I think you bring up an important issue that i am still struggling to account for. Church size does matter, it seems, in terms of how many voices can be heard at one time, in one place. Part of what seems to be at stake here is an understanding of what is most important to a community. If the point of the gathering community is to discern the proclaimed gospel, then it seems a good chunk of the service should be dedicated to conversation about the word of the preacher. I think this is also a wonderful way to see how disagreements are fertile soil for unsettling our previously conceived judgments—and realize that this is what the “finality of Jesus” is all about: “The finality of Jesus’ authority is simply this, that all must ultimately come to this light and this presence for their final place or destiny to be made known” (Rowan Williams). This could mean that our meetings of worship should make room for holy conversation—words transfigured by the Word—in which we come to see ourselves and our perspectives in a new light, the light of Christ’s authority, and change our mind because we realize someone else might be able to see us better than we can see ourselves—we always have a backside that we can’t see.

I think you are totally right about the allergic reaction against entertaining the possibility that we may be different yet worship the same Jesus Christ. It seems that a community uncomfortable with the disruption of emerging difference actually squelches the Spirit with a totalizing vision of Unity and Sameness: “this difference can’t be part of Us. Conform or leave!” I think it takes a certain degree of that self-emptying Paul talks about in Philippians 2 where the God-man releases his grasp on his divinty and makes himself a slave. There is a radical dispossession of control, a trust in the winds of the Spirit to blow us where the Spirit wills.

After saying all that I remember a disturbing quote from a Christian voice south of the border. This man lived in the slums of Lima and see the light of the gospel refracted in ways that highlighted the promise of abundant life of Christ for all—even those who suffer under oppressive socio-economic weight. Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez writes, “The poor of the earth, in their struggles for liberation, in their faith and hope in the Father, are coming to teh realization that, to put it in the words of Arguedas, ‘the God of the masters is not the same.’ Their god is not the God of the poor. For ultimately the dominator is one who does not really believe in the God of the Bible.” That voice coming from the margins, the understide of history, disrupts my desire to think that all so-called ‘christians’ are part of the same family. I know that I am not in a position to say that, but it seems that we should listen to these ‘strange’ voices that appear on the perimeter and offer a different vantage point. For Paul, the weakest voice is the most important—consensus descision-making doesn’t happen until the weakest voice is given the floor. Gutierrez might be one of these weakest voices that disrupts our claims and convictions, that is if we want to listen. We don’t have to listen to the weakest voice. That is exactly what makes their voice weak—it takes exercizing the ears to tune into those voices that we don’t normally register.