Social Change, Diversity and my Christian Faith

The Demerits of Technical Rationality
I just returned home from many a light bulb making moments of an MBA Summer School. Talk about enlightening. Talk about it.

Our Summer School instructor, the delightful Ms R, was, by all accounts enlightening. There she had twenty odd matured international students cum professionals, all richly knowledgeable and experienced in their field – and yet all wanted even more management education. But Ms R, astute as she is, threw the ball back to our court and introduced us to reflective and transformational learning.

Managing with a tolerance for ambuguity
Oh yes, she did. How so? Well, management education we came to learn, is about transformative learning, and that process, students cum international professionals, involves and requires reflection and not rational technicality. If you think you are consciously competent in the technicality of your discipline and profession, think again, think twice for that matter, for I am about to awaken you that your true calling as international managers is to manage with flexibility, manage with deep insight, manage with flexibility, and manage with a tolerance for ambiguity. For if you are to be successfully and efficiently manage your organization and hence people, it will take more than a few theories in management education. It will, fellow learners, take you thinking outside of the box, and realizing that your HR resources (and the art of developing your HR resources to realize their fullness personal and professional development) is the best hope for your organization’s future.

My lightbulb making day trip
So Ms R took us on a day trip. She did not disclose many details beforehand though. And, the technically rational international managers that we are, we were utterly frustrated by this. ‘What on earth could we learn just sitting listening to presentations all day?’.

So, we arrived at the site. An administrative office caring for the many living needs of the physically challenged in Sandwell. ‘God help us. What is Ms R up to?’ Well, some of us were to learn, she was up to awakening us to the very best of reflective and transformational learning.

So turn by turn the speakers spoke and presented. Inclusion, diversity, social change, inclusive citizenship was the theme. Social exclusion for any citizen regardless of their race, age, disability, creed was Zero Tolerance zone. So we met and listened to a presentation by the blind wheel chaired fifty something doctor (I forget which discipline his PhD is in) who had a family and had traveled worldwide on the academic and lecture circuits. We heard the 50 something HR manager who reminded us that the elderly, the transsexuals, the homosexuals, the ethnic minorities and the physically challenged have as much to offer in skills and abilities as anybody else and reminded us to be alert to this truth in our organisation’s HR practices.

And I began to be awakened to my own biases
How I have a preference for the heterosexual. How I have a preference for a certain kind of people, of a certain kind of age, from a certain kind of place. And I wandered how many potentially rewarding friendships I had missed out on because of my prejudices.

Vanity Fair and Bishop Desmond Tutu
The July edition of Vanity Fair magazine was a special edition on Africa, edited by Bono. Being mad about Africa, I purchased a copy. In an interview with Brad Pitt, Bishop Desmond Tutu said a few words. Here goes.

“I come from a situation where for a very long time people where discriminated against, made to suffer for something for something about which they could do nothing – their ethnicity. We were made to suffer because we were not white. Then, for a very long time in our church we didn’t ordain women, and we were penalizing a huge section of humanity for something about which they could do nothing about – their gender. And I’m glad that now the church has now changed all that. I’m glad that apartheid has ended. I could not for any part of me be able to keep quiet, because people were being penalized, ostrasized, treated as if they were less than human, because of something they could do nothing to change – their sexual orientation.

For me, I can’t imagine the Lord that I worship, this Jesus Christ, actually concurring with the persecution of a minority that is already being persecuted. The Jesus I worship is a Jesus who was forever on the side of those who were being clobbered, and he got into trouble precisely because of that. Our church, the Anglican Church, is experiencing a very, very serious crisis. It is all to do with human sexuality. I think God is weeping. He is weeping that we should be spending so much energy, time, resources on this subject at a time when the world is aching.''


Now, I don’t agree with Bishop Tutu on everything he said, but my newly developed diversity awareness kicked in.

Are we right in the Christian church to shun the homosexuals, the prostitute, the drug addict, the homeless who may meander into Sunday service - in all, the vulnerable?

No Christian church would probably admit that they do any of the above, but our self-righteousness and prejudices might very often turn the socially excluded away from The Liberty that they actually need in their every day lives.

And as if we ourselves do not toy with addiction of all kinds, whether that is sexual, power addiction and an addiction to our jobs and work to the detriment of all and who that we hold dear. Yes.

So, I wander where this leaves me. I am pro diversity, pro inclusion, and I am also pro Christ.
I believe in the power of His love – and I believe that He has placed skills, knowledge and abilities in all kinds of crafts in each and every one of us – regardless of our race, gender, age and sexual orientation. Would it be fair to say that we would only contact, the world would only benefit from, those skills, knowledge and abilities in all of humanity if we give diversity a chance?

Imagine a world without the outcomes that Martin Luther King Jnr fought for. Imagine a world without the outcomes that Emily Pankhurst and the Suffragettes fought for. Imagine a world without the outcomes that some such as William Wilberforce fought for. Imagine a world without the outcomes that the ANC and other freedom fighters such as the Aborigines fought for. And imagine a world without the outcomes that Zackie Achmat fought for?

Imagine.

Didn’t all these people all just seek to remind us that all are created equal? That no gender, no race, no economic class should live at the bereft of the other?