Large Group #6 Debrief: Unity, not Uniformity

Speakers: Sam Elder and Pastor Jeff Liou of Lake Avenue Church

This week, we continued with our series Nuances of the Faith with a two-part talk, by myself and Pastor Jeff Liou of Lake Avenue Church, entitled Unity, Not Uniformity, based in Ephesians 4. I spoke about the need for unity in the church, drawing from verses 1-6, my own experiences here at Caltech and an article from Christianity Today. Jeff then spoke about the need for diversity, drawing from verses 7-16, his own experiences at Lake Avenue, and his studies at Fuller on race. Afterwards, we broke into three groups for discussion.

Here's a synopsis of what I said:

We read Ephesians 4:1-6. This passage makes a lot of sense. We maintain unity in our groups through peace, so you've got to be able to deal with conflict. Paul uses the metaphor of the body of Christ, that we are to be the expression of Christ to the world, here to argue that we should be united as one body. Christians all follow the same God, our Lord, and that unites us. There's one faith, one thing you have to believe, and one baptism, only one way you can become a Christian.

To clarify: Not everyone who calls themselves Christian is. Identifying the wolves, and distinguishing them from the honestly mistaken shepherds takes very careful discernment. But let me submit to you that there are a lot more kinds of Christians than the ones you are familiar with.

This passage can be hard to believe when we see so much disunity. As I mentioned in my e-mail, the first thing non-Christians often wonder about is what denomination I’m in. Even “non-denominational” has a certain meaning, too, which gives us a clue that maybe the problem isn’t just in what we call ourselves. CCF, being interdenominational as it is, has also experienced probably more than our fair share of disunity.

Let me share a couple brief examples, not out of a desire to criticize but a desire to bring this message a little closer to home. In the fellowship my freshman and sophomore years, there was a definite divide between the Avery cluster and the non-Avery cluster in the Christians here. I know it sounds awful now, but Avery Small Group actually entertained the thought of leaving CCF during that time. Thank goodness we didn’t and now we’re seeing a much closer bond with the other houses, a much greater degree of unity.

My second example is beyond CCF. My sophomore year, I began to realize -- gasp! -- that there are several other Christian groups here at Caltech. If you haven’t heard of them, there’s a Korean group, a Catholic group, LCF which many of you know about, and also a group called Christians on Campus. But many of these groups didn’t even know about each other when I found out about them. So last year, I worked to bring together representatives of each of the fellowships to meet for lunches six times throughout the year. I’m not sure it was incredibly successful, but it did lead to some fruit, such as one friend in LCF realizing he should help out with the Korean group.

Personally, unity and rigorous thinking have been the two things that I’ve been most passionate about bringing to this fellowship. I draw most of my motivation for unity from an article I read in Christianity Today, an evangelical magazine. We read the article.

As a takeaway, here is a list of attitudes you need to adopt in order to be united:

1. You have to be willing to truly love people. I explained this from a quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Human love for someone is desire for community and fellowship with them. Divine love is actual concern for their well-being. One way this difference shines out is this: If someone starts going to another fellowship or church than yours, perhaps a better one for them, do you rejoice or grieve? You have to be willing to trust other Christian groups than the one(s) you’re in right now.
2. You have to view fellow Christian leaders in your area not as competitors but as teammates, colleagues. “We’re all on the same team.”
3. You have to humbly recognize the benefits and gifts that other types of Christians bring. Do you think that speaking in tongues is useless? What about systematic theology? You have to learn to appreciate the gifts that others have and you don’t.
4. You have to be clear about which doctrines are “closed-handed” and which are “open-handed”. Closed-handed means that we must insist on these in order to call someone a Christian. A decent list is the CCF basis of faith. Open-handed means that we can agree to disagree. We’re not entirely sure what God meant, or we disagree on matters of practice, but we pick what we find to be the most plausible interpretation for our local church.
5. You have to be willing to deal with conflicts, rather than simply avoid each other. You have to be willing to go through the steps of Matthew 18 like we talked about three weeks ago.
6. Sometimes, we just have to have faith that God is going to do something good through our stepping out in unity. It can definitely feel awkward, because we picked our church and our fellowship to be the one we were most comfortable in. But it is biblical.

We then read the rest of Ephesians 4. Here is an outline from Jeff about what he talked about:

• "But to each one"
• This marks a shift to talking about the diversity within the body of Christ.
• Two options for looking at the functions of those who were gifted to the body of Christ
• One sentence: To equip God's people for works of service so that the body of Christ is built
• Pastors have one function: To equip God's people
• This is a post-Catholic, anti-clerical stance; Very American
• Three phrases:
• 1.) To equip God's people
• 2.) For works of service
• 3.) So the Body of Christ is built
• Which is it?
• Diversity of theological opinion
• Come from one's tradition
• From the church one grows up in
• From one's friends' shared beliefs
• Etc.
• Is a good thing
• Looking at these passages with different sets of questions is so important
• Liberation Theology: Asks questions about the plight of the poor that wealthy Christians overlook
• Anabaptist tradition: Because of persecution, inclines toward abstention from political processes
• All these are important to consider
• Reformed Tradition
• Abraham Kuyper – Uniformity: The Curse of Modern Life
• Against the French revolution which stripped all distinctions, Kuyper defends Amsterdam's diversity
• All arenas and spheres of life are encouraged to flourish
• Consider the importance of this for Caltech!
• Consider the importance of this for the arts, etc.
• Herman Bavinck – The Image of God
• We usually talk about this as if the image of God resides in us, individually, as monads.
• Quite the contrary, the language of the Bible is replete with communal consciousness
• Hence, the image of God is a collective one and that image will only be complete when we ALL reach heaven together, Jesus Christ not having lost a single one for whom he came.
• This makes much more sense of the Body of Christ language in Ephesians 4.
• Richard Mouw
• Reconsider passages like Isaiah 60 which seem to indicate that our diverse works, rooted in our cultural heritage, are of eternal signficance
• (this is over and against the idea that everything "earthly" is, "Just gonna burn.")
• If this is true, then in what ways do we need to press into, rather than neglect or run from, our cultural/racial/ethnic heritage?
• Stewarding our culture seems appropriate
• Causing other cultures to flourish seem gospel-ish
• Creating new things, as the Spirit is in the business of doing, seems to be part of the image of God in which we are invited to participate in the life of the creator spiritus.