ARE DISAGREEMENTS BETWEEN CHRISTIANS ALWAYS BAD?
Acts 15:39 They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company.
Anyone who has been in church for any length of time will have noticed that the perfect world of Christian brotherhood is not so perfect and not so brotherly. In fact, we find that Christians argue, sometimes a lot, and sometimes over really stupid stuff. Often we argue because we are selfish and sinful. But is this always the case? In our passage we have two strong Christian leaders with unresolvable differences.
The issue was between Paul and Barnabas concerning what to do with Mark. Paul had been burned when Mark deserted him part-way through his first missionary journey (Acts 13:13), yet Barnabas believed in Mark (his cousin, see Col 4:10) and felt he needed another chance. Paul and Barnabas disagreed sharply. They argued! Both men were Godly men; both men were good men; both men were filled with the Spirit; both men were called by God, sent by the church (Acts 13:2-4), and worked in fruitful ministry together (Acts 11-15), and yet their opinions were so deeply rooted that neither could be moved off of their position. Their conversation(s) must have been intense, heated, and uncomfortable. Sometimes we get this idea that to be spiritual we have to kill our passion and never disagree with anyone over anything, a kind of unity-at-all-cost mentality. Prone to maintain a facade of self-control and holiness, we inwardly seethe with anger and bitterness.
I remember sitting in a church leadership meeting when a disgruntled man hijacked the meeting with multiple accusations against our pastor. The pastor had done nothing immoral or worthy of church discipline; he simply was not fulfilling this man’s expectations, who went on and on with his gripes and complaints. This would have been a good time for one of the other men (myself included) to rise up in the Spirit of the living God and put a stop to such ridicule (Micah 3:8). Instead the accusations were met with silence – dead silence, cowardly silence. I left burning with anger and, after a couple of days, I did respond, only inappropriately. I could have, should have, responded in the meeting by confronting the accuser face to face, anger intact. There is the scriptural idea of being angry and not sinning (Eph 4:26). We seem to think anger is sin in all cases, so we pretend we are not angry when we really are. This is a spiritual facade, a lie, and I would argue worse than the anger itself, because it immobilizes what would be a holy confrontation against an unjust act.
The two pillars of the faith, Paul and Barnabas, were not able to resolve their differences; therefore, they parted company, forming two missions instead of one, and having four missionaries instead of two (v.39b-40). It would have been difficult if Barnabas had given in and, in resentment, continued ministering with Paul, or if Paul had caved and then micromanaged Mark in the mission work. Paul actually came to admire Mark (2 Ti 4:11), which I think shows that Barnabas was right to continue mentoring him, but I also think Paul was right in that Mark may have not been ready for the immediate mission he was about to undertake. While in no way approving of constant quarreling and outbursts of anger (2 Cor 12:20), disagreements between Christians are not always bad; they can sometimes be necessary, and actually used to multiply the work of the kingdom.
