Jesus prayed for unity not world peace

With an eye on the future

As I worked with the students this week I brought up the issue of unity.  My desire is to take this group from being a bunch of individuals, to being a community (or family to be more biblical) of like minded believers, or at least try to get us to better understand what that looks like from a biblical world view.  These past couple of weeks I have purposefully watched them play games, talk with each other, and seen where they sit in the youth room. My observation is this there are many unified fragments and individuals but I struggle to find something that completely unifies them.  After asking them to rate on a scale from 0-100 where they thought their unity fell...both groups said anywhere between 60-75 on average.  Now, on a scale of 100% that is pretty good but if we hold it to a standard of grading, there is room for improvement.  I love how well these students get along. It brings me much joy to watch them work and laugh together but, I want them to see that Jesus himself prayed that between believers a relationship would exists that surpasses anything we can know with our senses.  He wanted His Spirit to bring us together (John 17:20-23).  There were millions of other things He could have prayed for but that was vitally important to him.

Because no one group of Christians is the same, each time we come together it can be an awesome and unique experience if we allow Christ to unify all of our differences.  On the other side of that coin is this principle:  When we allow things like fear, pride, selfishness, worldly standards of divisions (i.e. popular vs. unpopular) to keep us apart, while we are together, we grieve the very heart of God and will never reach the full amount of unity that Christ intended for us.

In Galatians 3:36-38, Paul goes so far as to say that not even the difference of being male nor female should be dividing the church.  Now, he does not mean that when we believe in Christ we become one gender.  What he is getting at is that the unity we can have in Jesus is greater than even earthly gender differences.  We are one body in Christ.

My Goal:

Over the next few months I hope to work with the kids and challenge their commitment to Christ, the church, youth group, and their friendships.  In this process I hope to see the body of Christ formed within these groups.  

What will it take for us to look like the unified body of Christ in Western Mass?   What does it mean to have  one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father like stated in Ephesians 4:1-6?  If we can understand this, we understand our freedoms as the church!