Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

Traditionally, the Church has made itself known to the world by its beliefs – the kerygma
rooted in the Scriptures and expressed in a Creed (which affirms the faith to its own people
and declares it to the world) and in a shared experience of the risen Christ, often expressed
sacramentally in Baptism and Communion. And these three elements of the Christian faith
(Scripture, Creed and Sacraments) are still to be found in the Church today.
In each church there are people who delight in the Scriptures and live by them, who confess
the classical faith as expressed in the Creeds and have a personal experience of Christ as God
and Man. Sometimes, sadly, these Christians are surrounded by fellow members and even
leaders of their church who, in one way or another, reject the authority of the Scriptures and
cannot assent to the declarations of the Creeds, and for whom Christ (and it is usually this
way) is not fully God.
In 1966 a famous debate took place in the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster among
Evangelicals in the UK about whether or not Christians should stay in or leave denominations
that had in them leaders and members who denied the traditional faith of the Church. One
side argued that the „remnant‟ should withdraw from the apostate body and form a new
alliance of Evangelical churches. The other viewpoint was that Christians should stay to be
„light and salt‟ in their denominations.
This is the stance taken in this book. In tune with the concept of „digging out the embedded
church‟, the call of this book is not for Christians to leave their denominations but for them to
maintain their witness to the traditional truths at the heart of their denominations and, above
all, to declare by meeting, worshipping and witnessing with Christians of other
denominations that these truths really are a uniting force.
At a recent united service I attended near to my home, I heard a call for Christians to work
with other Christians openly in the community and not just to work within one‟s own church.
The speaker saw the danger of adding extra meetings and efforts to churches often heavily
loaded with work and so suggested that it was not extra ecumenical activities that we had to
think up, but to do ecumenically with each other what was already being done.
From my own experience I can say how helpful this idea is. I was a worker at a mission hall
in Lancashire for many years and we did evangelism the best we knew how. But we were one
church among several, each doing its own thing. Then one year we combined with four other
churches for a special enterprise. The reaction of the local people changed positively as we
approached them in witness, for we were not representing the „Town Mission‟ (an individual
group) but the churches of the area together in our combined effort.
It seems to me that to go for the creation of one organisation to which all denominations
belong is not desirable. The Church should be able to show its unity without displacing timehonoured
structures of church government like the historic episcopate, the rule of elders over
a local congregation or local synods, any more than Baptists should abandon believers‟
baptism or Presbyterians infant baptism.
In this book we shall look at a number of attempts that have been made in the history of the
Church to get to the bottom of the question, „In what does Christian Unity consist?‟ We shall
try to find out why they failed, and then we shall ask what relevance those attempts have for
us today in the 21 st Century.
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