This story isn’t a call to compromise—it’s a call to press together. To stop assuming the worst, to stop feeding division, and to start working together on what matters.
They gathered with purpose. Men, women, and children—elders, leaders, and the quiet ones in the back pews—stood together, convinced a great threat had crept into their midst. Whispers had begun months earlier. Something was off. The spirit felt strained. Meetings turned tense. Worship lost its warmth. Fingers began to point, quietly at first, then openly. “There’s a problem here,” they said. “Something unclean, something destructive has entered.”
And so, the people prepared to defend what was holy.
They called meetings. They formed committees. They sharpened not swords, but words. They wrote letters. They gathered evidence. They remembered slights and compiled suspicions. They invoked righteousness. “We must protect the church,” they said. “We must cast out the one who threatens it.”
Each group believed they stood for truth. Each believed the other was the source of decay.
Week by week, the battle grew. Sermons became veiled accusations. Fellowship became frost. Conversations turned to confrontation. Kindness gave way to cautious silence. They fought in the name of purity, in the name of order, in the name of God. No one noticed how worship dimmed. How the children became quiet. How the peace left the room.
Then one day, it was done.
The pews were empty. The lights were out. The doors were locked. The church—the building, yes, but more than that, the body—was broken. Scattered. Wounded. What had been a sanctuary of prayer, a house of unity, lay in ruins. And the monster they had hunted? The beast they had sought to purge?
It wasn’t one person. It wasn’t some outsider. It was something they had all fed.
It was pride: the quiet certainty that I am right, and they are wrong. It was gossip, shared in the name of “concern.” It was envy masked as zeal, and bitterness disguised as boldness. It was the unwillingness to forgive. The refusal to listen. The fear of being wrong. The love of being in control.
In the end, they hadn’t cleansed the sanctuary. They had burned it down.
The tragedy was not that the monster had been strong. The tragedy was that no one stopped to ask if it had taken root in their own heart. No one paused to kneel before speaking. No one wept before accusing. They spoke hastily gathered, and sometimes blatantly false “truth” without love. They upheld law without mercy. They wielded Scripture like a spear, not a balm.
And they forgot the simple truth: the house of God is not built on perfect doctrine or powerful leadership. It is built on love that suffers long, bears all things, hopes all things. It is built when each person humbles themselves, seeks peace, and considers others better than themselves.
In their fight to preserve the church, they lost it.
This should give us pause.
If we see division, we must first search ourselves. Are we sowing peace or stirring strife? Do we seek restoration, or vindication? Do we pray more than we plot? Do we weep for unity, or merely demand to be heard?
The true monster was never a single person or idea. It was a spirit of division, so quiet, creeping, subtle. And it found room to grow in hearts too sure of their own righteousness and entertained with the possibility that they were right and others were wrong.
To build again, the people must remember what makes a church holy. Not bricks. Not bylaws. But love that binds every heart in humility, and grace that guards every tongue. The next gathering should begin not with accusation, but with confession. Not with anger, but with prayer.
And I hope we learn that the true strength of the church lies not in its objective certainty, but in its willingness to love.
“But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.”
James 3:17-18