We will need a miracle

We have all had experiences of groups trying to be ‘one’.

I like watching sport and I think part of the reason team sport is an important part of the human experience is that it gives structured opportunities for human beings to experience a taste the kind of oneness we crave.

When a good basketball or football team is playing well it is almost magical. Players somehow intuitively know where each other are on the court or field and pass the ball, not to where their teammate is, but to where their teammate will be when the ball arrives. It is a beautiful thing to watch and can give a false hope to fans who assume their team should always be able to operate like that. Sport gives us glimpses both about how beautiful being one can be and how difficult it is to achieve in an ongoing way.

Over the last fifty years I have spent much of my adult life in different expressions of intentional Christian community. Each one of those communities were made up of followers of Jesus who had chosen to share life by living in proximity to one another and living from a shared set of values. They were attempting to be one.

I learned a lot from each experience, but the overriding lesson from all of the experiences was that attempting to ‘be one’ with other people is profoundly difficult and can even cause significant harm.

Whether it was a dairy farm in rural Victoria, a repurposed convent in Broken Hill, a couple of houses in Hobart, a shelter for homeless teenagers beside the beach on the outskirts of Melbourne, or a whole village in the heart of Tasmania, there were moments of profound connection and beauty alongside moments of deep pain.

I write as one who carries emotional scars and even some level of trauma from times when the attempt to ‘be one’ went wrong.

There is a deep part in all of us that longs for community, but all of us have experienced the pain of relationships that didn’t work out as we hoped and we carry scars from times we opened up to people only to be let down. Some of the saddest examples of that are where people in leadership who we should be able to trust end up causing us and others harm.

It is important for us not to be idealistic about Jesus’ vision. He isn’t. He knows we both long for community but have never fully experienced it. He knows that we come into every set of relationships hoping that this time it will be different, and the traumas of our personal histories mean we have a picture of what the ideal community should look like.

The truth is that your experiences to this point cannot prepare you for what it means to be one with other people. Whatever you imagine a healthy community to be will be only a partial and imperfect vision that can itself be the problem. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:

Every human idealized image that is brought into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be broken up so that genuine community can survive. Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.[1]

Here we glimpse the first of two profound implications of Jesus’ prayer that we would be one “just as you are in me and I am in you.”

Jesus knew that we couldn’t possibly imagine a truly healthy community because our own needs would always creep in and colour our ideal. Jesus’ prayer for us is that we experience the kind of community that he experiences as part of the Trinity.

We will need the help of both the Holy Spirit and the bible here, because for most of us, even our picture of the Trinity will be shaped by our own limited understandings and histories. As Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Trinity is the ultimate expression of oneness. They are the ultimate expression of community.

The oneness of the Trinity

Stanley Grenz says that “Throughout all eternity the divine life—the life of the Father, Son, and Spirit—is best characterized by our word ‘love.’ Love, therefore, that is, the reciprocal self-dedication of the trinitarian members, builds the unity of the one God.”[2]

Jesus understands that the one thing that should stand out above all others in his church should be it’s love and not, as McGavran says, its growth. This is the North Star, that we should be a community of love, striving to emulate the ultimate community of love.

II love the description of the Trinity in Baxter Kruger’s book, The Great Dance.

God is not some faceless, all-powerful abstraction. God is Father, Son and Spirit, existing in a passionate and joyous fellowship. The Trinity is not three highly committed religious types sitting around some room in heaven. The Trinity is a circle of shared life, and the life shared is full, not empty, abounding, and rich and beautiful, not lonely and sad and boring. [3]

The kind of relationships Jesus wants for us are as wholehearted, joyful and passionate as the relationship he enjoys with his Father.  Because, as human beings we are created in the image of God, there is part of us that knows that is what we are built for. Parker Palmer points out that:

We are formed by the lives which intersect with ours. The larger and richer our community, the larger and richer is the content of the self. There is no individuality without community; thus, the surprising finding that an affluent suburb with all its options, but without community, may nurture individuality less than a provincial village with few choices but a rich community life… the way to self, and to self-health, is the way of community.[4]

The deep human longing for community is reflected in McCrindle research that asked respondents to name what they would expect to see in a flourishing community. Notice how their top 6 responses echo Kruger’s description of the life of the Trinity: laughing and having fun together (51%), ease of conversation (49%), inclusive and accepting of others (44%), feeling seen, known and valued (40%) and frequent communication and connection (39%).[5]

It is no wonder that Jesus assumed a community that reflected the life of the Trinity would be why the world would believe God sent him to us.

