How to Handle Controversy and Conflict in Ministry

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0:00:00 – (Ligon Duncan): If a pulpit is dominated primarily by the denunciation of our theological enemies, we will think that our biggest problem is them. And our biggest problem is always us. It’s not even when there is a true us in them. Theologically, my biggest problem is always me, not the heretic that I’m dealing with.

0:00:30 – (Matt Smethurst): Welcome back to the Everyday Power, a podcast from the Gospel Coalition on the nuts and bolts of ministry. My name is Matt Smethurst.

0:00:37 – (Ligon Duncan): And I’m Lig Duncan.

0:00:38 – (Matt Smethurst): And we’re going to be thinking about a painful subject for many pastors, and that is the pastor and conflict or controversy in every generation. Sometimes it can feel like in every season of pastoral life, controversy is just around the corner, if not something that’s crashed unbidden into our experiences. Sometimes that can be denominational conflict. Sometimes it can have to do with culture and politics, but often, maybe most of the time, it just has to do with pastoring a local church, shepherding sheep in a sheep pen.

0:01:13 – (Matt Smethurst): And it’s not just the sin of the sheep, but also the sin that is in us that can lead to conflict. Pastors don’t have the luxury of choosing whether controversy will come, but they do have to choose how they’ll lead when it comes. So what would be some general advice that you would give for leading wisely when conflict arises?

0:01:36 – (Ligon Duncan): First, let me give testimony to my pastors. As a boy, as a teenager watching them, I grew up in a time of controversy. You had theological concerns over liberalism or neo orthodoxy, and you had evangelical men doing, in this context of the Southern Presbyterian Church, a little bit of what would happen in the Southern Baptist Convention later in the conservative resurgence. And I grew up watching pastors that were involved in that conflict, and if I could just commend the pastors. And I didn’t just get to see my pastor at my local church and then my pastor in the teenage years, but I got to see a lot of the leading evangelical ministers in the Southern Presbyterian Church because they came through my home.

0:02:31 – (Ligon Duncan): They might be preaching a Bible conference at the church, or they might be their meeting as a part of a presbytery meeting or something else. I got to see a lot of these men, hear a lot of these men, and they conducted themselves so well. There was no shrill denunciation going on from the pulpit. The pulpit was mainly edifying people in sound doctrine, pointing them to Christ, preaching to them the gospel.

0:02:57 – (Ligon Duncan): They would certainly take stands on things like the authority of the Bible, the deity of Christ, things that we’ve talked about before as we’ve had conversations. Matt that are central things to the Christian faith and to a faithful, Bible believing evangelical ministry. They were solid as the day is long on that, but they were not unduly polemical in the tone and content that they struck from the book, even though in presbytery and in other meetings they were having to contend manfully for the faith. And I that was such a healthy environment to be in. Because if a pulpit is dominated primarily by the denunciation of our theological enemies, we will think that our biggest problem is them.

0:03:48 – (Ligon Duncan): And our biggest problem is always us, even when there is a true us and them. Theologically, my biggest problem is always me, not the heretic that I’m dealing with. And so my, as John Newton says,

0:04:02 – (Matt Smethurst): self righteousness can feed off doctrines just as much as works.

0:04:06 – (Ligon Duncan): Absolutely it can. And so thank the Lord. And I bet there are lots of Southern Baptists that could give a similar kind of testimony to the way that their pastors conducted themselves during the conservative resurgence. I can give that testimony. And so they gave me a good model of, look, there are gonna be some places where I have to take a stand, often against other pastors or other theologians on theological grounds.

0:04:37 – (Ligon Duncan): I want to make sure that my people are aware of the issues. I want to make sure that my people are standing firm on the scriptures, But I’m not going to bring them into an undue and imbalanced ministry of denunciation and of polemics. TGC has published that famous exchange between Martin Lloyd Jones and the minister in Canada who was a very famous controversialist. And Lloyd Jones was just saying, you’re not going to edify your people if your ministry is primarily denunciation and polemic. You need to edify them positively with the exposition of the Bible.

0:05:23 – (Matt Smethurst): And folks can look that up. By the way it’s titled When Martyn Lloyd Jones confronted a pastor who loved controversy and denunciation.

