Transcript
Roland Allen's final point, and this is, I think, the crucial point, really, is with regard to the ministry. And his great text here is in Acts 14, where you remember that Paul and Barnabas, at the end of their first missionary journey, returned, verses 21 and following, when they had preached the gospel to that city, that is, to Derby. They returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch. They came back along their track, strengthening the souls
of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations, we must enter the kingdom of God. And when they had appointed elders for them in every church with prayer and fasting, they committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed. They committed them to the Lord in whom they had believed. And sailed off. Back to Antioch. Leaving the local elders in charge. In complete charge. Now, who are these local
elders? They are people who have been converted, at the very most, a few weeks ago. We are not even talking about months here. And who are they? They are the local elders, the people of that place. Paul does not do what a modern missionary would have done, say to them, it will be a long time before you can develop a ministry of your own. Meanwhile, fortunately, we have a theological college in Antioch where we have some
very fine young men whom we have trained for the ministry, and we know that they will do just exactly what they ought to do according to the book of the rules, so we are sending, we are ordaining this man and sending him to you to be your priest, your pastor, your minister, whatever you call it. Paul does not do that. We do not know exactly how these elders were appointed, but they presumably were appointed in consultation
with the community as a whole. And it is from among these new converts that elders, now they are elders, they are not bright young men who have just passed their BD. They are elders, and elders originally means older people. They are elders. They are, in other words, the wise men of that community, the older people of that community. And they are made the people in full charge. From henceforth, the elder, the presbyter, is the person
in charge of the congregation. He is, I mean, presumably, although it is not specific. We have to assume it that he is responsible for the whole life, the ministry of the local church, the presiding at the Lord's Supper, administering baptism, and so on and so on. He is the local presbyter who is also called bishop. As you know, the two words refer to the same people in the New Testament. Paul didn't even require monthly reports from
them. Apparently not. No. Apparently not. He didn't even give them a course in keeping accounts, the double entry system. Well, says Roland Allen, there you have St. Paul's, the essence of St. Paul's methods. And the result of it is that in a period of ten years, Paul has established living, self-governing, self-propagating churches in four vast provinces of the Roman Empire. And that's what he did. All around from Jerusalem to Illyrica. He has done in
ten years what modern missions, with all their enormous resources, have not been able to do in a hundred years. Says Allen, writing, remember, in the first decade of this century, when there are hardly any of the so-called younger churches which are independent, self-governing churches. They are all still under missionary control. He has done in ten years what modern missions, with all their enormous resources, have not been able to do in a hundred years. Well,
as I've said, in some ways the crux of the matter is this matter of ministry. And in the second of his books, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, Roland Allen has a beautiful development of this. He takes an article by Bishop King, who was bishop in Madagascar, and then the general secretary of Allen's own society, the SPG, in which, in a very magisterial way, he lays down the following. Five steps which are necessary for the development
of a native ministry. And Allen simply takes him on a fork and toasts him, point by point. It must have given him great pleasure as a former SPG missionary. But here are Bishop King's five points. One, the foreign missionary begins to fasten on certain scholars and consciously to train them for future work. Why does he do this? Because he grows fond of his best pupils and tries to keep them near him. The majority of those he
teaches are clearly incapable of receiving a good education. They are good fellows, but they are stupid. And there are some three or four pupils whose intelligence is of a higher order, and whom he hopes to educate and use. In acting thus, he is naturally led to the only possible path of development in his work. He lays hold of the best elements in the race to which he ministers, and trains and wells them. And he is not
afraid to be done. He is not afraid to be called into a force which he can use. Now, OK, what is he doing? First of all, he is not taking the existing leadership. He is not taking the wisdom, the experience of the community that's already there, which is embodied in its older men. Then he is taking young people who are clever and quick and who can therefore be shaped according to the image that the missionary has
of what a Christian ought to be. Therefore, he is ensuring that the image of what a Christian ought to be, which he has, is the one which he's going to operate. Secondly, he is subverting the natural order of authority in the community. He is giving the young, clever schoolboy an authority over the old, perhaps illiterate, but also possibly wise, elder of the community. And thirdly, he is ensuring that he has, as the bishop says, a force
which he can use. A very telling phrase. He has a force which he can use. Which is under his control. Now, Alan, I won't read you what Alan says, but I needn't tell you that he makes mincemeat of it. The starting point is there. You set aside the existing wisdom of the community. My experience has been, and there must be others with the same experience, that in coming to village communities in India, one finds, of course,
that there is already an established leadership in the village. And those leaders will normally, at least in the time when I'm speaking about it, they will be illiterate. Because it's not a literary culture. But it would be absolute folly to suggest that because they are illiterate, they are not wise. They may be exceedingly wise. They may have a... They would not be in that position of leadership if they did not have wisdom. But it's another kind
