On Becoming a Mentor

1 April 2025

In Part 1 of this series, we considered finding a mentor. Now, let’s talk about the other half of the equation: finding an apprentice.

Lack of mentorship is of the biggest problems the West faces today, in and out of the Church. The Boomers as a generation shrugged off mentoring. When they were young, they were famous for saying “Never trust anybody over 30.” (I think it was Joe Queenan who observed that as they aged, they have done their part to ensure that it remains good advice!) As a result most of them were never mentored themselves, and then didn’t know how to mentor when it was their turn to give back. Mostly, they assumed every generation behind them would want to be neglected, which explains most of what you need to know about how Gen X was parented. This assumption was highly convenient for the Boomers, who as a generation were focused on enjoying life and couldn’t be bothered with the inconveniences of legacy. (Yeah, I know, not all of them. But a critical mass, easily enough to create a crisis of mentorship.)

But let’s assume, Gentle Reader, that you’re willing to embrace the hard work of mentoring. Probably the most common question I get from would-be mentors is, “Where did your apprentices come from? Where do you find these people?” Here’s what you need to know about that.

(1) They’re everywhere. People are desperate for what a mentor can provide, young adults especially. I can almost guarantee that you talked with someone I’d consider a candidate in the last couple days. It’s not about where you look, it’s about how you look. You need to learn to see what’s in front of you.

(2) Mostly they don’t walk up and ask for mentoring. But they definitely signal need:

  • “I guess I don’t really have a dad.”
  • “It must have been great to have had someone to show you how to do these things.”
  • “I just don’t understand those people!”
  • “I don’t really know what else to do.”

In a hundred little ways, people signal that they need what mentoring can provide, and that they are aware of the need. They often don’t know that mentoring can meet that need, but they have something going on where they’d be happy to hear “I think I might be able to help with that.” That’s where it starts. Don’t wait to be asked; go fishing for men!

3) Since you’re not waiting to be asked, you’re going to do some work up front. You know the white-bearded master that pupils climb a mountain to find? Being that guy is a cool little fantasy, but most of the time that’s what it is–a fantasy. In real life, they’ll show you a need, and you’ll respond with blessing and service, demonstrating that you can help meet that need, and that there’s more where that solution came from. They might jump over hurdles later after you’ve demonstrated what you can offer as a mentor, but they aren’t going to do it to start with. Expect to be generous with your time, money, effort, attention. If you’re not willing to do that, you shouldn’t be mentoring.

3b) One of the other common things I hear is “I’m investing everywhere I can, but nobody’s taking my advice!” If you’re having that problem, reconsider the nature of your investment. Invest your gratitude, your praise, your effort, your connections, your money. If there is anything virtuous, if there is anything praiseworthy, invest in it! Bless what can be blessed. If you can’t see what’s good, nobody will listen to you about what needs correcting, and nobody should. Quit pontificating and do some actual work.

4) The most straightforward way to “fish for men” is to make the initial overture and invest in the people around you, and then pay attention to what happens next. Most people won’t reward the investment. That’s fine; plenty of people didn’t reward Jesus’ investment either. Think “Parable of the Sower” here: some never start, some are drawn away by shiny objects, some quit when it gets hard, but some pay off –some just okay, some well, and some handsomely. But none of that happens if you don’t sow the seed. Start the ball rolling. Notice the need and do something about it; at least make an offer. When you see a return, invest more, and let the relationship grow organically from there.

When that works, congratulations! You’re a mentor. How do you do it well? Stay tuned.

Comments Off on On Becoming a Mentor | Love of Generous Fruitfulness, Mentoring/Disciple-Making, Real Ministry Training | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Getting and Keeping a Mentor

18 March 2025

Young adults need mentors, and a lot of them even know it. Most young adults never get a mentor, because they don’t have the first clue how to find one, and more importantly, how to behave in a mentoring relationship. It’s not their fault; nobody is born knowing these things. Unfortunately, most older adults no longer teach this skill set — not even parents. From the Boomers onward, far too many adults don’t know how to mentor, don’t want to, and simply refuse to assume the responsibilities and moral authority to do the job well.

So if you’re in the market for a mentor, but don’t know where to start, pull up a chair, grab yourself a fine brewed beverage, and let Uncle Tim lay some wisdom on ya. There’s two skill sets you need here: finding and acquiring a mentor to start with, and then living in a mentoring relationship.

The first thing is identifying the person you would like mentoring from. This can be really simple: look for someone who…

  • is who you want to be when you grow up, or
  • can do a specific thing that you really want to to do.

You’ll be tempted to think of internet personalities or celebrities. Stop it. Work harder; find someone less famous, and preferably someone local. Once you’ve identified the person, move in for a closer look, as close as you can get. Do you want the whole package, or some specific skill? Are there particular things about this person you definitely do not want to pick up? Think about that one long and hard; if you spend significant time with this person, you may end up more like them than you wanted to be.

Once you’ve found the person…then what? Ask, of course! But there’s an art to maximizing your chances of getting a “yes.” First you need the right mindset, and then you need a good approach. As a potential apprentice, you need to have a clear understanding of the nature of mentoring relationships. In no particular order, here are some key things to know:

