By Audrey deCoursey

The need is great.

Violence plagues our world. Wars ravage land and lives. Homes and houses of worship are too often centers of abuse, especially for women and children. The non-human Earth community is harmed by human choices. Structural inequity is enshrined in political, social, and cultural systems that deny billions of the world's people basic needs: enough food to eat, enough clean water to drink, enough shelter to cover them, enough medical care to heal their bodies. Racial classifications shift and change and are exposed for the artificial constructions they are, yet ethnic and racial conflict continue to threaten real, living bodies.

All these threats to the full flourishing of life on Earth loom as if indications of crisis. They must be addressed directly and strategically, and the efforts to work for peace will entail all of us together. In particular, the ancient religions of the world offer a context for these problems: they offer the longer narrative in which these problems sit. Religious vision offers us the sense of scale needed for addressing this violence effectively, so that we are not numbed by omens of crisis. This is not the first time in history that God's people have felt despair and wished for change, but this is the moment in which we live, the moment in which we sense the world's pain and potential, and the moment in which we can act. Religions teach the scale of human histories and this sense of scale can allow humanity to strategize its hope for the future.

Christian voices are especially needed in overcoming global violence. First of all, we who have inherited the Christian legacy must take responsibility for the harm it has caused. Christianity in its many forms has been too deeply implicated in the spread of violence. Our own Scriptures and structures have too often been used to justify oppression. Christians have too often been crucifiers. We must consider seriously what it is we have done, and cry out in mourning that we have forsaken those in need instead of working to fulfill our Christ's good news.

Christians are also needed because we have a special call from our resurrecting savior. Our spiritual heritage empowers us to minister to those who suffer. It opens us to hear the cries to God released by the crises our world faces. The triumph of our Christ Jesus over the powers of violence that sought to silence him orients us to confront oppression and violence wherever they emerge, and to stand strong against them. We are called as the worldwide Churchly Body of Christ - each Christian, every Church, and all Churches together - to transform violent relationships that break bodies and spirits into relationships that let life thrive.

The world itself calls Christians to ecumenical action.

Ecumenical vision of Church after genocide

The question of ecumenism - what it is and what it may be - is, ultimately, a question of what the Church is and may be. These questions of ecclesiology have been answered innumerable times, and each age calls for its own answer. Today's Church requires vision our forebears in the ecumenical movement could not have foreseen.

At the time of the founding of the World Council of Churches in 1948, the world was still reeling from the atrocities of World War II: the United States' atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the invasion and plunder of Nanking and other parts of the Asian mainland, the intense bombing campaigns in Europe, the resounding impacts on colonial and post-colonial nations across the globe. The Church was especially troubled by the war's most infamous crime, the Holocaust. For Christians, this posed a moral quandary that challenged the depths of their theology: how could people purporting to be Christians commit such atrocities against other people? The secular community also responded with promises to remember. International bodies formed, pledging themselves to free us from such horrors.

Sixty years later, we have seen those pledges unfulfilled. Christians, along with the rest of the world's people, have found themselves either stunned into inaction by the horrors of genocide or else confused by the complexities of situations precipitating such violence. Some Christians have even abetted genocidal evil, by the same moral calculus that had enabled the Holocaust and previous genocides to occur. And some Christians have been the victims of genocide. The Church has done too little to prevent this violence. It has not allowed the experiences of the world's people to touch and reshape its theology to better face the realities of living in this world.

The Rwandan genocide in 1994 provides one of the most potent challenges to global Christian theology since the Holocaust.¹ Out of a thick and bloody complex of stories, one phenomenon asserts itself: when the slaughter began, thousands of people congregated in churches (and schools and hospitals and other buildings they believed provide sanctuary). These people were allowed to congregate, but they were denied the refuge they sought. Instead, they were massacred there in the places they went seeking safety. Horribly, their voluntary assembly expedited their killers' crimes.

The fact alone that church buildings did not - could not - provide physical sanctuary, even to the people who believed in their power, challenges all who call ourselves Christian to reconsider what we call Church, and why.

More troubling, many of the murderers were Christians, just like their victims.

