"Malcolm Quotes" #2

Here's another installment. Lewis writes to "Malcolm":

Broaden your mind, Malcolm, broaden your mind! It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and heaven will display far more variety than hell. (Letter II)

I'll never forget the "cognitive dissonance" I experienced when I first arrived in England for a year of Bible training. I immediately mixed it up with all sorts of European Christians, some of whom even (gasp!) baptized babies! Having been raised in a "believer only" baptismal tradition, it was difficult to accept when I found out that these people were clearly brothers and sisters in the faith. "The church must be bigger than I thought," I said to myself. I learned to hang out with Christians who had a pint of beer with their lunch, or smoked cigars, or...baptized babies!

I wonder if I have completely learned this lesson. Of course, there are theological convictions that I will never, NEVER jettison, but sometimes I wonder if our denominational differences are rooted more in tempermental differences than theological. In other words, I wonder if our denominational differences (dare I say, our "denominational richness"?) are almost necessary to display the full panoply of God's richness.

Now calm down, my baptist brethren. I'm not at all suggesting a doctrinal relativism; I'm suggesting a packaging relativism. Is the ONLY way to do a God-glorifying worship service to have three hymns (or choruses), an offering, and a sermon? Is it really wrong to repeat the Lord's Prayer every Sunday, along with the Apostle's Creed, or Nicene Creed?

I'm very comfortable in my Southern Baptist situation (though that is not the tradition in which I was raised); I'm just trying to be a "Christian," in the fullest historical sense of that word, or as F.F. Bruce once said, "I want to be an un-hyphenated Christian," as opposed to "Baptist Christian," or "Lutheran Christian," etc.