As we open ourselves to the implications of Jesus’ prayer, we discover our need to put relationships back at the heart of our faith. Stanley Grenz puts it this way:

Because God is the social Trinity, a plurality in unity, the ideal for humankind kind does not focus on solitary persons, but on persons-in-community. God intends that we reflect his nature in our lives. This is only possible, however, as we move out of our isolation and into relationships with others. The ethical life, therefore, is the life-in-relationship, or the life-in-community.[6]

So the first aspect of Jesus’ prayer is that our vision for what it means to be one should not be based on our own fantasies of the kinds of relationship we feel we need, but rather based on the incredible and ultimate picture of loving community: the Trinity and that our measurable goal should be that our churches prioritize relationship above all else.

The second implication of Jesus’ prayer is that what we would normally mean by being ‘one’ is not what Jesus means by the word.

For us, being ‘one’ means typically being ‘the same.’ It means everyone looking, talking and acting in the same way.

One of the fears many people have with religion is that it results in a loss of individuality. Our experience of the workplace has been shaped by an industrial revolution that created systems in which lots of people could work together to produce incredible outcomes because they were placed in structures where each person was only responsible for a small part of the task of the whole.

Before the industrial revolution a shoemaker would purchase the leather and twine they needed and then make a shoe to fit the customer whose feet they had just measured. After the industrial revolution the task of making a shoe was divided up into a series of distinct tasks. People would stand in an assembly line and repetitively do the same small task, such as pulling a lever to punch out the leather for a shoe, over and over again.

We learned that the best way to get things done was in a hierarchical structure that allowed one person to manage the actions of many people towards a goal. As Sociologist John McKnight pointed out, these structures are incredibly efficient at producing a great deal of the same thing (whether goods or services)[7] at a consistent quality.

This hierachical system enables me to purchase a Big Mac anywhere in the world and know what to expect, despite the fact the person cooking my dinner is 15 years old. It also means that we can produce aeroplanes that actually fly and have a flight crew where it is clear that the pilot and not the cabin steward is in charge.

None of this is a bad thing, however what a hierachy is not good at doing is dealing with or accomodating individuals. The Big Mac is only predictable as long as the cook doesn’t decide to get creative and simply follows the exact same behaviours that the other 15 year old on the other side of the world is following.

We live in a world where this hierachical model is the dominant organisational paradigm not only for fast food restaurants but also for social service organisations and even churches.

A hierachy can produce programs and services consistently, as long as the people who are delivering the programs and services are happy to follow the policy manual and that the client of the organisation (McKnight points out that the Greek root for the word ‘client’ means ‘one who is controlled.’[8]) wants exactly the same program or service as the last person to access it.

With this in view, it would not be surprising if you recoiled at the idea of ‘being one’ because you will have had first-hand experience with the fact that the organisations that are the most effective are the ones in which both staff and clients are forced to sacrifice their individuality.

This has been as true in the church as in other sectors of society. The Mega-church model depends on the Pastor being a CEO and the church delivering consistent programs for different demographics. In this model it is hard to avoid church members becoming clients.

The good news is that that’s not the kind of oneness Jesus envisions for his church. When Jesus prays that we might enjoy the same relationship with each other that he enjoys with God the Father he is modelling a very different way of relating than an organisational hierarchy.

The early church spent a lot of time wrestling to understand the relationship between Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit. The word they came up with to name that particular kind of oneness was “Perichoresis.”

Perichoresis is a word to describe the beautiful mystery at the heart of the Trinity, as each member is ‘in’ each other, each being fully God, yet at the same time, they were three distinct persons. It describes the kind of community we all long for, where we can be fully ourselves and yet profoundly in relationship.

When Jesus prayed that we would be one, as he and the Father were one, he was praying for a special kind of miracle where we exist deeply ‘in’ each other as one and maintain our individuality.

