The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP 049 – Stop the Hate: How Christians Can Get Along When They Disagree. An Interview with Scott Sauls
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast, a podcast all about leadership, change, and personal growth. The goal? To help you lead like never before, in your church or in your business. And now your host, Carrie Newhoff. (upbeat music) - Well, hey everybody, welcome to episode 49 of the podcast. My name is Carrie Newhoff. I hope our time together today helps you lead like never before. My guest today is a guy by the name of Scott Saul. Scott is a pastor in Nashville, Tennessee. He is part of a mainline church, Presbyterian church. I've got some roots in that tradition. And also worked with Tim Keller for a few years in New York City and a number of other churches before that. He is also an author. And we are gonna talk today about how to have a dialogue when you disagree with someone. And it kind of sounds like, you know, we should have figured this out a long time ago, maybe even in kindergarten, but a lot of us didn't. And I don't know about you, but when I look at my Facebook page, I just get discouraged some days. And I look at my social media feed, and I just see people who are just hating other people and complaining about things. And I'm like, really, this is where we've come to, and we're Christians in the midst of it. And Scott was bothered by that too, and he actually wrote a book about it. So we're gonna talk all about how to stop hating each other as Christians, and how to have a civil dialogue when you disagree. So I really, really hope this is gonna help debate and dialogue. And I know for me personally, where I've really sort of encountered this, is on my blog. So we always tell you about the show notes, and actually you can get the show notes to today's podcast at kerrynuhoff.com/episode49. But that blog, the kerrynuhoff.com, is a lot more than just show notes. It's where I write, where I've done writing for years, and I try to help leaders. And we don't talk about it a lot on this podcast, but if you never hopped over to the blog, I would love for you to do that. I know a lot of you found the podcast via the blog, but maybe it's the other way too. You just stumbled on the podcast, and now you're like, "Oh, I didn't know you wrote." So yeah, I do write at kerrynuhoff.com. And there's a big debate in blogging circles this year about whether or not to allow people to comment. And I know a couple of people I really respect who write have just gotten rid of comments altogether, because they're so tired of picking through the trash, of the trolls who get on there and start yelling at people. And I ban certain people from my blog. Like you can't ever come back, you are banned, your website's banned, your addresses banned, your email addresses banned, like they're just toxic people. And they can't play on my site. And you might say, "Well, it's not against free speech." Hey man, if you're at my house for dinner and you start like dressing down somebody across or insulting them or being rude, I'm gonna ask you to leave. Like you can disagree, but you don't have to be disagreeable. And I'm really excited about this episode because I think it's gonna help us hopefully and in some way maybe find a civil voice and I know you can't control the trolls, but here's what you can do, you can be civil. And this is my little encouragement, my little editorial. For all of you who are moderate, and I think like the vast majority of people who read my blog are like reasonable, awesome people, the vast majority of people I know who listen to this podcast are like incredible people. You just need to speak up. You need to get into the flow. You need to say something that like a normal person would say or a good person would say, and you just need to say it rather than being silent. And I think we can take back the dialogue. That's a bit of a little editorial thing, but you know, I do hear from a lot of you. I hear from a lot of listeners via email, via comments on my blog. And the reason I haven't shut them down yet is because there's too many good people. And so sometimes it's worth having to ban the odd person and, you know, even get some help in getting rid of the bad or offensive comments just so that the good people have a voice. So hey, good people, thank you and use your voice. And I think when you think about disagreement in your church or disagreement in your community or online, guys like Scott are really gonna help us find our voice. So that's my little editorial for today and I don't know. I think a lot of you would probably agree with that. So just if you're a good person, speak up, speak up from time to time. We need to hear from you, we need your voice. The church needs your voice, faith needs your voice, the interwebs need your voice, we need your voice. So say something good. Okay. And if you haven't yet registered for the Orange Tour, I'd love for you to do that today because I'm gonna be in a bunch of cities this fall. Let's see, gonna be in California, in Nashville, in Atlanta, in Seattle, a couple of cities in Texas, Dallas and Austin and a few other places, I would love to meet you. And we are gonna be gathering senior leaders and ministry teams to talk about how to impact the next generation. Registration is still open. Space is going fast though. So if you go to orangetour.org, you can register today. It's very economical, in fact, you can probably even afford to bring your whole team. And I would love to meet you this fall on the Orange Tour. So orangetour.org, you can go directly there or just go to the show notes, carrynewhop.com/episode49. You'll find everything there. And in the meantime, without further ado, here's my awesome conversation. Well, I don't know whether my conversation was awesome, but here's an awesome guy you wanna hear from. His name is Scott Sauls and he's gonna tell you and me how we can have a more civil dialogue, which is what I think we need. - Well, I am super excited to have Scott Sauls with me on the podcast today. Scott, welcome. - Thank you for having me. - Hey, it's great to connect with you. And you just recently released a book. Tell us about that. - Yeah, the book is called "Jesus Outside the Lines," a way forward for those who are tired of taking sides. And it was a project that was just birth, I guess, out of a growing sort of restlessness about things that I was observing just in terms