by Matthew Pinson | Dec 9, 2022
Brett McCracken on “Cool Christianity Is (Still) a Bad Idea”
A dozen years ago I read with delight Millennial Brett McCracken’s book Hipster Christianity: When Christianity and Cool Collide. I remember thinking how fascinating it was that this young self-proclaimed hipster was skittish about making his religion, his experience of Christ’s church, another “cool” consumer commodity.
McCracken’s book appeared alongside another great book by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck entitled Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be), published during those years when Mark Driscoll (whose ministry has recently been discussed in the podcast “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill”), Donald Miller, and Rob Bell were growing in popularity.
My friend David Williford recently reminded me of these books, and the ideas in them, when he sent me a Gospel Coalition article McCracken wrote a couple of years ago entitled “Cool Christianity Is (Still) a Bad Idea.” In it, McCracken reflects on the book and how dated and silly much of what it described—a hipster mentality that seemed to many to be inherently disingenuous in an attempt to appear cool—is today.
But, as he says, that’s just the point. The never-ending quest for relevance—the quest for cool—will always make evangelicals look terribly dated when looking back on what they did just a few years earlier. This is very much unlike the continuity with the saints and martyrs of the Christian past the church has always pursued, which is ever-relevant because it testifies to deeper doctrines and practices that can’t be reduced to—that even defy—the passing fads of pop culture.
McCracken is not advocating a “drawing of the line” at some “golden age” in the past—1970? 1950? 1850? Instead, he encourages what all Christian leaders of all ages have always advocated until very recently: maintaining continuity with the Great Christian Tradition, not being a slave to the market—to our current cultural moment.
As McCracken says, “‘Cool Christianity’ is, if not an oxymoron, at least an exercise in futility.” This is because a “relevance-focused Christianity sows the seeds of its own obsolescence. Rather than rescuing or reviving Christianity, hipster faith shrinks it to the level of consumer commodity, as fickle and fleeting as the latest runway fashion.” Furthermore, he notes, “Chasing ‘relevance’ is exhausting and unsustainable.”
The reason this approach is not sustainable is that the enduring values of the gospel, which transcend generations and times and cultures and taste groups, militate against the “inherent transience of ‘cool’ that makes ‘cool Christianity,’ unsustainable by definition. Today’s hip, cover-boy pastor is tomorrow’s has-been. This year’s fast-growing, bustling-with-20-somethings cool church is next year’s ‘I used to go there’ old news.”
I talk to Free Will Baptist pastors everyday who are seeing slow growth in their churches that’s arising more from conversions and baptisms of unchurched people than from transfer growth. Yet they’re discouraged because they’re comparing themselves to the non-denominational mega-church and celebrity ideal.
They’re ready to throw in the towel because of the slow yet genuine growth they’re experiencing in their church of fifty or seventy-five or a hundred, as they faithfully pursue the ordinary means of grace, planting and watering with God giving the increase.
It’s just this kind of pastor who needs to read this article. Reading it could help encourage discouraged pastors to continue in the ordinary means of grace that the Spirit has blessed in communities and mission fields across the ages, and, as they zealously labor in the gospel God’s way, God will give the growth. And it will be sustainable.
by Matthew Pinson | Jul 1, 2022
This is a profound time of thankfulness as we express gratitude to God for the recent United States Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. This is a moment for which we have prayed a long time, and I wanted to take a few minutes and record several thoughts that have been on my mind over the past few days as I’ve reflected on this historic decision.
To quote Richard Weaver, ideas have consequences. The idea that every human life has value and the idea that every human life has essential rights the Constitution guarantees, such as life, liberty, property, habeas corpus, and the due process of law, have consequences. The idea that those who are pre-born or elderly or ill or disabled, as human persons and thus divine image-bearers, have the same rights and liberties as those already born or young or healthy has consequences.
The Conservative Legal Movement
However, if ideas remain theoretical and never grow into plans, then policies that lead to human flourishing will never be developed. The maturation of the conservative legal movement is one of the best examples we have of ideas, over time, turning into plans and eventually effecting policies. A coherent, intelligent, well-conceived conservative legal movement developed after the U.S. Senate defeated President Ronald Reagan’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court Robert Bork in 1987. Had that not occurred, we would not have had conservative scholars and practitioners with the legal and jurisprudential expertise to be nominated and confirmed for the Court now.
This is an example of the maxim that “politics is downstream from culture.” As conservative religious people, we have put too many of our eggs in the basket of the “horse race,” of trying to get people elected to office. But once they’re elected, too often we just fixate on the next election. But politics is indeed downstream from culture, and the conservative legal movement is a prime example of how an intellectual and cultural shift, together with philanthropic resources and single-minded determination, has resulted in a policy shift of momentous proportions.
We must remember, though, that such a shift took thirty-five years to take effect. And the pro-life movement worked for nearly fifty years for this moment. The conservative legal movement and the pro-life movement played the long game. They persisted and did not give up. They focused on ideas and on changing the way people think. This long-game mentality is perhaps the greatest takeaway from these movements.
But thinking of the conservative legal movement brings to mind how out of sync much of the American public is with the clear, constitutional language used in the majority opinion that overturned Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That is because the jurists that formed the Court’s majority in this case affirm the traditional notion of originalism.
Originalism holds that justices need to go back to the intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution and its amendments to determine the meaning of those documents. It holds that the job of the federal courts is not to introduce new ideas. It is not to legislate from the bench. Jurists are not to act as ethicists or sociologists or legislators to figure out what new laws they need to enact and enforce those laws on the states.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s role is simply to determine if laws or legal actions are constitutional. The Court’s majority opinion in this case rightly held that Roe and Casey were unconstitutional and thus the question whether a woman has the right to end the life of her preborn child must be decided by each state.
The only constitutional way to guarantee, in every state, the right to receive or perform an abortion is to pass an amendment to the Constitution. Everyone on all points of the political spectrum knows that could not have happened in 1973 and could not happen now. Likewise, to make abortion-on-demand illegal in all fifty states will require an amendment to the Constitution, which is just as unlikely at this juncture as a pro-choice amendment. Sadly, however, many individuals fail to understand how the American constitutional system works.
Christian Worldview Education
This leads me to the next thing that has been on my mind the last few days: we conservative evangelicals need to place more emphasis on Christian worldview education. That emphasis will lead to greater ethical literacy, including knowing how to explain how biblical ethics lead to human flourishing while providing for religious liberty for everyone. It will also lead to greater literacy regarding our role as Christians who are also citizens.
The recent Gallup poll that shows there are fewer people who believe in God should come as no surprise to us. At the very same time that we have allowed K-12 schools to become dominated by precise progressive-secularist ideology, we have dumbed down our churches almost in inverse proportion. The past few decades are when we should have become more intent on training our children in serious theology and Christian truth and how it relates to the culture around them. Instead, we have dumbed down our religion and, to quote Neil Postman, become intent on “amusing ourselves to death.”
It should not be surprising to us that our retreat from serious thinking and preaching and teaching about God’s truth—our substituting of entertainment for worship, motivational speaking for preaching, CEO leadership for shepherding, and marketing for evangelism—has been unsustainable. It has produced fewer serious Christian believers. And studies have shown that serious Christian believers are also the ones who invite people to church or share their faith. Further, the vast majority of new believers join churches because of the influence of a friend or family member.
George Barna has shown over and over again that many evangelical churches’ recent numerical success has increased at the same time that the spiritual health of their members has plummeted. Fewer and fewer of the members of seemingly successful churches can pass a basic Christian worldview quiz, give more than a few percent of their income, attend church or pray or read Scripture more than a handful of times a month, and invite people to church and share their faith.
The upshot of all this is that we cannot expect there to be more Christians when secular progressives pour more and more money into education and training that comports with their worldview while conservative Christians put paltry resources of time, priority, and funds into education and training that comports with their worldview. Yet a strong emphasis on education and training is what we see at the heart of the long game that the conservative legal and pro-life movements have played.
Committing Ourselves to Action
Now that the Court has overturned Roe, we as Christians will need to put our money where our mouth is. We’ll need to be intentional about supporting unwed mothers, who are divine image-bearers like the children they carry in their wombs. This will require our unflagging support of crisis pregnancy centers, adoption, and foster care.
This is what Jim McComas so eloquently reminded me of the day Roe was overturned. He is leader of our own Free Will Baptist Family Ministries, which sponsors ministries such as these, including a crisis pregnancy center known as The Hope Center, which is worthy of your financial support. We will need to pour more resources into these efforts than ever before.
We must also be intentional about continuing to speak the truth in love, standing strong on Christian teaching while tangibly demonstrating the love of Christ to people with whom we differ. Jesus was a perfect example of what it means to combine clear truth-telling and sharp rational thinking with compassion, meekness, patience, and humility. We must strive to be like Him as we combine truth and grace. We must model civility and understanding while being uncompromising on truth and virtue.
We must realize that ideas have consequences, that elections have consequences, that now is not the time to withdraw from the public square. At the same time, we must stop neglecting public life at the local and state levels, focusing only on the federal level. We must reinvest ourselves in helping our children to be Christian citizens who understand how their government works and are patriotic, without making politics and our country into an idol.
Finally, it is vital that we commit ourselves to sound Christian worldview teaching in the church, the home, and Christian educational institutions. And it is crucial that we provide financial resources for this task and for the educational institutions that provide leadership for it.
Thanks be to God for this historic ruling. May we prayerfully and faithfully move forward in our individual and corporate calling to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and do everything we do to the glory of God.
by Matthew Pinson | Jun 2, 2022
Carl Trueman, who teaches at Grove City College and is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is an increasingly rich source of wisdom for evangelical Protestants. A recent piece I read of his in First Things is very good and can be found here. While readers of this blog will, like me, find important things on which to differ with Trueman, in this First Things article and in his other books and articles, his basic instincts are right.
His most recent book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution is one of the most important books thus far in this century. Recently that book’s arguments have been summarized in the briefer book, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution.
Those books are on the Christian view of the broader culture, but they flow out of Trueman’s confessional Protestant view of the church and its teachings. His views on these things are seen in books like The Creedal Imperative. His podcast The Mortification of Spin is also worth listening to. He and his co-host Todd Pruitt are a lot like orthodox Presbyterian versions of us Free Will Baptists.
That very sentence is complicated—I can’t go into all the ways that I disagree with Trueman here. But Trueman is in many ways a kindred spirit despite those important denominational (and other) differences. I’ll never forget when he and I were on a panel at Southern Seminary with J. D. Greear, Josh Harris (who has since apostatized), and another minister, and we just happened to be sitting on one side of the platform and were the only ecclesially confessional people on the panel. It was funny that, even though he was the strictest Calvinist on the panel—and I was the onlyArminian!—we came down on the same side of most of the issues.
Two Observable Shifts
His writing and podcasting about the church dovetail with what I tell my students: Recently there are two observable shifts in some quadrants of evangelical Christianity:
- From theology to experience
- From tradition to culture
These shifts don’t always represent a complete disregard of theology or tradition. They represent a move away from theology and Christian tradition being the solid “place to stand” from which many evangelicals see their faith and how it connects with the world around them. Thus the shift to experience and culture as the main reference point of many evangelicals can be subtle. But Trueman clearly picks up on this phenomenon.
Trueman, like the stock-in-trade evangelical Protestantism we all inherited, strongly affirms that the New Testament vision of the church’s doctrine and its practice, as mediated by the Protestant Reformation, is normative for the church of the present and the future just as it was in the past.
Yet many evangelicals have moved from having two feet firmly planted in this broadly biblical-Reformation theology and practice that has dominated the consensus of evangelicalism up until now. They’ve moved at least one foot—and in some cases both—away from the consensus of Christian tradition to the consensus of modern popular culture in things that don’t violate the Ten Commandments. And they’ve moved away from theology to subjective experience as the primary reference point from which to evangelize and disciple non-believers in an increasingly secular age in the West. Thus they’ve whittled down their message to what it takes to be converted and to keep moral commands (the Ten Commandments).
In our case, a lot of the issues of “what do you teach in church,” “what do you do in church,” and “how do you conceive of spirituality” are obviously tied to the consensus of the Protestant tradition. Of course Trueman would be Calvinist Presbyterian and I would be Arminian Baptist. But we would both share the same basic convictions on the importance of maintaining the normativity of New Testament doctrine and practice.
So, while we would maintain our denominational distinctives, neither Trueman nor I would find ourselves in serious disagreement with the best-selling commentaries and Bible study resources and homiletical resources from the Reformation through the mid-twentieth century on the most basic principles of how to teach and practice the Christian faith in the context of the local church.
Church and Culture
But I also sense in Trueman that he sees these shifts in some quarters of evangelicalism as affecting their views on culture and society as well. One sees that in this most recent First Things article. These moves in the church—from a privileging of theology toward a privileging of experience, and from a privileging of Christian tradition toward a privileging of contemporary culture—are bleeding over into how Christians approach culture.
