Three Great Church Fights

23 April 2024

“When you’re picking a spouse,” I tell my young disciples, “make sure you can play well together, work well together, and fight well together.” They always think that’s a little funny, but I’m dead serious; the closer you are to someone, the more you’re gonna fight; best you be able to do it well together. We need these same qualities in the church, and the need didn’t take long to manifest.

The first serious recorded disagreement in the church was over ethnicity. The presenting issue was about the church’s charitable care for widows who didn’t have anyone to provide for them, but it wasn’t all the widows who were being neglected. It was the Greek-speaking (Hellenistic) Jewish widows who were being treated as second-class citizens. That sort of second-class treatment to Hellenistic Jews would have been common enough in the general culture of Jerusalem, but it had no rightful place in the church.

Acts 6 records the story: the apostles declined to leave their posts in order to handle the charitable matters themselves, and instead called on the congregation to nominate some men who were above reproach to administer these charitable matters. The apostles commissioned these men–Philip and Stephen famously among them–to handle the distribution. Worth noting: all seven of the chosen men have Greek names, and presumably could be trusted to treat their Greek-speaking brethren fairly. The matter doesn’t come up again; this solution seems to have put it to bed.

The next big fight is recorded in Acts 15, and this one is very different. The presenting issue this time is more doctrinal. Everyone understands that Gentiles can come to Jesus without becoming Jews first; the conversion of Cornelius and his family in Acts 10-11 made that plain. The question is, once you’ve brought the Gentiles into the church, then what? Up in Antioch, they were having a lot of success winning Gentiles to Christ, so the question became pressing. Some — Paul and Barnabas among them — thought that the Gentiles could follow Jesus as Gentiles. Others argued that it’s fine for a Gentile to believe in Jesus, and they clearly receive the Holy Spirit as Gentiles, just like Cornelius did, but if they’re serious about following Jesus, then they need to keep the Law. WWJD, right? Jesus kept the Law; if you say you’re following Jesus, put down the shrimp!

That’s not actually an easy argument to answer, and the details of the argument are beyond the scope of our time together today, but you can find the early church’s answer in Acts 15. In brief, the Gentiles are children of Noah, and therefore accountable to keep the commands God gave Noah, but they’re not Jews, and they don’t have to keep Jewish Law.

The next major church fight in Acts is different again. This time it’s a personal squabble between two people: Paul and Barnabas. Some distance into their first missionary journey (after Cyprus but before most of Asia Minor) John Mark left them and returned to Jerusalem. The text doesn’t say why. In any case, when it’s time go out again and encourage all the churches they’d started, Paul doesn’t want to take Mark. Barnabas does. There’s not much room for compromise — take him or don’t, right? In the end, the disagreement gets so sharp that they split the team and the job. Barnabas takes Mark and goes to Cyprus. Paul takes Silas and goes to Asia Minor.

Note that this disagreement doesn’t rise to the level of the previous one. It’s largely a question of personal philosophy of ministry: do we give the kid another shot? Barnabas is all for second chances. Paul wants traveling companions he can count on. Who’s right? The text leaves us to work it out for ourselves.

I say they both are. Barnabas — remember that his name means ‘Son of Encouragement’ — is living into the role that God has given him in the church. He’s the one, you may remember, who brought Paul (the freshly-converted former terrorist) into the Jerusalem church when nobody would associate with him. Barnabas was caring for Mark, as he should have been. Paul’s first priority was the work, and he chose traveling companions he could count on to keep up with him.

This third fight doesn’t ever come before the apostles or a church council. It doesn’t appear to even end up before the leaders of the local church (which would have been Antioch, in this case.) It doesn’t rise to that level because each man is within his liberty. Nobody is proposing to do anything wrong, and there’s no doctrinal issue at stake. Paul is not required to take a traveling companion he can’t rely on; Barnabas is free to give Mark a second chance if he cares to. At the same time, clearly they fought about it. The contention grew so sharp, Luke tells us, that they parted company. The first-ever Gentile Mission dream team, and it breaks up over an interpersonal squabble about whether to take along a particular junior team member. Wow.

(In God’s providence, the result of breaking up the team is two teams both going back out to the mission field. Don’t miss God’s ability to turn a profit on absolutely anything.)

The point is that not every conflict is the same, or calls for the same kind of solution. The first conflict was practical; the applicable doctrine was “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and everybody agreed on that. The question was just how to make sure that it got implemented well. Choosing people that everyone could trust to implement it well solved the problem.

The second conflict was fundamentally doctrinal; there was nothing to do but get everybody together and have it out. They needed time and space to do that, but they persisted at it until they came to agreement on the right answer.

The third conflict didn’t have one right answer. As conflict of personal and ministry philosophy where each man was within his Christian liberty, there wasn’t a clear wrong party. Because there wasn’t really a right or wrong answer, there also wasn’t an authority they could appeal to for a final resolution. Nobody had competent jurisdiction to curtail either man’s liberty in Christ, and the leaders rightly left it up to Paul and Barnabas to figure out what they were going to do.

You’ll face all three types of conflict in ministry. The vital thing is to discern which kind of conflict you’re facing, and act accordingly.

2 Comments | Ecclesiology | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Terrifyingly, Discouragingly Competent

16 April 2024

It is common in more conservative circles to think of the American church as ineffectual, diffuse, bumbling, incompetent. I have come to believe this is a comforting lie, and that the truth is far less flattering: the American church is terrifyingly competent at getting nearly anything it really wants. I know that sounds preposterous, but hear me out. 

Maintaining a typical American church is no picnic; starting one even less so. Even well-established churches die, and many, if not most, church plants fail within 3 years. But show me any major city in this country that doesn’t have a handful of hip, urban churches with that industrial coffee shop vibe. Show me any major suburb that’s not home to a few suburban megachurches that look like a mall or an airport concourse. The American church wants those things, and we make sure that we have them. 

Within most churches, the weekly worship service is a major priority. Go visit; sit through a service, then pull aside a church staffer. “That was amazing!” you say. “Would you mind telling me how you do it?” Ask the right person, and they can tell you, down to the literal nuts and bolts. After all, the Sunday service isn’t happenstance; they make the same thing happen every single week. 

  • They know exactly what tasks need to be done, by when, in order to pull it all off. 
  • They know what skill sets are needed to accomplish each task. 
  • They have identified people who have those skills, hired them (or installed them in volunteer positions), and empowered them to carry out their tasks. 
  • They make sure to provide those people with what they need to get the job done. 

We all know what this looks like. If a microphone cord goes bad, or a speaker goes out, they’ll replace it. The office manager orders the right kind of paper to print the bulletins. The PowerPoint (Keynote, if you’re really cool) slides will be carefully crafted and ready by Saturday so they can be loaded into Pro Presenter. The sound techs have an established rotation so there’s always someone on duty, and a backup in case of illness. The musicians will have the set list and be ready. The ushers who take up the offering will know who they are. The greeters will have been reminded to arrive 20 minutes early. And on and on….

I’m not knocking any of this. It’s a prodigious, brilliantly-coordinated effort, and a metric ton of work. Bringing it all off smoothly every single week is one of the great unappreciated labors of the modern church, and it’s not even considered some sort of extraordinary accomplishment. It’s just our baseline expectation — after all, it’s literally what we pay our church staff for, right?

…and that’s exactly my point. You want to know what it looks like when we really want something to happen? That’s what it looks like. We are absolutely competent at getting what we really want. 

Hold that thought.

Now go back to that same church staff, and ask them if they care that their kids grow up continuing to know and love Jesus. “Of course!” they will say. So then ask them “How do you make sure your kids don’t walk away from the Christian faith?” Inquire as to the plan. Ask the same set of questions that you asked about the service: 

  • What tasks need to be done, and by when, in order to accomplish the goal?
  • What skill sets are required to execute each task? 
  • Who has those skills? Who is empowering those people to use their skills?
  • What do those people need to get it done? Who makes sure they have what they need? 

You know as well as I do what’s going to happen. You’re going to get a deer-in-the-headlights look, a stammering recitation of some platitudes, and a quick exit from the conversation. And then we wonder why it’s getting sort of hard to find a 22-year-old who’s still Christian.

