Ecumenism and evangelism

Editor’s note: The following post arises from small group reflections from The Rise of Global Christianity, 1910–2010, taught by Dr. Todd Johnson at Boston University in the Fall of 2010. Lead by doctoral students, the small groups discussed lectures given by Christian scholars in various disciplines, including significant changes that have occurred in global Christianity over the past 100 years.

For this week, Dr. Rodney Petersen was invited as a guest speaker. He lectured on the recent history of Protestantism. After the lecture, our group members shared their thoughts on the lecture.

We started our discussion over the excessive Denominational splits in Korea, which was mentioned during the lecture. Since there are 3 Koreans in our group, including myself, we could further think about the issues. Two Korean students maintain that although there were indeed cases of divisions over the issues of Christian teachings, he thinks that the dominant reason of splits has been power struggles between individuals.

To their remarks, I basically agreed, but, I pointed out that compared to other denominations such as Methodists, Baptists, and Holiness Churches, the splits within Presbyterian Churches were conspicuous. In other words, we need to acknowledge that Presbyterian is more focused on doctrine relative to other churches in South Korea. In fact, they tend to argue more about doctrine with groups that are different, arguing “we are the true Presbyterians.”

After that, we turned to the issue of ecumenicalism and evangelicalism which are considered the two most important movements in the twentieth Century. Student C raised question, “Is the ecumenical movement as important as Petersen made it in class?” He thinks that in his view, there is less interest in ecumenical movement. I added to his comment by mentioning the fact that there is significant lack of mutual understandings among the bodies of Christ. For example, Catholics do not recognize the validity of baptism in the Protestant churches.

For the rest of the time, we spent a lot of time in talking about the very interesting issue over converting Protestants to Catholics and vice versa. To the question, “what should we think about Catholic missions to Protestants and vice versa?” two students answer that we had better stop sending missionaries and place more importance in converting non-believers. Another student suggested that we shouldn’t be quick to be missionaries be more devoted to the task of enhancing mutual understanding among different bodies of Christ.

Hye Jin Lee, discussion moderator