Disunity

Humility, Unity, and the Overly Opinionated Christian

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If Americans are known for one thing globally, it’s that we’re a bunch of opinionated cusses. And if anything, social media and the Internet have not only made us more so, they have made us militant about ensuring we express those opinions in public spaces.

Take the recently concluded legal case of George Zimmerman, accused of shooting black teenager Trayvon Martin. My Facebook Wall had a number of people commenting on this case. In addition, the Internet practically swelled with opinions on the verdict.

Here’s the breakdown:

Whites = Justice was done. Now let’s move on.

Blacks = Justice was stymied. The verdict needs to be thrown out.

I happen to know the religious affiliation of many of those with an opinion, and here is what I noted:

White Christians = Justice was done. Now let’s move on.

Black Christians = Justice was stymied. The verdict needs to be thrown out.

If I were not a Christian, the only conclusion I could draw from that outcome is Christianity makes no difference in the way people think. Their upbringing, race, viewpoints—whatever—are untouched by their faith. Being “born again” doesn’t really change anything.

What a terrible witness!

The problem as I see it is that we Christians too often let our opinions overwhelm our Christianity. The average unsaved person sees this happen so often that they immediately form “antibodies” against the truth of the Bible and, ultimately, against Jesus. That’s not the fault of the Lord, but it is the fault of us who bear His name.

There’s a second problem. In the case of the Zimmerman trial, neither you nor I were privy to all the details of that trial, yet we are commenting on it like we are experts. We offer an opinion based on incomplete facts, and then we spout that ill-informed opinion to the world and draw our line in the sand for everyone to see.

And that’s a sin.

What the Bible says:

Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.
—Matthew 5:37 ESV

But avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless. As for a person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned.
—Titus 3:9-11 ESV

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.
—Colossians 3:12-15 ESV

There is something in the American Collective Experience that makes it a crime not to have an opinion about this topic or that. Christians cannot fall for that lie. If we are to be salt and light to a dying world, our response must always be 180 degrees from the prevailing wisdom of the world. Always.

If we are to truly let our yes be yes and our no no, then there are times when our only response to situations in which we lack all the facts is to say:

“I don’t have all the facts, so I’m going to refrain from speculating rather than potentially dishonoring the Lord by offering my unenlightened opinion.”

Blasting our opinionWhat if each of us who claims to be a Christian started responding that way?

Feels a little humbling, doesn’t it? Suddenly, we’re not a subject matter expert on every little topic that comes down the pike. In addition to humility, not having an opinion all the time may actually cut down on the dissension that is ripping apart our society and even our churches. Did you spot that word in the list of things Paul said Titus should avoid? Well, are we avoiding dissension or not? Or is letting others know our opinion more important than unity?

This is not to say that we cannot speak truth when it needs to be spoken. However, much of what we pass off as truth is just our fact-deficient opinion about something we probably know less about than we think we do.

And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.
—1 Corinthians 2:1-6 ESV

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
—2 Corinthians 5:17-20 ESV

Christians are to know Christ alone and Him crucified. Our charge is to be ambassadors for Christ. Our message is to be one of reconciliation.

Which is more important then, our opinion about some topic about which we most probably lack many of the facts, or reconciling people to Jesus?

Are we driving away people from Jesus because we feel compelled to comment on some political happening? Is our identity in Christ that weak that we must ensure people know where we stand on issues we actually know little about? Are we that arrogant that we think our input is the deciding factor? Are we drawing lines in the sand over some opinion based on grains within that sand rather than the truth of God?

I’m going to start defaulting to this more often:

“I don’t have all the facts, so I’m going to refrain from speculating rather than potentially dishonoring the Lord by offering my unenlightened opinion.”

How about you?

Unity: A Failed Prayer of Jesus?

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Shortly before He was crucified for your sins and mine, Jesus prayed this prayer:

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. ”
—John 17:20-23 ESV

Unity gets a bad rap in some Christian circles. Being an “ecumenist” is tantamount to denying the Lord publicly, at least in the eyes of some.

But can anyone look at the Christian Church today and say, “Jesus’ prayer was answered! Just look at all the unity Christians enjoy”?

Silly question, especially given the thousands of denominations that exist.

On the list of grievous sins most Christians carry around in their heads—murder, sexual perversion, stealing, lying, envy, pride—I don’t think disunity makes it into the top 100.

