There is a Peanut’s cartoon; Lucy demands that Linus change the TV channel, threatening with her fist if he doesn’t.

“What makes you think you can walk right in here and take over,” asks Linus.

“These five fingers,” says Lucy. “Individually they’re nothing; but when I curl them together like this into a single unit they form a weapon that is terrible to behold.”

“Which channel do you want?” Asks Linus. Turning away, he looks at his fingers: “Why can’t you guys get yourself organised like that!”

Today is the Sunday in the middle of the week of prayer for Christian Unity and it seems to be a good time to take a moment to reflect openly and honestly as to where we are as a church when it comes to working ecumenically, when it comes to our attitude to Christian Unity. And as I thought this through I thought that as an area where the ministers work together, we are good at that, we take our attitudes to our ecumenical friends very seriously, we pray on a weekly basis for one of the ecumenical churches in the area and we have an attitude amongst us as ministers which is open and honest and friendly and a desire to work together.

And I know that for myself, as one of the ministers in the area. What I realise I don’t know – and I just don’t know, so this is not a criticism, I just don’t know – I don’t know how many members of this church work with members of other churches on projects or initiatives that might be described as part of our mission, outreach and commitment to the local community.

What I do know is that the formal links with the formal body that oversees the ecumenical relationships around here are almost non existent. We have no person that represents St Nicolas on the Council for Churches Together in Earley and East Reading. I very rarely go to those meetings either, so please don’t think I am criticising the laity. I am just as lamentable as the rest of you!!!

I get the papers and think: ‘Oh! Good grief! Still not doing anything with that’. And I file them! There always seems to be a clash of meetings on the night that they meet. And I always seem to go to the other meeting. The next meeting of Churches Together is on the 31st January and, yet again, there is a clash with another meeting. So we are not good at linking at the formal level, church to church rather than minister to minister. Church to church, is, I think it is fair to say, non existent.

We are good, though, in our intentions. At our last Church Council meeting here in St Nicolas in December we had a discussion about the fact that when we do anything for the community, be it local, national or international, we should seek to do that ecumenically. That should be one of our guiding principles. After a good discussion, that went through “on the nod”. It was taken as – well that’s obvious isn’t it!

So that’s good, that portrays our desire to be ecumenical. There is though quite a gap between our desires and some of our realities.

However, the schools work, with which we are heavily involved – at the trustee level and at the staff level and at the volunteer level and at the use of these buildings level – couldn’t be better.

So when we take an honest assessment of where we are ecumenically in this neighbourhood, we see that in the practical out workings of unity we are very much involved, and our desire to be ecumenical would seem to be strong, yet at the level of policies and decision making and meetings and formal links, it just isn’t happening.

That, though, is unity at a functional level. And there is something more important than that. There is something about unity which is more significant than whether I go to meetings of ministers from the local area and whether we have a representative sitting at a meeting four times a year at Churches Together in Earley and East Reading.

The Peanuts cartoon helps us to get into that a little bit. Like the fist, which exists because five fingers are attached to it, we are united. The churches of this area are united. The churches across the world are united. There is only one church, because we are ‘the Body of Christ’. Paul’s imagery of the Body of Christ is very important when we consider this understanding of unity. We have a unity which has not yet been achieved. We are divided and we do have our divisions between us on women priests and women bishops, on what the Eucharist is or isn’t, and how we might understand the role of bishops, of elders and of leaders – as well as all sorts of other matters.

There are divisions between us as churches, yet we are also united as the Body of Christ.

The foot cannot say to the hand ‘I don’t need you’. The nose cannot say to the spleen ‘I don’t need you’. The Baptists cannot say to the Methodists ‘We don’t need you’. The Catholics cannot say to the Moravians ‘We don’t need you’. The Orthodox cannot say to the Quakers ‘We don’t need you’. Our diversity is positive, because it brings in all aspects of the body. And far be it from me to say which part of the body is the Anglican Church and which part of the body is the Quaker Church and which part of the body is the Roman Catholic Church.

Despite our divisions and our differences we are one. Our unity is not centred around getting on with one another; it’s not centred around having friendships between one church and another; it’s not centred around agreeing doctrinal statements nor even sharing worship or writing deep theological tomes together.

Our unity is centred on the one part of the body that no one church can occupy, because the head of the body is Christ, and we are all limbs and organs of the one body of which Christ is the Head.

That is the unity that we have. And that is the unity that we strive for to make that unity more visible. And whilst it is very good and very right and very proper to make our unity more visible, there is an risk. In some respects we need our divisions, to keep us focussed on the unity we have in Christ, the head of the body. If we did get it right, if we did merge the Anglicans and the Baptists and the Moravians and the Lutherans and the Catholics and the Quakers, if we did become The Church, we might lose our focus that Christ is the head of the body. The danger is that we might begin to think that we’ve got it ‘right’ and that we’re the important ones now because we are the body united.

Christ is the head of the body in which we find our unity, calling us from here to who knows where. For me, the metaphor of our unity is found in the Eucharist. We can only become part of the body if the bread is broken. We can only share in the wine, if the wine is poured out. And the most ironical aspect of unity is that we will only discover our unity through that brokenness.