Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

clear that leaders of the younger churches were impatient with the Western Church‟s
divisions, and had spiritual insights that we ought to own and follow.
One of these insights is that no one culture, race or nation can arrogate to itself leadership of
the Church. The Church is a truly worldwide body and expresses its faith in a vast army of
languages, races and cultures.
From its very beginning Christianity has crossed cultural, social and racial barriers. Many of
the persecutions the Church endured in the first four centuries were caused by a growing fear
on the part of the authorities that Christians had a universal appeal which, if left unchecked,
could become a destabilising influence in the Empire.
Kenneth Scott Latourette, in his seven-volume history of the expansion of Christianity, gave
the title The Great Century to his Volume 6, which dealt with the 19 th Century. Christians of
all denominations continued this expansion of the faith worldwide in the 20 th Century.
Away from the confines of Europe and North America, the Church is growing rapidly today.
There are now many missionaries from Asia, Africa and South America in Europe. All this
bodes well for a great expansion of „spiritual ecumenism‟. As never before, Christians can
now count themselves part of a global koinonia. The practical implications of this are that we
learn from one another, across the cultures, respect our differences, and celebrate our
common faith openly for the world to see.
But if there is to be unity in all this, a shared confession of faith must be found. It is the basic
conviction of this book that this has emerged over the years.
h) Ordinary Christians must lead the way. Unity cannot be imposed by decree.
Paul Richardson wrote an article in the Church of England Newspaper about Adrian
Hastings, entitled Ecumenism‟s Future, in which he looked at Adrian Hastings‟ biography of
Oliver Tompkins. Hastings concluded that the „organic union‟ of churches was simply not
going to happen; the complexities of church history were too great. Summarising Hastings,
Richardson wrote:
„The solution to the ecumenical impasse, Hastings argued, was for ordinary Christians
to take the matter into their own hands.
Whatever church leaders and theologians may think, baptism marks our entry into the
one church of Jesus Christ. Baptism and Eucharist should be bound indissolubly
together. The battle for Institutional Unity may have been lost, but this should not
prevent intercommunion at the grassroots – a de facto ecumenism that in the end would
transform the churches.‟
Richardson concluded:
„Perhaps the way forward is for us to practise “theological ecumenism,” to try to cross
over into different traditions and to ask what they have to teach us. This could lead to a
Page 163