Trueman talks a lot in this article about Friederich Schleiermacher, one of the poster boys of Protestant Liberalism. One of his most famous books was On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Liberalism started out finding ways to make Christianity more palatable to “polite society” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At first these ways did not seem to threaten the “core” of the faith—how to be converted or obey the Ten Commandments. But eventually Christians like Schleiermacher grew so accustomed to accommodating Christianity to the tastes of its “cultured despisers” that that accommodation starting subtly bleeding over into areas that did violate conversion and the Ten Commandments.
Trueman thinks this is happening again. Evangelicals have gotten into the habit of accommodating Christian faith and practice to popular culture to make it more attractional. Now in bigger questions like race, sex, and gender, they’re trying to find ways to frame their Christian commitments in a way that is more acceptable to modern culture. He gives one example of framing the correct Christian opposition to racism in terms of contemporary critical theory, which rests on foundations in postmodernity that are poles apart from Christian theology.
So the “core” of Christian faith is becoming smaller and smaller as evangelicals hungry for cultural approval do everything in their power to adjust their Christian faith to make it more attractive to what Paul calls “the natural man” (1 Corinthians 2:14). But Trueman agrees that this seems like a poor strategy for spreading a countercultural gospel that operates on a completely different set of rules from secular culture. Attractional Christianity—trying to make the Christian religion seem appealing to secular culture—is doomed from the start because, as Paul says, “the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
I think we need to listen to Trueman. We’re not going to agree with everything he says, but his basic instincts, informed as they are by the Bible and the Reformation, give evangelicals much-needed wisdom in an increasingly bewildering age.
by Matthew Pinson | Nov 10, 2021
I often use the old General/Free Will Baptist phrase “ordinary means of grace” to describe the cherished methods of ministry the Spirit wants the church to use to bring a people to himself and fit them for His eternal kingdom. So I was elated when the recent 9Marks Journal was on the topic “The Ordinary Means of Grace—Or, Don’t Do Weird Stuff.”
The language of the ordinary means of grace is another way of saying that the methods God uses to build His church are those of the apostles, which are given by precept and example in Scripture, which is sufficient (enough, all we need) for the church’s doctrine (its theology, what it teaches) and practice (its methods, what it does).
General/Free Will Baptist Uses of the Term
Free Will Baptists in America, in the north and south, as well as their ancestors in England, who were called General Baptists, used the phrase “ordinary means of grace” over and over again. (It was used in the “practices” section of our Treatise, for example, until it was revised in the 1970s).
Again, it is another way of stating two other doctrines: the sufficiency of Scripture (the Bible gives us what the Spirit wants us to have to do church) and apostolicity (the doctrine and practice of the holy apostles is normative for the continuing church).
I discuss this doctrine, which appears in the second sentence of the Treatise (which says Scripture is “a sufficient and infallible rule and guide to salvation and all Christian worship and service”) in my booklet Free Will Baptists and the Sufficiency of Scripture. Randall House has published Rob Rienow’s defense of the sufficiency of Scripture in his book Reclaiming the Sufficiency of Scripture [1].
Early Puritans and Baptists
The language of the ordinary means of grace became famous when it appeared in the Westminster Shorter Catechism (WSC). Though this catechism was a Calvinist Puritan catechism, the answer to question 88 on the ordinary means of grace would have been answered similarly by any Puritan in the seventeenth century on either side of the Atlantic—whether they were Calvinist or Arminian or Paedobaptist or Baptist. Here it is:
Q: What are the outward means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption?
A: The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption are, his ordinances, especially the Word, sacraments, and prayer; all of which are made effectual to the elect for salvation.
Now of course, Baptists would define “sacraments” differently than the writers of the WSC did. But other than this, they all—again, whether Arminian or Calvinist—agreed wholeheartedly with this statement.
Ordinary Means and “Ordinances”
In fact, one of the particular reasons I like this statement is that it defines ordinances broadly, as I do in my book The Washing of the Saints’ Feet, simply as things God ordains [2]. Though some of us have thrown around the word, Baptists have not articulated a theology of the sacraments, though they have talked about ordinances, but most Calvinist Baptists eventually came to see only baptism and the Lord’s Supper as ordinances.
However, this is an unfortunate case of the evolution of language. “Ordinance” originally was used by everyone in the Puritan sense seen in the WSC, which said that all the ordinances of God were His outward and ordinary means of grace—especially the reading and preaching of the Word, private and public prayer, and the sacraments.
This is why Free Will Baptist forefathers like Thomas Helwys and Thomas Grantham, as well as American Free Will Baptists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—talked about doing only the things God “ordained” or “appointed” in the New Testament.
Renewal through Retrieving the Practice of the Apostles
This is the way of the apostles and their earliest followers after the New Testament era. Retrieving their approach to ministry will bring renewal to the evangelical church, large swaths of which have become addicted to the means and methods of modern secular industries (e.g., marketing, CEO leadership, entertainment).
Sometimes people are confused about this. Only a few people actually claim, “We shouldn’t adhere to the apostolic pattern. That’s not relevant for today.” Very few people veer this far from the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. Instead, many say “But the apostles didn’t have what we have today. If they had had all the methods and techniques we have at our disposal, they would have used them!”
But the fact is that the apostles had the same things at their disposal, but they didn’t use them. They had all the riches of the multi-sensory, entertainment-dominated culture of the Greco-Roman urban centers at their disposal. On a given Sunday, a Christian would walk past the theaters and concert halls and coliseums and games where rich, lavish entertainment was on offer—as well as many street entertainers. The best painting and sculpture was at their disposal.
They had at their disposal the highly efficient organizational methods of the Roman imperial government. They were surrounded by the methods of a highly complex marketplace. Their “competition” in the Greco-Roman mystery religions relied on spine-tingling techniques to draw in crowds in urban centers.
Yet these early Christians relied on the ordinary means of grace. Their churches were simple and counter-cultural, based on the ordinary, unadorned teaching of doctrine in their songs, reading, and preaching, accompanied by compassion for the poor and hurting and an unmistakable, authentic ideal of koinonia and community.
Commending 9Marks
In short, as the 9Marks Journal says, they “didn’t do weird stuff.” I encourage my readers to go read this 9Marks Journal.
We’re not going to agree with everything 9Marks says. But what 9Marks shows us—and Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C. and its pastor, Mark Dever, and the hundreds of churches that have been planted and revitalized as a result of this ministry—is that it’s possible to have vibrant, growing congregations that minister to diverse age groups and ethnicities in urban, suburban, small-town, and rural demographics that are firmly rooted in the ordinary means of grace, in the sufficiency of Scripture, and in the means and methods of the apostles.
[1] J. Matthew Pinson, Free Will Baptists and the Sufficiency of Scripture (Antioch, TN: Historical Commission, National Association of Free Will Baptists, 2014). It can be ordered here. Rob Rienow, Reclaiming the Sufficiency of Scripture (Nashville: Randall House, 2012). It can be ordered here.
[2] J. Matthew Pinson, The Washing of the Saints’ Feet (Nashville: Randall House, 2006). It can be ordered here
by Matthew Pinson | Apr 13, 2021
A Recent Lawsuit
Two weeks ago, the Religious Exemption Accountability Project filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education. The suit aimed at the Department’s funding of colleges and universities that have policies that prohibit LGBT conduct.
The class action lawsuit named twenty-five conservative religious colleges. Among them were schools such as Baylor, Bob Jones, Westmont, Fuller Seminary, Union, Brigham Young, Liberty, and Lipscomb. Specifically, the suit holds that the Department of Education should not allow such schools to claim religious exemptions to orders and statutes that prohibit discrimination against LGBT individuals.
The timing of this lawsuit is obvious in light of the passage of the Equality Act by the U.S. House and the introduction of that Bill in the U.S. Senate. It represents the careful strategy of the LGBT lobby to silence traditional religious people and their institutions from the public square when their sincerely held religious beliefs mitigate homosexual and transgender identification or behavior.
The Advance against First Amendment Freedoms
Free Will Baptists need to know how serious this state of affairs is. Most of the evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, Mormon, Jewish, and Muslim colleges, universities, and K-12 schools that hold traditional views on sexuality and gender have students who receive funding from the federal government. Most such schools would be forced to close their doors if their students were deprived of these funds, since such students could no longer afford to attend these institutions.
This situation represents the first in what would be a long line of attempts by the secular left to drive these institutions out of operation. LGBT rights groups have made plain their intentions not to stop with Title IV funding from the U.S. Department of Education but to continue toward the removal of tax exemption, the removal of all forms of federally recognized accreditation, and more.
In short, this powerful lobby believes that policies that preclude LGBT conduct are the same as excluding people on the basis of racial or ethnic identity. If this approach takes hold in the wider political culture, soon all non-profit institutions that hold traditional beliefs on sexual morality and gender identity will be deprived of their historic First Amendment rights to the free exercise of their religion.
What Can I Do?
What can an ordinary Free Will Baptist do? you might ask.
Educate Yourself
First, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the current conversation on these issues. One helpful resource is Dr. Albert Mohler’s “The Briefing.”
Also helpful is the Alliance Defending Freedom, (ADF) the legal organization that has successfully argued so many religious liberty cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. This organization provided legal counsel for Welch College in 2019 when the college came under fire for its traditional Christian stance on sexuality and gender. I strongly recommend ADF.
Other good organizations defending religious liberty and providing helpful resources on these issues include Dr. David Black and the Religious Liberty Coalition and David Gibbs III and the National Center for Life and Liberty.
Exercise Your Rights as a Citizen in a Representative Democracy
Another thing you can do is to exercise your influence as a citizen by kindly and humbly communicating with your U.S. representatives and senators, as well as your state legislators. You can keep them informed of the impact of the Equality Act and similar initiatives on the very existence of traditional religious nonprofits. This includes colleges, universities, K-12 schools, and thousands of other religious nonprofits that save the state billions of dollars each year in costly educational and social services.
Political engagement exists in the context of broader cultural engagement and stewardship and does not function in a vacuum. Yet we have the ability to exercise the rights of our citizenship in a democratic republic that governs through representative democracy.
Unfortunately, the religious liberty community does not have as loud of a voice as other liberal or conservative interest groups. Take for example the LGBT lobby or the environmental lobby or even the business or gun rights or pro-life lobbies. Elected representatives are kept apprised of what those groups deem important. It’s incumbent on religious believers to communicate their concerns about religious liberty to their elected representatives on the federal and state levels.
Particularly, traditional religious people need to make their elected representatives aware of the effect the Equality Act would have on religious liberty. It would be the most sweeping legislation threatening religious freedom in the history of the U.S. If the act were passed, most traditional colleges, schools, social service agencies, and other non-profits sponsored by traditional churches, denominations, synagogues, mosques, etc., simply could not survive.
For example, the accreditation of traditional religious colleges, schools, and seminaries whose deeply held religious beliefs prohibit their hiring of LGBT individuals and admitting of LGBT students would be endangered. Furthermore, their students’ access to Title IV funds would be eliminated Thus such institutions, which have saved the states multiple billions of dollars educating citizens and community leaders for decades and even centuries, would immediately be forced out of business.
This is because the Equality Act explicitly states that organizations will not be protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993. RFRA was introduced by Congressman Chuck Schumer of New York. Passed unanimously in the U.S. House, with only three dissenting votes in the U.S. Senate, it was eagerly signed by President Bill Clinton. This act guarantees the freedom of conscience for traditional religious people promised in the First Amendment. Yet the Equality Act would do away with RFRA’s protections.
Even elected representatives who do not share our deeply held religious beliefs need to be made aware of the very valuable role traditional religious colleges, K-12 schools, adoption and other social services agencies, and other traditional religious non-profits across the U.S. have long played in our society. They need to be made aware of the existential threat this entire sector is under should the Equality Act pass.
Financial Support
Importantly, concerned churches and individuals can increase their charitable giving to institutions like Welch College. Christian colleges and universities stand to lose the most the fastest as a result of the momentum the LGBT lobby is gaining.
Christian higher education, quite simply, faces an existential threat, and the only thing that will ultimately sustain it is the financial support of its denominational, church, alumni, and donor base. This financial support has never been so important, and its increase is the greatest bulwark against the loss of Title IV funds and tax exemption.
Speak the Truth in Love
Furthermore, we must continue to speak the truth in love. Love is the final apologetic, as Francis Schaeffer used to say. And if we are not careful to love individuals whose human flourishing and spiritual lives are being harmed by the LGBT ideology, and show that love observably, we will not have the right, spiritually, to speak the truth we say we believe.
In this regard, I highly recommend the writings of Rosaria Butterfield. Butterfield is an evangelical pastor’s wife who used to be a lesbian critical theory professor and came to faith as a result of the humble, hospitable witness of a conservative evangelical pastor and his wife in a small congregation.
This pastor and his wife, and their church, bore witness to the truth of Holy Scripture regarding what kind of sexual identities and relationships honor God and His creative design and foster vital human flourishing. Yet they were loving and kind and hospitable to Butterfield and her friends, who were at the vanguard of the LGBT movement.
Pray
Lastly, pray. Pray that God will provide wisdom for people who are in leadership. Pray that God will help legislators on the federal and state levels to understand what is at stake with the Equality Act and other initiatives that jeopardize the First Amendment rights of every citizen of the United States.
And pray that God will renew faithful churches that confidently teach and model the doctrine and practice the Spirit gives us in His Word, speak the truth in love, and spread the gospel of Christ, which is the power of God to salvation to everyone who believes.
by Matthew Pinson | Nov 7, 2020
I have been reading through the Puritan Thomas Brooks’s classic, Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices. It is best taken in sip-by-sip, each morning, as I have been doing. This morning I read about one of Satan’s most effective devices, “Device 7: By making the soul bold to venture upon the occasions of sin.”*
“Saith Satan, You may walk by the harlot’s door though you won’t go into the harlot’s bed; you may sit and sup with the drunkard, though you won’t be drunk with the drunkard; you may look upon Jezebel’s beauty, and you may play and toy with Delilah, though you do not commit wickedness with the one or the other; you may with Achan handle the golden wedge, though you do not steal the golden wedge.”
In ministering to young (and old) people over the years, I have found that this is one of the best specimens of wise counsel the Bible and the Christian tradition give us for avoiding sin: Think carefully, and figure out what situations you get yourself in that predispose you to be tempted, and avoid those situations.
The first remedy against this device, Brooks says, is “to dwell upon those scriptures that do expressly command us to avoid the occasions of sin, and the least appearance of evil (1 Thess. 5. 22): ‘Abstain from all appearance of evil.’ Whatsoever is heterodox, unsound and unsavoury, shun it, as you would a serpent in your way, or poison in your meat.” A few lines down he says, “It was good counsel that Livia gave her husband Augustus: ‘It behoveth thee not only not to do wrong, but not to seem to do so.’”
Quoting Proverbs 5:8, “Remove your way far from her, And do not go near the door of her house,” Brooks counsels: “He that would not be burnt, must dread the fire; he that would not hear the bell, must not meddle with the rope. To venture upon the occasion of sin, and then to pray, ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ is all one as to thrust thy finger into the fire, and then to pray that it might not be burnt.”
The second remedy against this device, Brooks says, is to consider solemnly “that ordinarily there is no conquest over sin, without the soul turning from the occasion of sin.” God will not take temptation out of our path, Brooks warns, unless we turn from the occasion of sin. If you dance near the edge of a pit, he says, you can’t be surprised if you fall in. “He that hath gunpowder about him had need keep far enough from sparkles.” Brooks is right when he says that it’s rare to go up to the brink of sin and not give in to temptation. “He that ventures upon the occasions of sin is as he that would quench the fire with oil, which is a fuel to maintain it, and increase it.”
This godly wisdom reminds me of a Christian counseling book I once read (I can’t remember which one). It told the story of a recovering alcoholic who was in addiction counseling. He walked to work each day, and he had to walk by a liquor store. Each day, he would struggle with intense temptation to go into the liquor store and buy a bottle of his favorite drink. This went on for months. Then one day when walking home from work, he gave in to the temptation, bought the alcohol, and drank it all.
When he told his counselor about it in tears, the counselor said, “You need to take another route to work.” He said, “I can’t. The only other route would take me thirty minutes longer.” The counselor said, “You can. You must, if you really want to beat this.”
Then the author went on to compare the door to the liquor store to the opening of a cave with a dragon inside: The closer you get to the mouth of the cave, the more you are predisposed to being captured by the dragon. So the best advice is to stay away from the mouth of the cave.
Brooks’s other two remedies are just as helpful: Using the example of Joseph fleeing Potiphar’s wife (Gen. 39:10), he says: “The third remedy against this device of Satan is, seriously to consider,
that other precious saints, who were once glorious on earth, and are now triumphing in heaven, have turned from the occasion of sin, as hell itself. The fourth remedy is “solemnly to consider, that the avoiding the occasions of sin, is an evidence of grace, and that which lifts up a man above most other men in the world.”
May we pray for grace not to venture boldly upon the occasions of sin, and may we apply ourselves, with God’s help, to adhere to make use of this precious remedy against Satan’s devices every day of our lives
*These quotations are taken from pp. 66–70 of the “Puritan Paperbacks” edition published by Banner of Truth Trust.