of wisdom. It's the wisdom of knowing how to handle people. How to deal with clashes of personality. How to preserve continuity and unity in the life of the village. But, you see, what this does is to set all that aside. To remove it. And to take people whose only qualification is that they... They can be guaranteed quickly to become good imitators of the way of understanding things which the missionary has. Therefore, you are, A, setting aside
the traditional wisdom. And, B, you are subverting the natural order of the community. You are disrupting the community. In contrast to that, as I say, Paul, in his ethical teaching, falls back upon the conventional wisdom of his time. You go to any community anywhere in the world, of course there may be evils there. You may be able to pick on certain evils which need to be criticized. But you will always find that there are already there
ethical principles which are good. If I, again, take the ordinary Hindu village, there are very strong... There are strong ethical principles regarding, for example, the purity of family life, regarding sexual behavior, regarding the whole question of interpersonal relationships. There's a very great deal of traditional wisdom there. There is absolutely no justification for the mission to say that we are not a community. We have to set all that aside and replace it with something else. Well, then
the bishop goes on and Roland Allen says, so far from this being the only possible path of development, it is in fact not a proper path of development at all. Then the bishop goes on with his second of his five steps. The education of the first boys completed. They become a group of teachers or catechists. They can read the Bible, conduct prayer, give simple catechetical lessons, preach simple mission sermons. They will form a sort of ring
around the missionary. Some will live near him and help in his central school and church. Others will settle in the villages roundabout, take services, build churches, work schools. And thus, in due course, the mission outstations are created. Daughter churches to the central church where the missionary more specially works. This is the second stage of the work. When the foreign... When the foreign missionary has formed a group of native workers depending more or less closely on him.
Well, this is the pattern that has been followed by modern missions everywhere in the world during the past 200 years. The outstation, the daughter church, staffed by a young person who is not ordained, who cannot administer the sacraments, who is not fully theologically trained, but is entitled, is authorized to preach, to exercise the pastoral care of souls. Now, Alan says, look at that. Where in the New Testament can you possibly find a justification for that? Where
in the New Testament do you get the idea of a daughter church? What has happened to the promise of Christ where two or three are gathered together in my name? There am I in the midst. Is he there or is he not? If he is, is there, is that a daughter church? Is it a dependent church? Is it an outstation? Is the place where Christ has his headquarters the outstation and the place where the missionary has
his headquarters is the main station? How on earth do you justify this on any New Testament principles? And furthermore, leaving aside the New Testament, on the principles of ordinary common sense, what do you make of this catechist who, who is not allowed to preside at the Lord's table? Which is a thing that any elder of the village could do. Because after all, every father presides at his own family table every day. He's not allowed to do
that. But he is allowed to preach, to teach, to catechize, and to exercise pastoral care. Now this is the, as I said to you the other day, this is the ridiculous situation that I inherited as a young missionary when I first went to church. When I first went out to India. These so-called outstations, village congregations, served by local catechists and visited by an ordained pastor. The ordained pastor, the man who is trained in theology to
preach and teach, has no time to do so because he is a peripatetic dispenser of sacraments running around the congregations administering Holy Communion and baptism. And the local village catechist, who has not been theologically trained, is entrusted with the teaching and preaching. So that each person does exactly what he has not been trained to do. So that neither on the grounds of scripture nor on the grounds of common sense can one defend it, but it is
and it has been the standard pattern to which the church has developed. And it has had the enormously significant consequence. And I wonder whether this may also be true even perhaps in this country where to some extent the expansion of the church was carried out by these kinds of methods. That the church at its foundation has grown up as an unsacramental church. A church which is without the sacraments. Because in this situation, the sacraments, baptism and
the Lord's Supper, do not belong to the very being of the church. They are in the hands of a visitor who comes once a month or once in a year. Three months or once in six months. The church itself as such does not have the sacraments. So you have a non-sacramental kind of Christianity at the very foundation of the church. And I think that that still shapes the mentality of the churches, at least that I
know in India. And I think I have felt the same thing in visiting Africa. Then we come to Bishop King's third stage. Which is the college. Some sort of college must be formed which will ensure a better education to new boys who give themselves to the work. All alike agree that we must have better trained men. Underlined in italics. We must have better trained men. In consequence, some one missionary withdraws from pastoral and evangelistic work and
concentrates his efforts on a college. The best existing native workers are called in to help him. And a much more thorough and effective training, lasting three to five years, is given to those who have passed through the local mission schools. A determined effort is made to develop the spiritual life and mental powers of a few selected native boys. These better trained men come out of college prepared to work as catechists of a superior sort. Well, says
Roland Allen, the theory supported by Bishop King is beginning to show its weaknesses. The half-trained catechists have been put into an impossible position, and so they now have to be further trained in a purely Western and alien way of life. Very specially, they probably have to be trained to keep accounts in the way that a missionary expects that they will be kept. But, says Bishop King, we are still a long way from an ordained ministry.
