Ecclesiology | Full Contact Christianity

People Like You

18 June 2024

Miles Smith of Mere Orthodoxy was kind enough to read a stack of exvangelical memoirs for us. For those of you who are blessedly unfamiliar with the trend, this is now a whole subgenre of personal memoir. You, too, can be applauded as courageously speaking truth to power, if only you will very publicly break up with the church, preferably on Instagram. You might even get a book deal out of it. Mr. Smith has done us all a service, plowing through a number of such books in order to discuss some of the common elements. He writes:

“Fundamentally, exvangelicals seemed to have been told that a specific type of church was the true church, that true faith probably didn’t exist outside of it, and that the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important. The specifics may change from church to church–some tended to be vaguely charismatic, others strict dispensationalists, and still others a kind of independent folk Calvinist. But all shared a certain exclusivity and clericalism that defined their existence. These churches and this culture were governed ostensibly by the Bible, but ultimately it was a faith defined primarily by individual pastors….Enough of these churches led by enough of this clericalist type of minister popped up between 1970 and 2000 to build an entire subculture.”

Just a Subculture?

Speaking from my experience ministering to people who’ve abandoned their faith, I agree that a number of them fit Smith’s profile, which is to say that (in rough generalities) they come from churches that mix generic doctrinal orthodoxy with cult-of-personality sociology. I’ve been at war with that defective ecclesiology my entire adult life. I cut my teeth in ministry doing counter-cult work with the victims of exactly that sort of ministry. Upon hearing their stories, I’ve surprised quite a number of exvangelicals from such churches by responding, “Well, you can’t go back to that!” (And they shouldn’t, either. There are plenty of faithful-if-flawed churches to fellowship with; no need to get tangled up in a cult.) But look, while we all agree that cults of personality are a bad idea, that’s hardly the whole story with exvangelicals.

Plenty of these folks don’t fit that profile, and Smith himself mentions one of them when he wonders aloud why so many people listened to Bill Gothard and Joshua Harris. It’s a good question (which I’ve discussed elsewhere), but the point for the moment is that he’s aware of Joshua Harris, himself now an exvangelical. Harris didn’t grow up the downtrodden follower of some clericalist mini-pope out in the swamps, thinking his church was The Only True Church. He grew up speaking all over the country in churches and at conferences, and attended seminary at Regent College in Vancouver before abandoning his faith. The exvangelical phenomenon is not confined to the isolated backwaters.

Politics and Pentecostals…

Smith’s article focuses quite a bit on both recent politics and the charismatic movement with regard to his exvangelical interlocutors. Bethel Church gets a mention, as does Greg Locke’s Global Vision Church, and the word “Trumpist” also comes up a surprising number of times for a short article. The overall effect is to give the impression that you’re seeing a wave of these “I used to be a Christian, but…” books because independent churches with no historical roots got themselves tangled up with Trump and Pentecostalism, and people understandably fled. (If only we’d all remained mainline, cessationist, and respectably centrist, how faithful we would be!) In keeping with that, there’s a definite class-oriented vibe in Smith’s piece. Trump’s appeal is populist, Pentecostalism is famously working-class, particularly in the South, and there’s a certain looking-down-the-nose, “Isn’t this a bit regrettable” tone in the article, especially in its conclusion: “We sometimes accuse exvangelicals of leaving ‘Protestant churches.’ I’m not so sure they did.” I began to wonder about Smith’s background: I made a bet with myself that he was a southern Episcopalian.

Upon a little research, I discovered that Dr. Miles Smith IV (Ph.D. in history, 2013) is Anglican (ACNA), “a native Carolinian,” and a Citadel M.A. graduate who, in addition to his serious work, “sometimes writes for popular outlets like Mere Orthodoxy, The Gospel Coalition, Public Discourse, The Federalist, and The University Bookman.” Call me crazy, but my Appalachian fundie-trained nose could smell the clubby, upper-crusty Southern Anglican aspirations coming off Smith’s article. As you might have guessed by now, Gentle Reader, I do not find this an endearing trait, but that’s fine; Jesus transcends all our tribal affinities. Miles Smith and I both belong to Christ, and therefore to one another, and anything that stands in the way of our unity is future ash in the Kingdom of God. For today, the point is that you should not be lulled by Dr. Smith’s complacent sense that exvangelicals don’t come from the same places that we real Protestants do.

