Dock Resource Kit
Sunday sermon, 20 July 2025
Summary
This week Brigid concluded our Romans Revisited series with a powerful message on unity in diversity, grounded in Romans 15. Reflecting on the rich theology we’ve explored over the past eight weeks, she reminded us that the goal isn’t just right thinking but faithful living — and that the church is called to be a foretaste of God’s kingdom: a diverse, reconciled community centred on Christ. In a divided world, we are invited to be a unified body where our differences don’t divide us but instead glorify God as we love one another deeply and stay at the table together.
Key Points & Takeways
Unity is the Goal of Romans
Paul’s theological depth in Romans is not abstract — it drives toward practical unity in the Church. We are one body with many diverse parts, called to live with one mind and one voice.The Church Is a Signpost of the Kingdom
Revelation 7 gives us a vision of every tribe and tongue worshipping together. The Church is meant to be a foretaste of that future, holding together radical diversity through unity in Christ.Shared Identity, Not Sameness
Our first and deepest identity is received — we are God’s beloved children. This identity enables us to honour our differences without being divided by them.Love Goes Beyond Tolerance
The gospel calls us to more than coexistence. Love, not tolerance, is the Christian ethic — costly, practical, self-emptying love that mirrors Jesus.Unity Is Our Witness
Jesus prayed for unity in John 17 because disunity undermines our witness. A loving, united church reveals Christ to a watching world more powerfully than any sermon ever could.The Church Has Always Been Messy — and Beautiful
From the earliest house churches in Rome to our local community in London, the Church has always gathered people from radically different backgrounds and called them to be one family.
Dock Discussion Questions
Brigid said, “We are not self-made; we are grace-made.” How does receiving your identity from God change the way you relate to others who are different from you?
Paul urged the early church to “accept one another, just as Christ accepted you.” What does that kind of acceptance look like in real-life church relationships?
Where do you most feel the tension of ‘us and them’ — in church, society, or your own heart? How might God be calling you to bridge that gap with love?
Unity doesn’t mean uniformity. What would it look like for our small group — and our church — to glorify God with “one voice” while still honouring our diversity?
Long-form, editted transcript
Romans Revisited.
United: DEI and the Kingdom of God
Good morning, and welcome to the very final Romans Revisited.
Over the last 8 weeks we have explored some of the big topics that Paul considers in Romans. Questions about truth, sexuality, gender, power, predestination, wrath and justice. And we haven’t looked at any of these topics just because we wanted to gain more information on them. But because the conversations that these topics open us help us to reflect deeply on what it means to life out of faith today. What it means to faithfully and deliberately follow Jesus in London in 2025.
Paul doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff in Romans, and we don't want to either. And we have wanted to think about all these topics generously, and grounded in Scripture. Allowing space to wrestle, while speaking with conviction.
And so here we find ourselves at the last week, and we are going to close by asking this question: How do we take all of this teaching, all of this conviction and wrestling and generosity, and go forward?
What does Romans teach us about the church should look like in light of all of this teaching?
Romans 15:1-7
We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. 2 Each of us should please our neighbours for their good, to build them up. 3 For even Christ did not please himself but, as it is written: “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.” 4 For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope.
5 May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude of mind toward each other that Christ Jesus had, 6 so that with one mind and one voice you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
7 Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.
So the instruction and the prayer that Paul prays here focus on what the church should be like, considering all of the teaching and theology that he has written, is that we ought to be unified.
May God give you the same attitude of mind toward each other that Christ Jesus had, so that with one mind and one voice…
We are thinking today about how we can be a unified church amidst our diversity.
Our church holds diversity from lots of angles. Gender, ethnicity, physical abilities, cultural and educational backgrounds, worldviews and experiences. And the global church holds a huge diversity of theological thought and understanding, and that is the case within our church community here too. But what does that mean for how we live?
