Believers Are Designed for Bigger and Better Playgrounds
When my daughter Luciana was four years old, my wife and I took her on an afternoon outing at the pier on St. Simons Island. It was a sunny, coastal Georgia day, and we went to the village area—a popular spot with shops, walking paths, and, in the span of about two hundred yards, two playgrounds. One has all the big, new equipment and the other is tiny and not very exciting. We happened to park in front of the not-so-exciting playground—directly in our path to the bigger, better playground. Our goal was always to go to the more exciting one, but something happened along the way. When we passed the small one, Luci ran over and started to play. I was surprised to see she was enjoying the low-grade mulch and sub-par aluminum. Man, if she likes this, she will love the big playground, I thought.
So, in my fatherly wisdom, I said, "Okay, Luci, let's go. There is an even better playground right over there." I pointed to the perfectly exciting jungle of plastic, which was in clear view and just a short walk away—at least if you are six feet tall. For a vertically challenged four-year-old, she could not see farther than the few feet around her.
When I suggested moving on, I was met with a shocking temper tantrum. Our happy outing was unraveling. "I am trying to help you," I said, forgetting that using logic with a four-year-old is like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Despite my reasoning, she continued to throw a major fit: "I want to stay in this playground!" she yelled.
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Divided
It is easy to get stuck in our comfortable playgrounds, isn't it? I wonder if this is what God sees when He looks at His followers. Through the Scriptures and nature, God has shown us the greater design that He imagined for the Church—that we would be one body, bringing our collective strengths to the table, loving and serving one another as we build His kingdom throughout the world. But somewhere along the way, we got stuck in our smaller playgrounds. Like four flat tires, have we become immovable, unwilling to dream?
What if there is a bigger, better reality just around the corner that God has invited us into?
Today, the current reality of the Church is a fragmented state. We have bought the lie that journeying from our playground to the bigger and better one is impossible. We are planted in our scattered kingdoms, thinking we are safe behind our fortified walls, not realizing that in reality, we are stuck in self-made cages.
God's heart is grieved. Yet sadly, our divided state doesn't bother us that much. Lack of forgiveness, bitterness, and envy abound in the personal lives of believers and at the corporate level of our churches. In both private and public forums, Christians slander one another. We are so busy building our own brands we have no time left to build community-wide collective movements that mobilize the whole Body of Christ. Trends of competition and individualism significantly undermine the effectiveness of our mission. We are miniature isolated flocks.
Yes, we might have numbers globally (an estimated 2 Billion+ professing Christians), but we have lost the defensive power of unified numbers, preferring isolation in more comfortable habitats—playgrounds—that meet our individual preferences or opinions. Despite the universal claim among believers that there is one Lord and one Church, all the practical evidence of how we operate says differently.
The reality is, we have a crisis of fragmentation. Our public disunity points to an even deeper fragmentation of how we see ourselves versus how we actually operate. Some of us declare weekly that we believe in "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church," but our actions rarely match our declarations about a universal Church. We don't see unity as a major priority because there is a major gap in our Christian understanding of the biblical vision for unity. Or for others, we see unity as unattainable and consequently, we try not to think about it.
Despite our failed attempts at being the united body of Christ, we do have reason for great hope. The same One who infused unity into creation still stands as the perfector and author of the story, a story where He gathers His bride into one collective whole for His purposes. It is a story where He sums up all things in heaven and on earth under His banner. Although unity was broken at the fall of man when sin entered creation, the death and resurrection of Christ is the hinge upon which unity between God and creation was restored. The message of the cross is that the greatest of enemies are reconciled. Now, He invites us into a divine fellowship and community where unity is possible.
But it goes even deeper. Jesus' death and resurrection was not simply to re-unite God and creation; it was also to secure unity between brothers and sisters. Between neighbors. If by faith we believe Christ is Lord, repent of our sins, and choose to live under His Lordship, we enjoy reconciliation with God and with our neighbor.
We quickly forget that in the final hours before suffering an excruciating death, unity was a major priority for our Lord: "That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me" (John 17:21 NIV). He could have prayed about so many things in those final moments, but in Jesus' longest recorded prayer, He spent his time focused on the unity of His followers.
We must ask ourselves: Is unity a priority for us like it is a priority for Christ?
God calls His followers to be angled mirrors of His love and reflect Him to the world. Therefore, our unity is critical in our witness of the Lord we serve: "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:35 NIV). John Armstrong, author and professor at Wheaton College, put it this way: "The real indicator of the church's faithfulness is not successful evangelization; it is our oneness." It is time for this vision to catch fire in the Church.
Imagine what would happen if believers stepped into this calling and united in Christ. Our unity would not simply be an unseen aspect of spirituality; we would see unparalleled work accomplished if the two billion people worldwide who claim to follow Christ began to communicate and share resources. The Church would become the hub of disruptive entrepreneurs and innovative problem solvers for the largest issues facing our world. Our fellowship would be marked by radically selfless servants worldwide. Imagine the dollars we could redirect away from any duplication this would reveal and reinvest into new projects. We would freely unlock our relationships and connections to help others with no hesitation for how it would benefit us personally in the end.
This is the type of community we all desperately long to be part of. Through learning lessons from nature and Scripture, God is calling the Church of today to walk in our true design. When we awaken to our divided state and simultaneously see God's vision for his Church, we will be propelled towards becoming the earth shaking, history making fellowship we were created to be.
Excerpts taken from Designed For More book, Faithwords 2018. For more from Lucas Ramirez, visit, www.LucasRamirez.org or @TheLucasRamirez
