“Those are values that we hold in our relationships at Highrock, and so to have people who carry gravitas in Christian circles just enter into our conversations with that same posture is encouraging,” she said. “It shows that Christians all over the theological and geographical map are wrestling with similar questions and that they’re not alone.”
Joe Marcucci, a pastor at Highrock who works with a prison ministry and other community outreach, facilitated one of the discussion groups. A former church planter and senior pastor at another church, Marcucci said he has mixed feelings about the term “evangelical” and its ties to politics.
“I feel like we’ve lost the evangelism part of evangelicalism,” he said.
The discussions in the theology lab are a good first step, said Marcucci. He said that there’s a balance between listening with respect and still acknowledging that people disagree. No one wants open conflict during the discussions, he said. But moving the conversation forward may be uncomfortable.
“To do that, there has got to be some messiness to it,” he said. “I don’t know if we have gotten to that point yet.”
That idea of listening to different points of view reflects their denomination’s ethos, said Rice, which makes room for diverse perspectives. That ethos has been tested in recent years as the Covenant church, like other denominations, has faced conflict over issues of sexuality and how to adapt to the challenges of a diverse and polarized nation.
Edwards said people in churches don’t often know how to listen to each other, because they are so concerned about being on the right side of issues. So they don’t have the patience to listen or consider that they might be wrong, or that someone else, with a different point of view, might be worth hearing.
“For a lot of people,” he said, “it’s about being right, not being gracious. The idea is I need to get this right. And you’re telling me something I haven’t heard before, so you must be wrong. It makes those kinds of conversations very difficult.”
This article originally appeared here.
