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Podcast: Why Did God Put Difficult People in My Church? (Jamie Dunlop)

June 03, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Worshiping Next to Difficult People

In this episode, Jamie Dunlop explains how unity—not necessarily uniformity—in the face of diversity glorifies God and strengthens the church’s witness. Reflecting on four waves of controversy that have racked his church over the last few years, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the last presidential election, Jamie offers wise counsel for keeping the main thing the main thing as we navigate our fractured political landscape and consider our calling as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Love the Ones Who Drive You Crazy

Love the Ones Who Drive You Crazy

Jamie Dunlop

This practical guide shares 8 truths to show readers how they can cultivate God-exalting unity by loving those in the church who, if they’re honest, sometimes drive them crazy. 

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:24 - A New Level of Conflict and Division

Matt Tully
Jamie, thank you so much for joining me on The Crossway Podcast.

Jamie Dunlop
It’s a delight to be here. Thank you.

Matt Tully
I think we all have a sense that tensions and divisions and divisiveness within the evangelical church today are higher than ever. We look around and we see that all around us, whether it’s related to politics, race, sexuality and how to deal with that, COVID, or any other host of controversial topics, it seems like we’ve never been more polarized and divided as a church than we are today. In your book you note one prominent sociologist who writes, “I’ve been studying religion and religious congregations for thirty years. This is a level of conflict that I’ve never seen before.” Do you resonate with those feelings? Have you seen that in your role as a pastor as well?

Jamie Dunlop
Yeah, I have. That sociologist made that statement in 2021. I think we can all look back at what was going on in 2021 and shake our heads strongly because we had not only the run of the mill debates going on in evangelical circles but obviously debates about pandemic precautions that I hope we’re done with, but we’ll see what the Lord has for us. I pastor a church on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Politics is ever present. Things I never thought were political before I started pastoring here I’ve discovered are more political than I realized.

Matt Tully
Do you think that’s unique about your church in DC, or do you think that might be true of everywhere at this point?

Jamie Dunlop
I think there is certainly something unique in a church where so many people make their living in politics. As best I can tell across the evangelical landscape in the United States at least, it does seem that the polarization of politics we see nationwide has found its way into the church. And maybe you and I will talk later on in this podcast about why, but it seems increasingly that certain political positions are non-negotiable. And you can very quickly evaluate someone else, whether they’re in or out, based on their positions on particular political matters in a way that I don’t think churches were dealing with twenty years ago.

Matt Tully
We evaluate people spiritually based on political issues.

Jamie Dunlop
Yes. That’s true. That’s true. I think about the 1990s worship wars, and I think for many church members and for many pastors, they would long to get back there.

Matt Tully
It feels so quaint.

Jamie Dunlop
It does. Yes. And there’s a level of tension, as you mentioned, that feels heightened and more brittle today than perhaps has been in the case in the past.

Matt Tully
Maybe use your church as an example. As you said, you’re a member of Capitol Hill Baptist Church. The senior pastor there is Mark Dever. He’s been there for a long time. You’ve been on staff for over two decades.

Jamie Dunlop
Fifteen years.

Matt Tully
Oh, okay. But you’ve been at the church for over two decades.

Jamie Dunlop
Twenty-five years.

Matt Tully
You mentioned in the book four waves of controversy and conflict that your church has experienced in the last few years. I wonder if you could just briefly walk us through those.

Jamie Dunlop
Well, I wrote the book on a sabbatical the church gave me as a thank you after we got through 2020–2021. So those ideas and those waves were fresh in my mind. They were waves of controversy that flowed through the church. You might say they were different axes of disagreement we were experiencing in the church. Certainly, one was what do you do about a pandemic, particularly in a city that shut things down very hard for a long time? Religious gatherings over 100 outdoors, even with masks, were illegal. So part of the controversy at our church was our decision to sue the government so we could meet outdoors.

Matt Tully
And you played a pretty prominent role in the work that that entailed.

