Being Nice

“Well behaved people rarely make history.”
- paraphrase of a popular feminist bumper sticker

All authority in heaven and on earth
Has been given to me.
Go therefore and populate your buildings,
Baptizing them in the name of daily quiet times,
Friendliness and clean living.
- Matthew 28, The American Cultural Church, Revised Edition

As someone who has made a few posts that could be considered not very nice, I’d like to comment on the appeal for niceness on the site. Or any place else in the church, for that matter.

Tanya told me a year or so ago that I am friendly but not nice. I always considered those two words as synonymous but when I asked her what she meant, she said something to the effect that I am a very good friend and am friendly toward people. But because I say what I think needs to be said, even though it may hurt someone’s feelings, I am not nice. Nice people do not offend others. Her observation was kind of unsettling for me and I fought it for a while but eventually, I realized she was right.

And it fit with an idea I have held for a long time regarding the church: We are infatuated with being nice. We teach the importance of being nice, we model it in our churches and we expect it of each other. For sure, we are to live in unity and to show kindness to each other. But I believe that the American church confuses unity with the absence of conflict. And if there is conflict, then someone, somewhere isn’t being very nice.

And the Doctrine of Niceness says that not being nice isnt very, well… nice.

I’m not exactly sure where this value on niceness comes from. I think it may come from the sanitized version of Jesus and God’s people that has surfaced over time. Niceness has become a sort of oral tradition in the American church. It is a lens through which we see the Scriptures and how we filter our relationships. We see Jesus as this nice enough kind of man who lived among us and strangely died for our sins. We’ve made Jesus into someone who smiles all the time and only has positive things to say.

Could it be that we have reduced God’s grace and patience to something that is nothing more than Nice?

But after 20 years in church, I have come to a conclusion: Chronic niceness is empty and hollow. It’s not real. After 20 years of sitting in churches, listening to sermons and engaging in the fake banter of the post-sermon afterglow, I have come to believe that one of the silent killers in the American church is the disease of niceness. “Hi, how are you?” “I’m great. And how are things with you?” “Pretty good. How’re the kids?…” Following close behind is the beast of gossip, whose vileness we all unleash on one another behind each other’s backs. I’ve done it countless times and so have you. That’s not very nice of either of us.

I’m always suspicious of couples who say they never fight or disagree. Whenever I see some beaming couple say, “We don’t argue or fight,” I tend to think, “Well, then you either don’t know each other very well or you’re stuffing a lot of emotions in the name of being nice.”

Without positive conflict, there can be no intimacy, there can be nothing of depth and substance. The best friends I have, the ones I trust the most, I trust specifically because I have been engaged in conflict with them and have emerged from it with them knowing that the relationship has been tested and proven. Conflict strengthens relationships when it leads to the resolution of a collision of ideas, wants or needs and when people learn how to sort through the emotions and incomplete communication that accompanies conflict. I trust Tanya more than any other person in large part because we have fought with each other and gradually learned that we can trust each other. Isn’t it funny how trust and conflict are intertwined?

Conflict can be good. Too much conflict is destructive and not enough conflict leads to relational atrophy. One of the wisest insights I have yet heard about marriage is this: When a couple stops fighting, it’s all over. When you don’t fight anymore, you’ve given up. When you don’t fight anymore, you’ve stopped caring whether it works or not. If this is true, and I believe it is, then a lack of conflict is a death knell for a marriage. And it’s the same with friendships.

But conflict is the evidence of at least two people at that moment, not being very nice to each other.

We can find in the scriptures numerous examples of God’s people not being very nice. To wit:

Jesus:
* You brood of vipers
* To Peter: Get behind me Satan
* You whitewashed tombs
* Clearing the money changers from the temple
* To the Samaritan woman: You worship what you do not know…
* To the 7 churches: This one thing I have against you…
* Jesus intentionally letting Lazarus die and then even hanging back a while before going to raise him from the dead. It wasn’t very nice of Jesus to let Lazarus die intentionally.

All of the prophets:
Take your pick. They have lots of not very nice things to say.

Paul and John Mark:
Some time later Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us go back and visit the brothers in all the towns where we preached the word of the Lord and see how they are doing.” Barnabas wanted to take John, also called Mark, with them, but Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with them in the work. They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company. Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus, but Paul chose Silas and left, commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord. He went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches.

