Why Baptists Must Recover the Order of Love

Not long ago, during a congregational meeting at our church, the budget committee presented our missions spending—approaching twenty percent of total giving. Someone raised a question that cut straight to the matter: Why are we spending comparatively less on local outreach? Shouldn’t we be reaching Jerusalem and Judea before the ends of the earth?

The exigencies are real, of course. Cross-cultural missions costs more by nature. Local outreach doesn’t require the same programmatic infrastructure; the workforce is the congregation itself, showing up on Tuesday evenings and Sunday afternoons. But the question lingered, as good questions do, because it points to something deeper than a budget line. The order of love (ordo amoris) is not merely an abstract theological concept. It is a practical one. How a church spends money, deploys people, and organizes its common life reflects—whether consciously or not—an implicit ordering of its loves.

Most Christians who have tracked recent political discourse have encountered the ordo amoris through a different door: JD Vance’s comments on immigration in early 2025, nationalist political theory, “America first” rhetoric, and the heated debates over Christian nationalism. These are legitimate applications of the doctrine, but they have also had the effect of obscuring the ordo‘s more immediate and pressing relevance to the church’s interior life. Before the order of love has anything to say about foreign policy, it has something to say about how churches govern themselves, how they prioritize their mission, and how they train disciples for life in the world.

The lawyer in Luke 10 asked Jesus “Who is my neighbor?” not to learn but to evade. Of course, we are not permitted to evade our Christian duties. But we must define them. We are finite creatures, and our finitude is not a curse but a creational given. The question “Whom am I to love?” is the beginning of responsible love, rightly directed.

The Scriptural Case for Ordered Love

Neither the words “ordered love” nor “ordo amoris” appear as a technical term in Scripture. But this should not blind us to the concept itself—the Bible doesn’t use the word Trinity either. Upon inspection, we will find that the substance of ordered love saturates both testaments.

God’s own love, as revealed in Scripture, is not abstractly universal but gloriously particular. He chose Abraham and his seed, and redemption radiated outward from a chosen center. The Mosaic law itself reflects this structure. Israel’s civil code treated kin and sojourner differently—not unjustly, but appropriately. Justice was for all; covenantal intimacy was reserved for those within the household.

This ordered structure carries into the New Testament. Paul tells the Galatians that Christians are to “do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Gal. 6:10 ESV). The word especially assumes a prior ordering of obligations. 1 Timothy 5 makes the hierarchy explicit: widows are to be cared for first by their own families, and only then by the church (1 Tim. 5:4, 8). Men who do not provide for their own households are, in Paul’s stark language, worse than unbelievers (1 Tim. 5:8). Elders and deacons must manage their households well as a prerequisite—not a supplement—to leading the church (1 Tim. 3:4–5; Titus 1:6). The household is the proving ground of ministry, and the church’s health is the precondition of its mission.

Paul’s own heart reveals something of the ordo in its deepest form. He writes in Romans 9 of his “great sorrow and unceasing anguish” for his kinsmen according to the flesh, to the degree that he would wish himself accursed for their sake (Rom. 9:2–3). This is ordered love pressing upon him with peculiar force through the bond of natural affection and shared heritage. His universal missionary mandate and his particular grief for Israel flow from the same love operating at different distances from the same center.

Jesus himself rebuked the Pharisees not for their zeal for proselytes but for the disordering of that zeal—”you travel across sea and land to make a single convert” (Matt. 23:15), while neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness at home. Their sin was an outward-facing piety that served as an escape from proximate duty.

That love must be expressed in a particular order is an inescapable concept. But to understand the contours of the doctrine, one must also turn to church history.

The Tradition of Ordered Love

The ordo amoris is not novel. It is among the most sustained and broadly attested themes in the history of Christian thought.

Even before the church, Aristotle observed in his Nicomachean Ethics that the just man renders to each relation what is appropriate and becoming—different honors to parents, comrades, benefactors, and the gods.¹ Education, for Plato, was the training of the affections to incline toward worthy objects and to order loyalties rightly.² These pagan insights represent, in the language of Reformed theology, the light of common grace—creaturely observations of a moral order woven into the fabric of things.

Augustine brought those intuitions into full theological flower. Haunted by his own history of disordered loves—loving lower beauties, sinking to the depths, restless until resting in God—Augustine became what one historian has called the “doctor of love.”³ In On Christian Doctrine, he defined the holy life as a matter of loving rightly: “He neither loves what he ought not to love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that more which ought to be loved less.”⁴ Virtue, for Augustine, was love rightly ordered. He pressed the point by collapsing the four cardinal virtues into four forms of love: “temperance is love giving itself entirely to that which is loved; fortitude is love readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved object; justice is love serving only the loved object, and therefore ruling rightly; prudence is love distinguishing with sagacity between what hinders it and what helps it.”⁵

Thomas Aquinas took up Augustine’s framework in the Summa Theologiae and worked through its practical implications with characteristic precision. He leaves no stone unturned—examining whether an order of love exists at all, whether we should love one neighbor more than another, how ties of blood bear upon obligation, and how love for parents, spouse, and children compares with one another. His conclusions are often surprising. On the question of whether we should love those who are more virtuous over those who are more naturally bound to us, Aquinas argues that while we may indeed love virtuous strangers with admiration, we love those connected to us in more ways—natural bonds being more enduring and more encompassing than bonds of mere affinity.⁶ He takes up the competing claims of parents and children, reasoning that while parental love is in some respects more fundamental—since parents generate children and not the reverse—the marital bond carries its own distinct priority, binding husband and wife as one flesh in a closeness that exceeds even the parental tie.⁷ And in a move that should discomfort those who treat the eschatology as an argument against ordering love in this life, Aquinas argues that the order of love endures even in glory: “Nature is not done away, but perfected, by glory.”⁸

C. S. Lewis brought the same convictions into the twentieth century through The Four Loves and his fiction. He explored the four Greek categories—storge (affection), philia (friendship), eros (romantic love), and agape (charity)—and refused either to belittle the natural loves and to crown them. He was insistent that the retreat from natural affection as a form of piety was less a Christian vision than a Stoic apathy, and that we follow One who wept over Jerusalem and at the grave of Lazarus, and who, “loving all, yet had one disciple whom, in a special sense, he ‘loved.'”⁹ But Lewis was equally clear that natural loves, left to themselves, tend to disorder. In The Screwtape Letters, the demon Screwtape counsels his apprentice to direct a man’s malice toward his immediate neighbors and thrust his benevolence outward “to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.”¹⁰ It is a precise diagnosis of the modern liberal consensus—and, at times, of evangelical culture.

The common conviction running through all these thinkers is that grace restores nature rather than destroying it. Natural affections—for kin, for tribe, for homeland—belong to the creational order that redemption aims to heal and rightly direct. The question has never been whether to love at all, but how to love well.

The Baptist Peculiarity

The widely circulated quip is that Presbyterians seem to have all the babies while Baptists do all the evangelizing. Like most good jokes, it lands because it is partly true. Baptist ecclesiology and soteriology have historically emphasized the conversion of individuals, believer’s baptism as a mark of regenerate membership, and a strong missionary mandate. These are genuine strengths. But they carry a temptation embedded in their own logic: to so privilege the moment of conversion and the advance of the gospel outward that the prior obligations of household formation, institutional health, and proximate duty get treated as lesser callings.

When missions becomes the singular, all-sufficient basis for Baptist cooperation and fellowship, truth and faithfulness lose their seat in the driver’s chair. Missions is a great copilot, but it cannot navigate alone. Many heresies in history have emerged from genuine, evangelistic motives. Arius, it could be argued, was overcontextualizing Christian theology to a Greek philosophical audience, seeking accessibility at the cost of orthodoxy. What unites genuine Baptist cooperation is not the ends alone but also the means and message.

Associations of churches hold together because of shared confession, mutual care for one another’s congregations, bonds of affection cultivated over time, and a common understanding of the gospel they are advancing. Strip away those prior commitments and what remains is a coalition of missionaries in search of a theology.

