In appreciating who we are as the Church – as followers of Jesus Christ – we need to take into account our very long history.  ‘We’ are not just the ‘We’ of today but we belong to a ‘We’ that goes back a very long way.

Our identity has its roots in Jesus Christ who lived some 2,000 years ago – and nothing can take his place.  So, the stretch from his time to ours goes into the making of who we are. 

Those believers who first bore witness to him, and who put that witness down on paper thus giving us the gospels and the rest of the New Testament, remain crucial to our faith and our identity as Christians.  We cannot make up what we believe.  What we believe now has to be in continuity with the faith of those first believers, even though there are considerable differences between their time and ours and between them and us.

This is what the Creed means when it calls the Church ‘apostolic’ – it has its roots in the apostles and those first apostolic times.  And we must maintain and nourish the continuity between those times and our own.

In between those first times and our present, there have been many centuries and many changes: a great variety of cultures and languages and ways of thinking, new geographical locations, differing political systems, differing relationships between the Church civil authorities.

In all these different situations, there have been developments in the understanding of the Gospel and in the way the Church has lived and presented itself and taken its place in these many societies.  But all this has happened while maintaining our roots in the New Testament and with an eye always cast in its direction.

This continuity with our origins has been maintained over all the centuries, often in the midst of conflict and threatening division, and at times with a necessary exclusion of some who refused to keep moving ahead or who refused to keep continuity with the origins. 

That long continuity of our identity, in differing situations, is a part of who we are.  It is what the Creed calls our apostolicity.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin

Published: 23 August 2024