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"For whoever is not against us is for us."
Last Monday, the Apostles have been approached by a father whose son had been possessed by a demon and they could not drive it out of the boy. Today we have someone driving out demons in the name of the Lord though he doesn't belong to the close company of the Lord Jesus Christ - and the Apostles tried to stop him from doing so! But the Lord corrects them and tells them not to stop anyone who does the same thing for anyone who does those things in His name is not against them, especially Him.
Many times we think of our religion in a very exclusivist way, that is, we tend to strictly apply the dictum, "Outside of the Church there is no salvation." But we fail to understand that the term Church in this sense does not strictly apply to the Church as we use it ordinarily, as in the Catholic Church. In this dictum we say Church in a wider sense, and includes the sheep that which do not yet belong to the Fold but are already performing the Lord's command and requirements for discipleship though they have not yet entered the One Fold under the One Shepherd for various reasons that are not of their fault but due to various reasons that we cannot fully fathom or which they could not yet overcome too.
It is true that ordinarily, the Church is necessary for salvation for it is through her that the Lord Jesus Christ has entrusted the keys of heaven and has given the authority to bind and unbind [see Matthew 16: 16-18; see also John 20: 22-23]. But we also have what we call baptism of desire. There are good and holy people out there who may not have yet heard about the Gospel and yet they already perform in accordance with their backgrounds the things, that if they have only heard about the Gospel, would fall under Christian faith, hope and charity. There are also those who may have heard the Gospel but fail to grasp the full truth about it because Christians do not manifest the full message of the Gospel and fail to follow what the Lord commanded in order for the world to know that Christians are truly His disciples: to love one another. So we cannot really condemn many who may have not accepted the Gospel yet but already perform what the Gospel requires in their own way.
What we ought to do is to simply follow the Lord's command to really love one another for even if we have the most eloquent way of preaching, even we could offer our lives to be burned for the sake of showing our faith, even if we could perform miracles, if we do not have love, we could never really make others follow the Lord and become true Christians [see 1 Corinthians 13].
Remember, unless someone is really against the Church, in which case he or she becomes against the Lord for the Church is the Lord's body, we cannot say that that person is outside of the Church.
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