How do we help avoid evangelical civil war and promote real unity?

We conservative evangelicals need each other. The challenges before us are just too big. We really can’t be what God has called us to be on our own. Our future should really be together. The stewarding of the gospel in our time demands it.

However, our future is also very tied to our ability to get on with one another. We need a very good capacity to navigate internal disagreements. Above all, we need a deep resistance to fracture and splintering. Some might feel that this is unproblematic. After all, we have the gospel of God, and one would’ve thought that that was enough to overcome any difficulties. Things are, though, a bit more complicated.

For a start, disagreement is built into the very nature of evangelicalism. We believe in gospel centrality, but also accept a level of disagreement. That introduces a tension that can bubble away, and, in the right circumstances, quickly explode in debate. Today, for example, we’re facing difficult questions about race and ‘wokeness’, concupiscence and sexuality, how to deal with the Church of England, music and singing, complementarianism, and different views of preaching etc. These are hardly unimportant issues – and they need to be thought through. The challenges here aren’t, though, just about an inherent tension within evangelicalism. The fact is that, on these controversial issues, we may well find people within the same denomination, who otherwise might agree on many things, also disagreeing over debated questions. A number of years ago the Reformed theologian, John Frame, wrote ‘Machen’s Warrior Children’. In this well-known article, he outlined how conservative Presbyterians in the US, who enjoy very tight confessional standards, had destructively fought each other over a whole range of contested issues. Disagreements are inevitable, whatever our denominational loyalties, or theological starting points.