By Jeff Brumley
Churches should welcome, not shun, debate and dissent, a pastor told a gathering of Baptists last week.
In fact, spiritual growth depends on tolerating and engaging those who hold divergent views, Taylor Sandlin of Southland Baptist Church in San Angelo, Texas, said in a sermon reported by Texas Baptist Communications.
“Faithfulness demands that we change,” he preached at the annual meeting of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. “It does us no good to disparage those we disagree with.”
It’s a lesson many pastors, minsters and congregational coaches told Baptist News Global that they have learned all too well. And they went a step further by urging not only tolerance of dissent, but to intentionally foster it.
‘New space for thinking’
It’s a dynamic seen regularly in spiritual formation ministry, said Ken Meyers, faith formation specialist with the Alliance of Baptists.
Spiritual growth results not from being in constant consensus on important issues but from being in tension over those issues, he said.
So the goal in congregations should be to create situations where knowledge is challenged, not confirmed, Meyers said. The result is that beliefs and knowledge are enhanced, not abandoned.
It was something he practiced during his years as a lead pastor, Meyers said.
“I was always trying to create some healthy learning tension” and “new space for thinking,” he said.
Once he experimented with Wednesday night classes. Church members would arrive in classrooms labeled with one topic and teacher, only to find the subjects and instructors had been switched.
These and other approaches were often messy and sometimes unsuccessful, Meyers said. But whether induced or accidental, the resulting tension generated conversation and thinking that got Christians out of their comfort zones.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if congregations could model that kind of sacred space and know that when we come out of it we are probably going to be stronger in our faith?” he said.
‘A healthy tension’
That principle is what undergirds interfaith work, said Kyle Reese, pastor at Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla.
Reese is heavily involved in work with other faiths. He is chairman of OneJax, which promotes inter-religious and inter-cultural understanding. He also is the host of Faith Matters, a local public radio show dealing with cultural issues from a faith perspective.
He’s known for his friendships with Jewish and Muslim leaders, as well as leaders from other Christian denominations.
All of those roles and relationships wouldn’t be possible if he didn’t embrace the tension that comes from encountering conflicting religious beliefs, he said.
“There’s a healthy tension that has to be there,” Reese said. “Either that, or you’re going to get a very shallow understanding of what interfaith dialogue is.”
The tension results when the primary faith commitments of each participant — those beliefs that are held to be non-negotiable — encounter each other, he said.
The goal isn’t to eliminate or work through those conflicts, Reese said, but to remain in relationship and dialogue in spite of them.
“I’m going to grow, but my primary faith commitment is not going to change,” he said.
So that tension is healthy — just as it is on the church level, Reese added.
Disagreements in congregations over weighty issues can generate growth. Arguments over the color of carpets or choir robes doesn’t, he said.
“I’m much more tolerant of dissent when it’s about issues that ultimately matter,” Reese said. “In these tensions we can listen and learn from one another, and that makes us all better disciples.”
Leaning into conflict
There’s a lot of research that supports the claim that debate and dissension can be good for individuals and congregations, said Bill Wilson, founder of the Center for Healthy Churches.
He cited George Bullard’s book Every Congregation Needs a Little Conflict and Speed Leas’ body of work on conflict management, including his conflict pyramid, as demonstrations that tension can be good for churches.
But unfortunately, Wilson said, he and his colleagues are often tasked with helping congregations where the dissent has gone far beyond the healthy stages.
This is where disagreements devolve into contests, fights and ultimately intractable situations, Wilson said, using Leas’ pyramid language. By then the dissent has become so toxic that it requires outside help to solve.
Wilson said author David Brubaker has found that those conflicts usually begin over leadership transitions, changes in decision making or changes in worship.
And he’s seeing another category more and more to blame — the social and moral issues of the day such as same-sex marriage and abortion.
“If a church doesn’t lean into the conflict — meaning they don’t proactively engage the behavior — it will get worse and it will get more and more corrosive and destructive,” he said.