In my nearly 20 years of doing this, I’ve run into two consistent themes in the church with regard to the kind of work I and my colleagues do:

A lot of preachers think cultural engagement is “icky…”

and a lot of people in the pews are starving for it.

“Ugh, you’re one of those guys who talks about issues instead of Jesus,” is the general response from many in the ministry crowd.

Those preachers can’t understand why someone would talk about names like Charlie Kirk and Lindsay Clancy, issues like abortion and immigration, and other hotly debated issues that grab the culture’s attention. We’re just here to preach Jesus, they say.

Meanwhile, many people in the pews want to know what the Bible has to say about those issues—and perhaps also where their church leaders stand on them.

One survey ahead of the 2024 election found that 82% of evangelicals wanted to hear a sermon about the Bible’s stance on immigration. That’s over 4 out of 5 churchgoers who wanted a sermon on immigration. Yet, less than 1/3 of them got one. If they want to hear about that issue, we can reasonably assume they want to hear about others, too.

Anecdotal experience certainly backs that up for me. The comment we get more than any other regarding Think Deeper Podcast is, “You guys talk about the things nobody else talks about.” I am not saying that to pat myself and my cohosts on the back. I’m saying it to point out that there is a tremendous void to be filled. We’d be far better off if the local church were having these discussions more than podcasters are.

But we don’t, because cultural issues are icky.

To be clear, only the cultural issues that the world tells us are icky are actually icky, in this approach. Taking a strong stand against feminism is unhelpful, but “we cannot be silent” about racism when the world tells us we have to talk about it.

The end result is that both Christians and the lost see that the church exists to push the left-wing status quo on some issues, and to protect it from ever being cross-examined with Scripture on other issues.

Why is cultural engagement seen as icky?

I can’t speak to anyone’s motives, but I can tell you what is often said. The claim is that issues divide, but Christ unites. Why speak about something that might drive people away when you could tell people about Jesus?

So, when somebody puts out a strong stance on abortion, Lindsay Clancy, or immigration, the ick factor sets in. Cringing responses flow. “This could keep us from reaching people for Jesus! If church members find out where their preacher stands on these kinds of things, some of them might leave!”

Those charges are worth our concern, but they aren’t the end of the story.

Here are three reasons why we shouldn’t let backlash keep us from cultural engagement.

First, that’s not what Jesus did.

Jesus was divisive because He claimed authority over every aspect of people’s lives. He couldn’t have “just preached the Gospel” to the rich young ruler instead of talking about money. He was preaching the Gospel by laying down the requirements that come with it.

And, that’s what we aim to do by discussing the issues. People need to know that the Gospel is going to require them to be transformed by the renewing of their minds.

Second, abstention is also divisive, it’s just a little more quiet.

When the church doesn’t take a clear stand on some hot button issue that the Bible addresses, maybe we kept from angering the blue-haired, nose-ringed Starbucks barista who hates religion, but we might have also pushed away the blue collar guy who sees what’s wrong with the world and wants to know if the church does, too. Somehow, the latter almost never enters into our calculations.

Third, we hurt people when we avoid the issues that affect them.

I posted recently about the catastrophic decline in marriage rates among young people, and one of the responses I got is that the church shouldn’t be focused on these kinds of things. Why not?
Does the Bible not establish the importance and goodness of marriage?
Does it not say that spouses and children are a blessing, and that it’s not good to be alone?
Shouldn’t we expect a church with a healthy culture to be one where young people can find like-minded spouses, raise families in the Lord, and grow into church leadership?
Does it not hurt the church if we have an elder shortage because not enough men could get married and have families?

I could keep asking questions, but I think you get the point. The world has some serious problems to solve, and by abdicating our job on these issues, we’ve failed to show them a better way. We’re little closer to solving these problems than the world, when we have the blueprint!

People need icky Christianity

If we’re going to have a prophetic voice in this age of so much confusion, we’re going to have to say some things that will get us labeled as “icky” by the “respectable” people.

Some people will probably leave. Some will be turned off. We can either fire the preacher and insist we keep our Christianity firmly in the building and our own hearts, or we can embrace the parts of the Gospel that others find distasteful, and thereby help Christians rise above the modern world.

The truth has always had an off-putting effect—just go see what happened to Jesus in John 6. Paul told us the same in 1 Corinthians 1:18 and 2 Corinthians 2:15-16. That doesn’t mean the truth is not the truth, or that it’s not worth saying.

Preach the Word, be instant in season and out of season—when people want to hear it, and when they think it’s icky.

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Notes

• My book Church Reset: God’s Design for So Much More is now permanently just $9.99 on Amazon, and features an all-new cover! Grab a copy here

• You can catch all 4 lessons I presented at the Engage Conference, along with lessons from Brad Harrub, Will Harrub, and Joe Wilkie, on the Brown St. Church of Christ YouTube channel!

The following is a talk I did at the Engage Conference in Waxahachie, TX on ‘Toxic Masculinity vs. Biblical Masculinity.’

I discussed the world’s view of masculinity, how the church has largely failed to correct them, and practical ways men of God can avoid the two ditches of unbridled masculinity vs. a denial of it.

You can watch below, or listen on the Church Reset podcast (Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app)!

