Our disunity is telling. The young see it. We have no common message, no coordinated effort. It's killing our testimony with them, and it drains the power & resources that would come from a combined effort.
John 17:23 I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.
‘Raise up a child in the way that they should go, and when they are old they will not depart from it’ ... absentee parenting has taken an horrific toll in the spiritual realm, for which we will answer, some where/when. Perhaps the curse of Obama is part of our reaping, and his criminal enterprise commies destroying America right before our collective feckless eyes ...
Truly there is great disunity in the never-ending theological debates among Christians.
However, I perceive great unity among Christians in the debate against atheism/agnosticism, i.e. the common enemy which is the spirit of anti-Christ.
Also, I'm leery of attempts to repair many of the doctrinal disagreements among Christians mostly because too much is lost in the interest of compromise.
Moreover, the United Nations shares the same goal of unity across all world religions. But Christianity cannot be united with Islam, etc.
To God be the glory, not man, never man.
I have repeatedly tried various efforts toward a unified front on the things we could be unified on and a gracious attitude on the rest.
EVERY BLESSED TIME
Rabid Clique sorts of RC’s and some on the fringes of such cliques have shredded the efforts wholesale and done their best to shred me.
I’m out of fresh ideas.
If you get something going successfully, let me know.
I agree . . . BUT there is a risk in the call to "unity." A unity of the brethren wrought by the Spirit, a unity of love that transcends labels (Christian, Messianic, Calvinist, Arminian, Evangelical, Lutheran, etc.) and relatively minor doctrinal and interpretive quibbles is, I believe, the unity that we are called to:
Hineh ma tov u'manayim shevet achim gam yachad.However, a unity at the expense of truth, I think we all agree, is no virtue . . . in fact, its the path to Babylon.Behold how good and pleasant it is when brethren dwell together in unity.
And how do we decide which truths are important enought to divide over and which are no big deal? To me, there's some pretty wide latitude in the whole paradox of predestination vs. free-will before a person trips into heresy, while for our Calvinist friends, nothing less than absolute predestination is the Gospel. Can there be common ground between a cessationist and a pentecostal?
And if we agree that the above distinctions don't matter, that we should just have the Messiah Yeshua (Christ Jesus) as our common ground, what then is our rationale for resisting the ecumenical slurry that is smothering the true Gospel?
I'm not saying that it's impossible. Neither am I saying that I have the answer. But I think I at least have the question, and hope that it will be answered in this discussion.
Shalom.