Segmented Kingdom...

So I was sitting in church on Sunday and listening to a great message. We were talking about missions and the things that were being done all over the world when something caught me in the wrong way. The speaker made a statement that “Now there is a presence of the (fill in the blank denomination) church in northern Africa. Now this is fine except that it broke my heart a bit to see that our denominationalism has fragmented us so much that we have to differentiate where “our” church is in the world. It’s totally fine to have differences in doctrine and church practices by why do we have to look at this from the standpoint of “churches” or “denominations”? Why can’t “The Church” be in Northern Africa? I wonder if it confuses people in other countries when we decide to bring our particular flavor of Christianity and separate it from the others? We are always looking for points of difference instead of unification. This was happening even in the scriptures. Paul mentions this in 1 Corinthians. People are differentiating their particular flavor of Christianity. “I follow Paul, I follow Apollos, I follow Mark Driscoll, I follow Shane Claiborne...” This is a call for us to not follow one teacher, or to differentiate ourselves from other churches or denominations but to follow Christ. Jesus is the teacher that we follow and after that we need to see and take all things that are true in all of these other places. Well my mind has wandered a bit, but this is how it works so deal with it. Just something that has been bouncing around in my head since Sunday. Grace and Peace.