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Are Progressive, Inclusive Churches More Interested in Being “Progressive” and “Inclusive” Than They Are in Being Christian?

Now, while I do spend plenty of time on here critiquing progressive Christianity, I think many conservative churches have exactly the same problem.

I was recently listening to my good friend and colleague interview on the Church and Main podcast. While I haven’t yet read the Substack essay that prompted their conversation, one observation Clark made during the podcast interview has been rattling around in my head.

Borrowing from Stanley Hauerwas, Clark suggested that whenever we put a word in front of church—whether inclusive, progressive, conservative, or traditional—that word can eventually “completely dominate what the church is supposed to be.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about that.

The word in front of church begins to eclipse the word that follows it.

That observation immediately reminded me of an interview I once had with a “progressive, inclusive” congregation.

When the Word Comes First

Interestingly, I wasn’t asked much about traditional Christian doctrines or even my understanding of the gospel. Instead, much of the conversation centered on my willingness to be affirming of LGBT Christians.

To be clear, I understand why.

Pastors have significant influence, especially through the pulpit each Sunday. Even conservative churches have been damaged by poor pastoral leaders. It’s entirely reasonable for a congregation to want confidence that a prospective pastor will care well for everyone in the pews.1

But looking back, I realized something felt off.

It wasn’t that the church cared about inclusion.

It was, like Clark suggests, that inclusion seemed to function as the primary confession of the church.

Listening to Clark helped me understand why that interview has stayed with me all these years. It felt as though the first question wasn’t, “Are you committed to Jesus Christ and the gospel?” but rather, “Will you affirm this particular ethical position?”

Clark put it this way:

“What happens when those ethical positions become the entry point—the confession that’s required to belong to Christ?”

That question struck me because I don’t think it’s limited to progressive churches.

It’s Not Just Progressive Churches

The more I sat with Clark’s observation, though, the more I realized this isn’t really a progressive church problem.

It’s an American Christian problem.

Conservative churches often do exactly the same thing. The word in front of church simply changes.

The point isn’t whether those words describe something true or valuable.

The point is what happens when they become the thing that most defines the community.

That’s what intrigued me most about Clark’s argument. The issue isn’t ultimately which adjective we choose. It’s whether that adjective begins to function as a confession that stands alongside—or even ahead of—the gospel itself.

And that got me thinking about Peter in the book of Acts. Acts 10 describes a deeply convinced Peter that certain foods were unclean. “By no means, Lord,” he said.

Peter’s practices weren’t arbitrary; they were rooted in Scripture and centuries of Jewish faithfulness.

Yet when the Holy Spirit confronted him, Peter changed.

Not because culture persuaded him.

Not because public opinion shifted.

But because he became convinced that God was doing something new.

To me, that’s one of the defining characteristics of Christian discipleship.

It isn't that every commitment is perpetually up for revision. It's that every commitment ultimately remains submitted to the gospel and open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

This also helps explain something I’ve found surprising over the years.

I’ve occasionally met LGBT Christians who choose to worship in churches that are not explicitly affirming. At first glance, that seems almost incomprehensible to many progressive Christians.

But I wonder if what’s draws some of them isn’t agreement on every ethical question.2 Rather, it’s the conviction that this is a community genuinely seeking to submit itself to Christ and to the leading of the Holy Spirit—even if that process hasn’t led everyone to the same conclusions.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting LGBT Christians should attend churches where they experience hostility or abuse. Nor am I suggesting questions of human sexuality don’t matter. They do.

My point is simply that, for some Christians, a community’s posture toward Christ and the Holy Spirit matters even more than complete agreement on every point of interpretation.

That strikes me as a deeply Christian instinct.

An Old Idea for a New Moment

As I thought about all of this, I found myself reflecting on the tradition in which I am ordained—the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

From its beginning, the Restoration Movement3 (out of which the DOC was born) wrestled with a remarkably similar question.4

How do we keep being Christian from being eclipsed by everything else?

Early leaders like Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell certainly didn’t believe doctrine was unimportant. Nor did they imagine Christians would all agree on every point of interpretation.

Rather, they were deeply suspicious of anything that functioned as a dividing line beyond the centrality of Christ. That’s why they were so insistent on open communion. They didn’t want creeds or theological systems to become ends in themselves rather than witnesses to the gospel.

Their founding vision was simple, if difficult:

Christians first.

Not because they thought differences didn’t matter.

But because they believed every Christian—and every church—should remain continually submitted to Christ, Scripture, and the work of the Holy Spirit.

The Restoration Movement certainly DID NOT solve this problem. It eventually developed its own divisions, labels, and identities.5

But its founding vision still remains remarkably relevant.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again—I’ve convinced that we can discern the future of Christianity by looking to its past.

I wonder if this is one of those moments.

Christianity Before the Adjective

As someone who can’t help but think about the future of Christianity in North America, I find myself wondering if we’ll increasingly see churches and Christians who refuse to let an adjective become their primary identity.

Perhaps that’s too optimistic.

But I also wonder if it’s already happening.

I’ve been with Christians who disagree about abortion, sexuality, and/or political policy, yet who share something deeper. They genuinely want to follow Jesus. They genuinely believe the Holy Spirit still has something to teach them. And they genuinely recognize that they themselves might still have something to learn.

That’s a very different posture than beginning with absolute certainty that our group/tradition already has all the right answers.6

And, this is where I think my own tradition has so much to contribute here:

Neither the Restoration Movement nor the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has lived up perfectly to its founding vision. No tradition has.

But that vision—that Christians should be known first and foremost as Christians, continually submitting themselves to Christ, Scripture, and the work of the Holy Spirit—feels remarkably relevant in a moment when so many of our ecclesial identities are shaped by adjectives.

This isn't about abandoning creeds or doctrine (even if the Movement became famous for saying, "No creed but Christ"). It's about recognizing that every creed, doctrine, and ethical commitment remains accountable to Christ, the gospel, and the ongoing guidance of the Holy Spirit.7

Back to the Future?

The American church has much to learn from the early Restoration Movement—and frankly so does my current branch of that movement—the Disciples of Christ.8

I’ve argued before that one way we discern the future of the church is by looking to its past.

Perhaps this is one of those moments.

Perhaps the future of American Christianity isn’t a more progressive Christianity.

Or a more conservative Christianity.

Perhaps it’s simply a more Christian Christianity.

One where the word Christian once again carries more weight than the word placed in front of it.

P.S. If you're interested in the future of Christianity in North America, I'd love to invite you to check out my forthcoming book, The Church as Community Hub (releasing September 8). While this essay reflects on the church's identity, the book asks what that identity looks like when embodied in neighborhoods, shared spaces, and everyday community life. I hope you'll take a look.

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This might be one of the few times you’ll ever read someone making the case for being a 1099 contract pastor.

Hear me out.

Recently I listened to a podcast episode about the growing trend of co-vocational ministry. The host, who serves as both a lead pastor and a co-vocational minister himself, was talking about some of the realities of churches working with pastors and worship leaders as independent contractors.

One thing that stood out to me was his acknowledgment of the limitations.

“The church is their secondary job. So you have to take that into account.”

He went on to explain that many of these ministers are technically 1099 contractors rather than W-2 employees.

“You can’t just tell contract workers, ‘You have to be here at this time and in this way.’ That’s a W-2, not a 1099.”

I found myself nodding along.

The point wasn’t really about taxes. It was about expectations.

Churches have to recognize that if someone is serving in a co-vocational role, ministry may not be their primary source of income. That changes the relationship. It changes what can reasonably be expected of both the church and the pastor.

At the same time, he also pointed out that this model creates opportunities. Churches can access gifted leaders they otherwise couldn’t afford, while pastors and worship leaders gain greater flexibility in how they structure their work and their lives.

As someone who currently serves in several ministry and nonprofit roles, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about these changing realities.

Job Creep

One of the biggest challenges with part-time ministry is what I’d call job creep.

A church hires someone for ten, twenty, or thirty hours a week.

But ministry doesn’t really work that way.

Hospital visits.

Funerals.

Committee meetings.

Pastoral care.

Crises.

Especially in churches with older congregations, the work has a way of spilling well beyond whatever was originally agreed upon.

I know there are pastors who simply say, “You make it work and cut back somewhere else.”

Maybe—But I’ve never found that particularly sustainable.

A Surprising Benefit

Here’s what I’ve found interesting.

Serving as a 1099 contract pastor has actually helped me develop healthier pastoral boundaries.

Like a lot of pastors, I’ve often struggled with feeling like I need to always be available, always say yes, or always help.

But when ministry is clearly defined as contract work, I’ve found it surprisingly freeing to simply and honestly say:

“I’m not contracted for that. I’d be glad to help, but I can only do so at an additional rate.”

At first that felt awkward.

Now it feels like a big relief.

If I’m contracted to preach, help plan worship, and provide a defined amount of pastoral care, then funerals or extensive hospital visitation—while deeply meaningful ministry—are also significant investments of time and emotional energy.

It’s okay to acknowledge that.

Better Expectations

Obviously there are tax implications when it comes to 1099 versus W-2 employment, particularly around housing allowance and clergy compensation.

Those conversations matter—and in my experience, there are actually some practical ways to navigate them well.

But I sometimes wonder if we spend so much time talking about the tax implications that we overlook the ministry implications.

Clear expectations can actually be healthy.

Not because pastors shouldn’t be generous.

Not because churches shouldn’t care for people.

But because healthy boundaries make long-term ministry more sustainable.

Ironically, I think they also force churches to think more carefully about what they’re actually asking of a part-time pastor.

A Different Way of Thinking

I don’t think 1099 ministry is the answer for everyone.

Nor do I think churches should classify pastors as contractors simply because it’s easier administratively.

But I do think there are some surprisingly healthy implications to thinking about part-time ministry through a contractual lens.

For me, it’s been less about taxes and more about boundaries.

Less about classification and more about sustainability.

In a season where more and more pastors are serving co-vocationally, that’s probably a conversation worth having.

I’d be curious what others have experienced.

If you’re serving in a co-vocational or contract ministry role, what has helped you establish healthy expectations and boundaries with your church?

And if you’re trying to figure this out and could use some ideas, feel free to reach out. I’d be glad to compare notes.

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I have spent what feels like the entire summer repainting my pergola.

It’s a big structure, and after hours and hours of work, I am finally nearing the end. I ran out of paint Saturday, so I’m gonna get the next gallon. Next Saturday. The last time I did it was in 2021, and I probably waited a year too long. But last summer I did the fence. And summer before that, I did the deck.

And I’ve already started doing the math again in my head.

Next summer I’ll probably have to do the fence again. Eventually the house will need to be repainted. And by the time I finish all that, the pergola will probably need attention again. It’s sort of exhausting. And my wife wonders, why is it taking so long? And I say, Well, I don’t want to spend my entire Saturday, A, when it’s 100 degrees out in the heat. And B, like I’m just gonna have to do it again soon enough.

Perhaps you can relate.

Wood rots, paint peels, metal rusts.

Eventually the things we carefully build and faithfully maintain begin to break down.

We can repair them, we can repaint them, we can develop better and more sophisticated materials and technologies.

But eventually...

Most of the time, the best we can do—and this is sorta depressing to say—the best we can seem to do is just delay the decay.

And that raises a much bigger question than the one I’m wrestling with with my pergola.

What do we do?

What do we do when we realize that human effort alone cannot keep everything from falling apart?

More Than a Home Repair Project

This is a problem that many of us can relate to beyond simply home repair projects.

Try as we might, human effort alone cannot solve all the world’s problems, or even, it seems, the problems facing our own nation.

We have more knowledge, more technology, and more resources than it seems any other previous generation.

And yet suffering persists.

War persists.

Hunger remains.

New medical treatments extend our lives, but they cannot keep our bodies from eventually breaking down.

The Apostle Paul calls this a bondage to decay.

Now the assumption of American culture in our lifetimes has been that progress is inevitable, or at least mostly possible.

Through human achievement, if we can educate enough people, elect the right leaders, and create the right technologies, we can steadily improve the world.

Now that confidence has lost some of its luster in recent years.

Still we cling to it.

We continue searching for the right innovation, the right institution, the right political movement that will fix finally what is broken.

Now, let’s be clear, these efforts are not wrong, per se.

We should relieve suffering where we can.

We should pursue justice.

We should develop medicine.

We should care for this world.

But none of these efforts can finally free us from decay.

And like my painting of my pergola, they simply hold it back for a while.

Eventually we are forced to confront a reality we’d rather not face...

...that the future cannot depend entirely upon us.

God’s Promised Future

Now, Paul does not say this to leave us in despair.

Our reading this morning is a rich and full passage.

It contains promise upon promise that the Spirit helps us in our weakness, that God remains at work amidst the suffering, and that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

There is far more here than we have time to explore this morning.

So I want to focus on one thread running throughout Romans chapter eight and this particular verse in Romans.

That God is moving creation toward a promised future.

Something new is coming.

And Christians have a word for that.

Christians always have big, complicated words, if you’ve noticed that.

In this case, the word is eschatology.

Basically, in a very simple summation, it’s that the trust that God has a future for our world.

That creation will not remain trapped forever in decay, and that God is at work redeeming it, restoring it, and ultimately making all things new.

Now in Paul’s time, in the time of the Apostle Paul, they believed in many gods.

The question was not whether God or many gods existed.

The question was whether or not there was a God who cared about creation and had a purpose for the world and for humanity.

Or whether everything we know and love was destined just for decay.

Paul’s answer is yes.

God does have a purpose.

And that’s the hope at the heart of Romans 8:28.

He writes,

We know that God works all things together for good, for the ones who love God and for those who are called according to his purpose.

Now, I do want to add this important caveat.

This verse is sometimes used as if Paul were saying that everything that happens is good, or even that suffering is good.

But I want to be clear that Paul does not mean that suffering in itself is good.

Paul knows that bad things happen.

He knows that suffering is real.

The point is not that everything that happens is good.

The point is that God is working in and through everything that happens to bring good toward God’s intended purpose.

It’s also worth noting, I think is quite interesting that the Paul the word Paul uses for works in this passage is in the present active tense in the original language, meaning that God’s work is not merely something that God completed long ago.

Nor is it something that God promises to begin someday, but rather it’s something that God is doing right now.

Right now, continually and actively, God is moving creation towards God its good intended purposes.

Now, truth be told, we may not always recognize that good work.

We certainly cannot always understand how present suffering could be drawn into something good.

But Paul is confident that even amidst the groaning and decay, God remains at work.

He writes that God decided in advance that we would be conformed to the image of his son.

God’s purpose is to bring humanity, us, and creation into the future God is already revealed in Jesus.

In the risen Christ, we see what lies beyond suffering, death, and decay.

We see renewed humanity and restored creation.

Jesus is not simply the one who rescues isolated individuals from the world.

Jesus is the first glimpse of the future God intends for our creation.

This is why Paul calls him the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

This purpose was already at work, this purpose was already in process before we recognized it.

We don’t need to invent it.

