Everyone Is Welcome. Not Everything Is.
There is a man somewhere in Lagos right now — perhaps in Victoria Island, perhaps in Surulere — who has discovered that the safest opinion he can hold is no opinion at all. He has learned that the shortest route to social peace is to smile at everything, affirm everything, and reserve his actual convictions for the inside of his own skull. He has been told, in language that sounds kind but carries the weight of a verdict, that he is intolerant. And because no one in the modern world wants to be that word, he has started to wonder whether his faith, with its insistence on things like truth and repentance and the uniqueness of Christ, is not some kind of personality defect in need of correction.
This man is not alone. He sits in churches from Abuja to Atlanta, from Accra to Aberdeen. He has been made to feel that the most Christian thing he can do is hold the door of belief wide open and wave every idea through with a smile. The church, it seems, has confused hospitality with theology. It has mistaken open arms for an open mind. And in its desperate hunger for the approval of a culture that has never particularly loved it, it has traded the sharpness of the gospel for the smoothness of a press release.
Let us talk about tolerance. Not dismiss it — talk about it. Because the conversation is worth having, and the confusion is worth clearing.
The Word That Changed Its Meaning Without Telling Anyone
Words do not announce when they are quietly changing meaning. They simply shift, the way a river shifts course over decades and one morning you look up and realise the water is no longer where it used to be.
Tolerance is that kind of word.
Earlier dictionaries understood tolerance as the endurance of things one finds objectionable — the capacity to let someone exist, to live alongside them, without requiring that you approve of everything they do or believe. This was, in its own way, a serious virtue. It asked something of you. It cost you something. It meant sitting across from someone whose ideas you found dangerous or wrong, and choosing not to crush them.
Today’s definition has moved. Significantly. Tolerance now means, in the mouths of most who wield it, the acceptance of feelings, habits, and beliefs different from your own — not mere endurance, but embrace. The word has been promoted from referee to cheerleader. It no longer asks you to let ideas exist; it asks you to applaud them. And it reserves its fiercest condemnation — here is the irony that deserves to be printed large — for anyone who dares to say that some ideas might be wrong.
There is a name for the position that demands tolerance from everyone while extending it to no one. The name is hypocrisy. And the people who shout loudest for tolerance tend to be the ones least willing to tolerate the possibility that Jesus Christ is who he said he was.
The apologist Rich Deem made the observation that has stayed with me: the “intolerance” of Christians is a direct result of the teachings of their founder — a man who, by today’s standards, would be among the most intolerant figures in recorded history.
His name is Jesus of Nazareth. We should probably spend some time with him.
The Passage Everyone Quotes and Almost Nobody Finishes Reading
Matthew 15 is a chapter that makes modern religious sensibility very uncomfortable. The Pharisees have arrived with a complaint: Jesus’ disciples are not observing the tradition of the elders. They are not washing their hands in the ceremonially prescribed way. This is not, to them, a trivial matter. It is identity, heritage, culture, religion — all bound up together in the water poured over hands before a meal.
Jesus does not soften his response. He calls them hypocrites. He quotes Isaiah at them. He accuses them of nullifying the Word of God for the sake of their traditions. And then, after they leave and the disciples come to him with the nervous question that disciples have always brought to prophets — Do you know that what you said offended them? — he says something that would have earned him a strongly worded letter from the modern church’s committee on public relations:
“Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.” — Matthew 15:13-14 (NIV) Leave them. Blind guides. A pit. This is not the language of someone calibrating his message for maximum inoffensiveness. This is not a man worried about what the Jerusalem Post would say tomorrow morning. This is a man who loved people enough to tell them, with the unflinching directness of a physician who has seen the X-ray, exactly what the diagnosis was.
The church at Thyatira received a different kind of rebuke — not for being too harsh, but for being too accommodating. They had made space for a woman whose teaching was leading people into sin:
“Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols.” — Revelation 2:20 (NIV) Read that sentence again. I have this against you. The charge is not cruelty. The charge is not harshness. The charge is tolerance. The church had been so eager to keep the peace, so reluctant to cause offence, that it had allowed a false teacher to do her work unchallenged — and the risen Christ, standing among his lampstands, called it a failure.
