“For to begin with, I hear that when you come together as a church there are divisions among you, and in part I believe it.”
[1 Corinthians 11:18 HCSB]
Cliques
In Corinth, their agape feast (what we might call communion) was being poisoned by castes. Throughout his correspondence with Corinth, Paul blasts their penchant for separation as a destructive tendency. Seeing that, we can only sigh and think, “Thank goodness we never struggle with that today!”
But of course we do. As Librarian Emeritus of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin noted way back in 1993:
The menace to America today is the emphasis on what separates us rather than what brings us together…the notion of a hyphenated American is un-American…It’s time that we reaffirmed the fact that what has built our country is community and that community is [solely] dependent on the willingness of people to build together.
In my home country, racial divisiveness receives the most press. Yet the solution for racial disharmony is profoundly simple – the intervention of Jesus. It’s the same answer for all castes, cliques, and conflicts. Church deacon Darrell B. Harrison (who happens to be black) details it perfectly:
Christ came into the world to save sinners, not society (Matt. 1:21; 1 Tim. 1:15). The problem of racial reconciliation is rooted in our inherent enmity with God, not our inherent ethnicity. In other words, it is what is on the inside of us that is the issue, not what is on the outside of us.