Unity

After having spoken with a lot of ministry friends lately about their church experiences, it continues to floor me how held back churches are by lack of unity. Not simply unity between churches --- moreso unity WITHIN churches. This is not a new problem, obviously. But for me it's one of those "God calls us to be unified, so it MUST be possible" things.

On one side of the problem, I can't understand why unity is so hard. I mean, the mission of the church is fairly clear - to be the body of Christ to a hurting world. We can have mild disagreements over exactly what that might look like, but the pastor is the one whom God will give a vision to, so if we just follow him or her and commit ourselves to building on that vision, we should be okay. With that in mind, how can there even be ROOM for silly squabbles and grudges and infighting? People die every day not having called on the name of Jesus to be saved - how DARE we waste time selfishly fighting amongst ourselves? How DARE we?

On the other side, I know EXACTLY why it's so hard --- because unity is a primary ingredient in the church being the church, so it's the thing that the enemy will work pretty hard at destroying... and he's obviously pretty good at it.

It hurts my heart to hear the discouragement my friends are feeling - they, like me, were far too idealist and clueless about church in the real world. And I'm very aware of my own discouragement at times. But there is hope - as long as God has called us to something, there is hope that we can still move forward.