A lovely thought, getting lovelier


Perhaps all along we have taken too complicated a view of the unity question. Perhaps to unify the church we need only be the church. By that I mean spiritual Christians sharing their gifts in cooperative work toward the kingdom's stated ends, making that arrangement work, despite difficulties, by loving one another. Where that happens you have the truest manifestation of the mystical body of Christ: The church has arrived.

When that happens, the people who need to be involved are drawn into the church by a process I am unsure how to explain. The church grows organically, finding her members as she has need of them, or perhaps more accurately, as we have need to be there.

If that vision is the truth, then it is very encouraging to think about. All we have to do is get things rolling, gifted ministries functioning among people who love each other, and things snowball from there.

I am not sure the brand name on the church greatly matters, if the Lord is obeyed. If he is not, no name however honorable will save the enterprise. There are few denominations, or none, that have not stained their names in one way or another, at one time or another. We have little reason to hold up our own tribes as superior. What any of us should strive to offer the world is the working church: a body functioning according to the pattern scripture bequeaths to us. There is something enormously attractive about that when it happens.

Earlier, in a bit of blue-sky speculation, I wondered how it would look if gift ministries crossed denominational lines. Could an empowered ministry team be made up of members from several denominations? Now I'm thinking something even farther out. What if denominational identifiers faded in importance and became merely matters of cultural history and ceased to be administrative fence lines? What if it became routine for team ministries to take up their members wherever the needed gifts appear? The Baptists have wonderful Bible teachers, the Methodists have administration down cold, and so forth: You can find high achievement in some of other gifting in this or that denomination. What if it were all right, indeed the usual thing, for the denominational makeup of a ministry team to be "some of each"?

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