of how conversations are being had publicly on contested issues like politics and sexuality and various teachings of historic Christianity that we all struggle with. And just wanted to sort of put something down and something out there that might hopefully help to contribute to a more gracious and civil way of entering into and engaging those types of discussion. - Yeah, now you've been in leadership for a few years now. You are the senior pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville. Before that, you worked with Tim Keller at Redeemer in New York City. And before that, a couple of other churches that you were involved with. Have you seen the dialogue change over the year, Scott? I mean, do you think it's worse now than it was or more polarized now? Or do you think maybe the dialogue was always polarized? It's just now that people have publishing tools like Facebook and social media. It just seems more polarized. - Boy, I think we've all, it's always been an issue in the human heart to sort of take sides and for our defenses to go up. I mean, you go all the way back to the Garden of Eden and that's what happened with Adam and Eve when disaster entered the equation for human existence when the forbidden fruit was partaken of and immediately Eve started blaming the serpent. Adam started blaming Eve and then Adam started blaming God for giving Eve to him. And there's posturing and self justifying behavior all the way back to the Garden of Eden. So I don't think it's anything new. I do think it's more pronounced in public and a lot of that has to do with, you know, to your question. Social media, the rise of the internet and how easy it is to get our outrage out there for the public to consume. And, you know, Slate Magazine even did a piece at the beginning of this year identifying 2014, this year behind us as the year of outrage. And it just chronicled all the different things that we're mad about. And it's interesting that, you know, we were getting ready to release the book when Slate came out with that. I was like, okay, I guess we were kind of onto something when we entered into this project. And I didn't know that outrage would become such a topic. And now everybody's outraged about outrage. And so it just keeps going. But I just want to turn my own heart back to and anybody who'll listen to me to where the scriptures calls Christians, in particular, to lead in this regard in terms of entering conversations, you know, that can potentially be heated because there are differences of viewpoint, but to do so in gracious and disarming and life-giving ways. And in some way that communicates, I love you, I want to be your friend. And our differences of opinion and viewpoint don't change that. In fact, they make me want to engage with you more if we disagree with this or that. And I think Christians are uniquely resourced to and called to having integrity in our convictions on the one hand and holding to the things that we believe as we get them from the scriptures and the life and the way of Christ. And not in spite of our strong convictions, but because of our strong convictions about Jesus to be the kind of people who genuinely love, listen to and serve people who don't share our convictions. - Yeah, see, that's a little bit unique because I think where people get into trouble all the time is when we say, well, we've got really strong convictions. So listen up, but you make the argument that, well, no, because we have strong convictions about Jesus, we're able to engage in a very, very different way. And so what does that look like? Like walk us through that. What does it mean to have strong convictions but not always be involved? And I mean, come on, I mean, all of us, my Facebook feeds sometimes. I just want to delete everything. It's like people ranting about this, people debating that, people judging. It's very frustrating. And that's all coming from Christians. So how do we get out of that trap? - Well, I think, like anything, the first thing, and I assume that my primary or at least my first listeners or my first readers are gonna be people who have some level of engagement with Jesus Christ and some level of interest in him, whether they believe in him fully or not, they're gonna have some kind of interest in Christ, right? And so because that's what the book is about. And what I'm trying to do in the book is to just again, put the reader in front of Christ on the issue of politics or sexuality or money, the issue of poverty and the people who are affected by poverty. And to just start with the question, where did Jesus go with this? Like sexuality, for instance. I mean, there were plenty of occasions where we see Christ engaging with sort of the first century ancient Middle Eastern version of a sexual minority, right? So that's like the big conversation now, at least in Western culture is sexual minorities. You got transgender, you got same sex relationships, you got gay marriage being discussed right now by the Supreme Court. I think a decision might have been made by the time you release this podcast there. But it's interesting all the sort of heated debate and discussion and consternation over sexuality that's happened publicly and culturally. And you look at Christ and you ask yourself the question, how did he engage sexual minorities of his day? 'Cause you've got the woman who barges in to Simon the Pharisees' house and she's a prostitute apparently according to commentaries. You got the woman caught in adultery in John chapter eight. You've got Mary Magdalene who was once a prostitute who's also chosen by Jesus to be the first witness of the resurrection. - It is a bit of a list, isn't it? - It is, but they're very, very striking consistencies in how Christ engages those scenarios. You've got a person who has blown it sexually, right? According to historic biblical teaching, they've blown it, right? And then you've got a group of people scolding that person and shaming that person and identifying them as a sinner and labeling them as a thing instead of as a person and things like that. Never does Jesus come into any of those situations and scold the sexual minority. Instead, the only people that he scolds are the people who are doing the scolding. The only people that Jesus ever seems to say shame on you to is people who are saying shame on you to other people. And so he enters with grace, with tenderness, and he does say to the woman caught in adultery, your ethics do matter, I