Preacher's Pen

The National Council of Churches is in trouble. You know about the NCC, don't you? It is America's largest ""religious alliance,"" representing 35 denominations and saying ""it is the primary national expression of the movement for Christian unity."" Yet even as the NCC celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, some of its own members are calling for it to disband, while others speculate that is has no real future. The problem? The NCC is notoriously liberal in its thinking and stance. Recent pronouncements from the NCC have favored universal health care, affirmative action, gun control, and nuclear test bans, while opposing the Kosovo bombing and religious school vouchers. Some think such leftist positioning is the cause of their membership decline, but whatever the reason, the NCC is in bad shape. Recently its biggest member, the United Methodist Church, suspended contributions to the NCC. Of course, without money . . . .

Frankly, I'm hoping the NCC will disappear faster than a snowball in a volcano. My objection, of course, is not to Christians being unified. My objection is to the creation of unauthorized, human-invented organizations designed to harness congregations into some super institution that is supposed to be able to do something the God-created local church evidently cannot do. The NCC is just another in a long line of human failures that demonstrate that all such institutions invariably and inevitably drift further and further from N.T. Christianity, no matter the good intentions of its founders. This is so because they represent, from the very start, a departure from the New Testament. Where in the pages of scripture do we ever read of a super organization representing hundreds of congregations? Where in the New Testament is the pattern for any harnessing of congregations together into some giant conglomeration, denomination or ""religious alliance?"" Where is Bible authority for delegates, voting and conventions, or for that matter, political pronouncements on federal economic policies? When you begin by violating God's word where else is there to go but deeper and deeper into apostasy? In fifty years the NCC has managed to get pretty far along that road!

The only way to true unity is to open the Bible, study it and obey it. Gigantic institutions that decide to pool together those of vastly different views of scripture by simply ignoring their differences and announcing ""unity"" simply don't work. Practically and scripturally, the NCC demonstrates the failure of human wisdom and ideas. Let us return to the simplicity of New Testament Christianity: independent, autonomous congregations that strive only to please Jesus Christ.