It is impossible to muscle unity in a church.
Truman Dollar
Fundamentalist churches suffer from many stereotypes, but unity isn’t one of them. The common image is usually one of scraps and splits. But if Truman Dollar isn’t careful, he’s likely to change that image.
During his sixteen-year pastorate at the Kansas City (Missouri) Baptist Temple, he saw the all-white congregation become racially integrated and at the same time grow to an average attendance of 1,800.
In 1984 he went to the ten-thousand-member Temple Baptist Church in the Detroit suburb of Redford. In addition to directing the diverse ministry there, he writes a monthly column for the Fundamentalist Journal, often calling into question divisive practices among Christians.
The son of a Baptist minister, Dollar began preaching at age fifteen. He graduated from the University of Missouri, where he was president of both the honor society and the student body, then served churches in Florida, Missouri, and Michigan before becoming senior pastor in Kansas City in 1968.
In this discussion, the first of three addressing tasks unique to the pastoral leader, Dollar offers counsel on how to bring solidarity and concord to a church.
With all the other concerns facing pastors, is establishing unity all that important?
Unity is vitally important if for no other reason than the fact it validates the gospel. There aren’t many things more important than that.
You can’t expect to win people to Christ when the body is fragmented and warring.
When Jesus prayed in John 17 that the church be unified, what kind of unity was he referring to? Doctrinal unity? An emotional affection for one another? A sense of common mission?
In the New Testament, the church had to decide whether it would include both Jews and Gentiles. It had to decide if men and women would both be involved. It had to decide if it was a church for free men and slaves. From Acts 15 and Galatians 3:28, we understand the church clearly decided it would include them all. It opted for diversity. Yet in that diversity, it clearly had unity. I see three types.
1. Functional unity involves the church’s organizational tools: gifted leaders, structure, its goals, and its mission — carrying the gospel around the world, baptizing people, and discipling them.
2. Doctrinal unity. There were some limits beyond which you could not go, such as accepting the teaching of the Judaizers or the Libertines. The early church leaders talked a lot about heretics. They were willing to disrupt temporarily the church’s unity to create a stronger, lasting unity of doctrine. They insisted that grace must be taught.
3. The church’s spiritual unity is captured in Jesus’ summary of the Law: loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loving your neighbor as yourself.
Spiritual unity has a vertical dimension, a unity with God — holiness. The Bible lists sins that God hates, which break our unity with him — uncleanness, filthiness, whoremongering — behaviors and lifestyles that affect the purity of the church.
Spiritual unity also has a horizontal dimension, a humble regard for others that overcomes schisms. For example, in Philippians Paul calls divisions carnal; he reprimands Euodia and Syntyche; and he begs them to have the humility, the servant mind, of Christ. Spiritual unity is by far the most difficult of the three.
Is this kind of unity possible, or in a fallen world do we have to settle for something less?
I don’t think we ought to look for less. That would be like saying, “We’re going to keep only nine of the Ten Commandments,” or “We’re going to give 8 percent instead of a full tithe.” Neither do I think we should say, “Some disunity is acceptable.”
Complete unity is what we’re after. Yet in a fallen world you constantly have people like Diotrephes in the church, and you have to deal with them because they disrupt a church’s unity.
We have never achieved perfect unity in a local church any more than any of us has been completely transformed into the image of Christ. It is a process that is ongoing, one that will not be realized ultimately until Jesus comes back. But that is the goal. To be willing to accept less is sin.
What does unity in the church look like? Can you think of a specific time when you saw it, at least in embryonic form?
I was on the staff of the Kansas City church for twenty-three years, seven as an associate and sixteen as senior pastor. At one point I’d spent half my life there. One Sunday morning I stood up and said, “A family in our church is about to lose their house unless they receive two thousand dollars by the end of the day. You don’t need to know who they are, but trust me that they’re godly people. We’re not going to vote on it. If you feel strongly about this, I’ll be at the door following the service, and you can stop and give me a check.”
Before the service my wife had said, “Are you going to set a bad precedent?”
I said, “I don’t know. All I know is that I’m hurting because this family is going to lose its house.”
Before the day was over, people had given over two thousand dollars. When I announced it, there was a sense of euphoria in the congregation. Together we had done something bold and creative to help someone and hadn’t worried about setting precedents.
Another incident involved three men, one Caucasian, one Hispanic, and one black. All three worked at TWA, and all three hated each other. Then, within six months or so, all three of them began attending the church.
