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What if I told you this image was taken from a moving train as I was translating the Easter passage from 1 Corinthians, where Christ our lamb is sacrificed for us and we're enjoined to attend the festival - actually the Corinthians of ca 50 AD are enjoined: we're on the outside looking in, a condition of reading any ancient text, but especially scripture. How do we enter the text? What must this group have been like? Certainly not participants in a worldwide movement. More likely a communal gathering tangentially connected to other communities by the comings and goings of the apostles. There was no central authority - no curia or general assembly or council determining what All believed.
When I look at the accumulation of theology and confessions and catechisms over the ages, I am overwhelmed by how many blanks have been discovered and filled in - blanks that these early people could not have guessed at. But then I look at ordinary believers, who are variantly involved in the faith and they are perhaps better informed than the early believers, but they also have blanks that need to be filled in. The blanks to be filled in today are different blanks. The church today is more fragmented, less communal, individualistic, more consumerist and the product of a particular culture of violence and libido (what Barth describes, in his Commentary on Romans, as the result of erasure of the Creator/creature distinction) - especially here in the US.
For early believers in Corinth: they were called to celebrate a feast of reconciliation, a feast of sharing abundance.