When I went on the church leaders’ Tantur trip to Israel in 2015 with its lectures and sightseeing, I remember going to the Melkite Byzantine Catholic Church in Jerusalem to see the church and hear a presentation and the first thing said to us, good naturedly, was, “What are you doing here?”. The question referred to all our denominations now having a presence in Jerusalem. “Why are you here when we have always been here from the beginning? We have never left.”
This week I attended a day conference on religious particularity and diversity in London at St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe (what a marvellous name for a church) organised by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland and hosted by the Coptic Orthodox Church in Britain. There has been a church on the site for 1,000 years and now a Christian Church that is 2,000 years old (round figures) is there.
The previous week I represented the ELCE at the Churches Together in England Presidents’ Annual Dinner at the Lambeth Palace Library and, as you might imagine, I can tell the story of the Lutheran tapestry here covering just over 500 years and resulting today in twelve Lutheran church bodies of which only two of them are British rather well. The ELCE’s story begins in 1896 and we become independent in 1954 (hence the 70th celebration at Synod). And to anchor me ‘locally’, Ascension is 21 years old. In my imagination, I can imagine the Roman Catholic Church saying to us and to the Church of England and to all the other denominations, “What are you doing here?”.
Of course, the ones who arrive first do not necessarily have proprietary rights to a place – as colonialization sadly teaches us – as the tensions in the Early Church about whether Christians had to be Jewish first to become Christian remind us – and as the Church learnt that the religion of the king does not have to be the religion of the people. History is often the story of either resistance or conquest – how things stay the same and how things change. If we call the 19th century, the century of Christian mission throughout the world, what often happened wasn’t so much the spread of the Church but the spread of my version of the Church. Hence today we see more and more organisational fragmentation of the Christian Church – more and more groups, denominations – especially independent ones – emerging. Christian history is often truncated to Pentecost and then when our church group was founded and centuries – maybe more than a millennia – are ignored – and yet we all stand on the shoulders of nearly 4,000 years of God interacting with people!
Today’s Church landscape needs a broad lens to see and appreciate God’s faithfulness to us and I think that affects how we live in our time and place. We confess that there is one, holy, catholic (= universal or global) / Christian Church while recognising the different teachings we have and our historical trajectories. We have moved on hopefully from executing those whom we regard as teaching the Bible falsely which isn’t to say that false teaching is to be ignored but it is to recognise and discern the whole message taught by a church and how we relate to it. Today’s Church scene is messy and complex, with long and short histories, and new arrivals keep appearing. What do we do? Hopefully what the Church always does – speak God’s Word in love, in season and out of season, saying clearly what is truth and what is error, and living, as far as possible, in peace with everyone.
GS