Before You Facilitate
What This Lab Is
This LEADER LAB™ challenges parents, coaches, educators, and faith community leaders to examine one of the most misunderstood tensions in relational ministry and formation: the difference between condoning, accepting, and loving. It's designed to be uncomfortable in the right ways — not to settle the theological debate on sexual ethics, but to confront the behavioral and relational failures that happen when leaders conflate those three distinct things.
The goal isn't consensus. The goal is a commitment — one specific, named action each leader will take differently because of this session.
Facilitator Posture
Hold the tension. Don't resolve it too quickly. The discomfort participants feel between their convictions and their relational failures is the formative material. Your job is to keep them in that space long enough to act, not long enough to argue.
What Participants Will Leave With
- A clear, three-part framework distinguishing condoning, accepting, and loving
- Theological grounding they can articulate to others
- A named, specific next-step commitment
- Language to have conversations they've been avoiding
Materials Needed
- This facilitator guide (printed or digital)
- Participant handout (commitment card — last page)
- Whiteboard or flip chart for discussion capture
- Timer
Session at a Glance
- The Honest Question Open · 5 min
- The False Equation Part 1 · 10 min
- Provocation 1 — The Neighbor Test Discuss · 10 min
- Three Concepts, Three Definitions Part 2 · 15 min
- Provocation 2 — Where Have You Failed? Discuss · 10 min
- Theological Anchors Part 3 · 10 min
- Provocation 3 — Presence or Verdict? Discuss · 10 min
- The Commitment Close · 10 min
For a 60-minute session, reduce each discussion block to 7 minutes. For 90 minutes, allow discussions to breathe fully.
Open · 5 Minutes
The Honest Question
Begin with this question. Don't answer it. Just let it land.
Discussion Provocation
Think of someone in your life whose choices you deeply disagree with. Are you actually in relationship with them right now — or have you created distance and called it principle?
Give participants 60 seconds of silence to sit with it. Then say:
Facilitator Script
That tension you're feeling — between what you believe and how you're actually living with people — is exactly what this Lab is about. We're not here to change your theology. We're here to examine whether your theology is actually producing the relational life it's supposed to.
Part 1 · 10 Minutes
The False Equation
Teach this section directly. Keep it crisp.
The Equation Most Adults Are Operating From
Acceptance = Approval
This is the equation quietly running in the background for most of the leaders you serve. It leads to two conclusions — both of them wrong: “If I fully accept this person, I'm implying I approve of everything about them.”
“If I don't approve, I need to create distance to stay faithful.”
The first conclusion collapses love into endorsement. The second collapses conviction into isolation.
Neither one reflects the full picture — biblically, theologically, or relationally.
Key Teaching Point
These are two completely separate questions: What do I believe about ethics? And how do I treat a human being made in the image of God? Conflating those two questions isn't theological faithfulness. It's theological error.
Discussion Provocation — The Neighbor Test
Do you have someone in your life whose choices you disagree with — overspending, a toxic relationship, a self-destructive habit — whom you still love fully and stay close to? Are you condoning their choices by staying in relationship? So why does this feel different?
Allow 10 minutes of open discussion. Capture key responses on the whiteboard. The goal is to surface the inconsistency participants already sense.
Part 2 · 15 Minutes
Three Concepts. Three Definitions.
Walk through each concept distinctly. These aren't points on a spectrum — they're categorically different things.
1 Condoning
Moral agreement with a belief, behavior, or identity claim. Suggesting something is acceptable, right, or without consequence. This is a statement about ethics.
Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
Romans 1:32 (ESV) Condoning isn't the same as tolerating. It isn't the same as staying quiet. It's an active moral signal — spoken or unspoken — that something is acceptable. Most leaders in traditional faith communities aren't condoning when they love. But they fear being perceived as condoning, and that fear is driving the relational failure.
2 Accepting
Receiving a person as they are — fully, without precondition — into relationship, community, and dignity. This isn't a statement about behavior. It's a statement about personhood.
“And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers… But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion.”
Luke 10:25–37 (ESV) The Samaritan didn't require the wounded man to have the right theology, right ethnicity, or right background before offering care. Acceptance is the precondition for any meaningful relationship.
Without it, there's no relationship — only a verdict with a person standing near it.
You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.
Amy Carmichael
3 Loving
Actively willing and working toward someone's genuine flourishing — which sometimes includes honest conversation, and sometimes means simply being present without an agenda. Love is the most costly of the three because it's sustained, unconditional, and oriented toward the other person's actual good — not their comfort, and not your own conscience.
Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.
Ephesians 4:15 (NIV) Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
1 Corinthians 13:4–7 (NIV) Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity