“One of the things Christians are disagreed about is the importance of our disagreements.”
-C. S. Lewis
Let me say a hearty “Amen!” We make the mistake in both directions, but soft-pedalling a major disagreement is something we’ll come back to another day. Today, I’d like to address our pernicious habit of making far more of a disagreement than we ought.
When we’re making a mistake of this kind, usually the problem has relatively little to do with the merits of the actual disagreement. Far more often, the problem has to do with pursuing comfort and avoiding hard work.
The comfort pursued has chiefly been of two kinds. The first kind is very personal. Person X and Person Y have a tiff of some sort, X’s ego is bruised, and X lacks the skills or the will to address it properly. So he waits, and in due time, some doctrinal molehill will arise that, properly nourished by his latent discontent, can be turned into a mountain. At that point X will divide from Y, ostensibly over the molehill in question, and entirely too many of us will think that is respectable. In this way as a community we have frequently given at least grudging respect, if not open admiration, to people who should have been sternly ordered into no-nonsense pastoral counseling.
The second kind of comfort we’ve pursued is avoiding the very ordinary rough-and-tumble of interacting with the full range of our fellow Christians. In the West, we’ve been spoiled quite a bit. We’ve been so successful for so long. If you grew up Methodist, chances are excellent that every city you ever moved to had a Methodist church. Ditto for the other major denominations, and a lot of the minor ones.
Once the seeker-friendly movement kicked off, a lot of the denominational distinctives got smoothed out of everyday church life, radically expanding the number of places a generically homogenized evangelical could attend church without being jostled by something unfamiliar. Most of the “worship wars,” in fact, boiled down to people not wanting to be jostled by something culturally unfamiliar — and that was true both for the children of old (mostly 19th-cent. revival, honestly) church culture who didn’t want to be jostled by contemporary music, and for the children of contemporary culture who didn’t want to be jostled by old music.
If we decide — as we are biblically required to do — to fellowship at table with people who are culturally different from us, but whom Jesus has declared clean, then we’ll find ourselves navigating all kinds of things. The guy on my right baptizes babies; the guy on my left celebrates Purim but not Christmas, and the guy across the table plays worship songs on a tuned badminton racket and speaks in tongues. (Okay, I made up the badminton thing. But not the tongues.) A lot of us think of that as insanely uncomfortable, impossible to live with. It’s not. That’s just being out in the field instead of cloistered in the greenhouse.
Full Contact Christianity 