Unity in Love

Last week the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, addressed the leading bishops of the Anglican Communion calling for unity in love and the healing of divisions within Anglicanism and the wider church. Here is an excerpt:

It is over 1000 years since the Great Schism fully separated Western and Eastern Churches, and, despite the Council of Florence in 1445, and a very temporary reunification, the divides and wounds in the body of Christ deepened greatly 500 years ago.

We so easily take our divisions as normal, but they are in fact an obscenity, a denial of Christ’s call and equipping of the Church. If we exist to point people to Christ, as was done for me, our pointing is deeply damaged by division. Every Lambeth Conference of the 20th century spoke of the wounds in the body of Christ. Yet some say it does not matter: God sees the truth of spiritual unity, and the Church globally still grows. Well, it does for the moment, but the world does not see the spiritual Church but a divided and wounded body. Jesus said to his disciples, “as the Father sent me so send I you”. That sending is in perfect unity, which is why even at Corinth and at the Council of Jerusalem, we find that truth must be found together rather than show a divided Christ to the world...

All of us here need a body that is mutually supportive, that loves one another, that stoops to lift the fallen and kneels to bind the wounds of the injured. Without each other we are deeply weakened, because we have a mission that is only sustainable when we conform to the image of Christ, which is first to love one another. The idea is often put forward that truth and unity are in conflict, or in tension. That is not true. Disunity presents to the world an untrue image of Jesus Christ. Lack of truth corrodes and destroys unity. They are bound together, but the binding is love. In a world of war, of rapid communications, of instant hearing and misunderstanding where the response is only hatred and separation, the Holy Spirit whose creative and sustaining gifting of the church is done in diversity, demands that diversity of history, culture, gift, vision be expressed in a unity of love. That is what a Spirit-filled church looks like.

You can read the entire address here at the Church Times website.