It’s been pointed out that nothing brings Christians together in unity quite like serious persecution. Minor doctrinal differences melt away in the face of great challenges. We don’t have time to argue with each other over the finer points of doctrine when we are just trying to keep our families safe. The same would seem to be true for missionaries working on the frontier as this passage from Rowland Bingham’s account of the Sudan Interior Mission in the 1920s indicates. Here we find mode of baptism (a oft-divisive idea since the reformation) becoming a non-issue with almost no overt ecumenical effort:
My Baptist friends were especially insistent that I declare myself on the form of baptism to be used on the field. I said it would be time enough to consider it when we came to baptizing our first converts. I preferred not to influence any of our pioneers in the early days. They were accepted without regard to their denomination. But a strange thing happened. The one denomination that was seeking to enter the Central Sudan with us was the Church of England. Their custom at home is well known, but on the Sudan field they came to baptize their first band of converts before we did. To the astonishment of every one, they decided to revert to the very early practice of their Church – baptism by immersion.
Our senior missionary on the field was Presbyterian, but when it came to the baptism of our first converts, he decided to follow the example set by our Anglican friends and immerse that first band of Christians. This became the general practice upon the field, so that we had no baptismal controversy and only one practice in the Central Sudan. Our missionaries have had minor doctrinal differences, but facing millions of people in the darkness of their heathenism, there has been a unity in presenting Christ as the Savior of sinners and “able to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him.”
-Seven Sevens of Years and a Jubilee, p.115
When you are living in the jungle and working tirelessly to translate the bible, preach the gospel to hungry hearts, and not get malaria, comradery is stirred up between anyone even barely on the same “team”. We see this in other accounts of Christian missions among pagans where cessastionists find themselves taking up exorcism and folks from an acapella psalm-chanting tradition find themselves ministering during a 4-hour worship service with drums and dancing. What happened? They discover that certain things just don’t matter near as much as they thought, especially given the context. They need all the friends they can get.
I imagine that when the early Christians were thrown to the lions, they prayed alongside their brothers, be they dispersed Jew or newly converted Greek. In the comfort of their homes these men might have argued with each other about this or that, (I am of Paul, etc.) but that is far, far from their minds in the face of war or martyrdom.
What is the flip side to all of this? Prosperity breeds schism. When everything is fine – there is tons of food to go around, everyone is safe and the police can be trusted, then we are freed to… bless the world? No, apparently not. We are freed to hash out contentious minutia within our family. And that is why we have the Presbyterian Church of America (a healthy and growing denomination) spending hundreds and hundreds of skilled man-hours trying to (once again!) give Peter Leithart a formal slap on the wrist for not articulating the Westminster Confessions in such a way to make certain folks happy. The canon lawyers could be home playing ball with their kids or some such thing, but they need not since everyone is apparently fat and happy. The mighty prosperity of the modern west has given them the leisure time to get bored with their lives and turn to picking bones with their brethren.
Contrast this with the people of the Coptic church in Egypt who are just trying to survive amidst very real danger. This picture is of firefighters at a church in Cairo last year after it was attacked by after rumors circulated of a Christian man dating a Muslim girl.
Do you think the folks from this church are sitting around in their bible studies debating the precise efficacy of the sacrament? I doubt it. Any port in a storm and that means that in hard times the walls that prevent our unity dissolve. Only in the ridiculously prosperous west do we have the time and energy to differentiate ourselves so much. When you are starving you will accept a cold glass of water from even an enemy. Only when you have a fat bank account will you turn up your nose at him.
I think that perhaps when we pray for Christian unity, we may be inviting war or at least economic hardship. That seems to be the most fertile ground for its growth. I guess I’ll take it.