Unity is one of those words we’ve quietly downgraded. Most of the time, when people say they want unity in their family, their team, their church, their community, they really mean they want everyone to get along and stop disagreeing. That’s a useful baseline, but it’s a long way short of what unity is actually meant to be.
A few definitions worth holding alongside each other:
- The state or quality of being one. Oneness.
- The act of forming a whole from separate parts.
- Something complete, made up of distinct parts.
- Mutual agreement. Harmony.
- Uniformity of purpose.
Real unity isn’t sameness, and it isn’t just polite tolerance. It’s the harder, deeper work of becoming one without erasing what makes each part of the whole distinct.
Authentic unity, in my experience, is always rooted in relationships. There’s a short Psalm that captures this beautifully.
“Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity!” (Psalm 133:1)
The Psalm goes on with two striking images. Unity is like precious oil running down a head and onto a robe. And unity is like the dew of Hermon falling on the mountains.
Three qualities sit underneath those images.
Unity is pleasant
The Psalmist’s first word for unity is pleasant. It feels good. It’s enjoyable. There’s a delight in being part of something genuinely united. If your version of unity is exhausting, joyless, or held together through gritted teeth, it probably isn’t unity. It’s compliance. Real unity has a warmth to it that you can feel when you walk into the room.
We need to actually enjoy it.
Unity is precious
The image of oil running down Aaron’s head sounds odd to modern ears, but in its original context it was the marker of consecration. Costly, perfumed oil set apart for sacred use. Unity, the Psalmist is saying, is that kind of thing. Not cheap. Not casual. Not something you take for granted.
We need to value it.
Unity is permanent
The dew of Hermon is the third image. Dew forms quietly overnight when the air cools and moisture condenses on whatever surface is exposed. It’s gentle, persistent, and renewable. It comes back every morning.
Unity, when it’s healthy, has that quality. It refreshes. It returns. It outlasts individual moments of friction.
We need to protect it.
A few questions worth chewing on, in light of all this:
- What does this kind of unity look like in the place you live?
- In your wider community?
- In your family?
- In your marriage?
- In you, when you’re alone?
The Paddington effect
A film I unexpectedly love for its theology of unity is Paddington 2 (2017). On the surface it’s a children’s film about a bear with a marmalade obsession. Underneath, it’s one of the most moving recent stories about how one kind, hopeful presence can change an entire community.
Paddington gets things wrong constantly, but his goodness is contagious. Even when he ends up in prison, he softens the hardest characters in there. Aunt Lucy’s line, repeated throughout, is the through-line: “If we are kind and polite the world will be right.”
When Paddington is taken away from the Browns and the neighbourhood, the loss is felt instantly. The street feels colder. The relationships feel thinner. The unity that had built up around his quiet kindness is suddenly visible by its absence.
That’s how unity tends to work. It’s noticed most clearly when it’s not there.
It starts inside you
Here’s the part that often gets skipped. Unity in any community starts with unity in the people who make it up. If you’re at war with yourself, fragmented in your own mind, body and spirit, you’ll struggle to be a source of unity for anyone else.
Paul writes about this in three different letters, and they’re worth reading together.
“Be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” (Romans 12:2)
“We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)
“Our citizenship is in heaven… who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body.” (Philippians 3:20-21)
Three different angles on the same idea. Mind, spirit, body. The whole of us is being slowly remade into something more whole, more integrated, more unified. And as that internal work happens, it starts to spill outwards.
The dew effect
The thing about dew is that it doesn’t fall in dramatic showers. It quietly settles overnight, on whatever happens to be exposed to it. The next morning, things are wet, soft, and ready for the day.
That’s what hope-filled, internally unified people do in the communities they’re part of. They don’t make grand speeches about unity. They just keep showing up, kind, hopeful, present, and the atmosphere around them begins to change. The people exposed to them, day after day, find themselves becoming part of something that’s pleasant, precious, and permanent.
So when people are around you for a few hours, what do they walk away carrying, and is it the dew you’d want to be leaving on them?