Episode 155: Revisiting What It Means To Be Winsome

What kinds of stuff do Tim and Rick read? Some of our listeners would like to know. So on today’s episode they discuss an article on “winsomeness” and whether being winsome in public engagement and public controversies is biblical. Some would disagree and say being winsome is unbiblical and unhelpful. How might we engage with such thinking? What is there to commend? What is up for a charitable critique? If you’ve ever wondered how Tim and Rick understand what it means to be winsome, you’ll benefit from this episode.

Transcript

Tim Muehlhoff: 00:02 Welcome to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. My name is Tim Muehlhoff. I'm a professor of communication at Biola University in La Mirada, California. I'm also the senior director of Biola's Winsome Conviction project that tries to open lines of communication rather than close them. I don't do this alone. I do it with my co-director, Dr. Rick Langer, who's emeritus from Biola and now lives in Colorado and is a full-time grandparent, but also has not given up on civility in our lifetime and still helps run the Winsome Conviction Project. Rick, welcome. Thanks, Tim. Great to be with you on this.

Rick Langer: 00:39 Looking forward to chatting about a few things.

Tim Muehlhoff: 00:42 So we thought it'd be kind of fun, Rick. You and I read uh widely, and uh obviously we read a lot of stuff on communication civility. So we thought it'd be kind of fun to let listeners know what's the stuff we're reading that's made an impact on us. We don't necessarily agree with all of it, but but it's made us think about civility in new ways. You recently came across an article that kind of got you thinking about civility.

Rick Langer: 01:08 Yeah, I did. And this is one of those articles that simply put in one article a bunch of things that I've heard and I've heard in other places as well. So it's nothing new, but it got me thinking again about kind of a persistent problem that we have, I think, as we as we think about the way we do our discourse, and in this case, particularly about the word winsomeness, which obviously for you and me has like a special value. So let me give a uh make a quick intro comment about our our experience with this word winsome, because it is uh actually a helpful piece of background information for a bit of this controversy that's rattling around. So you and I first published a book called Winsome Persuasion back in 2017. So that's you know, nine years ago now or what? Good grief. I can't believe it's good grief. Really? Yeah, I think that's how the math works. I don't know. But anyhow, we what happens when you when you write a book, we had this working title for you know Christian counterpublics or something like that, which probably means nothing to the average person on the street, which our publishers at Intervarsity quickly identified and said, Yeah, you guys need some help on the title. They came up with a bunch of different title ideas. We knocked a bunch of things around. One of them was this what had the phrase winsome persuasion as the key element of title. And it was, you know, talking about uh, you know, the our our discourse in the in the public square. So that ended up becoming the title of the book. And I think we both liked the title just fine. We had no complaint with it, but we are not like people who always say, oh, winsome is the perfect word. Winsome is this word that got stuck on our book by our editors uh and our publisher. So fast forward a few years, and someone says, hey, we want to kind of do more of the things you guys talked about there. And so the Winsome Conviction Project was born, and that happened to be born just as we were working on a second book because of the title of the first one. We uh our second one became Winsome Conviction. Winsome Persuasion was how do we speak to the non-Christian world? Winsome conviction was about the challenges we have when we have conflicts within the church. So we have conflicting convictions. So that was how we got the name. But I haven't done the Google search yet, but I bet if you went back and looked at the word winsome and how much it was used back in 2017, you'd find it's not very common. And I had people ask me when I said the title of the book, winsome. Well, that's an interesting word. What, you know, what does that mean? Or, you know, it it that kind of a sense about it. And nowadays, fast forward eight or nine years, and there's been kind of a lot of controversy about civility and how we deal with polarization and things like this. And there's a push towards winsomeness that some people will use that language as a key thing, and others have pushed back. Tim Keller has been the lucky winner of uh, you know, being a guy who is uh way more than you and I, way more famous than you and I combined, even though he passed away a couple years ago. He's still more into public discourse by far, but he's often associated with winsomeness. And I've seen a fair number of people kind of criticizing the concept of winsomeness. So let me give a little bit of just by reading this one article, this one just popped up a few weeks ago. So that's the only reason I'm choosing. It's not the best, it's not the biggest, it's just the most recent, and it helpfully and briefly states a batch of things that I've heard from several others. So let me read a little bit of this. Um he's he comments, begins by talking about uh Tim Keller's legacy and associates it with a quote, winsome approach. Um and he says there's some three simple observations that talk about how this is an unbiblical and unhelpful approach. So his first observation, it's the wrong starting place. The person says to begin with, being winsome as a philosophy of ministry is fundamentally a misguided approach because its starting place is wrong. When someone starts with man instead of starting with God, in other words, this philosophy starts with an orientation towards humans by asking, how will saying or doing this make others feel? Will it offend them? Will they be turned off? And of course, if they would be, then we shouldn't say it. So this is what the person is saying that you're oriented towards other people and you don't want to turn them off. So if it turns them off, you don't do it.

Tim Muehlhoff: 05:43 Yeah.

Rick Langer: 05:44 Um and let me run through all of these and then go back and let's talk about some of our our attitudes for them. Second thing that they are concerned about, that it's a very subjective guide. Um, you wouldn't want to have this be a thing that um is your guide to philosophy of ministry, because what counts as winsome to one person is not winsome to another. So it kind of doesn't help you go anywhere at all. And then finally, he talks about it's a path to dishonesty. So there's a deceit built into winsomeness. And here he quotes Gresham Machen, a famous uh Princeton theologian from the early parts of the 1900s, uh and classic uh sort of a uh Christian uh defender of the Christian faith. And he said, uh Gresham Machen says, few desires on the part of religious teachers have been more harmfully exaggerated than the desire to, quote, avoid giving offense. Only too often that desire has become perilously near dishonesty. The religious teacher in his or her heart is well aware of the radicalism of his views, but he's unwilling to relinquish his place in the hallowed atmosphere of the church by speaking his whole mind. And so he conceals what's in his heart. So these are some of the complaints that are given about this. Um particular I found interesting is a comment they said, is the value of being winsome or having a right tone being prioritized about other matters of doctrine and truth? Are we refusing to discuss the scriptures and how they speak out, or refusing to make application of scriptures out of fear for how it will be taken by our hearers? Would we refuse to have a fellow elder or pastor who doesn't consistently fall in line with a particular tone, this tone of winsomeness, even though he meets all the qualifications of an elder laid out by Paul? I would suggest that if our answers to these questions are yes, then winsomeness might winsomeness might just be the fear of man operating as a philosophy of ministry.

Tim Muehlhoff: 07:54 All right, so let me make one let me make one quick comment as I listen to these. We just finished a book called The Heart of Civility, where the heart determines what you say. So as you're reading these, I'm getting defensive, right? I'm just like, and I want to shake my head, I want to roll my eyes, but that would violate like every principle we wrote about in winsome conviction, right? So what a great place to start to say, how do you respond to critique? Like, like, do we give it a fair hearing, or do I dismiss as soon as you read them, I'm dismissing them? Like, well, that's ridiculous. No, that's not true. No, that's not. So that that's a heart check for me if I'm willing to receive a guy who wrote uh and published a critique of winsomeness. Um, I I think that's a heart check. Am I willing to even give this a fair shake, or am I discounting it as fast as you can read it?

Rick Langer: 08:54 Yeah. So great observation. And let me add one thing also in terms of you did a great moment of self-reflection there. What's going on in my own heart? Oh, and I kind of want to just break out my little yellow highlighter and have everyone here. Did you hear what Tim just did? He thought for a second, he became self-reflective and self-aware about what was going on in his own heart. So kudos to you, Tim, for acknowledging them. I am feeling it when I hear this.

Tim Muehlhoff: 09:20 Yeah.

Rick Langer: 09:21 And that that's one of the keys to responding better, right? When you don't have that self-awareness, you start to go off, and you kind of like, wow, that's maybe not the course it should go. Let me do one other thing with this. Let me just make the observation. I've read a fair number of things in this general vein. I would argue that by and large, this is presented in a civil fashion. I didn't feel like there was a lot of, you know, blasting sort of language and shouting sorts of things. I disagree, and we'll talk in a second about the things we I disagree with that were said here. But that said, um, I might feel like you didn't read our book or you didn't pay attention when you read it. But that's really different than saying you were uncivil, unpleasant, because honestly, a person speaking up to say, well, when when you talk about winsomeness, here's all my worries. It's actually an invitation for me to say, well, let me step up with the plate and say why that isn't what we mean or what I mean by Winston's. And so I want to acknowledge this. I'm not using this as an example of incivility, but rather I want to use it as an equation to say, hey, let me just assume this person is generally pointing out some things that he thinks of when he hears us talking about this. And let me give uh what I hope will be uh equally civil, but also equally fundamental pushback against the claims that are being made there. And we can chat about this as we go through this.

