Being a good neighbour demands we practice inclusion

Inclusion is an intentional process of unmarginalising people by infusing a culture where all enjoy privileges equally. Inclusion makes all people central. Through the lens of one-body-many-parts, inclusion is the practice of indiscriminate neighbourliness. This centrality of all manifests in a delinking of a person’s humanness and dignity from their location in the social stratification. A congregation that has a culture of neighbourliness is more likely to be welcoming to marginalised groups.

“Come to me all who are weak and heavy laden and I will give you rest” architecturally presents the allness of the biblical invitation. The biblical call ‘Come!’ is universal. The promise of preservation is to all who believe. Systemic diminution of particular groups in the church such as women and youth could be significantly attributed to a power-oriented church relative to a love-centered one. The struggle in the practice of inclusion can be understood through the tendency of people to prefer neighbours who are not lepers, Samaritans or gentiles. In a time when gated communities are the preferred places of residence, people want to determine the persons befitting and deserving neighbourly treatment.

Given the power to choose, a neighbour should not be a random person. This way, exclusion and inclusion become factors of power. The resultant power-broking discriminates against the weak by setting standards for undesirability. This is an error that needs to be reformed by the perspective that the strong cannot exist without the weak. In the Christian worldview, the tendency to exclude is exorcised by the centrality of love.

The biblical institution of the ministry of reconciliation is necessitated by the human condition of a divisive pride. Christ, who is love, is the reconciler. He reconciles people to a neighbour-based coexistence. The essential nature of neighbourliness makes inclusion a dimension of justice.

Inclusivity is a core ingredient in the existence of the authentic church. Seizing control of the power to include disempowers others who will now need to plead with the self-installed controllers so as to experience belonging. This disempowering leads to the sin of exclusion and minimisation. Inclusion is ensuring an even spread of love. No singular part of the body has power over distribution of love. On the contrary, every part of the body is commanded to love. Given this, if a part of the body has to wield power, it has to be the power of neighbourliness. Paul’s analogy of one body many parts exemplifies the structural nature of this neighbourliness.

God is free and not even traditions of the church can restrict God’s freedom. As the church structures its ministry for the sake of management, it must be conscious of the unmanageable movement of the Spirit. This Spirit-consciousness gives the church a quality of thorough structure on one hand and permanent malleability on the other. God freely calls all, equips all and sends all.

Because “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”, humans are also bonded by limitation that comes from sin. That God sends the disciples to “all the world” means that we are bonded also by an inner yearning for salvation. Neighbourliness then is not merely a concept of proximity but one of an inescapable and essential oneness made possible by love and exists for the same love. Inclusion then is the free love-assisted existence as a neighbour. Out-of-body practices in the form of seclusion, exclusion, minimisation or stigmatisation are essentially sinful. This is because the body of Christ thrives by respect and dignity of the parts. An internal minimisation chokes the body, limiting the abundance that can be experienced in and through the body.

The body exists only in interdependence. Attempts at independence in the form of compartmentalisation and erecting of walls that leave others out only limits the possibilities of the church. Christian individuality exists for and in community.

It is imperative that concepts of Christian living and church ministry fit in and affirm the analogy of one-body-many-parts. The Good News message is flung open to all in the world. The invitation ‘Come!’ is for all. While the Good News message is the same, recipients are in different contexts due to numerous societal factors. This necessitates differentiated ministry as a packaging strategy. Differentiation enables the facilitation of the one and total message with packages addressed to gender, tribe, race, economics, marital status, profession, age and such other segments in society. Each package is a mission field.

For example, the women’s ministry is differentiated by gender, and youth ministry is differentiated by age. Understanding the kind of people as well as the mode of presentation is fundamental to ministry success.

Differentiation and specialisation often run into conflict in practice. This conflict can be attributed to a faded ‘one body’ consciousness. Another challenge is that while mission packaging helps in ministry contextualisation, there’s the looming danger of too many differentiations making the church too fragmented. The challenge is keeping the many parts as one body. We can say that differentiation is workable in ministry to the extent that it maintains and enhances the one body. Where this is not managed, even well-intended differentiation can stray into diminution and discrimination. Differentiation should assure inclusion.

Martin Luther King Jr’s ideal of inclusion was represented in his vision of the beloved community. The beloved community is not mere co-existence made possible by tolerance but is neighbourly existence made possible by love, and love as exemplified by Jesus. To work for equality, black people differentiated themselves in the form of the civil rights movement. The focus of the differentiation was to challenge the out-of-body treatment accorded to blacks by discriminating whites. While Malcom X fronted an ideology of any means necessary, King adopted a specified method of non-violent resistance. Peaceful resistance is love-centered and therefore consistent with neighbourly-existence. King escalated the truth of many-parts-one-body to a vision for the community. There is no other way to achieve abundance apart from living in love alone. Love alone is the courier of life in fullness.