Unity with a Purpose

Tonight we're capping off our participation in 24/7 Prayer with a joint meeting of InterVarsity and Campus Crusade, the two largest Christian groups on campus. The purpose is for us to gather together as a larger body of Christ to pray for the campus, to ask God's blessing on this couple square miles of land that we occupy along with 25,000+ other students, faculty, and staff.

Students, of course, love this kind of stuff. There is generally a low-level grumble on campus that there are multiple Christian student groups. Why do we have to be divided? And every year or two a group of students decides that they want to be the group that gathers all peoples together. There's some sort of all-campus Christian pep rally thrown (where each group still sits together with it's own people), we all go home and things go on as usual.

There's a number of things going on here. One is that it genuinely does feel like you're the only one following Christ seriously on a secular campus--even in a relatively large community like UNC's Crusade (650) or InterVarsity (325). So just being in a gym full of other Christians makes you feel a little less like a freak.

And there's the very good desire that we not have a sense of competition or comparison. Inevitably every year there's some inter-group run-in where someone feels that their people are disrespected. Then the anecdotes get passed around, and before you know it, everyone in Crusade says that IV sucks...which of course makes us think that they suck.

So we need to work to make sure that we have healthy, cooperative relationships. But here's my deal: we could literally expend hundreds of work-hours trying to do joint events all the time. I'd much rather we spend that time, energy, money, and effort into mission outside ourselves than expend it trying to make sure that everyone plays nice.

There are tons of students on campus. We need more than one fellowship on campus to do Kingdom work in all the nooks and crannies of it. We need to be for one another, to honor and respect one another, certainly and by all means. I enjoy meeting with the other campus ministers and hearing what God's doing in their ministries.

But please, let's not waste time with Christian pep rallies. We have bigger missional fish to fry. We're gathering tonight not just for unity sake but for this work of prayer that we've been called to and engaged in together. And that makes it worth it.