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There’s a common misconception in the headship discussion that men who advocate for man’s leadership and woman’s submission only do so out of a desire to live like a king at others’ expense.

They seem to see it similarly to the little kid who demands the biggest piece of birthday cake, or cuts to the front of the line at batting practice.

This comes from what I’ve called the Dictator/Doormat dichotomy, in which people believe a man can only choose one of those two paths for his role in the home. The dictator takes all of the blessings of being the head of the house, without any of the burden. Obviously, that is not good.

Jesus said the greatest of all would be the servants (Matthew 23:11). He got down and washed feet (John 13). He wasn’t here to be served, but to serve (Mark 10:45). So, being the head of the household does not mean living large at everyone else’s expense.

However, we shouldn’t overcorrect.

In our feminist society and the Christian world that has been indoctrinated by it, the Doormat man has all of the burdens of the household, but none of the blessings.

The buck still ultimately stops with him when it comes to making sure the family is financially taken care of. If his wife is miserable, he is supposed to say “Yes, Dear” and “I’m sorry” and live by “Happy wife, happy life.” And if she isn’t happy, it can only ever be his fault for not “stepping up.” It must be because of something he did (or didn’t do—see “the mental load”).

As for the blessings, men have been told that accepting this role would help them gain appreciation and even sexual prioritization (“Nothing’s hotter to a woman than a man who cleans the kitchen!”) but
1) it doesn’t work,
2) the wife almost never agreed to that deal, and
3) it would be an even bigger problem if she did.

What kind of relationship has the man filling out a chore chart to get some consideration from his wife? Not a healthy one. But that’s the system that is often taught, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly. So, instead of any blessings that come with the responsibility, he becomes the constant butt of the joke and is expected to defer to his wife in all things or he isn’t “serving her like Jesus.”

This paradigm has chased a number of young men away from marriage entirely. Who would sign up for any job where you bear all the responsibility, take all of the blame, and get none of the benefits?

No, we should be able to find a balance.

The ideal is for men to sacrificially take on the challenging burden of leading the family, and to receive the blessing of being recognized and respected for doing so.

If that sounds radical… why? Why should the role of husband and father be a thankless job?

We are all effusive in our praise of mothers, and rightly so, as Proverbs 31:28-29 shows. A good husband who loves God, cherishes his wife, leads his family to obey the Word, and takes on the responsibilities of protecting and providing for the household, should be respected for who he is.

Truth be told, the Bible commands his wife to respect him even if he isn’t all those things. But the godly husband will strive to take on the burden of his task, and for that the blessing of respect should be his as well.

Getting practical

For wives

This is the way Christian women can be Sarah’s children, as 1 Peter 3:6 discusses. You don’t exactly have to call your husband “lord” as she did, but you should be showing the kind of respect and deference contained in that verse.

This kind of teaching is often countered with the charge that the wife is not her husband’s slave, or child, or whatever. No, but she is his wife, and as such God commands her to submit to Him and respect Him (Ephesians 5:22, 33). She should be in the habit of making it clear to her husband, their children, and anybody observing their interactions that she respects and appreciates him for who he is and what he does.

There’s a real beauty to be found when we abandon the feminist battle of the sexes and get back to these Biblical commands. He’s going to bear the burdens of leading and providing for the family… she can lighten that load by making him feel respected for it.

For husbands

Bear the burden, get the blessing. Seeking the blessing of being the lead man without taking on the burden just makes your family resent you. Bearing the burden while not being respected just makes you resent them. So, do your job, and communicate clearly that you and everyone else in the house will be expected to follow the Biblical commands given to each person in their role.

There’s a common thought that no good leader has to remind people of his title and authority. That’s not always true, though. Jesus did it. Paul did it. Any leader who is being undermined has to address it somehow. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.

If a man is constantly pointing to his title to get his way, that’s not the right use of authority. On the other hand, if a man has to tell his wife she can’t keep disrespecting him and overriding him in front of the kids, that would be a necessary part of managing the household well.

After all, as her spiritual head, he is doing her no favors if he doesn’t take her back to the Word when she needs to hear it. At the same time, he’ll be a lot more effective at that if he’s living consistently by the Word himself.

For all of us

The church should be leading the charge against young people’s growing disillusionment with marriage. Too often we hammer men for not stepping up enough, and we make them the butt of the joke for being less competent than their wives.

What if, instead, we presented the role of husband and father as a high calling with great responsibility to be borne, yet also with great honor coming to those who do it well? What if we taught the wives and young women what a blessing it is to have a good man to lead and protect them, and how good it is for them to respect their husbands?

To do this, we are going to have to shake off decades of feminist indoctrination, and we’re going to have to drop a lot of tropes and witty quips about men from our vocabulary. This will receive no small amount of pushback along the way. That’s but a small price to pay for Godlier, happier families.

Don’t fall in a ditch

As we swing back from our long foray into feminist-structured households, there will certainly be overcorrections, with some men trampling their families in the name of headship. Keep these two things in mind: that is still the far smaller problem than the opposite, and, that misapplication does not mean we have to throw any babies out with any bath water.

The Bible is incredibly straightforward about these things, and natural revelation backs it up. A man has a great duty to his family, and he should be honored for taking it on, even if he does it imperfectly. Don’t hand him the burden while holding back the blessing.

