Tectonic Ecumenism

Finding Creative ways to Work Together

Ecumenism is a dirty word among most conservative churches, and especially in the post-covid, negative world¹ of 2024. At one level It conjures up notions of milquetoast, white-collared mainline priests and ministers softly preaching watered down messages of pacifistic unity. At the other extreme is a vision of a globalist cabal subverting the Abrahamic religions into a Satanic cult peddling brainwashing propaganda on the feckless masses.

But in such a negative world, allies must coalesce around shared goals, and one of those must be survival. I don’t personally fear the extinction of Christianity as a whole, the church is booming in the global south. But if the existing traditions of the west want to have any part of the future Kingdom of God, they will have to put aside centuries old squabbles and find some common ground. 

This truth has persisted as long as there has been a negative world. While America as a whole may have been neutral or even positive towards Christianity during my youth in the 90’s, the area of New England in which our family resided had long been a stronghold of secularism. 

While the population had expanded greatly over the centuries since Puritans first settled in Plymouth, the land itself had not grown any bigger. A densely packed network of cities and towns filled all the space between the bigger hubs of Boston, Worcester, and Providence. 

With a few exceptions, there was no space to build mega churches. Each town was populated by a handful of small congregations, some of them historic, mainline protestant and usually at least one Catholic church, others were newer and more evangelical or pentecostal, maybe in newer, more modest church buildings, or often in storefronts. 

This meant that for any project aimed at helping the broader community, churches would have to work together. I remember such events as the National Day of Prayer taking place in the town square, with representatives of many churches. Our homeschool Co-op used a couple of churches on the same street for different classes, and many of the students would attend youth groups and special events at many churches. Since the large pentecostal church down the street had a wednesday night youth service, there was no need for one at my parents church, (with enough youth to count on one hand) and when I began volunteering there as a young adult, I regularly picked up younger kids from my parent’s church when they became old enough to attend. 

To contrast this, when I enrolled in a ministry training program in Illinois, our home base was a megachurch of about 3-5,000 people. This massive church, with its large force of student ‘volunteers’ would embark on huge evangelistic campaigns, canvasing the city door to door to invite them to Easter services, and organizing a city-wide clean up day with teams at all the major parks. 

To attend a service at this church, you would be tempted to think that they were the sole beacon of hope to this dark, secular city. Until you got out into the parking lot, and noticed an equally large Evangelical Free church on the opposite corner. What went on behind those doors none of us knew; yet an equal percentage of the city went there multiple times a week, to worship ostensibly the same God we did. Why didn’t anyone think to include that mighty force of kingdom builders into our efforts to save the city? 

The writer of ecclesiastes said “two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil”. That’s certainly true in a landscaping job. But when you could have two giant megachurches, the possibilities are beyond imagining. Of course, there’s always a danger that someone might get the idea to switch sides, - and that wouldn’t be good at all. 

The structure of Tectonic School is designed to be decentralized, with the business owners and mentors taking responsibility for the apprentices. However, to give students exposure and increased opportunity, cooperation between trades are necessary. Such cooperation is natural within the building trades, as most carpenters, plumbers, and electricians work with other trades to complete jobs within a home. 

Apprentices and mentors who work together on the jobsite may not always be attending the same church. Being able to work with other Christians who share similar goals, even if their particular beliefs differ, is essential for creating a lasting cultural impact. 

The biggest barrier to a fruitful ecumenism is the threat that individual churches feel to losing their congregants. But for all the reasons that churches bleed members, the lure of other churches should not be a chief cause for concern. 

Here in the Bible belt, there does seem to be something of a closed circuit of megachurches, and there’s definitely a history of folks hopping from one church to another when they get bored or offended by something the Pastor says. But the people who regularly cycle through are not the congregants that Pastors are really hoping to keep in their seats. The dedicated core of churches who volunteer, give generously and bring their kids tend to be in it for the long haul. 

However, unless your church is part of the traditional mainline, conservative churches have built in defenses against ecumenism. First is doctrinal distinctives, and strict adherence to confessions. If there is a unique theological position that a church holds, highly emphasizing this doctrine will make the people who agree with that position feel affirmed in their choice to stay. 

Take as an example the pentecostal distinctive of Holy Spirit Baptism as a secondary work, with the evidence of speaking in tongues. For those who hold strongly to this view (because it may have mirrored their own experience) they will feel a certain lack in churches that don’t place the same emphasis on this experience.  

Strict confessional adherence means that churches are constantly living under the assumption that their church correctly figured out everything in 1646, or 1689, or whenever their official documents were penned. Taking this position means that anything that happens after that is folly bound to expose itself as a doctrine of demons. While this is a satirical characterization that confessionalists will disagree with, it does mean that they cannot easily endorse the ministry of churches with contrary doctrines without undermining the importance of their confession.² 

Churches can take a less strict approach to their confessions, but the results of that tend to be what we see in mainline churches. Mainline churches will uphold the historical confessions as part of their identity, but they basically treat them like historical landmarks that display the ignorance of past generations. Their greatest functional use in liturgy is of categorizing the past collective sins their denomination needs to repent of.

