Longtime readers might remember that a highly challenging men’s growth gathering is an idea I’ve kicked around for a while. At a certain point, it’s time to stop kicking it around and start making it happen.

I’m not ready to announce a time and place just yet, but I do want to introduce the idea and start getting feedback from men who might be interested in attending.

A brief description of what I have in mind:

I’m currently in the process of lining up leaders, securing a meeting place, and handling various other logistical concerns. Once I have those details firmed up, I will share all the info and a signup link with anybody who leaves an email address on the form at the site.

You can go to excellentmen.work to sign up to be notified once the time comes.

If you’re interested, be sure to leave your address there and answer the 3 brief questions, and please be sure to pass the link on to any man you know who might also be interested.

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Arguably the world’s most despicable supervillain has been exposed yet again. Anthony Fauci’s diary from the Covid years was released via subpoena this week, and it depicted a man every bit as dishonest, destructive, and self-obsessed as many of us guessed 6 years ago. (You can read summaries of the findings here and here.)

As much as I’d like to vent about the little ghoul who impacted billions of people’s lives for the worse, I’ll save that for another time. Instead…

I want to use Fauci’s downfall as a case study for how credibility is destroyed, and, conversely, how it’s built.

We live in a time of mass skepticism toward institutions. Major media outlets are watched less than ever. Churches are given no benefit of the doubt by many. Corporations are assumed to be untrustworthy and only out for their own profits at the expense of everybody else.

Now, the same is largely true of the medical industry. Due to Fauci’s numerous lies and missteps, his own professional credibility is all but nonexistent. And it’s not just his own credibility—he dragged down countless doctors and basically the entire public health industry with him. It used to be seen as low-status to question or ignore doctors. Now it’s all but a mainstream approach.

Here’s Fauci’s three step path to destroying credibility

Do your job incompetently

I’m not sure there is anybody in a high-leverage job on earth who was worse at it than Anthony Fauci. Being prepared for a major outbreak was one of the most important parts of his job… and when one showed up, he abandoned all protocol and just made up attempted solutions as he went along. Getting exposed as ignorant at best and malicious at worst is a perfect first step to killing off your credibility.

No matter what role you fill, people will not look past incompetence.

Corporations lose people when they produce lousy products, or fail at customer service. Media outlets fail when people notice that they lie by forcing their agenda into the news. Churches can lose credibility by failing to care for their people, or by being afraid to answer any kinds of questions. Incompetence kills.

Put self-image over results

Step number two in losing accountability is to let people see that you are more interested in cultivating your social image than you are in actually doing your job. As Jesus said, wash the inside of the cup and the outside will be clean, too. Worry only about the outside and the inside is going to rot (cf. Matthew 23:25-28).

One of the most disgusting revelations from Fauci’s diary has been that he came off as positively giddy about what Covid was doing to his popularity. Yeah, people were dying and he had ground the world to a halt… but he got on tv and appeared on some magazine covers! The optics are atrocious.

Clout chasing is easier than ever, and it can be lucrative too. In the short term, you can win credibility with your name recognition. In the long term, though, the fruits are going to speak for themselves. People will see if you’re serious about the truth, or if you’re just saying what will get you attention.

Refuse to take accountability

The diary shows that Fauci knew what he was saying publicly was either untrue or up for debate… but instead of being transparent, he doubled down and attempted to silence anyone who questioned him. Now that he’s out of a place of power, he sat before congress and plead the 5th amendment dozens of times to avoid accountability.

Being wrong here or there or changing your mind about something doesn’t kill credibility, because it happens to everybody at some point. However, if you refuse to admit fault when your failures are plain for all to see, you’ll never be trusted again. Fauci, thousands of doctors, scientists, and pundits, and the public health establishment in general, have lost a long-held place of respect in the eyes of millions, and they’re never getting it back. Especially as they continue to stand by their lies.

The road map to credibility

So, in order to build credibility in yourself, your church, or anywhere else, the process is pretty simple. Just reverse engineer the Fauci plan.

Be fiercely competent

Looking to the Proverbs, “Do you see a man who excels in his work? He will stand before kings; He will not stand before unknown men” (Proverbs 22:29). To be fair, Fauci also stood before kings, but that exposure put his work up for intense scrutiny. Do the job well so that when people see it, they can tell that you know what you’re doing.

Aim for results, not accolades

Wanting to be adored by all is a great way to ensure that you will never stand for anything, and will always be controlled by the crowd. There is no glory in being renowned if you don’t deserve it. Deep down, you’ll know. Just worry about doing the job right and let the accolades come or go as they may.

Admit your missteps

Power hungry people think that saying “I was wrong” is a weakness. Quite the opposite, in fact. It shows that you care more about getting things right than you do about presenting yourself as perfect. “He who covers his sins will not prosper, But whoever confesses and forsakes them will have mercy” (Proverbs 28:13).

Put it to use

These principles apply anywhere. They work in your marriage, your career, in the church, and anywhere people are working toward some kind of goal together.

It is good to be known as someone who is reliable—though only if that reputation is actually true. As faith in institutions crumbles, cynicism will continue to have its day for a little while.

But eventually, people are going to need something solid to believe in and be a part of. Lay the groundwork right now by being the anti-Fauci and being competent, purpose-oriented, and honest.

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Notes

• Don’t forget you can get my latest book, You Are Saved: The Christian’s Assurance as a free download here, or in paperback or Kindle here

• I’m also excited to tell you about the release of Grow! A Helpful Guide to Practicing the Spiritual Disciplines. I had the privilege of contributing to this book, available now from Heritage Christian University.

As a teenager, I was a decent hockey player on a middling team. Every season we lost to a better team, a team that also played travel tournaments. Wanting to push myself a bit, I asked to join them for some tournaments, and surprisingly, they said yes.

On my first day of practice, I was excited to get to skate with better players… until we got started. The coach skated us until my legs nearly fell off. I was used to 10-15 minutes of conditioning drills to open an hour’s practice. My new team did 40 minutes. The long-timers handled it well, but a couple of us new guys simply could not hang.

I told the coach I felt like I was about to vomit—partly because I did feel like that, partly because I thought that would get me a couple of minutes of rest. I thought wrong.

He said, “That’s fine, you wouldn’t be the first. There’s a trash can here on the bench if you need to, then you can get back out there.” They weren’t going to lower their standards for anybody. If you were going to be on the team, you were going to skate with the team.

All of that was new to me. I had never been pushed that hard, and I had never been told to keep digging deeper rather than be let off the hook.

To be honest, I was embarrassed at how out of shape I was. But I kept going back. They were a winning team, and I wanted to be on a winning team, even if it meant getting run into the ground at every practice. Why?

Because, I quickly realized that they won precisely because they practiced hard and did not lower the bar for people who didn’t want to keep up.

In other words, the thing that drew players to them was also the most likely thing to push players away. Over time, only the dedicated were going to stick it out. That meant a lot of guys quit. It also meant they always had a team full of players who were fully committed. The high expectations at practice made the team better, but it also served as a filtering mechanism.

There's an invaluable life lesson in that:

Lowering the bar to coddle the individual hurts the group and the individual.

If they had taken pity on me and canceled the grueling drills, I wouldn’t have gotten better, so it would have been worse for me. At the same time, the rest of the team would have been deprived of the greater challenge, making each of them worse. And, if we’ve made everybody a little worse, then we’ve made the whole team worse.

This is why modern, feelings-focused Christianity has been such a disaster.

We have harmed the individual by lowering the bar to protect their feelings. This, in turn, keeps others from striving for more. As a result, our churches are deprived of spiritual maturity across the board.

If we talk about, for example, modesty, it might get controversial. Someone might have a problem with it and leave. So maybe we just don’t talk about it.

But that means the person who wants to be immodest never gets called to greater holiness. The person who doesn’t necessarily want to be immodest, but doesn’t know any better, suffers from our catering to the first person. Now the whole church is weaker because we have withheld Biblical principles from them. Lowering the bar for the one person lowers it for everyone, holding back the entire church.

What kind of bar do you think Jesus set when He required His followers to deny self and take up a cross (Luke 9:23)?

To be honest, His exchanges with the would-be followers at the end of Luke 9, and with the Rich Young Ruler in Luke 18, sounded a lot like what I heard from my old coach.

The Savior pushed those men into deciding: are you going to cling to your comfort and quit now, or are you going to go all-in and commit to being a disciple? Most of the time, Jesus’ demands drove people away. That never made Him change His tactics.

What kind of bar is the modern church setting when it refuses to push members to grow? What kind of bar do we set when we won’t talk about uncomfortable issues because somebody might get upset, or leave? What kind of bar is set when attendance and participation are left up to personal preference? What kind of bar do we set when everything is catered to making the unconverted feel comfortable in the worship service?

Come in weak, walk out strong

We can focus on the lowest common denominator and lower the bar for everybody.
Or we can invite everybody, but keep the bar high enough that only the committed will stick around.

If we’re not careful, church can become a “come as you are, stay as you are” system, leaving the masses unchanged. The answer is not to become a “don’t come until you’re good enough” system, but rather a “come as you are, and we’ll help you rise to the challenge” kind of system.

