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.

The truth is, just because a matter is secondary doesn’t mean it won’t have some important and significant ramifications. Think about baptism as an example. However you cut it, the particular people who you think belong to the church will inevitably have an impact on how your church functions and the various problems that may ensure as a result of that makeup. Or, think about secondary matters concerning one’s views on expression of the charismatic gifts. This in no way determines whether you are a believer or not but we can’t ignore that a refusal to practice the gifts or a desperate desire to actively pursue them will have an impact no only on the style and feel of your church but will inevitably have ramifications beyond whether people speak in tongues on a Sunday morning or not.

Even tertiary things will have some significant impact on things. To take the archetypal examples, think about common eschatological views. Just about everyone agrees that nobody should separate or refuse to sit in the same church as someone who doesn’t share your particular millennial view. But the idea that pre-, post- or A-millennialism won’t have some impact on how your church views its role in society, how it engages politically, how it preaches and applies the scriptures and how (or even if) it tends to front political issues on a regular basis is a nonsense. The idea that these views don’t matter and don’t have an impact on anything is clearly untrue. It doesn’t mean we should divide over them or write these views into our doctrinal bases and lock out all who demur. But they do clearly matter and inevitably have an impact on how we operate as a church.

All of which is to say, let’s not write things off as secondary or tertiary and then effectively suggest they are unimportant. The truth is, there are lots of tertiary things that will have a significant impact on your church. It doesn’t mean it should be a cause of separation, but we shouldn’t write them off as so unimportant that we don’t bother thinking about them or have little concern about where we land on them. 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.