In early Summer of 2020, while our faith communities were newly straining under the pressure of a novel virus pandemic that had quickly become a political grenade, George Floyd was murdered. Already simmering race tensions boiled over.
This was when my friend, Robin, posed a question on FB related to race.
It was a reasonable and timely comment. Robin is an Asian American woman. She has bi-racial children. This was personal.
Some people from her church responded with insults. They questioned her integrity.
Here’s how Robin’s church responded:
A slap on the wrist toward the church member.
Robin was asked to sign a social media contract.
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Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard a pastor or Christian leader say something like this:
“I’m too conservative for liberals and too liberal for conservatives.”
I see that hand.
All the hands.
You may have heard this referenced as a Third Way.
The Third Way is often communicated with some variation of the “I’m too conservative/liberal” statement- a statement about where one stands politically. It’s an approach that rejects the binary categorization of liberal/conservative or democrat/republican.
Another working out of this approach that might sound familiar to you is that we come together around the things we agree on, and we agree to disagree about the areas where we have a difference of opinion.
I don’t know where the Third Way approach first came from, but I do know that Tim Keller, author and Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, has been one of the highest-profile proponents of it.
I recently sat down with Robin Jester Wootton to talk about this.
After running from God in early adulthood, Robin was first drawn to a PCA church because of their open posture to her questions.
They were willing to engage in conversations the church she grew up in didn’t want to have.
But that was more than a decade ago.
It’s not 2008 anymore.
And like Robin said to me, 2020 broke a lot of things.
As we talked, we shared our fears that the gap between the way the Third Way works in theory and the actual working out of it on the ground in our faith communities is very different.
The way the Third Way is functioning is stopping us from having some necessary conversations.
What happens when the “sides” look like this:
Side 1: Person who is storming the capital and saying racist things.
Side 2: Person who believes that storming the capital and racism needs to be addressed because it’s antithetical to the Gospel
In churches I’ve been a part of, it looks like never addressing Side 1 and asking Side 2 to be quiet for the sake of “unity” and peace.
What if the Third Way has become a useful cover for leaders who don’t like conflict?
What if this Third Way is simply performative and when leaders do speak against a “side” it’s almost always to appease the side with the most power and influence in their community?
Jeremiah 6:14 comes to mind:
“They have treated my people’s brokenness superficially,
claiming, “Peace, peace,”
when there is no peace.”
If this is the Third Way, we are in desperate need of a different Way.
Is The Third Way Broken?
“Agree to disagree” is sometimes an amicable way forward when parties have equal power. When the party with greater power says “let’s agree to disagree”, that functionally means “my way or the highway” - the more powerful gets to stop the conversation and have things their way without consequence.