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

by Irwyn L. Ince Jr.

One was that white folks did not have to be personally bigoted toward individuals of another race in order to support social, educational, judicial, and economic systems and customs that automatically privileged whites over others. This is more often recognized now, but at the time it was a completely new idea to us. Like most Americans, we thought that every person’s condition was purely the result of their own choices, so that if you were poor it was mainly your fault.

white Christians don’t realize how much of what they say and do in church is not from the Bible but rather is shaped by cultural factors.

By making our cultural preferences normative for everyone, we not-so-subtly invite white people to come to our churches while inviting non-white people to stay away.

A third thing we learned was why white people are so unaware of these realities. Elward said, “We [non-whites] have to know the white culture in order to survive. When we come into your workplaces and retail spaces and organizations, we have to learn how you regard time and use space, how you understand relationships between the individual and the group, how you think and solve problems, and express emotion and handle failures and judge status. But for you to function well in your society, you don’t need to understand us or our culture and differences.” In short, nearly every racial minority in the US understands Euro-white culture pretty well, but we whites are far more ignorant of how the cultures of others operate.

“You can pick up the topic of race for an evening discussion and then the rest of your week you don’t need to think about it. Race is an abstraction for you—something ‘out there’. For me—every time I look in the mirror I think of race. We have to think about it all the time, but when we get into a church with white brothers and sisters and want to talk about it as much as we need to, you all quickly get tired of it.”

God is the one who writes our life’s story of faith in Jesus Christ.

In the concluding words of his Southern Christian Leadership Convention address in 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. exhorted his hearers with the challenge to depart with a divine dissatisfaction. That is, a God given dissatisfaction with the way things are when contrasted with how they ought to be according to God’s standard.

The church is a living sign of the union of all things in Christ because he supernaturally reconciles us to God and to one another by the power of his Spirit. Refusing to pursue this reconciliation is akin to resisting the heart of God. It means failing the calling we have been given as the people of God.

The ministry of reconciliation demonstrated in the local church by the gathering of people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and ethnicities is the natural outworking of a rich covenantal theological commitment.

“The Trinity reveals God to us as the fullness of being, the true life, eternal beauty. In God, too, there is unity in diversity, diversity in unity.”

As Charles Taylor writes, “The very way we walk, move, gesture, speak is shaped from the earliest moments by our awareness that we appear before others, that we stand in public space, and that this space is potentially one of respect or contempt, of pride or shame.”

It ought to boggle our minds that the perfect and holy God who sees everything wants to be known by us.

To know God is not simply to possess facts about him. We know God as those who stand before him, as we submit to him.

For God to be in the driver’s seat means that he sets the conditions and standards of our relationship with him. Because he is in control, we don’t get to tokenize him. “Rather than taking him for granted, as we do with impersonal things and forces, we must always take his concerns into account, responding to him in repentance, love, thanksgiving, worship.” Of course, the problem is that we do not always take God’s concerns into account. We do not always respond to him in repentance, love, thanksgiving, and worship. We regularly take God for granted through unbelief and willful ignoring of his concerns.

Biblical scholars have rightly pointed out that the death sin brought into the world was threefold. It was physical; we became subject to decay. It was judicial; we lost our innocence and became guilty before God. And it was spiritual; we lost intimacy and fellowship with God. We have been trying to hide ever since. But God was not and is not content to let us continue deceiving ourselves into thinking that our efforts at camouflage actually work.

Beauty is an attribute of God, but one through which we are able to view the majesty of all his other perfections. The truth is we only know beauty in relation to the one who is inherently beauty. All beauty in the world is derived beauty. All beauty has as its source the beautiful one, God himself.

His perfection of beauty has room for scars. The marks of human history—human sinfulness, depravity, and injustice—are indelibly inscribed upon the flesh of the resurrected Lord, carried into the life of the new creation by the Spirit, and transfigured. These marks in no way tarnish the glory of the new creation, but rather “those wounds, yet visible above” are “in beauty glorified.”

To say that proportion is an aspect of beauty is to say that harmony matters. The Bible speaks to us about peace a great deal. The Hebrew word, shalom, translated into English as “peace,” means more than simply the absence of strife. It is the presence of well-being, wholeness, harmony, the world fitting and functioning together as it ought. When we talk about proportion as an aspect of beauty, we are talking about shalom.

So it’s important to note that this harmony does not refer to uniformity. To talk about proportion is to talk about the relationship between things. Where the mystery of perfection is in its ability to accommodate scars, the mystery of proportion is the presence of unity in diversity.

“When all things are what they are in all their glittering variety, and when all of these are joined together in a cosm...

I love how Elaine Scarry describes beauty’s influence: “Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.” She’s speaking here about beautiful objects, but I envision the overflow of God’s beauty in the creation of humanity.

Richard Pratt points out that Genesis 1:26 establishes humanity’s unique place in God’s kingdom. God has given the human race the unique title of image-bearer. Pratt goes so far as to ask his readers to put down his book, go find another person, and shake his or her hand while saying with sincerity, “Hello, your Majesty!” What this means is that individual human beings possess inherent beauty, dignity, and worth since each one has been created in the image of God.

