Among the plethora of books being published about race, this stands out because it's first of all a book about God and beauty, including the beauty found in the unity and diversity of the world God created. Only after laying this groundwork does Ince address the church. He does ask the hard questions about how we can live out God's ideals, emphasizing very real challenges. But the compelling picture he has created of who God is brings hope to the struggles that will need to take place. A good book to add to the growing list of Christian books shining light on the realities of racism.

Unique approach, thinking about race and Christian community through a reflection on Trinitarian theology. Ince is someone I'll continue to listen to.

Inspiring! The author reminds us again and again, it was God's intention to have diversity and that it's beautiful. Our role, as the church, is to find a way to create unity without uniformity. This applies to the color of our skin, and so much more. I want the church Ince describes!

Is beauty really in the eyes of the beholder? That is another way of saying that beauty is deep in the pool of subjectivity. Before jumping to that conclusion, what about from God's point of view? What God had created good, just because it has been marred by sin, can we really claim it is no longer good? In a book that casts positive light on the potential of God's community, we have a book that describes the attributes of God being made manifest among the people of God. Author Irwyn Ince Jr writes with conviction: "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 reason why we persevere in cultivating a beautiful community is simply because our Lord God is beautiful. He begins with God, the beautiful God. We learn of what it means to see and know our beautiful Lord. That means seeing God as He reveals Himself to us, primarily through loving fellowship with Him. This is essentially the "fellowship of knowing." Through His grace, we learn that God is community. God is perfection, proportion, and pleasure. All of these highlight the simplicity of God's love to us. This beauty in knowing God as Trinity helps us appreciate the beauty of God in us. Sadly, we are often divided among ourselves. This leads to a marring of God's beauty and dignity in us. We need to go back to God for healing and to be remade into the image of Christ, the One who came to redeem us.

Part Two of the book deals with this step of being redeemed and how our beautiful community could be restored and cultivated. Ince does not mince his words with regard to the depravity of sin that has impacted the relationships, even among Christians. Calling it the "ghettoization of humanity," he traces the cracks all the way to Genesis 2 and the Tower of Babel. "Bumper sticker theology" will never cut it as long as it remain only on our lips and not from our hearts. What happens back in Genesis is still happening today in our fractured society. Racism is alive. The cruse of sin is still reeking its ugliness in our relationships. Instead of increasing friction in the different ethnicities around us, we ought to learn to see the beauty of God's blessings in our various diverse communities. We are called to come together instead of living apart. More specifically, Ince notes that a beautiful community ought to be led by the open embrace of diverse communities, and not one that is dictated by whiteness. This is a strong statement which Ince feels passionate about. This is also reflected in the foreword by popular preacher Tim Keller who also confessed that he didn't know how blacks feel about the cultural whiteness in our society. Instead of looking through the lens of culture or colour, we need to adopt the lens of love. This means embracing diversity, even to the level of doctrine. The Church must lead the way. They need to do their part to tear down barriers that divide and to build bridges that unite. Two initiatives stand out: 1) Confession and Forgiveness; 2) Proper Exercise of Power. The former deals with the inner changes that need to happen. The latter involves the outer actions that arise out of these convictions. He give us tips on what it means to hire a minority person. The majority need to find ways to include this person in more ways than one. In fact, the proper exercise of power essentially means finding ways necessary to display hospitality and acceptance. The beautiful community must be a constant care and sensitivity to all, especially those in the minority.

My Thoughts

It is not easy to speak from a minority perspective. As a black, the author seems particularly sensitive to his own ethnicity especially when interacting with white members of the community. He has woven into his book a number of confessions about the distancing he felt when among white community. I think such a self-awareness are not usually understood by anyone from the majority population. Ince's perspective feels strangely familiar for those of us serving in white-majority communities. In spite of the best of intentions, we will always be seen differently. Ince highlights some points which we should all consider seriously. Who knows, the tables might be turned sometime in the future, and when we become the majority group, would we also commit the same errors that we are calling out now? That is highly probable, given that sin continues to haunt us and to look for ways to harm the community of Christ. I appreciate how Ince describes the trauma of the minority leader and how we all need to count the cost of minority churches.

Having said that, I cannot help but wonder whether the feeling of being discriminated against is more self-imposed rather than reality? I have met people from majority groups who genuinely cared and are class acts of hospitality. They cannot be lumped together with the few bad eggs in their community. I believe that the desire to build bridges must grow from all sides. We can say that the responsibility lies with the majority or the ones in power, and so on, but the truth is, Jesus himself was never considered part of the majority, yet He came. If we could all learn to dialogue more and to find ways to understand one another's perspectives, it would go a long way to building a beautiful community. Both sides need to learn to give and forgive. The best way is for both sides, in fact, all sides to see God more clearly from His perspective. Ince did well to do that in the first part of the book. Yet, I see Ince highlighting that it is the majority white culture that should shoulder the "greater burden of dying to preferences." Personally, I am only partially convinced, given that the gospel is not about others taking the initiative but all of us, regardless of majority or minority position to lead as the Spirit leads.

