Holidays and Pagan Roots - Should We Celebrate Christmas?

Holidays and Pagan Roots (Full Handout)

Here's the video and a link to the handout for this week's Q & A study at my church. Unlike other weeks, where I've provided the handout text in the blog post itself, this time I'm just posting a link to the entire thing. The reason is that I went a little overboard, and the thing is 14 pages long. It not only breaks down the arguments around Christmas traditions, but it goes into Easter and Halloween too for good measure. A good resource, hopefully, but a little long for a blog post. Clicking the link should bring you to the document, where you can save a copy for yourself if you like.

The Radical Danger of Christian Celebrity

I'm going to begin this piece with a thesis that will sound perhaps a little radical:

- Any person in a public-facing Christian vocation should hope that they do not reach large-scale success or acclaim.

Musical artists? Give thanks for poor sales on your recent projects and at the difficulty of building any momentum in the touring industry. Pastors? Give thanks that your church does not grow to megachurch proportions (or even anything approaching that). Authors? Give thanks that your books sell poorly and that the publishing industry is stacked against you from the outset (I have a little personal experience of my own with that one).

A little radical, no? So much so, probably, that many people have already clicked away from this article because it sounds so off-kilter. "Why would I hope not to have success? Doesn't my success mean that more people are hearing about Jesus?" Well, maybe, but only in a very limited sense. Think of it this way: if you weren't successful, doesn't God have other means and other people by which he could also make the gospel known (1 Kings 19:14, 18)? Doesn't God have even greater resources for doing that than you have? If you fall short of celebrity status, it does not mean that the Kingdom of God has fallen short of its potential for growth.

My thesis is put in striking terms to make a point, but it's not really that different from the apostle Paul's counsel: "Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life" (1 Thess. 4:11). And with regard to giving thanks for a lack of success? - "Give thanks in all circumstances" (1 Thess. 5:16). Nor is this thesis different from the actual practice of our Lord Jesus, who based his ministry in what was essentially a rural backwater province and who invariably slipped away from the crowds whenever the specter of celebrity raised its head; in one instance he even seems intent on whittling his core of followers down in numbers, not building it up (John 6:60-66). The picture of ministry that emerges from the New Testament is small, communal, and local. This is true even in the exciting days after Pentecost--the church of Jerusalem, from what we can discern, was not today what we would call a megachurch, but seems to have operated on a flexible model as a network of house churches (see Acts 2:46). Further, the "celebrity" leaders of the early church lived lives more marked by persecution, imprisonment, and martyrdom than by any kind of popular acclaim. Indeed, that seems to be more along the lines of what Jesus expects a "successful" ministry to look like, rather than high sales and surging crowds. 

With that thesis in place, let's go back to what prompted this train of thought. Why am I up on this particular soap box right now? This week has seen another grievous set of revelations from the contemporary Christian music world (CCM)--Michael Tait, the frontman for the Newsboys (and former member of DC Talk), has been outed for a long-running double life while on tour, a story marked with drug abuse, alcohol-fueled parties, and sex abuse. A few other voices who know the CCM world well have spoken up to say that this was something of an open secret and a pattern that is not infrequent in the industry. This news hits hard to someone of my generation, who grew up loving Christian music in the '90s and early 2000s, when the Newsboys and DC Talk were at the forefront of it all. But is it surprising? No, it's not.

CCM has consistently shown itself to be a remarkably poor subculture for promoting spiritual maturity. This should have been obvious all along: to take musically gifted young men and women and dump obscene levels of popularity and acclaim on their heads, set them in front of roaring crowds, interview them as if they have deep personal insights on Christian living, put them on tour where they are disconnected from their own families and churches for large chunks of the year--this is a recipe for almost certain failure. We are uprooting them from their support networks and surrounding them with pitfalls and temptations. It is not a favor we do them by making them celebrities; it is an act of thrusting them into grave spiritual danger. I grieve for them, and I regularly remind myself and others that these are among the last people we should look to for teaching on the gospel or wisdom about the Christian life. They are in a place of dangerous prominence, both for themselves and others.

And it's not just Michael Tait; this is a story we've seen played out several times. Another of my favorite bands, NeedtoBreathe, has also been pierced by accusations of sex abuse and betrayal. Other prominent Christian musicians have gone apostate, either leaving the Christian faith entirely or "deconstructing" their faith--Hawk Nelson, Kevin Max (another DC Talk member), a Hillsong frontman, Audrey Assad, and others. Now, that's not to say that every CCM artist or band falls in this category--the majority, by all appearances, are well-rooted enough and put enough safeguards in the practice of their vocation so as to handle it well. But the dangers are very real, and we should be aware of them.

We can go further, and say that it's also not just a CCM problem. It's a pastor problem, too. This is especially the case in megachurches, but it really applies anywhere, even in small churches, if a pastor is surrounded by people who prefer to pretend he's not a sinner. Every Christian communion deals with this issue at some level--it's something we saw in the shockingly public outing of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy (and the continuing echoes of it, both in their communion and those of other denominations, from the Eastern Orthodox to the Southern Baptists). It's something we see even in small ministries, where too much trust is given to fallible, broken, sinful human beings (a category which includes all of us). And it's something we see in a grossly inflated form in evangelical megachurches (the list of megachurch leaders and celebrity pastors that have fallen from grace for sexual misconduct, abusive leadership practices, financial crimes, and other reasons would run for pages). 

Megachurches are perhaps the easiest target for this critique. And I'll say up front that I don't mean to imply that God doesn't use megachurches to accomplish great good--He certainly does, just as he's used CCM artists to do the same. But the leaders in these ministries must always be aware that they are walking through valleys where temptation is going to be on every side, temptations that have mastered and overpowered better Christians than they themselves are. They need to resolve to live radically self-effacing lives, to reject celebrity status with their words and their deeds, and to surround themselves with strong networks of support and rigorous accountability. Otherwise, they are very likely to find themselves in the category of those who have gained the whole world and lost their own soul. I know a man whose side-ministry was, for decades, to serve as a pastoral counselor to megachurch pastors in crisis, many of whom were still in active ministry, and his conclusion is that megachurches are bad for the spiritual health of pastors, period. 

And I include myself in this critique too, by the way. Praise the Lord, I live in an area which, demographically speaking, is unlikely to produce a megachurch. My church draws attendance at a higher percentage of the population of my city (about 3.5%) than most megachurches do of their cities, and yet we're just a bit above 100 on a good day. I honestly wouldn't want to be in another context; bigger churches have come courting on occasion and I've turned them down. If it sounds like I'm wagging my finger at megachurch pastors, it's actually much more of a sense of "There but for the grace of God go I"--I sincerely thank God that he has put me in a place where I can't become a celebrity, because it would probably be my downfall, too.

But the issue isn't just a problem with the size of the church, either. There are dangers associated with the levels of money and elite status-brokering which come with the celebrity life. We don't take seriously enough just how frequently an attachment to money is presented as a tremendous spiritual danger in the gospels. Having more money than you need is perilous for the soul. Even if you can handle it well, living a life of simplicity and generosity, just having it there keeps alive its cancerous potential to befoul the spiritual growth of your children and grandchildren (and I actually know a few Christian families for whom, sadly, that has been the story). As for the status-brokering--getting into social circles with other influential people--our culture has decided to call this "networking" as if it's something good rather than an amplification of the dangers involved, most frequently leading to the sin of pride and a sense of apathy regarding one's own perilous spiritual condition. Remember that we follow a Lord who networked with the ones that nobody else even bothered to care about, and shunned the company of influential people.

