Unity among Christians

Over the past month, I have developed more appreciation for unity among Christians. Not so much the kind of appreciation where I find more value in unity, but rather the kind of appreciation that comes from recognizing how big of a command it is for us to be unified. One appeal for unity in the Bible comes from Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:10: "I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought."

For a group like FOCUS, there are some challenges with this simply because we get people from all parts of the country (world, even), different denominations, different cultures, etc. I can definitely think of some examples where we have not all agreed with one another, or where various divisions happened. Off the top of my head, I recall some examples where various people felt the need to leave FOCUS because of something disagreeable to them (doctrine or otherwise), and a recent case of people fussing about when FOCUS meets.

Sure, FOCUS has its own challenges with unity. How about the bigger picture though? As Christians, how do we reach unity with other Christians in other denominations? How does one church reconcile their doctrinal differences with another church so that they agree with one another? At least one of them has to budge from their position, but it doesn't seem like anyone wants to do that. Rather, I get the impression that church A tends to get its feelings hurt and split into churches B and C a lot more often than churches A and B learn how to be unified and become church C.

I might make this sound kind of harsh, and it's certainly easy to point at all the various denominations and say that we do a horrible job of being unified. Does that make us hypocritical though? Would we even see a ministry like FOCUS today if there hadn't been a big reformation back in the day, with people splitting off from Catholicism? (Note: I don't know a lot about church history, so please correct me if I say something dumb.) I find it hard to agree with certain parts of Catholicism, but on the matter of unity, it seems like I'm part of the group that originated from a division among them.

Is unity possible in the context of having multiple denominations? If so, what does that look like? If not, how in the world can it be achieved at this point? Somehow I just don't see everyone changing their minds and going back to Catholicism. (Another note: I don't mean to make this blog post about group X vs Catholicism, I'm just trying to think on a somewhat historical level.) Having every Christian agree with one another seems like a lot to ask when Christian A's beliefs about something are directly opposite from those of Christian B's. But instead of dealing with the letters A and B, it's more like we have a whole Chinese writing system worth of Christians with opposite beliefs about something.

It's kind of cool seeing the iamsecond stuff happening on campus, where all the Christian groups on campus are coming together to do something that just one of the groups on its own couldn't do. It also presents some of these challenges of unity, since we don't all have the same ideas on everything. How do we go about spreading God's word on campus? What will the small groups look like? What is our plan for presenting the gospel? What topics do we cover on Sunday nights? These are all things that we need to agree on if we are to be effective. I hope that the iamsecond stuff is not only a huge blessing for our campus, but for the Christian body at UTD as well.

Also, I wasn't originally planning on writing about unity, but somehow the introduction to the topic I actually wanted to write about got really long. So I'll probably spare your eyes for now and stick my original topic into a new blog post.