Can’t You Just Be Like Me?

I pastor in Los Angeles, a sprawling city filled with ethnic enclaves isolated from one another economically, linguistically, culturally, politically, and religiously. In the latest US census, no single ethnic group accounted for more than 50 percent of LA’s population.

I meet monthly with a group of about twenty pastors from these diverse communities. We are uniform in our complementarity, high view of Scripture, Reformed soteriology, and gospel-centeredness, but we are completely different in some nonessentials. At my church, we typically preach in a jacket and tie. In another church, the pastors preach in T-shirts and shorts. One congregation sings hymns only, while another sings contemporary praise songs. Because our church communities face different civic problems, it’s not uncommon for our members to pursue different political remedies. Yet we don’t stumble or divide over our tertiary differences. We know our Lord loves all of our differing churches, and we are by grace through faith striving to worship him in spirit and truth.

God anchored a conviction deep into my soul with a quote from John Piper a long time ago: “Jesus didn’t die for a divided church.” This is true, so I hate tribalism. Tribalism is “my-group-centricity.” It believes and acts on the lie that in order for churches to be godly, they must be like my church (in worship style, political affiliations, missional priorities, and so on), and that’s regardless of their cultural context or the community God has called them to serve. The deceptive danger that drives tribalism is believing that God, who made diversity, doesn’t love diversity (Revelation 5:9–10; 7:9).

Tribalistic churches and Christians demand conformity to their broad range of preferences, believing they are inviolable God-ordained principles. So they strive to silence or coerce other Christians to assimilate, or they quietly despise these brothers and sisters. This inevitably leads to dark consequences. Instead of loving other Christians who have the same primary biblical convictions but differ over tertiary issues, tribalistic Christians feel justified in waging war against them.

As a preacher from times past used to say, “To be forewarned is to be forearmed.” Let’s consider three biblical prescriptions for this spiritual ailment that often remains undiagnosed but endangers the life of too many congregations.

Put Preferences in Their Place

In the beginning, what did God call good? God created the heavens and the earth, day and night, land and sea. That was good. God created humans as equals yet with complementary differences as male and female, and he called that very good. God created massive and microscopic sea animals. God created giant and dwarf planets. God created snowflakes that look alike, but each one is different. God fearfully and wonderfully made humans, yet all eight billion of us on this planet are different. God loves complementary diversity.

God also created his bride — the true church — such that no two churches are exactly the same.

In order to live in peace and harmony with all of our differences, every church member needs to heed Paul’s command to “count others more significant than yourselves” (Philippians 2:3). Having the humble mind of Christ leads to unity within complementary diversity. Pride, on the other hand, doesn’t. It can be dangerously subtle. It can appear when we simply think and say things like, “Why don’t they choose the hymns I like?” or “Why doesn’t my pastor preach like so-and-so?”

This scenario is so dangerous because pride can masquerade as harmless preference. Like the first sign of termites, our disagreements can start off small, but when not resolved, these problems can grow to infest and erode an entire house.

“Your brothers and sisters in Christ don’t have to embrace your preferences, so don’t devour them to get your way.”

James exposes the true root of this problem. “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (James 4:1–2). When members attack their own body like cancer cells, churches grow weak, become ill, and die. They “bite and devour one another” (Galatians 5:15). Christians can do this to each other while the root cause — prideful, self-centered hearts — disguises itself as preferences. The spiritual sickness remains undiagnosed and hidden.

Pray that God keeps your eyes open to his beauty in the diversity of his body, the church, and be humble. Your brothers and sisters in Christ don’t have to embrace your preferences, so don’t devour them to get your way (1 Corinthians 8:13).

Beware of Divisive Influences

As a pastor, I sit for a living. Sitting all day is an occupational hazard. It is poison to the body. Prolonged sitting leads to back problems, weight gain, poor cardiovascular health, and more. These are unintended secondary effects of reading and writing.

Many Christians today live online. That too can produce tribalism as a secondary malady. Churches are filling up with members whose favorite YouTubers, social media influencers, or news outlets are constantly telling them how to think. It shouldn’t surprise us if we are divided like the New Testament church in Corinth. Remember their disunity problem? Members were splintering around their preferred leader, boasting, “I am of Paul,” “I am of Apollos,” “I am of Cephas,” “I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:12). While Christians have “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Ephesians 4:5), that hasn’t always stopped us from being convictional cultural partisans at the expense of dividing churches.

This is a real problem. Jesus’s two-thousand-year-old maxim about being divided is still true today: Divided kingdoms, cities, and houses don’t stand — they fall (Matthew 12:25). The same is true for divided local churches, including yours. Beware! Our enemy, Satan, wants to divide and conquer your church. Don’t let your flesh become his willing ally.

Live by the Word and the Spirit

Let’s consider this problem in light of Paul’s admonition in Romans 12:2. Paul charges believers, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

“The aim of Christian discipleship isn’t to make everyone like us. The aim is to make everyone like Christ.”

We live in a 24-7 information cycle. Often the information is inaccurate, biased propaganda. By passively ingesting information from the world (being conformed in Romans 12:2 is a passive verb), our minds will be molded by the world to embrace its worldly perspective.

The word of God is the antidote. By it, the Holy Spirit transforms our minds to be in alignment with God’s perfect will. So heed the psalmist: Delight in meditating on God’s word day and night (Psalm 1:2). The Spirit of God will take the word of God and transform our values, convictions, and minds into greater and greater Christlikeness, and as a result, we will think less and less like the world.

Here’s more good news. Not only does the Spirit of God use the word of God to renew our minds, but he also transforms our affections by revealing to us the wondrous glories of Christ (John 15:26). This ministry of the Spirit will cause our hearts to overflow with the love of Christ, which will in turn stir our affections to love Christ and his bride, the church. So instead of fighting to subtly (or not so subtly) demand your way, you will give way to others as a servant like Christ. Having God’s love inflaming our hearts does that. It changes the way we live and the focus of our passions from me to we, from self to selflessness (1 John 3:1–3, 16).

Grateful, Not Tribal

The aim of Christian discipleship isn’t to make everyone like us. The aim is to make everyone like Christ. As each member of the body of Christ grows in Christlikeness, so will the whole local church. That can happen only when all the parts of the body are grateful to be and do their part in unity with the other parts of the body (1 Corinthians 12:12–26; Ephesians 4:12–16).

In sports, when every player wants to be the star scoring guard or the quarterback, the team doesn’t win. To develop cohesive unity, coaches drill into their players the cliché, “There is no I in team!” That’s true for the church too. Together, we reflect the beauty and glory of Christ more than any one of us individually ever could.

Let’s pray that Christ would be the one who is exalted in our churches, that Christ would have his way with each of us, and that we would be humble servants, yielding to one another in love and according to Christ’s will. That’s a prescription for building healthy churches and avoiding the deadly dangers of tribalism.