Mission Memo
Updates on campus ministry, church planting, and innovative leadership among
International Churches of Christ and beyond
GUEST EDITORIAL: Let’s Keep Coming Together to Cooperate
By Alan Rouse
October 27, 2007
As someone who did not affirm the Plan for United Cooperation, I want to make an appeal to the churches who did: let's keep cooperating.
Many brothers have worked hard in the past few years to build a more authentic unity that what we shared in the past. Some organized conferences. Some found ways to keep sharing the financial responsibilities for mission churches. Some started websites to keep us communicating. I am thankful for every effort to build more unity.
The bonds of relationships held us together when the old structures failed us. God has used the efforts of many people to nourish those bonds and to help them to grow. We didn’t splinter—the list of churches on the Disciples Today directory is longer than it would have been in 2002! Our churches didn’t abandon their core convictions, and we didn’t abandon each other.
In March 2006, several brothers proposed an “ICOC Plan for United Cooperation.” Like the conferences and mission organizations, they only intended the Plan to be a unifying tool. About 70% of the churches agreed to the Plan. I serve in a congregation that is among the 30% who didn’t. It’s not that we don’t want to cooperate, or that we don’t agree with the doctrinal statements in the Plan. It’s just that we felt we should not commit to a document other than the scriptures.
This document was not intended to persist forever: the writers envisioned this and said that it was “for the present and the near future.” Perhaps now we can take one more step forward. By removing the requirement that churches “affirm the Plan” and simply including all the churches that want to cooperate (the directory on Disciples Today makes a great list of cooperating churches!), we will have more participation in conferences, more cooperative mission funding, more unity. We’ve trusted all along that this is what the brothers who wrote the Unity Plan wanted. Let’s not keep two lists of churches—those who affirmed a document and those who didn’t.
Let’s make the test of cooperation…cooperation. Nothing more, and nothing less. Wouldn’t it make more sense to include all the churches that are actually cooperating as cooperating churches, rather than to exclude some who are cooperating simply because for them, not affirming a document is a matter of conscience? After all, if we’re participating in the conferences, sharing in the mission funding, speaking at each other’s churches…aren’t we all co-operating churches?
We can take united cooperation to a new level. We can be more united, and have more cooperation. While we have a chance to build even more unity, let’s take it.
Editor's Note: For more context on this article see Gordon Ferguson's The Cooperation Proposal Revisited and Mike Mike Taliaferro's The Latest on the Unity Proposal. We welcome reader comments.
