34. Holding Conviction and Love Simultaneously

The Christian Statement

The central challenge of Volume VI is the challenge Paul identifies in Ephesians 4:15: speaking the truth in love. Not truth without love - that is the confrontational church. Not love without truth - that is the accommodating church. Truth in love. Both. Simultaneously. Without resolving the tension in either direction.

This is harder than either extreme. The confrontational church is following its conviction. The accommodating church is following its compassion. Both are following something real. The disciple who holds both simultaneously is following something that requires more than conviction or compassion. It requires the specific grace of the Holy Spirit, sustained by abiding in the vine.

The practical marks of the disciple who holds both:

• They can say "I love you" and "I disagree with you" in the same breath without the first canceling the second or the second negating the first
• They feel the weight of the standard they hold - they are not indifferent to the person's situation even when they cannot affirm it
• They have sat with the person long enough to understand their story before offering the standard as relevant to it
• They hold the standard without holding the person at arm's length
• They can be wrong about secondary matters without losing confidence in primary ones
• They can acknowledge the church's failures without losing confidence in the Person the church exists to represent

This combination is not produced by better training, more sophisticated apologetics, or more theological education. It is produced by the Spirit in the believer who abides. Which is why this section returns, as every final section of the series returns, to the vine.

35. Being Right Is Not the Same as Being Effective

The Christian Statement

The Pharisees were right about many things. They were right that the Law mattered. They were right that holiness was required. They were right that God's commands were not optional. They were right that the people's tendency toward accommodation and moral drift was a genuine spiritual danger.

They were catastrophically ineffective at producing the transformation they were right about. Because effectiveness requires more than correctness. It requires relationship, presence, the earned trust that makes truth receivable. The Pharisees' correctness was delivered without any of those things. It was delivered from a position of superiority, through a system of exclusion, with a contempt for the ordinary person that Jesus specifically and repeatedly condemned.

The disciple who is obsessed with being right - with having the correct position, with winning the argument, with maintaining the purity of the community - at the expense of being effective has chosen the Pharisees' strategy. They will be right. And they will produce the Pharisees' results: a community of the already-convinced, increasingly alienated from the people they were sent to reach, increasingly convinced of their own righteousness, increasingly unable to understand why the world does not simply agree with them and come inside.

The Tertullian warning is the warning this entire volume is built on: the moment you are motivated to defend your position rather than test it, your critical faculties - however formidable - are working for the wrong team. The disciple who is more committed to being right than to being present and loving has already begun the drift that led Tertullian out of the tradition he was trying to reform.