Some Clarity on Tax Exemption, Part Two

In the previous post, I tried to make the case that non-profits are subject to several forms of taxation and that taxing non-profits further will either put a lot of good works out of business, or result in targeted discrimination. Now for a brief argument from religious liberty.

Tax Exempt Status is a Necessary Component of Religious Liberty

In a twist of mental gymnastics, those who fight most ferociously for the separation of church and state are now fighting the hardest for the entanglement of church and state.

Taxation is a form of behavior modification. It is an economic axiom: if you want less of a behavior you tax it, if you want more of it you tax it less. For example, states and the Federal government levy what are called "sin taxes" under the presumption that gambling, smoking, and drinking are detrimental to society. (Handily, they can also be taxed at high rates and people still engage in those activities leading to higher revenues.) On the other hand, the Federal government provides tax write offs for many activities including home ownership and charitable contributions. The tax write offs are intended to encourage certain behaviors. Plenty of candidates over the last 20 years have included tax benefits for renewable energy use in their platforms because they want to encourage the purchase of electric cars and the installation of solar panels. Behavior modification.

As such, the tax exemption of religious organizations operates under the principle of not letting the nose of the camel into the tent. If you let the nose in, the whole camel follows. Taxing religious organizations is a great way to allow the Federal government and the State to begin regulating the speech and behavior of churches. The Supreme Court has said so. In the 1970 Waltz ruling, the Supreme Court said that tax exemption for churches, "creates only a minimal and remote involvement between church and state and far less than taxation of churches. [An exemption] restricts the fiscal relationship between church and state, and tends to complement and reinforce the desired separation insulating each from the other....the power to tax involves the power to destroy." Taxing churches and religious organizations is a fast-track to entangling church and state, severely reducing religious liberty and speech, and creating a state-sponsored church.

If the Federal Government and the State begin holding certain ad hoc guillotines over the heads of religious organizations, the inevitable consequence will be churches doing one of two things: engaging in civil disobedience, or capitulating and becoming a de facto extension of the state's politics. And history tells us that every time churches capitulate to the state's demands, the pews grow cold when the dust settles the culture realizes that those churches were faithless and lacked the courage to fight for their beliefs.

Photo from USHMM

Some Clarity on Tax Exempt Status, Part One

More than once in our not-so-small hamlet of Colorado Springs public initiatives have been launched to tax non-profits in order to make up for the revenue shortfall the city consistently faces. Each time it happens the public argument is something to the effect that churches need to pay their fair share. Currently, with the SCOTUS ruling on Same Sex Marriage (SSM), the argument is being made that religious organizations ought to lose their tax exempt status because they (in reality, many but not all of them) do not conform to the newly minted SCOTUS ruling. Again the point is made directly - churches need to "start paying taxes."

I think a little clarity is in order (though, I must admit to a great deal of skepticism about the effectiveness of argument in our highly emotionalized culture right now).

We Pay Taxes

I am a pastor of a church and I helped to start a charitable non-profit that provides long-term support, education, and ministry to girls rescued from human trafficking in the US. I currently run and have run non-profits that own property, operate under state and federal tax guidelines, and hire people. We pay several forms of taxes and our employees pay taxes. We are exempt from a fairly narrow set of tax categories for which charitable non-profits must apply and prove they are eligible, and for which churches agree to a trade-off with the Federal government represented in the restrictions of the Johnson Amendment.

Having said that, I will say that the exemptions we are eligible for are a great help to churches and non-profits. We often operate on smaller budgets and different income structures than a typical business, so several tax categories are a significant barrier to entrance and a barrier to efficient non-profit work. For example, many people who give to non-profits are careful to pick organizations who can prove that the vast majority of their gifts go to the work and not to overhead. Overhead includes things like staff, taxes related to hiring staff, office needs, and office space. If your favorite non-profit began paying property tax, the percentage of your gift going directly to the work would necessarily decrease, often significantly.

There Are More Non-Profits Out There Than You Know

Did you know that many non-profits are news organizations and journalists' offices? Are you cognizant of the neighborhood recreation centers that run on paper thin budgets and are non-profit? Do you know that universities and colleges (with very rare exceptions) are non-profits? So, returning to the well-meaning but ignorant people in Colorado Springs who sponsored those petitions to remove tax exempt status from non-profits, when confronted with these details they did not know that they would likely put the liberal Peace And Justice Mission office out of business or shutter the soup kitchens run by the Catholic church they supported so much.

This brings us to the present push and the inherent tyranny contained within it. The current proposal is to remove tax exempt status from religious organizations, and more specifically, religious organizations that do not tow the line on SSM. So maybe the neighborhood community center is not affected, but what about the Episcopalian church and Southern Baptist church across the street from each other? The current argument has the implication that one is favored over the other for an ad hoc reason. One accepts SSM and the other does not, and based on that alone proponents of SSM want to discriminate and do harm. Why SSM? Why not the SCOTUS rulings on gerrymandering? Or the SCOTUS rulings on abortion, Civil Rights legislation, campaign finance reform, and so forth? In other words, there are hundreds of issues that could be picked on to discriminate with the power of Federal and State taxation, but this one has been picked by people drunk with current cultural power and who want to strike while the iron is hot.

As this particular form of tax discrimination moves forward be attentive to this form of argument, "You can keep your tax exempt status as long as you agree with us about X." This is tyranny and coercion pure and simple, which brings us to our last point.

Part Two: Tax Exemption is Necessary for Religious Liberty

Can I Love The Sinner And Hate The Sin? It's The Only Way To Love

There has been a lot of talk recently about the Christian doctrines of love and sin, mostly in the shape of, “I no longer can keep up the unbiblical façade of loving the sinner and hating the sin. The Bible calls me to love, and that is what I am going to do.”

While I believe deeply that we are called to love in extravagant and radical ways – ways shown to us by God in Christ – I believe the recent talk about refusing to see people as sinners actually strips the Christian of the ability to love in this deep and transformative way. Contrary to the assertion that “love the sinner and hate the sin” is not in the Bible, it is necessary to the character and nature of God, and is, ironically, all over Scripture. It turns out that you are unable to love the sinner without hating the sin.