The other defense against ecumenism is financial. Conservative churches tend to be more independent in governance, or part of smaller denominations that have split off from bloated and corrupt mainline institutions. This means that they are dependent on financial aid from their current crop of members and attendees. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a big part of what drives the church growth industry.

The long term goal of most churches is to keep families in their church for as long as possible. This means that not only must each church provide services for a wide array of different family situations, such as youth and children's ministries, but they must also be very focused on how their church presents itself to potential newcomers. This creates a cycle of pandering that has been highly criticized in the seeker sensitive movement. Many people can agree that this should not be the way it is, but from a financial standpoint, churches operate on an honor-based form of capitalism. They provide services, and if people are pleased they will give freely. 

That’s not the way things are supposed to operate. Churches should be concerned with the greater goals of the kingdom, and trust that their financial needs will be met. This is where a novel form of ecumenism could actually benefit all the churches involved. Let’s step back and take a broader goal of what churches are trying to accomplish. If individual churches can put aside their particular needs, all pastors and denominations would want more people to participate in Christianity. After all, the biggest bleed has been from a church going populace in general into an unchurched secularism.

If we can take the view that a rising tide lifts all ships, churches can actually lean into their niche distinctives, and useful parachurch organizations can help drive people who are interested in their particular tradition right to their doors. Let’s talk about a few areas where such organizations could be helpful. 

First, there is already somewhat of a political coalition centered around certain issues, like abortion. Catholics and Protestants have no major issues working together towards these goals, and will even work with groups they see as further on the fringe like Mormons. This is partly due to the fact that even if they meet in a particular local church, the movement itself stands outside the religious framework. 

Secondly, growing churches in the United States are almost all multicultural. The range of multiculturalism is somewhat determined by the demographic makeup of a given community, but churches as ethnic enclaves are going away. Evidence that the survival of any particular church depends on its cultural flexibility is well documented in the book Embracing The New Samaria, by Dr. Alejandro Mandes. Like the political alliances noted above, this requires people to unite outside their cultural norms, focusing on shared faith and doctrine. 

That outside perspective is important to making a coalition work. Since the goal of Tectonic School is to help young men become productive citizens of the community as a whole, a local network of business will almost certainly contain members of several churches. A plumber from one, a mason from another, and a landscaper from a third. 

Since these business owners can cooperate to give opportunities to apprentices from any other affiliated program, and not simply a particular church, the opportunity to create lasting business relationships with a group of students who are already attending different churches will easily lead to fruitful ecumenism in the future.

This decentralized, outsider model does not require official sanction from any local churches, since the discipleship happens on the jobsite, and the apprentices are simply attendees at whichever church their mentor goes to, or a host family attends.³ 

Tectonic School’s focus on trades is only a particular entry point into strengthening culture and community. It addresses the problem of young men without direction, a need for workers in the trades, and an opportunity to preserve generational wisdom that will otherwise be lost. 

But this basic model could be used to solve many other problems. The rest of this article will focus on imagining other things that families and parachurch organizations could address, without relying on the full buy-in of local churches. Perhaps by dealing with the other problems churches are facing, the issues of attendance and revenue loss will take care of themselves. 

One pressing issue is transferring faith to the next generation. Many branches of Christianity are suffering in this regard, and the default move out of a church tradition is into secularism. However, secularism is far from a perfect worldview, so people usually end up integrating spirituality or religious practices back in. If they have already dismissed Christianity as false, they will likely instead opt for a new age practice, or something like stoicism. 

How could an ecumenical approach help address this issue? When the stories of faith deconstruction are examined, there is a noticeable trend of people rejecting a rigid interpretation of what it means to be a Christian. This could be something like fundamentalism, or strict confessionalism, or an extreme emphasis on evangelism and community engagement.

Others are leaving ethnic traditions like Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, as well as mainline denominations. This may not require strict deconstruction, since they may already be only cultural in practice and not religious. In this way, the people walk away because it was never important. They may not harbor any animosity towards the church of their youth, it just doesn’t mean anything to them.

Faith deconstruction in the stricter sense, is what happens when a particular view of Christianity is presented as a strict set of propositions, all reliant upon each other. When one or more of these propositions are challenged, the system crumbles. This could be due to something like different interpretations of science, or the exclusion of same-sex relationships.

This doesn’t mean that those Christian traditions are actually wrong about those issues. What it does mean is that when a young adult questions the reasons why the church holds those positions, and the answer they receive falls on a seemingly arbitrary appeal to authority, such as “because the Bible says so”, they will be dissatisfied in comparison to the reasoning and explanation they receive from secular sources to the contrary. So instead of trying to reconcile the two worldviews, they ditch the one that doesn’t seem interested in answering the hard questions of epistemology. 