  • If you’re just getting started, all you need is someone a little ahead of you. As you grow, you’ll come to need (and be able to attract) mentors with much greater experience and skill.
  • Every beginner dreams of being mentored by a master teacher from day one. That really does happen occasionally; I’ve met a few such people. Usually, that person is the teacher’s kid, favorite nephew, or something like that. If you get such an opportunity, by all means take it, but don’t sit around waiting for it to magically happen. Normally, a master teacher’s time will be spent with advanced practitioners who have already put in the time to master the basics of the craft, and who have already proven their commitment to continuing in the work. Those people are a much better investment than you are as a beginner. If you’re the kind of person who won’t engage unless you can be guided by a master, then you’re also the kind of person no master will take. Nobody needs an apprentice who won’t get over himself.
  • It’s really rare that anybody worth following actually needs your help. Unless you happen to have some special skill your prospective mentor really needs, this isn’t going to be an even exchange at the beginning, which means you’ll be asking for an investment, not a trade. (There are ways of evening up. I have a colleague who cold-approached a world-class practitioner and asked him to mentor her; she offered to pay his regular hourly rate for any time he spent on her, so he wouldn’t lose money. He said yes; she worked her tail off, and today she’s highly and uniquely skilled. She also spent a small fortune getting there; not everyone can do that. But it was money well spent.)
  • Since it won’t start as an even exchange, you will be a net drain on the system in the beginning. Teaching you has an opportunity cost; your mentor is going to get less of something this year because he’s spending time and effort on you. What the cost is to him depends on the situation; it might mean slowing down his work so he can teach you as he goes; it might mean taking fewer jobs in order to make time for you. The time he spends with you might otherwise be spent with his wife, his kids, his friends, reading, learning some new skill, or binge-watching UFO documentaries, but count on it, that time is coming from somewhere. No need to feel bad about that; your mentor thinks you’re worth the investment, or you wouldn’t be here. But he has an expectation that the investment is going to pay off; it’s up to you to make sure he’s right.
  • Speaking of the investment paying off, here’s a basic rule of human behavior: everybody always gets paid…somehow.
    • You will get tutelage and experience.
    • Your mentor will get…something. In order for the relationship to work well, you need to know what he’s getting out of it. Find out what it costs and don’t be put off by the inconvenience. Training an apprentice isn’t convenient either; this is your end of the deal. If it’s not worth the cost, then find a different mentor. If it is, then pay it and make it look easy.
    • It’s an asymmetrical relationship, but it’s not asymmetrical everywhere, all the time. There are things your mentor will do for you that you couldn’t do or wouldn’t be expected to reciprocate. That’s fine. There are other things that you absolutely should reciprocate, and you’ll blow up the relationship if you don’t. Know the difference.
    • Balance is a moving target. Your obligations mount as your skills grow and your mentor’s needs change. Keep an eye on ways you might be able to reciprocate now that you couldn’t have when you started.
  • If you have integrity, you will at some point disagree with your mentor. That’s okay. Your mentor is not God, and it’s ok to disappoint him—but make it count. If the relationship is worth having, then it’s worth taking good care of; don’t become a disappointment through inadvertence or over something stupid.

Knowing that’s what you’re getting into, do you still want this person to mentor you? If so, then you want to ask in a way that maximizes your chances of getting an enthusiastic “Yes!” Here’s what you need to do:

  • Do your homework.
    • Know as much as you can about the field.
    • Know who you’re approaching. Study websites, social media pages, curriculum vitae. Whatever’s publicly available about where your prospective mentor has been and what he’s done, learn it.
    • If your prospective mentor has already produced material for up-and-coming workers in your field, get it. It’s gauche to ask an expert to tell you a bunch of stuff for free when their livelihood comes in part from selling that same information. If it costs money, then spend some! Read the books; watch the videos; listen to the podcasts. Digest that material ahead of time; don’t ask your prospective mentor to waste time telling you things they’ve already put out there.
  • Have something to show for it
    • Having done your homework, showcase it. At a minimum, come in with some intelligent questions: “I read where you said X, and I was wondering….”
    • Better: “I’ve been following your instructions from [book/podcast/article], and here’s what happened. I have some questions about my next steps.…”
  • Ask boldly
    • We all fantasize about our chosen mentor seeing how we’ve applied their work and begging us to come study with them. It’s okay to have the fantasy, but know that it’s a fantasy. People worth following already have plenty to do; mostly they don’t go about asking for more work.
    • Be very clear ahead of time about what you want from this mentor. Do you want them to give you a book review? Help you put together a business plan? Edit an article before you submit it? Help you figure out which school to go to? Find an investor? Talk about life over coffee for an hour a week? I strongly suggest writing it down clearly. “I want [person] to [action] for me.” You may not get what you want, but you should know what you want.
    • Don’t be coy. You’ve showcased your work; you’ve made the best case you can that you’ll be a worthwhile investment. You know what you want from them. So ask clearly for the specific investment that you want.
      • It’s ok if you’re just asking for something small, like “Would it be ok if I call or email to ask about advice on next steps every couple months? It doesn’t have to be a grand request.
      • On the other hand, if you want more, ask for more: “Could we meet for an hour every other week for the next year?”
      • You may well get a no. Take it gracefully. God has a way of bringing people back around in our lives; don’t burn the bridge. You never know what will happen later.
      • You may get “I can’t do that, but we could….” and an offer of some lesser level of investment. In that case, take it and follow up quickly. Treat it as a second interview.
      • You may just get an assignment. “I can’t meet with you, but here’s what you should work on next….” Frequently, your wounded pride will tempt you not to follow through on the assignment because they turned you down. Do what you want, but know that once upon a time, a very busy man gave me such an assignment. I did it, and it changed the course of my life. (God was being kind to me. In hindsight, he would have been a terrible mentor. But it was a great assignment. I’ll tell you about it sometime.) Also, again, treat it as a second interview. Sometimes it is.

If you got a “no,” don’t give up. Keep looking around. Locate another likely candidate. Do the same thing. Keep going until you find what you need.

On the other hand, perhaps you got a yes. Now you have a mentor! What do you need to know, to keep the relationship good? First, go back up to the top and review all the things I said about the nature of the mentoring relationship. Have all that firmly in mind. Then…

