To arrest a possible breakup, you need to talk about the threat before the root of bitterness grows. Deal with it quickly. Like cancer, it must be handled as soon as it is discovered because any delay only allows the cancer to grow. 

Jesus’s Prayer for the Church
Toward the end of Jesus’s life on earth, he prayed that his people may be united. His prayer was deep. He said, “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” (John 17:20–23).
Can any words be more sublime? Yet, you only have to be a Christian for a short time before you realize that churches suffer from disunity and splits after seasons of peace as surely as valleys follow rolling hills. Often, you can see the downward spiral coming from a distance. In this article, I point out ten ways in which you can fracture the church to which you belong. Most of these ways can be caused by anyone. The last few are normally caused by church leaders. If any of these describe your actions or your attitude, may God give you grace to amend your ways for the sake of Christ who desires his people to be truly united.
1. Self-Centeredness
If you join a church primarily because of what you can get from others, you will soon be full of complaints about “lack of love” in the church. Your grumbling is because of a failure to get from the church what you want. It is as James put it, “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (James 4:1–2). Church is a place to love others and to be loved, to give and take.
2. Impatience with Others
Christians come in all shapes and sizes, and so the church is very much like the human family. Some are hard workers while others are lazy. Some are fast learners while others never seem to grasp the most basic concepts of life. The process of sanctification takes time. If you fail to realize this, you will become impatient and grumpy. You will be complaining about the very people you are meant to exhibit Christian patience towards. That is why the apostle Paul said, “I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:1–3). Learn to be patient with others.
3. Importing Fights from Elsewhere
Sometimes your own church can be peaceful, but churches across town or in another country may have locked horns over an issue that is far removed from you. However, because you are connected to what is happening there through friends or relatives, you begin to agitate for a stance in your church that others see no need for. This has become common, especially with the advent of the internet. In the process, you brew a storm in a teacup and are seen as a mere troublemaker crying, “Wolf! Wolf!” where there is no wolf.
4. Unresolved Issues
Another way in which fights are imported is when you live with unresolved issues. You think that by changing churches or shutting out some people in the church you have closed that chapter of your life, but you have not. That grudge becomes like a bitter root that causes you to be toxic. Mole hills will become mountains by your opinion. People around you fail to understand your overreactions to issues in the church. The Bible warns, “Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no ‘root of bitterness’ springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled” (Heb. 12:14–15). This root of bitterness is usually because of unresolved issues. Learn to resolve issues instead of burying them and leaving them to fester. They can be disruptive, if not deadly.
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Wycliffe called indulgences one of the “Luciferian seductions of the church” and a “fiction of the Prince of Darkness,” and called upon Christians to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ…and teach the people that they should trust in Christ alone, and in his law, and in his members…”

George Housman Thomas’ illustration, “Wycliffe on His Sick-Bed Assailed By the Friars at Oxford,” is a striking depiction of one of the many trials endured by the noble English priest and reformer, and a testimony to his courage in the face of stringent opposition. The illustration depicts an encounter from 1378, when Wycliffe was suffering from a severe illness, perhaps the aftereffects of a stroke. Supposing Wycliffe to be near death, the begging friars and four Oxford eminents came to his bedchamber and pleaded with him to retract the fulminations he had published against the mendicants–that is, itinerant friars and preachers who relied on alms for their living. After the friars made their statement, a servant raised Wycliffe in bed so he could respond. It is this moment that is depicted in Thomas’ work. The mendicants linger about the room, not with looks of compassion, but rather countenances of contempt. One corpulent friar sets his back to Wycliffe, even as he turns his head and glares at the reformer with bulging eyes. Wycliffe appears gaunt and sickly–eyes hollow, hair matted. Within reach at his bedside is a thick book, likely meant to represent the Scriptures. Steadied in bed by his servant, he raises his hand and replies, “I shall not die, but live to declare the evil deeds of the friars,” before driving his detractors from the room. Thomas’ illustration is imaginative, but emblematic of the battles faced by Wycliffe as he sought the purification of Christ’s church from the licentiousness and bombast that had come to characterize it.[1]
Remarkably, though Wycliffe died a century before Martin Luther’s birth, he anticipated multiple of the doctrines that would eventually characterize mature Protestantism. This reality finds modest recognition in Wycliffe’s honorifics, “Evangelical Doctor” and “Morning Star of the Reformation.” But Wycliffe was more direct in his proto-Protestant convictions than is usually recognized. His opposition to the begging friars was founded upon a Gospel rooted in Scripture, and shorn of the ceremonialism and muddled soteriology of the Roman church.
When Wycliffe was born in Yorkshire around 1330, no complete English Bible yet existed. In fact, the church magisterium was hostile to vernacular translations of the Scriptures. When Wycliffe matriculated at Oxford around 1345, he followed in the wake of such distinguished Oxford affiliates as John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Thomas Bradwardine. He was accordingly tutored in scholastic philosophy.
Wycliffe established himself in the field of law—both civil and canon. It was in the legal arena that various controversies of the age presented themselves, specifically with regard to the prerogatives of sovereigns and subjects over against the church magisterium. Wycliffe was committed to resisting the unwelcome intrusions of the pope and the mendicants in English affairs. The term “mendicants” comes from the Latin mendicans, “begging”, and is interchangeable with “friars”, taken from the Latin frater, “brother.” The mendicants that Wycliffe encountered predominantly belonged to two new orders founded in the early 1200s around the time of the Fourth Lateran Council: the Franciscans and the Dominicans. Much distinguished these new friars from older Western monastics, not least of all their status as itinerant preachers, traveling throughout Christendom and relying upon alms as they did so, rather than doing their ministry and earning their keep in stable monastic communities. Whilst the founders of these orders, such as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic, were doubtless sincere reformers in their own way, they usefully served the ends of the papacy, since their calls to itinerancy afforded opportunities to impose piety and belief upon the laity.[2] By Wycliffe’s day, this facet of the mendicant life had only increased, and their once well-intentioned ascetic poverty had morphed into a leeching mendicancy which exploited both the purses and the souls of Christians across Europe. Wycliffe’s understandable mistrust of these foreign influences grew as he came to see Scripture as the supreme authority over Christian faith and practice. He found no authorization for these offices or their practices in the Bible.[3]
The Black Death reached England in June 1348, and over the following 18 months killed approximately half of the English population. The student body at Oxford, where Wycliffe was likely studying at the time, was decimated. Wycliffe was deeply affected by this catastrophe and came to see it as a judgment sent by God upon a wayward church, at whose head were debauched clergy and mendicants who exploited the people under their care.[4]
Wycliffe remained an affiliate of the university in various capacities after the plague subsided. His dispute with the mendicants began in earnest in 1360. The begging friars had established themselves in various cities across England (including Oxford) by the middle of the 13th century, taking their solemn vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. The original Rule of St. Francis read, “Those brothers whom the Lord favors with the gift of working should do so faithfully and devotedly, so that idleness, the enemy of the soul, is excluded yet the spirit of holy prayer and devotion, which all other temporal things should serve, is not extinguished.” Suffice to say, this ideal had not been maintained: the orders had succumbed to moral corruption and idleness.[5]
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We must not lay stress on our service, as if it deserved our hire. When we have done all, we are unprofitable servants. Indeed, though He say, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” yet our reply ought to be, “When saw we thee hungry, and fed thee?”

