Putting the Puzzle Together

2 December 2025

One of the things that’s really striking about the North American church is its near-total lack of interest in what the Bible says about local church life and worship. The Bible doesn’t give us a specific order of service, tunes to sing, or a template for the church event calendar, but it does give us a series of instructions to obey and examples to follow. When we get all the puzzle pieces on the table at the same time, we learn quite a lot about what we ought to do. I recently had occasion to correspond with a fellow pastor on the topic, with a specific focus on the role of women in the local church. Here’s some of what came out:

Biblical Basics

1. Women are not forbidden to preach, but preaching is for the public square, not the church. (See https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/proclaim/ on this)

2. Women are explicitly encouraged to prophesy with their heads covered. (1 Cor. 11, 14:26,31)

3. Women with the pastoral gift should practice it in ways appropriate to their sex (see #5). Since “pastor” is not actually a title, using the word that way just creates confusion. (The Bible never says God only gives that gift to men, and explicitly calls women to teaching/shepherding functions in Titus 2:3-5.)

4. Women do not serve as elders; it’s a fatherly role. (1 Tim. 3:2//Titus 1:6, 1 Tim. 3:4-5)

5. Women are not allowed to teach or exercise authority (or judge prophecy; an exercise of authority) in the church service. (1 Tim. 2:12, 1 Cor. 14:34-35)

Problems with the way we currently do church

1. We don’t permit women to be pastors since it is seen as a subset of being an elder, but this means we often bar women from shepherding when the Bible does not. Or when women do exercise the gift of shepherding, we have to invent another category for it, lest we confuse it with being a “pastor.”

2. In strictly biblical terms, our typical Sunday morning “preaching” is actually a combination of teaching and prophecy exercised within the church. In conservative churches, women are usually barred from “preaching” since it is correctly seen as a teaching role, but as a consequence they are also barred from exercising their prophetic gifts within the church. Furthermore, since we wrongly define “preaching” as something for the church, rarely will anyone (man or woman) preach in the public square, which is a problem. Public proclamation is one of our basic responsibilities.

3. 1 Corinthians 11-14 allows women to do than your typical conservative church will allow because of the way we bundle functions together (especially with a single long sermon and no opportunity to share or exercise gifts in the service). It is natural for male leaders to feel this lack and try to find a way to mend it by making room for women to do more. The problem is, in most of our services, the only thing for them to do is give a sermon—which is typically heavy on authority and teaching, and so crosses the line.

Toward a solution

We don’t know everything we’d like to know about early church praxis, but if we trust in the sufficiency of biblical revelation, then we don’t need to. Where the Bible doesn’t specifically tell us what to do, we have liberty. That’s a feature, not a bug: God is giving us the responsibility to adapt to the needs and circumstances of our neighbors and communities. However, where God does give us specific instructions, we have the duty to submit to them, trusting that God really does know best. So for example, elders should be male because the Bible says so, but we need not meet in homes—even though we know they did—because the Bible doesn’t tell us that we have to. We’re free to meet in homes if we like, or build a building, or rent space somewhere.

Male eldership was directly commanded; plurality of elders was normal. We know there were deaconesses and prophetesses and church widows (likely a subset of deaconess). We know services were highly participatory (1 Cor. 12-14) and included the Lord’s Table (1 Cor. 11) and a meal, but the meal’s not commanded. We know services could include extended teaching (nobody thinks Eutychus died during a TED talk), but we don’t know that it was normal practice. In fact, from 1 Cor. 12-14, it seems that long-form teaching from a single speaker was not normal, at least not in the Corinthian church. “Pastor” was a spiritual gift in the early church, but whether it was a church office is highly debatable (probably the best argument is based on Eph. 4:11, but mostly the people who make that argument don’t apply the passage consistently). Given what we know for sure about church offices, we can confidently say that if pastor were an office in the early church, it certainly was not the modern office of pastor (=CEO). They were certainly singing the biblical psalms, and there’s good indication they were writing new songs (Paul quotes some of them in his letters). The NT tells us three times to be a psalm-singing people. The Psalms themselves tell us to sing a new song, so we need new songs to sing too. We know they devoted time to Scripture reading and prayer, and we know that prophetesses prophesied with their heads appropriately covered.

