Faith Fights: Us & Them

Hey friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
We appreciate you joining us again as we continue through this series that we’re calling
Faith Fights, a look at the ways in which Christians have disagreed with one another
and the disputes that have been a part of the church in our historic experience as well
as in some of our personal experiences.
Today we shift gears a little bit,
Michael, less of a specific idea or a theme that we’ve
fought over and more of a tendency to kind of divide up over a variety of issues.
And so I would say today we have a little bit different session in that we look at our
Christian pattern of being able to divide and argue about just nearly anything.
Yeah, you know, there’s this sort of common refrain that I learned pretty quickly coming
into the church, and that is when someone has a thing that they would like changed,
there’s a pretty consistent temptation to come to the office or call in,
send an email, whatever, and say,
you know, I think a lot of people want fill in the blank.
And what’s interesting is if you dig into that a little bit,
nine times out of ten,
you ask them, well, what people?
It turns out there’s maybe two people or three people,
but it’s amazing how a lot of people
or there’s a group of us gets formed really quickly in church.
There’s this idea, hey, I’m not the only one.
There’s this whole tribe that wants this thing to be this way.
And Clint, you know, I think it’s interesting how pervasive across the church that this
is.
We just talked about worship in the last podcast.
It’s certainly present in discussions of worship,
but you may be surprised to find that this
pops up in building,
in finance,
in mission,
in congregational life.
I mean, really, whatever the church does,
this tendency to sort of create camps that
are trying to sort of lobby for differing ways of thinking,
how pervasive that really is.
I suppose there’s some sense in which it’s inevitable because we are in a church that
is diverse.
We are a group of people who have different opinions about things.
And some people are going to share some of those opinions more than others.
But we also do it outside of just our own congregation.
Sometimes the “we” and “them” changes.
Maybe it’s the denomination.
Maybe we feel like a congregation is at odds with the presbytery or with the synod or even the general assembly.
And so we see over and over again,
I think, this tendency to draw circles.
And it is a struggle for us at a human level.
And I suppose somewhere in there is the psychological desire to find our camp.
Certainly, it can be the manipulative desire to get our way.
But I think we are wired to look for people who are like-minded and gravitate.
And that’s one of the things that makes unity in a congregation so difficult because you
have to sort of consciously fight against this tendency to build camps and to,
you know, what do camps do?
They go to battle with other camps.
And as we do that,
it becomes very hard for a congregation to thrive,
to give the sense
that it’s a place for everyone.
You know, this is just one of our ongoing struggles.
I don’t think this is one necessarily that we will ever fix.
And it should be said that there are moments in the church history where the circling the
wagons and standing up for an idea has been exactly the right thing to do.
This isn’t always negative.
It’s not always a bad thing.
But it is to say that sometimes we draw up teams and pick sides and go to battle over
things that probably aren’t worth the damage that they do.
Yeah, I do think it’s worth taking a pause at some point in this conversation to reflect
on the positive nature of what it takes to have people who will support one another,
especially when there’s substantial issues on the table.
I do think a person joining us may say,
hey, guys,
this isn’t just a church thing.
This happens throughout society.
And you would be right that people find camps in politics.
They find it in community support organizations.
They find it in Bridge Club.
Right.
I mean, there’s this human tendency that this happens throughout all of these different sort of affiliations,
groups of friends, circles,
organizations,
of course, across the board.
We are looking at it,
though, today, I think, from a lens that may be a little bit different
from some of those lenses,
in the sense that the church is unique in its constitution.
The church only exists because of the life,
work, and person of Jesus Christ.
On any given Sunday, Clint,
the only thing shared by every person in the sanctuary or
in the worship experience,
wherever they are, is their faith and trust and hope in the person
of Jesus Christ.
If you sat those people down with an extensive survey,
they would like different foods.
They would appreciate different hobbies.
They would have different viewpoints about the world,
both what its problems and potential
solutions might be.
I mean,
there’s nobody who checks all of the boxes,
but the truth is church is a place where people gather,
not because of the stuff that separates them,
but because of the core
thing that unites them.
And because of that thing,
the us versus them dynamic in church is changed.
It’s shaped in a different way,
because even though we may have differences that in other
contexts would divide us,
in church, there’s a kind of gravity that holds us together as
a we that resists the us and them that we need to take seriously.
Let me say this more simply.
Church should be the school that we go to that teaches us how to remain in fellowship
and community with people,
even when the us and them is a very tempting way to go.
And I think that makes church a very instructive,
but yet also sometimes very difficult place.
This isn’t a new reality for the church.
We have always lived with it.
