Unity within a church is the indispensable key to accomplishing the Great Commission.
Show me a church with tremendous talent, resources and potential, but no unity, and I’ll show you a church that is already dead in its tracks.
But show me a unified church with limited resources and significant challenges, and I’ll show you a church that will find a way to win every time.
Church unity is never accomplished by wanting to feel unified. The feeling of unity is never the goal. I tell Senior Pastors I coach that feeling unified is the by-product of church leaders focusing on six extremely difficult and oftentimes painful actions:
- Unity comes through installing good leaders and removing bad ones.
- Unity comes through casting a clear enough vision that the wrong people don’t join your church.
- Unity comes through confronting sin.
- Unity comes through teaching sound doctrine, even when you think people will leave as a result.
- Unity comes through leaders insisting that the entire church avoids gossip and follows the biblical path of conflict resolution found in Matthew 18:15-17, without exception.
- Unity comes through leaders killing sacred cows and installing the right systems, processes and methods necessary to help the church accomplish the Great Commision.
Unity is a funny thing.
If as leaders we focus on trying to obtain the feeling of being unified, we’ll ultimately accomplish anything but.
But if we focus on simply doing what godly leaders do, unity somehow always has a way of showing up on our doorstep.
Have you served in a church that wasn’t unified? Which of the six things listed above was most prevalent?
