So you’re a bold speaking warrior for truth eh?

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Tribalism is synonymous with Western Church culture. Since the early schisms, through to the modern-day denominations and networks, believers ‘of every stripe’ rally to Paul, Peter, or Apollos (1 Cor. 1:12).

I remember being a teenager, sat with my vicar in his house trying to convince him to write a reference for me to go to an American seminary. He eventually did, but not until he treated me to a detailed list of all the peripheral things that he didn’t like about the seminary – and American churches in general. None of his problems were linked to Jesus, the nature of God, or to the Gospel, but he talked like I was walking blindly into a den of vipers.

At Youth for Christ in North Wales, we make a real effort to walk with any church who will walk with us. Our contentions are that they must love Jesus and must love young people. If there is something that has a significant impact upon the Gospel, then we’ll graciously go our separate ways. There is an enormous plethora of church styles in North Wales, and many small disagreements – but they’re still filled with good people seeking Jesus.

Finding identity in who we’re against

I recently heard a joke about an industrious Christian stranded on a desert island. He built a hospital, a school, a post-office, and two churches. When rescuers found him, they asked about the two churches and he answered very seriously, pointing, “that’s the church I go to, and that’s the church I don’t go to.”

It’s almost like we cannot be who we are without finding that in the relief of who we’re not.

If we spent one tenth of the time talking about Jesus than we do about our niggling differences, then I bet we could kiss evangelistic training goodbye!

At some point we made the theology yardstick as narrow as the narrow gates of salvation (Matt. 7:13-14) – as if we somehow could work out someone else’s salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12). Somewhere we decided that judgment, protection, righteous anger, and conviction should all be whacked together, indiscriminately, to mean an aggressive micro-management of doctrine. I simply cannot get over the mean-spirited Christian meme culture surrounding this.

I totally believe in Gospel surety, in clear teaching, and in exposing false teachers as dangerous to the children of God, but the Bible spells out exact how to do that, and more importantly the heart in which that should be done. (Check out this post for more on that).

Theological Surety and Bold Correction

‘Calling people out’ has never been easier with the internet being what it is. It has moved a long way from what was supposed to be a careful and loving process of church discipline. It was designed to be surrounded by gracious conversation in a sequential course of community sanctification.

I’m afraid that you’re not a plain-speaking, bold-truth-talking, patriarchal hero if you just cavalierly mash together theological clarity and bold correction – however testosterone saturated it makes you feel (#godcomplex). Iron cannot sharpen iron if one of you is carrying a machine gun!

We must learn to strive, brick-by-brick, mile-by-mile, word-by-word, and yes, doctrine-by-doctrine to learn more about who God is and how we can worship Him holistically and as a community. Worship of God should always be our motivating force.

What does your doctrine do?

That’s what proper doctrine is right? It’s not just a legislative road map, it’s a living and active set of tools to help us fall more in love with the living God. Sorry, did you think there was going to be an exam before you got to the pearly gates? Did you remember to bring your well-sharpened No2 pencil?

Does your doctrine call you to love and worship God more – or does it place you higher on your own throne?

Do your corrections of others come from a place of longing that God would get more heartfelt worship through people – or that you would be recognised as an authority?

Do you think that what God really needs is a ‘night watchman’, walking around with a flashlight and body-armour, making sure no pesky doctrinal discrepancies sneak through the cracks and into the Kingdom?

The church will keep sinking until we put down our swords and pull together.

 

Photo by Oleg Laptev on Unsplash

Are we supposed to ‘feel’ loved to ‘be’ loved?

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In 1970, a film adaptation of Erich Segal’s novel ‘Love Story’ made famous the line ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’, but it took another 34 years and an 8-year-old called Lisa Simpson to point out ‘No it doesn’t! This movie is drivel!’ Little legend Lisa.

Can you think of anything more manipulative than the classic cliché, ‘if you really loved me then you would…’? It’s the catchphrase of the abuser, the passive-aggressive turn of the knife, and the ultimate hammer blow of peer-pressure.

That little line alone has probably caused more regret and relational ruin than the entire collected works of J.D. Salinger and August Strindberg combined!

But have we made the philosophy behind this idea acceptable? Do we also judge (and sometimes flat out reject) the very existence of someone’s genuine love by our own emotive litmus tests.

If a tree falls in the woods

There is a growing trend that says perception is reality. Love, therefore, gets held to ransom by the loved. It’s measured in the eye of the beholder.

Imagine for a second that we decided that something was only food if we liked its taste. I really don’t like taste of celery, but because I don’t like it doesn’t make it not food. I really do like the taste of PlayDoh, but I don’t think that makes the neon pink putty into food, just because I have weird taste buds.

The classic is ‘if a tree falls in the woods, but no one was around to hear it, did it actually make a sound?’ It’s an interesting question, and one that places individualistic humanity over and above the reality of any and all outside experiences. It’s pretty selfish, and rather me-centric, but isn’t that just like us?

When it comes to love, we have begun to say things like ‘if I didn’t feel it right, then you didn’t do it right!’ Or more commonly, ‘unless you approve of me then you can’t really love me.’ When did approval get into this game?

There is a big difference between acceptance and approval. Whereas God might accept me just as I am, he doesn’t necessarily approve of all I am. It’s completely legitimate to have acceptance without approval. I think God probably wants me to eat celery and not PlayDoh! This doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love me though.

My wife accepts me leaving my underwear on the bathroom floor, it doesn’t mean she approves of it. Helping a friend with a drug addiction needs to come with acceptance of the person, but not approval of the habit, otherwise it’s just enabling.

If I said that you can’t love me because you don’t accept me – when what I really mean is approve of me – I think I would be just a tad manipulative. I would be holding your love ransom to my subjective and emotive standard. This just isn’t fair.

What about all the feels?

The resulting subversively emerging assumption (try saying that five times faster) is that making people feel loved is exactly what we were trying to conjure up all along. Of course, it’s entirely possibly to make someone feel loved, but not actually love them at all – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Let’s start with the goodness in this before we entirely chew the idea up and spit it out.

  • If you’re making no effort to understand the people that you are apparently loving, then are you really making an effort to love them?
  • If you’re holding people enslaved to your ideas of what they should and shouldn’t be before you love them, is it really love?
  • If you’re totally indifferent to how someone feels in response to your ‘loving’ language and or actions, then are you really sure that ‘loving’ is what you are doing?

Just saying ‘I’m loving you’ without any accountability to the person we’re loving isn’t enough. They might feel it or not feel it, but frankly we might be getting it wrong anyway.

