Navigating the doctrinal divide

A few weeks ago, I met a woman my age during a trip home to New York. We had gone to the same elementary school, and when I saw her I recalled her face and name—even the spelling—with the kind of sharp recollection we have only for our earliest memories. I remembered instantly that she had invited me once to a youth service at a Pentecostal church. As I walked toward her, the memory of that service flooded over me afresh, complete with its flashing lights, intense volume of worship music, and manner of preaching fifth-grade me was totally unaccustomed to.

We had not spoken in the interval between fifth grade and age 24. But here we were, meeting once again in church—this time, the small, one-piano, no-frills, no-spotlight church I grew up in—for a teaching conference on marriage. Like me, she had recently married, and during breaks she told me a few stories about the obstacles she had faced. To my surprise, they paralleled mine. She had grown up Pentecostal and married a conservative Baptist. I had grown up Reformed Baptist and married a man with a more Pentecostal upbringing. In the brief bout of friendship we shared that weekend, we stared down the same tough-rooted problem, one few dating books consider worthy of mention: How do you go about marrying someone whose theological story differs strongly from yours?

When I was first falling in love—back during that hurricane—I remember Skyping my parents with panic in my heart. I had so long loved the idea of joining myself to a man whose theological convictions and rearing matched mine exactly that I felt like I was committing a profound error. I will never forget the look of my parents when I confessed this struggle to them. Their reaction staggered me. They beamed out of happy faces and said, “Marriage is a journey. Your convictions will change. His will change. You will grow, and you will grow together.” With this ray of wisdom lighting my path, I launched forward in relative peace.

The same did not happen to my new/old friend. She said the theological chasm between her and her husband’s rearings had been too much for their parents to overcome. Because of this, she said, a wedge of deep dislike had fallen between the families.

People often talk about denominational disagreement like it’s a shameful thing we should shut up in the cupboard and forget. We should march on toward unity without discussion, clinging to essentials and disregarding the finer points of doctrinal or practical preference. What this approach forgets is the deep personal nature of spiritual history and practice. When you have grown up encountering God deeply in a certain way, you will never be satisfied locking it up—nor, frankly, will you be able to.

So where is the middle ground between bitter division and the erasure of a person’s spiritual history? My husband Jonathan and I found the middle ground by article-swapping, Bible-searching, idea-wrestling, and simply learning how to talk to each other. It was not easy. Usually, it hurt. But what my parents said came true. We grew together.