0:05:31 – (Ligon Duncan): Lloyd Jones was no mambi pamby minister. He stood up on his hind legs and fought on the important things. Praise God. And Spurgeon did the same thing. But nobody would have guessed Spurgeon’s ministry was a ministry of denunciation. It was a positive ministry of exposition, where you built people’s foundations of faith in Christ, in the gospel, in God’s word, not in those guys are bad over there. And boy did he have to contend in the downgrade conversation, controversy with others.

0:06:05 – (Ligon Duncan): But the warp and woof of his ministry was edification and sanctification and proclamation of the gospel. And so I think that’s if the controversy that we’re dealing with is a theological controversy. And all of us, those things, they don’t just come in one generation and go away. We’ll have to deal with those kinds of things. I’ve seen a series of things come on in evangelicalism. Many years ago, maybe 20 years ago, we were dealing with open theism in evangelicalism. And do I want my people to be open theists? No.

0:06:40 – (Ligon Duncan): I want them to believe in the providence of God and the foreknowledge of God, and I want them to take comfort in the sovereignty of God. And I don’t want them to grab onto the latest goofy trend, even if it’s coming out of evangelical quarters. But am I going to do a sermon series? Probably not. I might.

0:07:00 – (Matt Smethurst): Do you want to hear my joke about open dsm?

0:07:02 – (Ligon Duncan): Yes, I would love to hear this.

0:07:03 – (Matt Smethurst): Open theism has no future.

0:07:06 – (Ligon Duncan): Ouch.

0:07:07 – (Matt Smethurst): It’s not very good.

0:07:08 – (Ligon Duncan): Ouch.

0:07:09 – (Matt Smethurst): But we’re not a comedy podcast or it’s.

0:07:12 – (Ligon Duncan): There is no future. Right. The future doesn’t exist yet. Yes, exactly. So there are gonna be things that come along like that that require us to engage theologically and require us to take some hits. But we don’t want our people to become people that love finding out the things that other people are doing wrong. They need to be far more concerned about making sure that their own hearts are pliable to the spirit by the word than picking out everything else wrong that somebody else is doing. So, thank God I had pastors that were both faithful. They contended for the faith where it needed to be contended for.

0:07:59 – (Ligon Duncan): But in their ministry, to me, I mostly remember their edifying exposition that built me up in the truth. Now, one of the reasons in controversy that we have to contend for that is so that that can be the way that most of the ministry of the church is being done. And so it’s well worth our forefathers in the evangelicals in the Southern Presbyterian tradition or the evangelicals in the Southern Baptist Convention that were part of the conservative resurgence, they had to take a lot of hits.

0:08:33 – (Ligon Duncan): So the bulk of the ministry of the church could be edifying. But we don’t want to be so caught up in controversy that we turn our people into brittle controversialists. We want them to be whole, godly, faithful, steady, loving people that aren’t blown around by the winds of doctrine, but also aren’t on a heresy hunt every waking moment.

0:09:00 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, I’ve heard you used before the adverb manfully. There’s something about the role of elders as fathers in the household of faith, where we are meant to guard and protect the sheep from wolves and from other threats. But pastors need to really beware a heart that loves controversy, right? To be clear, no faithful Christian, no faithful minister will be able to avoid controversy. But beware a heart that relishes it, because the Kingdom of God is not a soap opera for our entertainment. And I just think that, honestly, sometimes we can think of ourselves as lovers of truth, when really we’ve just become lovers of controversy. And I think sometimes the reason we become lovers of controversy, frankly, lig, is because we’ve grown bored with Jesus, the thing that used to animate us, the gospel of grace and the glory of substitutionary atonement and the hope of a better world to come.

0:10:02 – (Matt Smethurst): That kind of stuff can start to feel like old news to our hearts. And so we’re more allured and drawn by the latest twist and turn of

0:10:12 – (Ligon Duncan): a given controversy that sparks in me yet another thought. I think one of the things that also helped didn’t cure me of that. I’ve had to fight against this over the course of my life and ministry, but it certainly warned my heart against it was just seeing the tears of godly men that I respected in controversy. They were not triumphalist. They were not patting themselves on the back like they had all the answers. And the other guys were completely wrong.

