What do we do when our enemies are other Christians?

Reflections on Peacemaking Part 2: Spiritual Gifts, Tolerance, and Hospitality

This article is part of a series of posts exploring peacemaking and unity in preparation for The (Re)union: A Gathering for Peacemakers, a virtual conference taking place February 26-28, 2025. Follow this link for more information on The (Re)union.

Can we be peacemakers when our enemies are other Christians?

Christians face an inescapable challenge in our call to be peacemakers: many enemies we must seek peace with are fellow Christians. This counterintuitive reality is one of the most pressing challenges for the church. This week, with the Presidential Inauguration, the divides in the American church are entirely on display. We are divided. Quite often, our enemies are each other. How will we cultivate peace outside the church if we do not know how to make peace with other Christians? If the church is at war with itself, how will we ever offer a witness to the peace of Christ?

“Never has any organization been so content to act against the express wishes and instruction of its founder as the Christian church…. If Jesus intends the church to be one, if upon this unity hinges the credibility of the Christian message, and if the churches are content to exist without full visible unity, then that existence is a performative contradiction, one that threatens the entire basis of the Christian faith. ¹

The divided church, at war with itself, is a performative contradiction. We claim to worship the God of peace, and yet the followers of Christ are locked in a seemingly eternal conflict with one another. Taking seriously a call to be peacemakers requires us to make sense of our internal conflicts in the church and how we participate in and are comfortable with having Christian enemies.

David Fitch in The Church of Us vs. Them describes it this way.

Something has gone terribly wrong in our country, and we don’t know what to do about it. Meanwhile, the church appears little different. Christians appear to be caught up in the same antagonism and disgust for one another that is evident elsewhere. We ourselves have become known for our own enemy making. We fight among ourselves on the various media while the world looks on. What has happened? Christians have failed to be known by our love, and the question is, Why?²

To take our call to peacemaking seriously, we must ask, “Why are our enemies in the church?”

The Body of Christ Has an Autoimmune Disease

In 1 Corinthians 12, the Apostle Paul offers a deeply helpful metaphor for the church, describing it as the body of Christ. This compelling image has shaped our understanding of the church for thousands of years, emphasizing our union with Christ as our head and our interrelated lives and purpose. In chapters 12-14, this letter offers a lengthy consideration of our shared lives as Christians. We are united in the love of God that saves, redeems, and transforms us. We are united in the Spirit that works within us, gifting each of us a manifestation of God’s grace. Our lives, held together by love, are a witness that Jesus is Lord.

Playing off of this understanding of our status as the body of Christ, we must ask, why is the body so sick? Why, rather than offering a witness of God's healing power and Jesus's lordship, is the church divided, angry, and beholden to the world's powers? It appears as if the church has an autoimmune disease, where the body is attacking itself. An autoimmune disease occurs when the body's immune system mistakenly attacks its healthy cells, tissues, and organs. The results can be deeply painful and traumatic to the body.

The sickness of the body of Christ is self-inflicted, having mistaken each other for enemies and misused our gifts to divide rather than heal. The good news is that the very things that are making us sick can become the means of peacemaking.

Want some training and insight into transforming conflict in the church? Join us for this workshop and others like it that are part of the (Re)union.

Manifestations of Grace

A key component to a healthy body of Christ is the proper use of spiritual gifts. Paul talks about these gifts at length in 1 Corinthians. Every follower of Christ has a giftedness from the Spirit; they are different but all vital, and they are given so that we might serve one another in pursuit of a common good. The gifts of the Spirit are described as charisma, manifestations of grace. They exist to benefit the body, to draw us into a shared life in Christ, and to help us resist the idolatrous forces that seek to misshape us in their image.

Much of the church's sickness has come from misuse, lack of understanding, and failure to honor the manifestations of grace gifted by the Spirit. For the Corinthians, improper understanding and use of gifts resulted in a failure of mutual submission, allowing the social hierarchies of power and status of their culture to manifest in their community. This led to disordered worship, where performance and personal expression subverted edification and a failed to make room for specific gifts.

