Exciting News!

I apologize for the lack of updates over the past couple months. I think that I am finally adjusting into my new schedule as a pastor serving in my first appointment. As I have told many of you, there is nothing I would rather be doing every day...and I still can't believe I'm getting paid to love people!

Despite this blog silence, all has not stayed completely quiet on the ecumenical front. A couple months back, I decided to enter an essay contest for the National Council of Churches entitled: "Moving Forward Together: Visions of Young American Ecumenists." Approximately 10 essays were selected to appear in an anthology to be presented at the National Council of Churches Ecumenical Centennial Gathering in November - and then are intended to be published.

Drawing in part from my posts on this site, I wrote on the topic of unity -- and my essay was selected! I titled my essay "The Scandal of Main Street Steeples: Imagining Christian Unity in Postmodern America."

Also, over the next couple months, I'm going to start blogging again, this time addressing some of the more current ecumenical news concerning the various major Christian traditions. Check back often and be sure to keep the conversation going!

Beyond Denominations?

Over the past twenty years, a remarkable shift has taken place in American religion. While most of the large Christian denominations in the US went into decline, "nondenominational" Christianity - typified by megachurches like Lakewood, Saddleback, and Willow Creek - experienced an explosion of growth. Nondenominational churches grew from less than 200,000 adherents in 1990 to over 8,000,000 today. When grouped together with those who identify only as "Christian" or as "Evangelical", this group comprises 11.8% of the US population.

Part of the success of nondenominational churches has been their ability to harness the shifting winds toward postmodernism in American society. In a culture that chafes at authority, tradition, and establishment, any sign of "your grandmother's church" has to go. In the place of stained glass, hymns, pews, and robes, nondenominational congregations have embraced nondescript buildings, rock music, theater seating, and jeans in an effort to attract religious "seekers". Instead of conforming to the catechisms and creeds of a single dominant tradition like "Calvinism" or "Lutheranism" - nondenominational churches provide individuals who are frustrated with denominational divisions with the freedom to draw from a variety of Christian beliefs and practices.

In spite of their disillusionment with Christian denominationalism, these independent congregations see no reason to insist on visible unity. A national or worldwide structure over all the churches conflicts with a postmodern vision of the Church as a decentralized network of Spirit-led and Bible-listening believers.

So, then, is the nondenominational movement the answer to the scandal of denominations? Are we moving into a new age of post-denominational unity? While the culture may be moving toward a “post-denominational” future, I believe that denominations continue to have an important role to play in the quest for Christian unity.

First off, they confront the reality that the Christian Church is sadly but visibly divided. I am glad that so many Christians are eager to move past our denominational divisions – but if all local congregations drop their denominational labels and become “Grace Church” or “Bible Church,” this division does not go away – in fact, it is amplified (from 10 denominations to 1000 congregations)! Without a common history and tradition, people tend to create their own personal version of Christianity (or their pastor's version) – and any overarching unity that exists seems to resemble the surrounding culture more than Christianity.

Denominations provide a history, a language, a tradition in which to live out the Christian faith. Each denomination brings its own gifts to the larger body of Christ. In order for the Church to truly move toward a visible undivided (nondenominational) church, we must first listen to “the grace given to you in Christ” in our brothers and sisters who are committed to different traditions from our own. Then, we can struggle together to find creative ways of building common ground while remaining faithful to our own own tradition. This is difficult ecumenical work, but I believe it is the best way to take each of our denominations beautiful and unique voices and blend them into a unified, harmonious chorus.

Lastly, while postmodernism includes many positive developments - including the humility that is essential for Christian unity - more and more people are feeling adrift, isolated, and disconnected. It’s hard to devote your life to something when all truth is relative, when everything is ultimately meaningless. This is why I know many friends my age who are finding peace and rest in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, which claim historical apostolic authority. In my own experience, I feel deeply committed to my own Methodist tradition – and yet still realize that my denomination is only one small part of the Christian Church and that we are called to “be one".

The way to work toward healing the divisions of the Reformation (and beyond) is by understanding and appreciating the differences of the denominational traditions – not pretending they do not exist.