Creating fear among people in order to gain their support is not a new political tactic.

Pharaoh doesn’t have to create a sense of national superiority. He just has to use it for his advantage. If we were to place Exodus 1:10 in a modern context, he says, “People of Egypt, we’ve got to deal shrewdly with these immigrants. We’ve got to be wise in how we deal with the Hebrew problem. They are a threat to national security. We have a whole nation of non-Egyptians living in our country. They’re not loyal to us and if war comes, they’ll join with our enemies and fight against us. They’ll take your jobs. They’ll take your wealth. They’ll take your property. They’ll take your power!” I invite you to see the parallels, to listen to the bells that go off in your minds. We can look at that text and see the evil at work in Pharaoh’s heart. We can clearly see the power of hell behind the problem presented in the text. But we should be able to make the connection to our current day as well.

You might feel deeply about the ways in which we talk about immigration in America. Every presidential candidate in this generation has to discuss their proposals for the “immigration problem,” as if the topic does not include real people made in the image of God who are deserving of dignity.

Here’s my point: wherever we encounter a those people attitude in America’s current immigration debate, we witness a heart that is closer to Pharaoh than it is to Jesus Christ. Pharaoh’s words in Exodus 1:9-10 ought to remind us that the imago Dei imprinted on every soul has implications for how we think about and treat all people. In Egypt, Pharaoh was considered the only image of God. So if you weren’t “his people” you could be dismissed as unworthy of dignity. We have a natural tendency to categorize people into groups of “others.” Doing so makes it easy to dehumanize people and think of them only as a commodity. God would not have us look at image bearers in that way!

The Christian view of the self looks back to the goodness of God’s original design and looks forward to the renewal of all things in Christ. Thus, woven into self-identification is God-given royal dignity where we place our story rightly into God’s story.

On July 4, 1965, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia titled “The American Dream.” He said, The whole concept of the imago Dei, . . . is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. Not that they have substantial unity with God, but that every man has a capacity to have fellowship with God. And this gives him a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this as a nation: there are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every man is made in the image of God. One day we will learn that. We will know one day that God made us to live together as brothers and to respect the dignity and worth of every man.

On February 24, 1968, at Clayborn Temple in Memphis, Rev. Lawson included these words in his sermon, “For at the heart of racism is the idea that a man is not a man, that a person is not a person. You are human beings. You are men. You deserve dignity.” When the protestors proceeded out of the doors of Clayborn Temple, they carried signs with four simple, yet profound words: “I Am a Man.” The dignity divide was on display in full measure. These African American men had to say, “This city, this country, will not recognize or promote our dignity as human beings. So we will shout it out loud!” Such is the nature of humanity. We know inherently that we are image-bearers, and that this comes with an ontological truth—we are endowed with incomparable dignity.

We are no longer in 1965. Progress has been made, but the work is not done. We are far from close to being able to loudly proclaim and promote the immeasurable dignity of every human being. As long as sin abounds idolatry will abound. And as long as idolatry abounds, the dignity-denying tragedy of injustice and oppression will abound. We could argue that too much of the church’s role in the history of America rejected the countercultural message of the imago Dei and we have a lot of catching up to do as the people of God in living out its implications.

Hirsch describes identity as a crucial aspect of humanity with which people grapple. Questions arise from encounters like this: “Who am I?” “How do other people see me?” “How do I see myself?” Whether or not people ask these direct questions, they demand attention because people’s differences are implicitly or explicitly evident.

The image of God is much too rich for it to be fully realized in a single human being, however richly gifted that human being may be. It can only be somewhat unfolded in its depth and riches in a humanity counting billions of members . . . [The image of God] is an undeserved gift of grace that was given to the first human being immediately at the creation but at the same time is the grounding principle and germ of an altogether rich and glorious development. Only humanity in its entirety—as one complete organism, summed up under a single head, spread out over the whole earth, as prophet proclaiming the truth of God, as priest dedicating itself to God, as ruler controlling the earth and the whole of creation—only it is the fully finished image, the most telling and striking likeness of God.

When I look at another human being, I am looking at royalty. But I am not looking at the full measure of what it means for humanity to be God’s image. I would expand Bavinck’s words to say that the image of God is much too rich for it to be realized in a single race, ethnic group, or culture. There is comfort in our cultural connection. Ethnic identity feels primordial to those embedded within a given culture. That is, it feels as though it’s the essence of who we are. This makes the intersection of multiple cultures challenging.

We were made to image God as beautiful community, but sin ruptured our communion and polarization has been our story ever since. As we said earlier, fragmentation is not God’s story, but it does tell humanity’s story. Ethnic polarization, gender polarization, generational polarization, socio-economic polarization, political polarization, national polarization—for every category of human community we are able to call out a particular polarization. It began in the Garden of Eden with the fracturing of the intimacy between Adam and Eve. Instead of owning their decision to trample on God’s love, they placed blame elsewhere. This fracture expands exponentially in Genesis 11 at the Tower of Babel, the ghettoization of humanity.

Rather than racial ignorance and hate leading to the creation of racist ideas and racial discrimination, the inverse is true. Racial discrimination drove the creation of racist ideas which led to racial ignorance and hate.