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Notes

Join me, Dr. Brad Harrub, Will Harrub, and Joe Wilkie this weekend at the Engage Conference in Waxahachie, TX!

Go here to see the schedule and to register

Author joined me to talk about his new book, 'Manmade: St. Anthony's Guide to Surviving the AI Apocalypse'

We discuss:
- What innovations like A.I. reveal about our shaky philosophical foundations
- Where God comes into the A.I. discussion
- Why "It's just a tool" misses the point
- Wiley's view on A.I. "writing" and sermon prep

You can order 'Manmade' here (Amazon affil.)
Check out Wiley's site at crwiley.com

Watch the interview below, or catch it on the go by subscribing to the Church Reset podcast (Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app)!

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I’ve been teaching through a study on Nehemiah, and every time I read the book my admiration grows for the man. He was in a tough situation, confronted with all kinds of difficulties, and yet he navigated it with perfect leadership.

Every decision he made struck the right note and helped the Jewish people restore the strength of Jerusalem by rebuilding the wall on an astonishing timeframe. While the Bible is filled with many great men and women, somehow Nehemiah is often overlooked among the greats like Daniel, Joseph, David, and others.

But that should not be the case. His book is a masterclass in leadership tactics and characteristics.

Here are 8 ways Nehemiah taught us to lead

1. He cared (1:4)
   It’s a simple one, yes, but it’s non-negotiable. Unless something really matters to a person, they’re not likely to get it done. Nehemiah cared about God, about God’s people, and about God’s city, and his care came through in everything he did.

2. He relied on God (1:4-11)
   Throughout the book, Nehemiah sought God’s blessing and relied on Him for strength and guidance.
   But notice, he prayed AND worked. Both of these are good, but they are incomplete without each other. Nehemiah prayed for God’s blessing on work he knew God wanted him to do, and then he didn’t wait around for God to make it happen. He acted.

3. He equipped the people (ch. 3 and 4:16)
   Nehemiah did not seek to be a one man show, nor did he micromanage them, but neither did he let himself be steered by the people. He cast a vision, put people in place to help him carry it out, and let them do their work. Any organization can learn from this structure, but churches especially can lean on “what every joint supplies” (Ephesians 4:11-16).

4. He inspired the people (2:17-20)
   Getting people excited about what they can accomplish and making them feel like they’re a part of something important and something bigger than themselves goes a long, long way. Practically every important man in history has done this for the people in his charge, and so anybody who would aim to get big things done must be able to inspire as Nehemiah did.

5. He stayed focused (4:6; 6:3, 10-13)
   There will always be a million things competing for our attention, and many of them will even be good things. Still, we can’t be everywhere all at once. Nehemiah was there to build a wall, and every decision he made came back to that central question: what is going to get this wall built? Focus is key.
   Part of that focus includes being shrewd. Not everyone who asks for your time asks in good faith, as Nehemiah’s opponents showed in chapter 6. A leader does not have to be everything to everyone, lest they tear him away from his purpose.

6. He cleaned house (5:6-7)
   When Satan can’t bring a good work down from the outside, he’ll try to bring it down from the inside. The Jews faced great internal strife in Nehemiah 5 as the haves took advantage of the have-nots, and Nehemiah would not stand for it. He angrily confronted those who caused the problem and pressured them into doing the right thing.
   These kinds of tactics are often not tolerated in our day, but they should be. No group can succeed without healthy internal confrontation.

7. He put his people first (5:14-19)
   Nehemiah was not there to live high on the proverbial hog—he was there to get the job done. He had every right to take the salary set aside for him, but he knew that would set him apart from the very people he was trying to lead, so he declined it.
   As Jesus told us, the greatest will be those who serve (Matthew 23:11). Nehemiah was not a “servant leader” in the modern, spineless sense. Rather, he was a ruler who did what was necessary to take care of his people.

8. He set the example (5:16)
   It’s very hard to get people to care more about a project than their leaders do. Churches, families, and any other organization will follow the cues of those who are in charge. For Nehemiah, that meant he had to work on that wall like his life depended on it, and when he did, the people did the same.

Take a read through Nehemiah again sometime soon. Let the man’s dedication to serving God inspire you to step up and get things done for God in your context, knowing that God aids and blesses those who step up in faith for Him as Nehemiah did.

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Complaining is one of mankind’s favorite pastimes. I have things to complain about, you have things to complain about, and so we’ll always have that in common. We hate Mondays, hot weather, cold weather, difficult coworkers, family members who don’t act the way we want them to, and so forth.

Unfortunately, this creates a perverse incentive for some people to put a magnifying glass on these grievances and “tickle our ears” by telling us how put upon we are by having to deal with the things and people we don’t like.

Every grievance has its own “Bitterness Brigade” online to commiserate and encourage one another to hate and resent the people around us.

As crazy as it is, there are people who make a living teaching others not to give grace, such as:

- Therapists who help clients blame every problem they have on things their parents did wrong, spamming words like “toxic” and “narcissist” to encourage breaking contact.

- Influencers who tell women to view everything their husbands do through a critical lens and constantly tell them how put upon they are in their marriages. Sheila Gregoire, Abby Eckel, etc.

- Influencers who tell a man that all women are untrustworthy and should be kept at arm’s length, even including the one he’s married to. Manosphere bros, MGTOW types.