And I want to start with the vision that God gives us in the Bible for what the Kingdom of God looks like on this theme:
In Revelation, the author John is describing the vision of heaven, of God’s kingdom that he is given. And in chapter 7 (9-10) this is what he says:
I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. 10 And they cried out in a loud voice:
“Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.”
This passage describes the Kingdom of God not as a homogenous unit, but as a diverse, colourful collection of humanity. All of those people standing before the throne of God, and before the Lamb Jesus declaring salvation belongs to our God.
All that we have been learning about through Romans, all of the meaty theology we have wrestled with, all culminates in this. Every tribe, every nation, every tongue worshipping God together, for he is the one who brings salvation.
And if we are serious when we pray in the Lord’s Prayer: Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven, then this is a vital part of that kingdom and that heaven. A diverse collection of humanity worshipping in unity.
So that’s the vision. But what’s the reality that we are living in…?
But before we think about the church’s unity and diversity, what does culture teach us about it?
Well the reality is, like many things, we live in tension.
Across the world, especially in the last decade, diversity, equity and inclusion have moved from the hard work of passionate advocates and niche HR initiatives to central pillars of organisations and everyday language. Following George Floyd’s death in 2020 and the momentum of Black Lives Matter movement, hundreds of businesses and charities launched formal DEI teams, aiming to be more transparent on diversity in the workplace. Black Lives Matter, and other movements like it, have gained global traction advocating for racial equality and social justice.
And gender representation in executive teams is rising, with policies and practices changing to see more representation of global majority heritage people, women, those with disabilities and neurodivergence and so on, taking their place at the table.
And benefits have been recorded. Diverse leadership improves innovation, financial performance, retention, and customer trust.
But, recent political pushback on this has led to companies rethinking DEI programmes and retracting race or gender based goals. So while awareness and compliance remain high, actual lived inclusion has stagnated, with many employees reporting little real change in workplace culture.
And of course this extends out of the boardroom, into schools and neighbourhoods and every day life.
The reality is that, as author Jon Yates puts it, we have a cognitive bias towards homophily - literally a love of the same - towards favouring and surrounding ourselves with people who are like us. Whether that’s because we share the same race, age, class, set of beliefs or interests.
This makes us feel comfortable and safe. And of course there’s benefit in shared experience and life stages. But it can also create echo chambers and social silos. Homophily is rising through residential sorting, especially somewhere like Tower Hamlets as new exclusive residential areas are built. Through our online algorithms. Through the lifestyle choices we make. All of this leads to societies that are divided down political lines, ethnic lines, class lines and culture lines.
And what is lost when this happens? We lose opportunities to learn from others who aren’t like us, we stagnate in creativity because we aren’t being inspired by others, we live more isolated and at its worst, we risk creating ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ dynamics, alienating the others and falling into patterns of racism, sexism, ableism. All the ways that we treat others as less.
Now in Jon Yates’ book about this, he argues for shared spaces, shared experiences and shared identity as a way to combat homophily.
And as I read about this, what struck me is that the church, at its best, is full of shared spaces, shared experiences and a shared identity that provides the fertile ground for extraordinary unity across diversity.
So let’s have a look at Romans, and what Paul tells us about this, because Paul was talking about how to do unity in diversity long before any board strategy was.
In Romans 11, Paul explains that even though many Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah, God has not rejected Israel. But instead, their unbelief has left space for Gentiles - not Jewish people - to be included in God’s people.
There’s a striking image of an olive tree - the Jewish people are described by Paul as the natural branches, rooted in the promises that God has been giving his people for generations. The Gentiles on the other hand are the wild olive shoots that have been grafted in to share in the rich root system.
This inclusion of the Gentiles, Paul tells us, has to come with humility. Do not consider yourself to be superior to the other branches, Paul says. You don’t support the root but the root supports you.
In other words, these two diverse people groups are being grafted into one plant, not by their own merit, but with the support that comes with their root system, their nutrients and foundation, coming from God.