don't condemn you. Now I'll go leave your life of sin, but I think the order of those two sentences are incredibly important. I don't condemn you. Now let's talk about your ethics, whereas I think where we get it wrong and have gotten it wrong for years, the fundamentalists from the right got it wrong in the 90s and 80s, and now the fundamentalists from the left are doing the same thing. - Because the public shaming is shifted. - Yeah, the public shaming has shifted, and the power has shifted in culture from the right to the left, in many respects, at least in the Western culture. But it's just a new form of fundamentalism because a fundamentalist is somebody who's absolutely certain that they're right and looks at other people with contempt who don't agree with their moral vision. That's what the religious right and so-called moral majority did in the 80s and 90s, and that's what the new moral majority on the left that's advocating for a more progressive ethic is doing. - I hadn't heard it described that way, but that is what it feels like is the moral majority of the left. - But Jesus never gets embroiled in that. He loves the person in front of them, and he says our starting point is I don't condemn you. There's nothing that you could have done that is so shameful that it's beyond the reach of my love and my grace and forgiveness now that we've established that environment, now that I've communicated to you that I genuinely love you, now let's talk about your ethics, now leave your life of sin. If you reverse the order of those two sentences and you start with leave your life of sin, and then we'll talk about whether or not I condemn you, you completely lose Christianity, and you completely lose Jesus. And yet that's what seems to be happening in this culture of outrage is the condemnation comes first, your ethics are wrong, whether you're coming from the right or the left, your ethics are wrong, and I'm gonna condemn you unless you agree with me on the question of ethics. And so I'm trying to, I guess, in the book, advocate for a return to the way that Jesus dealt with a woman caught in adultery. Start with love, start with grace, start with kindness, and then let's talk about ethics out of that conflict. - Right, I think that's a really helpful order, first of all, and thoroughly scriptural. You're right, I mean, I've studied the Gospels as well in one of my personal studies. I'm shocked that Jesus only scathing words are for religious people, not for immoral people or people on the outside, which, you know, we try to take a chapter from, but in some ways, and I don't know whether you would use these words to describe it, but like, it's kind of like grace and truth, right? The grace people somehow got in our culture or dialogue often dissociated from truth, it's like, it's all grace. I love you, I forgive you, and nothing matters. And the truth people have somehow become divorced or disengaged from love, which is, let's talk about your ethics, let's fix your ethics, let's get your life right, and I still don't agree with you, but there's no love in it. Is it sort of a fusion of grace and truth that you're driving toward, or how would you describe that? - Well, I wouldn't describe it as a fusion, because I don't think you can have truth without grace, and I don't think you can have grace without truth. Like, one without the other, you lose both. You know, truth without grace is really just a form of aggression with religious language put around it. You know, it's shaming with religion put around it, but grace without truth is, you know, that's sort of the classic codependent enabling, where I'm not gonna challenge you to become the best and most life-giving version of who God created you to be. Because if I really love you, then I'm just gonna let you do whatever you want. Well, how does that work out in parenting philosophy? How does that work out in any relationship where you say, I'm not gonna challenge you on anything? And that's how I'm gonna show my love for you. I mean, thank God that God hasn't done that with us. You know, what kind of wreck would we be if we could just do whatever the heck we wanted, you know? And so you gotta have both. You've gotta have, Jesus came to your point, full of grace and truth, both together. And that's what a more healthy expression of Christianity I think looks like. - Yeah, I agree. I don't think you can separate the two, but we try to, and you're right, that's counterfeit grace and it's counterfeit truth. It's not the genuine deal. If this is the essence of our faith, and I think you're right, it's the essence of our faith, this is who Jesus was, this is how we approached it, why is it so difficult for so many people to live there? Why do we tend to flip to the, oh, it doesn't really matter, and truth is relative, and I'm not gonna judge you, which means really I'm gonna leave you alone, I'm not gonna help classic codependent enabling, or that harsh judgment. Why do we get, I think most people get drawn to one extreme or the other. In, you know, you find very few people who end up in that place that you describe, starting where Jesus started. So why is it so hard to live there if that's the core of our faith? - I think either direction, you know, truth without grace, grace without truth, my belief is that both of them have the same root, and that's the fear of man, that somehow replaces the fear of God, and by fear of God, I mean, you know, God's, what God, how God sees us, matters more than anything else. When I say the fear of God, that's what I mean, 'cause that's what I think the Bible means, that we get our significance, we get our esteem from what God thinks, and the fear of man is when we get our esteem, when we feed our esteem from what people think. And so you've got the Pharisees, and that's manifesting itself, that, you know, the more sort of conservative-minded, legalistic Pharisees, you'll notice when you look through the gospels that they cannot tolerate being criticized or challenged. They just, they wanna throw Jesus off a cliff when Jesus, you know, calls him out on anything. They say, the solution to that is, let's find a cliff to throw him off of. You know, let's plot for his death because he's critiquing us, you know, because the Pharisees' identity is so bound up in being right, and that has so much to do with how they appear before other people. You know, Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, he's saying, don't pray in order to