Divisions? Or Revived in Love?
Church Conflicts
At times church conflicts are symptoms of buried personal pain seeping out sideways. For example, a friend of mine was abused in childhood. She grew up to mistrust all male authority figures. She challenged all male pastors. The husband of another friend was misogynistic; he was also a divinity school graduate whose issues had wrecked his own attempts to pastor. Nevertheless, he thought his education and experience automatically qualified him to advise his pastor. His views on women in the ministry caused great pain in the church. Still another friend with unresolved identity issues was musically anointed. He wanted ministry for himself. He didn’t care much about other people unless it was politically expedient. Because of his true gifting he thought himself chosen to bring revival to the congregation—if only the pastor and board would do things his way. Still another friend seemed comfortable only in hierarchical social networks; she needed to know who was above her and who was below her; equality was difficult for her. Each of these people influenced others within the church—at the same time. How did the pastor handle it? He had his own issues; he hated conflict and tended to trust only those with demonstrated loyalty—so he his response was mixed. His messages were indirect. Conflict was often swept under the table and outwardly ignored—but He loved God, had a true calling to his work, persevered, trusted and prayed.
What happened? Eventually, those who truly loved the Lord saw their painful difficulties as opportunities to draw near to God, to heal, and to grow. As the pastor grew, his wise interventions, confrontations, and counsel brought increased healing and understanding. A few left and took their unresolved problems with them. The church continues to grow in health and vitality.
It sounds like a storybook ending, almost too good to be true. But it is true. God loves us so much that when our painful personal issues bubble up and become ugly within a community that is committed to realizing Jesus’ love in their midst, what Satan meant to destroy us, God uses to strength and mature us.
Christian love and community is not natural, it is supernatural. The Christian message of brotherly love is constantly under attack by the natural man. When love falters, it’s natural to become carnally self-protective, self-promoting, judgmental and even spiritually abusive. It’s natural when misunderstandings increase, pain spreads, and differences turn into disruptive brouhahas or divisive splits. Christianity is not natural. It is spiritual. God’s love in Christians is not self-protective or self-promoting; it trusts, hopes, believes, encourages and nurtures. When our attempts to love go awry, it’s an invitation to confess our failures and turn to God to seek His love and our growth and healing.
Learning the Hard Way
I learned the hard way, by choosing dysfunctional churches and carrying my own unresolved issues into them. Seeking to follow God took me on a stumbling pilgrimage through a wilderness of spiritual abuse and misunderstanding. More than once I’ve blindly walked into sick situations. Eventually, when God choose my church for me, I choose to agree with him and began to heal and grow. It took years to unwind the deceptive godless patterns of culture, education, relationships and personality and to begin to learn His ways of freedom in faith, hope, trust and supernatural love.
It all began with a sincere longing for the vital community I imagined in the early New Testament Church. My zeal for Jesus had led me to search for Him on the more passionate religious fringes of Christianity. Seeking love, I found relationships that recycled my own unresolved issues. Within a fifteen-year span I attended five dysfunctional churches. They weren’t toxic for everyone all of the time, just for some of us some of the time.
I was a main-line denominational protestant who found friends and the baptism in the Holy Spirit in a healthy Roman Catholic charismatic community in 1972. Dissatisfied with the country club atmosphere of my own family church, where our pastor thought regeneration was not Biblical and his assistant screamed in my face that speaking in tongues was not our way, and doubts in the resurrection were voiced from the pulpit one Easter Sunday morning, I started looking around.
This was back in the 1970’s and 1980’s during the Shepherding Movement, where pastors were telling young congregants who they should marry and where they could and couldn’t work. They also imposed their own parenting standards on compliant congregants. Drawn by their vibrant praise and Biblical faith, I ended up in the Shepherding Movement.
I was a single mom with three children and no child support. I’d been raised to respect authority—all authority. When a pastor told me not to sell Avon products and instructed me to destroy my children’s Beatle’s records, I complied. (It’s a wonder they ever forgave me.) I was quiet when a fellow believer was strongly advised against dating me. I obeyed when the pastor told me to call the elders before the doctor when my children became ill. But sitting on a folding chair in a circle of men, the church elders, at a special meeting called one Sunday morning to excoriate me for leaving an unhealthy job, I finally knew they were wrong, very wrong.
