One of the most interesting and often encouraging aspects of the routine of producing a paper such as ours is the continuing contact which it provides with fellow Christians in many parts of the world whose concerns are essentially the same as our own. It sometimes recalls comparable experiences in overseas military service which often taught us lessons on what we mean when we confess, “I believe a holy catholic church, the communion of saints.” Our regular readers will have noticed from time to time reprints from other publications. The Outlook has exchange arrangements with perhaps three dozen other periodicals; with some of these we have reciprocal agreements to reprint with merely a credit line. Some of our most illuminating articles come in this way. Our own articles are often similarly reprinted. Recently I noted Rev. J. Blankespoor’s Easter meditation in the British Calvinistic Baptists’ Reformation Today and, in the (also British) Banner of Truth, Rev. John Piersma’s translation of a chapter in an old Dutch book. When Lester De Koster’s series on “Bureaucracy in the Church” began, its first article appeared almost immediately in the Lutheran Christian News (so that it may have had three times as many Lutheran readers as we have subscribers). Bureaucracy is a major threat to every church and those articles were as applicable to their churches as to ours. The conservative Mennonite publication, Guidelines for Today reprinted and circulates Laurie Vanden Heuvel’s booklet Women in Church Office, and its latest issue highlights our book review, “The Battle for the Bible in Foreign Missions.” These observations stress the fact, repeatedly noted by Guidelines’ able editor, Sanford G. Shetler, that despite our church differences, there is far more real unity between those who love the Lord and His Word than there is within our church fellowships between those who try to be faithful to that Word and those who attack that Word with their unbelieving criticism. We must together work and pray for ecumenical movements that are united by love for God’s Word while we reject movements that compromise and try to destroy it.
PDJ
