I genuinely believe this first question, who are we, is the most important question we’ll consider in this period of discernment. This first question is all about understanding what makes St Paul’s unique.
This is a crucial question to ask because each and every church is unique and understanding this is vitally important as we consider how to steward the grace of God to each other and our parish.
St Paul’s Canterbury isn’t Hillsong, or the Vietnamese Baptist church down the road, it’s different from other nearby Anglican churches too. They each do certain things better than we ever could and we will do some things better than they can.
Before we look at what makes our church unique its important to hear what the bible says about this question - who are we?
At our first workshop we looked at the following passages:
Galatians 3.26-28, 1 Corinthians 1.1-9, 1 John 2.28-3.3, John 17.20-25
Each of these passages speaks an important word into this question because they are all about Christian identity.
‘you are all children of God through faith’
‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’
‘to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours’ (quite a statement when you read on to see just how wild the Corinthians were 1 Corinthians 1.2)
‘See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!’
‘I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.’
Out of that solid grounding in Christ as God’s children who have had the love of the Father lavished on them we now have to work out what is the unique expression of these truths at St Paul’s. And this is so important to do because as crucial as that grounding in christ is those spiritual truths could be said of (and should be said of) every christian church.
In the next post we’ll look at the congregational history of St Paul’s from 1860 to the present day and trace some threads that continue to shape us today.