Yet, the relationships among Christians did not transcend political identities enough to prevent genocide; these relationships were not the meaning of Church. Rwanda had been known as one of the most Christian countries in Africa. And in 1994, many of those Christian people murdered their fellow Adventists, fellow Catholics, people who had sat in the same pews as them. Some pastors planned their congregants' slaughter or invited mobs to the churches where their people had gathered. Some pastors even participated in the killings themselves. The fellowship of Christ - the bond between Christians - the responsibility a pastor should have to care for, not kill, his parishioner - these were absent in this painfully-real incarnation of the Body of Christ. Christ's crucifiers had become leaders and laity of the supposed Body of Christ, and they used the structures of the Church to continue Christ's crucifixion, through the bodies of murdered Rwandans.

Theologies that do not grapple with the reality of the Rwandan genocide can never again suffice. The violence committed by one part of the body of Christ against another makes old conceptions of Church no longer tenable. Christian theology worldwide must face the horrific violence that has been unleashed in and through its physical and organizational structures. New ecclesiologies must clearly orient themselves in opposition to that violence and the racism that sows it, in order to honor the real Body of Christ and keep it holy.

Church as relationships, not structures

Various definitions of "church"/"Church" have been used (and useful) through time. Some define church as the authority structure of the Christian community. The church, in this view, is represented in official clergy of the community, as opposed to laity. Others call the buildings in which Christians worship churches. Billy Sunday's clever quote, that "going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car," reveals this spatially-located definition of church.² The ‘church' in this view is a place people go to, not an identity people embody.

For others, Church is not a building or a hierarchy, but a collection of humans set apart by their commitment to transforming the world through Christian witness. (I differentiate this usage of the word by capitalizing it.) Pacifist theologian John Howard Yoder presumed this definition of Church as congregation when he wrote his vision of Christian purpose: "The Church is called to be now what the world is called to be ultimately."³ Such a statement would seem peculiar if he were talking about a building. My ancestors in the Church of the Brethren reminded themselves that Church is the community of believers by using the term ‘meeting house' to differentiate the building the Church met in from the congregation of believers (i.e. the Church) itself.

In the shadow of the Rwandan genocide, we must shift our conceptions of Church from structural to communal definitions. This year, I met a director of the Leadership Development Initiative of Africa in Uganda who reiterated this theme. He stressed that Christians need to move away from conceiving of Church as a structure or institution.

Such structures too often develop a ‘life' of their own, which Christians feel the need to maintain for the structure's own sake, even when it becomes harmful and threatens the sake of the people it is designed to serve. (Another Ugandan I talked to went so far as to joke that denominations have been ‘demon-ations' in Africa because of how divisive they have been.) Instead, this faithful evangelical encouraged me to see Church as composed of relationships among Christians. A Church defined by relationships instead of buildings and hierarchies of authority is harder to maintain in a world that wants simple order, but it may provide a vision of church that takes the moral failure of the Church in the Rwandan genocide more seriously. It also more faithfully represents the spirit of the early Christian gatherings.

Ecumenism as work of relationships through the Holy Spirit

The task of re-conceiving Church is the essential project of the ecumenical movement. It is violence that we come together to end, but the immediate challenge we face is that our existing institutions, and the ways we think of them, may be unsuited for that ultimate task. Effective, violence-ending ecumenism demands of us that we start seeing Church in relationships instead of separate structures. History subtly hints that artificial distinctions may, in fact, impede Christian work. Instead, ecumenism must place faith in the power of relationships to honor real diversity while clearing away manmade obstacles to recognizing the face of God in the people around us.

Ecumenical partnerships like the World Council of Churches call on their members to discern who we are, what of our identities are critical to our call as Christians, and how we can improve our collective ministry - and to do all this in community with others very different from ourselves. These relationships call on us to remember, to imagine, to change, and to work together.

Unity…

We are called to unity by the world's need. Strategically, we must work together to address global needs. Our history reveals a lineage of effective partnerships, but also an inheritance of dangerous divisions that have contributed more to oppression than liberation. Overcoming artificial divisions is holy work.