Jamie Dunlop
I think of all the elders I took the lead on that. Yes. I think another wave were all the protests, and some became riots, in our city following the murder of George Floyd and the murder of other individuals in similar situations. I think another wave of controversy was the election. We’re on Capitol Hill. We’re very used to that every four-year test of our unity in Christ. This one felt a little different for a variety of reasons.

Matt Tully
I think it felt different, and the whole country would testify to that.

Jamie Dunlop
Certainly. One reason is that the debate didn’t end on election day. And then, of course, being on Capitol Hill and with the events of January 6, our church was inside the security perimeter. I remember calling the police chief to plead with them that we had to figure out a way to get people into our church on Sunday without showing IDs and not going through barricades. There were different waves of controversy, and each one felt difficult. Each one seemed to threaten to pull the church apart into different groupings. Each one left people upset. Each one left people feeling like their church leaders were not speaking the way they wanted them to speak or acting the way they wanted them to act. I think what we discovered was there was a pretty broad diversity in the church that had been hidden, and the right circumstances pulled it to the surface. Suddenly, we looked around the church and we realized, Gosh, these people are not of like mind on issues that are important to me in a way I thought they were.

Matt Tully
Would you say that you and the other elders in the church, the other pastors, were surprised at the variety of opinions that were present in the church as well?

Jamie Dunlop
Unprepared, yes.

Matt Tully
In what ways?

Jamie Dunlop
Well, I had never thought to ask myself whether our church would respond in different ways to government mandates for a pandemic. It just never crossed my mind. There were some ways in which we would expect the church to divide on different issues, but other issues we were entirely unprepared for.

Matt Tully
In addition to the congregation in your church disagreeing on all these issues at times and having frustrations and different opinions on things, was there ever disagreement among the leadership team at the church?

Jamie Dunlop
Oh yeah. I feel like the perspectives representing the congregation were represented in the leadership as well. And yet one of the sweetest parts of pastoring through that period of time in our church was seeing how the elders of the church worked very well together, despite the fact that we had disagreements. And we had serious disagreements. We would discuss our disagreements. We would make a decision. Everyone would get behind that decision. We would move on. And that was beautiful. It was such a good example for me. Those men were teaching me what it looks like to be a church member. I value that. We had a wonderful chairman to help us do that well. But yes, that disagreement was present in the leadership of the church. And yet they were a model to me of what it looks like to work through disagreement in a Christlike way.

08:17 - Conflict Is an Evidence of Faith

Matt Tully
I know there’s a lot of nuance that you want to add to this conversation, but before we get there, I think the natural posture of many of us when it comes to things like this—we all lived through COVID and the pandemic and the election and all of that. We know what it was like to have these disagreements surface, maybe with our friends or family or church members. And I think we can generally have the sense that this is not good. I don’t like this disagreement. It’s not pleasant. Even those who are more combative and like to argue, they still would know this is not a sign of health—that would be their sense—in an organization or institution. And yet you would say that you eventually came to see some of these conflicts within the church as less of an evidence of failure and more as evidence of faith. I guess I just wonder how you can say that? We’re going to get into some more of the nuance there, but just starting with that sentence, how is that true?

Jamie Dunlop
I think in the middle of the greatest amount of disagreement my church has experienced in the twenty-five years I had there, I realized this is because we’ve built a church around Christ, not Christ plus a bunch of secondary matters. If we had built church around Christ and a particular political stream, then we would never disagree about politics. If we had built the church around Christ and a particular response to the government’s pandemic measures. We wouldn’t have disagreement there. The fact that we have disagreement is because we’re united around the gospel and Jesus, not these other matters. And that was hugely encouraging to me. I remember preaching a sermon probably at the height of our congregational controversy where I just made that point. “Brothers and sisters, this is what it looks like to be united around Christ alone.” And I had a member of the church who called me and she said, “I’ve been listening to your sermon to put me to sleep every night.” And I thought at first, Is it really that boring?