The modern church files virtually all of that under “descriptive, not prescriptive” and moves on to just do whatever it prefers. They rely on accrued tradition (although in most churches, those traditions are much younger than people think) or on marketing consultants that tell us what will sell. By contrast, we have long thought that we should take the biblical revelation more seriously than that. After 10+ years of brainstorming and development, covid presented us with a need to begin holding worship services…so we’re busily putting all that into practice as best we can.

At Christ the Anchor, we try to include all the elements commanded or modeled in Scripture. We sing the Psalms (Eph. 5:18-19, Col. 3:16). We have four long Scripture readings (Psalm, Old Testament, New Testament, and Gospel) totalling about 20 minutes (1 Tim. 4:13). Following the Scripture readings, an elder will deliver a brief (7-10 minute) homily, then open the floor for sharing and reflection (1 Cor. 14:26), wrapped up by an elder summing up what’s been said and correcting what needs correcting (1 Cor. 14:29-35). Then comes a time of prayer (again, open floor- 1 Timothy 2, 1 Corinthians 11:3-16) before moving into confession, passing of the peace (1 Peter 5:14), Eucharist (1 Cor. 11:17-34), and a meal (Acts 2:42).

In our church, women participate in the open forum (especially to exercise the gift of prophecy) and in prayer (1 Cor. 11:3-16, 14:24,31). As a matter of practice (not a Biblical requirement), to distinguish between the roles of men and women in the church, a man (as a representative of Christ) will read the Gospel, and an woman (as an image of the Bride) will lead the corporate prayers of the people.

There are more than a couple of kinks to work out, but as a baseline, this approach to our church service has allowed us to be strongly father/elder led while encouraging our women to step up to what Scripture calls them to do in the service.

Leave a Comment » | Ecclesiology, Equality and Difference of Man and Woman, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Map and Mountain

4 November 2025

It is foolish to set two good things at war with one another. Many Christians do exactly this with sound doctrine and supernatural experience. People who talk as though we should focus on one at the expense of the other are advocating for a deeply subchristian existence, no matter which way they lean. Happily, many of them don’t really practice what they preach — by the grace of the Holy Spirit, lots of folks find their way to doing the right thing despite their professed beliefs, for which all thanksgiving! But how much better would it be if we got the beliefs straightened out?

Sound doctrine — every last shred of it — relies entirely on supernatural experiences. From creation ex nihilo through the plagues of Egypt, Joshua’s long day, water into wine and right on to the resurrection of Jesus, supernatural miracles are the beating heart of the actual Christian faith. Will it all stand up to reasonable examination? Of course. Can you domesticate it with logic? Not a bit. Saul of Tarsus didn’t reason his way into Christianity. Nor did Blaise Pascal, nor Anthony Bloom. From biblical times right on to the present day (and on to the New Jerusalem), actual encounter with the living God is more than an exercise in logic; it is the thing that the sound doctrine is about.

Running your finger along trail on the topo map and climbing to the top of the mountain are related endeavors, and you climb best and make fewer errors if you’ve paid attention to the map. But they’re still not the same thing, and someone who’s paid less attention to the map, but actually climbed the mountain, knows some things that those who only read the map have never guessed at. “Which one is more important?” is a foolish, foolish question to ask.

If you don’t have the thing itself, then you have what the Pharisees had, and what Jesus was at war with. If you have it, but refuse to account for it in your theology, then you live a split spiritual life, acting on visceral instincts you can’t explain and won’t admit to, while theology remains an exercise in map-reading at the kitchen table — intellectually interesting, no doubt, but that’s not what the map is actually for. It’s doubly silly in that you’re actively trying to climb the mountain but refusing to admit that’s what the map is about.

We were made for better. Sound doctrine teaches us to expect the Holy Spirit to operate; every part of Scripture resounds with this message — only people who have been catechized by something other than the Bible think actually experiencing God is “debatable.” Nobody ever obediently read the book of Acts and then scoffed at supernatural experience. Scripture never teaches us to think that any gift ceases short of heaven, and the history of the church proves this out, if you bother to actually read the history.

Growing up in the Bible Church movement, I’ve been a rock-ribbed sola Scriptura guy my whole life. I didn’t really wake up to the reality of the Spirit’s present ministry until my 30s. I’ve served in significant capacities in two charismatic churches over the years, so I know a bit about that corner of the world. Charismatics, as a rule, lack exegetical rigor. But then, so do most theological conservatives; the far majority will prioritize party-line doctrine over actual exegesis. The Bible Church folk at least usually care about getting the exegesis right. You won’t hear those folks scoffing at how “boring” it is to “live out of a book.” You’ll hear plenty of charismatics say stupid things like that.

