When I think of "Global Impact week"

At some point I think most every adult who encounters a church asks why there are so many different denominations.  Usually they ask that question in consideration of protestant denominations - seeing Catholics as one form of Christianity and all others (Baptist, Pentacostal, Methodist, etc) as various permutations of Protestantism.  As such, the question really is – why can’t all the branches of Protestantism get together – why can’t they be one as Jesus prayed, “that they may all be one…” in John 17:21? 

The reality is that from the time of Christ’s resurrection there have been various forms of Christianity, just as in Christ’s day there were various forms of Judaism (Sadducees and Pharisees to name two of them).  Just as today, there were free thinkers among almost every place Christianity spread.  They pushed the ideas they were given further down one line of thought than most commonly agreed on.

So many divergent ideas were formed that a gathering of Christian leaders was called by the Roman Emperor Constantine way back in 325 AD.  The purpose of that council was to attain some kind of consensus in the church regarding the nature of the Son of God and His relationship to God the Father.  A man named Arius put forward the idea that Jesus was created by God the Father and as such is subordinate to Him.  The council disagreed, and Arius was decreed a heretic.  But he believed in that idea and started his own branch of Christianity.  Some would argue that this was the first formal split.  We can all agree it certainly wasn’t the last.

When the church next got together over such matters (the council of Constantinople in 381), it split out the followers of Macedonius (aka the Semi-Arians).  At the next council (Ephesus in 431) it split out the Nestorianians.  And so it went - almost every time the church got together to come to some common understanding, a breakaway group was launched out.   We commonly think only of the day Martin Luther formally protested the teaching of the Catholic church in 1517 as the first great split in the church (Catholic vs Protestant), but actually there were many, including the ‘great Schism’ of 1054 that divided Eastern Orthodoxy from the Western church of Rome.

It is worth some consideration that while such councils were called ‘ecumenical’ (that is, about promoting unity), the way that unity was to be created was through sound and agreeable doctrine (doctrine being the set of beliefs our faith mandates).  But declaring sound doctrine almost always results in confrontation (Jesus had many such confrontations with both Sadducees and Pharisees), and that confrontation can go two ways – it can lead to repentance, forgiveness and restoration, or it can lead to anger and separation. In fact, every single one of the church splits was over a matter of church doctrine.

Nowadays the term ‘ecumenical’ typically means something slightly different – the changing of already established doctrine such that unity might prevail.  We can see that in the constitution of the World Christian Council of Churches.  It states, “…to call one another to visible unity in one faith and in one eucharistic fellowship, expressed in worship and common life in Christ, through witness and service to the world, and to advance towards that unity in order that the world may believe.”  A laudable goal if all have the same faith.  A laughable goal if you’re trying to get different faiths to unite.

Of course, in the broader sense, Christianity is not a set of beliefs but rather a worldview.  As such, it lies deeper than beliefs, and perhaps in that sense all Christians already have a degree of unity - at least as much as the Sadducees and Pharisees had unity (of course, that kind of unity was set against Christ).  Nevertheless, one cannot live one’s life with worldview only.   Someone once pointed out that your worldview must inform your beliefs and your beliefs inform your values and your values inform your behavior.  You will never find unity at the belief level and above (value and behavior) unless you can agree on an absolute expression of the common worldview.  Therein lies the ecumenical challenge (in the modern sense of the term).  We might find agreement in the Scripture (assuming we agree on what the Scripture consists of), but only if we have a very high view of Scripture.  As soon as we lower that view (via conflicting hermeneutic or outright dismissal of the text itself) than we will never find any agreement at all. 

This is true today just as it was true in Christ’s day.  When the Israelite elders questioned Jesus, He often said, “have you not read….”  He was calling them to a higher view of the Scripture (and a better hermeneutic) than they obviously exhibited.  So it is today.  At the core, it isn’t so much about whether we agree with each other or not – it is about whether we agree with God or not.