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After years of effort, racial and ethnic diversity remain a challenge for the church. Practical and constructive theologies of diversity generally depend upon the person and teaching of Christ and ignore the unifying work of the Holy Spirit. The eucharistie assembly, one of the most segregated of gatherings in the United States, must incarnate the diversity of the first Spirit-infused Pentecost to proclaim the kingdom of God. The church is not a static institution; rather, it is a living body, guided by the Spirit to its fulfillment in the other and in the eschatological assembly (Revelation 7:9).
Introduction
Diversity has been a buzz word in American society for the last two decades, and churches have increasingly joined the movement. Yet despite this growing interest within the church, little has been written about a theology of diversity, and the theologies that have appeared tend to be grounded in Christology rather than pneumatology. This essay posits that a racially and ethnically diverse ecclesiology must also be rooted pneumatologically. The Spirit is the enlivening principle of unity and diversity.1 The cacophony of Babel becomes the polyphony of Jerusalem at Pentecost through the Holy Spirit unifying the disparate nations.
The polyphony of Jerusalem, although manifested at Pentecost, will only be fully realized in the eschaton. The church, called to incarnate the diverse unity of the eschatological banquet, seeks its ultimate reality in the new Jerusalem. Church diversity slogans such as Radical Welcome, for all their rhetorical force, therefore, misstate the reality. The church is not the welcoming one, radical or otherwise; rather, the church is the one striving for its fruition that is found in the alterity of the other.
Ecclesial and Sociological Background
Race and ethnicity rive society and the church synchronically and diachronically. In the 1990s, so-called ethnic cleansing led to the deaths of more than a million people in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. In the United States, Martin Luther King said in 1963 during a question and answer session at Western Michigan University, "We must face the fact that in America, the church is still the most segregated major institution in America. At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing and [sic] Christ has no east or west, we stand at...