We are asking the wrong questions

By Charles Marsh

A great many people, I see, are approaching ecumenism by asking how we can achieve intercommunion and by asking the related question of how we can achieve uniformity in church government. It is not the right kind of question. Those are concerns to be addressed last of all. Before we ever get to them, we need something else to happen first. We need not think about unity on the administrative level before we find it spiritually, by really loving and serving one another across denominational boundary lines.

Before that happens, our divines have nothing to work with when it comes to questions of intercommunion or administrative structure.  They can point to our historical schisms, and the theological differences that played into those splits, but that tells them nothing about how to unscramble those eggs. They can talk about what now is, and give us an intelligent account of how it happened, but that is as far as they know how to proceed.

Something new needs to happen that gives them something to point to and say, aha, now we see a thing happening that we can describe in affirmative terms: something that now is that was not. It is the reverse of what they now do, describe unity as something that was and is not. At least, unity was more widespread before than now.

We know that if we love one another as Christ loved us, the world will take note. That is what he told us; he did not say unity in church administration must happen as a prerequisite. Let us look at the question this way: Love one another first--let the theologians sort it out later. When they have an emerging visible unity to work with, theologians will then have something they know how to address.