While the specifics may differ, it is easy to see many parallels within the church today. We are divided because we take our gifts, which are manifestations of the grace of God, and turn them into instruments of self-promotion, reasons for division, and the means by which we attack other Christians. A healthy body lives in balance, with its systems working in conjunction. In order for the body of Christ to foster healing, all its members, and all the manifestations of grace, must work together for this common good. The process, as it always does in God’s kingdom, will involve confession, repentance, forgiveness, justice, and reconciliation.

Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil names all this and more in Roadmap to Reconciliation.

“Among those who seek to follow Christ, it is generally understood that in order for reconciliation to occur, there must be repentance, justice and forgiveness. A wrong must be acknowledged and the cause for the lack of unity identified. There is no sustained peace without justice and no sustained relationship without forgiveness… We are called to go beyond making peace or getting enemies to stop fighting- beyond repentance, justice and forgiveness. The Bible invites us further.”³

First Steps in Peacemaking: Tolerance and Hospitality

With this consideration of the Spirit’s presence and work in the church, a first step to making peace with other Christians is to stop, pay attention to, and acknowledge the giftedness of those we experience as enemies. Luke Bretherton, describes these first steps in forming a common life and seeking justice as tolerance and hospitality.

Bretherton gives a detailed explanation of tolerance, its limits, and its moral and theological implications. He defines tolerance as “the willingness to accept differences ( whether religious, moral, or cultural) which one might, as an individual or community, find objectionable or which conflict with one’s own beliefs and practices.”⁴ A posture of tolerance is vital for peacemaking because it places us in a position of curiosity and discovery. An important discovery for all Christians is the radical diversity of Christ’s church. The God who created breathtaking diversity throughout all of creation is the same God who is at work among all people in all places. The grace of the Spirit manifests within any people who declare Jesus as Lord.

An autoimmune response to diversity is to attack what is not a threat but actually a healthy functioning system in the body. Identifying what threatens the health of the church is undoubtedly an important function within the body of Christ. However, the current situation of fragmentation and disease would indicate that we are either overzealous in our pursuit of unhealthy things or attacking the wrong things. Perhaps we too often mistake diversity in gifting or cultural manifestation for a threat.

We would suggest that a source of great conflict in the church is a lack of tolerance for and curiosity about the vast diversity of God’s work. Using Bretherton’s categories, we use religious, moral, and cultural preferences, commitments, and convictions as excuses for division. A minor but significant shift from distrust and animosity about these differences to tolerance can open up space for discovery and relational healing. Peacemakers are tolerant, willingly choosing to remain curious and open to discovery with those whose differences might otherwise position them as enemies. Tolerance does not disregard injustice, moral harm, or sin. Instead, it is an affirmation of our faith in the Spirit, an acknowledgment of the fallibility of our own discernment, and a posture rooted in love.

Tolerance isn’t a destination, however, merely a starting point in peacemaking. Moving beyond tolerance requires hospitality. Bretherton describes the power and possibility of hospitality this way.

“Hospitality aims at forging a common world of meaning and action between giver and receiver while recognizing actual or latent conflict and difference. Existing or potential hostility is converted into hospitality, even if only for a while. Thus the other, who may or may not be an enemy, is treated as a stranger to be welcomed…The gift of hospitality both signals respect and demands reciprocal recognition from the other, a demand that presumes and intends the possibility of a common life.” ⁵

Peacemakers working to cultivate healing in the church will be those extending and receiving hospitality with those who would otherwise be our enemies. There is a much longer discussion to be had about the nature and function of that hospitality, but it is a commitment to receiving the other and treating them as worthy of grace, compassion, and most of all love.

The Spirit has gifted each Christian with manifestations of grace which, when exercised in love, cultivate tolerance, patient endurance, curiosity, compassion, hospitality, and healing. Peacemakers are committed to the healthy and intentional use of spiritual gifts for the healing and edification of the church, working to subvert and redeem those that would harm the body of Christ.

1. Eugene Schlesinger, Ruptured Bodies, Introduction

2. David Fitch, The Church of Us vs. Them, p.2

3. Brenda Salter McNeil, Roadmap to Reconciliation, p.20

4. Luke Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, p. 259

5. Luke Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life, p. 272-273