That is, quoting Roland Allen, Bishop King, men whose character and piety we can sufficiently trust and whose mind is adequately trained to allow us to present them for the gift of holy orders. The gift of holy orders is seen as a purely personal thing which can be given to those who have been trained up to a certain point in the style that the Western, the foreign missionary, approves. And Bishop King criticizes what he calls the shortcut
that non-episcopal missions have taken. And here he refers to some missions which were experimenting in the Roland Allen method. A perilous shortcut towards ecclesiastical completeness which must be avoided at all costs. They have followed blindly what they conceived to be the practice of Paul and Barnabas. They have bidden each little group of Christian converts select a local man of good character and have appointed him to administer holy baptism. and the Lord's supper in the congregation
which has chosen him. They have failed to understand Now this is King's answer to Roland Allen. They have failed to understand that the first Christian churches were bits broken off the local synagogues and that they were usually to be found among the earliest converts men who had been well trained in the faith, the morals, and the devotional life of Judaism. The system does not work so badly as it might be supposed therefore, but when all allowances
has been made he, the foreign missionary, feels sadly conscious that he has let the reins of power pass from his hands and can only advise and exhort when he ought to rule. Well, says Roland Allen, it's a little odd for a Christian bishop to be saying that if a congregation behaves well that must be because of its Judaistic upbringing and not because of the Christian gospel. Which is a sound point whether or not it is true
that these first congregations were bits broken off the synagogue. The evidence we have, of course, is that the congregations that Paul is talking about did include converts from the synagogues but if the letter to the Galatians is written to these congregations which are talked about in that chapter as I believe they are it is, I mean this is the famous controversy between the North Galatian and the South Galatian theory but if the letter to the Galatians
is written to these congregations then it is clear that these congregations did not consist simply of Jews but did have substantial numbers of Gentiles in them who were converts not from Judaism but from paganism. But at any rate it is clear that the bishop puts himself in an impossible position by maintaining that Paul's method can only be defended because his converts were already trained as Jews. It's very difficult to base a doctrine of the ministry on
that. Then Bishop King goes on to his fourth stage the preparation of a native ministry can only come slowly. The clergy must be selected in due course out of the body of trained native catechists occasionally and to meet an immediate need a man of very partial training who has done long service and whose character has been well proved may be selected but as a rule knowledge as well as character, education as well as godliness are necessary
to a ministry which is to command the respect of a native church. It should be clearly laid down that a church has no right to expect to have clergy of its own in sufficient numbers until it can pay for their maintenance. It is gravely open to doubt if the clergy of any church can as a whole be trusted to put forth their best efforts if their success or non-success in no way affects their income. Well
that's an interesting comment on holy orders but the logic of this of course has meant in vast areas of the world where people are not accustomed to the cash economy where life is basically on a non-cash basis and where the community lives in a self-supporting way by growing its own products and where cash is only a very peripheral and marginal part of life it follows that you have to have if it is a basic
principle that a ministry must be that ministers, the clergy, priests pastors, whatever you call them must be people trained up to a certain educational level on the scale of the western cultural pattern and must be paid by the congregations to which they minister then it is inevitable that you will have the situation where it takes 20 or 25 or 30 congregations to pay for one pastor. The most extreme case that I know of is that my
own experience is with the Methodist church in South India where the Methodists were very very insistent upon the principle of what was called the parity of the ministry that all clergy must have the same salary that that salary of course therefore had to be fixed at the level that would be demanded by a highly trained graduate and therefore to pay the salary of a pastor of that qualification you would need about 50 village congregations. And so
it was normal in my young days in the Methodist areas in South India that one ordained pastor was visiting 50 village congregations. Well, it would be difficult to imagine a more total caricature of any New Testament picture of the ministry but it follows with logical necessity from the idea that the ministry has to be a body of professional people salaried and trained in accordance with the standards of the foreign mission. And then finally there comes his
last section which is the development of a native episcopate and Alan has no difficulty in showing that at this point the absurdity of the whole thing becomes completely clear because you are now suddenly asking one individual Indian or African or Malagasy or whatever he is to take the whole kind of responsibility which you have hitherto said in principle he cannot possibly pay. And therefore you have the breakdown as occurred for instance in the tragic story of
