Someone asks how it is that I do not fit the mold of any particular denomination, and agree at times with various groups across Christendom. Is not that being unfaithful to the tradition in which I was reared and to which I belong?
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I am convinced that each major Christian group began by a move of God’s Spirit to recover, renew or restore some element of Christian teaching, life or experience which was then dormant, lagging or lacking in the church at large. All of us need all the truth — and we should not fail to receive it just because someone else found it first.
We must also learn to eat the meat and throw away the bones. Every part of the Church has abuses and extremes, confusions and errors, which we do well to reject and to avoid. But we also need to avoid the mistake of the blind men who touched different parts of the elephant and respectively concluded that the animal resembled a rope and a wall. Their individual truths were not wrong — they were simply incomplete.
The point is not who said it first, or what our tradition has always held. If it came from God, it’s for all his people. I want all the truth anyone else has found — and I want to share with others all of God’s truth that I might have found. Only by such a quest will we come to realize the wholeness of the universal church.
