The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well.

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits... A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed... or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough... for such are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder! Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Some people have deviated... and turned to meaningless talk, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make assertions. Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right. Take note of those who do not obey what we say in this letter; have nothing to do with them, so that they may be ashamed. Do not regard them as enemies, but warn them as believers.

Making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. ...the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.

But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love. Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints. And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight.

John 17:11, 20-21; Matthew 13:24-26; Matthew 7:15,18; 2 Corinthians 11:3-4, 13-14; 1 Timothy 1:6; 2 Thessalonians 3:13-15; Ephesians 4:3-6; Ephesians 3:17-19; Colossians 2:19; Ephesians 4:15-16; Ephesians 6:18; Philippians 1:9.

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# In March 1982, when the Archbishop of Canterbury went to Liverpool he was met by about a hundred noisy protesters, waving banners and jeering him, because of his well-known views about the need for Christian unity. His address was constantly interrupted by people yelling 'Judas', 'Hang him,' 'traitor' etc. The interjections occurred even when he was praying. The protesters believed that the Roman Catholic church was unreformed, the 'harlot' of Revelation 13...

# Archbishop Oscar Romero was a small man - about five feet high - who urged his priests in El Salvador to 'put feet on the gospel' and challenge the idea that God ordained a few to be rich and the majority to be poor. At Easter 1980 he was celebrating Mass in a hospital near his cathedral. As he raised the chalice a shot rang out, and Oscar Romero's blood mingled with the spilt wine...

# For many years, when Americans were asked 'Which living persons do you admire most?' two Christians always appeared near the top of the lists: Billy Graham and Mother Teresa. Billy Graham has probably spoken to more people face to face than anyone else in history. Mother Teresa is probably the best-known Catholic Christian in the world, after the Pope. Billy Graham is a Baptist evangelist. Mother Teresa is an Albanian-born Catholic nun. Billy Graham lives in a beautiful home in one of the world's wealthiest countries - the U.S.A. Mother Teresa ministers to the poorest of the poor, in Calcutta and other places. What do they both have in common? Simply, a sincere commitment to follow Jesus Christ...

A well-known Japanese Christian, speaking in English about the many Christian churches would, in halting English, call them 'damnations'. Was he wrong? 'I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church,' Archbishop William Temple once remarked, 'but regret that it doesn't exist.'

The great American Methodist missionary, Stanley Jones, once asked how another missionary group had got such a lovely property. The reply: 'The man who owned it built such high and expensive walls around it that he went bankrupt... and had to sell the property.' Imagine that - bankrupt building walls! Jones wondered (as I do) whether that is not dangerously near the history of Christian churches today?

There are many varieties of religious experience. We tend to gravitate towards those who have some affinity with our own beliefs, experience, or social and educational background. Or else we have a particular kind of personality, and we enjoy being with those like us. Latin American Pentecostals will not be comfortable worshipping like German Lutherans, and vice-versa. The human species is greatly varied, so are their religions.

But that's not the problem. The difficulty begins when Latins and Germans tell each other 'You've gotta be like me!' Or the Brethren say to the Pentecostals 'Your gift of tongues is worthless'. Or the fundamentalist says of the Uniting Church 'They're too liberal, and therefore not as Christian as I am, a conservative.' Or the Catholics (in pre-Vatican II thinking) tell others they're at best 'separated brethren.'

Yes, the Roman Catholic Church believed it was the one true church. Vatican II's Decree on Ecumenism helped to change all that. Theologian, Oscar Cullmann, says of this decree: 'this is more than the opening of a door: new ground has been broken. No Catholic document has ever spoken of non-Catholic Christians in this way.' (1)

Traditionalists (eg. Anglo-Catholics) believe worship patterns are fixed: in worship we re-present to God our lives in liturgies which go back into the history of the church. Renewalists (eg. Pentecostalists) believe worship patterns are flexible: in worship we spontaneously offer to God our praise 'as the Spirit moves', in forms which may change from week to week.