…and you

I do appreciate Dr. Smith’s sacrificial act, slogging through a stack of self-justifying exvangelical accounts so the rest of us don’t have to. Speaking as a pastor who actively works with such people on a regular basis, I think Smith’s treatment tells some truths, but falls woefully short of really capturing the exvangelical phenomenon. The whole truth is a good bit less comfortable: while some of the folks who abandon the faith come from insular, low-caste swamps on the working-class side of the tracks, rather a lot of them are more like Joshua Harris: well-resourced, experienced, and connected to multiple institutions. (And not all of them admit to having abandoned the faith, but that’s a subject for another time.)

It would be comforting to believe that people like us (“real” Protestants, or whatever) know too much to fall for the temptation to abandon the faith, but it’s just not true. We’re not just losing people from the margins; we’re losing people like you–and your kids. Cool-shaming can work on anybody, and seems to work particularly well on people who aspire to respectability–or as C. S. Lewis put it, a place in the Inner Ring. The antidote is as simple as it is painful:

“Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore let us go forth to Him, outside the camp, bearing His reproach, for here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come. Therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name; but do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.” (Heb. 13:12-16)

UPDATE: Dr. Smith recently discussed his article with Aaron Renn.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Shadow Sins

11 June 2024

Some sins are fully conscious. You’re doing someone wrong, taking advantage of their weakness or their goodness or their inattention, or you’re cynically manipulating them to your advantage, and you are fully conscious of what you’re doing.

Some sins are fully unconscious—just as wrong, but you have no idea you’re doing it. Even when someone calls an unconscious sin to your attention, it can be extraordinarily hard to see, not because the act is particularly subtle, but because you’re genuinely unaware of what you’re doing. You are responsible for your unconscious sins—it’s not as if someone else should be apologizing for the things you do—but you can’t do anything about them until you become aware.

There’s also a third category: semiconscious sins. This is where a lot of the trouble happens. These are often patterns of behavior that have worked for you in the past, and like all people you habitually resort to things that have worked before. (This is called “learning,” and it’s how we become able to ride a bike or throw a ball or anything else we do: repeat what worked, and don’t repeat what didn’t. But learning is not a fully conscious process, and not all the behaviors we learn are good.) These semiconscious sins involve patterns of behavior that sin against the people around you, and they often involve violations of your self-concept.

For example, if you think of yourself as a generous person, you would probably not allow yourself to be stingy on purpose—say, by always being the last one to buy a round of drinks. If you were fully conscious of the implications of the act, you wouldn’t let yourself do it. But if you somehow acquired the habit back in your poorer days, and it’s worked for you, you will probably will continue the habit even though you don’t actually need to spend less money now. You will simply allow the program to run in the background, as it were, without examining it closely.

How do we know this semi-conscious category even exists? First of all, because the Bible talks about it in terms of self-deception. If someone else is deceiving you, then you can be fully unconscious of a thing, but if you are deceiving yourself, then some part of you knows. Apologist Greg Bahnsen likens self-deception to holding a beach ball underwater: it’s a demanding task, and there’s no way to be successful without being at least somewhat aware of what you’re doing.

Secondly, you know this category exists because you’ve experienced it for yourself. We’ve all had the experience of someone challenging a pattern of our behavior: “Hey, have you ever noticed that whenever you’re in this situation, you do X?” a well-meaning friend will say. X — as your friend is describing it — is clearly sinful, or at least a rotten thing to do to a friend. You’re offended, and you begin to object: “I do not! I would neve….” and then you can’t even finish, because all the times you’ve done exactly that come flooding into your mind, and you experience the stomach-dropping sudden cessation of ignorance: “He’s right! I totally do that!”

Now, if you were fully unconscious of what you were doing, that realization wouldn’t come so easily. And if you were fully conscious, you wouldn’t have been able to start the instinctive defense, only to stop when you suddenly realize your friend is right. That experience only happens because you were semiconscious of the pattern to start with. Someone had to connect the dots to make it fully visible, but the dots were all visible over in the corner of your eye, not quite out of view, just waiting for someone to connect them.