The first and most readily available analogy is the way a good parent loves their child. Any parent will tell you that they often live in the tension of loving their child while hating the things they do or the character traits within them that cause them harm. Have you ever known a parent in the middle of struggling over a rebellious teenager? In theological language, that is nothing more than loving the person prone to sin while hating the things in them that cause them harm. In fact, you might say the two sides of that parental disposition IS love. If you disagree, then you will need to convince most of the humans you know that a parent who allows their child to do each and every thing that will cause them short-term and long-term harm is a good parent. Obviously they are not.

And so it is with God. It is common for Scripture to speak of what God hates and why he hates it. Modern evangelicals don’t often think or speak in these terms, but maybe that is because many of us have been trained by our churches to conform the Bible to our current proclivities instead of the other way around. A small sampling of the Bible talking about God hating sin:

Isaiah 61:8 For I the Lord love justice; I hate robbery and wrong; I will faithfully give them their recompense, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them.

Jeremiah 44:4 Yet I persistently sent to you all my servants the prophets, saying, ‘Oh, do not do this abomination that I hate!’

Zechariah 8:17 do not devise evil in your hearts against one another, and love no false oath, for all these things I hate, declares the Lord.

Christ-followers are people who belong to this kind of God and are thus expected to learn to interact with the world the way God does. As a consequence, we are expected to have the same kinds of loves and hates that God has.  For example:

Micah 3:1-2 And I said: Hear, you heads of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel!

Is it not for you to know justice?— you who hate the good and love the evil,

who tear the skin from off my people and their flesh from off their bones,…

Ezekiel 35:6 therefore, as I live, declares the Lord God, I will prepare you for blood, and blood shall pursue you; because you did not hate bloodshed, therefore blood shall pursue you.

Amos 5:15 Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate…

And then there is the passage in the New Testament which is cited most often to promote the idea of loving the sinner and hating the sin:

Jude 21-23 keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. And have mercy on those who doubt; save others by snatching them out of the fire; to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.

Here Jude makes a direct link between the love of God, our acts of love and mercy, and snatching people away from the sin that so easily destroys us.

All in all, the evidence is pretty overwhelming – the best way to love people who sin is to hate the things in their life that cause destruction – sin.

This is radical love. To refuse to acknowledge or talk about sin is a weak and easy way to like people, but it is not biblical love. God’s love is often very hard to live out. If you have ever loved someone who is not exactly like Christ, you have loved someone who needs the kind of Christ-like love that makes sacrifices for sin and remains loving through all kinds of trials and rejections. Jesus loved Judas. Not in a way that refused to hate the sin, but in spite of the sin. Jesus loved the woman caught in adultery when he simultaneously saved her life and told her to go and sin no more. Jesus loved disciples who often misunderstood him. God showed steadfast love to a nation of people who were persistent in their rebellion against him.

God’s kind of love recognizes sin and rebellion in the human heart and shows unconditional love anyway. This is the kind of love the world needs to see in the church. This is the kind of love I am required by my God to show. This is the kind of love I need – the love that sees my sin and saves me anyway.

Links With Little Context

A Warning from Canada: Same-Sex Marriage Erodes Fundamental Rights
by  Dawn Stefanowicz

I am one of six adult children of gay parents who recently filed amicus briefs with the US Supreme Court, asking the Court to respect the authority of citizens to keep the original definition of marriage: a union between one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others, so that children may know and may be raised by their biological parents. I also live in Canada, where same-sex marriage was federally mandated in 2005....

In Canada, freedoms of speech, press, religion, and association have suffered greatly due to government pressure. The debate over same-sex marriage that is taking place in the United States could not legally exist in Canada today. Because of legal restrictions on speech, if you say or write anything considered “homophobic” (including, by definition, anything questioning same-sex marriage), you could face discipline, termination of employment, or prosecution by the government.


Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Are Not Like Race: Why ENDA is Bad Policy
by  Ryan T. Anderson

Sexual orientation and gender identity are conceptually different from race, and beliefs about marriage as the union of man and woman are conceptually and historically different from opposition to interracial marriage. Adapted from testimony delivered on Monday March 16 before the United States Commission on Civil Rights....

These classifications are problematic. Paul McHugh, MD, University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Gerard V. Bradley, Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, explain:

Social science research continues to show that sexual orientation, unlike race, color, and ethnicity, is neither a clearly defined concept nor an immutable characteristic of human beings. Basing federal employment law on a vaguely defined concept such as sexual orientation, especially when our courts have a wise precedent of limiting suspect classes to groups that have a clearly-defined shared characteristic, would undoubtedly cause problems for many well-meaning employers.


Post-Christianity & the Culture of Death
By ROD DREHER

A reader writes:

I’m a longtime reader of your blog, and while your writing has certainly made me, an agnostic/atheist, more sympathetic towards religion and its followers than I was as a callous teenager and young adult, this one article had the effect of making me practically jump in my car and speed to the nearest church.  It’s horrific, and I try not to use that term lightly.

She’s talking about a piece in the current issue of The New Yorker about the euthanasia culture in Belgium.  It is as horrifying as she says it is, and about as pure an expression of what John Paul II called the “Culture of Death” as you can imagine in our time. Euthanasia, the magazine reports, is thoroughly mainstream in Belgium, and embracing it has become a sign of what it means to be modern.


Evolutionary Computing: The Invisible Hand of Intelligence

Darwinian evolution is characterized by an utter lack of guidance; it is the "blind watchmaker" of Dawkins. It doesn't know where it's going. It doesn't know it is building a watch. It doesn't know what a watch is. There is no goal, no plan, and no target in "natural evolution." Mutations bounce around against environmental constraints, and whatever happens, happens.

William Dembski and Robert Marks have shown that no evolutionary algorithm is superior to blind search -- unless information is added from an intelligent cause, which means it is not, in the Darwinian sense, an evolutionary algorithm after all. This mathematically proven law, based on the accepted No Free Lunch Theorems, seems to be lost on the champions of evolutionary computing. Researchers keep confusing an evolutionary algorithm (a form of artificial selection) with "natural evolution."

It's Not As Easy As It Looks

In a recent interview with Ed Stetzer promoting a new book the popular pastor, Andy Stanley, said some rather provocative things about preaching (part 1 of 5). His book is about effective communication and when he was asked about what he thought of preachers who went through the Bible book-by-book and verse-by-verse, he answered:

Guys that preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible-- that is just cheating. It's cheating because that would be easy, first of all. That isn't how you grow people. No one in the Scripture modeled that. There's not one example of that. 