The pattern throughout the history of the Western church has been: out of a perception of 'deadness', renewal. Eventually the renewal movement settles down and becomes institutionalized - so another renewal is needed.

But the order vs. freedom question is only one of many which has divided churches from one another. 'How should the church be governed?' is another: Anglicans are episcopal - ruled by bishops; Presbyterians believe in rule by elders; Baptists and Congregationalists allow the congregation to decide major matters. Then there are different views about ministry: Anglicans appoint bishops, priests or presbyters, and deacons; Presbyterians, have ruling elders and teaching elders, and deacons; Baptists have pastors and deacons (with a growing number now appointing elders).

Another issue is baptism: Baptists baptize adolescents or adults only, and exclusively by immersion; although Anglicans allow and affirm baptism of adults by immersion, most of their baptisms are of children by sprinkling or pouring. (As we will see in chapter ?, the main issue is not the age of the recipient of this sacrament, nor the amount of water used, but its being done once, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is an example of churches majoring on matters of lesser importance.

The earliest baptismal confession - 'Jesus is Lord' - and the Christian credo of the catacombs - 'Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour' - were all that was needed for the earliest Christians to identify one another.

Each Christian denomination has its strengths and weaknesses. This is a personal opinion, but I believe (with Robert Webber) the Anglican tradition (Episcopalian in the U.S.) has six strengths: an appreciation of mystery, worship tied to theologically respectable liturgical forms, a well-developed sacramental theology, a historical identity, an ecumenical affiliation, and a holistic spirituality. On the other hand, the Pentecostalists, Brethren, Baptists and Churches of Christ insist on a greater lay participation in worship, Bible study and evangelism, and tend to produce more 'hands-on, out-going' Christians. The Uniting Church in Australia (combining former Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches) combines some of the best elements in several traditions. The Salvation Army majors (pardon the pun) on ministries of compassion.

The great weakness of all the mainline churches is their tendency towards institutionalism and spiritual inertia. On the other hand, there are sectarian tendencies in other denominations. The Brethren have to be careful about their exclusiveness (sometimes claiming to possess a monopoly on biblical truth). The Pentecostalists have to watch the tendency to produce first and second-class Christians not on the basis of character, but on the possession of certain spiritual gifts (especially tongues, healing, word of knowledge). The Churches of Christ and Baptists make a particular form of baptism a ticket to membership and debar people of good Christian character who have not had sufficient water applied to them. The Salvation Army ought to be careful not to give music too great a prominence: many in their bands and songster groups do not attend Christian growth groups.

In summary: the Holy Spirit is a work in every denomination, and every local church (and in every Christian). The devil is also at work. This 'spiritual warfare' shouldn't surprise us: Jesus said an enemy would be sowing weeds among the grain, and it will all be sorted out at the great judgment (Matthew 13:24-30).

A comment about the ecumenical movement, which Archbishop William Temple, in 1942, called 'the great new fact of our time'. The further to the right the denomination (ie. the more conservative theologically), the more suspicious it is likely to be about joining together with other churches. The far right has developed conspiracy theories about all this (a one-world church ruled by the Pope etc.).

My own response to the ecumenical movement is mixed. I've noticed that those who expend great energy working for the organic union of denominations ('ecclesiastical joinery'), good as that may be, sometimes lose touch with the evangelistic nature of the church. On the other hand, Jesus did pray that his followers would be one, and that this would be noted by 'the world'. At present conservatives are working hard to perpetuate the divisiveness which is scandalous in the eyes of 'the world'. If other Christians are my brothers and sisters in the Lord, perhaps there is a reason why I should not have full fellowship with them, but at present I can't think of it! I have so much to learn from them, to add to the knowledge of God derived from my own limited background.

What doctrines should Christians agree about? Try these: there is only one God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; Jesus Christ is Lord and Saviour and will come again as judge; we are united with Christ through repentance and faith, and belong to his church through baptism; our faith is divinely revealed in the Scriptures; Christianity is essentially living out a life of justice and love, in the power of the Spirit.