We are also called to unity in our faith's Scriptures. We share a history from our world's very genesis, in which all people, animals, plants, and other planetary elements were all formed from a common substance and through a unifying divine will to create that which is good. Christians are drawn together around (and set apart by) the birth, life, death, and resurrection of our Christ Jesus. The New Testament epistle to the Ephesians also stresses the Pauline theology of the unity of the Church, that "there is one body and one Spirit"⁴ which forms and moves our present community. And we share a destiny as Christians set apart by our commitment to transform our world.

… in Multiplicity

But we as a Church are not called to a simplistic unity. We are called to a complex "unity in multiplicity."⁵ We are called to this first in our Scriptures. Paul's words in I Corinthians 12 deepen his model of unity beyond identicality. Paul writes about the Church as an interconnected body composed of multiple members, each with unique forms and functions. Paul demonstrated the practice of this theology in his pastoral ministry to multiple congregations around the Mediterranean: our New Testament Scriptures collect letters Paul wrote to his fellow Christians in Corinth, in Thessaloniki, in Galatia, in Philippi, in Rome, each letter addressing the particular needs of each congregation. Different members of the Christian body required insights that took seriously their different contexts. This theology of unity in multiplicity is demonstrated liturgically in the experience of Pentecost recounted in Acts 2, when believers testified to their faith in multiple languages, as moved by the Holy Spirit.

We are called to unity in multiplicity by our gospel; nature teaches us how this may be lived out. Our Scriptures challenge us to seek wisdom of living in all of God's Creation, as the World Council of Churches has done by expanding its ministry to the whole oikoumene in recent decades. Psalm 19 points us to the testimony of nature, in the firmaments that proclaim God's handiwork, without a word. And part of what nature proclaims to us are models of this complex sort of unity. Paul used the natural metaphor of the body to describe the ministry of diversity, and later theologians followed with other ecological motifs.

Third-century bishop, Cyprian of Carthage, read ecclesiological models in his natural surroundings:

The Church also is one, which is spread abroad far and wide into a multitude by an increase of fruitfulness. As there are many rays of the sun, but one light; and many branches of a tree, but one strength based in its tenacious root; and since from one spring flow many streams, although the multiplicity seems diffused in the liberality of an overflowing abundance, yet the unity is still preserved in the source.⁶

Not only the human body, but also the bodies of trees, sunlight, and rivers - and even the entire Earthly ‘body' - provide models of community composed of differentiated living elements.

More recently, Catholic ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara writes of "unity in multiplicity" as a conception of the Trinity.⁷ If we aspire to pattern our human communities by the Trinity, and if that Trinity is shaped by unity in multiplicity, so must the church aspire to live in multiplicitous unity. The natural environment supplies models for perceiving divinity, and these models of divinity in turn supply models for reconceiving Church, in a circularly-reinforcing (and self-testing) loop. Gebara's ecclesiology also draws insight from ecological sciences directly. "Biodiversity," she writes, "exists not only among totally different religious traditions, but also within each individual confession."⁸ Gebara recognizes the motif of unity-in-multiplicity shaping life on multiple levels: in the mysterious dance of the Trinity; in the networks of ecology across Creation; and in the human communities of Church, if we, too, notice the reality manifest around us.

Secular models of community can also inform our ecclesiologies. As we have seen, the lessons of ecological systems offer ample nourishment for metaphorical musings, from early theological writings to today. Social sciences also provide helpful images. Political theorists Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt offer a vivid model of the "global multitude" that may and must exist for life to flourish. They describe this Multitude as "an open network of singularities that link together on the basis of the common they share and the common they produce."⁹ Christians might consider the shared commons to be our collective narrative as Earthly creatures living the story begun in the common origins of the world, the story moving toward our common destiny of koinonia. We might consider our communities that foster loving interdependence and worshipful praise to be our common ‘product.' Hardt and Negri draw on natural imagery (and simultaneously invert common connotations) in describing the Multitude's creative power as its "swarm intelligence," which is rooted in communication among a network of independent bodies.¹⁰ This vision suits interdenominational and interfaith work, by allowing each Church body to function through its own strengths while recognizing a common purpose communicated through uniting bodies like the World Council of Churches.

