On Being Naive

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     The opposition to our plea for recognition and implementation of the fellowship in which all the saints of God are involved, is gathering momentum. We are being assailed in papers of national circulation and attacked in local church bulletins. The pulpits in certain areas ring with warnings against the "sin" of treating the rest of the children of the Father as our brothers. None of this moves us. We anticipated and girded our hearts and minds in full expectation that the forces of orthodoxy would react as they always do. So long as we equate the faction with which we are allied as the "one holy, apostolic and catholic church of God" we will resist any attack upon our party as an attack upon the church of God.

     I can sympathize with all of the brethren who are vociferous in their pronouncements. They are no more factional in their attitudes now than I was a few years ago. They employ the same tactics now that I employed then. They misapply the same scriptural quotations in the same traditional fashion. Somehow I feel that a lot of these brethren would like to breathe the same air of freedom I now enjoy. Since I realize that fellowship is not endorsement and I do not have to agree with a person to love him, I am free to love all of the brethren, even those who find it difficult to love each other I can go speak, upon invitation, to any group of interested listeners in the whole realm of Christendom without clearing it in advance with any preacher or group. I no longer belong to any splinter, segment, fragment or fraction, but simply to my Lord Jesus Christ.

     My appeal to the brethren all over the world is very simple. There is nothing complex about it. It is merely a plea that we recognize all of our brothers as brethren and treat them that way. Surely if a man is a son of my Father he has a right to talk to and call upon my Father. If he has a right to call upon God I have a right to call upon him to exercise what is his right The thought that I should not call upon one of God's children to pray in a meeting which I am conducting is ridiculous and absurd. lust because a person disagrees with me about cups, classes, colleges, uninspired literature, the millennium, instrumental music, or orphan homes, gives me no right to abrogate his rights as a child of God.

     I must be quite honest and frank with you. I do not recognize "The Church of Christ" as being the church of God in its fulness. God has children outside of the restoration movement. I have brethren who are not in either "The Church of Christ" or "The Christian Church." I will give them brotherly recognition also. I am joined in spirit with every other person on this earth who is joined to my Lord by the one Spirit. I simply disregard the walls which men have erected and see my brothers on both sides of these flimsy and artificial obstructions. It is not necessary that they be on my side; it is enough that they are in Christ Jesus.

     Actually, all I am advocating is the application of the "golden rule" to brotherhood. I do not like for my brethren to cut me off or treat me with contempt so I shall not cut them off or treat them with contempt. I do not like for them to demand of me that to which I cannot subscribe in good conscience, so I shall recognize their own right of conscience. I do not like to go among them and be treated with coldness and disdain, so I shall treat all of them with warmth and courtesy. I do not have any half-brothers or step-brothers in the Lord. I will try to be fair, honorable and upright in my treatment of all the brethren--not merely those who agree with me or belong to the same factional background as myself.

     I suspect that this appeal is so homespun and natural that a great many will overlook the potential for real good invested in it. We are so conditioned to big programs, big promotions, and big projects, all drummed up by big preachers, that we tend to disregard anything which comes in a plain wrapper. When I was in California I learned through "the grape-

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vine" that the administrators of a certain college regarded our plea as naive, to use their own language. Recently the president of the same school took space in the journal of largest circulation within the ranks of the non-instrument segment of the disciple brotherhood to warn against naive approaches to Christian unity, now being circulated.

     Because we believe that it is imperative that we agree with all of our brothers when possible, we want to plead guilty to this charge. A great many folks, not knowing what the word means, may conclude that there is something frightful about "a naive approach." This is all the more likely when the accusation is leveled by a college president. It sounds to some ears as if it might be sinister, baleful or malign. On the contrary, the word "naive" comes to us through the French, from the Latin nativus, innate, native. It simply means, "Having unaffected simplicity, artless, unsophisticated."

     One definition of "artless," and the one most appropriate in this case is, "Free from guile or craft; simple and sincere; ingenuous." The word "unsophisticated" means, "simple, ingenuous, innocent, genuine." I would not know how to present a sophisticated approach if I wanted to. Such an approach requires a certain kind of ecclesiastical jargon which makes it unintelligible to the average person like myself. I rather suspect that many of our problems are created by worldly-wise debate which makes brotherhood seem like a highly complicated affair that only preachers can understand. It is a pretty difficult thing to make it appear that you "love the brotherhood" at the same time you are defending the kind of partisan prejudice which will destroy it.

     To be "naive"is to have a sort of "down-home" directness about things. I do not at all resent the fact that some of the more sophisticated brethren regard me as a "country cousin" and treat my plea for unity as they would an appeal for financial help from their poor relation. I'm just artless enough to confess our own errors as well as those of other folks, and this just isn't done in polite circles, you know. If you reveal what is wrong with our "brothers in error" who use instrumental music you are being loyal to the Book; if you tell on those who do not use it you are ridiculing the Lord's church. It is all right to be a spiritual Peeping Tom so long as you do not look in at our own windows!

     I suspect that naivete is sort of a synonym for "horse sense" and now that horses have been replaced by automobiles that kind of sense is about obsolete. I'm just naive enough to think we could still use of little of it. I know that in the old days when a man got drunk they could load him in his buggy and his horse took him home. You deposit one like that in an automobile and it will take him everywhere but home. He will tear up more landscape in three minutes than a repair crew can restore in three days.

     It just seems like old-fashioned commonsense to recognize my brethren as brothers. We are all in the same family. All of us have the same Father. "Jerusalem which is from above is the mother of us all." Some of my brothers believe Jesus is coming before the thousand years, some believe he is coming afterwards, and it will take others a thousand years to make up their minds what to believe. But they are all my brothers even if some of them seem to me to be a little warped in their thinking, even as I seem to them to be slightly off in some of my views. One thing they will not do to me and that is to enlist me in any of their parties, programs or performances where I'll have to hate the rest of them. I'm through with the factional spirit either inside the "Church of Christ" or out of it. If some of my brothers seem a little difficult to love sometimes, I'll treat them as one of my aunts down home did one of her difficult neighbors. "I'll love 'em to death, if it kills me!"

     If the brethren who think we are naive will suggest a better approach by which I can love and cherish all of God's children and go among them for their good and mine, I will gladly adopt it and labor with them. Unity in Jesus is more important than my approach.