  • You got into this relationship seeking guidance. So take it. If it doesn’t work, come back for a debrief. But don’t come back with “I thought your advice was stupid/hard so I didn’t do it, and now I need help managing the fallout of my poor decisions.” Can’t complain about the results you didn’t get from the work you didn’t do. If you screwed up, it’s not the end of the world; recover as best you can, go back to the drawing board, and do what you were told.
  • Some of the guidance your mentor gives will seem stupid. That’s normal. Real life is frequently counterintuitive, and if you already knew all the smart ideas, you wouldn’t need a mentor, wouldja? Go ahead and do what you’re told; see what happens. Usually, hindsight will provide all the insight you need. Sometimes, you’ll need further explanation. The best time to ask “Why?” is after you’ve gone and done the thing. Don’t ask for someone to invest valuable time and expertise giving you guidance and then argue with them about it. Show your commitment, then ask: “I woulda sworn that wasn’t going to work…and it did. I still don’t get it. Why?” Occasionally—because even the best mentors are fallible—it really will be stupid guidance. But as a newbie, you can’t tell whether the advice is wrong, or you are wrong. Accept that occasionally you’re going to follow bad advice. It’s the cost of doing business.
  • The above is a useful rule of thumb, but there are exceptions. Sometimes a promising-looking mentor turns out to be a tyrant who’s exploiting you and giving nothing worthwhile in return, and you really should just walk away. On the other hand, sometimes your mentor simply didn’t understand the problem. The easiest way to navigate that is to take responsibility yourself: “I’m so sorry, I don’t think I explained the problem properly. Let me try again….”
  • Some guidance will call for a metric ton of hard work, and you’re going to be tempted to seek shortcuts. Don’t. In the words of Scott Sonnon, “Until you have thoroughly mastered the basics, every ‘new’ idea you have has already been considered and rejected, with good reason.” That won’t be true 100% of the time, but close enough. Your time will be better spent working hard to master the basics; innovation can wait. (That said, look up the story of Gaston Glock sometime. There are occasional spectacular exceptions.)
  • You aren’t signing your life away when you apprentice to someone. You answer to God on the last day for yourself; you have to choose to follow your mentor’s guidance or not. But you can’t reasonably expect someone to continue to invest in you if you don’t take their guidance; conversely, if you don’t find their guidance worth following, you probably need a different mentor anyway.

So there ya go. I hope it’s helpful to you. Now, I know some of this is hard to hear, and of course I understand if you disagree. No worries; I’m fallible like everybody else. Maybe you know better than I do. And anyhow, I’m not holding a gun to your head; ain’t nothing stopping you from doing it your way. Best of luck….

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Hospitality as Alchemy

18 February 2025

I’ve been meditating recently on the parable of the unjust steward, found in Luke 16:1-13. Since Jesus Himself calls the guy unjust, obviously it’s not the cheating that Jesus is recommending. What does Jesus want us to take away from this?

The steward has a short window of opportunity where he has access to his master’s accounts, and he makes the most of his temporary access to make friends for the long term. We find ourselves in a similar situation. Everything you have can just disappear (as some of our brothers and sisters in California recently found out). But while you have it, what are you doing with it?

We can squander the goods we have, or we can use them to lasting effect. Few things are as fungible as a warm meal. The scraps you don’t eat will be cold in an hour and inedible in days; what you do eat will end up in your toilet in a day or two, depending on your intestinal transit time. But that meal, that future poop, shared with someone else, becomes an expression of love and care. Applied to someone at the right moment, that very transitory matter becomes a lifelong conviction that they’re loved.

The alchemists of old expended enormous effort trying to turn lead into gold. In hospitality, we do something much more spectacular, and we succeed at it! We transmute the basest of matter into something better than gold: the pleasure of God and the care of His image. So go forth and be hospitable to someone who can’t pay you back.

2 Comments | Mere Obedience, Parables, Shadow Ecclesiology | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Glories of a Good Corn Dog

7 January 2025

Imagine a friend of yours got involved in a commune, one of the really crunchy ones that does their own farming and such along with poetry nights and music and art. They’re pretty good at all this, actually. They’re using some really interesting permaculture practices at the communal farm, the poetry is actually half-decent, and they make the absolute best goat-cheese pizza you’ve ever tasted. As you ask a few more questions, it turns out that come March 21st, they’re all planning to drink cyanide in order to liberate their spirits to join the alien spacecraft that’s coming to take them away. Upon further investigation, this is the third such cult the charismatic leader has founded. He contends that the suicides of the two previous groups have indeed gone on to be with the aliens, while he selflessly remained behind to spread the good news.

How fast would you want to get your friend out of there?

So listen, I have some bad news for you. Large swathes of Western culture are that commune. We’re doing it in slow-motion, but look at the birth rates. What we are seeing is a cultural suicide pact. Hold that thought for a moment, we’ll come back to it.

****

In a post that’s worth your time to read, Michael Clary observes that one of the major objectives of neutral-world church strategy was “drawing left-leaning urban millennials, the most coveted demographic of the neutral world church planting boom.” In the interests of drawing the left-leaning urban crowd into church, we were all counseled to be “gospel centered” and “major on the majors,” setting “secondary matters” aside as “distractions.” Why were we given that counsel? Is it because our church growth experts were so taken with the gospel that for them, everything else just paled in comparison? Pretty to think so…but no, as I’ll demonstrate about four paragraphs down. Our experts knew that the left-leaning urbanites we were courting despised everything we love: backyard barbecues, fireworks on the 4th, “World’s Greatest Mom” mugs from Wal-mart, funnel cakes and corndogs at the county fair, all of it. They told us to “major on the majors” because our corn dogs offend left-leaning urbanites.

The urban elite have way fewer kids than the rest of us. It’s “grill Americans” who have the kids; the ranks of the urban elite are fed by a steady stream of young adults emigrating from flyover country. As a result, the rank and file of left-leaning urbanites didn’t grow up in that culture. They actually came from “grill American” culture, and lhey left it behind on purpose in order to fit into the elite leftist culture of their colleges. (You can tell this by their social media feeds over the holidays: they’re constantly reposting supportive tips for getting through dinner with your conservative relatives. Natives of the urban elite don’t have dinner with conservative relatives.) As young adults, these cultural emigres look back on heartland American culture with the white-hot disgust of the newly converted. In part, that performative disgust is driven by vulnerability: if you grew up slinging fries at McDonalds, you can’t afford for anybody at your art gallery job to even suspect you of plebian tastes — the accusation alone could ruin you.

I had half a mind to make this post a hit piece on that sad and hypocritical demographic. While they maybe deserve it, they need Jesus too! Somebody’s gotta go in there and get them, and the ugly truth is that unless you happen to catch them struggling to change a tire, you probably can’t make the initial approach in greasy Wal-mart jeans with a Modelo in your hand. When it comes to the logistics of winning that demographic, our neutral-world coaches were not wrong about the things they would find off-putting. But this is one of the major problems with managerial culture: it gets preoccupied with logistics at the expense of values.

Our coaches didn’t just steer us away from tailgating at the high school football game; they also told us to expunge all references to the sin of abortion from our church services; in fact, they told us not to talk about politics at all (as if the Bible doesn’t speak to such issues!) They upbraided us for big celebrations of Mothers’s Day and Father’s Day. They wrote long think pieces about the dangers of what they called “idolatry of the family” — a sneer at those who have the audacity to think growing up, getting married, and raising kids is normal. “Major on the majors; keep it about Jesus,” they said. “All things to all men,” they said. Too many of us listened.

