Carrie McKean grew up in a rural Texas town where expressions like “cleanliness is next to godliness” and “forgive and forget” were common. As a girl, she would look through the Bible in search of these truisms, only to find that they were nowhere to be found. Even now, years later, McKean finds herself, as she puts it, “clinging to some pithy proverb with the spiritual ardor that ought to be reserved for chapter and verse.”

In a recent CT article, McKean examines two such statements:

You are the company that you keep. Birds of a feather flock together.

In the past, McKean writes, she thought of those remarks as relatively compatible with Scripture’s call not to forsake the gathering of the saints (Hebrews 10:25) and to live in harmony with like-minded people (Philippians 2). But then, McKean’s pastor offered another perspective that prompted her to understand the Biblical call to like-mindedness not as an encouragement to think like one another but to think like Christ together.

As we build friendships and pursue unity, may we do so not as those who must all have the same opinions, but as those who are actively working to have the mind of Christ both individually and together.