Overcoming Stranger Danger

"We are a very friendly, welcoming bunch here, Pastor.  We are always so glad to have new people with us.  We go out of our way to make people feel at home here.  We're big on hospitality."

When I hear such descriptions, I know that I have my work cut out for me as a church consultant and coach.  That much protesting usually points to anxiety about being a closed off and unfriendly bunch.

We are wired to live in small groups and to be suspicious of strangers.  Studies using functional MRI data show that when we see the face of a Stranger, our amygdala gets activated.  We are preparing for a fight or flight or freeze response. This is the case even when subjects get the stranger images at a level beneath conscious perception.  

That little anxiety button heats up even before we know what's happening.  Then we create reasons for why we feel anxious.  I'm walking down a city street.  I pass a person or a group from the "Other" category.  Perhaps that category has to do with race.  Perhaps it was to do with economic situation. Perhaps it has to do with age or culture.  It doesn't matter.  If I am honest, I will admit my anxiety and my desire to move to the other side of the street.  That anxiety flares in advance of my conscious thought.

If that's the case, then is welcoming the stranger in church a losing battle at the physiological level?  Or as Robert Sapolsky puts it in "Peace Among Primates," "Is it possible to achieve the cooperative advantages of a small group without having the group reflexively view outsiders as the Other?"

Sapolsky's answer is a qualified yes.  He points to work done by Susan Fiske and colleagues on responses to strangers.  In one experiment the psychologists would "subtly bias the subject beforehand to think of people as individuals rather than as members of a group."  Sapolsky notes that with this kind of advance priming, "the amygdala does not budge."

So, welcoming The Stranger as a generic category may well be counterproductive in psychological terms.  But if we can prepare congregations to welcome individuals rather than categories, the whole game may change.  

I know this is the case in my experience with congregation-based prison ministry.  If we were dealing with generic Manacled Man or generic Prison Chick, then the response was negative and anxious.  But as soon as these folks became human beings with names and lives and stories, the response rotated one hundred and eighty degrees.  Suddenly, these were "our" inmates.  More than that, these were our friends, our neighbors, our fellow pew sitters and after a while our fellow members.

When I was a redevelopment pastor, I would routinely get pushback when I reached out to people who weren't white, middle-class and already churched.  The generic Other was frightening and alien.  But create the chance for actual and personal encounters and everything changed.  Suddenly welcoming that particular stranger became a snap for most folks.

This is why mission trips are so effective in building passion for partnerships.  This is why it is so important to bring real people, for example, from Tanzania to Nebraska.  Generic Tanzania person is a stranger, and the amygdala becomes unsettled.  But my friend from Moshi is not a stranger.  She has stayed in my home.  He has visited my school.  They have ridden in my combine.  And my amygdala no longer budges.

"Humans may be hardwired to get edgy around the Other," Robert Sapolsky concludes, "but our views on who falls into that category are decidedly malleable."  

"...remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us."  (Ephesians 2:12-14).