According to the Winkler and Morden websites there are 38 churches between the two communities…19 in Winkler and 18 in Morden. Of course this is a conservative figure and the number is likely closer to 50 when you consider house churches and non-traditional forms of worship and the unlisted.

Imagine that – for a region of 25,000 people there are about 50 churches. That’s one church for every 500 people. According to recent statistics Manitoba is 78 percent Christian and while our area is likely higher we’ll use that number to account for the number of people who claim Christianity as a faith but do not attend church.

This means we’re looking at one church for roughly every 390 people.

On the surface this seems great but in reality I wonder sometimes. I wonder how cities like Rome and Corinth which numbered in the hundreds of thousands could manage with one church instead of say, 500 churches. As much as we’d like to, we cannot claim that the preponderance of churches in our region is healthy because you don’t want 25,000 people in one church (there are churches in the world that actually make this work by the way…the largest church is a Presbyterian church in Seoul, South Korea with more than 200,000 members).

The primary reason there are so many churches in our region is not out of a desire to best serve the populace but because of historic and continuing church splits within Protestantism. There are 50 churches because there are 50 opinions on how best to be a follower of Christ.

Is this healthy? Is this biblical? Some would argue large churches kill community and relationship because they are impersonal and so, many churches equal smaller congregations and therefore more genuine relationship. Except that once a church gets to more than 70 people you begin to lose relationship so if this were a legitimate argument we’d have even more churches. Very large churches seek to solve this problem by developing small groups of no more than 12 people per group.

Still there is the problem of 50 different types of small groups, reflecting 50 differing schismatic perspectives and so one cannot claim a united body. One cannot claim one body even when 7 of the local 18 churches gather together once a year for a Good Friday service (as good an effort as that is).

To get back to Corinth and Rome it is clear that their were whole city church gatherings and, more often, small home church meetings. Do not confuse the biblical house church with the small group of today. While there are similarities there are significant differences as well.

Today the church is seen as the large group that gathers weekly in one place and encourages members to also gather regularly in smaller groups for personal feeding and depth. In the New Testament the church was the gathering of smaller house churches…the life of the church was nourished primarily in the home where worship through the singing of hymns, reading of scripture, teaching of scripture, prophesy, healing, tongues and interpretation, etc. occurred. The celebration of the Lord’s Supper was an actual shared meal…and this seems to have happened almost nightly after work rather than once every two weeks.

Imagine if there were literally one church in Morden and one church in Winkler. Imagine if, to make such a church work leadership was required to help structure a house church system of such depth and regularity. Imagine again that the church was not a large gathering of individuals once a week encouraged to get together as time permitted in smaller groups to supplement the Sunday service. Imagine instead the church was these house churches who would gather weekly in one place as an overflow to a week’s worth of worship and celebration of Christ. Imagine that every one of these house churches were united by a single creed; a place where there was unity in the essentials and freedom in the non-essentials and where people didn’t fight over which were which.

Imagine that. One church. It forces people to stop bouncing from church to church when things got difficult or disagreeable because there was only one. A place where leadership was distributed throughout the house churches.

One body, whole and not stitched together like some patchwork Frankenstein’s monster. Christ prays int he garden of Gethsemane prior to his arrest and impending execution. Likely his last significant prayer in this world he chooses his church and its unity as the primary theme (not relief of his own suffering). This is how important unity is.

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 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. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” – John 17:20-23

Why should we be brought together in unity? “Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

It is that important.