Further, the whole nature of evangelical church life has, unfortunately, set up the pastorate as a vocation founded not on spiritual maturity, but on the exercise of natural gifts. A charismatic communicator can draw thousands, even if he is in a wretched spiritual state. Evangelical worship, unfortunately, has degenerated to the place where many people come to church to enjoy the exercise of natural talents--primarily, musical abilities and public speaking--and not to encounter the living presence of the Lord in their midst. I'm not suggesting this is an easy problem to solve; it's not. The exercise of natural gifts is part of this vocation, and one that God has ordained. But there is a danger involved which we must always be aware of--are the people coming to hear me, or to meet with God? That ought to be a conscience-striking question for any pastor with gifted communication skills. 

As I said, I don't have easy answers, other than to say we need two things: a way of grounding our worship services less in the natural gifts of those up front, and more in the presence of God; and a way of seriously ensuring that we are cultivating deep-rooted spiritual maturity for anyone placed in a position of leadership or trust. For me, a lover of the early church, I would say we should bring back the Eucharist as a celebration of our weekly participation in Christ the Great High Priest's eternal presentation of his sacrifice in heaven (thus putting the focus squarely on him), and we should make prospective Christian leaders spend significant seasons before their ministries (and probably during their ministries, too) in places of complete self-renunciation, like a monastery. But I acknowledge that probably won't work for everyone.

My guess is that, in the end, our celebrity culture in American Christianity has almost no grounding in reality. When we look back at this age of the church, viewing it from the perspective of eternity, almost all of the true giants of God's Kingdom will be names we won't recognize at all. I expect that megachurch pastors and Christian music artists will be very poorly represented, except for those few who were able to survive the dangers of their vocations by a sustained practice of humble self-renunciation. The saints who knew God best and were of greatest use to his Kingdom will be, in large part, ordinary people that were unknown beyond their own hometowns, people whose examples of virtue rang out so loudly in the courts of heaven that their smallest, most unnoticed acts will resound through eternity. Those ranks will be especially filled with workers for the Kingdom who labored in almost complete anonymity from the world's gaze, people serving the Lord in places of persecution and suffering, living lives marked by the quiet, patient work of planting seeds in the darkness. I've known a few in my travels, and I did not deserve to stand in their presence. Those are the ones who deserve the acclaim, and one day they will get it, and we who received too much acclaim here on earth will probably just make it to the other side "as one passing through the flames" (1 Cor. 3:15). 

The Danger of Making Revival an Idol

Across a broad swath of evangelical and Pentecostal churches, there is a fixation on the idea of revival. The term itself can be used in several different ways, some of which are useful or even laudable, but one sense in which--I've now come to believe--it tends to be more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to the church's experience of life in Christ. The hope and expectation of a future revival, perhaps just around the corner--when this is meant to refer to a period of breathless fervor, high emotion, and mystical experiences--has the danger of becoming an idolatrous affectation for both churches and individual Christians. 

Picture in your mind the stories you may have heard of previous revivals: massive public crowds gathered to hear the gospel preached during the Great Awakening; attenders falling down weeping under their conviction of sin during the Second Great Awakening; prolonged sequences of worship in the presence of God that might stretch on for days. For many Christians today, these extraordinary scenes have consolidated into a desire that such times would come again, and in doing so, this sensibility has taken a new form: the idea that these things ought not to be extraordinary, but ordinary; that "revival" should be the normative state of the Christian life, and if it isn't, then one's church is doing something wrong.

But is that sensibility actually true? I'm not so sure. Before I go into why that is, it's worth noting that there are certainly cases in which the hope and expectation for revival can represent something healthy in a church's life. Revival need not mean a full-on outpouring of dynamic spiritual experiences in corporate worship as the normative Christian experience; some people use the term simply to mean a large-scale societal return to Christian faith, or a state in which a church's members regain a sense of abiding earnestness and zeal in their everyday practices of faith and devotion. I have folks in my church who pray and yearn for revival in these terms, which I find not only appropriate but commendable. Both of these senses of "revival" are, I think, something that we should hope for and pray that God brings about. In most of my usages in writing and sermons, I think I tend to lean toward the idea of revival as society-wide swing of the pendulum away from secular atheism and back toward the historic Christian faith. That's something that might include vast outpourings of spiritual fervor, but not necessarily so: such a revival might also happen very quietly, under the radar (as I would argue is even now happening across much of the West). But in many evangelical and Pentecostal circles, a broad social return to faith is only one small aspect of what is meant by "revival," and what many (perhaps most) people have in their heads is a scene of impassioned spiritual excitement that sweeps up enormous numbers of people in its fervor. 

This disjunction in meaning is one that has come up in my own church life. Some years ago, I felt a prompting in my spirit to devote a year to daily prayer for revival, and I shared that prompting with my church. Some of our folks excitedly grasped onto it, and I got the sense that, for at least a few of them, the expectation was that a promised revival would come upon the fulfillment of our year of prayer. That year--from early fall of 2019 to early fall of 2020--came and went, and the results were...well, let's just say that it was definitely not a massive outpouring of spiritual excitement through our town. Instead, what followed (in the very week we finished our year of prayer) was the first major outbreak of the Covid pandemic in our area, after having already had to re-imagine our practices of doing church thanks to society's efforts to "flatten the curve." This was swiftly followed by an outbreak in our own church, which (since it was still early in Maine's story of experiencing the pandemic) made headlines across the state, cast our church unfairly in a poor light to many of our neighbors, and resulted in several months of our church trying to connect online rather than in person. Instead of a revival, our year of prayer resulted in our church standing empty, week after week after week.

Where was the promised revival? Well, for anyone who might have been expecting crowds of people shrieking with excitement in a new Great Awakening (and I'm not actually sure we had too many of those), it hadn't happened. No doubt the Lord had used our prayers to prepare us for what was probably the hardest year in the history of our congregation, but no "revival" of that kind. Except...something peculiar is starting to be noticeable now, five years later. That time of transition in 2020 led into a new season in our church life marked by the vibrancy and joy of a growing faith-community that spans all the age groups in our town, who delight in spending time in fellowship and devoting their hearts to the worship of God. Even more strikingly, some experts in the wider world are now pointing to 2020 (the year we completed our season of prayer for revival) as the point at which a new and surprising upswelling of faith started to become visible, and which is now making headlines across the West: public intellectuals coming out as new Christian converts, high-church communions seeing crowds of new catechumens, and Gen Z swinging the pendulum away from agnosticism and back toward faith. And it's not just the West, either--these early decades of the twenty-first century have seen an acceleration of movements to Christ among people of other faiths around the globe (and especially among Muslims and Jews), and that acceleration shows no signs of slowing down. But apart from a few little hotspots that pop up here and there for a time, this hasn't been a "revival" of the emotional-outpouring variety; it has been a broad, quiet, grassroots work of God taking shape in the background of our daily lives. This quiet revival has the potential to be one of the biggest things to happen in the entire history of Christianity if it continues along its present course, and lots of people are still unaware that they are living in the midst of it.

