LaFe and the Gospel of Mark
It’s only been a few years that I really started to care about the ways that my ethnicity intersects with my spirituality. For the longest time I believed that to be Christian meant you had to leave all aspects of your old identity behind. And that’s true to a point. There are certain aspects of one’s life that one should give up. Culture and ethnicity are not one of those however.
The more I thought about it, the less it made sense. If I had to give up my old culture, what was the new culture I was stepping into? The Christian culture? As I analyzed what it meant to step into “Christian culture”, I realized that it came from a very WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) perspective. Men had to cut their hair short and women had to wear skirts. You had to sing hymns at church. The U.S.A and capitalism were your new best friends.
In high school as I discovered the ideology of socialism, I started to come into conflict with my beliefs. Didn’t Jesus help those who helped themselves? Wasn’t America a blessed country because it believed in God? As I started to delve deeper into the Scriptures, I started to see that there was something the church I had grown up in had been missing all along. Jesus truly and deeply cared about the poor. The early Church acted on a model where everybody helped those who were in need. They shared their lives and made sure all had enough to live. This impacted me deeply. I had a new way to view Scripture. I just had nobody to share it with and nobody to help guide me in my new understanding.
When I showed up to that first LaFe Bible study, I had no idea of the bigger picture I was stepping into. I had no idea that there was a staff team that had been praying for an ethnic specific ministry to start up. I had no idea that there had been a former Bible study for students of color which had failed. I had no idea I would end up being called to work for InterVarsity because God would instill a heart for LaFe in me. I was just a junior in college who was looking for some Christian community, something I had never truly had.
As I kept coming out to the LaFe Bible study and eventually joined leadership within it, there was a healing process that God took me through. I learned that God had created culture. I learned that each culture brought a small fragment of God with them. Together, all of us would create a bigger picture of who God is.For the first time in my life, I was hearing that my culture had something of value to offer. Christianity became a whole lot bigger. I was in a room with people who understood where I was coming from. Who encouraged me to embrace how God created me. God was doing something amazing in my heart. And over the next few years, God started working in the hearts of a lot of Latin@s on campus.
This past week, UCSD had their Spring Retreat. I got a chance to teach the first half of the Gospel of Mark. It was amazing. What was also amazing was that there were a good number of LaFe students in both the Mark 1 class. By good number, I mean 3-4. This lead to an interesting dynamic.
Many of the LaFe Bible studies tend to focus on the ways that Jesus is at work both in our own spiritual lives, but also in the oppressive systems around us. Jesus was truly an advocate for bringing justice into the world around him. He sought out those on the margins of society and brought them into His Kingdom. He denounced the hypocritical religious figures of the time. He broke a lot of rules. As Latin@s we live in a system that works against us. To be able to see how Jesus wants to heal a broken system is something new to many of us. As I said earlier, many of us grew up in churches where Jesus, capitalism and patriotism are one and the same.
This last week taught the staff team at UCSD that you can’t just pray for a more diverse fellowship without expecting anything to change in the culture as well, as Jason Belcher said. As we delved deeper into figuring out who Jesus was and how he came to change the world, it was obvious to many of the LaFe students that there was one vital piece missing. We, the staff team, weren’t always addressing that beyond Jesus coming to transform individual lives, he was also coming to challenge systems. The LaFe students felt like everybody except them was missing this. They weren’t wrong. Even as I compared teaching notes with another teacher, I realized that I had focused on the oppression felt by the bleeding woman more closely than their notes. It was an interesting position to be in. This created several different conversations over the week with both the students and the staff about how to best tackle this issue.
I praise God though, that the staff team at UCSD truly and deeply cares about multiethnicity. Everybody was open to opening up the conversation to the ways that Jesus wants to also bring change to the systems we live in. They also decided to rethink about ways that we could teach Mark next year. It was a really cool moment to be in.
God is answering the prayers of many staff and students who have been faithfully praying for students of color to be a part of the fellowship and to feel welcomed among InterVarsity. With that though, comes a new set of challenges as new cultural lens are added to the way we view Scripture. It’s exciting to see how InterVarsity will continue to be reshaped over the next few years by all of these students coming in with their own inputs and values.









