A letter from the Chairman
Dear Friends,
I thought it the right moment to say something this time about unity.
Jesus prays, yearns, longs and has a passion for the unity of his people. If we know the heart of Jesus, if we spend time, even for only a few minutes a day, at the heart of the Almighty, listening to him, we cannot avoid the fact that the passion of the Lord's heart is the same as it was two thousand years ago: 'Father, I pray that they may be one...' (JOHN 17:21.) Unity lies at the very heart and depth of God's being. The unity we are talking about is not the unity of an Islamic god or a Buddhist god or any other monistic god. I t is the unity which is uniquely Christian: Father, Son and Holy Spirit - at the heart of the universe, sharing together, enjoying one another together, never at variance, the Son doing the Father's will but knowing that if he asks for twelve legions of angels the Father will change his will because they work together in their intimate unity. That is the kind of unity we are talking about when we speak of the unity of God's people.
When we talk about building unity or working for unity it's almost an insult. We cannot create unity, we cannot invent it, we cannot add to it. It's something that God gives us - and when he gives it to us and we gladly and willingly receive it, the world sees something that it has never seen before. Unity is a gift that God gives us.
It's not surprising therefore that our unity is going to be one of the most important areas of defence for us and one of the most strategic places for attack from the enemy. The enemy is bound to attack your relationship with the persons you are closest to, the people you are working alongside. He would be a fool not to. We have got to discover how to live not in the naturalness of our own unities, within our churches and across the boundaries of our denominations, but in the gift that God gives us of love for one another, for the household of God as well as for the whole human race.
We don't work for unity, it is a gift. This doesn't mean to say we shouldn't seek the Lord to find out how that oneness is expressed in us. Of course we must do. Personally speaking, I don't worry about the 22,000 denominations in the world! They give us first of all an opportunity to understand the God who is a unity but a diversity, who has a variety within himself, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and yet in himself is a unity. You see any sort of unity we could achieve for ourselves would be rather bland and insipid, if it is without variation. That's not the sort of unity that the Church is meant to have. There are bound to be differences and varieties.
We want this variety because Jesus said Baptists can love Baptists and Anglicans can love Anglicans because tax collectors can love tax collectors without any grace at all, without any charis, (LUKE 6: 32-4, MATTHEW 5: 42) It's when you meet somebody different from yourself that you demonstrate whether you have got grace or not It's when you love across the barriers of sameness into differentness. That's the demonstration of the grace of God and that is why it's a grace that God has to give us to love one another. You can't love people without meeting them, can you? You do have to spend some time with people and get to know them if you are going to love them. We need to obey the Lord and to love one another across those boundaries. Outdo one another in love. I don't owe anyone anything but to love them. Jesus is longing to see masses of different people in different movements in different expressions of Christianity so loving one another that they join hands and refuse to budge until they see at last this Good News carried into all the world and then the end shall come.
This unity is not unanimity, that is an agreement with every single jot and tittle of our minds. No human being will ever be completely and utterly in agreement with anybody else because we are in this great variety that God has made. It would not be healthy for us to be a clone exactly thinking the same as every single other person. That is not spiritual life. It is by disagreement and further understanding that we break through into new insights. We will not always exactly agree.
Neither is it a uniformity, that is a similar pattern that is institutionally imposed upon us all. Of course we all break bread but isn't it interesting that we are never told in the Bible how to take communion? It just says, do it. Was the cup passed round first or second, did it go round tw1ce? Or four times like at the Jewish Passover Feast? We are not quite sure. When the Lord said, "Do this in remembrance of me", he just said, "Do it". And we all do it in different ways.
It is a relationship or family unity - your Father is my Father. If we have a common Father, we have the same life his. Are we going to fall out? Now that Father is defined in the terms of His providence and care for us, for apart from anything else He has given us His Spirit. Father goes on giving the Spirit to those who go on asking. And so if we all have the gift of the Spirit from the Father and all equally have a claim as children upon that Father, that is the oneness we begin with LUKE 11:13. Father gives to his children what is best for each - why should we be envious and fight? We can always share.
Phil
Editorial note.
What an amazing God we have. I hear Phil’s message as confirming what He
is saying to the Church and pray urgently that we will listen.
I trust Him to deal with the
content of each issue and know that there will be links that I could not
plan. Now hear this. I wrote the editorial before receiving Phil’s letter.