God in Others

I really like and respect Dave Livermore.  Dave is the Executive Director of the Global Learning Center at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary and the author of 2 great books:  Serving with Eyes Wide Open, and the brand new Cultural Intelligence.

I love what he writes on page 86 of Cultural Intelligence:

Most importantly, we’re all created in the image of God.  A theological understanding of imago Dei, the Latin phrase for our having been crated in the image of God, is essential for moving across the chasm from the desire to love the Other to actually expressing that love.  To understand and see the Other as being crated in the image of God is to recognize that he or she possesses special qualities that reflect God himself.

I don’t normally put long quotes in my blog posts but this one is worth it.  In our research for Deep Justice Journeys and Deep Justice in a Broken World, we interviewed “exemplars”, meaning leaders who were great at involving kids and adults in justice.  A dominant, and I mean dominant, theme in those interviews was the importance of viewing others in God’s image.  If I believe a child orphaned by AIDS in Zimbabwe or affected by the genocide in Darfur is made just as much in the image of God as my own three kids, then doesn’t that change the way I act toward them?

As we talk about justice in our youth ministries, a great starting point is that God’s image is in all people.  Equally.

©2009 Fuller Youth Institute