While it becomes easy to see only the negative realities of our world - and we shall ill survive coming days if we are oblivious to that with which we are, and shall increasingly become, challenged - it is yet needful to see the outworking of God's reign in the present.
We found a recent report that the twenty largest churches in the United States are interdenominational to be of no small interest. It signifies several things, including a growing awareness that God's kingdom exists, not in the realm of ecclesial politics or the humanly initiated, but rather Spirit-engendered dynamic of relationship with the Father and fellow believers in Christ ("all who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours," I Cor. 1:2.)
Simply stated, some of us have been somewhat slow in learning that: 1.) Christ neither sees us nor accepts us as Baptists, Methodists, Assemblies of God, etc., but rather (assuming our relationship with him) children of the Father, and; 2.) We neither program nor create the realities of the Spirit.
A church recently contacted us regarding a situation with which they are confronted. We are sympathetic to their need. At the same time, we were struck, as we always are in such instances, with the fact that apart from a narriw side street between, their property adjoins that of another evangelical church.
If, as per our Lord's declaration, the world will recognize our relationship to him by our relationship to others of faith (John 13:35), do we not sometimes fail our testimony at this point? (Although we do not know the one congregation's relationship to the other, we would nonetheless suggest the setting as possibly conveying a depiction of Christ's less than unified Body.)
Not that problems of this nature are all that unusual. We recall a situation some years ago in which two similar denominations had recently united. Not long after, we were invited to speak at an area interfaith prayer rally conducted at a rural church affiliated with the new body. Following the service, a gentleman directed my attention to a nearby church - one that was quite visible from the church yard in which we were standing. It had been a member congregation, he explained, of the other side of the merger. Neither congregation, however, would yield to a sharing of services or facilities with the other, despite the fact that they now belonged to the same denomination. "By this shall all men know...?"
It is good that growing numbers of believers are coming to recognize the unity of Christ's Body. The first stated objective in the apostle's listing of divine objectives within the Church is, as we have often noted, "unity of the faith" (Eph. 4:11-16).
The answer is not that we fight other believers or their organizations. To do so would only wreak further havoc in the Body. Resolution lies rather in a growing sense of oneness with, and commitment to, fellow believers as based on a shared relationship of faith in Jesus Christ. The Spirit will take it from there.
Burl Ratzsch
