Related articles and links |  1 of 4

If believers are to follow Jesus, they must work and pray for Christian unity. But unity means vastly different things, and some efforts toward unity are more faithful to the biblical vision than others.

In May of 2001, I went to Malaysia to attend the General Assembly of the World Evangelical Fellowship (since renamed the World Evangelical Alliance, or WEA). In December 1998 I attended the General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Zimbabwe. What I saw in these very different meetings helps us think about cohesion and cooperation between Christians—about our participation in global, national, and even local efforts at "being one."

The World Council of Churches is an organization of churches, historic denominations chagrined about their divisions. Its task is to bring church bodies into a formal dialogue leading toward visible unity.

The WEA is an alliance of evangelical missions, parachurch ministries, and national and regional fellowships of evangelical churches and alliances. Its task is to bring these associations of ministries into loose and informal cooperation, into joint practical efforts at proclaiming the gospel and building national movements. Evangelicals are not even talking about organic unity among church bodies. They assume the era of the denominations is over. They prefer missional variety and trust the Spirit to bring unity to the body of Christ.

The WCC wants to claim sole proprietary ownership of the term ecumenical. It aspires to be the one inclusive ecumenical organization for Protestants in dialogue with Orthodox. But it is not inclusive, as is seen from its long history of frequently ignoring evangelical concerns, missions, initiatives, and spectacular growth. It has hardly recognized that the growing half of the world church is not liberal, but evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecostal— and strongly biblical in its orientation to social issues.

A few evangelicals appear on WCC committees, but these are typically "safe" evangelicals who will not offer substantive critique of the Geneva office, and whose attendance makes the WCC appear to be evangelically acceptable. It will not work. Not until the WCC receives centrist evangelicals as equal partners can there be constructive engagement. Thus evangelicals have had virtually no corrective voice in WCC affairs, even when large portions of the mainline constituencies are evangelical believers. Strong resistance to evangelical witness remains among WCC bureaucrats, who often view evangelical themes pejoratively as "proselytism."

This is ironic. The evangelical mission movements invented ecumenism in the mid-19th century. While evangelicals were integral to early ecumenism, liberals took it over and spent its capital, good will, and support systems on supposedly prophetic political pronouncements. The WCC's Geneva offices were controlled for many years by leftist ideologues. By colluding with Marxist regimes, fixating on regulatory politics, fantasizing about various liberation theologies, fostering illusions about world anti-capitalist revolutions, and advocating some forms of sexual liberation, the WCC has defined itself in ways that evangelicals (and good Orthodox and good Catholics) cannot in good conscience participate. Though many Marxist regimes have passed, the historical pro-Marxist flavor remains in much of the political and social interpretation that comes out of Geneva.

The WCC is hierarchically organized to coordinate competing church hierarchies, each with their own vast bureaucracies. But evangelicals have long resisted central control in favor of local initiatives grounded in scriptural authority. Thus, the WEA has almost no bureaucracy, which makes it more flexible and less defensive. It has tiny regional offices that do not support extensive salaried bureaucracies. It trusts grassroots leadership. It sees its mission not as controlling or coordinating that leadership, but supporting the varied gifts of the Spirit in active ministry.

next page... |  1 of 4

August 5 2002, Vol. 46, No. 9