Updated Thursday, May 08, 2008

Formations lesson for May 25: The Prayer of Jesus

By R. Kevin Johnson

Focal Passage: John 17

Recently, our church has been working through a process of long-range planning. Over eight months or so, several members of our congregation have met together with the clergy staff to consider prayerfully how God might be calling our congregation to serve Him more fully. Ultimately, four broad categories emerged and our Long Range Planning Committee engaged the congregation in conversations about those areas of ministry. The midweek roundtable discussions yielded important information about our core values as a community of faith.

The most important discussion we had during that time together dealt with the spiritual aspects of our ministry. I had the privilege of walking our folks through various exercises in an effort to help them draw bullet-point conclusions about our identity in the Body of Christ.

First, I drew three lines across a large piece of poster board and explained that those lines represented three different forms of church governance.

Then I placed dots on each line to represent different denominations and briefly told about the polity, philosophy, and theology of each group. Eventually, I had one large messy and dotted-up piece of paper with smudge marks and scribbles. Then I drew a large canopy across the top of the page and wrote the name "C-H-R-I-S-T" in bold letters. "The important thing to remember in all this," I told our congregation, "is that every group represented on this page exists under the umbrella of the Christ."

Many times we Christians convey the message that we cannot get along within the Body of Christ.

There is great emphasis placed on those things that divide us and very little focus on the one thing that unites us as brothers and sisters in the faith. I wanted our congregation to think about the unity that we share as "joint heirs with Jesus" so that attention could center on the positive in view of strengthening our witness within the walls of our church and beyond.

Perhaps the key to fostering love among Christians is in the discipline of exalting Christ in all things. Only then will we muster the capacity to love God and love others; to show compassion to the least of these; to encourage the sister who is saddened; to lift up the brother who has fallen; and to rush to grace in light of truth instead of passing judgment in view of law. That is unity under the umbrella of Jesus, the Savior.