Tag: unity

Don’t Let Our Labels Divide Us

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date September 4, 2022

May We Be One in Jesus and Ignore What Could Separate Us

We live in a divisive time, with one group opposing another, often in the most zealous of ways, sometimes even with violent outcomes. As a society, we’re quick to put people in a box and label them according to some aspect of their life.

Though these labels are sometimes convenient, and at times even appropriate, more often they divide us and cause unnecessary conflict and needless opposition.

These divisions, however, don’t just appear in secular spaces. They also appear in the religious realm. We put labels on people of faith and use these identifiers to decide who we align with and who we oppose. And to our discredit, we do this in the name of God.

Here are some ways that we let labels divide us as people of faith and followers of Jesus:

Divided by Denomination

First, we divide ourselves by denomination, in both a generic and a specific sense. First, we segregate Christianity into three primary streams: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant.

Each group knows little about the other, often denigrating them over wrong assumptions and misunderstandings. Yet we all have Jesus in common. This should be enough to unite us and be one in him.

Within Protestantism, we see many more divisions with 42,000 Protestant denominations who distrust each other, criticize one another, and resort to name-calling for no good reason other than to make us feel smugly superior.

This is to our discredit. These manmade divisions take us far from the unity that Jesus prayed for and marginalize our witness for Jesus.

Divided by Theology

Next, we use the labels of our theology to separate us. We elevate our point of view—which we think is correct—and diminish our fellow brothers and sisters—who we perceive as being in error.

With academic vigor, we pursue a right theology. In the process, we overlook the importance of having a right relationship with God. Our connection with the Almighty, through Jesus, is what matters most.

Our theological labels don’t matter. In most cases, our theology wrongly judges one another and causes needless division. It generates suspicion and breeds mistrust. Instead of formulating tenuous theological constructs, we should focus on placing our trust in Jesus.

Divided by Politics

We also let our political views, which carry their own set of labels, influence our theology.

In the United States—and perhaps in the rest of the world too—we see well-meaning followers of Jesus who align with one political party, vilifying their brothers and sisters in Christ who belong to the opposite party.

I’ve heard each side lambaste the other, saying how can someone be a (enter party affiliation) and be a Christian?

Divided by Church Practice

Making an even a finer distinction on our theology, we place labels on our church practices, too, often with fervent passion. Some churches are known as being high churches, which implies the rest are low churches.

There are liturgical churches and non-liturgical churches. Some church gatherings place their focus on the practice of Holy Communion and others emphasizethe sermon.

Then there are musical styles, ranging from traditional to contemporary. We also debate pews versus chairs, women in ministry, and the “proper” way too be saved through Jesus.

Divided by Membership

Beyond that, we divide ourselves by membership status. For some churches—perhaps most—this is an essential consideration. Members are in, and nonmembers are out, be it effectively or legalistically.

But membership in a denomination or local church isn’t biblical. It opposes the Scriptural teaching that as followers of Jesus we are members united in one body, which is the universal church.

The Solution to Labels

It’s time we end our categorization of each other and stop our needless squabbles over secondary issues and disputes that don’t matter to God. Instead it’s time we embrace one another and love one another, just as Jesus told us to do.

We need to live in unity.

Then we can come closer to being united as one, just as Jesus and the Father are one.

It’s time we embrace one another and love one another, just as Jesus told us to do.

Read more about this in Peter’s new book, Jesus’s Broken Church, available in e-book, audiobook, paperback, and hardcover.

Peter DeHaan writes about biblical Christianity to confront status quo religion and live a life that matters. He seeks a fresh approach to following Jesus through the lens of Scripture, without the baggage of made-up traditions and meaningless practices.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags church services, Jesus, membership, theology, unity

Visiting Churches

Generalizations from 52 Churches

Post author By Admin
Post date July 21, 2022
1 Comment on Generalizations from 52 Churches

Stating generalities is risky, but it is a way of processing information.