These three different categories call for somewhat different responses. Of course, you should repent of all your sin, but if you’re fully unconscious of a sin, you can’t very well repent of it. Rest assured, there are items in this category for you, and thank Jesus that He cleanses you of all sin. That’s pretty much all you can do, until God makes the sin conscious. Trust me, it’s on His to-do list.

If you’re fully conscious of the sin, and you were conscious the whole time, there’s nothing to do but repent, fully and immediately, and take your lumps.

The third kind is a little trickier, but the brief is ultimately pretty simple: “rebuke a wise man, and he will love you,” and your job here is to be the wise man. Learn to love the people who will grab that thing that was over in the corner of your peripheral vision and drag it into full view. Don’t punish your friends for bringing things to your attention; encourage them!

One of the best things you can do is cultivate a ruthless honesty. Repent of exactly what you’ve done, and don’t repent of things you haven’t done. Depending on your personality, you’ll be tempted in one of two directions. Some people will be tempted to repent of nothing in the past. “I wasn’t aware of it,” they’ll tell themselves, “and I can’t possibly be responsible for something I’m not aware of. Of course I won’t do it in the future.” This won’t do, for the simple reason that you did what you did, and you need to own it. Your heart is a dark, deceitful place, more than capable of hurting your friends for your advantage and lying to you about it. You let it run around without a leash, and that’s on you. So confess it and forsake it.

Another sort of person will be tempted to over-confess, to not only own his actions but apologize as if he’d been cynically conscious of it the whole time. To this person, “I didn’t see it” will seem like a lame excuse he wouldn’t dare to make. But it is a sin to lie to your friends, in either direction. You may not under-confess, and you may not over-confess. Tell the truth: “I never quite thought about it like that, but now that you’ve described my behavior in those terms, I see that you’re right. I was wrong, and I’m so sorry I put you through that.”

And then go and sin no more.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Three Great Church Fights

23 April 2024

“When you’re picking a spouse,” I tell my young disciples, “make sure you can play well together, work well together, and fight well together.” They always think that’s a little funny, but I’m dead serious; the closer you are to someone, the more you’re gonna fight; best you be able to do it well together. We need these same qualities in the church, and the need didn’t take long to manifest.

The first serious recorded disagreement in the church was over ethnicity. The presenting issue was about the church’s charitable care for widows who didn’t have anyone to provide for them, but it wasn’t all the widows who were being neglected. It was the Greek-speaking (Hellenistic) Jewish widows who were being treated as second-class citizens. That sort of second-class treatment to Hellenistic Jews would have been common enough in the general culture of Jerusalem, but it had no rightful place in the church.

Acts 6 records the story: the apostles declined to leave their posts in order to handle the charitable matters themselves, and instead called on the congregation to nominate some men who were above reproach to administer these charitable matters. The apostles commissioned these men–Philip and Stephen famously among them–to handle the distribution. Worth noting: all seven of the chosen men have Greek names, and presumably could be trusted to treat their Greek-speaking brethren fairly. The matter doesn’t come up again; this solution seems to have put it to bed.

The next big fight is recorded in Acts 15, and this one is very different. The presenting issue this time is more doctrinal. Everyone understands that Gentiles can come to Jesus without becoming Jews first; the conversion of Cornelius and his family in Acts 10-11 made that plain. The question is, once you’ve brought the Gentiles into the church, then what? Up in Antioch, they were having a lot of success winning Gentiles to Christ, so the question became pressing. Some — Paul and Barnabas among them — thought that the Gentiles could follow Jesus as Gentiles. Others argued that it’s fine for a Gentile to believe in Jesus, and they clearly receive the Holy Spirit as Gentiles, just like Cornelius did, but if they’re serious about following Jesus, then they need to keep the Law. WWJD, right? Jesus kept the Law; if you say you’re following Jesus, put down the shrimp!

