Conflict Is A Thing In Jesus' Church #church 06

I’m the youngest child of four, and my family, like many of your families, is a blended family.  

My father divorced his first wife at the age of nineteen after bringing my two older brothers into this world.  The good news for me is that my father stayed married to my mother, his second wife, for the rest of his life.  My sister and I came from that marriage. 

My father’s parents had been divorced as well.  This meant, like many of you, that I had three sets of grandparents.  I had one set of maternal grandparents, and two sets of paternal grandparents.   Most of my grandparents passed away in the ‘70s and ‘80s before I ever met my wife Becca, so she never knew them.  

In the early ‘90s, when Becca and I were planning our wedding, my brother asked if Grandma Esther was going to be invited to our wedding.  Becca turned to me and said, “You have a grandmother that’s still alive?  I thought they were all dead!”  Stop.  This is one of those self-awareness moments that sneak up on you and announce to everyone within earshot that you have a glaring blindspot. It’s also where you stop and ask yourself, “How did I get here?”

That’s how my fiancé Becca learned that I had one grandparent left alive - my father’s mother.  

One of the many ways divorce complicates our lives is the bitter animosity that can exist between the exes.  Grandma Esther - my father’s mother - had absolutely nothing to do with Grand-daddy Dutch - my father’s father - her ex-husband. But it wasn’t enough that they couldn’t stand each other: she didn’t want my father to associate with my grandfather - his father - at all.  She had cut my grandfather out of her life, and she wanted us to cut him out of our lives as well.  

That’s how we came to a devastating split in our family sometime in the mid 1970s, when I was still very young.  My father decided to spend Christmas at Granddaddy Dutch’s house, and Grandma Esther - his mother - gave him an ultimatum: either you spend Christmas with us, or don’t bother coming around anymore.  My father, who was never a man to back down from a direct challenge, accepted her terms and disowned her.  Today, we’d say they cancelled each other.  

That’s how we came to that awkward family moment in 1992, when my fiancé discovered I had a grandmother that was still alive that she’d never heard about.  Here’s the hard truth: I didn’t give my grandmother any thought.  She was never on my mind.  This wasn’t intentional on my end; the break between her and my dad had happened when I was so young, that I’d grown up as though she were dead.  I had no relationship with her, and I couldn’t really tell you anything about her, other than the fateful family legend of their catastrophic split back in the 70s.  

For the record, we DID invite her to the wedding, and she DID attend, but I never really did get to know her, and relations with her were strained her entire life until she died several years back.  

I’m telling this story because it’s indicative of what a lot of us have experienced: the inability to handle conflict in a godly way, and the devastating consequences that naturally follow.  But this is nothing new for Jesus’ Church or for my family. 

Paul & Barnabas

There’s this odd little story in the Bible out at the end of Acts 15 that has fascinated me for decades.  Acts 15 is most well known for the Jerusalem Council that takes place that changes the face of Christianity for all time.  In a nutshell, the Jerusalem Council is where a group of prominent Jewish Christians get together to decide what parts of the Mosaic Law the non-Jewish Christians need to practice.  The ground shaking, life-changing decision the Council reaches effectively dismisses 95% of the Law for non-Jews.  That’s what Acts 15 is famous for.  




But in the last several verses of the chapter, we see this:

Some time later Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us go back and visit the believers in all the towns where we preached the word of the Lord and see how they are doing.” Barnabas wanted to take John, also called Mark, with them, but Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with them in the work. They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company. Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus, but Paul chose Silas and left, commended by the believers to the grace of the Lord. He went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches.

Acts 15:36-41

What in the world?  Isn’t that wild? Paul and Barnabas, two of the most famous apostles in the Bible, have this nasty little free-for-all, and it ends up IN THE BIBLE!  Man, can you imagine having a fight with your friend or your significant other over which fork you’re supposed to use for the salad or the entree and it ends up in the best-selling book of all time?  

The Apostle Luke is credited with writing the book of Acts, and I wonder if Paul and Barnabas ever knew he included this. “Luke, seriously man, did you have to include THAT in there? That wasn’t our finest moment.”  I find Luke’s honesty in recording the not-so-flattering details of what happened to be weirdly encouraging. 

Luke just tells us the facts.  He provides no commentary, and gives us no clue as to what he thought about the story or why it was included.  A little commentary from Luke, like, “Hey, don’t do this” or, “Here’s the moral of the story,” would’ve been nice.

An Ugly Conflict

Here’s what’s happening in this story:  Paul and Barnabas have finished their first missionary journey and planted a bunch of new church communities all around the Mediterranean.  They’re celebrating.  Not only that, they just had the epic Jerusalem Council that I mentioned earlier. 

