Do you believe this? Reflecting on Christian unity
Logo of the week of prayer for Christian Unity
“LGBTQIA+ Christians are no strangers to this prejudice and the exclusion it creates. A clear profession of faith and lived experience of Christ can so often be devalued or negated and the door to belonging - or at times merely attending - firmly closed. ”
After 27 years serving in international mission, Neil was the minister of CLM Church in Ormskirk near Liverpool until November 2021. He maintains a strong interest in the global Christian community and international development and serves today in Bible teaching, training and leadership development. He has an MA in international development and one published book, Not Everything in Our Bibles Is Inspired. He is actively working to see the Christian community become more inclusive to all, which led to him becoming an LGBTQIA+ ally, and a trustee of the Open Table Network.
IT'S THE WEEK OF PRAYER FOR CHRISTIAN UNITY. This year marks 1,700 years since the Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council of the Christian church.
At the heart of many Christian worship services is the Nicene Creed, which begins ‘We believe in one God…’ Reflecting this, the scripture readings chosen for this year focus on belief. OTN Trustee Neil Rees reflects on how we define ourselves by what we believe.
Generally speaking, in any walk of life we tend to feel most comfortable amongst people who are ‘like us’. The reverse is also true - we tend to feel uncomfortable, out of place, or threatened amongst those who are different from us. And the Church is no exception.
Despite Jesus’s prayer for us all to be one (John 17:20-23), even among those who profess the Christian faith our human tendency to tribalism repeatedly leads to suspicion of the ‘other’, if not downright antagonism and hostility. For some, anything other than our own particular version of the Christian faith is at best somewhat deficient, at worst utterly heretical.
It is in this context that the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity challenges all who profess to be Christians to recognise that we belong to something much larger - and to take practical action to demonstrate this reality. This requires both humility - to admit that I don’t have a corner on absolute truth - and generosity - to accept that others may have a genuine experience of the grace of God in Christ in ways and traditions that are not my own.
As Christians, this should not be beyond us, for the foundation of our unity is not to be found in either the detailed tenets of our belief or its diverse outward expressions but in a simple Christ-centred profession of faith. Our response to Jesus’s words to Martha as they met weeping at the grave of her dead brother Lazarus, ‘Do you believe this?’, is sufficient (John 11:25-27).
The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is usually seen as an invitation to Christian denominations to open their hearts to those who think differently on what they believe or what it means to be church. In reality, however, the invitation must go wider, for disunity in the church does not merely reflect historical tradition, dogma or conflicting interpretations of Scripture; the lines of division and prejudice that characterise society as a whole are also experienced within the Church.
LGBTQIA+ Christians are no strangers to this prejudice and the exclusion it creates. A clear profession of faith and lived experience of Christ can so often be devalued or negated and the door to belonging - or at times merely attending - firmly closed.
Yet we know that ‘there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28). While addressing the social fractures prevalent at his time, Paul’s bold statement provides the theological underpinning that enables us today to press for the full acceptance of all LGBTQIA+ Christians within the Church.