There are cities in West Africa and in North America, and in Europe where the same charge could be levelled today. Churches so anxious not to offend that they have stopped proclaiming. Pulpits so occupied with affirmation that they have run out of room for truth. Congregations so culturally fluent that they have become theologically illiterate. They have tolerated Jezebel and called it love.
What Jesus Was Actually Doing When He Offended People
It is important to say plainly: Jesus was not deliberately provocative. He did not wake up each morning looking for someone to upset. He was not the religious equivalent of a man who picks fights at bus stops for sport. The offence was not the point. The truth was the point. The offence was simply what happened when truth entered a room that had been furnished entirely with comfortable lies.
When he taught in his hometown, they took offence at him not because he insulted them, but because they could not reconcile the carpenter’s son with the authority of his words. When he said “Blessed is he who does not stumble on account of me” (Matthew 11:6, ESV), he was acknowledging something real: following him would cost something, and not everyone was prepared to pay it. When he cleared the temple, turning over tables and driving out merchants, the offence was the cost of what was being protected — a house of prayer that had been converted into a marketplace.
John the Baptist lost his head because he told a king the truth about his marriage. The apostles were killed not for being provocative but for being persistent. Not for agitating but for proclaiming. The beheadings and crucifixions of the early church were not the price of rudeness. They were the price of clarity.
Truth has always been the most dangerous substance in the world. More dangerous than money, more volatile than politics, more threatening to the powerful than any army. And the history of the church — the real history, not the sanitised version sold in comfortable paperback — is the history of people who chose truth over safety and paid for it with everything they had.
We in Nigeria know this in our bones. The earliest Christian converts in Yorubaland did not step away from the Orisa quietly or without consequence. To confess Christ in a compound where every ancestor had poured libations was not a polite lifestyle choice. It was a rupture. Families fractured. Inheritance was withheld. The converts knew what they were walking into, and they walked in anyway. They were not tolerant of what they had left behind. They were converted which is, when you examine it closely, the most intolerant act a human being can perform. It is the act of saying: this old thing is false, and I am choosing the true one.
The God Who Is Slow to Anger and Will Not Be Mocked Forever
Here is where the argument gets careful, because the truth requires holding two things at once — things that the modern mind, trained on clean binaries, finds difficult to carry in the same hand.
God is intolerant of sin. This is not a minor footnote in the biblical story; it is the reason the story exists. The whole narrative of Scripture — the covenants, the law, the prophets, the cross, the resurrection, the coming judgment — is the story of a holy God dealing with a creation that has broken his design. His holiness is not a cold abstraction. It is the burning fire that cannot coexist with what corrupts. He is not merely uncomfortable with sin. He is fundamentally, essentially, cosmically opposed to it.
And yet:
“This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” — 1 Timothy 2:3-4 (ESV) The same God who cannot look upon sin without judgment desires that every sinner — every single one — would come home. He is, as Peter puts it, “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9, ESV). His longsuffering is not weakness; it is strategy. He is giving time, because he knows what judgment costs, and he would rather save than condemn.
A Yoruba proverb puts it plainly: the Lord keeps calling, hoping you will turn back. The God of Scripture is precisely this: patient beyond all reasonable expectation, long-suffering past the point where any human judge would have closed the file, yet absolutely firm about where the road ends if repentance does not come.
This is not contradiction. This is holiness in full. Love that tells you the truth about your condition, and justice that means the truth will eventually be enforced. God tolerates much. He has been tolerating us for centuries — our idolatry, our pride, our creative theological inventions that have the shape of worship and the content of self-service. But there is a horizon. And beyond it, as Jesus told the cities of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum, is something worse than Sodom:
“But I tell you that it will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.” — Matthew 11:24 (NIV) Sodom, which burned. More bearable for Sodom than for the cities that had seen miracles and looked away. This is not a God who tolerates everything indefinitely. This is a God who loves with a ferocity that demands a response.
The Night Someone Offended Me Into the Kingdom
There is a testimony buried in the source material for this article that deserves to be pulled into the light, because it says something that no amount of theological argument can say as well.
A young man’s car breaks down late at night. A friend — a teenager, no seminary training, no carefully crafted evangelism strategy — stops and offers him a ride. The very first words out of his mouth: “Are you a Christian? If you aren’t, you’re going to hell.”
The man who received that question almost asked to be dropped at the side of the road. The words landed on him like an open palm. He stayed only because the alternative was a long walk in the dark. And the young evangelist, apparently unaware that he was supposed to be more pastoral about this, kept sharing the gospel until they reached the destination.
Five years passed. And the man gave his life to Christ.
That question — blunt, graceless by modern standards, utterly without technique — nagged him for five years. Because he knew it was true. Not because it was delivered perfectly. Not because the messenger had calibrated his emotional intelligence to the moment. But because truth, even when it arrives without manners, has a way of finding the wound it was made for.
I want to be careful here. This is not a licence for cruelty. This is not permission to bludgeon people with Bible verses and call it evangelism. The Christian life is one of love — genuine, sacrificial, costly love for people — and that love includes the patience to earn the right to be heard. But it also includes the courage to speak when the moment comes, without first sanding down every hard edge of the gospel until nothing remains sharp enough to cut through indifference.
The cross is an offence. Paul says so, plainly. “The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18, ESV). You cannot make it palatably inoffensive without making it useless. You cannot remove the scandal without removing the salvation.
The Most Intolerant Sentence Ever Spoken
If we are honest — and the apologist must be honest, even when it is inconvenient — there is one statement in all of human history that the modern world finds more offensive than almost anything else. Not a political manifesto. Not a religious law. Not a philosophical claim. A sentence spoken by a carpenter on the night before his death:
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” — John 14:6 (ESV) Not a way. The way. Not one truth among many truths. The truth. Not a life option on the menu of spiritual experience. The life.
This sentence has no room for the polite pluralism that the modern world requires of all religions. It makes no allowance for the comfortable idea that all roads lead to the same place and the differences between them are merely aesthetic. It stands in the middle of history like a wall, and it says: here, and not elsewhere. This way, and not that one.
All roads may lead to the top of the mountain. Perhaps. Different traditions, different philosophies, different spiritual quests, all ascending. But at the summit there is a door. And the man who built the door has told us what the key is. You can dispute his authority to make that declaration. You can reject the claim and live with the consequences. What you cannot do what intellectual honesty will not permit is pretend he said something other than what he said.
He said: no one. He meant: no one.
This is not Christianity at its most arrogant. This is Christianity at its most honest. The gospel does not offer a buffet. It offers a rescue. And rescues, by their nature, come with conditions — you must acknowledge that you are in danger, and you must accept the hand being extended. Telling someone they are drowning is not unkind. Pretending they are fine while they go under — that is the real cruelty.
What Love Actually Demands
Here is the volta. Here is where the floor shifts.
We have spent this entire article talking about intolerance and we have not yet said the thing that matters most. Because the question is not really whether Christians should be tolerant or intolerant. The question is what it actually means to love someone.
If a doctor knows that the growth is malignant and does not tell the patient, we do not call that kindness. We call it negligence. If a friend knows the bridge is out and waves you cheerfully toward it anyway, we do not call that compassion. We call it betrayal. Love — real love, the kind that costs something, the kind that was willing to go to a cross to prove its point — does not withhold the truth to protect the comfort of the moment. It speaks, even when speaking is harder than staying silent.
The church is not called to be the world’s most enthusiastic validator. It is called to be the pillar and foundation of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15). Not a pillar of niceness. Not a foundation of affirmation. Truth. The thing that, as Jesus himself said, sets people free.
You can love a person genuinely, warmly, sacrificially love them while believing that what they believe is wrong. You can treat every human being as a person made in the image of God, and mean it with your whole heart, while also refusing to pretend that all belief systems lead to the same place. These are not contradictions. They are the two hands of authentic Christian witness, held together in the same person, at the same time, toward the same people.
What we cannot do — what faithfulness will not allow — is choose between love and truth as though they were rivals. They are not rivals. They are married. Separate them and you get, on one side, a loveless truth that beats people over the head with a Bible, and on the other side, a truthless love that holds people’s hands as they walk toward a cliff.
Neither of those is the gospel. The gospel is both. Always both.
The Invitation
There is a reader somewhere at the end of this article who has been called intolerant one too many times. Who has started to wonder whether their convictions are a problem to be solved rather than a gift to be offered. Who has watched their church drift toward affirmation and away from proclamation, and has felt the creeping suspicion that something precious is being traded away for something cheap.
To that reader: you were not wrong to notice. The discomfort you feel is the friction of truth against compromise, and it is supposed to feel like friction. Do not mistake the discomfort for a sign that you should stop believing. It may be the most important sign that you should keep going.
Speak the truth. Speak it in love — real love, not the sentimental kind that flinches at hard sentences, but the kind that was willing to be crucified to make the truth available. Speak it with the patience of someone who knows that seeds take time, and the courage of someone who has read the end of the book and knows how the story finishes.
Offend, when the truth requires it. Do not go looking for offence. Do not cultivate it. But do not run from it either, when it arrives as the natural consequence of saying something real in a world that has grown very comfortable with beautiful lies.
And remember — because this is the thing that steadies the hand when the pushback comes — that somewhere, five years from now, someone may receive the truth you spoke today and discover that it has been nagging them all along. Not because you were clever. Not because you were eloquent. But because the truth you carried was alive, and alive things find a way.
The most intolerant statement ever made was also the most loving. No one comes to the Father except through me. Not because it excludes, but because it shows the door. Not because it condemns, but because it saves everyone who chooses to walk through it.
That door is still open.
Biblical References
- Matthew 15:13-14 (NIV) — Used to establish that Jesus responded to false religious tradition with what modern culture would call intolerance, dismissing the Pharisees without apology or softening.
- Revelation 2:20 (NIV) — The rebuke to the church at Thyatira, where tolerance of false teaching is identified as a spiritual failure, not a virtue.
- Matthew 11:6 (ESV) — Jesus’ acknowledgment that he would be a stumbling block; establishes that offence caused by truth is not a pastoral failure.
- Matthew 5:45 (NIV) — God’s common grace extended to the righteous and unrighteous alike; distinguishes universal love from universal theological agreement.
- Matthew 11:24 (NIV) — The comparative judgment on cities that rejected Christ’s miracles; demonstrates that tolerance of unbelief carries eternal consequences.
- 1 Timothy 2:3-4 (ESV) — God’s desire for all people to be saved; used to hold divine holiness and divine mercy in necessary tension.
- 2 Peter 3:9 (ESV) — God’s longsuffering as the logic behind his patience with a sinful world; paired with Yoruba proverbial wisdom on God’s persistent call.
- 1 Corinthians 1:18 (ESV) — The word of the cross as folly to the perishing; establishes that the gospel’s offensiveness is inherent, not incidental.
- John 14:6 (ESV) — The centrepiece of the argument: the exclusive claim of Christ as the way, the truth, and the life — the most intolerant and most loving sentence ever spoken.
- 1 Timothy 3:15 (NIV) — The church as pillar and foundation of truth; frames the church’s vocation as proclamation, not validation.
External Sources and Figures Referenced
- Rich Deem (Christian apologist, GodAndScience.org) — Quoted on the “intolerance” of Christ as the logical origin of Christian exclusivism.
- Yoruba proverb: the Lord keeps calling, hoping you will turn back. Used to illustrate God’s longsuffering and persistent call toward repentance, grounding the biblical portrait of God in African communal wisdom.