All Scripture is equally inspired, but not all Scripture is equally applicable or relevant to every stage of life. My challenge is to read culture and to read an audience and ask: What is the felt need? Or perhaps what is more important, what is an unfelt need they need to feel that I can address? Because if they don't feel it, then they won't address it.

Other parts of the interview linked above contain more information on his philosophy of preaching.

As I read this and other parts of the interview to make sure I was getting appropriate context (which may be one of the cardinal flaws in his view on expository preaching, but I digress), I am struggling not to say, "this is one of the dumbest things I have heard a pastor say in a long time." So I'm going to try not to say it.

I believe his view of expository preaching is dangerous for the church and for Christians, and here are a few reasons why.

To begin with, expository preaching isn't easy. Apparently he was taught to do it and did some of it when he was younger, and if that is the only exposure he has to the weekly grind of submitting to the narrative and logic of the text, he doesn't know what he is saying. Earlier in the interview he expressed his philosophy of leading people through a journey that includes the Bible (find a felt need, tell people why they need it fixed, pick a passage of Scripture, and finish with "wouldn't that be nice?"). Expository preaching is letting the narrative and argument of the text lead you through the journey, and that is often tough ground to till. Forget working through Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezra - try every chapter and verse of Acts. It isn't as easy as he says it is - at least not if you are trying to do the text and the people in the pews justice. So when he says it is cheating, he is flat wrong.

Then he appeals to Scripture to support his philosophy of communication above expository preaching. The problem is that Scripture does not teach or even model a single form of appropriate pastoral communication. People who say the kinds of things Stanley said often point to the parables as if those were the only things Jesus ever said. The New Testament is loaded with commentary on Old Testament Scripture, and it is clear within the text that the early church revered the epistles beyond the context of the original audience. In other words, though Ephesians is an occasional letter, it wasn't left there. It became holy writ for the entire church outside of the immediate context of the Ephesians' "felt needs" and their desire to have God meet them.

Stanley's vision of expository preaching reduces Scripture to a tool to be used by a clever speaker to touch on an exposed nerve of the listener. It is an instrument to be wielded to achieve a pre-determined result. (I preach expositorily, but have no quibbles with those to hold Scripture in high regard and preach by issue or topic. I am particularly worried about Stanley's apparent out-of-hand dismissal of submitting to the text on a weekly basis.) His is the Aristotelian and Roman model of rhetoric - know your audience and tailor your message to them in order to get them to respond the way you want them to. The problem for the pastor is that we are not given the right or the power to predetermine the outcome. Our variable is the work of God in people's lives, and we are not allowed to coordinate the outcome. We are tasked with rightly dividing and communicating the truth and wisdom of God and letting God do the work that needs to be done (I would cite Malachi 2:4-7 here, but Stanley might categorize that as not applicable to him at this point in life. That's too bad for Scripture - maybe it will catch up to him someday.) Stanley is just another pastor in a long line of American pastors who has apparently succumbed to an entirely corporate model of preaching - the only difference between the board room sales pitch and the sermon is a few carefully chosen verses from the Bible.

Christians raised and weaned on this model of preaching are trained to approach Scripture by waiting for it to submit to them and their "felt needs." They will be trained to read the Bible like the Farmer's Almanac or take it in like snippets of Oprah's advice. Over time peoples' habits and preferences will slide downhill, and they might learn that they can get the same kind of advice from non-preachers and avoid the stewardship campaign. On the other hand, Christians who learn to endure in faithfulness in all seasons of life learn to submit to the text no matter their "felt needs" and learn how to come to terms with a holy and glorious God who would rather their soul be right than their "felt needs" be met.

I really do hope and pray that the church Stanly pastors is full of the transformational power of God from week to week, and that people are being brought to the feet of a holy and great God. I just don't think it is smart or wise to say such ridiculous things about the discipline of letting the text, instead of perceived "felt needs," set the agenda for the pastor and the church.

Bonhoeffer, God, Failure, and Responsible Action

"I believe that God can and will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest evil. For that purpose he needs men who make the best use of everything. I believe that God will give us all the strength we need to help us to resist in all times of distress. But he never gives it in advance, lest we should rely on ourselves and not on him alone. A faith such as this should allay all our fears for the future. I believe that even our mistakes and shortcomings are turned to good account, and that it is no harder for God to deal with them than with our supposedly good deeds. I believe that God is no timeless fate, but that he waits for and answers sincere prayers and responsible actions."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a letter written the day after the failed assassination attempt on Hitler's life. From Letters and Papers from Prison.

"Preachers ply their trade with buffoonery..."

"Christ did not say to His first congregation:
'Go preach idle nonsense to the world,'
but gave to them a sound foundation.

"And that alone resounded from their lips,
so that, in their warfare to ignite the faith,
they used the Gospel as their shield and lance.

"Now preachers ply their trade with buffoonery and jokes,
their cowls inflating if they get a laugh,
and the people ask for nothing more."

[Dante, Paradiso XXIX:109-117]

Quoted in, How Dante Can Save Your Life, by Rod Dreher

"When I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness"

Emotional exhaustion; physically tired. I didn't expect it to take so much out of me, but it did. I have done it over and over for nearly 24 years, but it still surprises me when I walk away drained to the bone.

It's not bad - don't get me wrong. I have tried very hard to handle the Word of a jealous God to his people and simultaneously be faithful to it, to Him, and to them. And sometimes it takes the energy out of whatever reserves I thought I had. I never seem to sleep well the night before. Sometimes what the Word has to say is full of hope and joy, and sometimes I talk to people who are walking in darkness and pain. In either case, and every case in between,  my mind, body, and heart are left wrung out.

But it is for the good of the church, and of the people of God. At least I tell myself that. Maybe I missed the boat and everyone in the room walked away thinking, "That was nice. What's for lunch?" and I walked away ready for a nap. Maybe a life was stirred by my inevitably inadequate attempt to talk about the One True God and bring people to the foot of the cross or the threshold of an empty tomb. By the grace of God, may it be.

