The Deep Center

The Radical Center, Part 1

In my opening article, I introduced what I’m calling the Radical Center: a way for the church to live with clarity and courage in an age of fragmentation.

Over the next several weeks, I want to explore five dimensions of this vision:

• The Deep Center – rooting ourselves in the essentials of the Christian faith

• The Generous Center – making space for disagreement without division

• The Mediating Center – cultivating a less-anxious presence in conflict

• The Contemplative Center – abiding deeply in the life of God

• The Cruciform Center – embracing the cost of staying centered

We begin with the foundation: the Deep Center.

A Tree That Can Withstand the Storm

Recently, I had an arborist come to our home to look at a massive pine tree in our backyard. It towers over our house. It’s beautiful, but also a little unsettling. I found myself wondering what might happen if it ever fell.

After examining it, the arborist reassured me that the tree was healthy. As I commented on its extraordinary height, he remarked, “The only way it can sustain that kind of height is with incredibly deep roots.”

His comment reminded me of my friend Tom Greggs, who often uses an image of deeply rooted tree to describe what is needed in our current theological moment. A tree cannot sustain wide-reaching branches without deep roots. If the roots are shallow, the tree becomes fragile, vulnerable to every strong wind. But when the roots go deep, the branches can stretch wide, offering shade, shelter, and life.

This raises a question for us: What would it mean for the American church to become a deeply rooted, widely branching tree again?

The Temptation of Shallow Roots

We are living in a moment of profound fragmentation. As our society has become more divided, the church has followed along. In many ways, the American church has mirrored the culture’s dynamics, especially in how we define who is “in” and who is “out.”

On both the Right and the Left, there has been a subtle shift toward expanding the center of the Christian faith to include more and more things. Political affiliations. Cultural positions. Secondary doctrinal interpretations. Social and ethical conclusions.

What emerges is a kind of doctrinal and ideological maximalism, a thickening of the boundary lines around our communities.

And the result is predictable: The more we add to the center, the more people we exclude. The more we demand uniformity, the more fragile our communities become.

Rediscovering the Center

What if the problem is not that our faith is too small, but that our center has become too crowded?

For most of Christian history, the church has had a remarkably simple answer to the question: What is at the center? The answer is found in the creeds: specifically, the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.

The Creeds are not exhaustive theological systems. They are not position papers on every ethical issue. They are not partisan manifestos. They are, quite simply, a shared confession of the essential story:

• God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth

• Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human, crucified and risen

• The Holy Spirit, present and active in the life of the church, bringing all things toward the New Creation.

These creeds do not say everything, but they say enough. They provide a theological center that is both deep and durable, one that is capable of holding the church together across cultures, centuries, and disagreements.

Or, to put it simply: The historic creeds are sufficient to hold the center.

Bounded Sets and Centered Sets

Sociologists sometimes describe communities in two different ways: bounded sets and centered sets.

A bounded set defines itself by its boundaries. The key question is: Who is inside and who is outside? Like a fenced pasture, the goal is to keep everyone in within clearly defined lines.

A centered set, by contrast, is organized around a center. The key question is: What are we moving toward? It’s less like a fence and more like a well, something life-giving that people continually return to.

Both models have their place. But in a complex, pluralistic world, the centered-set imagination offers something really important. It allows for movement and growth, real difference within a shared identity, and a focus on direction rather than a defined location.

In the language of faith, it asks not only “Do you agree with me on everything?” but “Are we oriented toward Christ together?”

Essentials and Non-Essentials

This is where the wisdom of my mentor John Stott has been so helpful. Stott insisted that the church must learn to distinguish between:

• Essentials: the core truths of the gospel

• Non-essentials (adiaphora) : matters on which faithful Christians may disagree

This distinction is not always easy, and it is obviously complicated from age to age. It requires humility, discernment, and ongoing conversation. But without this differentiation, something dangerous happens: We begin to treat non-essentials as essentials. And when that happens, we don’t get a stronger faith, we get a more brittle one. We get a faith that can’t bear disagreement, communities that fracture under pressure, and churches that confuse uniformity with unity.

Why the Deep Center Matters

Holding to a deep center, rooted in the essentials of the faith, creates at least two vital possibilities.

1// It Creates Space for Real Difference

When the center is clear and grounded, the branches can stretch wide. People can wrestle with complex and difficult issues. Communities can hold disagreement without immediate division. Conversations can become places of discernment rather than battlefields.

We’ll explore this more in the next essay on the Generous Center. But it begins with theological clarity about what is essential.

2// It Clarifies What Must Be Resisted

The deep center is not only about what we affirm, it is also about what we resist. Every generation faces the temptation to distort the gospel by fusing it with something else, by bringing something other than our confession of Jesus Christ into the center.

In our time, two distortions seem especially powerful:

• On one hand, the temptation to fuse Christian faith with national or ideological power

• On the other, the temptation to imagine human flourishing apart from God.

In moments like these, the church must return to its center and learn to speak clearly and even prophetically.

One of the most powerful examples of this is the Barmen Declaration in 1930s Germany, where Christian leaders resisted the attempt to merge the gospel with nationalist ideology. They did not create something new. They simply returned to the center: to the Lordship of Christ, and in doing so, they exposed the idolatry of their time.

This is what a deep center does. It gives us the clarity and courage to say: This belongs. That does not.

A Courageous Simplicity

It requires courage to live this way. It is not the courage of the loudest voice or the strongest opinion. It is the quieter, deeper courage of refusing to add to what God has already made central.

In a world that constantly pressures us to expand the list, to take sides, to draw sharper lines, and to prove our allegiances, the deep center invites us into something both simpler and harder: to root ourselves again in the essentials and to trust that they are enough.

An Invitation

What might it look like for your faith, your church, or your Christian community to become more deeply rooted? Where have you felt the pressure to add to the center? Where have secondary things begun to carry primary weight? Where might God be inviting you to return to the essentials? What might need to be resisted?

The health of the tree depends on the depth of its roots. And in an age of storm and strain, the church does not need wider boundaries nearly as much as it needs deeper roots.