Last week, I got the chance to talk with someone that I never thought I would get the chance to talk to – an Anglican priest. Suffice to say, Anglican priests are not exactly a dime a dozen in Kirksville, Missouri, so when I got the chance to talk with one, I jumped at it.

His name was Kyle Oesch (‘esh’), and he is a CCF (Campus Christian Fellowship, the church community that I go to in Kirksville while at Truman State University) alum. He had come back to Kirksville to deliver a message at our Sunday service. It was fantastic – he talked about John 15 and the connotations of Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse” to his disciples and the image of the vine in relation to the meaning of faith. (Unfortunately, the recording of the sermon hasn’t been posted yet, or I’d link it, but rest assured that once it is I’ll put a link on this page)

But it wasn’t the sermon (however great and meaningful it was to me) that pulled me to want to have a conversation with him. It was an offhand comment that he had said in the sermon: “I grew up Baptist.”

I was intrigued – as someone else who grew up Baptist, I wondered what journey would take one from a Baptist childhood to an Anglican priesthood. While I won’t go into extreme detail (that story is not mine to share), I will happily talk about the conversation I was able to share with him later that night. Asking about his story, Kyle told me about how despite his church upbringing, he always had a love for the liturgies and history of the church – something that I too feel has been left unspoken in certain Protestant circles. My childhood, too, had been relatively liturgy-less, and I had to slowly learn to use it as I got older. So, it was an interesting conversation (and a bit of a relief, too) to find someone else that had learned to embrace liturgy later in life with the same passion and stylings I had.

I asked Kyle about denominations, too. I thought it would be interesting to get his opinion on the matter – he had, after all, been involved in many different denominations in his life thus far. We talked for a while, and raised a new question along the way: what do we make of this new era of post-denominationalism? Are they the preservation or the plague of the church?

Post-denominationalism within the Church (as a whole) has been growing in recent years. And as more people are leaving church communities that identify with one denomination or another and are instead flocking to communities that do not exhibit such concrete ties to a particular religious doctrine. Like most anything in the world, there are possible positives and possible negatives present in the phenomena of post-denominationalism. Let’s take a look:

Pros of Post-Denominationalism

I believe there are some inherently positive things found within the ideas of post-denominationalism. First and foremost, I do not think that any one person, or any one particular group, have a corner on what Truth is. I believe that there is a real danger as well, and I’ve seen what happens when someone claims a corner on Truth, when one group claims they are the only path to eternal life. Our world is already fractured and broken enough, and I’m fairly certain God is loving enough that when the Final Day comes, he won’t only allow in those that were a part of a Missouri Southern Baptist Convention church that upheld that 2000 Missouri Baptist Faith and Message, while simultaneously condemning those Baptists that upheld that 1963 Missouri Baptist Faith and Message, along with all the other denominations. When we fight and divide the church at large over something as small and inconsequential as we often do, we are cutting the church off at the knees, and effectively crippling the cause of Christ. I can’t tell you how many non-religious people that I’ve met that won’t give Christianity any serious thought because of the argument “if we spend all our time condemning one another, what’s the incentive to join?”.

Post-denominationalism (I believe) removes a lot of that debate over who has the “right” way to approach the church and salvation. There are many questions that we will not, and strictly speaking, cannot know the answers to while we are alive. The different views of heaven, hell, and salvation are questions that we are unable to definitively answer – we may speculate, but we can never know for sure until that Final Day comes.

Cons of Post-Denominationalism

At the same time, there can be dangers of post-denominationalism as well. A desperate attempt to field individuals into coming into the church by condoning any and all actions is to bow to the will of the World, not the Father.

It’s a fine line to walk: a post-denominational church will likely not have the same statements of faith and the like that a denominational church would. How do we withstand against the conforming pressure of the world while simultaneously working to welcome those from the world into the church?

Post-denomination can also target another victim besides denominations often quickly forgotten: church history. Kyle and I talked at length about this. As we are both lovers of the liturgy, and he is innately tied to the history of the Anglican church, to welcome post-denomination could mean forgetting the various important aspects of church history. Because we don’t have the respective denominations to act as guardians to their own history, the different history and traditions of the church could lay in danger.

All that being said, I don’t think that the dangers of losing church history and practices are particularly close at hand – but it is still worth thinking about.

So what are we to say?

In this world that is slowly becoming more and more post-denominational, the question as to remain denominational or turn post-denominational has remained. So here’s where I fall:

Keep your convictions. Keep your faith, your creeds, your beliefs. But recognize that they are your individual faiths, creeds, and beliefs – I think it is quite foolish to assume that you know everything about the mysteries of God. That is one of the things that I have really enjoyed about my time at CCF in Kirksville – different views provided by different denominational backgrounds means that your faith is challenged in different ways than when you grew up in a homogenous, one-denomination community. I think God is powerful enough, creative enough, and loving enough to come up with many different ways of connecting with his children. If one group believes in speaking in tongues, I think God will use the gift of speaking in tongues in that community – if another disparages the gift of tongues, I believe God will find a different way to create a connection with them. For mankind to limit what is or isn’t from God is to limit God Himself; to confine Christianity to one denomination above all others is to condemn the Church to a cruel and disparaging death.

I suppose I am biased. After all, I attend a non-denominational church community that isn’t even a “church” in the sense that we don’t own a brick and mortar church that we operate our services out of. But the community that I have found there, along with people from various backgrounds that have helped me grow and identify my personal faith means I can’t call communities that embrace post-denominationalism “un-Christian”. God will work with what He is given, and I firmly believe that as long as a community is actively working and striving to be closer to God, it doesn’t matter if the group as a whole is Baptist or Methodist or Lutheran or what have you. God will work with what He’s got. God doesn’t want Baptists any more than He wants Methodists or Lutherans. What He wants is Christians.

To Him be the Glory.