It’s always worth taking an emotional inventory before we push too hard on the ‘but I’m misunderstood’ button. Feeling loved, after all, is at least part of what we’re hoping for when we love someone. At least it should be.

This issue goes both ways, but is the feeling the whole story? No. It’s not even on the first page.

Are we loving wrong when they don’t ‘feel it’?

If people don’t feel loved by our love, would it necessarily mean that we’re loving those people ‘wrong’, or that our love is in some way defective, damaged, or deficient? Would it be unfledged or immature?

Let’s think about this for a moment. Have you ever done a loving thing that was then unfortunately taken in the wrong way? Have you ever been genuinely loving but the one you loved took it as something other than love? If you’re a parent, I imagine you can think of all kinds of examples!

Is it loving, for instance, to make your kids eat their greens, take baths, go to school, do their homework, or turn off their xbox after fifteen straight hours of looking like a zombie? Is it loving to watch out for who they are friends with, what they’re watching on TV, or who talking to on the internet? Is it loving to sometimes tell them ‘no’ or to discipline them when they cross a line?

Are there also times when a person we’re loving just won’t remember our loving actions? Is it, for instance, loving to pick up a drunk person from the floor and get them into a taxi home if they don’t remember that you did it? What about giving money to a charity that works with street children in Guatemala. The kids might ‘feel’ loved by the direct staff workers and volunteers, but they might not feel loved by the anonymous donor.

Thinking now of this in youth ministry, is it loving to tell young people about what the Bible says, even when it flies in the teeth about what they want? Is it loving to caution them about promiscuity, drug use, lying, or disrespecting their parents? Is it loving to talk to them about sin, God’s wrath or Hell?

Of course, it matters how you do all these things, but do we really expect people will always feel loved when we love them – is that realistic of fair?

Put another way, what would happen to our relationships with these people if we kept changing what we did in order to make sure they always felt loved. Would it always be in their best interests?

What is love, really?

Many in our culture believe that love is primarily and essentially a feeling. That is its crux, basis and bottom line. Five decades of Hollywood romance has taught us this.

Love and feelings do often overlap, of course. Love can give us all of the feels! It’s a great descriptive word to use for the warm fuzzies and we often identify the feeling of ‘love’ when good things have happened. We feel love at a funeral and we feel love at a wedding – it’s an important descriptor for complicated emotions.

So, love can be descriptive, but does that make it a feeling in and of itself?

Although love can be a descriptor for a complicated set of powerful emotions, the word itself in English is historically a verb. Love is an action, it’s something that we do. Even in New Testament Greek, the four words ἀγάπη, ἔρως, φιλία, and στοργή can be both nouns and verbs, and often mean both together.

When we love someone then, we don’t simply ‘feel’ towards them with some kind spasmodic force. Feelings may accompany what we do, but they are not the whole. When we love somebody we serve them, we help them, we lift them up, we support them, we stand with them, we are present to them, and we protect them. Occasionally we might even withdraw from them.

Sometimes we lovingly do loving things for people that are best for them even if they won’t like them or recognise them as ‘love’. My wife is still trying to ‘lovingly’ make me see a dentist.

Where do ‘love languages’ feature in this?

This is a really interesting question. Gary Chapman’s ‘love languages’ books became a growing phenomenon in the Church throughout the last two decades, disseminating across Christian literature.

There’s an awful lot of important things to learn about how people give and receive love in these ideas. Understanding love languages as a part of personality types can help us communicate better with people and be more sympathetic. They are not the whole story though and need to be balanced with a much fuller philosophy of who people are and what love is.

I would strongly suggest reading about love languages but keep that in check with reading something like Don Carson’s fabulous little book, ‘The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God.’

What about God?

God tells us that he disciplines those he loves. He reminds us of this exactly because often we don’t feel loved when He does (Pr. 3:12; Heb. 12:4-12). Is God’s loving discipline somehow defective? Does God need to readdress his understanding of our love languages? Of course not!

God is love after all (1 Jn. 4:7-12), and we should never accuse Him of not being so just because we didn’t ‘feel’ it at any given time.

We hope that the people we love will always feel loved – of course we do! There doesn’t have to be a dichotomy between the two. However, one doesn’t guarantee the other. We can’t hold our own loving actions captive to someone else’s feelings.

If in doubt, we should do the loving thing, however it is taken.

 

Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

The Pupil, the Pastor, the Professor, and the dead kitty – A one-act play.

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Scene: The trying -slightly-too-hard-to-be-cool community coffeeshop that’s attached to the local Bible College. Professor and Pastor are making small talk over lattes.

Enter pupil

Pupil – Professor, Pastor, I have a question.

Professor and Pastor, together in excited unison – Of course!

Pupil – My little cat Whiskers died last night. Will I see her again in Heaven?

Pastor – Oh my poor, poor… poor dear. That’s so sad. Aw, no. So sad indeed. Oh dear, my poor dear. I’m so sorry for your loss. Was poor Whiskers in your family a long time? Was it very sudden? Was she in much pain? Oh, I’m so, so sorry my poor dear!

Pupil – Um, thanks Pastor, that’s nice. But you didn’t really answer my question.

Professor – Maybe I can help you my young fruit. No. No you will not. Animals of the feline variety are not human, and thus – like humans – do not have existential existence beyond the finite and physical reality of this world. What you call a ‘Whiskers’ is simply the over-emotional and irrational construct of an inanimate lifeform without a soul or indeed any sense of self. Your attachment to her is delusional and entrenched in the sinfully depraved nature of humanity. You will not see, her or indeed any kitty, puppy, bunny, or even Bulgarian budgie in the eternal rest. You should stop mourning immediately. Perhaps you should repent?

Pupil is in shocked silence with her mouth hanging slightly open, making mumbling starts at trying to speak again.

Pastor – Urm, well, I think what my learned colleague is trying to say is that poor, sad Whiskers, who was such an important part of your life and family, and whose life was tragically cut short, in fact does have a soul, because she was bought to life when you loved her. Your love will continue forever into Heaven, and so your love for poor Whiskers will see her bought to life – resurrected even – in Heaven! She is in a better place because you loved her.

Pupil, raising a finger gently – Oh. Ok… but wh…

Professor (interrupting) – Well, actually, it may be that what Pastor is failing to tell you truthfully, is that your love is a poor, dim reflection of the Creator’s, and so can’t possibly create anything – and especially not in Heaven. What an absurd idea indeed! Your love is sinful, and that damned cat never loved you anyway! No. Whiskers is gone. Dead as a post. Demised, deceased, perhaps decapitated, and gone for ever. She never really ‘was’. Deal with it.