Here are two areas to discuss:

1. In our experiences, churches with older congregations and traditional services tended to be friendlier than contemporary services with younger people.

Does your church match this observation or break from it? What must change?

2. I’m dismayed that we witnessed dogmatic, closed-minded, and exclusive attitudes at some churches.

If your church produces division, what can you do to promote unity?

Seek ways to be friendly and promote unity at your church.

[See the prior set of questions or start at the beginning.]

Get your copy of 52 Churches and The 52 Churches Workbook today, available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags church services, traditional service, unity

Christian Living

In Jesus We Are the Same

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date July 6, 2022

It’s Time We Start Embracing One Another

Paul writes that when we follow Jesus there’s no real difference between being Jewish or Greek, slave or free, male or female, circumcised, uncircumcised, barbarian, or uncivilized (Colossians 3:11). He’s advocating Christian unity.

Stop to think about this, to really contemplate the ramifications. He tells us to break down all divisions over ethnicity, social status, gender, and religious practices.

Paul wants us to function as one and live in unity. In the same way Jesus wants us to live as one, just as he and his Father exist as one (John 17:21).

Today we need to apply this vision for unity to the church Jesus started. We need to add that when we follow Jesus there’s no real difference between being Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant; Mainline, Evangelical, or Charismatic.

Division

But to our shame we divide Jesus’s church. We live in disharmony. We fight with each other over our traditions and our practices and how we comprehend God.

We spar over worship style, song selection, and a myriad of other things that relate to church practices and right living. Or to avoid these errors we simply ignore one another, and that’s almost as bad.

But the world is watching, and they judge Jesus through our actions. They test what we say by the things we do. And we fail their test.

With our words we talk about how Jesus loves everyone and with our deeds we diminish our brothers and sisters in Jesus with a holier-than-thou discord. If we can’t love those in the church, how can we love those outside the church?

Disunity

It’s no wonder the world no longer respects the church of Jesus and is quick to dismiss his followers. We bring it upon ourselves with our church splits and 42,000 Protestant denominations, with our petty arguments over practices and theology and everything in between.

But with a couple billion Christians, mostly living life contrary to God’s will by not getting along with each other, what can you and I do to truly make a difference?

Be the Change

We can change this one person at a time. Find another Christian who goes to a church radically different than yours (or who has dropped out of church) and embrace them as one in Christ.

If you are a mainline Christian, find a charismatic follower of Jesus and get to know him or her. If all your friends are evangelicals, go to Mass and make some new friends.

If all the Christians you know look just like you, find some who look differently. Diversify your Christian relationships to expand your understanding of what following Jesus truly looks like.

Unity in Jesus

It’s time we embrace one another. The whole world is watching.

How can we live out Paul’s command to break down our divisions? What is the biggest obstacle to us living in the unity Jesus prayed for?

Read more in Peter’s book, Love is Patient (book 7 in the Dear Theophilus series).

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags charismatic, Roman Catholic, unity, worship

Christian Living

3 Problems Caused by Theology

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date March 9, 2022

An Academic Pursuit of Religious Knowledge Can Cause Much Harm

When I wrote about the dangers of pursuing a right theology, I noted that God doesn’t want us to know about him. He wants us to know him on a personal level. In our pursuit of knowledge, we seek to categorize our understanding of God. We’ve taken the mystery of who God is and turned him into an academic pursuit. We organize, and we intellectualize. In doing so we risk producing three negative outcomes.

1. Theology Labels

Theologians love to give highfalutin names to murky philosophical constructs in a vain attempt to quantify God and explain who he is. This produces labels for various theological thoughts. People who study God from an academic perspective will align themselves with viewpoints they like and distance themselves from others. Using these labels, they determine who is with them and who is against them in their spiritual comprehension of faith (see 1 Corinthians 1:12-13).