What has this experience taught me? Well, it's taught me to keep praying for revival!--so long as we're aware of what we're really praying for. But it has also made me a little wary of the fixation on a Great-Awakening-style revival that persists in the hopes and expectations of our churches. There are two main downfalls to that fixation that I can see. First, it can leave Christians in a place of perpetual sadness and disillusionment. While there is certainly a sense of hope in some future great work of God that might raise one's spirits, the continued absence of a visible, emotional outpouring of the Spirit on a broad scale is something that gnaws away at a person's faith, raising questions about God's willingness to act. It also builds up a sense that our normal Christian life is somehow insufficient, and that we (or our church's leadership) are doing something wrong. Is it any wonder that pastors and leaders in these traditions seem so often to fall from grace, often into sexual sin or abusive leadership practices? They have been conditioned to provide a sense of visionary excitement that God is at work, in answer to the hopes and expectations of their congregants, but in the end that excitement very often turns out to be little more than a cult of their personal charisma, and the perpetuation of that cult bears the fruit of its own consequences.

Second, this fixation on "revival" can lead to a kind of idolatry, which replaces the very real work of God that is going on in our lives right now with a wished-for substitute. Much of what we're called to as Christians is faithfulness and obedience amid the normalcy of everyday life. The mountaintop experience of the post-Pentecost church in Acts quickly makes way for the patient rhythms of simply figuring out how to live life together as faithful followers of Jesus, marked less by ecstatic wonder and more by "making it [their] ambition to live a quiet life" (1 Thess. 4:11). The whole Christian tradition, from the monastic fathers of the early church to the mystics of the Middle Ages to the leading pastors of twentieth-century evangelicalism, have tried to remind us that real Christianity is less flash and more substance, less of ecstasy and more of humble simplicity. As Oswald Chambers put it, "The snare in the Christian life is in looking for gilt-edged moments, the thrilling times; there are times when there is no thrill, when God's [blessing] is in the routine of drudgery on the level of towels and washing feet." The great Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross (who knew something about amazing experiences of closeness to God), advised other Christians not to seek out visions or ecstatic manifestations or special words from the Lord as the normal course of one's Christian life. Such things were always meant to be extraordinary, not normative. If one got caught up in pursuing them, one would lose sight of the greater part of the work of God in one's life. 

And that, I fear, is exactly what has happened with those Christians who are fixated on the idea of a future revival--they are missing out on what God is actually doing right under their noses. That's not to say that revivals of that sort can never come, of course. They do--we know they do, and they are great gifts of God when they do come. But we should treat them as St John of the Cross treated personal visions--accept them as a special gift of God, a blessing of precious value, and then move on. They are a gift to be appreciated, not an idol to be mounted on the altar of one's heart. We must always ask what comes next after the vision, after the revival, after the outpouring. And in most cases, like with the post-Pentecost church, it's things like patiently suffering persecution (Acts 4), dealing with matters of sin and holiness in our lives (Acts 5), congregational administration and dealing with church conflict (Acts 6), and other non-glamorous practices of ordinary Christian discipleship. These are things that God wants us to attend to, just as much as the mountaintop experiences of a Great-Awakening-style revival. God can work just as readily through slow, patient, quiet means as he can through big, showy, flashy means. It is perhaps no accident that Jesus describes the growth of the church in analogies of things that grow so slowly that one would almost die of boredom of one watched them from beginning to end: yeast spreading through dough, crops growing in a field, and so on. And yet, in the end, those slow, patient, quiet things are what make all the difference. So don't get lost in waiting and wishing for the next great revival. Pray for God's work in the world and then get to work yourself. Be faithful, proclaim the gospel, and give thanks for all things. Our Master is doing far more right now than we can even imagine, and perhaps what we are most in need of is simply to have eyes to see it.

A Change in the Wind

"And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time."

- T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," Four Quartets

Most of my adult life, I've been praying for a transformation that I sincerely doubted I would ever see. Call it what you will: revival, a Great Awakening, a return of the West to its Christian foundations. I came of age in a highly secular corner of the US at the turn of the millennium, and there was a palpable sense of anxiety in the air among Christians. It was becoming clear that our society, like Christian Europe before us, was entering a long, downward spiral into the abandonment of faith. The first two decades of this century were rife with bleak news for anyone who cares about Christianity in the West: it was attacked on all sides by both "the New Atheists" and a resurgent global wave of Islam's rising tide, it was swamped out of the cultural consciousness of the young by the advent of addictive, all-consuming technologies, and it was marked by growing movements of "nones" and "exvangelicals" and former Christians intent on "deconstructing" their faith. Much of this was the cultural harvest of decades upon decades of institutional atheism in academic circles, which exercised a serious trickle-down effect on society at large. It was common knowledge in Christian circles that to go to a secular university (unless you lived in a Bible belt) was an act of entering territory that was uniquely hostile to one's faith. Those trends had played out in public life to devastating effect, and with the loss of faith, the fundamental stability of many parts of society began to crumble. In short, it looked like all the momentum was going in one direction, and there was no way out. The West had become "post-Christian." And although I prayed and hoped and longed for a swing of the pendulum back the other way, the signs were all so evident that I dared not really believe it to be possible--I found that my heart couldn't bear the anguish of disappointed expectations.

Despite what I'm about to tell you, all of those worrying signs are still all around us. In much of western Europe, secular people now far outnumber religious believers. The "nones" still hold a significant share of our population here in the US. On my pilgrimage in England last year, the effects of the loss of faith on British society were poignant and painful. While I walked around the unimaginably beautiful heritage of the faith of ages past, there was a touch of sorrow to it. These beautiful churches were mostly empty. Those that still held services were either evangelical (where some life remains) or tiny groups that were simply holding on while deaths of old age gradually reduced their numbers. Many expressed surprise that someone as young as I was (and I'm not young anymore) had such an interest in the faith. Those churches that were full were full of tourists, not worshipers, and several cathedrals had gone a good way toward turning their naves into exhibit halls for community events or the celebration of woke-ist values. There was a painful disenchantment to it all.

But there is a change in the wind. It's discernible now; something is happening. It's still small, still just "the size of a man's hand" (see 1 Kings 18:44), but it's coming. This week, I read the testimony of another major public intellectual who has just announced his conversion to faith in Christ (Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia). Over the past five years, this has been happening with increasing frequency. Public intellectuals like historian Tom Holland and psychologist/influencer Jordan Peterson sparked open dialogues about their growing appreciation for the Christian faith. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim-turned-atheist (author of the book Infidel, published during the days of the New Atheists), has become a Christian. Paul Kingsnorth, a major literary figure, found the end of his religious journey through atheism and Wicca by becoming an Eastern Orthodox Christian. Even the agnostic Elon Musk and the world's leading atheist voice, Richard Dawkins, have recently gone on record that they are essentially "cultural Christians." It's not just intellectuals, either: leading figures in media and the arts are coming to faith, from movie stars like Russell Brand and Shia LaBeouf to Youtubers like Ryan Trahan. The uber-popular podcast host Joe Rogan has begun sprinkling an openness to faith into his shows, catching attention especially for one simple line: "We need Jesus."

And it's not just happening at the upper levels of society; there's also a growing groundswell rising up under the radar of public perception. Some events--like the revival at Asbury University last year--broke out onto the public consciousness. But it wasn't a one-off event; college students are showing a marked new openness to the gospel. In the US, there's a particularly noticeable shift of young people moving toward the traditionally orthodox denominations of ancient-rooted Christianity: Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, high-church Anglicanism. Some Eastern Orthodox churches in the US are seeing new catechumenate classes that are, at times, as large as the rest of the congregation put together. In Catholicism, the young people coming to faith are leaving behind the diluted expressions of worship that came into vogue among the previous generation, and are expressing a longing to go back to the rich heritage of older practices. Whereas my generation--the so-called "Millennials"--is probably the most faithless generation America has ever seen, the generations rising behind us, as they come of age, are starting to look like they're not on the same track. My children's generation is much more open to the Christian faith and much more skeptical of the self-centered secularism that dictated public consciousness in earlier decades. 