About fifteen years later in a testimony meeting, Sam, the black man, stood up. Here’s a guy who had been involved with the NAACP. When Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot, he flew to Atlanta for the big march at Emory University. Sam said, “I remember when I used to look at Bill and Augie and despise them because of my racism. And now we meet at lunch for prayer.” Bill and Augie both stood and confirmed how meaningful they found those prayer times. All three had come to the same church, all three had become Christians, and all three in one testimony meeting got up and talked about being reconciled in Christ.
Can you strategize harmony? Does it require planning and forethought? Or is it simply a gift from God quite unrelated to human effort?
As we teach people to develop the mind of Christ, we build unity. But it is impossible to muscle unity in a church. Unity doesn’t begin with strategies; it begins with people. Personhood precedes program.
Yet the way we do things does make a difference. If I do not have integrity as a leader, if I do not model the mind of Christ, unity won’t happen in the congregation, because the things that help produce unity won’t flow out of my life.
Let me illustrate. One thing I do is insist on giving the congregation sufficient information about the church’s finances. I want them to know how resources are being allocated and that their money is being handled well. This helps prevent disunity. But that wouldn’t happen if I didn’t care about honesty and integrity.
So unity in a congregation doesn’t come from the members up. It comes from the leaders down.
Yes. I believe God has ordained a vehicle to accomplish unity: gifted leaders (Eph. 4:11-12), men and women who know the power of the Holy Spirit. What happens in the church begins with its leaders. As a natural result of these leaders exercising their leadership function, unity flows.
A church can be diagrammed in what I call concentric circles of commitment. At this church, the center circle includes the pastoral staff and chairman of the deacons. The next circle out from the center is the finance committee. The next circle, the deacons. Then the Sunday school superintendents, then the Sunday school teachers, then those who come Sunday night and Wednesday night, and so on, all the way to the periphery. When I teach about the unity of the body, or give out financial information, or do anything, I start with the core. They become informed and committed and help me reach out and include the next circle and then the next. It ripples outward until the entire church is discipled and informed.
What’s the biggest impediment to unity that you face?
Autonomy. The opposite of unity is not disunity as much as autonomy. By that I mean individuals refusing to submit to the teaching of the Scripture by the gifted leaders whom God gave authority.
How do the gifted leaders avoid becoming autonomous themselves?
Paul tells Timothy, “Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine.” You have to be careful to submit yourself to the doctrine given by God. You also have to submit yourself to other leaders the church has ordained.
In what areas is unity most difficult to achieve?
The racial issue is the most difficult by far. When I came to the church in Kansas City, it was not racially integrated. I began to teach these principles, and within two years we accepted our first black family. When I left almost sixteen years later, we had a black deacon who in the last election received more votes than anyone else. Progress comes slowly.
Here at Temple Baptist, we’re still struggling with the racial issue. Minorities make up about 18 percent of the student body of our Christian school. In sixty years we had never had a black preacher speak — until 1985. Dr. S. M. Lockridge was one of the highlights of our summer Bible conference. We have a few blacks in the morning service every week, and at least we now receive members without regard to race, but the problem is not overcome. That eats at me, because I understand it’s a spiritual dysfunction. It’s not something we work on just for the public or the media.
In working for oneness within a congregation, what’s been the price tag for you personally?
First of all, there is an incredible investment of emotional energy, an investment of yourself. This is true regardless of the church’s size, though it certainly becomes more difficult as the church gets larger. The Dallas Morning News once interviewed W. A. Criswell and asked, “How can you possibly know twenty-five thousand people?”
Criswell answered, “I know two groups of people in this church — all the key leaders and all the kooks.”
This church has ten thousand members, with about three thousand average attendance. Every Sunday I shake hands with a thousand people. Each week a lady prepares for me a list of ten families, with their pictures and brief biographies. I memorize them, and the next Sunday I pick out those ten families and greet them. All of this builds personal credibility so you can invest yourself in their lives spiritually, and ultimately, it helps bring unity.
I also pay a huge emotional price when someone is disrupting the body, especially when I must confront moral impurity. I believe in confrontation, but I pay the price when I have to meet someone and say, “I understand this is true, and as Matthew 18 commands, I want to talk with you about it.”
One of the toughest confrontations is with a person who has a chronic negative attitude. It’s difficult to call that a church discipline case. How do you act in situations that are not clear-cut moral violations?
Several years ago an executive for a large corporation served on our finance committee in Kansas City. He was a bright man, but for two years he constantly brought up petty criticisms: “You’re 1 or 2 percent over budget in disbursements.” I listened, tried to give him information, and reasoned with him. But he kept carping, and that pains you when you know you’re not doing anything outrageous or ethically wrong.
