Yes. A shared defense of the faith does not require Christians to hide their disagreements. Rev. Brandon Harris, a Protestant chaplain at Georgetown University, serves communion every week beside ministers who understand that table in different ways. His answer has three parts. Name the core that every tradition in the room confesses. Hold your own convictions boldly. Treat the remaining differences as real and worth arguing about, while keeping them in proportion to the question a skeptic is actually asking.
That answer is easy to say and hard to live. A skeptic watching Christians argue about sprinkling and immersion, or about what happens at the Lord’s Supper, can fairly ask why anyone should trust a faith whose followers cannot agree on its practices. The honest response is to show exactly where those arguments sit and what they do and do not touch.
What is actually disputed at the table?
Harris describes himself as an “ecumenical mutt.” He was raised in the Church of God in Christ and educated in Reformed and evangelical schools from fourth grade through twelfth. He has served in National Baptist, United Methodist and Presbyterian settings and was ordained Baptist. One part of his childhood, as he tells it, had people speaking in tongues while another had him reciting the Westminster Catechism.
The sharpest disagreement he describes is the communion table at Georgetown’s Sunday night service. As a Baptist minister presiding, he holds particular views about what the meal means. The Methodist minister beside him holds a different view, and so does the Presbyterian minister on his other side. Harris puts it plainly: “our theology around the table is completely different.” He calls this a challenge, then adds, “It’s a good challenge.”
Harris does not spell out each colleague’s view, and their personal convictions may differ from their traditions’ textbook positions. The traditions themselves, though, can be stated fairly, and doing so shows how far apart they really are.
- The memorial view, common among Baptists, holds that the bread and cup are signs. The meal is an act of remembrance and proclamation, obeying Jesus’s command to do this in remembrance of him. Christ is present with his people as he always is, but the elements do not convey him in a special way.
- The Reformed view, historically taught in Presbyterian churches, holds that Christ is truly present by the Holy Spirit, and that believers who receive the bread and cup in faith are genuinely nourished by him. The elements remain bread and wine; the presence is spiritual and real.
- The Methodist view, following Wesley, treats the Supper as a means of grace, a place where God actually meets and strengthens believers, and speaks of Christ’s real presence without defining how it occurs.
The division here is specific. All three agree that Jesus instituted the meal, that it points to his death for sinners, and that the church should keep it. They disagree about whether anything is given at the table beyond what is signified. The memorial view says the meal reminds; the other two say it also gives. Two texts carry most of the weight. Jesus says, “Take, eat; this is my body” (Matthew 26:26), and Paul asks, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16). How literally to read “is,” and what Paul means by “communion” there, would settle much of the dispute. Christians who love these texts have read them differently for five centuries, which suggests the question will not be settled at one Sunday service.
Baptism gets similar treatment from Harris. He names the temptation to get stuck on the fact that “you sprinkle and I dunk,” and then calls these practices “essential to the faith” and “essential to what we believe.” He also insists, “I never wanna negate the essentials of belonging to a denominational body.” So he is not calling baptism trivial. His move is to ask a further question underneath the dispute: “what’s the core narrative about baptism and what does that mean?”
Where does the real agreement sit?
Beneath the mode of baptism lies the story baptism tells. Beneath arguments about salvation lies the claim that salvation comes through Christ. Beneath arguments about church order lies the question of what it means to follow Jesus at all. Harris’s summary is that we should “focus on our essentials rather than majoring in the minors.”
He gives a reason to expect the shared ground to be the weighty ground: “I often find that the heart of the gospel is not at its fringes, but at its center.” The edges are disputed partly because they sit further from the places where Scripture speaks most plainly and the church has spoken most consistently.
Pressed to state that center, Harris speaks as an old school Baptist. We have been saved by faith through grace in Christ, he says, and “salvation in Jesus Christ is both personal and social.” Salvation deals with a person’s sin and reaches toward the redemption of society and creation, which is why he ties it to creation care and social justice. A relationship with Christ that is only vertical falls short, he argues, if “I don’t have a horizontal one that transforms the world.” The broad claim overlaps with Jude 3 Project’s position on salvation, which affirms salvation by grace through faith as God’s gift that remakes the whole person and ultimately the whole creation. Harris’s specific applications are his own pastoral argument.
The letter of Jude frames the faith it defends as shared property. Jude intended to write “of the common salvation,” and instead urged readers to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). Jude was warning believers about false teachers, not refereeing denominational disputes, so the verse cannot be turned into a theory of ecumenism. Its wording still matters here. The salvation is common, and the faith was delivered to the saints as a body. What is being defended was never one tradition’s private possession.
Who decides what counts as essential?
This is the strongest objection, and Harris raises it against himself. Asked about the hardest part of his work, he points to the believers in his own room: “we all have different views on what the essentials are at times.” Sorting beliefs into core and secondary only works if people agree on the sorting.
