Safe Doesn't Mean Soft

The podcast episode discusses the concept of a 'safe church' and what it truly means beyond just comfort. Todd Rhoades explores how churches should aim to focus on core values like trust and inclusion rather than aligning strictly with a political or cultural tribe. He advocates for a church environment where Jesus is the main focus, allowing room for disagreement on secondary issues. The episode addresses challenges faced by churches and offers insights into how to maintain genuine connections within diverse communities. • Defining 'safe church' beyond just comfort. • Importance of trust and inclusion in church environments. • Challenges of labeling and exclusion through tribalism. • Ensuring Jesus is the central focus of the church. • Balancing primary beliefs with secondary disagreements. • Upcoming discussion on handling distrust within communities.

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Transcript

Safe Does Not Mean Quiet

SPEAKER_00 0:08

The word safe is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the church world right now, and I'm not sure we mean the same thing by it. A safe church doesn't mean a quiet church. It doesn't mean a church that never says anything hard. It means something more specific than that cost pastors more than what we realize. Hi there, my name's Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders of ChemistryStaffing.com. And I'm your host right here every weekday on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Let me start off today. We're in a series talking about what happened Saturday night at the White House Correspondence Dinner. Not a political series at all. Believe me, go back and listen to it. But we're talking about how and what to communicate and how our churches are different. And with a culture that is so judgy and so demanding, all that's creeping into the church as well, into many churches. So let me start off today by being direct. Okay. When someone says that they want their church to be safe, they usually mean one of three things. When they say they want their church to be safe, number one, safe from being attacked for what they believe. Number two, safe from having to engage with people who disagree with them. And number three, safe from feeling uncomfortable. The first one, safe from being attacked for what they believe. That one's reasonable. The second one, safe from having to engage with people who disagree with them. That one in today's culture is impossible. And the third one, safe from feeling uncomfortable. That third one is a trap. Okay? It's a comfort trap. Now listen, I want your church to feel comfortable. Okay? We all want our churches to be uh feel inviting and comfortable. You want your church to feel comfortable. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but comfort is not the goal. Comfort is a byproduct of trust, and trust gets built through honesty, not through avoidance. If your church has ever made anyone uncomfortable, has not ever made anybody uncomfortable, you're probably not preaching Jesus. Jesus made people uncomfortable. Like constantly. Right? The Pharisees, the rich young ruler, Jesus made his own disciples really uncomfortable at times. Comfort is not the metric. What I think safe actually means is this. Okay. It doesn't really have anything to do with comfort. That one's the trap. Here's what I think safe means in our churches. Safe means that you can sit in this room without having to check half of your identity at the door. Safe means that people who disagree with you on Tuesday can still take communion with you on Sunday. Safe means that your pastor knows your name and you know that they're not going to humiliate you from the stage. I remember getting called out when I was a teenager. Yep, I went to that church, and that was not a safe church. Not a safe church. Safe means that you can ask hard questions without being labeled. That's safe. And it's hard work to build that into your church. You see, there are two defaults that most churches fall into. One of two postures. The default one, pick a tribe. Hey, we're a conservative church, we're a progressive church, everybody knows where we land. The benefit is clarity, right? The cost is that you've eliminated half of your potential community. Let me repeat that. The cost of that being that kind of a church, that kind of a safe church, is that you've eliminated half, maybe in a lot of cases, comparing to how tight you want to be with your tribe, you've eliminated more than half of your potential community. More than half of the people in your community that need Jesus. So that's default number one. You pick your tribe. Default number two is you pretend that the fault lines don't even ever exist. We don't ever talk about hard truths at our church. We keep it, we keep it spiritual. Benefit is peace. The cost is that the spiritual stuff starts to feel disconnected from real life. I mentioned before this week, I think there's a third way. I'm a both and a guy, I'm not an either or, I'm not an option A or an option B. Here's the third way, I think, that I would propose to you if you find yourself stuck in one of those first two. Third way is to be a church where Jesus is so clearly the center that the secondary stuff stays secondary. Where you can disagree about secondary things and still know that you agree about the main thing. Where the main thing isn't a political per position, it's a person. Going back to the church that I grew up with, man. I grew up in a little independent Baptist church, and maybe I still have the scars to prove it. But we had this thing, and there's some churches that still do this. We called it secondary, what do we call it? I just forgot what we called it. Oh, secondary separation. So we grew up, I grew up a good Baptist. So we had our standards, and we had our we separated ourselves from the world, we separated ourselves from people that didn't agree necessarily with us. But in my church, when I was growing up, when I was a teenager, we had a pastor that was very legalistic. And thankfully, I'm still here to talk about it because a lot of the friends in my youth group, matter of fact, most of the friends in my youth group are no longer following Jesus because this was the type of unsafe church that this was. But we had something, and going off on a rabbit trail that we had something called secondary separation. So we would not agree with a lot of people on certain things, and that included other churches. There was another church in our county that that was another Baptist church that we didn't agree with. I don't even know what we didn't agree with them on, but it wasn't a separation issue because we we essentially believed the same thing theologically, but they partnered with somebody that we would not partner with, so we cut them off, right? Because of a secondary separation issue. It's not that we didn't agree with them, we didn't agree with who they associated with that didn't agree with the whole thing. And the third way that I'm presenting to you is to be a church where Jesus is so clearly the center that the secondary stuff stays secondary. Um it's harder than picking a tribe because when you pick a tribe, those lines are already set. It's harder than going silent. Because when you go silent, you just don't say anything. But it's the only church worth building right now. Here's the bottom line: a safe church is not a quiet church. A safe church is a church where Jesus is so obviously the main thing that everything else, including political things, can be a secondary thing. Ask yourself this week in our church, what is clearly primary and what is clearly secondary? Can you tell from a sermon? Can you tell from a small group? Can you tell from a staff meeting? That's your question from this week. Tomorrow's the last episode in this series, and we're going to talk about what is maybe the hardest part of this moment, which is pastoring people who don't trust people, who don't trust each other anymore. I hope you'll come back because this is something that's really on my heart. Our culture is such that we just don't trust anybody anymore. With AI, we go scroll through our social feeds, we don't know what is real and what is not. We don't know what is true and what is not true. How do you pastor in that kind of a culture? How do you lead in that kind of a church? We're going to talk about that tomorrow, so I hope you'll come back and join us. I'd love to hear your comments on this series, whether it's timely, whether it's helped you think through some things, and maybe how you can reach out to me anytime, podcast at chemistry staffing. It's podcast at chemistry staffing.com. If there's any way that I can help you or your church in staffing or healthy staff related topics, compensation issues, hiring, firing, any of those things, pop me an email at podcast at chemistry staffing.com. We have a team here ready to assist you if there's any way that we can. And I've been mentioning this at the end of our podcast. If you'd not signed up for my brand new churchleadership radar.com email, I would love to have you be a part of and be one of our charter subscribers absolutely free every day. I pick my top three things that we don't have time to talk about here on the podcast that I think you as a church leader should at least know about. Maybe it's a news story, maybe it's a leadership resource. But I think over time, if you well-inform church leader, it's going to be a better and more effective church leader. So you can subscribe to that absolutely free at churchleadershipradar.com. All right, we'll be back here again tomorrow and close out this series. Some of you are probably gonna be thankful, maybe I will be too. We'll see. Thanks so much.