Three churches along my journey soon dissolved, leaving painful cuts and tears in the unity of Christ’s body. For a season, I was so bruised by well-intentioned believers who wanted to deliver and help me that I got worse, not better. Fortunately, the Holy Spirit was teaching me and watching over my way. As we turned to God, He transformed all the divisive difficulties driving wedges between brothers and sisters who had once linked arms to sing, “Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love,” to sift us, teach us, and grow most of us up in love.
Recently, it all came back to me as I visited with two friends whose hearts were hurting over a church misunderstanding. My friends’ current distress felt like my own past. I identified with their pain and started writing. I wanted to encourage them to overcome their pain and find Jesus’ love. Disjointedly, I addressed first one friend, then the other. I longed to help, to comfort, to teach, to exhort and remind them of truths they already knew. I spent all day writing. My invisible audience changed. I addressed my old enemies too. I soon realized that I was writing to myself as well.
I’m web publishing some of these thoughts in hopes that my words might touch others who are confused and pained by persistent unlove in a religion founded by Jesus, the truest Lover to walk on earth. Do not expect a cohesive narrative. I separate points by bullets.
Insights, Warnings, Exhortations and Encouragements
• Most Christians I’ve known who’ve been mixed up in church misunderstandings have a cache of pain—they hurt before any contention came to the surface and they still hurt afterward.
• Our pain often draws us closer to Jesus. Do you recall Psalm 119:67? “Before I was afflicted I didn’t keep your word.” But sometimes pain turns us away from Jesus, often without knowing it. We may begin to judge and blame others for not loving us, for quenching the Holy Spirit, or for not recognizing our gifts and place in the body of Christ. We may try to spiritualize our suffering as sharing in the sufferings of Christ. At times we do suffer with Christ, more often we don’t; but I’m sure He always suffers with us.
• We may be in danger of deceiving ourselves if we spiritualize our sufferings. Yes, rightly received and given to Christ, suffering can be an ever-present thread of gold throughout our lives. Prayer doesn’t always make it go away. It is often unjust and exhausting. But there’s another vein of gold—it’s Jesus’ living within us. His life is never frustrated or unfulfilled. His life is purposeful. His life is purposeful inside of us. He died to fill us with Himself, to give us His joyous peace, to comfort us by the Holy Spirit, to bring us into a richly fulfilling love-union with Himself and our Father.
• Divisiveness in the church begins always begins inside a human heart and by a human choice. (Granted, at times it’s prompted by old nick, but only when people agree with the devil against Jesus.) Divisiveness is also understandable. When we take our focus off Jesus and His love, His life begins to drain away. Our spiritual vitality weakens. It’s often unnoticed—particularly if the anointing of the Holy Spirit continues to flow through us to minister to others. We tend to think, “If God is using me, I must still be Ok.” It may fool others, but in our heart of hearts we know that we are backsliding, that our character is in jeopardy. Our ministries may continue, a residue of grace. But our life with God becomes vulnerable, our cutting edge connection with His Holy presence is not quite the same, all freshness is gone. With divided hearts we pray and share with a professionalism, not with His strong, fresh, immediate, in-the-present love.
• In a sapless condition, any pent up, stuffed, unhealed pain seeks release. Without Jesus’ perfect love to cast away our fears, our hearts get all stirred up with restlessness at the tiniest suspicions of danger. Primal self-protective instincts may turn into defensive fight or flight patterns. Uncertainties can trigger unreal projections. We get suspicious and face life not with courage and warmth but with an uneasy anticipation that more pain and trauma is lurking around every corner. And some of us actually hide our darkness inside while outwardly asserting that we believe in a God who said, “Do not fear, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Luke 12:32 NKJV We do believe, don’t we? Oh Lord, help us.
• Without insight or until fully healed (and/or delivered) the very same pain and need for Jesus that draws us to Him and feeds our longings for revival can also begin to feed our fears. It can trigger unloving thoughts and words and judgments that separate us from our church families and from His care. Beware of all judgments of others, for our judgments separate us from God. We cannot be joined to God and judge others at the same It is impossible. That’s why Jesus urged,
Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.”
— Matthew 7:1
and Paul repeated,
. . . you are inexcusable, O man, whoever you are who judge, for in whatever you judge another you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.
— Romans 2:1
• Fears and insecurities can transform even well meaning believers into control freaks, witches if you will, for at the basis of witchcraft is the attempt to control outcomes. Perfect love trusts.
• Self-protectiveness inside the church family erodes our capacity to love, to trust, and to submit to our brothers and sisters in faith. It feeds the desire to be recognized as right and urges us to explain, defend and justify ourselves; it buttresses a judgmental caution about others and a zeal for our own personal visions of Christianity and the church. We think the church is ours, not God’s.
• When a church family is earnestly seeking God and conflicting issues surface and boil over into misunderstandings, the godly solution of more love, more forbearance, more mutual submission and continuing in prayer only works if it really is mutual submission and everyone involved humbles themselves before God and one another. As soon as one side or the other decides to take charge most negotiations and discussions turn into power plays. Power plays mark a giant departure from God and His ways. God’s true servants seek His solution. In the cross, He will guide them.
Sometimes being in the cross, that is dying to self, ends up in crucifixion. Remember Jesus, who we follow? He picked up His cross daily to die to Himself and live to God and He ended up nailed on one. Initially it looked to all the world l like humiliation and failure. Sometimes, being in the cross, God steps in to vindicate and establish His chosen man or woman. If you recall, when Moses authority was questioned, he didn’t quarrel or call in the troops to keep his leadership; he let God judge and vindicate him. When Jesus authority was questioned, He referred His detractors to the witness of His Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit.
• When we lose peace and joy in any controversy and are tempted to judge, blame, and accuse others, then we are guilty of sending away the Holy Spirit. At times He withdraws; at times He will uphold His own authority. No matter our motive or the issue—be it for more hospitality, a fund drive, purity of doctrine, addressing sin in the church, or encouraging revival, you can be sure that God will not vindicate us if we take matters into our own hands and break our relationship with Him.
• Part of growing up is learning to trust Him humbly with our place within His body and learning to willingly submit our opinions to His word and our church family. If we don’t, we ourselves will stop, quench, and stifle God’s Holy Spirit—even if we are right.
• In contentious atmospheres, even well meaning truth can be spoken harshly; it’s like salt or acid, not a healing balm. True insights get twisted. When prophetic words that are intended to heal and release divine energies from Heaven are spoken merely to point out wounds and weaknesses, they bring death, not life. Most of us know our own shortcomings; we’ve lived with ourselves for years and know all too well our character faults; we’ve suffered and cried out to God for help. There’s no love in point fingers and telling what’s wrong unless you can suggest a solution and are fully willing to become a part of it.
• When believers forget that merciful loving-kindness covers a multitude of sins, we stray far from the compassions of Jesus. Not only did He admonished us to take the logs out of our own eyes and submit to one another in love, He also told us to love ourselves. Are we loving ourselves when we get emotionally embroiled or fretful and anxious over changing others? Do our concerns bring death and doubt or restoration and hope to the vitality and health of life together in His Kingdom? Loving ourselves means getting our eyes off of others and setting our sight on God until He fills us with His righteousness and peace, His wisdom and joy, His merciful loving-kindness, not only for our own sinful souls but also for the multitude of sinners around us.
• When we judge others, love leaves. It is impossible to judge another and be in union with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit by nature cannot participate in our judgments. He is Holy. It’s moot to discuss whether or not we send Him away or He withdraws from us. The reality is that He is temporarily gone. Although He may beckon, call, and continue to convict, He will not fully return until we welcome His full rule over our repentant hearts. Repentance is simple, it just means changing our minds (and hearts).
• When others judge us and try to change us, it drains love; it’s confusing and disheartening. When judgments fly around, our spirits may falter. If perchance we’re thrown off balance, faith may wane; when doubt gains ground, it’s a short slide into forgetting that the Holy Spirit is always close by, waiting for us to turn to Him for strength. He has all the stores of grace we need to forgive and all the capacity and grace needed to pray for our accusers—both enemies or well-meaning but insensitive friends. (Remember Job’s story.)
• If we neglect the Holy Spirit we’re more easily deceived; when divine discernment dulls, we can act like know-it-alls and not begin to know that we’re clueless. Been there; done that; so I can speak.
• It’s tragic when people who purport to want the same thing turn away from Jesus, the head of the church, to look primarily upon one another.
• Remember, Jesus is emergent, not static. Nobody can second-guess Him. It’s presumption to think I might know or be the solution to another person’s problems or needs or attitudes. Only Jesus gives accurate revelation into others. Quite often, when we’re enmeshed in controversy, His revelation says nothing specific about the difficult people in our lives. He simply wipes away our anxiety, resentments, bitterness and judgments and solves our problems by revealing His love for them. As soon as we see it, we love them too. He Himself becomes our way. In His glorious light, all conflicts resolve into His truth, His beauty, His peace and love.
