Even as a child, I had an interest in the divided church. Sunday mornings found my family in a United Methodist church, but on Sunday evenings my parents took me to a nearby charismatic church instead. We began the day with liturgy and the Eucharist and finished it, late into the night, speaking in tongues. And neither gathering seemed strange to me. The contrast nurtured an interest in and appreciation for how Christ’s church grows in 10,000 fields.
That curiosity stayed with me into adulthood, and since 2020 I’ve found myself in a similarly mixed position: I direct the Baptist Studies Center at one of the most well-known universities associated with the Churches of Christ (CoC).
I’d been teaching for a Baptist seminary in town, and when it was slated for closure, this new partnership struck me as opportune. For deep insiders to both traditions, however, the pairing seemed nearly impossible: The Churches of Christ and Baptists have enough in common to make them enemies.
Both are reforming Christian movements, and Alexander Campbell, a Churches of Christ forefather, once attended a Baptist church and called his newspaper the Christian Baptist. But that was long ago, and the denominations have long since diverged over musical worship (the CoC historically do not use instruments in church) and the nature of baptism.
This history of similarity haunts West Texas to this day. It’s not unusual, in many small towns, for the Baptist and Church of Christ congregations to be the only two churches around. Yet physical proximity has not diminished a sense of theological distance, and since I began this work, I’ve heard story after story of painful division: CoC parents forcing their daughters to break up with their Baptist suitors, Baptist churches mocking their a cappella compatriots across town.
As a Baptist newly ensconced in a Church of Christ school, I was shocked to realize how little the Baptist and CoC social networks in Abilene overlapped. I found myself at the intersection of two worlds—so distinct yet with so much in common. I determined I could proceed in one of two ways: begin with comparison, enumerating every difference, or begin with charity and ask what we share and why we share it.
Comparison and understanding of differences are not wrong, of course. But it seemed to me that if I wanted my position to be more than a pragmatic alliance—a marriage of convenience required in this time of widely declining seminary enrollment—then I must take the charitable road. I must commit (and help my students and colleagues and other fellow Christians commit) to a deliberate ecumenism that does not ignore theological disagreement but far more fundamentally attends to our shared confession of Jesus as Lord, a work which only the Holy Spirit makes possible.
Ours is not the only era interested in ecumenism; my most recent book, published today, details the ecumenical initiatives of the last century, from the wide-ranging World Council of Churches to innumerable lay initiatives and missions partnerships. The 20th century saw hardened institutional postures—which had historically divided Catholic from Orthodox and Protestants from other Protestants—gradually soften into dialogues that grew into new configurations altogether. We entered our faith’s third millennium with new denominational arrangements in Korea, India, the United States, and countries across Africa bringing together long-divided bodies.
That history does not mean our ecumenical future will be all roses. Just like those past efforts, it will involve disagreement and infighting. But we will see new successes too. Here in West Texas, Baptists and Churches of Christ may never agree in our theologies of baptism, but perhaps we can come to recognize the more important reality that both traditions exist as works of the Holy Spirit.
To confess that Jesus is Lord is only possible through the Spirit (1 Cor. 12:3). And that means that whatever our errors—for we can’t both be right about baptism—our unity in the Spirit is the deeper and more important reality.
Taking that fact as our starting point won’t resolve the divisions between churches. If the Holy Spirit works in and through church traditions in different places over time, then we should not be surprised to find varying records of theological and cultural development. We can’t expect the Coptic church in Egypt to look like the Roman Catholic Church any more than American evangelical congregations will be identical to Pentecostal churches in Argentina. We read the same Scriptures and confess the same Christ, but history creates deep craters and long memories.
There is a way of talking about “the work of the Spirit” that drifts off into thin air, referring to anything and everything positive that happens in the world. So let me be more specific. In some of the oldest confessions of the faith, the church is described in terms of four marks, four attributes that signify the work of the Holy Spirit in creating the church: It is one, holy, universal, and apostolic.
“One” refers to unity: There is only one body of Christ. It cannot be divided and should work to mend divisions. “Holy” means the church shares in God’s own holiness and is called to bear it into the world. “Universal,” also translated “catholic,” means that what a church fundamentally teaches is not its own peculiar teaching but core doctrine all churches share in common. And “apostolic” means that a church shares in the teaching and authority that belonged to the apostles.
In any church with these four marks, then, our question should not be whether the Spirit is working but how the Spirit is working in its midst. And we must listen for the answer charitably, asking God to help us see what he is doing in other parts of the body of Christ.
This presumption that the Spirit is in fact at work also invites us to ask the same question about our own traditions, to ask where we have frustrated the Spirit’s work. Two things can be true at once: that the Spirit gives all churches the same vocation of living into the Spirit’s call and that churches do not yet fully live out that calling to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The Spirit’s unity is also the Spirit’s critique, calling us to look at what we have valued, but also at what we have downplayed or even denied.
Charitably encountering “strange” churches can only help us here, for very rarely are we the first to raise some question in our faith. More often, other Christians in other times, places, cultures, and traditions have already asked it and sought answers in new strategies of engaging with Scripture, missions, worship, structural authority, and more.
For instance, liturgical renewal—a concern for the church’s holiness among all the people—has appeared among Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, and Episcopalians. Debates over women’s ordination—a concern about who has apostolic authority—have appeared among the Orthodox, Catholics, Presbyterians, and beyond. A concern for the holiness of the body gave rise to medical missions in some corners of the world and charismatic healing ministries in others. The selfsame work of the Holy Spirit, across the 20th century, would yield new fruit in unexpected places.
We can’t undo the hard history of division among Christians by confessing the Spirit’s common work. Nor does that confession undo our theological and practical errors. But it gives us a different footing on which to ground the work of unity.
Just as the Jerusalem church could recognize the Corinthian church or the Galatian churches, so we can be curious and gracious toward fellow Christians in worlds very different from our own. We can ask how the Spirit is moving to mark the new church in old ways, albeit ways which are now still strange to our eyes.
Myles Werntz is the author of Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century. He writes at Taking Off and Landing and teaches at Abilene Christian University.