be seen by other people, don't give in order to be seen, don't even let your left hand know what your right hand's doing when you're giving. And you do all that in secret between just you and the Father, and that's completely contradictory to the Pharisees' whole way of doing things. - Sure. - You know, when they fast, they look mournful, so everybody will know they're fasting, and so that has its root in the fear of man, just like cowardice does. The fear of challenging you, Kerry, because, you know, I see this or you challenging me because you see this weakness or deficiency in my character, you know, if we're afraid to do that, if we're cowardly, again, I'm putting so much weight in what you think of me instead of in what God thinks of me, and it just causes us to act in either direction. - You know, that's a great insight. There is cowardice in what we often call grace or whatever you wanna call it. You know, there's an unwillingness to confront, there's an unwillingness, ultimately, not just to confront, but to help, right? There's an unwillingness there. - There is unwillingness because, yeah, you know, there's a quote in the book by a self-professing atheist comedian named Pendula, and basically what he says is, if you're a Christian and you're not trying to convert me, I have no respect for you. You know what I'm like, don't just take it from a Christian, don't just take it from what the Bible says, take it from an atheist who says, look, if you really think that there's a God in heaven who is gonna call us all to account for our lives, and you don't tell me that because you're afraid of a socially awkward moment, and he goes on, and this is really insightful. He says, how much do you have to hate somebody, not to tell them the hard things that you believe are absolutely true, you know? And I think the unwillingness to loving, and the challenge has to be loving, like we don't have this sanctioning from the Bible to come after each other and policing each other all the time and being harsh with each other, but speaking truth in love is the way that Christ put it. If we are unwilling to speak the truth because we fear a socially awkward moment happening, we're really a lot more about self-preservation in that moment than we are about helping the person in front of us become more the person that God has created than to become. And in a sense, that reflects a lot more fear than it reflects love. - No, that's a really good point because I can see for those who are so concerned about appearances and righteousness that that is a fear of man thing, I've got to be seen as being right before God and man and I have to be right, but I never really thought that, you know, on the, what we might call the grace side or the, you know, the, I'm not gonna confront you and nobody judges you side, that that too is a fear of how you look in front of people, really perceptive. So interesting, let's get a little more granular, this is a fascinating conversation, but you spent five years in New York City, really fascinating incubator, working with a lot of young adults, right, young professionals in their 20s and 30s, how did you see this problem that you're addressing of, like how did you see that play out among them? - On which side? - Well, you probably, my guess would be you would get more of the non-judgmental not going to, you know, or even the, what you call the new moral majority, the shaming on the left of anybody who is not tolerant, sympathetic, accepting. So let's start there. - That's a good question, Kerry, I think, yeah. I think that the sexual ethic was just very pronounced, just very explicit that, you know, this idea that people should be able to do whatever they want with their bodies. - I can sleep with whoever I want, whatever I want, it's just physical. - It was just as much inside churches as it was outside of churches. You know, you'd be surprised where you've got actual, you know, people who lead small groups or who, you know, are part of a ministry, you know, serving the poor or what have you and you come to, you know, and they ask you if you'll officiate their wedding and you say, of course, and then you find out in the process of the premarital counseling that they're cohabiting and have been for years and living like they're married in every way for years and you raise the subject and it's like, well, yeah, of course, you know, that's what people do. Well, have you looked at the, you know, the teaching of Christ on sexuality and, well, you serious about that? - You know, and they've been sitting there Sunday after Sunday, message after message. - Yeah, and it's a disconnect and there are few people who are more bold than Tim Keller in, you know, speaking about the, you know, I guess what I would refer to as a graciously historic, you know, view of biblical sexuality but it's almost as if there's just this disconnect, like, but really, like-- - You didn't really mean that. - You really still believe that, you know, and I'm like, well, yeah, you know, and I've seen a lot of disasters happen when people decided they weren't gonna believe it and raise it, you know. - So how do you have that conversation? Because I think there's a lot of leaders who live in fear of that conversation or it very quickly becomes polarizing or, well, we're just gonna agree to disagree. How do you go there? 'Cause that's what you, you know, that's what you're passionate about. I'm just fascinated by that. - Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna, I guess I'm gonna, I'll just throw it out there. - Sure. - It's always going to always, you know, I've been in pastoral ministry. I talk like I'm an old man and I'm not. I've been in pastoral ministry for about 17 years. - Sure. - In my experience, a grace without truth, you know, of just, I'm not gonna challenge, you know, ethics that are inconsistent with scripture. And I'm not just talking about sexuality. I'm talking about anything. - Everything. - Your use of money, your relationship with food, you know, whatever. If I am not willing to go there with you, and if I kind of let it go, it always gets worse. Every time it gets worse and more dysfunctional, not less. You know, grace is not a license to sin, and it's not a license to just create your own path. You know, it's the freedom that God offers us grace is to submit and surrender to him, knowing that his design is for our flourishing, whether we understand it or get it or completely or not. It is God's