Remapping the church
Migration and the church's future
This essay first appeared in Michael Bird and Brian Rosner, Mending a Fractured Church (2015).
Once there were no denominations. Once the church was not mappable into three great “families” of churches – Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox.
Once there was just “the church,” then East and West, then, over several centuries, the crazy quilt of churches we know today. Greek and Latin churches diverged from one another from the earliest centuries, but they remained officially united until the mutual anathemas of 1054. Prior to the sixteenth century, what became Europe knew only the “Latin” or “Western” church, which was catholic and centered in Rome but was not the “Roman Catholic Church.” As the Great Schism created “Catholicism” and “Orthodoxy,” so the Protestant Reformation produced not only “Lutheran” and “Reformed” and “Anglican” churches, but also founded the Catholic Church as a distinct Christian body. The teeming varieties of Protestantism have all emerged since the sixteenth century.
Denominationalism was not lurking under the surface, waiting to pop out when Luther catalyzed it. The three “families” did not exist in seminal form prior to the various fissures that produced them. The distinctions and groupings, the territorial boundaries, the liturgical and doctrinal differences, all the topographical clues and cues by which we map the Christian world today had to be created.
Whatever was “once” true but is not true any longer is contingent, by definition. “Once” is a signal that whatever is under consideration is not a design feature. Our mapping of the church into three clusters of churches has emerged over the course of a thousand years of church history. It is in no way essential to the church, as Jesus and the Spirit, the Scriptures and sacraments, are of the essence of the church. Ecclesial maps have changed in the past. They will change again. The church as we know it had to be mapped, and it is re-mappable.
Edit that: It is not re-mappable. It is being re-mapped before our eyes, if we open our eyes to see it. Or, edit again: It has been re-mapped, while many of us had our heads down and our eyes fixed obsessively on the frequently petty travails of our own denominations.1
When the World Missionary Conference met in Edinburgh in 1910, no representatives from Africa, Latin America, or the Pacific island churches were invited.2 Today, no international conference would fail to include many leaders from these continents, but our mental routines too often run along rails that were already flecked with rust in 1910. It has been a long time since Will Herberg could accurately summarize the religious life of the United States as Protestant Catholic Jew. It has been a long time since we could accurately summarize the church as Protestant Catholic Orthodox. Our maps are badly out of date, and it is time to notice and to ask what it might mean.
In this brief essay, I begin with two illustrative vignettes of the new, burgeoning African Christian movements that fall outside our habitual trifold taxonomy. These movements have been examined and reported on elsewhere, more thoroughly than I can do here. This essay is a pointing finger: “Look over here!” I want to say. “What do we make of that? How does it force us to change our ecclesial habits? And what opportunities does it offer for our pursuit of unity?” The sheer existence of these movements poses an intellectual and practical challenge to European, North American, and Australian churches, but their impact is deeper than simply forcing us to modulate from a triple to a quadrilateral classification.
In the latter part of the paper, I examine how immigrant African churches in the United States might affect not only the African churches themselves but American Christianity, especially exploring how the new immigrant churches might contest and modify America’s denominational form of Christianity. I do not focus on the United States because I think it is the most important laboratory of the future church. America is even less of the essence of the church than “Orthodoxy” or “Lutheran” or “Roman Catholic” are. I turn to North America partly because it is the world I know and partly because its denominational system has been the paradoxical source of much of both the vibrancy and the volatility of Christianity during the past two centuries. If immigrant churches have the potential to cause some fraying of American denominationalism, the fabric will likely unravel elsewhere as well.