We don’t need to bring it into existence.

We don’t need to carry the responsibility for its completion.

God calls us into a future that God has already promised and begun in Jesus.

And this is what I believe gives our lives meaning and purpose.

We’re not simply trying to slow creation’s decay.

Or make a few isolated improvements along the way before eventually everything disappears.

Rather, we are invited to live with God’s movement towards a promised future.

We do not need to create that future.

God creates that future, but we can begin living as witnesses to it right now.

So What Does It Mean to Trust This Promise?

First, I want us to trust that the responsibility is not on us.

As one theologian put it,

It is impossible to understand the Bible as long as we think in terms of human effort being enough to achieve human betterment.

What he means is this that human that does not now let me say this, that does not mean that human effort is unimportant.

It means that human effort alone cannot carry the weight of our ultimate hope.

God has not asked us to defeat by ourselves every form of injustice.

We are not being asked to end every effort every element of human suffering through our own efforts, nor carry the responsibility for freeing creation from its inevitable decay.

We are not the saviors of the world.

That position has already been filled.

And being released from that burden does not mean we are free to ignore suffering whatsoever.

Rather, I would say this morning, it frees us to care with hope.

We can look at the world and honestly say,

This is not, this is not how things should be.

Because in the life and witness of Jesus, we have already seen, God has already shown us how the world is meant to be.

Which leads to the second promise.

That God, that God will have the final word.

As one writer puts it,

Our hope is not in that our efforts can make the world a better place. Our hope is in the action of God to open our eyes to see the small but sure ways that God’s new reality is breaking forth.

God is working now.

God’s promised future is already breaking forth into the present.

And we may only see it in small glimpses, but its completion does not depend entirely on our own efforts.

It depends upon God.

This is why, this is why we can name what is wrong without assuming responsibility for fixing everything.

We know that children should not go hungry.

We know that migrants should not be abused.

We know the LGBT persons should not face discrimination.

We know that poverty, violence, and death are not how God intends things to be.

But this present reality will not have the final say.

God will have the final say.

And God’s final word will be life.

Every tear wiped away.

Every suffering brought to an end.

And all things made new.

Friends, that’s good news.

And the third promise we can trust this morning is that God’s actions will bear witness to God’s future.

And we are invited to participate through our actions to testify to that future.

As one theologian writes,

Our responsibility is not to bring about the new reality, but to live for it, to act for it, even if it’s not yet here fully.

And even our small acts, even our seemingly insignificant acts, become a sacrament, a testimony to that coming future.

So we feed the hungry.

We advocate for the human for the better treatment of migrants.

We stand for the dignity and honor of all people.

We comfort those who grieve.

We welcome those who have been excluded.

We care for whatever corner of creation that God has entrusted to us or called us to.

And we do this even as we know that one meal will not end hunger.

We know that one act of advocacy or kindness will not end injustice whatsoever.

We know that befriending a lonely person will not end loneliness entirely.

But each action, each action of ours bears witness.

Each act of mercy says that this suffering does not belong to the world that God intends.

Each act of justice says that the present arrangement will not have the final word.

Every act of love that we offer offers a glimpse of the future that God is bringing.

Friends, our actions do not need to save the world.

Rather, they are signs of what God has promised.

And this is the movement, this movement from responsibility to participation.

It’s a movement from control to trust.

We are not trying to create God’s future.

We are bearing witness to something that is already coming.

The responsibility is not on us.

God will complete what God has said, God will do.

And even our smallest actions testify to that promise.

Walking Into Hospital Rooms

And trusting in these promises changes the way we enter a world filled with pain.

As a hospital chaplain, I regularly enter into rooms filled with problems I cannot fix.

I cannot cure the cancer.

I cannot undo the accident.

I cannot bring someone back from the dead.

If I believed it was my responsibility to fix all of those things, I could not keep walking into those rooms.

That amount of suffering and pain and injustice would eventually overwhelm me.

But the burden is not on me.

Last week I shared that sometimes when I walk into the hospital I almost do so with a bit of enthusiasm because I know that I have good news to share.

The good news I seek to share is that God is present and at work no matter the situation, seeking to bring good for whatever happened.

When a woman who has endured a lifetime of abuse asks me whether she is worthy of love, I cannot undo everything that had happened to her.

I cannot guarantee that she’ll never be hurt again.

Just as I cannot single handedly end every form of abuse or injustice that happens in our world today.

But I can look her in the eyes and I can tell her the truth that God loves you.

That what happened to you is not what God intends for you, that it does not define your worth, and that it will not have the final word.

Now again that may not fix everything immediately, but it bears witness to the future that God has promised, a future in which abuse, suffering and injustice and death are finally overcome.

And this, I believe, is what faithful participation looks like.

We enter into places and spaces to which we have been called to offer the mercy, justice, hope, and love that we have been given to offer, and we entrust what we cannot fix to God.

And that does require a fair bit of trust.

I often leave hospital rooms wishing I could make everything better.

This past Thursday I entered a room of a woman who was quite literally at the end of life.

In fact, an hour or two later I was called back to be with her family and pray with them after she had passed.

I wished I could have ended the death.

I wished I could have had brought her back to life.

But I brought with me the good news and hope that I could bring that God had given me to bring, the hope that God had given me to bring, the place and the calling God had brought me to.

Bring that good news.

Good News

We don’t need to carry burdens that are not ours to bear.

We don’t need to protect ourselves from feeling like nothing we can do matters.

Because God is working, there is another way.

We can care without believing that everything depends on us.

We can name all that is wrong without pretending that we can correct it all.

We can walk towards suffering rather than turning away because we know we do not do it alone.

We carry good news.

This is not how things should be.

This is not how things will eventually be.

God is at work even now, and we are bearing witness to the world that is coming.

We have good news to share, friends, and and for the two months that I’ve been with you, I’ve been trying to proclaim this thing that the gospel of Jesus Christ really is good news and really has relevance and impact to our world today.

It’s good news for all of us.

The burden is not ours to carry alone.

God is at work.

God will have the final word.

And we are free to live and act towards that promise in whatever area of the world that we have been called to make a difference and to share God’s good news.

Thanks be to God.

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P.S. 📖 Save 25% on my new book! Church as Community Hub: Sharing Spaces to Help Neighborhoods Thrive is now available for pre-order. Use promo code CHURCH25 at checkout to save 25% through July 31. Pre-order your copy →

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I like you just the way you are.

Why did those simple words mean so much to so many people?

Perhaps you or maybe for some of us our kids or grandkids grew up watching Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood. Any? All right, some, yes. Maybe you remember the trolley, the cardigan, the puppets.

Perhaps more than anything, you remember those words.

I like you just the way you are.

Fred Rogers had a remarkable gift, and I think I mentioned this last week. He was a Presbyterian clergy person, but Fred Rogers had a remarkable gift for making people feel seen, safe, known, and loved.

A few years ago, Tom Hanks portrayed Mr. Rogers in the movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. But rather than retelling Mr. Rogers’ life, the film follows Lloyd Vogel, a cynical journalist assigned with writing a profile about Mr. Rogers.

Now, Lloyd was known for exposing people’s flaws in his writing.

But from the beginning, Mr. Rogers wasn’t interested in being interviewed, but rather interviewing, getting to know Lloyd Vogel.

At one point in the film, Lloyd even blurts out,

I’m supposed to be interviewing you.

As the film unfolds, Rogers gently earns Lloyd’s trust until Lloyd finally shares the painful story beneath all of his anger.

Years earlier, Lloyd’s father had abandoned the family just as his mother was dying of cancer. Lloyd was left alone with her beside his mom in her hospital bed, as she cried out in pain during her final moments.

No one, no one, should have to carry that kind of pain alone.

But Lloyd did.

And that loneliness of the moment became anger and bitterness that followed him for years. It shaped how he saw the world, how he treated people, and how he responded when life became difficult.

Anger became the place he returned to again and again.

When Protection Becomes a Prison

In many ways, what Lloyd experienced could be described as trauma.

And one of the fascinating things I’ve learned about trauma over the years is that two people can experience similar events but respond very differently.

Researchers have found that one of the greatest factors into whether trauma turns into long-term post-traumatic stress isn’t simply what happens to us.

But whether we have someone to help us carry that load, someone to help us process what happened, someone who reminds us that we are seen, safe, known, and loved.

But when we’re left alone dealing with a pain all by ourselves, we often develop coping mechanisms.

That’s what Lloyd’s anger was.

At first anger protected him.

Whenever something reminded him of that awful day his mother died, he could simply retreat into the bitterness instead of feeling the deep grief and pain beneath it.

So what began as protection slowly became a prison.

Over time, anger wasn’t simply something that Lloyd chose, it became his default response.

It shaped his relationships, it distorted how he saw the world and threatened the very people that he cared about the most.

He’d become trapped by the very thing that once helped him to survive.

We All Have Our Thing

I bet some of us can see some of ourselves in Lloyd.

Maybe for you it isn’t anger.

Maybe it’s perfectionism, this idea that if we can always prove that we’re good enough.

Maybe it’s busyness because if you’re busy, you don’t have to feel.

Maybe it’s people pleasing or control or cynicism, withdrawal, or work.

Or alcohol or something else.

We all have our thing.

Whatever it is, those patterns often begin as ways of protecting us.

But over time they begin to control us.

They become familiar paths, our minds almost travel automatically, and we fall back into them without even recognizing what we’re doing.

It’s almost as if they become our master.

And underneath so many of those patterns is often the very same thing.

Fear.

Fear of being hurt again.

Fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of being alone.

But we were never, we were never, we were never meant to carry our pain alone.

Slaves or Children?

The Apostle Paul knew what it was like to feel trapped.

Early in Romans, in Romans chapter seven, perhaps you remember, Paul describes wanting to do the right thing, but finding himself so unable to do it, caught in patterns he could not seem to escape.

Now, to describe that experience, here in this text, Paul reaches for an image that everyone in the Roman world would have understood.

Slavery.

Now, while Roman slavery differed somewhat from American chattel slavery, the point is much the same.

A slave’s life was no longer their own, they weren’t in control of their own future.

They lived under the control of a different master.

That’s the image that Paul wants us to have in mind, that fear can become a slave master, and a cruel, cruel, cruel master with that.

Fear promises to protect us, but eventually it controls us.

We fall back into the same familiar patterns because the unknown feels more frightening than what we already know.

I was listening recently to a former crisis chaplain describe working with victims or survivors of domestic abuse.

He said that often what kept people trapped wasn’t their situation, but was fear.

The uncertainty of leaving into an unknown future felt scarier than the abuse that they were enduring.

Fear convinced them that a better life wasn’t possible.

Paul says here in Romans, this is not the life, this is not the life, the kind of life that God desires for us.

He says,

You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.

I think it’s interesting here what Paul says.

He doesn’t simply promise that our circumstances will change.

He says, our identity, our identity has changed.

We are no longer slaves, we are God’s children.

And if we are God’s children, we are no longer alone.

This is why Paul can speak of confidence instead of fear.

Joy instead of slavery.

You know, I think the deepest fear beneath so many of our coping mechanisms is the fear of being abandoned, the fear of not having anyone to carry our burdens with us.

To that fear, Paul says,

I have good news.

You are not alone.

The Promise

So, what does then freedom look like?

Paul says it begins with a promise.

And the first promise is this, that when we cry out, God is already here.

Paul says that when we cry, Abba, Father, God is already with us.

Now, Abba is this word that Jesus himself used in prayer.

Paul even preserves it in the original Aramaic language that Jesus would have spoken himself, suggesting that this phrase was a common phrase used in early Christian worship practices.

But what’s important isn’t the phrase itself, it’s the promise.

Our cry does not summon God, it simply reveals that God is already present.

Long before we have the words to pray, long before we realize we need help, God is already present with us.

And the second promise, friends, the second promise is even better.

God’s presence by the Holy Spirit reminds us who we are.

Paul says the Spirit bears witness with our Spirit that we are the children of God.

Notice here, notice here who is doing the work.

This is not something we have to produce on our own.

The Holy Spirit is doing the work because fear always has a way of making us forget.

When we’re hurting, we begin to wonder if we’re alone, if we’re abandoned, if we’re even lovable at all.

But the Spirit continually bears witness with our Spirit, reminding us of a different truth:

• that we are known,

• that we are loved,

• that we are seen,

• that we’re not alone.

Even when you struggle to believe it for yourself, the Spirit keeps speaking that truth, promise over you and over me.

We Were Never Meant to Carry It Alone

I remember hearing a trainer for a debt collection company saying something that surprised me.

He said that when most people called, they weren’t asking for their debt to just simply go away.

They simply wanted someone to hear their story.

They wanted someone to understand what had happened:

• the layoff,

• the divorce,

• the illness.

What had brought them to that moment?

It reminded me of what we talked about already at the beginning of this sermon.

That beneath our desire to be rescued is often an even deeper desire to not be alone.

And that’s one of the greatest promises that echoes throughout the entire Bible.

I am with you.

God says again and again and again.

God speaks these words to scared, tired, grieving, uncertain people.

I am with you.

That’s the promise that Paul wants us to trust.

Not that we’ll never suffer.

Not that we’ll never struggle.

But we don’t have to carry those burdens alone.

And as the Spirit keeps reminding us again and again whose we are, fear slowly begins to loosen its grip.

The patterns that once mastered us no longer have the final say.

We belong to God.

A Hospital Room

As I’ve mentioned before, I work part-time as a hospital chaplain.

Most every Thursday evening I walk the halls of St. Anthony North Hospital looking for people to visit.

I simply seek to put into practice all that I’ve just shared, to remind people they’re not alone, that God loves them, and God is with them even in the midst of their pain and struggle.

So I often walk around with a bit of enthusiasm.

Because I know I have good news to share.

And I often joke with the charge nurses,

“Hey, I’m looking for business, looking for some customers.”

One recent Thursday, a nurse took me up on my offer.

“Can you go see room 302?” she said.

“Sure, I’d be glad to,” I said.

So I do what I always do.

As I make my way to the room, I try to remind myself that God is already at work in that room.

God’s already present in that situation, and I simply need to be a part of what God is already seeking to do with that person in that room.

And I also always try to pray some snippet, at least, of the Saint Francis prayer.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there’s hatred, let me sow love.

Where there’s despair, hope.

Where there’s sadness, joy.

So, you know, I knocked.

I introduced myself.

“Hello, my name is Loren, I’m a chaplain.”

And since I knew I’d been asked to come see this woman, I kind of boldly made my way in and I sat down and I chatted with her.

She was a woman around my age, had just undergone a painful surgery, and it was quite apparent that she was quite uncomfortable in the moment.

But the more I began to talk with her and hear her story, what occurred to me was as much as she was suffering under the pain and burden and weight of this recent surgery, the real story and pain that was holding her down was a deep woundedness.

As a child she had experienced abuse from her parent.

A parent perhaps acting out of their own pain and abuse, coping mechanism perhaps of their own.

And this woman in the years since had been living out that pain and abuse and trauma through abusive relationship after abusive relationship.