Let me urge you to affirm the distinctives of your own tradition, but also recognize its weaknesses and the strengths in others'. Thomas Aquinas, the great 13th century Catholic theologian wrote, Ubi amor, ibi oculus ('Where there is love there is vision'): knowing and loving are linked. D L Moody, the 19th century American evangelist used to say, ' If you go through the world with love in your heart, you will make the world love you, and love is the badge that Christ gave his disciples.' What unites us is more important - much, much, more important - than what divides us. Let us accept one another, then, for the glory of God, as Christ has accepted us (Romans 15:7).

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When I was in the Royal Air Force doing my national service, the Christian fellowship I attended used to have an open Bible study and discussion group. It came as quite a jolt to us all one evening, as we shared our experience of the fatherhood of God, to realize that we represented eight different denominations, including Roman Catholicism. Yet, somehow, our church allegiance, important though it was, did not matter. What was of greater importance was our common starting point in having a relationship with God. We belonged to one another through him.

George Carey, A Tale of Two Churches: Can Protestants & Catholics get Together? Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1985, p. 59

Christians have more that unites them than what divides them. We have begun to move toward one another. The signs include: # theological dialogue no longer based on polemics but on a desire to understand and heal the past, characterized by a number of interfaith Conversations that are still going on, # worship as Christians from different traditions worship and pray together, # charismatic experience as mainstream denominations have been penetrated by the renewal movement, leading to fresh insight from the Spirit and vital Christian experience, # the personal challenge individual Christians have experienced to consider the contributions each of us can make to the cause of Christian unity.

George Carey, A Tale of Two Churches: Can Protestants & Catholics get Together? Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1985, pp. 154-155.

I spent all of my childhood and most of my adult life dreading going to church. It was the place where I was supposed to get my spiritual batteries charged and it ended up being the spiritual drain of the week. I thought the problem was me. Since I've become an Episcopalian, I've discovered that what I needed was an experience of God-centred worship. I now love to be at church.

James Stambaugh, Curator, Billy Graham Museum, Wheaton College, quoted in Robert Webber, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals are Attracted to the Liturgical Church, Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1985, p. 31

[The spiritual tradition of the liturgical church is] sane, wise, ancient, modern, sound and simple; with roots in the New Testament and the Fathers... its golden periods and its full quota of saints and doctors.

Martin Thornton, English Spirituality, quoted in Robert Webber, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals are Attracted to the Liturgical Church, Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1985, p. 143.

Evangelicals bring to the liturgical tradition these strengths - the sense of personal conversion, a deep concern to be orthodox, an attachment and love for the Scripture, and a sense of mission.

Robert Webber, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals are Attracted to the Liturgical Church, Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1985, p. 170.

[The social ideas of church leaders have been] derived from the surrounding intellectual and political culture and not, as churchmen themselves always tend to assume, from theological learning... Each generation of Christians offers up in each age what they judge most to convey the presence of Christ. A lot of what is transient gets caught up in the process.

E.R.Norman, Church and Society in England 1770-1970, quoted in Gavin White, How the Churches Got to be That Way, London: SCM Press, 1990, p.63.

I was in a mainline church and did nothing. It didn't seem to matter whether What kind of faith I had. For years I participated in the life of the church, and served on its committees, but didn't grow spiritually one little bit. Then, after a spiritual experience they sometimes call 'baptism in the Holy Spirit' I joined the Pentecostals. They had me participating in an evangelistic crusade in Indonesia within a few months. I had to declare my commitment. Now, a year later, I've grown more in the spiritual life than in the previous twenty years in that dead church.

A Christian man in Victoria, Australia, to the author, 1989.

'Now abides faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is baptism.'

Churches of Christ pastor. Sardonic comment heard in a Churches of Christ pastors' conference.

You know, I think in another hundred years or so people are going to look back on the period between the Reformation and the twentieth century as the second Dark Ages of the church... I believe that the divisions which have haunted the church over the last four centuries have begun in our time to be healed. The walls that have separated us are being broken down. A great new convergence of the traditions are occurring which will change the face of the church...

