Come to Jesus

I was part of a conference call recently with a number of young-ish pastors in our denomination where we were talking about Jesus’ prayer in John 17 that the his followers would be “one.” Anyone with even the most cursory understanding of church history will know that, well, we haven’t exactly done so well with this little ideal of Jesus’.

Indeed, we might be forgiven for laughing out loud at the idea that there could be such a thing as a unified church—especially from where we sit, 500 or so years downstream of the Protestant Reformation, swimming in the murky seas of the postmodern, post-Christian, post-everything, hyper-individualist, ultra-consumerist West where the (individual) customer determines what they prefer, where oneness is often thought to be not only impossible, but even immoral. How could we dream of imposing a single ideal upon all our wonderful, and deeply cherished individuality?!

And even leaving aside the reality of the existence of different denominations, what do we make of the bewildering variety of views within this or that individual group. The Mennonite church that I am a part of, for example, is not very large in the grand scheme of things. Yet even within our little expression of the church there is a full range of positions on every hot-button issue out there, whether it’s human sexuality, climate change, controversial theological topics like the nature of the atonement, universalism, etc.