And the one thing I found myself saying to this woman wasn’t that,

“You’re fine,”

or,

“You’re special,”

or,

“You’re unique.”

I wanted her to know,

You are not alone.

God is with you.

Because even in that moment, as we were talking, she said something deeply heartbreaking to me.

She said,

“I’m not sure I’m worthy to be loved.”

And so I looked at her with as much conviction and courage as I could and I said,

God loves you.

You are a beloved child of God.

You Are Worthy of Love

It’s amazing how often beneath all of the stuff, we all sort of deeply want to know we’re loved and seen and known and cared for.

In that moment, I don’t think what she needed was someone to solve all her problems, not that it could anyway.

She needed to know that she wasn’t alone.

That God loved her.

And I really think underneath that pain that we all feel, that fear that we all fear, is the same question that that woman wrestled with herself.

Am I worthy?

Am I worthy of being loved?

And the gospel answers, yes.

The gospel answers affirmative—

I can’t say the word—the gospel answers, what’s the word I’m looking for?

Extremely, yes.

Not because of what we’ve done.

The gospel answers yes, not because of what we’ve done, but because of whose, because of whose we are.

We belong to God.

And I think that’s where the real freedom begins.

Because not that we finally become strong enough.

Not that we finally fixed ourselves.

But when through the Spirit we begin trusting that God has been with us all along.

That’s where freedom comes from.

Have you ever felt that kind of freedom?

Have you ever felt that kind of welcome?

Home

I remember when I was a teenager or young adult myself when my grandparents were still alive.

And often because of my activities or adventures, I’d find myself on their side of town.

Often I’d just swing by.

I’d walk in the back door and say,

“Hey, anybody home? Loren’s here.”

No matter what they were doing, they’d stop.

They’d come to greet me.

It didn’t matter if they were watching TV or working in the shop or cooking dinner.

What mattered was that Loren was there, one of their beloved grandchildren.

They welcomed me.

They welcomed me with kindness, joy, and love.

Looking back, I think that’s one of the closest pictures we have of what Paul means by adoption.

Not having to wonder whether we’re welcome.

Not having to wonder whether the door will be opened.

Not having to wonder whether you belong.

Simply knowing that when you walk in, you’re home.

I mean, that’s what it means then to be Christ’s body, Christ’s church here on earth.

When people walk in, to let them know they are home and they are loved.

Perhaps this morning you’re like that woman I met in the hospital room.

Maybe you’ve never experienced that kind of welcome.

I hope this morning, even at this time right now, through this church you’re at least experiencing a little snippet, a little taste of that welcome.

Even still, hear Paul’s words again.

When you cry, “Abba Father,” you are not trying to convince God to come near.

You don’t have to earn God’s love and presence.

God is already with you.

God already loves you.

The Spirit is already reminding you that you are God’s beloved child.

You do not have to fall back into fear again.

You do not have to carry your pain alone.

Because in Christ, you are already home.

That’s good news, friends.

That is good news.

Thanks be to God.

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The Fear of Being Labeled

Have you ever been so convinced that you were in trouble that you could feel it in your body?

Your heart racing.

A pain in your stomach.

Your chest tightening.

Your head spinning.

I remember I was about ten or eleven years old, sitting in my grandparents’ basement watching TV with my cousin. We were doing what kids did in the ‘90s—laughing, joking, making “your mama” jokes. Does anyone remember “your mama” jokes?

I thought I was being funny.

He said, “Your mama’s so ugly...”

I fired one back, thinking I was being pretty clever.

Then he looked at me and said,

“I’m gonna tell her you said that.”

Instantly, every ounce of joy left my body.

I was terrified.

I begged him,

“Please don’t tell her.”

I was the kind of kid who hated getting in trouble. Respecting adults mattered in my family, and my conscience immediately went into overdrive.

I remember feeling physically sick. I kept running back and forth to the bathroom because my stomach was in knots.

Looking back, I think I was less afraid of simply getting in trouble.

My uncle and aunt had recently married, and my cousins were my aunt’s children from a previous relationship. We had all just moved back to Colorado. We really didn’t know each other all that well.

I was terrified that one stupid comment I made trying to be funny might become the way she knew me.

That instead of seeing me as Loren, she’d see me as some disrespectful kid.

Now, whether because it had been a gag all along or because he simply felt sorry for me, he eventually said,

“I’m not gonna tell her.”

Boy, let me tell you—it was like a weight lifted off my shoulders.

Have you ever felt that kind of relief?

All that stress.

All that weight.

All that condemnation...

left my body.

I could breathe again.

When Judgment Becomes Condemnation

I’ve been thinking about that story because I wonder if what I was experiencing wasn’t simply guilt.

It was condemnation.

The fear that one mistake would become my label.

Have you ever felt something like that?

Have you ever made a mistake—big or small—that you worried others would hold against you forever?

That because of one moment you would forever be known as a bad mother...

a bad husband...

a bad friend...

a bad person?

Or maybe worse...

because of those mistakes, you began calling yourself those things.

Even if we’ve never experienced that ourselves, I imagine we’ve all seen it happen to others.

A few years ago, we lived through what many called cancel culture.

There was tremendous energy around calling out public figures for harmful behavior. In many cases, that truth-telling was long overdue. People who had hidden behind fame, wealth, and power while abusing others were finally being held accountable—names like Harvey Weinstein being the most obvious example.

Now let me say this clearly:

That kind of judgment is necessary.

Justice matters.

Actions have consequences.

But somewhere along the way, I think something changed.

What began as judgment often became condemnation.

Not simply,

“What you did was wrong.”

But,

“This is who you are.”

A bad person.

Soon it wasn’t just celebrities.

Relationships were canceled.

Adult children cut themselves off from their parents.

Friends walked away from one another.

Mistakes became identities.

There was no path toward repentance.

No possibility of repair.

No hope of reconciliation.

Only condemnation.

Paul’s Astonishing Promise

And I wonder if that’s where things often go so wrong—not only in our culture, but also in our own lives.

We confuse judgment with condemnation.

We mistake the labels born of our worst moments for our truest identities.

And into those fears, Paul speaks these astounding words:

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1)

What Comes Before “Therefore”?

When I was growing up in church, I always remember hearing that whenever you see the word therefore in Scripture, you should ask what it’s there for.

In other words, what came before it?

In this case, what comes before it is one of the most honest and heartbreaking passages Paul the Apostle ever wrote.

For the sake of time, I’ll summarize chapter 7.

Paul looks back at his own life and says,

“I keep doing the things that I don’t want to do.”

Paul knows what is right.

He knows what is good.

Yet somehow he finds himself making the same mistakes again and again.

Sound familiar?

Maybe not in those exact words.

But perhaps you’ve said something like:

“I can’t believe I did that again.”

“I thought I’d be further along by now.”

“Why do I keep making the same mistakes?”

Maybe you’re a parent and you’ve yelled at your child for what feels like the millionth time.

Maybe you’ve had another fight with your spouse.

Or another painful conversation with your adult child.

And afterward you ask yourself,

“Why do I keep doing this?”

Eventually, the question begins to shift.

Maybe I’m just a bad parent.

A bad spouse.

A bad friend.

Because Paul isn’t simply describing mistakes.

He isn’t just describing sin.

He’s describing what happens when our failures begin telling us who we are.

Listen to how he speaks about himself.

He doesn’t simply say,

“I’ve done bad things.”

He says,

“I am a bad person.”

His failures have become his labels.

Finally, Paul cries out,

“Who will rescue me from all of this?”

Notice the question.

He doesn’t ask,

“How do I try harder?”

Or,

“How do I finally get my life together?”

He asks,

“Who will rescue me?”

Paul’s answer comes almost immediately:

“Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Which is why chapter 8 begins with these extraordinary words:

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

Notice what Paul doesn’t say, because I think this is important.

Paul does not say there is no failure.

Paul doesn’t say there is no accountability.

Paul doesn’t even say there are no consequences.

He says there is no condemnation.

Because on the cross, Jesus took the condemnation that belonged to us.

Paul writes that because Christ bore our condemnation, our failures no longer get to define us.

Yes, they may describe something we’ve done.

But they are no longer our truest identity.

They’re no longer our labels.

What Does It Look Like to Trust This Promise?

So what does it look like, then, to trust in this promise?

First, I think it means trusting that our worst mistakes—our worst labels—are not our truest identities.

Paul says there is no condemnation for us. Not for someone else, but for you and for me.

Which means the labels that echo around in our heads—

bad husband...

bad parent...

bad friend...

bad person...

Maybe someone else gave you those labels.

Maybe you’ve given them to yourself.

But they are not the labels by which Christ knows you.

Paul’s promise is this:

Those labels are not your truest identity.

Your identity is found in Christ.

God’s beloved. That’s your identity.

God Does Not Define Us by Our Worst Mistakes

Secondly, I want us to trust that God doesn’t define us by our worst mistakes.

Again, I want to repeat this because I think it’s important.

There are still consequences to our mistakes.

There are still things to confess.

There are still relationships to repair.

Paul is not denying any of that.

But neither does God reduce us to our worst moments.

In Christ, our failures might describe what we’ve done, but they don’t determine who we are before God.

Beloved child of God.

Like God does not have a running thread.

God doesn’t have a big file cabinet in the sky.

God doesn’t even have a cloud storage account.

(I was hoping that would land.)

God does not have a running list—or a cloud storage account—of all our mistakes.

Free to Tell the Truth

Thirdly, this morning, I want us to trust that we are finally free to tell the truth.

And I think this is one of the most important implications.

Christianity is not anti-judgment.

Christianity is anti-condemnation.

Judgment tells the truth about what is broken.

And there are a lot of broken things in our world today.

Broken things in our families.

Broken things in our relationships.

But condemnation says that what is broken can never be repaired.

And that’s not the good news Jesus shares.

Because in Christ, condemnation has been removed.

We no longer have to protect ourselves.

We no longer have to pretend.

We no longer have to hide.

We can confess without fear of condemnation.

“I’ve failed.”

“I’ve made a mistake.”

“I’ve hurt someone.”

Not because those things don’t matter—they very much do.

There still may be consequences.

There still may be hard conversations.

There still may be repair work to do.

But confession no longer has to threaten our very identity.

And I think, then, the church should be the safest place in the world to tell the truth.

Not because failure doesn’t matter—but because condemnation doesn’t get to tell us who we are.

When Failure Became My Identity

I wish I had believed those words for myself five years ago.

In 2021, a church plant I led for more than three years closed.

I was quite simply devastated.

I’d poured my heart and soul—and more than that, blood, sweat, and tears—into that effort. It closed for a whole host of reasons, COVID-19 being the most obvious. But like many things during the pandemic, COVID simply revealed or accelerated what was already happening.

We were small, averaging only about thirty-five people on a Sunday.

We were nowhere near financially viable.

And I had made plenty of mistakes along the way.

Frankly, the details aren’t really the point.

We all have things we’d do differently.

We were running out of funding.

I had two young kids at home.

My wife was an ER nurse, literally on the front lines of the pandemic.

And I was quite simply running out of gas.

So when my church planting coach suggested it might be time to call things a wrap, I couldn’t disagree.

In the spring of 2021, we held our final worship service.

There were consequences.

There were things to grieve.

There were things I wished I’d done differently.

Those facts have not changed.

But in the months that followed, something else happened.

It wasn’t simply that the church had closed.

The church closure became a label.

I hadn’t just experienced failure.

I was becoming a failed church planter.

Quite literally, I’d heard those words from other pastors. Never directly, of course—more in the ways we all tend to talk.

And as I looked for other ministry opportunities, I could almost feel that label follow me into every conversation.

In many ways, I had become a black sheep.

After all...

I was a failed church planter.

Some people may have placed that label on me.

But eventually, I placed it on myself.

What made it truly painful wasn’t that other people used the label.

It was that I began to believe it myself.

In the months after the church closed, I actually changed my Twitter handle to @failedchurchplanter, trying to be funny.

A little self-deprecating humor.

But I eventually deleted it.

Not because it wasn’t true.

But because I realized it wasn’t a joke anymore.

I believed it.

And I began to wear it—not as a badge of honor, but as a mark of shame.

It became a weight around my neck that I carried into every gathering I attended.

It shaped my confidence.

It shaped my energy.

It shaped my behavior.

I wasn’t Loren anymore.

Beloved child of God.

Husband to Corinna.

Father to Lexi and Jackson.

Son of Loren and Kathleen Richmond.

Brother.

Friend.

Pastor.

I was simply...

Failed church planter.

And I thought I deserved no better.

A Different Story

Then, in the winter of 2025, something shifted.

I was listening to an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast about reframing our stories of pain and failure as a step toward healing.

As I listened, I had one of those moments where God used an unexpected voice to reveal—or perhaps remind me of—an old truth.

I found myself thinking,

This sounds quite Christian.

Because God has always been in the business of taking what looks like the end of the story and refusing to let it be the end.

I mean, that’s quite literally what happened at Easter.

And I began to wonder:

What if I stopped asking, “Am I a failed church planter?”

And instead asked, “Am I someone who has experienced failure?”

That little shift opened up just enough space within me for God to keep working.

The church really did close.

That fact has not changed.

There were still things I wished I’d done differently.

But failed church planter no longer had to be the final story.

Or the ultimate label.

Because Christ had already spoken different words over me.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

The Truest Label

I don’t know about you.

Maybe you have labels that rattle around in your own head.

I certainly do, at times, still.

But more and more I’m learning to trust that Christ’s declaration is the truest label I’ve ever worn.

Failure may tell the truth about something I have done.

Failure may tell the truth about something you’ve done.

But it does not—

It does not—

It does not—

get the final word about me.

And it does not get the final word about you.

Christ does.

So this morning I wonder...

Is there a label you’ve been carrying around?

A mistake you’ve quietly allowed to become your truest identity?

Maybe no one else even knows.

But Christ knows.

And into that place, he speaks the same promise he spoke through Paul:

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

That promise is not just for Paul.

It’s not just for me.

It’s for all of us.

It’s for you.

There is therefore now no condemnation.

That is good news, friends.

That is very good news.

Thanks be to God.

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Chips, Salsa, and Grace

Well do we have any World Cup fans here this morning?

I was watching last night Ronaldo and Portugal and a little bit of Argentina before Messi showed up with his goal. But my son and I have been watching the United States games. He’s less interested in some of the other ones. You know, sitting still for an eight-year-old is hard.

But what I think has been actually quite entertaining is seeing some of the social media stories around foreign fans coming to the United States.

And experiencing American culture for the first time.

So let’s see if we have this for us. I found this on Twitter, or X, I guess as they call it now, and I can’t verify, you know, I can’t independently verify the accuracy of the story, but it’s quite entertaining nonetheless.

So from apparently from the X account of a fan from Japan writes,

Now, for those of us who are regular patrons of Mexican restaurants in the states here, we know that technically the chips and salsa are not free, right?

They’re built into the cost of the meal at some point.

But I still think it makes for an apt illustration of God’s grace.

God’s grace is free, unrequested, and unearned.

The problem, I think, is that God’s grace has often been presented as something we need to earn, to acquire, to deserve.

This has been especially true for those who’ve been considered on the outside boundaries of society, beyond the bounds of so-called respectability.

In early colonial missionary efforts, sharing God’s grace with people often meant forcing Western cultural values upon them while stripping them of their own values, as if God’s grace was only compatible with Western European ideals.

More recently, sharing God’s grace with LGBT people often came packaged with the expectation that becoming Christian meant becoming straight, as if God’s grace were only compatible with heterosexuality.

To say it bluntly, in early colonial missionary efforts, becoming Christian often meant becoming culturally white.

And more recently, for many LGBT people, becoming Christian often meant being required to become straight.

In both cases God’s grace came with additional requirements.

With strings attached.

For centuries, humans have been trying to draw boundaries around God’s grace.

But God’s grace is always bigger than we would expect, always bigger than we could imagine.

Romans: Promise, Not Threat

During my time here this summer I’ve been preaching through the book of Romans.

For one, Romans is the reading from the revised common lectionary.

Second, I’ve never preached through Romans before, and as I shared last week, I’m only here for a short time, so whatever, if it doesn’t go well, I’m gone.

But third and perhaps most importantly for today, I’ve really only ever heard Romans preached as a threat.

So I’ve been approaching each sermon with this question:

What if Romans is not primarily about threats, but about promises?

In his letter to the early church at Rome, Paul is trying to set the record straight about who God’s grace is for and who the gospel is for.

Some Jewish followers of Jesus during that time believed that non Jewish followers of Jesus needed to earn God’s grace through strict adherence to religious rules and practices.

Conversely, other Gentile followers of Jesus, the non Jews, believed that Jewish followers had somehow forfeited their rights to God’s promise.

Both groups were drawing boundaries around God’s grace.

And Paul writes them, he says,

But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart, to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

Now again, for those of you who weren’t here last week, Paul uses some dramatic language around slavery and dominion.

And he’s convinced that all humans are slaving excuse me, all humans are serving something, are slaves to something, willingly or not.

And because of God’s grace, he says we are now freed to serve God.

And as Paul later writes in chapter six,

now that we have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage we get is sanctification, the end is eternal life.

From the message translation, if you’re familiar with that translation of the Bible, we get something a little bit more palatable to our modern ears.

It reads

But now that you found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the light of listening to God telling you, what a surprise. A whole healed, put together life right now, and more and more life on the way.

Perhaps what’s so surprising about the things that Paul is arguing for.

Is not simply what God promises, but rather to who God promises it to.

Because throughout Scripture, whenever people started drawing boundaries around God’s promises, they discovered that God’s promises were always bigger than they could imagine.

Isaiah 56

Which brings us to again from our reading this morning from Isaiah fifty six.

And I want to read it again this morning because I think it’s important.

Isaiah fifty six verse three says,

Do not let the foreigner join to the Lord say, The Lord will surely separate me from his people.

And do not let the eunuch say, I am just a dry tree.

For thus saith the Lord to the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast to my covenant.

I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.

I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

The Prophet Isaiah was speaking to a people who had their own assumptions about who did and didn’t belong.

In this case, he was writing about eunuchs.

People who, because of their bodies and their social status, were often viewed as outsiders to God’s promises.

Eunuchs could not have children, and because ancient society placed such an importance on family lineage and descendants, they were seen as people having no future and no hope and no lasting legacy.

Now, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that eunuchs were the ancient equivalent of LGBT people today.

The categories are different.

But many scholars and theologians have noted a similarity in that eunuchs occupied a place in society on the margins, they occupied a place on the margins of ancient society.

They did not ex they did not fit the expected norms around sexuality, marriage, and family.

And because they didn’t fit these expectations, these assumptions, many assumed that God’s promises were not really for them.

In much the same way today, many LGBT people have been told that they do not fit, they are outside the bounds of God’s grace, or that somehow God’s promises are not meant for them, but only for other people.

Yet Isaiah speaks directly to those who feared they were excluded.

Do not let the eunuch say, I am just a dry tree.

For Lord says,

I will give them a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

God responds not with a condition, but with a promise.

In other words, while people were busy drawing circles, drawing boundaries around God’s promise, God was reminding them that those boundaries were bigger than they could even themselves imagine.

These words from Isaiah remind us that God’s promise is not determined by social status, family lineage, or whether someone fits societal expectations.

God’s promise reaches farther than we ourselves can even imagine.

And that’s much the same point I believe that Paul is making here in the Book of Romans.

Paul says the gospel is not a reward for those who have earned it.

It’s a gift.

It is a gift for those who trust it.

Three Promises

So this morning I want to remind you again of God’s promises.

Of God’s gift.

First, that God’s promise is for all people.

So if you or someone you love is a part of the LGBT community, trust this morning that God’s promises.

God’s promise is for you.

And if you spent years wondering whether God’s grace extends the LGBT people, spoiler alert, I think it does.

And as we’ve seen in Isaiah, God’s grace is not conditional upon adherence to dominant cultural norms, it is for all who trust it.

That’s the promise, the first promise I believe, that God’s grace, God’s promise, is for all people.

But that’s not the only promise that God offers for us this morning.

The Second Promise

The second promise is that God’s promises do not have to be performed.

One of the temptations in churches like ours is to assume that if God’s grace is so important that we must constantly prove that we are gracious, we can begin to treat welcome like a performance, inclusion as an achievement, and acceptance as something that depends on us getting everything right.

Sometimes we act as if God’s grace is fragile, and if if we don’t get everything right, every statement correct, every policy, every conversation, then we can somehow mess God’s grace up.

But God’s grace is not fragile.

God’s grace does not depend on our performance, God’s grace is abundant.

God’s grace was here before us, God’s grace will be here after us.

We do not create it, we do not sustain it, we do not earn it, we simply bear witness to it and proclaim it.

Good news, good news for all.

The promise was God’s before it was ours.

Our task is not to manufacture grace, our task is to trust it and to share it.

Good news of God’s love and welcome.

The Third Promise

There’s one more promise here, and it may be, I think, sometimes the hardest promise to trust.

Third is that God’s promises keep breaking through any boundaries that we ourselves might set up.

If God’s grace is truly grace, then it cannot be reserved for people who already agree with us.

Otherwise, it’s not grace at all, but instead an earned reward.

Which means that even the people we disagree with, even the people who have hurt us, who have disappointed us, who see the world very differently than us, do not have to earn God’s grace before receiving it.

Our role as Christ’s Church, his body on earth then, is not to manufacture grace, but to trust it and to share it.

Which raises a difficult question, I think, I suppose.

Do we trust God’s promise?

Do we trust God’s promise to let God’s grace be as gracious as God wants it to be?

Do we trust God’s promise enough to let God be as gracious as God wants to be?

The promise of Isaiah 56 is not that God finally welcomes the worthy.

The promise is that God welcomes those who assumed they were already outside.

The promise is that God keeps extending grace beyond the boundaries that humans themselves ourselves create.

And once we start talking about grace, all of our human conditions fall away.

Because the moment we decide who can receive God’s promise, it stops being a promise and instead starts becoming a reward.

But God’s grace is not a reward, it’s a gift.

And gifts, by definition, are freely given.

And that brings me to the real question that I suppose for this morning.

Do we trust the promise?

The Hospital Room

At different points throughout my ministry career, I worked on and off as a hospital chaplain.

Early in my training I got the sense that being a chaplain in a hospital was sort of like a mix of being a crisis responder and emotional support presence.

In recent years I’ve recognized a deeper calling, that of being an evangelist, of trying to share God’s love and grace with whoever I encounter.

Some months back I remember seeing a young man in the hospital.

He had a note attached to his door saying, Check with the nurse first.

So I did, and the nurse said that he was a bit hot-headed and stubborn.

Good luck, she essentially said, but as I’ve already said, I enjoy a challenge.

But more I trust that God is already at work ahead of me in that situation.

So I knocked on the door.

Hello, my name is Loren Richmond.

I’m a chaplain here.

Would you appreciate a visit?

I came in and entered the room.

We began having a conversation, and as advertised, he was animated and expressive.

And despite being young enough to be my son, he had already lived a lifetime, and I mean a lifetime of pain and abuse and trauma.

Some of his stories were so shocking and appalling that I wasn’t really sure what was the pain Med’s talking and what was all the way true.

But it became quite clear to me in the moment as I was talking to him that this was a young man who was both desperately trying to outrun his trauma while at the same time desperately trying to not repeat that said trauma in his own life.

And I found myself saying something in the moment that surprised even me.

I kept telling him,

God loves you.

God forgives you.

God loves you.

God forgives you.

God loves you.

God forgives you.

Receive that.

See, this was a young man who was labelled as being far outside by society, by nurses, by his trauma.

That he was desperately, desperately, desperately trying to prove that he was worthy.

He was desperately trying to prove that he deserved a better life for himself.

And he was failing miserably.

What I wanted for him in that moment was not to proselytize him.

I didn’t want to win him over to a certain set of propositions.

I wanted didn’t want him to prove that he deserved love and acceptance.

I wanted to help him see that he could trust God’s promise of grace.

See underneath all the stories, all the bravado, all the pain.

I think there was a simpler question that was resonating from his heart.

Is God’s grace really for me?

And I kept trying to say to him again and again,

Yes, yes, it’s for you.

Yes, for the eunuchs that Isaiah wrote about.

Yes, for the LGBTQ community who has wondered if there’s a place for them in church.

But that’s not even it.

For those of you this morning carrying shame and grief and pain, yes, God’s promise is for you.

For those of you who feel like outsiders, yes, God’s promise is for you.

For those who have spent your entire life trying to prove you belong, yes, God’s promise is for you.

Because the promise of Isaiah 56 is not that God fondly welcomes the worthy.

The promise is that God welcomes those who thought they were outside.

And that’s good news, friends.

That is good news.

Thanks be to God.

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Are We Really Free?

Recently I was having coffee with a good friend, and as we are wont to do, we began talking about what the other had been reading. Myself, as someone who’s a pastor and general church nerd, always tends to read around church or theology or culture. He is a business executive coach, so he often reads about topics such as leadership and coaching and that sort of thing.

And sometimes he even reads beyond those boundaries.

But when he shared the name of the most recent book he had been reading, I was quite surprised. The topic and the title were a bit taboo, in fact.

I was immediately curious.

As someone who cannot, cannot, cannot resist an intriguing title, ⁓ I’ve already, in fact, taken home a book and read it from the church library here.

I was immediately drawn by the title and went to our local library to download the audio version of the book.

The book title is this:

Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power, a method for getting what you want by getting off on what you don’t.

No.

Now I must admit I feel a little sheepish saying those words in church and even especially from the pulpit, but I figure ⁓ this is Pride Month, so we say things that are unorthodox or untraditional, and I can get away with it perhaps.

And if not, I’m only here for, you know, how many more weeks?

As it turns out, this is a sermon about a kind of freedom that most would not understand.

The Patterns We Keep Repeating

Existential Kink is a self-help book by Carolyn Elliott, and she argues that our recurring negative patterns persist because at some level we are unconsciously attached to them. And by bringing these hidden desires into light, they lose their power over us and we become free to live differently.

She’s seeking to build off the words of the famed psychologist Carl Jung.

Who was German, guess, right? So it fits well in this context.

That he said,

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Listening to the author as she reads these words, I couldn’t get away from the question:

What if she’s right?

What if we’re not nearly as free as we think we are?

We say we’re free, but we don’t live like it.

And while Elliot’s language is certainly provocative, I suspect most of us would recognize that same basic premise.

We know what it’s like to find ourselves stuck in these same patterns again and again and again.

We swear we’ll respond differently next time.

We promise we’ll finally let it go.

We tell ourselves that we’re done.

We’re done with that bad habit, that resentment, that way of thinking.

And yet somehow.

Somehow we find ourselves there again and again.

Alas, I found myself there this past week.

Which raises, I suppose, for us a rather uncomfortable question.

Are we really as free as we think ourselves to be?

And if we’re not, what do we do about it?

We often move toward tactics of control and strategy.

We make vision boards, vision statements, we practice visualization, but these can sort of function like wallpaper over a deeper rot.

And until we address these underlying issues, the same black mold will just seep through, infecting our relationships, our actions, and our overall well being.

And perhaps this is where I suppose things get a little interesting, because maybe the deeper issue is not that we need to get a better hold of ourselves, develop better strategies for when we lose our temper, or even become more disciplined versions of ourselves.

Again, none of these are bad per se.

But it’s sort of like wallpapering over the black mold.

It’s not solving the root excuse me, it’s not solving the rot at the core of the problem.

And the deeper question is this:

Why do we keep returning to the things that hurt us?

Why do we keep repeating those same patterns?

Why do we keep finding ourselves stuck again and again in those same places?

In short, why do we say we are free yet live as anything but free?

A Very Pauline Question

I’m only a few chapters into this book and immediately after listening to the introduction I texted my friend and said:

This sounds very Pauline.

Meaning, this sounds very similar to the questions that the Apostle Paul is wrestling with in the book of Romans.

In his own way, I think Paul is asking a very similar set of questions.

Why do humans keep returning to the very things that diminish them?

Why do we say we’re free but keep living as though we’re under the power of something else?

The details, of course, are different.

We turn to vision boards, affirmations, strategies for self-improvement.

Not again that these are inherently bad per se, but Paul’s audience did something similar too, except their move was to turn to strict adherence to religious rules and practices.

The challenge, of course, is that underneath both practices, both moves is the same instinct:

If I can just get myself under control, then I will finally be free.

And that’s the very instinct that Paul here is trying to challenge.

Don’t You Know You’re Dead?

So Paul says something perhaps equally unorthodox and surprising to his hearers.

Don’t you know that you’re dead? he says.

Don’t you realize that the old person you used to be is buried and the corpse of your old self is dead and gone?

I mean he doesn’t quite say it like that.

He says this:

This is what we know that the person we used to be was crucified with him in order to get rid of the corpse that had been controlled by sin. That way we wouldn’t be slaves to sin anymore because the person who’s died has been freed from sin’s power.

Remember the question we’ve been wrestling with:

Why do we keep returning to the things that hurt us?

Paul’s answer is not what we might immediately expect.

He doesn’t offer a better strategy.

He doesn’t offer a more disciplined approach.

He doesn’t tell us to try harder or to go back to my children’s sermon to pull harder.

Instead, he proclaimed something else.

Something that God has already done.

That the old self is dead.

That the old self has been crucified with Christ.

And that the good news is that in death we are freed from that which once had control or dominion over us.

A few verses earlier, Paul writes that if we are united together in death like Jesus, we will also be united together in resurrection with Jesus.

In other words, Paul isn’t simply talking about self-improvement.

He’s talking about death and resurrection.

He’s talking about God doing something so profound that the person we were once no longer has the final word.

Trust the Promise

We tend to think we’re free from our past self, our old lives, our old habits.

Or perhaps more accurately, we think we can control them.

We think we can manage them, contain them, keep them in check.

Yet for all of our assumptions of freedom and control, we’re often more bound to these old ways than we would care to admit.

And Paul’s entire argument is that the old self is dead and buried, and sin no longer has dominion over us.

Sin no longer has control over us.

Death no longer has dominion.

And the question I invite you to consider this morning is whether we trust that promise to be true.

In his book The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticism, theologian Andrew Root writes that faith is about reception, not right actions or beliefs.

This is quite a contrast to our modern understanding of faith.

And today in some Christian contexts we understand faith as right beliefs, mentally assenting to the right sort of beliefs.

With the assurance that if we just think the right thing or believe the right thing, then we will be okay.

In other contexts, Christian contexts, faith is understood purely as right actions, that if we just do the right thing, then we’ll be the right way.

Again, none of these are bad per se, but they’re both moves of control.

And they can become assumptions that if we can simply get a hold of ourselves, if we can simply believe the right thing or simply behave the right way, then we can steer ourselves in the right direction.

What Paul is saying, what the good news of Jesus is saying, I believe, is something quite different entirely.

It’s saying:

Trust the promise.

Trust that this has already happened.

Trust that the old self is gone and the new self is come.

And to be sure, this is quite contrarian to our modern ears.

Shaped as we are for command and control, our move in most places is just to try harder.

To try harder.

And the good news of Jesus is essentially:

Try less.

I mean, again, the finger traps.

Try less.

Don’t produce, receive.

So then it becomes not about self mastery, but instead death with Christ.

It’s not about more effort, it’s about God’s action.

It’s not about finding ourselves, excuse me, fixing ourselves.

But rather trusting the promise.

And it’s not about I will change, but rather Christ is already changing me.

And that’s good news.

The way Paul describes is one of reception, and it’s only in a life of reception can the unknown be made known, and our cells be made attentive to the dramatic truth of God’s transformative love and grace.

Two Stories

So then in a way it’s not about self control, but rather about accepting our own mortality.

I see us quite often in my work as a hospital chaplain.

Not too infrequently I encounter people who have been hospitalized for what they assume is simply one too many drinks.

They often say the same thing.

This is my wake-up call. I’m going to get my life together. I’m going to get this thing under control.

Rarely, of course, do I get to see the fruit of their actions.

Except one time I did.

And it was not pretty.

It was a middle-aged man, not too much older than me, who had been hospitalized and was in quite bad shape.

He was unconscious and had the telltale signs of a person whose liver had quite literally taken too much.

Yellow and jaundiced, he lay there unconscious in the bed.

And as I sat there and talked with his family and his loved ones and prayed with them and encouraged them, something about his story rang familiar.

Sure enough, looking back in his chart when I was going back to track my meeting with this family and patient, I scrolled down a little bit in the chart notes and I noticed that I had actually seen this same man some months prior.

I remember hearing many of the same things from him.

This is a wake up call. I’m going to get my life together. I’m going to get this thing under control.

Quite clearly he had not.

What he had thought he had control over had in fact turned out to be his slave master.

And why, as unorthodox and pre-modern as those words sound to us today about slavery and bondage, I think in many ways they still ring true.

The man had been unable to admit that alcohol was his slave master, and that he was in bondage to it.

He thought he was free, but he was anything, anything but free.

And this is why I find the path of Alcoholics Anonymous so intriguing.

Each and every time they meet together, they say willingly, they say this:

I’m an alcoholic.

I am defeated.

I’m a slave to this.

Perhaps not so much in those certain terms.

See, us modern people today, we tend to think that if we’re a slave to something, we’re not free.

Paul says quite the opposite.

That when we finally stop pretending that we are in control, when we finally acknowledge our own bondage, we become open to a different kind of freedom.

Not by our own power or efforts or trying harder, but by the power of the one who already conquered death:

Jesus.

And that brings me to a second story.

The first man sought freedom through control.

The second man found freedom through trust.

A few days ago, I think it was driving perhaps to and from church here, that I was listening to an evangelical podcast about a man sharing his story about sex addiction.

And he had tried it all.

More rules.

More control.

More attempts at behavior modification.

None of it worked.

And none of it worked because none of it got to the heart of the matter.

The deeper rot inside of him that was a deep woundedness and brokenness that he could neither fix or control on his own.

One day his wife came home and asked him straight out:

“Is this you?”

Directly confronted with the reality, he did the unthinkable.

He didn’t try to fix things.

He didn’t try to manage.

He didn’t try to control things.

He simply surrendered.

“Yes”, he said.

And in surrendering and admitting that he could not fix things on his own, he joined a recovery group where he opened himself up to the radical and transformative grace of God.

He made himself receptive to this truth.

That when he finally acknowledged his own death and failure, newness could be born within him.

Whereas in the past he sought freedom through control and trying harder, instead he found freedom through trust.

The Good News

Friends, this is the good news of the gospel.

Like this is it right here.

Not that we finally can get our lives under control, but that in Jesus Christ, as we’ve already sang this morning, our chains are broken and we’ve been set free.

Thanks.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

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This book grew out of years of ministry, nonprofit work, chaplaincy, podcast conversations, and a growing conviction that church buildings can become places of faithful presence throughout the week—not just on Sunday mornings.

The book explores practical and theological ideas around:

• housing

• childcare

• food ministries

• social enterprise

• financial stewardship

• youth and older adult ministry

• and how churches can serve their neighborhoods without losing their identity as the church.

At its core, this is not a book about “saving” the church through innovation. It’s about joining the work God is already doing in our communities.

If you’d like to support the project, here are three simple ways to help:

1. Pre-order the book from the publisher:
   https://churchpublishing.org/products/9781640659988-the-church-as-community-hub

2. Share the book with pastors, church leaders, denominational leaders, and thoughtful church nerds in your life
   Word of mouth really matters with projects like this.

3. Recommend or share this Substack
   A lot of the ideas behind this book were developed right here through ongoing writing and conversation.

Thank you to everyone who has encouraged this project along the way. I’m genuinely grateful.

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Hospital chaplaincy often reveals the end result of years of unresolved grief and trauma. Watching these stories unfold has shaped how I think about faith as well. When Christianity becomes little more than our best intentions or moral effort, it cannot carry the weight of human suffering. Like recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous, real healing begins with confession and surrender—acknowledging our limits and depending on the power of God rather than our own strength.

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When Pain Goes Unexamined

The interesting thing about serving as a hospital chaplain is that I rarely see the beginning of a tragedy.

I usually see the end of it.

The ICU bed.
The machines.
The family gathering outside the room.

And almost always, when the story begins to unfold, you realize the crisis didn’t start here.

It started years earlier—with grief that was never faced, trauma that was never named, pain that was simply pushed aside until it became something far more destructive.

A dad who, isolated and alone during Covid, relents to addiction and ends up hooked up to machines in the ICU, awaiting death, leaving behind a wife and young daughter.

An older man, his siblings exasperated and exhausted as unexamined grief from the passing of his own parent decades ago cascades into an addiction that has made his life unsustainable.

A young man seeking to escape and outrun his own trauma through risk-taking and drugs, only to end up piling more trauma upon himself.

First, believe it when you hear people say men—and especially young men—are in trouble. I have more stories I could share.

Second, as I’ve said before, the hospital is often the end point of unresolved grief and trauma—the almost inevitable outcome when it isn’t dealt with but simply ignored.

And because of the way my mind works, for good or ill, I often wonder: when did this start? What was the unresolved grief or trauma that set this person on the path that led them here?

Once, a family member said it quite bluntly:

“This all started when his dad died. He’s been escalating and isolating ever since.”

For better or worse, that’s how my mind works. Seeing the end results of so much ignored pain and grief perhaps heightens my awareness of unintended consequences—or, said another way, leaves me somewhat obsessed with implications.

And that instinct doesn’t stop with the hospital. It shapes how I think about theology as well—especially the kinds of theology that try to carry the weight of the world without the resources the Gospel of Jesus actually provides.

I’ve written about it before, but I’ll say it again.

What has cooled me so much on so-called “Progressive” Christianity1 is that I’ve seen where it can end up: cynicism, mistrust, isolation, and a flattened view of divinity that reduces God to little more than a conglomeration of humanity’s best intentions.

But when sh*t hits the fan—or when a certain president unconscionably wins a second term—there’s not much left to do but fall into hopelessness, despair, and/or rage.2

After all, if Jesus is simply an example for us to follow, we have quite clearly failed to live up to his standards.

If the goal is simply to become more loving, as some might say, our nation seems to be descending further into anger and chaos.

If the Bible is merely a conversation partner, then clearly we must tell it what is what—because loving your neighbor and showing kindness to those who persecute you begins to sound quaint, old-fashioned, even irrelevant.

I don’t mean to say that every person who identifies as a “Progressive” Christian ends up bitter or despairing.

No—the message of the gospel is too powerful for that. Even in diluted form, it still transforms.

What I am saying is that, left to its own internal logic, this is where the trajectory of “Progressive” Christianity can lead: despondent, alone, exhausted.

It’s no wonder the Apostle Paul wrote, addressing those who doubted the resurrection of Jesus, that such people are “most miserable…having no hope in this world.”

Is it any wonder that those who reduce Jesus to a mere thought leader and the Bible to book club fodder can find themselves overwhelmed and exhausted when things don’t go as expected?3

This is where I say: thank God for the Bible. Within it we see testimony of God’s presence and participation in life even when things seem bleakest.

I think of Elijah and the still small voice when he believed he was defeated and alone. All his earthly efforts had failed him. He didn’t need a pep talk—he needed to be reminded of a living God. And he was.

Hospital beds are, in many ways, liminal spaces, as I’ve written about before.

They represent crossroads, where the addicted or broken must confront in real time their own inability to overcome their demons alone.

This past year in America, if I may be so bold, feels like a similar kind of acute-care moment for the health of our nation.

And yet many people—including many in our churches—seem convinced that doubling down on anger and effort will somehow fix things, as if trying harder or “fighting harder” will resolve the polarization and mistrust tearing us apart.

Sure—tell me how responding to gerrymandering with more gerrymandering will solve our problems.

But I digress.

Often when I speak with someone hospitalized after an overdose, they say the same things:

“This is a wake-up call.”
“I’m going to change some things in my life.”

Trying to be supportive, I encourage them to name who they can rely on for support, where they can find help, and what communities they can reconnect with—especially a church.

I rarely get to see the outcome.

I say rarely because I did once see a man again several months later who had made similar promises but had not implemented the changes he hoped for. Now, deeper in the grip of alcoholism and with his body further brutalized by it, the results were not pretty.

Let me close with this.

As I understand it, one of the key steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is confession and surrender—an acknowledgment that one is indeed an alcoholic and cannot defeat the addiction alone.

Recovery begins when someone stops pretending they can fix themselves.

“Progressive” Christianity, I believe, needs to come to a similar place of confession and surrender.

We cannot defeat all the evil and injustice in our world on our own. We cannot solve it through effort, outrage, or even our best intentions.

We must depend on the same power that raised Christ from the dead—the power revealed in Scripture and present with us through the Holy Spirit.

When Christianity becomes little more than our best intentions dressed up as “God,” it eventually collapses under the weight of reality.

But when we confess our limits and surrender to God’s power, something very different becomes possible.

Grace.
Renewal.
Hope.

And sometimes—like the first honest words spoken in a hospital room—the beginning of healing.

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What if church attendance is not correlation, but actually causation?

In a previous post (see below), I wrote about the confusing and confounding tendency of many, especially progressive Christians, to disregard the data showing regular church attendance as leading to better mental health. The data, as I’ve seen from Ryan Burge, seems pretty clear that it does—even if some have tried to discount it.

One of my readers, made an interesting comment:

“What can’t we ever just say that “church-goers actually are participating in something real”?”

I think there’s something to that.

And, if I may be frank, I think there are a lot of “we believe in science” progressives who simply don’t think this is real—even some progressive Christians, if I may be really frank. The assumption seems to be that there must be some other explanation.

But what if there isn’t?

Joy, Grace, and What We Receive

This Sunday in church, the pastor spoke on joy from Gospel of John 15. She made a few comments that stuck with me, reminding us that joy comes from God and is not something we need to manufacture or perform.

Looking at my Greek New Testament after the fact, I noted again that the word for joy is chara, and from doing a little digging that the Greek words—chairo (rejoice), chara (joy), and charis (grace)—all come from the same root.

In other words, joy and rejoicing are directly connected to grace—God’s grace.

Abiding as the Mechanism

Sunday evening, I was walking into church to pick up my daughter from youth group, and something hit me—what if it’s the abiding in Jesus, often practiced by being in church with the gathered community, that produces joy?

As in, we receive God’s grace, we receive God’s joy, when we are abiding in Christ.

Not just that church helps—but how: through repeated practices of abiding—worship, prayer, Scripture, community—that place people in a posture to receive grace.1

In John 15:5, Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” Then further down in 15:9, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.” Then in verse 11, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”

What’s fascinating is that in those few verses, the Greek word menó—translated as “abide” or “remain”—appears over and over again.

It seems then, pretty clear to me what Jesus is saying: abide or remain in me.

So Why the Resistance?

So I ask again: Why are so many progressives—especially progressive Christians—so eager to downplay or explain away the apparent benefits of church?

I can’t explain the former. But for the latter, I do increasingly wonder if, as suggested above, there’s no there, there, so to speak.

Or, to say it differently, data is discerning what we already know to be true based on the words of scripture.

Maybe the data isn’t surprising at all.
Maybe it’s simply measuring what happens when people remain in Christ.

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The Data—and the Reaction

In recent years, data has circulated showing that conservatives tend to be happier and more content in life than liberals/progressives.1 At this point, that’s become common enough that it hardly needs citation.

What’s been more surprising is the reaction to it.

A few weeks ago, I shared some data from showing that church attendance correlates with better mental health. I was struck by how quickly people tried to push back on it—even dismiss it outright. As I texted a friend, it’s surprising how many “we believe in science” progressives struggle to accept findings that don’t align with their assumptions.

And yet, even among self-identified liberals, those who attend church weekly are far less likely to report a mental health condition.

Trying to Explain It Away

So I started digging further.

I came across a research article2 attempting to explain the gap. It suggests the difference may be due to “Conservatives’ greater levels of justifications for and acceptance of the current state of the world (e.g. inequality)” serving as a pacifying factor, or even “due to stigma” around reporting mental health struggles.

The study goes on to say:

“One explanation for this ideological gap in mental health could stem from differing ideological justifications for the state of the world. Conservatism is a system-justifying ideology that seeks to rationalize the existing political, economic, and social order.”

I’m not a conservative, but it’s not hard to see why claims like that contribute to skepticism toward academia—especially when they read less like neutral analysis and more like heavy-handed interpretation.

After all, the entire Make America Great Again movement is built on the assumption that the current political, economic, and social order was not working. So the idea that conservatism simply “rationalizes” the status quo feels incomplete at best.

