I read a tweet that said ‘Church unity is the responsibility of all the baptised’.
Great, I thought: another one to add to the church this afternoon when we celebrate the Sacrament of Baptism for Jacob, who is 5 years old.
I’ll suggest he joins a Church Unity Commission straight away.
That’s the problem with unity; it has a musty smell and is reminiscent of stale biscuits. More 5 year olds doing Christian Unity would be a great thing. Too much of the time we think these things are just for adults.
This is a false idea. The church is all of us. It’s not about waiting until some of us are more grown up before we take our place. We already have a place: remember that.
The children and young people with whom I work are the Church now and for most of them these division in the Church and ‘different sorts of Christians’ is unfathomable. They just get on with following Jesus where they are alongside each other. To most of them denominational labels have less meaning than the sort of biscuits they prefer.
This afternoon, I shall ask him ‘Do you want to follow Jesus?’ not ‘and shall we dress like this, and meet at these times and say these words only, and let only these people do this, and exclude these ones and make these rules and so on and so on and so on. I realised years ago that once again I’d ‘gone native’ with them. But it makes sense to me too. The wide appeal of Messy Church points to it: make it messy, keep it simple, welcome everyone.
We are doing Christian Unity already, every day. As usual its taking the adults a while to catch up.

In our life and our believing
The Love of God.