That’s not actually an easy argument to answer, and the details of the argument are beyond the scope of our time together today, but you can find the early church’s answer in Acts 15. In brief, the Gentiles are children of Noah, and therefore accountable to keep the commands God gave Noah, but they’re not Jews, and they don’t have to keep Jewish Law.

The next major church fight in Acts is different again. This time it’s a personal squabble between two people: Paul and Barnabas. Some distance into their first missionary journey (after Cyprus but before most of Asia Minor) John Mark left them and returned to Jerusalem. The text doesn’t say why. In any case, when it’s time go out again and encourage all the churches they’d started, Paul doesn’t want to take Mark. Barnabas does. There’s not much room for compromise — take him or don’t, right? In the end, the disagreement gets so sharp that they split the team and the job. Barnabas takes Mark and goes to Cyprus. Paul takes Silas and goes to Asia Minor.

Note that this disagreement doesn’t rise to the level of the previous one. It’s largely a question of personal philosophy of ministry: do we give the kid another shot? Barnabas is all for second chances. Paul wants traveling companions he can count on. Who’s right? The text leaves us to work it out for ourselves.

I say they both are. Barnabas — remember that his name means ‘Son of Encouragement’ — is living into the role that God has given him in the church. He’s the one, you may remember, who brought Paul (the freshly-converted former terrorist) into the Jerusalem church when nobody would associate with him. Barnabas was caring for Mark, as he should have been. Paul’s first priority was the work, and he chose traveling companions he could count on to keep up with him.

This third fight doesn’t ever come before the apostles or a church council. It doesn’t appear to even end up before the leaders of the local church (which would have been Antioch, in this case.) It doesn’t rise to that level because each man is within his liberty. Nobody is proposing to do anything wrong, and there’s no doctrinal issue at stake. Paul is not required to take a traveling companion he can’t rely on; Barnabas is free to give Mark a second chance if he cares to. At the same time, clearly they fought about it. The contention grew so sharp, Luke tells us, that they parted company. The first-ever Gentile Mission dream team, and it breaks up over an interpersonal squabble about whether to take along a particular junior team member. Wow.

(In God’s providence, the result of breaking up the team is two teams both going back out to the mission field. Don’t miss God’s ability to turn a profit on absolutely anything.)

The point is that not every conflict is the same, or calls for the same kind of solution. The first conflict was practical; the applicable doctrine was “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and everybody agreed on that. The question was just how to make sure that it got implemented well. Choosing people that everyone could trust to implement it well solved the problem.

The second conflict was fundamentally doctrinal; there was nothing to do but get everybody together and have it out. They needed time and space to do that, but they persisted at it until they came to agreement on the right answer.

The third conflict didn’t have one right answer. As conflict of personal and ministry philosophy where each man was within his Christian liberty, there wasn’t a clear wrong party. Because there wasn’t really a right or wrong answer, there also wasn’t an authority they could appeal to for a final resolution. Nobody had competent jurisdiction to curtail either man’s liberty in Christ, and the leaders rightly left it up to Paul and Barnabas to figure out what they were going to do.

You’ll face all three types of conflict in ministry. The vital thing is to discern which kind of conflict you’re facing, and act accordingly.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Terrifyingly, Discouragingly Competent

16 April 2024

It is common in more conservative circles to think of the American church as ineffectual, diffuse, bumbling, incompetent. I have come to believe this is a comforting lie, and that the truth is far less flattering: the American church is terrifyingly competent at getting nearly anything it really wants. I know that sounds preposterous, but hear me out.

Maintaining a typical American church is no picnic; starting one even less so. Even well-established churches die, and many, if not most, church plants fail within 3 years. But show me any major city in this country that doesn’t have a handful of hip, urban churches with that industrial coffee shop vibe. Show me any major suburb that’s not home to a few suburban megachurches that look like a mall or an airport concourse. The American church wants those things, and we make sure that we have them.

Within most churches, the weekly worship service is a major priority. Go visit; sit through a service, then pull aside a church staffer. “That was amazing!” you say. “Would you mind telling me how you do it?” Ask the right person, and they can tell you, down to the literal nuts and bolts. After all, the Sunday service isn’t happenstance; they make the same thing happen every single week.