The objection runs deeper than Harris’s examples. The very idea of a short list of essentials with sacraments placed in the secondary column is closer to a Protestant, and especially evangelical, way of thinking. A Catholic or Orthodox Christian would likely resist it. In those traditions, and for many Lutherans and Anglicans, baptism is a means by which God actually gives new life, and the Eucharist is Christ’s body and blood truly given. To call those beliefs secondary would mean, for them, demoting how Christ meets his people. They would answer the skeptic about Jesus in terms many Protestants recognize, while denying that the sacraments can be set aside as matters of preference.
That marks the limit of what this conversation can show. The traditions Harris works among are Protestant ones: Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Episcopalian, nondenominational, and in his closing words African Methodist Episcopal, Church of God in Christ and Apostolic churches. His experience demonstrates that these communities can share a table and a witness. It does not show how the same approach would fare between Protestants and Catholics or Orthodox, where the disagreement concerns the place of the sacraments in salvation itself.
Jude 3 Project does draw its own line. Its position holds that on the essentials the church speaks with one voice, while on secondary matters faithful Christians have always disagreed, and that this is not a crisis. The essentials it names are the authority of Scripture, the deity and humanity of Jesus, the Trinity, the bodily resurrection, salvation by grace through faith, and the gospel itself, and it treats the mode and timing of baptism as an open-handed question. That list gives Harris’s Protestant table a workable test for any new dispute: does this difference change who Jesus is, or how a person is saved? Those who hold a sacramental theology will press on the second half of that test, and they deserve a hearing rather than a quick label.
Paul’s appeal for unity adds a related observation. He lists “One Lord, one faith, one baptism” among the things that bind the church together (Ephesians 4:5). Many readers notice that Paul could call baptism one thing for the whole church, though Christians later practiced and explained it in different ways. That is an interpretive observation and rules on no tradition’s practice. It fits Harris’s instinct to ask what baptism means before arguing about how it is done.
How do you hold a conviction without turning it into a wall?
Harris says “being bold and being humble go hand in hand.” Boldness means being able to state where you stand: “this is what, through my study of scripture and through church tradition and history, I’ve come to believe.” Humility means listening and recognizing that other traditions carry gifts your own may lack.
His example is concrete. When a student is in crisis, his own tradition may not have a ready resource, but the Book of Common Prayer does. He could treat it as the Episcopalian book that belongs to someone else. He treats it instead as part of the wider Christian tradition. His summary is careful: “yes, we draw certain lines and boundaries, but we should also allow ourselves to be permeable.” He is still a Baptist, and says so. He can pray from an Anglican prayer book without adopting Anglican sacramental theology.
He applied the same principle to his training, choosing a seminary with both theologically progressive and theologically conservative faculty. He wanted “to be around those who I could learn from, who I agreed with, and those who I disagreed with,” so that pressure would show him what he held at the core. He describes reading John Piper and the Gospel Coalition alongside mainline publications and womanist theology for the same reason.
Lisa Fields adds that people in other traditions “have legitimate reasons that they believe that,” and that dismissing a belief only because it is not yours stalls the conversation. Her reminder looks ahead: Episcopalians, Methodists, Reformed believers and Church of God in Christ believers will share heaven, so “you have to learn how to interact on earth.”
Humility also changes how you read people. Harris describes being caught in “this crossfire of folks who either think you’re extremely liberal or extremely conservative because of your background.” Some see his mainline seminary and assume he is progressive; others assume the opposite from the congregations he has served. His challenge is direct: “you’ve got to stop looking at the label of what seminary somebody went to.” A label points toward a person’s tradition. It cannot tell you what they confess about Christ.
Why should a skeptic care?
Harris starts with the people outside any church. He points to the rise of the religiously unaffiliated and to marriages that cross faiths and denominations, and concludes that “it’s important that we build bridges across our denominations to present a common front of what does it mean to be a Christian.” A common front is a shared answer, not a merged institution. When someone asks what Christians believe, believers from different traditions should be able to say recognizably the same thing about Jesus. The next generation, Harris says, does not care what background you come from: “they just wanna know who Jesus is.”
The skeptic’s question does touch the sacramental debate, and it helps to see where. If the skeptic asks whether Jesus rose and whether he saves, Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians give one answer. If the skeptic asks what Christians think happens to the bread, they give three. The second disagreement is real, but it arises among people who already confess the first answer. It is a family argument about how Christ meets his people, and it presupposes the Christ they share.
How believers handle that argument is itself evidence. Lisa Fields says “people will know us, by the way that we love each other,” echoing Jesus: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35). Harris showed that love in campus ministry by meeting nearby pastors and asking, “what’s a church down the street that I can send them to if we are not the congregation that they feel called to?” A student sent to another faithful church learns that the goal was Christ.
Does a common witness mean going quiet on hard things?
Harris’s own practice says no. Speaking with conservative white evangelical brothers and sisters about racial injustice, he asks what good the gospel is if you say you see him, but “you don’t care about what weighs me down.” He grounds the challenge in 1 John: “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” (1 John 4:20).
He makes that appeal from inside the faith his listeners already hold, using a text they accept as Scripture. Shared conviction is what gives the challenge its force. A thin truce between traditions could never carry a rebuke like that, because no one would agree on the standard being invoked. You can only call someone back to a gospel you both claim.