On Sunday evening, hundreds of commissioners and fellow worshippers converged on Vaughn Community, a church complex in Thornhill, Ont.
The thriving Korean-speaking congregation, which is part of the Presbytery of Eastern Han-Ca, welcomed them to their new building. During breaks in an afternoon of panel discussions and an evening dinner of European and Korean food, commissioners explored the sprawling building—it’s children’s area decorated like the ark complete with murals, the Christian education wing, the small museum of missionaries to Korea, the upstairs café, the sanctuary, chapel, gym and offices.
In the evening, commissioners were joined by many others who came to attend the assembly’s communion service. In previous years, the General Assembly began with a service on Sunday evening. But this year the meeting of the church’s highest court began on Friday and ended on Monday, placing the Sunday service closer to its end then its beginning.
Vaughn Communiy’s praise band led worship songs. Its choir offered classic hymns. And as moderator of last year’s assembly, Rev. Dr. John Vissers preached on unity in Christ. His passage was John 17:20-24.
“The unity about which Jesus speaks and for which he prays is more than some human or social ideal,” he said. It is “a deep spiritual unity. It is rooted in the reality of God’s unity, of divine unity. It is based in the unity between the Father and the Son. … The unity of believers is to be experiences as a participation in the very life of the Triune God.”
The unity for which Jesus prays is “expressed in diversity,” he said later on. “In this passage, you’ll notice, Jesus prays not only for his disciples but also for those who will believe through their word. The gospel writer reminds his widely scattered listeners in the first century that Jesus prayed not only for his earliest disciples but he prayed for them as well—for those who believe through the witness of the disciples. And this means, my sisters and brothers, that Jesus prayed not only for them, but he prayed for all believers throughout history, including us.”
“God is in the business of redeeming a diverse creation—all nations, all the peoples of this world. The African theologian Lamin Sanneh says that the message of the gospel has an uncanny ability to be transmitted across all cultures and to find a home in each. One gospel, many peoples. Unity that ignores this diversity is uniformity. Unity celebrates diversity. Uniformity seeks to eradicate it. Uniformity is coercive and exclusive, it wants to dominate and control and assimilate. But true unity is characterized by love, which does not seek its own way. Because that’s who God is.”
He challenged the church to move beyond “our colonial Christendom, Anglo-Saxon identity at every level of the church” to “become a truly, truly global church.”
In his final point, Vissers said the unity for which Jesus prays is “exercised not for the sake of the church but for the sake of the world.”
“The church of God does not have a mission,” he said. “But the God of mission has a church. And Jesus prays that this church will be one so that the world may believe. The church is to be the harbinger of the new humanity, the outpost of God’s work in the world, and may I say not the church in general, not the church as some vague ideal, but each and every local, struggling congregation in its own culture, in its own community, in its own context.”