Here’s what actually happened: Our advisers were not counseling us to “avoid secondary issues” because they cared so much about the gospel; it was because they wanted to muzzle the conservatives. Conservative values embarrassed them, and so as long as the voice of the church on “secondary issues” was conservative, no excuse was good enough for bringing those issues up. Now that left-leaning urbanites occupy positions of influence in the church, the very same advisers have suddenly discovered that there’s nothing more gospel-centered than a left-leaning take on…well, anything.

That joke about global warming on a record-setting snowy day? Total distraction. Come on, let’s keep it about Jesus, okay? But Greta Thundberg on climate change, that’s gospel-centered. Christians of all people should care about the world God made.

What are we to do with this situation? We can gather in twos and threes in desolate places and grind our teeth about the injustice of it all, but let’s not. I suggest we rethink the situation from the ground up. Let’s go back to that admonition to keep things gospel-centered, and have another look. I’m going to say something a bit controversial, and I welcome pushback, but I think I can make it stick.

I contend that we had a gospel-centered culture, however imperfect. In order to appeal to the coveted neutral-world demographic (left-leaning urban Millennials), we were urged to surrender our gospel-centered culture in favor of a different culture entirely. It is…ah, not obvious, shall we say, that the replacement culture is more gospel-centered than what we had. For one thing, that culture is committing suicide in slow motion. Remember the low birth rates? These are the people driving those statistics. Left-leaning urban Millennials are the cultural equivalent of that commune with the suicide pact.

Was existing grill-American culture perfect? By no means! But the Christian version of it loved children, honored mothers and celebrated fathers, valued and incentivized intact families, loved our country, made quilts and fluffy biscuits and plumbing that worked and sturdy front porches for the kids to play on, and had kids to play on them.

Left-leaning urbanite tastemakers don’t have kids. We traded young adults who got married and raised families for young adults who shack up, get cats, travel the world, and “don’t feel called to children.” We traded women who knew all Grandma’s best recipes for women who can’t make anything but a cocktail; men who could build a retaining wall in a weekend for inexplicably bearded men who can’t so much as change a tire. (A friend of mine asserts that today, a conspicuous beard is “the push-up bra of masculinity.” I’m afraid she may have a point.)

Conceding that someone needs to win these folks to Jesus, why would we want to adopt their culture? It’s not like it’s an improvement. So here’s my modest proposal: the gospel is indeed the center, but it is the center of something. Something good, not to put too fine a point on it. Where we genuinely fall short, let’s repent, and having repented of the evil, let’s not be embarrassed by the good things that remain. Let’s be a little loud about the beauty of marriage, the joys of having a gaggle of kids, the pleasure and difficulty of physical work, and the glories of a good corn dog. We have plenty of room to grow, but let’s not give up the good we already have for bland, HR-approved substitutes. Yech.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

An Example They Don’t Understand

26 November 2024

Back in my days running the sound board for my church, I quickly learned that invisibility is the key attribute of a sound tech. Everybody in the house should hear everybody on stage effortlessly, and everybody on stage should hear themselves and each other effortlessly, just as if there were no electronic amplification involved at all. For a young man both interested in technical things and possessed of a young man’s ego and hunger for recognition, it was a perfect lab for character formation: if I did the job well, nobody gave me a second thought.

The only time anybody looks back at the sound booth is when something goes wrong: they can’t hear a soloist or a speaker, there’s a sudden screech of feedback, or some such. Those mistakes are obvious enough; everybody knows they’re happening. But there’s another, more subtle type of mistake.

When the mix is off just a bit—one voice a little too high, another instrument a little too low, too much reverb here, just a touch too little mids there, that sort of thing—nobody looks back at the booth. But there’s an unease in the room. They can’t consciously name what’s going on; half of them are not consciously aware that anything’s going on. But there’s a wrongness you can feel, a restlessness in the crowd.

I learned to pick up on that restlessness as a newbie. The problem was, as a newbie, I was barely half a step ahead of the crowd. I know something was wrong, because I could see them reacting to it. But I often had no idea what was wrong, or how to fix it. The one thing I had going for me was blind instinct. I’d just get my hands on the knobs and start adjusting—a little too far this way; a little too far that way; back until it felt right, then stop. Move on to the next control. I couldn’t tell you, much of the time, what the needed adjustment was. I couldn’t consciously hear it, and after dancing all over the sound board, I usually couldn’t tell you which adjustment made the difference. But I’d get done making adjustments, and it just felt right to me. I could see the difference in the room, too: people would settle back in their seats, quit fiddling with their bulletins, just sing along with the music.

My fellow sound techs, including the guys who trained me, noticed. I remember more than one of them asking me “What did you do? That sounded good!”

I would just shrug. “I adjusted it until it felt right.”

In those days, we were blessed to have members of the music group Glad as part of the church, and sometimes Ed Nalle would sing on a special occasion. I vividly remember Heidi, Ed’s wife, coming back to the sound booth on multiple occasions. “Can’t you hear that?” she would ask. No, I couldn’t. Then she’d grab a chair, turn it around backwards, and half-sit on the chair back in front of the board. She’d reach up and make a couple of adjustments. It would sound better.

Unlike me, Heidi knew exactly what she was hearing, and knew exactly what to adjust. She ought to; she’d been running sound for decades. She had words for things I wasn’t even sure I heard, and as far as I could tell, she was never wrong. Looking back, I probably could have learned a lot more from her, but it honestly never occurred to me to ask her to stick around after service and show me what she’d adjusted and why. I don’t know that I’d have had the nerve; she was a seasoned, working pro, and I was a barely-trained amateur. So I just stood at her elbow and watched. I tried (failing, half the time) to hear exactly what difference each adjustment made. But sometimes I could hear the difference, and those times made me a better sound tech, just by watching Heidi’s example.

Why am I telling you this?

Because we rub shoulders every day with people who are the moral equivalent of barely-trained me, back in the day. The world these days makes them uneasy, and they’re not sure why. They don’t quite have words for it. Of course, there’s little they can do outside their own lives to influence the mix, but even in their own lives, most of the time, they have no idea what they’re doing. A little of this…oops, that was too much; dial it back. A little of that….

