Unity does not mean uniformity; diversity does not mean division.

It seems to me that one of the main challenges the churches and denominations face, perhaps moreso in this time than any other, is to work with greater integrity and grace with one another. As the Christian faith suffers at the hands of an increasingly secularised society (and, indeed, an increasingly more apathetic society – perhaps the greater danger), the public perception of division and disagreement within the Church (upper-case ‘C’, no one denomination) can only hasten its marginalisation.

The answer, of course, does not lie in creating uniformity and stifling diversity. I can’t think of anything more dire than an army of Christian clones who all act the same and think the same. And indeed, does creation itself not argue against such an approach? How easy would it have been for God to create each person in His own likeness, in exactly the same way, over and over again? Yet that is not what we have. Instead, there is an enormous variety of gifts and talents, of creativity and uniqueness.

Our trip included a visit to the World Council of Churches and it was fascinating getting a first-hand account of what their aims were and the challenges they face. Here, perhaps more than anywhere, the reality of unity without uniformity and diversity without division ought to have been clearly seen. And yet, we still heard stories of disagreements, but also some interesting little hints of change, of long-standing barriers gradually being broken down and challenged.

Of course such changes take time and there will always be voices who oppose such cross-denomination activities. But we were reminded one evening that the Reformed church’s cry of ‘semper reformanda’ is so often mistranslated as ‘always reforming’. Rather its more correct understanding of ‘always in need of reform’ seems to be something that we need to grab hold of as relationships with others develops. It says that we don’t have all the answers or the correct way of doing things. And this, of course, is another cause of Christian ‘clones’ – a sense of having the correct answers and the right way of ‘doing’ church means that one never questions, but simply adopts.

Isaiah 53:6 tells us that we have all wandered off the path, like sheep. We may well all behave like sheep, but with the exception of Dolly, even sheep aren’t clones. Time to stop behaving as though we need to be.

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I’ve been looking at Fresh Expressions – the Church of England/Methodist project into finding, strangely enough, fresh ways for people to express or explore their faith. In many respects it’s the background to much of what is happening within the Church of Scotland. What’s been interesting is that Emerging Church in its guises as ‘alternative worship’ or ‘seeker-sensitive’ or whatever other label one might care to apply is actually a subset of the overall strategy. By broadening out what ‘church’ is, in the sense of how to be a worshipping community, then the unity of the church is maintained. However, this opening out and creating space within the structure of ‘organised religion’ is not universally accepted as ‘a good thing’. How can one be a radical voice or a ‘fresh expression’ when one is still part of the ‘established’ church? The very fact that a group is still within the structures of the ‘parent’ denomination means that it can only ever be emerging and never really emerge.

In the book Evaluating Fresh Expressions, an article by Dr Peter Rollins, co-ordinator of the emerging church movement Ikon in Belfast, is pretty hard-hitting when it comes to this subject. He questions whether maintaining the close connection with the structures of ‘traditional’ church allows an emergent expression of church to find its real voice. He goes so far as to suggest that maintaining such a connection is a “restriction, misrepresentation and even perversion of the very message that they offer to both those outside and those within the church” (p84).

The challenge of such a view (and this is the point of the essay) is that we then have to look beyond our own denomination and tradition and consider what it means to be part of the ‘church catholic’. Barth offers a similar challenge. Church, he suggests, is, at its most basic, a statement of faith, derived from the creedal statement – “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.” As such, it is not a matter of ‘knowing’ it is right, wrong or whatever, but believing that the church, the body of Christ, simply ‘is’. For Barth, that ‘being’ is marked by the work of the Spirit within and through the church. That calls into question our ideas of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of ‘doing’ church. But it also continues to call into question what it means to be church and what the purpose of church is. Barth is still, in a sense, tied to the institution of church. This, in large part, is to avoid the dangers of 0f individualistic experientialism; a danger I think some expressions of Emerging Church are at risk of slipping into. That, of course raises the question of whether it is indeed a danger. Barth’s big argument here is that we are called as a saved people, not as individuals as such. It was the nation of Israel God established, not a disparate group of individuals. But maybe that’s a subject for another essay.

In the meantime, when we consider/believe we are ‘one church’, how far are we prepared to go to count other expressions of church as still part of the body of Christ and therefore part of our Christian fellowship?

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