Pastor, turning to Professor and standing – how can you be so insensitive? This poor young girl has lost a treasured member of her family!

Professor, also standing, pushing Pupil aside facing off to Pastor – well how can you be so deceptive. It helps the girl nothing by lying to her!

Professor and Pastor continue in this vein, their voices steadily getting higher and more intense, while the other coffeeshop patrons awkwardly stare intently into their grande mugs.

Pupil slowly slips away unnoticed.

 

Photo by Kilyan Sockalingum on Unsplash

Are you addicted to controversy?

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Just before Christmas I wrote a post discussing what we mean when we call our Bible a sword. As a postscript I added the thoughts below, but after further reflection – and as a recovering controversy-addict myself – I think these thoughts are worth standing on their own and expanding, which is the point of this post.

That said this is a scary post for two reasons: It boldly calls something out – which should always be done with gentleness and respect; and it includes some of the narrative of one of the biggest battles of my life – which is monumentally exposing. But God is good – and I hope this is helpful to someone.

Are you a controversy addict?

Do you desire the Bible to be a weapon? Do you try to justify rude, blunt, confrontational, quarrelsome, disagreements among brothers and sisters using theological language? Why?

Is it a buzz?

Wait with that thought for a second… do you get the buzz from being involved in controversy?

The beginning of addiction

I spent a bit of time on debate teams when I was younger. We were taught to exploit every possible weakness, and to polarise views to their extremes in order to win. Neither conversational progress, nor the deepening of understanding was the objective. Iron-sharpening-iron was not on the agenda. The objective was to win the argument – and I was very good at it.

The victories and the point-by-counterpoint take downs came with a surprising adrenaline rush that is hard to forget. I know exactly what it feels like to ’emerge supreme’ from a debate. It’s a buzz. A real physical and emotional rush.

After a while, this came with both a physiological release of dopamine and an existential sense of self worth. These two things made it incredibly addictive.

It felt good – and it made me feel good about me!

A growing issue fueled by discontentment

For some of us, this rush of ‘rightness’ and ‘winning’ can eventually change into a much healthier shape within the context of our faith. We grow more mature and nuanced, seeking goodness and edification over simply being right. For others of us though, it can subversively become the primary mover in our lives and as such becomes a true addiction.

As an addiction, it is fed by discontentment.

Things like bad church experiences, poor health, a sheltered or stymied upbringing, a consistent feeling of isolation, a sense that you are always misunderstood, or even an above average IQ mixed with social awkwardness – can all lead to a broad experience of discontentment.

This, when ‘treated’ by the balm of the rush of winning an argument, or trying to be always right, or constantly in the know, will turn that rush into an addictive defense mechanism. We become couch-commentators and pew-bound back seat pastors, stewing in our own hyper-logical, negative energy-soaked discontentment. And it goes unnoticed because we have dressed it up in the language of ‘holiness.’

This is probably the same thing that makes us want to pull people down rather than build them up. It’s the thing that makes us reach – sometimes desperately and wildly – for controversy over edification. It’s what makes us look for the problems with everywhere we go and every talk we hear. It makes us always need to have something to say, even if means slipping off to goggle, then pretending we just ‘knew’ it.

Subversively replacing ‘normal’ behavior

This need to be constantly right, smart, and winning, really can be genuinely addictive, and as when it becomes so, it can easily replace ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ human behavior and it can surround us with a self-delusional air of justification. Let’s make no bones about it, it is self-delusional, and the only people who thinks it’s normal is us, or fellow addicts.

Some of us – me included – love to poke holes in a position while building a watertight alternative. There can be some goodness in that when surrendered to God to be used in its right place. However, if this is not motivated by the great commission, moved foremost and uppermost by love for Jesus and people, and then delivered in gentleness and prudence, then it really counts for squat. It’s worse than nothing – it’s actually idolatry because we’re making ourselves out to be the thing most valued and praised.

Being right, even about Gospel truths, can become sinful and disconnected from God.

Is this you?

Think about it for a minute. Do you have fake debates in your head? Do you argue with strawman opponents when alone in the car ?

Do you feel primarily compassion or urgency when you hear something you think is incorrect?

Do you sum up huge swaths of people into tightly categorized and broadly reduced a-personal units?

Do you use social media platforms, younger audiences, and impressionable people to try out your views where they are easy to defend, edit, and impress?

Do you write people off quickly, or summarize them totally before you have a chance to be a brother or sister to them?

Bottom line: Are you on a adrenaline fueled, self-image-enhancing crusade for ‘rightness’ or a compassion-driven commission by Jesus for truth? What motivates your corrections and what focuses your criticisms? Is it Jesus, or is there something else going on?

So, what do I do?

I talk boldly here as an addict. I’ve been in the worst depths of these places and know exactly what it’s like to love ‘rightness’ more than I love righteousness. Or – frankly – more than I love Jesus. I know what it’s like to appear superior, rather than pursue humility – and I still struggle with these passions daily. I’ve been praying for God to change the shape of my heart in these areas for years – which is why I quit my debate team.

This is also why I don’t debate on facebook, don’t post thoughtless provoking memes, don’t talk politics unless its face-to-face, try to hear each position for the first time when a new person shares it as their own, and try my best to ask more questions during a disagreement than just give answers. It’s flipping hard (especially that last one), but it allows me to surrender myself and others to Jesus much more readily. He really doesn’t need me to defend Him, after all. Just love Him, love others, and pursue the great commission.

If your overwhelming passion – when you’re totally honest with yourself – is to be ‘right’, then it might be that you need to take a personal inventory and rediscover your first love for Jesus.

Or – moment of truth – it might just be that this Christianity thing isn’t what you were looking for, and isn’t what you thought it was. Think about it, does your faith primarily ignite your heart or feed your addiction? If the latter, then it’s probably not the faith Jesus gave.

Maybe you need to let Christianity out of the ego-shaped box you’ve put it in and actually surrender to the living Christ afresh… or even for the first time.

I say this very carefully, but as someone who has gotten this wrong far more than he has gotten it right. I’ve decided, however, to follow Jesus – this means I have to want Him to be praised and loved more than I want to be right. Hopefully, under His grace and leading, I can be both, but I know which way I need to balance to tip. It’s a journey – but it’s the right one to walk.

I’ve been tackling this issue personally and directly for about twelve years now – since it was identified in me. I keep cutting off heads and finding new ones but the battle is well worth it and God is so good!