Catechized by a culture that’s abandoned special revelation and at war with natural revelation, they don’t even suspect the existence of instructions that could help them. The culture has worked very hard to make them deaf. But the image of God is still within them, and a sinful, broken world hurts them even though they don’t know why they hurt.

As Christians, we hear what they don’t. Sometimes, we can explain; other times, they’re so deaf they can’t hear us anyway. What we can always do is what Heidi did for me: be an example. Half the time, they won’t be able to tell why we’re doing what we’re doing, just like half of what Heidi did was completely opaque to me. But the other half the time, they’ll be able to tell the difference. Maybe not anything they quite have words for, but it just feels better somehow. So even if you don’t know how to explain yourself, even if you know they wouldn’t get it even if you could explain well, just be an example they don’t understand. Your very existence shows them that a better way is possible.

Of course, you’re only an example if they can see you. Let the unbelievers around you into your life. In a culture that often hates us, we’re tempted to just hide. Don’t. Let them see you. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Micro-Christendom in Practice

4 November 2024

I got to guest on a podcast this past week. “Micro-Christendoms and Local Government” released a few days ago. It’s episode 24 of The Civitas Podcast, hosted by Peter Leithart and James Wood.

The Civitas Project is a mostly an academic endeavor out of Theopolis Institute, focused on what they’re calling “ecclesiocentric postliberalism.” That’s a jawbreaker of a term, but it describes a very practical reality. The classical liberal order–the political and social world championed by the likes of John Locke and John Stuart Mill–is dying. The old-line secular liberals weren’t able to contend with the “anything–no, really, anything!–goes” relativism of the potsmoderns, who in turn lack the resources to contend with the dictatorial howlings of everybody from rabid feminists to woke fascists to Muslim fundamentalists. We live in a world that is rapidly abandoning relativism for a new morality hostile to anything true, good, or beautiful. That’s the “postliberal” part. The “ecclesiocentric” part argues that any sane response to the world we now live in has to begin with the church at the center. The Civitas Project exists to figure out what, exactly, that might mean. The project existed for a few years before going public with the podcast, and has also produced a book of essays, Hell Shall Not Prevail, which is well worth reading.

On the podcast, Peter and James mostly interview academics from a wide variety of fields. If you’ve been hanging out here long, Gentle Reader, you know that I’m not entirely without academic chops, but I gotta tell you, I’m nowhere near the stratospheric level of the average Civitas guest. So how’d I end up on the show? Peter and James got interested in coming down to the other end of the spectrum to chat with some practitioners. Peter was kind enough to think of me, and given his area of interest, I immediately thought of Joe Anderson. The resulting conversation was a great deal of fun, and you can hear it online or wherever you get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy it!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

It’s Not All Foreplay, Pt. 2

22 October 2024

We ended part one with a question: it’s easy enough to see why pagans might believe that all intimacy is ultimately the same, and all leads to sexual intimacy, but what would possess Christians to think that?

Fear, that’s what.

Some of it is fear of adultery. It’s a massively destructive sin, and sensible people don’t want to be anywhere near it. But then, sensible people don’t want to be in a house fire or a high-speed auto accident either, and don’t on that account cut off the electricity in their houses or refuse to drive on highways. Sensible people recognize that everything has risks, and if you think electricity is risky, reading by candlelight is not exactly risk-free. A 30-minute drive on the highway has its risks, sure, but the 60-minute drive it takes to stay off the highway also has its fair share of risk exposure. Our problem, in this case, is that we’re sensitive to the risks of one course of action, and utterly blind to the risks of the other.

Adultery’s damage is well-known. The damage done by fearing and avoiding meaningful interaction with the opposite sex is less well understood, but no less real. Lacking an appreciation for the benefits of healthy cross-gender interaction and friendship, we see nothing there but danger. We ought to know better, because our advice to just stay away from the opposite sex does not track with how Scripture tells us to behave (but we’ll get to that).

Part of the perceived danger comes from a mythology we’ve allowed self-justifying adulterers to build up for themselves. “I don’t know how it happened!” they say. “One thing just led to another!” Too many Christians take these ridiculous claims at face value, and we really ought to know better. It’s fairly difficult to have sex by accident, unless you’re already so far compromised that the final PIV detail hardly matters anyway. But foolish Christians buy this nonsense, and then build on it: since apparently nobody, not even the adulterers, really knows how adultery happens, they conclude that men and women just need to avoid each other. Any intimacy of any type is a threat, and so they treat all intimacy as the same thing. Ironically, their fear of becoming like the world is the very thing that causes them to become like the world (no surprise if you remember Prov. 29:25). But God has not given us a spirit of fear (2 Tim. 1:7), so let’s not forget what He’s told us about sin. We are not ignorant of Satan’s devices (2 Cor. 2:11).

Some while back, I sat in a marriage counseling session with a husband who’d cheated and a wife who was deciding what to do about it. “I don’t know what happened!” he said. You know what I told him? “You just blew a hole in the bottom of the boat that is your marriage, and you’re taking on water fast. You need her help” I pointed at his wife “or you’re sunk. You need her to believe that this isn’t going to happen again. ‘I don’t know what happened!’ doesn’t inspire confidence.” As we dug into it, what we found is that his initial “I don’t know what happened” response was a defense mechanism. He didn’t want to think about it. It was just easier to say “I don’t know what happened” than it was to face the truth: he did know, and he’d been conscious the entire time. Part of my job was to help him do the hard work of facing what he’d done and excavating how it happened so they could prevent it in the future. Over the next half-hour or so, he faced his sin squarely, dug into how he got there, and then we made a plan to keep him out of similarly tempting situations in the future. Thirty minutes after his initial “I don’t know,” all three of us had a clear understanding of what happened. It didn’t actually take that much work; it just took the honesty and will to actually face it.

What we found, of course, tracks with Scripture (and common sense). He didn’t commit adultery by accident; both parties knew what they were doing. At a certain point, there was a decision involving a zipper, and nobody concerned was in any way confused about the implications. Sexual arousal is designed by God to be the sort of thing that gathers momentum as it goes, a bit like a long, steep playground slide. When they’re already three-quarters of the way down the slide, it’s easy enough to see how “one thing led to another” until they ended up in the mud puddle at the bottom. But how did they end up on that slide to start with? Answering that question is where Scripture is a big help.

God tells us: “Each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren.” The process certainly is deceptive—hence the warning against being deceived—but it’s not a mystery. God has told us all about it: we need to police our desires.

The deception comes in not believing God about this. When the desire passes through your mind, it’s not just a harmless pleasant thought. If you find yourself thinking, “I can’t…but it would be fun,” you’re already in trouble. If you think you can nurture the desire without getting hurt, you’re deceiving yourself. It’s already hurting you. And then, if you think about it long enough, it’s going to infect your behavior, one way or another. The same lies will still be with you: “It’s not hurting anybody. Besides, who’s gonna know?” If you think you can play with the sin a little bit without anything serious happening, you’re wrong. Desire conceives and gives birth to sin; sin matures and gives birth to death. So the thing to do is address the desire.

Let’s take an example. Say a particular couple’s sexual relationship is on the rocks, no matter why. He’s out there in the working world, he’s sexually hungry, and an opportunity—a willing coworker who’s particularly interested in him, say—crosses his path. What is he supposed to do with this situation?

Say no, of course, but that’s not nearly enough. He needs to kill the desire. His desire for sexual communion is a good and godly thing, and there’s exactly one person he’s to fulfill that desire with. When that desire gets misdirected onto anybody else, the thing to do is starve it ruthlessly. Don’t toy with it; don’t think about it. Give it no occasion for expression, and pray until it dies. He should turn his attentions to his wife (cf. 1 Cor. 7:2-5), and if for whatever reason his wife cannot or will not meet his legitimate needs, then he should embrace the ascetic struggle and suffer like Jesus would rather than give the enemy a victory. Jesus’ legitimate human needs were going unmet in the wilderness (food), in the Garden (companionship and emotional support), and on the cross (physical safety). We should be prepared to follow Jesus; a servant is not greater than his Master.

But this is not to say that the man has to go it alone. Christians are meant to live giving and receiving daily encouragement. Particularly in times like these, a believer needs the support of his brothers and sisters. How does that work? Stay tuned.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Denying the Incarnation

15 October 2024

A few weeks back, someone posted this quote in a theology forum I sometimes frequent. I’m told it’s from The Golden Path by John R. Rice:

“God’s ministers sometimes feel that they should first teach Christians the Bible and Christian living and later hope they will win souls, but they do not make as good Christians of young converts as the pastors and evangelists make who teach people to win souls as the main Christian duty. For God Himself presses on the soul winner to be clean. He ‘purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.’ All over America, some Bible teachers and pastors teach Christians a code of conduct without soul winning, and make Pharisees – don’ters.

But when God’s Spirit puts the inward urge in a Christian that he must “by all means save some,” there is a real striving for spiritual holiness, a consecration of life and talents that rules cannot make.“

Now thus far, I love this. While I think it’s possible to overemphasize anything, including the duty to evangelize, in general I favor an approach to discipleship that majors on putting people into play, and handling the rest of it along the way. I particularly like the language of “don’ters.” I’ve seen that problem firsthand, been part of it in my youth, and I’m very grateful to have been rescued from it.

Dr. Rice continues:

“Everywhere I go as an evangelist, I find pastors shocked, grieved, troubled and struggling because of the drift of their people away from clean, holy living, their entanglements in the world’s amusements and pleasures and aims. Even in the most fundamental churches, I find the young people going continually away from the standards the church has set in many, many cases. But I find that trouble among churches fundamentally sound in doctrine is far more prevalent where there is not a strong soul-winning program in the church. In those great churches over America (and I am acquainted with many of them) where the whole program of the church is centered around soul winning, I find there is a holy enthusiasm for Christian living. Christians who earnestly labor at soul winning feel they are citizens of a heavenly country, that they are not supposed to be like the people of this world. They are trying to snatch people from fire, and they tend to hate the garments spotted by the flesh.

I have been bombarded with thousands of letters from Christians, particularly young Christians, asking, “What is wrong with dancing? What is wrong with moderate drinking? And why not join in with other moral, good people in lodges and secret orders?” But I have found in literally hundreds of cases that Christians who set out to win souls decide for themselves, from an inner compulsion by the Spirit of God, that this or that worldly thing is not for them the way of happiness and the way of blessing. God Himself has pledged to help to purge and cleanse the life of a Christian to win souls! Oh, there are blessings a soul winner has beyond those of any other Christian.“

Dr. Rice’s application is questionable, but the underlying sentiment is exactly correct. Concern for the lost will determine how you handle peripheral matters. It is precisely in ministering to the lost that I found myself having a Bud with the construction crew that worked on my building (and nothing less would have driven me to drink tasteless rice beer). I’ve brewed beer for Jesus’ sake too; we did a couple community beer-brewing nights where we “cast [our] bread upon the waters” the way they did 5,000 years ago. As promised, it returned after many days, and the better for the aging. Of course, if I were a host with a residential rehab for guys in recovery, I’d probably be a teetotaler, and for exactly the same reason — Christlike concern for the people God put in front of me. (And that sort of thing is kind of the least of it. I’ve been places that would scare the hide right off your average seminary-trained pastorling — I know, because I was one! — places “good” people don’t go, but I was following Jesus, and that’s where I ended up. The key to those environments is to do what Jesus did: listen to the Spirit. He won’t steer you into sin.

Occupy yourself with the people Jesus was occupied with, and you too may find that He calls you to have a Dos Equis with the boys, accept the invitation to a dance, or join the Elks. Which is to say, Jesus might call you to do what He Himself did — go where the people in need are, even if “good” people don’t go there, for the same reasons that Jesus went those places.

Jesus never joined in anybody’s sin in order to “reach” them, but He was constantly joining in whatever they were doing. Zacchaeus lived at his house; Jesus joined him there. Somebody at Cana had a wedding and served wine; Jesus joined them (and provided a rather large amount of the wine, come to think of it). Tax collectors and sinners (and their contemporary equivalents) eat; Jesus joined them in it. The town hussy was drawing water at the well; Jesus asked her for some. All of which, if you apply your theology even a little, is a natural extension of the Incarnation.

There’s a school of thought in ministry that Christians ought to be distinguished from their worldly counterparts by their don’ts: the neighborhoods they don’t go to, the invitations they don’t accept, the occasions they don’t attend, the people they don’t spend time with. Practically speaking, that kind of life is a denial of the Incarnation. It is a refusal to follow Jesus and behave as He behaved.

I want to be clear here: I’m not saying that you have to hang out on skid row to follow Jesus. I don’t have any idea where Jesus is calling you to go. Remember, Jesus didn’t spend all His time with the hookers and drunks; He dined with Simon the Pharisee and worshiped at the Temple too. But I’ve been walking with Jesus a long time, and I’m pretty sure He’s going to call you to go to places where you’re going to be very uncomfortable, places where you’ll be tempted to make an excuse and not go. This is going to happen because Jesus is making you like Him, and He was equally willing to hang out at a country club luncheon or around a burn barrel in an alley on the bad side of town. He went where His Father sent him, empowered by the Spirit who rested on Him. You are directed by the same Father and empowered by the same Spirit — do you really think you won’t end up in similar places?

Jesus joined us as one of us in our world in order to draw us into His. When Jesus shows up in a place, He’s bearing the Spirit. He’s different from everybody else, and so should you be, but for the right reasons. It’s not about your clothes or where you go or who you go with; it’s about the Spirit that indwells you. If you’re not being a light, then it doesn’t matter that you got invited into the room. But it doesn’t matter that you’re “being a a light” if you’re in an empty room — you might as well be under a basket, or buried in the backyard.

So be like Jesus — provide wine to the wedding, eat with Zacchaeus, have a private chat with that girl at the well. Be “a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Because He would. Joining in what people are doing in order to gain them is literally the basis for His whole earthly ministry. It should be the basis for yours too.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

God Made Wine

8 October 2024

Many common beliefs are basically unsupportable, and spread for sociological reasons totally unrelated to the merits of the idea. For example, the initial spread of Darwinism and the current scientific establishment’s death-grip on the neodarwinian synthesis both rather obviously owe their success less to their ability to answer the relevant questions, and more to the sentiment that “we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.” The calumny that Christmas, Easter, and Halloween are pagan holidays repurposed by the church likewise flourishes because of an unwitting alliance between 18th-century French intellectuals and present-day evangelicals drunk on father-hatred. The odd notion that anybody thought the earth was flat in the days of Christopher Columbus is another. There are plenty more.

Mostly such ideas die when the sociological reasons fade. No longer in the grip of a passion that makes them want it to be true, reasonable observers note that the evidence was never all that good, and move on with their lives. One such idea, mostly dead but occasionally flourishing in out-of-the-way corners of the church, is the notion that wine in the Bible was really just grape juice. Now, as I say, this notion is mostly (and deservedly) dead, but occasionally it comes up, to the detriment of poor folks who are ensnared by it and therefore miss what the relevant passages are actually saying. I’d like to help administer the coup de grace. Hence this post.

It will help to know at the outset that there are a handful of biblical words that are translated “wine.” The common Hebrew word is yayin. That’s what Noah got drunk on when he had too much in Gen. 9:21, for example, and what was prohibited to the priests on duty in Lev. 10:9, but you’ll also find it offered to the Lord as a drink offering in the firstfruits offering (Lev. 23:13) and the twice-daily ascension offerings (Num. 15:1-16). There’s also a Hebrew word for new wine (Heb. tiyrosh). Likewise, there’s a common Greek word for wine (oinos) and another for new wine (gleukos). It’s possible to get drunk on both gleukos (Acts 2:13) and oinos (Genesis 9:21, 1 Sam. 1:14-15, Isa. 29:9, 49:26 in the LXX, the Greek Old Testament, and Eph. 5:18, Rev. 17:2 in the New Testament). This to say, there is no biblical word for “grape juice that’s nonalcoholic.”

Do you wonder why? I did too, many years ago, so I did a little research. As it turns out, this is one of those cases where we are the weird ones. Before 160 years ago, nobody really needed a separate word for grape juice, because what we think of as “grape juice” today was basically impossible. You know that cloudy stuff you find on grape skins? That’s yeast. It’s literally impossible to make grape juice without introducing yeast cultures to it; fermentation begins the moment the skin of the grape is broken. (A wise man might take that as a particularly broad hint from a loving God; as we will see, some men took it as a challenge.) In a warm climate like harvest-time Israel, freshly-stomped grape juice was already fermenting as it ran into the buckets and was poured off into new wineskins (Luke 5:38-39). That’s why there are passages that talk about getting drunk on new wine.

Now, there was a way to stop the process, and they sometimes used it. Yeast feeds on sugar, but high concentrations of sugar inhibit or kill yeast, so if you boil the juice down into a syrup, the yeast can’t grow. So you can store the syrup without it fermenting, and then add water to reconstitute the juice when it’s time to serve it. Easy, right? However, this process also had problems: while yeast can’t grow in the syrup, various molds and bacteria can, and will spoil it entirely. You have experienced this yourself if you’ve ever had a batch of homemade jam go bad on you.

So how did we come to think of (nonalcoholic) grape juice as a thing? To answer that question, I need to introduce you to Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch, a Methodist minister, doctor, and dentist serving in Vineland, NJ. Born in Glastonbury, England, in 1925, Dr. Welch emigrated to the States and became involved in the poorly-named Temperance movement. The teetotaling Temperance advocates (then and now) face a very serious problem in the church service: it’s difficult to maintain that wine is evil when you’re simultaneously serving it at the Lord’s Table…and they were! Remember, grape juice as you and I know it today did not yet exist.

Some Temperance churches would fresh-squeeze grapes when they were in season and serve the juice before it had time to ferment; some would refuse to serve communion at all when fresh grapes were unavailable. Others, not content to ban the sacraments most of the year, resorted to recipes that involved procedures like boiling raisins to make a kind of tea, or mixing raisin puree and water. The more extreme Temperance advocates would serve water at communion in order to avoid serving anything that might be alcoholic. But most churches simply continued serving wine; that’s what the Bible said to do, and the alternatives were both unappealing and nonsensical. The 1864 General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church pointedly nixed the alternatives, recommending that “the pure juice of the grape be used in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.”

