We sometimes use the analogy of beef stew to illustrate how we think racial diversity will play out in our church. We don’t want to be a bag of marbles, where each culture exists side by side in a congregation but with interpenetration with the others. We also don’t want to be a melting pot, however, where each culture loses its distinctive flavor. If you mix a hundred different paint colors together, you end up with a dull gray. We want the church to be like beef stew, where each element retains its basic consistency but “flavors” the others, too. That’s cheeky, for sure, but it helps us picture what racial diversification might look like in a local body.