I got to say hi to P.W. last Sunday – the sky was clear, so her Meniere’s disease didn’t keep her bedbound. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so grateful and delighted to be at church on a Sunday morning. She’d love to linger with her church family all day, as our pastor had just preached should be the case for all of us. Seeing P.’s huge smile was incredibly convicting for me, because, sitting in the pew with my parents, I was congratulating myself on just showing up. I’ve had whole years when I “went to the bathroom” right before the service ended so I could walk to my car without anyone around. What about all the Sunday mornings when my clothes chafed, my feet were blocks of ice, and the air conditioning made my contacts stick to my eyes? I didn’t cherish my time in church, rather I often longed to escape it.

For weeks now, I have been pondering what it means to be the Body of Christ. My Colossians Bible study put it on my heart originally, but since then, it’s everywhere I turn. Like Pastor L. said on Sunday, about the woman at the well’s normal day being suddenly transformed, “BOOM! And Jesus literally shows up!” I expect to see recurring themes in the biblical literature I’m reading, but it seems like God’s call for a unified Church meets me around every corner. I showed up at the women’s retreat last weekend, and BOOM, the speaker seemed to be referencing my notes spread across the table in my room. Just three days ago, I was searching iTunes for new music and – you guessed it: BOOM! God hasn’t exactly been subtle here, so even I noticed. Only two days ago, the sermon had me digging for a pen and my bulletin. God was speaking again, through L.s’ passionate call to shine Christ’s beauty – onto each other and into the world. We are one temple made of many stones, worshiping in one Spirit and all truth, as the extension of the Father God’s will in the world.

My brain and body have been healing slowly from years of damage wrought by dozens of medicines prescribed for a disease I didn’t have. The renewal of my body, however, has been barely noticeable compared to the growth of my heart. It was not long ago that I’d come to church right on time, sit in the back, and leave during the doxology. Back then, I didn’t have friends, and the thought of having “brothers and sisters in Christ” certainly never occurred to me. S.B. Church has changed my life, not just through individuals, but as a living, breathing life form of its own. As high and esoteric as that sounds, I still fight the desire to watch church from bed via, as Pastor D. calls it, “the ‘stream.” I still get fidgety if it is 12:10 and there are still three “points” left in the sermon. I may talk the talk of the essentiality of a unified Church, but the various insignificant discomforts of life are sometimes enough to draw me away from the very presence of God.

One of the things I dearly wish I could experience is being a part of a church in an area so remote, small, or unpopulated that all the believers in the area met as one denomination-less church. Here in 21^st-century America, there is often literally a church on every corner. Do you want to worship with loud, contemporary music? Go there. Do you want a pastor that softens up the hard stuff for you? Try over there. It seems endless – what you wear, where you work, what race you are, what music you listen to – these are NOT things that should determine with whom we worship. Paul, throughout the New Testament, makes clear it is the Body’s diversity in all things that makes Christ’s Church more than a pile of eyes (1 Corinthians 12, see below).

I have heard many prayers and cries for revival during my seven years in Tennessee. I’m not sure how people aim to accomplish that, but I know what we must address first: American Christianity has a unity problem. And if the people of the Body are not “nourished and knit together [by] its joints and ligaments,” its connection to the Head – to our Lord Christ – is compromised. The power of the gospel as the apostles preached it produced amazing fruit. Individuals throughout the Roman Empire were turning en masse to the Messiah of the Jews for their eternal salvation. But the Romans didn’t see lone believers turning to God. No, they saw the Church. They saw it swelling up in neighborhood marketplaces and oratory halls, among the powerful as well as the poor. For all the failings of that sprawling Empire, it saw the power of the Church for what it was – and they smashed, tore, and burned all they could of this formidable threat.

I managed to drag myself out of bed last Sunday with enough time to shower and make myself presentable for church. Had I woken up 30 minutes later, I am ashamed to confess that I would have stayed home. I often wonder what could have drawn thousands of people together to worship publicly, when just gathering could have led to their crucifixion. L. asked the same question Sunday, just coming at it from a different side. What did the first century Christians have that bound all of them together despite terrible danger? They had just two things: they had Christ, crucified, buried, and risen. And they had each other.

Certainly, Christ can spread his gospel without us, but, like Adam and Eve, like Abraham, like Moses, we have been given a mission. I think we can accomplish it, even with the Body broken into denominations and factions. But how much fire could we walk through if the entire Body throughout this world walked in step?

“For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Matthew 17:20b