Brief Thoughts on the Lay of the Land

It’s been obvious to all but the most panicked and fearful that the foolishness of the last couple of years has worn itself out. Even apologists for the government’s authoritarian actions earlier in the shamdemic are critiquing the validity of mandates in an omicron environment while still sanctimoniously congratulating themselves on having supported the control health measures, and ‘loved their neighbour’ through their support of state coercion of citizens to be vaccinated. They rest in the self-righteous knowledge that they have helped save New Zealand.

Except that they haven’t. Sure people weren’t dying of covid when we were all locked in our homes for weeks on end and refusing to let people visit our island nation. But what’s happened since the arrival of omicron? Their god the state through its Messiah figure Ardern promised salvation from covid damnation through the sacraments of masks and vaccination. But like all false gods, this one has failed miserably, much to the mirth of the true God (Psalm 2). Only the truly naive and self-deceived can believe that this has all been worth it. Rampant inflation is one of many signs that God is not mocked. Idolatry always ends badly.

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Tenacity and Intransigence

In the golden era of the Roman Empire, Pliny the Younger advised Emperor Trajan that Christians should be executed solely for their tenacity and intransigence. “Whatever the nature of their admission, I am convinced that their stubbornness and unshakeable obstinacy ought not to go unpunished.”…

Would we be convicted today for being stubborn, tenacious, unbending and obstinate? It is surely undeniable that only rarely in Christian history has the lordship of Jesus in the West been treated as more pliable or has Christian revisionism been more brazen, Christian interpretations of the Bible more self-serving, Christian preaching more soft, Christian behavior more lax, Christian compromise more common, Christian defections from the faith more casual, and Christian rationale for such slippage more spurious and shameless.”

Os Guiness in Impossible People

Evangelism and the Lordship of Christ

Evangelism, like apologetics, should be pursued as an expression and outgrowth of the lordship of Jesus Christ over all things, extending his reign through the witness of the Christian believer.

Joseph Boot in The Mission of God: A Manifesto of Hope for Society

The Resistance – Repentance – Part 1B

Continued from yesterday

Acknowledge Corporate Sin

In our churches, we need leaders who will help us see the big corporate sins of our age. We’ve often softened our congregations up on the easy topics that leave us feeling justified. It’s easy to rail against greed – especially when we think it is something that only rich people have. And rich people are people who earn at least $25,000 more than me. It’s easy to turn our applications into calls for more people to give up time in their ‘secular’ callings to spend more time helping out in the church institution. These soft and convenient applications have become staple.

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Wilberforce and Modern Christians

When Christopher Luxon gave his maiden speech, I was astounded by how many Christians were excited by what he had to say. I was disappointed. Yes, he pointed out the difference his faith has made to his life. He pointed out that it was helpful having something bigger than oneself.

Yet he then went to show how ill-thought-out his theology of politics was – a shameful thing in a Christian seeking to lead in civil government, but unsurprising given the weak state of the church in New Zealand. In his maiden speech, Luxon praised and highlighted the work of Christians like William Wilberforce who worked tirelessly for the abolition of the slave trade. Yet in a contradictory fashion, he continued by explaining his faith was personal to him and that he didn’t think religion should dictate to the state, and that politicians shouldn’t use their political platform to force beliefs on others.

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The Looming War and The Resistance

I received an email from a reader a week or so ago and in one sentence he put his finger on a feeling that has been growing in my mind. He wrote, “In my lifetime there has never been a time where it feels like there are so many dark forces around us; it feels like we are in precursor stages to something much worse.” It certainly feels like we are on the edge of something. And when I say “something”, I do not mean pink cupcakes with chocolate sprinkles. More the kind of something that Gandalf refers to when sitting with Pippin on the walls of Minas Tirith and says, “It’s the deep breath before the plunge.” Ever since the fall of Adam, there has been constant warfare between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. Sometimes it’s a Cold War and hostilities are not open, but every now and then open war breaks upon us, whether we would have it or not.

Perhaps those of us thinking like this are of a naturally pessimistic nature and we would think this about any time that we live in. Maybe history will show us to be utterly and completely wrong. Perhaps we are misreading the signs of the times. But I don’t think so. I think that we are like the dreamer who has awoken with relief from a nightmare only to realise that the disaster of his nightmare is real and imminent. If we are right, what are we to do? What is the battle plan? Where ought we to focus our efforts? Here are things I think urgently need addressing by Christians and the church in New Zealand.

1. We must acknowledge our individual and corporate sin as the reason we find ourselves in this current situation and repent by making changes where Christ in his Word calls for change. (Part 1A and 1B).

2. We must commit ourselves to dependence on our king. This means prayer, particularly for wisdom and courage and a renewed appetite for His Word, particularly looking at how God’s people of old have responded to times like these. (Parts 2A, 2B and 2C)

3. We must confront the Church’s unholy dualism and learn once more to apply the lordship of Christ to all things. (Parts 3A, 3B, 3C and 3D)

4. We must develop and practise an evangelism that not only calls for personal salvation, but Christ’s lordship in every sphere of life. In other words we must disciple the nations to obey everything that Christ taught and call unbelievers to recognise Christ’s kingship on earth. (Part 4)

5. We must seek to build a Christian counter-culture. and in that attempt, embrace Christian truths that make the world cringe.

6. We ought to prioritise Christian marriage and family as one of the most powerful methods of resistance

7. We must protect our children while we train them for the day they join us in the battle.

8. We must pray for and seek out leaders who understand the times, encourage (literally make or put in courage) timid leaders and challenge the compromised.

9. We must prioritise obedience to our king over wealth, comfort and respectability. We must be prepared to suffer for holding to the truth.

10. We ought to put our hope in the sovereignty of the reigning Christ who is subduing all his enemies. This is our Christian hope. We know how the story ends. He wins. And since this is so, we should fight like we can actually win, and at the very least, go down swinging

No doubt clearer thinkers will see other essential ingredients in our resistance. Feel free to let me know your thoughts on this. In future posts, we will explore each of these in a little more detail.

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.

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.

An Invitation to Your Mission

One of the issues I have thought through a lot in recent years is the place of a man in the church and the kingdom. Too often, for lots of men, the church seems ‘ho-hum’ and irrelevant. One of the reasons for this is that the role of men in the world is often denigrated. I’ve heard too many sermons that suggest serving Christ could mean dropping more of your vocational work to help in institutional church ministry. Other sermons critique wealth and suggest saving is not trusting God despite God calling men to provide for their families. I’ve seen videos of men at church valuing their role as a doctor only because it means they can fund ‘ministry’ in other parts of the world. Often sermons use examples of people in ‘full time Christian ministry’ (a phrase I find frustrating) as positive examples of Christian sacrifice. Rarely, if ever, are the laity and their ordinary lives looked upon as examples of godliness in Christ’s kingdom.

The problem with all of this is that it ignores core truths about masculinity in Scripture. While I am aware of some of the key issues with Wild at Heart by John Eldredge, there is a certain amount of truth in his diagnosis. One of his core arguments is that men are made for adventure and battles and a beauty. I might not put it in exactly those terms, but I do think Scripture teaches us that Adam was made for dominion. He was to go out into God’s earth and take dominion. He was designed to image God as he took what God had made and in an analogous way to God, fill up emptiness and give it shape.

Here’s how Eldridge puts it. Most men think they are simply here on earth to kill time – and it’s killing them. But the truth is precisely the opposite. The secret longing of your heart, whether it’s to build a boat and sail it, to write a symphony and play it, to plant a field and care for it – those are the things you were made to do. That’s what you’re here for. We are designed for dominion, and in Christ we are called to work to extend Christ’s lordship to the areas of his world that we touch. But too often we feel denigrated and tarred as ‘worldly’ for wanting to do these things. What we need to hear is the call that Christ lays upon every man to get out there and subdue his sphere of influence for Christ. This is the way you as a man are Christ’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works. We need to be encouraged to wage war in this world – not with worldly weapons, but to take every thought captive as we seek to demolish the strongholds of Christ’s enemies in the arenas we have been called. That’s a lot more encouraging than to hear that most of our lives are irrelevant except for the times we are at church helping out.

Christ and Culture

The Bible clearly teaches that Christ is Lord. He reigns. He is the universal king, the King of kings and Lord of lords. All authority in heaven and on earth belongs to him. Right now, he is acting throughout the world as he slowly but surely makes every enemy into a footstall. And yet sometimes you’d be forgiven for thinking that Christians didn’t believe this. We have ceded just about every bit of the public sphere to the enemies of Christ and acted if Christ’s lordship applies to our ‘hearts’ alone. We’ve acted as if the kingdom of Christ is an imaginary realm that we access when we die. But at least we’ve invited Jesus into our hearts though!

What happened to the conquering king? What happened to “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun does its successive journeys run, his kingdom stretch from shore to shore, till moons shall wax and wane no more”? Instead, we sing about running to his arms and how ‘nothing compares to his embrace.’ We’ve given up the majestic truth of Christ’s authority and gradual conquering of the nations and his enemies for an insipid private relational realm.

It is time evangelical Christians gained a renewed understanding of the truth of Christ’s lordship and its implications for culture. As education is my particular interest and field of expertise, I will briefly describe two implications of Christ’s lordship for education.

Firstly, Christians, and particularly Christian pastors and leaders, must wake up to the truth that education is not something neutral. It does not sit outside of Christ’s kingdom. Nothing does. And if Christ is Lord of all, there is an imperative for us to train our children up to recognise his kingly authority over every single atom in this universe. That means Christians cannot but be supportive of a truly Christian education, by which I do not mean a basically secular education with a prayer to start the day and a worship assembly once a week. No, I mean we must support an education that trains children to understand everything from a Christian perspective. Christ must be recognised as lord of all – economics, politics, science, history, mathematics and language. If this is true, we must evacuate our children from the government schools which do not recognise Christ’s lordship but teach rather the lordship of demos. Our children cannot hope to learn Christ’s lordship from pagans who deny it.

Secondly, since Christ is indeed Lord, a truly Christian education will reflect the actual structure of reality in a way that false worldviews cannot. Therefore, a truly Christian education will be superior to what is offered by those who deny Christ’s lordship. Christians should fund and run the very best educational institutions in the world. We should be the leaders in providing a first-class education. People should look at what we are doing, and though they deny Christ’s lordship, they should want their children to be trained by us. And that is what we do see in Christian schools which unashamedly provide a truly Christian worldview education.

Now imagine if this were multiplied throughout the West. Imagine if all supposedly Christian schools actually taught and recognised Christ’s lordship. Imagine if Christian film-makers and storytellers, and IT specialists and scientists and philosophers self-consciously acknowledged Christ’s lordship in their field and sought to apply it. Imagine the impact Christianity will again have when we get it back out into the public sphere.