Why would we want cookie-cutter Christians?

This Sunday I’m preaching at my loving, affectionate little Methodist church. Normally the service and sermon would be delivered by the same person. However, in my Mennonite years I learned about ‘multi-voiced worship’ and this week the service will be led by G, who is trained for it, but using a service planned by me, because he likes leading but doesn’t much like preparing. G is a gay man, from his toes to his fingertips – just one look at him and you can see that he could never be anything else. He is married to another man, R, who types up the slides for worship, is the treasurer, leads and preaches often, and together they set up the church pretty much every week. To be honest, we couldn’t survive without them. And their love for God and for each other shines out. In fact, G became a Christian after meeting R, though he was clearly seeking God before that.

Methodists generally baptise infants but last year we baptised an adult, A. They were clearly born male but wear rather old-fashioned female clothing (with fake breasts, but hey, I wear those myself) and prefer to be referred to as ‘they’. They too have been seeking God for some time, and during the readings and the sermon it is a joy to see their rapt attention and hunger for the word. 

This, to me, is inclusive church. Of course there are other aspects to being inclusive: gender, for instance (we do pretty well on female leadership), and disability – we have a number of disabled members, mostly due to age, and our building is wheelchair-accessible, but we don’t see much of them these days as they are largely housebound or in care homes. But we continue to remember them, pray for them and when possible, visit them. There are also questions about whether worship and church life are accessible, say, to those with dyslexia, autism or ADHD. Having liturgy and hymns projected on a screen goes some way towards this, as does having chairs that allow people to move around freely.

Fostering the right mindset

I think there is a wider issue to consider: a mindset that fosters inclusiveness. This is what I call ‘Zundel’s law’, and I formulated it in response to what I saw in 24 years in the Mennonite church. Basically, it states the difference between a community and an institution. When an individual joins an institution, they have to change to fit the institution. But when an individual joins a community, both individual and community change. Possibly the best context for this to happen is when the community is relatively small: the more a community grows numerically, the more it tends to become institutionalised. Church history amply demonstrates this rule. Not that this is an argument against evangelism, but perhaps it suggests that as a community grows, it needs to organise into smaller sub-units, to keep the intimacy it had at first. 

When an individual joins a community, both individual and community change 

When we think in terms of community rather than institution, we will be open to people who don’t ‘fit’ any preconceived idea of our church culture. We will not ask: “Is s/he one of us?” Jesus gathered prostitutes and secretly believing Pharisees, Roman-employed tax collectors and political revolutionaries, and he expected them to learn to get on with each other. Which leads us to the question you may have been asking: is inclusiveness biblical?

Jesus’ inclusive call

When I was a young Christian, I heard a lot of sermons about ‘the exclusive claims of Christ’. It struck me that there was something a bit unbalanced about this, but it took me years to work out what was missing: the inclusive call of Christ. Jesus declared that “whoever comes to me I will never drive away” (John 6:37). And if you look at the broad sweep of the Bible, it begins with selecting out a chosen people, but that people’s role was always to be ‘a light’ to the nations (see for instance Isaiah 49:6), to embrace those who were formerly regarded as outside God’s covenant. In Jesus’ genealogy in Matthew 1, three women are mentioned: two, Rahab and Ruth, are Gentiles, one of them a prostitute, and the third, Tamar, tricked her father-in-law into impregnating her after her husband’s death. Definitely not kosher!

Of course, we are called to repent when we become followers of Jesus, and to change into his likeness. But that does not mean becoming someone we are not. We cannot repent of what is not a sin, nor change into someone God never meant us to be. Indeed, as we grow in holiness, we become an ever-truer version of ourselves. And the role of the Church is to enable this process, not to make us into cookie-cutter Christians.

FOR AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW READ: In many ways, DEI replaces the redemptive power of the gospel