The Narcissism of Small Differences & the SBC

Mike Leake

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“I am not being melodramatic when I say that people from Eagleton are snobby and evil and would most likely exterminate everybody who isn’t from Eagleton if they weren’t so busy being obsessed with themselves.” — Leslie Knope

Leslie Knope, of Parks and Recreation fame, abhorred folks from Eagleton. That’s what people from Pawnee did. It was part of an ongoing feud. But the writers of he show include a couple of entertaining story arcs. One is that viewers find out Leslie Knope was actually born in Eagleton. It creates a funny story. Another arc has the two towns attempting to unify. The big plan is to create a massive unity concert to heal wounds and help the two cities become one.

Maybe when we Southern Baptists meet in June we should have a massive unity concert—but who gets to decide the bands? Certainly, one or more of the splinter groups among us would need to boycott such a festivity.

We laugh at the struggles of Pawnee/Eagleton in Parks and Recreation, and engage in a bit of nervous laughter as we joke about the 15 Baptist churches in our town of 300 people. It’s not secret that Baptist love to fight and separate over small differences. Somehow it seems to have become part of our DNA.

The Narcissism of Small Differences

Part of our sinful tendency is to pursue individualism. And this drive causes us to have the most heated of arguments with those whom we have much in common but only small differences. Now, I know that I’m not supposed to learn anything from such an unbelieving dolt as Sigmund Freud, but he has a term for this phenomenon—“the narcissism of small differences”. Our pride propels us to pursue dominance with our uniqueness. We like to think that we are uniquely great. When we are confronted with people who look and act and think mostly like us, rather than inviting us into oneness, it threatens our singularity and so we respond by heightening our differences.

We do have significant differences of thought and opinion within the big tent of the SBC. But I wonder if this narcissism of small differences plays a bigger role than what we’d like to admit. Is it possible that we are actually making our differences seem bigger than they actually are? I believe this to be the case.

I know within my own heart—which is prone to introversion, anyways—I will be quicker to make sure folks see me as “not one of those types of Southern Baptists”. On occasion it might be simply getting in front of bad press—but it may also be a good deal of pride. Am I willing to attempt to dig into community and find the things which are similar? Or am I immediately looking for places where we differ? Am I scouring for evidence of divergence or points of fellowship?

The Answer, Or Life in Mordor

It’s not an accident that Paul wrote Romans the way in which he did. It is structured in such a way that the Jew and Gentile would be leveled before God and their differences flattened compared to their commonality in the gospel. Not only are they both guilty before God but they also have the same means of redemption. Their justification, sanctification, and glorification flow from the same source. Therefore, they must offer themselves (plural) as a living sacrifice (singular). The gospel needs to get to Spain and the Roman church needs unity to make this happen.

The same is true for us today. We have over 7,000 unreached people groups. It is estimated that 3.1 billion people have little to no access to the gospel of Jesus. Even here in the US we are now considered a post-Christian environment. In my own county (Newton County, Missouri) which is part of the Bible Belt, we have over 50% of our population who are unchurched. And that number is probably higher if you consider the de-churched. And yet we find ourselves, at times, unable or unwilling to partner with other believers over minor points of doctrine or practice.

I realize that such statement can be used as tactic to minimize doctrine and turn into mere pragmatism. Doctrine does matter. The issues we are facing within the SBC actually do matter for things such as engaging the lost world. We are called to steward the gospel of Christ. That doesn’t simply mean to baptize the nations but also to teach the nations—and the content of this does matter.

But there is also something to be said about the desperation of doctrine in the midst of mission. What I mean is that when we are engaging in real battle together we have a tendency to minimize difference and maximize similarities. The narcissism of small differences is of particular temptation to the comfortable. I think Mark Buchanan makes this point beautifully in his book Your Church is Too Safe. He uses Lord of the Rings to make this point:

In the place where life is easy, where good things abound, where no threat encroaches, it’s impossible to get a dwarf and an elf to trust each other—even to be civil with one another—if their lives depended on it, precisely because in a place like that their lives will never depend on it. They can live forever there in their prideful independence. They need rely on no one. They need not trust anyone. they can simply become more entrenched in their belief that they are superior, all else are fools. (62)

But we aren’t in Rivendell anymore. And the sooner we wake up to this truth the better. What is needed for unity within the SBC isn’t a renewed focus on unity, or even lengthy discussions about fine points of theology. Perhaps what is needed is renewed engagement in mission together. That will have a tendency to shake us out of our narcissism of small differences and give us a worldview shaped by the gospel. And not a gospel of merely well-worn theology books but calloused hands and feet as well.

