"What is the tremendous power which can keep people together under those circumstances? I think certainly not in a minimum of faith or a minimum of anything, but in a maximum of experience. An experience which is at the very heart and the root of everything that is. A personal knowledge and commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the only thing that can keep us together and this must be a commitment to Him personally, to Him in His uniqueness, to Him who is committed in a way that no one of us is committed. The image that fits here is that of the story of the storm in the Gospel. The Lord is at the heart of the storm and the disciples edging towards the shore, but Christ caused Peter to walk and come to where he is in the eye of the cyclone. That is where we should be for it is where Christ is. Only then can we be committed to one another.
I wonder whether this question of culture, polarisation and so on is not, like everything human, equivocal. The early disciples had nothing in common except the Lord Jesus Christ and the knowledge of Him crucified and risen. Now we have got too much in common, and the more we have in common according to nature the less we perceive we have according to grace. The more we insist on the cultural aspect the more we risk to lose the only one who is the Lord Jesus Christ and our God."
+ Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1972-10-00-1-E-E-T-EM02-039IsFellowshipPossible(Ecumenism).html
