Church Unity in Yobitsugi

Beyond our own individual salvation, what does it mean to be the church — the body of Christ? As we learned last year in Ephesians, even as Jesus breaks down the barrier between us and God, he is also building his people together into “something new and greater.”

As an illustration, we can think of kintsugi, a Japanese art form that the American church and many others have embraced as a metaphor for God’s redemption and renewal of our lives. In the word’s etymology, kin means “gold” and tsugi means “to join” or “to mend.” Instead of discarding a broken cup or plate, an artisan mends the fragments back together with a tree-sap lacquer and gold dust, highlighting the fractures while creating something even more valuable. It is indeed a beautiful illustration: Each of us is cracked and broken, but through the blood of a tree, God is restoring us into something even more valuable than gold.

But if we stop there, we miss the full picture of what God is doing — a parallel called out in a form of kintsugi called yobitsugi. As yobi means “to call,” this variation involves “calling to mending” or “calling together,” using the same mending techniques with lacquer and gold but with different pieces of pottery, from different vessels or even different cultures.

Here, then, is the rest of the metaphor, going beyond personal redemption to a more expansive vision for the church and God’s plan for the renewal of all things, not just us as individuals. It’s not that the kintsugi metaphor is inaccurate or that our salvation isn’t part of God’s plan. But God never meant for us to stop there. He is writing a much bigger story, and although each of our stories is a part of it, we miss out on the fullness of his creativity and the richness of his intentions if we ignore the “call together.”

It’s hard to imagine this kind of unity among his body when unity even within individual churches is so difficult. Over the last several years, politics, the pandemic, and a renewed racial reckoning have driven churches across this country to ugly division. I will never fully understand what it was like to be a first-century Jew or Gentile, and to hear Paul’s words coaxing both to see past their own deeply held beliefs and the wounds inflicted by the “other side.” But I can imagine how he might have similar words for us here in 21st-century America.

And as we continue working to apply those words, I’ll be thinking of yobitsugi and the calling together of pieces that are nothing alike, that seem impossible to join together. I’ll remember that in this mending of a broken body of people, God’s hope for the mending of the entire world rests. I don’t know how that works, especially when even we in the church continue to divide ourselves by generation, culture, class, race, and a whole host of other barriers. But in Jesus, God has broken down those barriers and made all of us one.

I can only trust the Spirit. In Exodus, he filled Bezalel to create beautiful work for the tabernacle, the place God’s presence would dwell. And now it is only through that same filling of the Spirit that God’s church can be built up on the cornerstone of Christ, “being joined together” — or perhaps even mended together — into a “holy temple,” “a dwelling place for God” that displays his beauty to the world.

For more reflections on kin- and yobitsugi, see Makoto Fujimura’s speech, “Kintsugi Grace: Prismatic Art beyond the Rainbow” (2023).