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Photo source: here

I Had the Opportunity to Baptize a 79 Year Old Man and Preach His Funeral, This is The Story Of Jesus’ Work

Mike Leake

Last weekend, I preached the funeral for the man that I had baptized about a month prior. He was 79. The story of what God did in his life was quite miraculous and I thought others might be encouraged from hearing his story.

At the funeral, his daughter shared that her dad hadn’t been an affectionate man. She recalled the first hug from her daddy was a somewhat forced hug at her wedding day when the photographer had them pose. She shared that while they knew he loved them he was what you’d expect from a man who lived much of his life on the railroad. He was a hard man.

His daughter, a member of our church, had been praying for her father to come to know Jesus daily for 23 years. But up until last summer she hadn’t even been able to get him to come to church but a handful of times. But I believe with his health failing he was beginning to ponder some end of life questions. Yet, he still seemed relatively closed off to the gospel.

Then in November he found himself in the hospital and unresponsive. The doctors were going to give him a couple more hours and then put him on a ventilator. But then something miraculous happened. He woke up and was fully alert. And as soon as he was coherent he said, “I thank the Lord for bringing me back” with tears in his eyes. Later he would tell the story to a grandson and say that God had saved his life. That was a Thursday. He was discharged on Saturday–partly because he strongly encourage them to let him out so he could go to church.

There was a noticeable heart change which had taken place as well. When I went over to his house to share the gospel with him he immediately responded (I think God had already done this work) and shared how he wanted to follow Christ in baptism. His heart was immediately turned towards his wife, wanting her to know the Lord also. And this “hard man” had turned into a tender and compassionate man.

He began coming to services and attending our Seek Groups and devouring the Word. As he was dying a couple weeks ago his granddaughters were reading Scripture to him and he was comforted by it, often with a tear in his eye as he was overwhelmed by the goodness of God in his life.

He wanted to show everyone that he was a follower of Jesus and testify to the greatness of what God did in saving his life. And so even though his health was failing and he was frail and weak he wanted to be baptized. This was such a testimony of God’s grace and goodness. He answered the prayers of a daughter who had prayed for so many years. When we did the “Who’s Your One” campaign last Spring, Ed was somebody’s “one”. And the last few months of his life the life-changing power of God was on display.

This isn’t a story to encourage someone to wait until they are 79. We should grab ahold of grace whenever we can. But this is a story to encourage you to continue praying for beloved unbelievers. And it’s a testimony to say that God really truly does change hearts.

Old dogs can learn new tricks when Jesus is at work. Ed is a testimony to the grace and power of God. Be encouraged.

When the Gospel Causes You to Lose Your Faith

Mike Leake

photo-1550391383-bbd922a8d8cfThe most important aspect of your faith is it’s object and not it’s vivacity. This means that a weak faith can lay hold of a strong Christ. It also means that a really strong faith can be misplaced and ultimately end up with the Son of God saying, “Depart from me, I never knew you.” An implication of this truth, though, is that the Spirit of God is constantly working to tear down an impure Jesus-sounding faith and replace it with an unadulterated Jesus-grounded faith. The gospel aims to deconstruct your faith.

Two Paths/Two Trends

This truth, I believe, explains two trends which I see.  The first is the almost weekly occurrence of a well known celebrity-type renouncing their Christian faith. It seems to me that in a vast majority of these stories what is happening is that a nominal Christian who was heavily steeped in a Christian sub-culture no longer finds that culture appealing. Therefore, they reject the faith altogether. As Josh Harris explained, it became too much work to untangle his faith from the culture of his faith so he just threw out the whole thing (that’s my summary more than his exact words).

Now, I don’t want to overly simplify what is happening here. Nor to dismiss their stories and try to put them into a neat little box. But I’m writing about this general trend and not specifics so forgive my simplification here. Rejection of Jesus Christ doesn’t seem to be the issue these days as much as it’s a rejection of a certain type of Christian sub-culture. And it’s a sub-culture which I’d argue Jesus would be fine with us abandoning.

Which leads to my second observation. This is also why I hear so often of Bible-preaching and Jesus-loving pastors being eaten alive in churches—especially in the South or rural settings. These pastors have been brought to a difficult mission field. Dean Inserra says it well:

But many American pastors are faced with a similarly daunting task: to bring Jesus to a place where He is admired but not worshipped, where God is a grandpa in the sky, where many of their congregants are ‘good people’ who don’t know they need to saved. (Inserra, 30)

And they will fight tooth and nail to hang onto a culture that Jesus is working to overtake with His kingdom. The gospel calls “good people” to give up their comfortable Christianity. And there are many cultural icons which must fall by the wayside. When Jesus-loving pastors preach through the Bible and apply the Scriptures they are met with an angry resistance.

