Monoethnic churches.

I've been listening through the T4G main session speakers chronologically (as how the conference progressed) and started with Mark Dever's message on the church being a display of the gospel. The question of monoethnic churches came up when I was standing in line at FoBoGro with Justin. As an aside, FoBoGro has awesome sandwiches, I highly recommend it! I don't think monoethnic churches are necessarily sinning by serving one ethnic community and comprising mostly of those with similar backgrounds, but I also don't think it's ideal. Some reasons off the top of my head why monoethnic churches might be needed:

• Language barrier (i.e. a group of people only speak Chinese, then naturally they will need a Chinese service and congregate with Chinese people)
• The country is highly homogeneous

I'm sure there are more, but it seems there weren't too many things on the top of my head. I think the gospel is commended when there is diversity in the church. It is a display of God's wisdom to unite Gentile and Jew and cause people to ask the question, "Why do they hang out together when they have nothing in common?" Then we can answer: Christ. Almost every week at evening service we pray that CHBC would be more united in its diversity so that we could be a wonderful commendation of the unity we have in Christ that confounds the world.

Yes, it is important to agree to a unity in the universal body of Christ, but what a powerful witness the church has in its local diversity. In U.S. urban areas, where there is such a mix of ethnicities, I think it is in some ways harmful to the church's witness to have monoethnic churches. Monoethnic, mono-age-group, mono-economic status, etc. are all things the world understands; what we should do is reflect the unity we have in the universal body in the local body.

General Updates:

• I sent in a petition yesterday to have Boren accept my trip to Jordan instead of Egypt.
• Been busy catching up on readings for Int'l Security Politics, which I haven't been doing for the past few weeks
• Looking forward to meeting up with Mark and also CHBC Wed Night Bible Study