But we do live in a time where I think people are particularly quick to draw boxes around
an idea, a group,
a perspective or viewpoint,
and essentially rally,
you know, we see fewer and fewer examples in the world where people who don’t agree with one another work together,
honor one another,
value one another,
compliment one another.
The idea is increasingly apparent that if I don’t agree with someone,
I can’t I have
to cut off contact with they are sort of the enemy.
And I think that’s that’s an unfortunate reality for the world we live in.
And I think it is incumbent upon the church to push back on that idea very, very hard.
We week after week gather in the sanctuary or gather with others in this time who don’t
agree with us on things and with whom we wouldn’t agree.
And we say those things are less important than the fact that we together profess Jesus
Christ as Lord and we will sort out the rest and we will do so with love,
with forgiveness,
with grace,
with mutual respect and understanding,
and with some leeway to give people the right
to come to different conclusions at different times.
And we will do all of that consciously,
purposefully.
And that is not a message that is celebrated right now.
It is it is a foreign concept and I think it would be an absolute tragedy for the church
to join the culture and lose the idea that our commonality,
our oneness is in Christ,
not our opinions,
not our objectives, not our agendas, but in Jesus.
And you and I shared a seminary professor that I think is helpful in this conversation
to me and his word was reduced or reduction.
And the idea would be simply stated that the gospel is this enormous calling on our life
and that any time we make it smaller,
we have lost something of it.
In other words, any time we take the gospel,
which is about many things,
and we try to
make it about only the things that are important to me,
then I have done it a disservice.
I have reduced the gospel and therefore minimized it and kept myself from hearing the larger
call and I think that’s a helpful visual image.
One of the things that we all tend to do as humans is we tend to gravitate towards the
things that are compelling to us and maybe on some level the things that we prefer.
And as that process happens,
we do simplify,
we narrow down from the big sort of vision
towards these more specific things that fit who we are,
they’re more tailored to who we
are.
And there’s been no time in history,
literally, that’s not an overstatement,
there’s been no time in history in which that is not more true in our daily life than right now.
The idea that everything can be tailored to you,
that everything can be reduced down to your preferences,
is a reality that we literally live in.
I mean,
your choice of what ketchup you like or what drink you want or more than that,
what type of color you want in your car when you purchase it, I mean,
the ability for choice
that exists on the internet and phones in our daily life is so vast,
we should be gracious
on ourselves when we start to find ourselves believing that it’s only our preferences and opinions that matter.
Everything that’s been constructed around us tells us that that is so,
but the church does not.
Ultimately, it’s not that we don’t matter.
Each of us is named,
each of us is loved by a God who created us and who desires relationship
with us, that’s the good news.
But God isn’t particularly interested in our preferences of the flavor of coffee or what
we would like to have surrounding us all the time.
God is not only the one who loves us,
God is the one who stands over us,
who convicts us by his holiness, by God’s righteousness.
We stand in awe and recognize our own failed finiteness and humanness.
And I do think,
Clint, as we reduce down the gospel towards something that looks more and
more like us, by natural human progression,
what ends up happening is we begin to look
for others who are sort of close to our orbit.
Oh yeah,
I mean, I think I agree with you on this thing.
And so we sort of bring them in and pretty soon we’ve got a little tribe that sort of
all understands each other.
We like talking with one another.
And what we begin to discover is there’s other people who think and live and prefer differently.
And suddenly these different reductions happening,
all of us at the same time, begin to actually
sequester us such that we are less able to join together in that larger,
more holistic gospel.
And that isn’t something I think that we should bear a lot of guilt about.
We shouldn’t shame ourselves over.
It’s not like we’re the first people in history to do that.
I think it’s rather something to be open and honest and humble about because that awareness
then makes it possible for us to choose different paths.
Yeah,
I think that there have been times in my church experience where you have an experience
of this at its most shallow that someone comes in and they say,
“I didn’t like this program.
If that happens again,
I’ll leave the church.
If we use this room instead of that room or if this changes,
then my family’s going to
leave.” And that idea that you sort of use your personal preferences as a threat hanging over,
and again, I get it.
We all like to have things our way,
but that is an impossible way to live out life as a
church.
You know, it’s hard.
The ambiguity of diversity,
variety,
of allowing people the freedom to come to an opinion different
than yours, that’s really difficult.
And yet, I think we see it in the gospel.
And so on one end,
I would say that that’s sort of the most shallow approach of it.
But I can give another example of how it works its way into a church,
and this is what we mean by reduce.
So the gospel calls us to minister to those who are in need,
right?
Those who are hungry,
those who are poor,
those who are hurting.
And occasionally, I would say this happens at least once a year,
if not more, in the conversation about mission.
Somebody will say, and with good intention generally,
“You know, we’re sending money to Africa or sending money to these places where there’s need.
