It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
When we call for unity in the church, t’s not just that we don’t want dissent. It’s not that we hate division, although we do that.
Unity is far more than the nay-sayers being gagged or rebellion put down. The old joke goes, “You can tie two cats’ tails together and throw them over the clothesline and you’ll have union. But you will not have unity.”
Unity is a positive quality.
When the oaring team refers to perfect moments in their boat, they do not mean the time they won a race. A perfect moment is when they feel all eight oars in the water together, working in perfect harmony.
At such moments, we’re told, the boat seems to lift right out of the water. Oarsmen call this the moment of swing.
In an old Readers Digest article, Olympic oarsman John Biglow says what he likes most about that perfect moment is it allows one to trust the other rowers. A boat does not have “swing,” he says, unless everyone is exerting equal effort, and only because of that was there the possibility of true trust among oarsmen.
The athletes put it in the form of a formula:
Equal Effort + Synchronization + Lift = Trust.
Now, if we apply this to the body of Christ–a local congregation is usually a lot more than eight people, but regardless of the number–we will see what lessons of harmony and unity it yields.