Christianity Today (“Take the best and leave the rest”, as my mother in law would say) has a number of newsletters available via email. One that I subscribe to is the Leadership Journal.

Here is an excerpt from part of today’s newsletter entitled Avoiding the Argument Party by Brian D. McLaren.

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 who is persuaded differently. He urges them to focus less on who is wrong, and more on how we can manage our own opinions for the blessing and good of those who differ. He lifts the discourse to a higher level by reframing the issue.

Lord willing, this weekend, Tom and I plan to go to the Peacemaker’s seminar in Wayne, PA.

Peacemaker Ministries work with this very assumption – arguments are a fact of life. Their mission is to develop “virtue and discipleship” and “create communities where conflict and tension and diversity of opinion remain in the healthy zone” by teaching people how to work through conflict in a Godly way.