What makes a church grow, thrive and healthy?

Is it excellent preaching? Is it an awesome children’s ministry, or an amazing praise team? Is it warm, friendly fellowship amongst the believers?

All of these things are wonderful to see and experience in a local church. But what is essential for a growing, thriving, and healthy church is to keep something that was given as a gift to each true believer of Christ.

And this gift we are to keep, to guard, and to eagerly maintain, is the unity of the Spirit. It sounds so simple yet it’s so hard to do.

So the question is: How are we to keep the unity of the Spirit? We'll see in the passage from 1 Corinthians 12:12-26 that Paul uses the analogy of the human body to help the church see what keeping the unity of the Spirit practically looks like, and what it’ll take to achieve it.