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It’s a season of parent teacher conferences. And even if you don’t have children in school these days, perhaps you can remember with me years ago walking through the children’s school halls, or perhaps just try to imagine with me. You’ve only been to the school once or twice before, and you find yourself finding an eight following an eight year old. Through a maze of hallways, trying to remember, does any of this look familiar? Are we going the right way? And in what other circumstances would be would I be asking my child for directions?

Meanwhile, your child has other directions. There’s the artwork on the wall that you need to see. There’s a friend in the hallway she wants to talk to. And yeah, over there, there’s a funny story that happened there once. You’re trying to get to an appointment on time, meanwhile, she’s trying to show you around world.

A few weeks ago this was my wife and I at my son’s school.

When we finally reached the classroom, we walked past the corner where the reading nook was, along the wall filled with bins of school supplies, through the cluster of desks. We made our way to the teacher’s desk, pulled up a chair, sat down, ready to have a thoughtful conversation about our son’s school.

My son, however, wanted nothing to do with the chair. As we talked, he wandered around the classroom, occasionally adding his own thoughts to the conversation before moving on again. We were sitting there, my wife and I, having a thoughtful conversation with the teacher, and he seemed quite happy to participate, so long as participating didn’t require sitting still. He wasn’t wild or over the top. Perhaps a little anxious himself, or or maybe feeding off our own parent anxiety. I wanted him to settle down, perhaps be a little bit more respectful.

The teacher, however, seemed entirely unbothered and offered this bit of wisdom that I think is uh worth sharing. She said, kids spend the entire day holding it all together, sitting still, paying attention. Following directions by this point, they just can’t hold it together any longer.

And while we might think, ah, that’s just kids, we all know, even as adults, we too can reach that same point.

When Waiting Wears Us Down

Do you remember the phrase some years ago flatten the curve?

Back in March of 2020, as we are still trying to figure out what this new fangled virus called COVID-19 was, that phrase seemed to be everywhere. The concern was that too many people would get sick at once and overwhelm the hospital systems. So we were asked to stay home, practice social distancing, good hand hygiene, all of these things. Help flatten the curve, they said.

And in those early days I remember posts and news stories suggesting that our combined efforts were making a difference. We watched those charts and those graphs, hoping to see those rising lines begin to level off.

And to some extent they did.

And while so much happened during those early days and weeks, what I remember is the ways that people pulled together. Perhaps you remember the videos and stories of people uh banging pots and pans in support of hospital workers and nurses, or of people going shopping. Perhaps you some of you yourselves experienced this, people going shopping for their elderly neighbors, grocery shopping. Remember that sense of optimism and togetherness that we can get through this together.

But as the days stretched into weeks and the weeks into months. And the months into what felt like years, the camaraderie began to unravel. There were arguments about what to do, whom to trust, and whether the guidance even made sense. And beneath those arguments, I wonder if perhaps was this feeling that perhaps many of us shared. We were tired.

And how much longer can we keep this up?

It’s one thing to accept restrictions when we know they’ll only last a few weeks. It’s quite another when we don’t know how much longer we’ll have to do it and what will be asked of us next. Certainly, certainly, some voices fed the distrust. And I imagine if leaders could do things differently, some might change. Some things too.

But many of us simply grew weary of the strain. I remember cooking a turkey at home by myself, my wife and a ER nurse quite literally working on the front lines of the COVID virus, and here I was, even though we lived only minutes from family, eating Thanksgiving dinner at home alone with my kids.

What we’d all hoped would have been a short interruption had stretched into Thanksgiving and obviously well beyond. We watched the infection numbers rise, then fall, then rise again. Each improvement brought hope. Each setback raised the question yet again.

How long can we keep this up?

Following health and safety protocol and guidance became increasingly difficult. Even when we understood what we were being asked to do, sustaining that commitment was yet another thing.

Waiting without an endpoint wears on us. And that struggle didn’t just begin during COVID.

Prepared for the Wait

In our Bible reading today, there’s a lot to say about waiting. It falls in a section of Matthew where Jesus is telling his disciples about the future, the so-called end of the age, or the return of the Son of Man. In other words, Jesus is describing what the future and his return will be like. He does so telling stories and parables that sound uh a good bit odd, right, to our modern ears.

Including today’s story about a wedding party. According to one commentator, the parable describes a common wedding ritual of the time. A procession would take place from the bride’s house to the groom’s house where the banquet would take place. And while there certainly was differences between their modern culture and our wedding practices today, this is something we can all understand, right?

There have been a big party to celebrate the new union.

And in this particular story, there’s ten bridesmaids or ten young women who are waiting for the bridegroom to arrive and the celebration to begin. Five are described as wise because they are said to have brought extra oil for their lamps, and five are described as unwise because they did not bring extra oil. As the night wore on and the groom was delayed, they all got tired and they fell asleep.

Then at midnight a shout awakes them, Hey, the the groom is here. The wedding party can begin.

They all get up and tend to their lamps, but the five foolish women realized their lamps were going out. Or to happen put it in more familiar terms, their phone batteries were dying.

The wise had brought a charger, meanwhile, the five foolish ones had to run down the street, hoping to find a convenience store open at this hour where they could find a charger. The five eventually returned, but by then the celebration has already begun and the doors are shut. They call out to the groom, hey, we’re here, let us in. But the groom says, Truly I tell you, I do not know you.

Jesus concludes, keep awake, for ye do not know the day nor the hour.

Throughout Christian history, this story has been often treated as an allegory, meaning that the features like the oil, the lamp, other elements, other details of the story are all seen as carrying a particular meaning. And while I understand the desire to try to find things out like that, for me at least, it’s helpful to take a step back and consider the bigger picture.

Certainly there are some elements of the story that leave us with more questions than answers, such as the shutting of the door. But what seems apparent to me is that Jesus is asking his listeners to be prepared, to be ready, to be obedient.

And our obedience is to shape how we live, loving our neighbors, showing mercy, practicing kindness, working for justice.

While the story ends with the instructions to keep awake, every commentary I consulted suggests that this is not meant to be taken literally. Uh again, all ten young women fell asleep, so grogginess was not the issue. Preparedness was

Being prepared then means continuing to live as Jesus has taught us, even when his coming takes longer than expected. The wise young woman had prepared for a wait that might last longer than expected. The foolish ones were ready for the celebration to begin, but not for the delay.

And that’s where the story begins to sound a little familiar.

We may be ready to ask to t to do what is asked of us for a little while, but when the waiting stretches far beyond what we expected, the question returns.

How much longer can I keep this up?

So what do we do with such a lesson today as we are still waiting?

Throughout the years and especially in recent decades, Christians have understood the return of Christ in very different ways. But I think we can all agree on this: that the fullness of Christ’s promised return and his promised new realm is not here yet. There is still too much war, too much violence, too much suffering, too much injustice. And oppression in our world.

So what do we do? For centuries, followers of Jesus have imagined that Jesus’ return might be just around the corner. And for us today I think the question is less when will it happen, but instead will it even happen at all?

Like the weariness many of us experienced trincovid. We’re not sure who or whether we can trust. We’re tired of waiting, tired of waiting for an end to injustice and oppression and violence. And while we know God asks us to take part in acts of justice, mercy, and compassion, at some point we grow weary.

We keep doing what we’ve been asked to do, but the change we’re waiting for seems no closer and we wonder.

How long can I keep this up?

The Promise That Sustains Us

Friends, good news, the good news of the scripture, the promise of the scripture, the promise of Jesus that I want to share with you with you this morning is that Christ is coming. And throughout the centuries, Christians have understood and interpreted that coming differently, but the hope and the assurance has endured that Christ is indeed coming.

We can trust that promise.

And trusting that promise, we can continue to do the good work that God has called us to do in the meantime. Acts of justice, mercy, and compassion. As my favorite theologian Andrew Root says it our simple acts of justice, mercy, and compassion become a tangible witness to the sign of the coming of God. They testify to our hope and trust in that coming new reality. They become reminders to ourselves of the promise.

And our worship offers those reminders to us as well. We read scripture and hear the stories of God’s faithfulness. We sing words of hope and promise, the voices of others uplifting and encouraging us. We share joys and concerns, giving thanks for where we’ve experienced. God’s care and entrusting to God the places where we are still waiting. And friends, clearly there’s some among us who are still waiting.

And in so doing we remind ourselves and one another that God is present in this very room, like was sung this morning, that God has been faithful and that we can trust the God that is still to come.

And in these words spoken to his disciples long ago, yet still speaking to us today, Jesus calls us to be obedient and faithful, loving our neighbors through acts of justice, mercy, and compassion, trusting that Jesus is coming and is bringing with him a new reality. And it’s this good news the trust of that promise coming that gives us the strength and endurance. to keep going when we feel weary, when our efforts feel pointless, and when the future seems uncertain.

Waiting Depends on Trust

Do remember hearing the story of a classic study involving children and marshmallows?

So in the original study, children are seated in front of a single marshmallow and promised a second if they can wait to eat the first. The assumption was that how long they’re willing to wait speaks to their measure of self control.

But a later study actually found something quite interesting.

Whether they trusted the person making the promise. After all, waiting only makes sense if you believe that the second marshmallow will actually appear.

But if experience has taught you that promises always get broken, eating what’s in front of you seems like the most reasonable conclusion.

So researchers tested what would happen when an adult first demonstrated that she would or would not follow through on her promises. The children who experienced reliability waited longer to eat the marshmallow already in front of them.

Their willingness to wait in part depended on whether the person asking them to wait could be trusted.

It’s a really intriguing lesson for us all to consider.

For no matter our age, we carry lessons like those within us. Lessons about who to trust, what to expect. Whether it’s safe to even hope.

And to that frightened, uncertain, distrustful child within us, Jesus offers this promise.

Trust me, what I promised I will do, he says.

And that assurance gives us the strength to keep loving, to keep practicing kindness, keep working for justice, mercy, and compassion. Not because we ourselves can keep waiting, but because we have a savior we can trust.

To be sure. The promise doesn’t make the waiting any easier or assuage our exhaustion. Remember, all ten young women slept.

But when we ask how long, how much longer can I keep this up? We have more to rely on than our own self-determination.

We have the promise of the one we’re waiting for.

Christ is coming, friends, and that is good news we can trust. Thanks be to God.

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Who Seems Normal Now?

I had something else planned for today, but after the quite shocking election results, I felt compelled to write something different. While I am much relieved, I am also quite surprised.

Parts of the country where President Trump won by significant margins shifted significantly to the left instead. Take my own House District Eight, where Republican Gabe Evans narrowly won in 2024, only for the district to shift to Democratic candidate Manny Rutinel by 14%, a swing of approximately 15 points. Other parts of the country, including Kansas, Texas, and Mississippi, saw even more dramatic swings.1

Already, there have been a plethora of think pieces about why Democrats won so handily and Republicans lost so embarrassingly. Some explanations seem quite obvious, like the cost of gas and the state of the economy. Others strike me as more wishful thinking, like the suggestion that Americans are rejecting Christian nationalism and fascism.2

Sure. Sort of. Maybe.

I’ve always found the argument that Americans—even white American evangelicals—explicitly want “Christian nationalism” somewhat unconvincing. Whatever that term really means is itself debatable. And what’s more, data from Ryan Burge and others suggest that Christian nationalism may actually be on the decline.3

But I digress.

I think, as my friend has suggested, Americans chose Trump because he seemed the most “normal,” and they’ve since rejected Trumpism because he stopped being normal.4

Recently, I’ve been reading The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture by Kwame Anthony Appiah, a book that essentially argues that our collective identities are riddled with contradictions and falsehoods.