There Already is One Church (It's Mine)

Growing up a fundamentalist Baptist, I was taught that ecumenism is a bad thing - that it threatened to water down the truth by uniting with false teaching. The roots of this conviction hail back to the beginning of the 20th century, when conservative Christians who were alarmed at rising modernistic trends in the churches (e.g., Darwinism, higher criticism, denial of the miraculous) reaffirmed traditional Protestant theology by staking out certain "fundamental" tenants of the Christian faith. These fundamentals included the inspiration of Scripture, the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ, and atonement for sin through Christ's death on the cross.

As the century progressed, this original fundamentalist movement split into those who remained engaged in the world (present-day "evangelicals") and those who withdrew from the world in an effort to maintain purity (present-day "fundamentalists"). Within the second group, the list of fundamentals expanded beyond the initial understanding of what you believe to include things like what kind of Christian music you listen to, what Bible translation you read, and what clothes you wear. Furthermore, many fundamentalists began advocating what they called "secondary separation" - meaning that churches should not only separate from those they disagreed with, but also from like-minded Christians who had not adequately separated from those they disagreed with. As a result, for these fundamentalist Protestants, the "true Church" ended up consisting of their own local congregations (and perhaps a handful of other people who happened to agree with them on everything).

Key to understanding this fundamentalist separatist impulse is the connection between "the inspiration of Scripture" and "my church's interpretation of Scripture." Thus, other Christians could affirm the entire Nicene and Apostles' Creeds and still be labeled "apostate" because of their method of baptism or preferred Bible translation. In such an atmosphere, ecumenism is next to impossible because there are few to no other Christians left to unite with! In order to achieve true unity, fundamentalists insist that all other Christians must assimilate to the entirety of their congregation's particular interpretation of Scripture.

Although I have focused on fundamentalist Protestants, this model of Christian unity is held by most of the world's Catholic and Orthodox Christians as well. The list of non-negotiable "fundamentals" required for Christian unity is merely substituted for another. Pope Benedict caused a media firestorm in 2007 when he re-released a statement clarifying that Protestants cannot be true churches (in the proper sense) because they lack apostolic succession - ordination at the hands of bishops who are in unbroken unity with the first apostles of Jesus (see: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19692094) Because of this defect, Protestant pastors lack valid ordination and therefore cannot perform valid sacraments. In order to achieve true unity, all other Christians must submit to the apostolic authority of the pope and accept re-ordination at the hands of Catholic bishops (which, at least at this point, would include assimilating to the entirety of Catholic doctrine). Similarly, the Orthodox insist on re-ordination at the hands of their bishops and complete submission to their doctrinal tradition.

Most Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants will concede that people can be true Christians even if they are outside the true Church. In the Vatican II document Unitatis Redintegratio, the Catholic Church clarified that those “who believe in Christ and have been rightly baptized” exist “in a certain communion, albeit imperfect, with the Catholic Church” where their “sacred Christian rites...can truly engender a life of grace and give access to the communion of salvation.” Additionally, these communities have “by no means been deprived of meaning and importance in the mystery of salvation,” for “the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation which derive their efficacy from the very fullness of grace and truth entrusted to the Catholic Church.” In other words, there is sufficient overlap with the doctrine of the "one true Church" (be it Catholic or fundamentalist Protestant) to acknowledge that those in other communities can be "Christian" or "saved." However, more is needed - full doctrinal assimilation - in order to achieve Christian unity. In the meantime, there remains one true Church along with many Christians who have not yet fully assimilated to the truth of what it means to be the "Church."

Positively, this approach to Christian unity refuses to be satisfied with a cheap unity that waters down important doctrinal differences. However, if our differences are not essential to what it means to be "Christian," then why should they be essential to what it means to be united as "Church"? After all, to be baptized into Christ is to be a member of Christ's body, the Church. The picture that emerges from the assimilation model is a divided, disfigured Body of Christ - the true Church - with sundry lopped off parts of Christ's Body lying on the ground (Christians, perhaps, but not fully united to the Church). Ironically, such a gory image should provide the needed impetus for Christian unity that other models have failed to achieve.

