Weird Ideas: One ChurchSample

The church is supposed to be one, but too often it isn’t. Why? People stink. And because people stink, it’s far easier to separate ourselves from them and gather around those who think and act just like me.

That’s not what the true Church is supposed to be.

DA Carson has a fantastic quote on this. He writes: “Ideally, however, the church itself is not made up of natural ‘friends.’ It is made up of natural enemies. What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs, or anything of the sort. Christians come together, not because they form a natural collocation, but because they have been saved by Jesus Christ and owe him a common allegiance. In the light of this common allegiance, in light of the fact that they have all been loved by Jesus himself, they commit themselves to doing what he says – and he commands them to love one another. In this light, they are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus’ sake.” (From Love in Hard Places, quoted in Unoffendable, p 139.)

Church would be so much easier if it wasn’t for all those people. But that’s not Jesus’s vision. What did he pray to the Heavenly Father? “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.”

The world longs for unity. But it doesn’t know how to find it. And so people end up separating from each other or seeking to coerce others to their will. Jesus has a different way, and the Church is meant to express that different way. When Christians live oneness out, then what Jesus said will happen: “The world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:23).

This is the creedal dream: one Church.

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