General Maximus comes to Rome dirty and shackled. This is not the way it’s supposed to be. Where’s Rome’s legendary pageantry to greet one of her war heroes—the heraldry, the burnished armor, the laurel crown? Where’s the honor due him?
Maximus comes a slave.
That’s the premise of the movie Gladiator. Through a maze of events, Maximus goes from celebrated warrior, favorite of one emperor, to despised traitor, nemesis of another. He becomes a fugitive, then caged slave, then unvanquished gladiator. His growing fame in the arena brings him to the sport’s pinnacle: Rome’s magnificent Coliseum to face her elite warriors.
The games open with a re-enactment of the battle of Carthage. The gladiators, all foot soldiers, are cast as the hapless Carthaginians. It is a stage for slaughter. They are marched out a dark passageway into brilliant sunlight and met with a roar of bloodlust.
Maximus, their leader, shouts to his men: “Stay together.” He assembles them in a tight circle in the center of the arena: back-to-back, shields aloft, spears outward. Again he shouts, “Whatever comes out that gate, stay together.”
What comes out that gate is swift and sleek and full of terror. Chariot upon chariot thunder forth. War horses pull, with deadly agility and earthshaking strength, wagons driven by master charioteers. Amazonian warrior princesses ride behind and with deadly precision hurl spears and volley arrows. One gladiator strays from the circle, ignoring Maximus’s order, and is cut down. Maximus shouts once more: “Stay together!”
The instinct to scatter is strong. But Maximus exerts his authority, and they resist that impulse. The chariots circle, closer, closer, closer. Spears and arrows rain down on the men’s wood shields. The chariots are about to cinch the knot. Right then Maximus shouts, “Now!”
The gladiators attack, and decimate the Romans. Commodus, the evil emperor, caustically remarks to the games organizer: “My memory of Roman history is rusty, but didn’t we beat Carthage the first time?”
Whatever comes out that gate, stay together.
Deep down, most people long for someone who refuses to mince words or hang fire.
That echoes what Jesus prayed for us: “May they be brought to complete unity” (John 17:23). And he promises that the gates of hell will not overcome his church.
Whatever comes out that gate, stay together.
We know that. We long for it. We pray for it.
And we miss it, almost every time. The instinct to scatter is strong. Not only that, but what’s worse, we often turn our weapons inward. “If you keep on biting and devouring each other,” Paul warns, “watch out or you will be destroyed by each other” (Gal. 5:15).
Why are Christians so fractious? In 15 years as a pastor, I’ve seen a lot, and heard more: deacons in fisticuffs, screaming matches at business meetings, gossip-mongering that borders on lynching.
I know a church once teeming with 400 joyful members, feisty and plucky as Gimli. In less than six months they dwindled to a few bedraggled survivors, skittish and peevish as Gollum. Years later, they’ve still not recovered. The issue? A small faction wanted to push through a children’s program too hard and too fast.
In another church one home group came to believe the rest of the body was apostate. The issue? The group deemed the child-rearing practices of most church families to be slack and indulgent. They made a crusade
of it. They circulated petitions, they called clandestine meetings, and denounced the leaders. They harassed any who disagreed with them. Soon all the energy of the church was consumed by the issue, and eventually the board and pastor resigned.
From the first disciples on, it’s been civil war and rumors of civil war. The house of prayer has often been a bazaar for bonepickers and axe grinders.
We have a fondness for cat fights.
How do we turn them into good fights?
We have four disciplines, four spiritual orientations, to cultivate for such a time as this.
A spirit of heartbreak War, even when its cause is noble, can swiftly descend into pettiness and spite. Righteous indignation can turn, on a whim, into puerile fantasies of vengeance.
I’m not immune. Conflict makes me irritable and anxious. I might turn the other cheek, but usually with clenched teeth. I can worry a bruise into a hemorrhage. I have acted in cowardice here, belligerence there. I’ve been wishy-washy one moment, rash and churlish the next.
The only antidote is to open myself to genuine grief. I need to taste God’s heartbreak, to know his sorrow over the tragedy of his children fighting one another.
