Paul spends the opening four chapters of his first letter to the Corinthians discussing numerous facets of church unity. It is a topic that comes up in almost every letter he addresses to a church (e.g. Rom 15:5, Gal 3:28, Phil 2:2, Col 3:13). So why is this topic so important to Paul? There are several reasons.
- To begin with, the church is the body of Christ. No parent likes seeing their children fighting. So too does God hate seeing his family fractured.
- Second, the church is God’s blessing to his people. It is very difficult for a church to bless anyone when it is full of factions and infighting.
- Furthermore, a fractured church struggles to reach the lost. When non-Christians see churches fighting, it gives them even less reason to become a follower of Christ.
There is however one thing that is more important to Jesus than church unity; and that is ‘truth’. When churches, or individual Christians, turn away from the truth of God’s word, the Bible calls Christians to break fellowship with them. The reason being that such teaching (yeast) can infect whole communities, dragging people away from the Lord (cf. 1 Cor 5:5-6).
Yet if churches or Christians are not disregarding God’s word, but are rather trying to determine what it means, then we are to do everything in our power to seek unity with them. This requires extra care when social media is involved, as it is even easier to portray disunity with Christian brothers and sisters if a post becomes a little too heated. While there is a place to disagree with our fellow Christians, inciting disunity in the public domain is one of Satan’s favourite tools. So may we ‘make every effort to keep the unity’ (Eph 4:3) Brendan McLaughlin