Except, when it comes to social class, Appiah argues, which in modern America is especially shaped by money.

It’s in his chapter on class where Appiah writes:

Twenty-first-century systems of social standing, in [America], look very similar to the patterns that shaped the worlds I grew up in. One (but, yes, only one) strand of the populist explosion that tipped Donald Trump into power was an expression of resentment against a class defined by its education and its values: the cosmopolitan, degree-laden people who dominate the media, the public culture, and the professions in our country. Populists think that liberal elites look down on ordinary Americans, ignore their concerns, and use their power to advantage themselves (167).

It’s noteworthy that Appiah published this book in 2018, meaning he was writing very much in the thick of Trump 1.0. He saw Trump’s shocking rise to power for what it was, at least in part: an appeal to “flyover country,” to people who had long felt ridiculed and shamed by the “coastal elites” for all sorts of cultural and behavioral things.

And especially as this was around the beginnings of “woke 1.0,” these same people, who were being called “backward,” “on the wrong side of history,” and so forth by the left, found a man willing to pretend he was like them and advocate for them.

As Appiah notes, and history seems to demonstrate, “Resentment of this sort, as Nietzsche taught us, can be a reaction against a sense of inferiority” (167).

No doubt, as Appiah hints at, some measure of bias and prejudice played into the decisions of many who voted for Trump. That’s human nature, after all. We all have our biases, and I think it’s been part of the foolishness of the left to assume that biases can ever really be removed.

What’s more, the classic “bias training” so frequently promoted by the left during “woke 1.0” may have only furthered the social rift between the right and the left. All these formal trainings and educational efforts provided yet another socioeconomic divide, marking separation and elitism.5

For many white working-class voters, there was a sense of subordination, derived in part from a lack of formal education, that quite clearly played a role in their politics (168).

So what shifted?

For one, Donald Trump had freakin’ gold plating installed throughout the Oval Office. He was talking about “how much money we were making” off the price of oil when so many Americans grimace every time they pull up to the pump. And he was knocking down buildings and constructing new ones while so many Americans were struggling with the cost of living.

Conversely, I think it’s quite clear that Democrats—traditionally the party of labor and the working class—began to seem normal again.

Candidates like Talarico and Hamilton made reasonable and sensible statements about trans issues.6 They focused on “kitchen-table” issues and continued to emphasize affordability. Normal stuff—the kinds of things the vast majority of Americans deal with every day.

Or at least a vast enough majority to swing an election by 20–30 points two years later.

Trump, for all his appeals in 2016 to be the advocate of the middle class and the “common man,” finally showed who he really was.

And Democrats got back to their roots, caring about the middle and working class.

Saying it differently, I suspect there are roughly 33% of Americans who will only vote Republican, 33% who will only vote Democrat, and another third who make their decisions based on who seems most sensible, reasonable, and relatable to them.

And perhaps that’s what we’re seeing here.

A Lesson for Churches

Now, as this is intended to be a newsletter about the church, I’d add one lesson for churches and pastors:

Good luck if your church and congregation look nothing like the socioeconomic makeup of your neighborhood.

I think that’s key here.

Not only did Democrats begin to look the part, but they also talked about the everyday issues people actually care about.

If you’re leading a church where the neighborhood has significantly shifted around it, you’ve got to find a way to become more like the character of that neighborhood and understand what really keeps people up at night.7

And perhaps there’s an important distinction here between a church reflecting its neighborhood and a church genuinely knowing its neighborhood. Ideally, we’d want both. But a church can look a lot like the people around it and still have little understanding of what they actually care about, what they’re struggling with, or what keeps them up at night.

And conversely, a church might look quite different from its neighborhood but have deep relationships with the people who live there.8

And let me add this, too.

I’m already reading takes about how the wins by Talarico and Hamilton speak to a revival of the religious left, something I just don’t really believe.

But I think there’s something more important here.

As much as people need healthcare and food security—and they certainly do—I wonder whether churches could find ways to connect with people and the deep yearnings of their hearts.

A few weeks ago, I sat with an older gentleman who was likely of a lower socioeconomic status than me. And while I suppose I could have, like some of the blogs I’m reading today, offered him resources for food and social services, what he wanted to talk to me about was his relationship with his sibling.

As I heard it, he wanted forgiveness for the mistakes he had made.

If food and healthcare ministries are what enable you to have these conversations, as I suggest in my new book, all the better.9

But don’t assume that all people really need, as I’ve read elsewhere, is material resources.

Get to know people. Like the Democrats did, find out what they really care about, what keeps them up at night, what they’re longing for.

And meet them with the good news of the gospel.

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Graphs about Religion

Has Christian Nationalism Intensified or Faded?

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below…

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3 years ago · 36 likes · 28 comments · Ryan Burge

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If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it really make a sound?

If you go on vacation and don’t take any pictures, were you really there?

If you do a good deed and don’t post about it on social media, does it really count?

Among other things, I dabble in the nonprofit sector doing organizational and philanthropic consulting for churches and nonprofits. I have an MBA with a nonprofit emphasis and a certificate in fundraising. And recently, during a conversation with an executive director, he mentioned that he’d been told he needs to take more pictures of himself doing the good work of the organization.

In other words, if you do a good deed, but don’t post about it on social media, it doesn’t really count.

I grimaced and I begrudgingly agreed. That’s probably right, I said. And yet earlier in the book of Matthew, said quite the opposite. Be careful that you don’t let your religion to practice it in front of other people to draw their attention. Whenever you give to the poor, don’t blow your trumpet as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets so that you might get attention from other people.

Instead, when you give the poor, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.

I believe those words.

But in that fundraising conversation, I found myself wondering how practical they really are.

Because if you do a good deed and don’t post about it on social media, no one will know the good deed, the good work that your organization did. And if no one knows the good work that your organization does, they won’t financially support your organization. And if no one financially supports your organization, you won’t be able to continue doing the good work.

It’s a vicious, vicious cycle.

And it’s not just fundraising. It seems that more and more doing good requires playing the same game we’re trying to change.

Which reminds me of some words from the American writer, professor, and philosopher, Audre Lorde.

The Master’s Tools

Crafting a good sermon every week, well I guess you all are ultimately the judge, but crafting a sermon every week, good or not, is quite the task and requires for me a good bit of preparation, especially amongst my different time commitments and responsibilities. And something I’ve developed as a habit is every week to sit down after worship to look ahead at next week’s scripture and to read some commentaries. I found that even 30 or 45 minutes can get my brain spinning and later, whether it’s that day or later the week, I’ll somehow begin to work out in my head a central theme that I can organize my sermon around.

So if you see me slip into the office around 11.30 or 11.45, just know that that’s what I’m doing. This week I’m actually running off immediately after worship to go and my daughter is playing in the bell choir at her church. So I’ll be running out this morning. But last week, as I sat in the office,

Thinking about this morning’s message, Audre Lorde came to mind. Perhaps it has something to do with the Audre Lorde poster on the shelf right above the desk, the very desk or the very shelf that I had moved the desk closer to that very day.

Now in truth, I don’t actually know what the poster says. It’s rolled up with only her name showing, but it brought to mind some words that Lord shared at a conference in New York in 1979.

Speaking out about the lack of representation and diversity at the conference, Lorde offered these words that have continued to resonate some 40 years after she first shared them. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, she said. What does it mean, she asked, when the tools of racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?

Answering her own questions, she asserted, it means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are permissible and allowable. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, she said.

They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

Lorde was in those words advocating on behalf of poor lesbian and black women amongst others, demanding representation and recognition. It’s certainly a challenge that continues to this very day.

We still find ourselves caught in that same vicious cycle, feeling compelled to use the tools of power, oppression and domination, yet never producing lasting change. Only as Lorde said, the narrowest perimeters of change, only temporarily beating them at their own game, only achieving short term wins that cost us soul and spirit.

Inasmuch as we might appreciate Lorde’s wisdom, it seems like we have no other options. It feels as if the only way to win in this world is to use those same tools of power and oppression and domination. It is a vicious cycle.

This morning, if I might be so bold as a straight white man speaking some 40 years after she shared those words, I’d like to connect the words of Audre Lorde, the words of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

God’s Way of Exercising Power

In first century Judaism, there were different groups who sought to influence how their faith was practiced. There were the Essenes who emphasized purity and are associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls. There were the Zealots who were obviously wanting to overthrow Rome through rebellion. There are the Sadducees who were associated with temple worship and priestly practices.

And then there are the Pharisees who emphasize right practice and interpretation of the law. Often we read about the Pharisees and the scribes in the gospels. So these, Pharisees, are the religious leaders that Jesus is most often debating in the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And it’s whose actions we critique, whose actions he critiques in this morning’s passage.

Jesus challenges their prideful displays of religious piety outward displays that do not match their heart.

As one commentator notes, pious words and orthodox convictions alone do not make a faithful person. Pious words and orthodox convictions alone do not make a faithful person. It is so easy to confuse our interests with God’s purposes and our power with God’s power. We have a tendency to create

false and sinful hierarchies that replace God’s way of exercising power with our own. It is a vicious cycle.

And it feels like we have no choice but to keep using those same tools.

What then? What then is God’s way of exercising power? Jesus said, the greatest among you will be your servant and all who exalt themselves will be humbled and all who humble themselves will be exalted. This is a theme that Jesus emphasized repeatedly throughout the book of Matthew.

In chapter 18, when the disciples were asking who would be the greatest in the kingdom, Jesus places a child among them and identifies greatness with humbling oneself like that child. In chapter 20, Jesus again identifies greatness as serving others. He then presents his own mission as the example, coming to give his life to seek and to serve the lost.

And here once again, greatness means being a servant. As one commentator notes, according to Jesus, the true measure of human faithfulness is not found not in the words one speaks or the doctrines one accepts, or even if I might add this this morning, how one votes, but it is found in the orientation of one’s heart.

and orienting one’s whole life toward God requires a radical form of egalitarianism. The point is this, in God’s economy, in God’s way of doing things, greatness comes through humility and self-sacrifice.

It no longer has to be the vicious cycle. We do not have to use the master’s tools.

But These Are Not Ordinary Times

I mean sure you might say that’s all well and good, Lauren. Great ideas. But these are not ordinary times. The stakes are too high. The injustice is too great. The entrenched power is too strong. We don’t have the luxury, the privilege of doing things differently right now. We’ve got to fight and we’ve got to win.

I’m reminded of the proverbial church finance meeting where a significant budget crisis is revealed. The pastors talk about faith and trust and abundance all sound well and good, but now that the real crisis has arrived, it’s time to bring in the real experts. So we asked the pastors and the spiritual leaders to slide over a few seats and to make room for the accountants and the business executives.

You know, they have the real expertise that we really need in a time like this.

Things are desperate after all and we’ve got to do whatever it takes to survive.

But let me remind again of the promise that Jesus makes in this passage.

All who exalt themselves will be humbled and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

We do not have to use the master’s tools. And Jesus himself is proof of that promise.

Christ Has Broken the Vicious Cycle

Philippians chapter 2 in a passage that was written early to the early Christians in book of in the Philippi, the early church in Philippi, what we now know today as the book of Philippians, the Apostle Paul shares these words, which was actually in an early hymn that was shared in Christian communities. It says,

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Therefore, my beloved friends, every time we think

That won’t work.

The stakes are too high.

That story about Jesus doesn’t work in real life.

Scripture reminds us.

We don’t have to use the master’s tools. And Jesus himself is proof of that promise.

In Christ Jesus, God has broken the vicious cycle. In Christ Jesus, God has shown us we do not need to use the master’s tools. In Christ Jesus, God has shown us once and for all that the ultimate victory comes through the self-sacrificial love of Jesus rather than power and oppression.

Now, truth be told, this may not happen on our own two and four year timetables.

And this is, I think, the hardest part to trust.

That the victory will, that the victory revealed in Christ will ultimately be fulfilled.

Yet this is why we gather for worship, not simply to be encouraged and affirmed, but also to be reminded and assured, as Paul reminded and assured those early Christians, that the promise is already true and will happen. And that promise, it frees us to live another way.

A Glimpse Beyond the Vicious Cycle

A few nights ago, my middle school daughter was talking with my wife about the Estonian singing revolution. Anyone ever heard of the Estonian single sing revolution?

It caught my attention. I had just finished a war history book from the library that seemed to needlessly glorify the value and efficacy of war. The author seemed to affirm this same vicious cycle we’ve been talking about that ultimately war is the only way to accomplish anything.

So when my daughter said this story about the singing revolution, it caught my attention.

Between 1987 and 1991, mass singing and other forms of nonviolent civil resistance helped the Soviet-occupied Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania regain their independence. In Estonia, the people had endured decades of occupation and political repression.

The churches, with the help of other organizations, began organizing public singing events both as acts of protest and as a way to bring their community together. In the summer of 1988, thousands of people gathered at the song festival grounds in Tallinn, and standing together, they began to sing. They sang patriotic songs, songs that the authorities had forbidden. They raised their national flag, and as their voices joined together, their gathering became a public declaration that they were a people and that they wanted their freedom.

Singing alone could not remove an occupying army, but helped the people overcome their fear, recognize another’s courage, and organize for independence.

Together with political organizing and peaceful resistance that helped Estonia restore its independence in 1991.

The Soviet empire still possessed all the weapons. But the people gathered their voices and discovered what they could do together.

And their story offers a glimpse beyond the vicious cycle, a glimpse that perhaps we could ourselves use this very week.

What Will We Do With That Power?

In two days, perhaps somehow, you might be unaware, I don’t know how, we will have a national election. And already people are making plans, setting priorities and imagining what they’ll do with a victory.

For those of us hoping for a change of power or maybe even a continuation of power, it raises the question.

What will we do with that power?

In the weeks and months that follow, there’ll be the pressure to use those tools.

To dominate, to humiliate, even perhaps to punish. It may feel necessary, it may even feel deserved.

Friends, the good news of the Gospels is that we do not have to use the Master’s tools. Christ has shown us another way to live, and our hope rests in Christ, who has broken the vicious cycle.

Christ has shown us that ultimate victory is not bound by our two and four year timetables. But the promise of the resurrection is that it will come. And that promise, that promise frees us to live another way. Thanks be to God.

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What I’m Reading Right Now

Disciples and Theology: Understanding the Faith of a People in Covenant - Stephen V. Sprinkle

I’ve decided to do something fairly irregular for me—read from within my own theological tradition!

For those unaware, I am ordained within the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and I have been doing a LOT of reading of Wesleyan/Methodist theology of late, and I realized, I really don’t know the theology of my own tradition that well—hence the purchase.

I don’t have a lot to share about the book right now as I’m only a third of the way in and so far, it’s really more of a history of the Disciples movement with thoughts interspersed about theology.

But one observation has come to mind—reading so much theology from outside my own tradition has increasingly made my wonder if denominationally affiliated seminaries even like my own Phillips Seminary need to do a better job at teaching their students the theology of the tradition in which they exist.

For instance, if memory serves, I had to take a DOC History & Polity class in seminary, but I don’t recall an explicit Disciples theology class. My sense is that at most-all mainline seminaries, what one is getting is less Wesleyan or DOC theology and more a very generalized progressive theology. And I do wonder what that means for the future of our individual traditions. It’s long been obvious that Evangelicalism is melding into a sort of amalgamation, and I’ve increasingly become convinced the same thing is happening to the Mainline traditions as progressive Christian theology becomes the “de facto” theology.

I suppose in reading this book, I’m trying to do what I can to strengthen the tradition.

What I’ve Just Read

Last Stands: Why Men Fight When all is Lost - Michael Walsh

So… this was a book that I thought might be helpful for my current/next book project when I was doing some simple research at my local library. It was… interesting.

While I found the book somewhat engaging from a historical perspective—reading about historical battles and such, it was quite ideologically biased.

Among the quotes that made me squeamish:

“women (and feminized men) make poor political leaders in times of existential strife; their natural inclination to feminine virtues such as tolerance, as well as their innate sympathy for the stranger or the outsider, leads them to seek to understand their opponents rather than defeat them unconditionally and with all necessary force.”

And

“Talk rarely if ever settles anything. What it does do, though, is push the simmering resentments down into the emotions until they suddenly burst out, like a smoored fire that smolders and then catches flame once more.”

Obviously, Walsh has misogynistic tendencies. But more, as someone who wrote favorably of Christianity throughout the book, it seems he does not understand it whatsoever. To call virtues such as tolerance and sympathy for outsider “feminine” values reeks of a total misreading of Christianity. Has he never heard of the fruits of the Spirit? It’s quite troubling.

For those wondering why I finished the book, the historical nature was interesting to me, plus I do have this weird commitment that once I start a book I HAVE to finish it.

The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God’s Mercy - Tim Keller

At the same time I picked up the above book from the library holds section, I wandered over to the religion section and found this book.

Unfortunately, I didn’t read much of Keller when he was alive, but since his passing I’ve been increasingly intrigued by his works. While I still have a lot of points of disagreement with Keller, I have found him to be wise and thoughtful, including this book.

I’d also add this, which I posted as a note at got a lot of traction; I can understand why so many Evangelicals today are questioning the legacy of Keller—he has a lot to say about justice!

“When Christian believers care more for their own interests and security than for the good and salvation of other races and ethnicities, they are sinning like Jonah. If they value the economic and military flourishing of their country over the good of the human race and the furtherance of God’s work in the world, they are sinning like Jonah. Their identity is more rooted in their race and nationality than in being saved sinners and children of God. (104)”

“So preaching repentance is fundamental, but doing justice must be inseparably connected to it. This combination of doing justice and preaching judgment and therefore offering grace-goes together not only theologically and philosophically but also practically. (197)”

Might I also share this quote, which echoes a sentiment I’ve increasingly felt, sort of what my friend calls the “Democratic Party at Prayer” when Progressive Christianity seems almost lockstep in-line with the policy positions of the Democratic Party. And, to be fair, Dennis and I would both acknowledge Evangelicalism is guilty of this with the GOP.

“Another reason why Christians, especially today, cannot allow the church to be fully aligned with any particular party is the problem of “ethical package deals.” Many political parties today insist that members commit to all the proper positions on all issues. (167)”

Finally, in a quote that challenges me and my preaching:

“First, we must not think it really possible to transcend politics and simply preach the gospel. Those Christians who try to avoid all political discussions and engagement are essentially casting a vote for the social status quo. (163)”

Compassion: Living in the Spirit of St. Francis - Ilia Delio

I’ve read only one book of Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love, but as I work at a Catholic hospital with a Catholic mission director, it suddenly came to mind that my boss might have some Delio books I could borrow—and was in luck!

I can’t remember the exact wording used, but he mentioned that St. Anthony North and the CommonSpirit hospital system has a Franciscan heritage. That makes the connection to Ilia Delio understandable. Delio is a Franciscan sister and St. Anthony’s history is rooted in the Sisters of St. Francis.

Delio is quite brilliant and while this book was meant to be more accessible, little glimpses of her brilliance inevitably break through, especially her thoughts on “poverty”:

“Poverty and humility are the pillars of compassion. When we do not possess but live in openness to and dependent on one another, we live with a capacity for compassion. (44)”

“The sin of refusing our poverty is injustice. Our need to accumulate and possess everything can separate us from other people and the natural world, and we lord it over others through domination and power. (37)”

And especially this one…

“In our refusal to accept the poverty of our humanity, we may end up destroying ourselves… To live in receptivity to the gift of God’s goodness in creation is to live as a poor person, open to and dependent on the good of the human person, the good of the earth, and the good of the cosmos. (36)”

My Disability is Divine: A Joyful Witness that Defies Ableist Nonsense - Amy Kenny

This was a book I somewhat struggled with. While I appreciated Amy Kenny’s wisdom and perspectives in My Disability Is Divine, particularly her critique of ableism and the assumptions people make about those with disabilities. At times, however, I found her tone somewhat dismissive of those who might see things differently.

I was particularly struck by the tension between her admonition to “not be a jerk” near the end of the book and her description of responding to strangers who offer prayer by asking God to heal their ableism.

While I understand her frustration with unsolicited help, it seems that in challenging others’ assumptions about her, she risks making equally uncharitable assumptions about them. This struck me as particularly ironic given her own warning against dismissing those who practice their faith differently.

A Spacious Life: Trading Hustle and Hurry for the Goodness of God -

I found a lot of wisdom within this book, especially around freedom and constraints. In fact, I think in the last version of this email, I shared that I had been reading a book on how constraints make us better, so Hales’ thoughts here were well-appreciated:

“We think guardrails restrict our freedom. When freedom is freedom from constraints, we live in a world we control yet we find ourselves caged by the things we chase. (112)”

“Freedom isn’t stuffing more on your calendar to feel good enough. We’ll find freedom-not in the absence of constraints but in the presence of loving ones. (59)”

“Freedom is not simply freedom from constraints but for something—for love. (8)”

A simple way I’ve heard this explained is that as Christians we are not so much free “from,” but free “for,” meaning, like Hales says, in Christ, we find freedom from sin and death not simply so we can live our best lives now but rather so that we can be free to love and serve others.

Hales’ point about the busyness of the calendar is especially intriguing, as for some years now, the marker of status has been “busyness.” Recently, I heard on the Hidden Brain podcast that the new marker might be lack of sleep. In other words, “I’m so important I only have time to sleep 6 hours a night.” Yikes!

Take advice from Hales and trade that hustle and hurry for the goodness of God!

Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became our New Religion, and What to do about it -

Last but certainly not least, this book by Dave Zahl, which reminded me so much of a book I shared in the September version of this email, Work Pray Code by Carolyn Chen. Zahl’s book here is the more accessible, practical version with a very similar thinking, and which I might also add, echoes what Christian Smith wrote about in his book Why Religion Went Obsolete. The short of it is this—increasingly, Americans have made a “religion” out of many other things.

From the introduction, Zahl has a few especially important thoughts worth highlighting:

“Perhaps a more helpful definition of religion comes from writer David Dark. He calls it “a controlling story” or “the question of how we dispose our energies, how we see fit to organize our own lives and, in many cases, the lives of others… religion is not merely that which explains the inexplicable but the lens through which you sort the data of your days, rank your priorities, and focus your desires… A person’s religion is shorthand for the shape that lens takes—namely, the specific ways it refracts what we see and directs our longings.”

And

“Our religion is that which we rely on not just for meaning or hope but enoughness. And finally, The objects of our seculosity-food, romance, education, children, technology, and so on-aren’t somehow bad. Quite the opposite-they are by and large great. It’s only when we lean on these things for enoughness, when we co-opt them for our self-justification or make them into arbiters of salvation itself, that they turn toxic.”

Recently, I was at an employee appreciation banquet with my wife for her job. She is a manager and regularly rubs elbows with some of the C-suite, so inevitably I found myself in the middle of a conversation about everyone’s travel plans. The mantra or “rule of life (my words) of “work hard/play hard” was of course shared. I decided to buck the trend and talk about how we were in the early stages of planning a pilgrimage in Europe (very early stages). I wanted to hint that there was another way of living.