To go back to my painful day at practice, notice, they didn’t kick me off the team for lagging behind. Nobody made fun of me. In fact, a number of them encouraged me and told me how they felt the exact same way at their first practice. It was a huge boost to know that if I stuck around, I could get to their level, too.

When we do the “we’re all broken sinners” thing in church to make everyone feel comfortable, we cheapen God’s calling. The visitor and the new Christian should feel like I did after that practice: grasping the difficulty of the challenge, but also aware that growth is achievable with God’s help and with our brothers’ and sisters’ encouragement.

Expectations make all the difference—and I don’t mean expectations that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Rather, I mean the expectation that if exposed to God’s Word and accountability to help live by it, people will start to look more like Christ.

As always, that has to be the ultimate goal. For the individual, for their brothers and sisters, and for the whole.

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Notes

• This week’s Think Deeper Podcast episode is one I’m extra proud of. It’s highly specific and practical about the problems men and women face while trying to be the husbands and wives God calls them to be. Watch it here or search Think Deeper on your podcast app.

• I’ve been asked about the Plan of Salvation shirt recently and haven’t linked it in a while, so here’s a reminder you can pick one up here!

  

There’s a growing trend of people cutting off all communication with family members. Wall Street Journal ran a piece on it this week asking if therapists are behind this trend, and as I’ve written, the growth of therapy terms has not been healthy for relationships.

When do “boundaries” go too far? What is one’s duty to difficult family members?

My brother joined me today to give a therapist’s take on the issue.
You can find Joe at joewcounseling.com and the Godly Young Men Podcast.

Watch below, listen above, or listen on the Church Reset podcast (Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app).

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One of the points I try to drive home as often as I can is that God’s way of doing things isn’t a series of arbitrary hoops for us to jump through that make our lives harder just because.

Rather, they make us happier and more fulfilled than doing things our own way.

It’s kind of like how following the IKEA instructions step by step make for a smoother process and a better finished product than throwing the booklet away and insisting we know what to do. Maybe the designer knows a thing or two about His own design, you know?

So, it makes sense that when we go our own way on an issue like gender roles, it only leads to frustration.

One clear example of this can be seen in the case of what is called “the mental load.”

Here’s how the UN defines it:

The mental load is the invisible mental and emotional labour behind handling life’s never-ending to-do lists, including caring for others, managing a household, and delegating tasks. It’s the energy we spend thinking about and anticipating needs and tasks, organizing them, and following up and ensuring they’ve gotten done.

So, it’s the day-to-day burden of making sure a household keeps running. One YouTube influencer put it a bit more succinctly by saying it means “you are responsible for knowing, and doing, and remembering everything that makes your home function.” And, of course, the bulk of those tasks generally fall to women.

So, is the mental load real?

It’s hard to argue that it’s not. But that just raises another question: is the mental load a bad thing, an unfair burden that’s been foisted upon women?

What the Bible says

Back to the beginning

When you go all the way back to Genesis, we see God created Adam first, and Eve second. This is not an accident, nor was it inconsequential. This order is drawn upon throughout the Bible.

Man is told to be fruitful and multiply and take dominion over the earth and subdue it (Genesis 1:27), and woman is the helper suitable to him in carrying out his tasks (2:18). Notice, she is not given a separate mission. They were designed with different bodies and different minds, two inseparable pieces of a puzzle. He leads, she submits (1 Peter 3:1-7). He tends the garden, she provides the children (1 Timothy 2:15).

By nature, their skills, focuses, and tasks are going to be different. Funny enough, the UN piece on the mental load tries to deny this: “These roles are socially learned, not biologically predetermined,” they claim.

If our roles were meant to be the same, men would be able to bear and nurse children, too. Since they can’t, the order of the household takes an obvious shape.

The Proverbial Housewife

Proverbs 31 fleshes out the role of the wife more completely than any other text. And when you start to look at a day in her life, it sure looks a whole lot like the mental load.

“The heart of her husband trusts in her” (v.11)
“She brings her food from afar” (v.14)
“She rises also while it is still night and gives food to her household (v.15)
“Her lamp does not go out at night” (v.18)
“She is not afraid of the snow for her household, For her household are all clothed with scarlet” (v.21)
“She looks well to the ways of her household, And does not eat the bread of idleness” (v.27)

So… she goes from early morning to late night working to feed her family, keep them clothed, prepare them for winter, manage business for her husband, and so forth. And it is for all of those things that her children rise up and bless her, and her husband praises her.

In other words… the mental load is the job. We have further confirmation of this in Paul’s writing.

Titus and Timothy to the Women

Paul famously wrote in Titus 2:5 that older Christian women are to teach younger Christian women to be “workers at home.” More on that in a minute, but for now I want to focus more on another verse in the so-called pastoral epistles.

In 1 Timothy 5:14, Timothy is told to instruct young widows to get married, have children, and “manage the house” (NKJV). This comes from the Greek word oikodespoteo, a compound of oikos for house, and despotes for ruler, from which we get our word despot.

In other words, the job of the wife is to be the ruler of the house. This doesn’t make her the head of the family. Notably, in the same chapter, it is men who are “worse than an infidel” if they don’t provide for their own (5:8).

Rather, for her, oikodespoteo is a job description of her role as the one in charge of making the household thrive. Once again, it’s basically the Proverbs 31 role. To sum up, in this text they were told to get married, have kids, and take on the mental load.

God wasn’t wrong

The world will say that this is further confirmation that the Bible oppresses women. Many Christians will look for ways to wriggle out of these Biblical teachings because they don’t comfortably fit with what our culture has taught them to believe.

But go back to what I said at the start—the designer knows a bit more than we do about how we operate best. The age of feminism hasn’t made women (or men) happier, hasn’t made families stronger, and hasn’t created a healthy culture.

As Christians, we of all people shouldn’t be surprised. God’s way fulfills us, even if it means women volunteer to take on the mental load.

But… there’s still a problem to be solved

As I wrote in agreeing with the monologue from the Barbie movie on the expectations placed on women these days, women do have too much of a burden to bear. In some ways, they are more burdened than ever with their work week, kids’ extracurricular activities, church and other social engagements, and more. And, by nature, they are still more oriented toward the matters of the house.

So, in many households they end up with a huge weight to carry in the marriage, a weight that is too big, and frankly unfair. There is legitimacy to the mental load complaint.

We’ve just gone for the wrong solution

Funny enough, despite all the complaints that come from the mental load crowd about men not pulling their weight around the house, the stats actually say quite the opposite.

Today’s dads are more involved with their kids than previous generations. They are also doing more work around the house than previous generations. You could make the case that today’s husbands and fathers are doing more hands-on work in the matters of the house than any men in history outside of explicitly matriarchal societies.

But that might be an indicator that we still don’t get it.

70 years ago we started sending all the women into the workforce. They took on more and more duties all the time. This created a sizable mental load, as they now had to do part of what used to be the man’s job, and still do their own job.

As time went on, the man’s responsibility for providing was essentially split 50/50, while the woman’s responsibility for running the home was barely split at all.

So, our solution has been to identify the mental load and tell men to split more of the household duties. We’ve even lied to men to get them on board (“Nothing’s sexier to a woman than a man doing the dishes,” the ridiculous marriage advice goes).

Now, men are doing more. And the mental load complaint just grows louder, because we identified the wrong solution.

The right solutions

First, we’ll all be happier when we get back to the roles God gave us. When Titus 2:5 tells women to be workers at home, and yet the husband and wife are both out of the home for 40 hours a week, we aren’t obeying that verse. And when we disobey, we shouldn’t be surprised when we’re unhappy.

This means the man needs to take back his share of the responsibility and stop counting on his wife to carry his burden and hers. And, she’s going to have to take the step back and let him. She’s going to realize she can’t, in fact, “have it all.”

That might be a tough pill to swallow, but if she wants things to improve, that’s what it’s going to take. If we’re going to keep telling men to step up, at some point it’s going to have to include telling women to stand down, too.

But, doing more of her job for her is not the answer. It doesn’t earn her respect in the same way. And, it doesn’t really lighten the mental load, because she’s still going to think about those things anyway, because God designed her to do so. In other words, she’s not going to be happier if her husband become more of a woman; she’s going to be happier if he becomes more of a man.

If this all sounds extreme, just ask yourself: if the family goes bankrupt and gets thrown out on the street, who’s everybody going to blame? Who’s job is it to fix that? For that matter, who does the Bible blame for it?

Yeah… that tells you we all know who ultimately bears the responsibility of providing. When push comes to shove, we all know gender roles exist.

I realize how hard this is, especially in this economy, and that it’s not a change most couples can make overnight. But it’s worth praying about and working toward, even if it means cutting back. Dining out trips for my family are few and far between, and at least half of those trips are taken to the Costco food court for $1.50 hot dog combos. Allison and I can tell you, and hopefully our kids will someday agree—it’s worth it.

Second, we have to practice contentment. So much of the content geared toward women online is aimed at making them discontented with their lives. Your husband isn’t good enough, your life is too hard, hey, maybe you’d even be happier if you left him (a suggestion which is always among the top-voted answers on women’s forums).

