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It’s Not All Black and White

Is it really so difficult to hold two ideas in tension?

Why do Christians easily fall into an ‘either/or’ mentality, rather than a ‘both/and’ one?

I don’t have any solutions, but I just thought I’d air a little frustration. For reasons I can’t fathom, many Christians act as though things are mutually incompatible, when they are actually two sides of the same (often multi-sided) coin. In the area of mission we see false dichotomies created between proclamation of the Gospel and works of service as if Jesus didn’t tell us to do both. You get competition between mission at home and cross-cultural mission to the wider world and so the list goes on.

Another expression of the same theme is the way in which when someone suggests a new way of doing things, others will immediately take this as a rejection of everything that has gone before. A new approach doesn’t mean that the former ways were bad, just that things have moved on and we need to take a fresh look at what we are doing!

I don’t have any solutions, just the mild bemusement that people who live in hope of a eschatological Kingdom, find it so hard to reconcile different ideas in the here and now.

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