Digging Out the Embedded Church - The Maranatha Community

energy required to meet other Christians, they did not actually witness or worship with other
than themselves.
I had dug into the life of that East Yorkshire town and found embedded there some real
believers with whom I felt at one. I knew that there were other members of the true Church
embedded in the existing churches in the town, but I met very few of them.
At the top of the street in which the Gospel Hall was located was a Continuing Primitive
congregation in what looked like an old-fashioned schoolroom. This small company had
refused, some 20 years previously, to join other Methodist churches in reunion schemes.
They conducted their class meetings on old Methodist lines, which mainstream Methodism
had largely abandoned. Not far from it was a neat, new, prosperous-looking Roman Catholic
Church to which an RAF lorry took Catholics to Mass each Sunday morning. In the same
street as the Gospel Hall was a large pseudo-classical-fronted Methodist Church, and towards
the little stream, as I remember, was a meeting-place for Elim Pentecostalists, earnest and
noisy. On a small rise in the town stood a large Perpendicular medieval parish church, once
the only church in the town, conducting its services with the measured rhythm of the Book of
Common Prayer.
Embedded in all these congregations was the true Church. And so it is today. Fifty years
later it is more important than ever before that the true Church should be dug out. It has
been embedded for centuries now in the churches of our land.
Not one of the manifestations of the Church can itself claim to be the one and only true
Church. Yet each manifestation, usually in the form of a denomination, has been created
out of sincere and earnest convictions, and to deny the importance of some of those
convictions is to impoverish the Church as a whole.
Schemes of union and reunion do not themselves address the question of how to keep alive
valuable distinctive denominational insights while, at the same time, creating opportunities
for experiencing practical united worship, witness and service.
THE AIM OF THIS BOOK
The aim of this book is two-fold. First, it aims to provide a brief outline of the history of
efforts throughout the history of the Church to promote or maintain Christian Unity. Heroic
attempts at unity have failed time and time again – there really have been ecumenical
martyrs! Yet always there have been hopeful signs and none more so than from the beginning
of the 20 th Century.
Secondly, it is an attempt to discover ways in which Christian Unity, as distinct from Church
Unity (the organic merging of denominations), can be experienced in 21 st Century Europe,
where Christendom has disappeared and the Church finds herself in a society increasingly
embracing secular and non-Christian world-views.
This book is written very much from a European and Western perspective. The title was
suggested by some thoughts of Alec R Vidler, underlining my conviction that 2,000 years of
history have covered from sight the true Church, which is not an institution in itself. Though
sometimes glimpsed in institutions and sometimes obscured by them, it is composed of all
who have come to acknowledge Christ as Saviour and Lord.
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