To its credit, the study does acknowledge:

“We cannot rule out the possibility that there is a real gap between mental health and overall mood ratings among conservatives but no such gap among liberals.”

And even more directly:

“Since 1972, conservatives have consistently reported greater levels of happiness compared to liberals.”

But then it pivots, suggesting that “liberals lack an ideological rationalization which frames inequality in a positive or neutral light,” and again that “Conservatives’ greater levels of justifications for and acceptance of the current state of the world serve as a pacifying factor for their own mental state.”

Those conclusions read less like neutral findings and more like interpretive framing.

What the Data Actually Shows

What seems more straightforward is correlation.

“Conservatism is positively correlated with a number of traits that are traditionally associated with better mental health and well-being, such as religious faith, patriotism, marriage, higher incomes, and old age.”

“It is also true that conservatives in the United States are more likely to be religious than liberals. Thus, at least some portion of the ideological mental health gap may actually be caused by religiosity.”

In other words, church attendance is associated with positive outcomes—not universally, not in every case, but often enough to take seriously.

The study itself acknowledges these realities. Conservative Americans are “more likely to get (and stay) married, more likely to be financially secure, and tend to be older”—all factors tied to improved mental health.

Conversely, “liberal Americans are younger, less likely to be religious, more likely to be members of socially ostracized groups, and less likely to marry. Liberals are also more engaged in politics, participate more, and more likely to find meaning in political activism, but involvement in politics appears to have a negative impact on well-being” (my emphasis).3

That last line is particularly striking.

Even after attempting to control for these variables, the study still concedes that “even controlling for a wide variety of alternative factors the ideological mental health gap still persists.”

The Real Question

Which raises a different question.

Why is this particular conclusion so difficult to accept?

Why are so many progressives—especially progressive Christians—so eager to downplay or explain away the apparent benefits of church?

Seeking prayer, community, and support within a church isn’t a replacement for medical care—but it is a meaningful form of social and spiritual support. As a hospital chaplain, I regularly encourage people to draw on those kinds of resources.

Some of the alternative explanations offered from the study feel less convincing. For example:

“conservatives…may inflate their own mental health ratings to avoid confronting a negative image of themselves.”

But isn’t part of mental health the ability to cope, to reframe, to maintain resilience in the face of difficulty?

Similarly, the attempt to argue that liberals are “actually” happier includes this line:

“Liberals may be more likely to demonstrate signs of happiness: liberal politicians expressed more positive emotional language as well as smiled more intensely and genuinely, and liberal Twitter users were more likely to tweet out positive words and messages than conservatives on Twitter.”

Those words actually made it into an academic paper. That kind of reasoning doesn’t clarify much.

Formation Beneath the Surface

More broadly, I do wonder about the formation happening beneath all of this.

In recent years, parts of progressivism have leaned heavily into emphasizing injustice, marginalization, and structural critique. There is real importance in naming those realities.

But there is also a difference between acknowledging suffering and organizing one’s entire outlook around it.

At times, it can feel like we are encouraging people not just to recognize hardship, but to remain within it—to interpret their lives primarily through that lens.

The study itself hints at this dynamic when it notes that liberals are more politically engaged, more active, and more invested—while also acknowledging that such engagement “appears to have a negative impact on well-being.”

There may be something there.

A constant “hermeneutic of suspicion” doesn’t just analyze systems—it can begin to shape how a person experiences the world, often in ways that cultivate mistrust and resentment.4

A More Personal Question

Which brings me to a more personal question.

When so many people—especially liberal Christians—question the value of church attendance, are they evaluating it clearly? Or are they, like all of us at times, influenced by the assumptions of their broader ideological environment?

More and more, it seems like many of us—across the political spectrum—are susceptible to a kind of ideological capture. A reluctance to seriously consider that our own frameworks might be incomplete or even wrong.

That dynamic is not limited to one side. It’s part of the broader moment we’re living in.

Looking in the Mirror

There are, of course, real concerns worth naming.

Data shows that increased church attendance can correlate with stronger political conservatism. More, churches are increasingly becoming the domain of the well and educated upper-class financially.

Those are not small issues.

But for me, those concerns don’t negate the data—they invite deeper reflection.

They push me not to dismiss the mirror, but to look into it more honestly.

The Question We Have to Face

This isn’t about defending one ideology over another.

It’s about asking a harder question:

What is actually helping people flourish?

And are we willing to follow the answer—even when it challenges what we want to be true?

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The Setup

Lately I’ve been thinking about ’s Seven Primal Questions, his framework for understanding the deep need that drives each of us. Around the same time, I happened to hear For King & Country’s remake of Michael W. Smith’s classic “Place in This World,” featuring a cameo from Smitty himself.

It struck me: maybe the reason that song has always resonated with me is because my own primal question is #7 — Do I have purpose? That realization made me curious. If “Place in This World” connects so clearly with my question, what 90s CCM songs might connect with the others?

So I did what any nostalgic 90’s youth grouper with a blog would do — I asked ChatGPT to help jog my memory. Together, we built a little mixtape of the Seven Primal Questions, set to the songs so many of us had on repeat back then.

Mike Foster’s Seven Primal Questions

1. Am I safe?

2. Am I secure?

3. Am I loved?

4. Am I wanted?

5. Am I successful?

6. Am I good enough?

7. Do I have purpose?

1. Am I safe? 🛡️

Song: “God Is in Control” – Twila Paris
This was the youth rally anthem of reassurance. Even when the world looked uncertain, Twila’s soaring voice promised: God’s still got this.

Also, bonus points as I bought my then middle school girlfriend, now wife, a Twila Paris album years ago!

2. Am I secure? 🔒

Song: “Great Is the Lord” – Michael W. Smith
Smitty’s worship classic reminded us that real security wasn’t about money or stability, but about the unshakable greatness of God.

Also, this is more probably classic 80’s with the synthesizers, but this is my list!

3. Am I loved? ❤️

Song: “Love Song for a Savior” – Jars of Clay
Half worship song, half alt-rock ballad, it gave words to the teenage longing to be seen, known, and loved — not just by anyone, but by God.

I was never a HUGE jars fan, but I definitely remember this song.

4. Am I wanted? 🤝

Song: “Friends” – Michael W. Smith
The graduation slideshow anthem. Every time it played, we were reassured: you belong, you’re wanted here, and God’s presence makes friendship forever.

I mean, honestly, how can this song not be on the list!?

5. Am I successful? 🏆

Song: “For the Sake of the Call” – Steven Curtis Chapman
When SCC strapped on his guitar and sang about leaving it all behind, he reframed success for a generation. It wasn’t about climbing ladders; it was about answering God’s call.

I was always more a MWS fan than SCC, but there has to be a SCC on the list (yes, I know there probably should also be a Rich Mullens song too, but he tragically passed before I really got into CCM).

6. Am I good enough? 🙇

Song: “Mercy Came Running” – Phillips, Craig & Dean
The altar-call question of all altar-call questions: Am I really okay? Do I measure up? This ballad reminded us the answer was always grace.

Christian vocal groups other than Christian southern gospel was surely a 90’s phenomenon, right? 4Him, Point of Grace, etc?

7. Do I have purpose? 🌍

Song: “Place in This World” – Michael W. Smith
Here’s mine. Even now, this song undoes me. As a young, idealistic believer, the ache for meaning and direction found its perfect soundtrack in Smitty’s ballad.

The song that inspired this blog! I also liked the version that was featured on the Netflix Christian camp movie.

Closing Thought

Mike Foster is right — we’re all driven by one primal question. For me, it’s purpose. For you, it might be safety, security, or love. But looking back, it’s striking how the 90s CCM soundtrack we grew up with was already asking (and answering) these same questions.

So maybe all along, those cassette tapes and CD binders weren’t just nostalgia. Maybe they were the soundtrack to our souls trying to work out their deepest longings.

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In Family Systems Theory, anxiety isn’t just a feeling—it’s a force. It spreads, it escalates, and it shapes the behavior of entire groups. In anxious systems (or societies), people gravitate toward certainty not because it’s true, but because it’s soothing. Moral clarity, even when oversimplified or inaccurate, becomes a coping mechanism.

That’s what I see playing out in so many of today’s public controversies.

The Certainty Illusion

Take the recent news about CBS and Stephen Colbert. Is this the silencing of liberal voices, or just late-night TV evolving in a streaming era? Depends who you ask—and their answer likely reflects their emotional need for certainty more than any serious analysis.

Or consider the WNBA pay debate. Is it pure sexism, or the natural economics of a growing league? The truth is probably both. But social media and cable news thrive on either/or answers, not both/and tensions.

Even the NPR funding conversation is laced with anxiety. Is it a vital public service or a liberal echo chamber? Is this about bias or budgets? These are complex questions. But in anxious systems, complexity feels threatening. So we rush toward clarity—even if it’s false.

When Certainty Becomes a Weapon

There’s another cost to this compulsive certainty: it alienates. When we treat every issue as morally obvious, we make it nearly impossible for those who are undecided—or even slightly questioning—to stay in conversation. There’s no room for doubt, no space for nuance, no grace for process. You're either fully in, or you're suspect.

In that environment, good-faith disagreement is confused with bad character. Curiosity looks like compromise. Asking questions is mistaken for being part of the problem. So people stay silent—or walk away.

And here's why that matters: in high-anxiety environments, belief isn’t just about ideas anymore—it’s about group cohesion and fitting in. As David Zahl writes:

“If we are leaning on a specific cause or ideology for social acceptance, then the most accepted will be those who espouse their views the loudest. Belovedness will be bestowed in proportion to the strength of our commitments. In such environments, hesitation and doubt become grounds for rejection, which incentivizes entrenchment, escalation, and even radicalization.”
— David Zahl, The Big Relief

It should also be said that in midst of our “attention economy,” it pays to speak loudly or forcefully, which creates perverse incentives. The social media algorithms rewards engagement, and nothing seems to drive engagement more than outrage. Everyone needs to be freaking out about something online in order to gain attention. Therefore, we on the consuming end feel the constantly escalated tension because things indeed are always ratched up by one person or another to gain clicks and views.

Not All Clarity Is Bad

Let me be clear: some things do offer absolute moral clarity. There are moments in life and history when the right thing to do is unmistakable. The civil rights movement offered a clarity grounded not in emotional reactivity but in moral vision, patient suffering, and long obedience. When we call something “wrong,” we don’t need to hedge. And when we name injustice, we should do so plainly.

But even moral absolutes can have complexity in how they’re applied. Take “Thou shall not kill.” A clear command. And yet most traditions make ethical space for situations like self-defense, just war, or protecting the vulnerable. That doesn't mean the commandment is relative or optional—it means that applying moral truth in real life often demands wisdom, not just slogans.

This isn’t an argument for moral relativism. It’s an argument for virtue ethics—the belief that there is always a right and just path, but discerning it often requires maturity, courage, and careful attention to context. It’s about formation, not just rules; character, not just clarity.

The overuse of moral certainty—in every headline, every controversy, every tweet—cheapens its power. It turns what should be a moment of ethical conviction into a mood of self-righteousness. And it leaves us unprepared for the real work of moral discernment: listening, learning, wrestling, holding tension.

What Healthy Systems (and Leaders) Can Do

Whether in families, churches, or societies; what Family Systems Theory reminds us is that healthy systems are marked by leaders who can tolerate ambiguity. Healthy leaders can hold the tension without needing to resolve it immediately. They can resist emotional reactivity and stay grounded in purpose rather than panic.

In one episode of his podcast The Non-Anxious Leader, Jack Shitama uses a helpful metaphor: leaders should act like electrical transformers. Just as the power grid relies on step-up transformers to move energy long distances and step-down transformers to safely reduce voltage for home use, society needs leaders who can convert emotional energy into something useful and sustainable.

Sometimes, people need to be told: “Stand up. This matters.” Other times, they need to hear: “Calm down. We’ll get through this.” For instance, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. essentially told Americans—especially white Americans—stand up, this matters. Whereas in the midst of what was surely a serious crisis in WWII, the British government told people to “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Emotional intelligence means knowing which kind of energy transformation is needed—and when. Or, as Jack Shitama would say, we need leaders who will take principles stands.

Too many leaders today, however, have defaulted to one setting: full voltage, all the time. Instead of regulating anxiety, they reflect it. Or worse, they exploit it. They don’t calm the crowd or challenge it—they just tell people to keep freaking out.

We need something different. We need leaders, thinkers, and citizens who are willing to say, “This is complicated,” not as a cop-out, but as a commitment to doing the hard work of discernment. We need people who know when to raise the stakes—and when to lower the temperature.

Because clarity that costs us truth isn’t clarity—it’s reactivity disguised as confidence.1

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In an effort to sound humane, the church has slowly forgotten how to sound authoritative—and the result is a moral language that persuades less and collapses faster. Said differently, the problem facing many moral arguments today isn’t that they lack compassion—it’s that they’ve been stripped of the authority that once gave compassion weight.

I recently recorded a podcast interview with sociologist Josh Packard—his conversation on Future Christian should release a few weeks after this post goes live. In it, we talked about metanarratives versus micro-narratives. His point, if I understood him correctly, was that while we often assume metanarratives have collapsed, that’s not quite true. Instead, young people are forming micro-narratives—smaller, more personal stories of meaning—but these are often assembled from many sources rather than rooted in a single, shared framework.

That conversation has stayed with me.

I’ve been thinking lately about why certain moral arguments—especially around immigration, justice, and public policy—have lost their persuasive power. In an effort to remain credible in a pluralistic society, many moral claims have been reframed primarily in the language of compassion. That move was meant to broaden appeal. But by loosening those claims from authority, formation, and obligation, they’ve become easier to dismiss—and harder to defend.

What many leaders have attempted, I think, is to reason almost entirely from micro-narratives rather than metanarratives. Practically speaking, this looks like trying to build consensus around shared instincts—kindness, compassion, inclusion—assuming most people already carry an internal story about what it means to be a good person and how that story should be enacted.

The problem is that micro-narratives without a strong moral grounding—without a metanarrative that orders them—are fragile. They dissipate easily. They are easily distracted, redefined, or overridden by competing instincts.

An illustrative example: sanctuary cities

I should be clear up front: I’m not a lawyer or an immigration policy expert. What follows is not a legal brief, but an illustration—meant to clarify how moral language functions when it replaces moral authority rather than rests on it.

Consider the debate over so-called “sanctuary cities.”

These policies are often described publicly as acts of compassion—cities refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement out of moral concern. What many people believe is happening is fairly simple: Democratic-led cities arrest undocumented individuals and then release them, refusing to cooperate with federal authorities because they want to be “welcoming.”

What is often actually happening, as I understand it, is more technical—and more constitutional.

In some jurisdictions, local law enforcement processes undocumented individuals like anyone else. The point of conflict comes after local charges are resolved—when bail is posted, a sentence is served, or charges are dropped. At that point, ICE may issue a detainer request asking the local jail to hold the person longer. Many cities decline unless there is a judge-signed warrant, arguing that continued detention without one risks violating the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable seizure.