What about our county?
What about Spirit Lake?
There are people who need things in Spirit Lake.”
And the answer is yes, there are.
And we are trying to reach out through Upper Des Moines,
through food pantry, through helping people through the church office.
We do that.
But the idea that we can pick one or the other,
or that they’re somehow in opposition,
that we can help these people or these people,
or even the idea that these people are more
important because they live in our zip code,
and therefore they should get help first,
is to take the whole call of the gospel and make it smaller.
And when we make the gospel smaller,
we’re never doing it a service.
We’re never helping ourselves live the fullness of the church’s commitment to Jesus Christ.
And so that sounds like a reasonable thing.
We should help the people we see more than we should help the people we don’t see.
Well, the truth is, the gospel calls us to try and help all,
to try and do both.
And we should balance both.
It’s the same when we say,
“We need to take care of this group in the church.
We need to be especially aware of young people or old people or whatever.” Yes,
we should do all of that.
And doing all of it is hard because it’s huge,
Michael, and it is a natural human temptation
to want to hone that down into the things that I personally find most appealing.
But it doesn’t help the church be the church.
And this explains all of the qualifiers that come with church lingo.
If you’ve been in church for very long at all,
you know how much adjectives and descriptions
there are to describe stuff that happens in churches.
Well, we’re contemporary.
We’re traditional.
We are a really active fellowshiping church,
or we’re a church into social justice,
or there’s all of these terms and words that we use as sort of shorthand to describe for
people.
This is the emphasis.
This is the thing to expect.
And I think both of us resist those words for the reason that they always,
by definition, narrow a thing which is larger and grander and more difficult into a thing which is easier
to understand, which is maybe on its surface a good thing,
but also a little bit more controllable,
also a little bit more like what we would prefer as opposed to that call to live in
this far messier, bigger call, which is the call of Jesus Christ.
That is the gospel.
And I think that on one hand,
it’s good to pursue excellence in the different places
where the church serves.
We serve locally.
We serve internationally.
We seek to have good worship.
We seek to have good discipleship programs for young and for old.
There’s lots of different ways that we look at church and we say,
“Hey, these are all elements that are present in a healthy, growing, vibrant congregation.
We need to do that well.”
But we miss it when we start boiling down these things to be ends unto themselves.
Well, we have the best vacation Bible school that exists in the state of Iowa.
Well, that might be good,
but it’s not good if that’s the only reason the congregation
exists.
It’s good to do things well.
It’s not good for those things to exist unto their own ends.
And church is a particularly tempting place, I think,
to dig in,
to sort of find a spot
and to say, “This is the most important thing.”
And we as Christians who are called by the whole gospel are called to really critique
that and to try to push against that temptation.
I was once in a meeting.
This happened in Texas as we had conversation about how to reach out into the community.
And of course, there was a significant Hispanic population.
And so,
our conversation traveled some of the ground of what it would look like to be
more open, to be more aware,
to be more engaged with that part of our community because there
weren’t strong ties really at the time.
And again, I don’t want to cast this in a light too negative,
but one of the people
in attendance at some point made the remark,
“Well, they have their own churches.
Why don’t they…they should get those things or do those things in their own churches?”
And I think what it does is highlights the very natural process that gets us to an unnatural
place in regard to the gospel.
For example, when we use the word “they,” we have to recognize that we are probably
on ground to be careful with.
The word “they” doesn’t sound like a dangerous word,
and we could use it flippantly.
But when we use it in church and we are identifying a group that is outside of either the congregation
or what we consider to be correct,
we have to acknowledge it is vitally important that
we become aware that that language can have very damaging effects.
They can be language that builds walls,
that builds barriers, that builds separation,
and
it is generally not going to be the beginning of positive and helpful conversation, in my experience.
Yeah, I think as a way of illustrating that,
I would point to my own faith history.
I grew up in a tradition of the Christian church that very much conceives of itself
as being an “other” to some of the other churches.
They’re very suspicious of other denominations,
other church families.
There’s very much this sort of inward-looking kind of focus,
and that has strengths that
I could name in a different conversation.
I think the weakness that I saw in that tradition is that kind of skepticism keeps you from
being able to learn richly from the body of Christ that surrounds you,
and that has denominational
impact.
One of the things about the mainline denominations,
speaking as Presbyterians, that I’ve actually appreciated as somewhat of an immigrant to the Presbyterian family,
is how the Presbyterian
denomination contains a kind of diversity of intentionality.
Now this has changed and ebbed and flowed throughout history.
I don’t want to paint a rosier picture of our church family than is fair,
but there’s a sense in which we’re a big tent,
in which you’ll find lots of different “thems” present
in the larger “us.”
