Jesus came into this world to rescue us from sin and death, including the sins that fuel rage-driven ministry. He is our hope and our strength. No darkness will overcome Him or prevail against His church.

A cursory reading of the Bible reminds us that God really, really doesn’t take kindly to those who stir up division and dissension among His people. He wants His people to be united in love and truth.

This isn’t a new idea, and it shouldn’t be shocking. It isn’t the sort of insight that comes from years of faithful study, or a careful exploration of the languages, the context of the text, or anything like that. It’s an observation that literally anyone who is functionally literate is capable of making.

And yet, it’s one that we keep failing to really be mindful of, isn’t it?

Two Kinds of Divisive People

There are two sorts of divisive people, of course. There are the contentious and overt false teachers, the people that Paul warned about in so many places, like:

• the so-called “super-apostles” in Corinth (2 Cor. 11:5 )
• the Judaizers in Galatia and Philippi ( 3 ; Phil. 3:2 )
• Demas (2 Tim. 4:10 )

This is who we typically think of when we think about division. But they’re certainly not the only kind we’re cautioned against. The second is actually much more damaging. We are warned against:

• Those among us who stir up foolish controversies (Titus 3:9 )
• People who incite unrest and factionalism (2 Tim. 2:23 ; 16:17 )
• Fools who sow discord and say they were only joking ( 26:19 )

The difficulty with this group is that, in many cases, they’re not teaching overtly false doctrine. In fact, many paint themselves as Defenders of the Truth; the last bulwark, the Spurgeons and Luthers of our day, here for a time such as this to hold back the encroaching darkness of theological liberalism.

And yet, perhaps ironically, their approach to defending the truth too often results in a different sort of falsehood—error based in both doctrine and practice. They bite and devour one another (Gal. 5:15 ), turning on an ever-decreasing set of allies until, eventually, none can meet their standard of orthodoxy.

The Fuel of Rage Driven-Ministry

No doubt, a list of names comes to mind as you read that sentence. No doubt some of them would cross over with the list I have in mind. I don’t feel the need to address those people specifically by name in this article, because naming names isn’t the point here. But those names you can think of should serve as a warning against what might be called a rage-driven approach to ministry, one that has embraced the way to get attention on the social Internet:

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