If this is you – please, look it in the face and seek more of God in your life and less of you. Talk to friends, seek community membership (not always leadership), listen more, speak less, slow down, and ask God to melt your heart with His love. It will be so much better!

Thanks for reading 🙂

 

Photo by Miguel Henriques on Unsplash

Are you called to ministry? The fundamental question.

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Who do you want to serve?

The greatest commandment says to love God with every ounce and fibre of your being and it says to love other people like you do yourself (Matt. 22:36-40).

Basically…

Do you love God and love others?

Or

In reality – do you want to serve your own needs?

  • Do you want to minster the great love of Jesus to the great needs of broken people?
  • Are you so moved in praise and heartfelt gratitude to God that this overflows in a Jesus-like passion for others?
  • Do you recognise that people are flawed and vulnerable, and need the message of the Gospel to dwell in them richly as a grace-and-mercy response to their lives?
  • Are you overwhelmed with the story of the Cross to the point that if you don’t call it out of others, you’ll dry up into a nothingness husk?

Or

  • Are you most passionate about ‘fixing people’s theology’ and ‘rooting out the heretic’?
  • Do you see facts, figures, viewpoints, doctrines, worldviews, and belief systems before you see real actual people holding them?
  • Are you looking to scratch an itch that allows you to read all day and show off your knowledge at the weekends?
  • Do you want to create an audience for your teaching or debate abilities?
  • Are you thinking more about God than you are worshipping God?

What about the ‘ministry qualifications’ from Titus and Timothy?

Titus 1 and 1 Timothy 3 both give fabulous qualifications for ministry, but these are for after you have established the initial passion and drive which we traditionally call ‘calling’.

Calling is a fundamental move of the Holy Spirit in your life that wells up as a desire to fulfil the great commandment and live it out in the great commission. It is supported by grace and driven by mercy. It begins in humility and grows deep roots of dependence on God for all you need.

Your CV won’t get you into ministry; God will get you into ministry. Ministry is a miracle calling which God produces and provides. At interview, your heart for, and relationship with Him is what should bleed through. Your experience and qualifications are simply the evidence of that heart. They are the smoke to the fire of God.

Ambition vs. Calling

Ambition for ministry is not the same thing as calling to ministry. Start with these few questions:

  • Do I love God?

How is that love manifest in my life?

 

  • Do I love Jesus Christ, as God?

How does the story of the cross dwell in me personally?

 

  • Do I love the Holy Spirit, as God?

What dependency do I show Him every day I live?

 

  • Do I love the Father, as God?

What would I do and how would I live as a response to His will?

 

  • Do I love ‘non-Christian’ people?

Do I primarily see them as human beings needing the mercy of God?

 

  • Do I love Christian people?

Do I see them as human beings on a careful and precarious journey of grace?

 

  • Do I love people who agree with me?

Do I use them as a comfort and support for my ego?

 

  • Do I love people who disagree with me?

Am I willing to push through the thin veil of human worldviews and see the life of Christ and needs of the flesh within them?

 

  • Do I love people?

Do I want them to know and experience the same love of God that I know and experience?

 

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Is the Bible a weapon?

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I recently read a post from a young minster asking whether he should officiate the wedding of a believer to an unbeliever. He was genuinely seeking advice.

Some of the responses were brilliant. They asked clarifying questions, they raised  important perspectives, and they bought the issue back to the Gospel. Overwhelmingly the answer (probably rightly) was no.

Other responses however were combative, aggressive, obtuse, and completely impersonal.

One of them read:

‘Hell no, haven’t you read your Bible!?!’

Another said:

‘Um, No! The Bible forbids Christians marrying non-believers.’

And yet another said:

‘Uneven yoke! Uneven yoke! Read it?’

Quite a few proof-texted that 2. Cor. 6:14 (the uneven yoke) verse as if that alone obviously answered the guy’s question. Forgetting for a minute that 2. Cor. 6 doesn’t mention marriage at all, the tone these messages was blunt, combative, and way off.

What came across is that the Bible itself was their justification for being rude and dismissive. Their Bible was their weapon, designed (in their eyes) to be wielded by the righteous to cut down the heretic, and dice up the false teacher.

But hang on, isn’t the Bible a sword?

Yes, but no, but yes, but no, but.

I’m a fan of my Bible! I believe it is the infallible word of God and useful for everything we need (2 Tim. 3:16-17). However, when we call it our ‘sword’, its possible that we’re not saying the same thing that the Bible does when it uses that word.

I remember visiting a youth meeting when the leader told the group to ‘draw swords.’ What followed was a room of young people (some with more indecent enthusiasm than others) pulling out their Bibles and winging them around while making light-sabre noises. It was cute, but was it helpful?

Yes… but no… but

What do we really mean when we say our Bible is a sword? Swords, after all, are weapons designed to kill people. Sometimes, as was the case in the comment section of the example above, the Bible is used in exactly that way: proof-texting passages to score points with the choir and ‘take down the heretic’ on the way to victory.

Is that what the Bible is designed to do? Is that what the Bible itself means us to do when it calls itself a sword?

Like with all things, an extra minute to challenge our baseline assumptions with a second look at the passages themselves will really help!

Eph. 6:17

‘Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’

Ok, so the Bible is a sword – sure. However, context is key, and v.12 tells us explicitly that our fight is not against people, but against ‘spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.’

This makes sense of the rest of the passage as every piece of armour is defensive and they are all different ways to describe just one thing. It’s all about being clothed in Jesus.

The ‘belt of truth’ gathers our worldview together with Jesus; the breastplate of righteous covers our hearts with the purity that Jesus provides; our feet are covered in the Gospel to guard our steps wherever we go; the shield of faith challenges lies with the truth of Jesus; and the helmet of salvation caps off our assurance in heaven.

You can overinterpret the individual pieces for sure – in fact I think we tend to – but what Paul is actually saying is ‘be clothed in the Gospel’ or ‘be covered in what Jesus has done for you.’ All the pieces of armour (sword included) are ways of telling us to live in the light of who Jesus is and what He has done for us.

There’s nothing about false teaching, heresy, debate, evangelism, correction or rebuke. Nada!

Heb. 4:1

‘For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.’

If it is sharper than, then it is not. The nature of comparison is that if it is compared to then it is not the same as. If I am taller than Bob, then I am not Bob. So this means that the Bible is like a sword in that it is sharp. So the Bible – like a sword – can penetrate and divide, but its direction is inwards.

