By Paula Clayton Dempsey
During my initial involvement as a representative of the Alliance of Baptists at the National Council of Churches, I grew to realize that all I need to know about ecumenism, I learned in Hurdle Mills, N.C. — not from my home church, but from the farming community in which I was nurtured.
In our community, no one owned all the equipment necessary to run an entire farm. When it came to saving the season’s hay crop to feed the livestock, one farmer owned the mowing machine. My father owned the rake, which sat out by the tobacco barn, and anyone who needed it just came and borrowed it. Another farmer owned the machine used to bale all the hay for miles around.
The sweat and muscle expended to pick up the bales of hay and store them in the loft came from all the young people working together. The same young people who gathered on Sunday afternoon in our front yard to play baseball, in our side yard to play football, or in our backyard to play basketball. We played and worked together as a community, sharing our resources, our gardens, our joy and our grief.
On Sunday everyone in our community went to different churches or none at all. One neighbor to the Methodist church, one to the Presbyterian, another to the A.M.E. church, and we were Baptists. The church bell I heard every Sunday morning was from the A.M.E. church, yet I heard it calling all within earshot to pause and honor that the bountiful life we enjoyed was a gift from God.
Years later my father had enough money to purchase his own hay baler. No longer did we need our neighbors’ assistance; we had become self-sufficient. The process of harvesting our hay evolved into a mechanically driven family chore instead of a community project. As a result we began to spend less and less time with our neighbors.
Where I live now I hear stories of how, 50 to 60 years ago, communities worshiped together — at the Flats of Spring Creek Baptist Church first and third Sundays and at the Spring Creek United Methodist Church on second and fourth Sundays — the Sundays that preachers were available. How proud each congregation was when they were able to afford their own pastor and meet every Sunday. However, time spent together ecumenically in worship dwindled because of progress. Now, these same churches may come together to worship only once or twice annually.
In retrospect, the sharing of farm resources and labor and the sharing of worship originated in need, and yet I now perceive it as gift. Michael Kinnamon, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, offered in his report to his governing board that what he had learned about Christian unity is: “The greatest obstacle to Christian unity is a sense of self-sufficiency — a sense that we don’t need one other.”
“Surely,” he said, “this is a time that we need one another.”
Kinnamon was referring to a time in which the condition of the world economy is zapping the church of financial resources it has enjoyed for decades, a time in which unprecedented need is knocking at the door of the church, and a time that church people, weary of institutional church battles, are leaving the church in search for spiritual renewal.
Will these “conditions,” as he called them, provide for us (NCC) an opportunity to embrace ecumenicity as more than an occasion to do some things together, but rather as an opportunity “to go beyond cooperation to a genuine sharing of resources, a sharing of life through an intentional deepening of relationships?”
Could we find ourselves at the place in the church where we can embrace the historic Lund principle: “Doing all things together except those which deep difference of conviction compel us to do separately?”
How can I adequately tell you how energized I was by his words? In my bone marrow I have always known our oneness in Christ and have grieved the divisions in the church. I am thrilled to be a part of a national conversation about the face of ecumenicity in the 21st century. And I will be inviting many others to join in that conversation as well.
If ecumenism is to occur, it will begin at home — in your church and mine — as we share with other churches around us our resources, our gifts, our prayer life, our joy and our grief.
As the general secretary stated, “Our unity grows out of the conviction that we belong to one another, not because of what we have done, but because of what God has done.”
May it be so!
