Continuing from Part 1 —
* Start with grace. Everything stems from the gospel. Get it right, and everything else should follow. Don’t even try to talk about divorce, the role of women, or instrumental music with a works-salvation eldership.
Legalism peels off in layers. You have to go over the material repeatedly, in greater and greater depth, as the leadership fits the new learning into their old understandings.
* Be patient. Not too patient, you know, but patient enough. It can take years even for even an open-minded Christian to fully grasp the height, depth, and breadth of God’s love.
* Preach it. But only to the extent you can do so without rebelling against the eldership. Discuss the nature of God as revealed in 2 Chronicle 30. It preaches quite well! Preach the Prodigal Son. Preach grace.
Go through the Gospels and focus on the personality of Jesus — his compassion, how his love for others pushes him to help anyone he sees in need. Explain how Jesus reveals to us who God is. Preach a God of grace.
Now, we’ve never denied grace. Rather, we’ve denied that grace applies to doctrinal error — or some doctrinal error. And so you should actually have considerable liberty to discuss the Bible’s teachings so long as you don’t make the application to a hot-button issue. Some of our most conservative preachers and periodicals preach sermons and publish articles on grace that are pretty much right — they just deny that the lessons apply to doctrine.
* Teach it. Especially in classes where the elders are present. Don’t go too fast. Just carefully build your case from scripture without getting into the hot button areas.
* Teach in all the classes. In many churches, elder Jones teaches a Sunday school class every single week, decade after decade. It’s his identity and ministry. He won’t give it up for fear that someone else will take it over and never give it back.
Lovingly explain to elder Jones that this is a very unhealthy situation. If each class has its own teacher for year after year, people will gravitate to the class that affirms what they already believe. As a result, churches that split almost always split along Sunday school class lines! We can’t have a conservative class and a moderate class. All classes need to hear all the teaching — including his.
Ask him to swap classes with you once a year. Let him have yours. And teach grace in an humble, submissive way. Rotate through all the classes and teach the same material in every single class. Leave lots of time for questions and get the class into the Word.
Seek out men you can train as teachers to support this ministry. Have them rotate as well. Now, elder Jones might usually teach his customary class, which is fine — he just can’t always teach the same class.
This also has the advantage of helping all the members feel closer to you. They’ll have heard you in a more informal setting than worship and will hear you respond to questions and comments. It’s important in any church for any preacher, even if no change at all is needed.
It also helps elder Jones be a shepherd for the entire congregation, not just his class. He is, after all, a shepherd, not a legislator, and so ought to know and serve the entire congregation.
* Gently and lovingly raise the hard questions at the right time. Why do we apply grace to moral failings and some doctrinal issues — like disagreement on the indwelling of the Spirit — but not on other doctrinal issues? We seem to make the test very subjective: if it’s hard to me, then I can grant grace to others. If it’s easy for me, then no one else gets grace. This can’t be right!
Why do we have two standards of repentance? In moral questions, we consider someone penitent if they’re trying to do right, even though they sometimes fail to do what they know is right. But on doctrinal questions, we consider someone penitent only if they actually do right, even when they don’t even know they are in error.
Get the leadership to admit that there are gaps in our logic and that it’s worth exploring the questions together.
* Don’t give them unpersuasive books to read. A book can be entirely right but not speak in a way that persuades someone with a conservative background. For example, the Jesus Proposal is wasted on anyone not already persuaded. In fact, such books can serve to inoculate the leadership against grace. Just like a vaccine, they’ve heard an unpersuasive form of the argument, didn’t buy it, and so will refuse to even consider the same argument presented again, if though presented much better.
* Don’t surprise the elders. Elders hate surprises. Youth ministers especially tend to be impatient and so want to try things with the entire congregation without proper preparation. Sometimes a little chutzpah is appropriate, but usually it does more harm than good.
Imagine that a youth minister, without warning the elders, sings a solo during his sermon. The membership is outraged. The elders haven’t thought about the right and wrong of solos in decades, if ever. Some members confront the elders, who respond by saying they had no idea this was coming. One or two, upset with the minister, might actually announce that this will never happen again so long as they are elders!
Had the elders been warned, the minister and elders might have had time to discuss the question. He might have even persuaded the elders — given plenty of lead time. But since he decided to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, policy got made in the foyer after church with no discussion and even less thought.
* Take advantage of habituation. Habituation is simply the fact that we react less and less to things we’re used to.
My church claps with the a cappella music. Lots of members were pretty upset when we started. I’ve never thought it was wrong — but I was uncomfortable with it because I’d never been around it before. I mean, it wasn’t how church is done! It just drove me nuts!
However, over time, I got comfortable with it. Eventually, I got to where I liked it. On some songs, I’d even miss it. But it took years — and I never had a doctrinal objection!
Some people love novelty, and they’ll line right up and love the new thing just because it’s new. Most need time to adjust. Therefore, if your church decides to allow clapping, you must (a) introduce it in limited doses and (b) never stop. Don’t make people go through the transition twice! And give people room to breathe with lots of non-clapping songs.
Respect the feelings of the members who come from a different background and who need time to bring their feelings in line with their heads. They’ll catch up if you just give them time.
(By the way, habituation is also the reason that we find Stamps-Baxter and other Church of Christ peculiarities acceptable, even enjoyable. We’ve heard it so much it just sounds right. But this isn’t true for unhabituated people. You can surely think of other examples.)
I have a theory about that. Deep down inside, people tend to be pretty insecure about their own salvation. A lot of people feel that they are just barely saved, if at all. (A lot could be said about the works salvation fallacy inherent in that…) So each individual's own spiritual condition is set as a minimum standard. Anyone who hasn't at least reached that point, therefore, is viewed as falling short of salvation.
So our tendency to expect everyone to "get" what we "get" is really rooted in our own insecurity. And our insecurity is based on a misunderstanding of grace and works.