They know exactly what tasks need to be done, by when, in order to pull it all off.
They know what skill sets are needed to accomplish each task.
They have identified people who have those skills, hired them (or installed them in volunteer positions), and empowered them to carry out their tasks.
They make sure to provide those people with what they need to get the job done.

We all know what this looks like. If a microphone cord goes bad, or a speaker goes out, they’ll replace it. The office manager orders the right kind of paper to print the bulletins. The PowerPoint (Keynote, if you’re really cool) slides will be carefully crafted and ready by Saturday so they can be loaded into Pro Presenter. The sound techs have an established rotation so there’s always someone on duty, and a backup in case of illness. The musicians will have the set list and be ready. The ushers who take up the offering will know who they are. The greeters will have been reminded to arrive 20 minutes early. And on and on….

I’m not knocking any of this. It’s a prodigious, brilliantly-coordinated effort, and a metric ton of work. Bringing it all off smoothly every single week is one of the great unappreciated labors of the modern church, and it’s not even considered some sort of extraordinary accomplishment. It’s just our baseline expectation — after all, it’s literally what we pay our church staff for, right?

…and that’s exactly my point. You want to know what it looks like when we really want something to happen? That’s what it looks like. We are absolutely competent at getting what we really want.

Hold that thought.

Now go back to that same church staff, and ask them if they care that their kids grow up continuing to know and love Jesus. “Of course!” they will say. So then ask them “How do you make sure your kids don’t walk away from the Christian faith?” Inquire as to the plan. Ask the same set of questions that you asked about the service:

What tasks need to be done, and by when, in order to accomplish the goal?
What skill sets are required to execute each task?
Who has those skills? Who is empowering those people to use their skills?
What do those people need to get it done? Who makes sure they have what they need?

You know as well as I do what’s going to happen. You’re going to get a deer-in-the-headlights look, a stammering recitation of some platitudes, and a quick exit from the conversation. And then we wonder why it’s getting sort of hard to find a 22-year-old who’s still Christian.

Someone will complain, of course, that discipling our kids is a multifaceted and organic process much harder to map than simply putting on the Sunday production, and so it is. But it’s also our primary job. All the more reason to have a plan, yes? Jesus never told us to make a Sunday morning stage production; He commissioned us to make disciples. So why is it we’re so competent at the one, and so helpless at the other?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Egalitarianism as Luxury Belief

26 March 2024

If you’re not familiar with Rob Henderson’s work on luxury beliefs, it would benefit you to get acquainted. The essay above will develop the idea in more depth, but here’s the quick-and-dirty version: “Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” A common example would be the “defund the police” concept. People who live in gated communities with private security can afford to hold such a belief; people who live in a rough neighborhood where they need to call 911 a few times a month can ill afford to hamstring the police.

As luxury goods of all types (or credible knock-offs of same) become more attainable for anybody with a credit card and an Ebay account, it’s become increasingly difficult to tell who’s a member of the upper- (or upper-middle) class club by someone’s dress or accessories. Henderson suggests that fashionable ideas—luxury beliefs—are taking up that slack.

Both in general society and in certain quarters of the church, egalitarianism functions as a luxury belief. In general society, very few framing carpenters or concrete guys are women, and this is not because of some sort of systemic sexism. In jobs where physical strength and durability really matter, the workers are overwhelmingly male. Dangerous jobs are overwhelmingly male, as are workplace fatalities. More prosaically — and speaking from several years’ experience as the only male employee of a particular retail establishment — when the big, heavy box needs to go on the high shelf, the women look around for the guy to do it.

By contrast, people with laptop-class careers are much less likely to encounter circumstances on the job where they are forced to reckon with the biological differences between men and women. Anybody can sit at a desk and push buttons on a keyboard. These folks can afford a correspondingly higher level of fantasy about how much biology matters, because they don’t have to live with the consequences of that counterfactual belief. The head of a network administration department can entertain the notion that men and women are largely interchangeable; the foreman of a concrete crew had better not.

In other words, the key differentiator here is whether you face any plausible danger of having to eat your own cooking.

