Lost your password?
church
In his final prayer before his arrest, Jesus prayed for all believers – “that all of them may be one, Father, just as You are in me and I am in You” (John 17:21a). His prayer, simply put, was for a united Church, a united Body, and a united Kingdom.Two millennia later, there exist literally thousands of different Christian denominations and communities worldwide; the Body of Christ has been drawn and quartered a hundred times over.

What are we going to do about it?

In the past few decades, there’s been a tremendous shift toward ecumenism in Christian circles. In most parts of the world, we are long past the religious wars of yesteryear, which is a great blessing and victory. Yet I wonder what exactly this “unity” means.

But what does it mean if Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Evangelicals are united if they all attend different services on Sunday mornings? That cannot be what Jesus had in mind. The solution, then, cannot be simply to call ourselves “unified” and acquiesce to the status quo.

Nor would it be prudent merely to gloss over the differences among the various different branches of Christendom. What is the role of the Church in a Christian’s life? What about apostolic tradition? Free will and predestination? Homosexuality? The list goes on of questions that are too important to ignore, questions that have divided Christians for centuries and continue to do so today.

Unfortunately, Arminians spend most of their time talking to other Arminians; conservatives spend most of their time talking to other conservatives; Protestants spend most of their time talking to other Protestants; and, surprisingly, very little is every accomplished in terms of true reunification and reconciliation.

Is the Catholic Church the true Church? How am I supposed to know unless I take the time to talk to a Catholic? I certainly cannot find out simply by reading books about Catholicism written by Protestants; and yet, ironically, the very same Christians who would implore atheists to read Christian books as well as non-Christian ones hardly ever familiarize themselves with the thought of other Christian traditions.

Of course, unity won’t emerge from being well-read. But a great starting point for unity is talking to each other – about those things upon which you agree, yes, but especially about those things upon which disagree. Learn each other’s languages, patterns of understanding, and practices. Explain to each other why it is that we disagree – and if we do agree, explain why we are not more unified.

That will constitute just one small step toward true unity.

Previous ArticleNot The Way It's Supposed To Be
Next ArticlePacifism and the Sermon on the Mount

Related Posts

4 Responses

  1. Nick Nowalk

    “Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same [tuning] fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshippers met together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be were they to become “unity” conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship.” (A. W. Tozer, “The Pursuit of God”, p. 97)

  2. Samir

    Courtesy of ID:

    There has never been a time when the church was one. The centralizing of the church around Rome and the papacy was a historical move emerging between the third and fifth centuries in an already divided and contested Christendom. “Each one of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ,’” as Paul attests in one of his early epistles (1 Cor. 1:12). There has never been a Christendom in terms of a universal kingdom of Christ. While the Roman medieval church was extending both its powers and territorial domain from the eleventh century to the sixteenth, it became increasingly aware of its own smallness. . . . Even before the Reformation’s splintering, Christendom was an ideology only partly realized and internally contested. The church, then, is always to come. It is a promise that forms the horizon within which the churches seek to be and become more fully the church. (p. 25-26)

    http://www.inhabitatiodei.com/2009/10/05/the-never-unity-of-the-church/

  3. Judith Huang

    I think where the conversation ends because of hatred and war and division within the church, Satan is laughing.

    We’d best do to restart the conversation and keep the tone respectful – that is probably the best way forward.

    And the Ichthus is a good start!

  4. Unam sanctam

    “What are we going to do about it?” I think the first thing we have to do is to think seriously about what is the root cause of this problem.
    I would argue that the doctrine of sola scriptura has been disastrous in practice and that it cannot be the basis for unity in principle. Sola scriptura is the elephant in the room. It is illogical, unhistorical, unbiblical, and a failed paradigm. A better paradigm is one which is already hinted at in the New Testament and confirmed by St Irenaeus: that the unity of the Church is found and maintained in the bishops whose ordination goes back to the apostles, chief among whom is the bishop of Rome.

    (And this is not something that “emerges between the third and fifth centuries” as Samir’s comment falsely suggests: St Irenaeus was writing in ~170 AD, and there’s no reason to believe his ideas are novelties).