Bishop Crowther the first African bishop in West Africa who was appointed and consecrated through the insistence of Henry Venn a very far-seeing, pioneering missionary administrator but whose life was made impossible by the attitude of the local missionaries. Now all of this may sound as if I'm talking about something that applies only to so-called mission fields in the old-fashioned sense of the word but I think the basic principles are valid in any situation. The
main thrust of all Roland Alan's teaching is expressed in the title of his last posthumous book The Ministry of the Spirit. Alan was always trying to test every missionary theory by its relevance to scripture and when he went to the scriptures what he found was that essentially mission is the work of the Holy Spirit and that as I have tried to insist the Holy Spirit goes before the missionary that the Holy Spirit can be entrusted to
guide the Church to guide the Church into the truth but the Holy Spirit is a living power which is not just another name for our high-class educational methods and so forth and that the Holy Spirit works not by the imposition of a new law but by a new life which is equally available to a group of illiterate, illiterate peasants as it is to a group of university graduates that when people have actually turned to Christ
and have believed and have received the Holy Spirit then it is not our business to treat that body of people as though they were a class of children who have to be instructed and taught and trained up until they can stand on their own feet they are already the Church where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I and if Christ is there we have to take his presence with absolute seriousness and
we cannot therefore treat them as a body of people who have to be directed and trained and therefore and I think the question of ministry is crucial therefore the ministry of the Church will not be something that is so to speak given to the Church from outside the ministry will be part of the life of the Church from the very beginning and from the very beginning it will be the leaders of this local group in their
own culture even if it is an illiterate culture who will be the ministers the pastors the priests who will lead the congregation I like to tell a story which I think illustrates this beautifully and happens to be true I have a friend called Raymond Dudley who is retired now but who used to be the India Secretary of the old American Board ABCFM what is now called the United Church Board for World Ministries and he was going
around visiting the work of that board throughout India and wherever he went he met congregations which have been trained up rather along the style of Bishop King to expect that the mission board will provide everything and that they can rely upon the mission board for everything and wherever he went as foreign mission board secretaries used to be he was feted and garlanded and welcomed and fed and flattered and so forth and then pestered with demands we
want a school we want a hospital we want a well we want a... and so on and he had been doing this for about three months and he was getting very weary of it and the last congregation that he had to visit was up in Western India in Maharashtra and there he was as usual received and feted and told that the mission is our father and our mother and we are forever the mission's devoted children and
we want a catechist we have always had a catechist in the past we've not got a catechist now we cannot live without a catechist and you must provide for a catechist so Raymond Dudley in a kind of desperation he said to them kneel down all of you and somewhat surprised they all knelt down and Raymond went to the first one in the row and laid his hands on his head and said I appoint you a catechist
I appoint you a catechist I appoint you a catechist I appoint you a catechist and then he went down to Bombay and took his plane back to Boston as it then was the traditional answer even today even in what are thought to be sort of radical quarters is still that you have to say send somebody in look at the worker priest movement what is the worker priest movement it arises from the recognition that industry has become
a paganized area a mission field and so what do we do we send into industry people who are trained as priests in the traditional way so that from within industry they can then create and build up a new kind of Christian presence but surely this is to repeat the old mistake surely the what we should expect would be that it would be somebody who was himself already part of the industrial world a shop steward in terms
of English trade union practice somebody who is already an order accepted as a local leader on the shop floor in the factory who would be the person who presides at the Lord's Supper in this Christian cell within a factory for example in my own church to which I now belong the United Reformed Church of England and Wales there is a discussion going on now because we have a very large number of small local congregations that are
too small to employ a full time paid minister but which are very long established congregations whose members are in many cases very faithful there is a strong tendency to try to close down these congregations to get them to amalgamate with other congregations so that there can be a sort of consolidated consolidation of the life of the church and a smaller number of paid ministers able to minister to all these congregations I think this is a disastrous
