Some people say that relationships are all about compromise.
I’m not sure.
He lives in NYC. She lives in Southern California. He loves the hustle, the bodegas, and the subway. She loves mountains, beaches, and sunshine. SoHo or SoCal? They compromise and now they live in Nebraska.
So much for meeting in the middle. No city; no beaches. This is the problem with compromise. It often creates two unhappy people.
We often want to split the difference. We seek win-wins. But this assumes that we can find a solution that works for both sides if we just have enough creativity. Author Chris Voss compares it to a man being unsure if the brown shoes or black shoes go best with the suit—so he wears one of each. It’s creative. But it doesn’t work.
Win-win solutions often fail because they ignore the larger problem: people weren’t in a gridlock because they lacked new ideas; they were stuck because nobody wanted to give anything up. We will never gain if we refuse to lose. There is no resurrection without a cross. Because the cross is undesirable, we choose compromise, a form of procrastination that bequeaths our problems to the next generation.
I love the gathering in Acts 15 where early church leaders make hard decisions about their future. Their topic is whether believers must follow Jewish customs in order to follow Jesus. The key leaders gather a variety of voices: those who are responsible, those who are affected, and those who can do something about it. This is critical: difficult choices must include diverse voices. Peter stands up and speaks from his experience. James stands up and speaks from Scripture. Both experience and Scripture are necessary for discernment.
The final decision required loss. Non-Jewish believers would abstain from sexual immorality, blood, strangled animals, and meat sacrificed to idols. Jewish believers lost on their insistence that Gentiles would follow Jesus and Moses. Gentiles now have to vet their butcher before they buy a ribeye. One group surrenders some of their identity. The other surrenders some freedom.
Acts 15 might sound like a funeral for the early church. They say “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (15:28), but many of the original hearers might not have been very good with the decision. It might have felt like the beginning of the end.
But the opposite turns out to be the truth. God was just getting started.
Could a person in Jerusalem that day imagine that their faith would be robust and growing in many parts of the world 2,000 years later? Could they fathom that their convictions would lead to something that is now believed around the globe?
I doubt it. We shouldn’t worry either.
Our small losses over hard decisions must not stop us from making tough calls. Being honest and truthful is part of our calling. We cannot procrastinate. Before long, a compromising church will be a compromised church.
It’s time we gain a new way of making hard decisions. We can start by losing the language of win-win.
