The Sphere: Unity, Perfection, Completeness

My fellow church members and I are faced with a vote on a sensitive motion with the potential for civil war as members choose how to vote. Many a church has been torn asunder over far more mundane votes than the one my church faces. My childhood church split when I was a teenager, and the pain of watching the adults who had raised me in Sunday school fight viciously and then leave to form a new church shattered my faith in organized religion. When I went to college I left the church proper, not God, just the church and I didn’t return until my mid-twenties.

Now, with teenage daughters of my own, raised in this church the stakes seem higher for me personally because I know they are watching me, and the other adults in our church to see how we handle this situation. There have been heartfelt pleas for unity, but what in the world does that look like when a body of Believers must choose which side of the motion to vote on? Does it mean being nice to one another? Does it mean just going along with the Elders as Christ went to the Cross? Does it mean I can't say what I think? What about after the vote; will the 'losers' leave never to be seen again?

As I was walking and praying for the ones on the other side of the issue I asked God to help me picture what unity might look like when they will vote one way and I another. The image that popped to mind was a sphere, a shimmering sphere like the bubbles my children once loved to chase.

What I remembered is that the sphere is defined as the set of all points that are equidistant from a central point (the center) by the distance (radius) and the points on the surface of the sphere exist in pairs, each having one exactly opposite it across the diameter of the sphere.

Aha! Can I picture the individual members of my church as points on the sphere with Jesus Christ at the center? Now I can see how opposites exist yet make up the whole sphere, and the unifying center point being Jesus Christ. Looking at it this way, the enemy is not my opposite but the enemy is outside; the enemy is Satan.

My idea is no so farfetched. A Google search on sphere AND perfect turned up many results. The 16th-century architect, Andrea Palladio held that

"the most perfect and most excellent" form was "the round form, since of all forms it is the simplest, the most uniform, the strongest, the most capacious" and "is the most suitable for rendering the unity, infinity, uniformity and righteousness of God. "

Cicero wrote in De natura deorum (On the Nature of the Gods):

"Two forms are the most distinctive: of solids, the sphere... and of plane figures, the circle... There is nothing more commensurate than these forms.”

Well, even so each member is charged with evaluating the evidence and casting a vote on October 24, 2010, and such a vote requires me to choose a side on the issue, but not sides. The ones who vote opposite me are still part of the sphere with Christ at the center. The true enemy is outside not across the aisle.