Someone will complain, of course, that discipling our kids is a multifaceted and organic process much harder to map than simply putting on the Sunday production, and so it is. But it’s also our primary job. All the more reason to have a plan, yes? Jesus never told us to make a Sunday morning stage production; He commissioned us to make disciples. So why is it we’re so competent at the one, and so helpless at the other?

Leave a Comment » | Disciple-Making, Ecclesiology | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Egalitarianism as Luxury Belief

26 March 2024

If you’re not familiar with Rob Henderson’s work on luxury beliefs, it would benefit you to get acquainted. The essay above will develop the idea in more depth, but here’s the quick-and-dirty version: “Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” A common example would be the “defund the police” concept. People who live in gated communities with private security can afford to hold such a belief; people who live in a rough neighborhood where they need to call 911 a few times a month can ill afford to hamstring the police.

As luxury goods of all types (or credible knock-offs of same) become more attainable for anybody with a credit card and an Ebay account, it’s become increasingly difficult to tell who’s a member of the upper- (or upper-middle) class club by someone’s dress or accessories. Henderson suggests that fashionable ideas—luxury beliefs—are taking up that slack.

Both in general society and in certain quarters of the church, egalitarianism functions as a luxury belief. In general society, very few framing carpenters or concrete guys are women, and this is not because of some sort of systemic sexism. In jobs where physical strength and durability really matter, the workers are overwhelmingly male. Dangerous jobs are overwhelmingly male, as are workplace fatalities. More prosaically — and speaking from several years’ experience as the only male employee of a particular retail establishment — when the big, heavy box needs to go on the high shelf, the women look around for the guy to do it.

By contrast, people with laptop-class careers are much less likely to encounter circumstances on the job where they are forced to reckon with the biological differences between men and women. Anybody can sit at a desk and push buttons on a keyboard. These folks can afford a correspondingly higher level of fantasy about how much biology matters, because they don’t have to live with the consequences of that counterfactual belief. The head of a network administration department can entertain the notion that men and women are largely interchangeable; the foreman of a concrete crew had better not.

In other words, the key differentiator here is whether you face any plausible danger of having to eat your own cooking.

There’s a church near me that exemplifies this trend. On gender issues, good number of members profess to be strongly egalitarian as a matter of basic justice. However, the polity of the church they attend is such that they cannot have a female lead pastor, and they do in fact have a very strong, masculine man leading the church. One of the worst upheavals the church ever had happened because egalitarian staffers, most of them female, tried to steer the organization in a more progressive direction, and badly overplayed their hand. The strongly complementarian direction of the church was confirmed; many of the egalitarian congregants nonetheless stayed. Today, those egalitarian congregants–mostly middle- to upper-middle class, mostly driving 10-15 minutes or more to attend–drive past multiple churches with far more egalitarian convictions, some of them with female pastors, in order to attend this particular church. How many of these people would actually be happy with the results, were their fashionably avowed convictions actually put into practice? We’ll never know — and that’s exactly the point of a luxury belief.

Leave a Comment » | Ecclesiology, Equality and Difference of Man and Woman, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Lent-Challenged?

19 March 2024

Lent is always an interesting time for me. I’m a conscientious objector to the annual 40-day fasting-and-flagellation routine. When God crafted a religious calendar, He devoted exactly one day a year to that (Yom Kippur) — and all the other high holy days are big, mandatory parties. It can’t be that after the great victory on Golgotha, we now should be less interested in joy and forty times more devoted to self-affliction. One day is good — Good Friday seems a reasonable choice for those of us who don’t still celebrate Yom Kippur — but forty? No.

Also, frankly, the relationship between traditional Lenten practice and anything Jesus actually said or did is at best very diagonal. Two particular points here; first, Jesus did the 40-day fast once, when He was 30, and He didn’t just give up chocolate and swearing, either. Wanna be like Jesus? Celebrate your 30th with a 40-day fast. If you live to 60, maybe you can do it again. Second, Ash Wednesday directly and solemnly violates Jesus’ instructions on fasting in Matthew 6:16-18. So directly, in fact, that it’s kind of funny.

