Anonymous Asks (318)

“Why isn’t the obvious obvious to everyone?”

This isn’t an actual question. It’s my way of summing up the confusion of a number of different friends and other Christians who are frustrated with their fellow believers. One is frustrated because his church keeps recognizing elders who do not qualify by the standards set out in Timothy and Titus. Another is frustrated because his Christian friends are contemplating not voting in November’s election, thus increasing the likelihood of a Democrat win. Another is incensed that none of the Christians who heaped online abuse on the vaccine-hesitant during COVID have ever apologized for the foolish, uninformed and unchristian things they said. Yet another is frustrated by a pastor who believes the unwillingness to use a gun to defend one’s wife from rape is a biblical virtue.

Each sees the obvious and cannot understand why others don’t. The result is a potential breakdown in fellowship between believers.

I’m sympathetic to all these folks to one degree or another. The obvious is always obvious to me. I’m a very black-and-white character. If I do nuance, it’s usually an accident. (1) Biblical elders meet all the qualifications. If they don’t, they’re not elders, so don’t call them things they are not. (2) The Republican unwillingness to commit to legislating against abortion at the federal level is indeed cowardly and pandering, but it’s not anywhere near the level of depravity, warmongering and outright insanity to which the Democrats have descended. There is nothing approaching moral equivalence between the two positions. (3) When you’ve taken a public stand that hurt people’s feelings and it turned out to be dead wrong, you should seek forgiveness. That’s cut and dried. And I don’t do hypotheticals if I can help it, but (4) a pastor who actually allowed his wife to be raped when he had the means of stopping it at his disposal would be unworthy of leading anyone spiritually, and I would sympathize with any woman who divorced him.

Breaking Fellowship with Stupid People

In short, I see the problems, and I understand the frustrations. The real question is whether the evident stupidity of my fellow Christians about non-essentials is reason to break fellowship with them. And my answer would be that you have to attend church somewhere, so when you leave behind the stupidity of the believers with whom you currently associate, you will shortly be introduced to stupidity among the believers with whom you are tempted to associate instead.

Sadly, there is no real way to avoid this. At any given moment, the Christians you know will be at different levels of maturity in the faith, different levels of understanding about the world, and possess different quantities of natural and acquired wisdom. They will have backgrounds, personalities and characters different from yours. Some will be overly judgmental and even more will not be judgmental enough. If you talk to any Christian long enough, you will find reasons to disagree with him. Equally, because he is also in Christ, you may find reasons to like him a great deal, but you won’t know this unless you keep talking.

Concerning disputable matters, Paul writes, “The faith that you have [by which he means the convictions you have developed about lesser issues, not the substance of the faith, which is universal and most definitely to be shared], keep between yourself and God.” That’s sound advice. The level of frustration experienced by these Christians is a direct product of spending too much time talking about things that don’t matter AFTER it was already evident they had become sources of disagreement.

Arguing Hypotheticals

The most egregious example above is the pacifist pastor. His congregant has an issue with him because he asked him a dumb, completely hypothetical question: What would you do if someone were trying to rape your wife? My own conviction is that almost nobody who hasn’t had the experience of killing a human being knows the answer to this, and couldn’t possibly know until the moment he found himself in that situation. If he brazenly replies, “I’d blow him away and not think twice about it”, then I’d be even more confident he has the self-awareness of a tree stump. But even the committed pacifist who says, “I’d entrust her to the Lord” doesn’t really know what he would do. The most reasonable answer is “I’d pray for the courage to do the right thing if it ever happens.” Chances are more than 99 to 1 that it never will, unless you make a habit of putting your wife in hazardous situations.

It makes zero sense to be angry with a fellow believer over his instincts about what he might do in a situation neither of you will ever encounter. If you don’t want to be frustrated by what people tell you in ignorance, don’t ask hypothetical questions and make it a rule not to answer them. Christians frustrated with their fellow believers over abstractions need to take a chill pill and kick themselves for raising the issue in the first place.

Failing to Follow Procedures

A second cohort of frustrated believers are angry because they are themselves disobedient to the Word. Some Christians are unhappy about the way other Christians wrote about them online during the COVID drama, when everyone was talking and almost nobody knew what they were talking about on either side. Some have left churches over it. Ask any of them if they tried following the procedure laid down in Matthew 18 before doing so, and they’ll look at you like you have three heads. I actually agree with the vaccine-hesitant Christians who took flack for their unwillingness to put their health at risk by taking a largely untested substance now confirmed to have produced adverse effects in the tens of thousands and suspected of causing hundreds of thousands more. Turns out they were ordinately cautious. But those among them who have become bitter about the treatment they received from fellow believers before the data was in are unquestionably in the wrong.

Has your brother (or more likely sister) sinned against you in what she wrote about you online, in the harsh, judgmental assumptions she made about your motives or wisdom? You have two Christian options: (1) write it off to ignorance and leave it with the Lord; or (2) follow Matthew 18 and ask for that apology. The option you DON’T have is to sit around for two years airing your grievances with people who agree with you while doing nothing that might potentially resolve the problem.

There’s not much dumber than being angry that you haven’t received an apology you have never asked for.

Leaving Room for Disagreement

When it comes to elections, strategic considerations are all over the map. Even if we agree the Democrats are unspeakably diabolic and the Republicans are only venal after the usual manner of politicians throughout history, our voting (or non-voting) strategies are bound to differ according to conscience. I need to make allowance for the Christian who cannot bring herself to hold her nose and vote for Donald Trump. Assuming he gets elected, it may turn out his decision-making is far worse this time around than in his last term, or that the problems the US has right now are going to break up the country eventually no matter who is in charge. Likewise, she needs to make allowance for the fact that some of her fellow believers are going to vote for the Orange Man not because they love everything about him, but because the alternative this time around is apocalyptically awful. Christians who vote this way are basically playing goaltender rather than trying to advance a strategic position, and they are entitled to do so according to their consciences before the Lord.

Here’s the thing: if you feel like a Christian’s political views may lead you to break fellowship with them, don’t talk politics with that person. Claim ignorance and change the subject. Whatever leads to peace.

Making the Same Mistake

Finally, there are those well-intentioned believers who keep making the same mistake. Perhaps they recognize as elders men who are not elders. Then they do it again, and again, and again. Your frustration with them is understandable, but breaking fellowship with them over their repeated failures at pattern recognition is probably a little unfair.

If you do decide the vast majority at your local church are incorrigible, please make sure you do your due diligence first. I can’t count the number of Christians I know who left a church over differences with their existing elders, only to wind up sitting under the teaching of a single, seminary-trained pastor whose lack of biblical authority is orders of magnitudes greater than any group of imperfectly-qualified men trying to do a difficult job, usually in the absence of any genuinely qualified replacements.

In fact, if they are so stupid, perhaps you ought to offer them your services.