Book Review Christena Cleveland Disunity in Christ

Book Review of

Christena Cleveland’s

Disunity in Christ

Reviewed by Dan McDonald

 

            I write this review of Christena Cleveland’s Disunity in Christ on a day set aside in my worship tradition as Trinity Sunday. I have known some ministers who find it difficult to preach on the Trinity. How do you speak of the Trinity without going wrong? There is one God and three persons. There are not three gods. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost have neither beginning nor end. There is only one God but the Father is not the Son is not the Holy Ghost. We realize the Trinity is a mystery we understand only in part, incapable of us understanding in whole.

            I have always figured the best way to speak of the Trinity is to say that even if we cannot describe the Trinity, we are made in God’s image. I hope you can begin to feel why Christian unity is so important. In our humanity, and in Christ, we are a multitude of persons, but we are members of one body in Christ. The body of Christ is meant to show forth the image of God. We are meant despite being an innumerable number of persons to be able to be seen as a unified body of Christ. I think most of us realize that right now the church could be doing a much better job of being a unified body in our reflection of God's love and glory.

            I finished reading Christena Cleveland's book this past week. I will need to read it again as I have so much to learn from what she writes in Disunity in Christ. It is easy enough to read, but I have spent a lifetime with people who were mostly kind of like me. I have some hard habits to break, and some different habits to make.

            She teaches us how we identify and categorize things as we seek to learn. This takes place naturally. But sometimes the process leads to ways of perceiving the world that are not so helpful. We categorize people by how much they are like us. The people like me become "we" people and the people unlike us become "they" or "them" people. We are comfortable with some and not so comfortable with others. Her book's first chapter is entitled “Right Christian, Wrong Christian” She introduces us to a view of Christianity that probably some of us have had, maybe in the opposite way as she describes her problem with a believer named Ben. He and she were the two single people in her church community. But she was more annoyed by him than anything. He had a preachy Conservatism, was an engineer type, and wore goofy looking Hawaiian-print button-down shirts. All of this description is paraphrased from page 11 of her book. She was riding on a bus wondering how she could avoid Ben when she had this thought of how Ben was going to be in heaven. The thoughts that followed she described in her book:

“And suddenly I was confronted with the idea that Ben was going to be in heaven”

“With me”

“For all eternity.”

“And I would never, ever be rid of him.”

She then thought about how she first felt about other Christians when she first began walking with Christ. She describes how when first walking with Christ “I felt an immediate and authentic connection with any other Christian who crossed my path. Orthodox, Catholic, charismatic, Lutheran, evangelical, black, white, Asian, Ben –didn’t matter. We were family.” (Disunity in Christ p. 12)

But often we find ourselves as Christians being more and more divided by so many different things. Some churches take up a very specific form of doctrine, and it doesn’t seem like there is room for people whose doctrinal viewpoints aren’t in line perfectly with the particular church’s teaching. Some are culturally attuned to a perspective seen as black or white, if you aren't the right ethnicity perhaps there is another church for you. There are churches that are liturgical and churches that are contemporary. There are churches in which almost no one has gray hair, and churches where almost everyone has gray hair. Perhaps most of us have read John 17 and know that Jesus wants us to be one as Christians. But we find that on Sunday our churches are divided according to the way we worship, the doctrine we affirm or reject, the race and ethnicities that can feel comfortable coming to our congregation, our political perspective tendencies, and the age group that attends our church. There are churches where everyone homeschools and churches where no one would imagine that any good could come from that. The reality is that churches often want to be welcoming to a diverse group of people, but building a church that ministers to a people from varied backgrounds ends up being more difficult than we imagined. We might imagine that diversity within a congregation is something that should simply appear by preaching the true Gospel. But the Gospel, while it is in many ways a simple message, always leads us into a life of following Christ which involves many everyday decisions following that initial response of saying our yes to Christ.

Christena Cleveland’s book provides us some insights into how to enter the work of making our churches capable of drawing people from different races, perspectives, and cultural backgrounds into our churches; and also how to build a church which can work to make people feel like they are a part of the church. It will likely require work. In Acts chapter 6, the early church faced a bitter problem. Jewish Christians and Greek or Hellenistic Christians found themselves at odds because some of the believers from a Hellenistic background were complaining that their widows were being overlooked by the Jewish leadership in the church. The Apostles who led the church prayed and sought the Lord about a way to work through the problem. They were led to create a new group of leaders to assist the Apostles. Most of these new leaders came from a more Hellenistic background than the Apostles who were from a Jewish background. Many believe that this was the beginning of the Christian office of the Deaconate. It began as a way of dealing with a problem of varied ethnicities in a church. The Holy Spirit led the church to realize that the creation and maintenance of a culturally diverse church could be aided by a culturally diverse leadership. It should not be considered a mark of failed leadership if the leaders begin to acknowledge that there are members in their church whose background is such that they need help in their leadership to see to that their needs are understood so that the church might better serve them. Struggling to meet the problem of diversity is not a new problem in Christ's church.

