As we think about the early church, even though reading the epistles, it is still sometimes tempting to be idealistic about the world in which those believers lived and the manner in which those churches functioned. “If only our church could be like those early New Testament churches…,” we suggest. Yet in such longings we forget that many of those epistles were written to address real problems in those churches.
It is not very different from the parent of a two-year-old who believes that her child is the only one who misbehaves and needs daily discipline. That’s not quite so!
One of the real problems in the early church was conflict that resulted in disharmony and disunity in the church. Multiple examples exist: public lawsuits involving one believer suing another (1 Cor. 6:1ff), divisions in the church resulting from gluttony and drunkenness at fellowship meals (1 Cor. 11:18-22), attitudes of biting and devouring (Gal. 5:15), unspecified interpersonal conflict (Phil. 4:1-3), and disruptive distinctions over social class and status (Js. 2:1-9).
As Paul reminds the Ephesians (2:11-22; 3:2-13), the cross was offered to produce reconciliation not only between God and man, but also between believer and believer. What a grand demonstration of the power of God when two warring, angry, and hostile people are brought together in Christ to form a unified and harmonious church fellowship!
To know such reconciliation is to know something of the unfathomable riches in Christ (Eph. 3:8). For those who are in Christ, it is not anger and conflict that create a poor testimony in the world. What breeds contempt for the church from the world is not that believers walk into conflict, but that they remain in conflict and evidence no more ability to resolve difference and reconcile after sin than unbelievers do.
And lest we think we are immune to such ills, we do well to remember the apostolic founding and involvement in the early churches where the aforementioned sins took place. And we would be wise to look around the contemporary landscape and see churches that are disunified and angry.
In fact, Sunday evening, after preaching on the wonder of God’s revealed mystery of Jews and Gentiles reconciled into one church, I read of a nationally known church that had taken what essentially was a vote of non-confidence for a pastor that it had elected only six months earlier (they ended up voting to keep him). I know nothing of the inner workings of the circumstance, who has sinned and who has not, who has attempted reconciliation and who has not, only that the name of Christ has been publicly denigrated in that community. That sorrowful community airing of the church’s soiled laundry led the pastor to write the following in a letter to the local newspaper:
…whenever you see any of us who claim to be “Christ followers” behaving in a manner that is unlike Jesus, please forgive us. And please let that be a reflection on us, and not on Him. As imperfect people, we will continue to let you down and disappoint you, but Jesus will never let you down–he will never disappoint you. This conflict has “given the world the justification they’re looking for to disbelieve the gospel”, and I am sorry.
He’s right. And that could be any church in any community. So let us continue to pursue the peace and reconciliation with one another that God has made available through Christ.
Words of Grace 