misunderstanding I am trying to preach in my own church now that every one of these congregations however small it is is the starting point for a mission and that is the way to look at it it is the place where mission can begin and if our doctrine of the ministry means that that place has to be closed down then so much the worse for our doctrine of the ministry what we should do is to take the
existence of this congregation as the key fact and say how do we equip that congregation to become an effective agency for mission and the first thing obviously is that we authorize somebody in that congregation to be the leader of the group to administer the sacraments to preside at the Lord's Supper to be their leader and to lead them in mission and that our concept of the ministry has got to be changed in order to make that
possible and when you start opening that possibility up you discover that there are exceedingly able men and women in these congregations quite able to do that they just don't happen to conform to the image of a paid professional minister that we have so to come back to the question that I raised at the beginning what does the missionary have to transmit we have seen Alan's attack on the dominant idea of modern missions that the missionary has
to transmit the whole corpus of the Christian tradition of the church from which he comes in Anglican terms everything from archdeacons to harmoniums and everything in between now Alan if I read him rightly Alan is saying that the missionary's job is simply to transmit the gospel which means in concrete terms the scriptures the sacraments the baptism of the Lord's Supper and the ministry and Alan was as I said an Anglo-Catholic he accepted the Catholic concept
of the historic continuity of the ministry and therefore he would say that the missionary has done his job when he has handed over tradition handed over when he has handed over the scriptures the sacraments and the ministry and that these are the essential and that when the young church has these the missionary can move on he doesn't have to stay and train this church up to become a replica of his own church and that within these
these are so to say the outward signs of the inward reality which is the work of the spirit himself that where the scriptures are faithfully studied where the sacraments are faithfully administered and where there is a ministry in which continues the ministry of the universal church there the spirit is at work and the spirit can be trusted to bring forth his own fruits and that it is no business of the missionary to to mold this new
community into the forms which he has been trained to expect as the norm for the Christian life now this obviously raises the same some of the same issues that McGavran's point raises it raises questions about law to take a very acute illustration the example of polygamy Alan after he retired from China went to East Africa to live and there he was profoundly impressed by the speed with which Islam propagated itself and he was impressed by the
fact that this happened without any missionary organization such as the churches have that Islam was spreading through East Africa in a kind of spontaneous way without organization and he this strengthened his feeling especially meeting with the problem of polygamy that the church was was wrong in its laying down the law of polygamy as the precondition for baptism well that's a very controversial issue but it sharpens the point Paul obviously is not indifferent to ethical questions obviously
when the young churches tolerate sexual immorality as in Corinthians Paul doesn't just keep quiet about it Paul obviously regards it as an extremely serious matter and castigates the church about it but he does not apply a law he does not if I understand it rightly he still even in that extreme case so to say reasons with the church as being itself a responsible body which must make its own decision but this would be one of the
crucial points for discussion is Alan Wright in saying that the missionary does not bring a law with him not even the Ten Commandments that he is essentially the bearer of of these so to say signs of the gospel the scriptures, the sacraments, the ministry and that when he has transmitted these he has done his work obviously on the other hand there are certain differences here from McGavran's emphasis Alan shows no interest in simply church growth as
such he never suggests that numerical growth is the one measure by which one could judge missionary work I think he is more scriptural at this point because I think as I've said earlier Paul while he does not show an interest in mere numerical growth does show a very great interest in the establishment of a witness to Christ in every place and that is what Alan was concerned about Alan was concerned that the church should grow in
the sense that in every place there should be a living congregation where the work of the Holy Spirit is going forward and his claim is that by establishing these mission stations these mission bungalows missions were preventing this from happening they were obstructing the work of the Holy Spirit but I don't think that Alan would have agreed with McGavran's exclusive emphasis on pure numerical growth well I think perhaps since we are we have prayers to which I
won't say we are instructed by law to attend but we are evangelically invited to attend it might be a good point to stop here and we can discuss after coffee this lecture mission and unity and obviously this arises straight out of the things we've been saying in the last two lectures arising from the writings of McGavran and Roland Allen because with particularly McGavran's emphasis on the variety of cultures you remember McGavran's picture of the mosaic and
