us their life with Christ in God. The Church comes to us saying:
I am like a stream that flows,
Full of the cold springs that arose
In morning lands, in distant hills;
And down the plain my channel fills,
With melting of forgotten snows.
But the historic succession of Christians through the centuries is not our sole connection with Christ; we not only look back to Him, we also look up and look in to Him, for He lives above and in us. The Church is not a widow, but a bride; and shares its Lord's life in the world today. The same Spirit who lived and ruled in the Church of the first days has been breathed on us, through the long line of apostolic-spirited men and women who reach back to Jesus, and lives and rules in us. We must keep the unity of the Spirit with the believers of the past, and with all who are Spirit-led in the world today; and we must remember that "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." We are not bound by the precedents of bygone centuries in our organization; we are free to take from the past what is of worth to us, and we are free to let the
rest go. Is not the Spirit of God as able to take materials at hand in our own age, and to use them for the government, the worship, the creed, the methods of the living Church of Christ?
We cannot, of course, be content with an unrealized unity of the Church. Every little group of Christians, in the first age, felt itself the embodiment in its locality of the whole Church, and it was at one in effort with followers of Jesus everywhere. It exercised hospitality towards every Christian who came within its neighborhood, welcoming him to its fellowship and expecting him to use his gifts in its communion. We want the whole Body of Christ organized, so that it is vividly conscious of its unity, so that it does not waste its energy in maintaining needlessly separate churches, so that followers of Christ feel themselves welcome at every Table of the Lord, and every gifted leader, accredited in any part of the Church, is accepted as accredited in every other where he can be profitably used. The practical problem in Church reorganization is identical with that which confronts society in politics and in industry—how to secure
efficient administration while safeguarding liberty, how to combine the solidarity of the group with the full expression of its members' individualities. To be effective the Church must work as a compactly ordered whole. Individuals must surrender personal preferences in order that the Church may have collective force. Teamwork often demands the suppression of individuality. There will have to be sufficient authority lodged in those who exercise oversight to enable them to lead the Christian forces and administer their resources. But we dare not curtail the freedom of conscience, or impede liberty of prophesying, or turn flexibility of organization into rigidity, lest we hamper the Spirit, who divideth to every man severally even as He will. We do not want "metallic beliefs and regimental devotions," but the personal convictions of thinking sons and daughters of the living God, the spontaneous and congenial fellowship of children with their Father in heaven, and methods sufficiently flexible to be adaptable to all needs. We look for an organization of the Church of Christ that shall exclude no one who shares His Spirit, and that shall pro
vide an outlet for every gift the Spirit bestows, that shall bind all followers of Christ together in effort for the one purpose—the Kingdom of God—enabling them to feel their corporate oneness, and that shall give them liberty to think, to worship, to labor, as they are led by the Spirit of God.
Meanwhile there are some immediate personal obligations which rest upon us. We cannot be factors in the organized Church of Christ, save as we are members of one of the existing churches. A Christian should enroll himself either in that communion in which he was born and to which he owes his spiritual vitality, or else in that with which he finds he can work most helpfully. A Christian who is not a Church member is like a citizen who is not a voter—he is shirking his responsibility.
We must free our minds from prejudice against those whose ways of stating their beliefs, whose modes of worship, whose methods of working, differ from our own. We are not to argue with them which of us is nearer the customs of the New Testament; that is not to the point. Wherever we see the Spirit of Christ, there we are to recog
nize fellow churchmen in the one Church of God. We do not wish uniformity, but variety in unity; for only a Church with a most varied ministry can bring the life of God to the endlessly diverse temperaments of men and women. We are not seeking for the maximum common denominator, and insisting that every communion shall give up all its distinctive doctrines, ritual, customs and activities. We do not want any communion to be "unclothed," but "clothed upon," that what is partial may be swallowed up of fuller life. Dogmatists, be they radicals or conservatives, who insist on a particular interpretation of Christianity, ecclesiastics who arrogantly consider their "orders" superior to those of other servants of Christ as spiritually gifted and as publicly accredited, sectarians so satisfied with the life of their particular segment of the Church that they do not covet a wider enriching fellowship, and churchmen whose conception of the task of the Church is so petty that they fail to feel the imperative necessity of articulating all its forces in one harmoniously functioning organization, are the chief postponers of the effective unity of the Body of Christ.