If a session on ethnicity was started by asking the audience to write down the first words that come into their minds when they hear the words ‘ethnic’, ‘ethnicity’ or ‘ethnic identity’ the commonest word that would emerge in feedback is almost certainly ‘conflict’. In fact the overwhelming majority of the words that would come to mind would be negative. It’s not surprising that in the minds of many evangelical Christians that ethnicity is considered an evil to be rejected. But there are other aspects of our human experience that can be intolerably bad that we would not dream of rejecting altogether. If one did a word association exercise on ‘marriage’ with many people words like ‘quarrels’, ‘divorce’, ‘violence’, ‘hatred’ would emerge and no words like ‘love’, ‘joy’, ‘pleasure’, ‘security’. Where marriage is concerned we would not dream of drawing the conclusion that marriage is to be rejected and undermined because of the problems associated with it but with ethnicity that is exactly what many evangelical Christians have done. We fully appreciate that things often go wrong and that much of the conflict in the world has an ethnic dimension to it but blaming ethnicity for the conflicts may be like blaming the institution of marriage for the troubles that so many people experience within it. With marriage we say that we must go back to what God intended for human beings in the first place and work on ways in which we can strengthen the institution so that more people will experience it as a blessing. The same approach may be helpful with the ‘institution’ of ethnicity.

A crucial question in this context is whether or not the formation of ethnic groups is a part of God’s design for us as human beings. In the analogy above there is no doubt at all that marriage and family were divinely instituted but can anything like that be claimed for ethnic groups? One key to answering this question is God’s command to the original human beings and to the remnant of humanity that remained after the Flood to increase in number and fill the earth [Gen 1:28; 9:1]. What we have in Genesis 10 is a description of what happened when human beings did as God intended – groups of people appeared that were associated with a specific territory that had some ancestral affinity, developed languages, other cultural characteristics and a collective story that set them apart from other groups in other territories with other ancestors, languages, cultures and collective stories. In Genesis 10 these groups are called ‘goy’ [pl. goyim] and in the Greek translation they are called ethnos/ethnē [pl. ethnoi – this is where we get  ‘ethnic’ from]. What we have described in Gen 10 is the appearance of ethnic groups and the NIV is correct in calling these groups ‘nations’ [Gen 10:32] because that is what is meant by ‘nations’ in the Bible.  So it seems that ethnicity is a part of God’s plan and the last thing missions should do is foul up God’s plan – even if humankind has done an awful lot to foul it up already. But that’s another blog….