You're the Eye? More Like You're a Skin Cell

Another opinion column piece!  This week's thoughts on the issues facing Christianity is less controversial but just as important, oh and a lot shorter.  The topic is Church unity. 

Imagine the global church is the body of Christ.  Not metaphorically, but the actual physical body of Christ while he was on earth.  Mathematically, if you divided up his body into little sections so that each piece represented a single church with an average congregation of 75 then the pieces would be about as big as 1/20th of a drop of blood and an individual would be about the proportion of a single nerve cell (compared to the global Church of 2M+ people).  So if we think about the body trying to move without any of its pieces connected or communicating how will that go?  How much of a difference can a fraction of a drop of blood make compared to an entire body?  Or a single cell compared with a whole human?  A human can do things in its environment.  It can make calculated movements of limbs.  A 20th of a drop of blood, well… all it can do is soak into the carpet and hope to be a stain.  Imagine a house where three people and a single nerve cell all live together.  The people can talk and shake hands, they can wake one another up, cook food, build a shed, change a light bulb.  And what about their roommate the nerve cell?  He would have zero influence.  They'd probably never even be aware of his existence let alone be affected in any way by his presence. 

This is sort of a weird analogy but it is more or less mathematically accurate.  The fact is, as individuals or even individual congregations of churches, we are never going to accomplish much on earth.  Think of what we could get done if all two billion of us were working together with Jesus as the head of our body?  We could tackle immense problems like poverty, hunger, justice, and culture.  We could bring entire nations under the authority of Jesus with a single project.  We could put an end to slavery, prostitution, corruption, environmental destruction, and then go on from there.  My imagination isn't nearly robust enough to come up with it all.  If we want to be the generation to fulfil the destiny of the Church, this is what we are going to have to do.  We are going to have to figure out how to assemble as a single unit under the headship of Jesus.  This is the future of the Church. 

What do you think?  Is it possible?  Can the earth will be filled With the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea?  How can we do it?