Do not let your life be steered by bitter people with miserable lives who don’t know you or care about you or your holiness in any way.
Your husband probably isn’t perfect… but neither are you.
You probably have to carry a big mental load… but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t carry one, too.
Your kids probably drive you crazy some days, and your husband might not feel attentive enough, and there are certainly things to work on… but this is life.

This is how we honor God and find fulfillment, by doing things His way even when it’s hard.

Addressing this as the church

One final point on how we can help couples find more fulfillment and balance in these relationships as the church…

Somebody will inevitably ask if the woman working outside the home is a sin. Another will almost certainly make the laughable claim that the Proverbs 31 woman was actually a career woman just like we have today.

We don’t really need to go down either of these rabbit holes. We just need to stick to the good, better, best formula and maintain that the best thing a family can do is have dad go to work to provide, and mom stay home to manage the house.

We don’t have to beat everybody over the head. We don’t have to berate anybody. But neither do we need to shrink back and pretend that all choices are equally valid and Biblical. The pulpit should be encouraging men to provide, and women to have children and keep the home.

As a church culture, years of encouraging one idea as an ideal to strive for pays off. People come around slowly, but momentum builds. Peer pressure starts to take effect.

This is the kind of concept we should not be scared to elevate in our churches, not just because the Bible teaches it, though that’s certainly reason enough. But also because we love our people and we want them to live happier, more fulfilled lives. And they can do that best by aligning themselves with these Biblical principles.

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Notes

• Last week’s Think Deeper Podcast covered the Proverbs 31 woman, and this week we looked at Proverbs’ prescriptions for men. We covered some controversial ground with this one, especially with regard to self-discipline. Watch below or search Think Deeper on your podcast app

Jonah makes for one of the most interesting studies in the Bible.

Though known best for his cramped, disgusting camp out in the belly of the fish, Jonah has much to tell us about what not to do and who not to be.

Jonah only obeyed when he wanted to.

2 Kings 14:25 tells us that God once spoke through Jonah, so we know that at least some point in his life Jonah obeyed God. When the time came to go to Nineveh, however, we all know how disinterested in obedience Jonah was. He was so determined to not obey God that he ran as far as he could in the direction opposite of where God wanted him to go.

Jonah’s greatest priority was his own comfort.

The classic “running from God, running to God, running with God” explanation makes for a tidy outline of Jonah, but… it’s just totally false.

Rather than ending the book fully restored and on God’s side, Jonah ends the book being blasted by God for caring more about a plant that gave him shade than about the souls of the people of Nineveh. Jonah seemed to have one primary motivation in the book—whatever made Jonah comfortable.

Jonah was selective in his care for souls.

Jonah had no interest in seeing the souls of Nineveh restored. In 4:2 He expressed His frustration that God would show mercy, grace, and compassion to Nineveh. In fact, he admitted that the very reason he ran in the first place was to keep the Ninevites from getting a chance to repent. Jonah would prophesy in Israel, but Nineveh crossed a line for him. In his eyes, their souls weren’t worthy.

Jonah obeyed on his own terms. He put his own comfort over people and over God’s will. And, he decided which souls he cared about and which souls he didn’t.

Casual Christianity looks almost exactly like Jonah.

• It tells you that you don’t have to obey everything God says—He’ll be happy if we follow Him most of the time.

• It will never, ever push you out of your comfort zone. It will even create churches for you that let you come and go on your terms and never ask you to grow or change.

• And, it will let you live your life without caring for souls. Church is about you and what you get out of it. Go to be served, not to serve.

That’s not true Christianity, though. No Christian should be striving to be a Jonah.

As always, Jesus provides us the perfect counter-example to every bad example in the Bible.

Jesus obeyed in every way.

Jesus states a number of times in John’s gospel that He was here to do the Father’s will and not His own (5:30, 6:38, 8:26, 15:10). He was perfectly submitted to the Father.

Comfort never entered into Jesus’ consideration.

Philippians 2:5-8 details how He didn’t consider equality with God something to be grasped, how He emptied Himself to be found in appearance as a man, a bondservant who went all the way to the cross.

Jesus didn’t see any soul as being beyond His love and grace.

He looked at the very people who were crucifying Him and uttered those famous words, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

When you put the two side by side, the contrast is clear. This is why it’s so important to keep our eyes on Jesus. When we don’t, our standards slip dramatically, as today’s cultural Christianity shows.

That religion would tell Jonah that he was fine just the way he was. It would tell him that anyone who corrected him was being judgmental.

That’s why our Christian life must be spent in pursuit of Jesus. A lost, dying, Nineveh-esque world needs more Jesus, not more Jonah.

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Notes

As always, this article is free. Other than book content for paying subscribers, I’ve decided against putting my articles behind a paywall. Even my latest book is free.

However, that all comes with a cost. Paywalled articles drive more premium subscriptions, and that’s potential income I’m passing up to make everything free.

If you’d like to support me in this work and help continue to make the free content available for all, you can go here.

There’s a mindset I keep running into among Christians that I find completely baffling. It’s one of those underlying assumptions that nobody really teaches directly, but it’s there in the background, and it colors one’s approach to all kinds of issues.

Many Christians seem to deny the concept of cause and effect when it comes to our ability to impact the world.

They seem to think that the events of this world just happen, and we are all bystanders as they do. When I posted about Islam’s growth in the West the other day, I was told that Christians don’t need to think about such things, as God will handle that and we should just focus on the kingdom.

How can you read the Bible and think a pagan religion’s growth in a nation, in the midst of Christianity’s decline, has nothing to do with us?

Our combination of individualism and pietism has led us to believe that we can control our own lives and what we do, but outside of that, the world just marches on irrespective of us.

This lie is crippling us. We will not even be able to begin to address the numerous challenges facing us until we realize that we have many of those challenges because of our actions.

On the bright side, this also means our actions can overcome those challenges. We can do something about it.

A few examples of where this mindset shows itself:

The state of the culture

Just about everybody is in agreement that our culture is in disarray, and that things used to be better in many ways. However, many insist that this is just something that happens. “Empires rise and fall, but God’s church keeps marching on,” they’ll say.

Ok, but why do empires rise and fall? Is it not because of their standing before God? This is especially true under the reign of Christ, but it still applied in the Old Testament. Nineveh faced judgment, repented, and thrived… until they became wicked again.

We inherited a Christianized West. It got that way because of Christians taking agency. Now, we have seen it gutted out in the name of pluralism and “tolerance,” and is now being infiltrated by Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism. That’s really bad. And it got that way because Christians stopped taking agency.

Still, many insist that this is the natural rise and fall of the world, and we should stand back and let it happen. No, it is happening because of us, and it’s up to us to stop it.

This requires strategic, long-term thinking. We have to organize our lives around helping the Gospel re-leaven the culture by the way we preach, the way we vote, the way we raise our families, and more.

The church

Occasionally I’ll hear someone explain declining church attendance as something that happens because “People just don’t want the truth anymore.” In a sense, that can be true. We can’t force people to convert, and many aren’t interested.

But in another sense, people haven’t fundamentally changed. People move in herds. Back then, going to church was just what you did. Now, it’s not.

We as the church have to move the ball back in that direction, and that comes from being a healthier church that impacts the world outside its doors.

For too long we have been lax about sin in the pews, and it shows. The world impacts us way more than we impact it. We shouldn’t need God to send persecution to do the job we should already be doing.

Our own children

The youth dropout rate is inarguably the biggest problem facing the church, but any time the subject comes up, someone is quick to correct me that nobody can make their kids be faithful.

While that’s true, it’s ridiculous to think that parents’ actions don’t impact their kids’ faithfulness. They essentially characterize it as a coin toss, telling parents who raised all faithful children they “got lucky.”

But we all know that’s nonsense. Everybody agrees that the family who brings their kids to church regularly has a better chance of those kids becoming Christians than the family who comes once every three months.

How much more so for the family who does daily worship in the home, and who teaches their kids to memorize the Word, where the world’s influence from the tv, the phone, and the school are regulated, and where dad, mom, and everybody are committed to living consistently with their professed beliefs?

There’s a reason why having believing children is an elder qualification. There is such a thing as good parenting and bad parenting. Acting as though nobody can analyze why kids fall away because the parents can’t be held responsible is insanity, and it’s hurting us.

Here’s my theory for why we deny ourselves agency in these matters:

If we agree that the challenges facing us are due to our actions, then we have some confessing to do. And if we agree that we have the ability to change things, then we admit that we have a responsibility to change them. And that requires rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty.

It’s just way more comforting to tell ourselves there’s nothing anybody could have done to prevent things from going bad, and therefore nothing we can do to make it better.

That’s not good enough, though.

Just think about the downstream effects of generations of Christians telling themselves that their choices today bear little to no impact on the broader world around them. We cannot afford to live like our choices don’t matter beyond our own personal eternal destination.

No, you can’t fix it all right now. But what you’re doing today can help build momentum for those who come after us. If the loaf hasn’t been leavened, it’s not because that’s just what happens to bread sometimes. Either the leaven is dead, or it isn’t in the bowl. It’s time for us to act like leaven (Matthew 13:33).