Matt Tully
It’s hard to know how to interpret that.

Jamie Dunlop
She very quickly clarified. She said, “I have been crying myself to sleep every night, wondering what has happened to my beloved church. And as I listened to your teaching about what it looks like to be united around Christ alone, it makes sense to me.” It has been such a reassuring thought that if a society is divided, to some extent some of those divisions will appear in the church—because we’re Christians and we don’t agree with some things—but other divisions in society will be in the church precisely because we’re not a social club. We’re a Jesus club. We’re united around him. And that means we’re going to disagree, and we might disagree sharply because we’re centered on Christ.

Matt Tully
And yet your main point is although we do disagree on some of these issues, there can still be unity in Christ. We can still worship together, be a part of the same church, and call each other brothers and sisters.

Jamie Dunlop
Absolutely. I’m really struck by the passage at the end of the book of Romans where Paul is writing to churches that it seems were Jewish and Gentile, and where they had lots of differences. And apparently, some very significant and sharp disagreements of conscience that we read about in Romans 14. And Paul’s message to them is not get your act together by figuring out what the right answer is and sticking to it. His message is you can love each other despite these disagreements. And in fact, in that unity that comes because you love each other for the sake of Christ, God has tremendous glory given to him because it shows that you’re united around Christ. You’ve achieved unity, even though you don’t have uniformity.

12:11 - What We Can and Cannot Disagree On

Matt Tully
I think one of the big underlying assumptions here that you’re speaking from is that there are some things that Christians are free to disagree about, that there is freedom to have different perspectives on some political issues or cultural issues or social issues. But then you would obviously also say, though, there are certain issues that Christians aren’t free to disagree about that are more clear in Scripture. I think that’s a major underlying assumption here that I think sometimes Christians could maybe feel like that’s the whole question. What are the issues that Christians need to agree on that are issues of faithfulness to the gospel, faithfulness to Scripture versus what are issues where there can be disagreement within the church? How do you think about that meta question, and how do you adjudicate that in your own mind?

Jamie Dunlop
I think anytime the topic of unity comes up, a lot of us evangelicals get our hackles raised because that is how so much heresy has been snuck into the church. I think about the Episcopalian archbishop (I forget who) in the early 2000s who said that heresy is better than schism.

Matt Tully
And that’s the mindset of progressive Christianity down through the years.

Jamie Dunlop
Yes. Unity at all costs. We want organizational unity, and so we’re going to try to sweep very significant doctrinal differences under the rug. And the result of that, at the end of the day, is an organization which stops being Christian. And so I think we need to be very careful when we approach the topic of unity that we don’t follow that pattern. And yet the Bible talks a lot about unity. It’s never at the expense of orthodoxy, never at the expense of faithfulness, but you don’t have to have complete agreement on everything in order to have unity. And in fact, unity is most powerful when you don’t have complete agreement. And so the book that we’re talking about is really more of a how book than a what book. It’s not designed to determine all the different places where you’re allowed to disagree with other Christians and still be together in a church. To some extent, that’s the decision every church has to make when it writes a statement of faith, when it decides how it’s going to determine its teaching. And different churches will locate that in different places. It’s much more of a how book. It’s saying once you have a good sense that this disagreement should not divide your church, but it’s still really hard to be in church with people who disagree with you on that. Or maybe not even disagreements but maybe just differences. We all agree that a cultural background difference shouldn’t divide a church, and yet sometimes it makes it very uncomfortable for me to be at church with a bunch of people who share a perspective that’s very foreign to me. What do I do then? How do I love those people with the genuine, affectionate love Paul talks about in Romans 12? Even though we are different in so many ways, we don’t share common assumptions in so many ways, we might even disagree. Our consciences might even disagree. Not about primary things, not about gospel things, not about things that should divide churches, but about the many things that need not divide a church and yet threatens to anyway.