The point of contact between the ghettoization of humanity and Kendi’s discovery is that racially discriminatory policies came to be in order to serve cultural and other self-interests.

Put in theological terms, our racialized society is an outworking of our ghettoization at Babel. And the devastating reality is that groups of people still seek to serve the interests of their ghetto. The idea of different races is a social construct. It was created by humanity, but it is not a reflection of the beautiful image-bearing creative genius we discussed in the last chapter. It is strictly relegated to the sinful and depraved purposes of exploitation and oppression. To be clear, it served as a justification to overtake and enslave whole people groups.

Race, claims Dr. Korie Edwards, is central to the structure of American life and the everyday lives of Americans. Indeed, whiteness is the cornerstone of the racial system in the United States. She describes race as the basis of social systems that distribute rewards. People placed in the dominant stratum establish the racial classifications and have greater access to and...

Bearing this in mind leads some Christians to argue that we shouldn’t even talk about race or use the word since it’s a manmade concept. Using the term only serves to further divide us. There’s only one race—the human race—so shouldn’t we just categorize differences between people with terminology like “ethnicity”? In a word, no. I believe that Scripture compels us to speak the truth about the primary way our ghettoization has manifested itself in the American context. Discarding the word “race” would make it easier to ignore the devast...

As my brother Dr. Jarvis Williams puts it, race is a biological fiction, b...

In a racialized society, racist ideas become embedded in individuals, institutions, and systems. They manifest themselves in both aggressively active ways and subtly passive ways. However, every manifestation has the capacity for deadly violence. Discriminatory housing and loan practices can destroy lives for generations. We have lived in ghettos ever since Babel, finding our sense of value and worth in our group. But whatever your group may be, it’s only a facet of the human experience. What’s most tragic is that Jesus’ church has a ghetto-busting responsibility, but it has, like the people of Babel, ignored that command.

Sometimes we believe that dignity is a pie to be divvied up among us. We worry that if we grant dignity to one group’s suffering or accounting of history then there is less available for us. But this is foolish. We make God small when the reverse should be the case. For, after all, if Jesus is coming back to make all the sad things untrue, then the more sad things we know, the bigger Jesus must be to undo them. The cracks are already there. Calling out the brokenness does not diminish Jesus’s power. It magnifies it.

What I’m about to say may not be popular, but in America the greater burden of dying to preferences is borne by those in the majority white culture. Among the many points we can make about America’s founding, we must include the establishment of a white cultural normativity. Its existence has made the norm for minorities in America to embrace discomfort in majority culture contexts—an experience no less true in the church.

So, what is whiteness? Dr. Edwards helpfully points out three interdependent dimensions of whiteness: 1. White structural advantage—Whites disproportionately control or influence political parties, the legal system, government agencies, industry, and business. 2. White structural advantage facilitates white normativity. What this means is that divergence from the norm signifies deviant practices or understandings. 3. White transparency—Whites tend not to think about norms; behaviors, experiences, or perspectives that are white-specific. There is a lack of awareness that their race has consequences for their lives. Consequently, it is difficult for whites to explain what it means to be white.

We must realize that getting out of our ghettos isn’t free. It’ll cost you. You’ll have to examine your preferences. You’ll have to regularly embrace being more curious than confident when you’re in a situation involving diversity and difference. If you’re a part of the majority culture, you’ll have to learn how to listen to and learn under the influence of non-majority culture people. If you’re a part of a minority culture, you’ll need to learn how to trust majority culture folks—especially if your corporate/collective history is covered in wounds. Make no mistake, getting out of the ghetto is uncomfortable, but it’s close to God’s heart.

The problem of the divided church in America and the forces that keep us apart isn’t relegated to a bygone, racialized society. It’s all still current, right here right now.

So when the nations began to turn to the Lord, not only did they receive a new identity, but the church received a new identity. The importance of this new identity, this new normal, cannot be overstated. Antioch becomes the mission center for the Christian faith overtaking the mother church of Jerusalem.

Aaron Kuecker, in describing the language of social differentiation, says that ethnicity both in the ancient and modern context “is a powerful expression of the apparently pervasive human impulse toward social categorization and differentiation.”

Unity cannot be manufactured. It’s a matter of the Spirit. And the Spirit of God compels us to pursue this unity in practice. However, to say that we cannot manufacture it is not to say that there’s nothing for us to do. We don’t just drift our way into beautiful community! The key point here is that for belonging to be real, people have to have a sense of being co-owners and co-creators of the community to which they belong.

The uncircumcised don’t have to become circumcised. The Greek doesn’t have to become Jewish. The barbarian isn’t excluded because he fails to conform to cultural norms and practices. These boundaries were legitimate reasons people remained separated. What Paul is emphasizing to the Colossians, and by extension to us, is that the starting point for their practice as Christians was the recognition that, in all of their diversity, they stood before God in the same way as Israel. They didn’t choose God. He chose them. They weren’t holy because they were special and better than everybody else. They were holy because the Lord set his love upon them. Their life was to be grounded in the reality that they were the undeserving recipients of God’s abundant love.