You, the person reading this, have more power to affect things than you think, and you need to use it. He who entrusted you with these talents will come calling someday, and you will not want to tell Him you sat on the abilities He gave you because you didn’t think you could make a difference anyway.

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Notes

• As always, you can listen to these articles on the go via the Church Reset podcast (Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app).

• In other podcast news, this week’s Think Deeper Podcast examines the Proverbs 31 woman. Subscribe to Think Deeper on your podcast app to get it when it’s out!

In an attempt to forge a broad unity, many voices have urged that we remain above the fray by avoiding specifics and cultural issues and instead “just preaching the Gospel.”

But it’s this “just preach the Gospel” mentality that has left us cultureless. It is the primary culprit behind the sacred/secular divide under which so many Christians live (also known as compartmentalization).

In this approach, Christianity is for the spiritual concerns of your life, but in the day to day you’re free to chart your own path.

Disciples who hunger and thirst for righteousness are left wanting, looking for direction and being given none. Customers who want to put in the bare minimum and be convinced it’s good enough are given such comfort.

In other words, “just preach the Gospel” incentivizes the lowest-common-denominator faith that makes us so feckless.

The answer is to preach the whole Bible. But in particular I want to highlight the usefulness of Proverbs.

There is no way to read the Proverbs and come away thinking God has granted us the right to choose our paths for ourselves.

We’ve relegated Proverbs to a book of pithy quips to be tacked on topically, but they warrant much deeper study for their prescriptions over all of life.

The book is largely from a father (Solomon) to his son, teaching him wise living in the fear of the Lord.

Typologically, Jesus is that wise Son who chose His Father’s instruction in all things and spurned temptation. And, we are to follow His footsteps.

That’s why “just preach the Gospel” isn’t giving us the full Gospel. The true Gospel doesn’t merely justify us—it sanctifies us, too. It makes us obedient like Jesus.

How? In the nitty gritty, real life stuff. Where the rest of the Bible discusses some of these hands-on topics in bits and spurts, Proverbs dives deeply into the importance of things like:

Hard work (6:10-12, 13:4, 14:23, 21:5)

Honesty (11:1, 12:17, 12:22)

Temptation (chapter 7)

Service and giving (3:27, 11:25, 22:9)

Priorities (1:7, 3:5-7, 4:7-9)

Politics (11:10-11, 14:34, 20:28, 28:16, 29:2, 29:14)

Money (10:4, 13:11, 14:23, 22:7, 22:26-27)

Marriage (5:15-19, 12:4, 18:22, 21:19)

Masculinity (chapters 1-7, 12:16, 24:5-6, 31:2-3)

Femininity (11:22, 12:4, 19:13-14, 31:10-31)

Parenting (13:24, 19:18, 20:7, 22:6)

It’s dangerously easy to get into over-spiritualizing our Christianity, but reading and meditating on these truths grounds us in the real world. God cares about this life. In the Proverbs, He has shown us how to walk in the day-to-day, mundane matters.

This is not out of a maniacal desire to micro-manage, but to give the people He loves the wisdom needed to live life in a way that will bring them fulfillment and happiness. Why would we not want to drink deeply of that well?

Read more Proverbs. You’ll be glad you did.

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• As always, this article is free. Other than book content for paying subscribers, I’ve decided against putting my articles behind a paywall. Even my latest book is free.
  However, that all comes with a cost. Paywalled articles drive more premium subscriptions, and that’s income I’m passing up to make everything free.

  If you’d like to support me in this work and help continue to make the free content available for all, you can go here.

• For more on Proverbs, check out our Proverbs episode of the Who Let the Dogma Out? podcast

• Grab your Plan of Salvation shirt or mug and support my future book projects by going here!

  

In this episode, I react to a clip from comedian John Crist’s podcast in which Sadie Robertson Huff makes the case for women preaching.

For context, the interview is here

Watch below, listen above, or listen on the Church Reset podcast (Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app).

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• Subscribing is free, but if you’d like you can support my work here!

• Grab a Plan of Salvation shirt and fund my future book projects by going here

On Tuesday I wrote about why I’m against the idea of Children’s Church, in which the little ones are ushered out of the worship service to a separate, age-specific program.

This produced no shortage of feedback, with something like 250 comments across the spectrum of views.

So, I went live to discuss the issue from a different angle.

I believe the children’s church issue is a proxy battle for deeper differences in how we view the church, parents, and children. I explain what I mean in this video/podcast.

Watch below, listen above, or listen on the Church Reset podcast (Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app).

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Over the weekend, X user Luke Simmons stirred up some controversy with the following take about a church he attended:

Visited a healthy church in another state today…

While it was sweet to see some families worshipping together, I was grieved by how distracted parents were by their small children.

In my view, everyone would have been better served by utilizing the kids ministry.

Weird thing to be grieved by, but apparently it caused him emotional distress to see parents having to train their children in worship. This take brought about a good deal of debate about the validity of children’s church, including takes on both sides on a post I made about the matter.

So, I figured I’d briefly lay out the case:

Here’s why children’s church should be abolished

1. We have Biblical and historical precedent

In Joshua 8:34-35, Joshua “read all the words of the law, the blessing and the curse, according to all that is written in the book of the law. There was not a word of all that Moses had commanded which Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel with the women and the little ones and the strangers who were living among them” (NASB1995).

Everybody was there, including the little ones. Outside. For the entire reading of every word that Moses had commanded. If they can manage that, why can’t we get kids through a 25 minute sermon on a padded seat in an air conditioned building?

You think those parents weren’t distracted? You think those kids didn’t have difficulty making it through? They did it because it was important.

In the New Testament, Paul twice addressed children as though they would be present at the reading of his epistles (Ephesians 6:1-3; Colossians 3:20). There is no indication anywhere that children were sent away. In fact, the one time the disciples tried to send the little children away, Jesus welcomed the children and corrected His disciples (Matthew 19:13-14).

In other words, Jesus says “Let the little children come to me,” while children’s church says “Let the little children go to an age-appropriate room while the adults worship.”

Additionally, children weren’t segregated out by age for Bible class until the 1800s, and the idea of sending them out during worship didn’t become popular until the 1960s or 70s.

We act like it just can’t be done and that it’s just such a heavy burden when it has been done the world around for literally thousands of years.

2. Kids need to watch their parents worship

In Deuteronomy 6, fathers and grandfathers are told how to raise up Godly families. It starts with loving God, and it continues with teaching them diligently day in and day out, with every opportunity you get (6:5-9).

Then, as we keep God’s commandments, it gives an opportunity for the children to ask why we do what we do (6:17-20), at which point we can tell them about God and what He’s done for us and why we obey Him (6:21-25).

Notice, that can’t happen if they aren’t there to see it. I can’t tell you how many times one of my kids has excitedly gotten my attention when the preacher mentioned a Bible name or account they know about. Other times, they ask about what’s going on, and I get the chance to tell them more about it later. Those things wouldn’t happen if they were in an “age-appropriate class.”

3. Kids need to learn not everything is about them

We’re at the point where every minute of every day can offer kids a targeted option to keep their attention. Everywhere you go you see little ones walking around with their faces glued to screens. They go home and get Paw Patrol branded snacks and play with their toys and watch their shows and have a life completely catered to them. Then they go to worship and get a worship time catered to them, too.

One of the reasons they need to be in worship is to learn what we adults need to remind ourselves, too: sometimes we need to put down the entertainment and distractions and give God the praise and attention that He is due.

Giving them a children’s church catered to them, so mom and dad can have a church experience catered to them, just furthers the problem of consumer Christianity. Learning that church is for God and not for us is something that needs to start early.

4. Kids can be trained—and parents can, too

Believe me, I know how much kids can be a distraction. I probably haven’t heard a full sermon straight through in years at this point, but it gets better as they get older. Because Allison and I work with them.

And as we train them, it trains us, too. It takes discipline for ourselves to stop the whispering, to not let them wander back and forth down the pew, to make sure they’re not distracting other people, and so forth.

It would be easy for them and for us to just send them away. But that’s trading long term habit building for short term convenience. I know how much our society likes doing that, but deep down everybody knows how unhealthy that is. It’s good for us to work toward things that are important, even if it’s difficult in the moment.

We’ve badly overthought this

The funny thing is, just a few months ago a church went viral encouraging parents to bring their “loud kids” to worship. Tens of thousands of people shared the supposedly pro-kid message about the blessing of the noise of children.

In this discussion, we have people arguing that the kids should be brought to the building and then sent away.

What if we found a middle ground in which we agreed on the blessing of having children in the church and acknowledged they will not always be perfectly quiet, yet still didn’t give them a pass to scream and run around?

Can that be done?

It sure seems like it should be possible. We know it was possible for a long time. Maybe we should stop telling ourselves it isn’t.

It is good for kids to sit through worship, and it’s good for parents to put in the time to train them. This is just another way in which we pretend that expecting nothing from anybody is the loving option. A lowered bar isn’t loving, it’s insulting.

Go in with a plan, keep the kids in worship, teach them how to make it through, expect them to be capable of learning, and have faith that God will bless the effort.

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Notes

• For more, check out my article on America’s Kid Problem

Old Glory Club

America’s Kid Problem

By guest author Jack Wilkie from Church Reset…

Read more

2 years ago · 236 likes · 29 comments · Old Glory Club and Church Reset | Jack Wilkie

• Think Deeper Podcast this week asks, “Should Churches Acknowledge America 250?”

• Grab your Plan of Salvation shirt and support my future book projects by going here

  

I semi-jokingly made a post the other day about printing up t-shirts of the above image, but the response was so great that I actually made it happen. Grab a shirt or a mug at my Etsy store.

At the same time, I got a number of comments about the list, and I thought it presented a good opportunity to talk about the “steps of salvation” as they’re often understood.

To be clear first of all, the black and white design is based on a very popular shirt of recent years in which recognizable lists of names or other nouns were printed in this exact fashion—”John& Paul& George& Ringo." or “Jerry& Elaine& George& Kramer.” etc.

That might help explain the brevity of the message, as I got a number of comments and messages suggesting changes. To answer a few specific ones:

Missing words

The most common addition to the five steps of salvation is “Live faithfully.” I think the spirit behind the suggestion is right, as the Christian life begins, not ends, with the plan of salvation. However, if we understand the first five correctly, the sixth isn’t really necessary.

Repentance is a change of life. Confession is not just a verbal acknowledgement that Jesus is real, but that He is Lord. Belief means not just believing in Him, but also believing Him (see Hebrews 11:6). And, baptism is our death to self and resurrection to a new life (Romans 6:3-4). So, faithful living is fully implied when each item on the list is understood properly.

Another good suggestion was to add “love God” to the list. It’s true, there is no salvation without loving God. I think there’s a better case for this one than for live faithfully. However, I would like to think that if someone can be made to understand their need of forgiveness and how God loved us enough to give it to us (John 3:16), then they will respond with love for God. To paraphrase Luke 7:47, he who is forgiven much, loves much.

Missing verses

No, the shirt doesn’t have verses. That’s where you come in! I think of the shirt merely as a conversation starter. Beyond that, I think every Christian should have a basic grasp of some verses to back up our understanding of the Gospel.

Though you can use Romans 10:17, you don’t really need a verse for hearing. Anybody you’re talking to is already in the process of that step.

Repent and be baptized can be grouped together under Acts 2:38: “Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’”

Believe and confess can go with Romans 10:9-10: “that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.”

Memorization is good for us, and it only makes sense that we would be able to back up our view of the plan of salvation from the Scriptures.

Are they really “steps?”

Ironically enough, I’m not a big fan of the framing of “steps of salvation.” Steps are one-time measures we take, something we complete and move on.

But when it comes to salvation, we don’t ever stop listening to the Gospel. We don’t just believe once. Repentance is a lifestyle, not an event. Confession becomes a life motto. And though baptism is the one that we do only once, its consequences reverberate throughout our lives.

Thinking of them as five steps makes salvation just a bit too formulaic and can put salvation back on us, instead of Christ if we’re not careful.

So why the five steps?

Because it’s an easy on-ramp to a conversation about salvation that can lead to discussions about all of those extras—what Jesus has done, why we should love God, the importance of living faithfully, and so forth.

And, baptism alone makes the list pop. It’s the hottest of hot-button issues in the religious world, and always has been. If you want to start a conversation about the Bible, few words work quite as well as “be baptized.”

An acceptable oversimplification

So, the five steps of salvation make for a very poor substitute for a conversation about salvation. On the other hand, they make a solid door opener to such a conversation, and those are the kinds of conversations we should be seeking to have.

If you want to grab a shirt or a mug and help me fund future book designer and editor costs, you can do so here.

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Notes

As always, this article is free. Other than book content for paying subscribers, I’ve decided against putting my articles behind a paywall. Even my latest book is free.

However, that all comes with a cost. Paywalled articles drive more premium subscriptions, and that’s income I’m passing up to make everything free.

If you’d like to support me in this work and help continue to make the free content feasible for me, you can go here.

Baseball has a bit of a Pride Month problem, and the outcome is going to be fascinating to watch.

If you’re not much of a sports fan, you might not know that nearly every major pro sports team in North America celebrates a “Pride Night” to celebrate LGBT people at some point during their seasons. These events often include special rainbow uniforms or hats, some worn in-game and others just for warmups.

As Major League Baseball is the only one in season during June, they take full advantage of the “opportunity.” The Texas Rangers are currently the only team out of 30 who do not have a Pride Night of some kind.

The controversy

During their Pride Night on June 12, the San Francisco Giants donned caps with the ever-expanding rainbow flag in place of the usual orange of the interlinked SF logo. That’s when four of their pitchers decided to take a stand.

One of them stuck with the traditional hat rather than wearing the Pride version. The other three wore the Pride cap, but wrote “Genesis 9:12-16” right next to the logo. This, of course, points to God’s promise of the rainbow following the flood.

Starting pitcher Landon Roupp explained the decision by saying,

"It's just about God's covenant and a promise that he makes to us that, you know, his faithfulness and his mercy. That's just kind of something I believe in, and I stand firm in that, and I'm thankful we live in a country where, you know, we have the freedom to believe what we want ... and express what we want."

The three followed the example of now-retired Dodgers superstar Clayton Kershaw, who wrote the verse reference on his hat for his team’s Pride Night in 2025.

While Kershaw escaped any response from the league last year, the Giants quartet did not. The league warned them that writing on the uniform is not permitted, though they insisted it was not about the tar content of the message.

Perhaps thanks to the Giants pitchers’ boldness, a smaller league faces an even bigger protest. The York Revolution, a team in the independent but MLB-affiliated Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, had to forfeit their game on Thursday, June 18 as several players refused to wear the scheduled Pride Night jerseys.

And, it’s not just a baseball issue. A few years ago, the NHL limited their participation in themed nights due to player protests of rainbow uniforms, though most teams eventually brought a Pride Night back in some way.

Lessons from the MLB’s Pride problem

It’s much too early to tell what will come of this, but it does feel like the start of something rather than a one-off. While we wait and see, there are a few lessons we can take in the meantime.

Somebody is going to win

Those who hate God will not leave us alone. “Coexistence” and “tolerance” were lies meant to get us to stand down until they got enough cultural sway to enforce their views.

Therefore, our aim can’t be just to get them to stop walking over us. We have to normalize Christian morality. That does not mean we force everybody to believe what we believe, but it does mean we need to get back to a place where the Bible is the default operating system.

Our loss isn’t inevitable

For a long time it sure felt like we were just going to have to come to terms with living in a world that drove further and further into degeneracy with no looking back. Now we have plenty of reason to believe that we have more reason for hope than we think.

We can absolutely make strides in influencing the world. Even the smallest bit of pushback causes an uproar, which shows just how fragile the opposition is.

Sometimes hope comes from the darkest places

It probably didn’t escape your notice that this took place in San Francisco, essentially America’s answer to Sodom and Gomorrah. Last year’s protest by Kershaw occurred in Los Angeles, a city right on San Francisco’s heels when it comes to debauchery. That in itself is worth pondering.

Sometimes the Christians living in such areas have a much greater sense of the darkness around us and therefore feel a stronger impulse to stand up to it. Those of us in the Bible Belt can be guilty of passivity as we assure ourselves “things are way better here,” while the Atlanta Braves and Nashville Predators don their rainbow jerseys.

Let’s learn from our friends and brothers in more Godless places and start taking stands before things get worse.

Just take a stand

So many things like this would not have happened if Christians had taken a stand. As I’ve argued before, the only reason we have youth sports on Sundays is because all the churchgoing families didn’t put their feet down. The same is true with the Pride Night problem.

The American pro sports leagues are packed with players who point to heaven when they score a touchdown or throw a strikeout, who kneel for a postgame prayer, and who have Bible verses in their Instagram bios. If even 20% of them had looked at the first rainbow jersey they were handed and said “That’s not happening,” then it wouldn’t have happened.

The same point applies to anyone who was told to put pronouns in their email signature or call a man “her.” One or two people saying no might be enough to embolden others to stand up, too.

Yes, the players would have been called bigots. Others may be fired. Jesus said the world was going to hate His disciples. Sometimes you stand up and people join you. Other times you stand alone and get thrown into the furnace. In either case, God is with those who do His will.

Someone might counter that all of this is easy for a preacher to say from a pulpit, where he won’t get fired for taking a stand against the LGBT agenda, or for me to say as I work for a Christian publishing company. That’s true to some degree.

However, I’ve been putting feelers out for secular work to make sure my family is financially secure, while knowing full well that there are about a half dozen articles on this easily-found site that make me not just unemployable but untouchable to most corporations. Oh well. The Lord will provide.

One other stand worth considering…

Maybe Pride Nights should have been our line in the sand as sports fans. Plenty of people boycotted the NFL for a time over the kneeling for the anthem controversy. Isn’t this worse?

I’m not all the way to a boycott yet, but maybe I should be. Though I’d never dare set foot in an arena or stadium on Pride Night, the money from the next game goes into the same people’s pockets. Maybe it shouldn’t be our money.