There’s a church near me that exemplifies this trend. On gender issues, good number of members profess to be strongly egalitarian as a matter of basic justice. However, the polity of the church they attend is such that they cannot have a female lead pastor, and they do in fact have a very strong, masculine man leading the church. One of the worst upheavals the church ever had happened because egalitarian staffers, most of them female, tried to steer the organization in a more progressive direction, and badly overplayed their hand. The strongly complementarian direction of the church was confirmed; many of the egalitarian congregants nonetheless stayed. Today, those egalitarian congregants–mostly middle- to upper-middle class, mostly driving 10-15 minutes or more to attend–drive past multiple churches with far more egalitarian convictions, some of them with female pastors, in order to attend this particular church. How many of these people would actually be happy with the results, were their fashionably avowed convictions actually put into practice? We’ll never know — and that’s exactly the point of a luxury belief.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Lent-Challenged?

19 March 2024

Lent is always an interesting time for me. I’m a conscientious objector to the annual 40-day fasting-and-flagellation routine. When God crafted a religious calendar, He devoted exactly one day a year to that (Yom Kippur) — and all the other high holy days are big, mandatory parties. It can’t be that after the great victory on Golgotha, we now should be less interested in joy and forty times more devoted to self-affliction. One day is good — Good Friday seems a reasonable choice for those of us who don’t still celebrate Yom Kippur — but forty? No.

Also, frankly, the relationship between traditional Lenten practice and anything Jesus actually said or did is at best very diagonal. Two particular points here; first, Jesus did the 40-day fast once, when He was 30, and He didn’t just give up chocolate and swearing, either. Wanna be like Jesus? Celebrate your 30th with a 40-day fast. If you live to 60, maybe you can do it again. Second, Ash Wednesday directly and solemnly violates Jesus’ instructions on fasting in Matthew 6:16-18. So directly, in fact, that it’s kind of funny.

On the other hand, at a particular time in my life, God called me into a community that observed Lent. There’s no real value in being difficult and cross-grained about it, so I didn’t. Instead, I just skipped the Ash Wednesday service and took on a couple of positive projects (a stack of reading and a fairly sizable apologetics writing project). The projects were big enough that there was no way I’d get through them without giving up something. The goal was to find out in hindsight what I had given up, and then make a determination during Eastertide about whether to resume whatever it was.

That practice did three things for me: it got those projects done, it gave me an opportunity to reassess some of my less useful pastimes, and it gave me something to talk about when people asked — as they often did — “What are you giving up for Lent?” In other words, it allowed me to participate in my community and not be a grief and a trouble over something that wasn’t going to change in any case. The result was a number of great conversations about Lenten practice — mine and theirs — and how it was affecting our daily walk with God.

The communities I’m now part of align more closely with my convictions, and the question doesn’t arise as frequently. But for those of you who find yourself in similar situations, this is a practice I commend to you.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

“Not A Young Man”

30 January 2024

Among the list of qualifications for eldership is “not a novice” (1 Tim. 3:6). Depending on the translation you read, it may say “not a new convert” or “not a recent convert” or “not new in the faith.” The words “convert” and “in the faith” are simply not in the passage here. The word is νεόφυτος, and it means “young man.”

So why did some translators add the extra words? For the same reason they usually do: for clarity in English translation. There are two possible meanings: a literal reading (“not a young man”) or a metaphorical extension (“not young in the faith”). Translators who favor the metaphorical interpretation have often chosen to clarify their meaning by adding the additional words. In this case, that is a mistake.

First, let’s start with the vocabulary. Paul uses two different words in his writings to refer to the office under discussion here. The one in this passage means “overseer,” and the other word literally means “old man.” So when Paul says that the appointee should not be “a young man” — well, I ask you. The word Paul chose for this qualification refers to a new-growth plant in Job 14:9 and Isaiah 5:7; it’s applied to the younger generation in Psalm 127:3 and 143:12. In other words, Paul’s Greek OT source material uses the word literally.

Does that mean it can’t be metaphorical here? Not at all. Paul could be crafting a novel metaphor by applying the literal term in a new metaphorical context. As Christians, we already refer to conversion as being born again; calling a new convert a “young man” regardless of his chronological age would make a certain sort of sense. (In fact, that’s exactly the process by which new metaphors enter language.) But is Paul doing that here? If he were, how would we know?

One obvious way would be for Paul to add the extra words himself. If he’s crafting a novel (if fairly obvious) metaphor, it would be fitting to specify it: “not a young man in the faith.” But he doesn’t do that. Another way would be for the context to make it otherwise obvious that’s what he must mean. Proponents of the metaphorical view will argue that this is the case, because Timothy himself is a young man. Surely Paul can’t be giving young Timothy the job of appointing elders, and then telling him, “Don’t appoint someone your own age.”

Ah, but he could! In fact, we already know that Timothy doesn’t meet all the criteria in the list of qualifications. Being unmarried, Timothy isn’t the husband of one wife (for that matter, neither is Paul). Timothy doesn’t have a household to rule well. We don’t need to claim some special spiritual meaning for these terms, as if “husband of one wife” would refer to Timothy’s fidelity to the Church, the Bride of Christ, or that “rules his household well” must mean that Timothy functions properly in the “houselold of God.” No, “husband” and “household” have their ordinary meanings, and Timothy is a valid exception.

How is Timothy supposed to function in that situation — appointing people that meet qualifications he doesn’t? He’s exemplary. The overriding qualification is blamelessness. Paul has that, despite not being a husband. Timothy also has that, despite being young. When we’re evaluating elder candidates, if a man gives us reason to doubt his faithfulness to his wife, he’s not qualified. If we look at his household and think “yikes!” he’s not qualified. And if we look at him and see that his youth is a drawback, he’s not qualified. If, in contrast, we look at him and think “I wish I was like that” — if he’s exemplary despite being young — then he is qualified, in the same way that Timothy was qualified.

The older men who are married and running households are wishing they were like Timothy in word, conduct, love, spirit, faith, and purity. He’s setting an example for them, not the other way round. Because Timothy is exceptional, Paul has recognized him as an exception. And thus we can see that “young man” refers to age in the same way that “husband” refers to marital status and “rules his household well” refers to familial and business affairs — all the terms have their ordinary meanings in the context.

So how do we apply the criteria like Paul would? Clearly it’s not the case that no young man would ever serve as an elder, but it would be rare, and with good reason — chronological age actually is a concern. On the face of it, this ought to be obvious just from the terms chosen for the office: one means ‘overseer,’ but the other literally means ‘old man.’ Maturity matters, and most young men haven’t taken sufficient advantage of the scant time they’ve had, or haven’t had enough experience, to season them out. Life experience and maturity are simply more common in older men, thus most of your elders will be, well, elder men.

If the candidate you’re looking at strikes you as a greenhorn in any sense, you probably shouldn’t pick him. On the other hand, if he’s been raised in the faith from childhood, as Timothy was, and he presents himself as exemplary in word, conduct, love, faith, and purity, as Timothy did — sure, go with that guy.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Great Resignation Might be Good

2 January 2024

Pastors are leaving the church in droves. Why? This week, I spent some time reading one man’s answer. It would be worth your time to skim his account. As Rev. Lang articulates his reasons for leaving, not just that particular church, but the pastoral vocation altogether, I find myself sympathetic. There’s a lot in the article that I don’t agree with, and some of the things he says cause me to wonder if he’s called to the pastorate at all; good shepherds have to be tough, and I don’t think he is.

But his list of the seven proficiencies expected of a pastor really struck me. In his experience, church members expect their pastor to be…

A professional speaker
A CEO
A professional fundraiser
A counselor and conflict mediator
The HR director for both paid and volunteer staff
The Master of Ceremonies for a wide variety of community events
A pillar of virtue

That’s true in most churches. I don’t have any trouble seeing why ten years of his job left him burned out. I’m surprised he made it that long.

You know what’s missing in it all? Any sense of what biblical shepherding ministry actually is. Rev. Lang tells us why he stepped into the role which church culture defined for him, and why, some years later, he stepped out of it again. That’s worthwhile information for a church to absorb, but one of the things it’s missing is, well…the Bible. There is no such biblical position as the one his church asked him to occupy. He shouldn’t have been doing that job; no one person should have been doing that job. More importantly, no church should be trying to hire one person to do that job.