Dr. Christena Cleveland is a social psychologist with a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her sociology training wed to a love of Christ in a family where she is a fifth generation Christian participating in full time Christian work, has helped give her insights to be shared with the church at large. She can help us see how we can move to not avoiding Ben to an appreciation of Ben. It isn't easy but the goal of the church is to help both Ben and Christena reach their full potentials in living in and with Christ’s people. It isn’t easy work but it is likely essential work. It is working out the faith in love to the honor and glory of God in Christ.

I found a couple of things stood out to me as I read the book. One is how we naturally see life in categories. We identify and compare ourselves using such words as I and then “we” for people we include as being like us, and words like “them” or “they” for people different from us. She uses many examples to show how such identifications are natural, but can become limiting, and then suggests how we can learn steps to build “we” relationships from the desolation of the problematic “us” and “them” relationships which so often divide us.

She also describes how poorly planned ecumenical get together groups can end up dividing as much as unifying Christians. The goal we seek in building Christian unity is not to destroy the reality of cultural diversity and multiple perspectives in the body of Christ. The goal is to learn how to foster a unity which sees the contributions of all, from the strongest to the weakest, so that the least among us is valued for their contribution and humanity as much as anyone else in our fellowship.

In the previous paragraph I am expressing a thought that grew to become important to me as I read Disunity in Christ. Church unity is not about creating a place where everyone will be comfortable because we have all discovered in our congregation the right doctrine, right style of worship, and the right perspective on cultural and political issues while somehow becoming a culturally diverse appearing congregation. The unity to be discovered and encouraged in the church is a unity which is discovered in following Christ and then working out our salvation together in Christ. The unity set forth in the New Testament Scriptures did not require Jewish Christians to become Hellenized nor Hellenized Christians to become Jewish; but Hellenized and Jewish believers were called upon to work together in following Christ in a church which was breaking boundaries when in following Christ a new humanity was being shaped which was destined to be presented in Christ unto the Father by the work of the Holy Spirit. Until then this marvelous new creation of a church composed of Jew and Greek, side by side was to be learning how to speak with a united witness to the world with its many cultural and linguistic formats.

That is why it seems to me that reviewing Christena Cleveland’s Disunity in Christ makes a lot of sense on Trinity Sunday. It does so because our one God exists as three persons. The Father is not the Son is not the Spirit and yet the three are one. There is but one holy God. We are created in his image. We are being redeemed in the Son by the Spirit to be received by the Father. We are to be given as one body in Christ and yet the strongest and the least among us will have been redeemed so as to arrive at our most perfect individual states within the whole perfected body of Christ. The least individual among us is not less important than the whole of the church being redeemed. Oh by the way, if you are interested in how she got to a point where Ben fit in her Christian life it happened during some wild fires that threatened Santa Barbara, where they lived at the time. Most everybody was trying to look out for their things and figuring out escape plans. Ben was acting differently. He was checking on all the different people in the church who might be in harm’s way. It didn’t matter their ethnic backgrounds, their political affiliations, their eschatological viewpoints. He was responsible to them because they were members of the church where he was a member. When a need occurred he was there, and who would have cared if he was a bit too outspoken at times, an engineer type, and wore dumb Hawaiian looking button down shirts? When the fires were threatening the people of their church, he was at their doorsteps to help those in harm's way.

I have to admit something. I will need to read this book at least one more time. The reality is I’ve never much known diversity in my background. I suck at it. I was seventeen before I ever actually met a non-white person, as I grew up in rural Illinois. I have lived a life of going to churches that were small and mostly homogenous. In my thirties, my church had a thirty-something appearance, and in my sixties my church resembles a senior’s get together group. I have always gravitated towards churches sort of like me, at least in the way they looked. I’m more and more reaching the conclusion that is not how it was supposed to be in the church. Dr. Cleveland has some ideas and suggestions for how we move beyond that kind of church, or as  importantly how we move beyond the attitude that seeks to find a church just like us. It probably won’t be easy to implement on either the individual or church level, but what she suggests should be considered by many of us.