Disagree (2 min vid + text)

Winsome understanding . . .

. . . with respectful vigor.

We must practice the famed words “with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15).

Learn the questions to ask. Watch our two minute video (full text below).

How I treat others who may disagree with me shows the depth of my love for others.

Subscribe to “Truth in Two” videos from Comenius (here). Mark is President of The Comenius Institute (website). Dr. Eckel spends time with Christian young people in public university (1 minute video), hosts a weekly radio program with diverse groups of guests (1 minute video), and interprets culture from a Christian vantage point (1 minute video). Consider becoming a Comenius patron (here).

Picture Credit: Snappy Goat

FULL TEXT:

A student approached me with this question, “How do I respond to people with whom I disagree?”

In my usual way, I asked questions. Here are the three I suggested to the student then, to us all, now.

“Have you studied perspectives other than your own, giving clear hearing to their thinking?”

“Are you able to reproduce the opposite position to the satisfaction of those who hold it?”

“Do you give an intentionally vibrant, robust, and winsome Christian response?”

For twenty years I taught a full day of classes in Christian schools. During all those years I was teaching students both the tenets of Christian thinking and how to think as Christians. We would listen to the music my students listened to. We watched films and movie clips from movies students watched. We invited atheists into class to give them a fair hearing. We engaged unbelievers in the sciences, the arts, the humanities, and every vocation.

Why? Why did I expose Christian students to non-Christian thinking?

Because if I did not prepare students for the world they were entering I was not doing my job.

Some of my harshest critics were Christian parents. “Why do you have to read, listen to, watch, consider (fill in the blank)?”

My answer was always the same, “Your children will soon be leaving the warmth of your homes and are about to enter a cold world. What will you give them to prepare for the elements?”

You see, the questions I left with the student that day are the kinds of questions we all need.

Will I treat others and their beliefs with respect?

And do I know the reason for my own belief to speak it and live it winsomely and without apology?

The gospel is the warm response to a cold world.

For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, President of the Comenius Institute, personally seeking Truth wherever it’s found.

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