The sword-like Word of God in this passage is directed at ourselves to convict us of sin and help us be more like Jesus. It’s to lay bare the inner depths of our hearts before God for Him to judge (v.13). It is to make us see the depths of our need for Him, in His grace, to save us (vv.14-15), so we can have confidence in Him and not ourselves (v.16).

The sword-like word of God in this passage, just like in Ephesians, is a mechanism of assurance in the Gospel of Jesus – for us. It is not a weapon to be wielded against false teachers or imperfect, vulnerable, growing people.

What about correcting false teaching

Yes – absolutely! The Bible is a tool of correction and rebuke (2 Tim. 3:16), but this is not for point-scoring or cutting people down. Rebuke of believers happens in love and care, and of unbelievers with clarity, gentleness, and respect (2 Pt. 3:15). It is, after all, the Holy Spirit who convicts the heart (v.16).

Jesus does let the hypocritical Pharisees have it full-on from both barrels (Matt. 23), and Paul wishes that false teachers would be ‘emasculated’ (Gal. 5:12). In both of these examples however, Jesus and Paul were moved by a deep protective love of God’s children to push back against those who should have known better.

When we wield the Bible like a sword, are we primarily moved by genuine, overflowing love and motivated by a responsible sense of protection – or is that simply the justification we give to ‘be right’?

If our motivation is to fix people or pull people down then we too would benefit from reading the whole Bible in its given tone and context. Let’s end by looking at how correction should be done.

Biblical correction – as a pastor

In 2 Tim. 2, Paul gives very clear instruction on how to deal with false teachers as a pastor.

v.14 says to warn people against quarrelling over words as it holds no value and ‘ruins’ those who listen.

v.15 tells us to teach clear honest truth, demonstrated by handling the word correctly. This is to give a clear and solid alternative to false teaching. It doesn’t even need to target the false teacher – in fact it’s often more powerful if it doesn’t.

v.16 avoid gossip… yup!

vv.17-18 Paul does name and shame two false teachers, but that’s in the context of what God is able to accomplish in spite of them. Paul spends no more than half a sentence on these false teachers before reassuring Timothy of God’s ability to confirm His own word and protect His own people (v.19)

vv.22-23 going full circle, we should flee the ‘evil desires of youth’ and not get caught up in ‘stupid arguments’. I’m assuming the structure here means he is equating both together. It’s often a sign of inexperience and immaturity to want to score points and be right all the time. I’ve met quite a few – usually young Bible college students – who get a kick from being confrontational and controversial without any pastoral flock to protect, and without any evidence of being moved by love. Franky I’ve been there myself and it’s all too easy to slip into.

v.24 ‘the Lord’s servant’ must not be quarrelsome (especially not for quarrelling’s sake) but be kind to everyone. There is no exception made here for false teachers. As Jesus loves his enemies so we should always be moved by love. If you can’t love the one you correct – keep your mouth shut until you can… especially if you can’t point to a flock that God has put under your care to protect.

v.25 opponents must be ‘gently instructed’. It doesn’t say defeated, beaten, destroyed or owned. The hope is that they’ll repent and escape the devil (v.26). This is again moved by compassion and driven by the great commission to make disciples.

Biblical correction – as a brother or sister

If you’re not a pastor, then you too are called to be part of people’s journey of faith through gentle correction (Tit. 3:1-2). Your talk should be wholesome, and motivated by the desire to build up and not tear down (Eph. 4:29). Our speech should be gracious, especially in disagreements (Col. 4:6). We should treat our words with great prudence and care (Prov. 10:19; 17:9, 27-28; 21:23), and this is particularly true of gossip (Prov. 26:20).

Matt. 18 tells us that when a fellow Christian needs some measure of correction, we should go to them personally first (in the tone of the paragraph above) (v.15). Then we should bring another to be part of the conversation (v.16), then we should pass it over to the church (which should be to those with spiritual leadership over the person) (v.17). It’s then the job of the church – really the pastor – to handle it as in 2 Tim. 2 above.

So is the Bible a weapon?

When the Bible calls the word a sword, is it directed either at the evil one or ourselves. It is wielded by God, not us, and is used as a tool of precision, not an indiscriminate weapon of destruction. If we used a surgeon’s tool like we sometimes used the Bible, then we wouldn’t have many surviving patients!

We’re not called to score points, we’re called to love and protect. We’re also not called to be God, He can do that without us!

With false teaching, correction using the Bible should happen, but in gentleness and moved by love. Any other way is a distortion of the charge given to us in the Bible itself.

A gentle final poke to fellow controversy addicts…

Why do you want the Bible to be a weapon? Why do you want to justify rude, blunt, confrontational, quarrelsome, disagreements among brothers and sisters?

Do you get the buzz of addiction?

I’ve been on debate teams before and I was taught first by a Bible College deeply saturated in the Western traditions of analytical philosophy. I know how to ‘win’. I also know – really I do – what a buzz it is to feel right and win an argument. It’s a rush – and with it comes both a physiological release of dopamine, and an existential sense of worth and value.

It feels good – and it makes us feel good about us!

This is probably the same thing that makes us want to pull people down rather than build them up. It’s the thing that makes us reach for controversy over edification. It’s what makes us look for the problems with everywhere we go and every talk we hear. I know exactly what it feels like to ’emerge supreme’ from a debate.

It’s addictive, and as such it can replace ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ human behavior – and surround us with a self-delusional air of justification.

Some of us – me included – love to poke holes in a position while building a watertight alternative. And there is some goodness in that when surrendered to God to be used in its right place. However, if that is not motivated by the great commission, moved foremost and uppermost by love for Jesus and people, and delivered in gentleness and prudence, then it counts for squat. It’s worse than nothing – it’s idolatry, making yourself the thing to be valued and praised.

If your overwhelming passion – if you’re totally honest – is to be ‘right’, then it might be that you need to take a personal inventory and rediscover your first love for Jesus. Or it might just be that this Christianity thing isn’t what you were looking for.

I say this as someone who has gotten this wrong far more than he has gotten it right. I’ve decided, however, to follow Jesus – this means I have to want Him to be praised and loved more than I want to be right. It’s a journey – but it’s the right one to walk.

Photo by Ricardo Cruz on Unsplash

Is it your responsibility to make the people you love ‘feel’ loved?

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A couple of days ago, a famous pastor in America quoted this:

Although Pastor John Piper has become an increasingly divisive figure in the past decade, there were much stronger responses than I expected. These included:

I was pretty confused by responses, and I hurt by the way they made harsh assumptive judgements on his own parenting and kids. This said, I was still sympathetic with some of their passions. I wonder if a little thought experiment would help?