On the other hand, you’ll hear no shortage of Bible Church folks blithely asserting that “sound doctrine” is all you need to live the Christian life — as though ideas were enough and God’s actual presence in your life were immaterial! Honestly, it’s embarrassing. The New Testament flatly asserts the reality of mystical experience over and over, from John 17:3 to Gal. 2:20 to Rom. 8:10-11. It’s just impossible to live biblical spirituality without God’s actual intervention. And He does intervene; frequently people even recognize it, but through a variety of cognitive strategies, manage to keep their participation in tangible spirituality a secret from their theologizing.

Spiritual experience and theology are not natural enemies, and shouldn’t be set at odds with one another. “Which is more beneficial?” is a stupid question, a false question. You can’t live an intelligent Christian life without both.

You need sound doctrine to map the world. But when you’re beside a hospital bed, counting seconds since the last breath and looking at your watch in case you need to give the nurse time of death, sound doctrine just doesn’t get it done alone. “Peace that surpasses understanding” really exists, and talking about it is not the same thing as having it. (If you think it is, bookmark this post. Come back and read it again when your providentially ordered life teaches you otherwise.)

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Can a Christian do Energy Work?

28 October 2025

Some while back, a friend asked me about energy work. Isn’t it all some new age mumbo-jumbo, after all? Or is there more to it than that? This was my answer.

Moving into bodywork was…well, it was a surprise. I expected to spend the rest of my life in the study and classroom, doing exegetical work more or less full-time. But God has an infinite capacity to surprise.

I remain a theologian, and I want to be able to offer a theological account of what’s going on as I work with a client in my new capacity. Doing that work has proven to be an adjustment. By comparison with the exegete’s calling, stepping out to theologize about what happens on the massage table felt a lot like walking a tightrope across the Grand Canyon with no net. Being an exegete by training and inclination, I was not much given to wandering out into areas that the text of Scripture didn’t explicitly address. Or so I thought…  But as I have come to grips with my new calling, I have begun to notice all the ways in which I was already plowing the fertile fields of general revelation, ways I was blind to because I just thought of them as “the way things are done.”

As a teacher, I had no qualms about showing a new preacher how to set up a 3-point topical sermon. That’s certainly not a particularly biblical structure; it’s just something that works well, and gives newbies a starting point. There’s nothing unbiblical about it, of course. It’s craft knowledge, discovered by working in my calling in God’s world, and paying attention to what works and what does not. There are any number of other teacher tricks — use of slides and visual aids, intelligent use of assignments, questions, discussion, and so on — that are likewise discovered in the doing, and then passed from master to apprentice, down the generations. I learned many of them from my teachers, discovered some on my own, and I pass them on to my students in their turn, which is all as it should be.

The same dynamic of craft knowledge applies to everything. Scripture tells us much, and it is authoritative. But in most fields of endeavor, special revelation walks us right up to the edge of the field, legitimizing the inquiry — and there it leaves us to explore. Scripture teaches us that the physical creation is real, and good, and worthy of our study, and then leaves us to study it. It doesn’t tell us that the oak tree has several different kinds of tissue in it, nor that all those tissues are composed of complex molecules, nor that those molecules are composed of atoms, nor that the atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, nor that those particles break down into still more elemental particles, and so on. All that, we have to find out by examining the oak tree. Scripture gives us warrant for the examination, but it doesn’t tell us what we’re going to find.

And so it is with my work. Scripture tells me that the body is real, that it can be ill or healthy, but precious little about how to get it from the former state to the latter. That, we have to learn by exploring the fertile fields of God’s general revelation in the world. And by consistent and careful examination, by honest experiment, we have learned a whole lot — and we have a lot more to learn. Likewise, Scripture tells me that the spirit is real, which brings me to your question about energy work.

For pretty much any subject, I find the best way to begin is at the beginning, which is to say, in Genesis. The foundations of biblical anthropology are in those first few chapters. We first learn that we are designed to be God’s miniature self-portrait, His signature on the work of art that is the universe, which means we — male and female as a married team — are responsible to cultivate and guard the world. Thus far the first chapter. In the second chapter, we discover our composition: God compounded man from dust and breath. Dust is the material part that returns to the earth when we die. Breath is the immaterial part, the spirit that returns to God who gave it. But crucially, in the expression “dust and breath,” what is meant by “and”? In the complex interaction between physical and spiritual, there’s a lot we don’t really understand.

