c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In an age of schisms and denominational division, members of five segments of Christianity are celebrating their ability to work together on issues like poverty and evangelism.

Christian Churches Together in the USA (CCT) will gather 36 leaders of denominations and faith groups Feb. 7 to celebrate their historic alliance.The worship service, which will feature a procession of clergy and a candlelight ceremony, will be a highlight of a Feb. 6-9 meeting in Pasadena, Calif.

The occasion marks a major step for CCT, which includes five Christian “families” _ Catholics, evangelicals and Pentecostals, Orthodox, mainline Protestants and racial/ethnic churches. Ecumenical meetings among the groups began in 2001.

“It’s the largest ecumenical body in terms of the comprehensive nature that has been assembled to date in the United States,” said Cardinal William Keeler of the Archdiocese of Baltimore. He is one of five presidents of CCT, whose constituent church organizations represent more than 100 million Christians.

Despite the effort for a broad network, there remains reluctance in some quarters, including among some evangelical and some African-American groups.

The United Methodist Church participates in the effort but it retains a “provisional” status because some prominent African-American Methodist bodies have not felt comfortable about officially joining the network. Those groups include the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, which have sent observers to some of CCT’s past meetings.

“Those churches raised the concern about how committed will this body be to issues of racism and issues around which the African-American churches generally coalesce,” said the Rev. Larry Pickens, another CCT president. Pickens is general secretary of the United Methodist Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns.

He added that some of these groups were also concerned that a role in CCT might diminish their participation in the National Council of Churches. That ecumenical council, whose members include 35 faith groups, has been supportive of CCT and is one of about 20 groups that will have observers in Pasadena. While many mainline Protestants have joined the NCC, many evangelicals have not. Christian Churches Together includes both.

At least two others of the 36 denominations affiliated with CCT have provisional status, CCT officials said. The decision-making bodies of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Moravian Church have not yet voted on joining.

The Rev. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, interim moderator of CCT, said the network has sought to be inclusive, even waiting to formally launch until 2006,when two African-American denominations _ the National Baptist Convention (USA) and the National Baptist Convention of America _ joined the coalition.

“We’ve said from the start that we wanted to have all five faith families represented in a sufficient way,” said Granberg-Michaelson, the general secretary of the Reformed Church in America. “In each of those categories, we knew that we weren’t going to have all of the churches involved.”

The Christian groups, which often met within their “families” but not much outside them, are talking about issues they all care about. In Pasadena, they will continue to discuss how to address poverty and share views on evangelism.

Still, some denominations _ including the Southern Baptist Convention _ have said they won’t join.

Bishop James Leggett, the general superintendent of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church and another CCT president, said he responds to reluctant evangelical colleagues by pointing out the merits of simply meeting other Christians and knowing that consensus must be reached before CCT makes a major move.

“For any action, there must be unanimous agreement, so that would for us, especially, be a protection against positions that would be totally opposed to what we would take as Pentecostals or evangelicals,” he said. “And the same thing would apply to others.”

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