Working with many denominations

Yokefellow Prison Ministry has volunteers from many Christian denominations. Through the 10 years I've been involved, I've worked beside Presbyterian, United Methodists, Lutherans, Catholics, Seven Day Adventists, Pentecostals, Mennonites, Quakers and others.

As a Christian group, we need to work together with respect. Sometimes this is a challenge.

When I started with Yokefellow, I was in my 30's and thought I really understood the details of Christianity, or at least Protestantism, or especially Lutheranism. But I soon found out that my beliefs were not shared by everyone in our ministry team. When do you interrupt with your view of things? When do you tell someone they are flat out wrong about something?

Then, a couple of years ago, I went to a Synod Assembly for our church denomination. This is where 100 or so churches of a certain denomination get together once a year and pass resolutions to hand on to the main church gathering which happens every other year.

I noticed that pastors in our synod weren't agreeing with each other about doctrine and biblical meanings. This was a bit of a revelation to me. I thought everyone of a certain denomination agreed in doctrine. Silly me!

Our church is going through the "human sexuality" studies much like the Episcopal church went through recently. Again, I read deep, insightful commentary for both sides of the discussion from learned theologians. Hmmm. If pastors and teachers within a certain denomination can disagree on an important topic, what hope to us lay people have of knowing something "for certain".

So what to do?

We try to focus on the large, solid topics: God, Jesus, love, faith, hope, forgiveness and the like.

We don't ask people if they are "saved", because the verb "saved" means different things to different people.

I was introduced to the Yokefellow Prison Ministry by Rev. Alton Motter. He was also very involved with the Ecumenical organization of churches in our area and wrote a book called Ecumenism 101.