Our exploration of general revelation helps here, but it only takes us so far. We are learning that cells respond to very subtle influences — magnetic fields long thought to be so weak as to be indistinguishable from background noise, for example, or inputs as small as a single photon. It turns out that the human hands generate magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation that is certainly strong enough for a body to respond at the cellular level. (See Oschman’s Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis, 2nd ed., for a treatment of the physical science. Thanks to Flexner and his blinkered minions, we are a century behind on really exploring the field, so it’s maddening in spots, but it’s also really intriguing. The Healing Touch Program also maintains a research archive at healingtouchresearch.com, and they’re pretty good about keeping it up to date.) So that’s one thing we might end up meaning by “energy work:” instinctive manipulation of very subtle physical electrical, magnetic, and photonic inputs. 

But as a Christian, I see no reason to stop there. The things which are seen are not made of things which are visible, and we’re not just talking about subatomic particles here — electrons are visible in principle; it just takes a really expensive set of glasses to see them. But behind all that, behind the physical matter and energy, is something…other. Something spiritual in nature, that manifests in physical reality, but is prior to it and cannot be reduced to it.

In the language of the Eastern Church, everything that exists is made of God’s divine energies. Not His essence — that way lies pantheism or panentheism — but His energies, which flow from His being. There was no pre-existing material; it is all made by Him, and it all exists in Him — in Him we live and move and have our being, as both the pagans and Paul affirm. All that is, is the spoken word of God. He spoke, and it is, and He upholds all things by the word of His power.

And so when there is a person on my massage table, there is dust and breath, body and spirit. Following the biblical anthropology, I can use my body to work on their body, relaxing hypertonic muscles, releasing trigger points, and so on. Could I also use my spirit to work on their spirit? It seemed a hypothesis worth exploring, and upon experimentation, I find that it works. Moreover, when I set to work with that intention, and invite God to enter into the work and accomplish His will for my client’s well-being, I find that He shows up, and very interesting things happen. With some clients, it all happens quietly (because they’re not ready to be prayed over out loud), and with others, I come all the way out of the closet. We pray together, and God moves. I’ve seen everything from physical healings to spiritual turnarounds on my table. In all modesty, I’m good at what I do, but I’ve seen God do things that go way beyond anything I could accomplish.

So this is a very long way round to answering your question. As best I can tell, my energy work is partly manipulation of subtle physical energies that we’re only beginning to study, partly my spirit working on my client’s spirit in much the same way that my body works on his body, and partly the Holy Spirit (or whatever delegated angelic powers may be at work) responding to my prayer of invitation to do what the client and I are unable to do on our own.

I need to emphasize that the above is a description of my energy work. I make no guarantees about someone else’s work. Certainly the process is open to demonic manipulation, and some energy workers directly invite it. Others address their requests to “the universe,” which is sending your request into the spirit world addressed “To Whom It May Concern” — a dangerous practice if ever there were one. Lots of entities out there that might answer that request, and not all of them friendly. Some seem to address their requests to God without quite knowing who they’re talking to — “to the unknown god,” as it were. It is my pleasure, in that instance, to make the introductions. As with Paul’s experience in Athens, I find that most people aren’t too excited to have the veil of divine anonymity ripped away. But some want to hear more, and they’re the ones I came for.

The possibility of demonic intervention makes a lot of Christians nervous, and they want to be able to set up some kind of wall to separate our work from the bad stuff. A lot of people want that separation to be a matter of technique, as if you could photograph the difference between us and them — but no. There are doctrines of demons, but we don’t differentiate our teachers from theirs by their teaching techniques; we discern the content and results of the teaching. You don’t tell the difference between Moses and Jambres by technique — they both threw a staff on the ground that became a snake, both poured out water that became blood. It’s not the technique that distinguishes us; it’s which outlet your power cord is plugged into. We are made to live in partnership with God; nothing could be more natural than a human being seeking spiritual help in an endeavor. We shouldn’t be frightened by partnership with spiritual power. That admittedly leaves us with no escape from the task of actual discernment. But in my experience, the difference between God and a demon is not particularly subtle.

