'...only a church where grace is preached repeatedly and forcefully wil be preserved from degenerating into a club. Just as a variegated shrub can revert into one with a single colour of leaf, so a church can so easily revert to being mono-cultural. We must be realistic about this. We must not beat ourselves up because our churches are not wonderfully and ideally multi-cultural. We live in a broken world, and therefore Jesus starts church-building using broken materials. Our churches are bound to refleect in some way the divisions within our society, if only at the lowest level the social differences in different localities. The wonder is not that our churches are not perfect. The wonder is that they are beginning to bring together unlikely people, that they are pulling against the culture that keeps one race together or one class together or one type of person together.
This movement from homogeneity to heterogeneity cannot be engineered by positive discrimination (the token different person) or by hectoring or lecturing ("You rotten old middle-class Christians ought to be more multicultural"). It will only be created supernaturally by the preached word of grace in Jesus Christ.
The word of sovereign grace, preached and preached and preached again, is the necessary condition for a shaping of a people of garce, who alone can reassemble a broken world. All churches tend to revert from grace to being a homogeneous club. Grace is fragile, because grace humbles human pride. A church without the public preaching of garce at its heart will always slip away from grace. A church with grace as its theme tune in preaching will be held to grace.'
Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, p.98.
