There are Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians. There are Presbyterians, Lutherans, Congregationalists. There are Disciples of Christ. There are Seventh-day Adventists and … Moravians. There are Quakers. And that’s only for starters. New denominations spring up. Old denominations split up and form new branches. The question is not, Are you a Baptist? but, What kind of a Baptist? It is not, Are you a member of the Presbyterian church? but Which Presbyterian church? A town with a population of less than five hundred may have churches of three or four denominations and none of them more than a quarter full on a good Sunday. There are some genuine differences between them, of course. The methods of church government differ. They tend to worship in different forms all the way from chanting, incense, and saints’ days to a service that is virtually indistinguishable from a New England town meeting with musical interludes. Some read the Bible more literally than others. If you examine the fine print, you may even come across some relatively minor theological differences among them, some stressing one aspect of the faith, some stressing others. But if you were to ask the average member of any congregation to explain those differences, you would be apt to be met with a long, unpregnant silence. By and large they all believe pretty much the same things and are confused about the same things and keep their fingers crossed during the same parts of the Nicene Creed. …Then add to that picture the Roman Catholic Church, still more divided from the Protestant denominations than they are from each other [and the Orthodox church], and by the time you’re through, you don’t know whether to burst into laughter or into tears. …When Jesus took the bread and said, ‘This is my body which is broken for you’ (1 Corinthians 11:24), it’s hard to believe that even in his wildest dreams he foresaw the tragic and ludicrous brokenness of the Church as his body. There’s no reason why everyone should be Christian in the same way and every reason to leave room for differences, but if all the competing factions of Christendom were to give as much of themselves to the high calling and holy hope that unites them as they do now to the relative inconsequentialities that divide them, the Church would look more like the Kingdom of God for a change and less like an ungodly mess.” Frederick Buechner

“so that they may be one as we are one.”
Jesus in John 17:11

Moving From the Head to the Heart

• By some estimates there are 41,000 denominations. Could your group really have cornered the truth?
• Pick a group that differs from yours (evangelical, Catholic, Episcopal, Quaker). Can you list weak points in your group and strong points in the other one? Are you open to learning from others who identify as Christians but have views different from yours?
• Jesus spoke of a unified church. What can you do to practice this “oneness?”

Abba, help us!

For More: Whistling in the Dark by Frederick Buechner