What Is Unity?
In John 17, Jesus prays that His followers would be one. That they would be brought to complete unity. But how do we define unity?
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The congregation that I’m a part of was a white church sitting in a community that became 70% black in the 1970s. For the next three decades there were black congregations worshiping less than a mile away that we had little interaction with. We knew this wasn’t unity, but we didn’t know how to get to unity. About 20 years ago our church’s senior leadership started taking deliberate effort to make our church welcoming to black people, but our congregation continued to be overwhelmingly white. Then about 15 years ago, the demographics at our church started to change and we realized that God was in fact at work answering our prayers! Today, about 30% of our congregants are black. Five years ago, I invited five elders and deacons of color over to my home for lunch and listened to stories of how they were experiencing our church. It became clear that diversity is not the same as unity. What then is unity?
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Jesus said, “a new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35) We are to love each other as Jesus loved His disciples, but what does this mean in the context of a diverse body of believers?
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Loving each other the way Christ loved His disciples is always a challenge, but it becomes even more challenging when we are loving across ethnic or racial lines in America. In Ephesians 1:5, Paul uses the imagery of adoption, which can teach us valuable lessons about loving across racial/ethnic lines within the church.
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We Celebrate Our Ethnic Diversity
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As parents of adopted children from China, we were trained to anticipate that our daughters would experience life differently because they were adopted into a family with a different cultural background than their own, with parents that looked different than they did. We’ve taken the time to learn Chinese culture, cook authentic Chinese food and celebrate Chinese New Year to honor and celebrate their culture of origin, and by extension, to honor them. Research shows that “embracing racial and cultural variances and proactively shaping a home environment that honors the child’s heritage are essential aspects of nurturing in ethnically diverse adoptive households.”
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These lessons apply to building a local body of believers, from different races and ethnicities, if we want it to feel like a family. While we are all unique individuals that want to be treated as individuals, I’ve found that celebrating the cultural heritage of our diverse congregation helps some minority congregants feel accepted. These celebrations can take the form of eating ethnic food together, singing ethnic worship songs, or including ethnic dances in our worship service. Instead of saying that our race and ethnicity don’t matter, we celebrate our ethnic differences.
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We Are Intentional About Being Welcoming
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We chose to live in a community where the school district has a large portion of non-white students. While there are few Chinese students in the district, we thought that not being the only non-white students would be important to our daughters feeling accepted and developing a strong self-esteem.
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At church, we’ve noticed that sometimes it can feel uncomfortable if you are the only one in a group that is of your race or ethnicity. We make a conscious effort to ensure our greeters, worship team, church leadership, and those serving communion reflect the diversity of our congregation so that everyone will feel welcome and comfortable.
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We Care About People That Look Like You
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When our daughters were young, we were intentional about developing meaningful relationships with two Chinese families so that our daughters would see that we valued Chinese people, not just Chinese girls adopted into American families. In our church we’ve noticed that it is important to our congregants of color that they see that we truly love people of color demonstrated by who and how we serve in the community.
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Identify And Dismantle Ethnocentrism
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Becoming a foster parent can be an act of selfless service but we were counseled not to enter the permanence of adoption unless we were clear in our own minds that our motive was to build our family, not just to serve a child in need. Then when stormy times came in our relationship, we as parents and our adopted children had to recall together the certainty that we had adopted because we wanted them to be in our family. But with international adoption there is an additional component. We were counseled to reject any notion that we were saving our daughters from growing up Chinese. That we needed to be clear in our own minds that our daughters’ lives would look different growing up in America but growing up in an affluent white American home wasn’t better than growing up in a Chinese home. We were counseled to go through the difficult process of getting in touch with and eliminating our ethnocentrism.
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My image of unity within the church is like that of a family, where we’ve substituted respect for and appreciation of our cultural differences for the assumption that our own ethnicity or culture is best; that is, ethnocentrism. This is not a simple task because our ethnocentrism is subtle and typically escapes our awareness. But as we discussed in this essay, the polemic against ethnocentrism is not limited to Paul; it is pervasive throughout the Gospels as well.
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Express Empathy With Each Other
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Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 12:26 that expressing empathy is crucial in our interactions with each other. While this comes naturally in loving families, it can be challenging in the body of Christ, particularly among individuals of different races or political affiliations. In Module 2 we will delve deeper into why empathy is vital in discussions of race and how Jesus’ teachings can help us overcome our struggles with empathy.
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As you proceed through Embracing Unity Academy we will build out a fuller picture of what Biblical unity looks like. But what if my community and church are monoethnic? We encourage you not to stop there. First, ask why is this true? Communities and churches don’t necessarily lack diversity in race, age, culture or socioeconomic status by chance. Second, pray that God would bring more diversity to your relationships. Just as my wife and I are blessed to have a racially diverse family, I believe we all experience benefit when God blesses us with diversity in our personal relationships.