Every time I come across the evidence of this shift, I still find it surprising. I know I shouldn't; after all, I was writing articles years ago on this blog about how we were already seeing a slow shift back toward theism in academic philosophy. But I am always surprised. I find myself shocked, with wonder and delight, that it might really be happening. 

Back in 2019, I felt led of the Lord to commit to a year of praying every day for revival in our society. I initially took it as a personal call, but during an unplanned moment in the middle of a sermon, I let it slip to my congregation, and some of them took up the call with gusto. (At first I regretted that slip, because then all the pressure of public expectations came to bear upon it, as if people were expecting the call to be a prophecy of what would certainly happen if they prayed.) Rather ironically, the end of that year of praying coincided exactly with a major Covid outbreak in our congregation, one of the first in our state. It resulted in us closing down for several months and ending up in the hostile spotlight of regional news media--not exactly a revival. One could say, however, that it was perhaps not a coincidence that God had led us through a year of concerted prayer immediately before what was probably the most difficult period in the long history of our congregation. But on a larger scale, it's now possible to trace out the lines of another connection. That period, beginning around 2019-20, was the beginning of the recent surge of public conversions. Justin Brierly, host of the podcast "The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God," marks the turnaround to right around that time. That's not to say, of course, that it was our prayers that made it happen. But it's heartening to see the connection nonetheless. So, people of God: keep praying. We may find that rather than staring into the darkness of a falling twilight, we are in fact on the threshold of an entirely new dawn, and even now the brilliant colors of a fresh awakening are dancing on the horizon. 

The Wellspring Service

A few years ago on this blog, I designed a liturgical service drawn from traditional sources, which an evangelical church could hypothetically use to dip its toes into the great stream of the timeless traditions of high-church Christian worship. At the time, we weren't actually implementing such a service in my church; I knew that I would love it, but I wasn't sure anyone else would. Well, that has changed. There has been a growing groundswell of interest in connecting to the classical forms of Christian worship from the days of the early church, and so we've started offering a monthly service of high-church liturgy. I offer here, for anyone who might be interested in using it, the newly revised version of my Wellspring service (based mostly off the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, but with some additional prayers from ancient sources). I've also included a document I wrote for my church to answer their questions and explain the meanings behind the service. Click the links below to access the documents.

Wellspring: A Classic Liturgical Service of Christian Worship

Wellspring FAQs

What's the Best Form of Worship?

This is a follow-up piece to my last essay, which encouraged Christians to give grace to one another in the context of worship. In that essay, I argued that different forms of worship will appeal to different people, and we ought not to judge one another's preferences in that regard. Pretty straightforward, I think, but one of those good reminders that we all need from time to time.

It occurred to me, though, that a skeptic might object, "But what if there's a form of worship that is intrinsically better than others?--a form of worship which, regardless of personal preferences, ought to be held higher on its own merits?"

It's not an unfair question, though I think it's probably still just a way for people to argue for the rightness of their own whims. Those who argue that their form of worship is intrinsically better than others are not unified in a single opinion--rather, those from liturgical traditions argue for liturgical worship, those from evangelical traditions argue for evangelical worship, and those from pentecostal traditions argue for pentecostal worship. Everyone is pretty good at seeing the merits of their own form of worship and the weaknesses of the others.

Given the nature of my last essay, readers might expect me to take a fairly broad and permissive line on this question: just let everyone worship how they want to worship, so long as it finds support in the doctrine and traditions of scripture. My position is actually a little more assertive than that, though: I think churches should be giving their people opportunities to participate in all of the main forms of Christian worship. This isn't just an argument to pick the one you like and let others pick the one they like--this is an argument that we should be immersing ourselves in the whole vast and varied array of Christian worship. 

This is the line taken by the Convergence Movement, a late-twentieth century outgrowth of both the Charismatic renewal and various liturgical movements, as they interacted with one another and the broader evangelical tradition. Much of it relies on the work of Robert Webber (whom I heard in person when I was in college), who wrote about the Christianity of the twenty-first century as the "ancient-future faith." And while the Convergence Movement has inspired a few truly wacky spinoffs--new denominations that seem more like the old heresy of Montanism than anything else--most of its outgrowth has been orthodox, vibrant, and deeply committed to both the riches of church tradition and the freshness of the Spirit's present work. 

The underlying premise of Convergence strikes me as just about right: it identifies three major "streams" that have always been a part of the church's experience, but which certain movements and periods in church history have highlighted over the others. The three streams are (1) liturgical (or sacramental), (2) evangelical, and (3) pentecostal (or charismatic). The first stream focuses on the reverent prayer-life of the ancient Christian church and the richness of the physical symbology of worship; the second focuses on grounding the church in the teaching of the Word of God; and the third focuses on moving in step with the Spirit's work in the church. The argument is that each stream represents an authentic and powerful way that God works in his church, and that instead of insisting on one's merits over the others, we ought to be seeking the interconnected strengths of all of them. A good exposition of this view can be found in Gordon T. Smith's recent book, Evangelical, Sacramental, and Pentecostal: Why the Church Should Be All Three.

I want to add a supporting piece to that argument here, by rooting it in the theological vision of the offices of Christ, who is the head of his church. It strikes me that each of the three streams is aligned toward one of the offices of Christ, as traditionally identified: prophet, priest, and king. 

Liturgical and sacramental worship is ordered toward Christ's office as the Great High Priest, leading the eternal liturgy in the heavenly tabernacle. Liturgical worship envisions itself as joining in the heavenly worship and participating in the eternal self-offering of the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ, who is both the offerer and the offered. Liturgical/sacramental worship is really good at fostering a sense of reverence and awe in worship, and of forging connections to the church through the ages, all the way back to the temple-worship of God's people in the Old Testament.

Evangelical worship, meanwhile, strikes me as being ordered toward Christ's office as king: it gives foremost attention to learning the will of the Lord by studying his commandments and faithfully, obediently applying that will to our lives. Like good citizens of any kingdom, evangelical worship takes seriously both the knowledge and the actions necessary to live out our identity as the King's own men and women. Evangelical worship is really good at promoting robust doctrine and clear-eyed theology, keeping the apostolic witness of the New Testament foremost in the mind of the church, and it produces a calm and concerted passion for seeing God's will done in the world. 

Pentecostal worship is ordered toward Christ's role as prophet, the ultimate fulfillment of the office given by God to his people throughout the biblical period. A prophet was one on whom the Spirit of the Lord came, to speak the word of the Lord directly into the present circumstances of the people of God. One of the great expectations of the Messiah was that he would be the one who would pour out the Spirit not only on a handful of selected prophets, but on all flesh. Part of Jesus's Messianic reign in heaven is the impartation of the Spirit in just this way (see John 16:7-14; Acts 2:16-18). Pentecostal worship is full of vibrancy and laden with emotion, to the point where it pushes people out of their comfort zones--and that's also exactly what the ministry of the prophets did in the Old Testament. Pentecostal worship is good at harnessing the emotions of God's people, giving expression to their joy and their hope, and it continually keeps an attentive ear to what the Spirit is saying to the churches, not just in the biblical past, but in the present moment as well. 

