Inclusivity

The buzziest of all buzzwords.

Romans 4.13

For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.

“Inclusivity” is the buzziest of all buzzwords in the church these days. There’s a desperation that each church experiences in its desire to appear welcoming, loving, and open to anyone who may walk through the big red doors. And so, we purchase banners and pay for ads and generate slogans like: “All Are Welcome!” and “We Practice Radical Inclusivity” and “Open Hearts - Open Minds - Open Doors.”

And yet, I know of more people than I can count who have felt the exact opposite in church.

And not even for the big ticket items that seem to bifurcate the church, but for weird and strange and petty things like the clothing people wear to worship, or the insider language used from the pulpit, and just by feeling completely invisible to everyone else.

It’s the season of Lent, a time in which we come to grips with what we’ve done and left undone, a time in which we throw ourselves upon the mercy of God. So here’s a confession that no church wants to actually confess: It is impossible for any church to be inclusive of everyone.

Someone is always going to feel like an outsider inside the church.

Our judgments, our preconceived notions, and our general dispositions/attitudes will make it such that we can’t unconditionally accept every person who comes through the door because we never really know who God is going to drag into worship.

This is further complicated by the fact that we’ve turned our desire toward inclusivity into a kind of law. For instance, I saw a church sign once that said, “Hate Has No Place Here.” That’s a worthy slogan, but it ironically communicates that the church hates anyone who hates!

Paul goes to painstaking lengths in his epistle to the Romans to remind the early church that if the Gospel is turned into the Law then it is no longer the Gospel. St. Augustine put it this way: “The Law commands rather than helps; it teaches us that there is a disease without healing it. In fact, it increases what it does not heal so that we seek the medicine of grace with greater attention and care.”

To put it another way: If we’re commanded to be inclusive of everyone then we will, in short order, start to reject anyone who demonstrates exclusivity and thus we are no longer practicing inclusivity!

Doing all the right things, knowing all the right people, and making all the right choices sounds wonderful but it turns out to be untenable. We can’t make ourselves righteous, we can’t rectify ourselves, and we can’t redeem ourselves. We can’t even be the inclusive church we want to be; it’s impossible for us.

But, importantly, nothing is impossible for God.

You see, the most inclusive thing about the church is that the church is full of forgiven sinners. We’re not a bunch of good people getting good-er all the time. We’re a bunch of broken people who make mistakes constantly but we happen to have the good fortune of a community that welcomes us when we are broken because we are broken.

For some strange reason God delights in the motley crew that is the church and continues to give us the faith necessary to make it through day after day with such a strange assortment of people. And the promise that Paul writes about to the Romans isn’t something we produce, but rather it’s something we receive as a gift.

In Robert Jenson’s book Story and Promise he concludes it with this declaration: “The church is the community of the promise of the Kingdom… The church occurs in that the gospel occurs. Since the gospel is a promise direct to, and true of, precisely those who do not yet believe it, the reality of the church is in its mission: its work of saying the gospel in the world to the world… [and] The church is sent to get a specific word said in the world. Those who have not the stomach for this should seek some other society in which to be religious. Besides, what the world has to say is always pretty much the same old thing. The whole point of the gospel is that it is a new thing.”

The church is God’s new thing in the world and it is inclusive precisely because we’re inside of it even though we have no reason to be. It is by Christ’s righteousness alone that we are able to stand before the throne.

The world will forever tell us what to do, but the church exists to tell us what God has already done. And what God has done gives us the freedom to live wildly and wonderfully right now.

Which is all just another way of saying: God includes us no matter what we experience on Sunday morning in church. But maybe by recognizing our undeserved inclusion we’ll actually begin to include others.