Now That We've Agreed to MRI
Diocesan Press Service. November 2, 1964 [XXVI-26]
By the time you've said "Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ," you've said a mouthful, hinted at meaning, and made your listener feel he's missed something important somewhere along the line. Abbreviating it to "M.R.I." may only stir memories of projects which began in a burst of relevance and ended as alphabetic cliches.
Since the Church lives because of the meaning of this concept, how can the Church's people relate this meaning to themselves?
This question was faced by the Rt. Rev. Stephen F. Bayne, Jr., Anglican Executive Officer, in an address to a joint session of the Church's 61st General Convention.
GOD'S PRIORITY
Three propositions form the heart of M.R.I. The first reaffirms the absolute priority of God. In Christian faith and in the Bible, God comes first. He is the prime mover in creation and redemption. He is the response to His own mission.
The mission of the Church, then, is a following after God in which we try to read His will in our history, to discern His acts in our world, to fight our way through the confusion of our times to His side, where we can join Him and make Him known to those who do not know Him.
MANKIND'S UNITY
The second proposition is about the unity of mankind. By our inhumanity to each other, by our sin, we destroy the initial unity which was ours by creation, by nature. By God's grace, however, there is a second, deeper unity given us in our salvation.
Salvation is the unity that Baptism ministers and expresses within the Body of Christ. Its supreme expression is our companionship at our Lord's table, in that full Communion which makes it possible for us to break the Bread of Life together everywhere in the world. No division in human life is strong enough to overcome this unity born of salvation, if we are true to it.
CHURCH'S REDEDICATION
The third basic proposition is that now is the time for our Church -- for every Church -- and for ourselves as Churchpeople to rededicate ourselves to that unity and to the priority of God. Rededication means finding new ways, appropriate to our times, to express this obedience.
Once we have accepted and affirmed these propositions, how will we know that our action is making the whole Church more effective and the Gospel more relevant to the whole world? Two tests are suggested.
Test One: Brotherhood
The first test is brotherhood. To younger nations emerging from colonialism, the sincerity proclaimed by older nations and older churches is tested by the degree to which they are willing to admit in practice the reality and importance of the life of younger churches in the common life of the world. If actual working brotherhood is absent, no amount of paternal generosity can ever take its place.
The test of brotherhood is put this way: Do older churches mean what they say? Are they prepared to receive and to listen? Are they prepared to give with no strings attached and then accept the consequence of that giving?
A WAY OF GIVING
Our failure to date has not been in the heroic work of missionaries who help to establish churches or even in the generous gifts made by one church to support another. Rather, we have failed in our use of imagination. We often lack the ability to understand what it is to be young and inexperienced, what it is to need to stand on ones own feet, to be heard, to be part of the mature brotherhood of world society.
To pass the test of brotherhood, we need the ability to give in a way that truly sets people free -- to make real gifts of responsibility and freedom.
Test Two: Service
The second test is service. What are we serving? Whom are we serving? The non- Christian world often suspects that we are only serving ourselves. From this point of view, our world-wide involvement is a way of guaranteeing our own comfort, of using churches and Christians as tools for our own ends. To many, we support mission work in other countries only to soothe our own bad consciences, only to preserve the status quo a little while longer.
Moved by this point of view, some new nations have rejected our missionaries and the financial assistance we give to young churches in their midst. If we believed that mission service to us was motivated by self-interest, we in our country would act as quickly to reject it. HOW SERVICE ?
How, then, can we serve other people? Despite the critical, immediate needs of younger churches for emergency help in money and manpower, there is but one gift we can make that really matters: we can only give ourselves. Through every channel of service open to us, we can only give our own love, our own faith, our own discipleship, fully and lovingly shared.
Mutual responsibility may start with recognition of the immense and urgent needs of younger churches, but in the end, it is a program about us, about our own discipleship, about the life and witness of our own church, in our own land. If what we are is deep and true, if our discipleship is a true service, then this can be shared with others to encourage and lead them in their own discipleship.
Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ is a radical challenge to personal service, to conversion, to a new start. If it is so understood, God will lead us to find the new forms and structures and imagination we so profoundly need and long to have.