Another way of unity in multiplicity

We are not called to a false unity or a false multiplicity; counterexamples abound.

Divisions can clearly threaten the flourishing of life. Racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, political oppressions, religious persecution, and other oppressions target different people, but through a common method: they label a group of people as different from and inferior to another group; these labels are then used to justify differential treatment, ranging from denial of certain social privileges to violent abuse to the targeted group. The artificial origins of the labels are soon forgotten, and such distinctions are deemed timeless and immutable. The evils of prejudice based in shallow understandings of difference are evident.

These violent oppressive systems tarnish the concept of difference; diversity becomes seen as something to be liberated from, not the source of healthy community. Oppressions do, indeed, make use of difference as a tool of control. In this scheme, the label of difference is imposed, static, and confers a rank in a social hierarchy. In contrast, in multiplicity, difference is a self-chosen and dynamic identity, which empowers each member to participate as a contributing, equal part of the collective body. Different parts are simply different, without being additionally ascribed with labels to differentiate their value.

The dangers of unity might be harder to detect than the dangers of diversity. Unfortunately, in today's world of neo-colonial corporate dominance, we are provided a potent counterexample of how (not) to be a global unity. Hardt and Negri identify ‘Empire' as the system of hegemonic globalization that links together a multitude of violent relationships. Its effects are manifold: poverty, perpetual war, slavery, environmental devastation, materialism, individual isolation, spiritual alienation. Imperial global networks that seek to maximize financial profits and political control foster homogenization and conformity. They shun ecological biodiversity and the natural diversity of cultures, because diverse communities are harder to order and control. Being Church globally, we are called to unity in multiplicity, not conformity. We are called to cooperation not competition. We are called to learn from Empire and its violent effects through the method of via negativa, looking to Empire as the way not to follow.

We are oriented to do so by the single act that brings all of us together as Christians: the resurrection of our Christ Jesus over the forces of Empire that sought to control his life by ending it on the cross. As Christians, we are drawn together to witness the horror of that violent death and our Christ's bold assertion of life springing up, beyond of human control, escaping the grip that Roman Empire (or any Empire) sought to snare it in. And from that common moment of drawing together to witness resurrection, we are sent forth to the multitudinous ends of the Earth to identify and end the scandalously numerous crucifixions committed against God's beloved children.

Elements of an ecumenism of unity in multiplicity

Thus, we are called to practice being Church more deeply than shallow unity or shallow diversity alone would allow. The mystery of unity in multiplicity is embodied in the ecumenical movement undergirding the World Council of Churches; the challenges of human attempts to reach this mystery are also evident therein. An ecumenical movement of unity in multiplicity will be revealed by its distinct features, several of which I outline here. First, an ecumenical multitude will celebrate and rely on the particularity of its members. Christians will be encouraged to honor their unique backgrounds, the unique locations from which their faith sprang. As Adventist professor David Larson has written, "Nobody can be a generic Christian. It's impossible!"¹¹ Tendencies to collapse the richness of the Christian tradition into one strain weaken it and push against the patterns of nature. Each of us is rooted in a particular incarnation of Church, which strengthens the whole Body of Christ. As Gebara noted, biodiversity encourages health and sustainability not only for ecosystems but also for ecclesio-systems. Naturally, diversity is possible only when members of the body are in fact different than each other.

Concomitant with the particularity of an ecumenical multitude is the polyvocality of the Church. A group composed of multiple, unique members will have multiple voices rising up and speaking Truths. It will speak multiple languages, both liturgically and literally. It will practice Pentecost as its method of doing business. Further, its members will learn to be multilingual so that they can understand each other's testimonies.

Polyvocality alone does not embody a diversity of particular beings; that polyvocality must be lived out through a community that embraces polyvalency, multiple meanings. The Church must remember that, as Cyprian noted, the power of rays of sunlight shining from one source is in their ability to reach different points of the Earth. From one trunk, different branches reach into different parts of the sky. Truth itself, in our Christ Jesus, will by nature manifest itself in manifold contexts.