Matt Tully
You referenced Jesus’s commands for us to love one another, his prayer for our unity, and you talk a lot about Paul and Romans 12 to 15 where he is also addressing these kinds of things. I could see someone wondering, though, why is that the emphasis—the unity emphasis? Yes, it’s there in Scripture, but if they look around, they see the need of the day is not unity necessarily but its purity. It’s faithfulness to the gospel. And you see throughout the New Testament as well Jesus and Paul often warning against false teachers, often warning against the wolves in sheep’s clothing who have come in to destroy the flock of God. How do you put those two dangers, I suppose, in the balance?

Jamie Dunlop
I think you need to recognize that Scripture never treats them as opposites. They’re not competitors. I think about in Ephesians 4 where it is, our love for each other, as we’re equipped for works of service, that protects the orthodoxy of the congregation. You see the same thing in Colossians 2, that for a church to preserve the gospel for the next generation, it needs both orthodoxy and unity. They’re not competitors. You’re not trying to sort of balance orthodoxy against unity.

Matt Tully
It’s not a zero sum game.

Jamie Dunlop
No, it’s not. You need both of them. And so I mentioned the book of Romans earlier. In so many ways, the first part of Romans is our doctrine, and the second part is our unity, our love together, that the two should feed each other. They should help each other. They are friends and allies.

Matt Tully
Do you think it’s fair to say, and maybe this is just my impression, that oftentimes churches are characterized by one or the other. They could be characterized by this emphasis on love and unity and a kind of openness. It doesn’t mean they completely reject the faithfulness side, but that’s their bent. Or you have churches on the other side who are bent towards doctrinal fidelity and purity, and they can lean in that direction away from the love. Do you think that’s a fair characterization, that sometimes churches seem to be on one side or the other?

Jamie Dunlop
I guess if you’re looking very broadly. If you’re thinking about, say, historical Protestant liberals versus evangelicals, I suppose so. But at the level of an individual congregation, I don’t know if I’d agree with that characterization. Again, I do see what I see in Scripture, that if you do not have doctrinal purity, you’re not going to be united about anything that’s substantive and real. And if you don’t have love, that doctrinal purity isn’t going to get you very far very quickly.

Matt Tully
So maybe this is a good time for you to fill out the rest of this sentence in as many ways as you can. The sentence is, “What I’m not saying is . . . ?”

Jamie Dunlop
I mentioned one already—I’m giving you a how book, not a what book. This is not a book that’s going to tell you, Here are the dividing lines. It’s a book that’s going to help you navigate those dividing lines once they’re established. Though I do think as you read the book, it’s going to change your values a little bit.

Matt Tully
Yeah, it might challenge some of your dividing lines.

Jamie Dunlop
It might. Once you can more accurately and biblically weigh the values on both sides, you might discover you change your dividing lines. I’m not saying unity at all costs. Anything but. As I read you to, say, the book of Galatians, Paul put doctrine before unity because these people were embracing anti-gospel heresy. That was not a call for unity. It was a call for fidelity. And so I’m not saying unity at all costs. I am saying that within the realm of differences that are allowable in a church, then unity should be our foremost concern and love should be in the forefront. And I think sometimes as evangelicals, we can fight as if everything is essential. And we need to be careful not to do that. I’m not saying to be squishy, to be relativistic as if there are not some things more important than others and we should treat everything as if it’s negotiable. That’s not our call in Scripture at all. There’s a short list of what I’m not saying.

19:21 - Division Can Reveal a Consumeristic Mindset

Matt Tully
You mentioned a minute ago that evangelicals can sometimes treat every debate as if it’s essential, as if it’s the debate they need to hold their ground on. I think a lot of times we can tell ourselves and we can think in our own minds, maybe sincerely, that we are reflecting a true concern for what is right and good and just and even what is biblical. And yet you point out in the book that sometimes this can actually be a result of a consumeristic mindset that we can sometimes have about the church. I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit. We know that consumerism is a big boogeyman when it comes to the church. Many of our listeners, I would imagine, are probably anti-church shopping and church hopping. I think you make connections about this consumeristic mindset in ways that we don’t always think of.