law, God's ethics are for our flourishing, not for our harm. And that's what true freedom is. The ability to do whatever the heck you want is not freedom, that's bondage. True freedom is the freedom to surrender in every way to Christ. But it always, always goes wrong also if you flip to the other extreme and just legislate behavior and pound it in without any reasoning, without any gracious conversation. But what we, what we do is basically, you know, on the one hand, we've got to be kind and gracious. And if people don't agree with our ethics, we've got to figure out a way to genuinely love, listen to, and serve people whether they agree with us or not, period. But on the other hand, we have to be clear and not cowardly about what we believe and, you know, especially when asked. And we have to be willing, you know, Jesus said you're going to be persecuted. He said all kinds of people are going to hate you because of me and because of the things that I say and because of the way that you repeat, simply repeat the things that I say, no matter how gracious you do it, they're going to call you a bigot or they're going to call you whatever. Because, and that's just the way it is because it's just the way it is. And so, so what we've got to do is take great care that the only thing that runs the risk of being offensive is the truth itself that Christ has said you need to tell this to the world around you and that we deliver sometimes offensive truths in ways that cannot be described as an offensive way of delivering it. - So did most of those conversations end up, you know, with you being or whoever being labeled as a bigot or did some of them really result in transformation? And if so, how, like how do you get to that point where it's not name calling or where the conversation's over 60 seconds after it started? - Yeah, I think for us, we have just been very careful to say, look, I'll just, I'll share with you a few stories. Here's how it turned out when certain others continue down the road that you're saying that you are committed to continue down. This is how it ended up for this person and this person and this person. And in fact, I've never seen a situation where somebody's continued down the road that you're wanting to continue down and it turned out well for anyone in the equation. And that's what Francis Schaeffer talked about a lot was take people's worldview and walk them to the logical conclusion of the path that their worldview takes them down and then do the same with the Christian worldview and take them to the logical end of where it leads. And Paul is like this in Acts 17, too. I think this is the one other thing that I would say is that when we're in conversations that involve disagreement, there's gotta be affirmation in there along with the critique. And there's gotta be critique along with the affirmation. Like you look at Paul in Acts chapter 17 and he's talking with secular intellectuals, they're idolaters, it says in Acts 17, they're worshiping false gods. And the very first thing that Paul says to them is men of Athens, I recognize that you're very religious. That's very interesting. It says that he's torn up inside. He's agonizing on the inside because their worship is directed toward gods that are not true. It's a destructive thing. And yet he tries to find something good to say, you're religious, you're seeking meaning, you're seeking truth, you're seeking beauty. That quest in and of itself is a good thing. And then he goes on to quote, their philosophers and their poets from memory, Epicurean and Stoic philosophers and those worldviews in and of themselves were pretty destructive. But even in those worldviews, there are nuggets and kernels of truth and beauty in there that Paul is pulling out and saying, this is where our worldviews agree with one another. And let's start there. Let's start with the affirmation before we start getting into the critique. Let's start on the agreement points and the bridge building points. And then let's walk across those bridges together. And so just treating people with simple dignity and respect. Paul talks about, let your words always be gracious. So I think a lot of it, it's just so much of it. I would argue that over 90% of it has a lot less to do with the things that we're saying and a lot more to do with the way that we're saying. Because Christ was gracious. The only one that he came down hard on, exactly what you said, Kerry, were the bullies. The bullies were the one that he was hard on. And everybody else, he had this great patience. There's just some amazing patience. - Well, that's true, Scott. And it's interesting because often in apologetics we'll quote another religion, but we'll take the worst of it. And Paul did something very interesting. I think it was Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. He was quoting in Acts 17, if my memory's correct. And he actually took something that sounds like it could have been lifted from Psalms or Proverbs. And he actually said, as a compliment, here's the common ground. And let me look at your intention. And so when you approached young professionals working in Manhattan, living in Manhattan, with that approach to the conversation end up going a lot better. - Yeah, I mean, even if people end up disagreeing with you, they appreciate the conversation. Look, I've never been in a more secular city than New York. Less than 10% of the people in Manhattan, well, a lot less than 10% of the people living in Manhattan, which was where we were, identify as Christian. I've never been in a city that's more respectful toward pastors and people in ministry. - Really? How so? - Because they appreciate spirit and dialogue. They appreciate processing differences out loud and they're not afraid to do that. And nobody's going to reject you outright or treat you poorly. Nobody's, that's an overstatement. But very few people are going to disrespect you if you treat them with respect and in the way that you say the things you do. And so... - Maybe that's a nugget. It's very interesting you use the term respect because I think that's what's lacking in a lot of the polemics and a lot of the dialogue today. It's just even a basic respect for people you disagree with, a basic love for people that you disagree with. It's just like, as you said at the beginning, I'm right, you're wrong. I'm going to take out my weapon and show you how wrong you are. Or on the other side, well, I might not think you're right, but who