Zahl also offers this thought, that “Our religion is that which we rely on not just for meaning or hope but enoughness.” And I just can’t help but wonder, does “work hard/play hard” really offer enoughness? Or is it simply, as Steve Cuss might say, “try harder.” There is no gospel within, and I think that’s the point of what Zahl is trying to say. It’s not that work or sports is bad, it’s just that they offer no relief, it is only “try harder,” with maybe a week off here or there.

And Last but not Least..!

Have you read The Church as Community Hub?

If so, would you consider leaving a brief review on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever you purchased it?

Even a sentence or two helps other church leaders discover the book and decide whether it might be useful for their congregation.

My publisher and myself thank you!

Thank you for reading—and for helping spread the word!

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When my daughter was a little girl, one of the stories she most often chose for me to read to her at bedtime was the well-known children’s book, The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister.

Her aunt—my sister Katherine—had given her the book. And while I don’t think we have our copy anymore, I still remember reading it to her.

The story goes like this:

Far out in the sea lived a fish. No ordinary fish, however. He was the most beautiful fish in the entire ocean. His scales shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow.

The other fish admired his colorful scales and called him Rainbow Fish. “Come on, play with us, Rainbow Fish!” But Rainbow Fish was proud and swam past them…

(For copyright purposes I’m not sharing the full story text here. See link below.)

https://www.scribd.com/document/889585408/rainbow-fish

What Happens When We Run Out of Scales?

The Rainbow Fish is a wonderful children’s story, teaching young minds important lessons about sharing and friendship.

But as I prepared for this sermon, I found myself thinking about what happens after the story ends. And I kept coming back to one question:

What happens when we run out of scales?

In the book, the story ends after Rainbow Fish has given away all but one of his shiny scales. But I kept wondering, what if the story kept going?

What if another fish came along, asking for a scale? Would he have given away his very last one? And then what happens when the next fish comes along? What would he have told that fish?

Eventually, he’d have nothing left to give. Yet it would seem there would still be another fish asking—and another fish to disappoint. One fish after another would see those glittering scales and ask where they came from.

“Rainbow Fish,” the others would say. But when they came asking for a scale of their own, he would have nothing left to give. As a children’s story, it teaches an important lesson. But for us adults, things get more complicated.

What happens when we run out of scales?

When someone needs patience, but we’re irritated? When another cause asks, but we’re tired of giving? When someone needs care, but we wish they’d ask someone else?

We assume it’s up to us to produce more; more patience, more generosity, more love. As if we could somehow grow more rainbow scales.

And this is where a children’s lesson about sharing can become an exhausting demand:

I need to keep producing more of myself so I can give more of myself away.

And if I run out, that’s my fault.

So, like Rainbow Fish, we consult our friends and seek expert advice. We try new programs and practices, hoping to become better, kinder, gentler, more loving people.

But there is always another need, another request, another moment when we could have been more generous. And before long, we’re not simply asking ourselves, “Do I have anything left to give?” We’re instead wondering, “What does it say about me that I don’t want to give any more?”

It can become this endless cycle of questioning:

Have I given enough? Have I loved enough? Have I done enough to be a good person?

Every opportunity becomes another test. Every failure becomes evidence against us.

Even when we do give, we may find ourselves keeping score—hoping we’ve finally done enough, while perhaps also resenting those who seem to give less.

“I’m not perfect, but at least I’m better than them…”

Being a good person becomes quite the job.

And no matter how hard we work at it, we never quite know when we’ve done enough. Because sooner or later, another fish comes along. And What happens when we run out of scales?

Love God. Love Your Neighbor.

In our scripture reading today, religious leaders come to Jesus asking, “What is the greatest commandment?” As we discussed last week, Jesus, will not be trapped or fooled.

He answers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”

Then he adds, “And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Love God. Love your neighbor.

We know these commandments. But knowing them doesn’t mean we always keep them. And worse, even our attempts to love God and our neighbor expose how often we fail to do both. Despite our failures, we assume the solution is to try harder.

We consult experts, seek advice, and try all the more —straining to become better, kinder, more loving fish —I mean people. We try to become people who can give away our scales without ever running out.

But then Jesus says something else.

While the religious leaders are still gathered, Jesus asks them a question of his own: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?”

“The son of David,” they answer.

Then Jesus asks, quoting from the Psalms,

Asks them a hard question. “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord.” They are stumped, and have no answers.

Often, this riddle is understood as Jesus beating the religious leaders at their own game. Jesus is the smartest, wisest person among them.

Sure, maybe.

But as one commentator I read suggested, what if Jesus is trying to give them good news? They expected a Messiah like the great Israelite king David —someone who would bring political victories over oppressive rulers.

But Jesus points them toward someone greater than David, with the promise that his enemies will be put beneath his feet. One pastor I’ve read suggest a connection between these two exchanges: the command to love our neighbor and the question of who the Messiah is.

And I think the connection is this:

Christ does for us, what we cannot do for ourselves.

Try as we might, we cannot love our way into the kingdom of God. The command to love exposes our failure, however hard we try. The good news rests in what Christ has accomplished for us.

The Relief of God’s Grace

Too often, we turn Jesus into another self-help guru—someone teaching us how to become better fish, with more scales to give away —and church becomes a TED Talk about how to become our best selves.

For adults, the lesson can become: Being a good person means continually giving of yourself. And when you run out, you need to produce more.

Otherwise, what does that say about the kind of person you are?

Every opportunity becomes another test of our goodness. Every failure becomes evidence against us.

For many of us, the pressure is to prove ourselves to other people: to prove that we are caring, generous, worthwhile people. But the good news is that Jesus offers us relief from the need to keep proving ourselves.

God’s grace frees us from needing to establish our worth.

Others may still think we haven’t given enough. We may still disappoint them. But their judgment does not determine our worth and value in God’s eyes.

Better—God’s grace frees us to love our neighbors —not because we ought to do it or we need to prove our own goodness —but rather because in Christ, God’s love has been so generously given to us.

We love because Christ first loved us.

Even then, God’s abundant love doesn’t mean we possess unlimited scales. It means our limited, imperfect love no longer must establish our worthiness.

There will still be times when we fail to love well. We’ll snap at a friend or colleague. We’ll see someone in need and keep going. We’ll resent being asked to give again.

But God’s grace is still present when we fail. Our connection to God rests in Christ’s grace, even when our love falls short.

And there will also be times when we have genuinely reached our limits. We can honestly say, “This is my last scale. I don’t have another to give. I’ve done what I can.” We can trust God is not dependent on our efforts, without treating every limit as a verdict of our goodness.

We still care about our neighbors. Their needs still matter. We give and share where we are able. But we no longer must prove our worth through meeting them.

God Is Already in the Room

Once a week, I work an overnight shift as a chaplain at St. Anthony North Hospital.

Being up late is hard for me, And no matter how I plan my day, by the time I finish rounding, it’s about ten at night—well past when I’m usually in bed—and I’m tired.

I try to prepare. I drink plenty of water. I’ve even started bringing a snack. But after encounters with patients or staff, I often find myself wishing I could have done more, offered more… been more.

What I keep trying to remind myself is that I’m not manufacturing God’s loving presence for these patients and staff.

I’m simply trying to carry it.

Just a few weeks ago, I was rounding the halls near the end of the Broncos game.

I kept sneaking a peek into patient rooms, looking for someone watching so I could follow along. After getting a few nervous looks from nurses as I lingered outside doorways, I rounded a corner and nearly cheered.

There was the game, on a big screen in a waiting room.

Finally, I thought. I can sit in peace for a few moments and watch the final minutes. As I approached, I noticed a man sitting on the couch near the television. He was watching but didn’t seem quite as enthralled as me.

I said hello and introduced myself as a chaplain.

“I don’t envy that job,” he said. “You have to walk into some hard rooms.”

“Yes, I do,” I agreed.

He mentioned he was religious, So I told him what helps me walk through those doors:

I trust that God is already in the room ahead of me.

That my task is to be a reminder of God’s love & presence. He then mentioned that he was there for a family member who was near death.

Suddenly, the outcome of the Broncos game didn’t seem quite so important.

In that moment, I offered to him what I had to give.

“God’s peace be with you,” I said.

And then I left —perhaps still a little annoyed that I hadn’t gotten to watch the end of the game, but also grateful for the opportunity to share God’s love and kindness with a neighbor.

I’m still learning to trust what I told that man: God is already here.

God’s loving presence doesn’t begin or end with what I’m able to offer.

The gift Jesus offers us isn’t another demand to become better humans or grow more scales to give away.

The good news is Jesus himself.

Jesus helps us love our neighbors and fills in where we fall short.

Thanks be to God.

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Increasingly, within modern American Christianity, Jesus has come to be seen as a sidekick rather than a Savior—someone who affirms and celebrates us, but hardly challenges or shapes us, let alone saves us.

In this sense, the “good news” simply becomes “good job.”

In this piece, I’d like to examine the limits of such thinking, utilizing a sermon clip I encountered on social media and a ’90s-era bumper sticker slogan. Coming along with me on this conversation are Andrew Root’s books Churches and the Crisis of Decline and Evangelism in the Age of Despair, as well as Mildred Bangs Wynkoop’s A Theology of Love, as I ask this central question:

What happens when Jesus becomes a sidekick rather than a Savior?

A Sermon About a Trans God

Recently, I came across a clip shared on social media from a sermon given by an Episcopal priest. I’d rather not highlight the social media account because my intent here is not to shame or belittle the preacher, the Rev. Flourish Klink, but rather to quibble with some elements of Klink’s theology and seek to draw out broader implications for progressive Mainline churches.

Thanks to ChatGPT, I was able to find both the full video of the sermon from the church’s YouTube page, as well as the full text of the sermon provided on Klink’s website.

I’ll put links to the video and sermon text here: [VIDEO] & [SERMON TEXT]

Klink is an Episcopal priest who uses they/them pronouns and is currently Assistant Priest at Christ & Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan. The sermon was delivered March 21, 2026, at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City during its Celebration of Trans Joy and Resilience. I’ll mostly reference Klink by name rather than they/them simply for readability.

In the full sermon text, there are some interesting theological claims. While I’ll share some of them here, I want to reaffirm that my aim is not to belittle or mock Klink as a clergyperson, as I think the original social-media clip I first saw was attempting to do—and why I am not sharing it here—but rather to parse out some of the implications of what Klink claims.

The “headline” is this: Klink explicitly argues that God is nonbinary and trans and connects the Resurrection to transition.

“God is trans. It is not even a particularly convoluted theological statement to make.”

I found that statement a little confusing because, within the same sermon, Klink also asserts that “God is beyond human categorizations like gender” while then arguing that “God is non-binary,” which to me seems itself a human categorization.

Klink then argues that Mary “assigned a gender at birth” to Jesus. Klink also asserts that to deny that God is trans is to deny the divinity of Christ, which seems like a fairly significant leap to me.

Now, I’m going to stop here because my point in this blog isn’t really to argue with Klink’s interpretation, but rather Klink’s theology. And yes, for my purposes here, I am arguing that the assertion that God is trans is an interpretation that stems from Klink’s broader theological perspective.

And lest it seem that I am particularly seeking to pick on Klink, there are things in the sermon I would absolutely affirm—namely, that God cares for the downtrodden and abides with those who suffer.

Klink says:

“God promises us life, joy, beauty, dignity. God made us joyful and beautiful and authentic and wise.”

