First, a little background. A number of years ago, a friend of mine in seminary introduced me to another seminarian, Daniel Borvan, and a project he was working on called RED Churches. The purpose of this group was simple: facilitate reformed ecumenism between brothers of like faith and practice, essentially NAPARC churches. It started with a group of friends at Westminster California who realized that there was no reason they couldn't continue to be involved in each others lives as they became pastors in sister (read: different) denominations. In fact, not only was it possible, it was ideal. When I was introduced to the project, I fell in love with the idea. We as reformed Christians love to wrestle with and debate the finer points of theology, but I don't think we have a heartbeat for unity as we ought. We love truth, but we could greatly improve our love for the church catholic. The RED Churches project went dormant as all of the contributors became pastors or went to the academy, but the spirit has lived on in many of the friendships.
Church unity is crucial to the health of a church. Having a form of government where individual congregations are woven together is a good start. We see Paul reference the churches in Corinth as one and many (notice his use of "church" in 1 Corinthians 1.2 and "churches" in 1 Corinthians 14.34). The Jerusalem council also shows the gathering of churches into something resembling a Presbytery. Church government is a great first step, but it is not enough. Organizations like NAPARC are also helpful here. The organization exists to establish "a fellowship that enables the constituent churches to advise, council, and cooperate in various matters with one another and hold out before each other the desirability and need for organic union of churches that are of like faith and practice." Having these formalized agreements is still not enough. It is possible to be organized into one church denominationally yet remain functionally isolated from one another. It is often difficult to work together with churches in the same denomination, no less so with churches in different denominations, but that is the challenge set before us.
In Ecclesiastes, Solomon expressed the benefit of brothers being in fellowship together. "Though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken." We would do very well to mediate on and put this into practice not just individually, but corporately. Our Lord also prayed for unity among the disciples in the upper room. We are great in discussing the unity of the Godhead, but we do not have a church that is one, as Christ and the Father are one? We would also do very well (dare I say, we would be obedient to Christ?) to pray for, and work on facilitating such a unity. To have a longing for actualizing this unity should be one of the impulses of the church as we work toward loving each other and working on resolving real theological differences. To actualize this unity, a unity of truth and love, is the heart of our Lord, it should also be ours. We should be as passionate for this task as we are zealous for our orthodoxy.
How do we do that with the legion of denominations in Christ's church? One of the best analogies I have heard for the situation before us is a group of concentric circles. The churches who are formally connected in some way, those with like faith and practice, are on the inner circle. They should be the first to work toward this unity as they are closest together. We see that there are increasingly significant differences among the churches as the circles expand outward. To the degree that churches are of like faith and practice we should join together as we have things in common. In this service to each other, we should still work on the theological issues that divide us, doing so with grace and charity. This will all take time, but it is the task before us. We have an obligation to work on this because by doing so (being united) our Lord says, "...the world may believe that [the Father has] sent me" (John 17.21b). Christ ties his own reputation to that of the church, and we ought to take this a lot more seriously.
Here in Denver, the reformed churches have a lot of improvement to make. I find myself in an OPC church in Denver, one that I greatly love. I have been blessed by a pastor whose heart seems to burn for church unity among the Denver metro reformed churches. We have regular pulpit exchanges with sister (NAPARC) churches. Our pastor has, on multiple occasions, preached boldly on John 17 and other passages about church unity. He has used his blog to trumpet the need for greater cooperation and unity among reformed churches in the area. Another OPC pastor in the area has also been more outspoken about his desire for unity.
In order to attain this unity, local pastors have to get to know each other, to care about how each other are doing. Sessions have to get to know one another, to start talking about how their churches can get involved together. Laypeople also have to get to know one another. This is particularly challenging to us. One can argue that it is the job of pastors to get to know each other, and also for sessions to figure out how to work together, but the people in the pews have a role here too. It is not enough to just get to know the people sitting around you in your congregation (though that is a fantastic start), but it is important that people in different congregations get to know each other. While regular pulpit exchanges introduce different pastors to a congregation, they fall short of building relationships among the people in the pews. Joint services are a great start here, as long as there is a mixing of the people. Relationships happen during the other six days of the week. It is when you get to know the people in the pews, to get involved with their lives, that you start to love the body more personally. This is true of the local church, and the regional church.
For a whole host of reasons, the church is going to need to take it's existence more seriously. We are not yet widely persecuted in the west, and I don't yet believe we will ever taste the persecution our brothers do in other parts of the world, but things will certainly become less comfortable for us. I think this is good. Creature comforts have made us take too much for granted, have made us too soft. Losing our comforts, however, might truly be hard for us in the west. Churches may have to start to unite just to survive. My pastor has been articulating that, for a wide variety of reasons, the way we do church is a luxury we may not be able to keep.
This is the reason we had dinner on Monday. You don't need megachurches and revivals to grow, you need the ordinary means of grace, Word and sacrament, in worship. To grow together outside of worship, getting together over dinner can only help. There are many other things we can do together the other six days. It is something we need to do. I can only hope more of us start to make it happen more often. As we continue to fellowship with one another, we will learn how to serve one another. Unity is a grassroots accomplishment and it happens one step at a time. God has a great way of making a family out of people who have very little in common. Christ will indeed grow his church, but he will use means to do so. It's time to start acting like a family, because we are a family. We need to at least be taking baby steps, because we have a long way to go.
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