Is love an emotion?

One of the strongest driving points from these tweets is that love is primarily and essentially a feeling. Five decades of Hollywood romance has taught us this! Although love can be a descriptor for a complicated set of powerful emotions, the word itself is historically a verb.

Love is an action then, it’s something that we do. When we love someone, we don’t simply feel towards them (although that may come with it), but we serve them, we help them, we lift them up, we support them, we stand with them, and we protect them. Sometimes we do things that are best for them that they just won’t like.

Should we be in control of how people ‘feel’?

We do these loving things because we love them, not because we need them to feel loved. Think about the motivation here: Do we do loving things because we love… or do we do loving things to make them feel loved?

If our motivations to do loving things is primarily the latter, then the former is simply not required. You could hate someone’s guts and still do things to make them ‘feel’ loved.

Being motivated by the ability to manipulate their emotional state at best cheapens the experience of love, and at worst is actually abuse. We have to love people and allow them to the room to respond to it out of the freedom of their own experiences and judgements.

One of the key indicators of human maturity is the knowledge that we just cannot control the feelings of those around us, or their interpretations of our actions.

Piper’s tweet uses the words ‘guaranteeing’ that they feel love. Can we ever do this? For anyone? Can you guarantee that the person you love will feel the love they should?

We should love genuinely, passionately, and authentically – motivated by loving someone, not by trying to guarantee their emotions. It’s great when someone feels loved, and of course we hope for that! Devaluing love because you can’t guarantee that it will be felt is just… well, odd, and frankly dangerous.

What about when people just don’t feel loved… even when we are loving?

If people don’t feel loved by our loving actions, would it necessarily mean that we’re loving ‘wrong’, or that our love is in some way defective, broken, or immature? Surely not.

Is it loving to pick a drunk person off the floor and get them into a taxi home? Most likely, but it’s pretty unlikely they’ll remember us. Does this mean they were not properly loved because they didn’t feel loved?

What about making your kids eat their greens, take baths, go to school, do their homework, or turn off their xbox? What about watching out for who they are friends with or grounding them for being misbehaved?

God tells us that he disciplines those he loves. He reminds us of this exactly because they didn’t feel loved (Pr. 3:12; Heb 12:4-12). Is God’s loving discipline somehow defective? Does God need to readdress his understanding of people’s love languages?

We hope that people we love will always feel loved – of course we do! There doesn’t have to be a dichotomy between the two. However, one doesen’t guarantee the other, and in doubt, do the loving thing and don’t hold your own actions captive to someone’s subjective feelings.

 

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Ethics, Critical Thinking, and Youth Ministry

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I remember first reading Mere Christianity by CS Lewis when I was in my late teens. His opening ‘but that’s my orange segment!’ gambit inspired me to think more clearly about morality and ethics in relationship to my faith.

Fast forward a couple of years and I’m sat in my first ethics lecture a bible college hearing Dr. David Field’s three golden rules for ethical thinking. They were:

  1. Life is complicated
  2. The Bible is sufficient
  3. The alternatives are bankrupt

The next three months in these lectures were the most awe-inspiring time in my academic career. Ever since then I’ve been trying to explore one big question in my youth projects: Does Jesus work in real life?

 

Getting the juices going

Today, I find that there is nothing more invigorating for conversation in a youth club than a good ethical dilemma. Facilitated conversations about morality and God’s plan for humanities’ maturity is guaranteed to get even the most apathetic young person engaging with passion they didn’t even know they had.

What new rules would you give to the Internet? Who should be in charge of what you do with your body? Is there any situation where mind control should be allowed?

These kind questions fuel new layers of thinking and – properly handled – can draw a young person deeper into relationship with God and draw a community deeper into relationship with each other.

 

The balance between abstract openness and objective authority

Properly handling these types of issues requires a balance between firm leadership and an openness to grace.

Sometimes people in these conversations will give voice to thought that might well stray over the line of heresy. Great – this is something we can work with! In my opinion confusion and shaky foundations are much better out than in where the light of day, the clarity of the Bible, and the love of genuinely tolerant brothers and sisters can sharpen, inform and grow the thinker.

This sharpening, however, needs be done with maturity and great care. Rather than simply carpet bombing your project themes with hot topics like abortion and sexuality, instead create a regular time where many questions are thought about from multiple perspectives.

This isn’t to say you should leave every topic as messy heap of existential and epistemological indecision (it is responsible to draw things together, challenge, rebuke, correct, and speak clearly from the Bible), but you should make a safe space for the process to happen as a process. This means critical thinking, deep discussion, open questions, and sometimes raw confusion.

 

A hardcore example

There is a thin line between ethical discussion and critical thinking. Thinking about anything ethically means asking questions of it. Mathematician Jacob Bronowski famously said, “That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.” (This may have been more famous for its quote in the original X Files!).

There are lots of easy places to go for an example, but let’s take a more interesting one. Consider this, then, for a line of questioning:

  • Is there a distinction between the person and character of God (who he is), and the revelation and actions of God (what he says and does)?
  • What level of distinction is there?
  • Is it possible to worship what God does or what God says, and not actually be worshipping God?
  • If that is true, is it possible to make idol of what God does and says, and in effect be committing heresy by worshipping it.
  • Is it dangerous or sinful to worship the Bible? Is it at all? Is there a worse alternative?
  • How would you know if you were worshipping Bible instead of God? Could it be possible to worship the Bible as healthy worship of God?
  • Is it possible the two people to go through these same questions and arrive at equally valid answers; distinct yet equally correct because of their level of faith and maturity?
  • Should all people think the same about these issues regardless of where they are at in their faith?

This is an epistemological and yet still ethical line of systematic-theological scrutiny. We’re talking about the character of God, yet we’re also talking about revelation, and we’re talking about both corporate and individual worship. Added to this, we’re asking some interesting questions of our Christian habits and what is actually happening under the surface, and what is driven by our hidden assumptions. Cool eh?

None of the above questions have a simple ‘yes / no’ answer – they are all answered in degrees along a spectrum. Further, each question needs to be re-evaluated in light of the next.

This brings us into a fantastic line of ethical discussion. It relies on community conversation, it needs us to be nuanced and measured, it needs us to engage with both hearts and minds, it needs us to turn to prayer, and it needs us to read our Bibles carefully with a greater dependence on the Holy Spirit. Doesn’t that just sound like maturity?

 

Ok, so what about in a youth club? … Plain English please, Tim.

Of course, I wouldn’t suggest simply copying and pasting that above example set of questions into your youth group, but it should give you an idea of what you’re looking for.