I finally called the comptroller of the huge corporation where this man worked. I asked him what budgeting margins they maintain and found they weren’t anywhere near their projections. They’d projected a break-even year and in the first six months lost $88 million.
So I confronted this man in the presence of the finance committee, not as a smart aleck, but simply to say, “Don’t demand standards of us that your own industry cannot maintain. Be reasonable.” That was painful, but it had to be done. The man finally resigned, which was a good thing, though I don’t like that ever to happen. He simply began to realize he was a continual irritant and nobody was paying attention to him any longer.
Would you say that most discord starts with this kind of personality wrinkle, rather than significant theological differences?
Disunity rarely comes from legitimate theological disagreements. It comes from people who are acting autonomously, who are not obeying the Scripture: “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” That’s where Paul had most of his problems.
What’s the difference between being autonomous and being a strong, independent thinker? You want people in the congregation who can take initiative.
Instead of calling them independent, I call these people secure in Christ. People who are secure in Christ offer some of the brightest and most helpful ideas for the growth of the church. And they can be aggressive.
But here’s the difference: They offer ideas, do homework, take initiative, and still maintain the mind of Christ. When the body has made its decision, they don’t continue to lobby or create dissent. The autonomous person, on the other hand, maintains his position long after the vote and says, “You’re all wrong.”
Has there been a time when you have had to be “the secure Christian,” when you wanted one thing and the church acted counter to that?
Not officially, because of my style of leadership: I don’t allow a vote until I see we’re unified. I refuse to maintain my autonomy by going into a meeting with a strong design and forcing a vote on policy decisions. We discuss it and work it over until we reach a consensus. In sixteen years as senior pastor in Kansas City, I had only one negative vote as a result.
Of course, this means I may change my position radically during the course of a meeting. We wanted to build a new center some years ago, and I was ready to go. I went into the meeting with an entire finance plan laid out. But during the discussion, I realized, as they did, it was too soon, and we backed off. We ended up waiting two more years. But I didn’t go home from those meetings offended.
Naturally we do not extend that flexibility to the cardinal doctrines of Scripture. But on other matters, I try to avoid being adversarial.
Do new pastors usually have to wait several years before the congregation rallies around them and their vision for the church?
You can expect disagreement at the outset of most pastorates. When I became senior pastor in Kansas City, I had not chosen any of the staff members. So they didn’t have my mindset. But time is usually on the pastor’s side. Over the years, they adopt the pastor’s mindset and goals or they feel increasingly uncomfortable. If a staff member cannot adjust after some years, he generally chooses to leave.
Time also helps resolve other problems. Since I’ve been in Detroit, we’ve had several hundred families join the church. These people came partly because they respond to my style of preaching and leadership. So the longer a pastor stays, the more likely the church will assume his philosophical image through a natural process. Other members remain because pastor and people mutually adjust.
How might a pastor inadvertently contribute to disunity in the body?
One of the biggest problems is the inability to shift roles in ministry. It’s a weighty thing to stand in the pulpit on Sunday with this Book in your hand, representing God. And it’s tough to shift from that role.
You walk in Monday morning and tell a secretary, “Order a trainload of paper clips.”
The secretary says, “Are you sure we need a trainload?”
You think, You’re talking to God’s man. Yesterday I stood with the Book in my hand with an infallible message. Some pastors simply are not able to shift gears and understand that on Monday morning the secretary may have infinitely more information about how many paper clips to order than the pastor does.
When pastors are unable to make the role shifts gracefully, they create dysfunction in authority roles. A pastor goes home to his children and he is still the pastor because he can’t shift roles. It ends up that the child has neither a parent nor a pastor. That causes a dysfunction in the home. In a church, it breeds disunity.
Another danger is what David Jeremiah calls the “I-thou” approach to preaching, that somehow what I say from the pulpit as the representative of God applies to you but does not apply to me. So I can preach against sin but somehow be involved in it at the same time. We’ve all been shattered in recent years by the number of casualties in the ministry from this mentality. When a person stands in the pulpit and says, “Here’s what God said,” but doesn’t let that affect him in any way, congregations are fractured.
Are some issues worth standing for even if they cost the church its unity?
I am willing to die for what Dr. Bob Ketcham used to call the “irreducible minimum” — the gospel message, the redemptive work of Christ, the inspiration of Scripture.
I am willing to split a church for the integrity of the institution — in my case, Baptist distinctives.
