Unity: Is It A Lost Cause?

I have taken the last couple weeks to ponder this question before I typed this post because I wanted to be careful not to write something either too optimistic or pessimistic. Here are my thoughts about unity.

I believe that unity has become the single biggest lost cause in the church. I do not say this because we are fragmented, but because the vast majority of Christians do not want unity. I have heard several ministers and lay people alike over the past two years go out of their way to point out the errors in those "other" Christians. We would rather argue a point, even if we don't have a clue what we are arguing, than sit down and discuss the issue rationally with one another. I think it has become lost because we are too busy as churches looking for marketing schemes to target a certain audience and bring them into the church. We become so business-like (albiet we have good intentions) that we inevitably spend more time trying to package our version of Christianity as better than the other versions available that we lost sight of a key fact: those are other Christians.

A pastor whom I respect deeply recently broke my heart. He is a minister in a Christian church, a movement whose three guiding principles includes church unity, and he was giving me advice about my life after graduation. I told him that an American Baptist church was interested in hiring me and he informed me that if I left the Christian church, I would not be welcomed back into it. This broke my heart; the movement founded on unity would not accept one of its people crossing the denomination lines to minister to members of the Church. How could this be? How can we ever achieve unity if we are not willing to communicate?

However, though this cause is definetly a lost cause in my mind, it is not a hopeless cause. I see hope for the future. One of the main reasons for my hope is that we have become ignorant Christians. Yes, I just said that. The majority of Christians sitting in the pews do not know the difference between baptists and methodists and presbyterians and non-denominationalists. We have become theologically inept. First, let me say that I do not believe our ineptness is a good thing. It can, however, open up the door for a unity that the church has not seen for hundreds of years. If we, as ministers, set out to teach the Bible without preconcieved notions of doctrine, and we are able to get church people to get excited about the Bible, we will be able to achieve unity.

Why is excitement about the Bible the key to unity? Because there is more talk about love in the Bible than predestination or free will. Because there is more talk about unity than the nature of communion (I mean, if God wanted us to know if Jesus was being transubstantiated or consubstantiated or merely symbolic, don't you think he would have said so?). I think the majority of the arguments between churches do not rise out of the Bible as much as they rise out of our explanatory terminology about the Bible.

Second, excitement about the Bible is key because it will point us away from another major cause of disunity--preference. American Christianity has become more about preference than doctrine. Do we prefer narrative or expository sermons? Contemporary music or hymns? Emergent church or historical liturgy? There is not that option in the Bible. The Bible does not point us to argue about personal preference but to share in love. The Bible teaches us to be the last person, not the first--our personal opinions should be the last thing we think about. I would love to see a church that did a worship service with bluegrass one week, contemporary praise music the next, and traditional hymns the next. It would help us all to realize that the reason we are there is God, not ourselves. People would come together more if we did not give them so many choices to help them seclude themselves.

I also think that they unity cause is not lost on a local level. If ministers and lay people in communities decide to come together to discuss doctrine, if they come together to worship despite differences, and if they come together in love, then unity can be accomplished at a local level. One person is probably not going to unify the entire church worldwide, but one person can begin to take steps to create loving unity among the three or four or five churches in his area. Imagine how awesome a testimony that would be for a community!

As a final note, I will also say that I think as the church in America becomes more persecuted, we will become more unified. When outside pressure grows, we have less ability to focus on inward resentment.

In conclusion, unity is a lost cause. However, the pieces are in place for us to find that cause again, and bring it to the forefront of Christianity once again.

The peace of Christ be with you...