Jesus is ONE-denominational

I am amazed by the sheer number of different things people place a primary emphasis on in their Christian faith these days (and throughout history). This week a pastor I was talking with said that with the de-emphasis most younger people today are placing on denominational distinctions he feels a strong need to get his congregation to understand the history of his denomination so that people will retain their loyalty to it. With this in mind, he is planning on teaching the denominational history of his church during Sunday School classes (not just during his membership class).

Now the problems I have with this emphasis are that the denomination becomes more important than Jesus and people become more loyal to their denomination than to Jesus! The result is that the church slowly abandons its mission to bless the world with the message of Jesus (and in the above case the new mission becomes keeping Christians loyal to a denomination). In 1 Corinthians 1:10-17, Paul saw how a misplaced loyalty away from the person of Jesus was negatively impacting the church in Corinth. Rather than focusing their attention on blessing the outside world with the message of Jesus, they were focusing their attention on increasing their status within the church by aligning themselves with certain Christian leaders. I guess that they had forgotten that Jesus taught us to "deny ourselves" and that "the last shall be first, and the first shall be last."

Another problem I have with the emphasis on denominations is that I didn't realize that denominational distinctions were so important to Jesus, the founder of the Christian faith. In fact, I thought that he founded only one movement (or denomination). And I thought that the inspired history and distinctives of this movement were found in the pages of the Bible. And I didn't realize that whether someone was Reformed, Arminian, or Dispensational was all that important to Jesus. Maybe I'm just missing something by wanting to make Jesus the sole emphasis in the Christian faith.

Anyway, I love the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:2, "For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified." And in the same letter (11:1) Paul writes "Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ." I think Paul agrees that living two six (1 John 2:6) requires that Jesus and his example get the sole emphasis in our Christian faith! After all, Jesus is our faith!