Catholics, fundamentalists - what are your thoughts? Admittedly, this post is tainted by my own biases as a mainline Protestant. What would you offer as correctives to my analysis? How might you imagine a way forward that is faithful to your understanding of what it means to be Church?

A United Church of America?

The model for Christian unity that has been the most successful over the past century has been the "lowest common denominator" or the "Uniting church" movement.

Interestingly enough, the Uniting church movement has its roots in Christian evangelism. On the mission field, European/American distinctions between "Presbyterian" and "Baptist" seemed silly. Why impose the centuries-old wounds of the European church on a fledgling church in southern Africa?

So, in 1910, missionaries from across the globe converged in Edinburgh, Scotland for a Conference of World Mission and Evangelism. The chairman of the conference called for the "evangelism of the world in this generation" under the ecumenical motto taken from Jesus' prayer "that they may be one." Springing from this 1910 conference in Edinburgh, a growing consensus of missionaries viewed Christian divisions as the single greatest barrier to the spread of the Gospel.

This evangelical call to ecumenism led to the fusion of two or more churches across the world, many times from different confessional families. In these mergers, the uniting churches shed their denominational labels and joined together around a set of agreed upon doctrines. Typically, these unions involved Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists - most notably in Canada (1925), Thailand (1934), the Philippines (1948), Zambia (1965), and Australia (1977). Even more significantly, church unions in India included Anglicans - and thus episcopal structures of governance - first in the South (1947) and then in the North (1970). The Church of North India is the most comprehensive uniting church in the world - including Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Disciples of Christ, Methodists, Brethren, Presbyterians, and some Pentecostals.

If it could happen in India, why not America? Similar efforts aimed at full unity between Protestants in the US were made, but broke down for the following reasons:

1) Bishops: In both England and America, Presbyterians were reluctant to accept the need for bishops. Anglicans, for their part, insisted on the need for bishops, with some even calling for the re-ordination of pastors from non-episcopal traditions - a deal breaker for most Presbyterians and Methodists.

2) Bureaucracy: Especially in America, where the churches are still relatively large with thousands of congregations and millions of members, many feared that a united Protestant denomination with an accompanying bureaucracy would drag down the mission of local churches.

3) Shifting Emphasis: By the 1960s, the emphasis of an older generation of Protestant missionaries on Christian doctrine and Christian unity shifted as a younger generation focused more on political issues and unity between different religions. As a result, efforts at Christian unity have lost their sense of evangelical urgency, especially in the World Council of Churches.

4) Vatican II: Also in the 1960s, following the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church committed itself to full ecumenical dialogue with other Christians. Given the sheer size and historical self understanding of the Catholic Church, it did not make sense for them to become a member of a federation like the World Council of Churches. Instead, they began talks with other "world confessional families" - with Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, and Reformed. So, the conversation has shifted from unity between different Protestants to unity between Catholics and Protestant "families" (which has so far yielded few visible results).

5) Decline: In places where the church did manage to visibly unite, church unions often set off a period of steep membership decline. The United Church of Canada - one of the earliest uniting churches bringing together Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists - went from representing 6% of Canadians with over a million members in 1965 to representing less than 2% of the population with less than 600,000 members. At its current rate of decline, the United Church of Canada will cease to exist in the next twenty years. This has caused great alarm among potentially uniting churches in the United States (although they themselves are already declining), who warn that a watered down identity leads to a less compelling witness.

For all these reasons, the Uniting church movement has stagnated in the twenty-first century. Sadly, those churches that did manage to unite seem destined to be regarded as anomalies within Christianity - as simply one more denomination among many instead being part of a movement sweeping toward one visibly united Church.

What are your thoughts? Could the Uniting church movement be revived - or modified - for Protestants in our present context? Or was it hopelessly flawed from the outset?

Which Way Forward?

Over the past month or so, I have tried to express theologically why the movement toward full, visible unity is imperative for the Christian, and particularly for the Protestant. We cannot claim to worship a God who embraces the physical and remain satisfied with the spiritual. We cannot expect the world to believe in God's reconciliation if we are content to remain unreconciled to our sisters and brothers.

