Religion: The Church & the Churches

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He is risen; he is not here.

— St. Mark 16:6.

Easter is the one day of the year when everyone who calls himself a Christian goes to church, if he ever goes at all. Congregations flock churchward in their Easter best, and the churches themselves are brave with flowers; the preachers for once preach joyful sermons, the singing soars with hallelujahs. After the penitential season of Lent, the long winter night of the Christian year, Easter comes like the dawn —the dawn of the first day of spring.

The No. I Protestant churchman in the U.S. will start the day as a cleric, by celebrating Holy Communion; at the 11 o'clock service he will be sitting in a pew with his family, like any layman.

The way the Most Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill plans to spend Easter bespeaks his position in the Protestant Episcopal Church. As its presiding bishop, he has no diocese of his own. It also bespeaks the present state of Christendom, which he aims—partly and partially—to reunite. For Bishop Sherrill, the president of the National Council of 29 Christian denominations, will worship on Easter as an Episcopalian.

Where Is the Church? Christendom (meaning "all Christians collectively") is split into disunited, sometimes warring, sects and churches, more than 250 in the U.S. alone. Protestants have lived with Christian fragmentation—and rationalized it with Christian doubletalk—for centuries (see box). But it has a way of bringing them up short whenever they confront the concept of "The Church." What is the Christian Church, and where is it?

Roman Catholics have a ready answer. The Church is the Church of Rome, and no other. Protestants cannot answer the question so easily. For them The Church can exist on this earth only as an ideal; its reality is in the future—and in heaven, where it is formed of "the blessed company of all faithful people." But this is not a comfortable concept to many U.S. Protestants, who, as practical, organization-minded men, would rather have the Church, like the Kingdom of Heaven, inhabit this earth.

How to bring that about? Again (if their tremendous premise is accepted), it is the Roman Catholics who have the simple, uncompromising, logical answer: unconditional surrender to Rome. Let all who call themselves Christians submit to the authority of the Roman Church, they say, and the unity of Christendom will thereby be established. And again Protestants cannot agree. The Bible and the conscience of the individual soul, they believe, are higher and more trustworthy authorities than any pontiff, any single church.

In the present century, U.S. Protestants have been increasingly unhappy about themselves. Unhappiest of all were the missionaries, whose work spotlighted the absurdity of the Christian schism ("How can you ask a Chinese in North China to become a Southern Baptist?"). One of the greatest of those missionaries was Episcopal Bishop Charles Brent. At a worldwide missionary conference in Edinburgh in 1910, Bishop Brent conceived the idea that, just as division thrives on ignorance, unity might burgeon with more inter-church understanding.