Here the loyalty to one particular branch of christianity betrays the parents and church leaders. A better answer to the question would be a more thorough explanation of why the church believes what it does, and hopefully an explanation of how other branches of Christianity believe differently. This may be a scary idea for some people, but we shouldn’t want to build our communities on blind loyalty to claims of authority. 

This approach requires recognizing the fact that there are mutually exclusive claims made by almost all churches, which means the likelihood of one particular branch being absolutely correct is extremely low. However, because our opinions are our own, we cannot identify the areas we are most likely wrong.⁴ We need enough humility to recognize that we must be wrong in some, if not many, different areas of interpretation, and we can’t identify them ourselves. If push came to shove, most parents, and even most pastors should be happy for a young person to choose between a plurality of churches, rather than between one church and no church at all. 

This idea is similar to what Malcolm and Simone Collins have proposed in the concept of a “backup religion”, while they are trying to invent their own religious custom, they also teach their children about Judaism, in the hopes that if they reject one, they will cling to the other. Christianity in its vast history and many manifestations throughout different cultures does not require a non-christian backup, but the idea of “backup denominations” could be very useful to foster early on.⁵

Another reason why an ecumenism of this sort could be useful is due to aesthetic and liturgical reasons. Churches vary greatly in how much their modes of worship tend towards the head and the heart. Some people may experience a spiritual awakening within a cathedral that they never had in a megachurch, and vice versa. Some people may come from a household that puts great emphasis on music, but individually, they connect to God through the intellect. Moving from one church to another should be something that we can celebrate as an alternative to someone abandoning Christianity all together.

This kind of sorting could go along with things like the big 5 personality test. An organization devoted to helping people find the right church for them might give a list of options based on measurable qualities. There’s a slight problem that people will simply sort into their preference, creating echo chambers that are inhospitable to people with different personalities, but since that seems to happen already, the fact that parents and pastors would be willing to let their children try another church could go a long way to maintain relationships of trust between varying traditions. 

Another area where ecumenism could help beneficially sort people into different churches is according to mission. Some churches may excel at the outreach and welcoming of unchurched people. Such a church could be a great fit for extroverted people, and especially young singles. But as people enter different stages of life, it might benefit them to move to a church that has an infrastructure designed around helping young families. 

As kids get older, a family may want to bring their children to a church where they have opportunities to serve underprivileged people. In a model like this, churches could lean in to what they are good at, instead of trying to appeal to all types of people simultaneously. 

Of course, some churches may find that no one has a need for their particular community. If pastors fear this may be the case, is it truly better to stretch things out by keeping people in the dark? Or would it be best to simply give whatever resources are still useful to a church on the rise? A church can reflect the mission of Christ even in the way it passes away. “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it”. 

The key would be for churches to be truly committed to doing what is best for the individuals and families under their care, even if it means being willing to have their families leave. New wine can’t be put in an old wineskin, but it can still carry water for the thirsty. If the faithful few are able to do this, it may result in other churches being willing to do the same. 

1. This refers to Aaron Renn’s, The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism, described here: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/02/the-three-worlds-of-evangelicalism

2. The CREC has tried to accommodate these issues by uniting on their Calvinism and Evangelicalism, and accepting adherence to a wide variety of confessions, but they are also having issues with how families integrate into new churches along the points of contention between the confessions.

3. This is not supposed to be subversive in any way, it simply keeps the program flexible, and reduces barriers to getting things off the ground. Cooperation with particular churches is still very much encouraged, as it allows the use of buildings and facilities, and would open up families who are not involved in the trade aspect to become involved by hosting students in their homes, or for meals.

4.  An idea that I plan to examine more intently later on is how God can somehow seemingly transcend the laws of non-contradiction within factions of the greater church. There may be a way that God condescends to our limitations, and honors our choices in how He manifests within certain church contexts. Examples of this would be that when the Catholic church says transubstantiation is true, sometimes miracles occur around the eucharist, where the bread and wine become literal flesh and blood. Because another tradition denies this claim about the eucharist, God does not perform such miracles. Similarly, miracles around Icons occur regularly in orthodox churches, but not in churches that simply have images of Christ with no spiritual value placed on them. A third example could be in regards to pentecostal churches mentioned above. Because they teach that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is a secondary and subsequent work of God, with evidence of speaking in tongues, such an event occurs regularly. However, for some individuals it does not, as in the case of people in cessationist churches who do spontaneously speak in tongues. These events may provide the impetus for an individual to leave one tradition for another, but what do we do about these mutually exclusive claims? When confronted with so many points of evidence, the likelihood that one group is right and all the others are wrong is difficult to accept, because the fruit of the spirit is present in all these churches. It may be that promise of Christ that where two or three are gathered in His name, He is in the midst, and the authority given to bind on Earth is real, and not something passed on by apostolic succession, but something God allows to compensate for our fallibility.

5. You can find more about Malcolm and Simone’s ideas in their book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion