Both in my embodied life and my online life, I have been struck by the disconnect between love and truth in many arenas. Paul teaches in Ephesians 4:15 that the church grows by “speaking the truth with love.” In my youth, fundamentalist pastors preached truth dogmatically, but they did so in angry, demeaning ways. “Just preaching the truth IS loving,” many would say. The problem with that line of reasoning is that the Bible explicitly says it is not. The Bible explicitly says that growth in the church relies on the addition of love to the speaking of truth. Furthermore, the Bible goes on to describe in detail exactly what it means when it uses that word love.
4 Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not arrogant, 5 is not rude, is not self-seeking, is not irritable, and does not keep a record of wrongs. 6 Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
I Cor. 13 CSB
Speak the truth with patience, the Bible tells us. Speak the truth with kindness. Do not speak the truth arrogantly. Do not speak the truth rudely. Do not speak the truth irritably. Speak the truth while bearing with and hoping for those to whom you speak. Speak the truth with love.
I have found in adulthood that the flip side of the problem exists as well, among those who speak “lovingly” disconnected from solid truth. Truth becomes relative as long as you are personally affirming. But there is no kindness in downplaying the importance of God’s instructions. God’s truth is good. His laws in Scripture, particularly around covenant faithfulness and sexual restraint, protect us.
Over the years, I’ve noticed and, by the kind providence of God, become friends with a number of women who have similar convictions about both the truth of God and the love of God. We grieve together both when truth is diminished and when love is tossed aside in the defending of that truth. We are also convicted that we are not the final deciders of what is and is not Christian truth, but that we can lean into the teachings from the early church as they worked through the creeds and confessions that have guided the church in the centuries since Christ’s ascension to heaven.
We have been talking for a few years now, and we finally launched our initiative this week at thepelicanproject.com. We aren’t planning big conferences. We aren’t building each others platforms. We are simply existing. We are being. But we are doing so in cohort with one another, because it helps to find others who share similar values so that you do not feel alone in your own corner of the world. We are more committed to our real-life embodied relationships than to our online ones. Our ministries are in person more than over social media. But we also have found encouragement toward and resources for embodied discipleship within our cohort, and we hope to help others find it as well.
There are 19 founding members, and we expect to add more down the road. But anyone who can sign off on our Mission and Commitments can right now join our Facebook discussion group called The Clutch. Check out our website, read through our Mission and Commitments, and hit the link at Join the Conversation (which leads to a google form to fill out) if you think you’d benefit from such encouragement as well.
