Churches Seek Unity to Combat Society’s Ills

If history is any example, faith can be either the greatest bond among people or the sharpest wedge dividing them.

But for a group of Christian congregations in the county, dialogue has helped them reduce religion’s high-octane volatility and foster an atmosphere of camaraderie to meet some of society’s toughest problems head on.

For the past 34 years, the Ventura County Council of Churches has been bringing denominations together to find a common ground and ally themselves in an effort to relieve the community’s ills. Today about 20 congregations from a dozen denominations participate in the council.

“The fact that Christians share so much, but come together so little is perhaps our greatest sin,” said Bruce Oxford, past president of the council. “And we share much more than we differ, and the goal is to get people to understand this.”

Interdenominational organizations have existed in the county since the early part of the century, when six churches got together to form the Ventura County Church Federation.

Coming together, however, was about all the organization ever accomplished before it quickly faded.

In the early 1960s, the effort got its second wind as the Rev. David Houghton, then chaplain at Camarillo State Hospital, and the Rev. Bruce Coleman of the First Presbyterian Church in Oxnard began exploring ways to build consensus among the various denominations in Ventura County to help quell the roiling social tumult of the age.

“There were basically two goals that the council set for itself when it began, and one was to address some of the social problems that couldn’t be tackled by just one denomination or congregation,” said charter member and past council executive Ted Carpenter.

“There was a feeling that even though a lot of denominations had differences, they all agreed on some of the more pressing problems in the county at that time.”

In 1975, the group organized the jail chaplain program to help ease tensions in the county’s jails that had occasionally exploded into violence.

“Things were just terrible there, and we felt there should be a religious presence in the jails,” Carpenter said. “And right away we saw progress.”

The chaplains started “rap sessions” to help relieve tension among prisoners and agreed to act as mediators between law enforcement and the inmates.

Three years later, the group organized the Council on Drug Abuse and a youth and family aid program called Interface.

All three initiatives, particularly Interface, have since blossomed into successful, private programs run by charities and other institutions.

Despite those successes, the Council of Churches has run into problems, some so serious they threatened the group itself.

In 1995, the group, which had dwindled to just a few active members, asked itself whether it should even continue.

Members decided, by the slimmest of votes, to continue and have since focused on interdenominational dialogues that have highlighted both the stark theological and ritualistic differences among some of the county’s Christian faiths and the common threads of their belief.

In that same year, the group explored the possibility of organizing an interdenominational church in Camarillo, but abandoned the idea after council members said that raised the ire of several already established churches.

Despite that, the dialogues, which sometimes attract as many as 50 people from a gumbo of denominations ranging from evangelical Southern Baptists to stoic Methodists, have been credited with building bridges between traditionally polarized faiths.

“If there is one thing that I think could help society, it’s to have more visible unity among Christians,” said Pat Mitchell, a teacher of theology at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo and a longtime Catholic representative at the dialogues.

“Through the work of the council, I understand a great deal more and in many ways my faith has been strengthened because their [the other denominations’] example is very inspiring.”