Staying in fellowship

I have many friends who are in the Episcopal Church and, thus, are affected by the protracted debates between various parts of the world-wide Anglican Communion on controversial issues. The Anglicans have been struggling lately with the questions on the proper role of women within the church hierarchy and with the issue of how or whether homosexuals can be part of the church.

Now, the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, which is an every 10 year gathering of Anglicans from around the world, is on the horizon. Several prominent leaders of the church, mostly from the global south, though, are threatening to boycott Lambeth. So, at this conference that is supposed to demonstrate the essential unity of the church regardless of where in the world it is, the questions over what it means to be in fellowship with another in the context of a church are crucial.

Since I am not an Episcopalian, I do not feel qualified to speak much more about the specifics of their controversies. I can, however, relate to an incident in my own experience.

From 1993 to 1997, I served as the pastor of the Hillcrest Baptist Church in Mobile, Alabama. HBC was a relatively new church, having started about 10 years before I arrived. Despite its youth, though, the church had already caused much controversy in Mobile because the church decided to recognize the spiritual gifts of women and to ordain some women as deacons. [For those not steeped in Baptist (Southern, that is) lore, all who minister to others - both pastors and deacons - are ordained.] The overwhelming majority of Baptist churches in that Association [Baptist churches in the same geographical area are part of an association of churches] believed that to ordain women was to go against Biblical teaching. Thus, the move was made to "throw" HBC out of the Association, essentially to disfellowship HBC. The attempt did not succeed, then. Within the past few years, though, the issue was resurrected, and, this time, the defenders of Baptist purity won.

Interestingly, I had framed the parameters of this debate in the first Sunday night study I conducted at Hillcrest. I chose to use the Nicene Creed as a framework to lead a discussion on some basic and historic beliefs of the Christian Church. That decision was potentially controversial because Baptists are supposed to reject the use of creeds, but I did it anyway. On the first night of the study, I asked the questions, "What must you believe in order to be a Christian? What must you believe in order to be a Baptist? Are there differences between the two answers?" Implicit in this set of questions was one more: "What do you with someone who has a different list than you do?"

These questions, I believe, are still important for folks in churches to consider. Perhaps, the most important one is the implicit question. Can people worship together, work together, and serve together in the same local church or in a wider church body even though they may not agree on theological interpretations? OR, should churches only admit those who agree completely on everything? AND, what issues are important enough so that differences on them are sufficient to sever fellowship with other believers?