And I have appreciated that,
because though there are significant disagreements within our number,
and we have felt the weight of that through many debates throughout time,
we have done as good of a job as we possibly could have to try to hold the “we” even amidst
the “us” and the “them.”
Even though we’ve had differences of understanding,
theological differences,
even mission differences, budgetary differences, we should use our money to do this and not this.
Throughout it all, we’ve sought to try to practice humility and grace.
And though you can point to that history from one vantage and say,
“We failed because nobody
has gotten their side,” I would argue that’s a sign of wisdom.
When there’s been compromise,
when groups have sought to find a middle road amidst very different opinions,
I think some of our denominational history also points to people trying to live
this out well.
And that’s a difficult thing to do when your denomination spans 50 states.
And that denomination’s a relationship with denominations across the world.
I think there’s wisdom in that, Clint,
though you and I both know that people often struggle
with that kind of diversity.
There’s a sense in which it does make it more difficult when we hold those lines a little
bit more loosely.
I think that trying to keep the family together as best as possible is a commendable goal.
And I do think it is sort of where it is the assumption that Presbyterians historically
start with, the idea that we should not let our differences divide us.
Now,
there are moments that we find ourselves with incompatible ideas or practices.
There are moments where we have to wish each other well and go separate directions.
And we’ve not done that historically very well.
We’ve done it.
We’ve gone other directions.
We’ve generally done it angrily and hurtfully.
But it’s not to say that nothing matters and that nobody’s opinion,
there isn’t right, there isn’t wrong.
It’s not that.
It’s that we begin with this premise that we’re better off by staying together,
by working through our differences rather than simply taking our stuff and leaving.
And that kind of commitment,
I think, is commendable,
but it often doesn’t transfer down all the
way.
And so you think about the reality of a church family and that in any church family,
there are those who are ready to leave.
They’re ready to eject on the family because a room got painted the wrong color, or because
the drum set got brought into the sanctuary,
or because I didn’t like this one sermon,
or I don’t appreciate,
or I think we shouldn’t get new whatever it is.
And it is, there is something,
we talked last week about the emotional connection of music,
and there’s something also in church that is deeply emotional for people.
And the idea of church being just right for me is a deeply compelling idea.
But again,
when it is unchecked,
it can be a dangerous one.
Of course we want church to be the right place for me and my family.
I want church to be the place where my ideas find some traction and where maybe I don’t
feel assaulted by other ideas.
I want there to be a place of connection for me and comfort for me.
But when I begin to crave that more than faithfulness,
I’m in trouble.
And if I come to the point where I think I cannot be happy in a church family because
they did this with the building,
or because they did that in the parking lot,
or because they gave a donation to this organization that I don’t like,
then I think we’re being
very small in our outlook.
I think we’re being very narrow in our focus.
And I don’t know that we do that with other,
I’m not a part of a lot of other organizations.
It doesn’t appear to me that that happens at the same level in say the educational world
or say the corporate world.
There is something about church that makes that a temptation in a way that I haven’t experienced other places,
and one that I think we have to be aware of.
I think that it would be a failure to end this conversation without reflecting a little
bit on why Christians are driven to resist this temptation that we have,
because it is different than other organizations.
In fact,
I would say that there’s some argument to be made in a Western capitalist society
that if you disagree with the chapter leader of that particular,
you know, local group of whatever it is,
Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts,
or 4-H,
or Kiwanis, I mean, pick all of these
different associations that we can choose to volunteer to be part of, right?
If you have a difference,
if you see it differently,
you know, there’s probably some other people
who see it differently.
So there’s some value,
go start another thing.
There’s options in the community.
Different people can share their gifts and talents,
you know, Rising Tide rises all ships,
raises all ships.
I don’t think that works in the church because we aren’t founded on the same foundation as
these other organizations.
We don’t exist for the thing that we do,
or the service that we provide our members.
We exist because Jesus Christ calls the church into existence.
And that is a substantial difference.
When Paul uses the language in the New Testament about the church being the bride of Christ,
our desire to be unified,
our desire to have our structure and our systems and our body
put in order is not so that it’s just nice for the people who are part of it.
It’s because we truly believe that the way that we conduct ourselves together is the
way that the bride is conducting itself in relationship to the groom.
And if you allow that metaphor to sink in,
it adds a gravity to this conversation that
I think we miss at the ground level of our existence in the church because yeah,
we all have things, if we were going to be honest,
and we could rule by fiat,
but we would change
stuff in church.
Every single person in church would do so.
But the reality is the reason why we work together and why we resist this temptation
of us and them is not because it’s a nice thing to do or because civil people treat
each other that way,
but it’s because we take seriously that we are the bride striving
to live out the best that we are called to in honor of the groom,
waiting for the groom
to return.