Tim Muehlhoff: 10:52 So see, I yes, Rick, I again, I think that's a great point, is we need to start in today's crazy world where you and I have read some very uncharitable critiques, right? Just throwing it out there without any forethought of how a person's gonna read this or how it's coming across. That's a great point. Even though I disagree with him, the points you just made, um, we we should reward tone. In today's argument culture, we should stop and say, hey, can I first just say thank you for the tone of that? And now let's have a conversation. But I think we're to the point in today's toxic communication climate that we need to start rewarding people for saying, thank you for being charitable and not yelling at me so that we can now have this conversation. That that's a good, I think that's a good observation.

Rick Langer: 11:48 All right. Well, let me let me make a couple of comments about this. Uh, you know, from I'll say from my perspective, this is probably yours as well. I'm not assuming we you and I have a huge disagreement, though, like most things, we probably have different perspectives on some of this as well. The first thing I I kind of want to make clear, and I kind of want to jump up and down about this one, is that I have never ever understood or desired that the word winsomeness has anything to do with silencing a person. Winsome is a way to talk. And you can't actually be winsome unless you talk. If you're just silent, then you're not being winsome. And so the idea that I refuse to talk about this, I won't say this because, doesn't even bring the topic of winsomeness into the question because you're choosing not to talk. And I'll go ahead and give kind of my second related point of that is that in light of that, what you want to do when you hear the word winsome is say, this is not talking about a way to avoid difficult conversations, but rather a way to have a difficult conversation. In other words, it's exactly about speaking up. It's only asking the question, how can that be done most effectively? Right. How can we best speak up about this issue over which we disagree? And I would point out that the first book we wrote was Winsome Persuasion. And our whole point was that winsomeness was actually an essential rhetorical tool for persuading, moving the needle in another person's mind is largely dependent on the attitude and disposition you convey to them, one of respect, uh, understanding them. And the word winsome is a perfectly fine way to capture that. There's plenty of other words we could use. I'm simply saying that that word is absolutely intended to convey something about what, about the fact that we are talking about things, and then telling you the way we are talking about it, as opposed to being malicious, as opposed to being slanderous, as opposed to being inflammatory, uh, as opposed to being combative. There's a million ways that we obviously associate that with talking. I just want to say wisdom should be equally associated with talking. So don't say it's silencing and don't say it's avoiding things. It's actually talking about them and it's talking about how do we talk with the intention of moving the needle on a person on the other side.

Tim Muehlhoff: 14:17 Yeah, yeah, well said. Um my honest reaction as I was listening was okay, good point about the word winsome. That winsome can culturally be defined almost like this debate we're having with empathy today, a little bit. Yeah, winsome, winsomeness can be reinterpreted based on the cultural wind that's blowing. So you did a great job with the Christ-animated learning blog that we both write for by swapping out the word winsome with a biblical word, which is gentleness. And gentleness isn't up for cultural um morphing and redefining. I mean, I'm thinking of 1 Peter 3:15, which is give a reason for the hope that is in you. Then with all gentleness and reverence, we don't get to say, yeah, but I'm not going to do the gentleness and reverence part uh because I think that's gonna be be perceived as mushy or lacking conviction. No, I think Peter would say, I'm sorry, they're two sides of the same coin. Absolutely share your conviction, but don't, let's not use the word winsome. Let's do it in a gentle way with reverence. I don't think, and that's what you said in your great piece, that gentleness is not relativistic. It's not optional.

Rick Langer: 15:41 Yeah. So, and and so you picked up on exactly the next thing I want to talk about. So uh, for the sake of a conversation like this, I I want to say I am the happiest guy in the world to completely abandon the world winsomeness. If you find it offensive, if this is what you hear when you hear the word, I totally understand. I'm not even saying what's wrong with you for hearing that. I'm like, no, I get it. That that is a way that word can certainly be understood. So let's just not use the word winsome, but let's have a different conversation. Let's have a conversation about the importance of being gentle, the importance of being kind, the importance of being loving, the importance of being gracious. And notice all of those words I'm using are biblical words, number one. They are all included in the fruit of the spirit. And these are things that not only through the spirit, as you've already mentioned, they uh happen in 1 Peter when he talks about giving a defense. Notice that's exactly in the context of speaking up about a conviction, not about silencing it. So if they want to know what why you have this hope in you, you give them an answer. Uh, but do it with gentleness and respect. It's how do you give an answer, not whether or not. Same thing with Jesus. He comes and he's full of grace and truth. And you say, Oh, so I'm just gonna do truth, who cares about grace? And I'm like, well, hopefully, as a Christian, you do care about grace because you're trying to be like Christ. And he didn't just come with truth, he came with grace. Uh, so we have both of those things incumbent upon us according to biblical language, and that I care a lot about. If you just say, hey, this old gentleman's thing is way overrated, I'm not gonna do it anymore. I'm like, well, what are you gonna do with kindness? Are you gonna chuck patience? You're gonna kind of how many fruit of the spirit are you gonna just say, I'm not gonna do those? Um, so that's the thing I see. What thoughts on this, Tim?

Tim Muehlhoff: 17:37 So I agree with him if he's saying, no, no, no, you guys are starting with a cultural etiquette. Uh we'll call it winsomeness, politeness, okay? And we're saying, no, actually, we're not. We're starting with a biblical word, gentleness, and we are using gentleness to move forward, and it's not optional to ditch gentleness. Let's I I also teach rhetoric, right? Public persuasion. Let's make the argument, which I think maybe could be made, that gentleness is not effective today in today's argument culture. Being gentle, you get walked on. Well, I'm sorry, we don't get to ditch gentleness because it's not winning us points in the public political sphere. I mean, this is Jesus. You get slapped, I want you to turn the other cheek. I'm sorry, that's what I want you to do. And we're like, well, I that's not gonna go anywhere. Freud would say, you're gonna get walked on if you do that. And I think Jesus would say, yeah, you are. You're gonna get walked on. And that's gonna speak to them in ways that maybe your aggressive rhetoric wouldn't, right? Feed your enemies when they're hungry, not take advantage. So I agree with them. If we're just talking cultural etiquette, wrong starting point, and that's again, we're putting too much pressure on the word winsome. Let's replace that and call this the gentleness project. And I think then then we're rooting ourselves squarely in scripture. Yeah.

Rick Langer: 19:08 Yeah. Well, the other importance that this isn't just kind of playing with semantics. The other importance is how this bears on an argument that the this author uses later in his article, where he says, uh, you know, are we refusing to uh discuss things that Scripture speaks out about? Um, oh, here's a question. Would we refuse to have a fellow elder or pastor who doesn't consistently fall in line with a particular tone, even though he meets the qualifications for an elder laid out by Paul? And I want to say, well, wait a minute. Would we care about an elder who refused to practice one of the fruit of the spirit? Wait, that's the wrong way to put it. It's not one of them, because gentleness would cover it, kindness would cover it, goodness would cover it, patience would cover it. It's amazing how many different... love would cover it. Uh there's a ton of the fruit of the spirit that you're saying this person doesn't practice. And I go, well, what would you say then about approving them as an elder if they consistently refuse to practice those fruit of the spirit? And let me bracket for a moment the question we can come back to this of whether or not they ever have a time when they're not gentle or something like that. And I'm like, that's great. Uh we we can have that discussion. I'm just talking about a pervasive lifestyle concern, because that's my concern for winsomeness, gentleness, whatever you want to call it, relative to church. Not that there's moments when people are angry or prophetic or things like that. I, you know, we can we can solve that, we can acknowledge it, we can do whatever with it. I'm just saying the pervasive attitude is really problematic. And if you say I'm not going to be concerned about an elder who who consistently lacks gentleness and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and self-control, uh, that to me seems every bit as problematic as a doctrinal problem or him having multiple wives, or, you know, there's moral issues, there's all kinds of things that are built into the requirements for an elder. And I'm like, shouldn't we take them all seriously?

Tim Muehlhoff: 21:13 Yeah, and I and this is a um, I remember reading a Christian author saying, I think we're fighting the culture war with the culture's weapons. Like, and the reason we don't want to use grace weapons is because quite frankly, they seem weak. Like Paul says, right, in his church to the his letter to the church at Rome, can evil be overcome? Yes, with goodness. While being reviled, Peter says, Jesus did not revile in return. He uttered no threats, but entrusted himself to God. So I get why we might want to say, man, these are not good weapons to be using in such a hostile communication climate. And I might say, from a rhetorical standpoint, a human rhetorical standpoint. Standpoint, you might be right. But we don't get to pick and choose what is being given to us, both content and tone. And I think today we're forgetting the tone part is just as mandatory as the content part.

Rick Langer: 22:14 Yeah. So the the the final thing is this issue of it being a subjective guide in the leading to dishonesty. Um and I just want to pause again with that kind of an issue. And I'm like, I'm not sure why I would think being gentle would automatically lead me to be dishonest. I have no mental or you know, kind of connotation in my heart that says, oh yeah, those gentle people, they're always lying. Those kind people are always lying. And winsomeness might convey that more. And this is one of those things I'm like, okay, maybe that's a good point about the term. Like I say, I have no the only attachment I have to is accidental, like you and me both. We we kind of got it because we needed a title for our book. And now suddenly we're the Winsome Conviction Project. And of course, we've owned it, we've run with it, but I'm really quick to acknowledge those weaknesses. But again, I want to say, dishonesty, why would I associate with that? And I one of my worries is I feel like we, I guess I wonder why why is it that a person who's angry or shouting or you know, inflaming things, we associate them with likely holding on to the truth. And a person who's trying to be a peacemaker, uh, trying to be civil, trying to be gentle, we associate with dishonesty. And that seems to me to be uh profoundly counterintuitive, honestly. I I feel like it is far more common that when people are getting angry and things like that, they say things that just really aren't true, or they exaggerate in misleading ways and things like that. So I I worry about that one.

Tim Muehlhoff: 24:05 I do, but uh, but I want to say it's a good point if I'm pleasant, kind to you face to face, and then the minute we walk away, I'm bad mouthing you to other people, or I'm going online and obliterating you. So yeah, I I was kind to you, I was pleasant, but and that was being dishonest because I actually have a pretty harsh critique. I just don't want to say it face to face, so I'm gonna give you all these pleasantries. If that's what his point was limited to, I'd say, okay, yeah, well taken. Um, yes, we need to be a little bit more forthright with each other, but in a gentle way. Remember, Paul, knowing the fear of the Lord, we seek to persuade men, but we do that in a gentle spirit.

Rick Langer: 24:49 Well, and I think one of the concerns I would have is that when we think of any confrontation escalating to the point of anger or the kind of discourse we tend to have on social media that's often kind of supercharged for the sake of generating clicks on our, you know, social media account or things like that. If that's what we associate with a confrontation, then I think you'll find a whole bunch of people just backing off from confrontation. Some people will go after it. They'll think, oh, that's great. But a lot of other people say, well, I just can't bring that up because I'm not going to get in a big angry shouting match with this person. And I wish we would cultivate a bit of a vision for what you might call gentle confrontation. Because I think it opens the door for more people to talk, for you to talk with people who might be closer to you as a friend, um, to bring up some of these things. And I think as long as we have an attitude towards speaking the truth or having a confrontation with someone that is always supercharged with anger and vitriol, then we tend to have people shying away from probably some needful, difficult conversations that we need to have. So hopefully, gentleness, kindness, goodness are things that can prompt us to have some hard conversations, not keep us from that arena.

Tim Muehlhoff: 26:11 And kudos to this gentleman for keeping the Winsome conversation going, because there are a lot of articles now being written about civility and the misuse of it. So, hey, we need to be open to critiques, but we also have the right to push back on those critiques. So, again, kudos for this article. I I think we're kind of in agreement that there's much about it we appreciate, but we kind of see it very differently. But hey, let's keep the conversation going. I think it was a good read, and we should be open to critique. So thank you. Thank you for listening to the Winsome Conviction podcast. Um, we do not take you for granted. If you want to hear more, go to winsomeconviction.com. Uh, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can check all the past podcast issues. Um, we have different resources. Rick mentioned two of them. One was our very first book together, Winsome Persuasion. And then the second one was Winsome Conviction Disagreeing Without Dividing the Church. You can check out all of our resources there. Uh, a lot of it is for free. So thank you so much for being a good listener. We uh appreciate your support.