arguing with each other well

In a culture where there is a club or party or society of people who look and think just like you, no matter who you are, the neighborhood church (as distinct from the ideologically based church of which there are many) is fast becoming one of the few places left where we can form intentional community with people who aren’t exactly like us. While I myself hold very strong, often stubborn, political views, I’m grateful to serve a community of people who challenge these daily. I’m grateful because, like any mature adult, while one part of me is quite certain that I’m right about everything, another more levelheaded part of me remains skeptical that that could possibly be the case. So I require people in my life who are different. More than that, it would be lonely were I left to my own rightness with no one to argue against me.

In 20/20 hindsight it is now obvious why the church in early 20^th century Germany needed to oppose Hitler and side with the regime’s victims in order to have any resemblance to Jesus Christ. At the time though, especially in the early going as Hitler was being touted as a savior for a humiliated and depressed people, the rhetoric was veiled, and the genocide had not begun in earnest, it was not so obvious. It almost never is that obvious right at the moment that the church most needs to take its stand.

So for the theologians who signed the Barmen Declaration as early as 1934 and then for iconic Confessing Church leaders like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, it was not the later human rights atrocities that they had to go on when they first became nervous about the so-called Third Reich; it was the level of unquestioning allegiance that the Nazis were asking of the German church.

Think about that: long before the Nazis had achieved symbolic status for all that is evil in the popular mind, it was the best and brightest among theologians who had premonitions about what would follow for the simple reason that a church which calls Jesus Lord cannot give the same allegiance to anyone else.

Bonhoeffer, especially, would reflect at length on the difficulties of discerning the times while they are unfolding, but how, nonetheless, the church’s sole allegiance to one Lord demands nothing less than an absolute commitment to Truth. A church which divides its allegiance between Jesus and, say, this party, or that leader, or some ill-defined idea of “patriotism,” will find that it lacks the resources to maintain a critical distance from “the times” that it inhabits and speak Truth into them. 

This is why it so critical that any church worth its salt learn how to do conflict well, neither avoiding it nor practicing it in destructive ways.  In short, we need to learn how to argue with each other. Anyone who isn’t secure enough to do conflict well will inevitably gravitate toward the likeminded faction that most resembles his or herself. And regardless of whether it be liberal, conservative, educated, uneducated, or what have you, a likeminded faction will be fundamentally incapable of “discerning the times” because it will have nothing to compare against its own self-serving biases and motivations in its search for Truth in a given context.

In our culture, a church community that lacks the capacity for conflict is generally a community that has sacrificed its pursuit of Truth in favor of a shallow atmosphere of amiability or niceness. A church where conflict simply isn’t allowed is a church where a serious thing like Truth can’t really be entertained because it will forever be sidestepping real conversation about guns, wars, and incarceration for fleshless pieties and bloodless small talk.

I assume here that there is a big difference between creative disagreement for the sake of a community’s soul and destructive conflict where each tries to assert his or herself over against the community.    

My congregation is a mishmash of socioeconomic classes, cultural experiences, political views, and so on. I often say that the reason we can all come together under the same roof despite ourselves is that we’re not gathered together around a belief system but a dinner invite. Here, I’m not in community with the person next to me because we both read 1 Corinthians the same way or believe the same things about school funding but because we both received the same party invite from one whom we each address as Lord (and neither of us made a decision to have it sent to our address). We may both hold deeply serious and contradictory convictions on these things of which we’re both sure Jesus himself would approve. But it would be false for either of us to pretend like that’s the reason we were invited and then refuse a beer or a game of cornhole until the guest list is pared down to look more like us.

Now here’s the next tricky party. Getting a diverse group of people together is the first and maybe even the most difficult step in the pursuit of Truth—pursuing Truth implies opening ourselves up to that which disturbs and even contradicts what we already believe—but it’s not the last step.  

The temptation of a community at this point is to so enjoy a general atmosphere of agreeableness that agreeableness itself becomes her own idol, and the serious doubts and uncomfortable questions that Truth requires are swept aside because they might disturb her.

It is an ongoing challenge for any community that has leapt the first hurdle of forming despite difference to leap the next of creating a container that can hold creative disagreement. Congenial communities that misunderstand the importance of this next step will also misunderstand that the capacity for creative disagreement is a sign of their relational strength, not weakness. I’m always congenial with strangers. It’s only close family and friends that have a strong enough bond with me that we can have creative conflict.

To creatively disagree, we have to overcome our culture’s obsessive love of comfort. I’m at a loss to think of a single historically significant moment of witness to the faith that has been comfortable for those involved. In fact, the original Greek word meaning “to witness to the resurrection” is the same from which we derive the word “martyr.” And that level of discomfort is no more desirable because you’ve anticipated it. You can only take solace in the fact that it’s True.