UNITY IN DIVERSITY

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 50, 22 November 1928, Page 11

UNITY IN DIVERSITY

POSITION OF THE CHURCH THE SCRIPTURAL IDEAL ADDRESS BY MODERATOR OF GENERAL ASSEMBLY Dominion Special Service. Auckland, November 21. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church opened to-night, when the Moderator (Rev. Professor Hewitson, 8.A.) delivered his inaugural address. His topic was “The Unity in Diversity of the Church, which it the Body of Christ.’ “It is a subject suitable for au address to a church court at any time,” he said, “but especially so to us at this time when we have to consider some important proposals for the reorganisation of our work. It is especially suitable to us also as a part of the whole Church of God in days when there are movements for union among the Presbyterians of Scotland, and the Methodists of England, and in days when international and interdenominatioal conferences are being held, like that nt Stockholm in 1925, that at Lausanne in 1927, and that in Jerusalem in the early part of this year. Diversity. “In the modern Church, the number end diversity of operations is sometimes bewildering, and the tendency seems to be ever to increase them. Think for a moment of the diversity of operations, and the differences of administration in our own little Church. We began in the South just 80 years ago as one congregation. Now we have 257 charges, and 117 mission stations. Later, we organised a Presbytery, now we have 20. Later still, several presbyteries were organised into a Synod in the South, into an Assembly in the North. After half a century of existence, during which ecclesiastical engineers made many futile attempts to bridge the Waitaki, a wide, wandering, but rather shallow stream, a means of crossing was effected, and now we have a General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand. The bridge so far is only for passengers, the transport of heavy baggage being prohibited. Men from the North usually carry only their staff. . x xu “Think, without having regard to the order of their origin, of the many and different activities that have grown up in our Church in these 80 years: Evangelisation, home missions, Maori missions, foreign missions, the Theological Hall, the Women’s Training Institute, summer schools of theology, two university residential colleges, eight church schools, the Women’s Missionary Union, the Youth Work (Sunday School Associations and Bible Class Unions), publications and ■ literature, the _ bookroom the Presbyterian Social ‘ jer * vice Association, the _ Busy Bees, temperance work, Bible in schools, and other public questions, and perhaps some other committees which are regarded by their conveners as the most important committees in the Church. To these departments there is attached a considerable body of officials, honorary and paid. This is surely an astonishing record of diversities of operations in a Church so young and so small. Cause of Diversity. “When we ask the cause of all this diversity in the Church we shall find an answer suggested by the diversity in the members and functions of the body. They are not imposed upon the body from without; they are developed from within, by the life of the body reacting to its surroundings. ’ Life creates organisation, not organisation life, though organisation conditions life and reacts upon it, sometimes favourably, sometimes prejudicially. When the growing and changing life of the body experiences a new need, it develops new powers, to meet that need, or it modifies existing ones to do so. We see the same principle at work in the building up of a business corporation. The number and diversity of its operations are determined by the living man who is. the soul of the business, reacting to. the times and to the place where his business operates. He sees changes coming, and develops or modifies his business accordingly. This principle was active in the development of the Church as we see it in the Acts of the Apostles. , “There was a man that came fiom God whose name was John the B.nitist, another whose name was John Koanerges, the Evangelist, and another whose name was John of Golden Mouth and another named John Wyclif, the translate!-, and another John Calvin, the theologian, and another John Knox, th reformer, another John Wesley, the Methodist, and another John Keble, the High Churchman, and originator ot.the Tractarian movement, and another John Newman, the Cardinal, and another John Whittier, the Quaker and abolitionist, and another John Mott, an American Methodist, the World Student Movement secretary, and the International Missionary organiser. All these men at different times, and at different places, with diverse experiences,. . with varying messages, and with diversities of operation, were inspired and sent by the same God which worketh all in all. See that thou shut not the door of thy heart nor the door of thy Church against any man sent from God. John Wesley, the Methodist, John Keble, the High Churchman, and John Newman,. the Roman Catholic, sing in thy choir, let them also preach in thy pulpit. Interdependence. “Let us pass on now, to another point in St. Paul's analogy between the human body and the