Praying time

I really do think we might be on the brink of an LGBT rollback that was unthinkable as little as two years ago. It would be a tremendous good for our society if LGBT causes stopped receiving the red carpet treatment. This momentum is an encouraging sign in that direction, and we should pray it continues.

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Notes

• As always, this article is free. Other than book content for paying subscribers, I’ve decided against putting my articles behind a paywall. Even my latest book is free.
  
  However, that all comes with a cost. Paywalled articles drive more premium subscriptions, and that’s income I’m passing up to make everything free.
  
  If you’d like to support me in this work and help continue to make the free content feasible for me, you can go here.

‘Eden Has The Answers’ is a working title that will almost certainly not be the final one. If you’d like to offer a suggestion, go here!

“Speak your truth.”

As this little phrase wormed its way into our cultural consciousness, it was a clear sign that something was very, very wrong. Over seven billion people can’t have their own truths. If there are that many truths, then there are effectively no truths.

Thus, the idea of “my truth” is a complete rejection of God and His rule over all things. Anywhere man names himself the arbiter of truth, he has ruled out a Divine lawgiver. Like Eve in Genesis 3, he has decided that he can override God’s commandments and become his own source of good and evil.

The probably is, finite, mortal mankind make for very poor gods.

We are not capable of creating objective truth. For a time, man tried to find objective truth through science and other disciplines, but that failed to answer the big philosophical questions.

Instead of realizing that that road led straight back to God, man tried out the only other alternative: subjective truth. There is no objective truth to be created or discovered, we decided. It’s all up to the individual and their lived experiences. I can’t tell you what’s right, and you can’t tell me what’s right. You be you, and I’ll be me.

How’s that working out for us? About as well as one should expect. In the last 100 years we have seen…

• Anything goes, Godless systems of governance that have enslaved and killed tens of millions of their own citizens.

• Men and women who have killed over one hundred million of their own children, leading to the rejection of the blessing of children altogether, as seen in plummeting fertility rates.

• Soaring divorce numbers that gave way to cynical avoidance of marriage in the form of casual hookups, porn, and/or cohabitation.

• The glorification of sexual perversion of all stripes, including the sexualization of children.

• A battle of the sexes spawned by feminists that started small and ended with men in women’s bathrooms and locker rooms.

• Racial animosity and its various overcorrections that have pitted man against man for centuries.

• Crises of loneliness and poor mental health that have reached epidemic levels.

• Environmentalism that views man as a plague on the planet, equal to or even less valuable than animals.

In all of these things, mankind has been raging against nature. But nature can’t ever successfully be raged against, at least not for long. Why not? Because God made it. The earth and all that is in it are His, and He sustains it all by the power of His Word. It only works properly when it is submitted to His design.

As Psalm 127:1 says, “Unless the LORD builds the house, They labor in vain who build it.” It is clear that man has long been laboring in vain. We can’t have a house worth living in when we’re following our own plans rather than submitting to God’s blueprint.

But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost.

The Christian would argue that the Bible has the answers to all of these issues. The doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture insists that God has given us the instruction we need for life and godliness. When we trust in the truths He has given us instead of leaning on our own understanding, life just works.

However, in this book, we’re going to go one step further.

We’re going to examine how the answers to all of today’s biggest problems were established not just in the Bible, but in the Bible’s first three chapters. By the time Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, we had a rock solid foundation for everything we need to know. The first humans had a clear picture of how to properly live human life under God’s watchful eye.

To be sure, the answers are developed more fully throughout the rest of the Scriptures, and history has borne out their wisdom. We will certainly draw on the rest of the Biblical text to see how it built on the principles found in Eden. But the blueprint for happy, fulfilled, God-honoring life on earth has been in place since the very beginning.

The only questions are, 1) Will we seek God’s answers from Eden? and 2) If we find them, will we submit to them?

It is my aim to point you to God’s answers in this book, and by picking it up you are on the journey to answering the first question in the affirmative. But the answer to the second question remains to be seen.

Are you prepared to submit to God’s plan instead of making your own? Will you live by His truth, even if it’s difficult? Or will you go back to the comfortable convenience of “your truth,” regardless of the consequences?

Will we learn from Adam and Eve’s grave error and instead let God be God? Or will we follow in their footsteps and try to make ourselves like God by casting off His authority?

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If you’d like to support this book project and get a complementary download of it when I’m done, along with downloads of all of my other books, become a supporting subscriber!

Consumer Christianity is evolving and expanding its reach. As it does, compromise comes along with it every step of the way.

It started simply with worship.

Tent revivals bled into Sunday morning and suddenly everything was designed around providing an experience that visitors would like. Shorter sermons, fewer songs, more basic content… just make sure they want to come back.

And it worked! Who can argue with the numbers?

Then it took over whole churches with the seeker-sensitive, attractional model.

Give the people what they want. Figure out how to turn them into delighted customers rather than dedicated disciples. Build your church around programs and tell people what we can do for you. Make sure they really like us when they come in the building.

And it worked! Who can argue with the numbers?

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Now it’s reached the Gospel itself.

“Don’t discuss certain sins or take strong stands—that’s off-putting to the world!” That evolves into “Don’t expect Christians to pursue a higher standard of holiness.” If we preach on challenging topics like the Biblical design of men and women, modesty, politics, and such, people might leave.

And we can’t afford to have people leave. So just stay away, tell people to generically “love God and love others” without getting into specifics, and hope they’ll get the idea.

And it worked! Who can argue with the numbers?

Here’s the problem: Jesus doesn’t care about numbers.

He cares about faithfulness. He doesn’t pander to consumers—He calls only those who will take up a cross and follow (Luke 9:23).

We have to rediscover worship as God’s regular table fellowship with His family. Consumer Christianity totally misses the point of worship, and in order to stop this cycle we have to get back to understanding worship the right way. Stop building it around what will be most palatable to the carnally-minded and start giving God the attention and praise He is due.

We have to give up the consumerist approach to church. We preach the Gospel to people. We aim to convert them to Jesus and the abundant life He offers. That is a wholly different idea than trying to convert them to liking what we as an organization have to offer.

And, we have to grow the backbone to ditch the soft-pedaled Gospel and start tearing down strongholds. God’s Word meets people where they live. It is not some ivory tower, philosophical truth we assert that does not mix with the nitty-gritty of daily life.

It meets us where we live. It meets us right where we most don’t want to submit, and when it does so, it offends us. But the Gospel can’t save if it doesn’t offend, because then people will never know they are lost and in desperate need of a Savior.

We have the best news in all the world. Why not just believe it?

This article first appeared at focuspress.org in 2020.

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• I had the privilege of making a return appearance on Scripture Matters Podcast to talk about my book, ‘You Are Saved.’ You can tune in here.

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For the last couple of weeks, I’ve had numerous discussions with and about the Non-Institutional churches of Christ (NICOC hereafter), both in preparation for and response to our Think Deeper Podcast episode on the topic.

You can watch the episode for a bit of a background if you’re not familiar, but a very basic summary is that the NICOC and the Institutional or Mainline churches of Christ (MCOC hereafter) had a sharp parting of the ways 70-80 years ago over whether the local church had authority to send contribution funds to parachurch organizations.

Our guest, Jacob Hudgins, was a wonderful representative for the view, and we had a very cordial discussion. Everything that follows in this piece is neither an attempt to speak for his point of view or to argue back against what he said in the episode.

Rather, I want to look at the prospects for unity between the NICOC and the MCOC going forward from here.

I am not under the illusion that one podcast episode would be sufficient to bridge the gap or spur widespread reconciliation efforts. However, it has stirred up a considerable amount of discussion, which I think has been helpful when it comes to clarifying what next steps look like.

I fielded suggestions regarding what needs to happen next, and I’d like to respond to a few of them here.

Get together

To me, this is the best, most viable suggestion. Visit the other congregation in your area. Have a meal together, wherever both are comfortable having it. Find out each one’s framework for unity, and see where it goes from there.

That’s all we can realistically do. There is no mass solution. This is not like labor negotiations, where two sides send their representatives and everybody lives by what is decided. As we are not a denomination, no group of preachers on either side can reach a conclusion that everybody will abide by.

Even with our one hour episode, we’ve received comments suggesting that it was too cordial, and that our guest did not put us in our place enough. If that’s what happens from one podcast episode, how much more would that happen if a widespread framework for unity was suggested?

Having one on one conversations and working locally are far better solutions. Widespread unity won’t happen unless there is small scale unity first.

Police our sides

I believe this is also a necessary part of a solution. I’ve had people wade into my comments lobbing bombs at the NICOC, and where I’ve seen it, I’ve tried to rein in their strong rhetoric.

I appreciate where I see the same policing being done in the opposite direction. When somebody says the MCOC are out of the Book of Life because we don’t care about the Bible’s authority, I hope that someone who is seeking unity would tell them to back off.

Unity is going to be a lot harder if we don’t push out the hardliners who want to open old wounds and slam the other side.

Stop using labels

I have been chided numerous times for using terms like “side,” “wing” and “Non-Institutional,” under the idea that such terminology is divisive or that the widely used terms should actually be scrapped to fit the commenter’s view of how the issue should be characterized. To those I say, terms like these only arise to describe already-existent realities, and we can’t communicate clearly if we make up our own terms.

