Western culture is devoid of healthy conflict. In our movies, action heroes fight the bad guys to the death. In online discussion, we sling slurs: “Nazi!” “Fascist!” “Libtard!”, but in person, we frequently just go along to get along, telling ourselves that we don’t want to step on anyone’s toes. Everyone has to find their truth. Then, when people upset us or we disagree with them, we cut them out of our lives, calling it “boundaries.”

But, in the book of Acts, we see the early church disagreeing and wrestling with each other over and over again as they hammered out the details of fellowship, debated doctrine, traveled together, and more.¹

I mean, what else were they supposed to do?

We will do a close reading of two issues that arose in the early church which were both necessary and well-handled. First, the Hellenistic Jews:

Acts 6:1-4. Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned the full number of the disciples and said, “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.”

Early on, there’s a division between two ethnic groups. And this is no home fellowship: the most recent number of Christians mentioned before this verse was over five thousand people.² That’s a big church!

We know from earlier in the text that the believers “had all things common,” sharing their food and other necessities together (Acts 2:44–46). In this group of new Christians, the size of a small town all trying to share things together and care for each other, it’s inevitable that someone would feel slighted. It happens to be one of the most vulnerable subsets of an ethnic group: the Hellenist (or Greek-speaking) Jewish widows.

The apostles see the writing on the wall: it’s not a love issue; it’s a logistics issue. We can see this from the fact that they don’t go on a fact-finding mission to accuse someone of wrong. They don’t issue a public apology. They don’t start a new preaching series on racism. They get more volunteers.

Acts 6:5-6. And what they said pleased the whole gathering, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolas, a proselyte of Antioch. These they set before the apostles, and they prayed and laid their hands on them.

Commentaries note that these seven names are all Greek-speaking Jews! When the apostles empowered seven men to oversee the distribution of food, they chose men from the slighted ethnic group to ensure that these would look out for the Hellenist widows at the start of the whole debacle.

How could this problem have been solved without some conflict? Should the Hellenist Jews have started a tell-all blog informing Jerusalem that the first church was a scam? Could they have fixed the problem without someone bringing it up to the apostles? Without saying anything, would they have just had to leave the church later, after years of simmering, festering disquiet and neglect?

I thank God that the first Christians met together and came to a resolution, instead of allowing this injustice to smolder and break up the group.

Another well-resolved conflict appears in Acts 15, which details what is now called the Jerusalem Council. Here, Paul and Barnabas traveled from Antioch to meet with the then-church elders in Jerusalem. Their goal? To argue against forcing Gentile converts into circumcision.

The Jerusalem Council forms a crux of the Acts narrative. All the first Christians were Jews, who probably viewed Christianity as the natural conclusion of the Jewish faith. But the Gentiles were a different story: pagans from all walks of life were joining the church in great numbers, abandoning their former habits, their idolatry, and their immorality to follow the Lord Jesus.

What to do with them?

This was a theological, doctrinal, and practical disagreement that would shape the church for centuries, and in Acts 15, Peter, Paul, Barnabas and James have the final say: the Gentiles are to be included without following the Mosaic law.

James’s speech concludes:

Acts 15:19-21. “Therefore my judgment is that we should not trouble those of the Gentiles who turn to God, but should write to them to abstain from the things polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what has been strangled, and from blood. For from ancient generations Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him, for he is read every Sabbath in the synagogues.”

Clinton E. Arnold argues that these four rules would restrict Gentile converts from partaking in idolatry—essentially pulling them out from under demonic influences that oppose Christ. Perhaps, too, James’s final phrase implies that following these standards would allow Gentile Christians to enter the synagogues so that they could encounter God through the Scriptures.

How else could the early church have resolved it? Was everyone just supposed to know how to include the Gentiles into the faith? Did God want the elders and Christians to just download the correct doctrines from the Cloud™, never learning, never reading, never speaking to each other?

On the contrary, the elders in the early church listened to wise counsel. They considered the perspectives of missionaries Paul and Barnabas and worked out a decision together. Where they could have hardened their hearts and splintered, or assumed their initial perspective was the right one, they heard each other out and came to a resolution.

The world tells us that conflicts cannot be resolved, that instead we must incise from our lives everyone with whom we disagree, nursing every slight and labeling every difficult person as “toxic.”

But Christians are supposed to be different. We form a home for every combination of crusty, uncouth, and overly sensitive people to be transformed into disciples who serve each other. We demonstrate to the world how groups of people raise issues, discuss, listen, negotiate, while also loving each other.

In this, may we shine our light to the world.

Questions for consideration:
Do you need to engage in conflict in one of your relationships? How can you do it while characterizing the other person as someone you love and respect?

1. We should note here, nevertheless, that Acts is a description of the early church, not necessarily a prescription for perfection. In Acts, people still make mistakes and botch conflicts, and we can consider this an invitation to carefully evaluate the actions of the main actors in light of the rest of the biblical text.[↩]
2. Acts 4:4 says, “the number of the men came to about five thousand.” Clinton E. Arnold adds, “the fact that Luke uses the term anēr for men (versus the more generic anthrōpos), indicates that he has not included all of the women and young people in his figure.” Clinton E. Arnold, “Acts,” in Acts, vol. 2B of Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary: New Testament. ed. Clinton E. Arnold; (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019), 246.[↩]