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A friend recently e-mailed me a news item about a church in Florida that advertises something called "open baptism," which comes with "no strings attached." The church website also says, "Lack of 'belief' is not an obstacle to belonging or to participating at St. Christopher's by-the-Sea." Well, gosh, if you have to put belief in quotation marks, that is, if you don't even want to affirm the basic idea that churches are defined in part by the beliefs their members share, it isn't really clear what anyone is really joining. As Westerhoff writes, "If belonging is without obligation and accountability, then we finally have not joined much of anything at all."

St. Christopher's and other congregations also offer "open communion." That term used to mean that a church opened the Lord's Table to any baptized and committed Christian, regardless of denominational affiliation. Now it has come to mean, in the words of a Fargo, North Dakota, cathedral's website: "Whoever you are and wherever you are on your journey of faith, you are always welcome at the table of the Lord." Thus, being a Christian, is no longer regarded as a prerequisite for participating in the fundamental communal act of Christian worship.

This is the confusion of welcome and inclusion that Westerhoff warns against when she writes, "If anyone and everyone are too easily included, we are saying in effect that anything goes. We are disclaiming our boundaries. And as our membership is more and more made up of those who will not or cannot confirm some measure of adherence to the core practices and values of the defined community, that community as we have known it will disappear. Without bounds we are nothing; with different bounds we become something else."

In one brief quip attributed to her "good friend Joe," she says it all: "The recipe for ice cream excludes a lot of good stuff, but if we included all of it, we would no longer have ice cream!' "

Such reflections help us affirm the importance of the particularities of our faith traditions: the things that we can and should rejoice in. These are the things that actually make our communities attractive to others: "For there to be any validity to our life together," writes Westerhof, "there must be substance on the inside to which we adhere—beliefs, values, commitments, loyalties, stories that differentiate us from those outside our boundaries. And ironically, it is this differentiating stuff that will attract those we can then welcome to our community, welcome to come inside so perhaps they can later be included."

Bishop Wright is correct when he goes on to state that "we all agree that some 'differences' are to be celebrated … some 'Others' are to be embraced." If we don't seek to embrace the kinds of difference that Paul and Jesus embraced when they shaped the fundamental Christian community, we are not being fully Christian. Jesus was very clear that the gospel was for the poor (as Free Methodist founder B. T. Roberts reminded the middle-class Wesleyans of his day). Paul was very clear that the gospel erased the spiritual boundaries between the sexes, between Jews and Gentiles, and between slaves and free. These social and religious markers were no longer significant. All had an equal share in the salvation that flowed from the sacrifice of Jesus and all had equal access to God's grace.

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December 2004, Vol. 48, No. 12