Many years ago, a lovely man, who would do anything for the Church and was one of the best evangelists I have ever met, but who would have “nothing to do with God and all that stuff” commented one time that if I claimed that there was only one God, why did we need three different Churches in the village. I can’t remember my response, but guess that it was something trite and unimaginative, but the question has whirred around in my mind ever since. The fact is, looking back that the three Churches were very different in what they were offering and were appealing to different groups of people in the village. A smart answer might have been to point out that we had half a dozen or so different shops in the village, they were all shops, doing the same thing, selling to consumers, but each was offering a different choice of products.
So why is it that the Christian Church over two thousand years has divided into denominations? The main reason is that over time, people have had different opinions about how Church should do things, there have been differing views on when baptism should happen, some see Baptism as being the point of entry into the Church, therefore small babies are Christened, sadly because history shows that infant mortality was so high, that it was important to mark their Christianity immediately after birth. My father was born in 1903 and was Christened just over a week after his birth, because my grandparents had lost three small babies previously I understand. Others believe that we should be baptised as Jesus was, by full emersion when we come to faith, to be cleansed form our sins and mark a new beginning. Churches have different view on how we worship, how we manage the administration, our understanding and interpretation of the Bible and a whole host more.
The week the Church in the UK shares in a week of prayer for Christian unity, what does that mean? Ipswich, my local town has a population of around 135k people and we have eight-five different Churches, covering a huge range of different styles and traditions. Do we mean, when we talk about Christian Unity that there should be just one Church, offering one expression? No, I don’t believe that is what we are praying for, the word for that kind of response would be Union. What I pray for in a week of prayer for Christian unity is that despite our different approaches how we do things, we should be united in our Love for God, and in our desire to model our lives on the teaching of Jesus Christ and walk shoulder to shoulder, witnessing for Christ together. Unity only comes, when we rejoice in each other’s traditions, celebrate what they doing and recognise that theirs will be the style of being Church that will appeal to some, rather than focussing on our differences, we have strength in Unity!