the necessity for there to be a form of the church within each human piece of the mosaic so to speak which is authentically proper to that community obviously the question arises where then is the unity of the church as I indicated the other day McGavran for example advocates that for the sake of church growth there should be different congregations in madras according to the different different castes and that would be felt I think by most Indian
Christians to be intolerable because it would be an offence against unity and unity is felt to be tremendously important and of course the classic example on which McGavran quite rightly falls back is the great battle fought by Paul for the independence of the Gentile Christians for the principle that the Gentile Christians are not to be Jewish assimilados they are not to be just Gentiles turned into Jews but that they are to be authentically as Gentiles members
of the body of Christ and of course from a Jewish point of view this is quite shocking to talk about a Gentile member of Israel is like talking about a pagan Christian it is simply a contradiction in terms but as we know Paul fights for and wins the battle to ensure that the that the Gentiles do have their own authentic character as Gentiles in Christ but I think one should always remember the other half of the
story even if one takes Galatians which is the sharpest expression of Paul's polemic on behalf of the independence of the Gentiles when you have finished the first part of of the story you remember how fiercely Paul fights even against Peter when Peter suggests that there should be separate tables that the Jew Jewish converts and the Gentile converts should break bread separately and Paul regards that as an apostasy it is a falling away it is simply impossible
we have the passage in Galatians 2:7 first of all there is the separation when they saw that I had been entrusted with the gospel to the uncircumcised just as Peter had been entrusted with the gospel to the circumcised and when they perceived the grace of God that was given to me James and Cephas and John who were reputed to be pillars gave me the right hand of fellowship that we should go to the Gentiles and
they to the circumcised only they were anxious that we should remember the poor which I was very eager to do so they go their separate ways in good fellowship the Gentile mission and the Jewish mission are to be distinct but then when you go on to the next part of the chapter we say when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned for before certain men came from James he ate
with the Gentiles but when they came he drew back and separated himself fearing the circumcision party and with him the rest of the Jews acted insincerely so that even Barnabas was carried away but when I saw that they were not straight forward about the truth of the gospel I said to Cephas before them all how can you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews etc.
if you have once accepted fellowship with the Gentiles which is already to go beyond the law of Moses and you then draw back what is the implication of it you are saying that what you did before was wrong but why did you do it because Christ made you and therefore he insists that the integrity of the faith itself depends upon maintaining table fellowship sharing the bread and the cup together even though there is also the acknowledgement
of the separateness of the distinctness between the Gentile and the Jewish missions and as we know in Ephesians the whole thrust of the letter is that this marvelous new unity of Jew and Gentile which is celebrated in chapter 2 is the manifestation of the mystery of the gospel itself in chapter 2 we speak from verse 11 onwards about the breaking down of the middle wall of partition the hedge of the law which had protected Judaism from
the uncleanness of the pagan world terribly shocking thing to say, Paul says that's been broken down the hedge of the law for which the Jewish saints had shed their blood has been broken down and a new unity has been created which is in the body of Christ and in the blood of Christ these are the two phrases that are used the body of Christ and the blood of Christ and one cannot fail to recognize that in
his mind there is the experience of the Eucharist where they share together and then he goes on in chapter 3 to say that through this the wisdom of God is shown not merely to the world but to the angels to the principalities and powers this is the manifestation of the marvelous power of God, this miracle of unity and of course this is linked with the Old Testament promise which is the background of the whole gospel that
in the last days God will draw all the nations to himself at Mount Zion the famous promise of Isaiah 2 which is perhaps the classical case the classical example of it but we have many other similar ones in the Psalms it shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills and all the nations
the pagans the heathen shall flow to it and many peoples shall come and say come let us go to the mountain of the Lord to the house of the God of Jacob that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths for out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem and he shall judge between the nations and decide for many peoples and they shall
beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks neither nation shall not lift up sword against nation neither shall they learn war anymore that wonderful picture of all the nations coming to Mount Zion to be the people of the Lord this is of course the background of the whole New Testament and here is the beginning of the fulfillment of it the Gentiles, the heathen the uncircumcised who were outside the hedge are being drawn into