In my practice, I work spirit-to-spirit under God’s authority, and by His leading. The Scriptures lead me to expect that this might be a fruitful endeavor, practiced in service to Christ and under His Lordship, and I find that it is. I have seen wounded bodies restored and broken hearts healed. Some of that work was a stunning demonstration of human possibility. Some of it was plainly beyond my ability — and yet it happened nonetheless, thanks be to God. As with physical healing, not everything I try works — so I remember what does, and what doesn’t, and I try to do more of what does next time.

I look forward to growing in craft knowledge as I go. I already have a fairly good stock of knowledge that I couldn’t back up with a verse, any more than I could put a verse behind quenching O1 tool steel at 1475 degrees. But O1 hardens best when quenched at that temperature all the same, and likewise for what I’ve learned about energy work.

Well, I had better stop. I’m sure this was far thicker of an answer than you were really asking for, but I didn’t think I could do your question justice with less. Perhaps as I grow, I’ll be able to make it simpler.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Strong Enough to Dance

9 September 2025

I recently read a rant that started off “Horses built for war don’t dance at weddings.” It then goes on for many paragraphs about how men who are seeking the truth aren’t cut out for bread and circuses, how the system wants you frivolous and weak. When the day everyone thought would never come finally arrives, the author promises, the war horses will be ready. I’d link to the rant so you could read it for yourself, but I’ve already forgotten the guy’s name. (Just as well, I think.)

This is a man who has seen the problem, but doesn’t understand the solution. King David danced. Israel danced on the banks of the Red Sea. Psalms 149 and 150 (which we are all commanded to sing) teach us to praise the Lord with dance. But it’s not just Scripture: at the right times, warriors in every human culture feast and dance and sing. I’ve trained alongside people from the Army, Marines, various SWAT teams, British SAS, road patrol deputies in the Kentucky backwoods where backup is 45 minutes away — they feast. They dance and sing — not always well, but they seem to enjoy it.

But this fellow is too busy being The War Horse to dance at a wedding. He’s too serious to take a lesson from Scripture or history or culture. Don’t be like him. God has called us to be sober-minded, but this is the opposite of sober-mindedness. This is Being Very Stern, and looking at yourself in the mirror while you do it. It will make you grim, ungodly, brittle, and weak. God doesn’t want you to just be strong enough to fight; He wants you strong enough to dance.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Why Complementarian?

19 August 2025

From the time I became aware that Christian egalitarianism was a thing (age 18 or 19), I have been self-consciously complementarian. The sexes are made with different and complementary natures, with corresponding complementary duties and biblical commands. Those commands are not arbitrary, but rooted in the realities of the world God created. It was not a new concept to me even then; it’s just that I was 18 or so before I knew there was a term for it. 

Learning the term was quite a discovery, because that meant there were other views. I looked into alternative views and concluded that they weren’t convincing. I remained complementarian. At the same time, over the years, I noticed various self-professed complementarians who I found appalling, either because they had no understanding of the natural world, or because they read the church epistles as though they had been written to Ward and June Cleaver (about which more later). Nonetheless, centering the complementarity of the sexes seemed to me the best way to describe the Bible’s teaching, so I stuck to the term complementarian.

Of course, people to the left of me have been trying to drive me away from both the term and the convictions it represents for decades, arguing that my adherence to complementarianism implied endorsement of various abusive and denigrating views of women that I don’t hold and never have. But I knew what the term meant, so I ignored them. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to have the conversation, but I’m not moving on the term.)

More recently, I’ve found myself on the receiving end of pressure from the right, which has been something of a surprise. These attempts argue that “complementarian” implies various defections from biblical authority that I do not hold and never have held. As with my favorite lefties, they can point to actual humans who profess to be complementarian and commit the defection in question. Certainly they exist — as one commentator famously noted, “The left wing of complementarianism is the right wing of egalitarianism.” This testimony is true, but I’m not going to be driven off a thick view of complementarity because somebody else is complementarian in name only. As with the lefties, I am happy to have the conversation, but I’m not much impressed with the attempt to drive me off the term. (And I would point out that their preferred terms also have some impressive vulnerabilities.)

Very recently, Aaron Renn has weighed in. (And you should read it!) He’s not involving himself in the gender debates so much as making some observations about the generational development of different ideas. He correctly argues that the Grudem/Piper version of complementarianism was not traditional, but an attempt to respond biblically to feminism while also self-consciously breaking with the past. On that basis, he considers his article title justified: “Complementarianism is New.” That’s quite a leap, considering that in the article itself, he also says “The traditional view that Piper, Grudem, and company rejected was also complementarian.” (emphasis his)

Just so. The traditional view was complementarian, the teaching of the Bible is complementarian, and no one need be embarrassed to use the word “complementarian” to describe their complementarian view.