Perhaps the best definition I have come across of this kind of relationship was not written by a theologian but by a rock and roll singer:

One love, one blood

One life, you got to do what you should

One life, with each other

Sisters, brothers

One life but we’re not the same

We get to carry each other, carry each other

One

One, but not the same is perhaps the simplest way I have heard to describe both the relationship of the Trinity and the kind of communal life that the church is called to emulate.

I love that the kind of church we are called to be is one in which each of us is being beckoned into deeper and richer expression of our individuality, and yet at the same time, deeper and richer experience of being one with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Stanley Grenz writes:

Our understanding that the God we know is triune forms the foundation for our Christian ethic. Insofar as God is the ultimate model and standard for humankind, the essential nature of God forms the paradigm for the life of the Christian and of the Christian community[9]

As we begin to realise the seismic significance of Jesus’ John 17 prayer, much of emphasis of the New Testament starts to make more sense:

May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ Jesus, so that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. [10]

“Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called–“[11]

“make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose.”[12]

“Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful.”[13]

At no point does the New Testament writers direct the early church to focus on growing the church, but it seems like every epistle is specifically aimed at helping the church understand the very practical implications of being the one-but-not-the-same church that Jesus prayed for.

When the Apostle Paul was trying to help the cantankerous Corinthian church envision what they should be seeking to become he reached for the metaphor of the human body. He wanted them to understand that they were all part of the one body, but that there will be fundamental differences between individuals… and those difference are not a bug in the system, they are a feature.

He writes:

Now, the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

1 Corinthians 12:14-20 NIV

Donald McGavran rightly discerned that people find it easier to spend time with people who are like them, and it is far easier to build a church on that basis, the only problem is when we take that approach, the thing we are building is less a church and more a Tower of Babel.

The tower of Babel was an effort by human beings to get to God in their own strength. The story, recorded in Genesis 11, stands as a warning for those of us wanting to build big things according to our own plans. Christopher Watkins says of the Babel builders, “rather than playing a role in God’s story (filling the earth and subduing it), these people want God to play a supporting role in their story.”[14]

The extreme danger in organising churches around using corporate strategy and structure is that we don’t actually need God.

Jesus doesn’t expect us to build his church, he reserves that task for himself.[15] He wants his church to be a miracle and not a management plan so he gives us a North Star that will call into question all of our strategies and capacities: One, but not the same.

The kind of community Jesus prays for will stretch you in ways you can’t even imagine. Your prejudices and blind spots will constantly be revealed, and there will always be some people you will need special help to love. Parker Palmer names the truth of it when he writes:

In a true community we will not choose our companions, for our choices are so often limited by self-serving motives. Instead, our companions will be given to us by grace. Often they will be persons who will upset our settled view of self and world. In fact, we might define true community as that place where the person you least want to live with always lives![16]

If this is the kind of community Jesus is calling us to, then it is self-evident that we simply cannot rely on our own resources. We will need a miracle, and that’s ok.

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[1] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works) Location 669

[2] Grenz, Stanley J.. Theology for the Community of God (pp. 71-72). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

[3] C. Baxter Kruger The Great Dance (2000), page 22

[4] Palmer, Parker. A Place Called Community (Pendle Hill Pamphlets Book 212) (p. 13). Pendle Hill Publications. Kindle Edition.

[5] McCrindle Research Pty Ltd, The changing faith landscape of Australia report, page 48

[6] Stanley J. Grenz. Theology for the Community of God (Kindle Locations 1277-1279). Kindle Edition.

[7] John L. McKnight (1997). A 21st-century Map for Healthy Communities and Families. Families in Society, 78(2), 117–127

[8] ibid

[9] Grenz, Stanley J.. Theology for the Community of God (p. 76). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

[10] Romans 15:5-6 NIV

[11] Ephesians 4:3-4 NIV

[12] Philippians 2:2 NIV

[13] Colossians 3:15 NIV

[14] Watkin, Christopher. Biblical Critical Theory (p. 208). Zondervan Academic. Kindle Edition.

[15] Matthew 16:18

[16] Palmer, Parker. A Place Called Community (Pendle Hill Pamphlets Book 212) (p. 23). Pendle Hill Publications. Kindle Edition.