As you travel almost anywhere in the country, one is struck with the multitude of churches that dot our landscape. Christianity repeatedly has demonstrated the truth of Jesus’ rejection of the temptation to power (Matthew 4:8-10) and advocacy of a ministry of servanthood. Whenever we have acquired a measure of power in a society, we have quickly succumbed to the temptation to mimic the world in its use of power to the detriment of our proclamation of the Gospel.
At the same time, one cannot help but be struck by the potential of all of those churches if they could only unite in a demonstration of Christian love. Someone once made a modest proposal for world peace and said that as a beginning let us resolve that Christians will not kill other Christians.
During the Vietnam war it was not unusual to negotiate a cease fire during the Christmas holiday. I would make a second proposal for peace. Let us negotiate a cease fire during all the major holidays of all the world religions. That ought to provide us a number of days of peace each year. We might even grow to like it.
If those proposals seem too difficult to achieve, how about Christians in each denomination vowing that they will only act towards other Christians in their own denomination, even those with whom they strongly disagree, in a manner that reflects the mind of Christ (Philippians 2:5). In fact those first eleven verses of Philippians 2 might be a good place to start in reflecting on how we should relate to each other.
A Barna poll of the unchurched recently found that three-fourth of those surveyed said that the reson that they were not interested in going to church was that they believed that the church was full of hypocrites. Of course some of that may be self-serving rationalization but shouldn’t we at least strive to prove them wrong. Couldn’t we at least demonstrate our commitment to the Prince of Peace by trying to live peaceably with each other (Romans 12:18).
