The Ominous Ecumenical Movement
Part II in a series
Remember…this was written prior to Mr. Tozer’s death in 1963…
by A.W. Tozer
From his book “Reclaiming Christianity: A Call to Authentic Faith”
Guarding the Church Against Christendom
What can we do to guard ourselves from this kind of thing in the Church? The primary thing we need to keep in mind is to join nothing that questions the truth of the Bible. Any movement, any church or group anywhere that questions the truth of the Bible is one that you, as a believer, cannot afford to associate with. If this group allows any place for all the superstition that goes along with holy bones and holy water and the Mother of God and all mankind, the sane thing is to quietly walk out.
I have never left anything and never split anything. So I am neither a lint picker nor a witch hunter. And I am not compelling every man to say “Shibboleth” (see Judges 12) in the same tone of voice I do. If he has an Irish accent and says Shibboleth some other way, let him say it. If he loves the Lord, he is my brother. But if he is a smooth talker and tells me it is ridiculous to believe that God ever inspired the Scriptures, then I cannot have fellowship with him.
The seventeenth chapter of Revelation tells about that great mystery the Babylonian, the great mother of harlots, the abomination of the earth. This harlot has children. She not only is a harlot but she is the mother of other harlots, and these harlots are nothing else than apostate churches claiming the name of the Lord but not living the truth of the Lord.
I am not a good enough prophet to know what direction things are going to take. But I do know that I hear strange things in evangelical circles these days. I hear people rethinking things. We are rethinking inspiration; we are rethinking the deity of Christ; we are rethinking sin; we are rethinking morals and trying to equate it with what they call morays; or habits and customs, of certain cultures. We have gone to anthropology and have learned that what is a sin in one country is not necessarily so in another and, therefore, we christians have to accept whatever is there. We are rethinking things. We are even rethinking whether God created the heavens and the earth, and man after His own image.
The evangelicals are now rethinking things that evangelicals took for granted a generation ago. So I do not know what direction we are going to go from here. But I believe we ought to obey the Word of God and withdraw from all that deny it in any fashion.
I can tell you this: While I live, there will be one free Protestant. I know not what others may do, said the old politician, but as for me “give me liberty or give me death.” And as for me, I know not what others may do. But while I live, there will be one free Protestant. I may be in jail, but I will be free. A man who believes in God through Jesus christ the Lord knows where he is and is not going to be brainwashed by soft talk. That is a free Protestant, even if he is in chains.
We are asked to surrender to the movement that would unite us all together and make a great, vast, sprawling super-church out of all Christians. Some drink, some dance, some live wickedly, some are mad about money, some never go to church except once a year on one of the holidays. Some doubt the Word of god, and some deny it, and some will laugh at it. Some gamble and some play the horses; some are dirty minded and tell dirty jokes, and yet they belong to the different churches. And they want me to join that mess. To join it would be to surrender; and to surrender would be to perish.
I cannot have much influence on the evangelical church. But I should like to say to the evangelical church that there is a little limerick by Cosmo Monkhouse (1840-1901) they ought to remember:
There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode a Tiger;
They came back from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the Tiger.
Whether this makes me popular or unpopular, I care not at all. But there is a difference between the ecumenical movement, which would unify in one great super organization all people who say they are Christians, and the true Church., which is a living organism born of the Spirit, washed in the blood of Christ and joined to the Body of Christ by a mysterious operation of the Holy Ghost called regeneration.
I want you in the meantime to know that I am for the Church, but I am not for the great world super-church. I am for the Church, which Jesus Christ purchased with His blood.
Drawn Together by the Holy Spirit
Why was the Early Church gathered together, this beautiful crowd of believers? They were together because of a variety of reasons. They were pressed together by antagonisms from the outside and thrown together by the magnetism from the inside.
They were a body of Christians living clean and right. Because they dared to take their stand and to be counted on the issues that matter, they were likely to get pushed together and pressed together by external antagonisms. But that was not enough. they must be drawn together by internal magnetism. That is, they (and we) must be drawn together by the Holy Spirit.
I love the people of God. I am a nervous man, and sometimes I cannot spend a lot of time with people. The pressure of hard work keeps me rather jumpy, and so I do not say that I always like to sit down and talk five hours with everybody, but I love the Lord’s people. I love the old weary women; I love the bright-eyed young fellow just converted. I love God’s people. If they are in Christ, I love them, and that magnetism would bring me to the church of Christ. Do not imagine that I have not down the years said, “Well I’m going to quit preaching.” But as David said, “My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue,” (Psalms 39: 3), and I went back to preaching again.
Sheep are not solitary creatures. They work together, live together, feed together and lie down together in the green pastures beside the soft waters. The only time a sheep goes off by itself is when he is lost of sick. A sick sheep does not go with the flock; and when I find a christian who is such an individualist that he never goes to church, he is a sick Christian. So if you are a healthy sheep, you will go where the flock is. If you wonder where the Shepherd is, I would like to tell you: He is where the flock is.
If any of you wonder where the flock is, I would like to tell you that it is where the Shepherd is. So the shepherd and the flock always stay together, and I, for my part, have neither the courage nor the disposition to go off by myself and try to live my christian life all alone. I need others; I need the other sheep that are of the fold and the other sheep that are not of this fold but are coming into the fold.
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