READ Acts 15:28–29
For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.
MEDITATE
A friend told me recently about a small Baptist church, somewhere in Oklahoma, I think, that was happy staying small, Baptist, and American. Then about forty or fifty immigrants from Ghana visited them and announced, “We’re Baptists. We want to worship with you.” So they did, and the church changed its complexion—literally—overnight. Imagine that.
Different colors. Different countries. Different conceptions of time.
The earliest church experienced something similar. Originally, the followers of Jesus were all Jewish, like Jesus himself. But a flood of Gentiles—people who didn’t keep kosher or rest on the Sabbath or worship in the synagogue—overwhelmed them with all of the robust energy, I’d imagine, of Ghanian immigrants in a small Baptist church on the windswept plains of Oklahoma.
Different cultures. Different countries. Different conceptions of life.
The flood of Gentile believers into the once Jewish church changed everything. Lesslie Newbigin, a twentieth-century missionary in India, once wrote, “It is not as though the church opened its gates to admit a new person into its company, and then closed them again, remaining unchanged except for the addition of a name to its roll of members. Mission is not just church extension. It is something more costly and more revolutionary.”17
Mission isn’t just church extension. Mission prompts a revolution.
Where there’s revolution—transformation—there’s almost always opposition. While some people are lunging ahead, others are digging in their heels.
For some early Jewish followers of Jesus who dug in their heels, the change was just too much. They demanded, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved” (Acts 15:1). Peter fired back, “And God, who knows the human heart, testified to them [the Gentiles] by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us. Now therefore why are you putting God to the test … ?” (15:8–10).
How in the world would the early church come to any sort of healthy compromise?
They argued. Fiercely. Confrontation turned to combat before it ever became compromise. “And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them [the believers who championed circumcision], Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to discuss this question with the apostles and the elders” (Acts 15:2). The Greek word stasis, translated here as dissension, elsewhere in Acts describes Ephesian riots (19:40) and a rigid division between Pharisees and Sadducees, which turned so violent that the Roman soldiers had to intervene (23:7, 10). The “no small dissension” in Antioch that pitted Peter and Paul against the Pharisaic followers of Jesus was not civil debate. It was aggressive, even vicious.
This dissension joined with debate (Acts 15:2, 7). This word zētēsis, translated here as debate, tells us that the church was committed, even with explosive arguments, to intelligent investigation. Later in Acts, Roman procurator Festus tells King Agrippa about Paul’s legal case: “Since I was at a loss how to investigate [zētēsis] these questions, I asked whether he [Paul] wished to go to Jerusalem and be tried there on these charges” (25:20). Debate, zētēsis in Greek, is not argument for argument’s sake, but the intense investigation of a particular question. The churches in Antioch and Jerusalem applied their prodigious learning to intense debate over an intractable question: Are Gentiles who follow Jesus obligated to observe the commands of Torah?
Where does the Holy Spirit fit into all of this argument? The head honcho in Jerusalem, James, appeals to the Holy Spirit—“it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us”—when he sends word of a compromise to the people of Antioch: no circumcision for Gentiles, but stay away from blood, from food sacrificed to idols, and from sexual immorality. The decision, James notes, seems good both to the Holy Spirit and to us. The Holy Spirit is embroiled in our effort, James claims, enmeshed in our brutal, bruising path to compromise.
In the tough, gritty work of conflict and compromise we find the Holy Spirit. Not in the revelation of an easy solution. Not in the avoidance of conflict. In this gritty process, rather than instantaneous solutions or conflict avoidance, we discover a rich vein of the Spirit. Compromise—the battle-scarred road that leads to it, too—can seem good both to the Holy Spirit and to us.
Even, I’m told, in a colorful, not-so-small Baptist church in Oklahoma.
BREATHE 
PRAY
Holy Spirit
The audacity to argue
We ask for this
The ferocity to fight
We plead for this
The daring to debate
We beg for this
The courage to compromise
We pray for this
Above all, we pray for this
Amen