Look at the importance Jesus gives unity, though! He considers it the sign by which the world knows that He was truly sent by God, proving that He wasn’t just another in the long line of self-appointed holy men spouting nice aphorisms suitable for a bumper sticker.  And that unity of those who claim to love God verifies how much God loves the people of the world too (our favorite verse, John 3:16, and all that, right?).

Doesn’t that sound like it’s of the utmost importance? Yet unity is given the shortest of all shrifts. Being seen as always being correct trumps all efforts at unity, as if it were impossible to find unity if people are in different places in their walk with God and see life from different perspectives as a result.

What if disunity among Christians was the worst sin of all, since it undermines the very proof that Jesus is who He said He is and discredits the claim of God to love? Given the importance of those two bedrock beliefs in the Christian faith, how could disunity NOT be one of the most grievous of all possible sins? The perception of the character of God Himself is at stake when we are not unified, isn’t it? Doesn’t disunity within the Church even tear at the reality of the Trinity of God?

Yet who out there is striving to make unity important? Which well-known church leaders are working toward unity more than anything else, rather than separating themselves and their fans into tinier and tinier fragments of the Church Universal? Which disgruntled churchgoers are making unity the most important consideration for STAYING in a less-than-ideal church, rather than bolting like so many others do?

Fact is, too many of us Christians could not care less about unity.

My question then: Is the lack of importance we ascribe to maintaining unity within the Body of Christ making Jesus’ prayer for unity fail?

Unity & Disunity in the Church

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Tim Challies at Challies.com posted twice this last week on the issue of unity within a church (“Satan’s Great Desire” and “How to Build Unity in Your Church“).  As usual, Tim does a good job of noting the problem, rooting it to Scripture, and offering a solid biblical response to maintaining unity.

But what is left unsaid in those two posts is what has nagged at me the last few days, especially since I believe the topic of the year is church community (and the sudden interest in community seems to be widespread now).

Tim says that a lack of mutual love within a church is a major reason for disunity. His answer is for those in the church to use their spiritual gifts to serve each other.

You’ll get no arguments from me on this.

However, I believe that the problem we have with disunity within churches is more insidious than a lack of love.

What I share below is my experience as a trained observer of churches and people. I can’t give you a lot of Bible verses (yet) to back my observations, only that I believe that what I write is going to resonate—especially with seasoned Christians who have been wounded by their church experiences.

First, a clarification. How does disunity in a church manifest?

What most people see of disunity itself is anger, frustration, resentment, people leaving the church in numbers, and church splits.

Personally, I don’t believe that the majority of this disunity and its fruit can be traced to the Smiths not loving the Joneses. For the people in the seats on Sunday, not getting along with other people in the seats is almost never their reason for manifesting the bitter fruit that leads to people leaving the church.

What I know of people who have left a church or of a church that has split, the reasons are of a different sort. The leavers and splitters are far more likely to note the following failures:

Nuclear blast1. Church leaders failed to address “sticking points” within the church despite others (usually nonleaders)  noting those issues.

2. Church leaders failed to respond to pleas for personal help.

3. Church leaders failed to nurture other people’s God-given spiritual gifts (or even purposefully stymied them).

4. Church leaders failed to communicate vision and direction to the rest of the church body.

5. Church leaders failed to recognize they are fellow brothers and sisters of equal stature with the rest of the people in the church and therefore failed to lead humbly.

Picked up on the pattern yet?

Most solid people (as opposed to church hoppers/shoppers) who leave a church or most churches that split do so for one major reason: church leaders failed.

This is not to excuse those who are not church leaders for their personal culpability in that failure, but it demonstrates an enormous, glaring problem.

If church leadership failures are a major reason for disunity in a church, perhaps the problem is not one of love, as Tim Challies notes, but of the entirety of the way we allow our churches to be led. Perhaps the models of church leadership and proper church functioning we have fallen into over time are not the models depicted in the New Testament. Perhaps this is why church leaders fail so often, why so many people leave a church (or Christianity altogether), and why disunity reigns.

Sadly, almost no one within the North American Church wants to deal with this problem because it means a total rethink of the way we do church and would prove too threatening to a vast number of people.

But if the Church is to do more than survive, thriving means dealing with that problem.

And that is going to have to take a whole lotta love.