Subscribe now

I just finished Carolyn Chen’s fascinating book Work, Pray, Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley.

It’s a compelling read, and I’d 10/10 recommend it.

I’m trying to get her on the podcast—so, Dr. Chen, if you’re reading this, or if you have connections to Dr. Chen, please let her know I want to talk with her!

The book is about how tech giants are becoming a religion in their own way, reshaping spirituality to serve their religion of peak productivity while stripping out elements of supernaturalism and broader community benefit. Reading the book, it’s quite clear Chen is a talented and brilliant sociologist of religion, and she left me with MUCH to think about—I made fifty-five highlights in my highlighter app!

But it’s her final chapter, titled “Killing the Buddha” and running about fifty pages, that really had my brain buzzing. And even within that one chapter, full of compelling insights and examples, there’s one idea I can’t stop thinking about.

Chen spends considerable time examining the curious place of Buddhism within Silicon Valley. Meditation and mindfulness are everywhere, but Buddhism as an actual religion is considerably harder to find.

At one point, Chen highlights a conference in which, as she describes it, there were literally monks in their full religious garb being put on display—but they were never asked to speak. Instead, it was white people on stage reducing the practices to how they could impact the bottom line and provide a return on investment.

Chen calls what has emerged “Whitened Buddhism”—Buddhism that has been stripped of much of its Asian heritage and religious particularity and repackaged into something more palatable to White, educated, secular Americans.

Meditation or mindfulness remains, but much of the religious world from which those practices emerged disappears. Chen adds that most Americans think of Buddhism in this desacralized way because this is the form we’ve been sold.

Why has this happened? Well, Chen puts the dynamic rather succinctly:

“To survive in Silicon Valley, religion must conform to the logic and culture of the tech industry.” (154)

That line got me thinking about progressive Christianity.

And before anyone gets mad at me, let me say immediately: this isn’t uniquely a progressive Christian problem. Conservative Christianity can—and frequently does—conform itself to the logic of its surrounding political and cultural world too. The resulting Christianity simply looks different.

But since I self-identify as someone on the Christian left and often critique forms of progressive Christianity, I want to focus this piece on the secularizing pressure exerted on progressive Christianity.

What happens when Christianity has to conform to the logic and culture of secular progressivism in order to remain culturally intelligible within progressive spaces?

The parts of Christianity that translate easily remain.

Justice, inclusion, equality, community, liberation; care for marginalized people.

All of these are authentically Christian concerns. The problem isn’t their presence.

The question is what happens to the parts of Christianity that don’t translate nearly as easily.

Miracles, sin, salvation, resurrection; the actual activity of the Holy Spirit.

Having just finished Eric Smith’s By What Power, that last point is especially worth emphasizing. As I argued in my review, Smith largely reduces the story of Acts to “humans doing stuff” (my words). The Holy Spirit is remarkably absent—and, to my recollection, not even mentioned in the book. Instead, Acts gets read primarily through the categories of political, social, and economic power.

But Christianity also makes the claim that Jesus Christ isn’t merely a particularly compelling moral teacher, but the resurrected Lord who is somehow actually alive and active in the world.

There can be a kind of cultural selection pressure: keep the parts of Christianity that fit comfortably within a secular moral framework and “demythologize,” reinterpret, or discard the parts that don’t.

And that makes me wonder if we need a provocative term analogous to Chen’s “Whitened Buddhism.”

I want to call it “atheistic Christianity.”

I don’t mean that the Christians I’m describing necessarily identify as atheists or explicitly deny God’s existence. Many obviously don’t.

Rather, I mean a form of Christianity whose understanding of the world seems to require no actual supernatural agency—a Christianity in which we can talk extensively about God while very little depends upon God actually doing anything.

Christianity Within the Immanent Frame

Of course, I’m reminded here of Andrew Root’s book Churches and the Crisis of Decline, in which Root notes that “Religion does not want a living God—who is alive in speaking both a yes and a no—it wants an object to use of its own individual meaning making.”

While the subject is different, the move is similar to what Chen identifies in Silicon Valley: the desire to turn the divine into an object of individual meaning-making.

And again, I’d emphasize this, as Chen does: Buddhism is not without supernatural claims!

But this is the danger of the immanent frame, as Root notes, borrowing from the work of Charles Taylor. Churches, institutions, or organizations that concede to the immanent frame “tend toward a theology without the church.”

Yet, working from the dialectical theology of Karl Barth, Root argues that “attending to a God who is God is impossible outside the church.”

Which, again, speaks to Chen’s broader point.

Chen describes sitting next to a Silicon Valley type who, after hearing a presentation on the “productivity benefits of meditation,” turned to her and said:

“wait…is Buddhism a religion?”

That’s sort of the whole problem.

Root writes that “The immanent frame declares that togetherness, religious literacy, and intellectual interests are in bounds and therefore coherent.”

Chen describes something remarkably similar. “Mindfulness” and “meditation,” for example, are welcome. Less welcome are moral, ethical, or supernatural claims that transcend the assumptions of the surrounding culture.

As Root says in regard to the same secularizing forces acting upon Christianity:

“Less accepted is the idea that the God of Israel who stands outside the universe could enter into it, judging and redeeming it from death for life.”

In the same way that Buddhism is not Buddhism without the Buddha, Christianity cannot be Christianity without a risen Christ.

Quite brilliantly, Chen asserts:

“How, when, where, and why you do something changes the meaning of it.”

And I think that’s exactly the point.

If God Didn’t Exist…

Which leads me to a question I find increasingly useful:

If God didn’t exist, how much about some versions of progressive Christianity—what I’m calling a kind of atheistic Christianity—would actually have to change?

Would its politics change?

Would its understanding of justice change?

Would its advocacy change?

If the answer is not very much, I think we have something worth examining.

And again, we could ask the very same questions of some versions of conservative Christianity.

Chen’s critique of Silicon Valley Buddhism isn’t that meditation is bad. It’s that practitioners of that religion have been transformed by the cultural institution receiving them. To become acceptable within that world, they have had to conform themselves to that world’s assumptions.

And I wonder if some forms of Christianity are experiencing something remarkably similar.

The question isn’t whether Christians should care about justice, inclusion, liberation, or any of these other concerns; of course we should.

The question is in which direction the formation is happening.

Is Christianity forming our understanding of justice, politics, and the world?

Or has the surrounding culture determined which parts of Christianity we’re still allowed to believe?

For Buddhist practitioners within Silicon Valley, Chen argues that their faith increasingly had to be watered down and desacralized to become acceptable within tech companies.

I increasingly fear that progressive Christianity, in its desire to be accepted within broader social justice spaces, is undergoing a similar process—watering down and desacralizing the faith until Christianity fits comfortably within a world that has little need for a living God.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

“Just tell me again how gay marriage is going to tear this country apart.”

What If Liz Lemon’s Parents Were Right?

30 Rock, the American television comedy series created by Saturday Night Live alum Tina Fey, is one of my all-time favorite shows. As such, I was recently rewatching the series when a throwaway line from an early episode stuck in my head.

Season 2’s Christmas episode, “Ludachristmas,” features Liz Lemon’s family: her mother Margaret (Anita Gillette), father Dick (Buck Henry), and brother Mitch (Andy Richter).

Liz’s parents are sweet, small-town folks on the surface, but Jack’s mother, Colleen, insists on exposing the underlying tensions. By the end of the episode, what begins as a nice family dinner at a TGI Friday’s-type restaurant descends into a screaming match, as Liz and her family trade angry barbs, all the while Jack and Colleen sit idly by, smirking at one another.

One intriguing line, yelled by Liz at her parents, is something like: “Just tell me again how gay marriage is going to tear this country apart.”

While likely meant to be dismissive of the overreaction against gay marriage, I can’t help but wonder:

What if Liz Lemon’s parents were right?

Trump Did Not Happen in a Vacuum

I just finished reading Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech, a little book by William Galston that caught my eye at the local library. Checking in at only 176 pages, and with generous spacing throughout, it was a fairly quick and compelling read.

Galston’s central argument is that “liberal democracy,” or Western-style democracy, is actually quite rare and fragile, and especially susceptible to what he calls the “dark passions” of anger, fear, and domination—particularly when exploited by political leaders à la Trump.

While Galston and others deservedly place much of the blame on leaders like Trump and the voters who supported him, Galston makes some broader assertions that I think are important and are too frequently ignored in favor of simply blaming everything on Trump and his supporters.

To be absolutely clear, the point of this post is neither to valorize nor infantilize Trump supporters. Rather, the point is to say that Trump and the broader MAGA movement did not happen in a vacuum.

And while I believe that many of the reactionary actions and efforts spearheaded by Trump are unethical, immoral, and sometimes blatantly evil, I don’t think it does much good to resort to public shaming and name-calling. Such moves can themselves become acts of anti-liberalism, as Galston argues.

To that end, I would argue that we in the United States find ourselves in such an angry, divided, and polarized predicament in part because the prediction of Liz Lemon’s parents has turned out to be true:

Gay marriage really did help tear this country apart.

The Right Side of History

Now, before I get blasted with angry comments, let me first say that I was and still am an enthusiastic supporter of gay marriage.

More importantly, the point of this blog is not to debate whether gay marriage is morally good or not—though I would argue that it is. Rather, my point is that during the twenty-teens, the overwhelming assumption among Democrats and much of the progressive left became not simply that gay marriage was morally right, but that there should no longer even be a debate about it.

Broadly speaking, during that time the American left increasingly treated people operating from different moral frameworks as backward or bigoted, all the while adopting a sort of cavalier and presumptuous attitude perhaps best illustrated by the repeated moralistic language of being “on the right side of history.”

My argument is that this mattered.

Perhaps going back to the reelection of Barack Obama (whom I voted for and still support), conservatives—and especially religious conservatives within America—increasingly felt diminished, isolated, ignored, and culturally displaced. By the time a morally—and somewhat financially—bankrupt, swashbuckling political leader came riding down a golden escalator in 2015, many of these folks were ripe for the picking.

Consider the timeline:

• 30 Rock’s “Ludachristmas” first aired: December 13, 2007

• Seth Meyers roasts Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: April 30, 2011

• Obama administration announces it will no longer defend DOMA: February 2011

• Obergefell v. Hodges argued: April 28, 2015

• Trump descends the “golden escalator”: June 16, 2015

• Obergefell v. Hodges decided: June 26, 2015

• Trump elected president: November 8, 2016

The Politics of Humiliation

This is where Galston’s wisdom is especially helpful.

First, Galston argues that liberals have too often underestimated just how important cultural and moral questions actually are:

“Today’s defenders of liberal democracy often suffer from what might be termed myopic materialism: the belief—especially pervasive among elites—that economic issues are the real issues and that cultural issues are diversions, deliberately heightened by unscrupulous leaders to gain support for their anti-liberal agendas.” (18)

In other words, cultural issues aren’t merely distractions from the “real” economic issues. People actually care about them.

And I think this is something the progressive left has sometimes been unable—or unwilling—to accept: many Americans operate from genuinely different moral frameworks. Galston continues:

“Until liberals—mostly clustered in large cities and national capitals—make the effort to understand the enduring influence of religion and traditional morality in the hinterlands, they will continue to be surprised by political events.” (19)

But Galston’s second point is even more important to my argument: humiliation is a particularly dangerous way to respond to those differences.

In my opinion, shaming and belittling people who held traditional views on issues like gay marriage became an increasingly prominent move of the progressive left. And it wasn’t without blowback.

As Galston notes:

“Of all the variants of anger, the most powerful, and often the most dangerous, is anger born of humiliation.” (46)

This is what I want my friends on the progressive left to understand, especially when we respond to the rise of Trump with a sort of feigned innocence: How could they?

There was, I think, a real sense of humiliation experienced by many people who opposed gay marriage—not simply because they lost the political and legal argument, but because their position increasingly came to be treated as beyond the bounds of respectable public discourse. Meanwhile, within progressive politics, the direction of history itself was often treated as inevitable. We were, after all, on the “right side of history.”

Galston’s final example helps connect these threads directly to what happened in 2016:

“After the 2016 election, I asked a leading evangelical Protestant why so many evangelical voters had abandoned their long-held conviction that private morality is a threshold qualification for public office. His response: because evangelicals believed they were on the verge of losing every vestige of the culture they cherished, they were looking for a fighter, not a preacher. When people feel their backs are against the wall, they are unlikely to be particular about the character of those who step forward to defend them.” (112)

They were looking for a fighter, not a preacher.

That doesn’t absolve anyone of responsibility for choosing that fighter.

To be absolutely clear, I do not want this blog to be perceived as an apologetic for Trump voters or as me pretending they are not responsible for their choices. What I am trying to say is that those choices did not form out of a vacuum.

And while I don’t agree with those choices, I think we as a country would be far better off if those of us on the left had responded with more compassion—or at least some measure of understanding and curiosity—when people reacted so strongly to enormous social changes such as gay marriage.

A Lesson for the Church

Or, to say it somewhat differently, I’m not an expert in change theory, but I’ve learned enough over the years studying church growth and revitalization to know that shoving change down people’s throats won’t work—even if the change is desperately needed.

I’m reminded of Dawn and Joe Weaks, pastors of what is now Connection Christian Church, a stereotypical aging and declining Mainline Protestant church. In her book Breakthrough, Dawn describes Joe patiently—and perhaps also painstakingly—sitting with longtime members, going over item-by-item lists and descriptions of elements of their old building as they prepared for a change of venue.

No doubt, some people were likely offended and maybe even angered by the decision to sell their building and move to a newer location. But rather than shaming and humiliating them, Dawn and Joe offered kindness, care, and compassion—with, of course, a steady dose of realism and boundaries.

To be clear, they still sold the building. They still got rid of a lot of stuff. And they still changed the name of the church. I’m sure, through it all, they lost some people. But in the end, they gained a lot more.

And, to bring this back to the church, as this is a church—not political—focused blog, I’d make the same point as I did above.

Churches, like liberal democracies, are fragile ecosystems, and without wisdom, patience, and care, they can be derailed by nefarious actors looking to take advantage of offended and aggrieved groups of people.

And while those people are certainly responsible for their own actions, I guess what I would ultimately argue is that so are we.

Meaning, we can’t diminish and disregard whole swaths of people and then be shocked and surprised when they start following someone who affirms and supports them.

So What Do We Do Now?

The law of holes, or the first law of holes, is an adage that states: “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” It is used as a metaphor, warning that when in an untenable position, it is best to stop making the situation worse.

Galston says it a little more eloquently:

“When backsliding is occurring, the most urgent challenge is to prevent things from getting worse. In such times, naïveté about historical progress and human nature is especially dangerous.” (134)

I think there are two important points there.

First, stop making things worse.

This is where I find Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent efforts to laugh off “woke 1.0” as “crazy” dismissive and unhelpful.

Please read the room.

If part of what helped produce our current political moment was the humiliation and dismissal of people who felt culturally displaced, then we need to acknowledge that some overreactions occurred and that innocent people were caught in the crossfire. Laughing it off as “crazy” diminishes those people’s feelings and becomes emblematic of the very dynamic we need to name.

That doesn’t mean capitulating to their demands. Compassion toward people experiencing change is not the same thing as capitulation.

People remain responsible for how they respond to cultural change. But leaders are also responsible for how they lead change—and humiliation is an extraordinarily dangerous and ultimately ineffective change-management strategy.

Second, abandon our naïveté about historical progress and human nature.

I’m not too sure of Galston’s religious beliefs, but he makes strong use of Augustine and what I recognize as a classical Christian view of sin and human nature.

And maybe this is one of the real challenges for parts of the progressive left: we can fundamentally misunderstand how human beings actually work.

Galston, for what it’s worth, seems to understand this quite well:

“The psychology of alarmism is seductive. It gives the alarmist a sense of superior insight, and by raising the stakes of one’s judgment, it heightens the excitement. When leaders convey alarm to their followers, they enable ordinary citizens to feel a sense of significance that may otherwise be missing from their lives.” (90)

Human beings don’t inevitably march toward greater enlightenment simply because history is supposedly moving in that direction. We are susceptible to fear, anger, humiliation, tribalism, and the desire to feel significant. And importantly, that is true of people on both the left and the right.

Which brings me back to the church.

You don’t have to believe that the person resisting change is right to believe that they deserve dignity. Joe and Dawn Weaks didn’t keep the old building because people were upset. They helped people grieve. They listened. They treated people with compassion.

And then they changed it anyway.

I think there’s something important there for church leaders—and perhaps for our politics too.

Change may be necessary. Sometimes it may even be morally imperative.

But how we lead people through that change matters.

We cannot control how people respond. They remain responsible for their choices. But we are responsible for how we treat them along the way.

And humiliation is a terrible strategy for change.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

P.S. One More Thought About DOMA

There’s another piece of this history that doesn’t quite fit the argument above but has sat uncomfortably with me since it happened.

In 2011, the Obama administration announced that the Department of Justice would no longer defend Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in court because the administration had concluded that it was unconstitutional. Importantly, the administration continued to enforce the law while it remained in effect, so this wasn’t simply Obama deciding that DOMA no longer existed.

Still, I remember finding the decision a little unsettling even at the time—and I say that as someone who supported Obama and opposed DOMA.

The problem is bigger than whether I agree with the particular policy outcome. Liberal democracy depends not only upon getting the outcomes we want, but upon institutions, processes, and constraints that remain in place when someone we don’t support holds power.

If we become comfortable with executive officials stretching those norms when they produce outcomes we like, we shouldn’t be entirely surprised when future leaders push them considerably further to produce outcomes we despise.

That’s a different argument than the one I’ve made above, and probably deserves its own treatment. But looking back from where we are now, I think my discomfort in 2011 was pointing toward something important: the rules matter most when following them gets in the way of something we want.

Subscribe now

Those who follow this blog know I’m an avid reader. And lately, I’ve gotten into a cycle where every time I go to the library to return a book, I can’t help looking around—and inevitably, something catches my eye.

Recently, it was the book We Breed Lions: Confronting Canada’s Troubled Hockey Culture by Rick Westhead.

The book details, among other things, the scandal involving five members of Canada’s 2018 World Junior hockey team who were accused of sexually assaulting a young woman in a London, Ontario, hotel room. Hockey Canada later reached a confidential financial settlement with the woman, and Westhead’s reporting exposed the existence of a multimillion-dollar fund Hockey Canada had used to settle sexual-abuse claims.

The five players were eventually charged with sexual assault and pleaded not guilty. In 2025, all five were acquitted, with the judge concluding that the prosecutors had not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Westhead’s book, however, goes far beyond this one case. After his initial reporting on Hockey Canada’s handling of the allegations, his inbox filled with messages from people wanting to share their own experiences with hockey culture—which Westhead recounts throughout the book in painstaking and agonizing detail.1

It was one of those reads where every time I set it down, I felt like I needed to go take a shower—much like I did whenever I watched the Netflix political thriller House of Cards back in the day.

And while the book details other troubling elements of hockey culture in Canada—hazing, financial improprieties, out-of-control parents, and a general overvaluing of the sport within the culture (“Hockey is religion in Canada”)—what I found most troubling was story after story involving the sexual mistreatment, objectification, or simply sexual use of young women by male hockey players.

Near the end of the book, Westhead begins discussing actions and efforts aimed at changing that culture. A repeated theme is educating young men about consent, with one person quoted as saying, “perhaps if we had more consistent public awareness and education, [he] would have never made the decision he made” (293).

I may regret what I’m about to say—or it may prove that I’m way over my skis, so to speak—but after reading story after troubling story of young men acting as if sexual gratification by way of young women was a right, a privilege, something they deserved and should expect, I kept thinking:

Consent is absolutely necessary. But is consent enough?

Or, to put my concern more provocatively: a thin ethic of consent can become the inverse of purity culture.

Let me say a few things first to be clear:

1. I’m nowhere near qualified to be a “sex educator,” nor am I trying to present myself as one. Rather, I’m trying to think morally and also theologically about this topic.

2. Consent is, of course, an absolute minimum requirement. Sexual activity without consent is sexual assault.

3. I’m not trying to be a prude or moralist.

Here’s what I mean.

Having been reared during the heyday of purity culture, I experienced it very much as a “no, no, no, no—YES” framework. Sexual activity was considered a no-no until marriage—after which married couples were apparently supposed to flip a switch and suddenly become sexual savants.

There have been MANY stories of that dynamic proving deeply problematic.

More than that, the burden was often placed primarily on women—at least in the cultural contexts I experienced—to be the voice of “no.” Men were frequently portrayed as naturally wanting more physical and sexual activity, while women were expected to establish and enforce the boundaries.

That was profoundly inadequate.

But I wonder whether a similarly inadequate framework can emerge when consent itself becomes the entirety of our sexual ethic.

To be clear, I think that consent education is more sophisticated than simply “everything is permissible until somebody says no.” I’ve heard it said that affirmative consent emphasizes an ongoing, voluntary, enthusiastic “yes,” which is important.

But even an enthusiastic “yes” cannot answer every moral question about how another human being ought to be treated.

Consent establishes whether sexual activity is permissible. It does not, by itself, establish whether that activity is loving, caring, wise, mutually beneficial, or reflective of good character.

And that distinction kept bothering me as I read Westhead’s book.

One significant element of the 2018 case involved videos recorded afterward in which the woman made statements about consent. What those videos demonstrated—and how they should be interpreted—became contested issues at trial. I don’t want to relitigate that case here.

What interests me is the broader moral question raised throughout Westhead’s book.

A person can understand that consent matters and still fundamentally view another person as an object—a means toward one’s own sexual gratification rather than someone worthy of care, affection, respect, and, dare I say, love.

And this is where I come back to purity culture.

I think both purity culture and a thin, rule-based ethic of consent can fail in remarkably similar ways: both can reduce sexual ethics to whether the correct condition has been satisfied.

Purity culture says:

Not married → No.
Married → Yes.

A thin ethic of consent says:

No consent → No.
Consent → Yes.

But neither framework, by itself, answers the deeper question:

What kind of person should I be toward the person standing in front of me?

This is why authors and speakers like , a Canadian herself, have written about the problematic nature of sex for women within some conservative Christian marriages, where husbands can treat their wives as having a duty to sexually provide for them without much consideration for the woman’s own desire, pleasure, or agency—with the most extreme manifestation being marital rape.

Marriage isn’t enough—and consent—while absolutely essential, isn’t enough either.

I believe sexual relationships require something deeper: care, affection, mutuality, respect, and, dare I say, love.

Near the end of the book, Westhead introduces the idea that character and moral formation are part of the underlying problem with hockey culture.

Canadian journalist Donna Spencer puts it starkly:

“There was an absence of character. Nobody said at any time, ‘I don’t care what she’s saying, this is wrong. We need to be better than this. Stop.’” (358)

Spencer’s words perfectly encapsulate what I’m trying to argue.

There was an absence of character.

Her point pushes beyond asking whether someone had technically crossed a line. It asks whether anyone in the room possessed the moral character to recognize that something was wrong and intervene.

Another former hockey player describes what happened as “an absence of leadership” (358).

Sure, that’s part of it.

But I’d go further.

There was an absence of moral formation.

Westhead finishes the book discussing the Coaching Boys Into Men training program, something I was relieved to read about after wading through hundreds of pages describing sordid and sinful behavior. Here, finally, were people trying to be proactive—not simply establishing rules, but forming character.

Westhead describes mentors spending time with players throughout the season, speaking with them about “accountability, trust, and respect” (361), and later describes an emphasis on both “winning and character” (385).

That gets much closer to what I think has been missing.

I don’t think the purity culture of my generation adequately taught young men to value, respect, and care for young women. Sex was something we all supposedly wanted, and marriage was the legitimate way to get it. Once married, women were sometimes taught that they were obligated to comply.

That’s a terrible sexual ethic.

But replacing one rule-based sexual ethic with another still leaves me wanting something more.

Purity culture can become:

Sex before marriage is wrong. Sex after marriage is good.

A thin consent ethic can become:

Sex without consent is wrong. Sex with consent is good.

Both are attractive because rules are relatively easy to teach.

What is much harder is forming people of character.

What I’m trying to articulate is a more virtue-based sexual ethic grounded in love, care, admiration, mutuality, and—in explicitly Christian terms—the recognition of another person as a beloved child of God and someone for whom Christ died.

A young man formed within THAT framework is not simply asking:

“Am I allowed to do this?”

He is asking:

“Am I treating this person in a way consistent with the love of Christ?”

For Christians, Philippians 2 offers a radically different orientation: not grasping for what I can get, but looking to the interests of another and taking the posture of Christ.

That’s considerably harder to reduce to a list of rules.

And maybe that’s precisely the point.

Purity culture was easy to teach because it provided clear boundaries within conservative Christian culture. Consent can likewise become attractive within secular culture because it provides a clear and absolutely necessary boundary.

But boundaries alone don’t form character.

I welcome feedback and pushback on all of this. I’m thinking this through as a father, pastor, and someone who wants to raise my son—and mentor other young men—to understand that while sexual ethics matter and consent is an absolute must, the goal cannot simply be obtaining permission.

I want to teach young men to treat women with care, affection, dignity, respect, and, dare I say, love—not simply because a rule requires it, but because she is a beloved child of God, a person for whom Christ died, and because God calls us to practice the self-giving way of Christ.

Consent tells us where a necessary boundary lies. Character helps determine who we become on either side of it.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

P.S. As I was reading this book and thinking about an American comparison, college football came to mind. Westhead briefly touches on similar issues within the sport in the United States.

To that end, I was troubled by the recent AI-edited video depicting Texas coach Steve Sarkisian slapping ESPN reporter Holly Rowe—and especially by Texas QB Arch Manning initially laughing when asked about it, for which he later apologized.

I don’t want Manning or Sarkisian tarred and feathered over the incident, but I do think pushback was warranted. In fact, I was glad Manning apparently had people around him willing to tell him, “Hey, this isn’t okay.”

That’s part of the kind of character formation I’m talking about. Young men need people around them who will teach them that the mistreatment of women—even when presented as a joke—should never be a laughing matter.

Subscribe now

Former Disciples of Christ missionary and missiologist Donald McGavran became famous—and infamous, especially within more progressive Mainline Protestant spaces—for his “Homogeneous Unit Principle.”

Basically, McGavran argued that church leaders should focus on building churches through homogeneous units—groupings of people whose shared language, culture, and values make it easier for the gospel to spread through communities.

While this philosophy became widely influential within Evangelicalism, McGavran and his methods receive nary a mention in many Mainline seminaries—even those within his (and my own) Disciples of Christ tradition.

But I’ve increasingly wondered:

What if, despite rejecting the implications of McGavran’s framework, progressive Mainline Protestants are repeating some of its most problematic elements—only under a different name?

My argument is thus:

Affinity groups are the new Homogeneous Unit Principle.

To be clear from the outset, my concern isn’t with affinity groups within churches. It’s with affinity becoming the basis for forming churches.

Because if Mainline Protestants believe something is ecclesiologically problematic about intentionally building churches around people who are already alike, changing the category of similarity from race or ethnicity to interests, identities, experiences, class, or politics doesn’t necessarily solve the underlying problem.

McGavran’s Complicated Legacy

I’ve always been intrigued by the legacy of Donald McGavran, and especially his Homogeneous Unit Principle, which came to dominate the so-called “church growth movement” that was highly influential within much of Evangelicalism beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century.

McGavran was a third-generation missionary to India for the Disciples of Christ who eventually established the Institute for Church Growth at Northwest Christian College in Eugene, Oregon. Four years later, McGavran and his colleague Alan R. Tippett moved to Pasadena, California, where they launched the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary. From there, McGavran’s ideas became enormously influential within the emerging church-growth movement.1

In the June 2026 edition of The Christian Century, Francisco Herrera wrote an intriguing piece on the “complicated legacy” of McGavran, asking how someone whose life was “full to bursting with intercultural adaptation and anti-racist struggle” eventually became “the darling of White segregationist Christians.” Herrera offers a nuanced portrait I appreciated.2

Upon his family’s return to Indianapolis in 1958, for instance, McGavran boldly chose to join a Black church and wrote an “open letter to the 49 White DOC churches in the city, lambasting their total segregation from the city’s two Black churches.”

More, Herrera notes:

“He also wrote in full support of then nascent Black theology in his fascinating work The Clash Between Christianity and Cultures, published in 1974. He agreed that Black theology rightly denounced ‘Caucasian Christianity’ and its ‘mixture of affluence, white dominance, inherited privilege, [and] sex standards’ as flawed. He also praised ‘black idiom and thought forms’ for how they motivated in Black churches ‘a desire to live justly and to oppose oppression,’ perspectives perfectly concordant with the Bible which needed to be taken seriously.”

Herrera is considerably less charitable toward McGavran’s famous Understanding Church Growth, which he calls “bigotry-enabling” and accuses of “leavening the reactionary politics of the anti–civil rights movement.” Herrera quotes the dissertation of Jesse Nathaniel Curtis, who argues that McGavran’s ideas:

“gave white evangelicals theological justification and cultural analysis to recast their segregated churches and ongoing appeals to white identity as faithful evangelism rather than racism.”

That’s certainly difficult to ignore. I’m not a church historian, so I’m hesitant to offer much resistance to that historical assessment. And Herrera himself doesn’t reduce McGavran to a simple villain. Instead, he describes him as:

“a classic case of the good kid falling in with the wrong crowd. Worn out after persisting through decades of mainline indifference to his evangelistic ideas, and maybe even slightly humiliated, his persistence may well have eagerly warped into pride, a pride that sealed his ears against all dissension and insisted that he was right.”3

Herrera ultimately adds that “despite evangelism’s bad reputation, we still must share the gospel.”

I wholeheartedly agree.

While I think Herrera makes a bit of a leap connecting McGavran’s ideas all the way to those storming the Capitol on January 6, I also think McGavran would have been well served to take seriously the criticisms regarding the potential consequences of his framework—or at least the ways it was being put into practice within White American churches.

One particularly important distinction for McGavran Herrera points out was between “discipling” and “perfecting.”

“Perfecting” was where the “bringing about of an ethical change in the discipled group” would lead toward “holy living,” including commitments to “social, racial and political justice.”

The problem is that, in practice, this part often never got implemented in many White American churches.

Again, I appreciate Herrera’s nuance:

“This makes sense: some changes in the heart take time and should be made neither a requirement nor an obstacle to baptism.”

But Herrera is also right to worry that an “‘eagerness for quantitative growth’” can allow churches to sidestep the ethical dimensions of Christian life:

“Jesus never intended that after we profess to love God, our obedience to the command to love our neighbors should be postponed to a later, more convenient time. They must go together.”

I might quibble somewhat with Herrera here. I want to trust the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit and the proclamation of the Word to move even young disciples toward greater Christ-likeness.

But I certainly agree with his broader point: an eagerness for church growth can tempt us to accommodate existing social divisions rather than allow the gospel to challenge them.

And this is where I think McGavran’s complicated legacy suddenly becomes remarkably contemporary.

Because the sociology behind the Homogeneous Unit Principle hasn’t disappeared.

People still find it easier to gather with people who are already like themselves.

The question is whether the church should organize itself around that reality.

Affinity by Another Name?

And it’s for these very same reasons that I find myself increasingly uneasy with the idea of elevating “affinity groups” as a sociological organizing principle for new churches—especially within progressive and Mainline Protestant Christian spaces.

To begin, what do I even mean by “affinity groups”?

In an interview with Luke Edwards titled “Lessons from the Fresh Expressions Movement” from the Lewis Center for Church Leadership, it is noted that these new “communities form around particular interests, activities, or affinities.”4

Edwards offers some examples of what this might look like:

“a golfing group… group that goes out on a lake to paddleboard and to meditate… a group for older adults…”

To be sure, these aren’t meant to be simply social clubs. The groups are spiritually focused; Edwards explains that leaders intentionally:

“introduce spiritual conversations to these groups. They pray together. They seek to be a new form of church together.”

And I want to be careful here. My concern isn’t with Christians golfing together or paddleboarding together or older adults gathering with other older adults. Churches have always had smaller groups organized around shared interests, identities, ages, and experiences. I co-lead a parents of teenagers small-group.

My concern is what happens when affinity moves from being a group within the church to becoming the organizing principle for the church.

Because using different words—perhaps McGavran’s words—we might say these are very homogeneous groups.

A golfing group is a homogeneous unit.

A stand-up paddleboarding group is a homogeneous unit.

A group organized specifically for older adults is, at least in one important sense, a homogeneous unit.

The terminology has changed. But has the underlying sociology?

McGavran recognized something that remains obviously true: people find it easier to form relationships with people with whom they already share something significant.

Affinity-based models begin from essentially the same observation.

And there are obvious practical advantages to doing so. I recently invited my un-churched brother-in-law to another small-group I’m a part of because he fits the group—a bunch of software engineers and techies—better than I do.

But that was precisely the practical appeal of McGavran’s principle too.

Which raises the question I think proponents of affinity-based church formation need to answer:

What makes organizing a church around a shared affinity ecclesiologically different from organizing one around a homogeneous unit?

I may be wrong—but I don’t think there is much of a difference—and simply calling one an “affinity” and the other a “homogeneous unit” certainly doesn’t establish the theological distinction.

And this matters because Mainline Protestants have largely rejected the Homogeneous Unit Principle not because its sociology was necessarily wrong, but because they saw what happens when that sociology becomes an organizing principle for Christian community.

People naturally gather with people like themselves.

But should the church?

The Sociology Is the Same

This concern becomes more significant when we consider which affinities actually form communities.

It’s no secret that Mainline Protestant denominations are in something of a death spiral, with some denominations like the ELCA projected to become virtually nonexistent in the coming decades, according to Dwight Zscheile.5

As a result, Mainline Protestant leaders have spent much of the last decade-plus desperately looking for methods of innovation and opportunities for growth. Andrew Root has written extensively about the dangers of this impulse in books like The Church After Innovation and Churches and the Crisis of Decline.

And I worry that Mainline leaders may be attracted to affinity-based models for essentially the same reason Evangelical leaders were attracted to McGavran’s Homogeneous Unit Principle:

Growth.

Again, the sociology works.

People are more likely to gather around things they already enjoy, people they already understand, and communities where they already feel comfortable.

But affinities aren’t socially neutral.

It’s also no secret that church attendance is increasingly skewing toward higher-income and more highly educated people. And this makes examples like golfing and stand-up paddleboarding particularly interesting.

Golfing and paddleboarding aren’t inherently upper-class activities. But they do require some combination of disposable income, equipment, transportation, leisure time, and access.

And increasingly, having discretionary time and disposable income is itself a luxury.

So you can create a community that never says, “Lower-income people aren’t welcome here,” while nevertheless organizing it around an activity that disproportionately attracts people of a particular socioeconomic class.

Nobody has been intentionally excluded—but the affinity itself has already done some of the sorting.

And isn’t that precisely what should make Mainline Protestants uncomfortable?

Remember Herrera’s central criticism of McGavran’s Homogeneous Unit Principle? It allowed existing social divisions to determine the picture of Christian community. Rather than challenging those divisions, churches could simply build around them—then conveniently forget to move beyond them.

My point is that affinity-based ecclesiology risks doing something remarkably similar.

Sure, the categories may be different; instead of explicitly organizing around race, ethnicity, or language, we organize around hobbies, interests, or identities.

But the sociology is the same: people who are already alike find one another, and then we build Christian community around their existing similarity.

This doesn’t mean affinity can never be useful. Shared interests can provide wonderful entry points into relationships. Again, see my own examples above.

The question is what happens next.

Does affinity become a doorway through which people enter a much larger and more complicated Christian community?

Or does affinity itself determine who the Christian community becomes? Does it ever move people beyond “golf church?”

Because if it doesn’t, we may have changed the language without changing the underlying ecclesiology; McGavran’s fatal flaw remains.

When Affinity Becomes Ecclesiology

And this brings me to what I think is the more obvious—and potentially more consequential—form of affinity within progressive Mainline Christianity: politics.

We are increasingly seeing progressive Mainline churches turn toward political activism as a primary driver of congregational life and discipleship.

My own denomination—the same denomination as the late Donald McGavran—recently introduced, from it’s New Church Ministry, what it calls “Disciples Movement Initiators” focused on:

“Contemplative Action, Prophetic Advocacy and Faith-Rooted Organizing.”

To be clear, I am NOT arguing that churches shouldn’t ever engage in political advocacy, resist injustice, or organize around issues that impact their communities.6

The question is what happens when those commitments become the primary basis around which Christian community itself is organized.

With the ever-increasing political polarization within our nation, sacralizing political action as the ultimate expression of discipleship and faithful Christian living offers some obvious—and perhaps immediate—returns.7

One’s existing political passions can be “neatly” grafted onto Christian action.

As Dwight Zscheile and Blair Pogue note:

“Political activism became in subsequent decades for some churches on the theological left a primary way to discover energy, purpose, and identity in an increasingly secular culture.”8

The political conveniently becomes both deeply spiritual and faithful. Political partisanship become acts of piety.

But if affinity is already capable of sorting us by socioeconomic class, political affinity can sort us even more efficiently.

This is where I find myself returning to McGavran.

One of the central criticisms of the Homogeneous Unit Principle is that it allowed White Christians, in particular, to build churches around people who already looked, talked, thought, and lived like themselves—and then call the resulting community church.

But couldn’t political affinity accomplish essentially the same thing?

Consider a Christian community explicitly organized around “prophetic advocacy” or a “study group to peel back colonial layers.”

Again, I am NOT against resisting racism or colonialism.

But I do wonder: Who is likely to show up?

And perhaps more importantly: Who would feel that they could belong?

With my own “Disciples Next” framework, I can’t help but wonder how much a MAGA-supporting Trump voter would actually be welcomed into the fold.

My guess? Not much.

And to be clear, I could reverse the example. We should ask the same question of a conservative Evangelical church whose identity has become intertwined with Republican politics:

Could a progressive Democrat actually belong there?

Not simply visit, not remain silent about their commitments, but actually belong.9

This comes back to where I disagree slightly with Herrera. I want to trust the power of the gospel to transform hearts and minds. And it’s for this same reason that I get nervous when the gospel essentially gets translated into advocating for a predetermined set of progressive—or conservative—political policies.

Because if McGavran’s Homogeneous Unit Principle can be criticized for letting White Christians off the hook—for allowing them to remain comfortably surrounded by people like themselves—doesn’t organizing Christian community around political affinity risk doing the same thing?

We may even tell ourselves that our particular affinity is different because ours is morally correct and “justice-seeking”

But presumably the people within every homogeneous group have reasons for believing their boundaries are justified.

And that’s where affinity stops simply being a useful tool for gathering people and starts becoming something more consequential.

Affinity becomes ecclesiology.

The community is no longer simply using a shared interest or concern to build relationships. The shared interest, identity, or ideology begins determining who the community is—and perhaps who can belong to it.

At that point, I think Mainline Protestants need to ask ourselves an uncomfortable question:

Have we actually rejected McGavran’s Homogeneous Unit Principle—or have we simply changed which homogeneous units we consider acceptable?

A Community Affinity Cannot Explain

This brings me back to what I think is the fundamental problem with the Homogeneous Unit Principle—and why I’m increasingly uneasy around the idea of affinity becoming an organizing principle for church.

Mainline Protestants have largely rejected the Homogeneous Unit Principle because a church organized around racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic similarity fails to fully embody the reconciling character of the gospel. Yet some contemporary approaches to church formation increasingly organize Christian community around affinity—shared interests, identities, experiences—and especially politics.

The categories have changed, but has the ecclesiology?

Again, I’m not arguing that affinity itself is bad. Affinity is perfectly normal. Of course golfers like spending time with other golfers. Young parents want to know other young parents. People experiencing similar struggles benefit from relationships with people who understand those struggles.

Affinity can even provide an important doorway into Christian community.

But I don not think affinity is enough as the organizing principle of a church.

Because the church—or at least the gospel that the church proclaims—should be capable of creating relationships that affinity alone cannot explain.

A golfing group doesn’t need Jesus to explain why golfers gather.

A progressive advocacy organization doesn’t need Jesus to explain why progressive activists gather.

A conservative political organization doesn’t need Jesus to explain why conservatives gather.

But what about a community where people who would otherwise have little reason to associate with one another gather around the same table?

Rich and poor.

Black and White.

Republican and Democrat.

People with different interests, lifestyles, experiences, and backgrounds.

People who might never have chosen one another, yet somehow learn to worship together, bear one another’s burdens, forgive one another, and call one another sisters and brothers.

We should want to know how and why this has happened.

And perhaps this is where my trust in the transforming power of the gospel becomes especially important.

Christian community isn’t simply supposed to affirm the affinities we already possess.10 Through the presence and activity of God, it should also transform us—including our relationships with people we might never otherwise have encountered, much less loved. Isn’t that what was so revolutionary about the early church? Jew and Greek, slave and free, rich and poor?

This is ultimately why I remain uncomfortable with affinity becoming ecclesiology.

If the affinity is the organizing principle—what’s to say the church will ever move beyond that affinity? In fact, McGavran’s legacy suggests it will not.

Said differently, if the church simply gathers people who already look alike, earn similar incomes, enjoy the same activities, share the same experiences, and of couse, vote alike—then the church risks becoming another expression of the social sorting already happening everywhere else in American life.

And SURELY we believe the gospel of Jesus calls us to more than simply that.

So perhaps the question Mainline Protestants should ask isn’t simply whether affinity-based communities are effective at gathering people.

McGavran already taught us that homogeneity can be effective.

The more important question is what kind of people our ecclesiology is forming us to become.

If we believe something important happens when rich and poor, Black and White, young and old worship together, why wouldn’t we also believe something important happens when people without shared interests, lifestyles, politics, or experiences are formed into community together?

Maybe the church is most recognizably the church not when it gathers people who naturally belong together, but when Christ creates belonging among people who otherwise wouldn’t.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Increasingly, I’ve been thinking about a pretty basic economic reality: Scarcity forces choices between good things.

There is never enough time, money, attention, labor, or capital to do every good thing we might want to do.

Economics, at its most basic level, is about how we make choices amid those constraints.

Yet increasingly, especially within progressive spaces—of which I consider myself a part—I notice a tendency to moralize those choices. If something good doesn’t receive resources, the assumption can quickly become that someone—or some system—denied it those resources.

But those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

I recently came across a social media post referencing the early years of the league in contrast to the recent growth of the WNBA. It included this line:

“They played despite systemic denial of resources and media, as did the women who followed, chipping away for decades at the myth that no one watches women’s sports.”

I found myself getting stuck on the phrase “systemic denial.”

There’s no question that women’s professional basketball historically received less investment, media coverage, and attention than men’s professional basketball.

That’s an observable disparity. But systemic denial makes a different claim.

Denial makes a causal claim: that something or someone prevented those resources from being allocated. And more importantly, it assumes that because resources went somewhere else, they should have gone here.

But again: scarcity forces choices between good things.

Disparity Tells Us What Happened, Not Why

There is a tendency, particularly in progressive analysis, to treat unequal outcomes as prima facie evidence of discrimination.

Group A received more resources than Group B. Therefore, some system unfairly advantaged Group A or denied resources to Group B.

Sometimes that’s exactly what happened. History certainly gives us plenty of examples—redlining being a prominent example—but the existence of a disparity doesn’t establish its cause.

Consider the early WNBA.

The league certainly received less investment and attention than the NBA. But it was also a brand-new professional sports league competing for an audience. More importantly, it wasn’t simply being starved of resources.

The NBA created and financially supported the WNBA. Before its first season, the league secured national television agreements with NBC, ESPN, and Lifetime.1 And the NBA continued subsidizing the WNBA despite the league losing money for years.2

That doesn’t prove sexism played no role in women’s sports—it very well could have. But describing the early WNBA as suffering from the “systemic denial of resources and media” leaves out some rather important facts.

From a July 2025 article: “the NBA’s backing remains a pillar of the WNBA’s existence. And while the hope is for the WNBA to one day thrive on its own, for now, it’s clear that the NBA’s support is not just helpful — it’s essential for the league’s future.”

People were investing in it even when the economic return didn’t necessarily justify the investment.

Investment Isn’t Charity

This gets to something I’ve increasingly noticed in conversations about economics.

A lack of investment—or even simply less investment—is often treated as evidence of bias.

But businesses generally don’t exist to distribute resources according to what people deserve. They invest capital where they believe there is sufficient opportunity for a return.

I think this is a key point worth diving a little deeper into.

As a Christian, I’d say all people deserve access to basics like food, housing, and community. But saying someone deserves something doesn’t answer the question of how we actually provide it.

The question isn’t simply whether people deserve something. The question is whether—and how—we can deliver it.

And that’s ultimately an economics question.

We’re seeing something similar in philanthropy. Increasingly, philanthropists want to see evidence of impact from their gifts. They are less inclined to give to something simply because it is a worthy cause. After all, there are countless worthy causes competing for the same finite pool of resources.

So beyond basic business and investor questions like: How large is the potential audience? What revenues can we reasonably expect?

There are also more practical questions: What’s the risk? What else could we do with that money? Do we even have enough money?

Those aren’t necessarily moral judgments. They’re economic ones.

If one restaurant receives a $5 million investment and another receives $500,000, we cannot conclude from those numbers alone that the second restaurant was discriminated against. We need to know something about their markets, revenues, business models, risks, growth prospects, and expected returns.

Perhaps investors underestimated women’s basketball because of sexism—that very well could be the case and is worth examining.

But, it’s also possible that early investors observed that the audience at the time was smaller and therefore saw greater financial risk.

Perhaps both were true.

But those are empirical questions. The disparity itself doesn’t answer them.

To claim there was a systemic denial seems to me to require some evidence of the denying.

And in the case of the WNBA, at least, there seems to be significant evidence complicating that description: people were investing substantial resources despite uncertain or inadequate financial returns.

Churches and Nonprofits Aren’t Exempt From Scarcity

And this is where I think churches and nonprofits should pay particular attention.

We believe deeply in the importance of our work—we very much should.

But that can make it easy to assume that other people should support that work—with their donations, attendance, volunteer hours, or other resources.

And when they don’t, we can interpret that as evidence that they don’t care enough about our cause.

But that misses something fundamental about economics: Economics is about tradeoffs.

Money given to one organization cannot also be given to another. An hour spent volunteering at my church cannot also be spent volunteering at the food bank. A foundation investing $100,000 in affordable housing has $100,000 less available for childcare, environmental work, or any number of other worthy causes.

None of those decisions necessarily tells us how much someone cares about the thing they didn’t choose.

Scarcity forces choices between good things.

• A donor who doesn’t give $1,000 to your church may have given it to a food bank.

• A volunteer who can’t serve your ministry may be caring for an aging parent.

• A foundation that declines your grant may be funding affordable housing instead.

Not choosing our good thing doesn’t mean they don’t care about good things.

It means their resources have limitations also.3

Certainly, this doesn’t relieve churches and nonprofits of the responsibility to demonstrate the impact of our mission. We should be able to explain why our work matters and why someone should invest their limited resources in it.

But even when we do that well, we’re still competing—not necessarily against bad or selfish uses of resources, but often against other perfectly good uses of them.

That’s the tradeoff.

When Economic Outcomes Become Moral Narratives

This is where I think the disagreement becomes deeper than the WNBA.

Different frameworks begin with different questions.

One framework encounters a disparity and asks: Who had the power to create this disparity? Who benefited? Who was excluded?4

Traditional economic analysis tends to ask: What incentives, risks, scarcity, opportunity costs, and market conditions produced this outcome?

Both sets of questions can reveal something important.

My concern is what happens when the first framework becomes so dominant that ordinary economic explanations themselves begin to look morally suspect.

Less investment becomes “denial of resources.”

A smaller audience becomes evidence of systemic bias.

A business declining to invest becomes an ideological statement about whose work it values. And suddenly an economic outcome has become a moral narrative populated by oppressors and victims.

But sometimes also, a denial of resources is due to systemic bias. Redlining is one prominent example. Neighborhoods were purposely underinvested in, often explicitly because of race. Bias became systemic and produced disparities that lasted for generations.

So, I’m not trying to say that every economic decision is purely rational or nobly virtuous around making money. We KNOW that’s not true.

The point I’m seeking to distinguish isn’t that discrimination never happens, but rather that it doesn’t always explain unequal outcomes.

Sometimes people simply don’t want to lose money. And sometimes they chose to put their money somewhere else.

The WNBA May Actually Demonstrate the Opposite

And this is what makes the WNBA example so interesting.

The early league wasn’t financially self-sustaining. Yet powerful institutions continued investing in it anyway. They were essentially betting that an audience could be developed over time.

And now, decades later, we’re watching that happen.

A sparsely attended game early early in the WNBA and an arena packed with 20,000 fans in 2026 don’t necessarily tell a story about an audience that was always there but systematically suppressed.

It might also tell a much more ordinary—and frankly fascinating—story about market development.

A league was created, money was invested, financial losses were tolerated, players became stars, generations of fans encountered the product, media attention grew, the cultural environment changed, and and eventually demand increased dramatically.

None of that requires us to pretend discrimination doesn’t exist.

It simply requires us to distinguish between disparity and discrimination.

Scarcity Isn’t (always) a Moral Failure

I think where I’m ultimately going with this is that the moralizing of economic outcomes aligns well with the “hermeneutic of suspicion” that characterizes much progressive thought: when we encounter a disparity, we go looking for the person, institution, or system responsible for creating it.

Sometimes that suspicion is warranted—people ARE being stingy and selfish.

But I don’t think suspicion is a particularly healthy starting point for understanding every economic outcome.

And for churches and nonprofits especially, it can relieve us of the responsibility of reckoning with scarcity.5

If someone doesn’t donate to our organization, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re selfish.

If someone doesn’t volunteer at our church, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care about our mission.

And if investors didn’t invest more money into the WNBA thirty years ago, the disparity alone doesn’t tell us why.

Again, a reckless pursuit of profit has been detrimental to people, communities, and ecosystems. And people ARE worth far more than the measure of their economic productivity.

But as I’ve tried to argue throughout this series, economics is ultimately about how we handle the very real constraints of people, time, resources, and capital.

Perhaps the WNBA would have grown faster had early investors provided EVEN MORE investment. Maybe greater media coverage would have created greater demand sooner. Those are entirely plausible arguments.

But someone still had to provide that capital. Someone had to absorb those losses. And every dollar invested in the WNBA was a dollar that couldn’t simultaneously be invested somewhere else.

The same is true for every dollar donated to a nonprofit and every hour volunteered at a church.

Scarcity doesn't mean we shouldn't ask whether resources were allocated unjustly. It means that non-allocation, by itself, cannot establish injustice. Every allocation of scarce resources necessarily means something else was not chosen.

Which is why I keep coming back to the language that started this whole piece. Less investment is an observable fact. “Denial” is an explanation, and explanations require evidence.

Sometimes the reason one good thing receives fewer resources isn’t because anyone denied its value.

Sometimes people simply chose another good thing.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

My new book, The Church as Community Hub: Sharing Spaces to Help Neighborhoods Thrive, is officially available.

It’s a little bizarre to write that.

I wrote this book because I believe church buildings can be more than places congregations gather on Sundays. They can become seven-day-a-week anchors of community life—places where neighbors find connection, support, resources, and belonging.

And importantly, this isn’t just an obscure idea.

Throughout the book, I draw from churches already doing this work and offer practical ideas for congregations wondering what might be possible in their own buildings and neighborhoods.

What could happen if we began thinking differently about the spaces our churches already have?

Could an empty fellowship hall become a meeting place for a neighborhood organization?

Could an underused classroom host a social enterprise?

Could unused land become housing?

Could our buildings become places where people who may never attend worship nevertheless experience the church as a meaningful presence in their community?

Those are some of the questions at the heart of The Church as Community Hub.

Writing a book can feel like a solitary endeavor, but bringing one into the world takes a community. I’m extremely grateful to everyone who encouraged me, shared their stories, offered encouragement, endorsed the book, or helped spread the word.

Most of all—thanks to my family and my wife Corinna especially, who partially funds my writing habits!

You can order The Church as Community Hub directly from Church Publishing:

https://churchpublishing.org/products/9781640659988-the-church-as-community-hub

Want to Explore the Ideas With Me?

Over the coming weeks, I’ll also be participating in several webinars and conversations about the ideas in the book—how churches can rethink their buildings, develop community partnerships, and use their physical assets in service of their neighborhoods.

September 15 — Beyond Sunday: The Church as a Community Hub!

Abundant Ground: Faith-Based Housing Land Initiative

September 15, 2026
10:00–11:00 a.m. Mountain Time
Online via Zoom

Register for the webinar

October 11 — Reflect & Respond

Broomfield United Methodist Church

October 11, 2026
10:30 a.m.
BUMC Chapel
Live and in person

November 17 — The Church as Community Hub: Reimagining Church Property for Mission

Practical Resources for Churches

November 17, 2026
Online via Zoom

Register for the webinar

Please join one or all!

But for today, I’m simply grateful that this book is finally out in the world.

Thanks to all of you who helped make that possible.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

P.S. Want a free copy? I’m also running a special promotion for Church Nerd subscribers. New paid subscribers can receive a copy of The Church as Community Hub, and existing subscribers can earn one by referring new readers.

So, if you’ve been thinking about becoming a paid subscriber—or know someone who might enjoy Church Nerd—now’s a good time!

Subscribe now

Well, it’s wonderful to be with you all. My name, for those who didn’t hear, is Loren Richmond Jr. And I’m I’m glad to be visiting from Thornton, Colorado this morning.

And I must say, Charles already saw me. Charles and I are double dipping, and I’m sorry, I forgot your name. Hey, we’re double dipping. since I am, you’ll soon learn, and my daughter will tell you. I’m a self-described church nerd. So I actually worshiped at the Episcopal Church down at 9 a.m. So hopefully my sermon is at least as good as Dawn’s who I understand will be with you all, I think, in a couple of weeks.

But it’s a it’s a wonder it’s wonderful to be with you all this morning.

What Time Is It?

So I’m curious, have you ever woken up in the middle of the night completely disoriented, wondering what time it is?

It can be quite funny to observe when it happened to someone else. Last year, after a sleepover, my daughter fell asleep one afternoon and she woke up later that evening and she wanted to know what day it was. She wondered if she needed to get ready for school, where was breakfast. And it was quite funny to watch.

But when you’re the confused one, It’s not so funny.

I remember back when I was in college, I once woke up in the middle of the night, convinced it was morning. So I got out of bed, I put on pants and a dress shirt. This was Bible College, and I sat down and I did my morning Bible reading. Again, this was Bible college.

And I remember wondering why I was so tired, why I could barely focus on the words on the page.

And it never occurred to me that it was the middle of the night.

Now again, what made this especially confusing, this was not all the signs around me were normal. I regularly got up early for class, I had I had early classes. more so every other guy it seemed on my hall did not have morning class. So, you know, the halls being quiet, darkness outside, nothing seemed amiss, except of course my fatigue.

So it was just like my normal day, and I I wandered downstairs and left the front door. But of course, the moment I opened the front door, the alarm went off, and that’s when I finally realized it was not the morning, it was the middle of the night.

And now, of course, I had another problem. The door had locked behind me.

So I sit there in the middle of the night, fully dressed for class, waiting for security to come and let me back into the building. And when they came, I tried to explain what had happened, and they looked at me like I was, you know, yeah, like I was crazy, I’d lost my mind, and thankfully no one else was around to witness it.

When we don’t know what time it is, things can be confusing, disorienting, even quite upsetting. And darkness often makes the confusion quite worse.

It’s one thing to lay down for an afternoon nap, sleep longer than expected, and then wake up momentarily unsure of the time. It’s quite something else to wake up beneath the cover of darkness on an overcast night.

Where there is no sunlight coming through the windows, there is no obvious markers to tell us if it’s later in the day or later in the evening, there’s no way to know whether the morning is soon at hand or whether the night has only just begun.

And when we can’t tell what time it is, it can begin to feel like the darkness will go on forever.

When Darkness Becomes Our Orientation

Have you ever experienced something like that?

Not so simply just waking up confused like my daughter or myself.

But more so reaching a point in life where you feel lost and disoriented, unsure which direction to go, or frankly, sometimes which way is even up.

Sometimes it can look like sadness and despair. Sometimes it can become a recklessness like nothing matters. Sometimes it feels like aimlessness, a feeling that life has no real direction or purpose. I’ve certainly felt all three at different points in my life.

However it appears, this disorientation affects more than just our emotional and our physical health. Our relationships suffer, our families suffer, our communities suffer. We begin to assume that the darkness we see now is all that there will ever be.

And most relevant to Paul’s words this morning that was read by Charles.

Is that our spiritual lives also begin to suffer.

Our faith practices no longer seem to have a point. We wonder why gathering for worship even matters. Our acts of justice, mercy, and compassion feel completely pointless. After all, what difference will it really make?

With all the trouble in our lives, in our communities, in our world, it’s easy for this disorientation to creep into our faith.

And over time, rather than simply feeling disoriented by the darkness, the darkness becomes our new orientation.

We stop praying because we no longer see the point. We begin to wonder if church attendance is just a waste of time. We stop doing good in our communities because we are convinced that none of it really matters.

The disorientation of the darkness, has become our new orientation.

The Night Is Nearly Over

The Apostle Paul wrote to a group of Christians in Rome who were perhaps themselves feeling something similar.

I would encourage you to go back and read chapters 12 and 13 of the passage that Charles wrote, read before that. And and Paul’s words suggest, I or Paul’s words I might suggest that there may have been some feelings of disorientation among those early Christians in Rome. Some sense of what’s the point.

In chapter 12, Paul reminds him of some fairly obvious things. Let love be genuine. Hold fast to what is good, hate what is evil. As much as possible, live at peace with everyone.

And finally, right before the reading today, again, Paul goes back to the basics: love one another, keep the commandments, love your neighbor as yourself.

I mean it seems all rather straightforward and obvious.

But I wonder, I wonder if the reason Paul said these things is because he was writing to a group of Christians who were themselves struggling with a sense of disorientation and despair.

Maybe the Christians in Rome were also wondering themselves, why are we still struggling under Roman rule? How much longer are we supposed to wait? And if Jesus is not coming back to put these things right, then does it really matter how we live?

Perhaps the darkness had become their orientation.

And this is why Paul thinks it’s so important for them to understand what time it is.

Paul reorients them by telling them that the night is nearly over and God’s new day is approaching.

For those who feel disoriented and adrift, Paul offers a marker, a point of orientation. He says in fact he says in fact that it may feel that we are awash in darkness and disorientation, but this is actually the right time. This is the moment, he says.

And more than that, he promises them that God’s new day is almost here, that the night will soon be over.

To say it perhaps more simply, Paul says the sun will come up tomorrow.

God’s New Day Is Coming

Paul is here speaking about an eschatological promise. Now that’s a that’s a big theological word that simply means what God has promised, God will do. Thank you. No, no, don’t worry.

That God is moving the entire creation, all of the cosmos, towards the future that God has promised.

And I especially appreciate the way that Paul speaks about time here. Paul is not saying, it’s five o’clock and the sun will rise at 6:23. No. Paul is saying that the sunrise is near, but the time before the sunrise is not empty.

This moment matters.

Paul’s not just simply saying, hang in there, we’re almost there, much as we said to our son yesterday on the road trip.

In other words, this is not a long, laborious, tedious wait that we’re just supposed to kill our time and fill empty time with pointless distractions and games and entertainment, much as we might do on a long road trip.

Quite the opposite, actually.

Paul is saying that this is essential time. This is important time. This is God’s time.

And when we understand those two things, that God will bring the new day, and that this present time matters, it changes our entire orientation of how we live and how we act.

The darkness no longer determines our orientation, God’s approaching new day does.

So this morning I have good news for you: God’s new day is coming.

Throughout the sweep throughout the sweep of scriptures, biblical writer after biblical writer has expressed a yearning and an eagerness for the time will when God will come and make all things right in our world.

The promised future has been described differently by biblical writers and theologians. Perhaps you’ve heard of the day of the Lord, the kingdom of God, The second coming, the return of Christ.

This is part of what we celebrate in the season of Advent. Not only that Jesus came once as a baby, but that Jesus will come again.

And for Paul, this is not a question waiting to be resolved. For Paul, we can be as certain as we are that this is right here in front of us. It’s concrete, or I suppose wood in this instance.

And let me affirm that I don’t offer this as some sort of dreamy escape, but rather as something quite real.

And I think it makes a real difference in how we live when we recognize that the future does not depend entirely upon our own efforts and actions.

When we assume that the future depends on us, every human action faces the headwinds of human failure. If we can’t do it ourselves,

Eventually we wonder why even tried.

Again, the darkness becomes our orientation.

But trusting the promise of God’s new day does not mean that we do nothing and leave it all to God. This is not an attitude of God is coming back, so we can just so we can just let it all burn.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

Trusting the promise means that allowing God’s new day to orient us right now.

Said differently, because God’s new day is coming, our time and our actions right now matter all the more in this present moment because we have a part to play.

We do this and we live this way because God’s new day is already approaching.

Wake Up. Put On Christ. Live in the Light.

So, how do we live that way?

Well, first we wake up, we recognize what time it is.

Paul tells us to to wake up and pay attention to the opportunities God has given us to participate in God’s good work.

We do not wake up to cause the sunrise, we wake up because the sunrise is already coming.

Second, we put on Christ. We dress for the new day.

Paul describes this as clothing ourselves in the armor of light. He’s not saying that everything is gonna be daisies and roses. He recognizes that there will still be struggle and challenge.

But he reminds us that we cannot face the darkness through our own strength alone. We need God.

We receive Christ, the identity of

From Christ, the identity, the character, the strength that we need for this time.

And third, we begin living in light of this new day, allowing God’s future to shape our actions right now.

If we trust that the sun will rise tomorrow, we set out clothes for the next day. We make plans for what will come to be. In the same way, trusting God’s approaching new day changes how we live today.

It means trusting that what we do in this man in this moment matters. This is the essential time.

And it means practicing now the love, justice, and peace of God’s coming new day.

This does not mean that we ignore the justice we excuse me, this does not mean that we ignore the pain and injustice around us. We still grieve and mourn pain and tragedy and death and loss.

But we do not allow the darkness to become our orientation.

Instead, we yearn all the more for God’s new day, and we we affirm with the early Christians who would have said, Maranatha, our Lord comes.

And we do what God has given us to do, not to try to fix everything ourselves, but to testify and to bear witness through our actions that our Lord comes.

In short, when we trust that this is God’s time and that God’s day is coming, it changes how we live and how we move and how we act in this world today.

The darkness no longer determines our orientation. God’s approaching new day does.

Even There, This Was God’s Time

I had planned to to end this sermon differently, but I recently came across the story of a a man named Raul Hernandez, who is an undocumented immigrant from Honduras.

Roel’s story begins in a way that many of us perhaps have heard and become all too familiar.

Last November he reported for a routine appointment with immigration and customs enforcement.

His wife, pastor, children, several church members waited outside for him.

And Raul never came back out.

He was detained and eventually transferred to a county jail.

Early in his detention, Raul struggled with fear and uncertainty. But each morning as sunlight streamed through a small window high above his cell, Raul watched the birds fly by, and he remembered that God was still with him.

Before his attention, Raul was actively involved in his church, but it was still discerning what God had for him.

Inside that jail, Raul says that God awakened something within him.

He prayed with men who were frightened and uncertain about their future. He reminded them that they mattered to God and that God forgave them. He read scripture with them, he even preached to them.

Raul was recognizing and responding to God’s time.

It’s why even there he said, believe it or not, that he could wake up smiling.

Raoul later struggled to explain how the last place on earth he wanted to go had become a place he found difficult to leave.

God made that place holy for me, he later said,

Remember, the jail was still a jail. He was still separated from his family. The darkness was still very real, but it no longer determined his orientation.

All the while outside the jail, Raul’s church cared for his family, found lawyers, raised money, wrote letters, and fought for his release.

After Raul came home, they continued supporting and advocating for other detainees.

This is what God has awakened, Raul said.

To be clear, none of this makes Raul’s treatment acceptable. It does not mean that God intended for Raul to suffer, nor does it mean that suffering is inherently good.

But those who determined, excuse me, those who detained Raul, they could lock the door and determine where he slept, but they could not, they could not determine what time it was.

Even there, this was God’s time.

God awakened to something in Raoul, God awakened something in his church.

The darkness did not determine their orientation. God’s approaching new day did.

We do not live this way to make the sun rise. God’s already got that covered.

We live this way because the sun is going to rise.

The darkness does not become our orientation. God’s approaching new day does.

Thanks be to God.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Same Story, Different Moves

If you’ve been following my writing for any length of time, you know I spend a fair amount of it critiquing my own tribe: mainline Protestantism and progressive Christianity. Plenty of voices on the left spend their time criticizing evangelicalism, and while there is certainly PLENTY there to critique, I often find those efforts a bit too easy.

More importantly, I think we on the Christian left have plenty of our own blind spots to examine.

In a recent post, I wrote about the tendency within some mainline and progressive churches to want “hard” preaching—to lean into what my Lutheran friends call the Law side of the Law/Gospel framework. I won’t repeat that argument here when you can simply read it for yourself.

What surprised me recently was hearing how that very same instinct shows up within evangelicalism.

A Surprising Conversation

Because of the work I do, I regularly find myself in conversations with Christians from across the theological spectrum. Recently, one such conversation caught my attention.

We were talking about another area evangelical church—one that perhaps flirts with Christian nationalist themes—and why thoughtful, level-headed people would choose to attend.

From the Christian left, I think we often assume those congregations are filled with brainwashed, MAGA-hat-wearing drones who’ve checked their brains at the door.

I’m sure a few exist.

But I suspect the vast majority are something else entirely.

In fact, I wonder if they’re the mirror image of the well-intentioned liberal do-gooders I described in my previous essay.

What startled me was something one regular attender said. By every other measure, this seemed like a thoughtful, level-headed person.

They said they attended because they “needed someone to kick me in the ass.”

As I argued in my previous piece, this is simply another way of saying, “I want hard preaching.”

Different vernacular. Same instinct.

One seeks transformation through acts of justice and activism.

The other seeks transformation through behavior maintenance/modification.

But both assume that the Christian life is fundamentally about becoming better through our own effort.

That got me wondering why Christians from such different traditions could have the very same instinct.

I’m reminded of my own upbringing in conservative Christianity. There was a reason certain pastors repeated the same talking points week after week, and why those sermons were met with so many “Amens.” They clearly told me what I needed to do—or stop doing—to become a “good Christian.”

Different Flavors of the Same Move

Andrew Root has written about our tendency to flatten God into something we can control for our own purposes (The Pastor in a Secular Age, 197), writing that “we long for power and political control so we can secure happiness and be our truest self” (Evangelism in the Age of Despair, 22).

I won’t belabor the point, but I increasingly wonder if evangelicalism and progressive mainline Protestantism often do the very same things.

Both flatten God.

Both make Christianity fundamentally a project of self-improvement.

Both assume the Christian life is, at its core, something we’re responsible for managing.

The moves simply look different.

For the evangelical churchgoer I mentioned above, the project wasn’t becoming more socially conscious or justice-oriented. It was becoming a better person and a better Christian through greater self-control and personal holiness.

Structurally, though, it’s the same thing, just different moves.

We don’t actually think we need grace.

We think we can handle it ourselves.

recently spoke of Christianity's tendency toward "maintaining self-sufficiency." It struck me that this is especially true of white American Christianity.

Perhaps that’s what all of this ultimately comes down to.

Our culture prizes individualism and bootstrapping, and both traditions have baptized those instincts.

• Within progressive mainline Protestantism, the project becomes deep introspection to ensure our actions and choices are sufficiently justice-oriented.

• Within white evangelicalism, it becomes deep introspection to ensure our actions and choices pass the test of personal holiness.

Different virtues.

Different vocabulary.

Same story. Different moves.

Both law. Neither grace.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

P.S. My new book The Church as Community Hub is available for pre-order now!

Subscribe now

On September 8, Church Publishing will release my first book, The Church as Community Hub: Sharing Spaces to Help Neighborhoods Thrive.

The book explores how churches can use their buildings, land, and other resources to serve their neighborhoods through shared space, childcare, affordable housing, food programs, social enterprise, and community partnerships.

At its heart, the book asks a simple question:

How can the spaces God has entrusted to us help our neighbors thrive?

To celebrate the launch—and grow the community supporting this work—I’m offering two ways to receive a signed copy.

Become an annual subscriber

The first 20 readers who begin a new annual paid subscription will receive a signed copy of the book.

Annual subscriptions are $50 and support my independent writing, research, podcasting, and development of practical resources for church leaders.

This offer is available to U.S. mailing addresses through September 30 or while copies remain.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Already subscribe? Refer five friends

I didn’t want this promotion to benefit only new subscribers.

Current subscribers who bring five new readers to The Church Nerd during the campaign will also receive a signed copy. Substack provides every subscriber with a personal referral link and automatically tracks successful referrals.

You’ll find your referral link below this post and in the footer of my emails. Once five people subscribe through your link, you’ll receive instructions for claiming your book.

Thank you

Whether you subscribe, refer a friend, purchase the book, or simply continue reading, I’m grateful you’re here.

My hope is that this book—and the work surrounding it—will help congregations imagine more faithful, creative, and sustainable ways to serve their communities.

Refer a friend

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

For a long time, I think, American Christianity has implicitly taught people how to look the part.

Get a good education, have a stable family, raise well-behaved kids, give some money away, and most importantly—Be respectable. Or, more said differently—Be upwardly mobile.

Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with these things. But increasingly, the people showing up in American churches actually do look the part. They are disproportionately educated, financially stable, and doing reasonably well.

Which raises a question I’ve been thinking about:

What if that isn’t merely a demographic coincidence? What if we’ve inadvertently created churches for people who are good at looking the part?

That question came back to me recently while reading a nearly fifteen-year-old book by Andrew Root.

The “middle-class bias” of youth ministry.

As a self-described Andrew Root scholar, I’ve now read thirteen of his books—most recently one from his earlier work, Taking the Cross to Youth Ministry, part of his four-part A Theological Journey Through Youth Ministry series published in 2012.

I think one of the most provocative things Root says in all of them comes in this book, when he speaks of “the middle-class bias” of youth ministry.

Root talks about youth ministry being seen “through the lens of modernity,” with its “view of growth, advancement, and preparation as steps on the escalator to strength and power” (47). To that end, youth ministry, as Root describes through his narrative about the “Fab Four,” becomes about helping teenagers “look the part”—my words, not his.

And this is where I think his point about the middle-class bias of youth ministry becomes especially perceptive.

One of the reasons I keep reading Root is his ability to both perceive and name the broader dynamics within our culture and their theological impacts. What I find especially intriguing about this book, even though it is nearly fifteen years old, is how relevant it still is, needing only a few ancillary parts updated.

For instance, I might edit Root’s “middle-class bias” to more accurately describe the idea of being “upwardly mobile,” which both tracks with his latest book, Baal and the Gods of More, and also with the data we continue to see from folks like Ryan Burge suggesting that church has essentially become a luxury good.

And this is where I think Root’s book, even though it is nearly fifteen years old, is powerfully relevant for today: the teenagers Root describes, both real and imagined, are now well into adulthood.

And I wonder if what Burge is now documenting about American Christianity is, in part, the maturation of the very problem Root diagnosed fifteen years ago.

Church has become, quite literally in some cases, about looking the part—about being perceived as upwardly mobile.

In some ways, this is a societal and economic problem, as Burge would assert, and in many ways I’d agree. Yet this is where, as Root suggests elsewhere, we need to look to theologians first, not sociologists, for the reasons why—and I think this Root book explains exactly why.

The Opposite of Upward Mobility

Root’s essential argument in this book is that (youth) ministry is about “encountering God at the cross, where God takes on nothingness, and from nothingness brings forth new life, new possibility, and an all-new reality” (56).

Faith, then he says, “is to see and admit our impossibility, our stuckness, and through it to trust that God in the cross of Christ is acting to bring forth a new creation in you and in all that is” (57).

This is where I want to come back to the idea of “looking the part” or being “upwardly mobile.”

Admitting our impossibility, our stuckness, our nothingness is quite obviously the opposite of the upwardly mobile ethos. “Looking the part” within the broader American and church context has increasingly meant trying to promote our possibility, worthiness, and ability—as if church were a Tony Robbins motivational conference.

So, is it any wonder that church in America has increasingly become demographically filled with upper-income and highly educated people?

While in 2012 the middle class could still be perceived as “upwardly mobile”—or at least imagine ourselves to be—now, with the shrinking of the middle class, it’s increasingly the upper class and well-educated who can most convincingly “look the part” and present themselves as upwardly mobile and basically good.

Today, struggling lower- and middle-class people often cannot look the part so easily. They cannot necessarily imagine themselves to be upwardly mobile. Too often, they are actually struggling with addiction, debt, broken relationships, and more—much as we all are.

I don’t mean to insult or diminish those economically vulnerable. The difference, I think, is that economic precarity makes brokenness harder to disguise.

It’s not that upper-income people are somehow less broken. Rather, money and education can provide resources that make it easier to wallpaper over that brokenness—to maintain the appearance of stability, competence, and upward mobility even when everything underneath isn’t nearly so put together.

Those without those resources often cannot even presume to pretend. Their brokenness and nothingness may simply be too obvious and overwhelming to hide.

And what if we have constructed churches in which that makes it harder, rather than easier, for them to belong?

When Youth Ministry Grows Up

What I’m trying to say is that what Root diagnosed in 2012 has increasingly become true. The models of youth ministry have simply been transferred into adult ministry.

Those who, as Root notes, could “look the part” have stuck around so long as church attendance helped them look the part—upwardly mobile, respectable, successful, good.

Whereas those who found church no longer necessary to help them look the part no longer needed church. As Root writes, “They have no problem being good” (95).

All the while, those who are actually dealing with visible brokenness and nothingness increasingly find themselves alienated from church. They cannot even presume to pretend.

And yet, the cross says that the inability to look the part isn’t a barrier to encountering God. It may be precisely where God meets us.

This is why admitting to one’s brokenness and nothingness within church today can be so powerfully transformative.

“I Can’t Look the Part Today”

A few weeks ago, one of the pastors at my church shared a simple confession before giving the announcements. Her eldest son was away at college, and this was her first Sunday in YEARS without him. She was feeling quite emotional.

As I’ve reflected on it, I’ve been struck by how simple and profound it was: a moment of brokenness and nothingness.

She was admitting: I don’t have it all together. I can’t look the part today. I need help.

And this is why I use the word confession.

Root notes that “to be forgiven we must be where God is found, and the cross reveals that God can be found in suffering, weakness, and death” (73).

To be clear, Pastor Betty was not needing forgiveness. But I do believe she was needing God’s loving presence—and she found it.

And not just for her. For everyone who heard her confessing her own brokenness and nothingness, we too, in some small way, could confront our own feelings of brokenness and nothingness.

This brokenness and nothingness is what Root connects to sin and death, and what Christ overcame through his death and resurrection. Our “sins,” then, can be the things we try to do to solve that brokenness and nothingness on our own.

Say, for instance, that Pastor Betty—who has shared her enjoyment of IKEA—had instead responded by going on a spending spree, seeking to drown out the brokenness and nothingness of missing her son away at college.

It’s not that shopping at IKEA is “sinning.” It’s that seeking to solve our brokenness and nothingness entirely on our own is not so much wrong as, frankly, ineffective—and, as Root says, a way of “seeking to live outside God’s action” (96).

Think, then, about what a powerful move Pastor Betty actually made.

Confronted with her own brokenness and nothingness, she confessed it within the community of Christ, trusting that God was and is present in that brokenness and nothingness. And in doing so, she was met with the love and grace of God.

The contrast matters.

Looking the part says: I can handle this. I am capable. I am progressing.

Confession says: I cannot fix this. I need God, and I need you.

What If Church Looked Like This?

Root notes that “only suffering love can redeem another without using force and threat to do so” (98).

Pastor Betty exhibited suffering love.

Imagine how different church and church attendance might be if, rather than being about “looking the part” of being upwardly mobile, we instead confessed and shared with one another our brokenness and nothingness, trusting that God is with us in the midst of such—and reminding one another of that truth.

Think about all the pain, addiction, debt, broken relationships—the brokenness and nothingness carried by so many in our world.

They may not be interested in “looking the part” or being “upwardly mobile.” Some know perfectly well that they cannot pull off such an appearance.

But what if, through our own confessions of brokenness and nothingness, we bore witness to the love, grace, and presence of God?

Wouldn’t that be quite something?

As Root writes:

“We are forgiven because God is found acting for us by suffering with and for us. God encounters us in our own deaths through God’s own death. Therefore, justification is deep, because it is bound to a God that reveals Godself in the cross, next to our impossibility, besides our longing, suffering, and fear” (72).

That Sunday, Pastor Betty was grieving a loss.

And in confessing her loss, we found God. For as Root notes:

“When we are honest enough to admit and struggle with our yearnings and brokenness, the action of God transforms us into the new creation, the new humanity” (117).

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

I like to read books—like, a lot. And I read fast.

By my own calculations, this year I’m on pace for a book every 3.5 days.

Obviously, there’s no way I can feature every author I read on the podcast. And now I’m finding that even with some of the other books I read, I just don’t have the bandwidth to publish a stand-alone Substack blog for each one.

So, I’m going to maybe start doing a monthly book roundup.

This will still enable me to write more about books that I find particularly thought-provoking—like ’s In Defense of Evangelicalism—while also highlighting other books I’ve read that are worth mentioning.

So, here’s what I’m reading—and thinking about—right now.

What I’m Reading Right Now

Work, Pray, Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley by Carolyn Chen

This is a VERY interesting book so far, and I’m hoping to get Chen on the podcast.

I’m about a third of the way into the book, and right now what I’m finding fascinating is that Chen’s findings mirror much of what I’ve heard and seen elsewhere from sociologists like Christian Smith and Ryan Burge (both of whom I’ve had on the podcast).

As Smith especially notes, religion has not faded per se; it’s just been replaced by different things. Chen argues that work, especially in Silicon Valley, has become a religion of sorts, offering many of the same things humans get from religion: meaning, purpose, and something bigger than themselves that offers a measure of transcendence.

An early takeaway for me is this: religion is as much a practice as it is a set of beliefs.

What’s interesting is that the reasons people left their religion after moving to Silicon Valley for work seem to be many of the same reasons people leave religion more generally.

Martha Tatarnic did an interview a couple of years ago with Michael Graham, co-author of The Great Dechurching, and he made the point that life disruptions—new jobs, moving to a new place, and so on—take people out of church attendance more often than shifting beliefs.

The regular habit or practice of participating in religious life is, in my opinion—and in my reading of this book so far—deeply formative in helping people retain their faith.

What I’ve Just Read

Raising Gen Alpha by Dave Boden

I don’t know well, but I’ve also had him on the podcast. As a ministry leader in the UK working with young adults, I’m always interested in what he has to say because I think, in many ways, he’s working in the midst of a cultural context toward which we are likely headed ourselves in America.

His book isn’t groundbreaking, but he certainly has some thoughts worth highlighting here:

“The local church can offer something radically different to a generation of screenagers: a place where identity is shaped by belonging and purpose in Christ (133).”

And more:

“the church must resist being swept up in the very same things social media sells—platform, fame, image, and performance (133).”

Boden seems to share the same takeaway I had from reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation.

Taking away screens isn’t enough. Young people need purpose and belonging.

Right now, they’re finding a very thin form of that online, but they desperately want something deeper.

It’s worth checking out.

Sustainable Ministry: How to Lead and When to Nap by Margaret Marcuson

Marcuson’s book is grounded in Family Systems Theory, or Bowen Theory as some call it.

For anyone familiar with FST, nothing here will be groundbreaking, but I always find reminders helpful. Plus, Marcuson wonders, as I have also felt in recent years, “I think of Edwin Friedman’s frequent question, “‘Why are the least mature calling the shots?’” (24).

To this maturity piece, Marcuson offers this sage advice:

”You can’t spend extended time with everyone in your congregation, unless you serve a very small congregation. You have to make choices… I recommend you spend more time with the most mature in your congregation (23).”

This is SUCH a countercultural thought, and one I’m thankful to hear because I’ve often felt similarly but haven’t been able to articulate exactly why.

Countless times I’ve heard clergy talk about the time-suck of one or two people in the church who are always stopping by in need of counseling and support. And because clergy want to help people, they are often ready and willing to do so.

Marcuson’s point isn’t that helping is bad or that pastors shouldn’t offer pastoral care in times of crisis. Rather, in order to grow an organization in health and vitality, a pastor also needs to invest in its most mature and healthy leaders.

And, as Friedman himself would say, I think, constantly bailing out immature or needy people isn’t teaching them resilience or self-sufficiency in the long run; it can simply make them dependent on you.

You can never grow your church or expand your ministry if one or two people are dependent on you for their functioning. At minimum, investing in healthy and mature leaders develops other people who can help care for those in need.

Also, Marcuson’s book references Future Christian co-host and ministry friend !!

Church Together by Traci Smith and Dave Csinos

Finally, Church Together is more of an individual “recipe” book than anything else, full of practical ideas for intergenerational activities in church.

Nothing life-changing, but it’s full of ideas that some pastors and church leaders—especially those in smaller churches—might find helpful.

And Coming Soon on the Podcast…

If you’re not doing so already, please subscribe to the Future Christian podcast for feature-length conversations with authors and church leaders.

I have interviews scheduled with Bonnie Kristian, , and Jessie Cruickshank—all authors of books I’ve just read and recommend too.

And given how many books I apparently insist on reading, I’ll probably be back with another roundup next month.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Time costs have to be one of the most overlooked expenses in churches and nonprofits.

And I think this happens because churches and nonprofits often treat time as free.

And, in treating time as free, they repeatedly make bad decisions.

Economists, of course, have a name for at least part of this: opportunity cost.

Every choice we make with a limited resource means giving up something else we could have done with that resource. Money is a limited resource, but so is time. And while churches and nonprofits tend to track money quite carefully, we’re often terrible at accounting for time.

“We Can Save $500 by Doing It Ourselves”

I’ve worked for several different types of nonprofit organizations—churches, traditional nonprofits, governmental organizations, among others.

Because all of these organizations have limited budgets—much the same as traditional businesses do, which sort of proves my point—they often try to do everything in-house, using the same employees they already have.

Salaried staff time feels free. There’s no new invoice when you add another task.

In other words:“We can save $500 by doing it ourselves.”

Maybe.

But if three staff members collectively spend 30 hours doing it, you haven’t simply saved $500. You’ve exchanged $500 for 30 hours of organizational capacity.

The question then becomes: What else could those three people have accomplished with those 30 hours?

That’s what economics call opportunity cost.

And often, it’s not even a one-to-one comparison.

Do What You’re Good At

There’s another basic economic principle at work here: specialization of labor.

Generally speaking, people become more efficient when they specialize in work they are particularly equipped and trained to do—this is why so many churches hire a youth pastor or children’s ministry director for instance. Yet churches and nonprofits routinely violate this principle in the name of saving money.

In one job I had in the social work field, we hauled plant seedlings, lugged bags of soil, and made runs to the hardware store because it APPEARED cheaper to do these things ourselves.

Never mind that having those things delivered might have added only a marginal fee.

The delivery fee was visible. Our time wasn’t.

More importantly, the people hauling bags of soil had presumably been hired because they had skills and expertise that were more valuable to the organization than their ability to haul bags of soil.1

Every hour we spent doing that was an hour we weren’t doing the work we had actually been hired to do.

That doesn’t mean organizations should outsource everything. Sometimes doing something yourself really is the most efficient choice.

But doing it yourself isn’t free simply because no money changes hands.

When Volunteer Time Is “Free”

This problem becomes even more pronounced with volunteers because, if salaried staff time feels free, volunteer time feels REALLY free.

Volunteers can be both the BEST and WORST thing in churches and nonprofits.

Of course, volunteers are in many ways the lifeblood of these organizations. But conversely, it’s often easy to find someone who can do something for free when that very task really needs to go to someone who has the qualifications to do it well.

I see this trend in chaplaincy.

Anybody who is or was a pastor or ministry leader may think they can be a chaplain and may even be willing to do it for free as a ministry. But chaplaincy is a specialized discipline. Getting someone willing to do the work for free doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting someone qualified to do the work well.

And while the cost of that decision may not immediately show up on a financial statement, it can still negatively affect the quality and effectiveness of the organization’s work.

Which is another reason specialization matters.

Sometimes paying someone who can accomplish a task better and faster is actually less expensive than finding someone willing to do it for free.2

What Didn’t Happen?

And I think this is the bigger point.

The most important cost isn’t necessarily payroll.

It’s what didn’t happen because someone’s finite attention was consumed by lower-value work.

That’s why I think opportunity cost is such a powerful lens for church and nonprofit management.

Don’t ask only: “What does this cost?”

Also ask: “What won’t we be able to do because we’re doing this?”

Or, to put it another way: “How much organizational capacity does this consume?”

Those are very different questions.

Every hour spent hauling soil, fixing something around the building, designing a flyer, or doing any number of other things is an hour that can’t be spent doing something else.

And this is where another business concept comes into play: scalability.

If every new program requires more of the pastor’s time, every new initiative requires existing staff to absorb additional responsibilities, and every attempt to save money means doing more ourselves, eventually the organization hits a ceiling.3

There are only so many hours in the day.

This is where opportunity cost and specialization of labor come together. If an organization wants to expand its impact, eventually it has to stop asking simply: “Can we do this ourselves?”

And start asking: “Should we be doing this ourselves?”

Sometimes the answer will still be yes.

But sometimes paying someone else, outsourcing a task, developing another leader, or simply deciding not to do something at all creates the capacity for your people to focus on the work they are particularly equipped to do.

And that, ultimately, is what scalability requires.

You cannot continually expand an organization by asking the same finite group of people to do more.

Sometimes spending money actually saves resources.

Sometimes “free” is surprisingly expensive.

And sometimes the cheapest option is precisely what keeps an organization from growing.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

This is a book I REALLY wanted to like.

The authors—Dominic Roser, David Zhang, and J.D. Bauman—are clearly intelligent, thoughtful, and deeply committed to making the world a better place. I even had a brief phone conversation with Bauman a while back when he was pitching the book for the podcast and came away with a positive impression.

Which makes it all the more uncomfortable that the further I got into the book, the less I found myself agreeing with it.1

Honestly, I’m not even sure how to approach this review. I don’t usually write straight reviews. I tend to engage books in conversation rather than simply evaluate them. But publishers send me books all the time (and please don’t stop), and I feel the least I can do is write something up—even when I don’t particularly like the book.

And unfortunately, I didn’t.

Let me also say this from the outset: the authors are likely smarter and better educated than me. They have advanced degrees, impressive credentials, and are far more accomplished in their respective fields than I am. They also seem to genuinely care about philanthropy and making the world a better place.

My problem with the book is not its morality.

It’s the anthropology.

The authors seem to assume human beings are far more rational, disciplined, and calculating than they actually are.

The Good Place Problem

Several things came to mind as I read.

Years ago, I knew a young man who was experimenting with one of those bizarre sleep-hacking systems. He slept for thirty minutes every few hours or something equally ridiculous.

I remember telling him: that’s great while you’re twenty-two and single.

But what happens when you’re in a real relationship and your spouse wants to go to bed together? What are you going to say?

“Sorry, it’s not time for my sleep cycle.”

Of course not.

You’re going to crawl into bed beside the person you love.

Life has a way of disrupting elegant theories.

I was also reminded of one of my favorite television shows, The Good Place. In the “IHOP” episode, the characters argue that modern life has become so morally complicated that even buying a tomato or eating a chicken sandwich involves countless ethical considerations that no ordinary person can reasonably navigate.

(I had to link the YouTube of the clip because I enjoyed this episode sooooo much!).2

That’s exactly what I kept thinking while reading this book.

And then there is a phrase from Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework that has stuck with me for years:

Complexity confuses.

Human beings generally want to thrive or survive, he says.

Most people are not running cost-benefit analyses every time they buy groceries, volunteer, or make a charitable contribution.

They’re trying to get through the day.

Effective Altruism

The authors are writing from the perspective of what is often called “effective altruism.”

They summarize the movement with four core ideas:

1. Altruism. Doing good should be a significant part of ordinary life.

2. Impartiality. Everyone matters equally, regardless of geography or proximity.

3. Consequentialism. We should focus on what actually produces the greatest good.

4. Careful thinking. We should use evidence, reason, and research to determine what works.

None of those ideas are inherently problematic.

In fact, most of them are very admirable.

The challenge is that I think they often feel quite disconnected from how actual people make decisions.

The authors write:

“Evidence shows that, just like when choosing between charitable interventions, we tend to favor causes that we have heard of, which are closer to home, or which tug at our heartstrings, rather than those that have the biggest impact.” (65)

The implication is that this tendency is a problem.

The truth is that this is how most people operate.

We see a need, it moves us, and we respond.

That doesn’t strike me as a bug in the system. It strikes me as part of what makes us human.

The Fundraising Problem

Perhaps this is where my (albeit limited) experience in fundraising shapes my perspective.

The authors write:

“And in our time and age, taking a step back before blessing others—in order to choose the most effective avenues for transforming our resources into blessing—is one of the most explosively loving things we can do.” (55)

Sure, Maybe.

But here’s the reality.

In fundraising, you generally want to activate donors while they’re warm.

When someone feels moved to give, encouraging them to step back, conduct extensive research, compare outcomes, evaluate competing organizations, and calculate return on investment may work for a small subset of donors.

Most people will simply get distracted and move on.

And I didn’t like how the authors tend to downplay the emotional rewards of giving, as though logic and measurable outcomes should be the primary drivers.

People give for different reasons.

Some want maximum impact,

Others want to support something close to home,

Others want to support a cause that reflects their values.

A good fundraiser understands this and speaks to the motivations of the donor. Again, this is all pretty basic fundraising 101.3

Where the Book Lost Me

The authors write:

“Ethical consumption rarely avoids harm.” (172)

I understand the point they’re making, or do I? Statements like this left me more confused than inspired.

Should I stop trying?

Should I try harder?

Should I conduct more research?

Should I feel guilty?

The book often left me feeling as though the answer was simply more calculation.

More evaluation.

More analysis.

More optimization.

Again, I admire the impulse—I just don’t think it’s realistic.

At one point the authors discuss individuals who make dramatic sacrifices in order to maximize their giving. One example involves someone living in their car in order to donate more money.

That’s admirable.

It’s also not scalable.

Nor is it a realistic model for most people.

Which brings me back to the young man with the strange sleep schedule.

Some ideas work beautifully in theory. Real life has a way of complicating them.4

Admirable but Unconvincing

To be fair, the authors themselves acknowledge the difficulty.

They write:

“It’s easy to diagnose current systems as unjust. It’s harder to accompany such vague diagnoses with concrete action steps, particularly if these steps are to avoid grave risks of their own.” (169)

I agree completely.

What I’m less sure about is whether the book always recognizes that same challenge within its own proposals.

And as much as I wince writing a negative review, knowing my own book will be out in a few months and undoubtedly ripe for critique, here we are.5

In the end, I found myself admiring this book more than I liked it.

I really do admire the authors’ commitment to generosity, their desire to alleviate suffering, and their conviction that our resources should be used thoughtfully and effectively.

I think I even agree with much of what they are trying to accomplish.

What I struggle with is whether their vision is realistic for most human beings.

Perhaps that’s where age, experience, ministry, fundraising, and ordinary life have made me more skeptical.

Most people are not maximizing machines.

They are busy, distracted, emotional, relational creatures trying to do some good in a complicated world.

Still, I appreciate the authors’ challenge. Even if I remain unconvinced by effective altruism as a movement, I found myself repeatedly pushed to think more carefully about generosity, impact, and what it means to love our neighbor well.

And that’s probably worth something.

After all, as the authors themselves write:

“Jesus opens our eyes to see a million deaths as a million tragedies, and a million lives as a million individuals each uniquely loved by God. Love thy neighbor means love thy statistic.” (5)

That’s a beautiful sentiment.

And perhaps we need more young, idealistic, world-changing people willing to say it out loud.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

“Being in a garage doesn’t make you a car anymore than being in a church makes you a Christian.”

I remember hearing some version of this phrase repeatedly during my upbringing in conservative Christianity. While the tone and tenor changed depending on the preacher delivering the line, the point was obvious.

Yet, all these years later, it seems there are some retail business leaders who might have done well to take the saying to heart, perhaps only rephrased a little:

Being in a store doesn’t make you a customer anymore than being in a garage makes you a car.

The Kohl’s-Amazon Experiment

It’s no secret that the retail shopping industry has experienced significant disruption with the advent of Amazon and other online shopping trends, further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recognizing sagging demand for the traditional retail shopping experience, Kohl’s made what seemed like a strategic move: it would serve as a designated location for Amazon returns. More than that, Kohl’s would staff and handle those returns on its own dime.

Kohl’s began accepting Amazon returns in select stores in 2017 and expanded the service nationwide in 2019.

The logic was something like this: Amazon returns would increase foot traffic. Those same people, fresh off the feeling of getting money back from a return—and perhaps handed a Kohl’s coupon—might browse the store and make another purchase.

It sounded like a great idea.

And initially, the numbers seemed promising. In 2021, Kohl’s said it had gained two million new customers through its Amazon partnership.

But then something interesting happened.

Kohl’s largely stopped talking about it.

According to more recent reporting, the company stopped accepting Amazon returns at some locations. Modern Retail noted that the expected boost in foot traffic and sales “never seemed to have materialized,” while The Washington Post reported that the deluge of Amazon returns weighed on store employees, slowing operations without necessarily boosting sales.

The Amazon partnership unquestionably drove traffic to Kohl’s.

What’s much less clear is whether that traffic translated into enough purchasing to justify the operational burden of processing all those returns.

Which brings me to churches.

How Many People Come Through Your Building?

Back about ten or fifteen years ago, when I was new to the Mainline Protestant world, I remember hearing a common refrain whenever church leaders talked about average attendance or Sunday participation.

It was something like:

“Rather than count who comes on Sunday mornings, we’re tallying everyone who comes through our building during the week—Boy Scouts, childcare, community groups, and so on. That tells us more about our true impact and reach than Sunday attendance.”

But does it really?

Even back then, I remember thinking that didn’t sound quite right.

The Kohl’s-Amazon partnership illustrates why.

Getting people in the door isn’t automatically a win.

Someone walking through Kohl’s carrying an Amazon return is certainly foot traffic. But that doesn’t necessarily make them a Kohl’s customer.

Likewise, someone attending a community meeting, dropping a child off at daycare, or attending a recital inside a church building certainly came through the doors.

But what does that actually tell us about the church’s impact?

Maybe something or maybe very little.

And meanwhile, all that activity comes with costs: staff time, volunteer energy, utilities, maintenance, cleaning, wear and tear on the building, and the opportunity cost of using the space for one thing rather than another.

Be Strategic

The connections between established churches and Kohl’s are worth noting.

As one article observed, Kohl’s “has long had a loyal fan base,” but even that loyalty hasn’t made the company immune to competition and shrinking demand. It needs to be strategic as it navigates uncertain times.

And strategic is the word worth repeating.

As I hope you’ve already seen, I have a book coming out September 8 called The Church as Community Hub, which is all about utilizing church buildings to impact their communities.

So perhaps it sounds strange for me to say this:

Not every opportunity to use your building is worth pursuing.

First, as the Kohl’s example illustrates, bringing more people into your building creates additional demands on your people and physical plant.

But even more importantly, bringing in more people doesn’t automatically mean you’re accomplishing whatever you hoped bringing them in would accomplish.

To be clear, The Church as Community Hub isn’t about bait-and-switching people into joining churches. But neither do I think the point is simply filling church buildings with activity. As I try to make clear in the book, I believe these spaces can help churches be good neighbors while also sharing the good news of Jesus.

Whatever your church understands its ultimate “bottom line” to be—to borrow from the first article in this series—the important thing is to ask whether your strategy is actually advancing it.

Because in the Kohl’s example, it appears plenty of people were running in and out of the stores, treating them as another errand to check off, while Kohl’s staff and stores bore the operational burden without an obvious corresponding payoff.

Churches should pay attention to that.

Maybe simply getting more people into your building is the win. If that’s your goal, fine.

But if you’re hoping that foot traffic will produce something else—relationships, community impact, evangelism, discipleship, financial sustainability, or something entirely different—then make sure that’s actually happening.

Don’t mistake the thing that’s easy to measure for the thing you’re actually trying to accomplish.

P.S. My book is available for pre-order right now!

And yes, it’s available on Amazon or wherever books are sold.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Sources:

https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/kohls-stops-accepting-amazon-returns-at-some-locations-3341853/

https://www.modernretail.co/retailers/kohls-has-stopped-accepting-amazon-returns-at-some-store-locations/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/21/amazon-prime-day-returns/

A line within it that has been haunting me…

I’m reading the forthcoming book In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers by , and while I don’t usually write anything about a book until I’m finished, there’s a line within it that has been haunting me since I first read it last night.

That, and it’s the first day back at school for the kids, the house is quiet, and I’m already tired of house chores.

So, here we go…

The book, releasing September 8, draws on research, original reporting, and Kristian’s lifetime in the evangelical movement to address five serious criticisms of evangelicalism and offer a deeply informed and theologically grounded defense. Kristian engages with influential critics of evangelicalism—including Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Beth Allison Barr, and Tim Alberta—as well as theologians, pastors, and other thought leaders, seeking to dismantle bad-faith critiques while acknowledging where reform is necessary and desirable.1

I’m maybe a quarter of the way in, and it’s happened before that books have taken a drastic turn for the worse—I’m looking at you, Critical Dilemma—but for now, I’m intrigued by what I’m reading.

The line in particular that I can’t get out of my head is this:

“…imagining a future with Hillary as president was just too unbearable.”

For some context, these words come from a conversation Kristian had with an evangelical woman, a pastor’s wife if I remember correctly, who was married to a Hispanic man and attended a predominantly Hispanic/Latino church. Kristian recalls this conversation in a chapter titled “Hypocrisy,” addressing the charge that evangelicals are deeply hypocritical based on their voting choices.

Now, a few things I must say immediately: I most assuredly feel very differently than this woman, named Jane.

For me, imagining a future with Trump as president—well, I don’t have to imagine—and frankly, I think it has been awful and unbearable at times. (I first accidentally typed “unlawful” instead of “awful,” which also fits.)

While I hesitate to get into voting choices or do deep dives into politics, let the record show I was and still am a fervent “Never Trumper.” That being said, I was on the fence with Hillary for some time and seriously considered voting for Jill Stein—but I thought she was being too paranoid about Russia at the time. I was wrong; Stein was certainly right!

I say all of this to say that I am, in many ways, quite the opposite of Jane—or perhaps Kristian, for that matter, even if I don’t think she has revealed her presidential voting choices in the book yet.

But still, there’s that line I just can’t get out of my head:

“…imagining a future with Hillary as president was just too unbearable.”2

Curiosity Before Condemnation

The other day, before I started reading Kristian’s book, a Facebook “friend” and “exvangelical influencer” posted the above statement on social media.

My immediate thought was this: This “influencer” has had ten years to try to understand these perspectives so as to change people’s minds and still hasn’t.

Moral grandstanding is great, but it doesn’t do much good in the long run.

More, I’d add that, in my memory, a lot of evangelical leaders actually expressed significant concerns about Trump’s character.

But I digress.

I want to be absolutely clear: I am vehemently opposed to Trump, and I think his legacy will be one of moral and institutional disaster for our nation.

That being said, rather than simply trying to judge and condemn Trump voters, I’m really interested in trying to understand what could make him the LESS repugnant choice over even someone like Kamala Harris most recently.

To that end, I’ve begun purposely seeking out more opportunities to engage with people who feel differently about this topic than I do.

For instance, for the last six months, I’ve been getting my hair cut by a woman who quite clearly votes differently than I do. To be sure, we didn’t immediately share our voting choices, but let me just say it has been obvious based on other things I’ve seen around her studio.

Yet, as much as we barely know each other, she’s already shared with me compelling stories of tragically losing her son in an accident and her husband’s brush with death from an illness.

To say it bluntly, I don’t think she’s the monster the above exvangelical influencer would have us believe.

The summer before the election, I had a similar experience over dinner with a fellow pastor who stated quite clearly that he was going to vote for Trump.

We’d been having a good conversation up to that point, so I took a deep breath and kept listening.

Interestingly, as he explained his thinking, he brought up a couple of things I either agreed with or could at least understand why he saw things the way he did. I gently suggested that I would probably be voting differently than him, but we kept talking.

And we left on good terms. I didn’t change his mind. He didn’t change mine. But I understood him a little better than I had before.

Now, in fairness, many might point out my “privilege,” in that I am a straight white guy who doesn’t have a whole lot to lose—just my sad attempts at fashioning my “hair”—which is true.

But that’s also why the above exvangelical influencer has no excuse for his unwillingness to engage the other side. He, after all, is a straight white guy like me (though with much better hair) and could easily enter into some “unsafe spaces” with some measure of courage and curiosity in hopes of building some bridges.

I want to emphasize this point: I’m not asking members of marginalized communities to immediately enter into relationships with people who don’t respect them.

Although my barber might lose some respect for me if I shared my true opinion on certain matters, but still.

Here’s an opportunity where I can use “privilege” for good.

Maybe it’s my training and experience as a hospital chaplain, or maybe it’s just what I hope is some well-worn wisdom, but when I hear someone say the other choice was “unbearable,” while I am a bit offended, I am also curious.

Why?

What makes a future I might prefer feel literally unbearable to someone else?

And which posture is more likely to create some unity or break down the walls of division within our nation and our churches: condemnation or curiosity?

I can tell you with certainty, it won’t be the posture of the exvangelical influencer.

P.S. One More Thought…

I was tempted to write about this too, but figured I’d get back to the house projects.

Kristian’s book maintains that the evangelical movement is a force for good that every American should want to preserve.

The last decade or so in America has been VERY anti-institutional, some of which I’d argue has been fostered by Trumpism. But the broader question is one I’ve been wrestling with myself:

Are imperfect institutions better than no institutions whatsoever?3

If I had to give an answer right now, I’d say something is better than nothing.

But maybe that’s another blog.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Making money is HARD.

Nearly half of all businesses fail within five years.1

Now imagine making business even harder.

Imagine trying to turn a profit while also improving your community, caring for your employees, protecting the environment, and advancing some larger social mission.

In other words, imagine trying to succeed according to multiple bottom lines.

Businesses that intentionally pursue these kinds of competing goals are often called social enterprises.

Oddly enough, one of the more intriguing examples I’ve seen recently isn’t a coffee shop, a nonprofit, or a certified B Corporation.

It’s the WNBA.

Now, before basketball fans accuse me of picking on the league, let me be clear: I’m fan of the league and admire what the WNBA is trying to accomplish.

Like many organizations today, the WNBA isn’t pursuing just one objective. It’s trying to build a profitable sports league while also growing women’s athletics, advocating for social causes, paying players well, and providing compelling sports entertainment.

None of those goals are bad.

In fact, they’re all good.

The challenge is that every additional goal creates another bottom line to manage.

Sometimes those bottom lines reinforce one another. Other times they compete.

I think that’s one reason this summer of 2026 has been so turbulent for the league. Players like Caitlin Clark have become a lightning rod because her play and presence touch some—but certainly not all—of those competing priorities.

Social Enterprises and Multiple Bottom Lines

The business world has a name for organizations that intentionally pursue more than one bottom line.

They’re called social enterprises.

The United Way of the National Capital Area defines a social enterprise as a business that prioritizes social or environmental goals alongside financial sustainability.2 Unlike a traditional business that measures success primarily by profit, a social enterprise also asks questions like:

• Are we serving our community?

• Are we creating social value?

• Are we caring well for our employees?

The point isn’t that profit doesn’t matter—profits sustain the business after all. Rather, profit becomes one important measure among several.

That’s a noble aspiration, but it also makes leadership decisions exponentially more complicated in that—Every additional bottom line creates another tension to manage.

Sometimes those priorities reinforce one another; other times they compete.

Churches, I would argue, face exactly the same challenge.

Like social enterprises, churches rarely exist for a single purpose. They proclaim the gospel, form disciples, build community, care for members, serve their neighbors, and steward financial resources, among other things. None of these are bad goals. In fact, they’re all central to the church’s life.3

The challenge is that these priorities don’t always reinforce one another. Sometimes they compete.

Every hour spent on one ministry is an hour not spent on another. Every dollar allocated to one initiative is a dollar unavailable for something else. Every strategic decision inevitably elevates one priority while, at least temporarily, placing another in the background.4

That’s simply the reality of organizations operating with multiple bottom lines.

The Leadership Question

This, I think, is where churches have something to learn from both social enterprises and, perhaps surprisingly, the WNBA.

The challenge isn’t simply having multiple bottom lines—many healthy organizations do.

The challenge is recognizing that, eventually, every organization has to decide which bottom line is ultimate.

This summer, I served as a bridge pastor at a church that had begun asking how it might better use its building to fulfill its mission. Listening to some of those early conversations, it became apparent that many of the church’s priorities, while all good, also competed with one another.

For instance, questions were raised about whether flags—if any—belonged in the worship space. Others wondered whether, if the building were increasingly used for community concerts, recitals, and other neighborhood events, the worship space itself might need to be adapted to better accommodate those uses.

Whatever your thoughts on flags in the sanctuary or the use of sacred space for community events, I think the larger organizational principle is the same. These aren’t conflicts between good and bad. They’re often conflicts between good and good. Yet attempting to pursue both simultaneously almost always means one priority receives greater emphasis than the other. In that sense, one “suffers.”

That’s why every organization eventually has to ask:

Which priority governs all the others?

I’m intentionally not answering that question here.

Different churches—and different Christian traditions—will likely answer it differently.

My point is simply this: the more bottom lines an organization has, the more important it becomes to know which one ultimately drives its decisions.

That’s really the key. If that question remains unanswered, organizations inevitably find themselves pulled in multiple directions at once.

The WNBA is wrestling with that reality. So are many churches.

If I had one piece of advice for both, it would be this:

Figure out your ultimate bottom line—and have the courage to let it govern all the others.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

The Moral Foundations of Politics

The more I think about our political divisions, the less I think they're primarily about facts. Increasingly, I think they're about morality.

I just finished reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion and while it was a very fascinating read, by the end of the book, it did begin to show its age.

In it, Haidt argues that our moral reasoning is built on several intuitive "moral foundations." He identifies six primary ones:

1. Care / Harm – Concern for the suffering of others; virtues like compassion, kindness, and protection of the vulnerable.

2. Fairness / Cheating – Justice, reciprocity, equality, proportionality, and opposing exploitation or dishonesty.

3. Loyalty / Betrayal – Commitment to one’s group, family, nation, or team; valuing solidarity and faithfulness.

4. Authority / Subversion – Respect for legitimate authority, tradition, hierarchy, and social order.

5. Sanctity / Degradation – Ideas of purity, holiness, and avoiding contamination, whether physical, moral, or spiritual.

6. Liberty / Oppression – Resistance to domination and coercion; valuing freedom, autonomy, and standing up to bullies.

His broader thesis is not that one side is morally superior, but that different communities “taste” morality differently. He likens morality to having several taste receptors: progressives tend to rely most heavily on Care and Fairness, while conservatives draw on all six foundations more evenly. That difference helps explain why people can look at the same issue and arrive at fundamentally different moral intuitions before they ever begin reasoning about it.

After finishing the book, though, it struck me that I don’t think it’s accurate to say progressives have abandoned loyalty, authority, or sanctity. Rather, I think they’ve relocated those foundations to different objects. Sanctity may be directed toward the environment, loyalty toward activist or moral communities, and authority toward marginalized voices or expert consensus rather than traditional institutions. That distinction turns out to matter quite a bit.

So while it’s possible that conservatives and progressives don’t weight each of these foundations equally, I think Haidt is at least partly wrong (and, from what I’ve read, he has since revised some of his thinking on this). Conservatives and progressives both appeal to all six foundations.

If that’s true, then the real takeaway is this: political opponents often aren’t speaking different moral languages—they’re using the same grammar but with different words.

The Same Moral Grammar, Different Words

I think that explains why debates so often feel like people are talking past one another. Each side hears the other saying, “You don’t care about equality,” when the disagreement is actually, “What counts as fair?” Or, “You don’t respect authority,” when the real question is, “Who has legitimate authority?”

To put it bluntly, each side has sacralized different things.

One of Haidt’s most helpful insights is that people often don’t disagree merely over facts—they disagree over moral framing. And once an issue is framed as a moral absolute, compromise becomes much harder because conceding feels like participating in evil.

Take abortion as an example:

• Calling abortion “health care” frames it primarily through the moral foundations of care (meeting a medical need) and liberty (patient autonomy).

• Calling abortion “the killing of an unborn child” frames it through care (protecting vulnerable life) and sanctity (the inviolability of human life).1

Neither phrase is morally neutral. Each foregrounds one moral narrative while backgrounding another. As a result, each can sound to the other side not merely inaccurate, but morally deceptive.

This phenomenon extends well beyond abortion:

• “Gender-affirming care” vs. “gender ideology.”

• “Tax relief” vs. “tax cuts for the wealthy.”

• “Climate justice” vs. “energy independence.”

• “School choice” vs. “defunding public education.”

These aren’t simply competing descriptions—they’re competing moral worlds.2

Why This Matters

Where things get especially tricky—and arguably even dangerous for the future of our nation—is this:

First, we no longer share a common moral language.

In the past, Christianity—or at least what many called “Judeo-Christian values”—functioned as a shared moral language that Americans could organize around. More broadly, the American mythos also offered a common vocabulary centered on ideas like independence, hard work, and personal responsibility.

Today, many rightly critique parts of that story, often in favor of multiculturalism and pluralism. But I think we also have to name the elephant in the room: increasingly, we no longer share a common moral foundation or even a common moral language. We’re using the same words, but we mean very different things by them.3

Second, moralizing immediately raises the stakes.

Some issues do this more than others. “Tax relief” versus “tax cuts for the wealthy” doesn’t carry the same moral weight as framing abortion as either women’s autonomy or the killing of an unborn child.

But more and more issues are becoming moralized. Take the debate over trans kids. Both those who affirm gender transitions and those who oppose them generally believe they are protecting trans children (I’ve written about this in a previous Substack). Once an issue becomes morally foundational, disagreement is no longer experienced simply as someone holding a different opinion. It becomes an attack on one’s deepest moral commitments—and often on one’s identity.

Third, moralizing makes disagreement feel morally unacceptable.

In many ways, moralizing allows us to build a proverbial ivory tower while making ourselves almost impervious to questioning or debate. “How dare you?” becomes the default response.

Growing up in a very conservative environment, abortion simply wasn’t debatable because of how it was framed. If abortion is murder, how can we possibly negotiate over the taking of innocent life?

A similar dynamic exists on environmental issues, though with different moral foundations. Many progressives understand the earth as something sacred. Conservatives are more likely to understand nature primarily as a resource for human flourishing. Think of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. “Water is Life” wasn’t merely a slogan; it framed water as something sacred.4 That framing often made little sense to conservatives, who were more likely to view both water and oil as resources to be stewarded for humanity’s flourishing (which, in turn, many conservatives regard as sacred beneath God).

Once something has been sacralized, compromise becomes extraordinarily difficult. You’re no longer negotiating policy. You’re negotiating morality itself.

So what do we do instead?

Three things come to mind.

First, delay moral absolutizing.

Whenever possible, we should describe an issue in ways that both sides could at least recognize as fair before moving to moral evaluation.

Unfortunately, our social media ecosystem rewards the opposite. Algorithms reward immediate moral framing because outrage drives clicks—for supporters and detractors alike. And the quicker we’re able to moralize an issue, the quicker we convince ourselves we’ve gained the moral high ground, whether fairly or not. This is why nearly every tragedy is moralized almost immediately.

Second, learn to separate our moral beliefs from ourselves.

Here’s what I mean.

In modern Western culture, the individual has increasingly become the primary moral authority. In earlier eras, the family, tribe, or religious community often functioned as that center instead. Of course, those arrangements had plenty of their own problems—people fought when their family, tribe, or religious community was threatened.

But today, criticism of our moral beliefs is often experienced as criticism of us.

I wonder if we’d be healthier if we were more intentional about locating our moral beliefs outside ourselves. For Christians, for example, our moral framework ought to be grounded in Christ and the Christian tradition, not simply in our individual preferences. More broadly, simply naming where our moral convictions come from may help create a little distance between ourselves and our beliefs. Then, when someone challenges those beliefs, they’re not rejecting me as much as they’re engaging a set of convictions that I hold.

Third, become more secure in what we actually believe.

This may sound counterintuitive, but I sometimes wonder whether our outrage stems less from deep conviction than from shallow formation.

We often assume people are deeply knowledgeable about the beliefs they hold most passionately. I’m not convinced that’s true. Because we don’t always understand why we believe what we believe, criticism feels disruptive—even dangerous.

But if I know my own convictions well, I can receive critique without immediately feeling threatened. I can weigh it against my own reasoning, acknowledge where it exposes weaknesses in my thinking, and explain why I ultimately agree or disagree.

Ironically, the more secure we become in our own beliefs, the less threatened we become by someone else’s.

In closing

None of this means moral truth doesn't exist or that every viewpoint is equally valid. It does mean, however, that if we hope to persuade rather than simply condemn one another, we have to understand the moral world the other person is inhabiting.

We don't heal polarization by shouting our sacred values louder.5

We begin by recognizing that, more often than not, we're arguing over different sacred objects while using many of the same moral instincts. That recognition won't solve our disagreements, but it might make genuine conversation possible again.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Are Progressive, Inclusive Churches More Interested in Being “Progressive” and “Inclusive” Than They Are in Being Christian?

Now, while I do spend plenty of time on here critiquing progressive Christianity, I think many conservative churches have exactly the same problem.

I was recently listening to my good friend and colleague interview on the Church and Main podcast. While I haven’t yet read the Substack essay that prompted their conversation, one observation Clark made during the podcast interview has been rattling around in my head.

Borrowing from Stanley Hauerwas, Clark suggested that whenever we put a word in front of church—whether inclusive, progressive, conservative, or traditional—that word can eventually “completely dominate what the church is supposed to be.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about that.

The word in front of church begins to eclipse the word that follows it.

That observation immediately reminded me of an interview I once had with a “progressive, inclusive” congregation.

When the Word Comes First

Interestingly, I wasn’t asked much about traditional Christian doctrines or even my understanding of the gospel. Instead, much of the conversation centered on my willingness to be affirming of LGBT Christians.

To be clear, I understand why.

Pastors have significant influence, especially through the pulpit each Sunday. Even conservative churches have been damaged by poor pastoral leaders. It’s entirely reasonable for a congregation to want confidence that a prospective pastor will care well for everyone in the pews.1

But looking back, I realized something felt off.

It wasn’t that the church cared about inclusion.

It was, like Clark suggests, that inclusion seemed to function as the primary confession of the church.

Listening to Clark helped me understand why that interview has stayed with me all these years. It felt as though the first question wasn’t, “Are you committed to Jesus Christ and the gospel?” but rather, “Will you affirm this particular ethical position?”

Clark put it this way:

“What happens when those ethical positions become the entry point—the confession that’s required to belong to Christ?”

That question struck me because I don’t think it’s limited to progressive churches.

It’s Not Just Progressive Churches

The more I sat with Clark’s observation, though, the more I realized this isn’t really a progressive church problem.

It’s an American Christian problem.

Conservative churches often do exactly the same thing. The word in front of church simply changes.

The point isn’t whether those words describe something true or valuable.

The point is what happens when they become the thing that most defines the community.

That’s what intrigued me most about Clark’s argument. The issue isn’t ultimately which adjective we choose. It’s whether that adjective begins to function as a confession that stands alongside—or even ahead of—the gospel itself.

And that got me thinking about Peter in the book of Acts. Acts 10 describes a deeply convinced Peter that certain foods were unclean. “By no means, Lord,” he said.

Peter’s practices weren’t arbitrary; they were rooted in Scripture and centuries of Jewish faithfulness.

Yet when the Holy Spirit confronted him, Peter changed.

Not because culture persuaded him.

Not because public opinion shifted.

But because he became convinced that God was doing something new.

To me, that’s one of the defining characteristics of Christian discipleship.

It isn't that every commitment is perpetually up for revision. It's that every commitment ultimately remains submitted to the gospel and open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

This also helps explain something I’ve found surprising over the years.

I’ve occasionally met LGBT Christians who choose to worship in churches that are not explicitly affirming. At first glance, that seems almost incomprehensible to many progressive Christians.

But I wonder if what’s draws some of them isn’t agreement on every ethical question.2 Rather, it’s the conviction that this is a community genuinely seeking to submit itself to Christ and to the leading of the Holy Spirit—even if that process hasn’t led everyone to the same conclusions.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting LGBT Christians should attend churches where they experience hostility or abuse. Nor am I suggesting questions of human sexuality don’t matter. They do.

My point is simply that, for some Christians, a community’s posture toward Christ and the Holy Spirit matters even more than complete agreement on every point of interpretation.

That strikes me as a deeply Christian instinct.

An Old Idea for a New Moment

As I thought about all of this, I found myself reflecting on the tradition in which I am ordained—the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

From its beginning, the Restoration Movement3 (out of which the DOC was born) wrestled with a remarkably similar question.4

How do we keep being Christian from being eclipsed by everything else?

Early leaders like Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell certainly didn’t believe doctrine was unimportant. Nor did they imagine Christians would all agree on every point of interpretation.

Rather, they were deeply suspicious of anything that functioned as a dividing line beyond the centrality of Christ. That’s why they were so insistent on open communion. They didn’t want creeds or theological systems to become ends in themselves rather than witnesses to the gospel.

Their founding vision was simple, if difficult:

Christians first.

Not because they thought differences didn’t matter.

But because they believed every Christian—and every church—should remain continually submitted to Christ, Scripture, and the work of the Holy Spirit.

The Restoration Movement certainly DID NOT solve this problem. It eventually developed its own divisions, labels, and identities.5

But its founding vision still remains remarkably relevant.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again—I’ve convinced that we can discern the future of Christianity by looking to its past.

I wonder if this is one of those moments.

Christianity Before the Adjective

As someone who can’t help but think about the future of Christianity in North America, I find myself wondering if we’ll increasingly see churches and Christians who refuse to let an adjective become their primary identity.

Perhaps that’s too optimistic.

But I also wonder if it’s already happening.

I’ve been with Christians who disagree about abortion, sexuality, and/or political policy, yet who share something deeper. They genuinely want to follow Jesus. They genuinely believe the Holy Spirit still has something to teach them. And they genuinely recognize that they themselves might still have something to learn.

That’s a very different posture than beginning with absolute certainty that our group/tradition already has all the right answers.6

And, this is where I think my own tradition has so much to contribute here:

Neither the Restoration Movement nor the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has lived up perfectly to its founding vision. No tradition has.

But that vision—that Christians should be known first and foremost as Christians, continually submitting themselves to Christ, Scripture, and the work of the Holy Spirit—feels remarkably relevant in a moment when so many of our ecclesial identities are shaped by adjectives.

This isn't about abandoning creeds or doctrine (even if the Movement became famous for saying, "No creed but Christ"). It's about recognizing that every creed, doctrine, and ethical commitment remains accountable to Christ, the gospel, and the ongoing guidance of the Holy Spirit.7

Back to the Future?

The American church has much to learn from the early Restoration Movement—and frankly so does my current branch of that movement—the Disciples of Christ.8

I’ve argued before that one way we discern the future of the church is by looking to its past.

Perhaps this is one of those moments.

Perhaps the future of American Christianity isn’t a more progressive Christianity.

Or a more conservative Christianity.

Perhaps it’s simply a more Christian Christianity.

One where the word Christian once again carries more weight than the word placed in front of it.

P.S. If you're interested in the future of Christianity in North America, I'd love to invite you to check out my forthcoming book, The Church as Community Hub (releasing September 8). While this essay reflects on the church's identity, the book asks what that identity looks like when embodied in neighborhoods, shared spaces, and everyday community life. I hope you'll take a look.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

This might be one of the few times you’ll ever read someone making the case for being a 1099 contract pastor.

Hear me out.

Recently I listened to a podcast episode about the growing trend of co-vocational ministry. The host, who serves as both a lead pastor and a co-vocational minister himself, was talking about some of the realities of churches working with pastors and worship leaders as independent contractors.

One thing that stood out to me was his acknowledgment of the limitations.

“The church is their secondary job. So you have to take that into account.”

He went on to explain that many of these ministers are technically 1099 contractors rather than W-2 employees.

“You can’t just tell contract workers, ‘You have to be here at this time and in this way.’ That’s a W-2, not a 1099.”

I found myself nodding along.

The point wasn’t really about taxes. It was about expectations.

Churches have to recognize that if someone is serving in a co-vocational role, ministry may not be their primary source of income. That changes the relationship. It changes what can reasonably be expected of both the church and the pastor.

At the same time, he also pointed out that this model creates opportunities. Churches can access gifted leaders they otherwise couldn’t afford, while pastors and worship leaders gain greater flexibility in how they structure their work and their lives.

As someone who currently serves in several ministry and nonprofit roles, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about these changing realities.

Job Creep

One of the biggest challenges with part-time ministry is what I’d call job creep.

A church hires someone for ten, twenty, or thirty hours a week.

But ministry doesn’t really work that way.

Hospital visits.

Funerals.

Committee meetings.

Pastoral care.

Crises.

Especially in churches with older congregations, the work has a way of spilling well beyond whatever was originally agreed upon.

I know there are pastors who simply say, “You make it work and cut back somewhere else.”

Maybe—But I’ve never found that particularly sustainable.

A Surprising Benefit

Here’s what I’ve found interesting.

Serving as a 1099 contract pastor has actually helped me develop healthier pastoral boundaries.

Like a lot of pastors, I’ve often struggled with feeling like I need to always be available, always say yes, or always help.

But when ministry is clearly defined as contract work, I’ve found it surprisingly freeing to simply and honestly say:

“I’m not contracted for that. I’d be glad to help, but I can only do so at an additional rate.”

At first that felt awkward.

Now it feels like a big relief.

If I’m contracted to preach, help plan worship, and provide a defined amount of pastoral care, then funerals or extensive hospital visitation—while deeply meaningful ministry—are also significant investments of time and emotional energy.

It’s okay to acknowledge that.

Better Expectations

Obviously there are tax implications when it comes to 1099 versus W-2 employment, particularly around housing allowance and clergy compensation.

Those conversations matter—and in my experience, there are actually some practical ways to navigate them well.

But I sometimes wonder if we spend so much time talking about the tax implications that we overlook the ministry implications.

Clear expectations can actually be healthy.

Not because pastors shouldn’t be generous.

Not because churches shouldn’t care for people.

But because healthy boundaries make long-term ministry more sustainable.

Ironically, I think they also force churches to think more carefully about what they’re actually asking of a part-time pastor.

A Different Way of Thinking

I don’t think 1099 ministry is the answer for everyone.

Nor do I think churches should classify pastors as contractors simply because it’s easier administratively.

But I do think there are some surprisingly healthy implications to thinking about part-time ministry through a contractual lens.

For me, it’s been less about taxes and more about boundaries.

Less about classification and more about sustainability.

In a season where more and more pastors are serving co-vocationally, that’s probably a conversation worth having.

I’d be curious what others have experienced.

If you’re serving in a co-vocational or contract ministry role, what has helped you establish healthy expectations and boundaries with your church?

And if you’re trying to figure this out and could use some ideas, feel free to reach out. I’d be glad to compare notes.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

I have spent what feels like the entire summer repainting my pergola.

It’s a big structure, and after hours and hours of work, I am finally nearing the end. I ran out of paint Saturday, so I’m gonna get the next gallon. Next Saturday. The last time I did it was in 2021, and I probably waited a year too long. But last summer I did the fence. And summer before that, I did the deck.

And I’ve already started doing the math again in my head.

Next summer I’ll probably have to do the fence again. Eventually the house will need to be repainted. And by the time I finish all that, the pergola will probably need attention again. It’s sort of exhausting. And my wife wonders, why is it taking so long? And I say, Well, I don’t want to spend my entire Saturday, A, when it’s 100 degrees out in the heat. And B, like I’m just gonna have to do it again soon enough.

Perhaps you can relate.

Wood rots, paint peels, metal rusts.

Eventually the things we carefully build and faithfully maintain begin to break down.

We can repair them, we can repaint them, we can develop better and more sophisticated materials and technologies.

But eventually...

Most of the time, the best we can do—and this is sorta depressing to say—the best we can seem to do is just delay the decay.

And that raises a much bigger question than the one I’m wrestling with with my pergola.

What do we do?

What do we do when we realize that human effort alone cannot keep everything from falling apart?

More Than a Home Repair Project

This is a problem that many of us can relate to beyond simply home repair projects.

Try as we might, human effort alone cannot solve all the world’s problems, or even, it seems, the problems facing our own nation.

We have more knowledge, more technology, and more resources than it seems any other previous generation.

And yet suffering persists.

War persists.

Hunger remains.

New medical treatments extend our lives, but they cannot keep our bodies from eventually breaking down.

The Apostle Paul calls this a bondage to decay.

Now the assumption of American culture in our lifetimes has been that progress is inevitable, or at least mostly possible.

Through human achievement, if we can educate enough people, elect the right leaders, and create the right technologies, we can steadily improve the world.

Now that confidence has lost some of its luster in recent years.

Still we cling to it.

We continue searching for the right innovation, the right institution, the right political movement that will fix finally what is broken.

Now, let’s be clear, these efforts are not wrong, per se.

We should relieve suffering where we can.

We should pursue justice.

We should develop medicine.

We should care for this world.

But none of these efforts can finally free us from decay.

And like my painting of my pergola, they simply hold it back for a while.

Eventually we are forced to confront a reality we’d rather not face...

...that the future cannot depend entirely upon us.

God’s Promised Future

Now, Paul does not say this to leave us in despair.

Our reading this morning is a rich and full passage.

It contains promise upon promise that the Spirit helps us in our weakness, that God remains at work amidst the suffering, and that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

There is far more here than we have time to explore this morning.

So I want to focus on one thread running throughout Romans chapter eight and this particular verse in Romans.

That God is moving creation toward a promised future.

Something new is coming.

And Christians have a word for that.

Christians always have big, complicated words, if you’ve noticed that.

In this case, the word is eschatology.

Basically, in a very simple summation, it’s that the trust that God has a future for our world.

That creation will not remain trapped forever in decay, and that God is at work redeeming it, restoring it, and ultimately making all things new.

Now in Paul’s time, in the time of the Apostle Paul, they believed in many gods.

The question was not whether God or many gods existed.

The question was whether or not there was a God who cared about creation and had a purpose for the world and for humanity.

Or whether everything we know and love was destined just for decay.

Paul’s answer is yes.

God does have a purpose.

And that’s the hope at the heart of Romans 8:28.

He writes,

We know that God works all things together for good, for the ones who love God and for those who are called according to his purpose.

Now, I do want to add this important caveat.

This verse is sometimes used as if Paul were saying that everything that happens is good, or even that suffering is good.

But I want to be clear that Paul does not mean that suffering in itself is good.

Paul knows that bad things happen.

He knows that suffering is real.

The point is not that everything that happens is good.

The point is that God is working in and through everything that happens to bring good toward God’s intended purpose.

It’s also worth noting, I think is quite interesting that the Paul the word Paul uses for works in this passage is in the present active tense in the original language, meaning that God’s work is not merely something that God completed long ago.

Nor is it something that God promises to begin someday, but rather it’s something that God is doing right now.

Right now, continually and actively, God is moving creation towards God its good intended purposes.

Now, truth be told, we may not always recognize that good work.

We certainly cannot always understand how present suffering could be drawn into something good.

But Paul is confident that even amidst the groaning and decay, God remains at work.

He writes that God decided in advance that we would be conformed to the image of his son.

God’s purpose is to bring humanity, us, and creation into the future God is already revealed in Jesus.

In the risen Christ, we see what lies beyond suffering, death, and decay.

We see renewed humanity and restored creation.

Jesus is not simply the one who rescues isolated individuals from the world.

Jesus is the first glimpse of the future God intends for our creation.

This is why Paul calls him the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

This purpose was already at work, this purpose was already in process before we recognized it.

We don’t need to invent it.

We don’t need to bring it into existence.

We don’t need to carry the responsibility for its completion.

God calls us into a future that God has already promised and begun in Jesus.

And this is what I believe gives our lives meaning and purpose.

We’re not simply trying to slow creation’s decay.

Or make a few isolated improvements along the way before eventually everything disappears.

Rather, we are invited to live with God’s movement towards a promised future.

We do not need to create that future.

God creates that future, but we can begin living as witnesses to it right now.

So What Does It Mean to Trust This Promise?

First, I want us to trust that the responsibility is not on us.

As one theologian put it,

It is impossible to understand the Bible as long as we think in terms of human effort being enough to achieve human betterment.

What he means is this that human that does not now let me say this, that does not mean that human effort is unimportant.

It means that human effort alone cannot carry the weight of our ultimate hope.

God has not asked us to defeat by ourselves every form of injustice.

We are not being asked to end every effort every element of human suffering through our own efforts, nor carry the responsibility for freeing creation from its inevitable decay.

We are not the saviors of the world.

That position has already been filled.

And being released from that burden does not mean we are free to ignore suffering whatsoever.

Rather, I would say this morning, it frees us to care with hope.

We can look at the world and honestly say,

This is not, this is not how things should be.

Because in the life and witness of Jesus, we have already seen, God has already shown us how the world is meant to be.

Which leads to the second promise.

That God, that God will have the final word.

As one writer puts it,

Our hope is not in that our efforts can make the world a better place. Our hope is in the action of God to open our eyes to see the small but sure ways that God’s new reality is breaking forth.

God is working now.

God’s promised future is already breaking forth into the present.

And we may only see it in small glimpses, but its completion does not depend entirely on our own efforts.

It depends upon God.

This is why, this is why we can name what is wrong without assuming responsibility for fixing everything.

We know that children should not go hungry.

We know that migrants should not be abused.

We know the LGBT persons should not face discrimination.

We know that poverty, violence, and death are not how God intends things to be.

But this present reality will not have the final say.

God will have the final say.

And God’s final word will be life.

Every tear wiped away.

Every suffering brought to an end.

And all things made new.

Friends, that’s good news.

And the third promise we can trust this morning is that God’s actions will bear witness to God’s future.

And we are invited to participate through our actions to testify to that future.

As one theologian writes,

Our responsibility is not to bring about the new reality, but to live for it, to act for it, even if it’s not yet here fully.

And even our small acts, even our seemingly insignificant acts, become a sacrament, a testimony to that coming future.

So we feed the hungry.

We advocate for the human for the better treatment of migrants.

We stand for the dignity and honor of all people.

We comfort those who grieve.

We welcome those who have been excluded.

We care for whatever corner of creation that God has entrusted to us or called us to.

And we do this even as we know that one meal will not end hunger.

We know that one act of advocacy or kindness will not end injustice whatsoever.

We know that befriending a lonely person will not end loneliness entirely.

But each action, each action of ours bears witness.

Each act of mercy says that this suffering does not belong to the world that God intends.

Each act of justice says that the present arrangement will not have the final word.

Every act of love that we offer offers a glimpse of the future that God is bringing.

Friends, our actions do not need to save the world.

Rather, they are signs of what God has promised.

And this is the movement, this movement from responsibility to participation.

It’s a movement from control to trust.

We are not trying to create God’s future.

We are bearing witness to something that is already coming.

The responsibility is not on us.

God will complete what God has said, God will do.

And even our smallest actions testify to that promise.

Walking Into Hospital Rooms

And trusting in these promises changes the way we enter a world filled with pain.

As a hospital chaplain, I regularly enter into rooms filled with problems I cannot fix.

I cannot cure the cancer.

I cannot undo the accident.

I cannot bring someone back from the dead.

If I believed it was my responsibility to fix all of those things, I could not keep walking into those rooms.

That amount of suffering and pain and injustice would eventually overwhelm me.

But the burden is not on me.

Last week I shared that sometimes when I walk into the hospital I almost do so with a bit of enthusiasm because I know that I have good news to share.

The good news I seek to share is that God is present and at work no matter the situation, seeking to bring good for whatever happened.

When a woman who has endured a lifetime of abuse asks me whether she is worthy of love, I cannot undo everything that had happened to her.

I cannot guarantee that she’ll never be hurt again.

Just as I cannot single handedly end every form of abuse or injustice that happens in our world today.

But I can look her in the eyes and I can tell her the truth that God loves you.

That what happened to you is not what God intends for you, that it does not define your worth, and that it will not have the final word.

Now again that may not fix everything immediately, but it bears witness to the future that God has promised, a future in which abuse, suffering and injustice and death are finally overcome.

And this, I believe, is what faithful participation looks like.

We enter into places and spaces to which we have been called to offer the mercy, justice, hope, and love that we have been given to offer, and we entrust what we cannot fix to God.

And that does require a fair bit of trust.

I often leave hospital rooms wishing I could make everything better.

This past Thursday I entered a room of a woman who was quite literally at the end of life.

In fact, an hour or two later I was called back to be with her family and pray with them after she had passed.

I wished I could have ended the death.

I wished I could have had brought her back to life.

But I brought with me the good news and hope that I could bring that God had given me to bring, the hope that God had given me to bring, the place and the calling God had brought me to.

Bring that good news.

Good News

We don’t need to carry burdens that are not ours to bear.

We don’t need to protect ourselves from feeling like nothing we can do matters.

Because God is working, there is another way.

We can care without believing that everything depends on us.

We can name all that is wrong without pretending that we can correct it all.

We can walk towards suffering rather than turning away because we know we do not do it alone.

We carry good news.

This is not how things should be.

This is not how things will eventually be.

God is at work even now, and we are bearing witness to the world that is coming.

We have good news to share, friends, and and for the two months that I’ve been with you, I’ve been trying to proclaim this thing that the gospel of Jesus Christ really is good news and really has relevance and impact to our world today.

It’s good news for all of us.

The burden is not ours to carry alone.

God is at work.

God will have the final word.

And we are free to live and act towards that promise in whatever area of the world that we have been called to make a difference and to share God’s good news.

Thanks be to God.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

P.S. 📖 Save 25% on my new book! Church as Community Hub: Sharing Spaces to Help Neighborhoods Thrive is now available for pre-order. Use promo code CHURCH25 at checkout to save 25% through July 31. Pre-order your copy →