By Loren Seibold
I have a pastor friend who urged his congregation to join formally as partners with a local ecumenical helping agency. You know the sort of thing: used clothing, household goods, food closet, all run by an alliance of local congregations working together. My friend, like me, had grown up in a church with an active Dorcas society, but his observation now was that the world had changed, the congregation was doing fairly little for those in need, and so much more could be accomplished by working in league with others than the congregation could accomplish on its own.
Some objected to the idea of a working relationship with other Christian churches. One concern was about who got the credit. “We should have our name on everything we do,” they said. Showing our brand is more important, they seemed to say, than what we get done.
Another objection was related, but somewhat more critical. It had to do not with us, but with them. “We’re not sup- posed to be yoked with unbelievers,” they said. The pastor argued that the other churches they were working with were hardly unbelievers: even the Roman Catholics who were part of the ministry worshipped Jesus. “OK, pastor, now about that,” a few said, “that’s our main objection, right there. Maybe we can work with Baptists, maybe with Methodists. But Roman Catholics?” In any case, they said, there was nothing to be gained, and perhaps a great deal to be lost, by rubbing shoulders with these people.
Alliances
Although we Seventh-day Adventists have a fairly orthodox Protestant theology—note the number of hymns and gospel songs by other Christians that we sing without any alteration—we have always been a bit off to the side from the rest of Christians. Beyond the matters of schedule (our day of worship is a day before theirs, and we keep it with a devotion that few Sunday-keepers do) and food (our dietary restrictions have made us reluctant to partake of others’ hospitality), there is another factor that lies behind this: we are a little afraid of other Christians. Ellen White’s condemnation of Roman Catholicism and apostate Protestantism has always made us feel it’s dangerous to be part of the wider Christian community. This has left us feeling we are not in alliance, but in competition, which leaves little room for cooperation.
Some of us (though I think this view is fading) go so far as to assert that other Christians are so in error that their profession of faith in Christ is worthless—and that we alone will be saved. Others dislike the word “ecumenical,” assuming that anything it describes is inevitably compromising. Why would we, then, be willing to work in this context? The question has come up with reference to ecumenical community church services, welfare agencies, missions, and medical work. When other Christians do things together, we’re off to the side doing our own thing. (We have even been known to take resources that other Christians have developed and recreate them under our own name.)
A working principle
I think we’d all agree that there are certain things we must do for ourselves if we are to be true to our faith. We wouldn’t ask a dispensationalist Bible scholar to teach our students eschatology nor a Roman Catholic to teach them ecclesiology. Most all of us would, appropriately, balk if doctrines that are opposed to our well-founded Fundamental Beliefs were preached from our pulpits.
But our question here is whether working with other Christians is always wrong. I don’t think it is.
Suppose you have an accident along the road, and the car has rolled on its side. You manage to crawl out, but there are still people trapped in the car, and you need to push it back down so people can get out before leaking gasoline starts a fire.
A crowd of motorists stops to help you. Are you going to ask them their religious pedigree before you let them help you rescue the people in the car? Unlikely. You’re going to say, “OK, everyone, gather at this part of the car, and help me roll it back onto its wheels.”
That’s an extreme example, of course, but it is instructive. There are certain kinds of tasks that so desperately need to be done, with such urgency, that we would work with anyone to see them finished.
So perhaps our need to work in alliance with other Christians should be measured by the urgency of the tasks God wants us to do.
More questions
This principle doesn’t answer all of the questions, of course; it may even raise a few more. But it’s worth thinking about. Is helping the poor, for example, something that can wait? I don’t think the poor would think so. I wonder how Jesus would see the argument that helping people to survive is less important than not having to share the credit with those from another Christian tribe?
As for being frightened of other Christians, I’d argue that we’ve done wrong by discounting the genuineness of other Christians’ spirituality. I’m remembering the disciples telling Jesus that someone outside of their group was healing mental illness (casting out demons) in His name. They surely expected Jesus to march over and rebuke the man. Instead, Jesus rebuked the message-bearers. “He’s not working against us, he’s working with us,” Jesus said (Luke 9:49-50).
Perhaps the worst disservice we’ve done by keeping so much to ourselves is to ourselves. First, it conveys either conceit or insecurity on our part, neither of which is an attractive quality. Is our faith not strong enough to stand up to that of others? Second, it puts us out of reach of them, but it also puts them evangelistically out of reach of us. Isolation is rarely a strategy for spiritual or organizational growth.
We human beings are by nature tribal: we join ourselves into groups where we establish and confirm our identity, and sometimes separate ourselves from other groups. My question is whether our tribe should be Seventh-day Adventism or Christianity. Given the powerful influence of the world “out there,” I’d suggest that we and other Christians have more common enemies than we have differences between ourselves—which means to me that we needn’t agree with everything other Christians believe in order to work with them on shared concerns.
–Loren Seibold is a pastor in Ohio and executive editor of Adventist Today magazine and website. Email him at: [email protected]