If you think that Christianity is simply designed for your personal self-fulfilment and individual salvation, leaving you to get on with your own life and doing your own thing, then you are missing the point. The church as the whole people of God lies at the centre of God's purposes.

Every Christian is baptised by the Spirit into this one body. No Christian can or should exist outside of the church. Christ laid down his life in order to create in himself out of Jews and Gentiles one new man. I am part of that new man and his body. An amputated limb dies unless it is immediately attached again to the body. I am dependent and interdependent on the whole people of God, and they on me. If I think of myself as Mrs Cool and Detached Christian, or that I am Mr Lone Ranger Christian and that I can ride off into the sunset when I have some tiff with another church member then I haven't begun to understand what God did to all believers when he made us the body of Christ. There can be no Christian isolationists without severe deprivation coming upon the church.

Everywhere we look in the world there are walls between different people. They separate East from West, Arab from European, North from South, affluent from deprived. Broken homes, divided communities, gangs and ghettos abound. The Lord's purpose in the church is for this one body to be a visible alternative society to all of that. It is to be a fellowship of peace within which the dividing walls have been broken down, and where men and women are not be judged 'according to the flesh'. In other words, not by the colour of their skin, their IQ, the school they went to, the part of town they live in, their suntans, their accent, where they went on holiday. In this one new man you meet the rich and the poor, the black and the white, the intellectual and those who have learning difficulties. Its members welcome one another on the basis of spiritual realities, not human characteristics. Here the handicapped find a welcome, the easily tempted find strength, and the homosexual is helped to put his past behind him.

What kind of unity is this? It is a unity created in Christ. It embraces all who were given by the Father to the Son, and all who were in him when he hung on the cross, and all to whom the Father and Son send the Holy Spirit to dwell. We are all one new man because we all have the same relationship with God. All God's children are our brothers and sisters. We didn't choose them. God chooses them. Our responsibility is only to love and acknowledge them. Part of the meaning of being a Christian is that the triune God has taken up residence in each of us. Christ actually makes us all one by dwelling in each one of us. How can a Christian hate another human being in whom his very own God and Saviour lives? How can he rubbish him? How can he belittle him? ‘We are one new man,’ he has to confess.

If we are one new man then we have fellowship with one another. We share everything. Can you imagine the lungs refusing to pass on oxygen to the blood stream? Or imagine the heart saying it wanted a break and it wasn't going to beat for the next hour because all the rest of the body was taking it for granted! We share in the giving and receiving, and in the ministry of prayer, and in evangelism. We bear one another's burdens because we are one man. We share in such a way as to ensure that no fellow Christian is in need. When we go to the Lord's Supper we are told by Paul that then there is participation in the body of Christ and in the blood of Christ, but that is also true of our entire Christian lives. We are bound together by the fact that wherever we are all of us believers are sharing in the body and blood of Christ. We are experiencing together the blessings of the new covenant.

In the Christian church - remember I am writing about it as the one new man - there is something more than mere sharing. There is such an involvement with one another and such a depth of affection and sympathy, that if one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it (I Corinthians 12:26). You are one new man, and the inflammation of one little part, say an appendix, makes the whole body sick. A man does not say, ‘My liver has cancer, but I myself am fine.’ He acknowledges that it is he himself who is unwell. If one part suffers, every part is touched by it. So if one Christian is not performing as he should in a congregation, all of us are weakened, because the church is a body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, and it can grow only as every single part does its work (Ephesians 4:16). We are being summoned to a degree of commitment, concern, involvement and intimacy far beyond what we usually find in churches today.