The Beauty of the Bride
Sir Francis Galton was a British statistician and eugenics theorist who lived in the late 1800’s. Among his many theories was the idea that what made someone’s face attractive was the average-ness of their features. In other words, the closer the measurements of facial features was to the average, the more attractive that person would be. This became known as the averageness hypothesis. It wasn’t until the 1990’s, with the advent of computer imagery, that Mr. Galton’s idea could be tested.
One day I stumbled across a website that allowed the user to experiment with Galton’s hypothesis. You could select from a bank of available facial images. The computer would then combined the selected images to create a composite face. As Galton predicted, the more faces you selected, the more attractive the composite face would become.
As an example, below are a set of individual faces selected:
Below is the resulting composite face:
Pretty neat, huh.
While playing with the app, I also noticed a couple things.
Body positivity aside, the first thing I noticed that the attractiveness of the composite was independent of the specific faces selected. It didn’t matter which faces I selected, the same composite face would always be generated.
The other thing I noticed was that it only required the user select four or five faces before the composite face reached terminal appeal. Including more faces beyond this did little to change the appearance of the composite.
I think this phenomenon holds a lot of parallels in the church. (Hear me out…)
The church is the Bride of Christ on Earth. Her job is the demonstrate and embody the enduring life of Christ to the world and to one another by word and deed. She can’t do this by her own power alone. So, among her many members the Holy Spirit has distributed specialized graces (gifts) that empower us to the work that the Lord he has called for His bride to do. As I shared in Why We Gather – Part II, these graces are multi-faceted and innumerable.
We can think of these graces as features on the face of the Bride. These graces are balanced in such a way that, when combined, they give the world something beautiful to behold. And just like in the gospels when the world sees Jesus Christ in action, it can’t help but be drawn to Him.
But rather than every member function with their uniquely distributed gifts, we unfortunately tend to see one of two things happen.
First, the body tends to relegate all the ‘gift sharing’ to a limited number of professionals within the church. Second, churches will sometimes emphasize a limited set of gifts that they feel everyone should focus on. When either of these things happen, the church can lack the variety that would otherwise contribute to it’s beauty. It’s not that such churches aren’t beautiful in some respects. They simply aren’t as attractive as they were designed to be.
May we as the Bride learn to more fully operate in her abundant graces so as to reveal the manifold beauty of our King!
Images by Pat David on Flickr, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.