Galatians 3:26-29 — For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.

Our world is falling apart — and the church should be trying to hold it together. One of the things that is often on my mind is the way the church has splintered into twenty thousand denominations. But there’s another aspect to this question of church unity. It’s the question of nationalism or even regionalism, and the challenge is often masked by ideas that sound really good.
It sounds right, doesn’t it, to be adapting programs and practices to national preferences. History, though, has plenty of examples of “national” churches that were far away from being part of a universal catholic church. Consider, for instance, the “German” church of the 1930’s. In fact, of course, any church that puts national identity ahead of identity in Christ fails the test. It might even be said that the Church of England failed that test at its foundation and has been in recovery ever since. Looking at the issue from a broader perspective Alan Lewis said:

The cosmic range of Christ’s crucified lordship means that, on the one hand He may be found and followed in every society, and His gospel and His church live in symbiosis with every culture; and, on the other hand, that no culture whatsoever may be sanctified or idolized, identified as the embodiment of truth on which His church depends.

The warning is especially appropriate to a world in which, as the Cold War threat has receded, nationalism has re-emerged and in
which it is be be becoming fashionable to talk of the Western church fading and the African, Latin American and Asian churches becoming the new focus of Christianity.
There’s another aspect to this risk, too. Just as fracture across national lines is a misunderstanding of the church’s mission, so too is a fracturing across generational lines. There is a church movement having it’s roots in Europe in the 1970’s but now accelerating, variously described as “emerging”, or “emergent”, that seeks to place Christianity in a context for today. In particular, rather than providing a pre-determined and pre-digested theology, the emerging church assumes the reader brings a cultural context to scripture and will interpret it accordingly. It is, if you like, a post-modernist, “no absolute truth” theology.
The “time-shifted” view of Christian truth is as fallacious as the “space-shifted” view. We need to be acutely on our guard against any attempt to further divide the church by taking a”local” view of it. That is, as it were, to look from the wrong end of the telescope. We should be looking for the one church’s view on our society … Not our society’s view on the one church. We are the universal catholic church … we must seek to be the glue that holds things together.