The Ecumenical Mirage and the Path to True Unity

Have you ever sat through a family dinner where everyone was technically in the same room but somehow miles apart? Phones glowing, conversations overlapping, an uncle arguing politics with a cousin who’s only half-listening, someone scrolling through photos, someone else stewing about a comment made three Christmases ago. You’re together. But you’re not together.

Now imagine someone walks in and says, “I just want us to be one family.” What do they mean? Do they mean we should all suddenly agree about politics? Do they mean we should pretend the old wounds don’t exist? Do they mean we need a longer, more thorough debate to finally settle who was right about the inheritance?

None of that, of course. What they mean is something deeper, something almost impossible to manufacture.

They mean: I want us to love each other. I want us to be in communion.

This is, more or less, what Jesus is praying for on the night before He dies. And it is one of the most stunning prayers ever uttered.

But "just love each other" is also prone to fail if we do not know what Love truly is.

Because if we begin with our ideas about love, rather than with the Source, with Him who is Love Himself, with the perfect Trinitarian Love that Jesus speaks about, we're just as likely to create more division, more resentment, more pain.

 

The Prayer Behind the Prayer

In John 17, often called the High Priestly Prayer, Jesus prays not just for His disciples but “on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, 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 17:20-21, NRSV).

Notice what comes just before this passage. Jesus has prayed, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17).

The order matters. Sanctification in truth comes first. Then unity. The modern ecumenical movement has notoriously weaponized and misquoted these verses, ripping the petition for oneness completely out of its vital context. They isolate the call to be "one" while completely ignoring the prerequisite of being sanctified in the truth.

Notice the passive voice. Not in the verse, the way I put it above. It proceeds from the plea that Jesus makes, not to us to sort out all our little differences with more debate, but to the Spirit. Sanctify them in the truth...

The truth that sanctifies is not primarily a set of propositions to be mastered but a Person to be received, a Spirit to be welcomed, a Love to be inhabited.

“When the Spirit of truth comes,” Jesus had said just before, “he will guide you into all the truth” John 16:13.

Then comes something astonishing, beautifully shocking, and uncomfortably glorious.

The unity Jesus prays for is patterned on the very life of the Trinity: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us” (John 17:21).

The Greek preposition here is en—not merely with or near, but in. We are to dwell in God the way the Son dwells in the Father.

This is not a metaphor stretched for emotional effect. This is the heart of the Gospel.

Christian unity is not a sociological project or a committee-driven agenda.

It is a participation in the inner life of God.

 

What Unity Is Not

Two false versions of Christian unity have plagued the Church, especially in the West.

The first false unity says: let’s stop arguing and just love each other. Let’s set aside what divides us. Let’s sing a song, light a candle, agree that we’re all climbing the same mountain. This is the exact trap of the institutional ecumenical agenda, which has largely proven to be a historic failure. It missed the entire point of Christ's prayer. By chasing a shallow, lowest-common-denominator agreement, it reduced the fiery glory of God to bureaucratic consensus. It's the kind of thing I've seen in our community's occasional "ecumenical services," where substance is lacking, where everyone has a song to sing, and where truth is actually avoided because, well, we know too much truth will dispel the illusion we're trying to foster.

This is why the empty, performative "displays" of unity we see today ring so hollow.

They look "nice" on a stage or a joint press release, but no one actually celebrates them because they lack any real substance. They require us to pretend Christ is less than He is, or grace is less than it is, or sin is less than it is. It is not unity at all; it is a polite ceasefire built on amnesia.

The second false unity says: if we just get our doctrine perfectly correct, unity will follow. If we win the argument, write the better treatise, refine the confession, then the Church will finally come together. But this also fails. The history of the last five hundred years is, in part, the history of brilliant theologians producing brilliant arguments that produced more divisions, not fewer.

You cannot debate your way into communion any more than a husband and wife can debate their way into love.

Both of these false paths share a common problem: they treat unity as something we produce.

Either we produce it by lowering the bar or by perfecting the formula. Either by pretending "doctrine doesn't matter," or that doctrine is everything.

But Jesus does not pray that we will produce unity. He prays that the Father will give it through the Spirit who sanctifies us in truth. Unity is received, not manufactured by human agendas. And it is received the way all of God’s gifts are received: through abiding.

 

The Forgotten Path

There is a passage later in the prayer that should stop us cold: “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” John 17:23.

“That they may become completely one.” The Greek is teteleiōmenoi eis hen—literally, “perfected into one.”

Unity is the perfection of love. It is what happens when love does its full work in us.

I truly believe that if all Christians pursued greater unity in God, through the kind of prayer that is taught by the mystics like St. Theresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and the great desert fathers and monks, like St. Benedict, St. Anthony the Great, and the like... we would find unity, because truth would be arrived at through participation in the Love, the bond of love between Father and Son, the Spirit who sanctifies us in truth.

The contemplative tradition has always understood that the path forward for the Church is the path inward and upward into the heart of God.

Christian mysticism is often misunderstood.

We hear the word “mystical” and think of something exotic, esoteric, or vaguely Eastern. We picture incense and trance states and people in robes muttering syllables.

But Christian mysticism, at its heart, is something far simpler and far more demanding: it is the unwavering pursuit of greater union with God.

It is letting His love become the air we breathe. It is, as Paul puts it, the slow transformation by which “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

This is not a spirituality for an elite few. It is the ordinary calling of every baptized person. The mystic’s path is not a side road; it is the main road. We have simply forgotten where it goes.

