This week I asked Ben Griffith to tell us a bit about the book that the Tuesday Men’s Book Study has been reading:
This semester in our Tuesday Morning men’s book study we’ve worked our way through Dr. Irwin Ince’s The Beautiful Community: Unity, Diversity, and the Church at it’s Best. It’s a book about race and the church, written by an African American pastor in the PCA, and I would highly recommend it. It was a privilege to process and digest it around the table with a group of brothers who were committed to learning from each other, growing together, and being stretched and challenged in new ways around these weighty matters. I learned from Ince and I also learned from how other men learned from Ince, which is why we do this kind of thing. Shameless plug—men, we’ll be starting a new book soon, and we’d love for you to join us on Tuesday mornings! Stay tuned.
I want to briefly share with you one reason why I’d recommend you read this book and one of the major takeaways for me from reading and discussing it. To begin, I’d recommend The Beautiful Community because it will help you get to know the God of the Bible better. Yes, it’s a book about race and the church, a subject that has a long and ugly history and a painful and complex present. And yes, it’s about ways that Christians can be a part of the problem and are called to be a part of the solution. But it’s first and foremost a book about God—which is where this dialogue has to start and has to stay in order for true healing and hope to be possible. The “beautiful community” is actually God himself, who exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the perfect and ultimate expression of unity in diversity and diversity in unity. And we are made in his image and called to reflect this divine Beautiful Community! This is Ince’s driving theme throughout the book. The gospel imperative to pursue unity in diversity across lines of difference is rooted in the beauty of who God is, and the beauty of who he’s saved us to become. I was drawn closer to the “multicultural heart of the Father” by reading and wresting through the practical implications that Ince teases out of this doctrinal goldmine and was gently but clearly shown ways that I either forget or downplay this beautiful truth. Even as he leads his readers through some of the complex, sad, and sometimes overwhelming realities involved here, Ince keeps our eyes on our beautiful God and his beautiful gospel as the best and only resource available to us in our calling to pursue beautiful community.
One of the things that I’m taking away from The Beautiful Community is a renewed impression of two things: the enormity of the task ahead of us as Christians when it comes to race relations in the church, and the inevitability of the victory ahead of us. The task is enormous because people are sinful and the world is broken. It actually seems to grow more enormous the more I learn about myself, our history, and other people’s experiences. But the victory is inevitable because the beautiful community isn’t our idea—it’s God’s. We know that this beautiful and broken world is barreling through time towards Revelation 7 where we see “people from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” worshipping together in beautiful community before the throne. And Ince reminds me that I’m invited and called to practice for that inevitable eternity now, with my eyes on the One who made that eternity inevitable. As he says in the introduction, “What will enable us to actively resist the pernicious polarization that has been present in the church in America from the beginning? It will not be the fact that diversity is a hot topic in culture today. It will not be the pressure to appear viable or acceptable to the world. The pursuit is too hard. It is too perplexing and often too painful, if our commitment is not drenched in the beautiful truth that we are participating in the beautiful plan and purpose of our beautiful God.”