One holy catholic and apostolic church?

1 Tim 3:15 ...if I am delayed, you will know how people ought to conduct themselves in God's household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.

This verse is used a lot in some circles to promote the idea of a single unified church. While I agree that this is a lovely ideal, I am concerned about how this might work out in practice. Already even within denominations we see disagreements about interpretation of the Bible. People fight over deeply and sincerely held beliefs. As I see it, there are only three solutions to this:

1) allow difference by allowing denominations
2) allow difference by allowing disagreement within the one denomination
3) suppress all difference and expell the heretics.

We currently have 1) with lots of different denominations, some more similar than others. The different "flavours" of church have different audiences and appeal to different types of people, sometimes doing different types of work (mission, school ministry, hospital/teaching ministry, etc).

Option 2) has been tried by the Uniting Church, which resulted in such a watered down faith (IMO) that there is no longer anything certain and they might as well call themselves Unitarians. (Joke: on the front lawns of churches the rebels burn crosses, on the lawns of the UU they have to burn a question mark.)

Perhaps option 2) has a future in the Emerging Church movement, which has as a major belief the journey idea, rather than concentrating on held beliefs. Anglicans also do a bit of this between churches, along the lines of "in essentials unity, in non-essentials diversity, in all things charity". This allows a wide variance of practice while maintaining identity and beliefs. The problem comes when some insist on varieties of practice which others find unacceptable (women or homosexual ministers are the two issues which leap to mind) and ZAP! a new denomination is born...

Option 3) is usually the one the proponents of the "One Church" have in mind. Find the "right" beliefs and chuck everybody else out, since they are obviously heretics and have to either be brought into line or amputated for the good of everyone (they were probably never part of the real church to begin with. This is the idea I have a strong sense of uneasiness about.

Church history tells us that people are not going to agree easily on deeply held beliefs. These differences started with Peter and Paul arguing over how to bring Gentile Christians into the Jewish Christian community, and continue to this day. If there is to be One Church, somehow these differences must be dealt with, preferably without a huge cost in losing people who desperately want to follow the way of Christ but disagree with the church (Leo Tolstoy leaps to mind here).

In my opinion, denominations may in the end be the best of a series of non-ideal choices while we live here in the "not yet".