Yes, we should avoid using inflammatory terms like “Anti” and “Progressive” for each other, but beyond that, we should aim to avoid being sensitive to terms. Communication necessitates distinctions of some kind, and we don’t get our own dictionaries.

Wrangling over the use of terms before the discussion even starts isn’t terribly conducive to unity.

Make our cases from Scripture

Some have suggested that further discussion of the sticking points is needed to open up the Scriptures and let both sides (yes, I’m calling them sides, because they are sides of an issue) make their cases.

The only way that makes sense is if one thinks that more talking will convince the other side to concede and change their minds. With books and articles and archived footage that has been compiled for over six decades, why would we think there is going to be a mass changing of minds now?

I am not in favor of continuing the debate. At a certain point a decision has to be made, which leads us to…

The options before us

There are a few options for where we go next, though—once again—none of them can be accomplished on a broad scale. Still, here are the possible options I see (and if I’ve missed any, let me know).

One side convinces the other

It has happened in some individual cases, but as I noted above, there is too much data that shows this is not a realistic conclusion to expect.

One side forces the other to comply

That’s not much of a unity solution, is it?

It may have been different in the past, but at this point in time, I don’t believe many on the MCOC side intend to make the NICOC folks participate in our fellowship meals or institutional support. Will the NICOC folks be united with us if we continue in these practices without forcing them to join?

To me, that’s where the issue hangs in the balance. Sometimes the answer seems to be yes; sometimes the answer appears to be no.

A 2017 meeting between the two camps led to numerous articles in Truth Magazine about the various areas of disagreement, but I couldn’t help but notice that the NICOC prescription came down to this: if we’re going to have unity, the MCOC will have to repent and change their ways. In their own words, we were placed in the same camp as today’s progressive churches, the kinds with whom we do not cross paths.

I don’t mean to be harsh by saying this, but I also think it should be obvious: if you invite people to a meeting, say you’re interested in unity, and yet your proposal is “Repent, agree with us, and change your ways,” don’t be surprised when it doesn’t go well, and future invitations are declined. Also, don’t slam them for “not wanting unity” when they decline those subsequent invitations.

That’s not a plea for unity. It’s an ambush.

We decide it’s a Romans 14-style matter of opinion

I believe this is where most MCOC folks stand, but I also believe this is NOT where most NICOC folks stand. And that’s alright. They are allowed to view it as something deeper.

We leave it to church autonomy

If we are going to be local church maximalists, which most of us would agree we should, then why can’t the church down the road hold some differing views? Does church autonomy allow for any differences? Are we allowed to demand another eldership submit to our own eldership?

Obviously, there has to be a line at which autonomy goes too far somewhere—otherwise, we’d be universalists.

But that brings us back to the central question. Does the MCOC’s use of funds cross that line?

If that is one’s position, then unity is not going to happen, and we should stop pretending it might. If you truly think those who paid for a fellowship hall are sinners bound for eternal damnation, or are at the very least in jeopardy for their insubordination, stand by it.

If one’s position is that it doesn’t break the line of fellowship, but it is a conviction you can’t break, that makes our path to unity fairly clear. I suspect the overwhelming majority of MCOC folks will meet you in the middle and seek to extend fellowship in a way that doesn’t violate your conviction.

We can argue about whose court the ball is in, but if both sides are open to fellowship in a way that doesn’t demand the other completely cave in, then it shouldn’t matter who’s the first one to extend an olive branch. Just start talking.

Leaving with some optimism

I don’t speak for anyone but myself with any of this. I am a complete outsider to the centers of influence in the MCOC. Having established that, take this for whatever it’s worth:

I believe we are closer to unity than it might look.

The missing ingredient is time. As Steve Wolfgang noted in his discussion with Caleb Robertson, history turns over in 60-80 year cycles as old ways and conflicts pass out of living memory. We’re approaching that timeframe for this divide.

And, I can’t help but notice that many of the most inflammatory comments I’ve received on either side have been from older folks, and the most openness has come from the younger. Even some of those older folks who offered compliments on our episode could not help but do so with the backs of their hands. Others have been prickly, and immediately gave themselves a pass because of the painful experiences of the past.

A lot of hurt feelings and distrust remain. There’s a good chance unity can be much easier to find for those who don’t carry such wounds.

No matter where you stand, we all should pray for unity just like Jesus did. If you’re like me, you might read a statement like that and nod, “Yeah, we should,” and then forget. So I’m going to ask you to take a minute right now and pray for unity, grace, soft hearts, and understanding.

We’re far closer than we have acted, and it’s time we change that.

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Well, it’s June again. And despite some of the rollbacks of the last couple of years, “Pride Month” is still very much a thing.

It took them decades of plotting and working to make it happen, and so it’s probably going to take some time for us to make it stop happening.

But just saying we will not stand for the culture of LGBT+ism won’t be enough to turn the false rainbow tide.

We have to get over our aversion to standing FOR a pro-family culture.

“What aversion?” you might ask. “We’re pro-heterosexual marriage and believe a man is a man and a woman is a woman.”

To that I would say, we have settled for a bare minimum.

When I say that marriage should be prescribed as normative, the comments section floods with people pointing to Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 to make the argument that there is no normative path—disregarding that the vast majority of humans were made with desires that can only be filled in marriage.

When I say that we should be encouraging young people toward preparing themselves for and pursuing marriage in early adulthood, Christians push back by saying either they can’t be ready by then or should spend their early 20s pursuing other experiences.

When somebody has one kid too many, it’s not uncommon for church members to be the quickest to make passive aggressive comments. “You know what causes that, right?” “You guys are done, right?”

When you describe a masculinity that is anything other than emasculated “servant leadership,” many immediately write it off as domineering and unChristlike.

When you read Bible verses about women having a quiet and gentle spirit and submitting to their husbands, caveats start flying to gut the verses from any actual, practical application.

Until this changes, we won’t have a complete response to Pride Month.

You can’t beat something with nothing. You can’t win a culture war without a culture (and yes, you’re in a culture war whether you want to be or not).

Similarly, you can’t say “Not that” without prescribing a “This.” People are always moving in one direction or another. We have to have a direction we’re recommending. Yes, it will require a broad brush, and yes, there will be exceptions.

This is obviously not about shaming those who have yet to find a spouse, those who are divorced, or those who are unable to have children. In fact, they are the exceptions that prove the rule of the goodness of marriage and family.

There has to be a normative picture to pursue, and ours should come from the Bible

We don’t do this because it’s a path to success. We do it because it’s right—but not coincidentally, what is right is also a path to success.

Good, godly men married to good, godly women raising children to be faithful is the backbone of human society, all the way back to the Garden of Eden (Genesis 1:26-28). That’s exactly why the other side’s most sacred “values” are abortion, homosexuality, feminism, and transgenderism.

We cannot answer those positions with neutrality toward childbearing, indifference toward marriage, weak complementarianism, and a lack of clarity on masculinity and femininity. A thin Gospel that does not offer a positive prescription of what the average Christian ought to be and do is not Biblical, and it will not be able to stand in the face of degeneracy.

To that end, I recommend that churches join in with states like Tennessee in celebrating a Nuclear Family Month. Preach on manhood, womanhood, marriage, and childbearing. Speak of the goodness of God’s design for marriage, and the blessing of children.

Let the church know that the family is to be celebrated because God gave it to us for the purposes of solving our loneliness and giving us the unit we need to take dominion over all the earth (Genesis 1:28, 2:18).

Being against evil is great. But being for good at the same time is even better.

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Notes

• This week we posted what has already become our most-watched episode in the 4 and a half year run of Think Deeper Podcast! Check out our interview on Non-Institutional churches of Christ here

• For more on Pride Month, see these entries from previous years
  

Pop psychology and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

As we as a society have grown more self-aware about our mental health and the industry terms have entered the cultural vocabulary, there is no mechanism for preventing the potent concepts from being misused.

Suddenly everyone is an expert, throwing out diagnoses and analysis with a sense of authority because of the weight the terms carry.

In 2016, psychologist Nick Haslam put a finger on the problem by coining the term “concept creep.”

Wikipedia summarizes the idea as “the process by which harm-related topics experience semantic expansion to include topics which would not have originally been envisaged to be included under that label.”

To give an example, “trauma” originally had a useful meaning. Now it has come to mean “anything bad that ever happened to someone.” Similar terms like abuse, narcissism, gaslighting, and toxic have undergone the same kind of expansion.

The appeal is obvious: if I can label someone with a therapy-coded term, it’s a scientific diagnosis that can’t be argued against.

If I tell myself you’re being mean, maybe I can give you a little grace and assume you’re having a bad day. If I tell myself you’re an abusive gaslighter, I have no obligation to you and you have no opportunity to redeem yourself. You’re just irredeemably evil and I have no obligation to treat you with love.

It also works the other direction, where we can give ourselves a pass by laying blame due us onto the therapy dictionary.

The two create an incredibly convenient blend of taking zero responsibility for ourselves and feeling no sense of duty to anybody else.

If I act poorly, it’s because of my trauma. If you act poorly, it’s because you’re a toxic narcissist.

Then you add the third ingredient: boundaries.

