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

by Irwyn L. Ince Jr.

Notice Paul’s prescription in verse 12 for compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and forgiveness—these aren’t needed when everything is going great. They’re needed in the midst of discord. They’re needed when controversy looms and understanding runs dry. They’re needed when you’ve been hurt by somebody in the church, whether they intended to hurt you or not. The love that we’re called to dress in as those who follow Jesus Christ is the glue of perfection. That’s what Paul says in verse 14. Above everything else, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. The love we receive from God is impressed on our hearts. It is what enables God’s people, who are holy and loved by him, to be tender towards one another in the most trying of times.

David Livermore explains this challenge when he says, “We have to learn to be the people who become culturally accessible, living messages of Jesus and his love. Embodying Jesus crossculturally is a messy, complicated process. This is what often splits churches, divides families, and erodes Christian fellowship.”

Cultivating beautiful community by devoting ourselves to the doctrine of unity in diversity as a gospel imperative will compel us to press into issues of justice, racism, and oppression. We will embrace the gospel call for repentance where we’ve dishonored our Lord Jesus Christ by becoming opponents of injustice, racism, and oppression. We will also embrace the gospel call to repair and restore as fruit of our repentance.

What good is it? It’s no good to make a false dichotomy between the spiritual and the material. Well-wishing is not enough when the church encounters real needs that have an impact on the well-being of image-bearers.

The Catechism rightly understands that the commandments do not simply forbid sin, telling us what not to do. But where a sin is forbidden, the opposite duty is required. In other words, when the sixth commandment says, “You shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13), it’s not enough to refrain from killing somebody. To obey the commandment, we have to be people who promote and preserve life.

Those on the receiving end of public injustice in America have historically been black and brown people. We can no longer talk about unity in diversity while simultaneously refusing to consciously address the public justice issues that still have an impact on people of color. As I said, this is not radical. It’s simply being willing to live like we believe what we confess. Most of the diverse churches I engaged in my research put issues of race and justice front and center as a way of facilitating the experience of belonging. They held forums and conferences that provided a space for people to experience vulnerability in themselves and others.

My second recommended action follows on this point. Get outside help! You need someone from the outside to help you see what you can’t see and to create a context for people who are a part of the church share their painful experiences. Here’s where a tool like the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) can be extremely helpful. When I come alongside churches, ministries and organizations I utilize the IDI as a way of helping them probe their preferences. I call the IDI a common grace tool. It wasn’t developed to help the church in particular, but it is currently the premier crosscultural assessment of intercultural competence.

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.

The Spirit of Christ loves to empower us to move toward beautiful community. But rest assured, he will change us in the process. There is an unavoidable degree of dissonance, conflict, disharmony, tension, and discomfort that arises from cultivating a more beautiful community. It is not for the faint of heart.