the elusive bride

Do you know who the bride is? Not you or me or him or her alone, but us together. Us together is her, the bride. I'm just getting my brain wrapped around this. I'm seeing more that this is the Church. And big church Sunday style is not the Church. And the various house churches are not the church. It may be expressions, but not it. That's my growing understanding of the bride, and it's challenging.

That's my super quick background on why I thought this was a really great email I got to peek in on.

You know God was able to give Moses some very specific instructions on how to build the tabernacle. If He had wanted to, He could have done the same quite easily in defining what were the important sacraments, what day of the week we should meet, and what were the 17 key points to have in our statement of faith. Instead “He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.”

With all that there were arguments and schisms in the NT church too. I guess many of Paul’s letters (those that survived and those that didn’t) addressed that.

So do you think we have been doing it all wrong for 1700 or so years now since Constantine?

I suppose the problem is that you can’t really define what is beyond definition in some sense. People want an ecclesiology that they can see, understand, control, or at least that is definitive, ordered, and structured in some sense. They see a pattern or system to everything in the created world and expect the same in the church. What you’re describing is far too dynamic. People want to see and know what their role is in all of this. After all these years, we still want a king of our own flesh, just like Israel and a defined kingdom. We want a simpler order, hierarchy, methodology, or system. The order within a fractal is too complex!

Anyway…just some thoughts. In some sense its very simple to grasp. In another, it’s way over our heads, and not wanted because it’s not within our control, nor does it have the appearance of order in a simple way.