There was a time when the churches of town would hold a Sunday afternoon ecumenical service to mark the start of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. When the service was held in a Catholic church, there would be a Protestant minister as speaker and vice versa.
Thirty or more years ago, this kind of ecumenism was nothing short of remarkable. It had not been all that long before a Protestant entering a Catholic church of a Catholic stepping into a Protestant church would have been viewed with amazement if not alarm. Suspicion and perhaps a touch of superstition still lingered well over four centuries after the Reformation.
Heck, it had not even been that long since Catholics did not usually attend a service at the church of their fellow Catholics of different national origin — Irish, Polish, Lithuanian, Slovak, German, etc.
Perhaps the most memorable service occurred when a Presbyterian bishop, who happened to be African American, took to the pulpit at the community’s oldest Catholic church. There had been many hundreds of fine sermons/homilies delivered from that pulpit. However, it is doubtful that there was ever a more enthusiastic and rousing one.
I cannot recall anything that was said in that sermon, but the talk still speaks to us. Each Christian denomination is unique as are other faiths — Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, etc. However, they have something that unites them as people of every color and nationality.
Despite our uniqueness, we have something in common. We are children of God because each one of us was created in God’s image.
We are ALL God’s children.
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