Jamie Dunlop
It’s no surprise that a Crossway book is against consumerism in Christianity, right? That’s not news. And yet, gosh, particularly in the United States, I think we are so steeped in the water of consumerism from birth. And we are taught to be consumeristic in how we think about church. It’s really hard to get beyond that. I mention in the book that we so often shop for a church like you shop for a car. You’re asking yourself, Does it have the programs I want? Does it meet my needs? Will it give me any trouble? Does it make me look good? And the challenge is that the call to, say in the churches in Rome, the call for Jewish Christians to love their Gentile brothers and sisters—that’s not fun. That’s not going to do any of the things I’m looking for if I shop for a church like I shop for a car. And so we need to really wrestle with what we’re going to do with the very unconsumeristic qualities of churches that are built of people who agree on Jesus and agree on everything Jesus said, and yet disagree with a lot of secondary matters. Where they don’t understand me because they come from a different background, where they disagree with me on things that I, frankly, think are very important, they feel like strangers. What do I do with that kind of a church?

Matt Tully
And in a consumeristic culture like ours, the strong temptation is going to be to just go find a new one.

Jamie Dunlop
Yeah, go find a place where I don’t have to deal with that difference.

Matt Tully
They’re more like me.

Jamie Dunlop
Precisely. And I think sometimes when we do that, we’re doing what we need to do. I don’t suggest that it’s always wrong to leave a church because it’s uncomfortable. Sometimes, given the nature of the disagreement, I need to leave. Sometimes, given the nature of my own maturity, I need to leave. I’m not going to grow in Christ here, so I need to go to another place. And yet sometimes when we do that, all we’re doing is exchanging the glory of a Christ-centered diversity for the comfort of a Christ-optional similarity. I don’t think Christ is served when we do that. That’s certainly not what Paul called the Romans to do—or the Ephesians or any of these other churches in the Testament where you see this glory of Jew-Gentile diversity. The glory was in the fact that they were so different and yet their unity in Christ showed. Ephesians 3:10 says even the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms were astonished at God’s wisdom in bringing these would-be enemies together in the church. That’s the glory of God. That’s the joy of a church. And that’s what we give up sometimes when we say, Ah, I’m just going to go to a place where everybody agrees with me.

Matt Tully
You also highlight how a utilitarian mindset can sometimes also encourage this divisiveness or this underappreciation for the diversity that can be in the church. What do you mean by that?

Jamie Dunlop
I think as you begin to look at the way that the priorities of those New Testament churches—Hebrew and Hellenist, slave and free, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile—it really challenges how some of us think about the purpose of a church. If the purpose of a church is to do stuff—missions, evangelism—

Matt Tully
Pause for a minute, because I think probably most people listening are saying—

Jamie Dunlop
Well, of course it is!

Matt Tully
That’s what a church is about, right? It’s about doing missions and evangelism and caring for the poor around them.

Jamie Dunlop
The differences we see baked into those New Testament churches just don’t make a lot of sense. Wouldn’t you reach more Jewish converts in the city of Rome if you had a Jewish church? Wouldn’t you reach more Gentile converts in the city of Ephesus if you had just a Gentile church? So if the church is really just about accomplishing those things, doing stuff for God, those differences don’t make sense. And I think that begins to challenge us to look back to the Scriptures and ask, What’s the difference? Is the church really just about accomplishing stuff for God? Which is what I describe as utilitarian. I don’t mean by the word “utilitarian” to write that off. This is the Great Commission We’re talking about.

Matt Tully
The church is called to do things.

