In Hindsight: When Secondary Issues Aren’t So Secondary

Part one of a series. Hindsight is 20/20

I have recently been reading On Writing Well by William Zinsser. In one of the earlier chapters, Zinsser suggests that writers are at their most natural when they write in the first person.

I decided to take this as an opportunity to give some insight into who I am to the sudden influx of subscribers that have come to this page. Thank you for giving my humble Substack the time of your day.

This will hopefully be the first entry of a series where I take a look at some of my important life events and see how they’ve shaped me to be who I am today, and if I have any new thoughts now, several years later.

2016-2019: Early Ministry Years

The Lord called me into ministry around 2016. I had worked in software engineering for about two years post-undergrad, but eventually mustered up the courage to send in an application to Westminster Theological Seminary.

From several years prior and through my seminary days, I served as a pastoral intern at a church that I thought I was going to die at. That either means I was whole-heartedly devoted to this church, or I literally thought I was going to die there. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide which one I mean.

To be honest, I was at odds theologically with a lot of what this church stood for. However, I admired their passion and the fact that they carried themselves as a church that was “serious” about discipleship. They would tell me repeatedly that the theology I learned in seminary and “real life” ministry were at odds with each other. Being convinced of this, I figured I could overlook some of their secondary and tertiary issues for the sake of spreading the Gospel. I would find out eventually that I was wrong.

In 2019, that church would plant in Queens, NY. My fiancee (now wife) and I eventually were sent out as assistance and I was hired as an assistant pastor. The secondary and tertiary issues from the previous church carried over unto the new one. I was aware of this, but was optimistic and thought that it wouldn’t be a big deal. Being near the end of my seminary degree, I was excited for the new setting and hoped that I would have some more opportunities to preach and teach at this new church.

2020: When Convictions Collided

I got married in 2020 on a Friday in March. About 5 days before my wedding day, the governor of NJ reduced gathering capacity down to 100. 4 days before, he reduced it again to 80. And then 2 days before, 20. Our invite list shrank from the entire church and extended family, to just our parents and my pastor.

Such also was the case for our newly minted church. Within three months of planting, we shifted entirely to online services for the rest of the year. Quite the way for my wife and I to start a new life together.

However, as jarring as the shift to isolation and quarantines was, nothing was quite as bad as the sudden influx of politics into my ministry life. I use the term “politics” loosely, because that would soon turn out to just describe theological liberalism.

I will freely admit that up until 2020, I was politically ignorant. Not only was I oblivious to current events, but I didn’t have any real concrete views of my own. So when the TV told me that I should hate the bad orange man, hated him I did, and when Derek Chauvin pinned down George Floyd on millions of screens across the country, I joined in the outrage.

I was scared for minorities across the USA. I feared for people of my own skin color, who were forced to live in this white man’s world. And so like others, I signaled that we were going to be part of something greater. With this black box on our Instagrams, we were going to be a voice for the voiceless and pave the way for a future free of systemic racism. That was the plan.

That is, until I did some research and read my Bible after a cold shower.

I’m not quite sure when the flip happened for me, so truly I can only attribute it to the grace of God. Things weren’t adding up. I started by watching body cam footage, to reading police reports and even CCTV cameras of other incidents like Breonna Taylor’s. Every situation was messy, at best. So why were people interpreting them in such a monolithic way?

I stayed up that night — and the night after. By the third day, I was deep into Hegel, Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and the writings of the Frankfurt School. Some solid brothers in the faith walked with me through it all. Over and over, three words rose to the surface: Critical Race Theory. Whatever this was, it had fooled all of us.

My pastor wanted to bring the “experts” in to speak on race. I pushed back. That did not go well. Long story short, we eventually parted ways.

2021 - Like-Minded Saints

After departing my previous church, a place where I thought I was going to live out the rest of my days, I felt lost. There was no plan B, I had no ministry offers lined up, especially not ones where I could preach my convictions.

But in my searching, my friend from seminary introduced me to his church’s podcast. They had recently done an episode on liberation theology and from my understanding, they were the only ones in the area who were standing on biblical ground regarding the issue. There was an intern position open at the church. I applied and the rest is history.

During my first sermon at that church, I railed against Critical Race Theory. I was passionate. I was convinced it was a plague that the church needed to purge, and that its influence had ruined many well-meaning Reformed churches. I remember calling it “Critical Revenge Theory”, because it takes justice out of God’s hands and puts it in the hands of the “oppressed”. My thought was, “people need to hear this”.

When I came down, a brother pulled me aside and told me, “You don’t have to fight anymore”. He was right. This was a church that was mature beyond its years. Before I had even arrived, they had addressed this error and all its members were in agreement.

In Hindsight: Secondary and Tertiary Issues

This was unusual to me. For the past several years, I felt that I had lived in a theological wilderness. While I only mentioned Critical Race Theory, the truth is that was only the tipping point. I was a cessationist at a charismatic church. A complementarian serving under several women pastors. The list goes on. Every church I had been at convinced me that theological accuracy was secondary for successful ministry. But while I have nothing but respect for my previous pastors, one piece of wisdom that I have gleaned about in ministry in hindsight is this:

Sometimes secondary and tertiary issues do not remain secondary and tertiary issues.

At my current church, I have been dubbed the “CRT Guy” because of how often I speak out against it from the pulpit. I have since tried to cut back on it simply because there are other things the saints needs to hear. However, the reason I was so adamant against it is because 2020 revealed to me what inerrancy and infallibility meant for a lot of churches.

The claim after all, was that we lack clarity and the full revelation of God’s Word if we have not achieved diversity in a satisfactory way. While my objective in writing this is not to give a comprehensive analysis as to why this is wrong, the premise easily begs the question: “What is satisfactory? When is it enough and who determines that?”

After all, the main focal point of Scripture is not in its diversity of authors, literary genres or narratives (as beautiful and wonderful as those may be), but it is in its unity as the inspired revelation of God’s Word. It is the unfolding story of God reconciling a sinful people to Himself. What I was hearing from multiple churches that even had Reformed leanings was that we were missing out on an essential part of ministry by not uplifting minority voices and partaking in social justice. Obviously, this would presuppose that preaching the Word and the ministry of reconciliation to God was no longer a sufficient mission for the church. The new mission was equity, equality and discovering your intersectionality of oppression.

Perhaps a decade ago I would have felt I was splitting hairs. The main goal after all, is preaching the Gospel to the lost. However, ten years of ministry in hindsight have shown me that secondary and tertiary issues often stem from a faulty understanding of the primary. Even the descriptors “secondary and tertiary” are aimed towards describing what is unnecessary doctrine for saving faith. That much I affirm. However, when we use those descriptors, by no means are we using them to say that some things of Scripture are secondary and tertiary.

You may not be a complementarian, and perhaps that will not damn you, but by no means does that presume that John 3:16 is a primary text and 1 Timothy 2:11-15 isn’t.

Ten years have shown me that when a church has secondary and tertiary issues, be careful of what else may rear its head later down the line. Many seminarians have been gaslit into believing that theology takes a back seat in “real life” ministry. This is not true. I have seen the beauty of theological accuracy grow a church before my very eyes. Theology doesn’t hinder ministry, but rather it shapes it, guards it, and gives it life. Without sound doctrine, a church drifts with every cultural wind. But when a church clings to the whole counsel of God, even the so-called secondary things, it stands firm and grows strong, just as the Lord intends.