I do it over and over, like mowing my lawn or shoveling my driveway in the middle of a blizzard. There always seems to be a reason to do it again, a need that rises to the surface like a stubborn weed. Or maybe the weekly repetition has caused my words to sound like the ticking of the clock on the wall. It's there, and we know it's there, we just don't hear it anymore. But I tick on. Pastors keep keeping time according to the rhythms and motions of God's kingdom in a realm that listens to different clocks and follows flashier time pieces.

Nonetheless, the Word of God is sharper than any other tool we can use, and by the work of the Spirit of God, makes its way into the deepest recesses of the human soul. Deeper than we can even see within ourselves.

So, I will fitfully sleep, awake grumpy that I tossed and turned too much, but I will get up and go at it again. It is more important than some other, sleep-friendly substitute, and it is what I was called to do. So the fire burns and my bones quake, anticipating the next week.

Links with Little Context

"The Wrong Train" by Andree Seu Peterson, World Mag

Somewhere along the line, Western civilization boarded a train called Secularism and is now running on philosophical fumes. 

"Anne Bradley Reflects on New Zondervan Edition of ‘For the Least of These’"

For the Least of These has helped me learn that this is a matter of stewardship. We don’t get to choose the “how” in how we care for the poor. We have to do it the right way, because lives hang in the balance. 

We can’t just agree to disagree about the best means for caring for the poor. If we do it wrong, two things are going to happen: 

We will waste precious resources, and we can’t do that because we don’t have unlimited resources and thus we must steward them wisely. 

We may end up hurting the very people we are called to help, the people we care for so deeply. 

We know we can’t do that. We have to fight against anything that harms the poor and keeps them in poverty.

"No Differences? How Children in Same-Sex Households Fare (2014)" The Witherspoon Institute

Published in leading, peer-reviewed journals and supplemented by easy-to-read summaries of each academic article, the essays in this volume help clarify crucial points of debate regarding the “no differences” claim, including the weaknesses of the gay-parenting studies affirming the children are doing just fine; the comparative strengths of the academic research that finds the opposite; the actual setbacks children from same-sex homes suffer; and hypotheses as to why the children experience the negative outcomes. Ultimately, the researchers argue that the instability in same-sex parented homes, the loss of one or more biological parents; and the unequal gender distribution of the parents are among the likely channels by which children from these homes suffer harm.

"Does Attending Church Online Count?" by Kevin Ott, Vital Magazine

Some people are zealous for the cyber church movement. They see it as the inevitable future. 

Yes, the social features of virtual church - live chatting, Skyping, not having to wear a tie - can still make meaningful relationships possible. Some virtual churches supplement their online gatherings with in-person events - even mission trips. 

But here's a question: Does it affect the quality of a community when we give preference to cyberspace over physical space - when in-person meetings become an occasional add-on? 

Absolutely. 

After spending the last 15 years in the same church, I will say this: The depth of fellowship I've experienced in that little sanctuary could never be duplicated in a virtual environment.

The Pastor - Bearer of Knowledge

"For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and people should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts." Malachi 2:7

You believe most of what you believe on the basis of authority. How do you know the history you know? You were not there, but others were and you take them at their word. How do you know the earth revolves around the sun? You can observe a phenomena, but for centuries humans observed the same rising and setting and came to the wrong conclusion. Now, however, you have it on good authority from people who can do the math that you cannot. How do you know the antibiotic you were prescribed by your M.D. will do you any good? She said so.

Ours is an age of experts who acquire knowledge about several crucial specialties, and we place them in high esteem if they have done their job well. We come to them for knowledge we do not have to cure diseases and repair trucks. The average person on the street (including the average church-goer?) does not see pastors as this kind of professional, but according to what God says about his spiritual leaders they are specialists who do the work necessary to acquire and dispense a special kind of knowledge that others do not always have the time to learn themselves. And then it is entirely appropriate for people to come to God's spiritual leaders for that knowledge.

"Knowledge" is not a general, throw-away term, even in Scripture. It refers to a specific kind of reasoned and tested belief that is far more than mere opinion. Everyone has opinions about God, not many have genuine knowledge of him. Knowledge, when someone attains it, puts a person into contact with the way things really are. Opinions are certain kinds of guesses or desires about reality, but knowledge is connection to reality - a relationship between what you believe to be true and what is actually true.

God says his priests - what we might today call pastors - "guard knowledge" with their lips. In other words, they are doing the hard work of gaining true and accurate insight into who God is, and then teaching the same. Ideally, and you might say "strictly speaking," pastors do not dispense opinion, unless they have not done their job well. But if they have, people can listen to them talk about God and his dealings with humanity and gain knowledge about him. This truth about God's spokespeople puts the role of pastor into an interesting and significant light.

Pastors gain and dispense knowledge in ways similar to the traditional and well-known professions of experts. Pastors are not paid opinionators, but are tasked with getting to know God, his Word, the Gospel, and telling people what they know.

Pastors are not at the back of the cultural bus. Culture sure things so, but they are not. Knowledge about how the good life is to be lived is not in the realm of lawyers, politicians, media, and celebrities who do not know God. They all hand out opinions about how it is to be lived, but unless it coheres with God's vision of the good life, it is all balderdash.  

Pastors ought to do the kind of work necessary to make themselves trustworthy bearers of the knowledge of God. The text I quoted from Malachi is in the context of God getting frustrated with priests who did not actually do this. This was their charter, and instead they settled for corruption and they "caused many to stumble by [their] instruction" (Malachi 2:8).

This vision of pastors and spiritual knowledge puts the church right back in the thick of things. Our current culture has dismissed the church as insignificant by defining her out of significance. The church - and the religion she teaches - is private, psychologically helpful pabulum. But nothing could be further from the truth if the pastor and the church do their jobs, gain actual knowledge about God, and hand it out to the world around them.

(You can track my series of posts on The Pastor by following the tag.)

Don't Do Drugs, Kids. Not Even Marijuana.

I recently sat face-to-face with what marijuana does to the human being and it was not pretty. He is a friend, he is young, and he is convinced that all the dope he has smoked is OK because “God created it” and he is in good shape because “it doesn’t control me.” But the conversation was far from normal. The longer the conversation went the more unhinged from reality he became. His fantasies grew with each telling, his outlandish promises took over his sense of what was real and reasonable, and he was hearing and seeing things. He has genuine potential and parents who love him and provide for him, but he has gone a long way toward destroying his future.