I have three children, Adam, Sarah, and Nicola, all still young. I take no joy in their battles, their exchange of taunts and insults. I don’t secretly or openly side with one against the other.
It breaks my heart, is all.
Paul tells us that bitterness, rage, anger, brawling, slander—all our incivility toward one another—grieves the Holy Spirit.
It breaks God’s heart, is all.
I try to let it break mine, too.
A year ago we completed and moved into a new building, the culmination of years of work and prayer and sacrifice. It felt like crossing the Jordan into Canaan. Then the “troubles” began. The leadership came under heavy criticism, fed by hearsay. The mood of celebration turned sour. People murmured. They grew nostalgic for “the good old days.” Oneness broke into tribalism.
I became discouraged and defensive. It crept into my preaching—a shrillness, a mounting note of sanctimony and scolding. Every Monday I mentally composed my resignation letter. It was a masterpiece of wounded pride, a last testament of martyrdom.
Then God gave me a glimpse, through one woman, of his heartbreak. She came into my office with an armload of grievance. I heard her out. Then I asked, “Now is there anything that gives you joy?” She looked at me, stricken. She started to weep. She told me about how much pain, physical, emotional, relational, she suffered daily. She couldn’t remember the last time she tasted joy.
At that moment God reminded me of the story of the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son. That boy is bitter, accusing, scolding. His mouth is full of ashes, accumulated by years of rancor.
And the father? He goes out to him and pleads. Don’t you understand, he says to his son, that your brother, the one we thought dead, is alive? Everything here depends on one thing: that the older son understand the father’s grief over the one who was lost. Without that, no invitation to joy makes sense. He needs first to share his father’s heartbreak.
To be a minister of reconciliation begins when we grieve with the One who grieves.
A spirit of giddiness And yet we need joy, too, especially in conflict. And here is a Catch-22: maybe the first casualty of war is joy.
I live by the ocean, and often I walk the rocky coast, exploring its intricate tidal pools. These teem with life—scuttling crab and slinking snail, spiny urchins and skittering flat fish—but one of the prettiest and most exotic creatures is the sea anemone, a flower-like polyp with a brilliant garland of tentacles waving atop its thick white stem. Here’s the rule with anemones: look, but don’t touch. They’re highly sensitive, and will close up into a tight fist at the merest brush with anything hard.
Joy’s like that: it wilts when hard things touch it. A brawling church is a joyless one.
Even so, Paul tells the Philippians, just after he’s instructed them to step in and help resolve a cat fight between two leading women in the church, to “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!” (Phil. 4:2-4). Rejoicing, again and always, is integral to the ministry of reconciliation.
The counsel seems frivolous. Think how annoying it is when, in the midst of grim and tense matters, someone cracks a joke. Laughter at such moments grates. Doesn’t rejoicing trivialize the gravity of the situation?
But maybe the situation is trivial. Maybe those in conflict have inflated a minor misunderstanding into a church-wide altercation, nursed hurt into grudge and magnified it into vendetta. Animosity is a great exaggerator, able to turn the smallest thing—a gesture, a tone, a single remark—into injury. It traffics in rumors and hunches. Pettiness like this doesn’t deserve the dignity of serious response. Someone ought to have the guts to guffaw.
At any rate, trivial or otherwise, all conflict calls for the peculiar joy Paul speaks about: joy in the Lord. Conflict within the church almost always stems from a failure to live by faith and not by sight. Taking our eyes off of Jesus easily entangles us in sin and distraction, and quickly we lose heart. Thus, rejoicing in the Lord is reality therapy. It jolts us out of our preoccupation with “these light and momentary troubles” and reminds us of the “eternal weight of glory” that awaits those who trust in God (2 Cor. 4:17).
“A cheerful heart is good medicine,” Proverbs 17:22 reminds us. Joy is a restorative. It gives us the sturdiness and health we need to fight the good fight and end the cat fight.
A spirit of hardness When Jesus started his journey to the cross—that great personal and cosmic battle—he “set his face like flint toward Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51, KJV). Conflict takes this as well, this hard resolve, this toughness. A leader in battle cannot be thin-skinned.
