Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart

by Christena Cleveland

We represent Jesus well when we draw near to other believers, regardless of differences.

I have learned that the more we follow Christ’s example by relinquishing Right Christian/Wrong Christian labels and crossing the boundaries of our world, the better we represent his vision to the world.

I wonder how much Christ’s heart is broken when we denigrate followers of Christ who differ from us. I shudder at the thought of it.

People can meet God within their cultural context but in order to follow God, they must cross into other cultures because that’s what Jesus did in the incarnation and on the cross. Discipleship is crosscultural.

In the absence of diverse influences, homogenous group members tend to adopt more extreme and narrow-minded thinking as time passes.

If people who seem familiar are perceived as more likable and people who are completely unfamiliar are perceived as less likable, we’re going to naturally befriend the people who seem familiar. And the people who seem familiar are the ones that we see around us—our neighbors, fellow students at our schools and people in our church.

the mere existence of divisions triggers hostility between groups.

research on group processes shows that group separation and prejudice have a bidirectional relationship—that is, prejudice tends to result in division between groups and division between groups tends to result in prejudice.

Being reminded of Christian identity leads people to love their fellow group members well, but hate those who do not share their core values, attitudes and experiences.

In the household of faith, our relationship with God takes priority over our relatedness to family, race, culture, nation, gender, or any other group we belong to. This reordering also transforms how we relate to each other. The concept of family was reconstrued in the household of God. The terms sister, brother, mother, father, friend, and neighbor were all reinterpreted and redefined by Jesus.

Leaders hoping to build diverse teams should be aware that in order to fully utilize the wider range of resources and increased learning that diversity offers, each member of the diverse group must be of equal status.

The more we interact with those who are different, the more we can respond to the needs of those who are different.

We can conserve our valuable and limited cognitive energy by spending time with people who are like us and whose behavior we can easily predict. Conversely, our interactions with people who are different from us or who violate our expectations are laden with uncertainty and are cognitively taxing.

It’s a lot of mental work to treat everyone as an individual instead of just relying on categories.

Fixating on differences leads us to ignore glaring commonalities and focus on distinguishing ourselves from other groups, making it less likely for us to think that we should get to know other groups and collaborate with them.

When we make ingroup/outgroup distinctions within the body of Christ, we cut ourselves off from other parts of the body that may look different, act different and hold divergent perspectives but without which we cannot survive. We are a dismembered body that must overcome categorizing processes in order to become whole again.

we do four things to maintain positive self-esteem: (1) We tend to gravitate toward and form groups with similar others; (2) once the group is formed we engage in group-serving biases that defend the group’s positive identity; (3) we try to increase our status by associating with higher-status groups and distancing ourselves from lower-status groups; and (4) if all else fails we literally disparage other groups because in doing so, we elevate our own group.

“bask in reflected glory” (BIRG)

“cutting off reflected failure” (CORFing)

They couldn’t quit the group, so they just began to care less and less about it over time.

If you can’t physically walk away, you can certainly emotionally walk away.

They were teammates in name but not in heart. This was good for self-esteem preservation, but not so good for team unity.

We accomplish this by exaggerating our differences with culturally different Christians (as I described in chapter 4) and by clinging to our subordinate identities (e.g., identities based on ethnic, denominational, theological or political affiliations) while distancing ourselves from our common identity—our identity as members of the worldwide body of Christ.

differently abled people were outgroup members. So when they were asked to go out of their way to care for a differently abled person, they were unwilling or unable to do so.

We need to adopt the belief that to be a follower of Christ means to care deeply about and pursue other followers of Christ, including the ones that we don’t instinctively value or like.

we talked about the ways in which categorizing makes it difficult for us to receive useful information from outgroup members. Social identity processes amplify the problem. If someone critiques our group’s theology or lifestyle or political ideology, we are unable to receive it because we’re too busy protecting our positive group identity. Essentially, our defensiveness disables our ability to humbly receive correction and instruction.

We are often stingy when it comes to praising other church groups, especially those that are fundamentally different from our group. And most importantly, we are separate.

which preaches mutual crosscultural interdependence, was designed to rescue us from homogeneity and remind us of our truest identity—as diverse people united in Christ.

I think she should exposit a bit from scripture if she’s going to speak about what scripture says. She assumes the reader will not contest this point, but because of the vocabulary she drops here, it leaves questions in my mind about what she means versus what scripture means and whether they are congruent. I feel like this statement is the root of her belief of what God wants for the body of Christ and therefore needs exposition. Questions that arise for me: Is homogeneity really an evil which God is trying to help us avoid? It seems that scripture preaches right relatedness (vertical and horizontal) and freedom from sin. Homogeneity in a group may show a lack of right relatedness or it may just represent the make up of the local community. Or some other innocent issue.

I think of it as a spiritual discipline of sorts.

As a fellow member of the family of God, he’s irrevocably connected to me; I can’t just dismiss him as one of them. Like the hand needs the nose, I need him and he needs me.

At what point can we draw a boundary for membership in the body of Christ? This is the crux of the problem for many and while I suspect she would say we shouldn’t draw those boundaries, I think she needs to define this.

And aren’t those some of the significant goals of unity?

need for cognitive closure, which is defined as an individual’s “need for a firm answer to a question, any firm answer as opposed to confusion and/or ambiguity.”

In our brazen attempts to make sense of the world, we prefer to settle for an answer even if it’s not the answer.

People with a strong need for cognitive closure aren’t stupid, they just have a higher need to predict and control the world around them.

All people are more likely to succumb to need for cognitive closure when they believe that the benefits of premature closure outweigh the costs of remaining open-minded.

black sheep effect. Cultural distinctions are so crucial to maintaining ingroup/outgroup boundaries that group members have a special hatred for other ingroup members who, for the most part, act like normal ingroup members but do not “toe the party line” on one or two important issues.

Within the context of the larger body of Christ, when we interact with fellow Christians who possess a different cultural viewpoint or tradition, we are often interacting with what we perceive to be black sheep.

Within our culture of fear, our words and behavior are motivated by a desire to avoid being like a certain group, rather than a desire to be like Jesus.

Higgins believes that people are motivated by promotion (achieving a lofty ideal or advancement) or by prevention (avoiding danger or negative consequences).

promotion-oriented people are eager to find positive things so they can obtain them, while prevention-oriented people are eager to find negative things so they can avoid them.

Research shows that whether we include people in our group or not determines how threatening we perceive them to be.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all Christian truth is culturally relative. Rather, I’m pointing out that it is easy for us to follow in the footsteps of my friend Randy and confuse culturally based faith perspectives and traditions with universal Christian truth.

Well-rounded Christian faith involves both individual and social responsibility.

The key to achieving a common ingroup identity is crosscultural interaction.

“In a multi-ethnic ministry setting, there’s a 100% chance that you will be offended by someone or offend someone.”

a goal that required both groups of boys to work together in order to accomplish it.

As the Rattlers and Eagles changed from competitors to collaborators, they became we and a common ingroup identity was forged.

Unfortunately, even though the metaphor of the body of Christ preaches interdependence, we seem to believe that the fullness of truth is found in our culturally homogenous church groups.

The various atonement metaphors McKnight describes—offering, justification, reconciliation, redemption and ransom—typically lead to cultural division. Why? Because groups think that their particular metaphor provides the entire or most important truth about atonement and that other groups’ metaphors are wrong or relatively less important.

Each is designed to carry us . . . to the thing. But the metaphor is not the thing.”