Questions shouldn’t always be closed down, simple, black-and-white, or enslaved to rules of thumb. Life isn’t this simple after-all!

For easier start, simply answer questions with questions for a little while. Don’t dissolve into diverting every question another question but do take a couple of extra minutes to open discussion up bit more, before you close it down and move on.

Remember your golden follow-up and open-up questions:

  • Who?
  • What?
  • When?
  • Where?
  • Why?
  • How?

Let’s let the Bible, and our Christianity speak with the same complexity that real life affords. Let’s dig, get deep, and get applicable. Let’s not muddy the waters where they are clear and let’s not transform our projects into intellectual exercises, but let’s take more care to give exploration the room it deserves.

 

Some caveats

  • It’s important for you to be comfortable and confident in your knowledge of God and His Word.
  • It’s important to make people feel safe by keeping conversations from dissolving into personally targeted debates.
  • It’s important to ask responsible.. not just ‘cool’ ones.
  • It’s important to be aware of triggers in the room (additional needs, mental health etc.).
  • It’s important to make sure your questioning is serving your young people, and not just your intellectual curiosities or (heaven forbid) your god-complex.
  • Remember that God is big enough to handle paradox, disagreement, differences, and even subjectivity. His glory is not dependent on your ability to rationalise it out.
  • That said, objective discussion should always stand firm on the Bible and be led by a keen awareness of the Holy Spirit. Pray for discernment – trust in grace!

 

Some sample questions to get you started

  • Can a person really be anything they want? What are some things they can’t be (logically), and what are some things they should not be (morally)? Who says? Why?
  • Whose happiness is the most important in the world to pursue? What should be allowed to get in the way of someone being happy? Is happiness always the most important thing to be? What else is there? When happiness isn’t available, are you less than human?
  • Can you love someone even if they don’t feel loved by you? Is it important that the person you love actually feels loved?
  • What do you do if someone’s ‘rights’ trample over someone else’s ‘rights’? What ‘rights’ do people really have or should they have?

 

… I might add some more later 😛

Have fun!

 

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Is Bonhoeffer really a good role model for youth workers?

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Recently I wrote a critique of Dr. Andrew Root’s approach to incarnational youth ministry, to which he graciously responded.

In many ways, however, Root’s understanding of the Incarnation is not his own. The ghost of Dietrich Bonhoeffer walks each and every page. Even the phrase Root uses, place-sharer, is Bonhoeffer’s (Stellvertreter). Root said that Bonhoeffer’s part in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler was driven by the belief ‘that it was the only way that he could truly (truly = in the imitation of Christ) share the place of those crushed by the wheels of the Nazi political machine’ (2007:85). This would have been the ideal place for Root to have added some words of caution about using Bonhoeffer as a de facto position on Christology, however we are left wanting.

With this in mind I think it’s worth taking a minute to ask whether Bonhoeffer really is the best role model for youth workers. As much respect I have for him as both a compassionate minister, and a deep thinker, there is another side that is rarely discussed.

Bonhoeffer’s Christology was born out of a very turbulent life experience. He emphasised the this-world focus and concrete nature of Jesus becoming flesh which was heavily outworked in a strongly social gospel. Abstract or internal knowledge of God was almost entirely dismissed by Bonhoeffer. He intended that ‘all Christian doctrines be reinterpreted in “this world” terms… The only way to find God, then, is to live fully in the midst of this world. Christians must participate in Jesus’ living for others’ (Godsey, 1991).

Bonhoeffer, during the later period of his life, discontinued his daily Bible reading, denying that Scripture contained any timeless principles. He said, ‘we may no longer seek after universal, eternal truths’ by reading the Bible (Bonhoeffer and Krauss 2010:71). Further, as someone who leaned towards universalism, Bonhoeffer also lacked a coherent theology of the atonement or  even of salvation itself (Weikart, 2015).

Although Bonhoeffer brings humanity to a sometimes overly ‘functional’ evangelical Christianity, his work cannot be used uncritically. Yet this is precisely what Root and others in the modern youth work world do by building his theology of incarnation. It is little wonder then that Root deemphasises the divinity of Jesus, rarely speaks to any experience of Him outside of concrete relationships with people, and expresses a muddy view of the atonement.

What is continually missing from Bonhoeffer is any sense of it is finished.  There is no talk of victory, glory, heaven, or the eternal nature of salvation through Jesus being fully God. These have no presence in his work leaving a heavily misbalanced gospel.

Bonhoeffer is an inspiration personally, but I don’t’ think he makes a great role-model theologically when it comes to the practice of youth work. At least, I’d like to see him used more critically.

 

References (in order of appearance)

Root, A. (2007) Revisiting relational youth ministry: from a strategy of influence to a theology of incarnation. Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Books

Godsey, J. (1991), Bonhoeffer’s costly theology. Available at http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-32/bonhoeffers-costly-theology.html

Bonhoeffer, D. and Krauss, R. (2010). Letters and papers from prison. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press.

Weikart, R. (2015), The Troubling Truth About Bonhoeffer’s Theology. Available at http://www.equip.org/article/troubling-truth-bonhoeffers-theology/

Should Dr. Jordan Peterson be a role model for youth workers?

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Jordan Peterson. Is he the opium for the masses of yesteryear – fighting a last hurrah for traditional masculinity before it plunges into the abyss? Or is he the the national self-help coach, strapping a pseudo-understanding of a plethora of human interest topics onto his otherwise robust portfolio of clinical psychology (with grey tape and bungee chords), hoping that no-one noticed? Is he a misunderstood messiah, or troubled and troubling? Who is he, and do we really want to learn from him?

Upfront I want to say that I like Jordan Peterson – mostly. I’m not a lobster t-shirt wearing ‘bucko’, as his more effusive fans are affectionally called. I’ve read ‘The 12 Rules for Life’ and, despite being written in uninspiring prose, it does have a lot of well-tested, sensible ideas to take away. I’ve also listened to many of his interviews and lectures, and have learned much in the process. Some of it I liked straight away, other parts challenged me directly and won me over eventually. I respect that, however unpopular his ideas might be, he engages in calm and collected reasoning, allowing anything on the table as long as it is presented respectfully.

From a Christian perspective, however, there are some problems to navigate through. These are problems which need to be taken on board very carefully before we surrender our own reasoning abilities to his, getting caught up in the flow that it changes how we approach ministry.

