One Church?

Edward from the Anglican Church in Ghana raised an interesting point last week in our plenary session on Faith and Order. “To know where we’re going we must know where we’ve been. The church was one and it divided. If we see that decision as a good thing in our history, why are we trying to change it?”

This is my theory and I know there is more to it than this, but I believe this was part of the divisions that occurred and I’d be interested to hear other thoughts on this theory. I believe the division is tied to culture. As the church grew, tradition was integrated into the culture and therefore changed. (This goes along with what our missiology class has been discussing.) For religion to be poignant, it must connect to people and for that to happen people must integrate their cultural understanding, the world they know, into their belief system. We are products of our cultures and cannot fully separate from that understanding; we can to some extent choose to set it aside once we are aware of how out culture impacts our actions, but we cannot fully separate from it.

As we become part of a Global culture we begin to loose part of what divides us but along with that we also lose our diversity, so what is the answer? As the world is, I don’t see one church united under Christ; rather, what I see is one church united under Christ in all it’s diversity and I believe the ecumenical movement is succeeding in that way. We are not to the point where we will accept each other in full communion, which is unfortunate and painful at times, but we are working and dialoging about what that means and how we might continue to work as one body for peace and justice. The human race is vastly diverse and each person has individual spiritual needs and with that, I see that there will always be a need for different traditions to nourish the diverse spiritual needs of the global community and offer various ways in which to worship God.