, we can be extremely beautiful. We can take it to the next level because we see that, yeah, they don't have the same gifts as I have. But I need them. And I can't encourage like Conrad. I strive to encourage like Conrad. But every time I get encouraged by him so much, it's like, how does he do it?

But I do have the ability to encourage like Conrad because I have Conrad as part of the body. It says at the end of that verse in Corinthians that when one of us suffers, we all suffer. And one of us are honored. We're all honored. And so where I'm weak and someone else is strong, I'm strong because I have them.

And where I'm strong, where someone else is weak, they're strong because they have me.

When cultures collide, as different cultures and people come together, misunderstanding, assumptions, even gossip arise, leading to polarization. While I haven't seen this much in our congregation, these things can still become divisive. Instead of seeing things, issues as either/or, I want to bring it—this is a polarize. I want to bring a lot of our thoughts to both/and.

That both/and is often the best way. For example, the Protestants will say this verse cancels out this verse. And we like to say, no, this verse and this verse, it's both/and. It's not just one or the other. I'm going to bring that concept into this too.

When cultures collide, we find ourselves having an us versus them mentality. Us versus them instead of us and them. We need to have an us and them mentality because we're all from different backgrounds. None of us are ever—that we're not born an Anabaptist are going to be purely Anabaptist thought. We have different—we had different experiences and different perceptions of things.

We need to stay away from reacting and being dogmatic. So having an us versus them mentality often makes us react and makes us dogmatic. And we have assumptions. And one of the things—so when I first moved here, I had assumptions about words. Like I heard people say, that's so worldly. And in my vocabulary, where I came from, the churches I came from, worldly was like lustful, debauchery, lying, gossip, all these sins that lead to death. It was just an awful, awful thing. And I'm in little groups. And they're like, oh, that's so worldly. And they're talking about a tractor pool. And I'm thinking, wow, these people think you're going to hell if you go to a tractor pool.

Or you're going to hell if you eat on Sunday, eat out on Sunday or mow your grass on Sunday. It's so worldly. And I'm like, my brain just couldn't calculate it. I'm like, there has to be something different going on here. And there's misunderstandings. And so we have to give each other the benefit of the doubts. I might be saying one thing. And you're hearing something totally different. And that happens all the time. And so I've seen these kind of polarizing issues like theology versus practical.

So if you have theology and you say, oh, this person always preaches these theological sermons and never preaches practical sermons. But if you take, for example, if you believe in once saved, always saved, and you believe you can't please God, and if you try to please God, you're going to hell, then of course your practice is going to be living sinfully and raising grace because we need—and just emphasizing grace because of this theology we have this practice. But if you believe that we can please God and God is our Father who wants us to obey Him, and if we obey Him, He'll keep us on the vine, then our practice will be obeying Him. And it's this whole thing where theology and practice can't be separated.

What we believe in our theology is going to determine how we practice. And we shouldn't take two things that are really good and pin them against each other. That's what causes divisions. We need to be a both/and mentality. Or is this sermon for YouTube? Or is this sermon for the church? So if I preach a sermon on the head covering, and the people on YouTube are going to get the idea, hey, maybe it is for today. Maybe this history is right. And maybe they'll be convinced. But none of y'all will be convinced because you're already convinced. But you will be better prepared to go and express and to defend the faith of why you do what you do.

So it's a both/and. It's not an either/or. We don't have to pin them against each other. Or is outreach only for local or for Honduras or Chile or online ministry? I think that they're all good. We don't have to say one is better than the other.

Here's another short clip. In 1966, scientists conducted an experiment where they placed five monkeys in a room. In the room, they set up a ladder with some bananas on top. Whenever one of the monkeys climbed the ladder to get the bananas, the scientists sprayed the rest of the monkeys with cold water. The monkey would come down and the water would stop. When another monkey tried to climb, the cold water would be sprayed again. Eventually, whenever any monkey tried to climb the ladder, the others would beat him up to stop him. Then the scientists replaced one of the monkeys with a new one. The new monkey, unaware of the cold water, tried to climb the ladder but was immediately beaten by the other monkeys.

He learned that climbing the ladder led to a beating, though he didn't know why. As the experiment continued, the scientists replaced all the original monkeys one by one. Each new monkey was beaten when it tried to climb the ladder, even though none of them had ever experienced the cold water. By the end, all the original monkeys were gone, the cold water had stopped, but none of the remaining monkeys would try to climb the ladder, nor would they let any other monkey do so. This behavior had become a tradition, even though none of them knew why.

