Members of One Another

Unity Is More Than Getting Along

...individually we are members one of another.

— Romans 12

Romans 12 has an awful lot in it.

Paul has spent much of the letter explaining sin, grace, faith and salvation, and then he begins getting practical. Present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Don't be conformed to this world. Be transformed by the renewing of your minds. Don't think too highly of yourselves. Recognize the different gifts God has given His people.

It's almost like my grandfather reminding me, after I had already learned to drive and had plenty of experience behind the wheel:

“Watch the other driver!”

Sometimes we need to return to the fundamentals.

And in the middle of Paul's instructions is one little phrase that caught my attention:

“We, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.”

I've heard the Body of Christ metaphor all my life. But listen carefully to what Paul actually says.

We are not merely members of the same church.

We are members of one another.

That makes Christian division much more serious than an organizational problem.

Christianity has survived an astonishing number of divisions over two thousand years. East and West divided. Catholics and Protestants divided. Protestants divided again and again, sometimes over significant theological questions and sometimes over matters that, generations later, can seem remarkably small.

And yet the Gospel continued to spread.

Imagine what might have happened if we'd been better at being one.

On the night before His death, Jesus prayed for His followers, “that they may all be one.” Not merely cooperative. Not members of friendly organizations that occasionally work together on community projects.

One.

And Paul gives us an image for what that means. A body doesn't merely consist of parts that have signed an agreement to coexist. The parts belong to each other. If my hand is injured, my entire body adjusts. If my eyes can't see, my hands begin feeling their way through the darkness. The parts don't compete to determine which one deserves to remain attached.

You don't chop off your arm because it has psoriasis.

Yet Christians can become remarkably comfortable doing something similar to one another.

Politics has made this especially easy. We leave churches because the congregation doesn't align sufficiently with our politics. We write essays explaining why some other group of Christians are hypocrites. We publicly ridicule believers whose errors seem obvious to us, sometimes alongside people who have little affection for Christianity at all.

And perhaps the strangest part is that we can convince ourselves we're defending the Church while we're doing it.

Paul says that person is part of me.

That doesn't mean error doesn't matter. Christian unity cannot require pretending every teaching is true or every behavior acceptable. Paul himself corrected churches vigorously.

But correction within a body is different from amputation.

Families may give us another useful picture. My brother remains my brother when he's wrong. My cousin remains my cousin when she irritates me. Belonging doesn't eliminate disagreement; it changes what I do with disagreement.

Perhaps Christians should recover some of that instinct toward one another.

If somebody attacks a Christian with whom I strongly disagree, maybe my first response shouldn't always be to join the attack. There may be moments when I need to say, “I have plenty of disagreements with my brother, and he and I can talk about those. But you're still talking about my brother.”

Because we are members of one another.

And this brings me back to shalom.

We've been considering peace not merely as the absence of fighting, but as wholeness—things brought into their proper relationship and alignment. If that's true, then a fractured Body of Christ is almost the opposite image.

The Gospel moves the other direction.

God gathers. God reconciles. God restores. God takes what has been separated and brings it home. The Kingdom moves creation toward wholeness.

So perhaps one of the simplest contributions I can make to that Kingdom is to stop helping tear the Body apart.

There are enormous problems in the world that Christians care deeply about: poverty, injustice, broken families, violence, homelessness, hunger, loneliness and war. We can disagree about governments, programs and policies for addressing them.

But imagine the strength of a Church that actually behaved as though all its members belonged to one another.

Maybe we don't need another strategy before we try that one.

Paul already gave it to us.

We are many.

We are one body.

And, difficult as it sometimes may be to remember, we belong to one another.