People too often try to do this with me. They ask, “Are you a (insert-theological-label)?” They grow irritated when I don’t answer. This is because I can’t. By intention I’ve not studied the nuances of the doctrine they mentioned. Instead I study God as revealed in the Bible and through the Holy Spirit.

I follow Jesus and strive to be a worthy disciple. That’s all that matters. Seriously. Don’t let theological labels detract from this singular focus that trumps all others. If we’re all on Team Jesus, everything else becomes a nonissue.

2. Theology Judges

As we put labels on certain theological perspectives, we apply these tags to those who align with them. We judge people based on which camp they reside in according to their set of beliefs. As a result, we view some people as in and others as out (see Romans 14:10 and James 2:4).

If they agree with the beliefs we hold dear, we accept them. But if they have an alternate view, we judge them as unworthy of our attention and push them aside. In most cases, the judgments we form by our nuanced theology force many people away. It’s us versus them, even though we all pursue the same God—the God of the Bible.

3. Theology Divides

First, we label. Next, we judge. Then we divide. We see this most pronounced on Sunday morning. We go to church with other people who believe just like we do. And too often we vilify those who believe differently. This is why Protestantism has divided itself over the centuries to produce 43,000 denominations today. Most of these spring forth from theological disagreement.

Jesus prayed for our unity (John 17:20-21), and we responded by allowing our theological squabbles to divide us. Denominations are the antithesis to Christian unity.

Tool or Distraction?

For some people, an academic quest to understand God is a tool that brings them to him. Yet many more pour themselves into pursuing a right theology as if it is the goal, as if nothing else matters. They risk having this intellectual path distract them from truly knowing God, from having an intimate relationship with him.

The result is labeling, judgement, and division. This trio harms the church of Jesus, distracting us from becoming all he wants us to be.

Read more about this in Peter’s new book, Jesus’s Broken Church, available in e-book, audiobook, paperback, and hardcover.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags church, Jesus, theology, unity

Christian Living

The Downside of the Protestant Reformation

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date December 22, 2021
2 Comments on The Downside of the Protestant Reformation

The Wave of Disunity Continues to This Day

Reformation Day is one October 31. It celebrates the Protestant Reformation. I love the Reformation even though it was actually a spiritual revolution against the established status quo. (But perhaps that’s part of its allure.) After all, the root of Protestant is protest.

Though the actual reformation isn’t fixed in one date, on one person, or from one location, as a matter of convenience Martin Luther emerged as its posterchild, Germany became its setting, and Luther’s posting of 95 points of contention on October 31, 1517 set the date.

Hence we have established Reformation Day to communicate our celebration of this much larger movement.

Martin Luther’s 95 Theses: Celebrating the Protestant Reformation in the 21st Century

I understand that Luther didn’t intent to spark a religious revolt. What he sought was to bring about needed change within the established church, a most admirable and lofty pursuit. Though most of the changes he advocated did eventually occur; they didn’t happen quickly.

Instead it took decades. In the meantime impatient change backers, anxious to correct religious errors, set out to form a new church, a reformed practice with the Bible as its anchor.

This was fine, except that not one new church emerged, but many, all variations on a theme but lacking tolerance and love for one another. They argued, they fought, and they killed one another in the name of their brand of religious theology.

Each variation of Protestant thought assumed it was right, which implied everyone else was wrong.

Today, almost five hundred years later, we’re still stuck in this mindset. Each person and each preacher and each church establishes their sincerely held view of spiritual thought and then rejects all others who disagree.

But that’s not a problem, they say. The dissenters, the ones rejected, just go out and start their own church, complete with their own spiritual litmus test of who’s in and who’s out. As a result we now have 43,000 Protestant denominations.

How deeply this must grieve Jesus who earnestly prayed that his followers would live in harmony, that we would be one. And, for all the good it produced, we have the Reformation to thank for this most unbiblical result of division, dissension, and disunity.

God help us all.