Don’t do drugs, kids.

We are told by marijuana advocates, and I speak as a resident of Colorado, that the drug is safe, even medical. We are promised that it can be sold and consumed safely. And we are thrown the economic trump card that all the tax revenues will “go to the children.” But reality is very different from the propaganda. This isn’t the marijuana of the 1960’s and 70’s; this stuff is a serious and dangerous hallucinogen. The research is mounting, and the anecdotal evidence is following suit – this experiment in dope legalization is going to go badly for an entire generation. (This link to Bill Bennett’s book, Going to Pot, contains several links to the recent research on several marijuana related issues.)

I don’t want to recount the research here, but I do want to make some predictions.

Within 10 years, the rates of marijuana-related teen mental disorders will skyrocket. More and more young teens and pre-teens are getting their hands on the stuff right now, and with its increased potency, the kids won’t last long.

On a related note, public school districts and law enforcement agencies will spend an ever-increasing percentage of their budget dealing with pot related problems, causing their "normal" jobs to suffer.

Within 5 years it will become clear that the tax revenue collected by the state will not be enough to cover the state’s costs in handling marijuana-related problems. For example, the costs associated with alcohol far outweigh the taxes brought in by the sales of alcohol.

Within 10 years there will be a serious grassroots movement afoot to repeal the legalization of pot, but it will face a (likely) impossible task. The genie has been let out of the bottle and there may be no putting it back.

Turning a Garden into a City

In our mid-week Study/Pot-luck extraordinaire at Living Hope Church, we have been studying the topic of work, more specifically, the work for which God made us. When you look at Scripture with this topic in mind, there is a rich and varied theology of work from literally the first to the last page of Scripture. One of those "book-end" details is a tree that shows up both at the beginning of the human story and at the end. When God plants the garden he puts in it a Tree of Life. Then humanity is given the responsibility to tend to the garden. Then, at the end of history as we know it, God's children are re-gathered in a city in which is planted, you guessed it, the Tree of Life.

Genesis 2:9 "And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."

Revelation 22:2 "...also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations."

We begin in a garden, are given the task of cultivating it, and we end up in a city. A lot has been said about the significance of this move, but I find it provocative to pull Socrates into the discussion. Biblically speaking, the garden we are given by God is cultivated by the gifts and resources he gave each of us and the resources he embedded in creation. We work, as God's under-creators, and turn his gift into a city, which is from a certain point of view, the collection of a multitude of trades each laboring for the good of the city. This is, basically, how Socrates described the city in Plato's Republic. Each trade is engaged in for the betterment of individuals and families, but also have the larger purpose of building the just city.

Biblically, humans are creative and productive because they are created in the image of a God who is creative and productive. We take the things God provided for us, we employ our gifts and trades for the good of ourselves and our neighbors, and we build a city. And then, finally, when God rules all in all, that city (that collection of human productivity in the virtues of Christ) becomes the perfect city - the City of God.

The Self-Destructive Cycle of Self-Infantilization: We're All Babies Now!

Three articles, three separate sets of circumstances, the same problem. The problem is the self-infantilization of our culture, and it will lead to wide-spread and unsavory consequences.

At the National Review Online, Charles Cooke writes about the chilling effect of liberal emovitism in, "The New 'McCarthyism' Exists, but it Has Nothing to Do with Ted Cruz." He cites the case of a Purdue-based doctoral student and teacher named Fredrik deBoer who publicly lamented the state of his students, and thus the state of his teaching.

Fredrik deBoer took to Twitter to rail bitterly against the toxic climate that the advocates of “tolerance” have created on his campus. “Students,” deBoer wrote, are “very quick learners,” and they have realized that they can use our present hysteria to advance their interests. Indeed, far from helping to educate, deBoer added, our current penchant for hyper-sensitivity is having a deleterious effect on the quality of the critical training he is expected to provide. “If you question even the most obviously dishonest and self-interested invocation of trauma/triggering/etc,” deBoer lamented, “you will be criticized severely.”

And then a liberal friend of deBoer's adds her two-cents on the situation.

Writing anonymously on the “White Hot Harlots” blog, a “passionate leftist” friend of deBoer’s painted a disquietingly similar picture. “Saying anything that goes against liberal orthodoxy,” he declared, “is now grounds for a firin’.” Indeed, “even if you make a reasonable and respectful case, if you so much as cause your liberal students a second of complication or doubt you face the risk of demonstrations, public call-outs, and severe professional consequences.”... in fact. “I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican,” our anonymous friend insists. Rather, “liberal students scare the s*** out of me.

These teachers at public universities have come face-to-face with the intellectual climate created by secular progressivism - a climate of reason, free-exchange, and pursuit of the truth has been replaced with violent and threatening displays of emotion.

At the magazine, First Things, Mark Bauerlein writes about how it has become difficult to impossible to interact with this kind of emotivism in, "The Rhetoric of Anti-Discrimination." His article focuses on a briefing by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights titled, "Examining workplace Discrimination Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Americans." In it he quotes the transgendered representative at length making it obvious that the only argument offered up in favor of their position was an appeal to emotion. Bauerlein concludes,

What argument can be made against this cry of the heart? Who wants to stand up and deny suffering? The preceding person on the panel spoke against the ENDA revisions by noting mostly the costly and unreasonable litigation that will follow, but you can see how feeble that objection is relative to the pain of these vulnerable souls. So some businesses have to pay a few dollars more—isn’t that worth the healing that will go with it?
 

Given our current cultural climate and the values of equality, diversity, tolerance, and non-judgmentalism, I see no effective answer to these emotional pleas. There are principled answers, yes, but none that pass muster in public settings.

In other words, we have come to a point in our cultural discourse where reason and argumentation are no longer convincing in the public square because they have been effectively replaced with appeals to emotion. What can you say to disagree with how a person feels?

And then thirdly, a now well-known article that was published in the New York Times authored by Judith Shulevitz titled, "In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas." In it, she details a campus group's reaction to a debate about what is allegedly the "rape culture" on campus. This woman's group effectively quashed the debate and erected a safe room where people could go if they heard rhetoric that "invalidated their experience." The organizer of the safe room remarked that she was hurt by hearing people disagree with her deeply held and sincere beliefs. The author analyzes the situation well and cites what I think is a perfect moniker for this trend - "self-infantilization." She writes,

Still, it’s disconcerting to see students clamor for a kind of intrusive supervision that would have outraged students a few generations ago. But those were hardier souls. Now students’ needs are anticipated by a small army of service professionals — mental health counselors, student-life deans and the like. This new bureaucracy may be exacerbating students’ “self-infantilization,” as Judith Shapiro, the former president of Barnard College, suggested in an essay for Inside Higher Ed.
 

But why are students so eager to self-infantilize? Their parents should probably share the blame. Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote on Slate last month that although universities cosset students more than they used to, that’s what they have to do, because today’s undergraduates are more puerile than their predecessors. “Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity,” he wrote. But “if college students are children, then they should be protected like children.”

Examples of this new cultural reality could be produced ad-infinitum, ad-nauseam from the arenas of academia, government, politics, entertainment, and the media. For a long time people have lamented the rise of the power of the appeal to emotion in politics, and certainly that is a common problem, but this is different. This is systemic. This is engendered by, and I would say made necessary by, secular progressivism, and today the culture-shapers have themselves been shaped by this brand of emotivism and lack the intellectual tools to make any other appeal.

So, how did this happen?

For my thesis in graduate school I chose to read the collected works of Richard Rorty who was at the time the leading American philosophical proponent of what was then called postmodernism. People still use the term, but is has been made gauche by those who are its disciples. (That happens when an idea is so bad that its disciples refuse to give up the worldview but deny the title, as if changing the label will remove the stain.) Postmodernism had its roots in a philosophy that proclaimed suspicion of all truth claims. Rorty once infamously declared that "truth is what my colleagues let me get away with." It was argued that appeals to truth failed and did not do justice to how various cultures viewed the world and taught their children how to live. Then postmodernism took another step and went from suspicion of truth to the belief that any appeal to truth was an act of power over another human being, and thus our modern notion of "tolerance" was born. To be tolerant, in this new postmodern world, was to avoid making truth claims or judgment claims of others, and those who did were labeled intolerant.

This is a terrible view of tolerance. In reality, tolerance is reserved for those with whom you disagree. In this new view of tolerance, it is reserved only for those who agree with you, and those who disagree are labeled as intolerant. And being labeled intolerant is now the worst thing that can be said about  a person.  It is a terrible definition, but it has won the day. The catch with this view is that it was destined for self-destruction the day it became cultural cache. It rejects reality, grounds any concept of "truth," "good," or "right," in personal preferences, and raises emotion to the highest level of public discourse. As a result we have, in more ways than one, lost our minds and replaced them with our tear ducts. And moving forward, all we need is the next set of whiners to make their case and make it louder than the last group of whiners, and the definition of what is socially acceptable will change. The whole worldview is a self-collapsing cycle of public protests and threats of litigation.

Postmodernism ironically reduced itself to appeals to power, and over time has further reduced itself to appeals to emotional power. When truth beyond your preferences is gone, the only way to get your way is to exercise power over other human beings. Argument is gone, power reigns. And this is the very core of the secular progressive worldview, which is why I argue that the reduction of all human interaction to power and emotion is a necessary consequence of this way of seeing things. This also explains why secular progressives accuse everyone else of making power-plays to get their way - it is projection pure and simple. They have no argument, by virtue of their postmodern worldview, so they sling emotion and hope it sticks.

For the young mind, the result is exactly what our three authors noted. The uniquely human capacity for reason and reflection is diminished in favor of emotion coddling. More and more, older children are unable to make the crucial distinction between what reality really is like (for example, other smart people disagree with you and deserve to be heard) from their sincerely held beliefs (leading to climate where dissenting points of view are labeled as "hate" or "intolerance").

This leads to what is now the new fundamentalism. More on that later.

For now it will suffice to say that Christians ought to have nothing to do with this rampant self-infantilization. Christians are people of truth, not propaganda. Christians are people of self-sacrificing love, not coercive hate. Christians are unafraid of other points of view, for all truth is God's truth. Christians are people who are being built and matured in the image of Christ and in the kingdom of God, not letting themselves get stuck in the early Freudian stages of infant development.

In addition, Christians are people of hope. There really is a powerful and redemptive truth out there than can change a life and free it from its childish shackles.

What I See As A Pastor

I had a chance to show someone today "what I see" when I look over a congregation as a pastor.

A young man has been walking to church for a few weeks and he stopped by today in bad shape. Life is hard for him and he is baffled about where God is and whether he is paying any attention. A couple of us had a chance to talk with him and pray with him, but I have to tell you, these conversations are often very hard to get through. It is a common truth that life is often very hard, and most every Christian will experience seasons when they believe God is absent, and despair.

At one point he mentioned what he sees when he walks in the doors of our church. He sees people with smiling faces and happy children. He sees people who love God. He sees people raising their hands in worship. He sees people who feel the presence of God, and he keeps coming back because he feels the presence of God here as well. He wants what they have.

So I took him into the sanctuary, we walked down to the front, turned around, and I showed him a little of what I see every Sunday. I also see people happy to be with the family of God and who worship with all they have each week. I also see beautiful families, and I revel in the sounds of children racing through the halls, hugging their parents, and carrying around whatever craft they glued and colored that morning. I even get to hold a few of them.

I also see the saint who is twice widowed but who pours her life into her brothers and sisters in Christ. I see the families dealing with severe mental and physical disabilities who bring their kids and family members because worship soothes them. I see teens and young adults who have lost parents at an all too early age, but who come and find friendship and strength in church. I see blended families following God but who struggle with the rotten choices of their other family members. I see parents with wayward children who struggle in prayer constantly. I see single parents doing their dead-level best. And the story goes on, and on.

To my eyes, this is part of what makes church so beautiful. It isn't the perfection. It is more the quality of the mercy and grace of God alive in imperfect and hurting lives. It is the beauty of lumps of coal being turned into diamonds by the power of a loving and nail-scarred God. It is the cross leading to resurrection.

