The IRD Responds: Edgar’s Ecumenism Falls Flat

on February 28, 2007

The following commentary is a response to National Council of Churches General Secretary Bob Edgar’s article “Christian Unity is Never Easy, But is Always Necessary,” released by Religion News Service on February 28, 2007.

(RNS) – During an April 2005 conference sponsored by the National Council of Churches (NCC) that denounced conservative Christian leaders, NCC General Secretary Bob Edgar alluded to our work at the Institute on Religion & Democracy (IRD) to expose the NCC’s support for Marxist “liberation” movements in the 1980s. Whenever such criticism of the council arose, Edgar said, he instructed his staff: “Find them irrelevant.”

Apparently, Edgar can no longer afford to heed his own directive.

In his Feb. 28 commentary for Religion News Service, “Christian Unity is Never Easy, but it is Always Necessary,” Edgar pushes his continuing faith in the big-institution ecumenism that had its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s: Build an organization, charge them dues, and they will come. And they did—for a while.

But as the NCC’s financial statements eloquently testify, they aren’t coming any more. Ecumenism, Christian unity, and dollars fled the NCC, leaving little more than left-leaning politics and a budget deficit.

This is the main point of a recent IRD publication, Strange Yokefellows: The National Council of Churches and Its Growing Non-Church Constituency.

Edgar attended the press conference where the IRD released Strange Yokefellows and repeatedly announced that he had been hired “to do three things: raise money, raise money, and raise money.” The NCC’s member churches, many of which are diminishing in memberships and budgets, can no longer pay the NCC’s bills.

To make up the difference, Edgar has run to foundations. And he’s been successful. Less than half the NCC’s funding now comes from affiliated churches. A larger amount comes from sources such as the Ford Foundation, the Tides Foundation, AARP, the Sierra Club, and atheist billionaire George Soros.

Edgar avoids engaging the concerns raised by the IRD—and more important, by some of the NCC’s own leaders—about these funding patterns. Instead, he attacks the IRD, without any appropriate sense of irony, as a “front for wealthy neoconservatives.”

Only rarely has the IRD taken a position on any specific legislation, and we avoid any attempt to influence elections. The NCC, in sharp contrast, boasts that it “works closely with MoveOn.org,” refers to itself as part of “the religious left,” maintains a Washington office and takes strong positions on almost every conceivable political issue.

Those positions, needless to say, conveniently align with the platform of the left wing of the Democratic Party. Edgar once described the NCC’s efforts to influence the 2004 elections, including a rally in the crucial swing state of Florida with Michael Moore, as “nonpartisan work for regime change.”

By contrast, the IRD understands that most political debates amount to differing prudential judgments; equally faithful Christians, we believe, can and do disagree on policy. Edgar and other NCC leaders, meanwhile, reduce the Christian faith to little more than a partisan political agenda and treat differences of opinion as intolerable heresy—and intolerable heresy as mere differences of religious opinion.

Edgar’s political intolerance notwithstanding, independent polls show that the members of NCC-affiliated churches are extremely diverse in their political views. Edgar fails to see what United Methodist theologian Thomas Oden calls “new ecumenism” right under his nose as big-institution ecumenism goes the way of the wooly mammoth.

This new ecumenism is actually the ancient ecumenism, a theological and spiritual consensus built around Christian orthodoxy that supersedes institutional differences and has blessed the church for 2000 years.

Mainline and evangelical Protestants, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox believers—through organizations like the IRD—are finding a unity of faith and kingdom-purpose. It’s something the NCC, for all its dubious funding and political posturing, cannot possibly replicate.

 

 

©2007, Religion News Service.  Reproduced with Permission.

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