True Community Requires Diversity

Today I finished reading Lyle Vander Broeck's book, Breaking Barriers: The Possibilities of Christian Community in a Lonely World. I continue to be amazed at how truly radical Paul was in the applications he makes of the gospel's implications on community and culture, and how much our practice of reading the text for answers to our questions only makes us blind to so much that would actually be extraordinarily pertinent to our lives.

Paul's tough language in the latter half of 1 Corinthians 11, for example, is extraordinary: the fact that rich and poor were eating together at all was already an amazing transformation in Greco-Roman society, yet Paul makes a failure of true egalatarian community at the Lord's Table a matter of bringing the judgement of God upon oneself.

Paul asserts that poor and rich need each other. The poor need the material things others in the community can share. This principle is illustrated powerfully in the larger church by Paul's collection for the poor in Jerusalem (see 2 Corinthians 8-9) and by the support he himself received (Philippians 4:15-16). The presence of the disenfranchised and poor in the community is a clear reminder for both the rich and the poor that what we have in Christ does not come through human achievement (1 Corinthians 1:28-31). And 1 Corinthians 12 reminds us that the community cannot be the body of Christ without its diverse parts (vv. 12-31); the gifts of all are necessary.

Lyle D. Vander Broeck, Breaking Barriers:
The Possibilities of Christian Community in a Lonely World

I'm struck by the similarities between these insights and the insights that Henri Nouwen describes in relating his experiences with the L'Arche communities he was involved in. Nouwen finds that the mentally handicapped adults he serves play an extraordinarily important role in the community that is L'Arche — and an extraordinarily important role in God's formation of Nouwen himself. There are things that must be changed in Nouwen's life and perception of himself to become truly human; things that only the severely handicapped can help him with.

This is so different from the kind of thing implied in so much "Leadership" literature; whether written from a "wordly" or "Christian" perspective. It is hard not to come away from such literature without the sense that "leaders" are a class above the rest — those upon whom the success or failure of the enterprise rests. How different from Paul's radical flattening of class distinctions in Corinth (to say nothing of his rebuke of so manner other disputes in that factious church), and of Nouwen's recognition of the indispensability of the handicapped in making us truly human.