Unity and Diversity- One Faith Part 1

Ephesians 4:1-8 As a prisoner of the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling the you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. 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. But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. This is why is says: “When He ascended on high, he led captives in his train and gave gifts to men.”

This verse speaks of a unity and diversity in that unity. It says grace has been given to each one. This use of the word “grace” means ability given through the Holy Spirit. So what does real unity mean? I think this is the question that must be asked to keep two destructive things from happening:

1. Cultural and traditional additions to the faith mutating the pure seed of the gospel and causing different cultures to feel they have to deny the God given things in their culture to become a follower Jesus.(Un-necessary legalism/ someone’s personal standard is imposed on me)

2. The Essentials of the faith being compromised and allowing the sin in other cultures and traditions to remain thus creating syncretism.(destructive relativism where all things are ok and true)

What is essential? What does essential mean? Well ultimately only God knows
Someone’s heart and can judge if that person is saved. But it is irresponsible to just leave it at that and allow people to go through life never challenged as to what they believe and where that belief will take them. Essential means to me all of what the Bible says a person must believe to be born-again, saved, and go to heaven. This is the minimal a person can believe and be considered a part of the church which is all those described in the above passage.

The purpose of this teaching will be to combat both of the pitfalls cited in the first paragraph. My desire is to promote discussion and create an awareness of the good tension between these two pitfalls. God requires unity but loves diversity. To achieve true unity as a world-wide church we have to accept and appreciate our diversities. We have to learn to appreciate the abilities that He has given others.

This concept has been on my mind for many months and has come out in these teaching letters over the months. Much of the tension within me in regards to the tight rope between legalism and syncretism and the wrestling I have done with God has been spawned by a meeting called The Foundry that I attend on Thursdays. The entire idea of the Foundry is to challenge the assumptions of the Christian faith and ask good questions. In other words, why do we believe what we believe? The format is a discussion. A question is asked to challenge an assumption and the idea is to open the floor for other questions that raise the level of discussion so that we leave with some good questions to think about. Hopefully this inspires individuals and groups to find the answers. It often gets heated and that’s ok.

What does it mean to find the answers? Are there an answer for everything? Obviously not, but sometimes we must challenge our assumptions to see that there is no clear cut answer. Hopefully this will lead us to realize that the people we think that we disagree with are not as wrong as we thought. Most nights at The Foundry two sides of the issue our presented as polar opposites. I think the leaders of the meeting push the discussion this way for us to see that polar extremes are not usually good and that most of the time “both” is the answer.

The last discussion was on community and the need to be interdependent. What is community? It would seem to have something to do with unity. Unity is my job now. God and my base have commissioned me to go out and work in communities and find what God is already doing and try to get people to work together. This is really hard. Especially considering some true Christians look at other true Christians and think they are the enemy and sometimes not even saved based on some non-essential doctrine.

The hyper-Pentecostal looks at the Baptist and says you are not saved if you do not speak in tongues and the hyper-Baptist looks at the tongue speaker and says you are of the devil. This is an extreme example but illustrates my point. The other danger is “ecumenicalism” and trying to get everyone “Christian” to work together. If a person or group is not saved, according to the Bible, they need to be evangelized whether they call themselves “Christian” or not.

So is diversity in our unity on God’ heart? In my opinion, yes. I have read many articles from denominational headquarters that have tackled one or both sides of this issue. Can this be dangerous? You bet. I think the key is open discussion and balance.

The first theme I would like to discuss in my writings is from Ephesians 4:13- until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and becoming mature, attaining to the fullness of Christ. There is a lot here and I have spoken on these things in earlier months. However, I would like to zero in on one part of this: Unity in the faith. To put this in context we have to go back to verse 1 of chapter 4 where it talks about living up to the calling that we have received. I said months ago that this was an invitation to carry the Name of Christ with full authority and responsibility. I said that this calling was already attained legally and we try to walk in it relationally and explained the difference.

This leads me to a huge point. The end of this calling is the fullness of Christ. It is not salvation from sin. Salvation is a starting point not an end. God wants us individually and corporately to achieve the fullness of Christ. As we reflect Christ, it does not matter where we go as long as He goes with us. This is the key to missions. Paul talks about pressing forward to the goal of the upward call in Philippians. This is heaven but it is also for the here and now.

As I was preaching about this last Sunday I explained a vision I had seen while praying over this guy I had met. It was a mountain with Jesus standing at the top waving him up and calling for him to come. Between him and Jesus was a winding path illuminated by light. Behind him was all dark. I then spoke over him the scripture where Paul says to forget the former things and press on. My sense was that this older man had come a long way in his life that was represented by the darkness. God did not want him looking back to see where he came from he wanted him looking up and trying to follow the lighted path upward to Jesus.

