Nicaea 2025 Introduction: Why 2025 is Special for Christians Around the Globe
This post is part of our Faithfully Asked Questions series, in which we provide answers to common questions of faith. In this Lenten season, we are presenting a special series on church unity, as we celebrate the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed and a shared Easter date for all Christians in 2025. Have a question you want answered? A story to contribute? Email Matt at mcomer@ststephenumc.net.
This year marks a special moment of commemoration for Christians across the globe. 2025 brings us several ways to celebrate and emphasize church unity and remember the historic Council of Nicaea way back in AD 325.
Church unity, of course, has been a defining feature of the United Methodist tradition so it should come as no surprise that organizations representing Methodist and Wesleyan traditions have come together with Christians across the denominational spectrum to celebrate this year.
In 2025, we will celebrate:
- the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea and
- the creation of the Nicene Creed,
- the church’s adoption of a commonly calculated date for Easter, and
- our opportunity to remember Easter together on the same day this year regardless of our Western or Eastern traditions.
There’s a lot to unpack here, so in this edition of Faithfully Asked Questions and over the next few weeks through Easter, we’ll explore some of these topics individually. My hope is that you’ll walk away with a better understanding — not only historically, but also spiritually — of church unity and our common creed(s) of faith. I also hope you’ll gain a better appreciation of the journey our faith forebears took to get us here and our role now in fulfilling Christ’s prayer that we “may all be one” (John 17:20-23).
We start in this introduction by first defining some key concepts and providing an historical background.
What do we mean by the “church universal” and church unity?
This key concept of a “universal” church is mentioned in the Nicene Creed, which we’ll cover in more detail in a future edition. Near the end of the creed, we confess our belief in “one holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” A similar phrase appears in the Apostles’ Creed. Occasionally, we’ll recite one of the creeds in our services. When we do, you’ll usually see an asterisk next to the word catholic and a note with the word “universal.” We make this notation because of the easy confusion that might come from the word’s use; most people associate the word “catholic” with the Roman Catholic Church or, to a lesser extent, the Eastern Orthodox Church. No matter our traditions or denominations and the rules we create to define who’s “in” and who’s “out” of the Church, the word catholic always means the same thing. It was originally a Greek word meaning “universal” or “general.” It applies to and defines generally the entirety of the Church. To be a Christian is to be part of Christ’s one, universal Church.
This has always been the case and always God’s intended desire and will for God’s people. Jesus prays that we “may all be one” in John 17. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul compares the Church to a single body, an assertion he repeats in Ephesians, telling us that we are of “one body” with “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” Just as God — the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — is united as one, so, too, is the Church united as a single body.
This understanding of the catholicity, or universality, of the Church reflects our shared Trinitarian doctrine and understanding of God, which was, among a variety of other issues and questions, confirmed at the Council of Nicaea.
How has the church experienced unity and disunity over time?
United Methodists cherish our unity. Our denomination itself is the result of a movement toward Christian unity popular among a variety of denominations in the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries. Modern-day ecumenical conversations and initiatives for full interdenominational communion is a remnant of that unity movement.
The people of the Church have attempted to find unity for nearly 2,000 years. Along the way, we’ve discovered a great deal of diversity. In some eras, this diversity (of belief and thought, but also diversity like sex, ethnicity, race, and other personal characteristics) has resulted in greater understanding and a sense of common purpose. We see the benefits of diversity in the early Church, for example, as Jews join together with Greek-speaking Jewish people and gentiles (or “non-Jewish” people) to create communities of faith, or in some of the modern era’s greatest efforts for humanitarian relief, supported by ecumenical unity and partnership. In other eras, however, this diversity has drawn ire or become the impetus toward division, like debates over LGBTQ inclusion in many denominations.
The Council of Nicaea is the first Church-wide effort to reach a consensus on what it means to be united as a people called the Church. As we’ll discover later in this series, this council successfully created the first version of our Nicene Creed; most Christians across the globe and in a wide diversity of denominations claim this creed and are part of mainstream “Nicene Christianity.” While the Council of Nicaea modeled what unity could look like, it also modeled, for the first time, the ways in which the Church creates wide-reaching rules to exclude others. Over time, some of these excluded beliefs have come to be called heresies and the people who adhere to them heretics.
The Church’s unity has been tested throughout history. Early separations and disagreements revolved around debate on the nature of Christ or the readmission of “lapsed” Christians who bent under the weight and fear of Roman persecution. Disunity resulted in the Great Schism of 1054, when Latin-speaking Christians in the West and Greek-speaking Christians in the East mutually excommunicated each other. The Protestant Reformation of the 1500s further divided Western Christianity. American Christians faced disunity in the lead up to the Civil War, with several denominations fracturing north and south over the issue of slavery. Even today, we still struggle to find unity amidst a disunited, highly partisan, and hyper-polarized political and cultural climate.
2025’s commemoration of Nicaea, the Nicene Creed, the common calculation for Easter, and our shared date for Easter celebrations across traditions gives us a unique opportunity this year to reflect on what kind of Christians we want to be — how we want to be united with our fellow Church members in this local church and our unity with fellow Christians across this city, state, nation, and world.
Stay tuned for additional installments in this series as we make our way toward Easter.