On the other hand, at a particular time in my life, God called me into a community that observed Lent. There’s no real value in being difficult and cross-grained about it, so I didn’t. Instead, I just skipped the Ash Wednesday service and took on a couple of positive projects (a stack of reading and a fairly sizable apologetics writing project). The projects were big enough that there was no way I’d get through them without giving up something. The goal was to find out in hindsight what I had given up, and then make a determination during Eastertide about whether to resume whatever it was.

That practice did three things for me: it got those projects done, it gave me an opportunity to reassess some of my less useful pastimes, and it gave me something to talk about when people asked — as they often did — “What are you giving up for Lent?” In other words, it allowed me to participate in my community and not be a grief and a trouble over something that wasn’t going to change in any case. The result was a number of great conversations about Lenten practice — mine and theirs — and how it was affecting our daily walk with God.

The communities I’m now part of align more closely with my convictions, and the question doesn’t arise as frequently. But for those of you who find yourself in similar situations, this is a practice I commend to you.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

“Not A Young Man”

30 January 2024

Among the list of qualifications for eldership is “not a novice” (1 Tim. 3:6). Depending on the translation you read, it may say “not a new convert” or “not a recent convert” or “not new in the faith.” The words “convert” and “in the faith” are simply not in the passage here. The word is νεόφυτος, and it means “young man.”

So why did some translators add the extra words? For the same reason they usually do: for clarity in English translation. There are two possible meanings: a literal reading (“not a young man”) or a metaphorical extension (“not young in the faith”). Translators who favor the metaphorical interpretation have often chosen to clarify their meaning by adding the additional words. In this case, that is a mistake.

First, let’s start with the vocabulary. Paul uses two different words in his writings to refer to the office under discussion here. The one in this passage means “overseer,” and the other word literally means “old man.” So when Paul says that the appointee should not be “a young man” — well, I ask you. The word Paul chose for this qualification refers to a new-growth plant in Job 14:9 and Isaiah 5:7; it’s applied to the younger generation in Psalm 127:3 and 143:12. In other words, Paul’s Greek OT source material uses the word literally.

Does that mean it can’t be metaphorical here? Not at all. Paul could be crafting a novel metaphor by applying the literal term in a new metaphorical context. As Christians, we already refer to conversion as being born again; calling a new convert a “young man” regardless of his chronological age would make a certain sort of sense. (In fact, that’s exactly the process by which new metaphors enter language.) But is Paul doing that here? If he were, how would we know?

One obvious way would be for Paul to add the extra words himself. If he’s crafting a novel (if fairly obvious) metaphor, it would be fitting to specify it: “not a young man in the faith.” But he doesn’t do that. Another way would be for the context to make it otherwise obvious that’s what he must mean. Proponents of the metaphorical view will argue that this is the case, because Timothy himself is a young man. Surely Paul can’t be giving young Timothy the job of appointing elders, and then telling him, “Don’t appoint someone your own age.”

Ah, but he could! In fact, we already know that Timothy doesn’t meet all the criteria in the list of qualifications. Being unmarried, Timothy isn’t the husband of one wife (for that matter, neither is Paul). Timothy doesn’t have a household to rule well. We don’t need to claim some special spiritual meaning for these terms, as if “husband of one wife” would refer to Timothy’s fidelity to the Church, the Bride of Christ, or that “rules his household well” must mean that Timothy functions properly in the “houselold of God.” No, “husband” and “household” have their ordinary meanings, and Timothy is a valid exception.

How is Timothy supposed to function in that situation — appointing people that meet qualifications he doesn’t? He’s exemplary. The overriding qualification is blamelessness. Paul has that, despite not being a husband. Timothy also has that, despite being young. When we’re evaluating elder candidates, if a man gives us reason to doubt his faithfulness to his wife, he’s not qualified. If we look at his household and think “yikes!” he’s not qualified. And if we look at him and see that his youth is a drawback, he’s not qualified. If, in contrast, we look at him and think “I wish I was like that” — if he’s exemplary despite being young — then he is qualified, in the same way that Timothy was qualified.

