While even most Christians in America don’t know it, we quietly passed a very important week in the Christian calendar on Jan. 18, the internationally celebrated “Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.”
This little-known church celebration, which annually lasts eight days, or for an “octave,” is an ecumenical Christian observance, coordinated by the World Council of Churches, and calls on Christian faithful to pray for church unity.
Scriptural support of the celebration comes from Matthew 16:13-19, a passage in which the disciple Peter confesses that Jesus is “the Messiah, the son of the living God,” and later in which Jesus appoints Peter as the leader of the church, the “rock” in whom Jesus puts his trust.
Much of that context may be appreciated only by the nerdiest of church history aficionados. I guess I’m guilty as charged.
However, here’s what I find beautiful about the observance: It is a loving call to all Christians, regardless of denomination or faith tradition, to put aside the petty disagreements over doctrine and dogma and pray for unity with one another.
No more of a commitment than that. Just a heartfelt desire to pray "for the unity of the Church as Christ wills it, and in accordance with the means he wills,” as described by Abbe Paul Couturier, the father of spiritual ecumenism.
The Christian world is splintered into thousands of traditions that essentially become competitors in the business of saving souls. And my faith tradition is no different.
But as the gospel of Matthew teaches us, it didn’t start out that way. Jesus anointed one foundational leader for the church in Peter, and somehow every Christian tradition’s circuitous ancestral lineage harkens back to that rock … Peter.
I find beauty in this acknowledgment because it should give us all a different understanding of what it means to follow in the footsteps of Christ. Given the wide assortment of Christianity practiced in thousands of man-made traditions, I think Jesus himself might be dizzied by it all if he came back today.
Furthermore, I think for those outside the Christian tradition, it seems a little disingenuous — if not hypocritical — for each of us to think that our very own Christian tradition is the “correct” one.
But for eight days a year during the “Week of Prayer for Christian Unity,” all of us who profess to be Christian are invited to set all the petty divisions aside and pray for unity, to pray for one another. Not a prayer of conversion, mind you, but rather a prayer that one day Christ will unify the church in accordance to his will.
You see, it’s really not up to us to decide who is “right” anyway. And I, for one, think that is beautiful and inspiring. Amen.
Devlyn Brooks is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and serves Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minnesota. He also works for Forum Communications Co. He can be reached at [email protected] for comments and story ideas.