am I to judge and what am I going to do? And I can't say anything. And so you end up with this polarized debate. So can you stay true to your beliefs and be vibrantly engaged in culture? And if so, how? Like, a lot of, there's that whole Christian separation thing, be in the world, not of it. And I think there is a fear in some circles of culture that maybe you get co-opted by it. But New York is also, and Nashville, where you are now, cultural capitals, so to speak, of the country. Nashville in a different way than New York. So how do you do that as a follower of Jesus? Yeah, I mean, Nashville is actually becoming a lot more and more like New York and a lot less like the Bible belt. And very rapidly so. But the how-to question again, just goes back to Christ. I mean, Tim Keller says that true tolerance is not about abandoning our convictions. It's how our convictions lead us to treat people who disagree with us. It's not about not having convictions. It's about having the right kind of convictions. It's about having the kind of convictions that lead you to love people more who disagree with you, rather than loving them less. Loving people less because they disagree with you, that is fundamentalism. In the worst sense of the word fundamentalism. Yeah. Loving people more because of your convictions who disagree with you, because of your convictions, is what I would advocate for in Jesus' outside the lines, is the best public expression of what Christianity is all about. Because Jesus went around everywhere, loving his enemies. In fact, every one of us that is a Christian, that was the starting point with our relationship with him, that God demonstrates his own love in us or toward us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. While we were actively opposing him, that's when he reached out to us in love and gave himself completely and fully for us in love, while we were still opposing him. And just this very fact that Christ, who had every reason to take offense at us, instead of taking offense at us, gave his life for us, that should make us, more than anything, the most difficult people in the world to offend. And if we are easily offended, if we're always on a hair trigger, we're always looking for something to be offended by, always jumping on the bandwagon of internet outrage, always joining this mob over here, this mob over here against whoever the common enemy is and piling on, then we need to ask ourselves, how have we really met Jesus? Have we really encountered the Jesus of the scriptures? Because if it's true that he loved us to the full extent while we were still opposed to him, then we should be almost impossible to offend. And we should be very, very unoffensive as human beings in the way that we carry ourselves and in the way that we treat other people. I mean, Peter said it this way, live in such a way that nobody can say anything bad about you. You know, even that you're worse than enemies, they can't find anything bad to say about you. - So Scott, this is fascinating. This is really interesting because I can see as you engage deeper and deeper in the culture. I mean, one of the realities of the modern church is a lot of Christians don't know any non-Christians. And, you know, if they rail against them, it's from their little soapbox or, you know, their Facebook account or whatever it happens to be. But I can see for people who tend to be on the fundamentalist or the right, if you want to say, that you get into a place where people are living radically different lives, you know, because they don't follow Jesus or they say they follow Jesus, but they don't share a morality. You start to get your backup and you start to get upset and you almost feel like, oh, I don't want to become unclean. And on the other hand, if you tend more toward the left, then you come into that situation and go, well, I'm not going to judge and I'm not going to, you know, and you say nothing and as a result, you don't help them. But how do you move into that situation and either find the courage to say something, like to actually address the wrong or how do you find the courage to not polarize the debate and be combative if you're on the right? Like, how do you begin to find that space? Because I think almost everybody listening would agree that is very, very rare territory for Christians today to get into the place where because we're Christians, we engage more deeply and we love more fully. - Yeah, I, you know, you're asking a really big question that could apply to a lot of different hypotheticals. - Sure. - But I think that sort of the broad brush response that's coming to mind right now to your question is to figure out a way to deeply love everybody in the equation and not just everybody on one side of the equation. You know, for instance, you know, one of the chapters is about, you know, the whole politics around abortion and the life and choice discussion and the problem with that whole discussion, as I see it, in the way that it's played out since Roe versus Wade was approved here in the States by the Supreme Court is that people who are in favor of protecting the child in the womb, you don't hear a whole, you hear a lot of conversation about, you know, the rights of the child in the womb, but you don't hear a whole lot of public rhetoric about, you know, the mother advocating for the mother because, you know, the reality is a lot of these women go into abortion clinics, 60% of them live under poverty. Many of those women and many of the other women have men in their lives, either a father or a significant other or a husband saying, basically, I'm gonna abandon you if you go through with this pregnancy. And so there's a lot of pressure that is not sympathized with nearly to the degree that it needs to be. And I think Christians have done a world-class job of saying, hey, look, give us your babies, you know, instead of aborting them, we'll adopt. I mean, they're just waiting lists upon waiting lists, especially within Christianity, where people who are so eager to adopt, I'll adopt your child with special needs. We've got two friends right now who are actively seeking to adopt a child with special needs, you know? So that's one shining way that maybe the pro-life movement has responded. - Sure. - But we've got to also, those of us who are on the side of the child also have to figure out how are we going to do our part in taking burdens off of the shoulders of these women who many of whom feel like they