Now, most people are going to feel more at home in one of these three traditions, and not in all of them. Again, that just goes back to how we're wired differently, as I argued in my last piece. But even if we have a dominant preference, I think it may be important for us to keep dipping our toes in the other two streams as well. Each tradition also comes with its own weaknesses, after all--evangelical and pentecostal worship, for example, are just not as good as liturgical worship at fostering an atmosphere of reverence and awe at the holy mystery of the presence of God. Pentecostal worship gives such free rein to the emotions that it can be helpful if the more mind-oriented strengths of the evangelical tradition, rooted in scriptural doctrine, tempers it and ensures it doesn't go astray. Other examples abound. The strengths complement each other, and cover for each other's weaknesses: "A cord of three strands cannot be easily broken" (Eccl. 4:12).

This week, my church--whose dominant form of worship is evangelical--will be participating in a multi-church night of praise, where the free-flowing and emotive elements of the pentecostal stream will be in evidence, and we're also launching an optional liturgical service for any who want to experience it. I'm really excited about all of these: each service represents the strengths of these three great streams of the Christian tradition. (As a final aside, it might be worth mentioning that there's a corollary question in all this, too--is it better to "blend" all three forms of worship into a single service, as some Convergence churches try to do, or to offer separate services that highlight the strengths of each? I'm not sure about this yet, but I think there's merit to keeping them in separate services most of the time, if only to highlight the power of their distinctives, which would likely get watered down if fused.) The bottom line is this: our Messiah is prophet, priest, and king, and the history of the church has given us three grand streams of worship which align with the identities and offices of the Master. Let's make use of them.

Common-Sense Skills for Becoming Uncommon Christians

I'm in a season of my life where I'm reflecting a lot on the nature of worship and the church. In addition to my pastoral ministry in my Baptist church, where God's blessing is everywhere evident, I've also been cultivating personal contacts with other parts of the orthodox, confessing Church, from an Anglican "convergence" communion scattered across the world to an old Benedictine monastery set high in the hills of western Pennsylvania. Beyond the global church, the idea of worship has been on my mind, too--I'm in the final stages of writing a book on the topic--specifically, about the story of a time when God used a new worship movement to help launch a world-changing wave of global mission. I'm also preparing to offer my Baptist congregation something a little startling (at least, startling for a Baptist church)--an optional service at which they can enter the ancient Christian tradition of high-church liturgy. Trying something like that could get a pastor fired in some parts of American evangelicalism, but I have an understanding bunch. 

But as I navigate these issues of worship styles and denominational particularities, I very often come up against something that always startles me a little: the widespread inability, among many otherwise mature believers, to distinguish between matters of their own personal preference and matters of divine appointment. That is to say, when it comes to issues of what constitutes the best or most appropriate form of worship, or to issues of "disputable matters" in denominational distinctives, many people, if not most, have a reflexive tendency to think that their own tastes and experiences amount to a divine fiat. It's not hard to see why--one might say, for instance, "I've experienced God working so powerfully in such-and-such a way in my life, so I know that this is how God works, and I want everyone else to experience it too!" In the cases I'm thinking of, there's nothing selfish or petty in this; it's usually quite thoughtful and well-meaning. But it misses something rather important, something that seems so obvious to me that it doesn't really seem worth stating. But I've run into this a number of times, so I guess I'll say it.

Every disciple of the Lord is different.

And that means that the ways in which the Lord meets and guides and grows each disciple are going to look a little different, too.

Maybe you're a Christian with a deep-rooted love for the Lord, who has found unspeakable peace in a quiet and stately form of worship. Just to breathe the air of an old church, to stand in reverential wonder with the people of God and sing the old hymns, to hear the precious words of Scripture spoken--it draws you deep into God's presence every time. But there's this other Christian a few pews over who can't seem to be quiet or keep their hands from gesticulating wildly in the air, whose manner just seems to suck attention in their direction, rather than cultivating the awesome, peaceful contemplation of God's glory, with attention directed to Him and Him alone. Don't they know, as the Bible says, that God is not a God of disorder, but of order? What's wrong with a person like that? It's a little hard to take, isn't it?

Or maybe you're a Christian whose heart is running over with the joy of the Lord. When you hear the songs of the church, you want to dance and lift your hands, to shout "Hallelujah!" and let the groundswell of delight inside you pour out in thunderous cascades of praise to God. But there's this other Christian a few pews over that seems frozen in place, almost inexpressive throughout the worship service, as if they've constructed a gigantic dam somewhere deep in their heart to hold back any trickle of joy that might threaten to break through. Their silence feels like judgment, as if they're assuming hateful things about you. Don't they know, as the Bible says, that we are called to rejoice in the Lord always? What's wrong with a person like that? It's a little hard to take, isn't it?

I've known both of these people, in many different versions, many times over. They're both good, solid, mature believers. And they both cannot seem to understand what lies behind the absolutely bizarre behavior of the other one. Whenever they look at the other's way of worship, something just feels really off to them, in an unnerving and unsettling way. Never mind the fact that both are devoted to the Lord, holding faithfully to biblical doctrine, and exhibiting the fruits of the Spirit's work in their lives--no, the way they like to worship is just a bridge too far, and there must be something wrong with them.

This is an important matter, because it speaks to the heart of Jesus's commands for his followers. Is it really possible to love one another as he has loved us? Is it really possible to "judge not," when our human nature is so quick to leap to assumptions about others? This is an issue of such importance that it even shows up in one of the last recorded conversations of Jesus. We want to know what to make of that other disciple over there, and Jesus tells us, rather abruptly, "None of your business." The story comes at the end of John, where the resurrected Jesus is walking with Peter along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, having just forgiven and reinstated him with the famous commission of "Feed my sheep." While they walk, Peter looks back and sees another disciple (John) following along the shoreline. "Lord, what about him?" Peter asks. And Jesus answers, "What is that to you? Follow thou me." (In the context, it's treated as a question of how each disciple might one day die, but the nature of Jesus's answer permits a broader application.) Fairly often in the Christian life, we're tempted to look at other Christians and ask, "Lord, what about that guy?" And just as Jesus said to Peter, he says to us: "It's not your concern. Your job is simply to follow me."

Rather than assuming that the person who worships differently than us, or prefers a different style of worship music, or is drawn to a different liturgical tradition must be wrong, we should give them the benefit of the doubt. No, more than that--we should ascribe the very best of motives to them. We should be able to look at the way others worship and think, "Wow, I don't really connect to worship in the same way that person does. I wish I could experience some of the joy / reverence / celebration / quiet peace that comes so naturally to them. I wish I could see the beauty of these songs / hymns / liturgical prayers through their eyes, and taste just a bit of the way they experience Jesus." Instead, many people seem locked into the assumption that the way God has crafted them to appreciate worship is the way that everyone should appreciate worship. In a somewhat alarming moment recently, I (who, remember, am planning to introduce an optional high-church liturgy service) received a comment from a parishioner who declared that they didn't believe that God liked "set prayers." That's not actually an uncommon sentiment for someone from a low-church tradition, but the confidence with which they expressed their full knowledge about God's preferences was truly impressive (especially considering the fact that--to use only one of many possible counterexamples--Jesus himself instructed his disciples to use a set prayer). 