Paul and Barnabas decide to get the band back together and head out for a second journey to go back and visit all of the church communities they planted.  That’s when things go sideways.  

Barnabas wants to bring John Mark with him.  John Mark is Barnabas’ cousin, and apparently, John Mark punked out during the first missionary journey in the town of Pamphylia.  Paul, who has no love for quitters says, “I’m not taking your loser cousin with me again.”  Barnabas, whose nickname is “the son of encouragement,” is not encouraged by this attitude.  They have a “sharp” disagreement.  The word for “sharp” here suggests it was a passionate, very loud, and angry argument.  It ends with them saying, “Fine!  If that’s the way you see it then you go YOUR way and I’ll go MINE.”  The greatest power duo of the early church is broken up over a petty argument about WHO was going to go with them on the next journey.  Paul ditches Barnabas and takes Silas and they head out for Syria.  Barnabas ditches Paul and takes his cuz, John Mark, and they head to Cyprus.    

Sadly, this is the last time we officially see Barnabas in the Bible.  Luke moves on and follows Paul’s adventures and Barnabas fades into the background. 

Again, Luke doesn’t editorialize the conflict, so it leaves us with a lot of unanswered questions.  Why did Luke include this story?  Did they ever make up?  Was Paul being irrational?  Who’s fault was it?  Was Barnabas playing some sort nepotism card here?  We simply don’t know.  

We DO know that Paul speaks kindly about both Barnabas and John Mark later on in his letters, so it seems they got over it, or made up some time along the way.  It’s not definitive, but guess it’s better than nothing.    

So what can we learn from this text?

First, I think we can clearly see that:

Conflict is a thing in Jesus’ Church.

We tend to think of conflict as something that should be avoided.  We think of it as an unwelcome interruption, a smudge, a stain on our community.  If we have a disagreement or an argument with someone, or even worse - if someone dares to disagree with us, it’s not OK.  It should not be.  

Sometimes, when we think about our local church community, we have this picture of it as this perfect, sitting-around-a-campfire-with-a-guitar-singing-worship-songs kumbaya, holding hands, and just sitting in God’s presence beaming his love out to the world kind of community.  We always agree.  We’re always kind.  We never have hard conversations, because we don’t need to.  We don’t need sugar for our coffee on Sunday mornings because our church community is already so sweet.

But this kind of community is a myth. If you find a community that has no conflict, something’s wrong.  They’re hiding something and it’s going to be ugly when it finally gets dragged out into the light.

What would happen if we just agreed that conflict is a normal part of being human in this fallen world?  We all have opinions.  We all have opinions we feel strongly about - it’s really not that special.  We think we’re right about things we really believe.  You might even feel like, “David, no I AM right about this thing - I can FEEL how right I am.”  When we meet someone who disagrees with our strongly held belief, conflict is likely to happen.

Let’s normalize this:

People are going to disagree with you in any given church community.

Many local church communities are trying to build a community that’s the manifestation of God’s love in the world.  But the more people you have, the more diverse opinions there will be - which leads to conflict and disagreement that has to be resolved in a godly way in the midst of everything else that’s going on.  

That thing you care deeply about right now: someone in your local church community disagrees with you.  They disagree with you in a common, run-of-the-mill, everyday disagreement kind of way.  It’s really not that special.  Even if you grit your teeth and clench your fists and hold your breath to show how serious you are about this belief, there will still be people in your church community who disagree with you.    

Even more:

You are going to disagree with people in this church community. 

You probably already have.  You may disagree with me right now. You may disagree with your lead pastor, your small group leader, or one of the other pastoral figures in your life.  There will be people in your church  community who express opinions contrary to yours.  They still love Jesus as much as you do. Who knows? They may even love Jesus more than you do!  They’re passionate about their beliefs and they think they’re right, just like you.  You’ll find yourself disagreeing with them, and once again, this is completely normal.

This means we need to be spending time learning how to handle that conflict.

The question I’m asking is:

How do followers of Jesus disagree in a godly way?

Paul and Barnabas had a big disagreement that broke up the band.  It was an ordinary run-of-the-mill disagreement that they failed to handle in a godly way.  It led to the number one casualty of ungodly disagreement: broken relationship.  Even without Luke’s commentary, we can give Paul and Barnabas a solid “F” on how they handled this conflict.  They really blew it. 

In the second post of this series, I’ll dig into how to handle conflict in a godly way.  

What conflict are you dealing with in your church community right now?

When you disagree with someone in your church community, how do you handle it?

What do you think of the idea that conflict in your church community is unavoidable and totally normal?