When we respond to church conflict by applying the biblical cure, God gets the glory, and we experience the growth He desires for us individually and collectively as the church.

The Corinthian church was riddled with conflict among its members—something that the Apostle Paul addressed early in his first letter to this congregation. After laying out the call for unity and the causes for conflict, Paul gives the cure for church conflict through a series of questions and his own personal example.

Notice Paul’s first question: “Has Christ been divided?”

This question, like the subsequent two, is rhetorical with an obvious answer. Of course Christ has not been divided! People cannot separate Jesus into component parts and divide His person or His work however they please. While the body of Christ contains many members, it remains only one body. As soon as members decide they will split from others, a monstrosity results. To divide the church is to mutilate Christ in an outrageous act of desecration.

The cure, then, for church conflict begins by understanding that Christ Himself is united. Christ is not at rivalry, or in competition, or at war within Himself. Christians must recognize that if we are separating into factions, creating divisions, or seeing fellow believers as rivals, then we are out of step with who Christ is. To cure church conflict, we must all recognize the unity that exists within Christ Himself.

This brings us to the second question: “Paul was not crucified for you, was he?”

Paul makes a very wise decision and limits this question to himself, omitting the names of Apollos and Cephas, in order for his readers to understand that he is not for rivalry. Paul doesn’t want a faction named after him; he is nobody compared to Christ, and he was crucified for no one.

When Martin Luther first discovered that Christians were called Lutherans after his name, he said in response, “What is Luther? The teaching is not mine. Nor was I crucified for anyone…How did I, poor stinking bag of maggots that I am, come to the point where people call the children of Christ by my evil name?” The apostle Paul was of the same mind in this passage. He did not want the church to follow him, but to follow Christ!

This caution is exactly why we must be careful with spiritual labels. Labels can serve a useful function of describing a set of beliefs, but we can also find ourselves reveling in sinful pride. The one label we should be glad to take is Christians, as Peter says in 1 Peter 4:16; and we should seek to glorify God with this name because Christ is our only Savior. We all stand level before the cross of Christ, who is our Lord. When pride begins to creep into our hearts, when selfish ambition arises within us, and when we begin to be tempted toward quarrels, dissensions, rivalries, and disturbances, we must remember there is but one Savior of the church, the Lord Jesus Christ—and we all belong to Him!

The final question Paul asks is this: “Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?”

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