But Klink doesn’t leave it at that and, in fact, goes further. God does this “…because our God is trans.”

And this is where I would pause.

Must God Be Like Us to Love Us?

Let me say this first: I’m not particularly troubled by the idea that God is beyond human categorizations like sex and gender. Nor does the idea that “God is trans” itself cause shivers to go up my spine. As I’ve stated above, I feel like that statement is somewhat contradictory—but that’s not what I want to focus on.

Rather, what I want to take issue with is the idea that “God promises us life, joy, beauty, dignity. God made us joyful and beautiful and authentic and wise” because God is trans.

A question immediately comes to mind:

Must God share our identity in order to love us?

Perhaps this is where context is helpful. Again, this sermon was given during a Celebration of Trans Joy and Resilience at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine around the time of the Trans Day of Visibility, so context does matter. Klink is speaking these words as encouragement to a particular audience that likely included trans people, or at least those who know and love trans people.

But the more I sat with it, the more I kept coming back to a quote from Andrew Root:

“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” (203).

I’ve often seen the statement “God is queer AF” within progressive Christian spaces. Again, I struggle to understand how this is not using human categorizations to define God, but perhaps this is my own shortcoming.

Nonetheless, to further my argument, let me use a far less controversial statement that has similarly been shared far and wide: “God is my copilot.”

God Is My Copilot

While the prevalence of “God is my copilot” bumper stickers has greatly decreased since the late ’90s or early 2000s—I recently wondered with my kids why the prevalence of bumper stickers in general has declined so much—the idea of “God is my copilot” gets at what I’m trying to say here.

If God is my copilot, I’m still the pilot.

(For what it’s worth, I do remember hearing critiques of this logic even back then.)

And increasingly, within modern American Christianity, we do not want a Savior. We simply want a sidekick—someone who affirms who I am and what I’m about rather than someone who rescues and redeems me from my own brokenness.

And this is not simply a progressive problem. “God is my copilot” certainly wasn’t a slogan born out of progressive Mainline Christianity. The broader temptation is to make God into someone who accompanies and affirms the life and identity I have already chosen for myself.

Talking about the divine-human interaction, Wynkoop writes:

“if God is limited by man’s experience, something is said about God that puts an impossible limitation on Him in the Christian view” (224).

And this is why I increasingly struggle with “I am enough” language being used within many Mainline church contexts.

If “I am enough” means I am already everything I need to be, I certainly do not need a Savior. At most, I need someone who encourages me and supports me in the struggle. I need a sidekick, a good friend maybe, but certainly not someone who will challenge and confront me or call me to account.

(Perhaps there is also a lesson here for modern friendships and relationships.)

Here again, Wynkoop is helpful as she notes the danger in a philosophical perspective that assumes:

“man is a projection of Deity, or the finite projection of Deity, or the finite experience of Deity…Every man is a spar of the divine nature. He is a ‘lost’ fragment of God whose ‘salvation’ consists in merging again into God” (224).

We Need a Savior

This is not to say that God does not deeply love us and seek reconciliation with us. A beloved passage tells us that God takes extraordinary efforts on our behalf.

As we read in John 3:16:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

There are a couple of interesting things there, but most importantly for my argument, Jesus makes clear that what humans need is not a sidekick, but a Savior.

We need rescuing from something.

And I think the larger conversation with Nicodemus makes the point even clearer. Nicodemus comes to Jesus under the cover of darkness, and Christ’s invitation to him is not simply, “You’re fine as you are.”

Rather Jesus tells him: “You must be born again.”

In Root’s Evangelism in the Age of Despair, Root notes how EASY it is to find “friends,” those who will support us when things are good. But when life really hits the skids, a sad-face emoji may be all that can be counted on—real life actions are just too much.

God, however, is a minister—something Root writes about in Faith Formation in a Secular Age—and we evangelize not by telling someone they are fine and good, or even merely that God affirms them for who they are, but rather that in the midst of their pain, suffering, challenge, and brokenness, God is with them seeking to bring rescue (my words).

One other thing I want to highlight from Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus is that Christ’s invitation to Nicodemus is the same as it is to you and me, regardless of our gender or sexuality: be born again.

And that invitation is not dependent upon God sharing our own gender or sexuality.

God loves trans people not because God must first be trans, but because God is love.

And if I may add this: If I don’t share someone’s identity—or insist that God does—can I still share good news with them, or anyone else?

I believe I have good news to share with every person I meet, not in and of myself, and especially not because God is like them, but precisely because God loves them, I can proclaim the good news to them; “God forgives you, and God is here for you—whoever you are.”

Good News or “Good Job”?

Perhaps I’m out of bounds here, but increasingly I see within some expressions of progressive Christianity—which I think Klink’s sermon illustrates—a theological move toward telling people, “You’re all good, and Jesus is here to affirm that within you.”

Again, Jesus becomes a sidekick, but not a Savior.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, people are like, “Nah man, I’m good.”

Increasingly, I’m convinced of this: people aren’t looking for someone to tell them they are special. They want someone to tell them they are loved and forgiven.

And you want to know what the real good news is?

If I may be so bold, it’s not simply “God made us who we are.”

It’s that God loves us in our brokenness—and comes to rescue and redeem us, no matter who we are. That is as true for me as it is for Klink or anyone else.1

A sidekick affirms the story I’m already telling about myself.

A Savior loves me enough to enter my pain and brokenness, speaks a gracious yes and no to me, rescues me, and transforms me.

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What do you remember about the fall of twenty eleven?

The final Harry Potter movie had just been released.

Didn’t quite expect that one to land that quick. Okay. So no. Steve Corell had just left the office. Apple had just introduced Siri. And for Broncos fans, Tebomania was going crazy.

I still have a Tim Tebow jersey hanging in my closet.

But more than that, I remember the thick of the twenty twelve election season and things were tense. Or at least other people seemed tense. While I felt strongly committed to my own choice, I found the stakes that others attached to the election somewhat humorous. I remember writing even a blog post suggesting that many considered the election to be life or death, because they themselves might not have many elections left.

I was, in a way, being unkind to a particular voting block. Maybe because for me the election simply did not seem that serious. Perhaps my youth or social location insulated me from some of the stakes that others felt. Whatever the reason, the election season did not feel that consequential to me then.

Fast forward, here we are, fifteen years later, and wow, do things feel different.

Imagine I am hardly alone in feeling that increased tension.

In recent months, this election has been described as quote a philosophical war to save the greatest nation in history. An election we must win because our whole democracy is at stake. No pressure.

The pressures may be different, but beneath each line the same message. Everything depends upon your choice.

Years ago, even back in twenty eleven, it did not seem quite as true. Maybe that’s simply hindsight or rose colored glasses, but back then it seemed like one could reasonably justify not voting or even maybe wasting a vote on a third party candidate. But not today. Not when congressional races like my own eighth congressional district in Colorado was decided by only a few thousand votes.

Not when statewide policies are enacted by seemingly the narrowest of margins, not when relatively a sm a small number of votes in a few states can decide the electoral college.

More and more it seems like everything depends upon your choice. Your choice could determine which policies become law. Your choice could determine which party to holds the House or the Senate. Your choice could even help determine who becomes president.

And if everything depends upon your choice, then you had better get that choice exactly right. There’s no room for uncertainty, no room for incomplete information, no room to misjudge what the future might hold. Everything, it seems, is riding on you.

The Ultimate Gotcha Question

What if I told you this morning that in our reading Jesus himself was actually presented with such a high stakes decision?

A choice which it a choice in which either answer could carry life or death consequences, a choice designed to make everything depend upon what he said next.

In our reading from Matthew, we see the Pharisees trying to trap Jesus with the ultimate gotcha question. First, they they they butter him up.

Teacher, we know that you are sincere. You teach the ways of God in accordance with truth and show deference to no one. You do not regard people with partiality.

Like a good political reporter, we might say.

They are setting him up for the real gotcha question.

Tell us then, what do you think? Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?

They think they have got him with this question. No amount of talking points or generic answers will get him out of this. Either answer will carry devastating consequences.

Here’s why. Roman taxes were oppressive, placing heavy economic burdens on first century Jewish residents. Even worse, they’re often collected by fellow Jews.

If you remember Zacchaeus’s story.

So to say yes to paying taxes would have aligned Jesus with the emperor and alienated him from his own people. But the opposite choice was arguably worse. If Jesus denied the responsibility to pay taxes, he could have been accused of fostering rebellion or sedition and face immediate consequences from Roman rulers who would add absolutely zero tolerance for such.

Jesus himself grew up only a few miles from Sephorus, a Jewish city that had been destroyed by Roman forces after a failed rebellion and whose inhabitants had been sold into slavery. It was later rebuilt during Ju Jesus’ youth, and some scholars speculate that Jesus himself might have participated in in the rebuilding.

So Jesus would have understood what it meant to go against Roman authority. He could he would have understood what could have happened.

So the Pharisees in their political scheming wanted to make everything seem as if it all depended upon his choice.

Say yes and align yourself with Caesar, say no and align yourself with a rebellion.

Jesus surprises them. Bring me bring me a bring me a denarius, he says.

Perhaps he holds in his hand, flipping it over.

I wonder if you know maybe he’s spinning it on the ground. And he says, whose head is on this? Whose title?

Sort of flummox they say the emperors.

And Jesus responds Give to therefore to Caesar, give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperors, and to God the things that are God’s.

Not the answer they wanted.

Sort of confused and flummox they walk away.

What Belongs to God?

Now often we hear Jesus’ answer as advice for dividing life into separate categories. Determine what belongs to Caesar, determine what belongs to God, then make sure everything ends up in its proper category.

This way of thinking has deeply shaped American life. Religion is allowed to own, excuse me, religion is allowed to occupate, occupy its own separate sphere, personal worship, personal beliefs, personal piety. But increasingly it appears that everything that is actually capable of changing the world belongs to Caesar.

Our institutions, our elections, our future even our deepest moral and spiritual convictions must eventually be translated into political choices.

I’ll be honest and admit that this year there are measures on the ballot that I myself am struggling to decide between. I’ve even considered leaving parts of my ballot blank. But this year especially, it doesn’t seem like that’s an option. It seems I must choose one side or the other, yes no.

So while we may still speak about God, we begin acting as though our choices are ultimately what determines what happens next. Choose correctly and the country can be saved. But choose wrongly and everything will be lost.

But notice what Jesus says here. He doesn’t merely say, Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. He also says, Give to God the things that are God’s. And I just wonder about this.

What if the things that belong to God are not just simply one more category sitting besides the things that belong to Caesar?

What if Jesus is asking whether Caesar and the choices placed before us are not really as ultimate as they appear?

Because as Caesar is not ultimate, then neither are the choices placed before us.

And assumed within Jesus’ answer is actually some really good news. Elections have real power, they have real consequences, but they are not ultimate. Our choices matter, but the future does not rest ultimately upon them. God has got this.

And I know that’s a big, perhaps overly simplistic theological statement to make. We may understand God’s work differently in the world or have theological, different theological lenses around how we interpret or state that to be true.

But foundational throughout Jesus’ life and ministry was his conviction that all of life was bound up within God.

Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, he said.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind.

Even before the cross, in the moment that was quite literally life and death, Jesus prayed,

My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, yet not what I want.But what you want.

Jesus did not deny the seriousness of the consequences or the choices before him. He did not pretend that his actions carried no consequences. But neither did he act as though everything depended upon what he chose next. He trusted that life and the future itself was held within the love and care and provision of God.

And friends, that is good news. That is good news that Jesus offers to us even today.

I recognize that election seasons and election outcomes may threaten some of us and some of our neighbors in ways that do not threaten all of us. I cannot tell another person that their fear is exaggerated or that the consequences they may face are unreal.

But this theological claim does not stem from my own privilege. It begins with Jesus, a first century Jewish man living under Roman occupation, answering a question that potentially had life or death consequences.

Jesus does not deny the seriousness of the choice. He denies that the choice is ultimate.

So I’m not saying that everything will be fine regardless of what we choose. What I am saying is that our choice does not get the final word. No choice gets the final word. And that the future does not depend upon our ability to make every choice correctly.

Because no political outcome can place the world beyond the reach of God.

And friends, when we trust in this promise, it frees us not from responsibility or accountability, no, but to instead act with love and generosity and joy rather than fear.

Learning to Let Go

Think about a work or family or a personal relationship that has started to go sideways. You know, you can sense, right, that things are beginning to fall apart, or you know, the relationship with your boss is a little tense, or you have a you have a son or daughter or or child, that’s just it’s kind of things are slipping away, you feel.

We often put all the more energy into evaluating everything we’re saying, everything we’re doing.

We place every word under a mic microscope. We analyze every decision. We’re afraid that one wrong move might cost us the relationship or the job.

Does that ever really work?

Often the fear only makes things worse.

But when we live and act from a place of secure love, we do not abandon our responsibilities. We still make choices, we still do our part, but we no longer act as if the entire relationship depends on us getting every decision right.

We trust that we are held by something larger than our own performance. We trust that love has got us.

In the same way, faith does not free us from making difficult decisions or even the consequences of wrong choices. It frees us from believing that everything ultimately depends upon our choice.

Perhaps the most clearest picture of what fear does to us comes from the two two thousand three movie Finding Nemo.

At its heart, the story is about a father who deeply loves his son, but whose love has been shaped by devastating loss and fear. As a result, he feels an overwhelming need to control. Marlin and his son, Nemo, or clownfish, if you remember the movie.

And before Nemo is born, Marlin loses his wife and nearly all their eggs in a barracuda attack.

Nemo is the only surviving child. And after that, Marlin vows to keep him safe. But Marlin’s love is shaped by fear. He watches everything Nemo does. He anticipates every possible danger, acting as if Nemo’s safety depends on his ability to make every decision correctly.

Then on Nemo’s first day of school, Marlin’s worst fear happens. Nemo is captured by scuba divers and taken far from home. Marlon eventually searches for him, running into Dory, and they swim all the way to Sydney.

At last, father and son are reunited. But just as about their just as they’re about to return home, Dory is caught up in a fishing net, if you remember, with a school of other fish.

Nemo knows what they need to do. Swim downward together, right? But Marlin has just gotten his son back, and he cannot bear the thought of losing him again.

Nemo looks at his father and says, Trust me.

And Marlon does something that fear has made almost impossible. He lets go. Nemo swims into the net.

They get all the fish swimming down together, the net breaks, and the fish escape.

Marlin discovers that loving Nemo does not mean controlling every decision that Nemo makes. For once, he lets go of the belief that everything depends upon him. He lets go and he trusts.

Seasons of fear and anxiety, like Jesus in first century Palestine, or the one we experience today in our own election season, have ways of making Marlins of us all.

We’re told that disaster is only one wrong choice away. We are told that everything depends on getting this one decision correctly. So we tighten our grip, we analyze every possibility, we try to control what happens next.

Please hear this good news this morning. History does not depend upon our shoulders or our choices. Yes, elections matter. They have real consequences, but they are not ultimate.

We can choose, we can vote, we can act, but we do so from the secure belonging of God.

Not from the terror that everything depends upon us.

In the middle of our fear God says, Trust me. Everything does not depend on your choice. The future rests in me, God.

And friends, that is good news. Thanks be to God.

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An Unexpected Point of Agreement

As I’m writing this, I’ve recently interviewed two authors who are perhaps on opposite sides of the theological spectrum. Yet, in my conversations with them for Future Christian, I think they both made essentially the same argument, just in reverse.

, in her new book In Defense of Evangelicalism, basically argues that Evangelicalism IS and SHOULD BE something other than what many people have come to associate with it: racist, judgmental, and so forth.

Obviously, there are exceptions, and one could disagree with some of her points throughout the book about how evangelicals should live out their faith. But I think she’s ultimately trying to make the point that Evangelicalism has an identity and a set of convictions worth maintaining/recovering, rather than simply abandoning the tradition because of its failures.

In a similar, but reversed way, in a recent podcast conversation I had with Dr. Francisco Herrera, he made the point that Mainline traditions can and should be evangelical.

We were talking about an article he had written for The Christian Century, “Donald McGavran’s Complicated Legacy.” Herrera was explicit that he is a progressive Christian and certainly has his bona fides in that space. But he was equally insistent that evangelism matters, saying in our conversation:

“It stupefies me that whenever I mention the importance of evangelism or church planting, or how important it is to bring people to Jesus, a lot of my colleagues look at me funny.”

Herrera’s article was quite intriguing and worth a read—I’d recommend checking it out.

Becoming Who We Already Are

I guess what I’m saying is that I think both writers—in different ways—are calling their respective traditions to be what they are and should be. Neither is arguing that their tradition needs to become something else, but rather that each has lost sight of something essential to its own identity.

This is one of my favorite things about doing the podcast—talking to writers and thinkers from so many different perspectives, and sometimes discovering surprising points of agreement.

Neither of these episodes is out yet. Bonnie’s will be released in about three weeks, with Herrera’s coming the week after. So I suppose it will be interesting to hear them one after the other.

A Late-Night Addition

I’d already scheduled this post and was trying to settle into bed when another thought popped into my head (added the next day).

I think both Kristian and Herrera are also fighting back against implicit claims within their respective traditions—such as, in the case of Evangelicalism, that one can be a good Christian without being concerned about racial and systemic injustice.

And this is where the connection to Herrera’s article is especially intriguing, because he argues that many Evangelicals took McGavran’s work and used it to justify their lack of racial integration or concern for racial justice.

Yet, as Herrera notes both in his article and in my conversation with him, what ultimately drove McGavran toward the Evangelical world was the strong resistance he encountered to evangelism and church planting within his (and my) denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), as well as the broader Mainline context.

So, I guess what I mean to say is this: I think both writers are pushing back against the sort of poison pills that have taken hold within their respective contexts—that Evangelicals can’t care about racial justice, and that Mainliners can’t care about evangelism. Neither of those things should be true. And yet, somehow, we’ve come to treat them as though they are.

As always, if you haven’t already, please listen and subscribe to the Future Christian podcast.

In Other News

My new book, The Church as Community Hub: Sharing Spaces to Help Neighborhoods Thrive, is now a month old!!

The book offers practical guidance and real-world examples for congregations seeking to use their buildings, relationships, and resources to support neighborhood flourishing throughout the week.

You can order directly from Church Publishing using code HUB20 for 20% off. Bulk-order options are also available for churches, cohorts, classes, and other groups.

One BIG request: If you bought a copy of the book on Amazon already—thank you!—would you please take a moment to write a review for the book there? Reviews really do help other readers discover it.

And I am still offering a promotion where new paid subscribers to this Substack can get a copy of my book.

Well, that’s it for now. Nothing too complicated this week, just some things I’ve been thinking about.

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This past Sunday I had the pleasure of guest-speaking at a friend’s church. I was in town for a conference and stayed a day longer so as to guest-speak at the church.

You can read my full sermon via the link at the bottom, but for the purposes of this blog, I’d like to share again the close of my sermon. Because as sometimes happens in preaching, one of the more interesting conversations came afterward.

That conversation got me thinking more about what actually gets me through the door of a hospital room—and, more fundamentally, what I understand myself to be doing there in the first place.

What follows here in the text box is the close of the sermon:

Providing dignity to patients who are not wearing pants.

After the sermon, I heard from another chaplain who mentioned that he too was quite introverted. What helped him—and the same advice he offered to other chaplains—was remembering that in entering hospital rooms, we are providing dignity to patients because we have to ask permission to enter.

He joked that most people in the hospital aren’t wearing pants—“we are!”

I shared how I’d heard something similar from another chaplain friend of mine, who herself took solace in the fact that she gave patients “the ability to kick me out of the room.”

I certainly appreciated this other chaplain’s feedback, and it was somewhat helpful. But the more I thought about it, the more I found it ultimately unsatisfying, for this reason: I’m a chaplain not simply because I want to provide people with dignity. Not that I don’t want to provide people with grace and dignity, of course. But what gets me through the door is not the hope that I might provide people with a modicum of respect, but that I might be able to share good news with people.

To be clear, I recognize my role is not to proselytize. I have no intentions of walking people through the Romans Road or the ABCs. That would be both inappropriate within that context and, in my opinion, untrue to what evangelism really is, at least as I have come to understand it through people like Andrew Root and his Evangelism in the Age of Despair book.

But more than that, I consider myself an ordained minister over and above my role as a chaplain.

To say it differently, I often say that I bleed the gospel of Jesus, not denominational brand colors, when people question or find curious my dalliances within many different denominations and contexts.

And this gets at something I sometimes find frustrating about the chaplain profession. Not too infrequently, I hear other chaplains lift up a sort of milquetoast, pluralistic, “all-roads” approach to spirituality. I’m not meaning to say they are wrong, but rather that this approach is wrong for me and for my calling and ordination as a minister of the gospel.

As recently shared in a post he wrote about the creation of a liturgy for hospital chaplains and others involved in medical assistance in dying procedures, he too wondered whether the CPE-type approach has become too formative of the role of ministers and chaplains, rather than the other way around. He writes:

the idea that pastoral care both normatively and descriptively can be separated from moral or doctrinal judgements…is what I have called the ‘CPE-ification’ of pastoral care, in which a set of techniques developed in the context of multifaith hospital chaplaincy — techniques quite appropriate in their place — come to be seen as the entirety of Christian pastoral care.

But this ideal of judgement-less pastoral care is a very strange and attenuated understanding of pastoral care from a Christian perspective, because Christian pastoral care is aimed at bringing people to deeper intimacy with Christ, to a deeper knowledge of God’s love for them, and to a life marked by love of God and neighbor. That is, the goal of Christian pastoral care isn’t just to help people find peace and meaning, or something like that. Rather, it is to announce to them, in myriad different ways, the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection for their specific situations and to invite them into new life in him. Such a pastoral presence certainly should be loving, kind, and make use of helpful chaplaincy techniques, but pastoral care isn’t reducible to this.

Ben asks—or at least implies—a sort of interesting question in his full piece, and it’s one we should consider given that many chaplains are ordained: Are we ministers of Word and Sacrament first? Or are we first and foremost institutional chaplains?

For me, the answer is fairly clear.

I’m an evangelist first and foremost. My role as a chaplain is one of the ways I practice that task of bringing good news.

Let me finish with this.

Not long ago, I entered the room of a patient who was in significant distress and had been physically restrained in the hospital bed.

I willingly entered that room, not because I thought I could offer some measure of dignity—frankly, I’m not sure how much dignity one feels while strapped to a hospital bed—but because I wanted to remind this patient of the love and grace of God.

I wanted, in whatever way the moment allowed, to share with this person, God’s love and forgiveness.

In that visit, the patient was not particularly receptive to my presence. I prayed silently myself and left the room when the opportunity arose.

On another occasion, I entered the room of another patient who was also physically restrained. This time, I had been paged by staff because the patient had begun raising spiritual questions.

