This Sunday, guest Pastor, Darren Whitehead, continued our Summer sermon series, Defiant Joy: A Study Through Philippians, and focused in on Paul’s call to unity in the church. These verses reveal a conflict between two women in the church at Philippi, but Paul pleads with them to have the same mind in the Lord. This points us to the truth that the beauty of unity is rooted in God’s ability to transform our desires towards His. Community is not an absence of conflict, but the presence of God’s reconciling Spirit. However, there are cultural challenges that try to stand in the way unity. The church today faces political, racial, generational, and economic divides, but in the Lord there can be a unity in the body that crosses all of these lines. As believers, our loyalty to Jesus should be greater than our loyalty to any political party, we should identify first and foremost as a follower of Jesus, we should honor the generation before us and not look down on the generation after but build them up, and we should extend care within the church regardless of financial standing. These counter-cultural postures foster unity in the church and creates access to new authority. Pastor Darren referenced Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit fell on followers of Jesus, and before the Spirit came, it is said that the believers were ‘all of one accord in one place.’ It was after unity was already happening that God poured out His Spirit, and the early church was born. Unity is so important to God that He commands a blessing where His people live in unity with one another. We each have the ability to disrupt unity, but we also have the ability to repair it, and this is God's call to us today.