Purify Your Bride

It is an interesting question posed to Bryan Cross by the Internet Monk. It is the sort of thing that scares protestants from even thinking about unity. There were already comments making reference to the Borg. But unity by definition means one church organization. So Christian Unity means protestants and catholics together. What would you call the re-unified church? The name should not be the biggest issue. But the fact that many protestants cannot even imagine naming such an entity is really quite sad. I know many who have spend their lives building the Christian Reformed Church. To see it folded into something larger is hard to swallow. So we believe in Christian Unity our hearts are so far from it that even thinking about it makes us uncomfortable.

What would a re-unified church look like? That is an interesting question. Everybody tends to make the assumption that it would have to look a lot like their church. After all you believe your church is doing things the way God wants. It is teaching what God wants. It is worshipping the way God wants. It is resolving disputes in a Godly way. If you don’t believe that then why are you in the church you are in? But then you think that is not likely that all those other Christian traditions are just going to decide to be like yours.

The really amazing fact is that none of it matters. We are to be one. That is all. The rest of the details are up to God. He will clean up the mess. We just need to decide to be of one mind. Will that mind be one with the mind of God? It will. God guarantees that. We just don’t trust Him to keep his promises. We think that to be reunited we need to figure everything out. Quite the opposite. We need the courage to reunite without having it figured out. Like we actually expect Jesus to build His church and prevent the gates of hell from prevailing against it. Then we need to obey that church because we do believe it speaks for God.

So what would a re-united church look like? I think every Christian tradition would be amazed at how much of what is good about their spirituality will still be there after reunification. The spiritual gifts God has given you don’t disappear when you join the true Church of Christ. They just get more powerful. You might need to keep you spirit under control for the sake of order. But that is just so the entire church might be built up by every one’s gifts. Most of the fear that you somehow won’t fit in is completely unfounded. There is so much more to be gained than to be lost. But we need to believe that God can really be the Father of the household of faith. That He can make it work.

The reason we can’t trust that God will work in and through His church is because we have experienced so many bad churches. In the protestant world churches are purely human institutions. There is a real chance they will fail. They can fall into error. They can split. They can die for a wide variety of reasons. The idea that the one church of Jesus Christ will be different is just hard to comprehend. Being one can really be that powerful? Could the way we have been doing things for so long be so wrong?