In Faith, Unity Series

- “Make every effort to keep the UNITY of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:1)

- “agree with one another so that there may be NO DIVISIONS among you and that you may be PERFECTLY UNITED in mind and thought.” (I Corinthians 1:10)

These are NOT suggestions… they are marching orders. This is the overriding objective of the church.

In John 17, Jesus didn’t PREDICT unity. He PRAYED for it. He pled for it. And He prayed for unity because He knew that would be the one main difficulty for His church.

If it was so critical an issue that Jesus made it a key priority of His prayer, we need to be His servants to pursue it. But how? Well, there’s three ways that people have tried obtaining unity:

1st – there have been those who have pursued the “box of crayons” approach. They have tried to simply say that every church who claims to be Christian Church is one. It doesn’t matter what they believe. All that matters is that they CLAIM to belong.

Of course the problem with that approach is that, if we followed it to its logical conclusion, we would be forced to accept certain cults (i.e. Jehovah Witnesses, Mormons and others) who claim to be Christian but who hold a perverted view of God and Christ, and often add to God’s Word to establish their claims.

That’s not going to work.

2nd – there have been those who’ve tried focus on the doctrines that the majority of churches agree with and use that as their standard of unity. Essentially (they say) we could just boil it all down to the lowest common denominator and what we could essentially agree on would be the basis of unity.

In religious circles this is called “ecumenicalism”

A friend of mine showed me a list of about 7 doctrines that the majority of churches agree on. Things like:

– the divinity of Christ

- the sinfulness of man

- the need for salvation by the blood of Jesus

The ecumenical effort is an attempt to echo something said by Augustine several 100 years ago:

“In essentials unity, In doubtful things liberty, But in all things love.”

That’s a good saying… and it is one of the concepts behind the ecumenical approach. But there’s a couple of problems with this approach.

1st: ecumenicalism seeks the lowest common denominator. It focuses on what MOST denominations can “agree” on. Essentially it’s based upon “majority vote” mindset.

Do you remember a couple of weeks ago, when I told the story about the denomination that voted on their doctrine every couple of years? This OFTEN becomes the result of ecumenicalism. They vote.

And churches that have tried to be “ecumenical” on this basis have often ended up with a soft, pudgy–kind of faith that really stands for very little, and has very little power or substance. Their churches are generally not very exciting because they stand for so little.

The 2nd problem with ecumenicalism is that it tries to have unity while ignoring many the principle causes for division in Christendom.

· it ignores unBiblical terminology that a lot of churches use.

· it ignores man-made names, traditions, and creeds.