What Is Unity?
A question for the church about culture, worship, and what we’re actually asking people to give up
There’s a conversation happening in Christian circles about ethnicity, cultural identity, and the new creation. It’s an important conversation. But it keeps running into a problem: nobody can answer the most basic question it raises.
What does “culture-transcending worship” actually look like in practice?
Not in theory. Not as a theological abstraction. In practice. On a Sunday morning. With real people who have names and ancestors and foods they grew up eating. What are some specific examples?
Because when I try to picture it, I can’t. And I think that failure of imagination is telling us something.
The Strongest Version of the Concern
To be fair to the other side: the concern isn’t usually “stop bringing ethnic food to the potluck.” The people raising this question are not cultural police. The stronger version of the argument goes something like this:
Cultural identity becomes a problem when it becomes primary identity. When who I am as a Nigerian or a Korean or a Guatemalan takes precedence over who I am in Christ. When the church organizes itself around ethnic belonging rather than transcending it.
That’s a real concern and it deserves a real answer.
But here’s where it gets difficult. What does “making your identity primary” actually mean in practice? Can I not say where my ancestors came from? Can I not say what foods I like? Can I not bring a dish to the potluck that is recognizably from my culture?
The moment you try to draw the line concretely, it becomes much harder than its advocates often acknowledge. Because you need a principled account of which expressions cross the line, and why, and — most importantly — who gets to decide.
The Distraction Problem
The concern often surfaces as a worry about “distraction.” Some cultural expressions aid worship. Some hinder it. Discernment is necessary.
Fine. But discernment requires criteria. So: is paprika too distracting? Is a certain hairstyle? Is there a shade of skin color that pulls focus from the sermon?
I took a bite of a jalapeño popper once while praising God. All I could think was FIRE FIRE FIRE. That was genuinely distracting. But the solution was not to ban jalapeño poppers from fellowship meals. The solution was to not eat them during the sermon.
Distraction is primarily situational and personal, not an inherent property of entire cultures. And claiming that a particular cultural expression was deliberately designed to distract is mind reading — an epistemically arrogant move that attributes motive to someone else’s food, hair, or clothing.
Jesus addressed this directly. If your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out. The solution to distraction was never to police what the community brings. It was always to examine what the individual brings to it. The responsibility runs inward, not outward.
And the moment someone starts making a list of which cultural expressions are acceptable in church, they are not making a theological judgment. They are making a cultural one, dressed up in theological language.
The question was never really “is this expression distracting from God?” It was always “is this expression unfamiliar to the people setting the standard?”
The Neutral Church That Wasn’t
Here is a test. Imagine a church that has deliberately stripped itself of all cultural markers. No ethnic food at fellowship meals. No culturally specific music. No particular preaching style associated with any tradition. Pure, neutral, universal worship.
Now imagine walking in off the street.
You would clock it immediately as a white church.
Not because anyone intended that. Not because anyone was being malicious. But because “neutral” is not a place you can stand. Every worship form is culturally particular — its music, its cadence, its sense of what reverence looks like, what expressiveness is appropriate, how long silence should last. What gets called transcendent worship is almost always majority-culture worship that stopped noticing itself.
The absence of explicit cultural markers is itself a cultural marker. It just belongs to the group with enough power to make their defaults feel like universals.
Malcolm X at the Kaaba
In 1964, Malcolm X made the Hajj to Mecca. He wrote a letter home that became one of the most important documents in American history, because of what he witnessed.
Pilgrims from every nation — blonde-haired, blue-eyed Europeans alongside Africans, Arabs, South Asians — all wearing the same simple white garments, all performing the Tawaf: circling the Kaaba together, moving in the same direction around the same center.
The experience shattered his framework. Not because the differences disappeared. But because in that moment, the differences became irrelevant — not through erasure, but through shared orientation. Malcolm took this as a vision of what was possible in America.
Imagine not seeing it as what is possible in your own church.
Some will note that the pilgrims at the Kaaba are dressed identically — white ihram, no markers of status or origin. But Revelation gives us the same image: a multitude from every nation, all in white robes. And then, just two chapters later, the kings of the nations walk through the gates of the new Jerusalem bringing their splendor with them.
The robes are what God provides. The splendor is what the nations bring. Both are present simultaneously. The white garments don’t erase who they are — they mark what everyone is oriented toward. Something else still demarked them. The nations were recognized.
Nobody told Malcolm X that his Blackness was a distraction. Nobody told the Pakistani pilgrim that his food was pulling focus. The unity wasn’t in what they looked like. The unity was the direction of worship.
What Revelation Actually Says
This maps almost exactly onto the vision in Revelation 7:9 — a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne.
They are not sorted by ethnicity. They are not divided into their respective sections. They are gathered. Together. Around a center.
And notably: they are still from every nation, tribe, people, and language. The diversity doesn’t disappear in the new creation. It persists — and it glorifies God more for persisting. The united praise of ten thousand different peoples shines with a brightness no single culture could produce alone.
The eschatological vision isn’t homogeneity. It isn’t a church that looks like it belongs to nobody. It’s the Kaaba. It’s centripetal. Everyone moving toward the same center, bringing themselves with them.
Primary Identity
So back to the real concern: what does it mean to make cultural identity primary?
I’d suggest the answer has nothing to do with whether you bring jollof rice to the potluck, or wear your hair a particular way, or sing in your native language. Those are not identity claims. They are just you, being yourself, in community.
The question of primacy is answered by what you’re oriented toward — not by what you bring with you. A Nigerian Christian who worships with everything she is, including her Nigerian-ness, and orients all of it toward God, has not made her identity primary. She has brought it home.
What the new creation apparently preserves — what Revelation insists on showing us — is not a church that asked everyone to leave their culture at the door. It’s a church where every culture finally arrived at the same address.
Perfection Does Not Mean Sameness
That’s the claim underneath all of this, stated plainly.
A church that has genuinely transcended cultural division doesn’t look like a church that belongs to no one. It looks like a church where everyone has brought something — and everyone is oriented toward the same thing.
The unity is not in the erasure of difference. The unity is in the direction.
That’s what the Kaaba looks like. That’s what Revelation looks like. And that’s what the church might look like, if it stopped mistaking conformity for holiness.
If this resonated with you, share it with someone wrestling with the same questions.