Leadership Journal

Animal House, the old John Belushi film known for its adolescent debauchery and extraordinary bad taste, is hardly a place to expect pastoral insight. But recently, while channel surfing, I landed for a few seconds on a scene that caught my attention. A frat boy invites his girlfriend to a toga party. She says he's too mature and intelligent to go in for that sort of behavior; she doesn't want him to go. When he protests that he's a member of the fraternity and has no choice, she says, "I'll write you a note. I'll say that you're too well to go."

I kept channel surfing but couldn't get the line out of my mind: too well to go. I wondered: What if someone threw a church argument party and everyone was too well to go? Might some arguments, especially some religious arguments, attract only unwell people? Which of our contemporary arguments may be of that type, and how would one tell?

We pastors are building certain kinds of capital every day: not mere financial or political capital, but something far more precious, spiritual and social capital. Foolish arguments quickly embezzle a church's spiritual and relational reserves, often leaving those accounts empty and the church morally bankrupt.

There are two ways to avoid arguments, I suppose. First, a church can hasten to take an official stand on every issue, foreclosing upon argument by pre-set uniformity of opinion. The unintended consequence of this approach, though: as cases are closed, so are minds, and so are doors—to all but the few who already have it "right." Jesus said that even the godless love their friends; the mark of his followers would be their ability to love enemies. How does a church that forecloses on diversity of opinion show love of Jesus' kind?

Second, a church can avoid arguments by creating an unspoken censorship of "discouraging words." You can think anything you want; just don't talk about it. This might be fine for a home on the range, but is it a good environment for making apprentices of Jesus—people who seek truth, doubt illusions, grapple with paradox, and love one another too much to let one another go wrong?

If arguments are a fact of life, and perhaps even a needed context for developing virtue and discipleship, how can we create communities where conflict and tension and diversity of opinion remain in the healthy zone? Can we have good and needed arguments without bankrupting our spiritual and social capital?

Some of our churches have all the openness and freedom of expression of an old communist dictatorship, while others resemble an animal house of unrestrained adolescent bickering. Where are the pastors skilled to lead a church into healthy diversity of opinion?

For good models, we may have to go back to the apostle Paul and those strange chapters about eating meat sacrificed to idols (1 Cor. 8-10, Rom. 14-15, Acts 15). Paul doesn't require people to agree; he encourages them (a) to be fully persuaded in their own minds, and (b) not to judge a brother or sister ...