IMAGINE THAT YOUR church is deeply divided over some issue (and for many of you, that won’t take much imagination). The argument could be about anything: doctrine, policy, budget, church discipline, worship music, or something really important — like what color the new carpet should be. Sad to say, people who are supposed to be brothers and sisters in Christ don’t always handle such things well. As much as we preach about and believe in the love of God, we may struggle to embody that love when conflict erupts.

To an outsider, the conflict may seem to be over something trivial. But to an insider, how the controversy is handled and the stances people take may symbolize something deeper than the issue itself. When a congregational matter needs to be decided, people can debate endlessly over the relative merits of going this way or that. But just beneath the surface, what escalates a conflict may be anxious doubts about one’s place: Do I belong here? Am I safe? Do I have a voice? Does anybody care about anything I say?

In any argument, there’s a difference between being right and needing to be right, and the latter can get in the way of the former. When two parties can’t come to terms with each other, one or both may simply write the other off as pigheaded or tragically misinformed. Within the church, conflict can lead to an acrimonious split in which a large number of people simply leave, sometimes even starting their own congregation, seeing themselves as the ones who “got it right.” But even what seems to be an amicable parting of the ways can carry the sting of judgment: “Okay, fine. You go ahead and do things your way. As for me and my house, we’ll do things God’s way.”

Again, we can’t know exactly what happened in John’s community that caused people to leave, and I want to be careful about how we read — and possibly use! — his words of condemnation. On the one hand, he doesn’t call out the secessionists by name; he prefers to speak in generalities about false teaching and belief. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine that his readers would have taken his words in any other way.

Throughout the letter, John pulls no punches when talking about the folks who stirred up controversy and then left. Here’s a sampling of what we’ve already seen. They are self-deceived (1:8) and walking in darkness (2:11), in part because they love the world too much (2:15). They deny that Jesus is the Christ — indeed, John repeatedly refers to them as anti-christs (2:22). They are liars, claiming to have a relationship with God, but refusing to obey his commands, particularly the command to love one another (2:4, 9-10; 3:11-15; 4:20-21). They are sinful, lawless, and children of the devil instead of being children of God (3:4-10). They are false prophets who deny that Jesus Christ came in the flesh (4:1-3). And because of all this, they stand condemned: they do not have eternal life, no matter how much they might argue to the contrary (5:11-12), because that life is only in God’s Son, whom they refuse to acknowledge properly.

Okay, John. Now tell us what you really think…?

Before we come to the final section of 1 John, therefore, I want to draw together some observations and principles that apply John’s teaching to our own experiences of church conflict. Here are five statements to ponder in your own congregational context:

First, some conflict is probably inevitable. Jesus’ own disciples argued with each other; one betrayed him; one denied him three times. Churches founded by the apostle Paul experienced numerous theological and interpersonal problems. Why should a community under the leadership of the apostle John be any different? Or perhaps more to the point: why would we expect our own communities to be immune?

Second, however, not all conflict is created equal. It’s one thing to argue about what kind of music to play and sing in a worship service — and of course, we can do that with a surprising amount of self-righteous fervor. But that’s not the same as the truth of the gospel itself being at stake, as in whether people believe that Jesus was God in the flesh, or that we need to be cleansed by his death on the cross. We may fight as if the entire edifice of Christian belief will come crashing down over less central points of doctrine, but it might help to discern where we have some room to agree to disagree.

Third, some conflict may stem from worldly ideas. The secessionists, it seems, wanted to have their theological cake and eat it too, promoting a version of Christianity that blended in their Gnostic ideals to the point that the Christ of the gospel became unrecognizable. Today’s individualistic “you do you” culture poses similar problems — which leads to the observation that…

Fourth, there is such a thing as “God’s way.” Would any of us, for example, really want to live in a society that had no laws whatsoever, that allowed for no limits on “you do you”? We may argue with the application of the law in specific cases, but hopefully would not argue for the abandonment of law altogether. Now push it a step further. If God is truly God, if God is the Creator and not a human creation, doesn’t that God get to define how things should be?

But fifth and finally, we must be humble and loving in declaring what is or isn’t God’s way. What may be absolutely and irrefutably clear in Scripture to one person may not be to someone else, and it isn’t necessarily because they refuse to see the truth. Note that we don’t have to abandon the idea of divine truth to admit that our own understanding of it might be flawed. We need to recognize the ways in which disagreement can both take us by surprise and then quickly spur us to the kind of defensiveness that doesn’t bode well for honest and loving conversation. If we are to be the kind of people John is teaching his readers to be, we have to recognize how tempting it is to simply assume that we’re doing things God’s way without having to ask if we actually are.

I don’t know for certain, but I like to think that John’s readers were, for the most part at least, loving and humble Christians. That’s why John had to reassure them: they had compassion for the people who left and were hurt by their angry departure. When he encouraged them to obey the commandment to love, he was telling them to keep doing what they had already been doing.

If or when we ever find ourselves in the midst of church conflict, I hope he would be able to say the same about us.