It is astonishing that in the 21st century the World Church should be so fragmented and never realize its biblical identity or think of acting together. There is no conceivable doubt that the Church is a World Church. Christians were told to go into all the world and preach the Gospel. John 3:16 says, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes on him, should not perish and have eternal life.” The chorus, “Red and yellow, black and white – all are precious in his sight” has been round for a century or more. We hear Coptic, Russian, African, American worship and know the witness of Christians in every continent, but still most of the time churchgoers revert to being Anglicans in the Ely Diocese, or Welsh Methodists, and we practise our tribal rituals.

Of course, Christians know that there is a worldwide church out there, and they have been very adept at having events on television and throughout the media conveying it. There is no way Christians cannot be aware of their brothers and sisters across the globe through missionary movements, news of persecution, music, and so on. And, of course, the Catholic Church has been global for several centuries. Yet, still we are not the World Church.

There are three obvious impediments. The first is ecclesiasticism and institutional church loyalty. Still demoninations, sorry denominations, claim the organisational loyalty of Christians, and their money, and the institutional churches focus down on their within-building worship and ritualised behaviour. Churches have been through ecumenism and come out the other side knowing that somehow pulling together organisational churchianity misses the point.

The second is doctrinal exclusivism, the self-rightness of different groups and their need to possess their truth. For centuries the Catholic Church owned its truth, largely because it allowed membership criteria and created religious power. The Reformation and the opening up the Bible created a rich set of discussions about all kinds of aspects of truth, but sadly both Catholics and Protestants settled down on their own versions of infallibilism, infected by the need for pulpit power or the need to “defend” God. Poor education, doses of rationalism, and a range of sub-cultural attitudes kept us small minded, but God will give us big picture Christianity than which nothing is bigger.

Then the Church was frightened by Fascism, Atheistic Communism and Western secularism away from thinking big, or standing on public issues and it has become the amorphous introverted body it is at present, with some intimations of what God’s wider purposes might be, but actually unable to organise into the body of I Corinthians 12 knit together from the Head or able to run a race like an athlete, to do something efficiently. It is not fit for purpose. What might that purpose be?

This issue has grown from studying the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference when the World Church nearly emerged. Tens of millions of Christians and others, possibly amounting to nearly half the world’s population got behind world disarmament. It was backed by the Pope, Archbishops, Kings, most of the world political leaders, and usually on Christian grounds. President Hoover supported by almost all the world’s political leaders proposed a radical 1/3 plus immediate cut in arms, but the arms companies, and the British Government, because it was jealous of the United States, stalled it. Hitler came to power. He was funded and armed, and World War Two killed off the World Church, and it has stayed fragmented since.

It nearly happened, and it could happen again on the issue of disarmament. 2.3 billion World Church Christians could disarm the world, if we worked to one purpose. This time we can have the wit to see it through and save the world from disasters, waste, threats, wars, military global warming, just when the whole system of militarism is ramping up. But Christians need first to wake up to the possibility. The Lamb on the world throne, rather than the Bomb, is the God-given Way. Loving enemies works. Wars are stupid. Arms only destroy and are worse than useless. Weapons and War can be systematically rolled back. The logistics are not difficult. The costs are vastly negative. But for this to happen we need to undo a century of brainwashing by the militarists. Then we can disarm the world.

How can a Church preoccupied by chasubles, frightened by secular powers, locked in denominationalism, focussed on minutiae wake up to this – to being the World Church, to lifting its heads, to disarming the world? Really, it is easy in a social media world where hundreds of thousands of church members could sign petitions in a day, and all Christians can make peace all across the world. We need to know where the shoes of peace are going. The stages are relatively clear. The opposition is obvious. It will be a fight, but with the armour of God – truth, justice, peace, salvation and the Word of God – it can be done. But the first question is: Can the World Church wake up? You, too, are the World Church. Your power is not control or aggression, but shared public conviction and action with Christians everywhere. You are the World Church; you can bring about world multilateral disarmament and much more in God’s purposes.