I once described a local pastors' fellowship I belonged to as having hockey fight unity. When a fight breaks out in hockey oftentimes the players on the opposing teams pair up with one of their opponents and hold the other's jersey as a way to keep the other guy out of the brawl. The ministerial fellowship meetings always felt to me like competing pastors getting together to keep each other from getting into a fight. We'd smile at each other and toss around unity and brotherhood slogans all the while mistrusting and staying on the alert in case the other guy starts swinging.
It is the consensus among the participants of a small prayer group I'm involved with that the number one enemy of community transformation is division among the Christians. It's been 2000 years since Jesus prayed that his followers would be one in the same fashion that he and his heavenly father were one and we're as likely as ever to break out in strife over turf, doctrine, preferences and control. Why is that?
Aside from the general 'fallenness' that we all have to live with, one of the main reasons we have such a hard time making meaningful progress toward unity is the many and varied systems and structures we establish for the purpose of maintaining our own sense of well being. We all tend to seek identity in that which makes us feel the most comfort and control. Birds of a feather flock together because it usually seems easier--less stress and fewer strangers to fear. So we organize ourselves with policies and guidelines that are intended to preserve our status and space. In our effort to preserve we inevitably erect boundaries that exclude. Excluding boundaries always result in the "ins" and the "outs", the "us" and the "them". Once that dynamic exists disunity is assured. At this stage of my life I've come to believe that as long as we feel the need to defend institutional distinction (e.g., Baptist, Catholic, Pentecostal, Republican, Democrat, Hawkeye, Cyclone) we can make little or no progress toward genuine unity.
As always Jesus is our model. Of him Paul wrote to the Philippians: "Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of slave, became human!" Jesus willingly set aside his distinctive position for the express purpose of breaking through the boundary that separated humanity from its creator. Until we all are willing to identify and minimize those excluding labels and boundaries that define us, we'll continue to settle for hockey fight unity. How sad.
