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Dynamic diversity

The new humanity church for today and tomorrow

Sinfully monochrome

DYNAMIC DIVERSITY
The new humanity church for today and tomorrow
By Bruce Milne
IVP. 186 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978-1-84474-158-8

This book by the Scottish former pastor of First Baptist Church, Vancouver, and author of the splendid doctrinal summary, Know the Truth, is a sustained plea for multi-cultural, multi-everything-but-faith, churches — local churches that reflect the diversities present in their communities and begin to see the divisiveness of those diversities being healed in Christ.

So, if your local church is — by accident or design — made up almost entirely of one type of person (ethnically, temperamentally, in terms of social class, etc.), you need to read this book and repent.

Milne sets out the biblical case for humanly diverse local churches, majoring on Ephesians, of course. He then gives some doctrinal underpinnings (the doctrine of the Trinity, our oneness in Christ, etc.), and then applies the subject to the areas of worship, leadership, discipleship, fellowship, mission and evangelism.

This is an extremely important subject as the church in Britain flounders, and most of our communities become increasingly diverse, and also as we become aware that some of the apparently most successful churches are very homogeneous rather than diverse. Bruce’s message has got to be right, whatever the short-term gains and successes of applying the Homogeneous Unit Principle (he is wisely not opposed to some employment of it in an individual evangelistic endeavour, but abominates it as a congregation-wide principle). The book is also well written and clearly rooted in his own experience in Vancouver.

I was interested to read Bill Hybels’s regret at following the HUP in the past at Willow Creek, on p.184; and I was moved to read of the dynamic power to open people to the gospel that comes from costly love across human barriers. This is a superb and important book. Every concerned Christian should read it, and every leadership team should take its message on board.

Christopher Bennett,
pastor of Wilton Community Church, Muswell Hill,
and lecturer in NT and Greek at London Theological Seminary