The older men who are married and running households are wishing they were like Timothy in word, conduct, love, spirit, faith, and purity. He’s setting an example for them, not the other way round. Because Timothy is exceptional, Paul has recognized him as an exception. And thus we can see that “young man” refers to age in the same way that “husband” refers to marital status and “rules his household well” refers to familial and business affairs — all the terms have their ordinary meanings in the context.

So how do we apply the criteria like Paul would? Clearly it’s not the case that no young man would ever serve as an elder, but it would be rare, and with good reason — chronological age actually is a concern. On the face of it, this ought to be obvious just from the terms chosen for the office: one means ‘overseer,’ but the other literally means ‘old man.’ Maturity matters, and most young men haven’t taken sufficient advantage of the scant time they’ve had, or haven’t had enough experience, to season them out. Life experience and maturity are simply more common in older men, thus most of your elders will be, well, elder men.

If the candidate you’re looking at strikes you as a greenhorn in any sense, you probably shouldn’t pick him. On the other hand, if he’s been raised in the faith from childhood, as Timothy was, and he presents himself as exemplary in word, conduct, love, faith, and purity, as Timothy did — sure, go with that guy.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Great Resignation Might be Good

2 January 2024

Pastors are leaving the church in droves. Why? This week, I spent some time reading one man’s answer. It would be worth your time to skim his account. As Rev. Lang articulates his reasons for leaving, not just that particular church, but the pastoral vocation altogether, I find myself sympathetic. There’s a lot in the article that I don’t agree with, and some of the things he says cause me to wonder if he’s called to the pastorate at all; good shepherds have to be tough, and I don’t think he is.

But his list of the seven proficiencies expected of a pastor really struck me. That’s true in most churches. I don’t have any trouble seeing why ten years of his job left him burned out. I’m surprised he made it that long.

“This thing Rev. Lang was doing, that also calls itself ‘pastoral ministry?’ It’s not.”

You know what’s missing in it all? Any sense of what biblical shepherding ministry actually is. Rev. Lang tells us why he stepped into the role which church culture defined for him, and why, some years later, he stepped out of it again. That’s worthwhile information for a church to absorb, but one of the things it’s missing is, well…the Bible. There is no such biblical position as the one his church asked him to occupy. He shouldn’t have been doing that job; no one person should have been doing that job. More importantly, no church should be trying to hire one person to do that job.

I’m hoping that the masses of men leaving the ministry will provoke some soul-searching in congregations. We need — all of us — to be stepping into the work of the ministry. Every Christian should be a disciple, and every disciple should be a disciple-maker at the level they’re able to be. Those who are called to equip congregations to do that work are the leaders we need. More and more of them are bivocational, in part because it gives them greater freedom to do what they’re actually called to instead of getting sidetracked into various backwaters of institutional trivia. Back when I was on staff at a mid-sized church, I used to keep track of how much time I spent on different activities. When I left that position, I continued keeping track for a while. You know what happened? Fewer people wasting my time, and more disciple-making.

This thing Rev. Lang was doing, that also calls itself “pastoral ministry?” It’s not. For any young man who finds himself in the unfortunate position of being hired to do that job, I recommend that he resign forthwith and get involved with a ministry where he can heed the Bible’s counsel rather than flouting it as a necessary condition of his employment.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

No Real Discipleship

7 November 2023

For so long as the Holy Spirit restrains the wickedness of the world, culture can only get so bad, and for so long as Messiah tarries, culture can only get so good. We will not descend into the Great Tribulation of our own accord until God permits it, and we cannot ascend to the consummated Kingdom of God of our own accord in any case.

However, between these two great boundary conditions, there is a lot of play, and between these two great boundary conditions, God calls His people “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

The Old Covenant shows us that we cannot do the first two, and the New Covenant shows us that when we do the third, we are given the first two as gifts — a heart of flesh in exchange for a heart of stone, as the prophet said.

This has to include God fulfilling in us His very first command: to tend and keep the earth, the root from which all culture springs. To be engaged in glorious culture-building is a gift God gives His people, and always has. There is no real discipleship without it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Hail the Triumphant Dead!

