Based on the Church Health Assessment you completed, unity may be an area of needed growth for your church and/or church leadership. Other than the gospel itself, unity is the most valuable thing a church can possess. Consequently, it is also often the most delicate. In the Explanation section below, you will find several important biblical foundations for unity as it relates to church health. Subsequent sections of this report will include SBTC Resources/Tools, Other Recommended Resources and Contacts. All of these are designed to help strengthen your church in the area of unity. Please take time to read through this report and to share it with some key influential leaders in your church.

In a healthy church, sons of men will refuse to resurrect what the Son of God died to kill. In his flesh, Jesus put hostility to death when he was crucified in our place on the cross of Calvary. In healthy churches, members embrace unity and peace by meeting one another in the middle, at the cross of Christ, where antagonism, opposition, division and conflict come to die.

It is likely that we have all been a part of a church where disunity brought shame to the cross of Christ instead of bringing honor to it. Unhealthy churches often fight over the smallest of things. Their commitment to a bylaw revision, musical style or carpet color runs more deeply than their commitment to one another.

In his instruction on life together, the apostle Paul urged the Roman church to “prefer one another” (Romans 12:10). All matters of preference were to become matters of deference. In other words, if it was not a matter of doctrinal fidelity, it was to be a matter of interpersonal amenability.

Churches do not usually begin this way. When churches are freshly planted (or replanted) and their focus is on Great Commission advance, members usually defer their preferences willingly. They are too busy moving forward together, on mission, to get sidetracked by peripheral disagreements.

They possess little or nothing, so they are thankful for anything they get. An old music stand is just as well received as an ornately carved wooden pulpit. A school cafeteria is as good a place to gather as a dedicated room in an owned building. Folding chairs seem just as comfortable as padded pews. When they have nothing, they are thankful for everything.

They are as willing to sing songs after the sermon as they are before it. They could not care less if their small group meets in a home or a hallway. They are fine with either a Memorial Day picnic or a Memorial Day mission trip. When they have standardized nothing, there is joy in everything.

But as a church matures and grows over time, it can sometimes become more passionate about its possessions and its traditions than about its message and its mission. And when a change is proposed that might liquidize that possession or violate that tradition, disunity rears its ugly head. For such a church to take steps toward congregational health, divisions such as these must find their death at the cross of Christ.

Jesus himself prayed in John 17 that we would “all be made one, so that the world will believe” that he was sent of the Father. Pay careful attention to the words “so that.” In so praying, the Lord Jesus indicated a cause-and-effect relationship between a church’s unity and its effectiveness in its mission. There is a correlation between a church’s unity and its gospel-impact: “May they all be made one . . . so that the world will believe.”

But how do we know if our church is unified? Unity in the church can be a difficult thing to measure. Allow me to explain what unity is not and what it is.