Unity As Mission

The Protestant consensus that American churches long relied on no longer exists. The effect is similar to the effect of disestablishment in Europe. We never had an official national establishment, but we have enjoyed a strong unofficial generic Protestant establishment.

There is no traditional religious replacement for the loss of this establishment, and what effectively replaces it is a consensus about the freedom of the individual to do whatever he wants. The normal resources that establish identity – family, work, community – cannot serve that purpose. Divorce rates are high, and families are broken; work is insecure; mobility and double-income households have damaged neighborhoods as sources of community. Se are told to construct our own identity but denied the resources where people have historically discovered their identity.

The church has an enormous challenge and opportunity in this setting. Alienation from God is at the root of these social ills, and the church is the steward of the mysteries of the gospel. But the churches’ proclamation of the gospel is to take not only verbal, but communal, social form as the church. As in the early centuries, the churches can provide communities of intimacy, friendship, and material support for lonely people; churches have the resources to give lost moderns a sense of identity with a community, a tradition; churches can provide support for failing families, and a network of brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers for those who come from broken families.

Now how does this lend support to the urgency of unity in the church?

There is an historical case (made by Brad Gregory) that secularism is a product of the churches’ disunity. As the churches fought over the meaning of the gospel, the gospel became less and less plausible. We could make the point more directly: If the gospel promises the reunion of the human race, and the church isn’t unified, can the gospel be true?

If the church tries to address the ruin of families and communities in our current state of disunity, we are trying to heal the disease with more of the disease. If secularism, and the fragmentation of our society, is the product of the church’s fragmentation, then a fragmented church cannot fix it.

Again, we can make the point more directly: If churches are going to provide fresh forms of community in our fragmented world, we need to be a community. If we want to give rootless people a sense of tradition and history, then our claim to have a tradition going back for millennia needs to be plausible. If we offer rootless people a church with a tradition going back only as far as the murky 1970s, we aren’t giving them much more than the culture already gives them.

(This is drawn from a lecture on “Protestant and Catholic in Late Modernity,” delivered at Covenant Seminary, St. Louis, March 6, 2015.)