Today, we're pleased to share with you an audio essay written and read by Jamie Dunlap entitled, Help, People at Church are Driving Me Crazy.

Jamie's new book is, Love the Ones Who Drive You Crazy, Eight Truths for Pursuing Unity in Your Church.

Help, people at church are driving me crazy.

Written and read by Jamie Dunlop.

Who isn't discouraged by conflict at church?

After all, church should be as close as we get to heaven and earth, right?

Yet there are so many opportunities

for disagreement at church. Conflict comes from differences of opinion, like whether church

leaders were right to reduce support for the crisis pregnancy center you love. It comes from

differences of conviction, like that church member whose social media feed promotes positions

you found morally troubling. Sometimes it's differences of culture or class that make you feel like an outsider in your own church,

and sometimes it's no deeper than people who rub you the wrong way.

All those disagreements and differences can really drive us crazy.

Sometimes that's the result of sin and we need to repent,

where it's the sign of an unhealthy church

and we need to leave.

But very often, perhaps more often than we think, all these differences and disagreements

are not a sign that things have gone tragically wrong, but instead gloriously right.

After all, a church should be centered on Christ alone.

Not on Christ and a bunch of secondary matters, like Christ and shared tastes in music,

or by Christ and shared convictions about children's school and options, or by Christ

and shared revulsion at so-and-so social media post.

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