Playing It Safe

W. Carl Ketcherside

[Page 165]

     All sectarianism originates in fear and is perpetuated by it. It is fear which formulates creeds, erects walls, and dams the free flow of thought. Christianity is a great adventure. It thrives on daring deeds and epic achievements of men who burst their bonds and break their shackles. Christianity frees men; sectarianism enslaves them. The latter is the religion of the cross, the gibbet and the stake.

     We have been observing recently how our brethren are victims of that timidity which comes from deliberately restricting their own horizon by simply refusing to lift up their eyes and look. It is obvious that what is being said about fellowship in MISSION MESSENGER is having a profound effect. It is evident in the renewed partisan attacks generally labeled "The New Ketcherside Unity Movement." The brethren are forced to take time and space from their favorite axe-grinding and use it to build their own factional walls higher and thicker. It can be seen in the clever insinuations in sermons and in the innuendoes in college classrooms, as the defenders of orthodoxy pump the bellows to keep the fires of prejudice glowing. For the first time in a century of shame, scandal and schism, a plea for unity and peace based upon spiritual depth and increasing insight is penetrating even the most extreme and reactionary segments of the non-instrument Churches of Christ.

     Attitudes are changing at home and on the farflung mission fields of the world. The hearts of the humble yearn for a brighter day, when the acrid smoke of civil strife within the kingdom will no longer sear their nostrils or wring the tears from their eyes. There is a growing revulsion against the creation of artificial standards as the rallying point for clashing clans. Men are sick and tired of deserting the cross to dance and cavort around their own little rival maypoles while hurling challenges and insults at their brethren.

     Why do we not see greater tangible results? There is no simple answer to such a question which is affected by the matted roots of traditional slogans. But we can give you an inkling with reference to one aspect of it. Repeatedly in these days we hear from brethren who write, "I have been reading your articles

[Page 166]

concerning fellowship and have come to the conclusion you may be right but I am going to keep on the safe side." Occasionally this is varied to read, "I am going to play it safe."

     What does this mean? It means that frightened men, most of them preachers and elders, are going to continue to hide behind factional barricades and trust in their party affiliation for protection and security. The ground has been cut from beneath them as one scripture after another which they have wrested to justify division has been rescued for the cause of divine unity. They will cease to be as blatant in their condemnation of others and as bombastic in their challenges to dissenters. Their lessons will emphasize love as the hope for the future. In their hearts they will conclude that we are all "brothers in error" and that none of us know it all.

     But when a brother drops in to visit them from a congregation which uses instrumental music, or from one that differs with the party on cups, classes, colleges, orphan homes or the millennium, they will give him the "deep freeze" treatment which consists of the cold shoulder and the frozen smile. This is playing it safe! It is the very opposite of the nature of the Christian concept. No one can follow Jesus by such an attitude. He can merely sit on the fence and watch!

     Jesus lived in a nice comfortable heaven. It was completely walled in. He associated with angels who never spoke a questionable word. It was a wonderful, marvelous place filled with a glory that was before the world was. But He did not play it safe! He deliberately left it and came to associate with those who were enemies of God. He ate with publicans and outcast tax collectors. He was wept over and anointed by street-walkers and prostitutes. He was ridiculed by the religious, criticized by the conventional and ostracized by the orthodox. Those who claimed to have a closed circuit on the heavenly wave length called him "a glutton and a winebibber." They hustled him out of his boyhood congregation and were going to throw him over a cliff to prove their loyalty to God. He associated and shared with too many who were not "faithful" so they remained on the safe side and killed him!

     No one can participate in "the great adventure" who wants to remain in his quiet and serene little heaven behind walls of artificial jasper and with gates of cultured pearls. He who restricts his sharing to those who see everything as he does and who refuses to associate with those who disagree is not following Jesus at all. Jesus took risks for the sake of unity. If Jesus had set up the criteria for association and fellowship which his professed followers now project, he could not have left heaven and come to earth until all of us saw things as he did. Christianity is not made for heaven but for earth. It is warfare and there will be no more war in heaven. The one who caused the only war heaven ever knew was cast out and is now down here. We need to be shaken out of our little air-conditioned factional heavens where we spend our time talking to ourselves and start following Jesus. It is difficult to walk while sitting in a pew. Too many brethren get their spiritual exercise by pedaling stationary bicycles. They always get off where they got on. But it is safer that way!