2 November 2023

Yesterday was the Feast of All Saints, the centerpiece of Allhallowtide, a three-day celebration in the Western Christian tradition. All Saints is something analogous to Memorial Day – a grateful celebration of the saints and martyrs who’ve gone before us into heaven, and all they’ve done.

The feast was first celebrated in the early 600s, on a variety of dates that varied locally. Ultimately, it settled on May 13th. Pope Gregory III (served 731-741) moved All Saints to November 1 to coincide with opening a new chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica which was dedicated to all the saints who’ve passed before us into heaven. Moving a major holiday to coincide with your ribbon-cutting is a weird thing to do, but apparently that’s one of the perks of being Pope. Anyhow, that’s how it happened. 

A quick aside about pagan holidays: We all know that ancient cultures aligned major projects like the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, or the Hill of Tara according astronomical movements, and presumably they celebrated solstices and equinoxes in some fashion, but the links between those old festivals and present-day celebrations like Samhain are speculative at best. (Our earliest hard evidence for Samhain is ninth century). The coincidence between the old festivals and the November 1 date of All Saints is just that — a coincidence.

The day before All Saints is All Hallows Eve, the vigil that comes before the feast. It is a time where we look straight at the darkness of the world, a time when we celebrate our brothers’ and sisters’ victories over that darkness, and a time to pray that we would be like them in our own time. That’s what we were about last night. How it also became an occasion for dressing your kid up like Thomas the Tank Engine and sending him door to door begging for candy is a tale for another time, but it has to do with America’s melting-pot confluence of everybody’s local traditions, plus a healthy dose of good old fashioned American commercialization. 

Today, the final day of the feast, is All Souls, also known as the Feast of the Faithful Departed. This feast commemorates all those in heaven whose names are not widely known. These faithful servants of God have benefited us in countless ways, and we take the time to celebrate them, even though we don’t know who they are or what they did. One day we will, and on that day we will be glad to have been grateful in advance. It is also a time to be grateful for our family and friends who have gone before us.

Taken all together, this is a celebration of the Church Triumphant by the Church Militant — we are grateful for them now, and we will join them soon enough. Hoist a glass in their honor tonight.

Hail the triumphant dead – because they’re not actually dead! 

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Whose Faith Follow

12 September 2023

Once upon a time, I was a doctrine wonk. I honestly believed that if we just got the doctrine right, we would live well. My community valued correct exegesis and theology, and invested enormous effort in doing them well. As one of their fair-haired sons, and I got paid to research, write, and teach at seminary. It was a geek’s dream job, and I loved it….  

<cue spooky music>

…then the whole community tore itself apart. Some of the best exegetes and theologians I knew went for each other’s throats. I’d love to say that I stayed above the fray, but I didn’t. My personal loyalties were with one side, but I also thought they were exegetically and theologically more correct…at first.

I quickly began to realize that the conflict wasn’t actually about doctrine. That’s a big claim, but it’s true. The doctrinal differences were not entirely insignificant, but there was ample room for everyone involved to continue working together. A number of close observers and secondary participants, myself included, suggested ways to move forward, but there was a problem we couldn’t solve: the principals didn’t want unity. The doctrinal difference was a smokescreen, a way to make the conflict respectable. The real problems were personal and relational: abundance of offense, lack of repentance and forgiveness, and lack of sufficient emotional maturity to address the personal conflicts.

I slowly began to realize that even if the problem were primarily doctrinal, we were handling it poorly. As I dug into Scripture looking for instructions and patterns for handling this kind of conflict, I kept coming back to Acts 15. This chapter is the first big doctrinal conflict in the Church, and the pattern that it sets upholds the unity of the Body of Christ as a cardinal doctrine and practice for Christians. I’ve written on this at great length elsewhere, so I’m not going to belabor the point here. Outward unity that is visible to observing unbelievers is Jesus’ prayer to the Father for us, it is the manner in which we win the world, and without unity right down to the practical level of seating arrangements at supper, we are not being straightforward about the gospel. It’s a big deal. 

