You’ve been in that conversation. Someone sits across from you, Bible open, and tells you what they believe. You show them what the text actually says. They nod — and then explain why their interpretation is still right.
That’s not a Bible study problem. It’s an authority problem.
Here’s what nobody tells you when you step into ministry: most people in your church don’t actually submit to biblical authority. They submit to biblical authority when it agrees with what they already believe. When it doesn’t — they have opinions. Lots of them.
This Problem Is Bigger Than You Think
According to Barna’s American Worldview Inventory 2024, only 13% of adults who regularly attend evangelical churches hold a biblical worldview. Let that sink in. Roughly 87% of the people showing up to your church on Sunday are operating from a worldview shaped by something other than scripture. The same research found that 44% of adults in evangelical churches don’t even believe in absolute moral truth.
This isn’t a fringe issue sitting on the edges of your congregation. Check your small groups — it’s there. Look at your children’s ministry — it’s there too. Sometimes, if we’re being brutally honest, it’s in your leadership team.
Why People Choose Their Opinions Over the Bible:
The Culture Set Them Up for This
For decades, the culture has been telling people one thing: your truth is valid. Every social media platform, every therapy framework, every inspirational quote on a coffee mug has hammered home the same message — what you feel is real, and what is real is what matters.
By the time someone walks through your doors, they’ve been soaking in subjectivism their entire lives. Submitting to an authority outside themselves — including scripture — cuts directly against everything they’ve absorbed. This isn’t rebellion. They’ve simply been conditioned.
The People Who Discipled Them Modeled It
Here’s the part that stings. Sometimes this is a mentorship failure. People mimic who they admire. If the pastor or mentor who shaped them treated certain passages as negotiable — or defaulted to personal opinion whenever the Bible got uncomfortable — that became the model.
Spiritual leaders don’t just pass on theology. They pass on their relationship with biblical authority, healthy or not. Your people didn’t arrive with bad intentions. Many of them simply learned this from someone they trusted.
Where You’ll See It in Your Church:
In Your Small Groups
Small groups surface this fast. Put six people in a room with an open Bible and you’ll quickly find out how many of them treat scripture as a discussion prompt rather than a final authority. Someone shares what a passage “means to them.” Another counters with a personal experience that contradicts the text. Before long, the group has quietly agreed that lived experience is a valid hermeneutic.
Nobody challenged it. So it became the culture.
When Transfer Members Walk In
This one catches a lot of church planters completely off guard. A family shows up from another church — solid, engaged, genuinely excited about what you’re building. Underneath that enthusiasm, though, they carry deep loyalty to how their previous church did things: doctrine, methodology, specific interpretations that function as personal non-negotiables.
Their old church becomes the standard. Scripture gets filtered through that lens. When your church doesn’t match up, you become the problem.
I’m sure there are many more examples, but these are the two that I find most prominent. I am willing to bet there are many who are also swayed by things they have seen on YouTube or TikTok, but I don’t have the data on that at the moment.
The Mistake Most Pastors Make
Most pastors handle this one of two ways. Both are wrong.
Avoidance Dressed Up as Grace
The first mistake is avoidance. A pastor senses the tension, calculates the relational cost, and decides confrontation isn’t worth the risk. So the challenge gets softened. Qualifications get added. Eventually, the opinion stands unchallenged — and it gets rebranded as “meeting people where they are.”
That’s not grace. Calling leadership abdication by a spiritual name doesn’t make it pastoral.
Arguing on the Wrong Battlefield
The second mistake is going head-to-head. Logic versus stubbornness. The pastor’s reasonableness against the person’s resistance. Win the argument and you still often lose the person. Either outcome leaves the opinion calcified and the relationship strained.
Neither avoidance nor argument gets to the root. The root is authority — and only one thing settles that.
How to Actually Lead People Back to the Word:
Help Them Separate Four Things They’ve Been Conflating
Before you can lead someone back to scripture, you need to help them distinguish between four categories they’ve been collapsing into one their entire lives.
Feelings are real but not authoritative. A gut reaction to a passage is information — not interpretation.
Preferences are legitimate but not binding. Worship style, ministry approach, how the chairs are arranged — those are preferences. Just don’t die on those hills.
Opinions are formed conclusions shaped by experience, culture, and reasoning. They matter. Just keep them in their lane.
Scripture is God-breathed, authoritative, and sufficient. Second Timothy 3:16-17 settles it: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” That’s not a suggestion — that’s the foundation everything else stands on.
Most people in your church have never been taught to sort these four things. Helping them see the difference isn’t an attack. It’s discipleship.
Know What’s Clear and What’s Grey
Where the Bible Is Clear
Where the Bible is clear, you are clear. No hedging. Don’t soften what God has made plain for the sake of comfort or consensus. Pastoral courage lives right here — the willingness to say “here’s what the text says” without apologizing for it. Weakening a clear biblical position isn’t sensitivity. It’s a failure of leadership.
Where the Bible Is Grey
Where sincere, scripture-loving believers have disagreed for centuries, don’t make it a fight. Nonessential issues deserve conversation, not division. What you do ask is that nobody in your church elevates a grey area to a first-order conviction. Proverbs 18:2 is worth committing to memory: “Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions.”
Grey areas don’t become problems when people hold them. They become problems when people weaponize them.
Practical Moves That Actually Work
Preach hermeneutics from the pulpit. No seminary degree required — just regularly model how to read scripture. Show people what questions to ask, why context matters, and the difference between a descriptive passage and a prescriptive one. Most people in your seats have never been shown how to actually read the Bible. They’re doing their best with no real tools.
Build one question into your culture: “What does the text say?” Make it the anchor in every small group, every pastoral conversation, every leadership meeting. Replacing “what do you think?” with “what does the text say?” slowly but genuinely reshapes a congregation’s relationship with authority.
Have the conversation early. When a transfer member starts measuring your church against their old one, address it kindly and directly before it becomes a pattern. Letting it slide signals that comparison is acceptable. It isn’t.
Know when to release someone. Some people are genuinely not ready to submit to biblical authority — and that’s their journey. Holding on to someone who is actively resistant and divisive does real damage to everyone around them. Love them, pray for them, and recognize that sometimes the most pastoral thing you can do is let them go.
This Is Your Call
Paul warned Timothy that this was coming. Second Timothy 4:3 says people will “gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” That wasn’t a prophecy about some future church. That description fits you right now.
Popularity was never your job. Faithfulness is. Lead with the Word, hold the line on what is clear, extend grace on what is grey, and do the slow, patient work of building people who love scripture more than they love being right.
That church is worth building.
Jeff Hoglen is the author of Church Planting Done Different and Pitfalls of Church Leadership: Real Talk For Real Pastors. Jeff has been planting and coaching churches for over two decades and serves as CEO of churchplanting.com.