 

The Tragedy We Inherited

Something was lost when the Western Church, in the storms of the sixteenth century, began to suppress the contemplative life. Having been a Lutheran for most of my life, and having spent most of my adulthood studying Martin Luther, I noticed something interesting and tragic in his life.

Luther started out as a monk. He learned the Augustinian habit, the habit of love, the practice of contemplative prayer, but then turned almost entirely to debate, to arguing his point, to making "here I stand" moments in the imagined pursuit of "truth" divorced from unity. And he not only renounced his monastic vows, but pushed for the closure of monasteries. He replaced contemplatio in the pattern of prayer in the Christian tradition (the contemplation) with tentatio, what he called "struggle."

There's a place for "struggle," but when the struggle unseats rather than returns to contemplation, it's bound to produce anxiety.

When that happens, the more Luther starts gravitating away from his monastic foundation, you can almost sense an increasing anxiety in his writing, his language and name-calling gets more crass, there's an anger, a fury, in his later letters and books. His "toilet humor" would even make my three young boys blush (and they love their potty jokes). But Luther wasn't calling people he disagreed with "ass-farts" (his language, not mine) to get a laugh. He was doing it in order to denigrate his opponents, to discount them, to ridicule them and worse... to sow seeds of dissention, to sway popular opinion against his opponents.

The monasteries were not perfect institutions, and they certainly needed reform.

But the wholesale rejection of the monastic and mystical traditions in many parts of the Church created a vacuum.

When the language of love is removed from the heart of our theology, from our practice, from our prayer... it's replaced by anger, by anxiety, by frustration, by name-calling and hate.

Into that vacuum rushed not just harsh language, but a version of Christianity that was almost entirely forensic. Justification became a transaction happening outside us, a legal declaration in the heavenly courtroom, with little or no expectation that the inner life would actually be transformed in this life. Salvation was reduced to status. Sanctification, when it was discussed, was often a thin moralism rather than the deep, costly, beautiful work of being conformed to Christ from the inside out.

When the inner life is hollowed out, what’s left?

Identity markers. Doctrinal boundaries. The proliferation of competing "confessions" of faith. Tribal loyalties. Apologetics that look more like turf wars than testimonies of love.

The proliferation of denominations was not the cause of the disease; it was the symptom.

The disease was the loss of the path that leads through the heart, into the silence, where God Himself becomes the unity we cannot manufacture.

The answer to the divided Church is not more denominational apologetics, though apologetics has its place. It is not even more rigorous theology, valuable as theology is. The answer is what it has always been: greater love. Deeper prayer. Real participation in Trinitarian love.

 

The Glory That Was Given

Here is the line that should bring us to our knees: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one” (John 17:22).

Stop and read that again. The glory the Father gave the Son, the Son has given to us. Not held back. Not rationed. Given.

And the purpose of this gift is that we may be one as the Father and Son are one.

This means that the resources for Christian unity are already inside the Body of Christ. We do not have to invent them. We do not have to negotiate them at an ecumenical conference table. They are already given, already poured out, already ours through the indwelling Spirit.

What we need is to wake up to them. What we need is to stop trying to build unity by our own cleverness and start receiving the unity God has already provided. True unity won't be achieved by standing behind podium, or by beating our fists on tables. It will happen when we all fall to our knees and surrender; when we learn how to pray. Not just offer petitions. To pray as children who rest on their Father's knee, who rest in His presence, who seek His heart.

Augustine wrote that “you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is altered until it rests in you” (Confessions 1.1). That restlessness is not just personal. It is ecclesial. The Church will be restless—divided, anxious, combative—until she rests in the One who prayed her into being.

 

Practical Steps on the Mystic’s Path

How do we walk this path in ordinary life? Here are some suggestions.

Begin with silence. Set aside time each day, even ten minutes, simply to sit before God without an agenda. No reading, no journaling, no requests. Just presence. This is harder than it sounds. Your mind will wander. Your phone will call to you. Stay. The mystics call this “wasting time with God.” It is not wasted.

Read Scripture for communion, not just information. When you read the Word, do not only ask, “What does this mean?” Ask, “Who is meeting me here?” The ancient practice of lectio divina—reading, meditating, praying, contemplating—is a school of union. A single verse, prayed slowly, can do more for your soul than ten chapters skimmed.

Pray for your brothers and sisters across the divisions. Not for them to come around to your view. Pray that they will be drawn deeper into the love of God, and ask that you would be too. Discover the strange thing that happens when you pray for someone you disagree with: you begin to love them.

Resist the temptation to argue your way to unity. This does not mean truth doesn’t matter. It means that truth is received in love, not won in debate. When you find yourself reaching for an argument, try reaching for a prayer instead. There may be a place to have the debate, but no theological debate built on the foundation of pride and competing egos will achieve unity. A genuine debate, built on the foundation of Trinitarian love, can produce unity, because it proceeds from union.

Let your hidden life be your real life. What no one sees—your prayer, your hours with God, your inner surrender—is the deepest reality of who you are. The Church is healed not by louder voices but by hidden lives quietly burning with the love of God.

 

The World Will Know

Jesus ends His prayer with words almost too tender to bear: “I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:26).

The love with which the Father has loved the Son—from before the foundation of the world, in eternal generation, in unbroken delight—that love is meant to be in us. We are not loved less than Jesus is loved by His Father. We are loved with the same love.

This is the unity Jesus prayed for. Not an institutional merger. Not a doctrinal lowest common denominator.

A real, lived, costly, joyful participation in the love that holds the Trinity together.

When the Church begins again to walk this path, the world will know. Not because we have finally won the argument, but because we have finally been won by the Love.