Sam Allbury on Trinity

What happens when we forgetting the Trinity at Church? At least two things will follow.

1. Our view of church will become functional and not relational.
We will only meet to ?do? things, and will not really see the point of meeting for merely social reasons. Our gatherings will become a matter of utility and not family. In churches like this there will not be much life-sharing. The minister will see his congregation as ?clients? or 'patients'; his ministry as one of shunting people through the right programs or 'fixing the sick'. He will see himself as a professional ?Bible teacher?. His people will feel handled rather than loved. The church will be the place to grow for a while in understanding, or at least in Bible knowledge, but will not be the place to find authentic Christian community.

2. Our aim for church will be uniformity and not diversity. The Trinity shows us a God who is unity in diversity rather than unity in sameness. The Father, Son and Spirit are not interchangeable. They share an ontological unity, but function differently within the purposes of God. This lies behind Paul's teaching on the variety of gifts found in the church in 1 Corinthians 12:4-6, Our unity-in-diversity reflects God's unity-in-diversity.

A Unitarian view of God will therefore lead to a monochrome view of the church. Maturity will be understood in terms of trying to make everyone a certain kind of Christian. Christians will look the same and sound the same. They'll be encouraged into the same kind of ministry. A particular gifting will be the hallmark of the spiritually advanced. In Corinth (reading between the lines) it was evidently the gift of tongues. Today, in many reformed churches, it is the gift of teaching. Those who are really committed to the gospel will become ?Bible-teachers? (there they are again). There will be cultural and vocational flatness.

Christianity it may well be, but a form of Christianity unwittingly more akin to Islamic, not evangelical, theology.