Unity in Diversity

Image Credit: Andre Kohn – Garden of Bright images

Friends,

As we begin this New Year, let’s open each of our hearts to the work of conversion of God’s Spirit, drawing us into a deeper and wider relational unity in the Spirit.

One of the names of the devil in the Bible is the scatterer – the one who divides. On the other hand, God is the one who always wants to gather us together into his one family. This is the way God has worked right from the beginning and through the story of salvation, recorded in the Bible. Jesus of course, is the fulfillment of God’s plan of salvation – making possible this unity – a love & relational unity between people who are very different from each other in religion, ethnicity, language, culture, citizenship, social & economic status, gender, personality, philosophy, politics and so on.

We read the story of the beginnings of this unity that Jesus brings in the gospels – through the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus. In the letters of the New Testament which address various issues in the early church, this continues to be a major theme, rather than a side issue.

At a recent int’l ENC (European Network of Communities) gathering in Poland (Nov. 2022), Bruce Clewett – one of the founders of ‘Kerygma’, gave this message on ‘Unity in Diversity’. One of the things that Bruce shares, is about the tensions we encounter in the Body of Christ, even on non-theological issues and some keys we find in the New Testament, to foster the unity of the Spirit in our contexts.

It is well worth listening to: