Government and Incompetence

It was recently revealed that the government (or should I say we the taxpayer) forked out $50 million on a Maori Trades and Training Fund which since June 2020 has had the effect of providing 4 jobs. That works out at 12.5 million dollars per job. Admittedly, only $11.4m has been committed to approved projects and just $1.8m has been paid out. Nonetheless, this excels even the usual incompetence we see from the state.

National’s answer is to do a better job of spending the money. Well, I guess that’s a step in the right direction. Achieving some good that is not your responsibility while wasting less of someone else’s money is better than wasting that money and achieving next to nothing. But why should we settle for this?

When will we as a people stop worshipping this false idol of state? It cannot do what it promises to do. It cannot save us. It is given to us by God not so that it can create jobs, or educate our children. It is given to us by God to protect us from the evildoer and punish him. How many times do we have to see a government step outside its God-given role and make a complete cock-up of things before we throw down our idol and advocate for limited government? I can guarantee that an entrepreneur with $50 million could have provided a lot more than 4 jobs.

Bring Back the Doctrine of Vocation

In a recent sermon I heard, the congregation was encouraged to be at a second Sunday meeting (in the evening) as well as the morning service. They were encouraged to attend other weekly meetings of the church, and it was insinuated that it was Satan’s temptation that was causing people to stay at home. There was even that old chestnut, that we need to be careful we are not turning spending time with family into an idol. This was a fairly egregious example of what I have noticed is a serious temptation for many pastors – that of thinking that the church organisation and meetings they run are the most important thing in the lives of every member of the church, and that to miss one indicates a lack of seriousness about one’s faith.

This brow-beating approach to shepherding in order to get the flock to come to more church meetings is unfortunate. As one who has been a Christian for decades, I shrugged it off. I’m not about to be guilt-tripped into attending something because a pastor insinuates it is a sin to not attend. I know the Scriptures. It is dangerous for leaders in the church to put burdens on those they lead that Christ himself does not require. Young Christians however may be fooled by zeal into thinking this is indeed a requirement. The pressure this may put on them when they have a spouse or children and work may indeed cause unhelpful and illegitimate feelings of guilt.

Additionally, I’ve noticed and mentioned in a previous post, the tendency of many pastors to use the Sunday morning service as the opportunity to be evangelists. Instead of feeding God’s beloved sheep and assisting them to apply the gospel to their daily lives, some pastors focus on the gospel message of salvation every week as if their congregations are hardened heathens hovering over the fires of hell.

All this makes me think that our modern clergy need a reawakened understanding of vocation. A book helpful in this area is God at work by Gene Edward Veith Jr. Veith writes, “Churches should not demand so much “church work” from their members that it takes away too much time from their primary vocations.” We the laity are also called. God calls us to our vocations, be they son or daughter, husband or wife, doctor, teacher, labourer, retail assistant, nurse, or homemaker. Yes, pastor, God calls you as our shepherd, but don’t forget that he calls us to our vocations too. It’s easy for pastors to see the good things they are doing (and the vocation of pastor is a good and holy calling!) and expect everyone to turn institutional church-related things into the most important thing in their lives too. But it might be that in attending every church event, I may neglect my God-given calling as a husband or a father. Indeed, it might be that a pastor who fills his time with church events could well be neglecting his God-given calling to be a husband and father too.

Veith puts things this way, “We may assume that what happens on Sunday mornings is not enough, as if coming into Christ’s presence through the proclamation of His Word is a small thing, and as if the daily lives of ordinary Christians are not themselves arenas for divine service.” Pastors need to see their role as shepherds as Paul explained in Ephesians. Pastors are to equip the saints for works of ministry. Unfortunately, because we do not have a solid understanding of the doctrine of vocation, we miss that those works of ministry will often occur outside the institutional church meetings. The sum total of my ministry is not handing out the order of service at church, manning the kitchen, playing in the church band or being part of a welcoming team. These are good things, but my core ministries are being a father and a husband, and whatever God calls me to as I earn money to provide for my family. Paul writes earlier in the epistle of Ephesians, that we are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. On a Sunday morning, what we need to see from our pastors is an acknowledgement of the good works God has called us to do in our vocations, and then the opening of the Scriptures to help us in that regard as we are reminded of Christ’s kingship and authority. As Paul writes to the young pastor Timothy, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” Preach that word so that your congregation may be ready for every good work during the week.

Sounds Familiar

At this day, however, the earth sustains on her bosom many monster minds – minds which are not afraid to employ the seed of Deity deposited in human nature as a means of suppressing the name of God. Can anything be more detestable than this madness in man, who, finding God a hundred times both in his body and his soul, makes his excellence in this respect a pretext for denying that there is a God? He will not say that chance has made him differ from the brutes that perish; but, substituting nature as the architect of the universe, he suppresses the name of God.

John Calvin – Institutes of Christian Religion 1.5.4

We should not give god-like powers to the State

In Defending Marriage, Anthony Esolen lays out 12 arguments defending marriage. The final argument is that we should not give god-like powers to the State. A great quote from this chapter follows.

‘What the State essentially does, when it requires us to be parties to the lie that a man can marry a man, is to deny the anterior reality of marriage itself. It says, “Marriage is what we say it shall be,” and that implies, “Families are what we say they are,” and that implies, “There are no zones of natural authority outside the supervision and regulation and management of the State.” We’ve given up on the foolish notion of the Divine Right of Kings, dreamed up by totalizing monarchs of the late Renaissance. Now we have the Divine Right of Bureaucratic States. The old kings used to make common cause with smaller zones of authority, guilds and towns, for example, in order to check the ambitions of the noblemen. The new kings have obliterated those smaller zones of authority in principle, and seek to do so in reality also. That is in large part what public schools are now for; the education of children against the authority and direction of their own parents.’

Moral Confusion

One of the great marks of our time is our moral confusion and schizophrenia about the most basic issues of life. For all our technological prowess, we are moral babes.

A classic case is the issue of unborn babies. Are they human beings with all the dignity and rights that come with that, or are they just a bunch of cells that can be removed at will? The answer is…it depends.

Last year, one of the hosts of Breakfast, Hayley Holt, suffered from a miscarriage during one of the lockdowns. Quite rightly, Holt was devastated, and suffered greatly especially with the lack of support due to the lockdown. It was absolutely wonderful to see her co-hosts grieving with her and offering her words of hope and support.

What makes this incident so striking, is that a few months earlier, Holt interviewed Dr Alison Knowles, euphemistically termed ‘abortion practitioner’ (rather than cold-blooded baby killer) about the abortion law reform. In this interview Holt says in passing, “whilst it is a women’s right,” suggesting she herself might be pro-abortion. In the same segment, her colleague John Campbell, although congenial, does grill the pro-life interviewee in a way that slants the whole piece as supporting the law change.

An implication of this double-minded approach is that the value and worth of a human being (in this case an unborn one) is based on something extrinsic. An unborn child has rights and value to the extent his mother wishes him to live or not. But surely this is a reprehensible moral system. We know that in 2020 a four-week-old baby, Maree Kiwana-Makanihi Takuira-Mita Ngahere died as the result of a brain injury. She had been beaten multiple times by her father Jahcey Te Koha Aroha o te Raki Ngahere. Clearly, despite having Aroha in his name, Jahcey did not value his poor daughter. But in this case, we say that what he has committed is murder. Maree’s value is not based on whether her father or mother values her…at least it isn’t after she is born.

Scandalous Waste?

In a recent post, we considered the importance of long term thinking in Christian life. I hinted at the importance of long term thinking with regards to family, as I have done previously in a post entitled Your Most Valuable Ministry.

Recently my wife and I have been reading a book called The Disciplines of a Godly Family by Kent and Barbara Hughes. There is a lot of gold in this book, but we were particularly struck by a couple of quotes in the introduction, which I will reproduce here.

We must not succumb to the deceptive mathematics of worldly thinking that considers the pouring out of one’s life on a hidden few as a scandalous waste of one’s potential.

And a little earlier in the introduction.

Society applauds the person who designs a building more than it does the one who attends to the architecture of a child’s soul. Our culture values a face that is known to the public far more than it does a countenance reflected in a child’s eyes. The world sets a higher priority on attaining a degree than on educating a life. It values the ability to give things more than it does giving oneself. This approach to self-worth has been relentlessly sown by modern culture and has taken root in many Christian hearts, so that there is no room for another self – even if it is one’s own child.

Fleeing a Sinking Ship

As mentioned in previous posts, I have some knowledge of a small independent school in New Zealand. Situated in a low socioeconomic area of the country, you would naturally assume it would struggle to attract students. Not so. It has waiting lists at almost all levels. Despite local state schools having millions of dollars thrown at them in building upgrades, parents are desperate to move their children into this small independent school. Unfortunately, the school is at capacity in most year levels, and has to turn away many of those who apply.

So what’s going on in these other schools? There are of course multiple factors. One is discipline. Some schools seem reluctant or unable to deal with difficult students. In one of the local schools, teachers are instructed to leave the classroom with the rest of the class when a student ‘loses it’ and begins destroying things. Independent schools tend to have more ability to deal with discipline issues because a contract exists between parents and the school. Truculent students can be dealt with effectively by putting the onus back where it belongs – with the parents.

A second issue is of course the academic side of things. Unfortunately, the New Zealand curriculum is content-light and this is supposedly one of its benefits. Children will be able to learn skills in a way that caters to the interests and knowledge of their local community. This sounds very nice in theory, and in higher decile communities it has less of a negative impact than in lower decile communities. In lower socio-economic areas this ‘skills-based’ local knowledge approach tends to leave children from knowledge poor communities trapped. They are not provided with the knowledge that will help them succeed in society.

On a related note, there are low-expectations. Students applying to enter this independent school must sit placement tests, and the results of most children who apply from the local schools are depressing. Children can get through intermediate without knowing virtually anything about fractions or even basic numerical skills. In English, many students are unaware of basic conventions such as capitalization and punctuation. They write as they would text. Speaking of texting, these children often have atrocious handwriting because they have done most of their ‘learning’ on devices.

Unfortunately, for some children, they will never make up the lost ground. Those who spend their primary years in these state-run institutions may be doomed academically. High school teachers cannot be expected to teach cognitively challenging concepts in preparation for the rigours of university to children who are innumerate and illiterate. It is not fair or realistic.

So my advice to you if you are living in a low-socio economic area is to look very carefully at your options. If you want your children to succeed in the world, you might want to look at other options. If you are relatively well-educated yourself, you might consider home-schooling. If you are not, you might consider doing everything you can to get your child into a school that focusses on giving your child a knowledge-rich education. If you cannot afford to do that, the next best thing is to join your local library, and get your child reading widely. If your local school is focussing on things like environmental issues or cultural groups, realise that as nice as these things might be, if they are taking time away from attaining knowledge, your child is being cheated out of an education that could raise his sites, his future prospects, his future earning potential, and his future living standards.

Tactics in Evangelism

I read the following in an interesting series on Christian capitalism by Tom Addison. He has a lot of good things to say about how Christians can use wealth for the kingdom, and I really appreciated his antidote to the somewhat negative view of wealth common in evangelicalism.

For too long, Christian donors have been too focused on retail evangelism and not sufficiently focused on what I call intellectual logistics. In war, it is said that amateurs and wannabes study tactics, whereas masters study logistics. Logistics is the art of having the right resources in the right place at the right time so tactical opportunities can be maximally advantaged. Evangelism was simply a lot easier even a generation ago when our culture had a consensus on the reality of God, sin, and man’s need for forgiveness. When a lost person shares those concepts with the church, it only takes a moment of personal crisis, or personal conviction, to make the final leap to a personal saving faith.

This is part of the reason I split my giving. I know some pastors argue that all your giving should be to the church and that church leaders should decide how best to use that for the kingdom. However, it has been my experience that many Christian leaders lack the sufficient wisdom to play the long game. Why are our leaders not pushing Christian education as one? It doesn’t take a prophet to see that we are losing our children and our strength because we are giving our children to the enemy to educate. So why are we not investing in schools that will help us train our children up?

Instead, we aim for low hanging fruit with walk-up evangelism and learned gospel presentations. These are all well and good, but this approach works best when there is a certain cultural knowledge of the historic faith. That time is almost over, and therefore, our strategy needs to develop. Addison goes on to suggest how it needs to develop.

When none of the preliminary ideas are held in common due to years of Satanic propaganda in the media and school – there is no God, no morality, no sin, no life after death – evangelism becomes ten times more difficult. The personal crisis or personal conviction that before might have led to a conversion now simply adds to a general sense of despair and a desire to drown those feelings in entertainment, drugs, or materialism. Before we can reap the harvest, we must sow, water, weed, and cultivate with Christian education and Christian values.

