Something from my devotions today: 1 Corinthinas 12: 4-6: “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.”

The devotional I was reading from used the old King James terminology – “diversities of gifts, diversities of working,” etc.

And I got to thinking about word “diversity.”

If there’s any word that’s been abused in our time (and there are plenty) it’s “diversity.” Whenever a contemporary American hears the word diversity, he tenses up, figuring some bureaucrat is about to impose another form of uniformity on him. We’ve made diversity about race, and that’s just stupid.

Snatch up a dozen people from random spots around the world, and set them down together in a room. It’s my certain conviction that the least important thing about any person in that group will be his or her race (their views on race may have significance, though). Gender will matter. Politics and religion will matter, as will cultural tradition. I don’t know for a fact whether general racial traits actually exist in people (apart from physical appearance), but if there are such traits they will have little or no significance, except in terms of how people respond to them.

And yet we talk as if diversity were just about race. A university proudly points to its multi-racial faculty, calling it diverse, even though every single member of that faculty holds ideas and beliefs almost indistinguishable from any of the others.

All this is not what St. Paul is talking about here. The big racial divide in the early church was between Jews and Gentiles, and I’m quite sure the presence of both wasn’t what he meant by diversity.

What he meant was a wonderful truth, a truth Christianity has given as a gift to the world, which the world now takes for granted and thinks it came up with itself.

Paul declared that every human being – however weak, poor, and thickheaded – had a special, precious gift to give the Church, the Body of Christ. However little some individual seemed to have to offer, he did have a gift to share, according to Paul. All members of the Church were like organs in a body. The kidneys might be a little ashamed of their humble function, and the other organs might make jokes about them, but take the kidneys away – put their owner on a transplant waiting list – and it suddenly becomes clear how much those kidneys matter. Everybody matters in the Church.

This truth – in spite of centuries of officious attempts to make the Church an aristocracy where only the elite organs counted – could not be forgotten, and kept (and keeps) pushing through. Everybody matters. The one lost sheep counts. The widow’s mite counts more than the rich man’s endowment.

That’s what diversity actually means.