And when the groom comes,
we want to have our relationships look like the gospel and
we want to reflect the goodness that Christ has called us to do.
And that call,
Clint, moves us into a different ordering of priority.
We have to look different than the world that surrounds us.
We must resist the labels that are so easily applied in the culture that surrounds us
because we’re not driven by the service that we provide,
we’re not driven by sort of the
outcomes that these organizations want.
We’re driven by the person,
the risen Christ,
and that changes everything.
I think the phrase that comes to mind,
Michael, because the church dabbles with the sacred
– and I say dabbles intentionally,
not because we don’t encounter the sacred,
but because on any given week we’re trying to stumble toward the sacred.
We seek to encounter what is sacred in the church,
in the gospel.
We seek to elevate what is sacred,
incorporate what is sacred in our lives.
But we don’t have a handle on that.
We don’t own it.
We don’t know how to do it.
We don’t have a formula by which we can invoke the sacred and make it work for us or make ourselves sacred.
We are in this constant effort to stumble in front of the sacred and sit long enough
with Him to be blessed and then be called to be a blessing.
But because we seek to have something to do with the sacred,
there is always this underlying
temptation to treat all of it as sacred.
In other words, because we encounter the sacred in the sanctuary or in the music,
then we are tempted to consider that thing,
the organ,
the hymnal, the pulpit, as the sacred moment.
And it isn’t.
It is only a step on the way.
It is only a signpost that hopefully directs us on the journey.
But when we confuse things and make them sacred with the sacred one,
then we’re in danger.
And so when the building becomes sacred,
when the liturgy becomes sacred,
when the version of the Bible or the hymnal becomes sacred,
it doesn’t matter what it is.
That’s what humans do,
right?
We are wired to make idols out of things.
And so when we get one that feels like it has a connection to the sacred,
we are very likely to make that thing itself sacred to us.
And when that happens,
it becomes very easy to draw these lines of us and them,
and then trouble starts.
And we do it at the congregational level,
the denominational level.
It’s because we’re human.
And I think that one of the great challenges of being the church,
particularly a church like the Presbyterian Church that tries to leave room for diversity and tries to really
live into the idea that it matters that we don’t all agree and that we don’t all come
from the same place and that we’re not all the same color and that we don’t all have the same backgrounds,
is that it gives us lots of opportunities to fall into that trap
of separating ourselves.
And that’s one of our great strengths,
and often your great strength is also your great weakness.
And I’m glad that we live with it,
though it doesn’t always make things easier for us.
It’s a really important point,
Clint.
And I have a friend who just bought a house and they’re doing some extensive remodeling,
and some of that remodeling is taking out walls.
And I think that the process of remodeling looks a lot like being church,
because there are some walls you can take out,
and there are some walls that will bring the house down.
And it takes someone with some wisdom,
or in the case of home remodeling,
of course, an engineer’s ability to know the difference between the two.
And you get there,
I assume, I don’t know, I’m not an engineer,
through some training, through extensive experience, from understanding how houses work and having seen this in different
processes.
But a person with some wisdom can say,
you can take out all of those walls because they
don’t hold up the building.
But when you take out this wall,
it’s going to collapse.
And that’s fundamentally what living in community in the church is like.
It is practicing,
learning,
growing, becoming able to separate between the wall that will
bring the building down and all of the other things.
And there are fewer of the things that will bring the building down than there are the
walls that can be taken out.
And the reality is that we need to stand upon the thing that must hold the building.
There are substantial things that are worth sticking our back up for and defending.
There are things that we should be confident in saying, this is irreducible.
We must stand on this.
And there are times in which conflict will arise because those things are the things on the table.
But Clint, I’ve not been in a leadership capacity in the church nearly as long as you.
But I’ve got to say that a large,
in fact, I would say exclusively the conflicts that
I can look back on in my short time in the church,
I have not seen that kind of substantial
conversation raise hardly at all if it has.
I was just trying to think,
Michael, I’ve not been a part of hundreds of these conversations,
but maybe dozens in which somebody comes and either by appointment or call,
sometimes email says,
you know,
Pastor Clint,
I’m leaving the church.
I’m moving to another church.
I’m done at this congregation,
whatever this congregation was at the time.
And I’m trying to think,
Michael, I don’t remember a single one of those conversations
in which the core issue was,
I don’t think this place is helping me live out the gospel.
I can’t think of a time in which I would characterize the thing that is leading the person out of
the church to be a core issue of faith.
It’s,
I don’t like the youth program or I,
it was always event driven or issue related.