Jamie Dunlop
Absolutely. It’s called to do things. And yet there’s a deeper purpose underneath those things, which is that the church is called to be a display of God’s glory. It’s called to glorify him. The Great Commission is a means to that end, but the church is not purely an evangelism factory. It is a portrait of Christ through our unity together that both feeds our evangelism and that we see through our evangelism. I think about the middle of the pandemic when my church was struggling so much and it was easy to be discouraged because we weren’t doing as much disciplining. We weren’t doing as much evangelism, and we weren’t doing as much church planting. We did plant a church in the middle of the pandemic, but maybe not as much as we wanted to. And you just have to realize the church is about something deeper than that. And maybe right now where it takes 110 percent of our faith just to stay together, we are bringing honor and glory to god in a way that we’re not during those easy seasons when we see tons of ministry pouring out the doors of the church.

25:12 - Examples of How to Handle Conflict

Matt Tully
I wonder if you could walk us through a number of what if scenarios. These are things that maybe are situations that we found ourselves in during different seasons. We’ve felt these things before. Maybe they all relate to this issue of pursuing unity around Christ and the gospel, even in the midst of differing opinions on things. So the first one is, What if there’s theoretical unity that I have on an underlying doctrine with somebody, but it seems to me that the way this person is behaving or the things that they’re saying or the opinions that they’re expressing that they’re at odds with the doctrine that they say they believe? I think that sometimes, a lot of times, the issue is we’re with someone in a church and we both affirm that God desires justice, justice is an important priority in the world, and that Christians are called to go do justice in the world. And yet the way some people apply that doctrine in their actions—the methods that they would use to pursue that—seem out of step to me with the doctrine itself. So how do we navigate that as Christians when we’re feeling that way?

Jamie Dunlop
It’s a great question. I think I need to have in the back of my mind the possibility that I’m wrong.

Matt Tully
So humility is a pretty foundational virtue in all of this.

Jamie Dunlop
Yeah, I think of Romans 14, where they’re disagreeing over—

Matt Tully
Meat sacrificed to idols.

Jamie Dunlop
Can a Christian eat meat or drink wine or celebrate special days. Those are the three things that he gives us in Romans 14. And Paul’s first focus there in the first twelve verses of Romans 14 is to say the one who eats is eating for the Lord. The one who abstains is abstaining for the Lord. Now, we learn later in the passages that Paul is on one side of that argument very clearly. He’s on the eating side. It’s okay to eat these things. But he’s pointing out to these people, Hey, both of those folks are pursuing what they’re doing in faith, and we need to recognize that. And so I need to have a category in my mind where though I think that you are a living contradiction because you say you value justice and yet you pursue this other thing over here, that if I understood why you value that other thing, and if I understood how that’s motivated out of your faith for Christ, I might have my categories broadened a little bit. I certainly have seen this in my church where I have had people in the church who call me, very upset. It’s something I have done as their pastor. And my first inclination in the conversation is to feel like, Oh, you just don’t get those biblical values. You are a living contradiction. And as I listen through the conversation, which is uncomfortable because they’re upset with me, but by the end of the conversation, I realize, Ah, okay. I think I can understand how your legitimate Christian faith is motivating you to do something which is quite different than what I’m valuing.
And maybe I wrongly saw this as there’s the Christian way, and you need to get in line. You’ve got to be careful with that, because if you let that go too far, that is the road to theological liberalism where, again, we lose all of our orthodoxy. But just like in Romans 14, I need to have a category where I’m wrong. I also have to have the category where I’m right. That if you and I begin to talk, you might realize, I guess that this and this principle in Scripture do mean that I need to change my perspective on this matter.

Matt Tully
Another scenario. What if I’m theoretically okay with loving somebody, like, I guess I see how I can love this person.

Jamie Dunlop
Which we always have to be. Yes.

