God's people dwell all over

This article was written by Amarillo's own, Pastor Gene Shelburne! The article originally appeared in the Amarillo Globe News on April 20, 2012.

It's a great article emphasizing the need for people of faith to band together:

Gene Shelburne

Back in the heyday of Word Publishers, I enjoyed writing dust-jacket copy for dozens of their best-selling books.

To enable me to write words that might persuade folks to buy those books, the good people at Word had to get the manuscript into my hands long before the book went to press. Often I saw a famous author’s rough copy before it went through the editing, typesetting and proofing stages.

Since I’m also a writer, this was a rare privilege for me. In my view, those manuscripts from the top religious writers in the world were next to holy.

Publishing schedules for those books usually were tight, so often I did not have time to read an entire manuscript. If I was lucky, the foreword and a chapter or two would yield the gems I needed to capture the book’s sparkle.

I recall, however, that I read every word of one 800-page manuscript. As I flew cross-country to a speaking engagement, I was riveted by that book-to-be. Page by page I savored that historic volume compiled by Chuck Colson and John Neuhaus, the book that would be titled “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.”

In that decade after the Vatican II Council, we Protestants and Catholics were just beginning to find each other. Kept apart by centuries of vitriol and distrust, many of us were beginning to converse, and we actually were learning to like one another.

My own warm friendships with Catholic leaders in our community already had begun to expand my faith universe, but my mind was still fettered by scare tales and doctrinal warnings preached to me by men with roots deep in Reformation struggles. As I sat in that airplane digesting that grand manuscript, the theological chains of my Protestant past melted away.

No, I didn’t hurry off to join the Catholic Church. But I did learn to thank God for a host of “new” brothers and sisters in Christ. I realized many in the Roman ranks stood closer to me on key moral and theological issues than did some Protestant friends.

That book title was right. Evangelicals and Catholics do have many valid reasons to stand together. Right now we need each other. Only by uniting our efforts and our voices may people of faith successfully rebuff the growing efforts of government to outlaw traditional morality in our land.

Gene Shelburne is minister of the Anna Street Church of Christ, 2310 Anna St., Amarillo, TX.