Again, I wasn’t sure how much dignity my knocking on the door could offer to someone strapped to a hospital bed. In this instance, it was a bit nerve-wracking based on what I had been told about such questions. But I knew why I was willing to enter—because I wanted to share the love and grace of God. And I trusted that God was already out in front of me, in that room.

During our conversation, the patient began talking about how difficult it was to forgive oneself.

To which I said, “Receiving God’s grace is sometimes the hardest part.”

In both instances, in good CPE fashion, I did not try to force an agenda. I did not walk into either room determined to manufacture a spiritual conversation or get someone to respond in a particular way.

But neither did I enter purely to provide dignity or a calm presence.

I entered in the hope that, in whatever way the moment allowed, I might share good news with someone in crisis.

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Draw Near With Faith

Woe to a church that calls evil good

A few months ago, the Anglican Church of Canada released for trial use a document entitled “Pastoral Liturgies at the Time of Death in Contexts of Medically Assisted Dying.” This is a liturgy for use by Anglican priests at the bedsides of those who will be shortly intentionally killed by their doctors. I am an Anglican priest serving in the ACC and some…

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a month ago · 63 likes · 6 comments · Ben Crosby

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Philippians 3:4-14 NRSV

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: ⁵circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; ⁶as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. ⁷Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. ⁸More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ

⁹and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. ¹⁰I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, ¹¹if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. ¹²Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. ¹³Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

Excited for a new shirt

Have you ever had an item of clothing, perhaps a new shirt, a jacket, an outfit that you’re really excited to wear on a first day of school, first day of work, for a social event, only for that outfit to be spoiled before you could get to events.

When I was growing up, in my family money was kind of tight, so shopping at second-hand stores or getting hand-me-downs was a fairly regular occurrence. Now I didn’t really know any different, so it didn’t really bother me. That is until one day in fifth grade.

I attended a Christian school where my mom taught, and another family, perhaps knowing we could use them, offered us some hand-me-down clothes.

Again, I had nothing against hand-me-downs, and for me the excitement of getting something new, whether it was technically new or just new to me, overwrote any sorts of unease I might have about it belonging previously to someone else.

And in this particular bag I found a real treasure.

A crisp white Colorado t-shirt.

I remember it.

I remember seeing it had Colorado emblazoned across the front, I think in turquoise letters with perhaps a mountain background, but best of all, it was my size.

So I grabbed it and I was excited to put it into my drawer, in my dresser drawer, and put it into my weekly rotation of wearing to school. A few days later I put it on and I felt proud. I felt confident.

I felt like I looked the part.

Then at recess, a girl walked up to me and said:

That used to be my shirt.

Every bit of confidence left my body.

I didn’t know whether she had told anyone else, but honestly it did not matter.

Fifth grade me had just discovered that the shirt I had proudly worn to school had been once a girl’s shirt. No offense. Girls, females in the room.

Somehow, somehow, I made it through the rest of the day. I went home and I took off the shirt and I stuffed it deep into the recesses of my dresser.

Never, never to be worn again.

The thing I had been proud and excited to wear had suddenly become a source of shame and embarrassment. The shirt itself had not changed.

What changed was that I had been found out.

For a few hours I felt confident, I felt like I belonged, I felt like I looked the part. Then one sentence changed something, exposed something that I did not know I was hiding.

That used to be my shirt.

Have you ever experienced something like that?

Have you ever worked hard to appear confident, qualified, worthy, all while fearing that someone might expose you or discover you as lacking?

What if someone sees through the surface? What if someone finds me as lacking?

What if I’m found out?

Looking the Part

The same fear I think can creep into our Christian faith.

Growing up myself as a conservative Christian, I learned that looking the part often meant being a good kid. Not cussing, not listening to secular music, certainly not smoking or drinking. Being a good Christian meant not doing certain things.

But beneath all those rules was a fear of being found out.

What if I made a mistake? What if I did something wrong? What if people discover that I’m not nearly as good as I’m trying to be?

Now that I find myself more often in progressive Christian contexts, the expectations may be different, but I think the fear is remarkably similar.

Looking the part can mean using the right language, supporting the right causes, condemning certain actions. And once again, the fear is being found out.

Except now, when your fifth grade classmate walks up to you and says, “That used to be my shirt,” she’s not just telling you.

She’s also taking a video of it and blasting it all over the internet for you to be publicly shamed.

You may not be merely found out, you might be publicly also called out.

What if I say the wrong thing? What if I’ve not kept up with the right language? What if people discover that I am not on the right side of an issue?

In one version of Christianity we fear being exposed as sinners, in another version of Christianity we fear being exposed as being on the wrong side.

I think the expectations are different, but I think that the anxiety is remarkably similar.

What if people discover that I’m not nearly as good, faithful, or righteous as I’m trying to appear?

We work so hard to look the part, I think, because we’re afraid of being found out.

Now again, the point is not that avoiding destructive behavior is bad, nor is the point that pursuing justice is unfaithful. The problem is when we expect those things to establish our righteousness, to assure us that we’re good enough on our own.

Because there will always be another rule to follow, there will always be another statement to make, there will always be another way to be found lacking.

And no matter how good the appearance becomes, the fear remains:

What happens if I am found out?

Paul Looked the Part

The Apostle Paul was writing, as I read this morning, to a group of early Christians. In the passage we read, he’s pushing back against some teachers who insisted that following Jesus meant looking the part through practices such as circumcision.

In verse 2, before the section we read this morning, Paul is actually suggesting that such practices can become destructive.

Paul then lists all the ways he looks the part. He came from the right family, he went to the right schools, he advocated for all the right causes.

If anyone’s credentials could withstand scrutiny, it was the Apostle Paul’s. If anyone could be confident that they would not be found lacking, it was Paul.

Yet he said that none of those credentials could give him what he found in Christ.

Compared with knowing Christ, Paul considered it all rubbish.

Looking the part could establish Paul’s reputation, but it could not establish his righteousness. What mattered to him was gaining Christ, knowing Christ, and sharing in Christ’s suffering.

But if we’re not careful, we can turn even this into yet another requirement, a religious performance, another way of looking the part.

We can stop trying to look righteous through the law and instead begin trying to look righteous through the strength of our faith.

But still the same fear remains.

Have I believed strongly enough? Have I been faithful enough?

But what if I am still found lacking?

The Faith of Christ

And this is where another reading of the text I think becomes intriguing.

In verse nine, the NRSV in the footnotes suggests that the passage that the righteousness comes not from the law but through faith in Christ.

Now again, I think at first glance this can sound like yet another requirement. Now I need to believe hard enough. I need to have enough faith.

And once again, how do I prove that I have enough faith?

Through my own actions.

But as the footnote in the NRSV suggests, that same phrase can also be translated, the faith of Christ.

And I think this is helpful, at least to me, because it is so easy for me to read what follows as yet another encouragement for me to press on, to try harder, to look the part, to not be found out.

Now, to be clear, faith in Christ is not a wrong translation, but many of us have been taught, including myself, to hear Christian faith primarily in terms of our own efforts.

Like I remember seeing Philippians 3:14 as motivational posters at my Christian school posted on the wall.

I press on towards the goal.

The message I received was kind of simple.

Work harder.

Keep trying, become a better Christian.

Not bad things per se. But Paul says that his righteousness comes neither from following the law or from believing hard enough.

It comes through the faithfulness of Christ and what Christ has already accomplished.

Now this may seem like a small distinction, but I think it changes so much.

Because if righteousness depends on our actions, on our ability to perform, our ability to press on, then Paul is simply exchanging one set of rules for another.

And we are left with the same exhausting fear that we might eventually be found lacking.

But our participation in Christ does not depend on our own efforts alone. It begins with Christ’s faithful action already completed within us and at work within us.

How does this happen though? How does this happen within us?

How does the life of Christ become active within our lives?

Permeation

Again, as I shared when I was growing up in church, I heard Paul’s instructions to press on as another way of looking the part.

Growing up Baptist, we would have never said that salvation is something we had to earn.

But sometimes we lived as if we need to prove that we were truly Christian and to make sure we were never found out otherwise.

Like I don’t think this is what Paul is saying. He’s not telling us to try harder to look the part.

As one commentator writes, God’s agency accompanies and interpenetrates human agency.

Another source describes this like:

Permeation.

Permeation is what happens when a fluid spreads through and penetrates something, sort of like a wood stain.

A good wood stain does not merely rest on the surface. That’s paint.

A wood stain moves through something and throughout something and soaks in.

And I think this image can help us grasp what Paul is saying here.

Christ’s faithfulness is not merely painted over us, the life of Christ is now at work within us.

Our righteousness does not depend on maintaining surface appearance.

Christ has made us his own, and the life of Christ is now permeating our lives. Christ is at work within us, beneath the surface, transforming us from within.

And to me, this is really good news.

Because we may be afraid that once the layers of our surface level are pulled back, we will be exposed as lacking, our inadequacies will be exposed.

And while beneath the surface there will be imperfections, blemishes, knots even.

God’s grace is not a paint that can be simply peeled away.

God’s grace has soaked into the grains of our lives.

And when the surface is stripped away, what is revealed is not our imperfections. What is revealed is Christ already at work within us.

Christ has made us his own.

Christ is permeating our lives.

And this is why pressing on is not another religious performance. We’re not manufacturing faithfulness. Christ is producing faithfulness within us.

And because Christ is still at work within us, we are still in process.

On the Other Side of the Door

As Dennis shared, I work as a part-time hospital chaplain. Every [week I walk the halls of a hospital in Colorado] as a chaplain.

Now as someone who is fairly introverted, how about the other chaplains in the room? But speaking for myself, walking into a room of strangers is not something I enjoy at all.

But I am helped by the fact that I somewhat look the part.

From when I began my chaplaincy training, even as recently as a month ago, I am sometimes mistaken for a doctor.

Now certainly that reflects some measure of privilege, but I will take whatever help I can get.

Because for me, walking into a room full of strangers, dealing with pain, suffering, and trauma is not my idea of a good time whatsoever.

And it’s even more so scary when the door is closed.

There’s something about an open door that makes the whole thing feel far more invited. When the door’s open, again I don’t know about y’all here, but when the door is open, you know, I can kinda walk by, peek inside, get a sense of what’s going on in the room.

And if I really need to, I can take another lap around the unit to work up some courage to go in.

And then I can walk in.

But when the door is closed, that is like an entirely different story.

Most of us here, and obviously our fellow chaplains, have spent some time in the hospital. And I don’t know about you, but I imagine that if hospital doors are anything like they are in Colorado here, they can be quite imposing, especially when they’re closed.

And my job requires me to walk up to one of those closed doors, knowing only the slightest bit about what might be happening on the other side of that door, and enter in the hope of offering some measure of spiritual support.

A few weeks ago I was paged to support a family after death.

It was about ten thirty at night, and I had just begun settling down into the sleep room. I changed clothes, I think I was sitting in bed, and all of a sudden the pager went off.

Beep, beep, beep.

Something like that, right?

I called the nurse and learned that someone had just passed.

Put my clothes back on, walked upstairs, and checked in at the nurse’s station. The nurse pointed me towards the room.

And sure enough, closed door.

Say some portion of the prayer of Saint Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

I rub some sanitizer on my hands, I knocked, and I slowly enter.

“Hello, my name is Loren. I’m a chaplain here. I’m sorry for your loss and I’m here to support you in any way I can and offer you some guidance as you navigate the next steps.”

Part of, for me, what makes that closed door so intimidating is the fear of being found out.

What if I don’t know what to say? What if I can’t provide what this family needs? What if I’m not as capable or qualified as my badge makes me appear?