That is a legal argument. A constitutional one.

But here’s the complication: cities rarely lead with that explanation. Instead, these policies are often framed publicly in the language of compassion, welcome, or justice.

That framing matters.

When legal restraint is explained primarily as a moral posture, it can sound discretionary—like bending the rules rather than obeying them. Constitutional obligation is translated into ethical sentiment. Critics, hearing moral language where they expect procedural clarity, respond by accusing cities of lawlessness, even when the underlying policy is an attempt to follow the law carefully.

What’s happening here isn’t unique to immigration policy. It mirrors something I’ve watched unfold in the church.

The same pattern in the church

This dynamic feels familiar because I see it in progressive Christianity and the Mainline more broadly.

Over the past several decades, many Mainline leaders intentionally reframed the church’s moral claims in language that could resonate beyond explicitly Christian commitments. Appeals to compassion, justice, dignity, and inclusion allowed the church to remain publicly engaged without requiring shared belief in Scripture, doctrine, or even God.

The goal was not to abandon theology, but to extend the church’s reach—to ensure its moral voice could still be heard in a pluralistic public square.

That strategic choice made sense at the time.

But as with most strategic choices, it carried consequences.

From shared authority to shared sentiment

Over time, shared moral reasoning has increasingly given way to shared moral sentiment. Moral agreement is sustained less by a common account of authority or purpose and more by whether a position feels compassionate or just to a particular community. As long as those intuitions align, the framework holds. But when they diverge—as they inevitably do—the church has fewer internal resources for navigating disagreement beyond appeals to empathy, goodwill, or posture.

This shift doesn’t eliminate moral concern; it reshapes it. Compassion and justice remain central, but the theological scaffolding that once explained why they mattered, how they were defined, and what they were ordered toward becomes less explicit.

What fills the gap is moral intuition—powerful, sincere, and deeply felt, but also variable.

The unintended outcome

One implication of this shift is that disagreement becomes harder to navigate. When moral claims are grounded primarily in shared sentiment rather than shared authority, disagreement often feels less like a difference in reasoning and more like a failure of empathy or goodwill.

Another implication is that the church’s moral voice becomes harder to distinguish from the surrounding culture. When the church speaks in the same moral grammar as secular institutions, it may gain initial resonance—but it loses a clear account of why its claims are specifically Christian rather than simply humane.

In trying to speak to everyone, the church risks speaking from nowhere in particular.

This isn’t an indictment so much as an observation about how moral language functions when it is detached from formation, theological anthropology, and a shared sense of telos.

Why this matters

I don’t see this as a failure of intent. It’s a reminder that actions have consequences, and that strategies shape outcomes in ways we don’t always anticipate.

Compassion remains essential. Justice remains central. But without a clear account of authority, formation, and purpose, those virtues struggle to persuade beyond communities that already share their assumptions.

What was meant to broaden appeal can, over time, weaken durability.

That feels less like a moral failure than a cautionary lesson—one worth paying attention to as the church continues to discern how it speaks, and from where.

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I agree that when Christianity becomes indistinguishable from politics, it hollowes itself out—but far-right evangelicalism won’t collapse the way Progressive Christianity has. Progressive Christianity weakened itself by failing to explain why the church must exist at all. Conservative Christianity, for all its distortions, persists because it still binds people through guilt, high expectations, and a dense cultural ecosystem. What then does that leave for the rest of us?

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I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the past couple years critiquing Progressive Christianity—often to the discomfort of some who assume that critique must mean a slide toward reactionary politics or theological retrenchment. It doesn’t. My concern has been far more basic: Progressive Christianity, as it has often taken shape in Mainline Protestant spaces, has struggled to articulate why the church itself must continue to exist.

That struggle matters. In practice, it has meant worship becoming optional, theology giving way to ideology, and the church increasingly understood as unnecessary overhead—useful only insofar as it advances social outcomes that could just as easily be pursued elsewhere. Over time, that logic doesn’t reform churches; it dissolves them. And in many cases, it has. People haven’t been driven out by strict doctrine or moral demands, but by a quiet, persistent question left unanswered: Why bother with church at all?

It’s from within that line of critique that I’ve been listening carefully to a recent claim made by Carey Nieuwhof, drawing on research from sociologist Ryan Burge. Nieuwhof suggests that the current rise of far-right evangelicalism may eventually collapse the same way Progressive Christianity did—fracturing, losing credibility, and hollowing out from within. Burge’s data strengthens part of that case, noting that a growing percentage of Americans who identify as “evangelical” rarely, if ever, attend church. The label itself has become as political as it is religious.

There’s truth here. When Christianity becomes indistinguishable from a political ideology, there is, as Nieuwhof notes, “nothing left to convert people to.” I agree with that diagnosis. Where I’m less convinced is the conclusion that the far-right evangelical movement will therefore fade in the same way Progressive Christianity has.

Sociologically and theologically, the two are not the same.

1. Guilt Still Functions as a Binding Agent

One of the underappreciated differences between progressive and conservative Christian cultures is the role of guilt. In progressive spaces, sin is overwhelmingly framed as systemic rather than personal. While that insight is often correct and necessary, it has an unintended consequence: there is very little mechanism for personal moral obligation to the community. Asking why someone hasn’t been in church can feel judgmental. Naming personal responsibility can feel suspect. As Andrew Root and Christian Smith both hint in different ways, moral exhortation itself becomes difficult to sustain.

Conservative Christianity, for all its problems, does not lack this mechanism. Personal guilt is real, operative, and formative. Having grown up in those spaces, I’m under no illusion that this is harmless—religious guilt (or really religious shame) can wound deeply and should never be minimized. But sociologically, it binds people. It keeps them tethered to communities even when belief wavers. It creates an internal pressure toward participation that progressive spaces largely lack. Conversely, I would also add I don’t think guilt is inherently bad, sometimes people need to be reminded that they are not living up their stated values. But conservative Christianity is far more practiced in utilizing guilt—for good or ill—than progressive versions.

2. High-Control Culture Produces Durability

Closely related—but distinct—is the presence of high-control culture. Conservative Christianity has long normalized practices like accountability partners, pastoral authority, and explicit expectations around attendance, giving, and behavior. Leaders are expected to speak directly into people’s lives. Congregants, in turn, expect to be challenged—even corrected.

In progressive contexts, such practices are often viewed with deep suspicion, and for understandable reasons. Power has been abused. Authority has harmed. But the result is a culture where strong claims are difficult to make at all. A progressive pastor telling congregants they ought to attend worship regularly or give sacrificially is often met with silence or exit. In conservative settings, the same exhortation may produce resistance—but also compliance, conviction, or renewed commitment.

High-control cultures can become coercive. They can also, paradoxically, sustain institutions. I would also add, high-expectation and high-control don’t have to be the same thing. I’ve argued in the past for high-expectation churches, but such can certainly slip into high-control—especially if, as Smith notes in his book, the point of Christianity is simply about making people be good.

3. The Ecosystem Is the Real Difference

This, to me, is the most important distinction—and the one least acknowledged in comparisons between the progressive left and the evangelical right.

Conservative Christianity is not just a set of beliefs or churches. It is an ecosystem.

There are schools, colleges, seminaries, publishing houses, media outlets, podcasts, conferences, political organizations, legal advocacy groups, homeschool networks, worship industries, and donor pipelines. Belief is reinforced across multiple domains of life—education, family, politics, entertainment, and economics. One can drift from church attendance and still remain deeply embedded in Christian subculture. There’s a reason why Charlie Kirk was understood as a Christian martyr—because these systems are so intertwined.

Progressive Christianity has never developed anything comparable. Its institutions were largely inherited, not built. Its cultural infrastructure was thin. As ideology displaced theology, there was little ecosystem left to sustain belonging once worship lost its central place. Think about many influential progressive Christian voices like Rob Bell or Brian McLaren, both of whom have de-emphasized their Christian convictions and commitments. Remember, McLaren quite literally wrote a book, Do I Stay Christian?

So Will Far-Right Evangelicalism Collapse?

It may fracture. It already is. It may lose moral credibility. It should. But collapse is not inevitable in the same way, because the sociological scaffolding is different. Guilt binds. Control disciplines. Ecosystems endure.

None of this is an argument for far-right evangelicalism. It is an argument for realism. If we want a church that resists both ideological capture and institutional decay, we need to understand why some movements disappear quickly while others persist—even when deeply compromised.

Progressive Christianity has faded not because it cared too much about justice, but because it could not convincingly say why the church should exist beyond the causes it championed. I’ve tried to argue that its core mistake was grounding itself in secular ideology rather than biblical theologically—which I think uncategorically supports justice and equality.

Far-right evangelicalism, for all its distortions, has not made that same mistake, though time will tell as the far right drifts farther into Christian Nationalism, even going so far as sometimes questioning the efficacy of the Beatitudes, and the legitimacy of famed leaders like Ed Stetzer, Beth Moore, and the late Tim Keller.

So What Remains?

The question for those of us who reject both paths is whether we can recover a church that is neither ideological nor authoritarian—one rooted in worship, thick enough to endure, humble enough to repent, and faithful enough to remain distinct.

I can imagine a more genuinely middle-road—or politically “purple”—expression of Christianity beginning to take shape, not as a bland compromise but as a deliberate refusal of extremes. This would require Christian leaders to set aside partisan allegiance and instead coalesce around shared convictions centered on Christ himself. That kind of convergence will not be easy. It will demand humility, patience, and real flexibility—especially around questions like LGBT inclusion. But I don’t think this is wishful thinking. The theological and pastoral pathways already exist, particularly among leaders who are increasingly weary of being told they must choose between left and right orthodoxies.

Time will tell whether such a church can emerge with enough coherence and courage to matter. It almost certainly won’t generate the same attention or outrage as the loudest voices at the edges. But that, perhaps, is the point. The far edges of our discourse are far smaller than their amplified presence on social media suggests. Most people are not looking for ideological purity or culture-war dominance—they’re looking for a church that is faithful, honest, and real.

And that quieter work—forming communities shaped by worship, repentance, and hope—may yet prove more enduring than any movement built on outrage or fear.

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Quick Editorial Update: The morning I have this set for release Ryan Burge just posted some very intriguing data related to this topic. I don’t think it contradicts my conclusions here, though I do hope to engage with it further at a later time.

Graphs about Religion

The Political Takeover: Why Ideology, Not Faith, Drives the Culture War

No term takes me back to my graduate school days like the “Culture War.” And for good reason: it was one of the biggest methodological debates in political science. Two camps emerged—one argued that polarization had completely infiltrated American society. It wasn’t just a phenomenon of the chattering class, but it was also clearly evident among rank an…

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7 months ago · 33 likes · 5 comments · Ryan Burge

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I’ve written in the past about the necessity of a moral ecology—a moral foundation rooted in Christianity.

I’ve also written about the Black Church, particularly its leadership during the Civil Rights Movement, as a model worth recovering today: deeply rooted in Scripture, spiritually grounded, morally serious, and unflinchingly committed to justice.

At the same time, I’ve expressed concern about grounding the actions of the American church primarily in secular theories—especially those that reduce moral life to a struggle for power. When power becomes the dominant explanatory frame, dehumanization can never be far behind.

This is why I get nervous when I see or hear slogans like “f*ck ICE.”

I understand the outrage. I share much of it. I don’t question the anger that arises when injustice is blatant and lives are lost. A Substack reader commented that initial outbursts of “f*ck ICE” is understandable. I agree. Another suggested that such language is meant systemically—“f*ck the system,” not individual people. Fine, perhaps.

But I’m not convinced our moral imaginations—or our nervous systems—actually make that distinction in practice.

When people chant “f*ck ICE” in the streets, or when videos circulate online with those words emblazoned across them, the message does not land as a nuanced critique of systems of power. It lands as an expression of hatred—often directed, explicitly or implicitly, toward human beings.

I do believe in lament. I’ve written previously about lament as a necessary Christian practice—one that refuses denial and resists injustice. And I can imagine how such chants might function, at least initially, as a form of raw lament.

But I grow uneasy when those chants become repetitive, habitual, and central—because I also know how human beings work.

There is a reason Jesus tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us—not because injustice is excused, but because hatred corrodes the soul of the one who carries it.

What I’m ultimately grieving here is not simply a breakdown in tone or strategy, but the eclipse of Christian moral formation itself. In many spaces—both secular and religious—the grammar that once shaped Christian resistance has been replaced by a framework almost entirely concerned with power, struggle, and domination. That framework can name injustice, but I’m unconvinced that it can reliably form people to resist injustice without becoming distorted by it. Part of why I continue to point back to the Black Church and its leadership during the Civil Rights Movement is not nostalgia, but grief: a recognition that America has largely lost a shared moral ecology capable of sustaining costly, disciplined, non-dehumanizing resistance.

As warned of several years ago, if many are alarmed by the excesses of the Christian right, they should be equally—if not more—concerned about what emerges when moral restraint, transcendence, and formation disappear altogether. We are clearly seeing that a politics untethered from any thick moral or spiritual tradition does not become gentler; it becomes rawer, crueler, and more efficient in its capacity to harm.

And again, this is why I found myself returning to the wisdom of the Black Church and to a few books pulled from my shelf: Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King Jr., Hope and History by Vincent Harding, and Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman.

Thurman’s reflections on hatred are especially clarifying. It’s important to say at the outset that—assuming I am reading correctly—he is not writing to excuse oppression, nor to shield oppressors from accountability. He is writing to those who are disinherited—to those whose lives are constrained, threatened, or crushed by unjust systems.

“Hate,” Thurman writes, “is another of the hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the disinherited” (74).

One of Thurman’s most piercing and prescient insights is that hatred can masquerade as moral clarity. It can offer what he calls “a dimension of self-realization,” where “the illusion of righteousness is easy to create” (82). Over time, hatred becomes “a device by which an individual seeks to protect himself against moral disintegration” (83). In other words, hatred does not simply react to injustice—it can become the moral framework through which a person understands the world.

And this is where Thurman’s warning becomes especially relevant for our moment.

We see this all around us. When hatred becomes the motivating force—as it has for many in our current administration—creativity dies, imagination collapses, and cruelty hardens into policy. Thurman names this dynamic with chilling clarity, warning that hatred “tends to dry up the springs of creative thought in the life of the hater” (88). Hatred does not simply oppose injustice; it corrodes the inner life, narrowing vision and foreclosing the possibility of newness.

What Thurman is diagnosing is not partisan—it is human.

And it is here that I want to make a contemporary observation of my own. When anger and vitriol become the primary animating energy on the left—even when that anger is understandable or morally justified—the danger Thurman names still applies. As he cautions, once hatred takes hold, “resourcefulness becomes completely focused on the negative aspects of the environment” (88). The imagination contracts. Creativity gives way to reaction. Resistance becomes defined more by what it opposes than by the life it seeks to bring into being.

