“The Hobbits named it the Shire …. and there in that pleasant corner of the world they plied their well-ordered business of living, and they heeded less and less the world outside where dark things moved, until they came to think that peace and plenty were the rule in Middle-earth and the right of all sensible folk.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Fellowship of the Ring
My Shire was a little village, which primarily consisted of white people. While my hometown wasn’t void of social issues, I came to see how much more complicated the world is when I entered into the diverse landscape of a suburb of Detroit. After a few years there, I moved again to another primarily white country town.
Talk about cultural whiplash.
I enjoyed each community in its own way, but my there-and-back-again tale had oriented my future back to the city. I had lived a pretty sheltered life, been exposed to the world outside, and then returned to the sheltered life. Whatever ministry looked like for me down the road, I didn’t want to return to the sheltered life again. I felt like I would be betraying something God had done in my heart if I did so.
This isn’t meant to be a guilt trip. Wherever we are is where we do ministry. The country needs the gospel just as much as the city, and white people need it just as much as any other race. Not to mention that there are social issues in every city to address. But throughout my life, I had seen the ways in which my white experiences had crafted a white gospel for me to follow. It was an incomplete, sheltered form of the gospel that I later found to be incongruent with the King that the gospels proclaimed. It was a gospel that struggled to listen to any other opinion of what the world is like.
The world is diverse, beautiful, and painfully complicated. This is hard to understand when you have lived a sheltered life. It’s hard to understand what the voices of the city are saying when you haven’t lived there and seen or experienced it for yourself.
It’s a dangerous business, going out of your door. For you never know what might happen to your heart once you do. But it’s worth it.
Jamin Bradley 
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