0:10:43 – (Ligon Duncan): They were tearful about it. They cared about the unity of the church, but they did not believe that they could compromise the truth of God for the sake of a sham unity. And it broke their hearts. And I myself, because I got to see that in them, I’ve been able to go back and look at that history and realize, you know, there were some dear, dear saints that were on the wrong side of that controversy that I care about a lot and I have respect for.

0:11:16 – (Ligon Duncan): And so if we don’t engage in controversy with a spirit of heartbreak and tearfulness, that’s a dangerous thing, too. The triumphalism that can, you know, I’m right and you’re wrong, and that can be, as you were saying earlier, a sense of self justification. That my justification rests in my rightness on this. And I think that can be lost in controversy where you can. And I think that’s maybe part of the story of what happened in parts of fundamentalism.

0:11:56 – (Ligon Duncan): I would have been far more sympathetic with the fundamentalists of the early 20th century than I would have been with any of the theological liberalism that they were responding to. But when you’re in an environment where the dominant thing is they’re the enemy, you forget about the Dangers in your own heart. And an edifying ministry is going to make sure that we’re pointing the fingers at our own hearts, even while we are warning people against errors that are going to send them a bad pathway.

0:12:28 – (Matt Smethurst): It reminds me of Spurgeon saying, when you’re drawn into a controversy, use very hard arguments and very soft words, because ultimately we’re trying to win the person, not trying to destroy them, we’re trying to win them as we, yes, courageously, valiantly try to attack wrong ideas. But we, again, need to be careful that we’re not, frankly, looking for a rush that we used to get from meditating on the things of God and the glory of Christ and the beauty of the Gospel that we’re now having to find in just a form of street fighting.

0:13:09 – (Matt Smethurst): John Newton, in one of his. I already quoted him once, but he has an amazing letter called On Controversy. We’ll put it in the show notes. It’s not long. We would encourage listeners to read John Newton’s letter where he’s giving a younger minister some advice for whether and how to wade into a painful controversy. And at one point he says, what will it profit a man if he gain his cause and silence his adversary, if at the same time he loses that humble, tender frame of spirit in which the Lord delights?

0:13:42 – (Matt Smethurst): There’s not only one kind of controversy, there are many kinds. So talk more about how do we know when we’re called to public clarity, to patient, private shepherding, to an immediate response, or to letting something play out?

0:13:58 – (Ligon Duncan): Well, there are gonna be other kinds of theological controversies that are not at the level of the denial of authority of Scripture or the denial of the deity of Christ, or even the denial of the sovereignty of God, where good men can have differences. And I think we need to be aware of that. That sometimes is even more painful and more difficult than the ELO elevated controversies over foundational matters of the faith. Because it’s a situation where you do know that that brother is a brother and he’s a valued brother. But you’re on the different side of a theological issue of how you should go with something. Those can be very, very difficult to deal with. And then yet another kind is over prudential judgment issues when it comes to matters of church discipline and. And boy, there you can really see.

0:14:53 – (Ligon Duncan): Or culture, politics. Correct. You know, you can really see a divide where people that are, like, right here together theologically can have very opposite impulses and instincts for how to go in a particular culture, politics.

0:15:11 – (Matt Smethurst): And often it’s because people are attuned to real threats in different ways. So it’s a matter of same position, different suspicions.

0:15:22 – (Ligon Duncan): So if people are familiar with either Kevin DeYoung’s categories of 1, 2, 3, and 4, or Mike Graham’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, I do think that part of the reason that that spread of instincts and groups, if you will, amongst evangelicals is because of what you just said. They’re attuned to different things, and so their instinct is to push back in one direction or another. And you can actually have somebody that’s pretty close theologically that will react very, very differently to the cultural or to the political or to the judgment in church discipline call that you need to make.

0:16:04 – (Matt Smethurst): In Trevin Wax’s little book, the Multidirectional Leader, he does talk about this medicine for the moment. I mean, I think it’s very helpful, even prophetic, because frankly, we see in the Lord Jesus himself that kind of versatility. He kept everyone around him on their toes because you never quite knew how he was going to respond in a given moment because he was alert to threats from all sides. That’s not to say that there’s equal and opposite errors on both sides.

