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Dear Friends,

In many of the letters that the apostle Paul writes, we can see that
he is responding to reports that he has received that has given him
concern. We don’t have access to that information, or those letters,
that bring him the news that clearly distresses him so much. All that
we have are his responses from which we can surmise what it was
that he heard.

One such response from Paul comes in what we know as the first
letter to the Corinthians, where he writes,

For as long as there is jealousy and quarrelling among you,
are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human

inclinations? For when one says, ‘I belong to Paul’, and
another, ‘I belong to Apollos’, are you not merely human?

It seems as if one of the problems affecting the believers in Corinth
was that they were splitting into factions. We do not know the
reasons behind these factions, and neither do we know whether
these factions were particularly antagonistic towards one another,
although the fact that Paul mentions jealousy and quarrelling gives
us a strong hint that there might have been. All we really know is
that there were factions and that they each claimed a different
person as their leader – whether or not that person actually sought
to be their leader in the way they were proclaimed.

Unfortunately, factionalism is still
something that can be seen in churches
today. Disagreements over almost
anything can, if they are not kept in
perspective, easily be blown out of
proportion and cause all sorts of
problems. And any such unchecked
disagreement can soon turn into a
problem between personalities, where
instead of the issue being resolved, or the
issue being viewed in isolation, the issue
can only be seen as attached to a specific person. From there it is
only a small step into factionalism.

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