One Body

By: Gordon Showell-Rogers, General Secretary, European Evangelical Alliance

Part of the beauty of the Body of Christ within Europe is its huge cultural and linguistic diversity.

Within the European Evangelical Alliance (EEA) we celebrate the differences, and enjoy the variety: working hard to hear and understand and care for one another within the Body- and then supporting one another to work together in areas of common concern.

For all evangelicals, our organic unity is the foundation for our shared mission into the world.

The pressures faced by the Body of Christ in Belarus, under an oppressive dictatorship, are very different from those faced by the Body of Christ in a nation like Norway. The difficulties faced by evangelicals in countries with majority Roman Catholic populations (Belgium, Croatia, Italy, Lithuania, Spain etc) are very different from those in countries with a Protestant heritage. Pressures faced in Turkey or Kazakhstan are different again.

But we are all one: delivered from eternal death by a Saviour whose body was broken once, so that He might build a People who would be His Body on earth.

And by God’s grace, all of us in the EEA form part of that global Body, and seek to reflect Him to our societies….so that all our populations might encounter the crucified and risen Saviour, whose Body is, mysteriously, physically in heaven in His Person, and physically on earth, by His Spirit, to the glory of God the Father.

Gordon Showell-Rogers
General Secretary
European Evangelical Alliance
www.europeanea.org