Matt Tully
Even though they drive me crazy. And I can even affirm that they are brothers and sisters in Christ, and that’s good. But at the same time, I see this person in what I think is an error—a bad opinion or a bad way of thinking. I see them actually leading other people to think the same way. They’re influencing people in my church to think a certain way, and that worries me. I’m worried about the good of our church. I’m worried about the good of these people that they might be leading astray, so to speak. How should I handle that?

Jamie Dunlop
You have to make a determination there—Can we disagree in this matter and still be members of the same church? My church, for example, does not have a position on whether Christ is coming before the tribulation, in the middle of the tribulation, or after the tribulation. You can agree on any of those things and be a member of my church. And so if this person is leading people astray by teaching a pre-trib theology, it may be a great debate for me to be engaged in, but at the back of my mind, I have to just commit myself to recognizing that this is not a hill to die on. We can disagree over this and still be members of the same church. I think for a lot of people in the church, your pastor is a good resource in that regard. I think another factor to keep in mind is how this is happening. Is it divisive, or is it just a debate? Paul talks about factions as works of the flesh, like sorcery and witchcraft, in Galatians 5. Its terrible to have a faction where we are united against the rest of the church and against the leadership of the church because of our agreement on one particular matter. So you’re trying to figure out what’s the nature of the disagreement and how are we going about it. I think the two of those together are going to give you some insight as to how you should respond.

Matt Tully
Just a couple more scenarios. What if the disunity that I’m feeling isn’t just related to disagreement over an idea, an abstract idea, or even over a concrete next steps for something, but actually, I feel personally attacked. I feel insulted. I feel ignored or snubbed through the course of this disagreement or through what someone is advocating for. What do I do in that scenario?

Jamie Dunlop
Ideally, you talk to the person. I think the bellwether for determining if you need to talk to the person is are your affections toward them diminished? Now, maybe you’re a big enough person that you can feel snubbed and walk on and continue to have an affectionate relationship with that person. That’s wonderful. Proverbs 19:11 says it’s to your glory to overlook an offense. Sometimes we can. Sometimes we can say, You know what? I feel snubbed by you. I don’t feel like that sin is dangerous to you or to our relationship. In fact, it probably isn’t even sin. I will just ignore that and walk on. But sometimes, what that person is doing to me is dangerous to them, or it’s dangerous to our relationship, or it’s dangerous to me, or I’m just not a big enough person to overlook it. In which case, Matthew 18 would say I need to talk to them about it. That’s a very humbling thing to do. It’s much easier to pretend like what you said didn’t matter to me than to go to you and say, Brother, that hurt. I love you and I don’t want that to get in the way of our relationship. I want to talk about it.

Matt Tully
What about one additional scenario that’s related to this one—What if you do feel like you’re able to move on? You’re able to forgive them or just look past the offense, so to speak, but it doesn’t seem like this other person or these other people in the church are feeling the same way? They are not accepting of you as a brother or sister in Christ. They haven’t read your book. How do we deal with that?

Jamie Dunlop
Well, in Matthew 18 Jesus says if someone sins against you, you’ve got to talk to them. Matthew 5 says if they feel like you’ve sinned against them, you’ve got to talk to them. And he puts the ball in your court in both scenarios. So I think you’ve got the same obligation there that you, in love, need to say, Look, it seems like I’ve offended you. And I don’t want to have done that. And I want to talk to you about that. How do you feel like I’ve sinned against you? Because I want to repent if I have.

32:58 - Is the Problem in the Church with Disunity or Cultural Compromise?

Matt Tully
Everyone listening right now would almost certainly agree that this is an issue in the church today. This division that we see around us is real. We see it all the time. But I wonder if some listening might wonder if this is the biggest issue facing us right now. They might say that, actually, the division that we see around us is less a function of a sinful divisiveness that’s crept into the church and a factionalism that’s crept into the church. The reason we see so much division around us is because of all the compromise that we see around us in the church, of all the capitulation to the pressures that we feel increasingly from a secular culture around us. Is that fair? Do you agree with that? Is that the real issue? Is this kind of a secondary thing, or again, would you say that that’s a false dichotomy?