Church, namely, this.: that notwithstanding the number and diversity of the members of the body, they are all inter-related; every part, even the smallest, affects every other part for good and for evil. There is nothing in the body that is perfected in isolation, nothing that suffers alone. Even “those members of the body” says St. Paul, “which seem to be more feeble are necessary.” “God has tempered the body together.” is Moffatt’s translation of the Apostle’s words, “with a special dignity for the inferior parts.” ... To an old man, extrolling the great preachers of the past and depreciating those of the day, Dale replied rather tartly: “You forget, sir, that there were great hearers in those days.” The. pulpit never rises much above the level of the pew. “The explanation of the interdependence of the diverse parts of the body is. that, in general, one part cannot fulfil the functions of another part: the hand cannot do the work of the foot, nor the eye of the ear. No training will enable the eye to hear, nor the ear to see. Much the same condition of things prevails among the members of the Church. Each lias his own distinctive gift or gifts, which determine the work he can and the work he cannot do. The Evangelist and the teacher are both necessary to the health and progress of the Church, but it is not common to find a man who has the gifts of both teacher and evangelist, as Professor A. S. Peake is said to have. If we realised this fact, which is often very patent, we should not demand from a man as we sometimes do, a kind of work his Creator never intended him to do, and then harshly blame him for not doing it. Dependent on Others. “We are dependent upon others, not only in work, but in thought. Alexander Whyte, a convinced Protestant, and a strong Presbyterian, acknowledged his d<’bt to the Roman Catholic, Newman. "We are now ready to make the transition to the last point in St. Paul’s analogy of which I small speak, namely, the unity of the body. “All the members of that one body,” says he, “being many, are one body; so also is Christ.” The unity of the body is the goal to which St. Paul has been-moving in his practical teaching and exhortation. He is urgent that there shall be no party spirit, no schism in the body. The unity of the

Church is not only one of the ends of St. Paul’s practical teaching. It is also a master conception of his theology. “The unity of the Church transcends racial boundaries; it also overleaps class distinctions. Master and servant are made one by the fact that both of them have a common Master in heaven, and ‘there is no respect of persons with Him.' The Historical Reality. “Such is a brief and very inadequate statement of some of the main points of the New Testament doctrine of the Church, as the Body of Christ. When we turn from exposition to history, from the ideal to the actual, we are struck at once by a great and painful contrast between them. The great and painful contrast between the ideal and the actual existed in Paul's own day. He writes to the Corinthians : “It hath been declared unto me of you, that there are contentions among you.” St. Paul was constantly harassed by men who crepj: into the Church, and undermined his personal authority, and subverted his teaching. “When we pass out of the New Testament into the stream of Church history, we are soon met with fierce doctrinal discussions. One of these discussions, on a subtle point of doctrine, of which many in this assembly have never heard, culminated at the end of the first millennium in the cleavage of Christendom into the Eastern and Western Churches. “Six hundred years later came the "reat breach of the Reformation. Towards the churches that were then formed. even towards the greatest of them, Rome has maintained for centuries an impressive attitude of isolation. She will not hold fellowship with any of the Reformation churches, except upon the condition of perfect submission to her astounding claims. There is something very impressive in the way in which she holds up her proud head. The Reformation churches on their part, condemn her teaching, watch her movements with suspicion, and entertain towards her a spirit of distrust. Very rarely does one hear of anything good that we owe to her in the past, of anything that we can learn from her in the present. “Church and Chapel.” “When we follow the history of the Reformation in England we soon find ourselves in the age of church and chapel, of university monopoly, and educational disability, of social prestige and social neglect. These unhappy days have given place to a very hearty recognition by those in high station of the value of Nonconformist life and work. There have been conferences between representative men of the Church of England and of the Free Churches, with the object of finding a way by. which all these churches could meet in fellowship and in work. After months of discussion characterised by fine Christian courtesy and a high spiritual atmosphere—these conferences have ended, in the meantime at least, m an impasse. The Church of England is going through one of the greatest crises of her history, a crisis that may affect all English-speaking churches immeasurably, but so far as I can judge, from the pages of our church paper