Diversity in Community

I spoke at Sunday School at New Life last week on Diversity in Community. It was an extremely challenging topic, but one that I really enjoyed. I'll give you a few random thoughts, in no particular order of importance...mostly because that's about all I did with the class - it was more a facilitated discussion than a lecture.
I had us interact with a couple articles that analyzed the riots in Paris this past November. This article compares the model for diversity in France with the model in India; while this one argues that no model of diversity will work unless there is a sense of purpose within society. This second article especially intrigued me, because it connected with something else I was thinking - namely, that the church is united in its missional calling to be about God's purpose of reconciling the world to himself.
I had us look at Genesis 11, the story of the tower of Babel. Here, linguistic diversity is actually a blessing that enables humans to get back to their original purpose - to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it. At the begining of the story, humans had all congregated in one place and didn't want to be scattered over the whole earth. We then looked at Genesis 12, where God tells Abram he is going to bless him, and that through him all nations on earth will be blessed. We can't talk about diversity with the local church without connecting it to God's purposes to bless all nations. We also looked at a few others - Genesis 7, Acts 6, and one of my favorites - Joshua 9, the story of how the Gibeonites brought diversity to Israel by basically stealing their way into the community.
In all of this, the overriding assumption is that it's the Holy Spirit that forms the church into a community - he is the one that unites us under one Lord, giving us His mission and making us His body. For those of you who are interested, that fits under the scheme of Kingdom-->Mission-->Church