Unity in Conflict: A Counter-Cultural Approach
Week 1: Conflict: Inevitable, Yet Positive
The Illusion of a Conflict-Free Life
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to always be right and to always get what you want? If you pause and imagine it for a moment, it sounds like that would simplify almost everything. There would be no disagreements to work through, no awkward conversations where you have to backtrack or admit you were wrong, no tension over decisions—where to go out for dinner, what to do on vacation, how to spend your time or order your life together. Everything would simply fall into place, and at first, that almost sounds like perfect peace.
In The Stepford Wives, a woman named Joanna moves to a suburban town where everything seems almost perfect. Maybe too perfect. The women are kind, attentive, agreeable, endlessly accommodating, and always romantically available to their husbands. Yet as the story unfolds, Joanna discovers that the reason is that the men in the town have replaced their wives with robots! What initially appears to be harmony is revealed to be something far more unsettling. Conflict has been eliminated, but so has the reality of a real relationship. And while that mystery-thriller story is extreme, the instinct behind it is not. Perhaps in more subtle ways, we are inclined to diminish the personhood of others around us. When conflict arises, we want to resolve it quickly, to win the argument, or move past the tension without truly engaging the person in front of us. But the person you are in conflict with is not merely a position to correct or a problem to solve. They are someone created in the image of God. Which means that if conflict is inevitable—and it is—the deeper question is not whether we will face it, but who we will become in the midst of conflict?
The Image of God and the Layers of the Self
When we turn to Genesis 1, we are stepping into a world as God intended it to be. At the climax of creation, we read, “So God created mankind in his own image… and God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1:26, 31, NIV). This is not only a statement about where we come from, but about who we are. To be made in the image of God is to carry a God-given dignity, to reflect something of His character into the world, and to bear a worth that is not earned but God-given. And yet, as foundational as that truth is, it is remarkably easy to forget that if I am made in the image of God, then so is every other person as well—including the one I find myself in conflict with. But conflict has a way of narrowing our vision until we are no longer engaging a person but reacting to a position. We begin to flatten the other person, reducing them to something more manageable in our own minds.
Betty Pries, in her book The Space Between Us, offers a helpful way of understanding what is happening beneath the surface of those reactions. She suggests that we tend to live out of three layers of the self. The descriptive self names what is simply true about us—our story, our background, our identity—without judgment or distortion. The defended self develops over time as we learn to protect what matters to us; it manages our image, avoids pain, and reacts when we feel threatened. And then there is the deeper self, the place where we are most grounded and most aligned with who God created us to be, less driven by fear and more open to grace, curiosity, and generosity.
When Paul the Apostle writes that “the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh” (Galatians 5:17, NIV), we begin to see a clear parallel. What Pries calls the defended self aligns closely with what Scripture calls the flesh—that inward pull toward self-protection, control, and self-assertion. Whereas the deeper self reflects life in the Spirit, where we are no longer governed by fear but are freed to live in openness and love.
In the midst of conflict, we instinctively lean into that defended self. We tell ourselves the most generous possible story about our own motives, while telling a far less generous story about the other person. We inflate ourselves and deflate them, creating a dividing line between “us” and “them.” The good guys and the bad guys. And in doing so, we begin to lose sight of the image of God—not only in the other person, but even in ourselves.
A Unity Centred on Christ & The Recognition That I Am Not
Jesus never prayed that His followers would always agree, but He did pray that they would be one. As Ronald J. Kraybill observes, “Jesus’ desire that his followers become one suggests that he knew we would struggle with division. He did not pray that we would always agree, but that we would stay together in the same love that bound Jesus to the Father. We stay together so that the world may know.”
This is the kind of community we are called to be. Not a community without conflict, but a community that remains in love in the midst of conflict. And this is where the confession of John the Baptist becomes so significant. In the Gospel of John, when he is asked whether he is the chosen one, the people have been waiting for, John the Baptist responds simply: “I am not the Christ” (John 1:20, NIV). This confession that “I am not the Christ” has the power to de-centre us from ourselves and to instead re-centre on Jesus. Because in moments of tension, we are often tempted to place ourselves at the center—to defend and justify ourselves and our own perspective. But when we say, “I am not the Christ,” we step out of that false center of the defended self. We are reminded that we do not need to control the outcome, that we do not need to win, and that we are not the ones holding everything together. Rather, Christ is. And when Christ becomes the center, our conflicts do not disappear, but they are no longer ultimate. We are holding onto something greater, something that allows us to remain in relationship even when we do not always agree.
The Practice of Presence
This leads us into a different way of being in the midst of conflict, one that is grounded not in avoidance or control, but in presence. We are invited to be present with God, present with ourselves, and present with one another. This kind of presence requires growing in self-awareness, learning to notice what is happening within us when tension arises. When anger surfaces, or offence takes hold, it is often a signal that something deeper is at stake, that some part of our defended self feels threatened. Rather than reacting immediately, we are invited to become attentive. We begin to ask what is happening beneath the surface, whether we are experiencing a loss of security, identity, or place? These are not easy questions, but they are essential if we are to remain present in conflict. Because when we bring that awareness into the presence of God, something begins to shift. We create space to slow down, to listen, and to respond with intentionality from the deeper self and respond to the leading of the Spirit, rather than react out of instinct from the defended self and the flesh. And in that space, a different kind of community begins to take shape. Not one without conflict, but one marked by a commitment to remain in love, a community that is not centred on always being right, but centred on Christ. And as we learn to live from that Jesus-centred paradigm, we begin to embody the unity of the Spirit that Jesus prayed for—a unity that is formed even in the very midst of our differences.