“This thing Rev. Lang was doing, that also calls itself ‘pastoral ministry?’ It’s not.”

I’m hoping that the masses of men leaving the ministry will provoke some soul-searching in congregations. We need — all of us — to be stepping into the work of the ministry. Every Christian should be a disciple, and every disciple should be a disciple-maker at the level they’re able to be. Those who are called to equip congregations to do that work are the leaders we need. More and more of them are bivocational, in part because it gives them greater freedom to do what they’re actually called to instead of getting sidetracked into various backwaters of institutional administrivia. Back when I was on staff at a mid-sized church, I used to keep track of how much time I spent on different activities. When I left that position, I continued keeping track for a while. You know what happened? Fewer people wasting my time, and more disciple-making.

This thing Rev. Lang was doing, that also calls itself “pastoral ministry?” It’s not. For any young man who finds himself in the unfortunate position of being hired to do that job, I recommend that he resign forthwith and get involved with a ministry where he can heed the Bible’s counsel rather than flouting it as a necessary condition of his employment.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

No Real Discipleship

7 November 2023

For so long as the Holy Spirit restrains the wickedness of the world, culture can only get so bad, and for so long as Messiah tarries, culture can only get so good. We will not descend into the Great Tribulation of our own accord until God permits it, and we cannot ascend to the consummated Kingdom of God of our own accord in any case.

However, between these two great boundary conditions, there is a lot of play, and between these two great boundary conditions, God calls His people “to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

The Old Covenant shows us that we cannot do the first two, and the New Covenant shows us that when we do the third, we are given the first two as gifts — a heart of flesh in exchange for a heart of stone, as the prophet said.

This has to include God fulfilling in us His very first command: to tend and keep the earth, the root from which all culture springs. To be engaged in glorious culture-building is a gift God gives His people, and always has. There is no real discipleship without it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Hail the Triumphant Dead!

2 November 2023

Yesterday was the Feast of All Saints, the centerpiece of Allhallowtide, a three-day celebration in the Western Christian tradition. All Saints is something analogous to Memorial Day – a grateful celebration of the saints and martyrs who’ve gone before us into heaven, and all they’ve done.

The feast was first celebrated in the early 600s, on a variety of dates that varied locally. Ultimately, it settled on May 13th. Pope Gregory III (served 731-741) moved All Saints to November 1 to coincide with opening a new chapel in St. Peter’s Basilica which was dedicated to all the saints who’ve passed before us into heaven. Moving a major holiday to coincide with your ribbon-cutting is a weird thing to do, but apparently that’s one of the perks of being Pope. Anyhow, that’s how it happened.

A quick aside about pagan holidays: We all know that ancient cultures aligned major projects like the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, or the Hill of Tara according astronomical movements, and presumably they celebrated solstices and equinoxes in some fashion, but the links between those old festivals and present-day celebrations like Samhain are speculative at best. (Our earliest hard evidence for Samhain is ninth century). The coincidence between the old festivals and the November 1 date of All Saints is just that — a coincidence.

The day before All Saints is All Hallows Eve, the vigil that comes before the feast. It is a time where we look straight at the darkness of the world, a time when we celebrate our brothers’ and sisters’ victories over that darkness, and a time to pray that we would be like them in our own time. That’s what we were about last night. How it also became an occasion for dressing your kid up like Thomas the Tank Engine and sending him door to door begging for candy is a tale for another time, but it has to do with America’s melting-pot confluence of everybody’s local traditions, plus a healthy dose of good old fashioned American commercialization.

Today, the final day of the feast, is All Souls, also known as the Feast of the Faithful Departed. This feast commemorates all those in heaven whose names are not widely known. These faithful servants of God have benefited us in countless ways, and we take the time to celebrate them, even though we don’t know who they are or what they did. One day we will, and on that day we will be glad to have been grateful in advance. It is also a time to be grateful for our family and friends who have gone before us.

Taken all together, this is a celebration of the Church Triumphant by the Church Militant — we are grateful for them now, and we will join them soon enough. Hoist a glass in their honor tonight.

Hail the triumphant dead – because they’re not actually dead!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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