More thoughts on "all in each place"

How linguistic minority churches show us what reunified churches might look like

What would it be like if Christians actually achieved the old ecumenical goal of “all in each place” united in one fellowship, under one jurisdiction, worshipping together, attending to the one Gospel, receiving the same sacraments? I’ve written before about what we lose when we give up this goal for the (admittedly more manageable) one of full communion agreements, suggesting that — as difficult as it sounds — we should not give in to the market logic of denominationalism and should hold out hope for a genuine union of Christians in each place.

Over the last year, I got a little taste about what “all in each place” looks like when worshipping at two English-speaking congregations in Zurich, St Andrew’s and the International Protestant Church. There’s an interesting thing about minority-language churches. Of course, they are obviously separated from most Christians in their area by linguistic difference — so that any claim that worshipping with them might provide a foretaste of a reunited church might sound, on the face of it, ridiculous. But precisely because they are serving a smallish linguistic community, they simply are not able to further divide by preferred liturgical style, secondary theological commitments, country of origin, class, cultural background, and so on. And what this means is that a group of people who, in a context where they represented the linguistic majority, might quite probably have sorted into different churches by affinity instead end up figuring out how to worship and be a church community together.

Take St Andrew’s, for example. It’s an Anglican church, of the Church of England’s Diocese in Europe. And it quite intentionally seeks to serve a broad spectrum of Anglicans. Everyone from dyed-in-the-wool Anglo-Catholics to committed Evangelicals have to figure out how to exist together — for there simply is no other Anglican option. The single largest group of attendees is immigrants from the British Isles, but there are also some North Americans, Indians, Subsaharan Africans, and native-born Swiss among the congregation too. Nor does it only serve Anglicans; there is a decent-sized group of Lutherans and other high church Protestants there too. In London or Oxford or Cambridge, the people attending this one church would probably be attending a half-dozen or dozen different churches. But by necessity, here they all worship together.

The International Protestant Church might be an even more clear example of the same theme. It is broadly Reformed in orientation and presbyterian in polity, but attracts members from a bewildering number of ecclesial and cultural backgrounds. I’m not sure if there is any one dominant racial/ethnic/cultural group, although there are a lot of North Americans, East Asians, and Southeast Asians. And while the church has a fairly clear theological identity, there are plenty of ways to be Reformed, and most of those ways are reflected among the congregants. It straddles what in the US would be the mainline/evangelical divide, as well as divisions around sacramental practice (baptism, in particular). In another context, members wouldn’t just be at different churches of the same denomination but in probably a dozen different denominations. And yet once again, here they’re all in church together.

I’ve experienced something similar, actually, in rural Quebec. While in Montreal there are enough English-language churches for a familiar US-style sorting (both between denominations and within the churches of a denomination), I served as a supply priest for about a year for Grace Church, Arundel — a church up in the mountains north of Montreal which was the only English-speaking church for miles around. And so, once again, not only was the whole spectrum of Anglicanism represented, but a number of people who would have been Presbyterian or nondenominational evangelical or some other variety of Christian were part of this church community.

I don’t mean to sound like these churches were perfect. Of course they weren’t. And there are trade-offs involved in these sorts of self-consciously broad churches. There are questions that clergy and parishioners have to wrestle with about the limits of comprehensiveness. And needless to say, I was not likely to find north-end 1662 as a regular service at St Andrew’s. It’s worth saying too that while all three of these churches mentioned avoid it, there is a real risk of a sort of lowest common denominator mediocrity, where rather than a vital center in Christ you end up with a commitment to inoffensiveness above all.

Still, in a quiet, unfussy, undramatic way, these churches were (and are), well, churches together. They gather around Word and Sacrament, children and adults alike are nourished in the faith, the congregations care for their own and for the needs of the world. And in doing this, they show us a vision of Christian belonging that is a little closer to the vision that the 1961 New Delhi Statement on Christian Unity set forth, in which “all in each place who are baptized into Jesus Christ” are together in one fellowship. It’s a vision of Christian belonging that doesn’t turn churches into mere voluntary associations organized around various affinities and competing for market share. And if in each of these cases people are thrown together into the same congregations in part by the mere fact of being a linguistic minority — well, thank the Holy Spirit that he uses such things to knit together people who otherwise wouldn’t know or interact with each other around the confession of Christ crucified, both for their own good and as an example to the rest of us.