Robert Schuller, quoted in Robert Webber, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals are Attracted to the Liturgical Church, Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1985, p. 171.

Divisions in the church have always existed, and there have always been occasions when it has been necessary for somebody, somewhere, to leave and to set up a rival body. Yet in time the reasons for the divisions become less pressing, or are overcome by new developments, and it is possible to put back together the fragments of an earlier age.

Gavin White, How the Churches Got to be That Way, London: SCM Press, 1990, p. 105.

Eli Halevy was a distinguished French historian who wrote of the history of England. He noted, as any Frenchman would, that England had no French Revolution. This remarkable fact had to be explained. What did England have in the eighteenth century which France did not? The answer was obvious. Methodism. The Methodists had given English workers and peasants an ideology which led them to work and not to agitate, and their religious hopes had made them indifferent to social and economic complaints... Today the Halevy thesis is out of fashion, but it still reappears in modern forms.

Gavin White, How the Churches Got to be That Way, London: SCM Press, 1990, p. 33.

It has been argued that missionaries went to Africa and Asia with cultural baggage; undoubtedly they did. Nobody goes anywhere without cultural baggage, and Christianity can no more live without a culture than bacteria in a laboratory can live without a culture.

Gavin White, How the Churches Got to be That Way, London: SCM Press, 1990, p. 74.

The gift of tongues is not given to every Pentecostalist, and the desperate attempts to keep it alive suggest that it may be declining. It is something most world religions seem to produce for periods in their history... The spread of Pentecostalism has been erratic. Nobody knows why it has been successful in South Africa but scarcely elsewhere in Africa. Nobody knows why it flourishes in parts of Latin America but not in Asia.

Gavin White, How the Churches Got to be That Way, London: SCM Press, 1990, pp. 86-87.

The members of the Eternal Church of the Believer were all part of a very special group inside society at large. The Church told you never to donate money to [other] causes. You tithed your ten per cent... and when there was some great new need, the Church would ask for a second tithe... As a Church member you had to live up to certain codes of dress and behaviour. You did not seek medical help because it was a proven fact that faith kep the members healthier than all those people who had not found the true religion... Sometimes you could not understand why certain rules were imposed on you. But in the end you realized every rule was there for a good reason...

Part of the reason for the success of the Eternal Church of the Believer... [was because] it was a way out of a life of dreariness and despair. It made them part of some great shiny thing that overshadowed their workday, and gave them a source of both pride and a kind of humble arrogance. I am forever saved and you are forever damned. Hooray for me.

John D. Macdonald, One More Sunday, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984, pp. 114, 187.

A church in whom the Bible will have the last word will never be able to forget that it is not the kingdom of God and that it lives under the constant judgment of God.

William A. Visser 't Hooft, The Renewal of the Church, London: SCM Press, 1956, p. 93.

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Lord, we come to worship, Lord, we come to praise, Lord, we come to worship you in, Oh so many ways. Some of us shout, Some of us sing, Some of us whisper the praise we bring, But, Lord, we are all gathering To bring to you our praise.

Ishmael (English Christian singer quoted in George Carey, A Tale of Two Churches: Can Protestants & Catholics get Together? Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1985, p. 158.

Who are we whom God has called? Few of us are wise, few are powerful. Yet to shame the wise God has chosen what the world counts folly; to shame the strong God has chosen what the world counts weakness.

In union with Christ Jesus, we are all children of God. Baptised into union with Christ, we have put on Christ like a garment. There is no such thing as Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female; we are all one in Jesus Christ.

A New Zealand Prayer Book, Auckland: Collins, 1989, p.115.

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Further Reading: George Carey, A Tale of Two Churches: Can Protestants & Catholics get Together? Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1985; Robert Webber, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals are Attracted to the Liturgical Church, Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1985; Gavin White, How the Churches Got to be That Way, London: SCM Press, 1990.

Endnotes.

(1) Quoted by Walter M. Abbott, S.J., (ed.), The Documents of Vatican II, London: Geoffrey Chapmen, 1966, p.338.