On practically everything else, I am not willing to fight. Take eschatology. I’m strongly pre-trib, pre-mill, but many matters of eschatology are just not that clear, so I tolerate other viewpoints while I preach what I believe the Bible teaches.
Do you often preach on the theme of unity?
I preach on it but don’t call it that.
Then how do you approach it?
I cover the biblical principles about loving one another. And I talk about the fundamentalists who blast each other in the periodicals. I really raise the Devil about that.
One means of trying to build loyalty is talking up the threat of attack. “We are the remnant people and some group out there is persecuting us.” Is that a valid method?
I think a lot of anticommunist preaching, for example, has been in many cases a unity-building and fund-raising tool. I am willing to concede that some of this is unconscious. As Eric Hoffer observed over twenty-five years ago in The True Believer, “It’s easier to unify people through hate than through love.”
I’ve seen people milk those crusades and then I have seen their organizations fall apart because either the issues are removed or people lose their intensity. You don’t build a church based on your opposition to abortion or pornography or your hatred of Keynesian economics. I’m not going to put my neck on the line for some political candidate and then find that the expletives have to be deleted. (Laughter)
The foundation of the church can’t be an anti-something crusade. You build it on the redemptive work of Christ.
How has your thinking on unity changed over the years?
I was on my first church staff at age nineteen and started pastoring at twenty-one. I realize now my ministry was basically strategizing how to outsmart people. I didn’t understand body life; I didn’t understand the gifts. I felt there was a difference between pastors and lay people in essence, not just function. So in my early ministry I had a lot of conflict. Unity was something I had to manipulate.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I was on the varsity debate team at the University of Missouri for three years. I was a good debater, and I let a lot of that creep into my leadership. I could outtalk anybody whom I pastored. I won a lot of battles. But I lost a lot of wars. I thought I had to win every time to maintain leadership.
I got tired of that. I realized it was hollow. I began to see what the Bible said and understand the Spirit of God had to bring unity as I faithfully taught people. It took time, but I have changed dramatically. I finally got to where I could say to a group of deacons, “You know, I really blew it.” I learned I could make mistakes of judgment as an administrator, and when I admitted them, there was nobody to fight with. They would say, “We understand. We make mistakes, too.”
So the urge to be right can block unity.
You don’t have to be the repository of all truth to be a leader. You can be vulnerable and admit before a crowd, “I have made some mistakes and I’ve learned by them.” Chuck Swindoll is probably the greatest at this. He knows just how far to go, to be vulnerable without simply dumping on people. I heard him tell a story about himself when he was accused of shoplifting that was a great teaching tool.
I told this church once about some incidents during my early ministry. I had great success in building projects. The church built 421 units of senior citizens’ homes. The whole project was worth twelve or thirteen million dollars. I began to realize I was good at financial management, and so with a couple of men in the church I got involved in a number of business ventures. They were moderately successful.
Nobody said a word to me, but I became deeply convicted that as a minister of the gospel, I needed to live by the gospel. I read those passages about being a soldier of Jesus Christ, and I just up and sold all my shares voluntarily. I never told anybody except my wife. Eight or ten years had to go by before I could admit I’d gotten so involved in that.
Preachers don’t often admit they’ve made mistakes. I can understand that. I don’t want to stand up and tell all the dumb and sinful things I’ve done. But if I don’t open up, I often can’t help people. So I’ve got to be transparent.
What was a mistake you made that caused a lot of disunity?
When I was a young preacher, twenty-one years old, I took a little church of about thirty-five people in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I led the church up to about two hundred, but the offerings were poor. We were running up deficits, yet I was dead set on having an additional staff member anyway. I figured everything had to be bigger and better and growing faster than the church down the street—you know, common nonsense. I got my way but ultimately lost the church. They didn’t fire me, but I left because I saw the growing deficit. I was unwilling to admit I was wrong and being foolish.
Experiences like that helped me realize I’m not right every time. And I don’t have to assert myself or lose my leadership every time. So now, instead of trying to manipulate unity, I try to just teach and model the mind of Christ, function as a leader, and let the Spirit of God bring unity.
In our church we have two little boys named Nick Maple and Frankie Galloway. One is four and the other is five. Both of them, in three months’ time, came down with leukemia. I’ve seen our whole church rally around those boys in a very moving way.
Families have taken food for months. I’ve seen our families pour into the hospitals. I’ve seen them weep on a Sunday morning as we kneel, three thousand together, to pray for Nick and Frankie. The unity has been overwhelming to me. And it just arose. There was a functional unity, a doctrinal unity, and a spiritual unity preceding it that made it possible.
Copyright ©1987 Christianity Today
