We are heirs of tragic division. All Christians today have inherited a fractured church. And there is plenty about which we may disagree, some of which rises to the New Testament’s sensibilities about breaking fellowship (1 Cor. 5; Gal. 1:8-9). But the New Testament also speaks about the importance of unity: Christ himself prayed for it, and Paul and other apostles admonished it (John 17:11-23; Eph. 4:3). How then should we respond to the reality of God’s fractured family?
The easiest response might be willful ignorance. Whatever our tradition or tribe—whether that’s a denomination or a coalition of churches or even a fiercely independent congregation—it’s easy to become myopically focused on what’s happening with “us.”
My Twitter feed is usually swarming with Anglican drama, yet a Presbyterian friend of mine who is also active on Twitter recently shared, “I never hear about Anglican stuff online.” It was a good reminder to me of the silos we tend to inhabit (and of how the internet helps create and sustain them). As important as it is to be actively engaged in our church bodies, it can be both challenging and refreshing to hear from Christians in other traditions. Without them, we don’t know what we’re missing or what we have to offer God’s larger family, the whole church.
Among American Christians, especially evangelicals, there is tremendous ecclesial migration. Sometimes this is because of church splits, because spiritual or theological interests change, or because of bad actors. Sometimes, though, especially when these migrations happen because Christians feel called to take a stand for their convictions or make difficult decisions about where to affiliate, the response to church division can take a triumphalist tone. We congratulate ourselves for our theological or moral superiority while assuming the church’s problems now exist on the other side of the fence. But in my experience, most converts to another church tradition gradually learn that triumphalism does not last long. No matter where we worship, the church is deeply broken.
Yet disillusionment with our respective traditions, or with the church’s divisions writ large, doesn’t have to lead to despair.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing in the context of Nazi Germany and a sharply divided German church, argued that disillusionment is not only inevitable for Christians but necessary: “Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment … begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.” Bonhoeffer was writing about fellowship as we experience it interpersonally within a congregation, but his words also ring true on a broader scale: If we don’t grapple with the painful realities of the church’s divisions, we can’t understand how deep Jesus’ rescue really is.
Wesley Hill, drawing from the work of Ephraim Radner, points out that God’s people have been dysfunctional and divided from the very beginning. Jesus came not to a unified and faithful Israel, but to a fractured people in exile:
Jesus the Israelite is born into Israel’s divided brokenness; he takes Israel’s destiny and failure onto his own shoulders, and he suffers Israel’s curse in his own broken body on the cross. He, like Israel, indeed as Israel, is exiled, ‘cut off’ (cf. Col. 2:11). Out of that death, God creates new life by raising Jesus on the third day, and, just so, God will raise and reconstitute the church, too, on the far side of exile. (Hill, “When Christians Disagree,” Evangelical Review of Theology Vol. 45)
In other words, because Jesus came to redeem a divided Israel, we can trust that he will return to redeem a divided church. This promise brings both comfort and challenge: we can’t ignore the brokenness in God’s family, but we also don’t need to despair over it. Instead, our response to the church’s many divisions can be one of hopeful longing for Jesus’ work on our behalf.
Arguably, we experience our division most acutely at the Eucharist. The meal by which we share communion with Jesus and each other is one that not all Christians can celebrate together. Our inability to eat from the same table reflects the depth of our exile from the full fellowship God intends. But the Eucharist also reminds us of the depth of Jesus’ actions to bring us out of that exile: his body was broken for us. As we partake of him, we can trust that he is working to put us back together.
This past summer, 15 years after my sister’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, I was invited to worship at her parish when her son was baptized. She and her husband had asked me, an Anglican priest, to be his godmother. Her conversion in our youth was painful, a site of division even within my family. Yet as I stood with her at the baptism and later received a blessing from her priest, I was amazed at how much God had healed in our relationship. I was surprised by how sorrowful I was to not receive Communion with the rest of the congregation. Yet I felt supremely hopeful for the unity we were experiencing— only a glimpse of the unity to come, but a mysterious participation in it now.
A beautiful prayer in the Didache speaks to this hope: “As this broken bread was once scattered on the mountains, and after it had been brought together became one, so may thy church be gathered together from the ends of the earth unto thy kingdom; for thine is the glory, and the power, through Jesus Christ, forever.”
The earliest Christians offered this prayer in expectation of the gospel’s power to reach all nations. But when I hear these words, I can’t help but also think of all those who’ve responded to the gospel yet who are still estranged from each other in one way or another. One day, Jesus’ family will be seated at one table in perfect harmony. Until then, we take and eat in anticipation.
Sections of this essay were adapted from King’s Feasting On Hope, published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois. Used with permission.
Hannah King is associate rector of The Vine Anglican Church, Clyde, North Carolina. Her writing has appeared in Christianity Today, Holy Post Media, Fathom Magazine, and Anglican Compass. She is the author of Feasting on Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness (InterVarsity Press, 2026).
