No one ever wrote a children’s song that said, “They will know we are Christians by our every-second-Sunday-of-the-month Lord’s Supper, 9 a.m. and 11 a.m.”

I suppose every body of believers that hangs their shingle out has to decide pretty soon exactly who they are. There may be a fair amount of wiggle room for “disputable matters.” But at the end of the day, the congregation has to know what are the “non-wiggle” truths without which they should not consider themselves a Church.

A friend of mine said that a while back his denomination did some rethinking. They were a group that had held to the three traditional Reformed marks of the true Church: (1) the right preaching of the Word; (2) the proper observation of the sacraments; (3) the practice of spiritual discipline. But it occurred to someone that maybe they should amend their statement to include “love” as one of the necessary marks without which the Church is not the Church.

I can just imagine how that would hit the fan in some churches. There is something about the word “love” that riles folks. It sounds like a code word for liberal, or soft on doctrine, or some other deviance from orthodoxy. It’s just touchy-feely. It lacks intellectual rigor.

If we can get past that initial visceral response and love one another enough to think calmly about this, we find an interesting question on our hands, and one not easily settled in either direction.

Read More: http://online.worldmag.com/author/andreeseu/

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