I can’t think of a time when it was,
I don’t think this church is living up to its calling
to be the church and therefore I don’t think it’s helping me follow Christ.
It was music or this conversation,
this decision, the session did this or said this.
And that person,
you know, it,
this is hard.
I think this is one of the most difficult tasks of being church is for all of us as church
members to try and manage our stuff and keep a reins on our desire to create a little church just for Clint,
a church just for Michael,
you know.
And that’s a very natural inclination,
especially when you factor in this idea of trying to encounter the sacred.
But when we can do it,
when we can reach out to someone that we know we wouldn’t agree
with on many things and say in the name of Jesus Christ,
you and I, our brother and sister,
we’re first Presbyterian church together and together we’re looking to serve the cause
of Christ despite the fact that we don’t see everything the same way.
That’s a rare practice.
It’s an incredible gift.
It is not something I think we see much of in the world around us and it is the inherent
strength of a church built on Jesus Christ to seek to do that.
And it is not easy and the church has never had moments where it wasn’t failing to do it, myself included,
but it is vital for us to understand what it means to be one body
in that way.
That same professor that you referenced earlier has done extensive amount of writing and thinking
about what happens when the church over aligns with the culture that surrounds it.
And I think that that is a particular temptation in every time and place.
All the generations of Christians have tried to figure out what’s the church’s relationship
to the culture,
to the politicians,
to the policies and laws.
Sometimes the church has just been outright persecuted and sought after and the relationship
is pretty obvious at that point.
But what’s I think important is we need to be able to evaluate and to see the moments
when we’re allowing the cultural conversations and concerns to over impress upon what it
means to be in the family of faith.
We are people who live in a culture and then time and place,
so therefore the stuff that
the people and the culture surrounds us cares about,
we will naturally care about.
That is what it is to be human.
But there’s another thing when we allow those conversations to impress upon a space where
we’re seeking encounter with a God above and beyond that culture,
above and beyond our
time when the gospel has implications that critique the culture in which we live.
We are in a sense nomadic people.
We live where we live in the time that we live,
but we’re not in the kingdom in which
we exist.
We are in God’s kingdom.
We call ourselves out of the place or we’ve been called out of the existence in which
we know and that creates this odd kind of community with a different priority that surrounds
us.
I think the point I want to make,
Clint, is that when we find ourselves in conflict, especially
when we find ourselves occupying different camps with lines between us,
and we discover that those camps look remarkably similar,
if not the same,
as the camps that exist outside the church.
I think that is a moment where we must stop and practice real spiritual humility.
We need to ask God for wisdom because I suspect often when the camps of our culture live inside
our churches, we’ve not allowed the kingdom of God to live enough in our place.
We have not found ourselves captured by the God who calls us out of that time and place
into a gospel bigger than the space that we occupy.
That is challenging.
I’ll tell you, when I’ve heard the critiques in my own life,
those moments where I’ve heard them clearly,
it often causes pain and struggle because it conflicts with what I
have believed and what I’ve held sacred.
But I can tell you on the other side of that is a new kind of awareness of God’s presence
and goodness and willingness to draw us out of ourselves.
And that’s what church should be.
I had a—early on in my preparation for ministry,
I had an experience that I think has kind
of helped me keep some of this in perspective when I’ve been able to do it,
Michael.
I went to a fairly conservative undergraduate and studied religion.
And so at Northwestern College,
by virtue of being Presbyterian,
by virtue of maybe
not being as certain about some of the doctrinal stuff as my peers,
I was in the camp that
would have been considered left or liberal.
Now understand, liberal at Northwestern College is still pretty conservative everywhere else,
which I learned when I went to seminary,
which as a Presbyterian seminary was far left of Northwestern College,
and without having changed a certain idea,
without having changed anything that I thought,
I now found myself branded as a conservative.
And all I did was move.
All I did was change locations,
and I went from being left to right without changing
anything that I believed.
And it helped me in those early moments understand that labels by and large are not helpful.
Conversations are helpful.
Exploration is helpful.
But the label is so often not—it’s not trustworthy.
And so I think we have to be very careful not only using them to others,
which we should be extremely cautious with,
but even applying them to ourselves,
because we may or may not
understand all of what it means that we use that label,
and where we use it matters.
And so maybe if we could try to bend this for a moment to practicality,
then maybe that shouldn’t come so late.
But so here’s what I think is helpful.
If I find myself upset by a church,
how can I measure what it is that’s going on?
I think it’s a helpful moment.
Something has upset me.
I think the questions are helpful.
Why am I upset?
Is what I’m upset over a kingdom matter?
Is this a gospel issue,
or is it some other issue?
And if it’s not a gospel issue,
then really how important is it?
