I recently was posed with this question for one of my Bible classes, and although I didn't take it the way the professor was probably expecting, I felt it was particularly applicable to my blog. I hope you enjoy it and find it useful.
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1. What can we do as Christians to promote more justice in this world of hatred? For example, we have churches from various ethnic backgrounds that don’t seem to have fellowship/partnership with one another. We have drawn a clear distinction along the social and ethnical lines.

Unfortunately, this is a very difficult question to answer. Our society is still heavily segregated along various social an ethnic lines most often due to the overarching societal stigmas that are constantly battled and placed on us by the media and our government. I think of affirmative action as an example of being one of the most blatantly government forced segregation made.

The very fact that it is such a big deal that our President in the United States of America is black is an indicator of our segregated attitudes. Unfortunately, we tend to want to force people to not segregate by any manner of coercion: political, guilt, or violent. This however tends to cause the opposite of the intention to result. For instance, one of the absolute worst ways to help those who are poor is to increase or have welfare at all. In addition, things like, Medicaid, social security, welfare, unemployment, are all increasingly detrimental to the poor of society rather than beneficial. This fact is incredibly ironic when it is considered that such programs coerce people into recognizing who the poor are (discrimination) and “help” them, when in fact it hurts them both socially and fiscally.

I am distinctly of the opinion that if we ever want to change the views of American society on social and ethnic segregation, it will come by the lack of acknowledgement of their existence and by simply once again viewing people as people regardless of any denotation into a certain group that person may have. This is a very Christian idea as Christ always viewed people as people and not as a person of a group. I think about the women who was about to be stoned who Jesus saved from that peril. It is interesting that all the men who were to stone her simply saw her as being a part of an “adulterous” group, while Jesus saw her as an individual who had specific needs, and concerns that needed to be met in order to change and follow God.