The idea of boundaries is a necessary one, as some people will not stop taking from you or encroaching upon your life until you tell them otherwise. As Cloud and Townsend (the doctors who coined the term for therapeutic use) point out, even God sets boundaries in His relationships, so it clearly is good and proper—within reason.

But boundaries are another victim of concept creep, as millions of people have taken “boundaries” as a pass to not make any effort or do any forgiving in their relationships. “One strike, and you’re done. Gotta have boundaries!”

Lest we feel any guilt over drawing a boundary too far afield, we fall back on all the concept creep therapyworld labels to assure ourselves it’s ok.

“My parents are toxic.”

“My spouse is a narcissist.”

“That preacher is abusive.”

Again, sometimes these accusations are accurate on some level. But, thanks to concept creep, the terms are useless. Without specifics, who knows if it’s a legitimate claim or an exaggeration or fabrication being weaponized to avoid personal responsibility?

Marriages march all the way to divorce court with one or both spouses feeling perfectly justified because they could recite all the therapeutic terms that showed why they were 100% in the right and their spouse was [insert whatever combo of diagnostic labels it took to help them feel justified].
People destroy friendships and treat others like human garbage with the approval of their own DSM-coded consciences.
Family members have been completely cut off because someone’s “boundaries” meant attempts at reconciliation were a bridge too far.

Where is Christian duty in all of this?

Before we use these terms, shouldn’t we check with the Word as to what God requires of us toward our friends, family, church family, and even enemies?

“So, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience; bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you.” (Colossians 3:12-13)

“[Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13:7

Truth be told, somebody may well be, say, a narcissist. I may need to set proper boundaries so I don’t allow him to get away with things that will harm both of us. But if I place him in the “narcissist” box and never see him otherwise, I will fail every “one another” command God ever gave me.

Shouldn’t we do unto others as we would have them do unto us (Matthew 7:12)?

Lest that still sound too difficult, there’s one more question that must be asked:

Aren’t you glad Jesus didn’t label you “toxic?”

Aren’t you glad He modeled the commands He gave us: “Bear with one another,” “Forgive one another,” “Tolerate one another,” “bear one another’s burdens?”

None of us would stand a chance if our God dealt with relationships the way weaponized therapy-speak tells us to. We want grace and mercy. We had better be prepared to give them.

As for the therapy world, the tools we use can make our lives better, but we must never let them supersede our duty to God.

Hit the brakes before the next time you throw out a weaponized therapy term at somebody, and ask yourself what your real goal is—to score a point, or to please God and love the people He’s put in front of you?

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Notes

• This week’s Think Deeper Podcast episode is on track to become our most-viewed of all time! Join us and guest Jacob Hudgins for a friendly discussion on the Non-Institutional churches of Christ

I’ve been working through Malachi for our Minor Prophets teaching series on Focus+, and every time I visit the little book I’m reminded of a challenging truth:

Sometimes, our worship is the LAST thing God wants.

This truth demolishes the idea of box-checking Christianity. Just because we showed up and went through the rituals doesn’t mean God was pleased. In fact, sometimes it makes Him even more upset.

Let’s talk about the two times the Bible tells us God doesn’t want our worship.

First, God doesn’t want our worship when it’s half-hearted.

In Malachi, God was furious at the dishonor that was being shown toward Him, as those post-exilic Israelites offered Him lame, blind, and sick sacrifices—sacrifices they would never offer their governor (1:7-8).

Where David had insisted he would never make an offering to God that cost Him nothing (2 Samuel 24:24), these people were doing the opposite. In v.9, God essentially asks, “Did you really think I was going to be happy to receive that?”

He goes even further in v.10, saying He wished someone would shut the gates so they couldn’t even attempt to offer a sacrifice. “‘I am not pleased with you,’ says the Lord of hosts, ‘nor will I accept an offering from you’” (1:10b).

God was so disgusted with their half-hearted offerings that He would rather they not even be allowed to show up.

It’s a great reminder to take stock of what we’re offering to God. Are we giving Him the Sundays that aren’t taken up with more “important” things, like youth sports or a trip to the lake?
Are we showing up with divided attention, checking scores or scrolling social media during worship? (As an aside—yet another reason to bring a paper Bible, by the way.)
Are we walking as living and holy sacrifices, or giving ourselves up as lame and blind by being covered in worldliness?

While churches are sometimes called to “close the gates” on the unrepentant via church discipline, we shouldn’t need to let it get that far. The point is not to stay home on Sunday if you’ve been half-hearted. The point is to repent and go offer Him our best this Sunday.

Second, God doesn’t want our worship if we’re not right with our brothers.

In Matthew 5:23-24, Jesus told His listeners that they shouldn’t make an offering if they hadn’t first reconciled an outstanding problem with a brother. This sentiment is reflected elsewhere, as in 1 Peter 3:7, where husbands are told their prayers would be hindered if they don’t treat their wives well, and 1 John 4:20, where we learn that we can’t say we love God if we hate a brother.

It’s too easy for Christians to be at sharp odds with each other and think they can keep on walking with God without a problem. Jesus told us it doesn’t work that way.

I even once had somebody ask during a Bible class about peacemaking, “Can I just sit on the other side of the building from someone if I have a problem with Him?” Ridiculous.

See the conflict through God’s eyes. He loves you. He loves the brother with whom you’re feuding. But He’s not going to bring you into eternity having separate relationships with each of you since you can’t get along with each other, like estranged brothers showing up to the family reunion on different days to avoid each other.

So, He doesn’t want us worshiping Him if we’re hanging onto grudges with each other.

Worship is all-encompassing

What we do together on Sundays is not ever a matter of checking a box God has given us in order to punch our ticket to heaven, with no regard to how it gets done. No, it’s something we do for Him, and as such we have to do it in His desired way.

So, as Sunday approaches, take stock: are you ready to give God your best, or would He want the gates closed on you? Are you right with your brother? Or would He want you to set your offering down and go make amends first?

Worship is too important for us to offer it on our terms. It has to be done on His terms, or not at all.

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Notes

• Don’t forget, you can now grab a download of my latest book, You Are Saved, for FREE!

“Actions speak louder than words,” and “Kids will do what you do, not what you say” are two clichés we all understand, but sometimes need to take more seriously.

This is particularly applicable when it comes to what we do as Christians.

Every choice you make as a church member teaches your children an important lesson about the church.

Here are four of the biggest lessons they are learning from your words and actions.

You teach them the importance of the church by committing to attend.

They need to see that church is a non-negotiable part of our lives and that God comes first in all things. When attendance is optional and we let all kinds of other activities take precedence, we shouldn’t be surprised when the church doesn’t matter to them as they become independent and make their own decisions.

You teach them what matters in a church by your choice of where to attend.

If you choose a congregation because the lessons make you feel good, their takeaway will be that making people feeling good is the point of the church.
If you choose one because of the offerings they’ve catered to you, you teach them that the church is an organization that is there to serve the individual rather than the other way around.
If you choose one purely because it’s a convenient distance from home, they’ll learn that the character of the church matters far less than our own comfort.

When it’s time to choose a congregation to be a part of, two reasons should outrank all the others: biblical teaching, and opportunities to serve. From these they’ll learn that the Bible is of utmost importance and that we are servants of the church, not customers.

You teach them by your words the value of Christ’s church.

If they hear us lifting up our church family in prayer, speaking well of them, and praising them, they will see the value of having a church family. On the other hand, if they hear us picking apart the preacher or the song leader or sharing the latest gossip or speaking negatively about our fellow members, it will teach them all kinds of bad attitudes.

It will teach them to think of themselves as superior to others. It will teach them to be judgmental. And, ultimately, it will teach them to have little value or love for their church family.

Instead, we must find ways to teach our children to love the people who make up the church. Speak highly of your brothers and sisters. See the good. Encourage them and build them up when you’re together.

Though the people around us are never perfect, we can teach our children to love as Jesus loved by caring about our church family. And, we teach them humility and grace when we show them the importance of loving people through the ups and downs.

You teach them by your fellowship that the church truly is a family.

When we tell people that church is a family and then only see each other briefly each week, know little about each other, and rarely help build each other up and bear each other’s burdens, they’ll start to see “church family” as little more than a weak metaphor.

Teach your kids that you mean it when you call your fellow members your family. Have your fellow Christians in your home. Attend the funerals and weddings with your kids in tow. Pray as a family for the needs of the people in your church. Teach the kids to shake hands and remember names at worship.

One way or another, they’ll learn

We want our kids to love what we love and carry on our values and traditions. But of all of these, the church must be first. What shall it profit a kid if he can root for the family sports teams, make the family recipes, and yet forfeit his soul?

The same way you pass on those other traditions is how you pass on the faith. Show your kids you love the church. Show them that participation is important to you. Show them that God matters above all else in your family. Deuteronomy 6 practices create a Deuteronomy 6 people. Teach your kids to love God and His church.

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Notes

• Don’t forget, you can get my latest book You Are Saved: The Christian’s Assurance FREE!

• This week’s Think Deeper Podcast covers the parallels between Israel’s Divided Kingdom and modern day America, with lessons for churches, families, and today’s Christians.