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.
6 comments:
I mentioned this last night a bit but I truly believe that through prayer for one another is how we gain and maintain unity. When we are only praying for ourselves it means that we are being selfish, that in our relationship with God we are not concerning others. I've noticed that the more I pray for someone or a group of people (CORE, FOCUS, foreign countries) the softer my heart is for them, in fact I want to be more unified with them.
In our efforts to unit with other Christian groups we have to start at individual levels. This means it takes time; time to make meaningful relationships. Sure we can cordially greet one another and say "Hi!" and work with one another here and there but that is only superficial unity, in my blunt opinion. We see in Acts that unity was created by the community sharing everything, temporal and monetary.
If this is something that we truly want, we will each have to work for it. And perhaps that is a good thing.
Our call to unity also comes from Jesus. He says the way we will be identified as following him is by our love for each other.
Jesus also says that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. Josh's comment about the people in Acts sharing everything made me think of that. A group willing to sell its own possessions to give to anyone of them that had need is a group that isn't going to split easily. If I've invested my property, money, trust, and time into these other people and found a community that I know will help me out if I need it too, I'm not going to bail at the drop of a hat. Or even the bash of a sledge hammer.
The whole idea of reconciling differences seems to be something we aren't very good at. We often agree to disagree.
Does God want there to be one Christian group on campus? What message would that send to non-Christians? How would that diminish our reach?
It's easy to get self-righteous about this too. "If everybody would just agree with us, then everybody would understand and we could be united." How do we overcome that attitude (especially if we think we are the right ones)? And then how do we encourage other groups to do the same?
unity is something that i struggle with. most of my struggles stem from me being alone or set apart from other people most of my life. if there is no unity it doesn't really bother me, i expect that people will not get along and choose to agree to disagree. this makes me wonder how many other Christians grew up like this. we live in a world that so divided that unity is unnatural to us.
Romans 12:2 we (i) need to follow this verse
while there is emphasis on unity, we are also commanded to not tolerate false teachers,a mong other things. I think most of the disunity among Christians is a result of a distortion of Jesus' teachings, honestly, and denominational differences are the political outpouring of deviations from Christ. On an individual level, it is so much easier to be unified because "politics" becomes more prominent and important the more people are involved. Thinking about unity on a global scale, while laudable, seems to me to be one of those things where we are looking too far into the future, worrying about tomorrow so to speak, when we can't even control the events of today. First work on controlling the unity that we can (on an individual basis, within your church or ministry, among your friends) and then a more global unity will follow.
end ramble
I think no matter what there will always be things available to divide us. But the real issue is what people are focused on. If people are focused on the things that divide, then we'll be divided. But if people focus on what makes us unified then we'll be unified. I don't think unity requires doctrine reconciliation but what people focus on and why.
Post a Comment