By bringing together these diverse members, the Church will be able to balance primitivism and progress that keep the ecumenical body in movement. Christians are a people living conscious of time. We recount our origins, we remember a moment when history pivoted around the life of one human, we work today to transform the future world. We are people who live after birth and before death, considering what that means. We also live after death - after the death of Jesus, in a state of memory. We live knowing that our story not only plays out in many places across space, but across the contours of time. Our rich diversity of denominations allow our global Church to carry histories that root us in different eras of the human story, and thereby connect us to those eras' faith struggles. Each denomination can recount how its traditions have carried the gospel through changing ages. Apostolic lineages will document how continuity has sustained believers by connecting them to their forebears. Restorationist denominations like my Church of the Brethren will remind the ecumenical body to constantly check its choices against the standard set by the early Church. Emerging faith communities will help us grapple with new spiritual needs. Together, we will discern a way of being Church across time.

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The Prospects for Ecumenical Multitude from one Particularity: The Church of the Brethren

My personal inclination to embrace ecumenism prompted (and has since been strengthened by) my choice to pursue seminary studies at an interdenominational school within an interfaith graduate consortium. Here, I have deepened my understanding of and commitment to my denomination, the Church of the Brethren, through conversation and cooperation with peers from a wide spectrum of faith backgrounds. Ecumenism has enhanced my faith and my life.

The 20th century was indeed the ecumenical century for the Church of the Brethren. In the course of a century - perhaps even several decades within that time - the Brethren reversed their position on ecumenical relations, from avoiding them to embracing them. The Sunday school movement and the push for international missions at the end of the 19th century enticed the Brethren into the ecumenical sphere, so much so that by the forming of the World Council of Churches, the Church of the Brethren was an eager founding member. This shift paralleled the Brethren's process of cultural assimilation, most simply described as a transition from ‘sect' to ‘denomination.'

Ecumenism has been the denomination's trend over the past century and the personal trend of my recent life, but the value of ecumenism is not assumed across my denomination. The Church of the Brethren was founded as a countercultural sect that valued nonviolent resistance to the demands of the state, which were often made at the behest of leaders of the state churches. The Brethren narrative of itself reminds us that, as our ancestors sought to create their odd little community in Southwestern Germany, other Christians used the state to force them to follow religious practices they didn't believe in, from infant baptism to armed service. To be fair, the established churches may have had reason to discourage these new, charismatic Brethren from tempting away the flock from their churches. Nonetheless, Brethren are often skeptical of crossdenominational dialogue because of our own genesis stories.

More recently, over the past few decades, membership has declined in the denomination. In some measure, this is due to national trends of decreasing civic engagement in the United States. Many mainline denominations are suffering shrinking populations, as are the less-ecumenically-inclined Mennonite Church. Yet, there are some Brethren who attribute our decreasing numbers to our assimilation, specifically our engagement with the world and other forms of Christianity.¹² They would say that abandoning our drastically isolated way of life has effected an identity crisis, allowing us to forget what makes us distinct as Brethren. Liberals and conservatives alike bemoan that Brethren today care less strongly about the values like pacifism and Love Feast that made us who we were/are, and that make us different from ‘generic Christianity.' Ecumenism need not come at the expense of each participating Church's distinctiveness, but it will certainly require intentional effort to avoid that tendency. To sustain Brethren needs, it will require an ecumenism that honors and supports the diversity of its members.

Despite these serious concerns, a survey of the past century of Brethren history leads me to conclude that Brethren are indeed called to participate in ecumenical dialogue and partnerships, taking into account the challenges thereof. The world, and particularly the global church, needs our witness. We Brethren need the experience of letting our light shine. And we, in turn, need wisdom from our neighbors of the Church.

Brethren have offered the world practical contributions through their ecumenical engagement. If the Church of the Brethren refused relationship with other denominations, we might not have the agency Church World Services. If Brother Dan West had not worked with the American Friends Service Committee in Spain, he would not have gotten the idea to launch Heifer Project International, and that great organization would not be empowering God's people to end hunger. If the Brethren Service Commission had not provided rich global experiences to folks like actor and conscientious objector Don Murray during the United States' Korean War, he would not have shared his admiration for the program with Senator Hubert Humphrey, who would not have encouraged President John F. Kennedy to mobilize the nation's youth for service, and the Peace Corps might never have existed.