0:16:37 – (Matt Smethurst): We don’t want to succumb to a kind of both sidesism. And yet at the same time, we want to be aware that the devil is crafty and he is going to try to attack us from the direction we’re least prepared to meet him.

0:16:53 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah, yeah. And even looking, what Jesus was interested in engaging with and what he was not in comparison to some of his other contemporaries is fascinating. So you think about. You think about, for instance, Jesus ignoring the Sadducees. Really, there’s very little interaction from Jesus to the Sadducees. He spends a lot of time on the Pharisees, and he uses really strident language with the Pharisees.

0:17:27 – (Ligon Duncan): And I think it’s because he’s got so much hope for them and for the Sadducees, he’s just not even bothered. There’s very little interaction with them. They are so far off, they’re not anywhere near the. With him. They’re disrespectful in the way that they approach him. They’re dismissive of him, and he is dismissive of them. And so even watching what Jesus decides to engage and what he decides not to engage with in his context is something that we need to.

0:17:59 – (Matt Smethurst): Just because it was the thing everyone was talking about doesn’t mean he thought it was worth his time to engage.

0:18:04 – (Ligon Duncan): Exactly. And so I think we need to think. We need to think that through the other testimony I’d give. Matt, you and I have talked about this, being with John Piper in T4G, and John and I have a lot of theological commonalities and a lot of shared concerns, and yet we would be.

0:18:25 – (Matt Smethurst): You’ve converted him to Coke Zero with Lyme.

0:18:28 – (Ligon Duncan): I have taught him about Lyme in Coke Zero, I’m very proud to say. But even thinking through a few years back how John responded to certain issues and people differently than I did made me rethink how I related to people in my own ecclesiastical fellowship and communion that related to those issues differently than I did.

0:18:57 – (Matt Smethurst): And, I mean, John was a good example.

0:19:00 – (Ligon Duncan): He was a good example. And it just made me think, okay, wow, I’m really close to John on this and this and this and this. And yet he relates to this guy and this movement maybe in a softer way than I would. I’d be more hard edged in relating to that. And yet with guys within my own circles, if they related like John did, I would tend to view them as the bad guys. And I thought, why is John not a bad guy? But they’re bad guys. And I had to do some searching in my own heart and realize they’re not bad guys.

0:19:36 – (Ligon Duncan): They’ve got the same instincts that John does. They’re actually really close to me theologically, and I need to be more patient and hear them out and like you said with Spurgeon, use soft words with really good arguments to try and win them instead of driving them away. And I had the same experience with. With Tim. You and I were talking about this before we even started this conversation about Tim Keller. Yeah. You know, Tim and I were first sort of thrown together in a theological controversy in the PCA to represent two sides.

0:20:11 – (Ligon Duncan): And, you know, as we talked, I think we really liked one another.

0:20:16 – (Matt Smethurst): And it was the context in which you kind of met and got to know each other.

0:20:20 – (Ligon Duncan): Right. It really was a debate. It was supposed to be a debate. Really ended up being a fruitful conversation that I think helped the whole denomination figure. Figure out how to think about the issues that were before us. But number one, we found, wow, we’re really close on this, and we could live with our differences on those things. And that started a friendship. And that made me think, have I treated other guys like enemies or like the bad guys too quickly because they had different instincts on how to vote about something in presbytery or how to address a particular prudential or judgment call?

0:21:03 – (Matt Smethurst): Again, you’re talking about wisdom. Calls not orthodox.

0:21:08 – (Ligon Duncan): And so I do think we can sometimes move to a moral and a theological level too quick when we realize actually it’s back a couple of steps at a prudential wisdom level. Not that those are unrelated, those are related. But we can get our high horse too quickly. And that’s another thing that can spawn division and sort of a context of conflict where it shouldn’t. We can disagree with people and still respect them and love them and value them. In fact, it was during that time it really hit me hard around the early 2000s. I would rather engage in controversy with somebody that I love than somebody that I really don’t respect, because the worst instincts will come out of me if I’m engaging in controversy with somebody that I don’t respect.

0:22:13 – (Ligon Duncan): And it was so easy to argue with Tim because I didn’t just respect him, I loved him. And so I would rather have theological controversy with somebody like that. Then if I’m talking with somebody that has denied fundamental elements of the faith, I’m gonna. Contempt is gonna be. That’s gonna be a temptation to me, even though that’s a human being made in the image of God, however wrong they are, and however pastorally dangerous the things that they are teaching may be to my flock, and however much I wanna protect my people from that, I’m tempted to contempt in that setting.

