“Oh how good and pleasant it is when brethren live together in unity.”

Living in unity doesn’t necessarily mean living in whole agreement. It means living in holy agreement. Psalm 133 tells us to do the one thing we’re always supposed to do: Love.

It seems like priests (especially this one) have a message set on repeat: Love your neighbor. There’s a reason for this. Since there are two great commandments, following the second one is paramount to following the first. We cannot love God with our whole heart, mind and spirit without loving our neighbor as ourselves. Even Jesus chimes in on this one with his final words to his apostles: Love one another as I have loved you.”

That’s what it boils down to, really. We can have large churches, successful ministries, bank accounts that read in ooooooo after a number, but the real test of a church, the real metric? Do we love one another as a Christian community or are we another charitable organization among the throng? I’m not interested in touting numbers over souls. For me, a church can have an ASA (average Sunday attendance) of over five hundred people, but if they don’t have love and connection, what’s the point? I can tell almost immediately how a church loves within the first few moments of stepping into the space.

Do her people smile when they greet one another?

Do they walk up to the unknown and introduce or simply hand them a bulletin?

Are there people talking and catching up with the week, or is everyone simply walking in and going to their seats?

Then, during the service, that love continues. The sermon is met with attention rather than phone time. The choir is applauded for their offering instead of expected to do ‘their job’. The peace feels more like coffee hour than a cold handshake. Birthdays and anniversaries and blessings and times of trouble are prayed upon instead of given a universal prayer and dismissed. No matter how big we are, we must remember how close we must remain.

A church isn’t a community gathered for the purpose of making the world a better place. That comes next. We’re called to one another to love each other first, become a family, and then adopt anyone who seeks that love. We don’t have to agree. We don’t have to live in political, socio-economic harmony, and/or look the same. We do have to accept, to uplift, to nurture and to care for one another. Meetings become moments of inspiration instead of tasks. Ministries become means of evangelism instead of things we just do. Generations begin to understand, faith follows.

Unity means bonding, not agreement. We are unified under Christ with the enormous amount of grace freely given. Oh, how my heart sings to see faith birth families of Christ.

Faithfully,

Fr. Sean+