Misconceptions Of Unity
In John 17, Jesus prays that His followers would be one. That they would be brought to complete unity. But what does Biblical unity look like? When I share my story of coming to the realization that my church wasn’t experiencing racial unity, my audience often tells me that they have heard no complaints about racial hierarchies from black congregants at their own church. It might be a mistake to define unity as the absence of racial tension or complaints of racial hierarchies.
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In Acts 6, Hellenistic Jews complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked. If the Hellenistic Jews had privately felt their widows were being overlooked but had refrained from publicly complaining, would that have been unity? Jesus said that when we are brought to complete unity that the world will know that the Father has sent Jesus. Jesus is saying that one of the ways we will know that we are achieving complete unity is that the world will recognize this and be drawn to Jesus. And that is exactly what we see in Acts 6. After the Apostles addressed the structural issues in the daily distribution, the word of God spread and the number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly. What caused the Gospel to spread rapidly was the local community seeing the church solving racial hierarchies, not the church conducting business without apparent racial tension and the perception that racial hierarchies didn’t exist.
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I was recently told that discussing race and building multiethnic unity in the church should be limited to generic discussions of loving your neighbor. The reason? Because these conversations make people uncomfortable and hurt church unity. But is Biblical unity really defined as ensuring that white congregants remain comfortable? Researcher Korie Edwards has established that a large portion of both white and black congregants in multiethnic churches strive to ensure that the white congregants don’t become uncomfortable. In her book The Elusive Dream, The Power of Race in Interracial Churches, Korie labels this phenomenon as White Hegemony, which she defines as “a form of rule where whites dominate society with the consent of racial minorities. Racial minorities acknowledge whites’ dominant status as legitimate and affirm (if only passively) the culture and structures that sustain it.”
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Many majority culture participants don’t even realize the cultural differences because it is the way we have always done it. As minority culture participants join with a congregation that has a history and tradition of the majority culture, the unspoken expectation is that the “new” folks will adopt to our traditional way. In so doing the minority culture must assimilate to the majority culture and lose its distinctives and traditions. In a healthy multiethnic congregation, we intentionally become aware of the practices of both groups and bring them together in a new way.
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Old Testament lecturer Michael J. Rhodes asserts in a Christianity Today essay that how the Corinthian believers maintained the social hierarchies of society in their celebration of the Lord’s Supper mirrors the way many multiracial churches prioritize white preferences and norms in their worship styles, their approach to community engagement, and the racial makeup of their leaders (1 Corinthians 1:17-34). Paul rebukes the Corinthian believers with strong language saying they “despise[d] the church” and sinned against the very body and blood of the Lord himself (11:22, 27).
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Michael Rhodes concludes that if the problems are similar, perhaps the solutions are too. Every church, regardless of its ethnic makeup, must “examine” itself and “discern” the ways congregational life privileges white culture and treats certain brothers and sisters as less than full members of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 11:28–29).
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My fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, we have work to do to live into Jesus’ prayer of unity within the body. I believe that journey starts by having conversations on what genuine multiethnic unity should look like when God’s will is done in our lives and churches as it is in heaven.
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