Diversity training cultural awareness programmes and intercultural education programmes all operate at the level of information — providing people with knowledge about groups different from their own. The research is consistent: information about groups rarely changes the fundamental empathy deficits that produce prejudice. What changes them is sustained personal encounter with specific people from those groups. The church that runs diversity programmes without creating the conditions for genuine encounter has invested in the wrong intervention.

John 4:9-10: The Samaritan woman said to him: You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? Jesus answered her: If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink you would have asked him and he would have given you living water. The encounter at the well is a Contact Encounter: equal-status unexpected sustained and producing a 47-point shift in one Samaritan woman's understanding — and then her entire community's.

Ephesians 2:14: For he himself is our peace who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier the dividing wall of hostility. The barrier is destroyed not by information about the other group but by the encounter with the peace that is Christ — often mediated through a specific person across a specific cultural line.