"The very definition of 'unity' itself has disunity!"

One of the issues with unity is that people have different ideas of what it means. The very definition of "unity" itself has disunity!

If you ask someone who is an Orthodox Christian, they may not want to talk about Christian unity unless you are committed to working against the religious persecution and genocide in the Middle East that is currently devastating their churches.

If talk to someone who is African-American, they may not have a lot of patience for discussions about Christian unity unless it involves healing the ongoing sins of racism that continues to fracture our churches and our society and leaves black bodies dead in the streets, rotting in prisons or suffering in near-perpetual poverty.

The desperately poor people immigrating to the U.S. from Latin America are almost all Evangelical, Pentecostal or Roman Catholic Christians. If an asylum seeker is denied entry and is doomed to die on the other side of the border, then some statement resolving theological differences may not mean a whole lot to them—they aren't going to feel any warm fuzzies over church unity as they will only feel cold exclusion from (most likely) their fellow Christians. The group that steers this page is comprised of Evangelicals, Protestants and Catholics. Therefore, these are our sisters and brothers in the faith whose lives are at stake at the border. That means something.


Source: The Traveling Ecumenist  -  "Why would a group dedicated to Christian unity talk about justice?", Traveling Ecumenist blog post on 29 April 2019
https://travelingecumenist.blogspot.com/2019/04/why-would-group-dedicated-to-christian.html