What I Learned From The Fundamentalists

I had dinner with a friend whom I don't get to see often.  She used to be my employment counsellor.  Now we work for the same boss in different areas in the mental health field.  Among many other things we were mentioning our positive experiences with fundamentalist Christians; well, not necessarily fundamentalists, but evangelical Christians and there is a difference.  Not all evangelicals take a completely literalist view of the Bible, even if many of them still err on the side of theological conservatism.  What stands out to us about evangelicals is the depth and quality of their faithfulness as Christians, their sense of devotion to God and the love and care they demonstrate towards others.  This doesn't mean that I still agree with them on all points: I have become pro-same sex marriage and pro-choice though I wouldn't say staunchly so.  One could say that I accept and appreciate as valid these positions without really enthusiastically endorsing them.  I am okay with marriage equality and with a woman's right to choose.  Perhaps I would say that I am not really enthusiastic about these matters because they do not rank high on my hierarchy of what I see as the most important matters of Christian witness.  I would be more inclined to work for economic justice and defending widows and orphans and refugees and feeding the hungry simply because I see these as more essential needs.  This doesn't make other matters frills but I do think there is a priority of order that should be heeded when we are dealing with matters of social justice.
     I get uncomfortable when I hear other Anglicans (I guess you could call me an Anglican, since I attend an Anglican church) speak disparaging of evangelicals and fundamentalists, not because there is nothing wrong with them and I know that I also have reservations about their narrow mindedness and their biblical literalism.  But they are, like us, Christians.  And some of them believe they have and might also in reality have valid reasons for not agreeing with us.  I think if more effort is made to reach across the small differences that divide us that we could see that we really share more in common with one another than not, since we profess to serve the same Lord, and that we owe one another the courtesy of agreeing to disagree.  This does not mean that we endorse homophobia and that perhaps we might have to accept that we will never agree on this and other issues.  This is tricky because it isn't just a matter of different interpretations of the Christian faith here but a matter of standing up for human rights and, in extreme cases, such as recent developments in Uganda, thanks to evangelical Christians, and in Russia thanks to the Orthodox Church, taking a stand against hate crimes against gays.
     Still, agreeing to disagree it would do us well to reach across the divide with the hope that seeing Christ in the other that this can also bring us together in communion with the Lord whom alone can stand and interpret between us.  Someone has to set the example and someone has to have the humility to reach across, not in judgment but in love.  We still might never come to agree on some of the issues that divide us, but if this is done in a spirit of humility and love, perhaps the issues themselves will cease to matter as we cede to the Lord of Love to arbitrate between us and help us see his face in one another.