- FB groups and reddit threads that will tell you that divorce and ghosting are the answer to all your problems.

- “Deconstruction” groups that will tell you to desert your church full of imperfect yet caring Christians because of a sermon you didn’t like or a rude comment from someone one time.

People will come across groups like these, feel a kinship over a common experience or two, convince themselves they’ve “found their people,” and next thing you know, they’ve blown their lives up thanks to the bad company that corrupted their good morals.

When you come across these types of groups, scroll their pages for a while and you’ll see they are almost always deeply unhappy people who attract a following of other deeply unhappy people—and remember that misery loves company.

Many of them are quite obviously just seeking validation by getting others to make the same choices they made.

Divorce is contagious because divorced people often spread their misery and tell others to look for greener grass, too. Going non-contact with family has snowballed in recent years as that is often the only tool some can loan from their toolbox. These things become social contagions long before many of the adherents stop to think if their choice was wise.

But evaluating the wisdom of our choices is the task before us.

Does God condone these kinds of Bitterness Brigades?

As always, measure the fruit.

Evaluate the influencers and commenters against 1 Corinthians 13 and see how much bearing and believing they’re encouraging. Spoiler alert: none.

Watch a TikTok video of a mom complaining about her annoying kids or lousy husband and ask yourself if she’s considering it all joy to endure her various trials, or rejoicing in the Lord always, and if she’s helping you do the same.

Read some forums about cutting off family members and see if the people there are dedicated to forgiving just as God in Christ has forgiven us.

Just slamming the door for the slightest offense isn’t the answer, no matter how many maladjusted Redditors say so. We aren’t perfect either, so we had better give the grace we hope to receive on our worst days, too.

You have to be so careful about who you’re listening to. No, you don’t have to ignore every offense a loved one commits, but even in conflict we have to start from a place of love and grace. Look at the fruits of doing otherwise and you’ll see that this kind of advice does not make one more Christlike.

That’s why enduring these hardships matters: this is our sanctification.

People are difficult. Sometimes, life is difficult. We were not promised otherwise.

We can either complain about it, and throw blame and resentment toward the people we are commanded to love, or we can see our struggles the way the Bible presents them: as opportunities to grow in Christlikeness.

We think our sanctification will come from a great worship service, or a good personal devotional time, or the spiritual high of a camp or a retreat. All of those are great. But where God really shapes us is in our faithful obedience to the day-in, day-out commands we don’t always want to obey.

A tough day with your spouse or kids is a new opportunity to submit ourselves to the Bible’s commands to love them, not be embittered toward them, and fulfill our God-given role for them. Hurt from your parents or someone in the church is a chance to learn how to bear with people. Removing your pains and obstacles won’t make you more joyful. Faithfully bearing them will.

Patience, humility, love, and grace are the answers. Finding people who will encourage our bitterness and validate our anger and annoyance is not.

If the people who have your attention online are making you more resentful toward the people you are called to love, use that unfollow button wisely.

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Notes

• My book Church Reset is just $10 on Amazon nowadays in either paperback or Kindle and has a slick new cover - Grab a copy here!

A few months ago, I wrote a piece here asking, “Who’s Going to Challenge the Women?” My premise was that young men have received a lot of tough love, and it has been a good thing for them.

At the same time, women have received nothing but coddling in the media and in the church, and it is not doing them any favors. They need someone to lovingly but firmly give them a course correction away from the path of feminism.

Now, the world is seeing that truth in 4KHD.

The Lindsay Clancy case is making it painfully clear that modern women are in a horrible way.

For those of you who aren’t heavily online and aren’t familiar with the case (and bless you for it), Lindsay Clancy was a married mom of three who sank into postpartum depression and then alleged psychosis before strangling her three children to death.

We can feel awful for her that her mental health was suffering so greatly. We can acknowledge that pharmaceutical interventions can sometimes wildly exacerbate the problems they are intended to help. And, at the same time, we can acknowledge that this was a horrific crime, and she should receive the full force of the law for her actions.

Instead, many women have decided that Clancy is the real victim.

Today, women rallied outside the courthouse dressed in pink in solidarity, cheering Clancy’s defense attorney. A GoFundMe has raised nearly a million dollars in support of Clancy, as women flood the page with encouragement for the face of their cause.

Other women have posted videos of themselves holding their children with the caption “Same, Lindsay,” either unaware of the horrific implications of identifying with a woman who killed her kids, or unbothered by them. They see Lindsay Clancy as their opportunity to talk about the struggles they’ve faced, leaving out the fact that they didn’t kill their kids.

The end result is that a woman who strangled her kids has become a hero and a vicarious avatar for an alarming number of women.

And none of them will entertain the idea that Clancy is responsible for these terrible actions.

Violating the 9th commandment, and contradicting Clancy’s own defense team, the women of TikTok have decided that Clancy’s husband may actually be the culprit. It’s the husband’s fault, they’ll tell you—whether they think he actually did it, or that he wasn’t supportive enough, or that he was guilty of driving her to it by some unreported abuse he must have committed.

If it’s not him, it’s the drug companies’ fault. It’s the therapist’s fault. It is everybody's fault but the woman who killed the kids.

