Churches working together? Yep.

The Baptists do stuff together. (Really well, like in disaster relief.) The Catholics, ditto. The Methodists are perhaps famously ecumenical, reaching across all sorts of denominational and organizational lines. How about all the rest? Well...

I asked my friend Jeff, who's lived here for much of his life (and most of the rest in Central America), who was doing cool parachurch things in the Tampa Bay area. He mentioned Somebody Cares Tampa Bay, among others.

"Well, I've seen people try to draw churches together to do stuff my whole life, and generally it doesn't work. But some years ago, this guy Dan Bernard came in from 10 years on the mission field, which gave him a certain amount of street cred. Somehow, he got it to work."

So over lunch, my first question to Dan was, "How'd you do it?"

"Hard work and the Lord's favor."

I believe it.  Someone asked former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker what it was like to have his job. He replied, "Herding cats." (Sidebar:  fun cat herding video.) I've noticed that most things that cross organizational lines resemble herding cats. Especially where those lines include deep religious convictions. But you'll have a better shot at gathering a lot of cats if you plant some catnip. Or in this case, a word from the Lord and the Holy Spirit that moves Christians in all places and all times.

Dan, fresh off the mission field of Nigeria, heard the name "Ehud," from the Hebrew word for "Unity." It was his next assignment.

He started cold-calling pastors in the Clearwater area, finding those who would like to gather and pray together. A few became more, and after a while there were groups in St. Pete and Tampa, and a Unity Covenant, and cooperative work projects, and...you get the idea.

It looks like Dan went looking for common ground, and found it. The common ground tended to be serving others, which Jesus was pretty clear was a big deal. (Actually, the whole Bible is filled with that kind of thing.) God showed the people at SCTB how they could help churches do what they already wanted to do. He showed them opportunities to bring economies of scale to what had formerly been small, separate resource-buying endeavors by individual churches.

He mentioned that smaller churches often partner with others simply because they don't have the extensive resources of big churches.  They're motivated to practice interdependence. That's a good thing - and not just for churches, but for us individually.

God wants all of us, and each of us. How about those doctrinal divisions?  Dan (and I) quote St. Augustine: "In the essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty.  In all, love." Not everyone will agree to joining with other churches, much less various secular organizations.  But as for me...if God is reassembling the pieces of this broken world using some people different from me, well, he's the boss.  And I want to labor in his way and his favor.

Dan sets great store by the idea of "transference," which is the release of newly-empowered people to keep on doing great stuff without additional oversight.  So do I, which was a big part of my previous career in technology transition from lab demonstrations to end-products. More importantly, so did Jesus, not just in commissioning his disciples, but in how he constantly put them in the front lines of ministry.  That's the key to sustainable ministry that can outlive us all.

Sunday I wrote about Shevet Achim, whose inspiration comes from Psalms 133: "How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity!  It's like the costly anointing oil flowing down Aaron's beard..." Not surprisingly, Dan cites the same verse in his work.

May we seek the essentials, let the nonessentials rest, and experience the good and pleasant shalom of God flowing through our lives together.