Owen Strachan@ostrachan
How preachers and teachers can handle gray areas in an era when we're all tempted to be Hot-Take Artists:
1) There are many matters of the Christian life that aren't explicitly lined out in Scripture
2) On such areas (how to help boys become men, how to develop a marriage culture in a church, when to have family devotions, what movies are good to watch, whether Christians participate in cultural holidays, what modesty looks like, and much more), it is appropriate, at times, for leaders to give a warning about a gray area of concern.
3) In the case of a pastoral warning, a preacher or teacher should develop his view from Scripture, pointing his people to biblical principles, always with a view to how Christ's Lordship bears on life.
4) The preacher or teacher can thus take an opportunity to train his people in thinking well with an open Bible in their lap.
5) The focus of such loving instruction is not to force-feed Christians a given view that everyone must hold. The focus is on training Christians to think with discernment, care, and wisdom anchored in the gospel of grace (Romans 12:1-2).
6) The mature pastor thus makes the best case he can, showing love and humility in his argumentation, even as he makes clear that he leaves room for disagreement on the issue.
7) He helps his people understand his own position on this contested subject or gray area (which is a good thing!), even as he quite intentionally makes clear to the church that he is not binding peoples' consciences. Nor does he declare that it's sin to hold an alternate view.
8) A wise and mature pastor is incredibly careful about church discipline. Church discipline is only to be applied in the case of egregious sins that go against the Word and the gospel--eg, teaching or behavior that denies the gospel and rejects the counsel of the Word.
9) In the case of public schools, therefore, mature preachers and teachers will work hard to not make principled disagreement with their personal conviction a matter of discipline.
10) In all of this, a preacher or teacher is not merely showing necessary humility (for he is not Jesus, but a sinner in need of God's daily grace). He is helping his church base its identity in the gospel, not his opinions on contested matters, gray areas, and hard questions.
11) This is no easy thing. Every preacher and teacher will fail. All of us will under-speak at times; all of us will over-speak at times. Thankfully, the gospel is just as powerful for the sins we commit 30 years into our walk with Christ as the sins we first confessed on the day of our conversion. The blood of Jesus never loses its power! This is good news for all of us thoroughly fallible preachers and teachers. We must remember it, and apply it, every day we live on this earth.
12) But the wise and mature preacher and teachers LABORS to build a church that is anchored not in his extrabiblical opinions, and his overheated dogmatic pronouncements on debatable matters, but in the one true saving gospel of grace.