The responsibility Clancy bears, one woman told me, is the unfortunate responsibility that she will have to live without her kids. Unsurprisingly, the same woman suspects the husband—you know, who also has to live his life without his kids because his wife murdered them—may have been the cause.

I am telling you, women are not okay.

Not all the women, of course—though the ones who aren’t included in that diagnosis are also the kind who can deduce that on their own.

But many women are suffering from a similar total lack of accountability across the board. All of this TikTok mommy-sleuthing and searching for evidence and “following the trial” with gossipy speculation and “just asking questions” is an elaborate attempt to avoid facing an uncomfortable but obvious conclusion: women sin, too.

Consider how often you see attempts to avoid this conclusion…

• If a woman gets an abortion, it’s the man’s fault for impregnating her, and the doctor’s fault for carrying out the procedure. Don’t you dare suggest we prosecute the mom who hired the hitman.

• If a woman is promiscuous, it’s because of the lust-filled men who took advantage of her.

• If a wife blows up the family because the internet convinced her that her husband was a toxic narcissistic abuser because he left his socks on the floor instead of in the laundry hamper, then the divorce is his fault. She’ll get the kids and probably the house. The social circle will side with her. (In most but not all cases, I know).

• Even in the church, many won’t preach Ephesians 5 without telling the wives they are to submit on the condition of a man’s perfect leadership, and if he fails in her eyes in any way, then it’s his fault that she didn’t submit. She gets to decide when she’s supposed to follow, if at all.

What kind of “equality” exempts one party from being responsible for their actions?

The kind of “equality” sought by Godless frameworks.

This case is oddly reminiscent of last year’s Karmelo Anthony case, when a young black man murdered a young white man and received an enormous outpouring of support. His GoFundMe, too, brought in a seven-figure windfall. It, too, was filled with messages of us against them rhetoric. Older folks might remember the O.J. Simpson trial going the same way.

What this shows is that we are dealing with mass demographic enmity. That’s what Marxist Critical Theory, with its oppressed/oppressor dynamics, has given us. “Oppressed” classes are pumped with delusions and fears about their supposed oppression. As a result, they are convinced that they can do no wrong as the alleged underdog in a class war.

So, women view themselves as the underdogs in the eternal struggle against men. Being a victim is the path to victory in this framework, so finding a way to become the victim is the gameplan.

Thus, when a woman kills her children, she couldn’t possibly be responsible. In fact, the first person we should question is her husband. It just had to be him, they instinctively deduce. And you know what that means… she is actually the victim here.

I’m sorry, but this is insanity.

We cannot go on living like this. God willing, we won’t.

This is why I have been beating the drum so loudly about restoring Biblical man/woman dynamics. Many will warn you about what will result if we get back to men leading and women submitting… and then those same people will give women a pass for tens of millions of abortions and strangling little ones in one’s own home.

Plenty of men and women are seeing just how many women are reflexively siding with a murderous mother over three innocent children and her devastated husband, and that toothpaste doesn’t go back in the tube. This is the kind of thing that will contribute to a huge swing back toward Biblical and historical gender roles.

100 years of so-called “equality” led us to this shocking dead end. Don’t be surprised when people start looking in other directions. Feminism must be rejected, and women must be taught to reject it for their own good, and for the good of all around them.

I realize this will fall on many deaf ears among those who are unashamed feminists. But there are also many who aren’t there, yet are still drawn to Lindsay Clancy’s defense.

Once again, we should be sympathetic to mental health struggles, and it’s long past time to question the kinds of drugs that are handed out like candy. However…

Just think about this for a second. Three kids are dead. A man lost his family at the hands of his own wife. Those are the victims, and they aren’t victims of a nameless, faceless entity. They were victimized by a woman—their mother and wife—and she bears responsibility. Let’s not lose the main thread here.

Time for a change

The only way out of this is God’s way, in which we abandon the feminist war between the sexes and acknowledge that men are responsible for being good men, and women are responsible for being good women.

Men should honor, love, and cherish their wives. Women should respect and submit to their husbands, and love their families (and work diligently as housekeepers to avoid gossip chains, which seems particularly relevant right about now - 1 Timothy 5:13-14). Whatever this current thing is, it isn’t that.

So long as we accept a system of competition between the two sexes, the scales will be tilted. Women will be unconcerned with what’s right, but who wins. And men will start to respond in kind. That only gets worse from here if we don’t turn it around. It’s time to restore the beauty of the sexes as God intended.

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Notes

• For a longer discussion on this case, check out our Think Deeper Podcast livestream

  

Progressives love to lay the blame for all of society’s ills at the feet of Patriarchy, what they call a system of “male dominance.” Because of this, many conservatives in both the religious and political senses, have become almost allergic to both the term and the general idea of male headship.

We should be unashamedly pro-patriarchy.

Why?

Because, simply put, patriarchy is God’s design.

“For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church…” (Ephesians 5:23).

“For in this way in former times the holy women also, who hoped in God, used to adorn themselves, being submissive to their own husbands; just as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord, and you have become her children if you do what is right without being frightened by any fear” (1 Peter 3:5-6).

Jesus picked 12 male apostles. Elders are men (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1). Preachers are men (1 Timothy 2:11-12). The priesthood was exclusively male. Adam was created first. It is a curse on a nation when women and children rule (Isaiah 3:12). The Bible is not unclear on any of this.

