Matt Chandler is the lead pastor of teaching at The Village Church, in Flower Mound, a north Dallas suburb. Matt is the President of the Acts 29 Network. His podcasts are perennially in Top Ten in the Christianity section of iTunes. He’s written several books, including Recovering Redemption, Creature of the Word, and his latest, The Mingling of Souls.
1. There are a lot of marriage books on the market, so what unique contribution do you think your book makes to this discussion?
I think what the unique contribution Mingling of Souls adds to the discussion is that the book itself isn’t really ultimately about marriage but rather the whole process by which the covenant of marriage plays itself out. The first half of the book actually is much more about attraction and where we place attraction in regards to priority of relationship and the character traits we are actually looking for. The book from beginning to end really covers marriage in a way that I’m not sure other books do in that we are starting at attraction and we are ending at dying together. That’s the breadth of the book really—just kind of following along in Song of Solomon.
2. In 2009 you were diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and had to undergo significant treatment for this. How did this season in your life affect your marriage and your view of marriage?
This season shaped my view of marriage in that it really created in me a glad-heartedness in God’s good design of covenant love for one another. When I was going through chemotherapy and when I was walking through really the deepest parts of that treatment, all that you might see in a romantic movie about a man’s creativity, about his energy levels, about his passion, his zeal, his sense of humor, all of that, all of that was gone and many times it was me just trying to muster enough strength to get myself up off the bathroom floor to vomit again. Ultimately I came from that season watching Lauren love me, watching Lauren serve, watching Lauren be unwavering in her affection towards me, despite the fact that I wasn’t really bringing anything to the table. This was a really beautiful picture of what God intends marriage to be. It runs in sharp contrast to the kind of romantic comedies and romantic notions of our day and comes back to self-sacrifice and comes back to leaning into the covenant that we made before God on our wedding day. So, I think that’s what I pulled away, a growing confidence, a greater zeal for what the Bible explains marriage is and so I think that’s how the cancer shaped my view.
This contractual way is in no way what God has for us who are Christians in regard to marriage.
3. You describe marriage as a "covenant" instead of a "contract", can you explain the difference?
Our lives are driven by the contractual and what I mean by that is most of our cell phones, our mortgages, our leases, our car notes, all of those are forms of contracts; we are saying that I am going to give these things, but if I give these things, you must give these things. So, I will give you this amount of money, but if I give you this amount of money, you will give me in return this much data or this car or this house or whatever it actually is. Covenant is the opposite of that. If you think about that moment in a wedding ceremony where the vows are exchanged–that’s covenant. Covenant language is “for better or for worse.” We are acknowledging that this might go south.
Think about how crazy that is that on our wedding day we are acknowledging a relationship that could go bad, but my vow before you, the covenant I am making before you, before our friends and family, and before God, is that I’m not going anywhere. Then it gets even more detailed than that in most vows. Consider the words, “In sickness and in health.” If we are healthy and we get to travel the world, we get to laugh and there is a lot of energy and passion and all of that, then I’m in but it’s also “If you get sick and I’ve got to take care of you for the next thirty years, like on the way back from the honeymoon, we get in an accident, you’re in a wheelchair and in a diaper for the rest of your life, I’m not going anywhere.”
That’s covenantal love. It’s different than contractual; contractual would say, “I’m going to love you as long as this is fun, I’m going to love you as long as this can be mostly about me." That’s contractual and I think it’s an unbiblical form of self-idolatry. This contractual way is in no way what God has for us who are Christians in regard to marriage.
4. Marriage is a very controversial topic these days, with the rapid acceptance of gay marriage. Even some evangelicals are rethinking the Bible's teaching on marriage. Some pastors want to avoid the topic all together. How would you advise pastors to address this?
I would plead with those who teach the word of God not to back away but to enter the fray of this topic and then be prepared for what comes after that. I earnestly believe God’s way and God’s design lead to human flourishing and that where people will line themselves up with the word of God, despite cultural norms, will see humanity flourish.
I believe young people want someone to enter this fray with something stable and historic and unchanging and so when we step in and say, no, no, no, here’s God’s good design for human flourishing and there’s a way to do this that doesn’t lead to human flourishing, and there’s a way that does.
Now, what you’ll find if you’ll enter the fray like that is most of the honest sociological data supports that God’s way of doing marriage leads to human flourishing in a way that any other types of relationships simply can’t adequately provide. There’s a lot of false dichotomies and straw-men arguments. It is hard to argue that where a man loves and serves his wife and the wife respects and serves her husband, and there is a type of unity among those two that is built upon not really the symptoms and scenarios of their life, but built around this covenant that they made before God that in their environment, children flourish, the economy flourishes, the man and woman flourishes as persons and then you get a stable and healthy flourishing society.
I earnestly believe God’s way and God’s design lead to human flourishing and that where people will line themselves up with the word of God, despite cultural norms, will see humanity flourish.
5. Some have said that the church's position on marriage is driving young people away. But Village has held to traditional biblical teaching on marriage and has a very young and diverse congregation. How is that?
The Village Church is a very young church that has singles and young marrieds. We have found it effective to enter that space and show them that God’s design is beautiful. We show that we all have inequity and all have bents towards sinfulness that we want to justify but all of us must lay our lives down before the God of the universe in glad submission to the word of God. We communicate that there will be days where submission isn’t glad but still necessary, trusting that what God has for us and what he wants for us is better than what we want for ourselves.
An illustration I’ve tried to use is about one of my three children that loved to play in our street. I would often have to go out there and tell her “Get out of the street! Get back in here!” There was nothing cruel about me telling my daughter that as much fun as she was having in the street, she needed to come out of that street or else she’d get hurt really badly.
There is nothing wrong or unloving about saying, “Hey you are going to get hurt here.” God has designed us to flourish in these spaces. Ultimately we have to line ourselves up with the Word of God and become a light in the midst of an ever-changing darkness.
Daniel Darling is vice-president of communications for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Activist Faith.