The Disciple and Happiness

There is a line in Pride and Prejudice in which one sister tells another, and I am paraphrasing here, that she cannot have her happiness until she has her goodness.  Jane Austen is relying on a traditional sense of happiness (and goodness) to make her point that virtue is the path to true happiness. For a very long time philosophers and theologians believed that humans were made to be certain kinds of beings, namely rational and virtuous beings, and that we would not lead fulfilling lives until we began to function according to our created mandate. Thus, happiness was to be a consequence of reason and virtue. This idea, which reigned philosophy and culture for centuries, has fallen apart and been replaced with one form of hedonism or another. Happiness now is a factor of what makes us feel a particular emotion without any regard to virtue or the right training of character. In fact most people now find the idea, "the right training of character," to be odd or offensive.

But for the follower of Jesus Christ, we must return to a version of this traditional notion. Moreland and Issler say, "According to the ancients [Moses, Solomon, Jesus, Aristotle, Plato, and the church], happiness is a life well lived, a life of virtue and character, a life that manifests wisdom, kindness, and goodness" (The Lost Virtue of Happiness, pg. 25, italics theirs). The way I want to put it here is that in the life of the believer happiness is the place where there is no tension between what gives God joy and what gives you joy.

For the Christian, maturity consists in the building of the life and character of God within us. As the Apostle Paul noted, we have been predestined to be conformed to the image of God's Son. This is not a bad thing. It is a good thing. It is a beautiful and powerful thing. It is a joyful thing. But it presupposes that we currently, or in our broken human condition, are not in the image of God (Romans 8:29). We must be transformed to get there. Thus, the things that give us joy or happiness now may need to change and the things that give God joy must replace them in the makeup of our character.

So, at the very least, the Christian needs to learn that they cannot accept happiness on hedonistic terms, or to settle for the kind of joy that comes with a broken and sinful nature. As C.S. Lewis said in another context, if we do those things we are happy with playing in the mud when the glories of heaven are available to us. The Christian is given the Word of God, the life of Christ, and the presence of the Holy Spirit, and these become our guides in learning God's kind of happiness and joy, and they become the power of our transformation.

Toward a Public Christian Faith

It has become a common, if unexamined, belief that the only institutions that have anything to say about a culture’s common problems are politics, law, and higher education, especially the hard sciences. What this means is that when we are faced with common, large, problems we look to these institutions, people, and their respective ideologies to provide solutions. The problem is that none of them have any solutions worth any serious devotion.

The Christian, however, has at their disposal another resource that has answers to public problems. At the very least it provides a sound and valid foundation for understanding and addressing our common issues. But our culture has ruled it out of bounds for public discussion. The living Christ and Christian theology is the resource that exemplifies God’s wisdom and power among humans and which reveals truth to us. But people of faith, theologians, pastors, and churches have been relegated to the insignificant shadows of “private belief” or “opinion.” And not only has the outside world pushed the church and her theology out of the public square, the church has, in many respects, become content there.

To come “out of the shadows” and put forward a full-bodied public life the church must learn that she is a public institution with answers to our culture’s common problems. We need not subsume ourselves and our priorities to the other institutions listed above, and neither do we need to learn a triumphant posture over them. Instead, for the follower of Christ, all these vocations (and many, many more) become means of expressing our theology. If this is understood and practiced, the Christian need not seek a revised form of Constantinianism (because they no longer see politics as a surrogate savior), and the Christian need not separate their faith from the tasks that consume most of their waking hours (because their faith and their lives have become indistinguishable).

Part of what this means is that the church must learn to use the resources at her disposal to begin learning and teaching what it would mean to begin thinking about daily life with Christ. Christ is not a spiritual add-on, or the ideal who guides some of our moral decision making. Instead, he is the very manifestation of the Creator of all things, the smartest man who ever lived, and still alive filling his people with the power and wisdom of his kingdom. So, we don’t begin thinking about marriage, politics, law, education, computer programming, or custodial work with the presupposition that Christ is not concerned. On the contrary, if the Christian is doing it, Christ is deeply concerned and involved.

Does this mean we must develop a “Christian quantum physics,” a “Christian computer programming language,” or a “Christian” anything? Not necessarily. Instead, we ought to become people enamored with and filled with Christ and then go do our jobs, or relate to friends and family, or vote.

I wonder from time to time, what would it look like for the local church to become so robust a community founded on the truths and life of Christ that people find in her the resources they need to address life and all that comes with it?

Christians in this World

The Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus was written in the late 2nd century by an unknown disciple, self-described as a "disciple of the apostles" to a Roman teacher who was likely the tutor to Marcus Aurelius. Though an ideal, it is a wonderful description of how Christians can approach their lives in this world - lives lived here but belonging to God.

For Christians are not distinguished from the
rest of mankind either in locality or in speech or in customs. For they dwell not somewhere in cities of their own, neither do they use some different language, nor practise an extraordinary kind of life. Nor again do they possess any invention discovered by any intelligence or study of ingenious men, nor are they masters of any human dogma as some are. But while they dwell in cities of Greeks and barbarians as the lot of each is cast, and follow the native customs in dress and food and the other
arrangements of life, yet the constitution of their
own citizenship, which they set forth, is marvellous,
and confessedly contradicts expectation. They dwell in their own countries, but only as
sojourners; they bear their share in all things as
citizens, and they endure all hardships as strangers.
Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and
every fatherland is foreign. They marry like all other men and they beget
children; but they do not cast away their offspring. They have their meals in common, but not their
wives. They find themselves in the flesh, and yet they
live not after the flesh. Their existence is on earth, but their
citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws, and they
surpass the laws in their own lives. They love all men, and they are persecuted by
all. They are ignored, and yet they are condemned.
They are put to death, and yet they are endued with
life. They are in beggary, and yet they make many
rich. They are in want of all things, and yet they
abound in all things. They are dishonoured, and yet they are
glorified in their dishonour. They are evil spoken of,
and yet they are vindicated. They are reviled, and they bless; they are
insulted, and they respect. Doing good they are punished as evil-doers;
being punished they rejoice, as if they were thereby
quickened by life. War is waged against them as aliens by the
Jews, and persecution is carried on against them by
the Greeks, and yet those that hate them cannot tell
the reason of their hostility.