“Father rule,” the literal translation of patriarchy, is how we as a people were meant to operate, and when things go wrong it’s because fathers aren’t ruling, or because they are doing so poorly.

The resistance to patriarchy shares a lot of similarities to the “libertarian moment” of the 2010s. So many of us were drawn into it by watching a woefully incompetent (at best) or malicious (at worst) government. The only logical conclusion we could make was that government either needs to go, or to be pared down to almost nothing.

But that’s an overreaction. Just because we haven’t seen it done well doesn’t mean it can’t be. Good governance is a blessing (Proverbs 11:11, 28:2, 29:2).

Similarly, the answer to a society run by weak, undisciplined, selfish men is not to abolish male leadership. It is to restore positive, virtuous, male leadership. We are not suffering from too much male leadership—we’re suffering from a shortage of it.

This is why I have been advocating so strongly for efforts to raise up a new elite in the home, church, and society. Without decisive, active men of honor, we will remain stuck in the mess we are in.

Men of honor who handle their responsibilities well and bless all who are under their care are God’s designed servants for a well-functioning world. It’s literally the only system that can possibly work. That’s why returning to patriarchy is the answer.

Unfortunately, because of the rise of feminism, patriarchy is a bridge too far for a lot of Christians. Complementarianism has become the reasonable position for those who aren’t ready to fully cave to feminism but don’t want to be called misogynistic, either. But that’s not good enough.

The Scourge of Complementarianism

This position acknowledges some male and female differences and holds that certain roles are made for men and not women. Namely, those roles are elder, preacher, and head of the household. Beyond those, men and women are typically considered to be fit for all the same roles.

A woman might not be able to lead the church, but there’s nothing wrong with her running the county, according to the complementarian. A man might be the one tasked to check out the strange noise in the night at home, only to wake up and see his wife off to her job as a policewoman or soldier. Thus, it is the fence-riding position between patriarchy and feminism.

As Aaron Renn has usefully documented, this is a completely ahistorical stance that was hastily put together only within living memory. As feminism began to spread through society, leading evangelicals offered up complementarianism as a compromise position.

“Ok, we’re not misogynists. Men and women can keep on operating exactly how they want, as long as you leave the church and the home alone.”

There are three major problems with this compromise.

First, the world does not care for your compromise.

They see anything but total bowing of the knee as hatred of women. They blame all of our societal woes on “the Patriarchy,” when we haven’t had anything near patriarchy in decades. In fact, our whole decline has occurred in a time when men have relinquished their roles.

And yet patriarchy is still blamed thanks to the last vestiges that Christians and conservatives hang onto. Compromise appeases no one.

Second, and naturally following the first, compromise with people who aren’t looking for a compromise always ends in capitulation.

So, now you have countless Christian couples who declare they are equal in every role. And you have plenty more who give lip service to male headship while the wife “wears the pants in the family.”

In like fashion, you have more and more churches giving in on female leadership while others are quietly driven by the demands and sensibilities of their female members as the men scramble to appease.

That’s really who the compromise was for—churchgoing women discipled by the feminist world. John Piper and Wayne Grudem didn’t have the fortitude to tell women to stop abandoning their families to compete with their husbands and go read Genesis 2, 1 Timothy 5, and Titus 2, so they gave them a pass. Now we’ve figured out how to justify the compromise by making Proverbs 31 about “have it all” Barbie imitators.

The compromise wasn’t a stopping point, but a speed bump, as per usual.

Third, the compromise ignores natural order.

This is the key point at which most complementarians go wrong: they can tell you that God wants men to lead in marriage and the church, but they can’t tell you why. But God has made it abundantly clear both through natural (creation) and special (Bible) revelation.

And when you pay attention to those reasons, you begin to see that male and female suitability extends a lot farther than you think.

As I’ve often pointed out, we mock progressives for not being able to answer “What is a woman?” when we can only say what they are not. Just looking at men and women, you can see they are built for different purposes. When you get beneath the skin and into the brain, the differences become even more stark.

A person built from the ground up for nurturing feelings and avoiding conflict is not a good fit for political or military leadership (or even business leadership).

This is why God chose a string of male leaders of home, temple, and nation throughout the Bible. And, it’s why He called the rule of women as a sign of judgment on a nation.

Whether we like God’s design or not, it is undeniable that things work better when we follow it. He made us, so He knows far better than we do how we should act, think, and speak.

Get off the fence

It’s time for us to do away with the compromise and just stand where the Bible stands. God is not unclear in the Scriptures about the role of men and women in the home, the church, and the society, and He is not unclear in natural revelation that the two are designed for different purposes.

It’s time we get back to acknowledging the division of purposes, and therefore roles. We have to start raising our sons and daughters in different directions. We have to stop carving out a space for women in roles clearly reserved for men. We have to teach men and women to sharpen the strengths God gave each of them respectively, and to guard against the temptations that come more naturally to them.

The sooner we get over our gag reflex to Biblical terms and ideas like “father rule,” the sooner we can start fixing the problems before us.

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Notes

• I’m still putting plans together for the first Men’s Excellence Workshop—be sure to check out the post and fill out the brief survey if you’re interested!