Is it a safety issue?
Then it might matter a lot.
Is it a personal preference issue?
Well I still might share it,
but I might share it less angrily.
I might share it way differently than if I—you know,
I have gotten very intense, heartfelt,
passionate, angry communications over things that I just couldn’t understand how there
could be so much anger about.
And I think when we jump from square one to square eight, that happens.
And so I think in those moments,
what am I angry about?
Why am I angry about it?
How important is it in regard to the gospel?
And it may still be a thing.
I may still write the letter that says,
“Hey, I notice we’re thinking of changing hymnals.
I love the old hymnal.
I hope we’ll continue to use it.”
That’s a far different thing than,
“If you change the hymnal,
I’m out of here.”
Well, that’s less helpful for pastors.
It’s just going to be—I don’t know if we can just—I’ll just be honest.
Those kind of letters are not very helpful because they’re not communicative.
So I think that when we are upset by a church,
it is worth asking the questions that help
us unpack how much of this is my personal stuff and how much of it is on the congregation.
And in the midst of that,
we can then perhaps have a real conversation that is productive
and meets in the middle,
which I think is always better.
Yeah, if I could, Clint, I might add another question to that hopper.
And I think I would ask,
what would be the thing that would happen which would resolve
my anger or my frustration?
What would happen for me to win?
And if you played that out hypothetically,
and it looks like something changing that
is not substantial—the color of the carpet changed,
the type of hymnal changed,
the whatever—if
it is not something that is a gospel solution or it doesn’t move forward that,
then I would
immediately put on the brakes and I would start asking,
why is it that such a simple
solution would suddenly resolve this situation for me?
Because Clint, I have never—maybe you have—I’ve never received a letter,
I’ve never received an email, I’ve never received a phone call from a person who said, “Michael,
I don’t think in that sermon you preached Jesus clearly enough.
I don’t think that the incarnation has been present in our life of our congregation in
teaching and in worship.
Michael, I feel like we need to be giving more to the poor.
We need to be figuring out how to be more present for those people who need it.”
Often,
in fact, I think exclusively that the concerns brought have been us concerns,
me,
our group.
And I don’t want to say that stuff’s not important,
Clint.
It is important.
And we try to be resonant with the things that we can do better.
But when the solution to our problems looks like simply changing things that will make
them a little bit more palatable to us or to our group,
I suspect it has fallen far
beyond the bar required for us to call them substantially rooted in the gospel of Jesus
Christ.
And that is, once again, to return to that sort of theological underpinning.
That is the bar.
And if we can’t make that bar,
then I think we need to practice humility and patience
and long suffering in matters that are not substance.
It’s tough for people that have so many choices.
I mean,
Jane and I will,
you know, on the nights that we don’t want to cook,
do you want to pick up something to eat?
What do you want?
And it’s almost overwhelming just in our small community.
You have 25, 30, 40 choices of what you might eat.
And so what I’m going to say is overstated.
But in that context,
it’s easy to think of church as another choice we make of our preferences.
You know, do you want burgers or do you want chicken or do you want pizza?
Well, do you want this church or that church?
But when we understand that our church,
the church that we join,
is our membership to
the body of Christ and our connection with our brothers and sisters in faith who serve Jesus together,
then when something comes up,
it is not inconceivable that we ask questions like,
is this an issue that would make me leave my friend group?
Is this an issue that I would, you know,
walk away from significant relationships?
Is this an issue that would cause damage in my marriage?
Or is this just something that I don’t like?
And if it’s just something that I don’t like,
again,
I don’t mean to say that it’s unimportant.
I mean to say that we deal with that very differently than treating it as if it is a
kingdom issue.
And if the church could sort out kingdom issues from non-kingdom issues and put the
kind of energy and passion into kingdom issues that we have so often thrown into non-kingdom issues,
we would be so much better off because the church has spent tons of energy and tons of passionate argument.
It’s not that we shouldn’t argue,
it’s that we should argue over the right things.
And so often we’ve put a vast amount of energy into arguing over things that in the long
run probably didn’t matter that much.
Yeah, in the spirit of being practical,
Clint,
if you want to continue to grow in that ability
to sort between the substance and the peripheral,
I would encourage you to begin in the Gospels,
the four tellings of Jesus’s life.
And, you know, if opening a study Bible and starting Chapter 1 of Matthew is difficult
for you, we just finished a Bible study on Mark.
Jump into that, go through that Bible study.
But what you’re going to find in any one of the Gospels with all of their diversities,
you will find universally in all four of those accounts of Jesus’s life the consistent telling
of Jesus’s critique of religious people’s hypocrisy,
the stuff that they make important.