• When Jesus actually does give true revelation and discernment about a divisive situation, it’s usually with the faith to believe Him for a Kingdom outcome, to trust that His good will overcome all evil. His death and resurrection testify to it. Whatever folly others are about, our only business is to follow Him in the fullest confidence that what He purposes will come to pass—we may not live to see it, but we can believe it. He never fails. Our place is to believe. Holding that place of faith is an intercessory prayer for His Kingdom to come, His will to be done.
• Reconciliation is not always possible. Sometimes two different arguments or facts cannot both be true, two people cannot agree.
• Reconciliation that leads to restoration can be hard. It can be humbling. It may mean forgiving irreparable damage. It requires dying to self, holding fast to faith, and keeping our eyes on Him. It means facing fears that we’ll be hurt or betrayed again; it means refusing to judge; it means maintaining His joy and peace and truly loving our brothers and sisters in the fullness of truth. Before anyone smiles back or reaches to return a proffered hand, we must tear down every barrier to love within our own hearts and souls. Only then do we make room for His restoration.
• It’s easy to forget that I’m usually half of the problem. It’s easy to distance myself from my enemies, turn them all into tyrants, terrorists and sociopaths to justify my own hardness of heart. If my heart is right with God, His gift of discernment will point out any true tyrants, terrorists and sociopaths. Then the rules change. As Mother Angelica once observed, they deserve a good kick in the you-know-where. Truly evil people understand power. God promises to be with us in the battle.
• Most often our enemies are men and women with uneasy scars on their conscience. And wonder of wonders, when our hearts are right, in God’s wise planning, he often uses us to bring peace to them. As Matthew 5:9 promises, Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God. Just as the destroyer uses us ordinary people to divide and splint the body of Christ, God uses us to bring understanding, healing, unity and love.
• Sometimes we need reminding that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Ephesians 6:12 These principalities and powers are at work in the atmosphere and at work in us. But how does Jesus over come them? By moving through us in an opposite spirit. I’ll never forget the story (I think perhaps R.E. Miller told it) of a team of young street evangelists in a proud South American city. No one would listen to them. No one. Realizing that a spirit of pride governed the city, the young people humbled themselves and got down on their knees. They acted in an opposite spirit. Immediately the very passers-by who had indifferently ignored them began reaching out for their tracts.
• When we’re hurting it’s hard to recall that our fight is against principalities and powers, not against flesh and blood. In pain it’s quite human to blame another person. It started with Adam; he blamed his woman and his woman blamed the snake. Loving your enemy when you’ve just been kicked in the gut is not human, it is supernatural; it is the life of Christ expressing Himself in and through us.
• Jesus dismantles high spirits of pride as well as our own human pride by working first within our own hearts. Broken, humble teachable spirits are open to the message of Christ.
• Pride feeds an anti-Christ spirit. then the anti-Christ feeds pride. In egoistic self-importance we deify ourselves; we loose sight of what it means to let God be God. Such a joke. God is God. He is not changed by our idolatries. We are; glorifying our own thoughts and opinions, we doubt God more and more. In a climate of faith, judgments and accusations shrink and there’s room for reason and mutual problem solving. As faith wanes, hurtful judgments and accusations grip us and grow strong. The destroyer is always ready and active to undermine our unity with one another and with Jesus. He’s working to shred the fabric of community in Christ and destroy the righteousness, peace and joy that thrive when believers are one with God and one another.
• When differences are not respected and mutually submitted to the Holy Spirit, when we are too impatient to wait on God for loving consensus about His plans, we give the destroyer weapons to intensify the differences. Self-righteousness thrives, love flees; religious spirits enter the fray.
I speak from experience. I laugh about it today, but one afternoon a sister and I decided to come clean, to be honest with each other. We accused each other of the same thing. We were clearly both in darkness not light. We were hateful to one another. Jesus’ beloved disciple John once wrote,
He who loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no cause for stumbling in him. But he who hates his brother is in darkness and walks in darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.
— John 1:10-11 NKJV
In this the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest:
Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is he who does not love his brother. For this is the message that you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.
— John 3:10-11 NKJV
As brothers and sisters in Christ we are commanded to love, encourage and strengthen one another. In our church families, we expect acceptance, loving kindness, understanding, and mercy. Perhaps that’s why it hurts terribly when we meet with rejection, indifference, cruelty, misunderstanding and judgment from fellow believers. Satan and his demonic network will always try to address real needs and weaknesses and to use truths in ways that twist our innards. The destroyer knows just how to turn our vulnerable and wounded places into targets. Our Lord knows just how to protect our vulnerable places, strengthen us in weakness, and heal our wounds.