That is why I now funnel a large percentage of my giving into Christian education. Yes of course I still support my pastor and church, but because Christian leaders in New Zealand often do not understand the times we are in, I know that I (and other Christians who do) must put as much money as we can into Christian education. And I know this is having fruit among groups that our churches do not tend to reach. A Sikh or Hindu child who hears the gospel every day for 10 years or more is much more likely to come to faith (humanly speaking) than a Sikh or Hindu university student who has grown up in a government school and is hearing the gospel for the first time. I think it’s time that we Christians who see these things put continuous pressure on our leaders until they get this long term thinking. Imagine the impact the gospel could have in New Zealand if we were providing a quality gospel education for children from all faith backgrounds. Yes it is intensive and takes a lot of resources, but it is long term thinking that will reap long term rewards.

Parenting Advice – Sleep

Recently I viewed some great clips of Matt Walsh giving parenting advice, and I thought I’d get in on the act. It looks like it could be quite fun, and given I have a number of children, and have an interest in parenting children and education, I may even try to make this a semi-regular feature. Today we will look at a post on Reddit.

I’ve seen a lot of posts about baby not sleeping without being held but these all seem to just apply to naps because these people still manage to get baby into the cot at night. We can’t. At all.

We’re 5 1/2 months in and we’ve tried a few times to get him in his cot with no joy. I get into the cot myself and nurse him the try seeking out but it’s like he knows he’s in the wrong bed. We can practically throw him in our bed and he doesn’t flinch but we place him carefully and feed him in the cot and it’s like he just knows! He used to go in for 20 mins here and there but now he won’t even co sleep without me holding his hand or nursing him.

It’s my fault. I do love cosleeping and know breaking this habit is going to mean possibly weeks of no sleep for me, my husband or my toddler so I’ve opted for the easy life but he needs to leave at some point…

FYI We have a toddler so any advice needs to take her into consideration. We don’t really want to consider any form of sleep training until he is past his 9 month sleep regression at least.

Ok, so let me start with the first paragraph. We have a mother who cannot get her 5-month-old into a cot at night. I actually don’t believe that for a minute. There is no way it is physically impossible for a mother to get her 5-month-old baby into a cot. What you are actually saying is you won’t put your baby into the cot. One of the biggest failings in modern parenting is that adults refuse to be adults. You are the parent. You run the show. If you can be beaten by a 5-month-old, perhaps you should consider what has gone wrong.

Then in our next paragraph we find out that she has managed to get him in his cot, but with no joy. In other words, he cries when you put him into the cot. This mother has even tried to get him to sleep in the cot by getting into the cot herself. Seriously?! Dear reader, do you have that mental picture emblazoned in your mind? This is where poor parenting philosophy will lead you…back into a cot. Clearly lack of sleep does terrible things to our cognitive functioning.

In paragraph three we get the truth. Our mother admits it is all her fault. Correct. She has created this habit because of her own love for cosleeping with her child. In putting her own desires ahead of her child’s actual needs, she has created a sleep problem for her child. She rightly points out that she has opted for the easy life. She has trained her child to need her to sleep, and it is no surprise that he now needs her to sleep.

Situations like this in parenting are all too frequent, and there are almost always a few common elements. The first is the life principle that those people who opt for the easy choice often end up walking the hard road. When it comes to making decisions, there is often a difficult choice and an easy choice. An example would be putting your child down to sleep. It’s difficult to do this at first, and new mothers find it hard to be parted from their little ones. It is easier to hold and rock the child, and it’s beautiful to see a baby fall asleep in your arms. It’s a lot harder to make the choice to put them down and hear a bit of crying. But the truth is, the difficult choice leads to an easier life, whereas the easy choice leads to a difficult life. This is a common theme in many parenting dilemmas.

The second common element is that so often parents know what they need to do, but they do not have the ability or will to carry it out. This mother knows she needs to let the child cry and learn to sleep, but she is putting artificial barriers in the way because she does not have the will or strength to do it. As you can see, this is related to the first point. If you go through life making all easy choices, you do not develop the strength of character to make difficult choices. Unfortunately, as a result of this, you will forever be suffering the harsh consequences of not being up to doing what you need to do.

The final element in all of this is that your inability to do the right thing does not just impact you, but it impacts your husband, your toddler, and also, your baby himself. Learning to sleep is extremely important in your baby’s cognitive development. More sleep is correlated with higher IQ and performance in school years. A good parent, should strive to ensure that their own emotional weakness does not get in the way of their child’s development. So grow a bit of character, make the hard decision and give your child sleep. It won’t take weeks. It will take a few nights of you developing the strength of character to allow your child to cry it out. Don’t make out like you love your child and people who love their children would never do this. Loving your child means doing what is best for them. What you actually love is your feelings. So get over that, and act for the good of your child and the rest of your family.