Once I had gotten this far, God moved me to Englewood, Colorado, to see unity in practice. 

In Englewood, I met a group of pastors who got along. They prayed with and for each other. They blessed each other’s ministries. Every once in a while, they preached in each other’s churches. They gathered their churches once a year for a joint worship service. Were they all the same denomination? Not even close. We had Messianic Jews, Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, Dutch Reformed, Anglican, Bible church guys, nondenominational, Missouri Synod Lutheran, and more. With far less common doctrinal basis than my seminary faculty had, the Englewood pastors created a far greater obedience than we had ever dreamed of. What was I to make of that?

“Remember those who rule over you, who have spoken the word of God to you, whose faith follow, considering the outcome of their conduct.” The author of Hebrews 13:7 is talking specifically about our relationship to our local church leaders, but the principle applies. Pay attention to the outcome of your leaders’ conduct. Follow the faith of those whose fruit is good; do not follow the faith of those whose fruit is bad. 

So what did the Englewood pastors have that my seminary faculty did not? There actually are some relevant doctrinal pieces here, but that’s another post. The first and most important common element wasn’t doctrinal at all. It was obedience, straight up the middle. Jesus wanted us to be one, and they set out to find a way. They knew they weren’t going to be able to iron out every little doctrinal difference, and they were looking for ways to obey anyhow. Turns out, when we start looking for ways to obey instead of reasons not to, a lot of things are possible.

Comments Off on Whose Faith Follow | Ecclesiology, Mere Obedience, New Fundamentals, Unity and Community of Christ's Body | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Niceness: A Unity-Breaking Disease

11 July 2023

I hang out in theology discussion groups some. In a particular (very doctrinally narrow) group, someone recently asked a question about non-theological issues in the group. “What things other than doctrine divide the group?” he wanted to know. As I mulled it over, it occurred to me that one of the biggest divides is our accepted modes of speech. Some of us seem to think that the speech norms of the faculty lounge should govern all Christians all the time; others of us don’t buy that. Now if you’re reading here, you probably already know that I am in the latter group. As far as I’m concerned, kindness is a virtue, but niceness is a disease. We should be willing to speak like Jesus did, and He didn’t say nice things and make everything smooth. He was willing to make things awkward and difficult for the sake of a jagged truth. Among brothers, of course, we have no business slinging a ‘truth bomb’ and then running away; Jesus never did that. We hang around for the whole conversation, and then move forward and work together regardless, because action for Jesus’ sake matters more than agreement on every little thing.

I’d made my defense for a more biblical mode of speech in that very group multiple times already (and mostly been rebuffed), so this particular question would hardly have been worth commenting on by itself. But it sparked another thought: many of the members of the group are also very, very specific about who they’ll fellowship with or collaborate with. “Is there a [___insert affiliation here___] church near my town?” is a frequent question in the group. The responses will always include tales of people who drive 60 miles to get to a church they can stomach, others who are listening to an internet broadcast from another state, and still others who’ve simply given up for lack of a local fellowship they can be satisfied with. Still others, having found a local church that meets their exacting specifications, are busy pretending that all the other local churches don’t exist.

The same people who upbraid me for being coarse and disagreeable — people vastly nicer than I am, who want me to be nicer too — are unable to get along with the majority of their fellow Christians. You’d think that the niceness would make it easier, but it doesn’t seem to. Meanwhile, as rough as I sometimes am with people, I’m deeply embedded in two local churches, we routinely join up with other groups for prayer and sometimes for shared worship services, and our working partnerships span Anglican, Messianic, Charismatic, Baptist, Reformed, and more.

This to say, adherence to faculty-lounge norms of smooth speech does not seem to be the difference that makes a difference. There’s a divide between people who value honest community and people who value niceness, and it shows up in the way we’re able to minister. In my experience, honesty makes you able to minister in ways niceness can’t touch, and gives you partnerships you couldn’t get by being nice. So don’t be nice; be like Jesus. The more you’re like Him, the more you’ll be able to share life with others who are like Him, despite your disagreements. Truth is, talking and being like Jesus is your best shot at getting the disagreements resolved anyway.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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