A few months ago, a former classmate who is now a pastor reached out to me to ask my sense on a particular theological issue. I stated that one of my guiding passages for the Church, both the local community I serve and the Church universal, is from the Gospel of John.
“I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” John 17: 20-23 (NRSVUE)
The concept of unity is one that has captured the imagination from my heart since high school. It didn’t take much time looking around my small town at the myriads of churches representing different denominations to realize that not all Christians are unified. When visiting some of these churches, they would lead with what made them different from the church down the street or a different denomination. But I wasn’t much interested in what made us different—I wanted to know more about what drew us together, as one, in the body of Christ.
There have been moments where I have caught a glimpse of unity. When I was in high school, I was part of an ecumenical Bible Study. Every week we would come together to study, pray, eat, and play together. What started out in a local youth leader’s living room quickly outgrew their house until we had to meet in a double wide the church had purchased in prior years as an extended classroom. When we arrived, we weren’t asked what made us different in our beliefs or what church we attended or even if we wanted to join the church the youth leader worked for. We were simply asked to come and be together. One. In the body of Christ.
My most recent pastorate was in the town of Altoona, Pennsylvania, which is known for having a large number of churches per capita and for being a low point during Billy Graham’s career. In 1949, the story goes that he came to the town and there was so much division amongst different church leaders and a pitiful attendance that Graham considered leaving ministry, calling the crusade in his memoir Just as I Am, “a flop” and a “time of testing.”
Yet, that story of disunity became a turning point for the town, as they now work together in different ministries to reach out to the community—calling to set aside denominational strongholds for the sake of the Gospel in this town of less than 50,000.
Disunity that became unity. A reminder of what is possible.
But the story of Altoona’s many churches doesn’t just have to be one of disunity or even disunity turned to unity. Shortly after I moved to the town, I asked a church member why there were so many churches in our geographic area, located near the old rail station. At one time, Altoona was a stronghold on the Pennsylvania Railroad, with the town being established in 1849 by the railroad, which continued to be one of the top employers in the area for years to come. What my congregation member told me is something that I still treasure to this day. With the railroad dismissing people from work at different times from different shifts, they wanted to make sure that there was always a church opened where the workers could come worship and pray.
And that—that is unity. That is being one.
What’s the difference then between disunity and unity? A focus on Christ first. These churches so believed in wanting to minister to the people working on the railroad that they were willing to worship at times beyond the traditional Sunday hours. A focus on Christ that supersedes difference or putting one church down in order to lift up another. A focus on Christ that Billy Graham reminded those pastors in turmoil with each other to have all of those years ago.
We are living in a time where we aren’t always great at unity as churches—which may mean that we aren’t always great at putting Christ first. We become so focused on wanting to defend our particular beliefs and readings of scripture that we miss Jesus’s prayer that we should be one. Or we misunderstand what Jesus is praying for— thinking that unity needs to be uniformity, where we each are replicas in belief of each other.
Unity is not uniformity.
Unity is not allowing our differences to define us to the point where it separates us from the work of mission and ministry.
Unity is putting first things first.
And unity is hard.
But every time I think of Altoona and the transformation that happened after Billy Graham visited, I’m reminded that until is both possible and bears much fruit. How might you be called to be unified in Christ in this season?
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