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The prayer services at the Vine make the point. Worship varies from low-church praise choruses (all 150 participants gathered in a large conference room singing "Lord I Lift Your Name on High") to a meditative chanting service reminiscent of TaizÉ prayer. At last year's conference, more than 50 people showed up at the Episcopal Eucharist—and Episcopalians were in the minority.

Not every Gen-Xer is liturgical. Indeed, some Vine participants wonder if the conferences aren't a little overly enamored of liturgy. "The thing that bugged me about the first Vine was that there weren't a lot of Pentecostal, less-liturgical worship styles represented," says Russell Sharman, a Catholic-turned-low-church-Protestant-turned-Episcopalian who has attended both Vine conferences. Still, all things considered, the conferences are more intentional than most Christian gatherings in striving for a worship environment representative of the church's many traditions.

The Vine's ecumenism also grows out of the larger culture's hostility to Christianity of any stripe. Participants come to the Vine to talk with others about how to best live and witness in our culture—as the titles of the seminars suggest. Yet there is an in creasing awareness among younger Christians that what we share with Christians from different traditions—being under the authority of Christ—gives us something to learn from each other, even though we may disagree about some fundamental things. Crouch recalls that when he became a Christian at 13, he embraced any believer—Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox—who also attended his high school in the Boston suburbs; there weren't enough Christians to be choosy. "I'll welcome all comers," he says.

Lauren F. Winner is a contributing writer for CT. For more information about the Vine and its upcoming conferences, go to www.the-vine.org or send e-mail to vine@regenerator.com.

Copyright © 2001 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Regenerator, re:generation quarterly's Web site, offers articles from the magazine and more message boards.

More on church unity is available from Christianity Today's ecumenism area.

Learn more about the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, and its programs (like ASP), at CCCU's Web site.

Andy Crouch's columns for CT are available at our site, as is "The Antimoderns | Six postmodern Christians discuss the possibilities and limits of postmodernism", an article featuring Crouch and some of his colleagues.

The Veritas Forum site offers links that explain the forum's history and links to purchase Finding God at Harvard from a variety of online bookstores.

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February 5 2001, Vol. 45, No. 2