Local and universal

Abstract

CHURCH AND CHURCHES ‘One of the greatest challenges facing the Church today is that of maintaining a healthy balance between the universal expression of the faith of the Church and the particular expression of that faith in each local Church. When the scale tips too far, the whole Church, inseparably universal and local, suffers.’ This warning comes from a Roman Catholic commentator, aware of a danger which arises even within a church which is visibly already a single communion. But it arises, too, and more challengingly, in the case of the relation between Church and churches where all are not in communion, and that is the problem to which this book is chiefly addressed. In the foregoing introductory remarks we have been asking what the Church is for and where it is going. We now need to ask in what form or forms, and by what manner of life, it is going to be itself and do its work. The World Council of Churches embraces as ‘churches’ ecclesial entities which St Paul would not have recognised as churches in the same way as he did ‘the church of Corinth’, ‘the church of Rome’. The crucial difference between the usage of St Paul and speaking of, for example, a ‘Methodist church’ or an ‘Anglican church’ is that he understood the local churches he knew to be simply the one Church of Christ meeting in that place.