One, But Not the Same: What Jesus Actually Prayed For

Why understanding other Christian traditions is an act of fidelity, not disloyalty.

If you are already a committed Christian — if you belong to a church, hold to a confession or creed, and believe that your tradition reads Scripture faithfully — why would you spend time learning how other Christian traditions think? What is the point of understanding what Baptists believe about baptism if you are Presbyterian, or what Pentecostals believe about the Spirit if you are Anglican, or what Catholics teach about the Lord’s Supper if you are Reformed? Doesn’t studying the disagreements just breed confusion? And isn’t a certain kind of commitment to your own Christian tradition actually a virtue?

Yes. It is. And I am not going to argue you out of it.

What I am going to do is take you to a prayer — the last prayer Jesus prayed before his arrest — and let that prayer ask you a question.

The Night Before the Cross

John 17 records a prayer of Jesus. It is his longest recorded prayer, and he prays it making his way to the cross. By verse 20, he has already prayed for himself and for his followers standing with him. Then he turns — and this is where it gets personal for us — and prays for everyone else:

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one — I in them and you in me — so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

He is praying for you. He is praying for the person in the pew next to you. And — did you know — he is praying for Christians in traditions you most disagree with.

The question is not whether this prayer matters. The question is what it actually means.

What Kind of Unity?

The first thing to notice is that Jesus does not pray for organizational merger. He does not pray that all believers would gather in the same building, share the same name, or agree on every secondary doctrine. The history of forced religious uniformity — every attempt to achieve visible oneness by institutional control — is not what Jesus had in mind, and the results of those attempts in church history should warn us away from that reading.

What Jesus prays for is something deeper and more demanding than that. Look at the model he gives: “just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you.” The unity he is asking for is patterned on the relationship between the Father and the Son — a unity of mutual indwelling, of shared life, of one will expressed through distinct persons. It is not sameness. The Father is not the Son. But they are one.

This distinction matters. Unity and uniformity are not the same thing. Uniformity means everyone looks the same, talks the same, and does the same. Unity means people who are different are held together by something — or Someone — greater than their differences.

The unifying bond Jesus identifies is not a creed, a polity, or a worship style. It is the presence of the Father and the Son dwelling in believers: “I in them and you in me.” The unity he prays for is a spiritual reality that already exists wherever someone has been genuinely united to Christ. It is not something the church creates. It is something the church is called to recognize.

Paul Knew This Too

The Apostle Paul picks up exactly this idea in his letter to the Ephesians. He writes to a church that was diverse — Jewish and Gentile believers who had different histories, different practices, and different worldviews and beliefs about nearly everything. Paul pointed to and emphasized what was known to be true without making light of their real differences:

“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

Seven times he says one. Theologians have noted that he groups them in threes — one body, one Spirit, one hope (gathered around the Holy Spirit); one Lord, one faith, one baptism (gathered around Jesus Christ); and then the culminating one: one God and Father of all. The structure is clearly Trinitarian.

But notice what Paul does not say. He does not say that achieving this unity is our job. He says there is one body — present tense, declarative, factual. The unity already exists. What believers are commanded to do is “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3). You cannot keep something you have not yet created. The Spirit’s unity is already real. The calling is to live life in the Body of Christ in this kind of unity as if it was real because it is.

Here is what follows from this: every believer in Christ — regardless of what tradition they belong to — is already part of the same body you are part of. Not symbolically. Not aspirationally. Actually. Right now. This is what the New Testament teaches.

The Body Has Many Members

Paul extends the image in Ephesians 4:7–16, and the point he makes there is important. Within the one body, there is genuine diversity — not because the church failed to get its act together, but because Christ deliberately equipped it that way:

“But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it.”

Different gifts. Different emphases. Different callings. The same Lord.

Think about what this means for the history of Christian traditions. When the Reformers recovered the doctrine of justification by faith alone, they were not inventing something new — they were functioning as the Spirit’s instrument of correction to a body that had drifted. When the Anabaptists insisted on the visible holiness of the gathered church, they were pursuing a truth about discipleship that comfortable state-church Christianity had softened. When the Methodists took the gospel into the fields and the mines of England, they were carrying a truth to places that the settled parish structures had not reached. When the Pentecostals, at the turn of the twentieth century, pressed the question of the Spirit’s present activity, they were asking a question the rest of the body had largely stopped asking.

None of these movements were right about everything. But each of them had discovered something important from the Scriptures for us to learn as we grow in the one faith already given. And none of them can be fully understood in isolation from the others — because they were all, in different ways, responding to the same Scriptures, the same Spirit, and the same Lord. That faith — the one entrusted to all of God’s people — is what binds them together and binds us to them.

“Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people.”

Why This Matters for You

So here is the answer to the question we started with.

Studying other Christian traditions is not an act of disloyalty to your own. It is an act of fidelity to the prayer of Jesus. When he prayed that we would be one, he was not praying that we would all dissolve into the same shapeless middle. He was praying that we would be bound together in him — distinct, like the persons of the Trinity are distinct, but genuinely one.

To treat the rest of the body as irrelevant is to act as if Jesus’s prayer was answered only in your tradition, in your corner of the church. That is a claim I honestly would not want to make.

I am not asking you to abandon your convictions, nor treat all traditions as equally faithful to Scripture. Honest people will disagree on which are more or less faithful. What I do ask is something simpler. Take seriously the possibility that the Spirit has been active and working in the whole Body of Christ, and not just the part you occupy.

Understanding what other traditions believe — and why — will very often send you back to your own tradition with sharper questions and clearer convictions. It will help you see which of your beliefs are genuinely biblical and which are simply inherited habits. It will help you recognize brothers and sisters you did not know you had. And occasionally, if you are willing, it will show you something you were missing.