Given the anti-institutional bias of our society, it may be important to re-examine what we mean when we as Presbyterians, and many other denominations, speak of ourselves as being a connectional church. Too often people hear that term in the midst of judicial questions with respect to property or ordination issues. There is a sense in which even the most independent of congregations, even one who claims to be a community church, is part of a connectional church. When we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and therefore confess ourselves to be a Christian, we become part of what the Bible calls the Body of Christ. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:12-13, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — Jews, or Greeks, slaves or free–and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”
We can’t escape that reality by saying that it was different in the early church. As he says in 1 Corinthians 11:17ff, “Now in the following instructions i do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. for, to begin with, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you; and to some extent I believe it. Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine.”
The truth that we are, even when we want to deny it, part of a connectional church suggests that we need to explore more fully why God in
Christ created a connectional church and how we might recognize the strengths of that reality as a counter-cultural reality in our society.
More tomorrow