     Saul of Tarsus could have played it safe. He was valedictorian in his rabinical class at the Hillel School in Jerusalem. He might have succeeded Gamaliel as president some day. He could draw up a list of qualifications that topped any other candidate. "If any other man thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more." Then he saw Jesus and took the plunge. "For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as refuse." Later on when he attended religious services on the campus he was assaulted by some of the alumni, who dragged him out of the chapel and slammed the door shut. They were beating him up until he was rescued by the state troopers who got a call that there was a riot going on.

[Page 167]

     The "mother church" with which he met when he was in the city had a very restricted view of who should share in the Good News of Jesus. It was the idea of the elders and membership generally that every place on earth must be just like themselves to be recognized of God. They could not distinguish between Christianizing the world and Judaizing it. As they saw it, a missionary who was loyal must insist that every one embrace the forms and traditions which characterized their congregation. They packed enough weight that even their leaders when visiting congregations in other countries quickly snapped back in line when they learned that a "missions inspection team" from the home church had arrived in town.

     If Paul had stayed on the safe side the community of saints for which Jesus gave his life would have been just another sect. But he refused to recognize any creed but Christ or any test of fellowship except Christian character based upon faith. He recognized those who placed emphasis on ceremonial ritual and those who did not; those who had scruples about dietary restrictions and those who had none; those who esteemed certain days as having significance and those who regarded all days alike. He was concerned only that no one make a test of brotherhood out of his personal views about such matters. It was his contention that, since the kingdom of heaven did not consist of such matters, they should not be made the criteria of union or communion in the one body. He held that all that was necessary to join us as brothers was just what it took to join us to Jesus--no more and no less!

     He was denounced as ultra-conservative by those who wanted to make a prey of the church by philosophy "according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ." They did not like it because he insisted, "For in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily...and you were buried with him in baptism, in which you are also raised with him through faith in the working of God." It was rather obnoxious to the intellectuals to hear any one naive enough to think that deity could be invested in a historical figure or that baptism had anything to do with coming into relationship with the divine.

     Mostly, though, he was decried and disparaged as a liberal because he refused to bow his neck to any party yoke, and branded "selfishness, dissension, party spirit, and envy" as works of the flesh. When he was in a congregation that had four factions he refused to be confined to any of them but called them all "brethren" and treated them all as being "in Christ." To Paul the Christian life was not staid, stagnant or stifling. It was a thrill-filled adventure, vibrant, throbbing and pulsating with joy. "We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing and yet possessing everything." As Paul viewed it, Christianity was for eagles soaring in the wild blue yonder, and not for barnyard fowl clucking contentedly to each other while pecking in the tame brown dust of the corral.

     God needs preachers who will not "play it safe" with reference to the status quo. We will never get over our sectarian state so long as we hide behind our sectarian fences. Brethren need to have the raw courage to go anywhere the Spirit opens up a great door and effectual for communication and promote peace by personal contact. Jesus "came and preached peace" and he did it to those who were not at peace with each other or in agreement with him. We need to cross back and forth across our "crazy-quilt pattern" of lines. The shameful "Berlin walls" of the spiritual realm should be disregarded, rendered null and void. One does not fraternize with the "enemy" when he shares with God's other children. The devil never pulled a more clever stratagem than when he caused us to regard our own brothers as aliens. If men cannot be free and supported financially they are en-

[Page 168]

slaved by a chain of gold. They should free themselves to teach school, dig ditches, or do some other worthy work which will permit them to assist in the crusade for unity among all the believers in the Lord Jesus Christ.

     God needs elders who will not "play it safe" to appease a narrow, provincial, sectarian attitude. Elders are called to feed the sheep and lead them into the broad paths of Christian grace and love. There are too many who want to keep the flock confined to stalls of their own construction and throw down only the hay which they have cured. Let the elders be men of valor. Let them daringly rise above parochial, illiberal and intolerant views and practices. Let them scrape off the superficial and superfluous traditions which have accumulated like barnacles on the Ship of Zion and free that vessel to sail through the sea of life unhampered.

     Elders must resist pressure from without, of editors who talk glibly of congregational autonomy and exercise diocesan dictatorship. Why should not a congregation of saints be free under God to listen to any consecrated person whom they wish to hear? Why should not brethren have the God-given liberty to invite any brother to share his thinking with them as long as he is not dogmatic, arbitrary or uncharitable? Let us cease to erect artificial barriers of our own devising. Let us make peace. Let us dare to be one in spite of differences. This is no time for cowardice. Shall we play it safe when the cause we love is in danger?

               They are slaves who fear to speak
               For the fallen and the weak;
               They are slaves who will not choose
               Hatred, scoffing and abuse,
               Rather than in silence shrink
               From the truth they needs must think;
               They are slaves who will not be
               In the right with two or three.