At this point, the reader might be justified to say, "Hold on, Matt--you're calling people out for judging others, but aren't you also judging the people who do this sort of thing?" It's a fair question, but in this case, one of the fundamental realities of my pastoral office is that I must deal with interpersonal misperceptions like the ones described above as part of the weekly course of church life. It's just something that always comes up, and it's worth taking note of.

I should also say that this is very much a case of "There but for the grace of God go I." There's nothing innately better in my makeup that renders me untouched by the human urge to rush to judgment against others. I'm sure I'm so blindly stupid in many other ways that it all probably cancels out in the end. If anything, I'd chalk up my ability to see the breadth of the field on this issue to the grace of God working in my life in two rather unique ways: first, as an introvert, and second, as an Intercultural Studies major in college. To any who know me well, it's no surprise that I'm an introvert. I've learned good interpersonal communication skills, so I can fake it in an extravert's job most of the time, but being an introvert in a highly social context continually drives home the point of just how singularly weird I am. I'm so, so different from just about everybody else. And that's okay. It's not always easy, but it's okay. And this is where the grace comes in: my constant reminders that I am different from the other disciples of Jesus around me has given me long experience in acknowledging the rightfulness of others' differences. 

Does everyone like the same kind of worship I do, or act the same way in worship, or feel comfortable with the same things? No. But that doesn't mean that God likes my way best and not their way, it just means they're different than me. I intentionally give my praise team at church a relatively free rein to choose a broad variety of songs--some of which I love and really connect to on a deep level, and some of which I could easily do without. But you know what the funny thing is? Every now and then, someone will talk to me about a song that really impacted them deeply, through which they experienced the Spirit's grace in their lives...and it's often the song that I didn't care for. Just because something doesn't speak to my heart doesn't mean that it isn't speaking to someone else's heart, and part of my love for my brothers and sisters in Christ is to give them not only what I need, but what they need too. I know I'm different, and not everybody is going to connect with God in the same ways that I do.

My training in Intercultural Studies was also, I think, helpful in this. As a young man, I was initially preparing to go into cross-cultural mission work, which didn't end up being the road of my vocation. But even though I'm not directly using my degree, I wouldn't trade it for a different set of studies. In that field, you're trained in the art of not making assumptions--really, any assumptions at all--about the motivations of values behind others' actions. That's a really hard skill to learn well, and I'm grateful for the training I received in it. Interacting with people from other cultures, you learn to put yourself in their shoes right off the bat, to always give them the benefit of the doubt, and not to assume that they see things the same way you do. This isn't an argument for relativism, by the way; not a concession that we can't know right from wrong. Rather, it notes that there are aspects of our lives that are matters of universal truth, but there are also matters of personal preference. God made us both with minds to know the truth and wills to make free choices for ourselves, and both of those dimensions must be honored. Too often, American Christians make the mistake that an issue of personal preference--that is, one that is tied to God's gift of free will--is instead an issue of universal truth, and so we end up conflating the two and abusing the image of God in our brother or sister. 

The truth is, we all wear lenses that color the way we experience the world, even when it's the same world--the same objective truth--that we're looking at. Culture and personality are impressively strong lenses on our experience of the world, and most people don't even know they're wearing those lenses. They just see things as they've always seen them, experience them the way they've always experienced them, and think that's the way things are. Thanks to my personal journey as an introvert and my cross-cultural training, I generally have a pretty good handle on knowing how my lenses might be distorting my perceptions, and I try hard to make allowances for that. 

God doesn't wear lenses when he looks at us. He sees us as we truly are, knows us better than we know ourselves. Let's remember that when we look at the worship of another believer and see something that we don't understand, we ought not to think that that person has something off in their relationship with God, something that's preventing them from being able to worship the way we ourselves do. No, we ought to think, "That person has a way of walking with God that is so different from my own--maybe there's something I can learn from their experience that will help me deepen my own walk with God, so that I can appreciate worship in that way too." After all, Jesus is at work in the world--not making disciples that all look like me, or disciples that all look like you, but disciples that look like him, shining his radiance in prismatic beauty through all of the thousands of different lenses that make us who we are.

On the Unity of the Church

This essay is a follow-up to my previous series on the question of whether there is only "one true church" from among the Christian denominations (and if you haven't gone back and read it, I'd encourage you to do so). The apparent conclusion of that series answered the question in the negative: The claims of various denominations to be the "one true church," to the exclusion of all others, do not seem to stand up to the light of careful scrutiny with regard to their historical, biblical, or experiential arguments. Now, there's still some openness to that conclusion--it might the case, for instance, that the issue isn't a simple black-and-white question, and that there might be one church, above all others, that possesses the fullness of God's grace, whereas other churches only cling to a partial inheritance of that blessing. While that possibility remains, I've yet to see any significant evidence toward that end, and so I maintain my skepticism for now.

However, in this essay I'd like to flip it around and make the case that the answer to the central question--Is there only one true church?--should actually be Yes. There is only one church, and it is the Body of Christ, composed of all faithful believers everywhere. And further, our visible divisions ought not to be an obstacle to our fundamental unity. We are mystically united in Christ, through the Holy Spirit, and we have significant ways of giving practical evidence of that unity here and now.

The argument for the metaphysical unity of all Christians in the mystical Body of Christ is not difficult to understand, and it has been the fundamental conception of the church in some denominations (like Anglicanism) for centuries. It simply follows the Apostle Paul's argument in Eph. 4:4-6:

"There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all."

Essentially, since the Holy Spirit is undivided, then if he indwells one's church, the true believers in that congregation are part of the undivided church. Since there is only one Christ, there is only one Body of Christ; and if we are members of it, then we are part of the one true church. And since the Holy Spirit gives evidence of being present and active across the whole swath of orthodox Christian denominations (as argued in the closing section of my previous essays), all such churches should be regarded as part of the one true church. We're basically just doing the same thing that Peter did when he recognized the Spirit's work in Cornelius's family--since God has accepted them, how can we maintain a division that keeps them apart from us?

A critic from one of the ancient apostolic churches might argue at this point: "Isn't the visible unity of the church important, though? The early church was single and undivided, a unity held together both by shared faith and a network of offices established by the apostles, held in complete communion with one another." This appeal to history does say something valuable, but it's not as robust an argument as the critic assumes. There exists a counterexample that calls the whole premise of the objection into question. You see, we actually have evidence of a part of the ancient church, recognized as being authentically Christian, but which appears to have maintained an entirely separate life from the "Great Church" tradition (the tradition that eventually became the Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic churches). That is to say: we have evidence of a separate "denomination" existing in early Christianity. This was the Nazarene sect (not the modern Church of the Nazarene), essentially a Messianic-Jewish tradition which persisted across the first four centuries of Christian life. References to it are sparse because the group appears to have been small, but recent scholarship has revealed that the early church fathers regarded it as separate, but not heretical. It was a direct outgrowth of the early Jewish followers of Jesus, and while it may have been the same community from which the Ebionite heresy eventually emerged, a significant orthodox remnant of that community faithfully maintained a truly Christian set of doctrines. It had a robust Jewish-Christian theology, entirely acceptable to the wider church, yet it did not have any known aspects of visible communion with the Great Church tradition beyond their shared doctrine. Differences in language and culture, together with their existence in geographically isolated areas on the margins, appear to have kept them effectively separate. So, yes, there is historical evidence of a separate-but-equally-the-true-church denomination, existing from the earliest days of the faith, until they were gradually absorbed back into the larger structure after the public Christianization of society in the fourth century, probably reintegrated as part of the culturally-similar Syriac churches. 

