On the Move

The Church is the pilgrim people of God. It is on the move hastening to the ends of the earth to beseech all men to be reconciled to God — hastening to the end of time to meet its Lord who will gather all into one. Therefore the nature of the Church is never to be finally defined in static terms, but only in terms of that to which it is going. It cannot be understood rightly except in a perspective which is at once missionary and eschatological, and only in that perspective can the deadlock of our present ecumenical debate be resolved. But — and this is of vital importance — it will be a solution in which theory and practice are inseparably related, not one which can be satisfactorily stated in terms of theory alone. 

There is a way of bringing the eschatological perspective to bear upon our present perplexities which relieves them at no cost to ourselves, which allows us to rest content with them because in the age to come they will disappear. That is a radically false eschatology. The whole meaning of this present age between Christ’s coming and His coming again is that in it the powers of the age to come are at work now to draw all men into one in Christ. When the Church ceases to be one, or ceases to be missionary, it contradicts its own nature. 

Yet the Church is not to be defined by what it is, but by that End to which it moves, the power of which now works in the Church, the power of the Holy Spirit who is the earnest of the inheritance still to be revealed. To say that the deadlock in the ecumenical debate will be resolved in a perspective which is missionary and eschatological is not true unless it is understood that that perspective means a new obedience to, and a new possession by, the Holy Spirit. It is a perspective inseparable from action, and that action must be both in the direction of mission and in that of unity, for these are but two aspects of the one work of the Spirit.

The whole core of biblical history is the story of the calling of a visible community to be God’s own people, His royal priesthood on earth, the bearer of His light to the nations. There is an actual, visible, earthly company which is addressed as ​‘the people of God’, the ​‘Body of Christ’. 

It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book, nor a creed, nor a system of thought, nor a rule of life, but visible community. l think that we Protestants cannot too often reflect on that fact. He committed the entire work of salvation to that community. It was not that a community gathered round an idea, so that the idea was primary and the community secondary. It was that a community called together by the deliberate choice of the Lord Himself, and recreated in Him, gradually sought — and is seeking — to make explicit who He is and what He has done. 

The actual community is primary: the understanding of what it is comes second. The Church does not depend for its existence upon our understanding of it or faith in it. It first of all exists as a visible fact called into being by the Lord Himself, and our understanding of that fact is subsequent and secondary. This actual visible community, a company of men and women with ascertainable names and addresses, is the Church of God. It was present on the day of Pentecost, and the Lord added to it day by day those that were being saved.