Enter Dr. Welch, who served his church as the communion steward. In 1869 Dr. Welch, working in his own kitchen, successfully applied the (then-new) techniques of Louis Pasteur to sterilize grape juice, killing the yeast so it wouldn’t ferment in the bottle. He served it in his church, and advertised Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine to surrounding churches, but garnered little interest. For four years, he continued to produce a small quantity of his Unfermented Wine for a few local churches that used it, but it never really took off, and so he quit. Two years later, his son Charles Welch took up the cause, convincing him to start again. Charles advertised Welch’s Grape Juice heavily, and by 1880, the Methodist Episcopal Church had begun to require serving unfermented juice wherever practical. Charles went on to launch multiple advertising campaigns, extolling various (and dubious) health benefits of grape juice and even serving it at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Growth was explosive; Charles would move the business to a factory in New York to keep up with the demand. The rest, as they say, is history. Today you can buy Welch’s grape juice in any grocery store, and most American evangelical churches think of it as the default choice for communion.

But is it? Scripture is quite clear that what’s in the communion cup is oinos, and it’s equally clear that oinos is something one can get drunk on. It’s not grape juice. And why should it be? Scripture repeatedly presents wine as a blessing from God (Gen. 27:28, Psalm 104:15, Prov. 3:10, Ecc. 9:7, John 2) a suitable sacrifice (Lev. 23:13, Num. 15:5, 7, 10), and part of communion with God (Deut. 14:26). Scripture presents the lack of wine as either a form of fasting (Num. 6:2, 20, Jer. 35) or a curse from God (Isa. 24:7, Jer. 48:33).

The New Testament pointedly tells us not to judge one another in matters of food and drink (Rom. 14, Col. 2:16), which means that we are free either to drink or to abstain. Timothy had evidently chosen to abstain; at a certain point in his life, Paul told him to start drinking a little for his health (1 Tim. 5:23).

So how shall we then live? Today, we live in the world Welch made, and you can have your pasteurized grape juice in communion year-round. If that’s your conviction (or your church’s practice) then drink your Welch’s with gladness and simplicity of heart. Nothing could be less fitting than turning the feast of unity into an occasion for division. By the same token, barring medical necessity, if the church you’re part of (or visiting) serves wine, drink your wine with joy and thanksgiving; taste and see that the Lord is good! In any case, don’t seek to bind other’s consciences on such matters; no less an authority than Paul himself tells them not to listen to you (Col. 2:16-17).

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Posted by Tim Nichols

It’s Not All Foreplay

13 August 2024

“Spiritual intimacy leads to physical intimacy.” I was told that a number of times growing up, by various parties in and around my church, but especially (and repeatedly) by a godly older couple I highly respected. Their practical application of that idea was a corollary to the Billy Graham rule: a man and a woman ought not to have serious conversations about deep spiritual things. Aside from your spouse, men ought to talk with men, and women with women, (or maybe couples with couples) and that’s that. (I’ve both written and said my piece about that error elsewhere, and won’t belabor it here.)

More recently, I had an unbelieving colleague with whom I did some very high-quality, very careful bodywork over a period of about a year. Everything was going well until one day, out of the blue, she began a conversation that turned into an invitation to adultery. To her dubious credit, she was very forthright: for her, being seen well and known well created sexual tension, which she wanted to relieve by taking our working relationship into the bedroom. I declined, which she certainly expected—the invitation was framed in a “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” kind of way—then I declined further contact, which seems to have surprised her; and when she continued to reach out to me, ultimately asked her not to contact me again.

Now, the same type of work I did with her, I’ve done with others of both genders over the years with no such difficulty. So what caused her to have such a problem? The same misbelief that the godly older couple in the first paragraph was suffering from: thinking that all intimacy is ultimately the same thing.

Let’s go back to the beginning. The world was formless and empty. God forms the world by dividing a series of contrasting pairs one from the other: light and darkness, sea and sky, dry land and sea. Then He fills the newly-divided world: the greater lights to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night, fish in the sea and birds in the sky, and land-dwelling animals. Then He signs the portrait: “male and female He created them.”

God created genuine variety, not a world of monist mush. Many of the different things He made are perichoretically related in surprising ways, but they are different things, each with its own glory. One of the fundamental truths about God and His creation (as Francis Schaeffer famously observed) is that all things are not the same to Him. He doesn’t just recognize distinctions; He literally makes distinctions. Christians ought to be automatically suspicious of any claim that starts out, “It’s all the same thing, man!”

One of the distinctions we ought to recognize is between a marriage and every other human relationship. Different kinds of relationships are different, each with its own unique glory. There’s not a single staircase of human relationship with casual interaction at the bottom and a marriage bed at the top, the only variable being how far up the stairs you climb with a particular person. Relationships differ in kind as well as degree. There’s more than one staircase, and they don’t all go to the same place.

This is something that Christians ought to already know: we will have eternity—literally all the time in the world—to know each other better. There’s not a single person on the New Earth that you won’t meet, and with that kind of time on our hands, we’ll all get to know each other very well indeed. As well as you can get to know your spouse in 50 or 60 years of successful marriage, that’s nothing to how well you’re going to know, say, Deborah or Samuel one day. And you still won’t end up married to them. “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” like Jesus said.

Similarly, same-sex friendships like Jonathan and David, Ruth and Naomi, are held out as examples of close friendship and love: a different kind, not a lesser degree, of relationship. Contemporary revisionist takes on those relationships (wrongheaded for reasons I’ve gone into elsewhere) are actually a symptom of the very error we’re addressing. The revisionists’ inability to imagine a close relationship that’s not sexual is precisely the problem, and they’re projecting their own lack of imagination on everyone else.

Contemporary people think they live in a world of monist mush, and they’ve deified their lusts to the point that many of them will bed virtually anybody under a highly flexible ‘right’ set of circumstances. Many really do only have one relational staircase. That staircase leads inexorably to sexual intimacy, and every step below it is some combination of audition and foreplay, all the way down to a casual conversation with a stranger on the sidewalk. Which is kinda gross, if you think about it for a moment.

Framed that way, the failure of imagination is easy to see, and it ought not to surprise us that pagans would struggle in this way. It’s baked into their basic premises about the world; the mystery is that they don’t struggle more often. But what in the world would possess Christians to get tripped up like that?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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