The Beautiful Community, by Irwyn L. Ince, Jr.

Pastor Irwyn Ince has broken ground in the Presbyterian Church in America, as the first African-American elected as moderator of the General Assembly.  In a mostly white denomination, he's leading the charge for diversity, as he has done in the Grace DC Presbyterian churches where he has served as a pastor.  In his book The Beautiful Community, he further casts the message: the body of Christ is a beautiful community that includes people of all races.  He writes that "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 covenantal relationship we share among ourselves, as reflected in our covenantal relationship with God, should also reflect the "beautiful community" shared among the three persons of the Trinity.  "To refuse to pursue unity in diversity as a redeemed people is to fundamentally neglect what it means for us to be the image of God."

Of course, the point of writing this book is that the church does not reflect that unity in diversity.  To be fair, I think we (meaning the contemporary American church) try harder than Ince gives us credit for.  Ince's anecdotes aside, I think it would be rare for a person of any race to walk into any church in America and be excluded or shunned because of race.  The larger question is the assimilation and blending of culture that should happen.  We, as humans, hang on to our identities.  "Our Blackness, our whiteness, our Asian-ness, our Latino-ness still tends to be at the center of our identity even after faith in Jesus Christ."  And this is reflected in the styles of worship we enjoy.  Ince points out that as welcoming as white Christians may be to other races in our churches, they still worship, teach, and fellowship like white people, expecting other races to assimilate to their ways (which are not biblical but cultural).

While this is true of white Christians, as the majority culture in America, I would argue that it's true of virtually any culture.  My wife and I are white and one of our children is black.  When he was getting old enough to be aware of the world around him, we moved to a new city and hoped to find a diverse church.  What we found were culturally black churches, some with a few white people, and culturally white churches, some with a few minorities.  We chose a mostly white church with a few black families and a couple of families who had also adopted black children.

Can worship ever be separated from culture?  Likely not.  Can we learn to worship together in beautiful communities?  Absolutely.  "He enables us to love, hear, seek, understand, and pursue one another in our diversity."  This is a process of discipleship, and of giving up our preferences.  I don't know how much The Beautiful Community moves us toward that goal, which will likely never be achieved short of heaven, but it's certainly food for thought and a challenge to consider how much of our worship, and even our theology, is tied to our cultural and racial preferences, not to our shared, biblical faith.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!