This is not a theoretical concern. It is the pattern that has repeatedly produced ecclesiastical drift in missions-focused movements. Baptists must be particularly aware of this danger and adjust appropriately, applying the ordo to our life together. Four places where Baptists must do that work follow.

Four Practical Applications

First: Get the Baptist household in order before going abroad. The principle of 1 Timothy 3:4–5 applies beyond the elder’s personal household to the health of the sending church—and by extension to the institutions that support missions. Extravagant missions spending has its place, but not at the expense of doctrinal integrity, church discipline, and the formation of men and women in the distinct callings Scripture assigns them. The first nation to be discipled is the one we inhabit. Only a church with a well-ordered interior can send missionaries who know what they are planting and why.

There is a homely analogy that makes the point plainly: you do not adopt a child if your own children are unruly and unattended. The same logic applies to the church. Missions without domestic faithfulness produces missionaries who are unclear about what they are multiplying.

Second: Hold the line on biblical manhood and womanhood. The Southern Baptist Convention’s failure in 2023 to pass an amendment that would have more firmly codified the exclusion of women from the pastorate was, at root, a failure of the ordo. If we do not have clarity about the sexed roles God assigns in Scripture—husband and wife, elder and deaconess, father and mother—then when we plant churches and train believers in other cultures, we will reproduce our confusion. Mixed teams of egalitarian and complementarian missionaries do not produce complementarian churches; they produce churches that inherit their teachers’ uncertainty. If the trumpet gives an uncertain signal, Paul asks, who will prepare for battle (1 Cor. 14:8)? The same question applies to missions strategy.

This is not a peripheral matter. The household codes of Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, and 1 Peter 3 are among the most concrete expressions of ordered love in the New Testament. Marriage is the mirror of Christ and the church. If we distort that mirror in our sending churches, we send missionaries who cannot hold it up clearly abroad.

Third: Reckon honestly with the social justice settlement. The woke wars may have quieted since 2020, but the theological and institutional causes of that drift have not been addressed with the same urgency. Many churches and institutions that overcorrected toward the social justice framework of that era have adjusted their rhetoric without auditing their assumptions. The impulse to fold progressive categories into gospel work has not disappeared; it has adapted. To bring the gospel faithfully to new cultures, missionaries must understand what has happened within their own, trace the corrupted influences to their sources, and—where necessary—repent publicly. The ordered love tradition warns precisely against exporting disordered loves under the banner of cross-cultural sensitivity. Overcontextualization overseas tends to produce not the gospel but the ideological commitments of the sending culture in local clothing.

Fourth: Pursue financial transparency. The love of money, Paul writes to Timothy, is a root of all kinds of evil (1 Tim. 6:10). Evangelical institutional life has, in various ways and at different points along the way, been marked by opacity in financial governance. This is not always malicious; after all, complexity and scale create genuine challenges. But cloak-and-dagger budget management and financial opacity are not legitimate alternatives to accountability. Faithful stewardship of financial resources is a precondition for the credibility of those who deploy resources abroad. The church that cannot render an account of what it has done with the master’s talents is in no position to commend the parable to the nations.

Conclusion

Greville P. Lewis—whose words are often misattributed to C. S. Lewis—wrote: “It is easier to be enthusiastic about Humanity with a capital ‘H’ than it is to love individual men and women, especially those who are uninteresting, exasperating, depraved, or otherwise unattractive. Loving everybody in general may be an excuse for loving nobody in particular.”¹¹

11. Greville P. Lewis, The Johannine Epistles (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017), 86. This quotation is commonly—and incorrectly—attributed to C. S. Lewis.

The ordo amoris guards against using the nations as an escape from the proximate duties that define faithful discipleship. Baptists have been among the most fervent champions of the Great Commission in the history of the church—Carey, Judson, Fuller, and a long succession of ordinary men and women who counted the cost and went. That heritage is worth preserving. But it is preserved not by loosening the conditions that made it possible but by tightening them: ordered households, ordered churches, ordered institutions, ordered affections.

We are ordered to love. Let us, therefore, love in order.