I’m not sure I can sing that...

‘And in this gospel the church is one…’ (CityAlight, 2022). ‘I believe the church is holy, one communion in God’s love…’ (Emu Music, 2023)

Have you ever had the experience during a song of something welling up within you saying: ‘I’m not sure I can sing that right now’? That’s been me.

We have recently enjoyed learning several songs at our church that draw to our attention what the Bible says about the church. But against the backdrop of all the doctrinal disharmony in the Church of England, alongside the intense outpourings of anguish, grief and outrage that have followed in its wake, how can I say, let alone sing, with any integrity that the church is in any sense ‘one’?

No sooner does this thought surface in my mind, than also arises the premonition that there is someone, armed with a copy of the Westminster Confession, advancing ominously towards me with much to say about the difference between the church visible and invisible. But, without wanting to minimise the blessings of history’s greatest theological brainiacs, there’s a difference between knowing the correct answer and having a truth effusively cascade out of you as you sing it with joy to God and your fellow believers.

What has helped me is understanding that, as the Nicene Creed formulates it, ‘I believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic church’ is not merely a statement of fact, but a statement of faith. And that faith is not in a man-made organisation, in an incorporeal natural law or an unknown deity, but in a trustworthy person, in Jesus, who declared ‘I will build my church’ (Matt.16:18) and prayed ‘that all [Christians] may be one’ (John 17:21). To sing that the church is one is to sing with a hope that Jesus Himself personally guarantees.

We will have brothers and sisters whose faith is feeling wobbly in the wake of much ecclesiastical upheaval. But instead of merely filling minds with correct doctrinal answers, let’s teach people to sing, fuelled by a heartfelt assurance that when Jesus says He will do something, it will dependably happen.