0:22:51 – (Ligon Duncan): And I don’t want to operate out of contempt in polemics. And so I started thinking then, yeah, I’d rather talk to a person really loving that person, because I’m going to talk differently to a person that I love. The disdain and the contempt that I hate in my soul are not going to come out when you’re talking to somebody that you love. So you are then going to be marshaling your best arguments and you’re going to be trying to put them in the most respectful language that you possibly can. You’re not going to be hammering your friend, the things that you perceive or weaknesses in that person. You’re going to talk to them like you would talk to your wife, talk to them like you would talk to your best friend. And so I do think that’s something we need to spend some time thinking about, because we can get in a controversy over these sort of second level things that we amp up to a theological and moral level that’s really not justified.

0:23:50 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah, absolutely. Proverbs is very clear. I mean, there are different ways to respond to a fool. Sometimes we should answer a fool according to his folly, sometimes we shouldn’t. But the tilt of Proverbs certainly seems to be toward versus like a gentle answer. Turns away rest.

0:24:06 – (Ligon Duncan): Very much so.

0:24:07 – (Matt Smethurst): And so if you are unwilling to offend people, you’re not fit for ministry. If you revel in offending people, you’re not fit for ministry. There’s a place for polemics, but polemics is more like medicine than it is like food. Praise God for medicine. It’s necessary at times, but you don’t live on medicine. And that can be, again, a real danger for a pastor who has forsaken his first love and is starting to feed off of that rust.

0:24:40 – (Matt Smethurst): Now, we’ve talked kind of about national controversies, denominational controversies, but we might have some pastors listening who are like, okay, well, that’s a great story, lig of you in a denominational debate, but you’re a denominational leader. I’m just an ordinary pastor laboring in a small church. My controversies are closer to home. So let’s talk about controversy, conflict in the local church.

0:25:06 – (Matt Smethurst): What advice would you give pastors who are wading through that?

0:25:10 – (Ligon Duncan): Again, there are different kind of conflicts there. One can be over something as simple as property decisions, buying property for a church, plant, building, adding on to a church. It can produce tremendous tension in a congregation. When my congregation was out of space, when I came to the church, it was already out of space. We were having two Sunday morning services, and we had two, what we call television church meeting at the same time in other parts of the building because we couldn’t get everybody in the space.

0:25:46 – (Ligon Duncan): And yet we were landlocked, and there was no place to go to purchase new land and build. There was just what were we going to do? And we eventually decided, okay, we’re going to tear the old sanctuary down to the ground, and we’re going to build a larger one on the same spot. And there were a lot of good people in the congregation that did not want to do that for a whole variety of reasons. And there was temperature about that, but you have to decide you’re either gonna do it or not.

0:26:19 – (Ligon Duncan): And so I went into that congregational meeting with fear and trepidation because I had already heard there were people animated about it. And so those kinds of things. And if the pastor gets associated with one or the other of that, you can have people that think you’re bad. I saw this happen to a really good pastor that I served. They were in a very similar situation at another church that I served where they were landlocked. They could not buy new land, and the only way that they could build was to get permission from the neighborhood, and the neighborhood wouldn’t give them permission.

0:27:03 – (Ligon Duncan): And so the pastor ended up buying property further out in the county and building a church there. And it split the church right down the middle. And people were really angry with one another about that. And that was one of those tragic situations where there was no way to get everybody on the same page. There just wasn’t a way to get everybody on the same page. And they all had validated, they had valid concerns, but you have to decide to do one way or the other. And he got associated. Well, you’re the pastor that took all our people and went out to another church, and that’s tough. And pastors do face things like that all the time. It may just be something as simple as a building program or how much of your budget you’re going to spend on missions, or instead of building, are we going to send out a group to plant a church? Those kinds of.

0:28:00 – (Ligon Duncan): Of prudential judgments that the congregation is involved in can be tremendously controversial. And the pastor can get tarred and feather, even down to what our pastor friends were deciding. During COVID five years ago, I met pastors that were tarred and feathered by two sides of their congregations, even though they were only doing one thing, and one side thought they ought to do this and the other side thought they ought to do that, and they were tarred and feathered from both sides. So. So pastors know those things.

