History presents many ironies. One of them has to do with evangelicalism’s relationship to the task of Christian unity—or what theologians call ecumenism. The mandate is robustly set forth in John’s Gospel 17:21, where Christ prays for his disciples and their followers: “That they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (emphasis added). In short, sans Christian unity, the task of the Great Commission will always be compromised. (Who would want to embrace to a religion whose members are at one another’s throats or else not speaking to one another?)
At the famous 1910 Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, attendees were overcome with a profound sense of the need for Christian unity for the sake of the transmission of the Gospel. As things turned out, the charisma of this meeting was later routinized into the World Council of Churches, settling into a bureaucratic, least-common-denominator social ecumenism—one that many evangelicals, not without good reason, came to criticize.
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