Several years ago my wife was invited to a special dinner for people who are influencing their communities here in Atlanta.  We suspect they had the wrong people, but she went anyway.

One of the keynote speakers at the dinner was a man who had worked in planned mixed income communities for decades.  These are developments that are intentionally design and managed to get people of different income levels – and often of different educational attainments and racial groups – living in close proximity to each other.  The primary goal here is to disrupt the concentration of poverty and give the children from poorer families social contact with people who are finding more success in certain areas of life.

These endeavors don’t always go smoothly.  These are communities designed around artificially constructed constraints.  People who for various reasons would otherwise live in more homogeneous communities are incentivized to live in diverse communities.   This is not without its costs and consequences.  As Harvard Professor Robert Putnam and others have long established, diversity is not our strength.  Diversity is divisive.  Diversity in a community often leads to a deterioration of trust, a diminishing of goodwill in the community, a loss of social capital, and an increase in conflict.

This keynote speaker – who I wish I could remember his name – witnessed this dynamic throughout his career.  He witnessed time and time again diversity and proximity leading to conflict. Diversity is divisive.

But he also witnessed some really beautiful things too.  He saw people getting along and becoming friends in ways that surprised him.  Over time his perspective on what really causes divisions among people began to change around what he was witnessing.

He said that throughout his years of watching and dealing with people he has learned that the types of diversity that we typically believe cause divisions among people – race, economics, nationality, etc. – are not really that big of a deal.  He said he has learned that the only diversity that matters is a diversity of values. 

He has seen time and time again, people who are different in every other way becoming trusted friends of each other when they had sufficient shared values.  He had also see the opposite – people who are the same in every other way become estranged antagonists of each other over a diversity, a conflict, of values.

I see this reality play out every week at Edgewood Church – people who are different in every way coming together, loving each other, relying on each other and enjoying each other’s company not due to some progressive ideology or some artificial incentives, but because of a shared sense of values.

I don’t know how you might pull this off in the groups that you are a part of, but this happens so naturally for us because we put Jesus at the center of our life together.  We have a person, a common embodied ideal, that we all love, trust, rely on, and aspire to be like. Jesus gives us our shared values.

I hope you can use this truth to seek out and built up beloved community in your own life.