Moses, the great leader of God’s people in the Old Testament, was characterised above all by his meekness. His brave leadership in exceedingly testing circumstances was marked neither by harshness nor self-aggrandizing. Although it subverts worldly ideas of what a strong leader looks like, those who want to be the greatest in Christ’s church have to be servants, and serve God by serving others. In the following excerpt from one of his sermons, the godly pastor Alexander Wedderburn explores the huge dignity that belonged to Moses when God called him, after his death, simply, “My servant.”
Commendations for God’s servants.
The great testimony of God to Moses is, “my servant.” It is the highest commendation of a man after his death, that in his life he was God’s servant. It is true, all the creatures are in their kind subservient, and God’s greatest enemies do His work. But to be “His” by way of distinction or propriety, as Moses is said to be, is a man’s greatest eulogy in death.
In Scripture, “servant” is the name given to the most eminent saints as their title of greatest honour. Think of “Abraham my servant,” “Job my servant,” “Jacob my servant,” “David my servant.” The greatest prophets and apostles glory in it; Paul, for example, prefixes it to some of his epistles, “Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ.” This name is also given to the greatest princes, such as Nebuchadnezzar, head of the Assyrian empire (Jer. 25:9) and Cyrus, head of the Persian empire (Isa. 45). It is given to the excellent martyrs (Rev. 19:2), to the saints in glory (Rev. 22:3), and to the blessed angels (Rev. 19:10). Lastly, this name is given to Jesus the Mediator, “Behold my Servant …” (Isa. 42:1). When you see all these uses of the name laid together, it shows what an eminent testimony of honour it is.
Many things are fixed on in the world, as things which commend people after their death, according to the diversity of their lives. Some have been commended for their honour, some their courage, some their wisdom, some their riches. Where there is a concatenation of these, how eminently commendable that person must be! Well, in spending your life in service to God, a multitude of these concur. How deservedly then is a servant of God commended!
There is wisdom in being God’s servant.
It is the highest wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and a good understanding have all they that do His commandments. Moses is brief in determining what wisdom consists in. “Keep his statutes, for this is your wisdom” (Deut. 4:6). Yea, where His service is absent, the Scripture speaks of men as fools. Since they have rejected the word of God, what wisdom is in them? (Jer. 8:9) The foolish virgins are foolish indeed, to make no provision for the time to come. Though they should be able, with the philosophers, to dispute de omni re scibili (about every knowable thing), or, with Solomon, to traverse nature from the cedar to the hyssop (1 Kings 4:33), yet he who does not walk circumspectly is a fool (Eph. 5:16).
There is honour in being God’s servant.
There is no trade of life so honourable as to serve God. “The way of life is above to the wise” (Prov. 15:24). There are four things which show how honourable a service it is.
First, they are taken up with the noblest objects. Philosophers call their metaphysics the most noble science, because it deals with the highest beings. God’s servants, like Caleb, constantly follow Him (Num. 14).
Next, they act from the noblest principles. Love constrains them, and indeed, by regeneration, they partake of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1), which elevates the spirit far above what the most famous among the Greeks or Romans could ever reach.
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