When I was serving a church in a rural county, I eagerly looked forward to the county pastors’ lunch each month. About 15 of us, from all denominational stripes, would get together at a diner to swap stories, share jokes, and pray together.
Then a female pastor was hired by the Presbyterian church in the county seat—making her the first female pastor of a prominent church in the county that anyone could remember. Without a second thought, I invited her to join us for lunch. Word of the invitation got out, and suddenly our little group was coming apart at the seams.
First, several pastors from traditions that do not ordain women made it clear they would not attend lunch if she were present. Next, the Presbyterian pastor made it clear that she did not want to be part of any group with such attitudes. Shortly thereafter, many of the pastors who supported women’s ordination decided they did not want to attend anymore if their more conservative friends were no longer going to be there. By the time the dust settled, the county pastors’ lunch—a group that had worked for the common good and taken decades to build—was reduced to just three United Methodist pastors staring across the table at one another.
This schism within the ecclesial fabric of the county was especially painful for the three of us because, as United Methodists:
“We understand ourselves to be part of Christ’s universal church when by adoration, proclamation, and service we become conformed to Christ.” —¶102, The Book of Discipline
The Pain of Christian Division
The disunity of the Christian church, despite Jesus’ explicit teachings about unity (John 17:20–23), is often used by atheists as an argument to discredit Christianity. While there were always multiple perspectives and minority expressions of Christianity from its earliest days, the Christian church was rather remarkably unified until the Great Schism of 1054, when the Western Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church split. Roughly a thousand years later, and several centuries removed from the Protestant Reformation, the church is now remarkably divided, with around 45,000 recognized Christian denominations worldwide.
Within the United Methodist world, these divisions have come very close to home as we have recently endured a season of disaffiliations that sparked the creation of at least one new Methodist denomination—events we have responded to with a mixture of faithful mourning and faithless handwringing.
A Question for the One Church
So, what are we to make of countless divisions in the service of the One Lord?
First, let’s step back for a moment and consider the mission and the religious landscape we have inherited. If we desire to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19, ESV), would we prefer the entire Christian movement to be contained within a single, unified denominational structure, or for the Christian movement to be dispersed among thousands of denominations, each structured to share the Gospel with its local culture?
Unity or Diversity?
If we had one unified denomination, it would witness to the unity for which Jesus prayed while wielding colossal resources and power. However, a few scandals within that denomination’s leadership could have a catastrophic effect on Christianity worldwide.
On the other hand, if we had thousands of smaller denominations, they would be able to reach local cultures with more agility and flexibility regarding the nonessentials of the faith than any massive denomination ever could. What’s more, if one denomination struggled, it could be replaced almost instantaneously by another denomination that would sprout up in its place.
A Powerful and Agile Movement
As it happens, what we currently have in worldwide Christianity is something akin to the best of both worlds. We have a major denomination, the Roman Catholic Church, with almost 1.4 billion members, which can influence global attitudes and politics to a degree no other denomination can rival.
We also have other large bodies with varying degrees of organizational governance, each of which contains hundreds, if not thousands, of individual denominations: the Eastern Orthodox Churches (250 million members), the Anglican Communion (100 million members), the Oriental Orthodox Communion (60 million members), and the conglomeration of churches within the Protestant movement (900 million members).
The Spirit Beyond Our Structures
While I do not doubt that many divisions within worldwide Christianity are the result of human sin, the Holy Spirit has done something beautiful with our mess by creating a Christian movement that is both powerful and agile, influential and flexible. It is a movement with sufficiently diverse leadership that no single leadership failure or scandal can threaten its mission, and with enough in common to exert global influence on culture, religion, and ethics.
Jesus said that if his people failed to praise him, the very rocks would cry out (Luke 19:40). He also ministered to people whom his followers were not yet structured to incorporate organizationally into the movement because of cultural differences, lack of resources, or their own biases—such as Gentiles and the thief on the cross.
In Acts 8:26–40, we learn that the Holy Spirit guided Philip to share the Gospel with an Ethiopian official. After the official accepts Christ, the Holy Spirit leads Philip away. It sends the Ethiopian back on his way home, with no structure in place to support his newfound Christian faith other than his new understanding of Scripture and his experience of the Holy Spirit.
Apparently, neither Jesus nor the Holy Spirit was willing to wait until the church got its organizational act together before sharing the Gospel with people beyond its human organizational reach.
Based on these Scriptures, we should not be surprised by the religious landscape of our day. The same is true today as it has been since the days of the New Testament: the Holy Spirit is at work in the hearts of believers to an extent that our human organizational systems cannot fully accommodate.
Serving the One Lord
Rather than endlessly bemoaning our lack of unity, perhaps we should give thanks that, within our denominational diversity, we still serve the One Lord who is willing to leave the 99 to find the one lost sheep, even when no established denomination has yet figured out how to reach the lost sheep.
________________________________________________
Wil Cantrell serves as senior pastor of Concord United Methodist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee.
He is author of:
ATONE: The Difference the Cross Makes
From Heaven to Earth: Christmas for New Believers, Old Believers, and Nonbelievers