Tread Carefully

I’ve just finished an MA in the hopes of soon starting a PhD, and – although I did well – one of the most consistent pieces of feedback that I received from professors is that my analysis is good but my conclusions are often overstated. I wonder if the same can be said for Dr. Peterson?

When you listen to Dr. Peterson question, dig, differentiate, clarify, and present clinic studies as evidence – he is on fire! His critical reasoning abilities, especially in the line of critical and hostile debate is incredible. His analysis is often spot on, sourced well and undergirded with a startling, well-honed talent for critical thinking.

His conclusions, however, often jump wildly to something that can seem completely left field. His credibility was built during the analysis, which – guard now dropped – makes us accept his conclusions all too readily.

The problem, of course, is that he is looking for the ‘true’ meta-narrative of the universe without actually knowing God. He is attempting to find this ultimate truth in the orbits of myth, legend, ancient story, classical philosophy, and even the Bible. These, however, all surround an aura of an idea that he hasn’t properly grasped or digested, thus are all held with equal weight.

Dr. Peterson is looking for an ultimate ethic; an absolute foundational set of principles to guide humanity, but without a living relationship with the living God. This means he is working from the outside in – getting close, but misunderstanding the weight of his evidence, thus missing the truth.

Without a fundamentally Christian ethic he can only get close, but not actually get on point.

What does this look like?

His idea of the divine results in an Eastern balance of equal and opposite forces – almost karmic. The yin-yang is his meta-type metaphor that he uses to explain the chaos and order that battle in the world. This stems from a serious lack of understanding of the nature of sin (the actual bringing of chaos), and the character of God (ultimate order).

His conclusion is balance (over equality), and wit this comes an acceptance of suffering as a part of life, helped only by the masses individually trying to correct unjust situations.

There is a lot of admire in this, but ultimately it is a pure form of humanism, and not compatible with Christianity.

Aspects missing from Dr. Peterson’s worldview – but clear in Jesus’ – are things like:

  • Ultimate sacrificial love
  • Servant-hearted leadership
  • A honour in humility
  • Seeking to be last
  • Dependence upon God
  • Seeking the goodness of others above personal success
  • An end to suffering – ultimately
  • Chaos solved by surrender to, not creation of, order

This is not to say that Dr. Peterson isn’t immensely compassionate, and fiercely ethical. I believe he is. Christian ethics, however, cannot be tamed by conventional wisdom, or dammed by conventional fears. The God-man, Jesus, demonstrates the perfect picture of leadership that run counter to the ideas of self-actualised success as presented (at least in my understanding) of Dr. Peterson’s work.

Some of this comes down to him being a traditional scientist, weighing all evidence with equal weight as is responsible to the method. Thus the Bible is put alongside other sources feather than above it. Some of this, however, also comes down to a poor understanding of the Bible. When he does quote from Scripture, he seems to cite odd scholarship and rather mess up fundamental exegetical methods.

We do, therefore, need to tread carefully when mirroring Dr. Peterson’s worldview. This doesn’t mean, however, that there’s not a lot we can’t learn from him.

What can we learn from Dr. Peterson

Going back to his analysis, I think that the most important takeaways from Dr. Peterson is both his critical thinking ability and calm response to conflict.

Critical Thinking

I believe that critical thinking is one of the most undervalued aspects of early education. Throughout high-school (in the UK at least), the emphasis is placed on memorisation of facts, rather than on the discovery of them.

This, in turn, has deeply effected our evangelism. I guess that almost half the questions that I’m asked by young people would never have been asked in the first place if they were taught how to think. Misplaced stereotypes and new-atheist propaganda has been swallowed hook, line, and sinker, as if it was candy rather than a barb.

When we are asked a question, our natural response is to answer it – either as stated or as categorised as something we’ve heard before. Neither of these might be what the asker was interested in.

Instead, when asked a question, Dr. Peterson, clarifies the question. He asks a question back (or twelve), not to avoid but to focus. In doing this he better understands the question, shows more respect for the person asking the question, and he starts to find holes in the assumptions given.

Take this question for instance:

‘If God exists why is there suffering and evil?’

There’s a question we’ve all heard many times, and we probably already have a stock answer ready to roll. However, using critical thinking, and being a little Socratic about it we can have a much more effective answer. How about responding to that with one of these:

Why do you think suffering and evil means God can’t exist?

What kind of God are you talking about?

What kind of suffering and evil are you talking about?

How would you do it?

Can you think of any way suffering happens for a good reason?

Are you struggling with something right now? Want to talk about that?

A little bit of critical thinking reveals that this question doesn’t challenge God’s existence at all, instead it brings up whether or not someone likes the idea of God, which is a much weaker – but more honest – position.

This effects our Bible studies and talks too. If we only ask closed ended questions, or speaking at young people then we won’t be training them to discover truth for themselves. What about printing off Bible verses, and letting young people try their hand at some exegesis tools? What about getting them to write a Bible study then deliver it?

Critical thinking is gold, because we love and serve a reasonable God. He wants us to think, and He wants us to discover Him.

Calm under Conflict

If you watch Dr. Peterson when he comes under fire in an interview or debate, you’ll notice a few things.

First, his posture doesn’t change. He stays leaned back, with his hands folded.

Second, he doesn’t loose eye-contact, he stays connected at a personal level.

Third, his tone, although firm and direct doesn’t gain an overly aggressive edge. He remains respectful.

Fourth, he listens critically, doesn’t interrupt, takes a minute to understand and clarify, and he processes his answer carefully.

If you watch me – especially at my worst – you’ll see me do all the opposite of these things. I lean in, I fidget, I interrupt, I look anywhere but at the person’s face, I speak erratically and defensively, I say off-the-cuff things or placating things, and I speak to quickly without digesting. Bad!

This is one of the main reasons he wins his debates, but is also one of the main reasons he is respected. He shows respect when under conflict.

He is slightly less reasonable when the person attacking him is rude and unreasonable – which is fair enough. However, as we work with teenagers and in churches, we may need to dial up our tolerance for this kind of behaviour.

So what?

Dr. Jordon Peterson, I believe, is a helpful figure in public discourse. He’s thoughtful, compassionate, helpful, and articulate. He thinks before he speaks and he listens carefully. He doesn’t dismiss the supernatural out-of-hand, and he believes in the power of story.

He does not, however, represent a Christian worldview, or present a complete picture of Christian leadership values as were displayed in Jesus. Thus we need to tread carefully around his conclusions.

Dr. Peterson does, finally, give us a wonderful role-model for critical thinking, and remaining calm under conflict. Both of these traits will, I believe, serve us very well in our ministries with young people.