Even aside from the Nazarenes, you could argue that a form of denominationalism has always been a part of Christianity from the very start, when linguistic and cultural divisions were causing factions in the Jerusalem church. There are evident differences between the Hellenistic form of Christianity and the Jewish form as early as Acts 6, and these are repeated in Acts 15, Acts 21, and in the curious disjunctions between Paul's letters and that of James. There is no overt hostility or excommunication of one another, but there is clearly a development of different ways of expressing and practicing the Christian faith. Beyond the New Testament period, these gaps persist. One can see major divisions in practice between Greek-speaking and Syriac/Aramaic church traditions; other similar fractures in culture accrue in regions which spoke still different languages: Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Georgian, Latin, and so on. These differences weren't just issues of style, either: they affected major questions of doctrinal practice. The Syriac liturgy of Addai and Mari, for example--recognized even by the Roman Catholic Church as an accepted and authentic form of ancient Christian worship--has no words of institution in its Eucharistic prayer, which in any other context is considered an indispensable element of Catholic practice. The culturally-different churches of early Christianity quickly developed their own ways of worshiping, which, while recognizably Christian, differed in some non-trivial respects from the way Christians worshiped elsewhere. All that to say, the argument that denominations did not exist in early Christianity is a little too much of a blanket statement to match the truth of the matter. The roots of denominational division were often clearly visible long before any official schisms took place.

OK, one might say--even if it's true that we Christians all share some kind of metaphysical unity by our incorporation in the mystical Body of Christ, isn't our lack of visible unity still a tragic thing? Well, yes and no. Certainly, the hatreds and persecutions that have arisen over division in the Body of Christ are tragic. But I'd like to argue that if we put aside the polemics for a moment, to pause and to "hear what the Spirit says to the churches," we'll begin to see with fresh eyes the great harvest of the fruit of God's work among our sister denominations and the beauty of our diversity. I also want to suggest that we have ways of demonstrating visible unity close at hand, for anyone willing to use them. Three in particular suggest themselves to me: recognizing Eucharistic unity, credal unity, and the unity of brotherly love.

First, Eucharistic unity. This one may come as a bit of a surprise, since it's usually listed as one of the main things that divide Christians. We squabble about our different beliefs regarding what is really happening in the elements of communion. Are they actually transforming into the flesh and blood of Jesus? Or is Jesus somehow spiritually present (but not physically) in the bread and wine? Or are they a purely symbolic memorial of his sacrifice? This was one of the great fracture-points of the Western Christian tradition, and it remains a sore point to this day. 

It's not an unimportant question. Indeed, in many ways it stands at the absolute center of our corporate Christian life. But as I've reflected on the question over the course of my life, I've gradually come to the conclusion that we're all coming at it backwards. What we believe about the Eucharist will certainly frame our devotion around its practice, but is our belief about what happens actually the operative agent of what occurs? We all have faith in God's miraculous power at work in his church, and we practice the Eucharist as scripture and our traditions have handed it down to us. It seems to me that under those conditions, it will be what God intends it to be. If God's intention was for it to be a symbol of Christ's sacrifice, then that is what it actually is, even in Catholic churches that like to imagine there's a metaphysical transformation going on. Conversely, if God intends for it to be the literal presence of the flesh and blood of Christ, why wouldn't that actually be what happens, even in a Baptist church, seeing as they are instituting the service of communion exactly as Jesus and the apostle Paul commanded it to be done? Granted, there's no prayer of epiclesis in the New Testament, and so that part is absent from the Baptist rite, but as we've seen, even the omission of the actual words of institution in some ancient liturgies is not an insurmountable hurdle. Might it not be the case, if transubstantiation were God's intent, that a faithfully orthodox church, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, would receive the efficacious change of the elements as a result of their usage--being exactly faithful to the New Testament prescription--whether they were aware of that change or not? I'll admit that I don't know for sure what is happening behind the scenes in communion, and that the early traditions are generally more sacramental than the normal Baptist conception, but I don't think the theological logic of any of that means that God's gifts are not actually present in the precise way he intended, even in a Baptist church like mine. There's at least an off chance that we'll get to heaven and find out that our communion has been the true flesh and blood of Christ the whole time (or, on the other hand, that the Catholics will find out that it has been a symbolic memorial the whole time). 

In short, I think the differences in our perceptions of communion do not actually add up to a difference in our actual reception of communion, and so our mutual participation in the highest rite of the faith ought to be a sign of our unity, accomplishing in each one of us everything that God intends we should receive from the rite. Indeed, this idea of the Eucharist as a sign of Christian unity is at the center of the first post-apostolic interpretation of the rite. In the ancient Christian text known as the Didache ("The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," and repeated in the later Apostolic Constitutions), there's a very early Eucharist liturgy which, interestingly, makes no claims about any of the things that later generations obsess over, like symbolism-vs-transubstantiation in regard to the body and blood. It includes neither the biblical words of institution nor a prayer of epiclesis. Instead, this is what it says (and it's worth considering it in full):

"Now concerning the Eucharist, give thanks this way. First, concerning the cup: 'We thank thee, our Father, for the holy vine of David Thy servant, which You made known to us through Jesus Thy Servant; to Thee be the glory forever.' And concerning the broken bread: 'We thank Thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge which You made known to us through Jesus Thy Servant; to Thee be the glory forever. Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills [i.e., in the form of grain], and was gathered together and became one, so let Thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Thy kingdom; for Thine is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ forever.' But let no one eat or drink of your Eucharist, unless they have been baptized into the name of the Lord; for concerning this also the Lord has said, 'Give not that which is holy to the dogs.' But after you are filled, give thanks this way: 'We thank Thee, holy Father, for Thy holy name which You did cause to tabernacle in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and immortality, which You made known to us through Jesus Thy Servant; to Thee be the glory forever. Thou, Master almighty, did create all things for Thy name's sake; You gave food and drink to men for enjoyment, that they might give thanks to Thee; but to us You did freely give spiritual food and drink and life eternal through Thy Servant. Before all things we thank Thee that You are mighty; to Thee be the glory forever. Remember, Lord, Thy Church, to deliver it from all evil and to make it perfect in Thy love, and gather it from the four winds, sanctified for Thy kingdom which Thou have prepared for it; for Thine is the power and the glory forever. Let grace come, and let this world pass away. Hosanna to the Son of David! If anyone is holy, let him come; if anyone is not so, let him repent. Maranatha. Amen'" (Didache 9-10).

Based on this tradition--likely the earliest post-apostolic Eucharist liturgy available to us--the first Christians were not much concerned with the question of whether the bread and cup actually became the body and blood of Christ (and if it was a point of doctrine, it was apparently not one requiring an emphasis in the ritual itself). If it leans in any direction on that question, it appears to be more toward a low-church conception than a high-church one, but it's left largely undefined--the closest we get is a description of the elements as "spiritual food and drink," which could be taken either as symbolic or sacramental language. What does jump out clearly from the text, though, is an emphasis on communion as an expression of the church's unity. The beautiful imagery of the individual grains from fields on the hillsides all coming together to form one loaf is presented as the great hope for Christian unity and the ultimate redemption of the church. It would be well to reacquire this early point of emphasis in communion. Just like disparate grains scattered across the hills, the various denominations of Christianity are separated by wide gulfs of culture, language, and differences in style. And yet, by the miraculous work of God's Holy Spirit, we are made one in Christ, just like the grains coming together to form one loaf. I believe that our common practice of the Eucharist is, in fact, one of the very things that binds us together, far more so than we have ever perceived. Christ's command to take, eat, and drink--a command given to "all of you"--has taken us, this wayward rabble of wildly different disciples--and made us one communion in his Body.

