Unity Without Uniformity

After nearly thirty years in the Autocephalous Sacramental Movement, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the question of Christian unity. For many years, I measured unity largely by visible organization: fewer jurisdictions, fewer divisions, fewer independent bodies. Over time, however, I have come to wonder whether the problem is not simply our divisions, but also the way we have learned to define unity itself.

I think that our modern definition of unity is wanting. We often use the word as though unity means agreement, sameness, or everybody belonging to the same ecclesiastical structure. Historically, however, the idea is closer to oneness, uniqueness, something being whole, singular, or held together without necessarily being identical in every part.

Unity does not require uniformity.

A body is one precisely because its members are different. The eye is not the hand, the hand is not the foot, and yet they belong to one body. Diversity does not necessarily threaten unity; sometimes it is the very thing that makes genuine unity possible.

The Autocephalous Sacramental Movement certainly has its share of unnecessary divisions, wounded egos, personality conflicts, and jurisdictions born for questionable reasons. We should be candid about that. But multiplying jurisdictions by itself does not prove that unity is impossible any more than having many religious orders, dioceses, rites, or theological schools does.

Christ Catholic Church itself grew out of an earlier attempt to hold freedom and communion together. Bishop Karl Prüter came into the Free Catholic Movement from Congregational Christianity, where the independence of the local congregation was deeply valued. During the upheavals surrounding Congregational mergers in the 1950s and 1960s, he had already been involved in efforts to preserve both local autonomy and a recognizable common Christian identity. When he later entered the Free Catholic and Old Catholic world, he carried much of that instinct with him. His vision was never simply to create another isolated little church, but to gather sacramental Christians into relationships where independence did not have to mean isolation.

That tension became one of the distinctive gifts of Christ Catholic Church: Catholic without requiring Roman centralization, Congregational in its respect for local freedom, and ecumenical in its willingness to recognize grace beyond its own boundaries. Prüter spent much of his ministry connecting people who otherwise might never have known one another, not only through ecclesiastical relationships but through his publishing, correspondence, and directories of independent bishops and churches. In a movement scattered across countless small jurisdictions, even helping people find one another was an act of unity. The goal was not necessarily to erase those jurisdictions, but to create enough relationships, mutual recognition, and common purpose that they might understand themselves as parts of something larger than themselves.

There have also been other sincere attempts within the movement to bring greater cohesion to this scattered sacramental family. Jurisdictions such as the Ecumenical Free Catholic Communion, my first jurisdiction, were deeply concerned with finding ways for independent Catholics to cooperate, recognize one another, and present something more coherent to the wider Christian world. Part of that concern was practical: if the Autocephalous Sacramental Movement hoped to be taken seriously by the historic and mainstream churches, we needed to demonstrate that independence did not necessarily mean disorder, isolation, or ecclesiastical chaos.

Some of those efforts succeeded, sometimes remarkably so, but often only for a season. Again and again, promising attempts at communion fractured over disputes that, from a distance, appeared remarkably small. Minor theological disagreements, questions of jurisdiction, titles, precedence, personalities, and authority could suddenly become reasons for separation. Sometimes there were genuine matters of conscience involved, but sometimes what appeared on paper as a theological dispute seemed, in practice, to be wounded pride or competing egos dressed in ecclesiastical language. That experience has taught me that merely putting everyone beneath a common organizational umbrella does not create unity. We can share a constitution and canons and still not share a heart.

Perhaps the better question is not, “Why aren’t we all under the same roof?” but, “Can we recognize Christ in one another across the fences?”

Unity can be discovered, cultivated, and freely embraced in the midst of profound diversity. It cannot be manufactured by demanding sameness and it certainly can’t be forced. Forced unity is not unity at all; it is assimilation and conformity dressed up in ecclesiastical termonology.

Maybe the task before the Autocephalous Sacramental Movement is not to build one enormous institution, but to learn how to become a communion of communions, different, autonomous, sometimes disagreeing, yet still willing to meet one another at the Table and confess that Christ is greater than the boundaries we have drawn.

I don’t pretend to have any solid answers to all of this. In fact, I increasingly suspect that part of our problem is that we have been asking the wrong questions. We ask how to organize ourselves, who belongs where, who recognizes whom, who has authority, and how we might finally get everyone under some common structure. Those questions may have their place, but perhaps the more important question is much simpler and much harder: What would Christ do? How would Christ call us to live with one another, disagree with one another, forgive one another, and still recognize one another as members of the same Body? Until we are willing to begin there, I’m not sure any structure we build will ever give us the unity we say we want.