Twenty-one years ago, as a new Bible college graduate, I became the preacher of a nine-year-old church of 30 people in rural Virginia. Several years before I arrived, this church had experienced a split. As often happens, two groups of people couldn’t agree on an issue each believed was important. One group withdrew and started a new church. The other group remained. Division in the body of Christ hurts because we’re a family. The pain of separation is real and both groups felt it. The division hampered both groups’ success because in a small town (or any community for that matter), people quickly heard about the division and most were not attracted to either group. One lady summed it up: “If they can’t get along with each other, they probably won’t get along with me.” This is just one of many reasons why unity is vital to a church and why disunity is destructive to the cause of Christ.
Turning It Around
Seven years later something amazing happened. There was a “family reunion”! Time had eased the hurt and the two groups reunited in love and acceptance. Grace and understanding began to flow freely, and where grace abounds, unity often follows. With a renewed sense of evangelism and purpose, one body, empowered by one Spirit, sharing one faith in one God, reunited with one goal: to make disciples. Just as disunity repels, unity attracts. “If they can do that,” people began to say, “something real is going on there.” Following the reunification, our church grew by an amazing 85 percent in just two years. Unity is the desire of people because it is the desire of God.
Keeping It Together
Growth has continued because grace and unity have flourished in Christ. We have an unofficial slogan based on a loose paraphrase of Ephesians 4:2. We joke that we’ve learned to “put up with one another.” Unity isn’t always about complete and total agreement about everything. Sometimes it’s about “putting up with others” because you understand they have to put up with you! |L
Walker Gaulding is the senior minister at the Rappahannock Church of Christ in Warsaw, Virginia. He and his wife Mary Bob have three daughters: Kylie, Spencer, and Olivia.