And Jesus consistently cuts them down for and says,
“No, the thing that matters is the
care for the lost and the least,
God’s love,
God’s desire to impact our hearts,
not just how we appear.” And if you turn to those passages of Jesus teaching,
leading,
often critiquing the church of His day,
what you’re going to find is the tools to self-evaluate,
to ask, “Lord, God is, am I the scribe in the Pharisee in this moment?”
And friends, I’ll tell you, whenever I’m honest enough,
vulnerable enough to open myself to
that question, I find myself convicted and compelled to change and transform the way
that I operate in the world.
You know what?
Yeah, this seems really important to me.
I really don’t like it.
But if Jesus was here,
Jesus would be critiquing the way that I’m entering this situation.
That’s how we train ourselves.
We return to Scripture.
We return to the one who starts and teaches what it means to be an authentic follower of God.
And in doing that,
we become better able to sort the substance from the periphery.
Right. And I think, you know, fundamentally, all those questions flow from the question,
“Is this about the gospel,
or is this about me?
Is this a God thing,
or is this a Clint thing?”
And the more that I can—and again,
it’s not to say that me things are unimportant.
They just can’t be primarily important,
and we have to keep that balance.
You know, there’s just an inherent tension,
Michael.
There’s this beautiful passage in the book of Revelation where John says,
“I looked, and I saw a multitude that couldn’t be counted from every tribe,
from every nation, from every people, from every tongue,” a diversity that was literally for John unimaginable.
There was everything.
When he looked at the people of God,
he saw everyone and everything.
And yet, you weigh that against our experience of Sunday morning church,
which is when we
tend to want to go gather with people kind of like us.
Same general background,
often same ethnic group,
etc.
And so those two things have to be in conversation with one another,
because what the gospel
invites us to is a conception of church,
a conception of gospel,
and then the conception
of what is important that will always be far larger than wherever we are at the particular
moment.
And that’s a beautiful vision of what it means to be the church.
And we just simply can’t get there if I’m getting in the way with my stuff all the time.
It won’t work.
I won’t make much progress,
and I’ll never see the deeper invitation in the gospel.
You know, Clint, by way of my conclusion here,
I think most of us think of church as our sanctuary,
as our place that literally keeps the anxieties and the struggles of life.
It puts them at bay for a moment when we come into our place of worship.
I think that’s part of what’s made this separate worship time so difficult,
is because it doesn’t
feel like we enter into our sanctuary.
We have to imagine that sanctuary now in our own homes,
which has its own beauty.
But I do want to say this,
that functionally,
what we’re talking about is a struggle.
It’s a challenge.
If you’ve kept with us through this whole conversation,
you might at this point feel
a little beat up.
Like, my goodness, the place where I go for refuge is a place where I’ve got to have iron
sharpening iron, where I have to struggle through what I want,
but be patient with what
others want.
And I need to love and practice humility,
even in a place where I might not have the
bandwidth to do that.
And the answer is yes.
The answer is yes.
You come to this place,
whatever that means, right, in whatever time we’re in,
we gather in our sanctuaries, in holy spaces, to meet a holy God who gives us the strength to do this difficult work.
Church is both a place of rejuvenation and challenge.
And if we ever lose that,
we’ve lost what we are called to be as people of faith.
So yes, there is a challenge in resisting this us and them.
We can’t just go to church,
and we can’t just have a great time with people that we always
agree with all the time,
because if that’s the reality,
we’re no longer we.
We’ve just jettisoned the them.
And as long as we can live in faith and trust that God will bear us through,
even through the difficulty of living together,
then I think we’ve found at least a nugget of the
sacred, and that will continue to shape and reform us.
And the image of the one who gives us the good news,
Jesus Christ.
And the grace in that is the promise that no church is big enough to do that.
Quite frankly, you and I are not big enough to do…
None of us are capable of that,
but the God that we serve is.
And as we submit ourselves to the love and grace and mercy and calling of Jesus Christ,
we find the ability and the strength to live that out.
And it’s often by starts and stops and fits,
and it is rarely smooth-going.
It is nice when it is,
but generally it’s work,
and that’s okay, because the one who
has called us to do the work is with us in doing it and allowing it to happen.
And it’s…
When we get it right,
man, it’s good.
And so the goal is to get it right as often as we can.
Well, friends, aside, go forth.
Let us continue in whatever way we can,
seek to be one body in Christ and reflect the unity
of the good news that’s been given to all.
We’re grateful for the time that you’ve spent with us in this conversation.
It’s always a privilege that we would get to share this time with you.
We pray that you’re blessed until we come together again next week as we continue to
explore the different places where we as church are tempted to fight with one another.
Until then, be blessed.
Thanks for listening.