The New Room has been sharing a Friday reflection each week. We hope that these short reflections act as a point of spiritual focus, enabling a moment of quiet thought and prayer.

We are delighted to have David Carter contributing our reflection for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. David is a local preacher in Bristol and has spent much of his life working for and writing about Christian Unity.  

Reading John 17: 20-26. 

This passage is foundational for the search for Christian Unity. Its original context was, Jesus’ prayer for his disciples, and we are likely to be familiar with the words ‘that they may all be one’. But have we thought as carefully about the implications of the immediately following words? ‘as you, Father are in me and I also am in you, may they also be one in us’. What Jesus is praying for, is that all his followers might enjoy the same depth of relationship with each other as He and the Father enjoy.  This is a relationship of extraordinary depth of closeness, totally enwrapped in the affirmation of the Father and in total reliance upon Him. Jesus wants his followers to engage with each other in similarly total depth and mutual commitment.  

We may wonder how we can do this, seeing that we are so different  in the ways we  pray, worship and serve Christ. Yet the fact is that we are all called to love and affirm and support each other, however much we may differ. We have only one Lord, one faith, one baptism, whereby we become brothers and sisters by adoption. We come, with our Jesus, to serve the one, who is His Father and our Father, in adoration and obedience, that all may be one in the one Church that, in His will, we all belong to. We come that all the promises of the Father may be fulfilled in us and the New Creation be brought to perfection, through our loving co-operation with all His plans for the new Jerusalem. 

Prayer for Unity of all humanity in the charity and truth of Christ. 

‘Father, we pray for the unity of all Christians. May your spirit penetrate all our souls and draw us closer to Christ in holiness. Today, we pray for the unity of all humanity in the charity and truth of Christ. Give all your children an ever greater holiness and lead us along your path, to unity in the love and truth of Christ’.