The Global Conversation

Filling in the Holes of Holism

To facilitate a truly global conversation, we ask Christian leaders from around the world to respond to the Global Conversation's lead articles. These points of view do not necessarily represent Christianity Today magazine or the Lausanne Movement. They are designed to stimulate discussion from all points of the compass and from different segments of the Christian community. Please add your perspective by posting a comment so that we can learn and grow together in the unity of the Spirit.

Christians are so adept at theological reductionism that thousands of denominations have spun off from the teachings of Jesus. Many of these versions of Christianity are differentiated by slight hermeneutical nuances, nearly undetectable to the theologically untrained. Others argue the heart of the gospel beats within the incubator of their doctrinal laboratories, rendering all others a diluted version of Christianity.

Some splinters of the larger evangelical community avoid these doctrinal divisions by merely resonating with styles of worship, teaching, or mission toward which their constituents have a strong affinity; they simply agree to disagree over doctrinal divides.

Whatever the issue—including issues no less comprehensive than church, gospel, or world—Christians are a divided people. Yet Christ shunned such ecclesial, theological, and human reductionism and division by maintaining a simple center based in love and reflected in unity.

Throughout the Gospels, Christ attempts to form a community that doesn't exclude deeply committed religious people, including the Pharisees and Sadducees—they do a fine job of excluding themselves. Rather, Christ looks for common ground as a hinge to community, even tucking voices on the fringes into the company of his message bearers.

Mark 9:38–41 expands our notion of the "whole church." Someone on the doctrinal margins (insert whoever that might be in the reductionist standards of one's tradition, e.g., the emergents, liberation theologians, prosperity gospel preachers, charismatics) is ministering under the name of Christ. The disciples attempt to arrest his activity, eliciting this response from Christ: "Whoever is not against us is for us."

Today, many evangelical churches draw sharp lines to indicate who's in and who's out. Citing doctrine, evangelicals sort out the issues around an understanding of the saints, negotiating a relationship with Mary, the in-filling of the Holy Spirit, or using icons in worship. Doctrinal lines allow unenlightened evangelicals to suggest they are the whole church.

The historical, Christ-centered, worshiping community of believers, however, includes sisters and brothers committed to mainline Protestant denominations, Orthodox Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. For any one of these historic Christian traditions to lay exclusive claim to the title "whole church" would be a direct assault on the others.

Similarly, evangelicals, though a significant and crucial part of the global Christian mosaic, would be presumptuous to assume that our expression of the greater Christian tradition embodies the "whole church."

For More Conversation

After Lausanne 1974, John R. W. Stott explained the process behind the covenant the Congress had adopted, and its key points of significance.

Chris Wright talks about the breadth and depth of the phrase "the whole church."

Samuel Escobar describes some of the many distinctive contributions from Global South theologians in the wake of the 1974 Congress.

Can Christians address poverty without personal relationships with the poor? Christopher Heuertz suggests why our approach to poverty is often inadequate.