Bare with me here. I’m going to try to use an analogy that popped into my head the other day about what I’ve been experiencing.
Let’s say ‘the bus’ is a group of people who all meet together in the same church building once a week – a congregation of a particular church. Some of those people are on ‘the bus’ 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Each bus has slightly (or possibly largely) different ideas on issues concerning faith, leadership, the Christian walk, etc. The people who stay on the bus all the time for the most part hold to the ideas of that particular bus. The bus might stop beside another bus and the people on those 2 buses may talk to each other while waiting at a stop light or in a traffic jam. But each person stays on their own bus.
There are people, however, who do not ride the bus all the time. They might get off and go for a walk. Or they might board another bus for a while and then get back onto the first bus. They don’t necessarily hold to all the ideas of the bus they are riding. While not riding the same bus 24 hours a day/7 days a week can broaden a person’s perspective and help them test more thoroughly what they’re hearing, their relationships with the people who ride 24/7 seem to be affected. It’s like when you get onto a bus and everyone is talking and laughing, but you don’t know what they’re talking about and you’ve missed out on the joke. After being on the bus for a while, you can pick up on the conversation and enter into the discussion, but there always seems to be a lag time when you first get back on the bus.
As I’ve been thinking about this analogy, some questions have popped into my mind:
Is it biblical for a congregation to ask everyone in that congregation to hold to the same ideas?
(I used to think this was the way towards unity, but now I’m not so sure)
And if this approach is biblical, what place is there in this framework for people who don’t think the same as everyone else? Or who don’t necessarily hold to the same ideas (although they can agree on the foundations of the Christian faith – Christ’s death & resurrection, for example)?
Can we or are we able to accept and embrace those people who don’t ‘tow the party line’? What do we do with those people? Can they function in unity with the rest of the body of Christ?
What does unity in Christ look like?