and from other sources of information, it has not interested us as a church very much. We are more taken up with our socials, rallies, conferences, and pastoral settlements. At the heart of the crisis is the Book of Common Prayer. This is the devotional manual of the largest church in the Empire and in the Dominion, one of the great devotional classics of the world, full of sober Scriptural thought and feeling, expressed in English pure and undefiled. but I surmise it is an unknown book to the vast majority of Presbyterians. . “If we look at the relations of the Free Churches to one another in England we shall find that, though very great advances have been made in recent years in friendsship and co-operation among them, yet, in many villages in England where there is room for only one church, there are several, sparsely attended and feebly manned. We need not go to England for instances of that sort of thing. “Look now at the relations of churches that have substantially the same form of government, the same doctrine and the same worship. Churches like the Methodist in England, the Presbyterian in Scotland. Dr* Moffatt, writing of churches of the Presbyterian order, says: ‘Our record is not good. In almost every country it is the same tale; divided churches and reunion difficult.” “Removal of Denominations.” “In the first centjiry a council of the church was held in Jerusalem to deal with the inter-relations of Jewish and Gentile Christians. This year, nineteen centuries later, another council—interdenominatiou and international in character —met in Jerusalem to deal with much the same and with other problems. In an official report of that council, it is said, under the heading, ‘Christian Unity’: ‘This statement would be seriously incomplete without reference to the desire which is. being expressed with increasing emphasis among the younger churches, to eliminate the complexity of the missionary enterprise, and to remove the discredit to the Christian name due to the great number of denominations, and the diversity, and even competition, _of the missionary agencies now at work in some countries.’ The Bishop of Gloucester, in speaking of the conference at Lausanne last year, said that nothing was more pathetic than the appeal that come to them from the peoples of India, China; and Japan to allow the different churches to unite in those lands, and so put beyond them the divisions of religion, which in Britain might seem something, but meant nothing at all on the missionary field. The Bond of Peace. “What then can we do to promote the realisation of the Scriptural ideal? I do not know that we can do anything better than what Paul did, and what he recommended the Corinthian and Ephesian churches to do. We can try to grasp clearly and strongly God's purpose for the church, to make all persons and all things one in Christ one church with many and diverse members, but all interdependent. We can theu preach that ideal as Paul did. and as Dale is said to have done, with intellectual ardour and a glowing passion of love. “We can try to create a better atmosphere, which already shows signs of improvement. Dr. John R. Mott, in closing his ‘foreword’ to one of the official publications of the Jerusalem Conference, said. ‘Far more important for all coming days that the findings of the conference is the fact that an atmosphere was generated in which serious difficulties and conflicting views, while never ignored, but frankly expressed, were transcended; an atmosphere in which men and women of widely differing backgrounds and schools of thought either entered into a deeper understanding, or resolved to understand; above all, an atmosphere in which it became possible to receive fresh mandates from the ever-creative God.” “Let us “strive to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace; let us do this with all lowliness and meekness with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love.” „ , “ ‘Forbearance in Love,’ says the Apostle; it is his last and most difficult word for keeping the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. A man of love is more important than a man of scholarship, and he is not so common. Applying the Principle. “There is one thing we can do here and now in this Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand. We can try to apply the principles of diversity, interdependence, and unity to ourselves, and live and work together in lowliness, meekness, long-suffering, forbearance, and love. We can recognise that there’must be diversities of operations and of thought, where there is a growing and expanding life. We can strive to make all these diversities interdependent, so that there shall be no conflicting sectional interests, that disregard the good Of the whole. We can determine that there shall be no parties, not even a young New Zealand party, which would sfrrely be a strange feature in a Church which was founded bv men from older lands, some of whom have served us with great ability, farseeing leadership, and unselfish devotion. We can strive so that our Church shall be one from North Cape to Stewart Island. and uot, broken into North and South by the troublous waters of Cook Strait, nor by the wide-Wfijidering stream of the Waitaki.”