Yesterday – my copy of the Spring 2013 edition of Windows – a publication of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary – arrived in my mailbox. As usual I took a few minutes to flip through this current issue looking for a word that I need at this particular time and place – and – I found it.
A brief article by Theodore J. Wardlaw, President of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, titled “The Church: Communal, Diverse, and Hopeful.”
Following is an excerpt from this article which offers a very good word for us as we continue in our consideration of an inclusive language of arts for and in the church:
Many understand Christianity in fundamentally individualistic terms – as a matter between self and God. By contrast, the Reformed traditions insists, distinctively Christian spirituality is irreducibly corporate and communal – in short, ecclesial spirituality.
This distinctive – that the Christian faith is expressed in community – is at the heart of the Doctrine of the Church. Simply put, it means that we cannot be Christians by ourselves. Moreover, it means that Christian community is deliberately diverse – not like-minded, as if such community depends upon our sharing the same opinions on every topic – but as diverse as the human body. As St. Paul put it in his first letter to the Church at Corinth, “If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body.” Paul imagines eyes and ears and noses and hands and feet and all manner of difference depending, all the same, upon being knit to one another in a kind of biological unity.
Meanwhile, we practice the faith together in community; we become – again, in community – a “telling presence” out in the larger world, both in terms of our words and our deeds; and we nurture, as a community, a confident hope that even the future belongs to God! (9)
With thanksgiving and gratitude!
tmitchellmusic 