Paul then goes on in Romans 12 to explain that practically this means that they needed to live as one people.
Verse 3: For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. 4 For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, 5 so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.
And through to chapter 15, Paul goes on to explain that this diverse body is to live in love, fulfilling the law and everything Jesus taught by loving their neighbours as themselves, tackling tensions around food customs and holy days and so on as one body. Bearing with each other’s weaknesses and welcoming one another.
This would have been hugely radical teaching at the time. When Paul wrote this letter to the Romans, in around AD57, the church in Rome would have been a mixture of Jews and Gentiles. The Jewish Christians knew the Hebrew scriptures, they kept kosher food laws, they observed the Sabbath - they saw themselves as the original people of God.
The Gentile Christians on the other hand came from other backgrounds. They didn’t keep the law, didn’t know the Scriptures and might have looked down on the Jewish customs are old fashioned or unnecessary.
As far as each of these groups were concerned, the other group was batty. There was ‘us’ and there was ‘them’. But Paul is clear - this division is a false understanding of what it means to be God’s people.
So for the Jewish Christians to hear this would have stung. They were affirmed as God’s people, but also told that they needed to accept and welcome these Gentile Christians who didn’t keep the same food laws and holy days. And the Gentile Christians, yes they were told they belong to God’s family, but they mustn’t boast that God was done with his people.
Paul was challenging deeply held prejudices, encouraging the Roman church into radical hospitality and calling them to a new identity. One tree with different branches. One body with different, diverse parts.
This teaching was uncomfortable yet radically hopeful. The good news of Jesus doesn’t just call us chosen and loved and forgiven, but creates a new, united people who can model reconciliation in a divided world. And it remains radically hopeful today.
One body with different, diverse parts.
Both parts are important. We are one body. Once we are in Christ, we are all one, having God’s riches bestowed upon us. He will receive anyone who calls on Him in faith, no matter their nation or the circumstances of their birth. He is not reserving salvation only for those who are part of a certain heritage. Or class, or economic status, or education. One family with a shared identity as children of God.
One body, with diverse and different parts and functions. Each of our differences, Paul tells us, brings blessing to the church. Ethnic identity, gender identity and social identities are hugely significant. And we need every nation, every tongue, every kind of person to be the true body of Christ. As the church, we need to honour and affirm the many identifying factors that make us different.
The challenge that we have is that these identities that make us different have also been used, in human brokenness, to build walls that divide.
And you know, so much in the secular world also wants to respond with this vision. So many in our cultural moment want to see every tribe, every tongue, every nation represented at board meetings and leadership conferences and decision making tables.
But the big difference is that our cultural moment and the secular vision of this removes the one God around who we can gather. Our culture wants the vision of the kingdom, but doesn’t want the king. It wants all the fruits of the diverse, beautiful kingdom that God is building, but it doesn’t want the root system that holds up the fruit tree.
It is only around Jesus that lasting change can happen. The death and resurrection of Jesus is what breaks down the walls of division and forms us into a new, unified community.
That’s what makes the church a completely unique place. We have a vision of diversity - every tribe, every tongue, every nation - that is held together by our unity around the person of Jesus. The church is the only community that will always exist and so it is, and should be, a signpost and a foretaste of what will be when God’s kingdom comes in all its fullness. Revelation 7 tells us that this is our future. This is the world that God will make new. And that’s the vision that should inspire our response to diversity, and division, now.
BUT IT’S HARD.
Paul goes on in chapters 14 and 15 to give the Roman church instructions about how they are to live like this. Accept those whose faith is weak, don’t quarrel over disputable matters. Accept one another then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.
And you know, the fact that Paul needs to give these instructions is encouraging for the contemporary church in a way.
Picture the church that Paul was writing to. The early churches that Paul’s letters go to weren’t meeting in dedicated buildings or public spaces. They were meeting in homes. So it’s likely that this Roman church was meeting across multiple house churches with maybe 30-50 people max. In those days, that was a mega church.
