We all like it when people agree with us. Let’s face it a lot of our social circles are surrounded with people who have like interests and thinking as we do; often it is why we became friends in the first place. What happens when we hit issues where we don’t see eye to eye though? Everyone handles this differently. Over the years my approach was simply to keep my thoughts to myself. I’ve never been a huge fan of confrontation. That doesn’t work well in leading people, though. I’ve had to change my view on confrontation because it was hurting me in my growth as leader. It hurt the reality of my relationships because I wasn’t honest with the people I was leading. This actually caused unintended consequences. In leadership situations it forces you to try to build consensus around people that agree with you. This is how you make a case that what you believe is right, after all there is strength in numbers right? It becomes political and it feels icky. I had to learn to see confrontation in a different way. One of the mentors in my life taught me to see how confrontation works from Heaven’s perspective. In Isaiah God appeals to Israel saying “come let us reason together”. He wanted to have dialogue. Ultimately he wanted them to have sound thinking. We often look at disagreement as fighting but it really is about seeing things from a different point of view. I learned that when I have a disagreement with someone it is an opportunity to gain understanding of not only how they think, but who they are.
Why is this so important? Well let’s look at the church for example. For years our focus was on agreement. If you agreed with everything we said then you could be a part of our church. You could disagree as long as it wasn’t in front of church leaders and they didn’t hear about it. Agreement was the most important thing. If people disagreed it was because they were questioning the leadership not merely asking questions. The result was that people still disagreed and often left churches without conversation or understanding. Essentially the church drove people into darkness by not allowing them to disagree. They didn’t have the heart that God displayed…come let us reason together.
Unfortunately, I see this happening again. Not in the church this time, but in the world view. If you have a conservative world view you are an enemy of the liberal world view and vise versa. There is no dialogue there is only name calling and disdain. Social media has allowed us to huddle in our little safe circles of agreement and delete everyone who offends us. We don’t learn, we don’t grow, and sadly we don’t understand. Jesus warned us about this in the gospels. He said beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the Leaven of Herod. Leaven in the bible speaks of influence. Jesus was saying beware of the religious and political spirit. These influences thrive on fear and manipulation that is rooted in this twisted form of agreement. If we buy into this we are creating a polarizing atmosphere where people can’t be themselves around us for fear of retribution. In the next few blogs I want to look at the idea that loyalty is not agreement and that actually, as my father-in-law has taught me, loyalty isn’t really tested until we disagree.