have no other option, how are we going to step in and rectify that? And if you're coming from the choice side of the thing, you never hear the human life inside the womb being talked about, you know, a woman has a right to her own body, how about the 50% of the human beings inside the womb who are girls? - And they're not giving any right, you know, they're not giving a choice. The most powerless person in the equation is not giving a voice at all. And so we've got to figure out how do we serve and relieve the pressure and relieve the burdens on both sides of this equation, rather than just locking down on one side and caricaturing the other side. - But what you're describing requires engagement. It actually requires you to stop just talking and maybe get to know a mom and enter her world, which I think, you know, to your point earlier, is exactly what Jesus did. When you look at the debate and the dialogue, you know, there's a lot of discussion these days about generational changes. And do you think this dialogue is different if you're under 40 or over 40? Do you see less division in younger adults or more in older adults or how is that playing out? Or are there, maybe there's no generational differences? - Total generational differences, absolutely. And I mean, this is where I live. And I mean, the book was actually birthed out of the generational differences. 'Cause I came into a church where I started off three and a half years ago as one of the youngest people in the room in my 40s. And now it's this multi-generational-- - In Nashville, where you are now? - Yeah, now our church is this multi-generational, you know, we've got four generations, you know, equally represented here now a few years later. And that dynamic is there where you've got, you know, your baby boomers politically seem to lean more red state, whereas so many of your millennials, your younger millennials seem to lean more blue state and their sensibilities and they're all Christians, you know? They all believe in Jesus, they really do. And it's interesting that Jesus, when he selected his 12 disciples, that one of them was an anti-government zealot and the other one was the worst kind of government employee, Matthew the tax collector. And Jesus said, look, you guys, you're gonna work it out right here, right? Here and now you're gonna work it out because my kingdom is not of this world. And so hold your politics loosely, right? But absolutely, there's a generational difference. And this is what can become beautiful about the church. If we stop hiving off into traditional baby boomer churches and the new progressive millennial churches and we figure out a way to get the millennials and the boomers and the builders and such under the same roof, under the same king and the same kingdom, you know? It can get messy, but we've got people in our church I had this one guy recently say, look, I am a committed Democrat and I would like for you to help me get into a small group full of Republicans. - Wow. - Not because I wanna go in and change them, but I want my perspective, I wanna learn, I wanna learn what the kingdom looks like and what humanity looks like through the eyes of other believers in Christ who see things very, very differently than I do. 'Cause I feel like I might have something to learn and I might have some blind spots. And when we can start having those conversations, older people getting with younger people and cross politically, cross racially, people who make a lot of money, people who are barely scraping by in community together, everybody can learn and grow. But the more we hive off into people who just look and think and spend money like us, the more impoverished we're gonna be. - I think that's a really good point. And actually that somebody of the opposite political stripe wants to be in the same room and build relationships with someone he probably fundamentally disagrees with is phenomenal. I think that's great. And I think that's true, you know? We talked about the whole sexual identity, sexual minorities reality is most people who go to church don't know any sexual minorities. You know, transgenderism. - Or at least they don't know any that they're aware of. - That they're aware of, yeah, they probably do. They just haven't gotten to that point in the relationship. But you know, you don't speak about transgenderism unless you know somebody going in, you know, through that right now that you wanna have the conversation. Do you think the relativism of a lot of people in their 20s and 30s will be a permanent impediment to faith or how have you seen that evolve in that younger generation? - Well, we're really relativism is the water from which almost everyone drinks. - Yeah, I don't think it's a permanent impediment because Jesus said that nothing's gonna kill his church and nothing can destroy the church of Jesus no matter how hard we try. And so, you know, if the first century, second century Roman emperors couldn't do it, nobody can do it. - Yeah. - And what's gonna happen with the millennials kids is that the millennials kids are gonna challenge their relativism just like the millennials challenge the baby boomers, dogmatism. Every generation comes along and corrects. And I think this is a prophetic gift in many ways that God gives to each generation as the next generation comes along and corrects the brokenness of the previous generation and hopefully the previous generation will have an awakening and repent. But I think that's gonna happen to millennials because it happens to every generation. - So their kids are gonna go, "Why are you guys so relativistic?" - Well, I think a lot of the next generation after the millennials will say, "Look, this isn't worked for you." You know, legalism doesn't work. It leads to all kinds of dysfunction and who feels that more than the children in the home and license and relativism doesn't work and it leads to all kinds of dysfunction and inconsistencies. Like, you know, the millennials parents are gonna say, "Mom and dad, you bang this drum of tolerance, you know, all of your life and how important it is to be tolerant and how important it is to be tolerant." But you're some of the most intolerant people I've ever met toward people who don't agree with you about tolerance. And so there it is. And that's what's likely to happen because it happens with every generation. - Yeah, no, that's very true. I mean, I went through some of my higher education in the late '80s and early '90s. And I remember profs who were products of the '60s, you know, and they're now all in their '40s or whatever when I was in school and they couldn't believe how conservative our generation was. And what is wrong with you? And you know, what's wrong? But we looked at them and said-- - Like the Jesus people? - Yeah, the Jesus people and the, you know, the hippies, the Vietnam draft dodgers, the free love people. And they looked at this young generation coming up and they were just like, "What did we do wrong?" It was fascinating. - Well, that might be your answer because the 60th generation and millennial generation have very, very similar views of the world. - They really do. Grandma and grandpa and the kids. - You may have answered your own question right there. - I think maybe. So I know we're gonna have a lot of listeners as we wrap up. Scott, who are going, "Oh my goodness. "I live in a world of polarized conversations. "My church, my workplace, my neighborhood, "my friends online, it's just all polarized." So where would you suggest they start? Like if they're like, "Okay, I gotta get out of this mess "and I don't know how to get out of this mess." Helpful conversation, but what's one or two things they could do to just start a better dialogue? - You just really threw me a softball. I mean, the only answer I can give to that is pick up a copy of Jesus outside of the line. - There you go. We'll link to that, by the way. - In all seriousness, I wrote the book to help people who are wrestling with that question. And I try to pick out some of the most, I guess, common points of contention that are happening culturally around sexuality, politics, the use of money, wire-Christian such hypocrites, yeah, and so on. And hopefully the book can be a resource for that. I've got free study resources on my blog for people who wanna go through the book with a group. ScottSalls.com, free resources there. But I think too, just find a communicator or two, like a Tim Keller who's talking about these things all the time and who's speaking into a culture that actually disagrees with his views on many things, but he happens to be doing so really effectively and listen to people like that. There's another one named John Dixon who's an Anglican or Episcopalian minister in Australia who is part of the Center for Public Christianity, which is that they've got a website and everything, but they've got some really great stuff and just the way that John Dixon engages these issues through video, like a little short 15 minute YouTube videos is another great resource. - Okay, we will link to those and to your book in the show notes and a shout out to all of our Australian listeners. There are actually quite a few, which is great. So, okay, and I think that's good. - And Keller, I mean, I listen to Tim Keller a lot and he is so funny because he'll tear a strip off the Democrats and then in the next breath, do the same for the Republicans and talk about where Jesus lands. And just brilliant at it and in a way too. I mean, he is a baby boomer, Tim's in his 60s, but has a real connection with that next generation. I mean, Redeemer is full of 20 and 30 somethings, which is super cool. - Another one to watch is John Tyson. - Yes. - Sort of an up-and-comer in New York City, good friend of mine. You know, I just, when I introduce him to people, I introduce him as New York's next, Tim Keller. Yeah, except he's different. He's not trying to beat him. He's just uniquely himself and his whole movement, Trinity Grace Church and Center for City Renewal is also just an incredible resource for people. - Yeah, yeah. And he's somebody I've been listening to as well, just a great, great leader. So, yeah, and I think you find that middle way. You really find that middle way, or the third way or however you want to put it. Easiest place for people to find you, Scott, online. - ScottSalls.com, that's S-C-O-T-T-S-A-U-L-S.com. I write a weekly blog there, and there's a whole resource section for using the book productively with others. - Scott, I want to thank you so much. Really appreciate your time today, and thanks for helping us get away from the polls. That's a good thing. - Okay, thanks, Carrie, appreciate it. - Okay. - Hey, that was so encouraging just to hear that. And I don't know what your takeaway was. I mean, for me, just to know that somebody cares about this and is willing to write about it, and show us that third way is awesome. I just think that's great. And so, again, if you're a good person, make sure you comment somewhere civilly today. That would be a huge gift. So, if you want more information, you can find all of Scott's personal links and more about his book simply at carrynewhough.com/episode49. And we'd love to hear a comment from you, too. Maybe you've got something you want to add to this discussion. We would love to hear from you. You can leave a comment in the blogs because I have still left. Comments open on my blog for people like you, so. So, that's awesome. Hey, next week, we are coming back. We are at, are you ready? Episode 50, episode 50 already. Wow, we are coming up on a year, and you're going to hear from Barnabas Piper. And Barnabas is going to talk about growing up as a pastor's kid. Now, he grew up as a pastor's kid, but he also grew up in John Piper's home. That's right, Barnabas is John's son. And he wrote a really fascinating book a couple years ago all about growing up as a pastor's kid. We're going to talk about his experience, what it was like having a famous dad as a preacher, and what it was like, you know, 'cause I know a lot of pastors listen to this podcast, what it's like to grow up in your home. Barnabas is honest, he's real, he's authentic. He's a 31-year-old leader in his own right now. He has his own podcast, actually. We'll do all the links next week, but thank you really enjoyed it. That's episode 50. Best way to make sure you don't miss it is to subscribe. It's free on iTunes, Stitcher, and TuneIn Radio. Thank you for leaving reviews and ratings and sharing the messages that help you with your friends. Helps get the word out, and we're back next Tuesday, and I can't wait to have that conversation because I really hope it helps you lead like never before. (upbeat music) - You've been listening to the "Carry Newhof Leadership Podcast." Join us next time for more insights on leadership, change, and personal growth to help you lead like never before. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)