Read more about Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation in Peter DeHaan’s book Martin Luther’s 95 Theses: Celebrating the Protestant Reformation in the 21st Century. Buy it today to discover more about Martin Luther and his history-changing 95 theses.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags Martin Luther, Protestant Reformation, unity

Bible Insights

3 Lessons from the Early Church

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date October 20, 2021

Dr. Luke Describes 3 Characteristics of the Acts 4 Church

The book of Acts unfolds as an historical narrative of the early church, the activities of the first followers of Jesus and those who join them. For the most part, Acts simply describes what happens, with little commentary and few instructions for proper conduct.

While we can look to Acts as a possible model for Christian community, we would be in error to treat it as a requirement for right behavior. In this way Acts can inform us today, but it doesn’t command us.

For example, if I wrote, “My church went to a baseball game after the service,” no one (I hope) would think I was saying that attending baseball games is prescriptive of Christian life. No. It was merely descriptive of what one church did one time. We would never build our theology on a statement like that.

So it is with the book of Acts. Yet we can learn from it. Luke writes three things about that church:

Christian Unity

The Acts 4 church is of one heart and mind, just as Jesus prayed that we would be one (John 17:21). Their actions are consistent with Jesus’s prayer. Jesus prayed it, and the early church does it; I hope unity describes every one and every congregation.

Community Minded

In the Acts 4 church, no one claims their possessions as their own. It isn’t my things and your things; it is our things. They have a group mentality and act in the community’s best interest. While we might do well to hold our possessions loosely, notice that this isn’t a command. They just do it out of love.

Willing to Share

Last, the Acts 4 church shares everything they have. Not some things, not half, but all. This would be a hard thing for many in our first-world churches to do today but not so much in third-world congregations.

Again, this isn’t a command (and later on Peter confirms that sharing resources is optional, Acts 5:4); it is just a practice that happens at this moment of time in the early church.

While these three characteristics should inspire us to think and behave differently, and can provide a model for our gatherings and interactions, we need to remember that the Bible gives us no commands to pursue a communal-type church.

We can, but it’s one option. Of the three only unity rises as an expectation because Jesus yearns for it to be so. That should give us plenty to do.

[Read through the Bible with us this year. Today’s reading is Acts 1-4 , and today’s post is on Acts 4:32.]

Read more about this in Peter’s new book, Jesus’s Broken Church, available in e-book, audiobook, paperback, and hardcover.

Read more about the book of Acts in Tongues of Fire: 40 Devotional Insights for Today’s Church from the Book of Acts, available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover. [Originally published as Dear Theophilus Acts.]

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags church, early church, give, Jesus, Luke, unity

Christian Living

Do You Live in a Spiritual Silo?

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date August 18, 2021

Aligning Ourselves with Like-Minded People Results in Isolation and Division

An issue in the corporate world is business silos. This is where a department or unit puts up walls that separate them from the rest of the company. The leaders of these silos of information and function do so to maintain control and assure them of power.

The result is a lack of communication with other units or departments, along with the hoarding of knowledge. This means the sales department doesn’t talk with the customer service department and neither one knows what marketing is doing, along with research and development, billing, and operations.

In the end, the customers suffer and the company is less than what it could be.

You may or may not have experienced this in the business world, but in Christian circles it’s much more common. It’s so common that it’s hard to avoid.

For most Christians who’ve been following Jesus for a while, their circle of friends and the people they interact with have become other Christians. They have little meaningful interaction with people who don’t follow Jesus.

This, however, overstates the situation. In truth their circle of friends and the people they interact with aren’t just other Christians, they’re only other Christians who think and act like they do.

Spiritual Silo as a Group

Over the centuries Christians have become experts at dividing themselves. Courtesy of the Reformation we ended up with Catholics and Protestants.

Protestants then divided themselves into three main streams: mainline, fundamental, and charismatic. But within each of these groups, further division occurred, now amounting to over 43,000 Protestant denominations. That’s a lot of division, disunity, and opportunities to form spiritual silos.

