Unity to What End?
Christian unity isn’t a flag or a doctrine. It’s a discipline of service — and institutions that hoard wealth to survive it have already lost the plot.
A recent Substack article asked Christian denominations to unite under a single banner — literally. The author, drawing on Ben Franklin’s “Join or Die” snake cartoon, designed a flag representing the Body of Christ and flew it outside his house. It is sincere. It is creative. And it raises a question the article never quite answers: unified to accomplish what, exactly?
The urgency is borrowed from Franklin’s original context: colonies facing military annihilation. The threat was concrete. The “or die” part meant something specific. In the article’s adaptation, the threat stays vague. Die how? From what? The piece asserts that division is fatal without ever establishing what the wound actually is.
The deeper problem, though, isn’t what the article fails to argue. It’s what it quietly assumes: that unity is primarily institutional — a matter of denominations aligning, flags flying, common banners raised. That assumption deserves a direct challenge, because it may have the thing exactly backwards.
What unity actually is
When Jesus was pressed for the foundation of everything, he didn’t give an ecclesiology. He gave two commandments: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else — the councils, the creeds, the polity debates, the flag designs — is commentary. And commentary has a way of serving the commentator.
Real unity, the kind the New Testament actually describes, is not ceremonial. It is submitting to one another to meet needs — without keeping score, without expecting something back, without even drawing attention to the fact that you did it. “When you give to the needy,” Jesus said, “do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.”
That is the definition of unity the article never offers. Not a merger. Not a shared creed. A Catholic feeding a Methodist’s kids after a house fire without pausing to discuss transubstantiation. A Pentecostal congregation sitting with a grieving Episcopal family without checking theological credentials at the door. Service without transaction. Presence without agenda. Need met because the need is there.
This kind of unity is already happening, quietly, everywhere. It doesn’t need a flag. It doesn’t show up in institutional statistics. And it is almost certainly more effective at reaching people than any ecumenical summit has ever been.
What a Coke commercial understood
In 1971, Coca-Cola put a hillside full of young people from every nation on television, holding bottles of Coke, singing about teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony. Unabashed commercialism dressed as idealism. And it worked — not despite its simplicity, but because of it.
It was concrete: share a drink. Actionable: you can do this today. And it required no prior agreement — nobody on that hillside resolved their differences first, signed a statement, or raised a flag. They just stood there together and handed each other something.
That is nearly a perfect illustration of what the New Testament means by unity. Small. Human. Across difference. No authority figure required. Your left hand barely has to know. The uncomfortable implication is that a soda company grasped something about togetherness that this theological argument missed — and the commercial didn’t threaten anyone with death for not participating.
The manna problem
Here is where the institutional church’s deepest confusion lives — and where the “Join or Die” argument quietly colludes with a problem it doesn’t see.
When God fed the Israelites in the desert, the manna arrived fresh each morning. The instructions were simple: take what you need for today. Those who tried to store it overnight found it rotted. The manna was designed to be consumed. Its entire logic was present-tense. It had no concept of an endowment.
A church that has accumulated significant wealth — property, reserves, endowments — can survive empty pews for years. It can keep the lights on long after anyone is being served, long after the community that called it into existence has dissolved or moved on. And it will, because institutions with resources tend to deploy them in service of their own continuation.
The standard objection here is that long-term ministry requires long-term resources. Buildings need maintenance. Staff need salaries. Stability enables service. That’s not wrong as far as it goes — but it describes operational funding, not hoarded wealth. There is a meaningful difference between a church that maintains what it needs to serve its community today, and one that sits on an endowment large enough to survive a generation of empty pews. The first is prudent. The second has confused its own survival with its purpose.
A church with empty pews and a full endowment is not a church in a dry spell. It is a real estate holding company with a cross on the roof.
When people stop coming, that is information. It means the work has stopped, or the community no longer believes it has. Hoarded wealth allows an institution to ignore that signal indefinitely — which is not faithfulness. It is institutional self-deception funded by yesterday’s generosity. The manna rotted for a reason.
Longevity is not faithfulness. A church that closes when its work is finished has done something right.
The tithe, understood this way, is not a tax paid to an institution for the privilege of its existence. It is a tool the giver wields — deployed toward actual need, retracted when the need is no longer being met, redirected when a new community presents a genuine opportunity for service. Keeping it until you see the need isn’t stinginess. It is stewardship. It keeps the resource alive and mobile, rather than frozen inside an institution that has stopped moving.
The fractures are real — and they don’t prevent any of this
None of this dismisses the genuine difficulty of denominational division. Whether the Eucharist is the actual body of Christ or a memorial is not a question that resolves itself over shared coffee. Whether apostolic succession confers legitimate church authority matters enormously to the traditions that disagree about it. These are real fractures, not stylistic differences, and pretending otherwise in the name of unity is avoidance dressed up as humility.
But not one of those disagreements prevents a single act of service. The Catholic and the Baptist cannot agree on what happens at the altar. They can absolutely agree to fix a neighbor’s roof. The doctrine divides. The need unites — if you let it. And the need requires no joint statement, no merged institution, no flag. Just someone showing up.
Institutional unity, the kind the “Join or Die” article imagines, would require resolving arguments that have resisted resolution for five hundred years. Service-based unity requires nothing of the kind. It is available this afternoon, to anyone willing to look at who is next to them and ask what they need.
The flag is asking the wrong question
The author of “Join or Die” is asking something genuine: why is the church so divided, and what does division cost? That deserves a serious answer. But the answer is not a flag, a merger of institutions, or an endowment that keeps the appearance of community alive long after the community itself has gone.
The answer is a casserole left on a porch. A hospital room sat in. A bill paid anonymously and never mentioned. And when the neighborhood changes, when the need moves on, when the pews go quiet and stay quiet — the honest answer is to close the doors, release what remains toward wherever the need has gone, and trust that the work was enough while it lasted.
Unity isn’t what happens when churches agree. It is what happens when someone sees a need and meets it — without keeping score, without storing credit, and without a reserve large enough to keep pretending the work is still happening when it isn’t.
It just needs to show up today.