I’m a terrible baseball player. It stems from an accident in childhood. I was pitching, and the batter (my brother, the rat) hit a line drive into my mouth, bursting my lip and leaving me a skewed front tooth as a lasting souvenir. Ever since, an airborne ball—even a lazy fly ball—triggers a flinch in me. My every instinct is to duck.
We can be like that with conflict, too. We can flinch and avoid it at every turn. I’ve done that enough times to learn a hard lesson: it only gets worse. Combatants, left to themselves, rarely come to peaceful resolve.
So I’ve learned to set my face like flint. The results almost always surprise me. Most people want someone to step in, though almost always their first reaction is to balk. But deep down they long for someone who refuses to mince words or hang fire.
I think “the spirituality of hardness” has spared our church a split more than once. Not long ago, some tradesmen in the congregation got into a disagreement that threatened to spill its banks. I called them all together. The last thing I wanted to do was go in that room myself. But I set my face like flint.
I went in, read to them Psalm 127—”Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain”—and called them to stop behaving like children and start acting like men of God. Their hackles bristled at first. But I held my ground. I painted for them a picture of the likely outcome if they carried on the way they were heading. They listened and repented.
We all grew stronger, more devoted to each other. I watch those men now. None are best friends, but they hold each other in high regard. There is nothing any of them must leave at the altar before they can worship together.
I shudder to think what softness might have left behind.
A spirit of humility I have rarely stepped into a conflict without someone—maybe one of the combatants, maybe the devil—reminding me of my own shortcomings.
And it’s true. I don’t just live among a people of unclean lips: I am a man of unclean lips. Rather than deny this, which is what I’d like to do, I confess it. In fact, I know of nothing like a season of conflict to purify and refine me, to prune my wild wood and remove my dead wood. Over and over, I have learned the cathartic power of David’s prayer: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Ps. 139:23-24).
I see this quality in the Apostle Paul. Maybe the church that gave Paul the most grief was the one in Corinth. They attacked his integrity, his giftedness, his appearance. In their eyes he didn’t look right, speak well, or talk straight. Paul’s two letters to them, especially the first, are thick with a defense of himself and his ministry.
Only, it’s an odd defense. It’s cruciform. Paul doesn’t bellow or hammer. Instead of countering their accusations, he admits most of them. Yes, he’s unimpressive in speech. Yes, he’s physically frail. Yes, he’s unwise by human standards. Yes, he’s shoddy-looking alongside those swaggering “Super Apostles.” He preaches in weakness. He ministers in brokenness. He has nothing to boast about except the cross.
This is no disingenuous rhetorical ploy. It’s true, and its overall effect is to disarm his opponents. It’s hard to keep pressing an attack when your target refuses to fight back.
Recently, Carol, one of my pastoral colleagues, sought my counsel. Every time Carol approached a particular ministry leader about a certain matter, she’d throw it back in Carol’s face, reminding her of her own shortcomings.
“Well,” I said, “she’s right, Carol. This is something you struggle with. Tell her you’re thankful for her honesty, and that you’ll continue to seek God’s grace and power to change. You’re working to remove the log in your own eye. But plead with her to also remove the speck in hers.”
“A gentle answer turns back wrath,” Solomon told us. Such gentleness is the fruit of humility.
About a year ago I was given one of the highest compliments of my 15 years in pastoral ministry. Eight months prior, I tried to resolve a messy dispute between two men. One of them saw my intervention as intrusive and blundering. He left the church.
But he came back. At first, he slipped in, skittish and cagey. He avoided me, and when he couldn’t, he kept the conversation vague and evasive.
Then one Sunday he waited for me at the door.
“I wanted to tell you,” he said, “wanted to say—well, thanks. What you did last year was hard for me. I resented you for it. But I know now why you did it: you want the best for me.
“So what I wanted to say is, thanks for being my pastor.”
Apart from heartbreak, giddiness, hardness, humility, I might have missed that.
Mark Buchanan is pastor of New Life Community Baptist Church in Duncan, British Columbia.
Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information onLeadership Journal.