• Think Deeper Podcast this week looks at the challenge of being authentic and genuine as Christians in an age of so much fakeness and cynicism

Bafflingly, millions of people ate beans with toast for breakfast this morning.

While that was technically an option available to me, it did not even cross my mind as I strolled from my bedroom to the kitchen to begin the day. If it had crossed my mind, the very thought may have nauseated me. What a disgusting breakfast.

Despite having the same option, you probably didn’t entertain the idea, either. And yet, again, millions of people ate it without thinking twice.

Maybe we aren’t the individualists we believe ourselves to be.

Maybe thousands of times per day we’re heavily impacted by factors entirely out of our control, and maybe we’re—to some significant percentage—a product of the choices created for us.

We saw this in more impactful terms across 2020-21. While Covid responses largely fell along red-blue lines, there were plenty of liberals in Florida who were more lax on masking and distancing than some conservatives on the West coast.

In a sense, the culture around us grants us permission for how to act and speak.

It does not force our choices, but it does go a long way toward providing the menu of options.

There are millions of similar lines of evidence we can point to across the span of our lives that show that, while we may be making choices moment to moment, the choices themselves and the options available were largely pre-selected for us.

Culture that existed before we were born and is continually being restructured under our feet has enormous influence on who we are.

Even those who fancy themselves counter-cultural have their rebellion largely charted for them. For example, America’s “new atheists” of recent years mostly raged against Christianity rather than Hinduism or Judaism. Culture dictated that Christianity was their competition, and culture dictated that they were free to rage against it. Plenty of jokes about God as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Not so many cartoons of Mohammed.

In other words, culture conditions people toward what they believe and value.

I am certain there are people born a century ago who will spend eternity in heaven, who, if born today, may have been culturally conditioned into transgenderism, atheism, and hating God.

This is not to deny their free will. It is to acknowledge the set of choices they’ve been given and the cultural pressures to which they’ve been subjected.

And, it’s to acknowledge what I’ve been saying since day one of this site:

1. People are sheep, and

2. The leaders creating culture bear an Atlas-sized load of responsibility for the culture they build around people

This is why Christian cultural engagement is so important.

We cram everything the church does into the basket of evangelism, but evangelism is exponentially harder when culture predisposes people toward skepticism.

I believe this explains the confusing but technically correct Greek reading of the Great Commission, which says to “disciple the nations.” Sure, nations can’t be baptized, but they can be taught to observe Jesus’ commandments. And that’s largely what happened in the West, and what needs to happen again.

To lay out the road map: evangelism brings baptisms, baptisms bring changed people, changed people create a culture, and a culture creates greater evangelism.

Every person we convert represents countless more potential Christians, if we bring them into our culture. An American Christian culture led my grandmother to walk into a church building with a friend one Sunday. She got baptized, she got her parents baptized, her eventual husband was baptized, her daughter was baptized, and I got baptized.

You’re reading this right now because cultural influence laid the groundwork for evangelism, which created a culture in our family. You likely have a similar story. Or, if you’re a recent convert, you may be the start of one. People whose grandparents grew up in Soviet Russia do not have such a story.

Do you get how powerful that is?

So, all of us talking about this have been baptized. It’s time we live out the changes and rededicate ourselves to culture-building. Consider it a form of pre-evangelism; planting the seed in people’s subconscious minds before we ever get a chance to preach the Gospel. It’s like conditioning people to accept beans and toast before they’re even born.

What does that look like?

It means discussing the most pressing issues of our day. It means showing the world we have answers for the questions they are asking, and that God is superior to their idols of consumerism, feminism, sexual perversion, and so forth.

A lot of preachers seem to think it’s “icky” to talk about such cultural issues, insisting they will “just preach Jesus.” But if the Jesus they preach never goes against the idols competing for the people in the pews, is that really Him? Shouldn’t we be tearing down strongholds, casting down every argument that sets itself against God, taking every thought captive?

To be frank, if we refuse to engage the culture beyond evangelism for fear of being called bigoted and “damaging our witness,” we don’t believe in the Lordship of Christ over all things. And, we don’t believe in His parable of the leaven, either.

As a result, with every generation we’re back to the drawing board, trying to pick off a few individuals here and there because we have not demonstrated how Christ’s rule blesses a people.

Instead, we must begin to think of our efforts as both individual and corporate ministering, winning people to create a people. Because culture matters. And without one, we can’t compete with one.

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Notes

• Some personal news… it’s a big week in my family as my wife will soon give birth to our second set of twins! It’s a stressful but exciting time at our house. Please keep us in prayer.
  
  As a result, it may be a little while before my next post. Thank you all for subscribing and reading/listening, and I especially want to thank those who support my work here. It’s a blessing to get to connect with so many kingdom-minded folks through this work.

• Think Deeper Podcast this week was a fun one, as Joe and I took on Bible debates like “Who were the Nephilim?” and “What was Paul’s thorn in the flesh?” Watch below or listen on your podcast app by searching for Think Deeper.

As Blaise Pascal famously said, “Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”

The crazy thing is, he said that long before computers, the internet, social media, and AI. If truth was obscure in his times, it’s like a needle in a haystack in ours. It takes an incredible amount of work to sort through all the static and find what’s really true, and we won’t put in that work unless we really love the truth.

When it comes to the Bible, the stakes are that much higher, and love for the truth is that much important.

