Seen and Known: Why the Church Must Learn to Disagree Well
This fear reveals something important: we long for spaces where we can be seen, welcomed, and known without having to brace ourselves against hostility or judgment. This is why many churches have decided to wave a rainbow flag inside or outside their sanctuaries. We want places where we can exhale, without worrying that our existence will be treated as an issue up for debate. The church should be such a place. At its best, the body of Christ is not defined by uniformity but by love—the kind of love that sees the image of God in every person before it ever sees a label, a position, or a vote.
And yet, while safe spaces are essential, the church is not called to be a “holy huddle” where everyone thinks the same way, agrees on every issue, and insulates themselves from challenge. The church is not to live in an echo chamber—at least, it's not supposed to. To be the church is to belong to a community that can hold real difference, even conflict, without unraveling.
The question is: Can we be seen and valued while also learning to disagree well?
The Temptation of Conversionism
Part of the difficulty lies in our history. The church has often succumbed to a kind of relentless conversionism—a deep impulse to insist that others must accept our beliefs as we understand them. Of course, there is something good at the root of this. When we discover good news, we naturally want to share it. If we believe we’ve encountered truth that heals and liberates, it makes sense that we’d want others to experience it too, right?
But too often our drive to convince has slipped into a drive to control. And even in our reaction against the conversionism of conservative evangelicalism, we Mainline liberal Christians are not immune to this drive. We take ourselves so seriously that we begin to equate faithfulness with winning arguments, if not about postmortem destination then often about social justice or inclusion. In either case, our passion for truth is compromised when it is fueled more by fear of being wrong or need for dominance than by love. For progressives, perhaps more than conservatives, this is exasperated by secularization and the growing suspicion that we are alone in this, that the world's fate is in our hands, so there's no time for compromise or epistemic humility. So the ability to hold space for people whose beliefs threaten what we hold dear depends on our ability to wait for and rely on a God who is God—a God who bears the burden of our fate and the fate of the world. When we can trust God with our fate, we can be patient with and loving toward the people who threaten us. We can even accept the possibility of defeat.
Consider, for example, the problem of climate change. If we are of the belief that our responsibility in this existential threat (and it is an existential threat, don't get me wrong!), is to take control, if we believe there is no more time for others who may disagree with us or reject the reality before us—if we believe that the weight of the world is on our shoulders, then the only option is conversion—immediate and total conversation—because we're already 10 years behind curve. No time to wait on God! We've got to get to work!
When we convince ourselves that the stakes are so high, that everything depends on our victory, our rightness—and thus the conversion of the other to what we know we have to do—then genuine conversation becomes impossible. We no longer engage others as people to be cherished; we treat them as projects to be managed or problems to be fixed. The tragedy is that in the very act of trying to win someone to our vision of the gospel, we can lose sight of the gospel itself—the good news that God’s love and hope are freely given even when we are "dead in our trespasses" (((Ephesians 2:1))... which may be more true than ever in a quite literal sense, especially when it comes to climate change!).
Disagreeing Well
The alternative to this secular conversionist ideology is not to abandon conviction or to pretend our disagreements don’t matter. It is to let love—not control—guide our convictions. Indeed, it is to let love be our guiding and normative conviction—the conviction that orients and relativizes all others.
This means we must learn the art of disagreeing well. Disagreeing well requires epistemic humility—the ability to recognize that we might not see the whole picture. It requires patience—the willingness to sit with tension rather than rushing to resolution. And it requires generosity—the practice of treating those who differ from us not as threats but as fellow image-bearers of God (after all, if we're going down, we're going down together).
When we disagree well, we make space for something miraculous: for people to feel genuinely seen, even when we don’t share the same beliefs. We stop confusing agreement with love. We begin to understand that to be church is not to erase difference but to discover communion that is deeper than difference.
The Church as a Place of Belonging
Imagine a church where LGBTQ+ people never have to wonder if their presence is a provocation. Imagine a community where Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, young and old can gather not because they’ve solved all their disagreements but because they’ve committed to love one another through them. Imagine a place where people are not reduced to their “positions” but are known as whole persons.
This is not naïve idealism. It is the "beloved community" (Martin Luther King Jr.). It is the very hope of the gospel. Jesus did not gather around him a group of people who agreed on everything. His disciples included tax collectors who had collaborated with Rome and zealots who wanted to overthrow it. They quarreled, misunderstood, and betrayed each other. And yet, Jesus called them friends. He washed their feet. He prayed that they would be one—not because they were the same, but because his love was magnificent enough to hold them all.
Asking Hard Questions
So if your church feels like a holy huddle where everyone agrees, it might be time to ask some questions. Are we truly embodying the breadth of Christ’s welcome? Or have we built a comfortable club for people just like us? Are we confusing unity with uniformity, safety with sameness, conviction with control, love with agreement?
The church has a chance in this season—this season of deep cultural polarization, suspicion, and fear—to offer something different. Not another battleground of ideas, and not a sanitized bubble where conflict is avoided, but a community where love is stronger than division.
The challenge before us is daunting, but the invitation is clear. We can choose to be people who see and cherish one another, who open ourselves to disagreement without closing the door on communion. We can be a church that refuses to treat difference as danger and learns, instead, to make difference a place that anticipates divine disclosure.
If we do, perhaps we will glimpse something holy: not just the absence of conflict, but the presence of Christ—who stands between us and holds us together, even when we cannot hold ourselves.