0:28:29 – (Matt Smethurst): And none of this was with the hindsight we have now. This was in real time.

0:28:32 – (Ligon Duncan): No, we didn’t know the things that we know. You’re just doing the best you can in that context. So you can have that kind of a controversy, and then you can have personal controversies, and they can be incredibly painful sometimes.

0:28:48 – (Matt Smethurst): Those are the hardest.

0:28:49 – (Ligon Duncan): They are the hardest. They are the hardest and the closer. And very often they happen with people that you’re really close to. I mean, I’ve lost count of pastors who’ve told me about controversies, personal controversies that they’ve experienced, from the person who was the chairman of the pulpit committee that called them to be the pastor. It’s just heartbreaking. And there are a lot of reasons for that, psychologically and spiritually, why that happens.

0:29:16 – (Ligon Duncan): But those kind of controversies just. They take a chunk out of you as a pastor. And then you have to figure out, how do I love that family? How do I try to act as normally as I possibly can, knowing that they want to get me fired? They’re working behind my back to undercut me on this. And that and the other. That’s really, really hard.

0:29:41 – (Matt Smethurst): I confess something that makes me nervous is when I meet a visitor who’s interested in joining the church or I’m having a membership interview, and they just seem over enthusiastic about our church.

0:29:52 – (Ligon Duncan): And

0:29:55 – (Matt Smethurst): we’re the third or fourth church they’ve been a part of in the area, and they think they finally found the one that’s gonna check all their boxes. And it’s in those conversations when I’m wanting to actually just be very clear and say, we are going to disappoint you.

0:30:09 – (Ligon Duncan): That’s so good.

0:30:10 – (Matt Smethurst): You’re gonna be disillusioned. And it’s not a matter of if, but when. And you just need to know that coming in.

0:30:16 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah, that’s a good warning. And I’ve had to give the same warning, Matt. And also to say, we’re not gonna. Forgiveness. There is going to be a time when you’re going to have to forgive me. I’m thinking right now a hard pastoral situation that I was brought into, and it was a family conflict, and I was invited into that family conflict unwillingly. But it’s one of those things, as a pastor, you can’t say, no, I won’t sit down and meet with you.

0:30:47 – (Ligon Duncan): You know, I’m going to get ick on me no matter what happens here. And I did, because I made a bad judgment. But in that case, the woman in the family forgave me, and we’re really good friends to this day. Without her forgiveness, that relationship would not have survived with that family without her forgiveness, because I just made a bad decision.

0:31:12 – (Matt Smethurst): Well. And who knows what the collateral damage would have been to your ministry or to the rest of the congregation.

0:31:18 – (Ligon Duncan): And. And I’m super close with her husband. I’m really close with her children and her forgiveness to me. There have been other situations where I’ve messed up and the forgiveness has not been there. Thankfully, it has not had ripple effect, bad ramifications for the rest of the congregation. It’s funny how I remember those pastoral mistakes more than I ever remember. People come up and say, oh, you encouraged me such and such in 2002 when you did so and so. And I don’t remember that, but I do remember when I’ve messed up.

0:31:56 – (Ligon Duncan): And it just. It. Sometimes it’ll hit me out of the blue and I’ll just. The tape replays, and I think, how in the world could I have done that? And so there have been other situations where the forgiveness couldn’t come.

0:32:09 – (Matt Smethurst): Yeah. And let me just say on that Front. Speaking of Tim Keller, his last published book, you may think some kind of, Was it some kind of sophisticated cultural analysis? What did he write about? No, it was a book on forgiveness because he understood that we live in a day and age in which everything is permitted and nothing is forgiven. That’s a really helpful book. Pastors who are listening for you to work through with your fellow leaders, maybe with church members. It’s called Forgive.

0:32:36 – (Ligon Duncan): And Tim was so good on that. A lot of people don’t know that President Bush reached out to Tim in part because he, he wanted to know how to forgive. I mean, you can imagine in a political life how much you have to forgive. And he wanted him to help him pastorally process what he needed to do to forgive. And so I do think telling people at some point our church is going to disappoint you and they’re just saying we won’t survive.

