A Pastor's Pain: Wounding with Truth
As a pastor, I have often been put in a difficult place by people I love. They claim that something I have taught or that our church stands for has hurt them. “If you were teaching truth,” they say, “I wouldn’t feel hurt. And if you really love me you will apologize, recant what you’ve said, and change your teaching.”
Every time a pastor experiences this—and all pastors experience it—he is placed in a tension between truth and mercy. Which is more important: maintaining a belief or maintaining a relationship? If I prioritize truth and risk the relationship, I am portrayed as cold and lacking love. If I prioritize the relationship and try to alter biblical teaching, I am seen as a spineless people-pleaser.
How should a pastor think about this—and what should he do?
If the situation is seen as merely binary (one pole is right and the opposite is, of necessity, wrong; see my previous blog), then I must simply choose the “right” pole. But if the situation is polar (both poles are good things) then I must find the right relationship between the two goods and navigate them accordingly.
The first problem to be navigated is the complainant’s binary perspective. “If you were teaching truth, I wouldn’t feel hurt.” Look at the binary beliefs tucked into this complaint:
(1) Truth doesn’t hurt; therefore, falsehood does.
(2) Feeling pain is bad; therefore, feeling good is always good.
(3) Love wouldn’t make someone feel pain; therefore, those who make me feel pain don’t love me.
Each of these binaries is an oversimplified view of the world and a person committed to them has “rigged the game”, so to speak. The simplistic thinking forces me to compromise and love them—or to stand for the truth and hate them.
But each of these oversimplified binaries can be false. Many lies, flattery in particular, are designed to do painless damage. Truth often hurts and those willing to risk hurting you may be your truest friend: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend, profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (Proverbs 27.6). Pain is nearly always a necessary part of healing, and absence of pain (or inability to feel pain) is not necessarily a sign of health. Many die of diseases that present no painful warnings.
These things are true spiritually as well. Jesus said following Him meant taking up your cross daily (Luke 9.23)—not a painless prospect. Likewise, Jesus taught that all men speaking well of you is not a good thing (Luke 6.22-23,26). Conviction of sin and the personal discipline of confession and repentance are painful but productive (e.g. Psalm 32.3-5; Hebrews 12.11; Revelation 3.19).
To understand this, however, one must abandon binary thinking and grasp polar thinking. The problem here is not good versus evil, but good versus good. How do I navigate relationships to truth versus relationships with people?
My experience has been that if the person refuses to abandon binary thinking for polar thinking when the situation requires it, it is a no-win situation. They insist that the matter can only be understood their way.
That forces me as a pastor to navigate the channel between two other goods: maintaining the truth or maintaining the friendship. The strain I feel when that happens isn’t intellectual; it is emotional and relational.
When I refuse to concede the truth or revise our beliefs, it isn’t because I want to alienate a friend. I am protecting something that pastors are called to protect: the integrity of the gospel and the authority of Scripture. False teachers have always compromised truth to make people feel better, saying “peace, peace” when there is no peace. False teachers don’t like having enemies and prefer to avoid conflict. It seems easier. It is easier. Always.
But I am also protecting something else when I side with truth and risk friendship. Though my alienated friend sees me as cold, uncaring, and lacking compassion—maybe even hateful, I am protecting the truth of the only real mercy that can resolve the guilt and pain for sin. Not only for him, but for others. That is what it costs me on the love side of the tension.
My choice for the truth doesn’t make the tension go away. It maintains the tension. I must bear the pain of one lost friendship for the sake of a truth that I believe will be a far more important blessing to many more people in the long run.
I hate losing friends for the sake of the truth, but I don’t hate them for walking away from me. I am more disappointed than angry. It is part of a pastor’s dying to self and bearing the cross.
But more than once a good God has turned my disappointment to joy, sometimes after many years, by powerfully turning around my ‘enemy’s’ perspective and making them my friend once again.
Every time a pastor experiences this—and all pastors experience it—he is placed in a tension between truth and mercy. Which is more important: maintaining a belief or maintaining a relationship? If I prioritize truth and risk the relationship, I am portrayed as cold and lacking love. If I prioritize the relationship and try to alter biblical teaching, I am seen as a spineless people-pleaser.
How should a pastor think about this—and what should he do?
If the situation is seen as merely binary (one pole is right and the opposite is, of necessity, wrong; see my previous blog), then I must simply choose the “right” pole. But if the situation is polar (both poles are good things) then I must find the right relationship between the two goods and navigate them accordingly.
The first problem to be navigated is the complainant’s binary perspective. “If you were teaching truth, I wouldn’t feel hurt.” Look at the binary beliefs tucked into this complaint:
(1) Truth doesn’t hurt; therefore, falsehood does.
(2) Feeling pain is bad; therefore, feeling good is always good.
(3) Love wouldn’t make someone feel pain; therefore, those who make me feel pain don’t love me.
Each of these binaries is an oversimplified view of the world and a person committed to them has “rigged the game”, so to speak. The simplistic thinking forces me to compromise and love them—or to stand for the truth and hate them.
But each of these oversimplified binaries can be false. Many lies, flattery in particular, are designed to do painless damage. Truth often hurts and those willing to risk hurting you may be your truest friend: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend, profuse are the kisses of an enemy” (Proverbs 27.6). Pain is nearly always a necessary part of healing, and absence of pain (or inability to feel pain) is not necessarily a sign of health. Many die of diseases that present no painful warnings.
These things are true spiritually as well. Jesus said following Him meant taking up your cross daily (Luke 9.23)—not a painless prospect. Likewise, Jesus taught that all men speaking well of you is not a good thing (Luke 6.22-23,26). Conviction of sin and the personal discipline of confession and repentance are painful but productive (e.g. Psalm 32.3-5; Hebrews 12.11; Revelation 3.19).
To understand this, however, one must abandon binary thinking and grasp polar thinking. The problem here is not good versus evil, but good versus good. How do I navigate relationships to truth versus relationships with people?
My experience has been that if the person refuses to abandon binary thinking for polar thinking when the situation requires it, it is a no-win situation. They insist that the matter can only be understood their way.
That forces me as a pastor to navigate the channel between two other goods: maintaining the truth or maintaining the friendship. The strain I feel when that happens isn’t intellectual; it is emotional and relational.
When I refuse to concede the truth or revise our beliefs, it isn’t because I want to alienate a friend. I am protecting something that pastors are called to protect: the integrity of the gospel and the authority of Scripture. False teachers have always compromised truth to make people feel better, saying “peace, peace” when there is no peace. False teachers don’t like having enemies and prefer to avoid conflict. It seems easier. It is easier. Always.
But I am also protecting something else when I side with truth and risk friendship. Though my alienated friend sees me as cold, uncaring, and lacking compassion—maybe even hateful, I am protecting the truth of the only real mercy that can resolve the guilt and pain for sin. Not only for him, but for others. That is what it costs me on the love side of the tension.
My choice for the truth doesn’t make the tension go away. It maintains the tension. I must bear the pain of one lost friendship for the sake of a truth that I believe will be a far more important blessing to many more people in the long run.
I hate losing friends for the sake of the truth, but I don’t hate them for walking away from me. I am more disappointed than angry. It is part of a pastor’s dying to self and bearing the cross.
But more than once a good God has turned my disappointment to joy, sometimes after many years, by powerfully turning around my ‘enemy’s’ perspective and making them my friend once again.