Finally, I applaud the author's boldness to look at the promises of beauty on the one hand, and on the other hand, to recognize the reality of our society today. The beautiful community is the vision. Our mission is to do what we can in the power and strength of God to journey there. In the meantime, we need to educate, to advocate, and to initiate building bridges of reconciliation. Cultural values need to be secondary, while Christlikeness must always be primary.

In summary, this book ought to be given a wider audience, both majority and minority, and everyone else in the middle.

Irwyn L. Ince Jr. serves as a pastor at Grace DC Presbyterian Church and director of the Grace DC Institute for Cross-Cultural Mission, a church-based training and research entity dedicated to equipping current and future Christian leaders for cross-cultural ministry. He is a graduate of City College of New York, Reformed Theological Seminary, and holds a DMin from Covenant Theological Seminary.

Rating: 4.5 stars of 5.

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This book has been provided courtesy of InterVarsity Press and NetGalley without requiring a positive review. All opinions offered above are mine unless otherwise stated or implied.

Smart and incisive. This text is a must-read for any individual or community committed to both the way of Jesus and the linked path of anti-racism. Ince offers a series of actionable ideas regarding the ways in which community can be both diverse and unified.

Thank you to Net Galley and InterVarsity Press for an advanced copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

This book took me by surprise and what timing! Ince is both compassionate and direct in his delivery to the church on what diversity and true unity in Christ looks like. He does not paint an us versus them but rather gently explains how the necessity to acknowledge diversity is both biblical and necessary in building Christ’s community. While Ince does delve into the sticky mar of the evangelical church and their ignorance regarding racial tension, he also does a good job marrying what everyone needs in order to accomplish a beautiful community in the church on all sides.

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!

Like many in recent months, I have intentionally sought out books by people of color to try and become better educated about their experiences. Understandably and rightfully so, much of this reading has included heavy content. While this book does not shy away from hard topics, it left me with a hope for the vision of the church as the Bible describes it: people from every tribe, tongue, and nation gathered at the marriage supper of the Lamb.
Ince Jr. begins the book by showing how a pursuit of diversity in the church is sustained by our trinitarian God who is Himself the picture of beautiful community. When the church pursues diversity with the goal of more accurately reflecting God rather than because it is the current hot topic, it will have far better and more authentic results.
From there, the book reads as a sort of "how to" manual for Christians who desire to see the church reflect God's heart for unity. He discusses tokenism, politics, majority and minority culture, and gratitude. I believe if we took to heart what the author talks about in this book, God would be glorified and the watching world would marvel at the power of the gospel to unite.
This book gave me a real look at the effort required to pursue unity with purity of heart, but it also left me hopeful. I learned a lot by reading it and would highly recommend it.

Irwin Ince's The Beautiful Community is a timely polemic to the Church on her lack of true ethnic and cultural diversity in the 21st century. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said "it is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning", and this indictment still rings true in 2020. Ince employs a thoroughly Biblically-informed approach to tackle the Christian vision of the Church as a diverse and beautiful community. By tracing themes of unity amidst diversity all throughout Scripture, Ince employs a strategy that cuts to the heart of readers who wish to align their ecclesiological vision with that of Yahweh. The regular pattern of anecdotal examples assists in driving home Ince's thesis of re-structuring local church communities to place minorities in leadership without tokenism, assimilation, or sacrifice of orthodoxy.

Where Ince's work could use improvement could be deeper and more frequent case studies. Additionally, hypothetical examples would serve to assist the reader in applying the book more readily.

Ince takes a good look at what the Bible says about beauty, community and ties that into broader theological concepts like Cosmic Redemption Theology, making a compelling case that the church at its best is a multicultural entity.

The book is about the beautiful community, the Church, and worshipping together in all our diversity. The author argues that God reveals himself in the trinity as perfect beauty and fellowship. As followers of Christianity it becomes incumbent upon us to form beautiful communities in our churches. I would add Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the church "The Beloved Community" and our beautiful communities will become beloved communities.

Ince notes we as the church are the prolepsis of the Kingdom of God here and now. He also reflects on the reality of a new heaven and new earth:

"Can you picture the nations coming to the feast with joy? Some approaching with moccasins on their feet, others dressed in Kente, or saris, or overalls, still others with turbans on their heads! And the one raising the glass for the toast is the bridegroom! He speaks and reminds us of how he told the disciples at the Last Supper that he would not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when he drank it new with them in his Father’s kingdom (Matthew 26: 29). That new day has fully arrived! And as he raises the glass he’s not looking up in the sky. Rather he’s looking everyone in the eye with a loving gaze that communicates, “I see you. I made you. I redeemed you. You’re welcomed at my table as queens and kings, a kingdom of priests.”"

Ince opens our eyes to the beautiful community, creating the desire to work toward such, yet understanding it will not be perfected until we are with Jesus in his Father's Kingdom. He also provides for us suggestions as to how we can create a path to the beautiful community.

I highly recommend reading and adding this book to your library. It was insightful and and a joy to read.


This book has been provided courtesy of InterVarsity Press and NetGalley without requiring a positive review. All opinions offered above are mine unless otherwise stated or implied.