Scot McKnight's Fellowship of Differents: Showing the World God's Design for Life Together is a book that addresses questions everyone is asking these days: Can a person be a Christian and not be part of the church? Or,
is involvement in the church an essential, even constitutive part of
what it means to be a Christian?In light of the recent Pew Center study results that nearly 8 full percentage points fewer folks self-identify as Christian, an n alarming number of religious folks are tending toward affirming the first question, that following Jesus is something one can do apart from any involvement in a local church. I wish I could get McKnight's newest book into the hands of everyone who has bought that line.
Because, here's the truth:
Everything I learned about the Christian life I learned from my church ... a local church determines what the Christian life looks like for the people in that church ... we all learn the Christian life from how our local church shapes us (p. 15).McKnight's newest book is a working ecclesiology (doctrine of the church) drawn from a close reading of Paul's letters. "The earliest Christian churches were made up of folks from all over the social map", McKnight rightly insists. The earliest Christian communities -- and all of them since! -- have always been communities of difference and differents. The unity of the church is not the same as uniformity. And to insist on uniformity now, is to deny the very nature of the Body of Christ.
Why is that, though? Because the very love of God is itself diverse. Paul's vision of the Church grows out of that extravagant understanding and experience of divine love. So A Fellowship of Differents is a book that belongs on the shelf of every pastor, every church leader, every follower of Jesus, who wants to embrace the community of Jesus in all its fullness.
Be careful, though. McKnight's book is not simply a new call for the church's "diversity". It's a thorough exploration of the apostle Paul's vision for the church. It's an ecclesiology, but one that is accessible to the average church member, and deep enough to keep the attention of theology-nerds. That's a difficult needle to thread, and it's McKnight's specialty to do just that. A Fellowship of Differents is able to take such complicated themes as gender, socioeconomics, race, culture, style, moralities, politics, language, ages, marital status, and so on and place them into a single-minded devotion to Jesus and Jesus' new community called the Church.
This means, of course, that's Paul's vision of the church is going to be quite different from how we perceive diversity as Americans, and nothing like "the American experiment". In some of the most chilling words of Christian prophetic voice, McKnight insists:
What the church most needs is not heroes of the faith, but faithful followers of Jesus. What your local church needs in order to live out the designs of God for a church, that grand social experiment of bringing all sorts of people to the table and into the circle of one another's lives, is not great Christians, but faithful Christians (p. 164).What we embody, then, is nothing less that "God's design for life together ..." (as the subtitle puts it). The Church is the divine design for human communities in general. "God's mission in this world is to create the church where God's will is lived out by all of God's people" (p. 183).
If the Church will take it seriously, A Fellowship of Differents has the ability to be a transformative work of God in the world. If not, the Church in the West will continue its downward spiral. The choice is up to those of us who love this community and dream God's vision in Jesus Christ.
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