Looking the part does me very little good once I cross the threshold.

A badge, title, or professional appearance cannot itself give comfort to a grieving family. The closed door strips away the appearance and exposes my own limitations too.

But I think it also reveals something else.

That I don’t enter that room alone.

I trust that Christ is already at work within me and that God is already present on the other side of that door.

I’m not carrying God into that room.

I’m entering a room where God is already at work.

And that knowledge and certainty alone gives me confidence to enter quite scary rooms.

…

Yet I walked in not trusting my own appearance or my own capacities, but that I carried Christ with me and that Christ was already active within that room.

Certainly looking the part gets me to the door.

But it cannot carry me through the door.

What carries me through is not the confidence that I will never be found lacking.

What carries me through is the promise that Christ is already at work both within me and within that room.

And the trust that when my limitations are exposed, as they most certainly will be, Christ will still be at work both within me and within that room.

Because Christ has made me his own.

Christ is already at work within me, and God is waiting on the other side.

And that’s what I believe it means to press on.

We press on not because we look the part.

We press on not because we will never be found lacking.

We press on because Christ has made us his own, and Christ is already at work within us.

Thanks be to God, thanks be to God for this unspeakable gift.

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Humans—or at least humans in modern Western culture—have a remarkable tendency to simplify.

I’ve heard marketing guru Donald Miller say that the human brain is designed to thrive and survive. I read very nearly the same thing again recently in the book Inside the Box by David Epstein.

Because our brains have limited capacity, they’re constantly looking for ways to automate tasks and conserve energy so it’s available when we really need it.

The funny thing is that even this explanation is itself a simplification of far more complex neuroscience. Yet from that admittedly simplified observation, Miller has built an entire marketing philosophy.

I found myself thinking about that while reading N.T. Wright’s recent book, God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal.

I found the book deeply engaging—to the extent that I saved fifty-seven highlights in my reading app.

Heaven, Earth, and the Afterlife

Broadly speaking, the book unfolds in two parts.

In the first half, Wright argues that the way many Christians have come to summarize Christianity—“getting saved so you can go to heaven when you die”—is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the gospel and the broader story of Scripture. Instead, salvation is something more like “experiencing the kingdom of God in this life—not simply in the life to come” (my summary, not Wright’s wording). Rather than God rescuing humanity from creation, Wright argues that the biblical story culminates with God coming to fully restore creation itself.

The second half explores why Christianity has come to be understood primarily as “going to heaven when you die,” while also addressing what Wright believes happens to believers between death and the final resurrection.

Spoiler alert—here’s the version that made the most sense to me.

“At death God will download our software onto his hardware until he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves.” (291)

Wright credits the analogy to theologian John Polkinghorne and admits he doesn’t especially like it himself. Still, I found it considerably easier to grasp than Wright’s own description of entering a state of refrigerium—the “refreshing and awesome gladness of being ‘hidden with the Messiah in God’” (295).1

And you wondered why I preferred the software analogy!

Our Need to Simplify

As much as I appreciated Wright’s book, in between thinking about “heaven”2 and the afterlife, I found myself wondering about our remarkable human tendency to simplify complex realities—I’m guilty as doing as much in this very post!

Sitting and praying with grieving families in the hospital, I often find myself wondering where their loved one is now. Wright offers one compelling answer. But reading him also made me wonder:

Is our impulse to simplify one of the greatest obstacles to faithful thinking?

Ironically, even Wright occasionally seems to simplify the history he’s critiquing.

I found myself wondering whether the “Christianity is simply about going to heaven when you die” narrative has really been as dominant throughout church history as he suggests. It seems to me that this understanding only became broadly normative in many circles with the rise of Billy Graham and the modern “born again” movement.

Then again...

Who am I to critique N.T. Wright of all people?

I also grow a little cautious whenever anyone suggests, “Most of historic Christianity has gotten this wrong—but I’ve finally gotten it right.”

My point isn’t that Wright is wrong.

My point is that even Wright, at times, seems to simplify a far more complicated story.

Which raises the obvious question:

How do we resist that tendency ourselves?

Three Ways to Resist Simplicity

I’m not entirely sure, but a few thoughts come to mind.

First, we have to continually expose ourselves to new books, new perspectives, and new voices.

That’s difficult because it requires tremendous mental energy. It’s far easier to sort ideas according to labels we’ve already assigned than to genuinely wrestle with whether they might teach us something new.

And the dangerous part about algorithms is they decrease our exposure to other topics while assuming we are actually widening our perspectives.

Second, we need intentional ways of disrupting our own assumptions.

I recently heard the story of an airline crash involving pilots based in Florida. Accustomed to warm weather, they routinely breezed past the checklist asking whether the wings needed to be de-iced.

The problem? That particular flight departed from the frigid Northeast.

Since then, many aviation checklists have been intentionally redesigned so pilots can’t simply move through them on autopilot. A pilot friend told me that they have disrupted the routine itself in order to encourage careful thinking.

I wonder whether Christians need similar practices.

Third—and this may sound counterintuitive—we HAVE to be patient.

The human brain has limited capacity. Faced with a constant flood of information, most people eventually stop processing altogether or retreat into familiar categories and cultural scripts.

I think this helps explain many of the political and cultural reactions we’re witnessing today—including, at least in part, the MAGA movement. While I understand the frustration of having your own freedom or dignity depend upon someone else’s willingness to change, what I know about change theory is this:

Overwhelming people rarely changes them.

More often, it simply causes them to cross their arms.

Real change is slow and requires trust, patience, and perhaps most difficult of all—believing that people are capable of growth.

Which also explains why it’s so tempting simply to write off those with whom we disagree as irredeemably prejudiced, ignorant, or bigoted.3

I suppose I’ve wandered rather far afield for a blog that began as a reflection on N.T. Wright’s book about the afterlife.

Then again, this series is called Thinking with Books.

Books rarely leave me thinking only about the topic they set out to discuss.

Maranatha

In the end, Wright’s book made me long all the more—or perhaps, as Paul would say, groan all the more—for God’s promised homecoming.

It reminded me that while I can participate in the early signs of God’s kingdom even now, neither I nor humanity as a whole can bring that kingdom fully into reality ourselves.

And honestly...

I think that’s very good news.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

Maranatha.

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What I’m Reading Right Now

Socially Awkward Evangelism: Overcoming Fear in Sharing the Gospel by Mark Teasdale

This is book I was excited to check out and is so far leaving me fairly disappointed. The line that perhaps best encapsulates by disappointment is this:

“Moving from spiders to evangelism… (78)”

Obviously this is just a short snippet, but it illustrates what the book is about—tips for overcoming one’s anxiety around sharing the gospel. In this instance, Teasdale offers some comparison to anxiety most people feel about spiders to the anxiety most people feel about sharing the gospel.

He even offers some psychological frameworks to put this into practice, such as ACT, which “recognizes that it is anxiety producing to run through thickets while racing horses, but it also insists that avoiding this will not protect us from pain. It gives us the tools to harness our anxiety and use it to share the word God has given us regardless of how intense the is in doing so. (55).”

I mean, again, I’m just not sure what to do with this and I don’t know how in the world it’s anywhere helpful, faithful, or accurate to compare sharing the gospel with spiders or running through thickets. Like, the gospel is good news, and Teasdale’s methods here speak so much to the sort of command and control style of evangelism that I think does far more harm than good. The style of evangelism that I teach is much more relational and trusting, and Teasdale does acknowledge that “Evangelism is always done within a trusting relationship (89).

But I’m just not sure how comparing sharing good news with scary anxiety is really aligned with what the gospel is—good news. I much prefer the way of evangelism that Andrew Root talks about in his book Evangelism in an Age of Despair. See my conversation with him below:

What I’ve Just Read

A Theology of Love: The Dynamic of Wesleyanism by Mildred Bangs Wynkoop

Having read another book by Wynkoop, her short and punchy "Foundations of Weslyan-Arminian Theology, I was excited when I saw this fulerer book on the shelves in the church library. And, while Wynkoop had many interesting things to say, I found it to be dry and somewhat over my head, perhaps as someone not schooled in Wesleyan theology.

More so, I’ve learned that I just struggle with systematic theology books, and while most such books really aren’t meant to be read straight through, that is how I like to read. Meaning, I much prefer books that explore a single premise entirely throughout, which is probably why I like Root’s books so much.

That’s not to say I didn’t find anything helpful. I interact with a couple of her quotes in a forthcoming post, plus in her chapter on “Man” she shares thought like this that I found quite intriguing:

Love does not end in a self cut off from God and others. The tragedy is that love does not end. Hell could eventually burn out without ending the passionate desire of men for fellowship. But hell, whatever else it may be, is perpetuated and stoked by a yearning that cannot be satisfied. (146)”

I’m not sure how much more I’ll read on Wesleyan theology in the near future—I’m nearly through a stack of books given to me by the associate pastor at the UMC church I attend (plus having added a couple on my own) and I’m trying to get back into some from my own Stone-Campbell tradition, but I’m intrigued/curious as to how the differences in Wesleyan theology have played out in various Wesleyan traditions.

At This Time: Dialogues in Theological Education edited by Corwin Malcom Davis and Ted A. Smith

This is a book I’ve had sitting on my stacks for a while now and was excited to get to—thinking it would be more like Smith’s previous work The End of Theological Education. This book instead was an edited compilation I frankly did not understand or see the point.

As to my previous point above, I don’t much like compilation books, save when they are edited to have a similar voice/flow like Skills for Safeguarding.

This book instead featured different authors talking about theological education from their own unique contexts, but I really didn’t understand who these people were or why their observations were so unique or important.

Maybe I missed something?

Sermon Treks: Trailways to Creative Preaching by Ronald Allen

Here’s another book I’ve had sitting on my stacks for sometime and thought it would be more compelling. There were a couple useful ideas I’ve saved regarding preaching through the Christian year, but the book was sort of weighed down by essentially two chapters covering the same thing in explaining the Christian year.

The Starter’s Way: Leading New Contextual Christian Communities edited by Ed Olsworth-Peter and Dwight Zscheile

This book basically discusses a new discernment framework published in 2021 by the Church of England to assist in the vocational journey of those called to lay and ordained ministries. The framework was a shift away from “criteria to be met” and a move toward “qualities to be inhabited.” …the old criteria focused on the self, they were predominantly describing “doing.” … [the] new framework… was asking questions of “being.”

I found the opening discussion of these fifteen points quite intriguing, especially I’m one who has done new-church work and it was readily apparent even then that the old metrics of attendance and giving just don’t adequately measure the efforts or faithfulness of the ministry leader—they are far more “lag” metrics than “lead” measures, and I think these fifteen points offer a much more realistic and faithful framework by which to evaluate new ministries and their leaders.

Again, this was an edited book and again I really don’t like edited works that much. One thing I wished had been different is that, for the most part, each chapter/section was about describing what the metric was rather than describing what the evaluation metric might look like within a new ministry context. I would have found that more helpful.

Peace Be With You!: My Words to the Church and to the World by Pope Leo

This was basically a compilation of Pope Leo’s sermons from recent years. I saw it at the local library and decided to read it. Nothing too compelling, but tying back to that evangelism book above, Pope Leo did note that “Evangelization… is not our attempt to conquer the world, but the infinite grace that radiates from lives transformed by the Kingdom of God (121).”

This is much more in line with what Root writes about and the kind of evangelism that I seek to practice and teach.

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 Margaret Marcuson and Francisco Herrera, plus and I are putting together an AI roundtable episode with and .

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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