Gathering the Broken Fragments of a Church

There is a ritual, a unifying sacrament in which every Christian, regardless of the limitations of their ability to understand and articulate the Christian experience of faith, can participate. It is a sacrament from the roots of Christian community; from the beginning the disciples of Christ ask one another who it was they were following. And it was ratified Jesus own question: "who do you say that I am." This sacrament of dialogue over the meaning of the shared experience of Christ was formally embedded in Christian life by the decision to hold a council at Jerusalem Council to discuss the grown of faith among the Gentiles (Acts 15). The apostolic dialogue became foundational to the creation of a Christian church for both Jews and Gentile. 

Dialogue was further ratified as an essential element to Christian community when the Epistles were accepted as part of the canon of apostolic witness to Christ, for far from being a singular decisive statement of faith they are a record of cross-cultural dialogue between the apostles and their churches over the essential matter of witness in the world. They are the recorded dialogue over what it means to be an apostolic church. 

The sacrament of dialogue becomes the practical means by which the promise of Christ in John 17:20-23 is fulfilled. It is the dialogue through which individuals and groups are drawn into fellowship with Christ, and it is dialogue that continually creates and recreates the community of faith and its public witness. 

Christian scripture as God's Word provides both the shared object for dialogue and the common language for that dialogue. It is scripture in both these roles that insures that the dialogue is distinctly Christian. Scripture is the primary object of dialogue because it is the location in human experience (whether read or preached) in which Christ manifests Christ's self to contemporary persons. And scripture is a language of dialogue not because it needs be reduced to the original source languages in which it first appeared, but because it provides the narratives, observations, and dialogues that create a common language for all who read and discuss it. 

This is because language doesn't precede speech and its written form, literature. Language is created by the process of expression and dialogue. The distinctive Christian language is created by the process of hearing, reading and dialoguing over the intersection of scripture as the apostolic witness, the Canon of the Church and the contemporary experience of faith in Christ. 

This mandate for dialogue as the sacrament of Christian fellowship and unity meets a world of diverse cultures all of which have within themselves a history of cross-cultural encounter and the development of new languages suitable to whatever form of partnership arises from those encounters. This isn't merely a matter of translation, or even the adoption of foreign words, although these are critical ways through which a culture grasps concepts, events, and even physical objects it has never previously encountered. 

Rather, dialogue is the way in which people from different cultures develop a new common, although never universal, language allowing them to come to a finite unity around some set of shared concepts or behaviors. It is a  unity can be expanded by ongoing, and increasingly varied engagement in dialogue. But it cannot be short-circuited by the assumption of a common mind. 

For Christians the purpose of the sacrament of dialogue, a sacrament enacted daily and weekly in everything from Bible studies to seminary classrooms to the whispered (or more liked tweeted) comments on a sermon is building up the saints of God, the koinonia, for common witness. Through it those engaged develop is a limited set of shared outlooks and analysis and thus an ability to work together, speak together, believe together, and worship together. 

Understanding this we should recognize, as did John Wesley, that Christian unity isn't built around a common mind, something which can never be achieved, but around shared expressions of Christ's love within the fellowship of Christ and to the world. We cannot always think alike, speak alike, or even worship alike. We can engage in common acts of love for one another and our neighbor as exemplified by the Christ we find together in scripture. And it is dialogue, not a common mind about theological assertions or uniform ritual that makes this possible. 

And actually, this is almost all we need to unify us as Christians. After all, it is concrete acts of love alone that Scripture teaches will be the basis on which Christ separates the sheep from the goats and unifies the former in the Reign of Christ. We will, of course, having been baptized into the life, death, and resurrection of Christ feast together at his heavenly banquet. But we won't get there together, whether next Sunday or at the end of times, without dialogue.