Specialist Christians, specialist churches

In the city near to where I live there is a church that's well known for its Bible teaching; it attracts a good crowd of intelligent, thinking Christians. There is also a church that has become known for being charismatic, and the spirit-filled Christians go there. There's a church that is superb at reaching people who have no prior church background, and offers a great welcome and a message that is understandable to newcomers.

There is the church that has beautiful music, the one that is full of young families, the one with great youth work and the one that has an older congregation.

So it is that, as people become Christians or move into the area, that they look for the church that feels most comfortable to them, according to whether they are a new Christian, a young family, want a particular emphasis on the Bible, or the Spirit, etc.

What were probably once minor differences of emphasis in this way grow over time into full-blown specialisms. The differences, nay the gulf, between the churches grow and we propagate a generation of specialist Christians - all experts in their chosen field, relating to and learning from other like-minded people.

The only problem with all of this is that it's not God's model of church! This is a consumerist approach to church.

What's wrong with that, some will say? Knowledge and learning in each field grows, and we attract people into churches that are easily accessible to those of different persuasions.

Well, here are some of the things that are wrong with this way of doing church:

• We teach Christians that relating to others who are different in some way is beyond what the church can accomplish
• We are all impoverished by the lack of any balance and roundedness to our knowledge and Christian understanding and experience, and come to imagine God in our own narrow likeness
• We don't experience the joint worship and witness of Christians of all ages and persuasions, of all backgrounds and levels of maturity coming together in love for one another to worship and magnify the One God, our Lord
• We develop a wariness of churches with a different slant, largely out of ignorance arising from lack of exposure to other Christian traditions
• We become commuter-Christians, travelling to and from our chosen church, rather than a local community of Christians, living shoulder to shoulder, accountable to one another, and providing a united witness in our neighbourhood
• We disobey Jesus' command that Christians be united, and come to disbelieve that this is even possible, assuming that this splitting is the natural order of things, the way they have always been
• We rob the church of the power that comes from Christian unity, undermining our witness and demonstrating a worldly attitude which non-Christians can see, along with the hypocrisy of our words of love which are not lived out in practice
• And the church, both locally and world-wide, fragments
• And the devil laughs.