This past Sunday I preached on Ephesians 2 as we work our way through this letter of Paul to the church at Ephesus. One of the major themes of the entire letter is unity; that is, that Jesus unites Jews and Gentiles into one Body, the Body of Christ, through his death on the cross. I mentioned near the end of the sermon that we cannot allow ourselves to be united in anything other than Jesus Christ.

Throughout church history, there have been times when churches or denominations, for one reason or another, couldn’t remain united and broke away to start something new. The most famous of these might be the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, but history is littered with differences that led to change. It reminds me of that old joke about the guy who had been stranded on a desert island for years and was finally rescued. The rescuer noticed three different huts and asked the man about them. The man said, “The first one is my home, and the second one is my church.” “What about the third one?” the rescuer asked. “Oh, that’s where I used to go to church!”

The Bible tells us that wherever two or more are gathered for worship, the Lord is present with them. Human nature tells us that wherever two or more are gathered, there will be disagreements! As I mentioned Sunday, unity does not mean uniformity; we have so many different denominations (around 200 just in the US along)  because people have differences, whether they be minor or major. Some like traditional worship, others contemporary; some believe in baptism by immersion only, others are okay with sprinkling; some want to have Holy Communion weekly, others much less often; some believe in the manifestation of the Spirit in worship through speaking in tongues, others do not; some want the church to have a particular structure and governance model, others want a different model; some want expository preaching, others want topical preaching.  I could go on and on, but you get the point. The unity we are called to in the Bible is not unity around modes of worship or denominational structure or how much water we use in baptism. No, the unity that Jesus and Paul spoke of is centered around one thing and one thing only: The Lordship of Jesus Christ. Whenever we put our convictions or allegiance in anything above Jesus, we have gotten off track.

Christ Church was born out of a desire to be unified around Christ and no other. This idea of “Unity at all costs” or unity for unity’s sake misses the mark. I love how the folks at Christ Church in Memphis put it in a recent blog of theirs:

“If we aim at unity, we will miss Christ, but if we aim at Christ unity comes automatically. We can’t manufacture unity in our own efforts. It can only come together by aligning our individual hearts with Christ first, then collectively, we’re unified. As A.W. Tozer noted, ‘Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same 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.’”

May we here at Christ Church always be aligning our individual hearts with Jesus, being in tune with the Master so we may walk together in unity toward the cross!