So it's interesting when I play this to non-Anabaptist people, when they're thinking about Anabaptist people, they're like, you see all these bad traditions that they hold on to and don't know why. But we shouldn't be fast to get rid of traditions. There's lots of traditions that are probably extremely good, and we don't know why.

So for example, someone asked me, well, in your standards, you're not supposed to wear t-shirts. And they asked me why. And I said, well, I'm pretty sure I've heard that because our ladies dress this really modest way and that they stand out in the culture that we feel like it's odd or weird to go to a store in t-shirts and holy jeans next to our wife that's dressed for the king.

And that might be a good argument. But when I looked it up, this was considered underwear when it first came out. And it was not modest to wear it. And it was actually considered rebellious. And what's interesting is this, if you look at the two timelines, the timeline that women started wearing pants and started wearing what they called cross-dressing back then, which I guess it's still called cross-dressing now, when the same time that happened, men started wearing t-shirts. And a lot of the people thought it was not right. And James Dean and Elvis Presley and all these people were pushing this idea. And the same timeline happened.

So if you're a church that's trying to remain modest and you're watching all the cultures do this, it's OK to make a tradition that we maybe shouldn't wear t-shirts. I think that now there's more modest t-shirts. Their t-shirts were much—they seemed much tighter. And they weren't made for outerwear. They're really only made for undergarments. So today, there are modest t-shirts. And there are modest dress shirts. And so I'm not saying that we have to have it. But they saw those traditions. They saw this shift. And they said, let's not move with the world. Let's not become worldly. Let's not do those things. And it's not a bad thing.

And here's another really short video. Training fleas requires a glass jar with a lid. The fleas are placed inside the jar, and the lid is then sealed.

They are left undisturbed for three days.

Then, when the jar is opened, the fleas will not jump out.

In fact, the fleas will never jump higher than the level set by the lid.

Their behavior is now set for the rest of their lives.

And when these fleas reproduce, their offspring will automatically follow their example.

So how true this is or not, I don't know. I know that it's been an actual experiment. But that picture, I don't think, was a real picture of it. But traditions are OK to keep us in certain boundaries. And traditions can also hinder us. And my encouragement is that whenever you have a group of people, I had onboarding with two Mennonite or Anabaptist couples and then me and my wife. And during it, we somehow got talking about divorce and remarriage. And I said, well, how many divorces have you four experienced? And they were from four different congregations. And they're like, we've never seen divorce or remarriage in our churches in these four congregations. And I'm thinking, like, all the churches I've been to, it's like 20%, 30%, 40%.

And I think that holding on to traditions and making sure we have this foundation of Jesus' principles, we can—it's OK to be in this jar and not jump over the fence and not try to push every boundary and go somewhere else. I know that from the outside looking in and the inside looking out, there's an in-between where we can start to understand one another.

When cultures collide—so this is—I know this seemed really kind of random, maybe. But this is my conclusion. It is easy to become divided, polarized, and become us versus them mentality. We need to be us and them, or we. Practice a both mentality. Do not divide over two good things. Let's continue to appreciate and attempt to understand each other's perspectives as they bring a vibrance to the church and respect each other's gifts and encourage each other's gifts, even if they're seemingly very different from ours. Remember, we may be wrong about some things we are 100% sure we are right about.

If I would have continued to try to get into that car, and I would have probably got stabbed or put in jail, or those guys wouldn't have stabbed me. Those are very gracious guys. If they would have, they had already done it. But if I would have not paid a—if I would have not looked at the other evidence and given someone the benefit of the doubt, I would have kept trying to get in that car. And it would have been a disaster. We have to know that we might be wrong. And what I mean by traditions, let me give some examples that I had on here that I forgot to mention, like the plain suit.

David has mentioned that a lot of the Anabaptist churches wear a plain suit. And when they originally decided as churches to wear this outfit for the men for church or whatever, it was because it was affordable. And it was not extravagant. And it wasn't over the top. And it was something easy to get. But now the opposite is true.

To get a plain suit, you have to go get it tailor-made. And it costs a lot of money. And so that's one of the traditions in our church that we decided that it's OK to let that one go and replace it with new traditions.

But then there are some traditions that we shouldn't let go of. So give others the benefit of the doubt. And don't give up traditions just because you don't understand them. And be willing to give up traditions that no longer make sense.

And I know it might be hodgepodge of thoughts. But that's what you get this morning. So I really feel like we have something special. And I don't want to lose it. And that's one of the things I didn't mention is churches are fragile. And they're only fragile if we don't take those positions of forgiving quickly and not being angry. And if you can grasp all those things that Christ teaches us, we won't be fragile. Things will come. And we'll be able to be here still.