I have a minister friend from Memphis, Tennessee, where there are more Baptist than people. He told me the story of a Baptist Church of some reputation there.  It seems that someone called the police to this Baptist Church because of a ruckus going on there. When the police arrived, they found a microphone cord noose around the pastor’s neck, and the deacons trying to hang the pastor. That’s why before I accepted the call to be your pastor, I made sure I could whip the deacons in a fight if I had too! The police inquired why they would want to hang the pastor, and the deacons replied, “he furnished the church with stolen furniture and kept the furniture money for himself!” Sounds like the pastor and church were a good match.

My mother told me that in nearby Tull, Arkansas where she grew up, that her church got into such a church fight that the county Sherif was called to break it up, when she was a little girl in the church. I guess that things were not dull in Tull!

Well, most churches don’t need the police, but they might need a referee at times. Especially Baptist Churches, where fights and splits are as common as Sunday School and dinner-on-the-grounds. After I first surrendered to preach (fighting terminology by the way) I held a revival or preached at three Baptist Churches about a mile apart in Quitman, over a few weeks. When I in my naivete inquired as to why they had three small Baptist Churches instead of one medium size church, I was educated on church splits. The truth is, if you’ve been a Baptist very long, you have endured at least one church conflict, guaranteed. Even large churches are not immune. Say the word Pentecostal, and the first thing that comes to my mind is speaking in tongues. Say Episcopal, and high falooteness comes to mind; Say Catholic and the Pope comes to mind; But say Baptist, and church fighting often comes to mind–along with arrogance, bragging, and presumptuousness, all key ingredients for a good fight.

Leadership magazine listed the key ingredients for church conflict1 and reported that they are caused by personality clashes and people with different agendas. By conflicting visions and poor agendas. By narrow mindedness and dogmatism, and by people’s different backgrounds. By pride, jealousy, and an independent spirit. By moral failure, insecurity, and unresolved hurts– even among leaders. And, and I quote, “by small groups of people who set themselves up as God’s spokespersons to the congregation.” Speed Leas, of the St Alban Institute of Church Studies adds that people can reach a point where they won’t stop fighting because they believe it would be immoral to stop!

I, like some of you, have been in church fights. I have not always helped those situations, and may God forgive me for that. I have been at the heart of at least one church fight, a record that I am not proud of. I certainly would say and do some things differently if I had them to do over again. So none of us are immune. I believe that Baptist are more prone because of our style of church polity, where everyone has an opinion and vote. A marvelous strength this polity, but because of afore mentioned reasons can lead to disaster.

Jesus commands us in our text today to love one another. In fact He says that they will know that we are his disciples because of that very love we have for each others. This raises an obvious question for me, why then, is it so hard to love one another? It is much easier to fight with one another. Jonathan Swift, said in an editorial cartoon about religious fighting in India in 1711 said, “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”2 History is full of religious wars and Christians are not immune. Denominations are not immune. And there is no war as bad, as vicious or as mean as a holy war.

Well, I suppose some people are pretty hard to love, no doubt. But this is the simplest of evangelism programs. We spend millions missions and evangel-ism, we have classes and courses on how to witness, we polish our shoes and our buildings, we shine our stained glass and our presentations, we study our Bibles diligently and we pray hard, but we if fail to love one another, we fail the test of discipleship and it is all for naught.

We fail to love one another when we put our needs first; we fail to love one another when we close our minds to other points of view; we fail to love one another when we are inflexible to change, we fail to love one another when we misplace our priorities and forget what is most important. Well, this is most important, this is job one, to love one another.

One problem is that we fail to understand adequately what love is. Love is not just a feeling, but it is action. Love is a verb and not just a noun. Loving is not liking, but it is not hating either. To find out what this love us exactly, we need only to look at Christ, for he clearly explains to us to love one another, as I have loved you. And how did Christ love people? His love was without respect of persons, it was not selective. He did not love only people who were nice to love. He chose to love the unlovely; people who rejected him, people who were difficult, looked down upon and condemned by society. He loved the sinner, the leper, the prostitute, the tax-collector. Yes, he even loved the pharisee and Sadducee, the thieves on the cross, and the soldiers below. He loved them not for the feeling of it, but because they needed his love.

Jesus loved them, and it was expressed by his actions not just his words. He didn’t make idle talk about it, sing songs about it, or tell stories about it. He healed the sick, opened blind eyes, and cleansed the temple of evil. He forgave a woman caught in adultery, fed 5000 hungry souls, and promised a thief paradise. He had supper with a despised tax-collector, and ultimately he died for everyone of them and every one of us. How many times did he actually tell someone that he loved them? Not very many. How many times does the Bible say that he felt like loving someone? Not very many.

Jesus’ love doesn’t wait for love or service or duty or anything else in return. It loves first, because that is what real love is like. Jesus’ love met real need and accepted people for who they were. Jesus’ love was tolerant and inclusive, and both of these concepts were quantum leaps in his culture. Jesus loved people who didn’t deserve it, and he loved people who would not love him back. He loved people that the average good person in his day could not stand. His kind of love was nothing less than the beginning of a revolution. Will Durant, who was not a professing Christian, in his Story of Civilization stated “The revolution he (Jesus) sought was a far deeper one, without which reforms could only be superficial and transitory. If he could cleanse the human heart of selfish desire, cruelty, and lust, utopia would come itself, and all those institutions that rise out of human greed and violence, and the consequent need for law, would disappear. Since this would be the profoundest of all revolutions, beside which all others would be mere coups d’etat of class ousting class and exploiting in its turn, in this spiritual sense, the greatest revolutionary in history.3

Because Jesus so loved us, we ought also to love one another. For you see, it is by our love that others know that we are his disciples. When the news of our fights hits the press, I wonder whose disciples people think we are? When we pick on people for going to Disney World because they offer health insurance for homosexual couples, I wonder whose disciples people think we are? When we are always against and never for, I wonder whose disciples people think we are? When we can pick a speck out of your eye at 50 paces and can’t the find the tree because of the forest in our own, I wonder whose disciples people think we are?

All too often we are known by anything, anything but our love. We are known by our hypocracy; we are know by our anger; we are known by our greed; we are known by our pride and arrogance; we are known by our selfishness or our uncooperative spirit; we are known by our misguided motives, we are known by our intolerance for others different than ourselves. It is precisely this reason that we cannot let Providence die. It is a spring in the Baptist desert, and a beacon for any who would seek safe harbor.

In our churches today we want to be model citizens of the community, and we want to influence our culture. Some want to influence the political landscape as well. We find ourselves wanting to be known by our beautiful buildings, by our missions, by our evangelism, by our community service, by our contributions, by our zeal and by our dedication. But the gospel of Jesus Christ is not about what you say, or what you feel, it is about what you do. They will know we are Christians by one thing and one thing only: That we love one another! If we have not this love then nothing else we do, nothing else we can accomplish, nothing else we stand for will ever amount to a hill of beans. It is by our love that they will know us. It is our love that will transform this church and shake this city. Not boycott, not strikes, not protest, not resolutions, not political action, not social ministries, but by love, the most needed, the most revolutionary, then most powerful force ever unleashed on a hurting world.

Paul said it best when he said in I Corinthians 13: “If I talk with the tongues of men (people) and of angels, but if I do not love people, then I am only like the sound of a big horn or a loud bell. If I speak words from God, if I understand all secrets, and know everything, if I can move mountains by believing, but if I do not love people, I am nothing, even though I can do all these things. If I give away all that I have, and if I give my body to be burned, But if I do not love people, I get nothing out of it. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous. Love is not proud and does not boast. Love does not do things that are not nice. Love does not just think of itself. Love does not get angry. Love does not hold wrong feelings in the heart. Love is not glad when people do wrong things. But it is always glad when they do right. Love forgives everything, Love is always trusting, and always hoping, and never gives up. Love never ends.”4

We may never have a nice building of our own here at Providence; We may never have a lot of programs; we may never have many members– but if we are known as a people who love one another we will be a success. And if Christianity can learn the same lesson, then church fights will be church history.