0:33:06 – (Ligon Duncan): And by the way, I’m not saying that I don’t also have a responsibility to repentance. In that case, I had some repentance I needed to do, but without repentance,

0:33:17 – (Matt Smethurst): in fact, we should be the lead repenter in our congregation.

0:33:21 – (Ligon Duncan): And I don’t want you as a pastor feel like every Sunday you have to get up and engage in self defenestration over your.

0:33:34 – (Matt Smethurst): I’m not smart enough to know what that word is.

0:33:35 – (Ligon Duncan): Throwing yourself out the window. We’re going to make plenty of mistakes, not all of which need to be rehearsed to the congregation. But there need to be enough of the folks in the congregation that the pastor can repent. He doesn’t think that he’s perfect. He doesn’t think that he always gets it right. He doesn’t always have to get his way. He knows that he can mess up. He knows that he can sin and he can repent. When that happens, the congregation needs to know that because they’re gonna need to do that with one another in their relationships to survive. And we’re gonna have to do it as a family of the congregation.

0:34:10 – (Ligon Duncan): So they got to know that their pastor is going to do that too.

0:34:13 – (Matt Smethurst): Your ministry won’t survive, your church won’t flourish. If verses like love covers over a multitude of sins, and it is to a man’s glory to overlook an offense. Are not banners flying over the life of your church? I mean, just take the topic of grumbling. Grumbling is one of those respectable sins. We tend to view it as tame, something we can tolerate. But grumbling is insidious to the heart and Life of a church, it’s like the black mold in a congregation.

0:34:43 – (Matt Smethurst): You don’t notice it until everyone is already sick. In fact, one of the things I said to our church on our one year anniversary was that we will not have any future anniversaries if we’re not on guard against the subtle corrosive power of complaining and bickering. Because once that kind of spirit gets a foothold, it fractures unity right down the middle. And one of the passages that I pointed out was Jude.

0:35:10 – (Matt Smethurst): It’s so interesting that Jude says, starting in verse four, for certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ, our only sovereign and Lord. So like this is a blistering tirade against the kind of godless, immoral, false teachers who were slithering into the church.

0:35:36 – (Matt Smethurst): And what is the climax, the crescendo of Jude’s Great indictment, verse 16. These people are grumblers and fault finders. I would have expected him to say these people are heretics and murderers and adulterers, but he just says no, they complain a lot.

0:35:56 – (Ligon Duncan): Paul does the same thing in 1 Corinthians 10. Now he hits idolatry, but his big thing is don’t be. He hits immorality, but his big thing is don’t grumble as some of the children of Israel did in the wilderness. So he’s gonna go back to the great Exodus event? Yes, he’ll hit idolatry. Yes, he’ll hit immorality, but grumbling is also in his sight. So you’re absolutely right.

0:36:21 – (Matt Smethurst): And in Philippians 2, do everything without grumbling or complaining. And then where does he go? He go so that you may be blameless and pure children of God, without fault, in a crooked and depraved generation in which you shine like stars in the universe. In other words, what’s his train of thought? How pervasive is complaining? How pervasive is grumbling? Not doing it will make you shine like a star in the universe.

0:36:45 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah.

0:36:45 – (Matt Smethurst): That’s how powerful it is to have a church. The language I use among our people is, hey, let’s strive to be a people who are easy to please and hard to offend. We live in an age of outrage, an age of cynicism. It’s so easy to be someone who’s easy to offend and hard to please. But by God’s grace, let’s be the reverse The Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs once said this that I’ve quoted to our people before.

0:37:13 – (Matt Smethurst): Rejoice in the good of others, though it eclipses your light, though it makes your abilities and your excellencies dimmer in the eyes of others. Rejoice and bless God for his gifts and graces in others, that his name may be glorified more by others than I can glorify it myself. In other words, we want to be more bothered by our own failings than by those of others. And we want to have the perspective that whatever it takes to see the gospel flourish and Christ to be made much of in our church, even if that means I have to take a backseat, even if that means I have to lose an argument or have to lay down a preference, because it’s better to be humble than it is to be right.

