The Church is One

In the Nicene Creed we confess that the Church is one. We are the one body and bride of Christ, “for in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free” (1 Cor 12:13). The Church is one because the Father, Son, and Spirit are one. The one Church has one faith in the one God. As Paul writes in Ephesians 4:4-6: “There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

We are one and we must guard our unity and grow in unity. We must be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:3) and we must “build up the body of Christ until we attain the unity of faith” and “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:12-13). 

It is the ministry of the saints, the ministry of every member of the church, that promotes this growth towards greater unity and maturity in Christ. Christ has given apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry. (Various aspects of this ministry are outlined in passages like Romans 12, Ephesians 5-6, Colossians 3, Titus 2, etc.)

As we are gifted and equipped by the Spirit of God for ministry, we must also be engaged in ministry. We cannot be disconnected or disengaged from the body of Christ. On the contrary, Paul exhorts us: “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love” (Eph 4:15-16).

Paul warns that if we are disconnected and disengaged, if we are virtually connected to our screens rather than vitally connected to the one body of Christ, then we will be “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Eph 4:14). 

Finally, the unity of the Church not only sustains and promotes our maturity in Christ, it sustains and promotes our witness to Christ. Our Lord prayed for the Church and all those who would believe in him, “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21).