unity

Every Wednesday night at Edenvale Baptist church (my church) the young adults have a little get together that normally comprises a talk and some small group discussion. Last night was my first time going and the evening’s theme was unity. We focussed on Jesus’ prayer for believers in John 17 and then started to discuss issues of unity amongst ourselves.

We chatted about many things but one thought has lingered with me and so I’m going to try and get it down onto paper (well, screen).

The discussion question was the following: “If a person had to come into your church setting and pick up on disunity, what would that reveal?” And so there was the usual string of cliché but fundamental answers: “that we don’t love God enough”, “that we don’t love man enough”… but there was something deep to this question that was clawing gently at my mind. It was a good clawing. One that felt more like a back scratch when the back is itchy… Lame analogy. Apologies.

The thing with people is that we will always have differences. BUT the one thing what unites over and above those differences is when collective man has a common GOAL. When man is striving towards something, differences become unimportant because there is a drive to fulfil the common goal and such differences become less important and even less noticeable.

This is all seeming like common sense and maybe there is nothing profound here but when I started to piece together my thoughts I realised something so simple and yet so cutting: Is the common goal of loving God and loving man important enough among believers to sideline differences? I look around this miserable planet where so often Christians are part of that misery and I wonder what our goal really is… Are we really as selfish as our disunity lets on? Are we really living thinking that loving God is not all that important? Or at least that it is not important enough for us to forget differences, embrace commonalities and get on with it?