The theological-strategic contributions offered by the Church of the Brethren also aid the ecumenical project. Most prominent among these contributions is our pacifist theology. Its value is likely evident. The world parches for new strategies to end violence. The Brethren traditions of conscientious objection and community service have challenged mainline denominations to seriously scrutinize their theologies for ways they support cultures of war.

Because of our history of pacifism and Anabaptism, the Church of the Brethren, like several others, reminds the ecumenical community that churches oppress, too. We are a denomination that was founded under religious persecution. We recall that the Hebrew religion was formed under persecution in the crucible of the Babylonian exile and we recall that the Christian religion took shape under the violent oppression of the Roman Empire. The Church of the Brethren was formed under the religious persecution, too, but for us, the persecuting force was a Christian, European one. In this way, our denomination holds a cultural memory to remind us that neither European ancestry nor Christian credentials absolve a state from imperial potential. This is a message the greater Christian world vitally needs to hear, especially those of us of European descent, so that we may recognize and reject the violence waged in our Christ's name. This Brethren heritage allows us to hold the pathos needed for justice-making and peacewaging in a world under Empire.

Also resulting from our unique theology, my Church of the Brethren can offer the ecumenical community a third lesson in ecclesiology. It is a complicated lesson, however. It is the wisdom of humility.

If it were not an oxymoron, I would say that Brethren pride themselves by their humility. We tend to believe that as Christians, we are supposed to do good just because it's the right thing to do, not because we want to get credit for it. Humility has become habitual practice for Brethren, but it is rooted in our theology. The principle of pacifism teaches us that there are limits to what we can know as humans. In particular, humility reminds us that it is God alone who knows what a person's life will come to, and so it is not humans but God alone who should judge when that person's life will end.

Despite its legitimate theological grounding, humility carries a burden. In Brethren Society, Carl Bowman's book on my Church's struggle to define its identity and maintain its relevance in the world, he charges humility with partial responsibility.¹³ The Brethren have intentionally kept a low profile, even as the service projects they found and fund grow to international acclaim. From a marketing standpoint, the Brethren commitment to humility as necessary partner of devoted service has bordered on the masochistic.¹⁴

Humility has its challenges, but the lesson it provides of the nature and necessity of human limits is crucial for ecumenical ministry. Humility is different than feeling guilt for having erred. It is knowing that we are not perfect, and not letting that stop us from taking action. Humility is the reminder to constantly seek new Sophia. It is opening oneself to being always re-created by the Holy Spirit.

Humility is at the heart of living out unity in multiplicity. We recognize that we need multiplicity as humans because our attempts are only ever approaching true koinonia; we have not realized it, and as long as we live on Earth, we will only we striving toward it. Because of this, hegemonic ecclesiology is idolatrous: it posits our ability to know as equal to God's perfect knowledge; it shifts our worship onto our own institutions which have gotten koinonia ‘right' instead of on the dynamic multitude of the Church. When we call our finite, manmade buildings ‘church,' we risk idolizing the work of human hands instead of the work of God's creative power in making the human members of the Body of Christ, the real Church. All we can know is what works for us now, in our own particular experiences of God's creation. The ecclesio-systemic biodiversity of ecumenical multitude keeps us in check, reminding us of the limits of our ability to imitate koinonia.

Humility is a necessary tool for ecumenical ecclesiology, but it is also a tool that is strengthened in the practice of ecumenical relationship. While it can be hard to get new people to join your church when no one has heard of it, the more troubling side of humility is that it becomes hard to know who you are when no one knows you well enough to tell you who you are. Humans thrive by seeing and hearing positive reflections of themselves coming from people they love. Humility makes it hard to gain the public and interpersonal recognition we need to feel affirmed in ourselves; thus, we Brethren must learn to place limits even on our humility. Perhaps counter-intuitively, it is in ecumenical relationships that we both practice humility and experience the sort of identity-crossing encounters in which we can see ourselves and see how others see us - and it is in these moments of seeing who we are that we can gain the self-confidence to know the proper limits to humility.

