THE CHURCH AND HER MISSION IN THE WORLD
The GOD and Father of Jesus Christ loves every human being
individually, cares for each and has a specific vocation for each one
to fulfil. This doctrine of the equal preciousness in the sight of GOD
of all human souls is for Christianity fundamental. But the
correlative of Divine fatherhood is human brotherhood: just because
GOD is love, and fellowship is life and heaven, and the lack of it is
hell, GOD does not redeem men individually, but as members of a
brotherhood, a Church.
The Church is simply the people of GOD. It is the fellowship of
redeemed mankind, the community of all faithful people throughout this
present world and in the sphere of the world beyond--one, holy,
apostolic (i.e. missionary), and catholic, that is, universal. Death
is no interruption in that Society, race is no barrier, and rank
conveys no privilege. "There is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision
nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is
all, and in all": over the Church the gates of Death prevail not: and
"ye are all one Man in Christ Jesus."
Furthermore, the Church is described as the Body, that is, the
embodiment, of Christ: the instrument or organ whereby the Spirit of
Christ works in the world. Her several members are individually limbs
or members in that Body, and their individual gifts and capacities,
whatever they may be, are to be dedicated and directed to the service
of the Body as a whole, and not to any sectional or selfish ends or
purposes. In practical churchmanship, rightly understood, is to be
discovered the clue to the meaning and purpose of human life.
Again, the Church is by definition international. The several races
and nationalities of mankind have each their specific and individual
contribution to make to the Church's common life, in accordance with
their specific national temperaments and genius. All of them together
are needed to give adequate expression in human life to the many-sided
riches of GOD in Christ. The Church is incomplete so long as a single
one remains outside. The idea, therefore, of a so-called "National"
Church, as a thing isolated and self-contained, is intrinsically
absurd.
Therefore also the Church is missionary. She exists in order to
proclaim to all the world the Good News of the love of GOD. She exists
to bring all men everywhere under the scope of Christ's redemption,
and to claim for the Spirit of Christ the effectual lordship over all
human thought and life and activity. It is her threefold task at once
to develop and make real within her own borders the life of
brotherhood in Christ, to evangelize the heathen by declaring to them
the satisfaction of their instinctive search for GOD in the answering
search of GOD for them, and to labour for the discovery and
application of Christian solutions to the problems of industry and
commerce, of politics and social life and international affairs.
In so far as the Church has been true to the Spirit of Christ she has
succeeded; in so far as she has made compromises with the world, and
in every generation has in greater or less degree been disloyal to the
standards of her Master, she has failed. In every generation there has
been partial and obvious failure, side by side with real, if partial
and in some ways less immediately obvious, success. But the Church can
never wholly fail and must one day wholly succeed, for the reason that
behind her is the omnipotence of the love of GOD.