The Journey Part 5: Denominationalism and Exclusivity

After having our Christian foundation laid within the Assemblies of God, I moved on to formal Bible training. I was exposed to the independent charismatic movement through the year and a half that I spent at Christian Life College in Chicago. It was there that I learned about local church autonomy, and leading a church by flowing in the Spirit, while making friends and colleagues who were zealous about winning people to Jesus Christ.

It is amazing, while looking back at my past experiences, how the influence of men and women you respect will dominate how you look at Scripture and how you lead in ministry work. I was discipled by wonderful men and women who loved God, His Word, and the Church. Their model of ministry made a lot of sense, so I adopted much of what I had learned from them into everyday ministry.

I was privileged to be pastor of a small church during my first year of Bible School. I didn’t know much at the time, but everything I learned in my classes during the day, I put into practice on evenings and weekends. If you were to attend our church during that time, you would have found the same zeal for God, His Word and the Church that I was learning about in the classroom. In a very humble sense I found myself on top of the world, as fulfilled as one could hope for. But it didn’t last long.

Many of my fellow classmates and colleagues in ministry had a tough time with liturgical, traditional churches and were quite vocal about it. They were quick to label them as the “frozen chosen” or to suggest that they had “all the wood but lacked the fire.” Their complaints encompassed just about everything done by traditional pastors in their churches. Everything was fair game. They showed their disdain for money that was “wasted” on stain glassed windows. They couldn’t understand how following a lectionary could benefit a church body. In their minds, singing out of a hymn book was part of a dead ritual and they lamented about the lack of the presence of the Spirit in the services.

Many of these critics had never stepped foot in a traditional church, but a number of them actually grew up going to these churches. It was unanimous. If you wanted to fit in with this bunch, you had to join the choir of criticism. Nothing good could ever come out of the liturgical churches. But I was uneasy. Surely these movements must have had relevance and significance in their day! What caused them to become dead? Were they indeed dead? Would it be acceptable for us to just write them all off? Was renewal the answer, or did we have to convince and convert them?

I transferred to another school in Southwest Missouri to get my undergraduate degree. The town had two Bible colleges, one Assemblies of God and one Baptist. It was there that I was shocked into the reality of denominationalism. On two separate occasions I was exposed to the dangers of exclusivity.

During my junior year I was asked by one of my classmates if I was going to seek licensure with the Assemblies of God when I graduated. I responded at the time that I couldn’t see myself aligning with the A/G’s because of some differences in eschatology (view of the end-times), and because they wouldn’t allow anyone to be licensed to ministry if they or their spouses had been previously married and divorced, regardless of whether the marriage happened before or after a conversion to Christ. I couldn’t reconcile their views with how I was understanding the Bible. This classmate’s reply stunned me. “If you aren’t A/G you’re not going anywhere in the ministry.”

I realize now that it was a childish response on his part, but it went against everything I held dear in my heart. Jesus prayed that we would be one (John 17) and I wasn’t going to be a part of something that would exclude other bonafide Christians from the Body.

A few days later I was driving to class. Ahead of me was an automobile with a bumper sticker that read, “Accepting Jesus as my Savior made me a Christian, Reading the Bible made me a Baptist.” There it was again. That sectarian, exclusive spirit wasn’t limited to Pentecostals. I later found that it exists in just about any denomination I have encountered. Maybe I was naive, but I was grieved. I committed myself to being interdenominational in scope and Spirit. And although it gave me much peace, it repeatedly became a stumbling block to others who weren’t like-minded. Some questioned my commitment to pure doctrine. Others called me confused. But I never wavered. Something inside of me kept pointing to the fact that real Christians could be found in all denominations and we should be striving to fellowship along the lines of what we agree on and stop drawing new lines that would further fracture the Body of Christ.

After graduation, I moved back to Chicago and we planted a church. I’ll pick up that heart-warming part of the story in Part 6: The Church Planting Years.