The Enemy Gets It. Do You?

..the battle for mankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizer of a new faith; a religion of humanity…utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach.

The Humanist Magazine – Jan/Feb 1983 Issue

That was 1983. Have Christian leaders and pastors caught up yet? Do they get the power of educating the next generation? They have the pulpit once a week, and even then they send the children out to help the adults enjoy the service more provide ‘age-appropriate’ learning. The humanists are preaching to their children every day in school, and the mentally unstable and degenerates are preaching to them in their spare time on social media. What chance do you think they have? We need to develop a Christian counter-culture. That’s more than just church on Sunday. It means starting our own schools and training institutes and choosing for our children to engage in more useful activities that build up their faith. Get your kids out of government schools. Get them off social media. Get them into theologically robust study and train them up in worldview. Spend time with them developing the relationship you will need to steer them through this chaos and get them to adulthood unscathed and ready for taking back this culture for Christ.

The Directory for Private (Family) Worship #6

In recent weeks we have been slowly working our way through The Directory for Private Worship which the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland approved in 1647. Thus far, we have noted the pleasing concern these church leaders had for the discipline of family worship and their understanding that the health of God’s church relies on the spiritual health of the individual families that comprise it. Today we look at the sixth direction.

VI. At family-worship, a special care is to be had that each family keep by themselves; neither requiring, inviting, nor admitting persons from divers families, unless it be those who are lodged with them, or at meals, or otherwise with them upon some lawful occasion.

This provision highlights the importance of families keeping to themselves when they conduct their private worship. What is meant by this? Well, it’s not a blanket rule. There are legitimate reasons the Assembly saw for worship to be conducted with other families. One example is when sharing a meal with another family.

So what is the thinking behind this direction? It seems likely that this rule is included to protect family worship from being hijacked (see rule 5), and to strengthen spiritual bonds in the family. Because family worship is so important, it is necessary that it is not regularly interrupted by outsiders. This no doubt makes it easier to rebuke and encourage members of the family in their ongoing spiritual warfare.

Child Sacrifice in NZ

Last year, politicians from all political persuasions voted for the Abortion Legislation Act 2020 which decriminalised abortion. 94 voted for decriminalisation and only 23 voted against it. You can see the roll of shame here. It includes all of NZ First (that bastion of conservatism), all of the Greens, as well as Act (David Seymour was at that stage their only MP), as well as 42 out of Labour’s 46 MPs and 33 out of National’s 52 MPs.

Voice for Life has recently written on the case of a baby being born in a New Zealand hospital after an unsuccessful late-term abortion. The baby was then “left gasping without medical assistance for two hours before dying.” Why was the baby aborted? The mother had “financial and housing issues”. And how many people in NZ want to adopt and cannot? Unfortunately, it sounds as if this is not even a one-off, as the healthcare student who passed this information on said that this sort of situation is not uncommon and that “in these situations, the baby is just left to die.”

Why is this not in the mainstream media? Why is there not outrage over this? Because the secular New Zealand elite does not care. They want to hide their blood-stained hands. Despite Ardern’s constant mothering and telling us to “be kind”, we are dealing with callous leaders, who having being warned about the possibility of this very thing happening, refused National MP Simon O’Connor’s Supplementary Order Paper that would have made it a legal requirement to provide appropriate medical care and treatment to a child born alive in the event of an unsuccessful abortion.

But Christ is king. He rules the earth, and these politicians who have shaken their fists at his law must repent or suffer his wrath. Already they are under his curse of judgment. Hands that shed innocent blood are one of the seven things the Lord hates according to Proverbs 6:17. Our God is the protector of the innocent and those behind this law and these actions will not go unpunished. All those involved in this depravity must kiss the Son in repentance or be prepared to be part of his footstall.

Yet even more is going on here. The secularist worships the material world rather than the Creator. These people have no hope. They destroy their offspring for the sake of their economic prosperity and convenience, just like the ancient Canaanites sacrificed their children to Molech. In this despicable evil lie the seeds of their own destruction. While they snuff out their future, we who worship Christ and look forward to his reign on this earth will be fruitful and multiply. We will inherit the earth.

In the meantime as we look forward to this day, let us stand up for the rights of the innocent. Go here to sign Voice for Life’s petition to repeal Labour’s Abortion Legislation Act.

Fathers and Blessing

When there is a fundamental estrangement between fathers and children, the results of that unhappy mess will be that God will come and strike the land with a curse. In short, when fathers are blessed, the land is blessed. When fathers are cursed, the land is cursed.

Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger

Reddit Parenting Advice #10 – Changing Identities

The more I look at parenting posts on Reddit, the more I am struck by how inadequately some people are prepared by their faulty worldviews for parenting, but as a connoisseur of human folly, I have to admit I do find I am intensely interested to read how crazy things can get when parents set themselves adrift from the anchor of reality found in Christ alone. My deep hope is that the parenting thread on Reddit somehow attracts all of the very worst parents into a common space where they can encourage and commiserate with each other in their inadequate approaches to parenting and spread their poisonous advice in a space where it will impact only those already infected with their madness. Is that too harsh? Well, check out this latest tragedy. N.B. Spelling and grammatical errors have been left in.

I have a child who has ODD and depression that has latched on to what appears to be a fad. Claiming oppression as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community and changing their description over and over in alignment with friends who are doing the same. Sophia was born female and has identified with Pan at one point, lesbian, trans, furry, and it evolves. She has started to get angry if we don’t use the favored pronouns which also change without notice. The name used has been one of about 4 over the last 2 years and has settled on “Robin” recently. If she is accidently referred to as Sophia by me she loses it. The weird thing is that I’ve been extremely involved in activism pertaining to LGBTQIA+ issues for over a decade and have attempted to involve her from early childhood. (walking in pride parades and taking her with me to events) Has anyone else sensed a faddish reaction in their kids to this recently? I know that during the pandemic she has been watching far more influencers online than I’m comfortable with. Her mother and I are in conflict over how much she watches and what she watches.

Let’s analyse this stream of folly droplet by droplet. I have a child who has ODD and depression that has latched on to what appears to be a fad. Alarm bells are already ringing at this point. Why doesn’t anyone question why children today seem to be diagnosed with so many disorders. As we have mentioned previously, ODD is essentially the description of a child who has not learnt to govern themselves. And depression? As a school teacher who has many conversations with children, I can tell you that there are some interesting home commonalities in children who suffer from anxiety and depression. These things seem to be symptoms of a larger problem, not the actual problem itself.

Claiming oppression as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community and changing their description over and over in alignment with friends who are doing the same. That right there is a failure in parenting. If you have your children in a government school at the moment, let this be a warning to you. These places are no longer safe for your child. The LGTQIAlphabet cult wants your children, and school is the perfect place to pervert them and enlist them to their unrighteous cause. Unfortunately for you, other children are a powerful influence on your children, and what they do impacts what your children do. The Bible clearly teaches this. In I Corinthians 15:33, Paul says, Do not be deceived: “Bad company corrupts good morals.” Part of the job of a parent is to be the gatehouse in determining which influences are allowed in your child’s life.

Sophia was born female and has identified with Pan at one point, lesbian, trans, furry, and it evolves. See, poor parenting is definitely part of the problem here. What do you mean she was born female? She is a girl, she has been female from conception. When you say she was born female, you indicate the possibility that sex is mutable. It is not. From conception, she has been female and she will never be anything else no matter how many toddler tantrums she has as she shakes her fist at you and ultimately the God who made her. And for those of you who do not want to be traumatised, I suggest not even finding out what identifying as furry means.

She has started to get angry if we don’t use the favored pronouns which also change without notice. The name used has been one of about 4 over the last 2 years and has settled on “Robin” recently. If she is accidently referred to as Sophia by me she loses it. Interestingly your daughter’s Christian name means wisdom. The very thing you as a parent need to pray for because so far you seem to be lacking in this department. It’s interesting that she has given away the name ‘wisdom’ for a name meaning fame. It seems highly likely that a lot of young girls attracted to this choose your own identity nonsense are seeking fame. They want someone to acknowledge them to take an interest in them as someone special. They are crying out for love.

The weird thing is that I’ve been extremely involved in activism pertaining to LGBTQIA+ issues for over a decade and have attempted to involve her from early childhood. (walking in pride parades and taking her with me to events). Well there we go. What can you expect? What you sow, so shall you reap. You wanted to celebrate this identity nonsense and encourage your child to do so, and you expected her to turn out a well-adjusted young girl?

Has anyone else sensed a faddish reaction in their kids to this recently? I know that during the pandemic she has been watching far more influencers online than I’m comfortable with. Her mother and I are in conflict over how much she watches and what she watches. Here we see some deep underlying issues. Mum and Dad cannot agree on basic parenting philosophy. They can’t agree on who they let influence their children. Dad is correct in that many of these influencers have the nutritional value of a sewer, but there is more going on here than who the child watches online. There is a breakdown in the family dynamic. Dads ought to lead and protect their families. Mums need to support Dads in their leadership role. There needs to be a unified front.

Education and Fathers

Education is not simply a means of data transfer. It is not reducible to state-certified techniques. Education, when it succeeds, is the result of a child wanting to be like someone else. If you take away the drive train, can you really be surprised that the car won’t go? Fathers are essential to any successful school system, and no system of education can successfully compensate for the abdication of fathers.

Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger

Thinking Longterm

Joy Pullman executive editor of The Federalist, has written an excellent piece highlighting the dangers of evangelical over-emphasis on evangelism. Before you burn her at the stake for a heretic, hold on. The context for the article I am quoting from is the Southern Baptist Convention where an ageing and declining membership are considered to be an issue.

As I watched my evangelical peers apostatize as they left childhood, it made me reconsider our churches’ frenetic verbal focus on evangelism. What trust — and financing — was it realistic to place in “evangelization” efforts run by people who are clearly unable to retain current members? Why doesn’t evangelization start at home?

In fact, I think it [evangelisation] does start at home. Before running out and attempting to “gain more souls for Christ” (itself theologically suspect, as scripture — at least as Protestants understand it — clearly teaches it is Christ who does all the work to save souls), what about attentiveness to the “feed my sheep” charge Christ gave the Apostle Peter in another mic-drop gospel ending, in John 21?

Shepherds — the antecedent of our word “pastor” — don’t go around rustling sheep. Shepherds tend an existing flock that grows almost exclusively organically, from within the herd. Shepherds cultivate those they are given; they don’t go around trying to convert goats or leaving their flocks to search for others. From where this Christian sits, our Western churches and most of their leaders have done a perfectly horrific job of tending to the lambs Christ has given into their care.

Too many men commissioned as shepherds are off wandering the mountains, leaving their sheep unfed and unprotected while wolves make off with the babies. The answer is not to focus more on wandering around in alleged search of random sheep, nor to steal sheep from other people’s flocks. It is to sacrifice anything necessary to beat off the wolves and protect the lambs.

She makes some excellent points. On the whole, Christianity in the West has been bleeding members. The tap pouring new members into the faith might be going full bore, but the hole in the bottom of our bucket is such that we are losing water at a faster rate. What’s going on? Often church growth is by transfers from other churches. We have Christians moving around from church to church finding the right fit. Some churches become the place where ‘the cool kids’ go. Then local churches can be stripped of their members as people head to the new hip church. There are of course churches that do have relative success in evangelism, and this can be measured in the short term, but what we don’t think about too much is what’s happening in the long term, and the long term trajectory is not looking good.

The evangelical church, as its name suggests, has a real strength in evangelism Our pastors and church leaders are extremely concerned with encouraging members to ensure they are taking opportunities for personal evangelism and as we have mentioned in earlier posts, church sermons are often targetted at ‘level 1’ or entry-level to the Christian faith. Our services are designed to be “seeker-sensitive”. But there are potential disadvantages to this strategy. More mature members can be seen as means to the end of gaining more contacts and therfore converts. These sheep can be left to figure out how to feed themselves.

But there is an even darker side to this. Pullman notes another interesting implication of this approach which she illustrates with Mrs Jellyby from Dickens’ Bleak House. Mrs Jellyby was an evangelical Christian whose every thought and effort was spent in ensuring Africans are evangelised and given opportunities to access wealth from trade while her own family lives in squalor and neglect. She writes of evangelical organisations that “spend so much time, money, and effort on what they claim is evangelization while the majority of children who attend their churches grow up and leave the faith.” She cites Mary Eberstadt’s research on the impact of family disintegration and its connection to church decline.

If that is the case, then Christians need to be doing things like countering the cultural insistence that people wait until they are financially comfortable before starting a family and stay artificially infertile indefinitely to help that happen; making theologically robust Christian K-12 schools the top priority of evangelization efforts; and making it more institutionally possible for young people to get started in life without college loans.

It’s not clear how much American Christianity’s decline stems from unthinkingly accepting our culture’s antagonism to sexual fertility and our refusal to prioritize evangelism in the home, but it’s clear there’s a relationship between these that bears deep introspection.

If we gain 10 converts a year for 20 years, but lose 70% of our children to the faith once they hit adulthood, we might need to rethink our strategy. Imagine if we kept 70% of our children growing up in Christian families, and they kept 70% of their children. Then imagine if we took God’s command to be fruitful and multiply more seriously and still had that rate of success.

Pastors are geared to look at the short term. A pastor, with God’s blessing, may be in a church for 20 years. It’s easy for him to think success looks like unbelievers coming into the church or the church growing in numbers whether by transfers or conversions. He knows he has a short time to ‘prove’ himself. Unfortunately, short term thinking can always get more people in, but long term effects are by their very nature…long term, and therefore harder to judge immediately. Twenty years is the length of time it takes for an infant to be trained for adulthood. It’s a long time to wait to see if families and churches have been successful. We want KPIs for each year – we don’t want to wait for the tree to be fully grown and fruiting. That takes time. But while the short term indicators might look good, if we take the twenty or forty-year view, when the majority of our children have left the faith, things look bleaker.

So what does this mean for churches and our leaders? Churches need to focus on the health of families and training Dads and Mums to raise a godly family. We should stop seeing these families as simply means to the end of reaching new people. These are people in our flocks. They need feeding and shepherding. To that end we need our church leaders to think far more strategically about how they will aid parents in the discipling of children from Christian families. Churches need to start Christian schools that focus on developing Christian worldview and culture or support people who are doing that. Our leaders may retort, “That’s not the business of the church!”. We need to show them that it is, and the reason we are failing on so many levels is precisely because we have not made the education of the next generation our business. How has the evangelical strategy of saving individual souls been working for the church? Not so well. Church leaders need to signal that Christianity is not just a personal faith which we worry about on Sundays, but it is a faith that takes all of life and brings it under Christ’s authority. It’s a faith that develops Christian culture. Getting people to level one is not enough.

The Directory for Private (Family) Worship #5

Let no idler, who hath no particular calling, or vagrant person under pretence of a calling, be suffered to perform worship in families, to or for the same; seeing persons tainted with errors, or aiming at division, may be ready (after that manner) to creep into houses, and lead captive silly and unstable souls.

In more modern language, we might say that people who are lazy or have no settled work or home should not be allowed to perform worship in families even if they have a desire to. Why? These kinds of people are likely to introduce error and division into the family and potentially the church. The reference to leading captive silly and unstable souls seems to be a reference to 2 Timothy 3:6 where Timothy is warned by Paul against people who “worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires.”

Now when I initially read this I struggled to see the relevance to our situation today. To be honest, the chance of many Christian families even having regular family worship is not particularly high. So what are the chances of some ‘idler’ coming in and performing worship in families and leading people astray?

Yet when you think about it, there are many idlers and vagrants who are allowed into many Christian homes. We have social media where the clamor of idle, ignorant and bellicose women often reigns supreme. We have the teachings of Hollywood reminding us to ‘be true to ourselves’ and even those prosperity gospel preachers who deceive many ill-taught Christians.

While the original intent of this document lay in a slightly different direction, I think there is a call here for fathers and church leaders to warn against these deceitful teachers and influences. Certainly, fathers should police strongly what influences are allowed in their home via screens. It is our duty to protect our families. But what about our church leaders? If our church leaders used to take steps to stop idlers and ‘vagrant persons’ from creeping into houses and leading unstable souls captive, what ought we to see from our leaders with respect to the current day embodiments of this danger?

Look who has the Low Expectations!

Recently the Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, that illustrious bastion of excellence in education and line of defense against ignorance and bigotry in education has put together an app called Unteach Racism. I’ve referred to and critiqued some of the modules in this app already, as have others. The most recent module I explored was entitled ‘low expectations’.

In chatting about this module with others, a friend noted the irony of the situation. It’s the Teaching Council that have low expectations. They are the ones who see Maori children as helpless victims. As I reflected on this, I was impressed by her insight. They are the ones running around accusing teachers of implicit bias and racism as if Maori educational aspirations are at the mercy of much stronger and more powerful people. It’s the Teaching Council and their ilk who imply that Maori learners are weak and unable to grasp success without others going into bat for them.

Take a look for example at the Teaching Council’s code. Section 2 of the code for teachers states, I will work in the best interests of learners by: 5. affirming Māori learners as tangata whenua and supporting their educational aspirations. This is not said of any other particular cultural or ethnic group. What is the Teaching Council saying? Are Maori learners uniquely unable to meet their educational aspirations unless teachers specifically work in their best interests? Do they need to be treated as special because they arrived in these islands a little before some of the rest of us in order to achieve excellence? I don’t think so, but the Teaching Council of Aotearoa and their code seems to. So who has low expectations?

And if we move over to the teaching standards which every teacher in New Zealand is supposed to adhere to we see similarly low expectations. We are required to, “Specifically support the educational aspirations for Māori learners, taking shared responsibility for these learners to achieve educational success as Māori.” Once again, we are not told to specifically support Chinese learners, or Dutch learners and their aspirations. Why are we specifically told that we must take shared responsibility for Maori learners to achieve educational success as Maori? The implication of this patronizing standard is that Maori need to be catered to and helped because they can’t get there without us pandering to their special needs. I don’t believe that for a minute. I happen to believe Maori learners are capable. So who has the low expectations? Not me or fellow conservative teachers…but the Teaching Council does.

The Worst of Both Sexes in Our Politics

It appears to me that our politics now reflects the worst of both sexes, not the best: the violent passions and ambitions of unscrupulous men and the shrillness and manipulative emotion-mongering of meddlesome women.

Anthony Esolen from Out of the Ashes