Someone would have hosted the church in their home, perhaps a craft worker, along with his family, a couple of their male and female slaves and their dependent relatives, older parents or some cousins perhaps. And then there’d be their tenants, and their slaves and dependent relatives. Then perhaps a few freed slaves who came along and some migrant workers. These churches were young, small, socially fragile. There definitely wasn’t unity of life experience, socioeconomic status, class, ethnicity.
And so Paul gives these instructions because there were tensions, and differences and disagreements.
And the reason I find this encouraging is because it highlights something profound about church. It has always been a place where different, diverse groups of people work out how to live alongside each other, and be family for each other, and live out a shared identity and calling.
Over the last couple of months we’ve explored some meaty topics together, and there are differences of opinion around those areas of theology and doctrine amongst us. And yet our encouragement the whole way through has not been to use those points of difference as a way to divide, but instead a way to express unity around the thing that matters most - our identity as the body of Christ.
And that’s not unique to us here at SPS. That’s the way of the Church of England. Since its conception the Church of England has sought the ‘via media’, the middle way. A balanced path between the Catholic and Reformed churches, preserving the structures and liturgy and sacraments whilst embracing the authority of Scriptures and justification by faith.
The Church of England has been entirely shaped by unity and diversity. This broad range of beliefs across the spectrum of the church within one church body. Personally, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to be ordained in the Church of England - the richness of worship, the thoughtful faith, the humble dialogue, the generosity to people who are different, that this via media requires.
You see, our unity is seen most in how we treat each other when we disagree. What we do with these tricky moments reveals what we really believe about the teaching and life of Jesus.
So what do we do?
Two things to reflect on. How we relate to ourselves, and how we relate to others.
All of this starts with who we think we are. The building blocks that we use to build our identity.
In the world around us, the dominant message is this: define yourself. You are your label. You are your story. You are your success or your pain or your past. The secular solution to identity is to construct it, usually from what’s been imposed on us from our backgrounds or what we feel in the moment.
But the kingdom offers something far more stable and far more beautiful: identity not as something we build, but something we receive. We are not self-made; we are grace-made. The gospel tells us that who we are begins not with what we do, but with what God has done. Before we achieve anything or fail at anything, we are named: beloved sons and daughters.
And that changes everything. The first task of the Christian life is not performance. It's receiving. To receive our identity as a gift from God. The other aspects of our identity are important - they bless the church - but our first and foremost shared identity is as children of God.
If we receive our identity from God as His beloved children, then no other identity, be it race, class, gender, or background, can divide us, because we are united in the one true identity that matters most. In Christ, we are part of one body and one family, grounded in God’s love, which transcends all human distinctions.
Romans is full of the nature of the identity we receive.
Loved by God and called to be his holy people.
Justified freely by his grace.
Given peace with God through Jesus.
No condemnation for those in Christ.
Those led by the Spirit are children of God.
And so on and so on.
This is our identity. Our shared identity. So living together in our glorious diversity starts with knowing who we are.
And so the second task is to treat others as though that’s who they are too. Not as enemies, threats, or labels, but as people made and named by God.
So secondly, how we relate to others.
We live in a culture where the answer to conflict or difference is to fight or to flee: to control or cancel. But Jesus offers a third way. As his disciples were sharpening their expectations for a violent revolution - Peter literally drawing a sword in the garden - Jesus was preparing a bowl and towel.
In the upper room, as they celebrated the Passover during what we call Holy Week, Jesus flipped their expectations of what deliverance and rescue and revolution should look like. Instead of launching a rebellion, he gets down on his knees and begins washing feet. In a moment that could’ve been about swords, Jesus chooses surrender. In a moment that could’ve been about power, he chooses love. This is the kind of revolution the world still needs. Not one of domination, but of self-emptying love.