In both instances I believe Jesus is calling people to abandon their faith. Not to abandon their faith in him, but to abandon a faith which is more grounded in the culture and less in Christ. And it really is a difficult task, but it’s worth it.

The Path of Embrace

Some people aren’t able to give up their faith in order to embrace Jesus. Some choose a path of anger. Others choose a path of abandonment. But there is another path—the path of embrace*.

I found myself at one of these moments a couple years ago. I was crushed by Christian sub-culture. I’ll give you one little slice. I was tasked to write an article about a few hymns which might have theology we need to reconsider. I’m a pretty modest and moderate dude. I don’t write articles with a flame-thrower. I think my tone was pretty irenic in the article. But I received hate mail. Yes, HATE mail. I was told that I didn’t know Jesus. I received threats. A big part of me was able to laugh it off and just shake my head. But it was also eye-opening to see how ugly “good church people” could be.

There was so much more going on in my life at this point as well. That article wasn’t written in a vacuum nor was the criticism received in a vacuum. I was hurting. And I found myself at a crisis point. There are two things which the Spirit of God used to helped me choose the path of embrace instead of the other paths.

First, a little book I’ve read multiple times on pastoral ministry—The Sacred Wilderness of Pastoral Ministry. In that book there is a chapter called Confusion, and it’s on “risking doubt versus denying dissonance”. It was an invitation for me to dig into my doubts and all the things which I was feeling. The words here of Dave Rohrer were being played out in my life:

What we try to push away or deny always seeps out somewhere else, and any futile attempt to try to plug up these cracks in our armor diverts our attention from doing the very work we are trying to protect. To make this choice is to live with a divided heart, and this is the beginning of the end of effective service as a pastor. (Rohrer, 137)

And so I dug in to my doubt. I put it all on the table. If God wanted me to step away from pastoral ministry I would do it. I had to press into all those doubts. I had to wrestle with feelings of disappointment in God. Why did God call me to a place which was, to put it bluntly and honestly, pushing me to the brink of suicide? Why take me to a place to crush me when he had promised His presence? And there in the doubts I found these words of Rohrer to be true as well:

When we are confronted with the truth that God is not at all like what we might have expected him to be, when we have to face a crisis where God has not come through for us in the ways that we had hoped and believed he would, we are invited to let go of our projections and make space in our lives for the God who truly is. (Rohrer, 140)

At this same time God placed into my life a second resource—a godly man who is a Christian counselor. He was used by God to help me rethink what the goodness of God meant and to tenaciously cling to hope. He helped me confront some of the emotions that I was feeling and take the shame out of much of them. To sum, he helped me to see Jesus in the midst of all the fog.

And eventually the fog lifted as I abandoned many of those Christ-haunted but ultimately Christ-empty aspects of my faith. The truth is my faith is still deconstructing. But it’s being wrecked by the wrecking-ball of the gospel and reshaped by the nail-scarred hands of the God who stoops and saves.

And maybe that’s a difference too. It’s not for us preachers to deconstruct the cultural faith of others. We don’t have the surgical precision our Master does. It’s our task to faithful preach the gospel and love people. And that’ll come with blows, certainly.

It’s also not for us to deconstruct our own faith either. We’ll throw out the wrong stuff and keep all the wrong things. We aren’t the source of truth. We need the good news of Jesus to be our anchor. But that’s not a tidy task.

So when I hear of another pastor being decimated by “good Christian people” it hurts me. It gives me great sorrow. Likewise, I’m deeply grieved when I hear of folks abandoning their faith. But there is another story here—God is working to deconstruct any faith which isn’t grounded in Him.

So when I hear of these two trends, while my heart breaks, I’m left with just one overarching conclusion…

Aslan is on the move.