this one unity in the body and blood of Christ and the supreme expression of this is in the great high priestly prayer of John 17 where Jesus after consecrating himself to the Father and consecrating his disciples with himself to be sent out into the world for their sake I consecrate myself goes on I do not pray for these only but also for those who are to believe in me through their word that they may be one
even as thou Father art in me I in thee that they may be one in us that they may be in us so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me and now here is the crucial verse the glory which thou hast given me the glory of sonship the glory of an only begotten of the Father the glory of the Son I have given to them so that they may be children of God that
they may be one even as we are one if they are the children of one Father they are one family as I said the other day God has no grandchildren only children and if they are children of one Father they are one family I in them thou in me that they may become perfectly one so that the world may know that thou hast sent me know that the name of Jesus doesn't just mean one of the
prophets one of the holy men one of the religious leaders but the apostle of God the one whom God has sent and that thou hast loved them even as thou hast loved me that this is the place where the love of God is actually present concretely not just an idea not just a concept not just something talked about but concretely here in this earth a community in which the love of God is actually known now that
surely is the crucial point unity as a manifestation of the glory of God in the midst of history and as I said the other day that is the heart of the Eastern the Orthodox understanding of missions and it's being validated today in for example in Soviet Russia where one sees people who have been indoctrinated all through their life with Marxism being drawn without any preaching or active propaganda being drawn into the life of the worshipping community
and as I say at the heart of that unity there is the Eucharistic fellowship and I think that one cannot read these words of Ephesians without understanding that this is in the background Ephesians 2:11 onward let me read from verse 13 now in Christ you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ for he is our peace who has made us both one and has broken down the dividing wall
of hostility the hedge of the law you are pagans we are the people of God the dividing wall of hostility he has broken it down by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances thou shalt thou shalt not that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two so making peace reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross thereby bringing the hostility to an end here is the
new reality which is the visible manifestation in the midst of the life of the world of the presence of God and therefore this is the place where disunity becomes intolerable and therefore we have the very strong language of Paul to the Corinthians who were evidently meeting in separate groups these different parties I am of Paul, I am of Apollos I am of Cephas and so forth which prevents them from meeting together and so he says chapter
10 verse 16 the cup of blessing which we bless is it not a participation in the blood of Christ the bread which we break and therefore he goes on in chapter 11 to rebuke them for their divisions at the Lord's supper and he says when you meet together it is not the Lord's supper that you eat for in eating each of you goes ahead with his own meal and so on they are breaking the unity and
this unity is not the unity of a private club as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup and proclaim the Lord's death till he comes it is not your supper it is the Lord's supper you cannot just eat it how and where and with whom you will it is the setting forth of the decisive reality by which in the end all will be judged and so therefore it leads out into the appeal to
all men to be reconciled to God and so therefore the love of Christ is the only way of a life of a life of a life for the love of Christ controls us constrains us because we are convinced that one has died for all therefore all have died and he died for all that those who live died and was raised again and therefore we are ambassadors of christ beseeching you to be reconciled to god the offer
of reconciliation is the heart of the gospel and it must be born by a reconciled community and therefore the question of unity is at the heart of mission when you are so to speak at the missionary frontier then the one question that matters is christ or not the other questions have to become secondary questions and that is the simple logic of the matter does it matter supremely whether jesus is lord or not if that matters supremely
then it matters supremely the other matters are secondary and cannot be allowed to obscure that issue and it's out of that missionary pressure so to speak that the whole modern ecumenical movement has arisen as we know and the ecumenical movement has struggled from the beginning to say what is the kind of unity that we are seeking there have been many different models of unity the most often quoted one but i think not most often believed as
the formula that was adopted by the third assembly of the world council of churches at new delhi in 1961 which spoke of it as the unity of all in each place in a totally committed fellowship which is at the same time recognizable as one with the church in every place but the emphasis on all in each place sharing one loaf sharing one cup preaching one gospel living one fellowship mutually committed to one another in the place
where they live neighbors becoming mutually responsible brothers in one family now the question is hello the question is does that ignore the differences of culture