Josh Samarco has spent most of his adult life in pastoral ministry and in higher education. For the past 18 months, he’s been serving at ����app. This past June, he was named the director of ����app’s Center for Intercultural Student Development (CISD). We recently caught up with Josh to talk about ����app’s unique approach to DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging) work and to understand how the upcoming UnLearn Week (October 28 – November 4) helps further ����app’s commitment to this core value. 

Why is it so important for you to see ����app excel in DEIB work? 

We believe DEIB work is kingdom work. There are quite a few scriptures we often use when it comes to DEIB work. One I like to highlight is Matthew 22:36-40, which highlights this picture of loving God, loving yourself, and loving your neighbor. So, who is your neighbor? It's anybody around you—your colleagues, anyone in the community, people in your local church, students, people you get to serve with.  

So, as you lean into loving yourself and loving your neighbor, out of it comes beautiful relationships, hopefully because the kingdom of God is so diverse that we have some cross-cultural connections and relationships, which then you begin to tap into stories, whether that’s sharing your story or learning someone else’s and that creates a beautiful tapestry of relationships. And as kingdom of God people, we want to care for people well, and that’s where DEIB work comes in. It’s not some political gimmick, we believe it’s straight from the Bible. 

I know the scripture we highlight here at ����app is Revelation 7:9, which gives a beautiful picture of God’s tribes, his diversity of people learning how to do life together, celebrating, worshiping God in what we like to say unity and diversity. And that’s our theme for UnLearn Week this year, “Unity and Diversity,” because we believe there’s a biblical call to live out our oneness in Christ, not sameness, because that would be boring if we all were the same, but our oneness, that we have a beautiful foundation of brothers and sisters united by the cross, so that’s the heartbeat of DEIB work from a kingdom perspective. 

Why is ����app a good place to do this important work?

I believe from my experience that ����app is a place where it’s okay to lean into the middle, a place where it’s okay and you are invited to lean into the tension, whether you’re from a certain denomination or not, from many different denominations, across the divide, across the political spectrum, ����app is a place that invites all parties to the table, and says let’s have a conversation, lets respectfully listen to one another, let’s have healthy dialogue, so having this work be central to who we are is important because it can’t just be talked about, it has to be lived out. To live that out you need to have conversations in proximity to one another. In my experience and what I’ve heard from others, ����app champions those efforts and those conversations for people to learn across different denominational backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, and creates amazing cross-cultural experiences for someone to learn someone else’s perspective. 

What is the purpose of UnLearn Week? 

The title gives away what the heartbeat of UnLearn Week is about. There is something that all of us need to unlearn about ourselves, about God, about neighbor, about one another, and we often don’t know what that is until we are invited into a space, an intentional space to hear from other stories, to look at scripture, to have healthy dialogue together.  

So, we like to say during UnLearn Week, we aim to honor what we have in common and celebrate what makes us unique, effectively discuss polarizing issues, name and help our community identify divisive stereotypes, create safe and brave spaces for healthy dialogue, and then we want to encourage relationship-building and community engagement.  

There’s a space for you to learn, to get to know somebody, to hear another perspective when it comes to DEIB work, because you can just do a google search or go online and find DEIB work across all types of spectrums, but again we want to take a Kingdom approach to the work that we do here at ����app.  

What’s a specific example of something someone might unlearn? 

First thing that comes to mind that I often hear in conversations with many different people is when you think about neighborhoods and you think about certain sectors of town, oftentimes you might here ‘that’s a sketchy area’ or ‘that part of town is sketch,’ so the question is what do you mean by that? And oftentimes, they’ll say ‘well, it seems unsafe over there.’ Ok, well what do you mean by that? Why does it seem unsafe? ‘Well, you know this is heightened.’ Ok, but who lives there? And oftentimes when it comes to what is deemed sketchy neighborhoods or areas of town, people of color reside there. So, there’s this lack of cultural lens, lack of understanding of how the area (maybe the crime is higher, maybe that is a fact), how did that area get that way? And sometimes I think we don’t peel back the layers enough to begin to understand how a neighborhood forms and develops and turns into certain stereotypes that these areas get. So, how do we best learn or create new practices for ourselves to get to know the cultures? Not just to know the cultures, but to get to know the people and befriend and create relationships. 

What is one thing you hope someone takes away from UnLearn Week? 

I hope someone attending would see, know, and understand that the diverse community that they are looking for is already here, that the relationships that go from monoethnic to multiethnic to multicultural exist now in Grand Rapids, and at ����app. And I would hope that someone would say ‘I want to live this in my daily life, and I want to learn with people daily who don’t look like me, dress like me, talk like me.’ If someone can walk away with that sense of purpose, that they can have connections and relationships daily, so that when certain issues happen in the U.S. and around the world, they don’t have to go into a silo, but can go into a group of people who see the world so differently than them and they can all learn and grow together in that space—I think that would be a huge takeaway for someone attending.