Our life is open to men from a wide variety of Christian churches. Christian unity benefits from a shared life built upon a daily call to service: care of the sick, reaching out to the poor spreading the Gospel on a college campus, encouraging a disheartened believer, can all be done by Christians from many backgrounds with out doctrinal conflict. Such cooperative ecumenism is a powerful witness to membership in the Body of Christ.
We have purposely structured our life to bear witness to this unity, while supporting and safeguarding the individual church commitments of our brothers.
The following summarizes our approach in this area:
We believe that God has called us together from many Christian traditions and churches to be a living testimony today to God’s purpose for His people of “uniting all things in heaven and on earth” in His Son (Eph. 1:10). We live as brothers united in a common commitment and a common way of life which allows us to support one another in living a zealous, disciplined life in Christ, and at the same time to respect those differences among us which reflect our various church backgrounds and Christian commitments.
We believe that such a witness to our unity in Christ reflects the Lord’s concern for His people today. Christians need the strength that comes from cooperation with one another in facing the enormous challenges presented to us today, challenges which are on the one hand threats, such as the growing theological secularism which undermines faith in Christ, and opportunities, such as the vast task of spreading the gospel to all nations (Matt. 28:19).
We believe that we can discern in this time in history a great and important working of the Holy Spirit to draw together the Christian people in a mutual recognition of their common “sonship” in Christ, a recognition which can form a solid foundation from which to deal with the many important questions which still divide the Christian people. We believe that our life as an ecumenical brotherhood is in part a response to that working of the Holy Spirit, and so we desire to take part in supporting and encouraging responsible and mature ecumenical cooperation.
We believe that the Lord desires to overcome the divisions among the Christian people (Jn. 17:22-23), and we also perceive that many of the Christian churches are eagerly seeking unity with one another. We therefore join ourselves to one another as brothers both as a response to the way God has worked among us and in the belief that it furthers the Lord’s work of unity and contributes to the life of the various churches and the Christian people as a whole. We do so humbly, recognizing that our efforts are only a small part of what God is doing in the world today. We also do so in a desire to serve a growing convergence among the Christian people: a convergence in teaching, mutual love, common mission, and prayer for the unity of the body of Christ. We wish to be faithful to our churches and traditions in a way that furthers this convergence and that does not unnecessarily reinforce old divisions. We believe that there is a prophetic element to our calling, which points to the unity the Lord desires for all of His people, but we recognize as well that such a calling is also a great challenge, and in responding to it we must rely upon the grace of God and the help of others.