As Pentecostal leaders, one of our ongoing responsibilities is to help God’s people discern what truly belongs to the gospel and what reflects our cultural or generational context. God’s church is richly diverse, and that diversity often raises important questions about how faith should be expressed in different settings.
The challenge is that, in our sincere effort to protect the faith, we can sometimes blur the line between what is central to salvation and what is shaped by culture. When that happens, the church risks becoming a community of control rather than a Spirit-filled family of grace.
In his letters, the Apostle Paul shows us how to hold those tensions well—distinguishing between the essentials of salvation and what he calls “disputable matters,” not to enforce sameness but to cultivate the kind of Spirit-filled community where grace makes room for all.
Paul’s Leadership Example: Meat Sacrificed to Idols
In Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8-10, Paul faces the challenge of leading believers beyond cultural conformity. The early church was split over whether believers could eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols. For Jewish-background Christians, eating such meat carried the stench of idolatry. Therefore, they considered its consumption to be sinful. For Gentile believers, idols were powerless objects, so eating that meat seemed spiritually irrelevant. The disagreement threatened to fracture the unity of the church.
Paul’s response is a masterclass in leadership. He refuses to turn the issue into a test of salvation—Christ alone saves, not dietary choices. At the same time, he avoids dismissing it as a mere matter of preference. Instead, he honours conscience: those who abstain do so to the Lord, and those who eat do so to the Lord. Above all, he elevates love as the chief guiding principle. Freedom must never be flaunted, and restraint must never become judgment.
In this moment, Paul embodies a leadership posture that resists false tests of spirituality. He shows that guiding God’s people means drawing clear lines around the gospel while leaving generous space for cultural difference. His wisdom still challenges leaders today: protect the essentials, but let love—not uniformity—govern the rest.
Then and Now: The Leadership Challenge Has Changed
The structure of the early church community explains why questions of conscience and freedom were so urgent. First-century believers were not scattered individuals meeting for an hour or two on Sunday; they were interwoven households. Christians lived, ate, prayed and worked together in the same spaces. A disagreement over food, Sabbath practice or ritual purity wasn’t theoretical—it was a daily reality. In those tight-knit house churches, every personal choice was visible and potentially disruptive. Leadership, therefore, required constant mediation: helping believers honour one another’s consciences without collapsing into uniformity. Paul’s concern was not moral policing but community survival—nurturing a love strong enough to hold diversity together.
By contrast, modern congregations inhabit a radically different social structure. Most believers live kilometres apart, see each other only for scheduled gatherings, and lead largely private lives shaped by individual routines and digital interactions. Offence no longer arises from daily life shared in the same space; it often arises from symbolic signals—what someone posts, wears, drinks, or who they vote for. Yet many churches still operate as if they were Paul’s tight-knit house churches, attempting to manage believers’ private choices as though those choices still pose an immediate threat to communal harmony.
This anachronism fuels much of today’s judgmentalism. When leaders treat cultural preferences—say, drinking a glass of wine, adopting a different dress style, or supporting another political party—as if they were matters of being “right with God,” they import an ancient community-survival mindset and mechanism into an individualized age. The result is heavy consciences, divided churches, and leaders burdened with tasks the New Testament never assigned them. The call of leadership today is not to enforce uniformity born of a bygone proximity, but to form mature disciples capable of living faithfully in freedom.
Why Leaders Struggle with This Distinction
Why do pastors and leaders still struggle to separate cultural sensitivities from salvation issues? Why is the impulse to enforce conformity so strong, even among sincere shepherds?
In this context, conformity refers to the pressure to make everyone look, act and think alike—to reproduce a single cultural style of holiness (what some might call a kingdom culture) instead of nurturing the rich diversity of faith expressions that naturally emerge within the body of Christ. It is not unity born of the Spirit, but uniformity born of anxiety. Leaders often reach for conformity when they fear that freedom will lead to chaos.
Several dynamics feed this pattern:
- Boundary Anxiety. Out of a genuine desire to protect the flock from error, leaders can build visible boundaries: rules about dress, entertainment, social behaviour or political loyalty. But when these boundaries are drawn around cultural habits rather than gospel essentials, the result is legalism disguised as holiness. Instead of equipping believers to discern, we can end up controlling how they show up.
- Holiness Misapplied. Pentecostal spirituality rightly exalts holiness, but holiness is about being transformed into the likeness of Christ, not about external uniformity. When holiness is reduced to a checklist of visible behaviours, it becomes performative—more concerned with appearance than inner transformation. True holiness produces love, humility and justice; conformity produces fear, pretence and competition.
- A Substitute for Community. Because today’s believers rarely share daily life as the early Christians did, leaders sometimes use conformity to simulate closeness. Enforcing sameness gives the illusion of unity without the cost of relationship. Instead of building communities of spiritual formation and trust, we risk creating systems of compliance—where belonging depends on fitting the mould rather than walking together in grace.
Conformity, then, is leadership’s false comfort: it replaces relational depth with predictable control. The challenge for Pentecostal leaders is to resist this impulse—to trust the Holy Spirit to sustain unity through love and truth, not through uniformity.
Paul’s Leadership Correctives
Paul offers leaders today at least four critical lessons:
- Guard the Gospel. Salvation is grounded in the death and resurrection of Jesus, received by grace through faith. Leaders must resist adding cultural tests to the gospel (Galatians 1:6-9).
- Respect Conscience. Mature leaders do not impose their own conscience on others. Instead, they create space for believers to follow the Spirit’s guidance.
- Teach Freedom in Love. Leaders must form disciples who are free in Christ, yet willing to limit their liberty for the sake of love. This balance is the heartbeat of Pentecostal holiness.
- Mind Your Leadership Role. Paul’s words to the Thessalonians apply to leaders, too: “aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs” (1 Thessalonians 4:11, ESV). Leaders do not need to police every detail of cultural life. Instead, they should equip the saints for maturity and discernment.
As Pentecostal leaders, we believe the Spirit equips us with wisdom for such challenges. The Spirit does not lead us to impose cultural conformity as a condition for salvation or “rightness with God.” Rather, the Spirit empowers us to lead with discernment, grace and courage. Discernment to know what belongs to the gospel and what is cultural preference. Grace to honour the consciences of believers without burdening them. And courage to resist pressures—from inside or outside the church—to make salvation narrower than Christ does.
Conclusion
“[W]here the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:17). That freedom is not chaos; it is Spirit-shaped holiness. Leaders are called to guide believers into that space, resisting both legalism and licence. If we, as leaders, confuse salvation with cultural sensitivities, we risk creating unnecessary divisions in the body and losing credibility with younger generations who can see the difference between gospel essentials and cultural rules. But we can learn from Paul, whose leadership model is as relevant today as it was in Corinth and Rome. He teaches us that salvation belongs to Christ alone, while cultural sensitivities belong to conscience and love. Pentecostal leaders today must resist the temptation to collapse the two. Our calling is to keep salvation central, to teach freedom shaped by love, and to lead communities where cultural differences are not threats but opportunities for grace.
Kyvenz Amédée is the assistant superintendent for PAOC’s Quebec District. He attends Gospelvie Church with his wife, Madglara, and their three children. This article appeared in the January/February/March 2026 issue of testimony/Enrich, a quarterly publication of The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. © 2026 The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. Home page photo by Sigmund on Unsplash. Photo above © istockphoto.com.