It’s easy for a group to be united when there are few differences among the individuals. (“Isn’t it nice that we all think and look alike? Let’s congratulate ourselves for our unity.”) And it is easy to be divisive in a group whose individuals represent diversity in some way. (“Those guys just don’t know how to dress like us cool dudes do.”) The real challenge to human nature is finding ways to be united around real, fundamental truths while recognizing and even valuing differences. This may be one of the most difficult problems facing any community, one that only the gospel can genuinely solve.
One of the eight Core Values of Westlake Christian Academy is “Unity in Diversity” – respecting and celebrating variety within God’s family while treasuring the truths which unite us (Ephesians 2:13-18; Philippians 4:2-4; Revelation 5:9-10; 7:9-10). We believe that the gospel destroys human barriers, enabling all believers to stand in unity on a level plane before the cross and receive equal forgiveness. Recently I wrote a piece here on diversity vs. elitism in Christian education, which became my most widely read post yet. That piece dealt primarily with the desirability for a diverse student body. Now it is time to take up the other side: unity. This particular core value appears to be two in one, and we mean it to be. We do not want one without the other.
The Tragic Truth
Tying the tails of a cat and a dog together brings about diversity. It creates a union of sorts, but there will certainly be no unity! Social engineers have sought for ages to establish utopian communities by forcing diverse populations to do life together. Without establishing important points of agreement which transcend whatever may distinguish their differences, such communities most often disintegrate into warring factions. History is rife with sad examples: Scots and Brits, Serbs and Croats, Hutus and Tutsis, Catholics and Protestants (Ireland), and in our own country, racial and ethnic tension among white, black, Hispanic, Irish, Poles, Germans. Wherever people differ, their natural bent is toward suspicion, xenophobia, and ultimately violence and exclusion. Why is this so?
It all started in a beautiful garden where relationships were absolutely perfect. Creator-God made the first man and the first woman. He blessed them, hallowing their relationship, and established a beautiful bond between Himself and His two lovely creatures. Adam and Eve were married by God Himself and enjoyed perfect fellowship: no anger, no disagreements, no fights about anything. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? And to top it off, they had continual, uninterrupted access to God, personal, face-to-face time. They had the most satisfying and fascinating jobs to do in the new creation. And their home was perfection itself: a garden made just for them.
I wrote the previous paragraph to remind myself of two things: (1) in choosing to worship their own desires rather than God, they (and we) lost an unimaginably beautiful treasure, and (2) God has promised to restore it all again, only better next time. But in the gap between Adam’s fall in the garden and the restoration of all things in a new heaven and new earth, mankind’s history has been tragic. Not only have we been estranged from our Creator-God, but we are at odds with each other. We are broken creatures thrown together on a sin-cursed earth and have no basis for lasting, mutually beneficial, fruitful community. Without God, the best we can hope for is banding together in homogeneous societies and defending ourselves from the savagery of other homogeneous societies.
Is that assessment too pessimistic? Think for a moment of even the most advanced civilizations. If you consider, perhaps, that our own country, the United States of America, represents that most advanced condition because, after all, we are a melting pot, think again. We wax eloquently about giving us “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores.” But every wave of immigrants has been rudely shoved into isolated communities of “their own kind,” and has faced often insurmountable hurdles to even meager success. This country has fared no better than any other in creating diverse communities—we’ve just had more room to push undesirables someplace else. And even after fifty years of hard work among civil rights leaders, most Americans still know little of real inter-cultural community. And our growing Hispanic population continues to fan the flames of bigotry. Ethnic gang wars in LA and communities like Ferguson remind us of the fractured human condition and the need for a real Prince of Peace.
Is There Present Hope for Unity? Oh, Yes!
The authentic Christian community offers the only foundation for true cultural and ethnic unity. This does not mean that all Christian communities enjoy uniform success in achieving that unity. Even as redeemed children of God, believers are still broken people who face spiritual battles with the old nature. We are still tempted to treat one another with self-centered suspicion and contempt. That being said, though, we do have resources unavailable to the pagan world by which we can learn to do life in a loving, caring community regardless of our ethnicity, socio-economic status, gender, or even theological persuasion. As evangelical believers, we embrace eternal truths which transcend our earthly conditions.
What are those transcendent truths? The first is the glorious gospel by which we are brought into the Christian community and by which we find daily power and grace to live the life “worthy of the calling” we have received. That gospel, good news, not only teaches us about mutual reconciliation, but actually accomplishes it.
He [Christ] himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility (Ephesians 2:14-16).
Through the new birth, God forms a new heart within us that is drawn to love, especially those who are fellow believers, no matter how we look, where we come from, or what language we speak.
A second transcendent truth we claim is that each of us believers is being molded by the Holy Spirit to become more like Christ. There is a humility in that truth that recognizes, in the words of John Newton, “I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am.” None of us can claim to have arrived, and so we are all paupers and beggars, dependent upon a gracious God for growth in righteous living. No matter what our skin color or our IQ, we need Him every day.
Next, we understand through our reading of the Scriptures that God has not called us to live lonely, isolated lives as believers, self-sustained and self-sufficient. He has designed the Christian life to be communal. “Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity!” (Psalm 133:1) The New Testament abounds with the compound pronoun “one another,” indicating a plethora of expected Christian behaviors which can only be practiced in community. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer” (Life Together, p. 17). Taken with the previous truth, the Christian community we are called to should appear as a cultural kaleidoscope.
Finally, we anticipate with great joy and expectation to live with God in eternity with fellow worshippers of the Lamb “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9). Diverse? You bet! But worshipping one Lord and Savior, singing one song, enjoying one heart together. Oh, that our communities on earth would mirror those in heaven.
So, as Christian educators at Westlake Christian Academy, we value diversity—we welcome rich and poor alike, Hispanic, black, white, Asian, prodigies and those who struggle, Presbyterians, Baptist, Methodists. But the richness of our diverse community is not simply that we’ve managed to assemble this variety of students and their families, but we work hard to deal with the messiness that comes with that variety. We are all learning to dwell together in unity. We come to understand when our brokenness becomes divisive and respond with repentance and healing. We celebrate and rejoice in our differences rather than use them as occasions for mockery, belittling, and suspicion. Do we get this right all the time? Until we arrive at heaven’s gates, we will fail, and fail, and fail. But may we have the grace to encourage each other in this, for at Westlake, we value “Unity in Diversity.”
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