Oneness in Hope

I, today, have experienced something I have never experienced before. This morning we joined together for a morning service at our church building with the other two churches that share the building. A Harvest church, Anglican and Nazarene denomination came together to worship God and celebrate the birth of Christ all at once! Fantastic!

Hope has a very unique spiritual atmosphere among the church-going populace here. There is, in general, an air of working-togetherness for the same purpose. I have often been astounded, because of the relations of Christians in other urban centres I have witenessed, how much they often work and help each other here. If a pastor from the Baptist church needs a fill in one Sunday, they might phone up the Harvest church pastor to help. If the Nazarene's need a worship leader, they might ask the Baptists, and so on. I love it! And today, at the ANGLICAN'S request, we all got together to worship Christ the King. The Harvest did the music, we did communion and the Anglican's expoused from the Word of God. And Pat, my good friend and pastor of the Nazarene's commented saying [summarized]: "Isn't this great, that we can set aside our names and titles to come together and worship Christ. God doesn't see our denominations when He looks at us. He's not looking down and going, 'There they are, and there they are, and there they are and ... who are they?'"

How true, that we enjoy categorizing ourselves, often to our own detriment. It was great to set aside those insignificant differences to remember that we are one people under Jesus Christ.