Something struck me after engaging in a particular dispute recently. It was the dispute about the Keswick Convention’s relationship to abortion campaign group CBR UK and their church focused project, Brephos.
I was reflecting back with my wife after some follow on conversations with people who had got in touch we me about my article. I noticed that there seemed to be a perception of the Convention and its leadership that they existed as an impersonal, faceless authority. As I said to Sarahcon
… but they aren’t a faceless, impersonal authority. I know some of the people who have been involved in Convention leadership over the years, some of them have spoken at our church for us, one former senior leader was my Hebrew and Old Testament tutor at theological college.”
At the same time, the people left likely to be affected at the moment by accusatory comments on blogs and in Christian news articles are not even the senior leadership, the people you see on stage if you go to the convention. Rather, it’s people who work in the office. These are not people really in a position to defend themselves..
This was part of my concern that the insinuations affected ordinary Christians, people with families, people who are members of local churches. How will a social media hoo-ha affect them.
There can be a tendency at times to argue, critique and even attack in a way that forgets or ignores that we are dealing with real people. We depersonalise the debate and our opponents. Yet, it seems to be exactly because of this that we can end up being very personal. What I mean by this is that instead of dealing objectively with the issue, we end up presuming about and attacking motives and character, undermining people personally without evidence.
I would suggest that this problem has been a key part of recent evangelical debates and falling outs where we have ended up disagreeing badly. I include here the EFS/Neo-classical debate. Complementarianism v Egalitarianism and intra complementarian debates as well as a lot of the COVID debate.
I was very grateful that in one conversation, my correspondent concluded by saying that we might have to agree to disagree but he could see and empathise with where I was coming from. I can’t help but think that a little bit of empathy will go a long way.
Faithroots 