0:37:58 – (Matt Smethurst): I mean, unless we’re talking about deity of Christ, authority of scripture, when it comes to these issues on which the temperature can so easily be turned up, issues on which Christians ought to be able to live with, differences of conscience, room for disagreement, it’s far better to be humble than it is to be right. Any final words of wisdom that you would commend to pastors as they think about conflict and controversy?

0:38:27 – (Ligon Duncan): You’ve already said it. As shepherds of the flock, we cannot simply be conflict averse. There are times where we have to be ready to stand up in conflict because our job is to guard the sheep. On the other hand, life is not

0:38:45 – (Matt Smethurst): just going to be one. I’m sorry to interrupt. Let me just say, being conflict averse is shortsighted. I mean, sometimes we should overlook, like I just said, we should overlook an offense. You know, we don’t have to rush into every potential conflict with fists raised. And yet that hard conversation, brother pastor, you know, you need to have. Kicking the can down the road is probably only gonna make the controversy grow and make it harder to navigate.

0:39:14 – (Ligon Duncan): Well said. I would say to brethren that have the instinct to wake up in the morning and try and find a hill to die on. Remember that that very attitude in a local church or in a denominational setting can actually push brethren to be more conflict averse. You may actually be working to the detriment of your concern over an issue or a theological problem by your conduct in that area. And I don’t want people not to care about really important.

0:39:46 – (Ligon Duncan): But if you’re up every single day and it’s the conflict du jour, you’re probably gonna. There are gonna be a lot of good men that just say, forget it, that guy is at it again. There’s nothing to that. And I’m gonna go on. So even if you feel called to be bold and brave, you need to be careful about how you go about that, lest you discourage people. You know, it’s kind of like the crying wolf thing. How many times can you cry wolf and still get the town to come out and fight the wolf?

0:40:17 – (Ligon Duncan): And that’s something we need to know what our tendencies are. Is my tendency to shrink away from controversy or is my tendency to court controversy? We need to know ourselves. And then that’s where the judgment of the brethren helps us so much. I don’t wanna trust my own judgment on its own. I need the brethren to give me some balance and to think about that. And then it’s very helpful to have

0:40:44 – (Matt Smethurst): a plural of godly elders.

0:40:46 – (Ligon Duncan): Oh, so good that don’t just have

0:40:49 – (Matt Smethurst): symbolic authority in your life.

0:40:51 – (Ligon Duncan): And that has happened to me over and over, Matt, where I’ve thought, yeah, he’s exactly right about that. I needed to hear his voice on that. So there may be times when we stand up and we’re the ones that give the signal to everybody, yeah, this is the right way to go on this. But you have to be measured. You have to be a person who clearly loves God’s people that doesn’t just love to be right, isn’t always the one who is picking the fight.

0:41:23 – (Ligon Duncan): And when that measured voice stands up, it can really speak powerfully. My high school age, when I was a high schooler, my pastor, he was that kind of a person. He was rock solid theologically. He was not all the one. He was not always the guy in the middle of a fight in the presbytery meeting. But when he stood up, it was like the old E.F. hutton commercials. You probably don’t remember these. There was an old commercial back in the 1970s. When E.F. hutton talks, people listen.

0:41:55 – (Ligon Duncan): And he was that guy, he would stand up. And when he spoke, everybody in the presbytery on every side thought, okay, that’s wise. I really need to listen to what he says. And so sometimes, sometimes we have to be ready to be the person to give that measured word in season. And that helps pull people together. Ultimately, I think all of us need to be thinking, even in controversy, how can I pull people together?

0:42:22 – (Ligon Duncan): It’s not just how can I win? How can I pull people together and

0:42:25 – (Matt Smethurst): by God’s grace, be the adult in the room in the sense of being that non anxious presence because it’s so easy to think again depending on our temperament that the measure of courage is how many people you can call out, how many people you can offend, or that the measure of love is how many people you can please. And the Bible says no to both.

0:42:47 – (Ligon Duncan): Yeah, that’s exactly right.

0:42:48 – (Matt Smethurst): So may God give us wisdom as we seek to lead our congregations in a fallen world amid inevitable conflict that will arise. Thanks for listening to the Everyday Pastor. We hope this episode has been helpful to you. If you want to share it with a friend in ministry that is waiting through some difficult times, it may be of use to them. We want to help pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry.