It’s not the Mission of the Church to celebrate various cultures. There is much to be celebrated in various cultures and about our civil relations and social histories. But the Church must remain above such things and reflect the glorious, heavenly culture with the diversity, unity, and peace that Christ brought to us. In the Church we do not celebrate culture, but Christ.

There has been a remarkable amount of controversy heading into this year’s PCA General Assembly. Perhaps nothing more heated than the question about something called “affinity groups.”

TE Billy Boyce wrote an excellent summary and defense of ethnic-based affinity groups. It is one of the few essays or articles I’ve encountered to defend the practice. There was much I appreciated about his argument, but many areas with which I still disagree.

A. Points of Agreement & Appreciation

1. Concise Clarity

I appreciate TE Boyce setting forth with relative brevity and accessibility something of a primer on these affinity groups. I had not encountered such a clear defense of the practice. I watched a podcast episode with TEs Ince and Vogel on this subject, but found it unsatisfactory as it seemed as though the issues were being talked past and around rather than addressed directly.

Full episode here: Growing Together Podcast: Setting the Family Table – Affinity Gatherings

The Boyce article, however, was different in that he more directly interacted with the objections raised by TEs Zack Groff and Kyle Dillon to the practice of affinity groups.

I don’t agree with TE Boyce’s conclusions, but I appreciate his openness, clarity, and directness.

2. Problematic Nomenclature

I am grateful for how TE Boyce acknowledges there is a need for a “better name” to describe these groups. The way the culture uses “affinity groups” must not be what these groups are in the Church. In one of the podcasts I hosted, we discussed whether the PCA’s use of “affinity groups” or “affinity ministries” differs from the way the world uses the word affinity.

Full episode here: 225. Affinity for Christ & All His People

On that episode, RE Tim Rice warned that it seemed to him that the PCA is using a sociological definition for affinity, of “groups being segregated,” instead of groups gathered on the basis of shared interests, e.g. “hey, we like to hunt.”

TE Boyce suggests the mouthful, “cross-cultural cohort” instead of “affinity group.” I agree this would be a better name and better practice if these groups were truly cross-cultural instead of designed to be a subgroup within the church that is united by shared ethnic characteristics and distinguished from the larger Church on that basis.

TE Boyce concludes this point saying,

By re-envisioning such groups within an ecclesiological and functional framework, we can avoid accusations of redemptive-historical regression or racial essentialism, and instead focus on the actual goal: “redemptive ethnic unity.”

But these groups continue to separate people along ethnic lines. As the first Hispanic-American Moderator of the PCA General Assembly, TE Dominic Aquila wrote elsewhere:

We still have remnants of Babel in our psyches as we use human definitions of heritage to try to patch ourselves together as one…Having been scattered at Babel, Christ now gathers his people from all realms by the power of the Holy Spirit (not the power of enforced legislation or cultural shaming).1

3. Temporary Nature

This leads to a third area of hearty appreciation. While I do not agree with his “temporary, contingent yes” to the idea of “racial affinity groups,” I nonetheless appreciate his concession that these should be temporary.

Because the church is “imperfect,” he says, these groups exist to meet a “specific, providential need.” But I believe to make this concession is to acknowledge that these practices are at odds with the redemptive historical reality in the present.

To borrow from TE Aquila, again: has Christ reversed the curse of Babel or not? If He has, then the Church should not be dividing herself or siloing herself off into groups according to various ethnic characteristics.

What is needed in our culture moment – as in every cultural moment – is for the Church to proclaim the truth of what Christ has done in putting to death shame, hostility, and division within His people whom He has formed as a new humanity with Himself as the head, Adam the Last.

B. The New Humanity

What Christ has done in His flesh is obliterate any ground for suspicion, animosity, and resentment among His people and toward others of His people. Christ has taken us out of our cultural comfort and “made us fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” together (Eph 2:15). He has killed the hostility (Eph 2:16).

The Apostle Paul uses remarkably violent language to describe what Christ has done to effect this sociological unity in His Church, to create one new humanity in the Church of which He is the head as the Second Adam:

• He Himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in His flesh the dividing wall of hostility (Eph. 2:14).

Christ did not simply remove the wall or make a doorway in that wall: He broke it down… in His flesh. He made the two camps one!

To the Jews, flesh was so important; bearing Abraham’s flesh was their great qualification (cf. John 8). But the Apostle emphasizes: the only flesh that matters is Christ’s flesh.

How refreshing! To a world in which fleshly characteristics are so pronounced and used to divide man from man, to a world where the “Blood and Soil” Bund is once again marching with (tiki?) torches, Christ comes and proclaims peace and tells us the only flesh that matters is His own! Christ frees us from captivity to fleshly concerns and cultural loyalties and ethnic suspicions.

• He has reconciled us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility (Eph. 2:16).

Through Christ, all His people enjoy the same access to God as members of the same body of which He is the head. The reason for this is Christ’s personal killing of the hostility. On this point John Chrysostom (d. 407) notes,

No expression could be more authoritative or emphatic. His death, he says, killed the enmity, wounded and destroyed it. He did not give the task to another. And he not only did the work but suffered for it. He did not say that he dissolved it; he did not say that he put an end to it, but he used the much more forceful expression: He killed!2

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