There were times growing up when the Baptist Church would join our little Methodist Church in the valley to hold joint services, a “Joint Revival” we called it. Sometimes we’d go to their church, other times they’d come up the hill to ours. We’d sing songs we knew in common, pray (sometimes everybody praying out loud their own prayers at the same time, called “concert prayer”), and the preachers would preach hard about end times, our need for salvation and the goodness of Jesus who was ready to receive us right then and there. It was my first lesson in Christian unity.

I think I was drawn to the church in these times of cooperation. Knowing other people worshiped the same God I worshiped in a different building with different emphasis, was a source of curiosity that sprouted and grew in me like the seeds of the tobacco we planted in beds in the month of February, hoping for a good crop. That seed of Christian cooperation grew as I went away from home and got involved in campus ministry at my college near Abingdon, VA.

Somehow I found myself working with a community of tiny black churches around Glade Spring, Virginia. They would have “singings” on Sunday afternoon (sometimes they had other names like “Rally Day” and what not, but they were song services mainly). Each little church would provide a song or three and we would all join in, clapping in rhythm or even singing along as we could. It was literally and figuratively a larger gathering of extended family.

It was about that time I became familiar with the term “ecumenical.” Based on a greek word, oikoumene, which refers to ”the inhabited earth,” meaning something like universal. This is where we get the idea we profess in the creeds that the church is “catholic,” also a word referring to the universal nature of the church. The church as we know it today is “catholic” when it works together across organizational boundaries. And so we work together even though our signs may have different words on them. We especially do this well in terms of how we reach out to our neighbors and provide relief for the poor, build better communities, and stand up for the needs of those who don’t have power in our culture.

Today’s Church in the United States is having a lot of difficulty finding commonality. Forces are at work reshaping our culture and they have focused their efforts on getting the church to “evolve” their teachings especially in regards to human sexuality and gender politics. So unity has become much more difficult as the church is finding itself more and more divided between those who want to hold onto purity of scriptural teaching on these subjects and those who wish to disregard biblical morality in favor of the cultural mood of the times.

The level of rhetoric and shrill nature of this conflictual era has made me want to go back as far into the “holler” as I can to escape this mess. But I still find a lot of beauty in times when Christians work and worship together across denominational bounds. There’s a lot of potential when we work together, even if we have different beliefs.

Even within a denomination there can be found people with different understandings of the common core of Christian beliefs. We are never going to be on the same page in this life. But we look forward to the day Jesus will come and reestablish the Kingdom of God on earth.

This is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. This could be a good test for all of us. Can you pray for people you don’t agree with? Can there be unity in the prayers of people of different denominations, different languages, different opinions? Prayer is mostly an act of love. If we pray for one another, it could lead us to love each other even if we can never come to agreement. That could be revolutionary.

The great German theologian, Karl Barth once preached a sermon on Repentance in which he focused on the invitation of Jesus: “Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” We need that invitation. It is a call to prayer. Come to Jesus. Lay aside your differences. Lay aside your efforts to change each other and just come to Jesus. There’s plenteous redemption in that.