There is no end to the list of debated Bible issues. These issues range from foundational matters like the role of baptism, down to the meat and potatoes of everyday life like gender roles or Christian political action, all the way to the trivial, like the matter of the Nephilim.

We all want to side with the Bible in our beliefs… but how do we know what side the Bible is on?

On each of these and countless others, multiple parties all claim their view is the Biblical one. They can even support their interpretation with Scripture. Just saying “I believe what the Bible says” isn’t enough.

Once again, finding the truth takes a lot of work. Choosing a viewpoint and seeing how it holds up to cross-examination is a process that must involve a good deal of prayer and study, and a determination to not take short cuts. And as you study, you have to use discernment and ask good questions to see which side best aligns with the fullness of God’s Word.

Here are a few questions to ask when you're seeking to figure out which view best represents the Scriptures.

1. Which view best synthesizes the Scriptures?

When you’re trying to figure out which view reflects the Biblical text, you don’t want to come out with spare puzzle pieces you couldn’t make fit. Serious Bible students don’t play Scripture Wars, because the Bible doesn’t contradict itself.

In my baptism debate with Jeremiah Nortier, he played Scripture Wars, and seemed to think I was doing the same. He pitted the faith verses against the baptism verses, essentially saying that because we are saved by faith, Acts 22:16 can’t mean what it says.

Instead of firing Acts 22:16 back at a verse like Ephesians 2:8, we must explain how the two verses can mean exactly what they say and still not contradict each other. If faith excludes baptism, then Acts 22:16 must be discarded or reworded. If faith includes baptism, we don’t have a problem. That view synthesizes the texts.

The problem is, properly synthesizing the texts takes longer, and some people won’t stick around for the process. Unless you love the truth, you’re going to be a sucker for Scripture Wars.

The same is true of ongoing controversies like male and female roles in God’s design, as I’ve written so much on in recent months. “…just as Sarah obeyed Abraham” and “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loves the church” are not an either-or choice. We must develop a view that incorporates both verses. Drive-by analysis is always going to miss the synthesizing process.

2. Which one is novel?

This doesn’t always work, as sometimes both sides have historical claims and the evidence can be murky. But many times it does.

If nobody held a particular view for centuries upon centuries, and then somebody decided that everybody before them was wrong, that should raise some eyebrows.

Such is the case with the gender roles discussion. The kinds of takes you see from egalitarians in the church and feminists and even complementarians in the home are largely inventions of the last 100 years. The same can be said of baptism for salvation at the time of the Reformation, as even Zwingli admitted that every single Christian after the apostles and up to his day had disagreed with him about the doctrine:

“In this matter of baptism, all the doctors have been in error from the time of the apostles…. For all the doctors have ascribed to the water a power which it does not have and the holy apostles did not teach.”

When you’re in that position, saying “every Christian in history was wrong until I got here,” it’s worth taking a step back and reevaluating.

Even in this, we must remain vigilant. Everybody knows that history pulls weight, and so rarely does anybody present their view as something new. Take “servant leader,” for example. The concept as it is currently taught is completely ahistorical and, as I’ve argued, incompatible with Scripture. But the term itself sure sounds grounded in history, doesn’t it? Thus, we must not just look for what sounds historical, but what is.

Tradition doesn’t answer everything, as man has gotten plenty of things wrong throughout history, and tradition isn’t always in agreement. But if, as Chesterton said, tradition is the “democracy of the dead,” getting outvoted 19 centuries to 1 should give one pause.

3. What are the fruits?

Drive-by analysis doesn’t ever stop to ask about second order effects, like “What will result if we adopt this belief?” Nor does it take a look around to see what has resulted from such ideas.

The Bible has plenty to say about fruits, though. Indeed, we would be terribly unwise if we didn’t check an idea’s fruits.

To draw on our ongoing examples once again, abandoning baptism for salvation led to a lot of easy-believism and ultimately resulted in sinner’s prayer “conversions” via television. Not great fruits, huh?

Feminism and complementarianism have strongly correlated with higher divorce rates, greater cohabitation rates, plummeting birth rates, and skyrocketing mental health struggles. We also have the church’s elephant in the room, that many congregations are quietly run by a group of women who hold sway over the leadership. Once again, the fruits are rotten.

When we lack the attention span needed to look around and see how an idea has played out, or calculate how it most likely would, it makes it that much harder to choose which view aligns with the Bible.

There is no cheat sheet

Every debated view has to be evaluated to some degree, and we can’t just default to the option that sounds nicer. Nor can we farm out our decision making to what mom, dad, or brother so-and-so says. Nor can we choose the path of least resistance.

As Hebrews 5:14 teaches us, the mature are those who have put in the practice to train their senses to discern good and evil. That is a process that requires us to go to the Book over and over, and then look through its lenses to see the world around us.

The more we do that, the sharper our senses become, and the easier it gets to hold a coherent worldview. And, the better we get at seeing through arguments that sound Biblical but aren’t grounded in truth.

Truth can indeed be obscure in these times, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find. Have the humility to pray for guidance and ask the right questions and you’ll end up where you need to be.

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Notes

• If you missed it, check out my post about next year’s event!

• Think Deeper Podcast this week looks at how we can prepare for the church’s future

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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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 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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Notes

• 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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