Peter:
Read the opening chapters of Acts and notice how many times Peter says to his Jewish audiences: “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.” Over and over, Peter tells the Jews, “You crucified the Christ.” That wasn’t very nice of him to say that sort of thing.

Why is this significant?

Because sin pervades all that we do. It is a most severe and tragic irony that the church places such a high value on being nice and not being willing to offend one another in a healthy way and in the right time. It is tragic and ironic because of all the people in the world who could be adequately equipped to confront the reality of sin in our lives, we are just like the rest of the world: we hide from it. Paul said that if Christ was not crucified, then we are of all men most to be pitied. Why? Because fundamentally, the life of Christ brings something different to our approach to how we live our lives. If the best we can offer people is clean living and an unoffensive life, doesn’t that mean we have missed something? I mean, I really find it hard to believe that Jesus died to make us good, nice people. It has to be more than that.

We get tons of teaching about how to be nice to each other but precious little about how to work through the hardships of life. I believe that we have, in a subtle yet profound way, crippled the power of body life by being unwilling to offend each other, by placing a higher value on being nice to each other at all times than on seeking a balance between conflict and harmony. There is a time for peace, and a time for war.

I believe that we are over-schooled in the expectations of niceness and fairly stunted in terms of being able to grapple with one another’s sins. And because being nice is so important, most of God’s people spend their lives hiding their sin in shame and contempt. We bury it in our marriages and in our friendships. We swallow a lot of hard emotion all because we don’t want to plunge into a deeper level of conflict because we fear, sometimes rightly, that the conflict will blow everything apart.

If this is true, then being nice is probably nothing more than fear dressed in happy colors.

We live in an area that could fairly be called the epicenter of innovation in America, if not the world. Innovation is driven relentlessly by conflict. It is the never ending process of idea being set up against idea against another idea where all the churn eventually leads to iterative, incremental improvements. Periodically, that churn also leads to to a breakthrough. The American democratic and free market ideals are based, in part, on the value of conflict, where ideas can compete in an open forum, where they are considered, debated, shaped and eventually adopted as beliefs worthy of being held.

Innovation, transformation and change all are dependent on conflict. Entire industries have died because of the impulse of innovation. Many carriage makers went out of business once Henry Ford’s contraption captured the imagination of the world. But when was the last time you longed to ride a horse to work? Do you feel bad for those whose businesses failed back in the 1900s? How about the relatively recent collapse of silicon valley after the dot coms busted? It’s more recent but I’ve heard story after story from people who said that it was hard, but good came out of it. Some even say the bust transformed their lives. The dot com wave was a macroscopic version of the collision of ideas and the temporary hardship that resulted from that collision.

The Journey is undergoing an ambitious reinvention. Incrementalism will not get us to the place we want to be. Neither will change for the sake of change. But do not be deceived: if we successfully make the change we want to make, feelings will be hurt, ideas and beliefs will be challenged, relationships will be strained and lives will suffer varying degrees of disruption. You can read page after page in the scriptures about the importance of not sacrificing God’s work on the alter of niceness. Jesus is no pacifist. He died a brutal death when he threw his very body into battle with Satan and when he comes back, he will come to kick some cosmic ass. It will not be nice. It will not be pretty. But it will be just and it will be glorious.

So, we take the full counsel of the word to heart: we are to live in harmony, we are to be friendly and hospitable, we are to care deeply about the condition of our relationships, we are to bring goodness into the world. We are to encourage one another and not give up the habit of meeting together. Yet, if we are to flourish, rather than merely survive, then it is important that we learn how to engage conflict with each other. Paul urged Euodia and Syntyche to agree with each other in the Lord, which I take to mean: work it out, hash over it, say what you mean and mean what you say, ask for forgiveness when you go over the line, be willing to believe the best in the other person, accept that our communication is imperfect as are our motives. But in all this, agree that what matters is that our community glorifies God and work to that goal in unity.

Being unified does not mean stuffing your thoughts and emotions. Being unified means maintaining a coherent community of vital relationships that have trust and strength to enter into occasions and seasons of conflict in order that each person would agree together what it means to reveal Christ to the world.

I wonder what would happen in a church that abandoned niceness and instead committed to unity.

—

Dave Reynolds
dave@bimmergeek.com
http://www.bimmergeek.com