The Beautiful Community

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.

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.