The appeal of the apostle Paul (Romans 14) was that the Christians in the church in Rome should remain united even if there was a difference in doctrine and practice over these matters. Not all differences are worth dividing over. On some matters, you can agree to disagree.

Unity as Striving Together for the Gospel
An extreme view of Christian unity is found among those who will work together only with those with whom they agree on everything—doctrinal and practical. They often divide over styles of worship, political and social issues, modes of child discipline and education, church organization and administration, the use of social media, eschatological views, and so on. As you will notice, these are all non-gospel issues. Granted, our level of interchurch cooperation does depend on how united we are over matters of doctrine and practice, but there should still be some level of cooperation where it is evident that we stand for the same gospel. Refusing all cooperation with fellow believers is surely wrong. If such division were allowed, the New Testament church would have long split between Jews and Gentiles, because in those early days that was what largely threatened church unity.
The apostle Paul addressed this matter in some of his letters, especially Romans and 1 Corinthians. For instance, to the Romans he wrote:
As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables…
One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind…
Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother?…So then each of us will give an account of himself to God.(Romans 14:1-2, 5, 10, 12)
The appeal of the apostle was that the Christians in the church in Rome should remain united even if there was a difference in doctrine and practice over these matters. Not all differences are worth dividing over. On some matters, you can agree to disagree.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, January 30, 2022
Look for the person on the edge who doesn’t get included, have them around your table. Look for the person who is very much ‘in’ but gets overlooked, have them around your table. Look for the person who hosts all the time but never gets invited elsewhere, have them around your table. Look at your pastor and their family—have them around your table.

What do you do when you need to cook for 30 people for a Sunday lunch? In our house, you get the cauldron out.
Before you start reading out Macbeth and building a pyre, it’s a large steel preserving pan that the group of students from our church we feed most weeks have dubbed ‘the cauldron’. Or maybe you got stuck in the previous sentence, because cooking for 30 people for lunch after church is alien, or superhuman, or unimaginable. I get that.
This wasn’t a normal Sunday for us, we’re in a church near one of the University campuses and about a third of our church is students. At the start of term in a September we, like most churches near a University, host groups of new first year students in a number of homes. We were hosting a student lunch that week and for one reason or another the other homes that students were going to were unable to have them, so we were catering for an unknown number of students, hence the many pots of cassoulet bubbling on the hob.
Helen, my wife, is an excellent cook and more importantly actively enjoys feeding people. She’s in her element with the challenge of figuring out how to stretch our food to go further. She’s also never knowingly under-catered so on this occasion cooked for 45. Go big or go home, I say.
We had 19 students that week, which meant it also fed our mid-week group, and a family in the church whose kitchen was out of action, and another family the following Sunday, with some spare to go in the freezer for one of those days your home fills with hungry people you weren’t expecting.
I don’t expect everyone to do what we did that day, or to have the space in your home to even make it possible. Those mass groups aren’t my favourite anyway, I’d much prefer 6 or 8 sat around one table enjoying each other’s company and perhaps a bottle of wine. But the principle should be a lot more normal than it is.
I’d like to reframe two things as normal that are less normal in Christian culture than they should be:
Adding an extra mouth to a meal should be a skill we learn.
You meet someone at church that week who’s new and want to invite them back for food to get to know them a bit better? That’s difficult unless you’ve either cooked for a bigger number of people deliberately, which is a wonderful thing to do but does tend to leave you with a lot of leftovers, or you’ve learned how to stretch a meal.
We feed our ‘Life Group’ every week, which I think is how this sort of thing works best, they’re mostly students or new graduates. We have at times had some lads who can really put it away—the sort of thing where you wonder if they are intending to eat again that week.
Regularly feeding large groups can get expensive if you just multiply up what you might cook for two of you, so you have to approach the meals a little differently.
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We should not be passive participants in the work of the church as members, even when it comes to the sermon or the life of our pastor. He is meant to serve you, and you him. He is meant to teach you, but you are not therefore absolved from the commandment to make disciples.

“Five-billion people.” I answered, “There are five-billion people online right now, according to the latest data.”
I had been asked to come on the radio to talk about three news stories that stood out to me from the previous week. Two had come to mind easily, but for the third I decided to look for something encouraging; I wanted to find a story about a local pastor doing the work of the gospel or who was being celebrated for ministry faithfulness.
I searched everywhere.
I found nothing.
The “five-billion people online” statistic jumped out to me on my search, and so I decided I would use it to make a point. If there are that many people online, then a good deal of them must be Christian. So where are all the stories about tremendous pastors? I know they’re out there ready to be told! Yet, it doesn’t seem like anyone is telling them.
I finished the interview by saying something to the effect of, “I’d just love to use my time here to say how thankful I am for my pastor. He loves our church and loves God, and that might sound boring, but I think that is awesome.”
It wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t controversial, it was just true.
As much as I would love to see more people publicly praising their pastors, the work starts closer to home. In the first two installments of this series, I’ve talked about what a sermon is and how to get the most out of a sermon each Sunday, but in this article, I want to look at how and why we should encourage the man standing in the pulpit. How do we love our pastors well, submit to them, and encourage them? To be clear, this is an area we all need to grow in—myself included.
Be most known for encouragement. “We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves” (1 Thess. 5:12–13).
I make it a point to ensure everyone whom I love, knows that I love them. The words “I love you” hold a specific weight when spoken to my wife, but they aren’t reserved merely for her. Jesus taught us that people would know who we belong to and whose disciples we are if we “have love for one another” (John 13:35). It is, therefore, no surprise that this extends to our leaders. Pastor Jared C. Wilson has mentioned on several occasions that he never leaves the pulpit without expressing his love for the congregation.
If your pastor did this, would that expression of love be reciprocated?
My guess is that if you’re plugged into a local church, whatever differences you might have with your pastor, you do love him. Like a cheesy 90s rom-com, however, this love might go days, weeks, or years without being revealed, leading both parties to question its existence.
This commandment to love is accompanied by another that seems to be intrinsically linked to the first. “Esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves.”
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