• Disappointment is another enemy. Most frequently, we want to be friends with our accusers and they want to be friends with us. A bit like the kindergartner who hits the child he wants to play with or the third grader who saves his ugliest faces for the girl he thinks is cutest of all. Sometimes we sense they they might be gifts to us, might be placed in our lives by God to stand alongside us, to strengthen and encourage us with a supportive helping hand. If they weren’t so damnably accusing of us—if only they loved us. But then, how much do we love them?
• Do you get tired of hearing people say they need God? I used to. “Fill my cup, Lord” got tedious. Our cups are full, by faith. Today I’m not tired of hearing we need God. We always need God. Especially when it comes to love.
• What about squabbles that arise because we don’t know the full story and fill in the blanks? A wounded woman once went to her pastor and poured out her fears. She jealously accused me of having an affair with someone in the church. It was a lie. The pastor believed her and instead of confronting me and the gentleman in question, he took the issue to the pulpit and excoriated me in his sermon one Sunday. Fortunately, most of the church knew it was false and someone wisely set the pastor straight. My second brush with filling in the blanks wasn’t as easy. A treasured Christian friend believed lies about me. I could not, in good conscience, set her straight because telling the truth would have hurt her family and mine. Sadly, she went to the pastor, he picked up her offense, held it again me and destroyed chances for reconciliation. Another time, with good reasons, I disliked and distanced myself from someone. In conversation I mentioned his past choices to another person he knew and caused great pain and misunderstanding. Years later I learned that he had almost immediately repented in agonizing and life changing sorrow for the choices I’d judged and held against him. I did not know the whole story. Our own critical and unloving judgments and opinions can fill our minds and influence our imaginations when lack of information leads us to fill in the blanks. When that happens, we’re more likely to be deceived than discerning. We get used to our own thoughts, come to trust them, and easily forget that love
thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
— 1 Corinthians 13:6-7
• When we turn our disappointments and betrayals of hope and faith over to the Holy Spirit, He turns all losses, controversies and pain into lessons that mature and complete us. He transforms difficulties and hindrances into opportunities. Every obstacle and defeat is an opportunity to grow in faith and trust. Every failure of love a lesson in humility, a chance to die to self and let the true Helper, the Holy Spirit, take over and transform us in His love.
Leaving the Past Behind; Turning to Revival— The Goal
Anyone who has read this far must be asking why is she writing all this? What’s really bothering her? What does she want?
I want revival. Revival. It’s all about wanting revival. Life. Wanting life. And the waste of seeking for less—the waste of perhaps even writing this rather than seeking God for it.
We already know from history that revivals are birthed with prayer.
Revivals seem to be linked to the faith of a person or a group of people. Often those who pray for revival are quite hidden away. Are we disputing and judging or are we praying?
We also know that no revival comes by our own efforts or vision. Revival comes from God when the conditions are met. It often appears to be totally spontaneous—bursting forth in many places simultaneously. (Revival is happening now, over the globe, one by one, within the Muslim world.)
We know from history that all revivals are different. The Billy Graham Crusades launched a revival, but so did Azusa Street. Charles Finney brought revival wherever he preached, but the revival of the Jesus Movement on the California beaches in the 1960’s and1970’s happened many places at once. Revival in Rwanda in the 1930’s and 1940’s was a quiet move within the hearts of believers, but recently the African revivals sparked by the faithful witness of Reinhold Bonnke have been exuberant, filled with healing and creative miracles.
We also know from history that no revival can last without humility and love for one another.
Can revival begin within our own hearts? Today? Now?
Yes! It can. If we repent of pride, opinions, entitlements, and judgments. If we set our squabbles aside and lay open at Jesus feet every hindrance to embracing His truth and love. If we determine to forgive and love our enemies. If we plead for His love when we have no love of our own to give. If we make the choice, of our own free wills, to believe. And if we can’t believe, if we beg and plead and hold on Him for more faith. If we seek Jesus for His will, not our own. If we believe He will give us His strength to endure the unendurable. If we put our hands into His with surrender and allow Him to lift us, we will rise up free to love. Lord, help us. Have mercy. Answer our prayer.
Choose us, Lord. Grows in us, Lord; Shine Your life, that is the light of the word through us.
Dissolve our differences in Your great love.
Joins us together with (as the old song says) chords of enduring love, chords that will not, that cannot ever be broken.
