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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Waiting Wears Us Down

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

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

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

And to some extent they did.

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

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

And how much longer can we keep this up?

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

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

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

How long can we keep this up?

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

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

Prepared for the Wait

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much longer can I keep this up?

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

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

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

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

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

How long can I keep this up?

The Promise That Sustains Us

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

We can trust that promise.

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

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

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

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

Waiting Depends on Trust

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

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

But a later study actually found something quite interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I believe those words.

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

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

It’s a vicious, vicious cycle.

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

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

The Master’s Tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God’s Way of Exercising Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But These Are Not Ordinary Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christ Has Broken the Vicious Cycle

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

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

Therefore, my beloved friends, every time we think

That won’t work.

The stakes are too high.

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

Scripture reminds us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Glimpse Beyond the Vicious Cycle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Will We Do With That Power?

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

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

What will we do with that power?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story goes like this:

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

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

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

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

What Happens When We Run Out of Scales?

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

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

What happens when we run out of scales?

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

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

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

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

What happens when we run out of scales?

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

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

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

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

And if I run out, that’s my fault.

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

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

It can become this endless cycle of questioning:

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

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

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

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

Being a good person becomes quite the job.

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

Love God. Love Your Neighbor.

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

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

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

Love God. Love your neighbor.

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

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

But then Jesus says something else.

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

“The son of David,” they answer.

Then Jesus asks, quoting from the Psalms,

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

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

Sure, maybe.

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

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

And I think the connection is this:

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

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

The Relief of God’s Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We love because Christ first loved us.

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

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

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

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

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

God Is Already in the Room

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

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

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

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

I’m simply trying to carry it.

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

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

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

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

I said hello and introduced myself as a chaplain.

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

“Yes, I do,” I agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

“God’s peace be with you,” I said.

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

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

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

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

The good news is Jesus himself.

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

Thanks be to God.

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What do you remember about the fall of twenty eleven?

The final Harry Potter movie had just been released.

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine I am hardly alone in feeling that increased tension.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ultimate Gotcha Question

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

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

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

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

Like a good political reporter, we might say.

They are setting him up for the real gotcha question.

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

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

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

If you remember Zacchaeus’s story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps he holds in his hand, flipping it over.

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

Sort of flummox they say the emperors.

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

Not the answer they wanted.

Sort of confused and flummox they walk away.

What Belongs to God?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning to Let Go

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

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

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

Does that ever really work?

Often the fear only makes things worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nemo looks at his father and says, Trust me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not from the terror that everything depends upon us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But again: scarcity forces choices between good things.

Disparity Tells Us What Happened, Not Why

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

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

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

Consider the early WNBA.

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

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

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

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

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

Investment Isn’t Charity

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s ultimately an economics question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps both were true.

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

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

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

Churches and Nonprofits Aren’t Exempt From Scarcity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scarcity forces choices between good things.

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

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

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

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

It means their resources have limitations also.3

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

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

That’s the tradeoff.

When Economic Outcomes Become Moral Narratives

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

Different frameworks begin with different questions.

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

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

Both sets of questions can reveal something important.

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

Less investment becomes “denial of resources.”

A smaller audience becomes evidence of systemic bias.

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

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

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

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

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

The WNBA May Actually Demonstrate the Opposite

And this is what makes the WNBA example so interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It simply requires us to distinguish between disparity and discrimination.

Scarcity Isn’t (always) a Moral Failure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes people simply chose another good thing.

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

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

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

What Time Is It?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Darkness Becomes Our Orientation

Have you ever experienced something like that?

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

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

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

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

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

Is that our spiritual lives also begin to suffer.

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

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

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

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

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

The Night Is Nearly Over

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

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

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

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

I mean it seems all rather straightforward and obvious.

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

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

Perhaps the darkness had become their orientation.

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

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

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

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

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

God’s New Day Is Coming

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

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

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

This moment matters.

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

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

Quite the opposite, actually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eventually we wonder why even tried.

Again, the darkness becomes our orientation.

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

Quite the opposite, in fact.

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

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

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

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

So, how do we live that way?

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

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

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

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

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

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

We receive Christ, the identity of

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even There, This Was God’s Time

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

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

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

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

And Raul never came back out.

He was detained and eventually transferred to a county jail.

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

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

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

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

Raul was recognizing and responding to God’s time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what God has awakened, Raul said.

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

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

Even there, this was God’s time.

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks be to God.

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

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

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

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

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

“We Can Save $500 by Doing It Ourselves”

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

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

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

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

Maybe.

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

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

That’s what economics call opportunity cost.

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

Do What You’re Good At

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Volunteer Time Is “Free”

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

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

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

I see this trend in chaplaincy.

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

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

Which is another reason specialization matters.

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

What Didn’t Happen?

And I think this is the bigger point.

The most important cost isn’t necessarily payroll.

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

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

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

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

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

Those are very different questions.

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

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

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

There are only so many hours in the day.

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

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

Sometimes the answer will still be yes.

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

And that, ultimately, is what scalability requires.

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

Sometimes spending money actually saves resources.

Sometimes “free” is surprisingly expensive.

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

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

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

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

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

The Kohl’s-Amazon Experiment

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

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

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

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

It sounded like a great idea.

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

But then something interesting happened.

Kohl’s largely stopped talking about it.

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

The Amazon partnership unquestionably drove traffic to Kohl’s.

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

Which brings me to churches.

How Many People Come Through Your Building?

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

It was something like:

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

But does it really?

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

The Kohl’s-Amazon partnership illustrates why.

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

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

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

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

Maybe something or maybe very little.

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

Be Strategic

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

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

And strategic is the word worth repeating.

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

So perhaps it sounds strange for me to say this:

Not every opportunity to use your building is worth pursuing.

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

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

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

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

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

Churches should pay attention to that.

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

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

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

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

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

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Sources:

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

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

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

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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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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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