Discipleship Changes Things - The Words We Use

When we become disciples of Jesus - or become serious about following him - all kinds of things are supposed to change. The Jesus way of life is a new way; a way of thinking, believing, and doing that is often radically different than other non-Jesus ways of doing things. So it would follow that discipleship to Jesus begins to transform our lives in ways we may expect, and in ways we may not expect. So, what kinds of changes might we expect if we begin to authentically follow Jesus? Over time I want to flesh out several changes, but here is one you might not expect.

Our vocabulary changes, and I don't mean we stop swearing. We may very well stop swearing when we become disciples, but I am thinking of a much more significant shift in the way we understand and use words. Words are powerful things. Language is more life-shaping than you probably think. At the very least, words signify things and ideas. When we use words we are verbalizing what is going on around us or within us. We express relationships between things in the world and we express what is going on in our inner states. We say, "The light is green," and we mean to say something about not only a certain colored light, but to also convey meaning. We are saying, "it is your turn to drive." We can say, "I feel anxious," and reveal something going on within us that another person may not know unless we say it, and we may be communicating a need for sympathy or reassurance. In either case, we use words in ways that we believe will communicate with other people.

So it is with our use of words and ideas that appear both in Scripture and in the common culture. What do you think of when someone tells you they spent Thanksgiving with their "family"? What ideas and images are conjured in your mind when someone talks about their "anger"? What about "friendship," "work," or "love"? The images and ideas that arise in your mind when people use those words with you are the result of years of contextual content-filling. In other words, those words have already been defined for you (in large part) by your background, education, language, culture, and so forth. Exaggerating a bit, you might say that whoever or whatever filled your vocabulary with meaning has also given you your view of how the world works.

There is an unavoidable tension here for the disciple of Jesus. Christian theology and practice wants to use words one way and the rest of the world wants to use them in another way. We live in a pluralistic culture, becoming more so all the time, and each corner of our culture wants to use words in different ways.  The more ways a single word is used, the more difficult it becomes to maintain a straightforward belief in the way "we" think that word ought to be used. To put it another way, if the church teaches you one thing about "love" for one hour a week, and media teaches you a very different thing about "love" 40-60 hours a week, which meaning will be easier to believe? And if you want to believe what the church teaches about "love" then you will need to work harder at it.

But then, it seems this is one thing the follower of Christ learns to do if they plan on being genuine disciples. If we are discipled by someone or something, we are taught a view of the world by them. The disciple is striving to learn the Jesus way of life, including the Jesus way of using words. This means that we learn how to begin with sound biblical ways of understanding words and their respective concepts and carry them into our respective niches of society. What normally happens is the reverse is the case. Church and Christian theology often feel odd or antiquated to us because we have let other things define the terms for us.

So, what does it mean for you to robustly learn and absorb the biblical meaning of "love" or "forgiveness" or "work" and then engage your world? We are all waiting to see, and we will all be better for it.

Links with Little Context

What are the rights of Donor-Conceived People? by Alana S. Newman

We’ve created a class of people who are manufactured, and treat them as less-than-fully human, demanding that they be grateful for whatever circumstances we give them. While fathers of traditionally conceived human beings are chased down and forced to make child support payments as a minimal standard of care, people conceived commercially are reprimanded when they question the anonymous voids that their biological fathers so “lovingly” left.

Five Ways Liberals Ignore Science by David Harsanyi

It’s no big deal for us to ask Republican evolution skeptics to raise their hands or force a bogus Senate vote to try and shame Republicans, yet no reporter would ever think to ask a pro-choice politician if they believe life begins at conception. Sometimes denialism matters and sometimes it doesn’t.

Why It Matters That the Exodus Really Happened by Gregory Alan Thorbury

Truth matters. People want to know the answers: the who, the what, the when, the how, and the why. And without providing those little truths, they may never learn of the ultimate Truth behind them.

Molecular Biology Has Failed to Yeild a Grand "Tree of Life"  by Casey Luskin

Unfortunately, one assumption that these evolutionary biologists aren't willing to re-evaluate is the assumption that universal common ancestry is correct. They appeal to a myriad of ad hoc arguments -- horizontal gene transfer, long branch attraction, rapid evolution, different rates of evolution, coalescent theory, incomplete sampling, flawed methodology, and convergent evolution -- to explain away inconvenient data which doesn't fit the coveted treelike pattern. As a 2012 paper stated, "phylogenetic conflict is common, and frequently the norm rather than the exception." At the end of the day, the dream that DNA sequence data would fit into a nice-neat tree of life has failed, and with it a key prediction of neo-Darwinian theory.

Is The "Pastor as Leader" Paradigm Destroying Pastors?

In his refreshing book, Replenish: Leading from a Healthy Soul, Lance Witt collects several distressing statistics regarding pastors and their vocation:

1,500 pastors leave the ministry permanently each month in America. 80% of pastors and 85% of their spouses feel discouraged in their roles....Over 50% of pastors are so discouraged they would leave the ministry if they could but have no other way of making a living. Over 50% of pastors’ wives feel that their husband entering ministry was the most destructive thing to ever happen to their families. 30% of pastors said they had either been in an ongoing affair or had a one-time sexual encounter with a parishioner. 71% of pastors stated they were burned out, and they battle depression beyond fatigue on a weekly and even a daily basis. One out of every ten ministers will actually retire as a minister.

There is a lot to be said about what these stats represent, and Witt does a wonderful job talking about the importance of restoring the pastor's soul and leading from the depths that can be created by God. But there is something more to be said. It is a frustration I have with the 'pastor as leader' model that has become a kind of talisman in the evangelical world over the past three decade.

Pastors are not CEO-style leaders. Yet they have been treated as such and expected to lead and produce results like captains of industry. My working theory is that one significant reason pastors have such an incredible failure and dropout rate right now is that they are pressured to be the kinds of things they are not by nature. Here is a nutshell version of how my theory works.

1. Our culture and our churches have almost completely lost a biblical definition of the role of pastor.

2. Our culture and our churches are enamored with the seemingly magical techniques of corporate management.

3. Because we lost the one and learned the other, we imposed corporate-style management on pastors.

4. That kind of leadership requires a certain kind of leader to make it "work" and most people called into the pastorate are not that kind of leader.

5. Hence, most pastors quickly become frustrated, depressed, and angry.

So, there it is. I hope over the next few days to tease out each assertion and make more sense of what we have done to pastors and the church and how, God willing, we can reverse course.