In spite of common blood and name, the Church is like a feuding family that is unwilling to forgive or forget, paralyzed by its past and unable to embrace a future together.

Now, I was a history major, so I'll be the first to say that the past matters. Some of the Church's divisions were born out of good reasons, perhaps even necessity. Most Catholics today will concede that Luther raised some valid grievances - points that were later addressed in the Council of Trent - but that the Church would have done well to keep him within the fold instead of forcing him out. My own tradition, though originally a renewal movement, was institutionalized when English bishops vindictively refused to ordain and send priests to American Methodists hungry for the sacraments. Today, many Anglicans and Methodists recognize this split as regrettable and steps have been taken - most strikingly in India - to restore their broken unity.

For those of us who "share in one Spirit," might we trust that God's grace is greater than our brokenness and imagine the original reasons for our schism (whether valid or invalid) being swallowed up by love and reconciliation in the present? Might we envision a reunited family, the past forgotten and a common identity embraced?

OK, you might be thinking, but what would this family reunion look like? What is the way forward?

First of all, it requires everyone to come to the table for conversation - even the uncle that you hate. The first step toward unity is the ability to listen in humility, to hear what someone else is saying. This, of course, doesn't mean you will necessarily agree with them, but there can be no possibility of reconciliation if the differing parties don't even know each other.

This is the great achievement of 20th century ecumenism - somehow, they were able to bring Christians from all stripes into the same room where they could get to know each other. In this room, many stereotypes and semantics were ironed out. Not all Catholics think they can save themselves! Not all Protestants think good works don't matter! Particular differences were clarified - but it became much harder to dismiss entire traditions when you looked in someone's eyes and saw the spirit of Jesus there.

In the wake of these conversations, three main strategies for unity have emerged among Christians:

1) Lowest Common Denominator - what are the things we hold in common? This "core" becomes the basis for unity and all other differences are either thrown out completely or judged to be non-essentials. This has been the approach adopted by "uniting" church movements among Protestants in Canada, Australia, India, and some other parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe.

2) Assimilation - one church is right (or the closest to right) and the rest are wrong or misguided (at least in regard to the things that keep them separate). All of the "wrong churches" must conform to the beliefs of the "right church", thus restoring unity. This has been the approach adopted by most Catholics, Orthodox, and various fundamentalist Protestant groups.

3) Non-denominational - local assemblies of believers are united by their common faith. This group agrees with #1 that there is a "core" that all Christians hold in common, but rejects the need for a single overarching structure in favor of a federation of local, independent churches. This approach is rapidly gaining prominence among young, postmodern Protestants in the United States.

In the next three weeks, I'll address each one of these options in more detail. Obviously, none of these models has yet led to full, visible unity among the churches, which is why I'll then offer my own vision for what a Christian family reunion might look like in the future.

The way forward seems uncertain. How might you imagine a reunited Christian family?

Disunity on Display

It was a beautiful, late summer morning, and I was driving a car full of groomsmen to my old roommate’s wedding ceremony. As we meandered through the tranquil countryside of upstate New York on the way to the church, the conversation turned to religion. The best man, sitting next to me in the passenger seat, asked about my studies in divinity school and we began talking about the differences between various Christian denominations. About halfway through our discussion, we followed Route 21 into the tiny village of Palmyra. There, at the intersection of Main and Canandaigua Streets, our eyes could not help but drift up to notice four soaring church spires that pierced the sky. On each corner of the intersection stood a different church – Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal. The best man, who attended a suburban nondenominational congregation, remarked how he had never really thought about Christian disunity until he saw it dramatically displayed on that street corner.

That moment remains etched in my mind whenever I consider the importance of Christian ecumenism. As it turns out, another young man – Joseph Smith – was troubled by that very same intersection over a hundred years earlier. Born and raised in Palmyra, Smith’s frustration with the competing denominations in town contributed to his disillusionment with traditional Christianity. Thus the scandal of Christian division – embodied on a remote corner in New York – gave birth to the new religious movement of Mormonism.

What about you? Do you worship across the street from another church? What keeps us divided? How does our disunity effect our credibility or "witness" to the world?

Is Unity Realistic?

