Integration comes from the latin integer, meaning whole, intact, complete, untouched. It is the process of brining separate parts together into a coherent whole.
Integrity comes from the same root. Before it came to mean moral honesty, it carried the sense of wholeness, soundness, being undivided or intact. We still use it when we talk about structural integrity talking about a substance or building… all its parts hold together.
Psalm 26 begins with the rather audacious:
“Vindicate me, O LORD, for I have walked in my integrity (blamelessly)…”
And then, even more strikingly:
“Prove me, O LORD, and try me; test my heart and mind.”
There’s something deeper happening here than simply saying, “I’m a good person.”Integrity is about wholeness. Congruence. An undivided life. It is about who I say I am and how I actually live becoming aligned and the Psalmist almost sounds unbearably confident: “I have walked in my integrity.”
I’m not entirely sure I’d be brave enough to stand before God and say, “Go on then, God. Test me. Examine my heart and mind.”Because most of us know there is a gap. A gap between what we believe and how we behave. Between the values we proclaim and the choices we make. Between Sunday worship and Monday morning. Between the person others see and the person we know ourselves to be or indeed want to be.
Integrity isn’t pretending that gap doesn’t exist.It is allowing God to bring our lives increasingly into alignment.
And this takes us beautifully into Romans:
“Let love be genuine.”That might be Paul’s definition of Christian integrity in four words. Not, ‘say loving things’. Not, ‘believe the correct things about love’. Not even, ‘belong to a community that talks about love’. But, let your love be genuine.
And then Paul gets painfully practical about what genuine love looks like.
Honour one another. Contribute to the needs of others. Welcome strangers. Bless those who persecute you. Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep. Associate with people of low position. Do not repay evil for evil. Live peaceably. Feed your enemy.
Paul seems unwilling to leave love as an idea.
Love has to acquire hands and feet. It has to turn up in the way we speak to people, the people we make room for, the grudges we relinquish, the tables around which we make space, the people whose joy we celebrate and whose tears we are willing to share.
In other words, integrity is when the love we proclaim becomes the life we practise. Then Matthew 28 becomes particularly interesting. Jesus doesn’t say: “Go and make people who agree with you.”
We live in such a time of culture and faith wars, political misalignment and tension… this is not the get out jail free card for calling evil, well evil, it is an invitation to a deeper journey, because Jesus says;
“Make disciples… teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”
Discipleship isn’t simply acquiring Christian beliefs. It is learning a way of life. We see this way of life in a God who goes out and finds the man hiding in the cave surrounded by his demons, the blind sitting by the well, feels the touch of the woman failed by medicine and community and in the busyness and throngs of the people. The risen Jesus sends these rather imperfect disciples to do it. Significantly, Matthew tells us that when they encounter him:
“they worshipped him; but some doubted.”
I think that this is an important detail. They are commissioned while faith and doubt still coexist. Jesus apparently does not wait for perfect disciples before entrusting them with his mission.Which means integrity cannot mean having everything perfectly sorted before we are useful to God.
It cannot mean never doubting, never struggling, never getting something wrong.
Instead, perhaps integrity means bringing our whole, complicated selves into discipleship and allowing what we encounter in Christ continually to reshape how we live.
It is not perfection.
It is integration.
It is allowing the Jesus we worship to shape the lives we actually live.
For some of us, becoming whole has meant learning that integration does not require us to erase our differences. I know something of that through queerness: the discovery that faithfulness did not require me to divide myself into acceptable and unacceptable parts — Minister over here, husband over there, faith here and my body somewhere else. Integration has meant allowing those parts of myself to belong to one another, and discovering that God was not waiting for me to become less myself before I could become more whole. Perhaps that is part of what integrity asks of all of us: not sameness, and certainly not perfection, but the courage to bring our whole selves before God and allow grace to weave together what we, or others, have learned to keep apart.
This has an implication on what we mean when we say we are saved, or the word salvation. When we see Jesus act of salvation as integration, wholeness rather than merely an acquittal for sin done and words said. Christ doesn’t simply declare something about us; Christ draws our fragmented lives toward wholeness.
And when we bring these three readings alongside one another, perhaps we can hear a movement between them:
Psalm 26: Test me. Is my life integrated?
Romans 12: Let love be genuine. This is what an integrated Christian life looks like.
Matthew 28: Now go and live it — and invite others into this way of life.
And there is a question sitting underneath all of this that I think is worth taking hold of and shaking around a bit:
If someone encountered only the way I live — before I told them anything about what I believe — what would they conclude about the God I worship?
This is not a question of shame, it is a question of limits! What limits are we imposing on our God, by limiting the experience, diversity and life of ourselves, of others and of faithfulness? How might our actions, words or deeds separate us from displaying the love that we are called to through our God and to our neighbour?
This post is from Rev James Baker’s Substack here.
