We should think through tertiary and secondary matters and think carefully about what the scriptures say and how our approach to them will impact our churches. We may not write people out of the corpus if they land differently to us, but where we land may have implications that matter far more than we tend to think.

If you have been around the church any length of time, you will have probably come across people talking about primary and secondary issues. Primary issues are those essential gospel matters over which we cannot simply agree to disagree. Secondary matters were thought to be those matters that we can disagree over without writing each other out of the kingdom as a result. For many, primary meant important and secondary meant, effectively, unimportant.

Seeing some of the problems with that, theological triage advocates have seen something closer to a three tiered system of parsing issues. First order issues are those primary gospel matters the like of which, if they are denied, makes a person an unbeliever. Second order issues are those that don’t mean a person isn’t a believer but would make it hard for two people to sit comfortably together in the same church. Disagreements at the secondary level might not stop you doing gospel work together but might stop you belonging in membership to the same church. Third order issues are those matters that you might comfortably disagree on without thinking anyone outside the kingdom nor suggesting they couldn’t be part of your church.

These approaches to thinking about how to understand points of disagreement in the church is really important. We do need to know whether this particular disagreement is one that means a person is showing they don’t belong to Jesus at all or whether they just disagree with your particular perspective that is not a core part of belonging to a local church, let alone to the kingdom. If we are going to have any ability to live in community with people we will inevitably disagree with from time to time, and knowing we have to interact with believers from beyond the four walls of our own local church here and there, we do have to think carefully about how to judge these issues. But recognising that, we shouldn’t fall into the opposing ditch of suggesting secondary or even tertiary essentially mean unimportant.

Read More