My good friend Derek recently made the comment on Facebook regarding the blog phenomenon in general: "your blog: nobody cares." In spite of the irony of his criticism being posted on a public forum, I think he has a point. A blog that seeks to address large, important questions - but that nobody reads - may be therapeutic for the writer, but in the end is kind of, well, pathetic.

That being said, I want to thank those of you who have been offering feedback and asking questions. While I am grateful for the chance to organize my thoughts on this subject and be able to refer back to them, my main purpose in writing is to encourage conversation and dialogue on the subject. So keep your comments coming! I will continue to develop my posts in ways that correspond with your questions/interests (you can also check out two polls listed on the right side of the page to help me with this).

In the past two posts, I have sought to convey why I think unity is essential to the Christian gospel (incarnation, reconciliation, evangelism) and therefore to the Christian understanding of "Church". For Protestants in particular, who are responsible for much of the Church's current visible disunity, ambivalence toward division is inexcusable. While most seem willing to acknowledge that unity is important for the Church's integrity (at least in theory), three very important questions are commonly raised.

1) Given the current state of the Church, is unity even realistic?
2) If we are to strive after unity, how might we envision a way forward?
3) What qualifies as "essential" versus "opinion" for Christians who seek to be united?

Obviously, these three questions are interrelated. In future posts, I'll be focusing almost exclusively on the second and third questions. But in this post, I want to briefly address the first question: is Christian unity realistic?

For me, the answer to this question is deeply embedded in the Christian understanding of how we, as human beings, are reconciled to God. Led by the Holy Spirit, Christians should seek to be reconciled to each other in the same way that we have been reconciled to God (see 2 Corinthians 5). In Christian theological lingo, this involves two important steps: justification and sanctification.

JUSTIFICATION: For Christians, the biblical story of God’s redemption of humanity reaches its climax in the cross of Christ. Through Christ’s atoning work on the cross, humanity is justified before God and able to enter into a restored relationship of love by faith. Yet despite their status as justified sinners by the grace of God, Christians continue to wrestle with the ever-present reality of sin until Christ returns in final victory. The Christian, then, is simultaneously sinner and saint.

Lesslie Newbigin, a bishop in the Church of South India and a leading 20th century evangelist and ecumenist, contends that the doctrine of justification by faith through grace provides the theological underpinning for the Church’s quest for unity. Like the individual believer, the community of faith is both grace-filled and sinful. While the Church is meant to be a place where God’s love is experienced through the fellowship of believers, its communion is disrupted and discredited by countless denominational divisions. The Church is simultaneously the Body of Christ and a squabbling bunch of sinners.

SANCTIFICATION: Here's where the Wesleyan side of me kicks in. Absolutely central to a Wesleyan understanding of salvation is the conviction that we should not remain content in our current sinful state. Rather, the same Spirit who draws us into a restored relationship with God also empowers us to become holy - to love and serve God as we were intended. The Holy One’s call for us to “be holy” takes us by surprise. Incredibly, we discover that God has written us into the divine plan to save the world. Though our sin is great, God’s grace is infinitely greater. To deny this call to holiness is to “reject not human authority, but God, who gives his Holy Spirit to you” (1 Thessalonians 4:8).

Despite our present state of sin, God mercifully works within us, calling us forward to perfect love and participation in God’s Triune life. Likewise the Spirit empowers the Church to be the community of reconciliation and love that fulfills God’s eschatological purpose, where “all flesh will see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:6). For too long, Newbigin says the churches have spent time and energy arguing over “what the churches are – surely it is time for us to meet one another in penitent acknowledgement of our common failure to be what the Church ought to be” (if you're interested, see Newbigin's work on ecclesiology: "The Household of God"). Instead of remaining content in its sinful sectarian state, the Church is called to embody in our institutional life the same unity with one another that has been given to us in Christ.

Viewed this way, the answer to the question - "is unity realistic" - is a resounding NO if the Church is relying on human strength alone. But if we are willing to humble ourselves and trust in the same Spirit who is able to graciously lead sinners toward holiness, we may begin to glimpse together what the Church "ought to be."

What are your thoughts? Can Christians hope for unity? Or is this hopelessly unrealistic?