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Christian Oneness
promoting love, unity, and service together
in the Church, the Body of Christ
Mission Statement
The mission of Christian Oneness is to:
1. Promote Christ the one Lord, and encourage fellowship and oneness in the Body of Christ;
2. Emphasize areas of agreement in the Church;
3. Promote careful study of the Scriptures;
4. Encourage careful thought and good discussion concerning issues concerning which division has occurred;
5. Encourage prayer as one;
6. Encourage action as one, in loving service and in presentation of the Gospel to the world.
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Introduction: Unity in the Body
All Christians -- all who are devoted to Christ the Lord, only Son of the Father in Heaven -- are one body, and are united in Him, regardless of labels, factions, and other definitions of human limitation. We declare this fundamental Christian unity and seek to encourage believers to act in the oneness He has given us.
Christ is not divided. It is often in the unity of
His Body and the love of its parts for each other, that
those outside Him can truly see that God loves them and
sent Jesus for them. See
The body of Christ at present is marked by many divisions - denominational, national, cultural. Yet there can be no doubt that most of the people on Earth who name the name of Christ as their Savior name the same Jesus we do and are our brothers and sisters, regardless of the different labels we all wear. After all, it is not we who are credited with finding God; it is God who is credited with taking us. It is written that it is He who reveals Himself to us, and not the other way around. All of us know only in part; and we suggest that we will all sometimes err, concerning anything He has not yet revealed to us about Himself.
Many names by which we identify ourselves, bear the marks of the unnecessary wars -- both theological and military -- of past centuries. For example, throughout our lives the current public participants in this Christian Oneness organization, have been associated with churches which are not parts of certain others: currently each of us are part of groups which are descended from some which protested certain practices 500 years ago. These protests led to more than a century of wars in Europe. But we of Christian Oneness do not protest anything about our brothers and sisters, because we love them, as the Lord has commanded. And we are happy to witness much faithfulness to Christ among all of them. We find there to be very strong, but often different, institutional evils and unrighteousnesses within every group of people in this world which claim Christ as Lord and King. We find none to have a rightful claim of true superiority in the face of God.
The last 500 years of history, and the separate development of sectarian doctrines and the blood foolishly shed during those years, have pulled many groups violently apart. For this reason, the practices of the church organizations in which we have spent our lives, differ from others' practices to such an extent that we might not be entirely comfortable in their services, and vice versa. However, Jesus still prayed for our oneness, His blood still unifies us, and the same Holy Spirit works in all believers, regardless of whether we acknowledge it.
The late Pope John Paul II, in the 1995 encyclical Ut unum sint ("That they may be one"), took the very large and commendable step of recognizing that some outside his organization are true Christians and have manifested the Holy Spirit at times in ways his followers have not. The late Pope's emphases on recognizing that Christ has one Body in spite of the doctrinal and historical divisions we have placed in it, and upon the practical recognition of our Christian unity through joining together in prayer with those in other fellowships, also appear to be exactly correct. Clearly, all communities of Christ should reciprocate by recognizing the Spirit at work within us all. We should join our brethren in prayer. It's time to end the wars of the Reformation.
It is also clear that many of the theological disputes which have for centuries moved Jesus' brethren to distrust, hate and kill each other, are primarily semantic. That is, many disagreements concern whether this sect's term or that sect's semantic formulation for a truth is correct. Usually, in fact, both of the sects in an argument are at least close to the real underlying truth, though possibly arriving there from opposite directions, but neither sect can understand this because each is too securely wed to its own terminology.
Moreover, far too many of the disputes which have shed blood in the Body of Christ, have involved minor points of doctrine, matters of ceremony, matters of church government or, still worse, matters of worldly politics or loyalty to worldly governments. While such matters may have great impact on the way the individual believer lives and relates to the organized church, they have little relevance to the real content of the Gospel.
Nevertheless, theology texts generally, with only a very few exceptions, emphasize denominational "distinctives," the doctrines which set the author's denomination apart from other sects. These points of division also tend to be the focus of lay teaching materials and preaching. However, these sectarian markers usually involve only minor points and semantic distinctions. We suggest that to a large degree, it is these minor and sometimes contrived disputes which have been the historic battlegrounds within the people of Christ.
We suggest that it is only God who chooses what of His essential truths shall be revealed to any human being in this world. We suggest that since it is only by deliberate act of God at any moment that we can learn or know anything about Him, we should discuss with each other beginning and ending at points of agreement, and should never focus upon points of disagreement.
Ian Johnson & Jonathan Brickman
Email us! We love to discuss, we desire to learn!
| For Ian: | ian4christ41@yahoo.com |
| For Jonathan: | jeb@joshuacorps.org |