And here’s the challenge for us: the world offers tolerance as its highest ethic. And tolerance sounds noble, but it’s a low bar. Jesus didn’t say, “Tolerate your neighbor.” He said, “Love your neighbor.” The goal of the kingdom isn’t to sit at the same table in silent resentment - it’s to break bread and become friends. Real friends. Love goes further than tolerance. Tolerance might make space for difference, but only love can break down the walls we build. Only love restores what oppression has broken. And that love is costly - it’s the kind that lays down its life. The kind Jesus showed when he said, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
Scot McKnight, a New Testament theologian, puts it like this: “The Christian life is not about ‘How am I doing?’ but ‘How are we doing?’” And that might be the most countercultural idea of all. Because Christianity was never meant to be a solo project. We were saved into a family. Called into a body. Grafted into a single tree, wildly different branches made one by grace.
But if that’s the vision, then real community is going to cost us something. Psychologist Francesca Tighinean puts it plainly: “Being annoyed is the price we pay for connection and community.” It’s true, isn’t it? Community isn’t always convenient. Sometimes it means showing up when we’re tired. Sharing space when it’s uncomfortable. Opening our tables to those who are different from us. Somewhere along the way, Tighinean argues, we began to teach that protecting ourselves meant isolating ourselves. We built perfect routines, strict boundaries, no interruptions - and we called it peace. But what we gained in convenience, we lost in connection. What we built to protect us started to imprison us.
The early church was messy. Jews and Gentiles trying to figure out how to eat together, pray together, forgive each other - and Paul keeps urging them: stay at the table. Because when we sit down with people who are not like us, love stretches. And when love stretches, Christ is revealed.
So what kind of church are we becoming? What kind of community does the Spirit long to build in us? Paul gives us a vision in Romans 15:5–6 which we read at the beginning:
“May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude of mind toward each other that Christ Jesus had, so that with one mind and one voice you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
That’s the vision. Not sameness — but unity. Not uniformity — but harmony. When we embrace our unity in Christ, something powerful happens: our diverse voices begin to glorify God with one sound. That’s the kind of unity the world can’t explain. And that’s why it matters so much.
And the prayer for unity is seen highlighted at a pivotal moment in Jesus’ life. In John 17, his final prayer before the cross was not for safety or success, but for unity. He asked the Father to protect his followers not from danger, but from division. Jesus thinks division in his followers is even more damaging than the danger of persecution or martyrdom. Why? Because division destroys our witness to the world. When the family of Jesus turns against itself, we lose credibility, power, and authority. The world doesn’t need a smarter church, able to win its intellectual or theological battles. It needs a more loving one. As someone once said, “The world will not be won for Christ until we are one in Christ.”
To be one doesn’t mean we agree on everything. Unity is not sameness. The church isn’t a cloning machine. It’s a body with many parts, many voices, and many gifts.
We won’t always think the same, or see the same issues in the same way. But we can still choose to stay at the table. We can still choose to be family, because that’s what we are. Not because we have the better argument, but because we have the better love.
What if people came to know God not just because of a sermon or a really great worship set, but because they encountered a community so loving, so gracious, so Christlike that it awakened something in them? That’s what Jesus suggests in John 17.
“I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”
John 17:22-23 NIV
“I don’t know what I believe yet… but there’s something about the love in that church that made me believe God might be real.”
That’s the power of unity.
Your culture, your personality, your opinions — these are all part of how God made you. And they matter. But they are not ultimate.
Our deepest identity is not in where we’re from or how we vote or what we prefer — it’s in who we belong to. We are God’s beloved children. That is who you are. That is who we are.
And so as we face difference, the real question is this:
Will we choose to act as brothers and sisters first?
Will we stay at the table? Will we keep washing feet? Will we choose the way of love?
Because when we do — the world will see something they can’t ignore:
A community where difference doesn’t divide, where grace runs deep, and where Jesus is glorified — not by our perfection, but by our love.