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Photo source: here

*I almost used the word “acceptance” because alliteration is part of the preaching culture I grew up with. But I have, without anger, abandoned that practice 

Polarization Is Always An Identity Issue

Mike Leake 1 Comment

A couple years ago Scientific American published a study which found that “identifying as liberal or conservative was a stronger predictor of affective polarization than issue positions”. To put that in more understandable terms the study found that a person who identified as a conservative would have a stronger negative emotional response to someone who identified as a “pro-life liberal” than to a “pro-choice moderate”. The article concluded with this warning:

If Americans slide into seeing all policy debates as battles between Us vs. Them, we stop selecting policies based on their actual content. Ironically, this would lead to choosing policies that don’t match our personal values, because the content and evidence would become less important than the source. In short, seeing politics as a battle may worsen things for everyone. (Here)

What is true within American politics is also true within religious circles such as the SBC. We’ve broken up amongst various camps. The SBC has always been a “big tent” denomination with several differing beliefs partnering together for the sake of missions. But in our increasingly polarized society our predominant identities are now found within our splinter groups instead of the name outside the big tent. As such we’ve become Corinth. “I follow Tom, I follow Beth, I follow JD”.

We might say that our fractures are centered around issues, but it’d be interesting to do a study within the SBC similar to that done by Robert Talisse which finds that “Americans are less divided over the issues” but we “see ourselves as profoundly at odds.”

This means that when you see a Tweet from someone from the “other” party our first instinct is to suspect instead of engage the actual statement or argument being presented. When all is said in done we probably have more in common with the “other team” than we think we do. But our polarization causes us to maximize those difference.

This was the very thing which plagued the church at Corinth. We will always attach our identities to something or somebody. As those created in the image of God who are hard-wired for worship this will always be the case. We were made to have our identities attached to the Lord. But if our identity is not attached to Christ it will be attached to someone or something else.

In Corinth they had similar things. Who are you? I’m part of team Apollos. I’m the guy who speaks in tongues better than any of those other jokers. Oh, I’m not like those fools who can’t eat meat they got at the market, I understand the gospel. I’m a forgiving dude. I’ve arrived. I’m knocking this Christianity thing out of the park.

And what Paul does here in the very beginning is remind them of who they are in Christ and how empty all those other identities are. No matter what that self-focused identity is founded upon it will always hinder our ability to be kingdom-focused.

And this was precisely what was taking place at Corinth. When God used Team Apollos perhaps Team Cephas was getting upset about it. That promotion should have gone to them. I belong to Apollos…

But notice what Paul does at the very beginning of his letter to them. He reminds them who they are. Their identity is found in Christ not anywhere else. They were saying “I belong to Apollos, I belong to Cephas, I belong to Paul” and God is saying, “No, you belong to me.” Notice how verse 2 begins. “The church of God…” Not Apollos, not Paul, not Cephas, but God. It is God’s church. They belong to God– those who have settled in Corinth and have been rescued by Jesus.

So how does that change things?

If my identity is found in money then I’ve got to claw and scrape and do everything I can to be financially successful. Same with power. Same with parenting. Same with pastoring. None of those are big enough to hold the weight of our identities. They will all come crumbling down. So when I hear in the gospel that my identity is found in Christ that changes everything. I don’t have to make my life about these other things. I belong to God. And so does my neighbor.

“There is not one square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”

We rightly use that Abraham Kuyper quote to be involved in many different things—a host of missional enterprises—but perhaps we should extend it to our fellow humans. While I’m certainly involved and our unity and shared responsibility in Christ says something to a church which features dancing storm troopers, a faithful starting point is that such a church belongs* to God—even if they are fully apostate. It’s ultimately His to sort out. My higher calling is to be faithful with what God is calling me to do and be. (John 21:21)

Again this is what Paul is doing when he reminds them that they aren’t the only church. They are a church and not the church. Their identity is found in Christ just like all of the others who “in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”. You don’t have to compete or compare yourself with other churches. That’s just silly. But you’ll do that if your identity isn’t found in Christ. You’ll compete instead of cooperate. You’ll start asking the wrong questions and make wrong comparisons. But Paul reminds the Corinthians that they aren’t alone in calling upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. They are in this with other believers from all around the globe. Their calling is to be the church at Corinth. To be obedient to God and do their thing that God has called them to do.

Polarization happens when we move away from our identity in Christ being primary. Such a move will always call me to put undue weight on the identity of something else. And it’ll impact the weight that I give to the words of others as well. It’ll shape the way that I view them. If we want to fix our squabbles and increasingly polarized tribes within the SBC (or within Christianity at large) it’ll do us well to begin with digging into what it means to be “in Christ”.

Notice that Paul never really settles whether team Apollos or any other team is the one who is theologically correct or the one who is knocking it out of the park. He changes the focus for every one of the groups. If Christ isn’t their identity then everything else (even correct theology) is going to miss the mark. 

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Photo source: here

*When I’m using the term “belong” I mean in the creational sense and not necessarily in the relational sense. Though I’m not necessarily saying they don’t belong to the Lord in a relational sense. I’m simply not making that point.