Christian Unity Is Easy to Praise Until It Costs You Something Real

Christian Post reported this week on the release of “That They May Be One,” a new docudrama featuring voices such as Francis Chan and James Ward and built around Jesus’ prayer in John 17 that his followers “may all be one.” The film explores Christian unity across Catholic and Protestant lines and arrives at a moment when many churches are exhausted by fragmentation, suspicion, and culture-war sorting.

That makes the film’s subject unusually timely.

Because unity is one of the most admired Christian ideas and one of the least practiced.

Almost everyone says they want it. Almost no one wants it cheaply. And very few people want it on terms that require humility, repentance, or shared sacrifice.

This is not because Christians are especially evil. It is because unity is always harder than slogan form makes it sound. As soon as unity moves from aspiration to embodied practice, it raises difficult questions: unity around what? Without collapsing real theological differences? Without asking suffering communities to pretend wounds are healed when they are not? Without turning “oneness” into a vague emotional atmosphere that avoids truth?

That is why a film like this matters, at least potentially.

It reminds modern Christianity that Jesus’ prayer for unity was not decorative. It was missional, visible, and costly. A fractured church does not merely suffer internally. It also weakens public witness. The world sees division and concludes that Christianity offers no deeper reconciliation than any other tribe can manage.

But the answer to that problem cannot be a sentimental unity that ignores conviction.

Real Christian unity is not the denial of difference. It is the refusal to let difference become total estrangement. It is the patient labor of discovering what faithfulness, truth, charity, and shared witness require when believers do not stand in perfect agreement.

Modern Christianity struggles here because our larger culture rewards alignment more than communion. We are trained to build identity through distinction: my tribe, my lane, my side, my camp, my certainties, my preferred enemies. The church is not immune. Christians can become so defined by internal sorting that they forget unity is not simply an optional nicety for ecumenical conferences. It is part of what obedience looks like.

That does not mean all divisions are trivial. Some matter profoundly. But it does mean Christians should stop congratulating themselves for loving unity in theory while investing very little in the habits that make it plausible in practice.

Those habits include:

learning to speak truth without contempt,

confessing real sins against each other,

refusing caricature,

distinguishing necessary boundary from ego defense,

and remembering that the church belongs to Christ before it belongs to any faction.

A film cannot produce that by itself. But it can remind people that the alternative to unity is not simply doctrinal clarity. It is often mutual hardening.

And hardening is one of the central spiritual dangers of the age.