Thus, ecumenical relationship is of mutual benefit for us. We Brethren need the rest of the Church, too. As a small denomination, our witness is magnified and multiplied by working with others. We simply cannot accomplish as much when we must duplicate the infrastructural efforts of our ministry. Teaming up saves our energy for the subtler ministry of articulating our particularity.

On a more abstract level, though, ecumenical dialogue can strengthen us in our unique Brethren identity. Coming together can help us do a better job of being different. The Church of the Brethren offers members a heritage of cultural distinction. We Brethren grow up knowing we are different because of our religion. Religious persecution, or at least, being ‘set apart' for our religious beliefs, is not a historical memory, it is the lived experience of my immediate ancestors: being ostracized at work for having a husband who was at a Civilian Public Service camp instead of in the military during World War II; being blacklisted from the high school honor society for speaking out against the Viet Nam war; being the odd kid who doesn't play with the same toys or read the same stories as other kids, the kid who doesn't pin yellow ribbons on her backpack during the Gulf War.

We state our commitment to providing Christian witness by living ‘another way.' So we stick out. And even though we may believe that we are morally correct in our choice of lifestyle, it is not easy. It's hard to always have to translate from ecumenical Christian theological language into the language we Brethren grew up with. It's hard always having to explain what your denomination is from scratch when you meet someone new. It's hard to not read theologians from your tradition in the ecumenical theological ‘canon,' because your faith is considered a flavoring and not a staple in the Christian diet.

At the same time, it can also be hard to maintain difference in a pluralistic climate, even when we want to. It becomes easy to ignore the little things that make us different when our ecumenical communities are not intentional about recognizing our differences, which in turn makes us forget how we are more than ‘generic' Christians. We start to lose the details of being a particular, peculiar people, which were the reasons we came to the faith in the first place.

It's hard to not slip too far into assimilation that blurs distinctiveness and causes the identity crises my denomination is now in the throes of. As Carl Bowman states in an article in our denominational magazine, Messenger, a recent trend among Brethren is toward "a sort of cultural Christianity that equates Americanism with Christianity," a sort of Christianity that makes less distinction between Christ and culture or Christ and state than our early forebears made.¹⁵ But if our Church is seeing this dilution of our identity into the mainstream Christian culture, it's likely that we're not the only ones. Thus, ironically, to find ways to affirm our Brethren identity, we might look to the strategies other denominations are employing to define themselves.

Yes, it is hard being different. But we are not the only ones who are different. By cultivating relationships across our differences, we may realize that more of us than not feel different for our faith traditions. Even in an ecumenical movement uniting the Church's many members, each of us has a particular way to serve the Body of Christ.

And so we can teach each other strategies we have developed for celebrating and maintaining our difference. We can support each other in our uniquenesses. We can absorb the interfaith and ecumenical lessons for how others have succeeded and failed in living their ‘other ways.' In societies that tend toward hegemony more than biodiversity, the ecumenical multitude can help us practice our life-giving particularity.

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This work of ecumenism is, at heart, Holy Spirit work. It is the Spirit that has been sent to guide us as Christians as we step into the future, and that Spirit operates in distinctive ways. It unites us across real, sacred differences, reaching each of us in our uniqueness, when we are open to feeling its touch and hearing its testimony on others' lips. It does not demand of us that we fit a mold or meet a manmade standard of holy credentials; it breaks out of the containers we try to channel living water through. Spirit empowers new voices and new expressions of love. It is prophetic. It demands of us creativity. It prods us out of comfortable arrangements that seek to contain divine mystery in set structures and polity. Spirit moves us.

Honoring the boundaries of our own traditions in ecumenical communities that unite us in multiplicity will build Church through sustainable relationships open to the constant remaking of the Holy Spirit. And by being able to know and love ourselves as members of the Body of Christ, we will be able to show healing love to the rest of the bodies in our aching world.