As Good As It Gets?by Dr. Paul Louis Metzger
![]()
Ed.'s Note: Join Dr. Metzger, Dave Gibbons, Efrem Smith, Erwin McManus (via video), David Anderson, Mark DeYmaz, Brenda Salter-McNeil, Curtiss Paul DeYoung, Rodney Cooper, and some 350 others at the historic Multi-ethnic Church Conference
coming to San Diego, CA, November 2-3!
Do you want your church to be as good as it gets? Then take a lesson from Jack Nicholson’s character, Melvin, in the movie As Good As It Gets. He goes from prejudging and objectifying those around him like Carol the waitress and Simon the gay guy to viewing them as persons with whom he has relationships. A best-selling romance novelist by trade, he doesn’t actually experience romance and friendship until he falls in love with Carol. Love is all so intellectual and remote until love captures him, as a result of difficult life circumstances bringing them all together. What does this have to do with the multi-ethnic church? It is so easy for us in the church to prejudge and objectify people who seem all so different from us, when we don’t have exposure to them. Homogeneous churches do not help us move beyond objectification of people who are different from us ethnically. Once I enter into a relationship with a Hispanic or African American person, a First Nations or Asian American person, I can’t label him or her as a statistic or as a demographic datum. Pray that God will bring us together through life circumstances, even difficult ones. Pray with Jesus that God would bring us “to complete unity to let the world know” that God has sent Jesus and has loved all his people even as God has loved Jesus (John 17:23). We Christians talk about the greatest love story—God’s sending his Son to the world to make enemies his friends and forming the church as a bride for his Son. But all too often, like Melvin in As Good As It Gets, we write about love and communion without truly experiencing it. We’ll never truly experience radical, life-giving community if we only hang out with people like us. God didn’t choose us based on affinity with us. God turns his enemies and aliens and strangers into his friends and members of his family. True community involves otherness and difference, bringing people together based on values and convictions that go deeper than shared consumer preferences. Nothing speaks more profoundly to the world of God’s miraculous love than when people very different from one another—including those from diverse ethnic backgrounds—come together in radical love that breaks through long-standing prejudices and divisions. I no longer simply want to write or talk about a love story. Like Melvin, I want to live one.
Paul Louis Metzger is Professor of Christian Theology and Theology of Culture at Multnomah Biblical Seminary in Portland, OR and Director of its Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins. He is the author of numerous works, including the award-winning Consuming Jesus: Beyond Race and Class Divisions in a Consumer Church and Editor of the journal, Cultural Encounters – a Journal for the Theology of Culture. He has developed a strategic ministry partnership with Dr. John M. Perkins titled, “Drum Majors for Love, Truth and Justice” and speaks on the themes of racial reconciliation and related justice concerns.