If Eucharistic unity is the first form of practical unity which lies open for us to recognize, another one is creedal unity. Just as in the first great church age, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed can be the irenicon it was always meant to be. It remains, to this day, the standard summary of Christian dogma on Trinitarian doctrine and Christology, agreed upon by all. You might ask, "Well, what about non-creedal types (like you Baptists), who insist that Scripture alone is the only rule of faith?" It's a fair question, but it misunderstands the doctrinal position of the non-creedal churches. Most of these, in fact, have come around to a recognition that creeds are necessary tools, even if we don't call them that (we tend to call them "Statements of Faith"), and if you apply for a job at a non-creedal evangelical ministry, you might be surprised to find that you are being asked to assent to a Statement of Faith (that is, to a creed). I've lived my whole life in the evangelical world, and never ran into anyone who disagreed with any single line in the classic Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. If they did, they wouldn't be an evangelical anymore, nor really even a Christian. The creed is a summary of core biblical doctrine, and so us Bible-only types recognize the biblical truth within it and generally have no trouble agreeing with it.

The creed also remains a source of unity for the apostolic churches and communions, despite their differences. Major creedal ruptures tended to happen after the fourth century (in which the creed was produced), so it still stands as a representative of the more-or-less "undivided" age of Christianity. Even later disputes that focus on the actual text of the creed, like the Catholic/Orthodox feud over the Filioque, are potentially easily overcome once we explain exactly what we mean by the lines we confess (for example, the Orthodox can say that they are referring to the manner of the Spirit's eternal procession from the Father; the Catholics can say they are referring to the historical procession of the Spirit in the divine economy as it played out in the Gospels and Acts). Such disagreements really do, it turns out, fall under the much-abused category of mere semantics, despite each side's continued declamations against the opposing one. 

My suggestions, then, are to frame our unity on these two aspects that really do matter to us all: the rite that stands at the center of our worship, and the statement of faith that serves as the classic exposition of our doctrine. That's not to say that we have to start doing these things together, as the ecumenical movement has so often tried to do (with relatively little effect), but simply that we can recognize our unity in these things. To be a member of the one true church is to receive God's purpose for us in the rite of the Eucharist and to confess together the biblical truths found in the creed. A Nicene church that practices the Eucharist by (at the very least) an obedience to the form as mandated in the New Testament should, in my opinion, be regarded as truly the church of Jesus Christ. This doesn't require a formal, institutional union, but a recognition of mutual brotherhood in the communion of the faith. My third practical suggestion follows on this: to seek a unity of love with one another, foregoing the fever dream of full institutional unity for something that is, quite probably, closer to what Christ commanded. The rule of love is what Jesus points to as the center of our unity: "Love one another as I have loved you."

But what about Jesus's prayer for Christian unity in John 17, praying that we would be one as he and the Father are one? Doesn't that imply a deep, real, abiding unity that goes beyond merely loving one another? Well, it depends on how you frame the matter. I would say first that there's nothing "mere" about loving one another. Further, given my prior arguments, I must insist that there already is a deep, real, abiding unity across the churches, because of the Holy Spirit's abiding presence. We really are one, in the deepest and truest sense.  One day the veil will be lifted from our eyes, and we will see just how deeply we were a part of one another this whole time. But I would also say one more thing: I think we're mangling the analogy in Jesus's prayer if we take it to mean that unity-in-the-manner-of-the-Trinity means a full visible and institutional unity, such that there would be only one "denomination." After all, it's an indispensable point of Trinitarian doctrine that there is a real distinction of persons in the Godhead--they are all God, but they are not each other. The Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Father, though both are fully and undividedly God. To interpret Jesus's analogy as implying a full institutional unity of the church appears to make a serious error of Trinitarian theology, dissolving the distinction of the persons into the unity of the divine nature. A more natural reading would suggest that the various denominations can remain themselves, as they are, while acknowledging the underlying metaphysical unity we already hold together in the Holy Spirit (thus, as the Father and Jesus are one: distinct in person, united in essence). The outward and visible sign of our unity would then be our love for one another, which is itself the defining quality of the Trinity's inter-relationships, the radiance that suffuses their union. And again, this is no "mere" loving one another, as if it's somehow a lower standard than institutional unity. If anything, it is probably a great deal harder. We Baptists need to learn to love our Catholic brothers and sisters, and the Orthodox need to learn to love the Pentecostals, and the Anglicans need to learn to love the Methodists, and so on. It won't be easy, but if my personal experience is of any value, it's more than possible.

As a closing thought, I would direct readers back to an essay I wrote years ago, on "The Beauty of Denominationalism." It strikes me that Jesus chose not just one successor, but twelve--twelve men with very different personalities, who all had to figure out how to love each other and get along together. This is our calling, too--our life as the church won't be made better by absorbing evangelicalism into Roman Catholicism, any more than it would have been had all the other disciples given up their identity, authority, and mission, so that Peter could just do everything for everyone. Rather, what we see in the apostolic missions of the book of Acts is that Peter and the other disciples, along with Stephen, Philip, Paul, Barnabas, and James, all exercise their own functions from the strengths of their differing personal qualities, and the whole church is strengthened as a result. I see the same thing in the panoply of denominations: we're better for having the Lutherans' untiring drumbeat on the refrain of grace, the Reformed emphasis on the glory of God's sovereignty, the Pentecostals' joy and expectation of the Spirit's work, the Anglicans' commitment to the beauty of moderation, the Anabaptists' patient adherence to the rule of peace, the Catholics' delight in the communion of saints, and Orthodoxy's rich vision of personal sanctification. If we were all subsumed into one institution, even if allowance was made for some differences in practice and culture, it would necessarily result in a gradual adjustment toward uniformity and a loss of some of these distinctives (a case in point is the way that Uniate churches--formerly Eastern Orthodox communions which joined Roman Catholicism--are now regarded by their old Orthodox family). An institutional uniformity that makes us less than what we are, I'm afraid, could be a tremendous loss to the whole Body of Christ. 

This isn't an argument for relativism, by the way--I'm not saying that Baptists and Catholics can both be right on everything, because that would just be nonsense. Take the question of the scope of the Pope's authority, for example. One of us is likely right, and one is likely wrong. No, this is an argument for recognizing that where God has not seen fit to grant us abundant evidence for settling a few secondary theological issues beyond the primary core we hold in common, the best response is charity for our differences and a commitment to loving each other in the midst of them. That's what brothers and sisters do.

This, ultimately, is the reality that I inhabit. I've fallen in love with the whole church, and I won't give any of it up. I have roles as both a Baptist and, weirdly enough, also as an Anglican (yes, really), and even as a monastic oblate in a 1500-year-old Catholic institution. These roles are not mutually contradictory--I am a Christian, a member of the mystical Body of Christ, and thus I am an heir of the whole church tradition, every part of it. Those who willfully dispossess themselves of fellow members of that Body merely end up impoverishing themselves, because we really are one in Christ.