I have heard this phrase all my Christian life. People are very fond of it. They will put in on pictures and etch it on decorative mirrors and post it on Facebook. "Speak the truth in love," they will remind us.
But how often do we actually see this?
Churches are not, sadly, filled with people who speak the truth in love. Paul has a clear idea in mind. He is describing God's plan in giving the church apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teacher. He says that they are to grow us to maturity, to help us attain the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. He explains that we are no longer to be children. Then, he gets to "speaking the truth in love."
It is not a command, oddly enough, but a description. It is a description of what we are supposed to be doing (not a statement of what we ought to do, like "love they neighbor" is a command statement). Speaking the truth in love is what mature people do.
I attend business meetings in my lawyer job. One of the great things about business meetings with serious business people is that they do not waste a lot of time. They speak the truth. They are not interested in having their emotions stroked or their egos enlarged. They want to redeem the time and speak truth. That is what maturity does.
But we often see the opposite in our churches. Pastors are so concerned about "how people will react" that they try to avoid saying anything at all. Deacons worry about "how the pastor will react" and about "how people will react," and meetings often turn into kind of a circus, where no one wants to say anything really truthful. We want people to "come around" to our point of view, without ever really saying what our point of view is.
On the other hand, we almost always have a few members who are very interested in "speaking the truth" but not very interested in the "in love" part of the sentence. They will say whatever they think "needs to be said" regardless of the people to whom they speak.
In short, what we find is that Paul expects the natural growth of the church to arise through "speaking the truth in love," but we find almost none of it in our church meetings.
We also have little unwritten rules about what can be said. In most churches, no one will speak to the pastor about his preaching if they are unhappy with his preaching or confused by it. Preachers kind of like this silence, I am afraid. We do not want people "speaking the truth in love" about us. I remember a pastor telling me that he liked to hear from people who loved his sermons, but did not want to hear from those who were unhappy. "They just don't understand," he asserted. Amazing how we can deceive ourselves into thinking those who like us are smarter than those who don't, and that those who don't like our preaching are somehow at fauth. We like to say "speak the truth about others" but are not so happy with the truth about ourselves. And we wonder why we are not growing.
Speaking the truth in love is a fundamental goal for every serious preacher and teacher. We do not want to speak what is easy or false or popular. We do not want to speak truth in anger (although I see far too much of this from pulpits). We want to love and to speak truth. We want our people to love and express truth.
To the extent that you see this as a conflict, to that extent you will fail as a preacher and teacher. To the extent that we, as churches, find it impossible both to love and be honest, we will fail as churches.
Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Christ, from whom the whole body will ultimately be built up in love.
That, my friends, is a real "church growth" plan.