Most denominations isolate themselves from other denominations. Afterall, it was disagreement that caused them to form their denomination in the first place. And once they split off and formed their new denomination, they isolated themselves from those they disagreed with.

The result is a spiritual silo. Even within denominations, individual churches isolate themselves from other churches in their own group.

Some churches go so far as to isolate themselves from every other church.

The result of these spiritual silos is people associating themselves only with others who believe and act exactly as they do. Their understanding and practice of Christianity becomes extremely narrow, with them on the side of right and everyone else, wrong.

Spiritual Silo as Individuals

The spiritual silos that churches form—and most every church has done so to one degree or another—spills over to the people who attend there. Within churches people congregate with others like them, specifically others who follow Jesus with the same spiritual paradigms and priorities as theirs.

They push away people who think and act differently, even if it’s by the smallest of degrees. This produces even smaller spiritual silos, where members of the same church withdraw from other members over the most trivial of issues.

Taken to an extreme a person completely retreats from church and any form of spiritual community to live an isolated life away from all other followers of Jesus. They create for themselves a spiritual silo of one.

Spiritual Silos Promote Disunity

As we associate with people who are precisely like us, we push aside all others. The result is we spend our time with people who think exactly as we do, believe exactly as we do, and act exactly as we do. We view our own thoughts, beliefs, and actions as best aligned with God.

The logical extension is that we view all others as misaligned.

But our spiritual silos are exactly what God doesn’t want. Jesus prayed for the unity of his followers, that we would be one just as he and Papa are one. Our divisions, denominations, and spiritual silos work against Jesus’s desire for us to get along and function as one (John 17:20-23).

And why does he want us to be one? It’s to maximize our witness to the world, so that they may know.

Read more in Peter’s new book, Living Water: 40 Reflections on Jesus’s Life and Love from the Gospel of John, available everywhere in e-book, paperback, and hardcover.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags Jesus, unity

Christian Living

A False Assumption About Church Growth

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date March 21, 2021

A Lesson in Reacting to the Unexpected

In college I heard an account about a struggling church who hired a minister to help them grow. He was full of energy, enthusiasm, and ideas. In no time he connected with the local community.

They responded by showing up for church on Sunday morning and for the community programs throughout the week. By the time he reached his one-year anniversary as their pastor, the church had added programs, went to two Sunday-morning services, and had more than doubled their attendance.

And the church fired him.

A False Assumption

What neither the church leaders nor the congregation were aware of when they hired their pastor, their goal to grow their church carried an unspoken expectation, a false assumption. They anticipated the new attendees would be people just like them.

When their growth came from people who differed from them, they realized they weren’t getting the results they wanted and blamed their new pastor.

This church was in an urban location. The members, however, drove from their suburban homes to this inner-city church each Sunday. These white-collar, middle-class people carried the false assumption that their increase in numbers would come from people just like them: white-collar, middle-class.

Yet the church didn’t reside in a white-collar, middle-class neighborhood. It sat in the middle of a diverse community of blue-collar workers along with the underemployed and unemployed.

The church members didn’t feel comfortable with this rapid shift in the demographic of their church. They blamed the minister and got rid of the problem.

The church soon returned to what it once was. Most of the locals stopped attending, the church retreated to one service, and its members ceased their outreach into the community.

Though the church members’ desire for numeric growth is admirable, their failure to embrace the outcome isn’t. Though we can understand their false assumption of what the growth would look like, we can’t excuse their reaction to it.

Love and Embrace Everyone

Their surprised results should have caused them to look inside themselves, to uncover their biases of people and who they wanted to go to church with.

Yes, embracing a different socioeconomic group might have been uncomfortable for a time, but it would’ve been a necessary interpersonal development for each of them on their spiritual journey.

Instead of embracing their commonality in Jesus and the unity he prayed for, they sought solace in the status quo and what made them feel most comfortable.

It’s easy to be critical of this close-minded congregation, yet I wonder if we are all a bit like them, just in diverse ways.

God, reveal to us our blind spots—any false assumption we may carry—and show us how to love all your people, not just those who are just like us.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags church attendance, love, minister, unity

Christian Living

9 Perspectives That We Must Change about Church

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date December 4, 2020

Re-examine Our Church Practices from a Biblical Viewpoint

Over the past few months, I published a series of posts about assumptions we should change about church.

Here is a list of all nine:

What perspectives should you change about your view of church? Pick the assumption that most convicts you and work to reform it, first in your mind and then in your practice.

Read more about this in Peter’s new book, Jesus’s Broken Church, available in e-book, audiobook, paperback, and hardcover.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags church, disciples, kingdom of God, membership, seminary, Sunday school, tithe, unity

Christian Living

Love God and Love Others: A Call to Christian Unity

Post author By Peter DeHaan
Post date November 8, 2020

Shun Division, Disunity, and Denominations in the Name of Jesus

Just as church member status divides the church body into two groups, so does our doctrine. Instead of obeying Jesus’s instruction to love God and love others, we make a lengthy list of what we should do and shouldn’t do, judging others according to our opinions of what’s proper and what’s not.

This legalistic approach follows what the Old Testament set in motion with its 613 instructions in the Law of Moses, of things to do and not do.

Compounding the problem, God’s children in the Old Testament added tens of thousands of manmade rules, which evolved over the centuries, to help interpret the original 613 expectations he gave to Moses.

Jesus Says to Love God and Love Others

Jesus says that his yoke is easy in his burden is light. This means his doctrine is simple to follow and effortless to bear (Matthew 11:30). To confirm this, Jesus simplifies all these Old Testament commands and man-made traditions when he says we are to love God and love others (Luke 10:27).

Yes, Jesus’s essential expectation is love.

To accomplish these two instructions to love God and love others, we can best do so through Jesus. We should follow him (Matthew 4:19 and Luke 14:27), believe in him (John 6:35), and be his disciple (John 8:31 and John 15:8).

These are all ways of saying we need to go all in for Jesus. That’s it.

That’s our essential doctrine. Everything else is secondary. Beyond Jesus and love, we shouldn’t argue about the rest. We are to be one church, just as Jesus prayed we would (John 17:20–21).

Denominational Division

Yet in the last 500 years we’ve argued about doctrine, we’ve judged others by our religious perspectives, and we’ve killed people for their beliefs. We deemed that our view was right and everyone else was wrong. We used this to divide ourselves.

We formed groups of like-minded thinkers, which became denominations.

Today we have 42,000 Protestant denominations, dividing Jesus’s church so much that we’ve lost our witness to the world. Jesus wanted his followers to live in unity. Yet we persist in division. Our denominations that we made are the antithesis of God’s unity that Jesus wants (Ephesians 4:3–6).

Yes, division occurred in the prior 1,500 years—the first millennia and a half of Jesus’s church—but that was nothing like what’s happened in the last five centuries during the modern era.

Paul says that we are to unite ourselves under Jesus, to be like-minded, of one Spirit and one mind. In our relationships we should have Jesus’s mindset (Philippians 2:1–5).

To Titus, Paul writes to warn a divisive person one time, and give a second notice if they disregard the first. Then the only recourse is to ignore them (Titus 3:10–11).

Jude also warns against division. Instead of taking sides, he tells us to rise above it by focusing on growing our faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, and abiding in God’s love (Jude 1:18–23).

As followers of Jesus, we must pursue unity in him and oppose every instance of division—regardless of the source.

Read the next post in this series about things we must change in our discussion about making disciples.

Read more about this in Peter’s new book, Jesus’s Broken Church, available in e-book, audiobook, paperback, and hardcover.

Read more in his books, blog, and weekly email updates.

Tags doctrine, God is love, Jesus, Jesus's Broken Church, love, theology, unity