This is why Thurman insists that hatred ultimately produces death, not life. “Hatred bears deadly and bitter fruit,” he writes. “It is blind and nondiscriminating…once the hatred is released, it cannot be confined to the offenders alone” (86). It spreads. It metastasizes. And eventually, it consumes even those who believe they are wielding it justly.

This is precisely why Martin Luther King Jr. could say, without sentimentality, “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” And why Thurman insists that Jesus rejected hatred not as weakness, but as faithfulness:

“Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial” (88).

Jesus’ command in Matthew 5—to love enemies and pray for persecutors—is not naïve idealism. It is a refusal to let dehumanization become the engine of action.

None of this denies injustice. None of it excuses evil. I do not want to pretend that what our current administration and many ICE officers are doing is anything other than morally reprehensible. Anger and rage are sometimes appropriate. We should be angry when a mother is killed unnecessarily.

But the point I am trying to make—and perhaps I am wrong—is this: action rooted in hatred will not bring new life.

What I long for instead is a recovery of the moral and spiritual posture exemplified by the Black Church during the Civil Rights Movement—deeply grounded in Scripture, disciplined by prayer, committed to love of neighbor, and yet utterly uncompromising in its pursuit of justice.

Justice and accountability matter profoundly.
But so does the way we speak.
So does the way we imagine.
So does the kind of people we become along the way.

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Drawing on Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination, this post reflects on how modern political power—especially in its totalizing forms—seeks to control people through numbness and despair. I argue that Trumpism in its current form mirrors what Brueggemann calls “totalism”: demanding absolute loyalty while crushing imagination and hope. Against this, the prophetic task of the church is not spectacle or outrage, but faithful resistance—offering an alternative vision of reality rooted in grief, moral clarity, and the conviction that no political regime is ultimate. We need to feel again. Only then can we hope.

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I just finished reading—again—Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination. Having read it about five years ago, I decided to pick it back up, and I was not disappointed in the endeavor.

For those unfamiliar, from the book description on Amazon: Brueggemann offers a theological and ethical reading of the Hebrew Bible. He finds there a vision for the community of God whose words and practices of lament, protest, and complaint give rise to an alternative social order that opposes the “totalism” of the day. Brueggemann traces the lines from the radical vision of Moses to the solidification of royal power in Solomon to the prophetic critique of that power with a new vision of freedom in the prophets. Linking Exodus to Kings to Jeremiah to Jesus, he argues that the prophetic vision not only embraces the pain of the people, but creates an energy and amazement based on the new thing that God is doing.

There are so many powerful and compelling points in the book that I cannot even hope to adequately touch on more than a few here—it may yet require further posts. For the purposes of this one, I want to briefly examine Brueggemann’s reflections on despair and the “royal consciousness”—or what, in his 2017 edition, he further clarifies as “totalism,” lest there be any confusion about his intentions.

Brueggemann notes that within the “royal consciousness” (or totalism), the way of keeping people down essentially takes one of two forms: numbness or despair. On numbness, he writes, “[In the royal program], God has no business other than to maintain our standard of living” (37). On despair, he observes, “The royal consciousness leads people to despair about the power to move toward new life” (59). In short, people will either feel nothing or feel everything—and thus be unable or unwilling to seek a better, different way. As he puts it, “Numb people do not discern or fear death. Conversely, despairing people do not anticipate or receive newness” (60).

As I write this, we are approximately twenty-four hours out from the Trump administration essentially invading a foreign country and deposing the leader of that nation—something shocking and, by almost any past standard of American foreign policy and military diplomacy, unheard of. For someone old enough to remember that even Bush/Cheney respected the process enough to pretend there were WMDs at stake in Iraq, what is most striking here is how totalitarian the messaging has been, especially from within the party itself. There is no uncertainty, no questioning—only unflinching loyalty.

And I think this marks the stark difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. Whereas the first administration was chaotic and disjointed, this version has operated with cold, ruthless efficiency—from Russell Vought to Stephen Miller to Kristi Noem, the latter two even recorded dancing to the tune of “ICE, ICE Baby…” at a New Year’s Eve party. The only acceptable posture is unwavering obedience and acquiescence. Those who dare refuse to bend the knee face vengeance and blowback, as my home state of Colorado is experiencing, with Trump & Co. vetoing bipartisan legislation to provide clean drinking water to rural, red districts in eastern Colorado and seeking to shut down the NCAR laboratory.

Trump, much like the royal consciousness—or totalism—Brueggemann describes, seeks to pump up the economy to keep half the country numb and comfortable, while overwhelming any opposition into despair, shame, and defeat.

It has been especially disappointing to see so many conservative Christians march in lockstep with his every action—and worse, respond vengefully when anyone dares to question. While I am hesitant to label every instance of support among conservative Christians as Christian Nationalism, there is no doubt a strong and foundational undercurrent shaping much of what now passes as politics and Christianity.1 And it is no wonder that questioning the system provokes such hostility, for as Brueggemann writes, “The reason for hostility, rather, is because the enunciation of the God of the covenant renders the claims of the totalism penultimate, while every totalizing regime (as in ‘Make America Great Again’) presents itself as ultimate. Prophetic deconstruction dismisses the ultimacy of allegiance and submission expected by the totalism. The enunciation of this God undermines all such pretensions” (129).

So then, what can be done?

In our time and culture, we are obsessed with big, bold acts. But as Brueggemann suggests, what is needed is not spectacle, but faithfulness. “The prophetic ministry does not consist of spectacular acts…[but] of offering an alternative perception of reality” (116).

What, then, might it look like to offer an alternative perception of reality in a time of totalism? Not dramatic gestures or viral resistance, but daily practices that quietly refuse to acquiesce, numb, or despair. The other day at the hospital, I held the hand of an older women gripped by despair—she asked to hold my hand, and I imagined she was longing to feel again. This past Sunday, I read Psalm 46 in small group: God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea… And nearly every day, I try to remind my kids about doing the right thing, being kind, and understanding history and how we got here (oh, and I do occasionally email and call my congressman).

I remember posting something to this effect a few months ago on Substack, and I was frankly offended. But then I realized—that my reaction was precisely the problem. That is what the royal consciousness wants: for us to be so despairing that we assume an alternative, hopeful future is impossible. As tired as I get of endless talk about the political horse races of 2026 and 2028, I do think such conversations can function as an alternative perception of reality. Trump is not forever. The royal consciousness is not forever. God is living and active in the world, still working and willing justice into being.

One final note. Brueggemann emphasizes the importance of grief and death, themes I’ve also encountered in Andrew Root’s work—connections I hope to explore in future posts. For now, the point to take from Brueggemann is this: when we grieve, we feel. Working as a hospital chaplain, I see daily how many people have numbed themselves through alcohol or other addictions, or have sunk so deeply into despair that they can no longer imagine another life for themselves. Grief restores feeling.

We need to feel. When we feel, we know we are alive. When we know we are alive, we know there can be a future.

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The Massacre of the Innocents is not an awkward add-on to the Christmas story—it’s the first sign that the incarnation threatens violent power. Matthew 2 reveals a God who is found with the vulnerable, the fleeing, and the grieving—not with those enforcing order at the cost of innocent lives. When Scripture is reduced to a book of principles or political props, we miss its central witness: God’s unmerited grace saving action. If our reading of the Bible leaves us comfortable with state violence against migrants, we are not misreading Scripture—we are telling a different story altogether.

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Reading Matthew 2 After Christmas

Having just seen the 60 Minutes segment on El Salvador’s CECOT prison pulled by CBS News shortly before airing, I have no qualms saying this: our current administration would rip the baby Jesus from his mother’s arms, send Joseph to be tortured in another nation, and leave Mary weeping and alone in a detention center.

That may sound extreme. But it is also precisely the story Christians tell at Christmas—if we bother to keep reading.

It’s often called the Massacre of the Innocents, the story recounted in Matthew 2:13–23, where, fearing the Magi’s words that a king has been born, Herod “sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.” Earlier in the story, Joseph is instructed by an angel:

“Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt… for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.”

As things go, this text is appointed in the Lectionary for the Sunday after Christmas1 in most Protestant churches. It lands at an awkward and emotionally complicated moment. Many pastors—having just run the gauntlet of Advent, Christmas Eve, and often a Longest Night service—take that Sunday off. So do many congregants, exhausted from travel, family, and worship packed into a few short days.

What often happens instead is that an associate pastor, a seminarian, or even a volunteer is tasked with preaching what amounts to one of the most difficult Lectionary texts there is: the slaughter of children.2

13 Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt…”

16 Then Herod sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem…

18 “A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children…”

While it’s understandable that so many miss this Sunday, it’s also a shame—especially this year—as we are witnessing, in real time, this text being lived out before our very eyes.

What the Bible Is—and Is Not

In Unpacking Scripture in Youth Ministry, Andrew Root explores how Scripture is meant to shape ministry and faithfully form those entrusted to it. Root begins by clarifying what the Bible is not.

It is not a divine reference book.
It is not primarily a history textbook.
And it is not, at its core, a book of principles.

Instead, Root insists:

“The Bible is primarily a story—the story of God’s action. It doesn’t primarily reveal a set of principles, but an agent” (65).

Scripture witnesses to who God is and how God acts. And in reading it, we are invited to discern how God is acting now.

This is why Root pushes back against a purely academic approach to Scripture—important as historical and cultural context may be.3

“Reading the Bible,” he writes, “should direct us not into the world behind the text, but into our world where God acts” (102).

The central question becomes: What does this story tell us about who God is and where God is found?

When I Read Matthew 2:13–18

When I read Matthew 2:13–18, I cannot escape the conclusion that God is found with the innocent—among the fleeing family, the grieving mothers, the terrified children.

God is not neutral here.
God is not abstract.
God is not standing above the violence, weighing principles.

God is present in the suffering, and judgment is reserved for those who would sacrifice innocent life to preserve power.

The Bible’s authors intentionally included this story to say as much.

Nativity Scenes and Moral Incoherence

In recent weeks, some churches have drawn criticism for displaying incomplete Nativity scenes—Jesus or the Holy Family absent, replaced with signs suggesting they are in hiding due to threatened deportation by ICE.

These displays are often dismissed as “political.” I would argue they are something more precise: they are theological. They are attempts—however imperfect—to take Matthew 2 seriously.

If Scripture tells us who God is and where God is found, then we should be very clear: God is not found with ICE or with the government officials ordering these actions.

And this is why I continue to appreciate Root’s insistence on taking Scripture seriously without reducing it to slogans. There are many Mainline and Progressive Christians who rightly protest the mistreatment of migrants while simultaneously weakening Scripture’s authority elsewhere. That inconsistency matters.4

At the same time, I am utterly confounded by the number of Christian pastors and influencers who claim biblical justification for our current immigration policies. This is where Root’s warning about treating the Bible as a book of principles becomes painfully relevant. If Scripture is reduced to rules, one can cherry-pick Romans 13 and conclude that migrants deserve whatever consequences come their way for violating the law.5

A Yard in My Neighborhood

This disconnect feels especially close to home for me.

In my own neighborhood, there’s a house with a Trump 2024 sign still prominently displayed—and, in the very same yard, a Nativity scene.

I don’t say this flippantly or even angrily; I say it with a kind of stunned sadness. What strikes me is not hypocrisy so much as moral incoherence. The two symbols sit side by side without any apparent awareness of the tension between them.

And I wonder if that’s because Scripture has been reduced, in many contexts, to a political prop—a book of principles selectively taught and interpreted so as to align neatly with one party’s talking points.

When the Bible is flattened this way, it no longer confronts us; it confirms us. And once that happens, even the image of a refugee child fleeing state violence can be rendered invisible—standing quietly beneath plastic shepherds and a glowing manger.

Principles or Presence?

Root reminds us:

“In real life—and the Bible is only concerned with real life—principles must be violated on occasion, sometimes even out of obedience to God” (66).

Jesus himself says the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.

So when “Bible-believing Christians”—and notice again that for Root the Bible is not something we believe in so much as a witness to who God is—argue that innocent migrants should be rounded up, detained, and deported in the name of law and order, they reveal what they believe Scripture ultimately is:

a book of principles to be enforced, not a story of God’s saving action among the vulnerable.

Grace, Not Return on Investment

I was listening recently to an episode of my good friend and colleague ’s podcast Church and Main, where he hosted a conversation with Todd Brewer, a PhD and New Testament scholar. At one point in the conversation, Brewer made an observation that stopped me cold. What made early Christianity so radically different from its surrounding Roman culture was the sheer recklessness6—my word, not his—with which Christians gave to the poor.

Brewer contrasted this with the Roman philosopher Seneca, who understood gift-giving as a kind of strategic investment. You gave gifts to those who could return the favor, or at least benefit you down the road. Giving to the poor made little sense in that framework. There was no real return on investment. It was inefficient. Foolish, even.

And yet, this is precisely where early Christianity broke ranks with its culture.

Brewer also noted that in the New Testament, the word for gift is deeply connected to the word for grace—charis. Early Christians understood their generosity not as calculated benevolence, but as overflow. They gave because they believed they themselves had received an overwhelming, undeserved abundance of grace in Christ. Their generosity wasn’t strategic; it was a testimony.

Which makes me wonder this.

As I sit here editing this post yet again on Christmas Eve, with a $25 gift card next to me that I’ll send off to a local teen moms ministry, I can’t help but ask: have I—have we—really experienced grace?

I’m thinking here of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his insistence that grace is costly. And I wonder whether American Christians—myself included—have developed such a cheap understanding of grace that it no longer disrupts us. Maybe that’s because we’ve flattened God into this immanent frame. Or maybe it’s because of our quiet pride and hubris—the assumption that we’re, all things considered, pretty good people. Deserving people. Worthy recipients.

And if that’s the case, then like Seneca, we can afford to be careful. Measured. Prescribed in our generosity. We can give, yes—but only within limits that preserve our sense of control.

Which brings me back, again, to Root’s central point.

If the Bible is merely a book of principles—rather than the story of God’s overwhelming grace and mercy toward humankind—then it makes perfect sense that Christians would treat it as a collection of precepts we can selectively apply. We remain in control of the narrative. We decide where grace stops.

But if Scripture is truly the witness to God’s unmerited favor and reckless generosity, then the only faithful response is to live out of overflow. Out of abundance. Especially toward those who have been named as “vermin,” “garbage,” “human refuse,” or “the worst of the worst.”7

I realize I’m belaboring the point. But this is precisely where theology matters.

If we are already pretty good on our own, and grace is merely God’s stamp of approval, then our restraint makes sense.

But what if the biblical story is right?

What if we were all, as Scripture says, “aliens and strangers… having no hope, and without God in the world”?8

Well—
that changes everything.

In Closing

The Massacre of the Innocents is not an embarrassing footnote to the Christmas story. It is the first sign that the incarnation is a threat to the powers of this world.

And if the story we are telling at Christmas leaves us comfortable with state violence against the vulnerable, then the problem is not that the gospel is unclear—it’s that we’ve stopped listening to it.

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