Jamie Dunlop
It has to be true in both ways in some places. I was talking to someone just yesterday regarding another church that has made a fatal compromise, and they’ve aligned with the culture in a way that’s going to kill the gospel in the church. And my advice to someone in that church is this is not a time for unity. This is a time to fight for what the Bible says is true and important. So absolutely there are places where compromise is the biggest problem. And yet there are many places where I think that the fact that we’re surprised by these differences and disagreements has led us to feel like something must be wrong and the issue here must be compromised, when in actual fact it may be more of a Christian freedom type situation where what we need to do is to learn to love across this divide rather than treat everything as a compromise situation.

34:45 - Remember Who Your Judge Is

Matt Tully
As a last question, what advice would you offer to pastors and church leaders who want to cultivate this mindset in their churches? They look out at their congregation, and they see division. Often, I think pastors have a front row seat to different opinions in the church. They’re the ones who get the phone call with, I hated this sermon and what you said there. And then they get another call ten minutes later, I loved it when you said that thing! They kind of feel like, What am I supposed to do here? How do I actually do this? What practical advice would you offer to pastors?

Jamie Dunlop
This is going to sound theoretical, but I really intend it to be most practical. Just remember who your judge is. Your job is to be faithful to Jesus Christ and his word, not to please those people. I think about Paul with the Corinthians saying, “You’re not my judge. Even my own conscience isn’t my judge. It’s the Lord who judges me.” And so it’s so easy as a pastor to feel like my job is to give everybody a little bit to keep them all together. And at the end of the day, that results in a church which is centered on you. You don’t want that. They don’t want that. Jesus does not want that. You want a church centered on Jesus Christ and the gospel. Remember who your judge is, that you will give account to him. In fact, you will give a stricter accounting, James 3:1 says, because you’re the teacher. You should never forget who you’re giving your accounting to. Second piece of practical advice is this is what Romans 12:14–15 are there for. Everybody knows Romans 1 to 8, but I feel like we have this amazing toolkit sitting in our Bibles for churches that are built on these fault lines of opinion and difference in culture that goes unused because it’s not the theological Mount Everest of Romans 8. But it’s what you do with the church that is built on the Mount Everest of Romans 8. Get to know Romans 12, Romans 14, the beginning of Romans 15, the end of Romans 13 as well. The beginning of Romans 13 is really important, but it’s kind of a different topic. And make sure your church gets to know that as well, that there is so much of a wealth of wisdom in those passages for how to love despite and across and in the midst of our differences.

Matt Tully
I think sometimes we can assume that the differences that we see in the church today are so much bigger, they’re so much more significant and difficult and tricky to navigate. And we kind of underplay or downplay the significance of what the early church was facing that we see chronicled in Romans and other passages. We don’t know the culture enough to know how big a deal that was.

Jamie Dunlop
And to some extent, our culture is changing so fast. It’s refreshing to go back to a culture that is now 2,000 years in hindsight. I mean, so many of our problems, I think, today in churches are that society is secularizing very quickly. And that is putting new pressures on the church that we haven’t had to face even ten or twenty years ago. And with that rising tide of secularism, we disagree over which moorings we should cling to. Thirty years from now, we’ll look back and there will be some more agreement as to what the Christian way to proceed is, but the cement’s still wet. We don’t know the answer to that. And there are going to be disagreements that we have. And so going back to look at Paul’s advice to those churches, in many ways, it’s going to be a more stable place to look than just trying to stare at our navels today and try to figure out what to do with these newest, latest controversies that we’ve not yet quite figured out.

Matt Tully
Jamie, thank you so much for walking us through this difficult issue, this big topic that is an ever-present issue for our churches today and our relationships with other Christians, and then giving us a little bit more biblical wisdom for thinking about these things.

Jamie Dunlop
It’s a joy. Thank you, brother.

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