Not that God never wants us to look back and see where we came from just not all the time. We can get stuck there and never move on. This is what Paul was talking about in Hebrews and Corinthians when he said they still needed milk and were still talking about all the things of initial salvation when they should be talking about walking in the fullness of Christ. What I have found that so many lack an understanding of the essential things that we must have unity in to even talk about fullness is not wise. Statistic after statistic backs this up nation-wide. To live worthy of this upward call to come up the mountain to Jesus we have to understand the calling we have received. What does it take to bear the name of Jesus and be a true Christian according to the Bible?

There is much debate on this and some will leave out things that are essential and others will add things that are not. But the Ephesians 4:13 tells that there is ONE FAITH. If this is stated then I assume that means it is possible to find out what this one faith is. I think this is the foundation of any discussion of unity in the body of Christ. I think it is the bed rock of a solution to the two pitfalls cited in the first paragraph. This journey to fullness is not any easy one. But is has to start at saving faith. One man was quoted as saying, “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, in all things charity.” If the Body of Christ at large lived by this we would begin to see the scripture fulfilled that says the world will know we are Christ’s (Christians) by our love for one another.

To put our search for the essentials of the ONE FAITH into perspective let me share part of my journey the last few years. I was born-again into a Charismatic Non-Denominational Church that had a heavy emphasis on short-term missions, spiritual gifts, apostolic ministry, the prophetic, deliverance ministry, and some other things. I am grateful for all the things that I learned. I believe in all these things and was taught to walk in them. What I was also taught, more by watching than anything said, was that others had little to offer and at times it seemed like they were the enemy. We began to compare ourselves with ourselves and it was not good.

It is no different in any church I have been in and I am not picking on my old church. I am not exactly what this is but it is everywhere. It manifested itself in me by thinking that what I was doing was the only thing and my approach to it was the only way. I was dogmatic about things where God requires liberty. I had almost no charity or love at all. I wanted to be “unified” with people that thought like me and looked with suspicion at anyone that was not in my little bubble. This was both towards people in my own church and from other movements that I did not understand. I was so “super-spiritual” that I thought I had to right to judge what was and was not of God.

I see this attitude everywhere. I have been reading periodicals this week from denominations that I had never heard of until the last 8 months and would have assumed were filled with unsaved people. They all have good things in them but are isolated and refuse to learn from others. To use Nehemiah’s wall for an example, they are working on their gate that I think God gave them but could care less about anyone else’s gate and what the overall picture is. Their gate is the most important gate so it must be built. It must be built but it is no good if the other gates are not finished. In some cases, I think they are building with some of the wrong materials and their friend next to them has the right material but they would never know it because they do not communicate.

People look at the tower of Babel and say that God does not want us communicating to build something. That is wrong. He does not want us communicating to build something for our name. He does want us to communicate to build something for His Name. It is called His kingdom and to get a full picture of God we have to all types of people, races, economic levels and other things. The glory of God dwells, at least in part, inside all cultures. It is just a matter of taping into it by plugging that culture into God. Not into tradition of religions but into God. We need to start communicating and not fear tension or debate.

The next months will be dedicated to provoking discussion about what the essentials are. I hope to challenge assumptions and spur some healthy dialogue about what unity in diversity means. I challenge you to talk about this with someone from another church, movement, denomination, or lost person that may consider themselves Christian but is not saved because they do not have a revelation of the minimum to be saved. But we should be careful not to label someone non-Christian until you ask them what they believe and why? Do not look at their behavior because my fear is that yes we will know them by their fruits but I think we are so dogmatic about things that do not matter as much as we think that we are looking for different “fruits” than God is.

I will spend the next 6-10 months picking what I consider an essential based on a few things:

1. Exegetical certainty(sure of the context)
2. Theological importance(Does it paint a right picture of who God is)
3. Biblical Emphasis(What importance does the overall counsel of scripture ascribe to this)
4. Historic agreement in the church(That is the true church)

Here is my tentative list of essentials:

1. Salvation by Grace Alone
2. Salvation by Faith Alone
3. Resurrection of Christ
4. Deity and Humanity of Christ
5. Trinity
6. Sin Nature
7. Repentance
8. Atonement

This list could change through personal study, prayer, and feedback from you. I am not an expert on this and do not claim to be. I am interested enough to study it and report my findings to challenge assumptions and promote discussion and personal study.

When I am finished going through what our ONE FAITH is then I will discuss some other important but not essential doctrines that every Christian should know but are not essential to saving faith. These some call “cardinal” doctrines. These are the things that it is important to know and lack of knowledge can cause problems in this life and the next. But this lack of knowledge will not exclude someone from heaven. The third topic will be debatable issues that we should discuss as a Christian Community but are unclear. The message never changes but the way to deliver can vary due to culture, economic level, generational differences etc…

This will get messy for me and I am sure some of my assumptions will be shattered as I study all this. Please check out http://www.thefoundrytogo.com/ and see what we discuss every week. It will change your life. Next month we will discuss salvation by grace alone.