Strategy for Peace
W. Carl Ketcherside
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The day we first divided we ceased to be a unity movement and became a contributor to the sectarian complex. Our plea was no longer a force, our program became a farce.
When we began to make pieces of one another, our work as peacemakers in a strife-torn world came to an inglorious halt.
The rents in the fabric of brotherhood give the lie to our vaunted boast of loyalty to Jesus. We have denied his prayer, defamed his plan and derogated his purpose. Our factions are monuments to our failures, our parties proclaim our futility.
We must heal our breaches, repair our cleavages, and bridge our chasms, or we shall forfeit all right to speak in the ecumenical councils of the world. If there is not a sufficient dynamic in our program to hold us together it is a foregone conclusion that it can never have the power to draw all others together. Our approach has been immature, impractical and ineffective. While parroting pious platitudes we have become further fragmented. We are strangled by senseless slogans,
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In our dilemma of division and in the interest of inspiring a definite strategy for waging peace I suggest very humbly the following guidelines.
1. Let all of us, in a deep sense of remorse and with unqualified repentance, acknowledge our guilt for perpetuating the partisan principles and positions inherited from our fathers. Let us desist from the puerile practice of pointing the finger of accusation at others as the sole cause of our disaster in the restoration experiment. The question is not who split the log, but who is going to put it back together. The need is not for pointing fingers but for helping hands.
2. Restore the cross of Jesus to the center of all Christian concern. Relegate all opinions, interpretations, and personal views to a secondary position. It is absurd, silly and ridiculous to make any view of instrumental music, the millennium, cups, classes or colleges, more important than the blood of God's dear Son, and to allow the relationship created by that blood to be negated by any blunder of those within it. Jesus did not give His life to purchase a non-instrument entity, a post-millennial party, or an anti-class clan.
3. Recapture the local autonomy of the congregation in truth as well as in theory. When a congregation of saints mutually and unanimously agrees to express its praise to God and to propagate His work in a certain manner, allow them to do so without reprisal and answerable to the sovereign rule of Jesus Christ as the only Lord. Let us renounce the rule of editors, preachers cliques and pressure groups. It is useless to oppose hierarchical domination in Rome and practice it among ourselves in America.
4. Recognize that fellowship is not endorsement but a family relationship produced by the indwelling Spirit in children of God. Our goal must be community and not conformity. The only unity possible for finite beings is unity in diversity. Harmony is not essential to fellowship but acknowledgment of fellowship is essential to achievement of harmony.
5. Let us begin at once the recognition both privately and publicly of all of God's children and our brothers. I am resolved never to be a partisan pawn nor to go any place which imposes upon me as a condition of my participation, the disregard of my brethren from another segment or faction. I will not insult the Father by cold disdain of His family. I shall not sell my birthright for the pottage of partisan praise or acclaim.
6. Substitute meaningful dialogue for debate, inviting all brethren to attend, and providing opportunity for all to question. To this end I am ready to meet any brother, or any group of brethren, one or a hundred, in public dialogue, at any time or any place which may be mutually agreeable. I think that the traditional crazy-quilt pattern of "fellowship" practiced by the "Church of Christ" is absolutely inconsistent, untenable and indefensible, when measured by the eternal purpose of God as revealed in the new covenant scriptures. I am ready to examine it and to have my own position examined freely and openly in brotherly fashion.
We can unite in Christ Jesus and point the world to a brighter and better day and none of us give up any truth he has ever held. But we must love Jesus more than we love our private opinions and public prejudices.