"Where is this new spiritual reality in Christ to be housed or displayed?" Where can it be observed? Where is this dynamic available for us to witness, see and touch? Not in coffee houses. The local Rotary club does not display it. Neither do neighborhood or community groups, political parties, governmental jurisdictions, or even pastor fraternals and networks as valuable as they are.

The local church penultimately displays the unity and solidarity we have in Christ, the "race"-abolishing oneness we share with Him and with each other.

The local church is not a perfect display. Some people fear that talk of ethnic unity in the church borrows too much from the perfection that lies ahead in heaven.

It seems to me that our problem leans in the other direction. We need to live more fully in the already. We live beneath our inheritance in Christ. If Esau sold his inheritance for a bowl of porridge, we've sold an even greater inheritance for his leftovers. If the prodigal squandered his inheritance, we're the older brother refusing to rejoice and receive our once-dead sibling.

Ultimately, the one new man reality that transcends gender, ethnicity and class accomplished by Christ in the cross awaits its full display in the new heavens and the new earth when we gather around the throne and fall before the Lamb. But we are to get real and enduring views of that glorious future in our local congregations.

Consider Ephesians 2:14-17:

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.

Consider the past tense nature of many of these verbs — "has made the two one ... has destroyed the barrier...." This work of making Jew and Gentile one new man was accomplished on the cross in a very real way when the sinless Savior died as atonement for sin.

And there are present tense verbs as well. For example, "He is our peace." Peace is a Person. It's Jesus Christ. This peace is experienced in Him, in His body, in the church. It is an existing peace accomplished on the cross.

And we can see more of these present tense realities accomplished by Christ and housed in the church. "The Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus" (Eph. 3:6).

Given what Christ has already accomplished on the cross, it is understandable then that Paul goes on to exhort the church at Ephesus to a practical, real unity in Ephesians 4:1-6. God intends Christ's accomplishment for each of them to be displayed in their unified life in the church.

I doubt very seriously that in view of how Paul described the work of Christ in its abolition of the "dividing wall of hostility" between Jew and Gentile; the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in the body of Christ, in His flesh through the cross; and the church as a demonstration of God's manifold wisdom to the rulers and authorities of the heavenly realm that Paul now means in chapter 4 that church unity is acceptably limited and rationed by skin color.

I don't think Jesus is impressed with our failure in our churches to love others not like ourselves. That's just not going to be compelling in glory when the loving Savior died for enemies, rebels and wretches who were anything but like Him.

Our local churches are to be the penultimate display of the new humanity created in Christ Jesus.

The Homogeneous Unit Principle and Loveless Churches

Many readers of this article will reject the "homogeneous unit principle" (H.U.P) as a betrayal of the Bible's depiction of the church. Yet, how many of us practically affirm that principle every Sunday morning when we drive past churches filled with people "not like us" to get to the one where everybody looks like us?

Even if we are not committed to the H.U.P. theologically, it does seem that far too many of us are in practice. Our church membership may only be the practical affirmation of our unspoken but resolutely practiced commitment to racializing the church where Christ does not.

This is not merely a problem of integration, of spiritual forced busing to churches. It's more serious than that. From Sunday to Sunday, month to month, year after year, Christians of every hue are abandoning one another in lovelessness. Because we are too often loveless, "race" overpowers us even though it is not real. Our love seeks the limits of convenience and familiarity, to be bounded by the ease that "race" offers, when Christ calls us to a largeness and breadth of love that is like His own, that assembles and gathers and loves and gives to every nation, tribe and language. And that's to be displayed in our churches. Christ has made us one and called us to unity, but we have filed a declaration of independence from one another and voluntarily enacted Jim Crow practices to reinforce it.

Is there any biblical justification for the socially and ethnically stratified existence of the American church? Even if the fulfillment awaits the final things shouldn't we incline ourselves to living and experiencing more and more of that reality while we wait?

Article XVII of the T4G Affirmations and Denials reads:

We affirm that God calls his people to display his glory in the reconciliation of the nations within the Church, and that God's pleasure in this reconciliation is evident in the gathering of believers from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. We acknowledge that the staggering magnitude of injustice against African-Americans in the name of the Gospel presents a special opportunity for displaying the repentance, forgiveness, and restoration promised in the Gospel. We further affirm that evangelical Christianity in America bears a unique responsibility to demonstrate this reconciliation with our African-American brothers and sisters.

We deny that any church can accept racial prejudice, discrimination, or division without betraying the Gospel.

We believe that. How now shall we live that?

All that the Scripture teaches us and calls us to be is intended to fit us for the final stretch and reaching home base. As pastors, it's our job to fit our people for heaven. We are to use all that the Spirit gives us to pack and push and shove our people up into Christ. We're to whet their spiritual appetites for the delicacies of glory and to stir their hearts for the fellowship of the Beloved.

We're to prepare our people to sing the new song of Revelation 5:9-10:

Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.

All of human history is headed to this one reality — a new kingdom of priests, one in Christ, redeemed by his blood, serving the One True and Living God.

If that's where we're headed, why not live more like that now?