The Beautiful Community: Unity, Diversity, and the Church at Its Best

by Irwyn L. Ince Jr.

When we imagine a culture, we should have the image of an iceberg in view. Above the surface of the water are the artifacts, products, and institutions of a culture. They compose the aspects of culture we experience with our five senses and include things like dress, food, art, literature, language, music, games, and holidays. However, ships have wrecked because they mistakenly thought most of the iceberg was comprised of what their eyes could see. In the same way, our crosscultural efforts wreck when we engage primarily at a surface level in our attempts to step across lines of difference. Like an iceberg, most of a culture’s life is unseen. In fact, the products of a culture form from the values that lay beneath the surface of the water. There we find values, beliefs, social expectations, parenting styles, gender roles, ideas of modesty, concepts of time, importance of space, the nature of friendship, concepts of beauty, and other unspoken aspects of culture that shape our understanding of who we are. As a reminder, it is these reinforced behaviors and ideas that are the true barriers to beautiful community because of our ghettoization.