Speaking for myself, I’m complementarian (and patriarchal); have been my whole life. I know what the word means, despite the various weirdbeards and feminists-in-all-but-name who wrongly claim it, and despite the various haters who wrongly try to tar me with one or the other of those groups. If I may put it bluntly, nobody needs the permission of some self-appointed gaggle of word police to use an appropriately descriptive term for their view. So let the word-scratchers say their bit, but don’t be disturbed by them. If you’re getting harrassed from the left and the right at the same time, perhaps you’re onto something.

Now it is true that all man-made symbols, including terms, have a lifespan. The day may come when for whatever reason, “complementarian” ceases to be useful, and it’s time to put it to bed. But it’s not today, and by my lights, it ain’t likely to be tomorrow either.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Utterly Ordinary Men

15 July 2025

Becoming a good man absolutely requires input from both men and women. Not everybody’s blessed with a mom and a dad, and fewer still are blessed with functioning examples in both of them, but we need to find that input somewhere if we’re going to grow well. Think Proverbs: literally a dad writing a manual for his sons, and it repeatedly exhorts them to heed their father’s advice, and not to forsake the law of their mother. It presents Wisdom as a woman throughout, and all the things that are true of Wisdom early in the book are true of an excellent wife later — a good woman is Wisdom incarnate, and that’s essential to making a good man. And there’s Dad, writing the book that says so, imparting a pile of his own masculine direction in the process.

Our culture has absolutely failed to embrace this dynamic of older men teaching younger men how to be. Men have contributed to that failure by refusing to step up and exercise a measure of moral authority, preferring to mind their own business and let the “experts” take the stage. Dunno if you noticed, gents, but the experts are how we got where we are. It’s time we quit leaving a vacuum for them to fill.

It’s not all on the men, either. Too frequently, otherwise decent women have contributed by privately loving, but publicly disrespecting their husbands. “They never do grow up, do they?” “He’s the only one of my kids that didn’t move out!” Ladies, the culture has given you these tropes to play with; do not be conformed to the world. When you indulge in these tropes…well, let me put it like this: do you want more men to be like your husband? Then stop running him down. No young man listens to a wife insult her husband and thinks “I really want to be him when I grow up.” If you want your daughters to have good men to date and marry, then quit driving the young men away from good men.

Young men will seek advice, and if we insist on leaving a vacuum, various toxic idiots — pickup artists, professional athletes, influencers and the like — will fill it. Even for the young men who have the sense to steer clear of those folks and seek a better class of podcaster, there are hard limits on what mass media can teach. You can’t get wise counsel tailored to your specific situation from a podcast. So what are we to do?

The answer is actually simple. Not easy, but simple enough. We don’t need a Christian Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson or whoever. We need an army of utterly ordinary men willing to care for the young men within their reach. Not one influencer that can reach 50,000 young men at a time, but 25,000 ordinary, admirable, salt-of-the-earth guys that can reach 2. Which is to say that the answer is the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of God is like leaven….

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Posted by Tim Nichols

In the Company of Badasses

6 May 2025

One of my daughters sent me Aaron Renn’s interview with David Murrow a while back. The subject of the interview is “Why Men Hate Going to Church,” which is also Murrow’s book title. There’s a lot to unpack there, and I encourage you to listen to it, but one particular thing jumped out at both of us: safety.

Murrow talks about how virtually every Christian radio station has a tagline that’s something like “listening that’s safe for the whole family,” which is obviously designed to appeal to Christian moms. That makes good business sense for the stations, since mom is the one who decides what to listen to in the car. Murrow points out that at the same time Mom is getting her safe listening option, little Johnny in the back of the minivan is getting catechized that Christianity is the safe option that appeals to his mom. By age 11 or so, testosterone is flooding his body and he’s looking for danger and adventure and the opportunity for hijinks…and we’ve spent his whole life teaching him that Christianity is safe. Then we wonder why he’s turned away!

My daughter is a teacher and youth minister, so kids abandoning the faith is something of a preoccupation for her, as it should be. “You were raised on Christian music,” she said to me. “How did you avoid this trap?”

As it happens, part of the answer is that I wasn’t really raised on Christian music the way she was thinking, not like Murrow is talking about. I grew up on a lot of old music: everything from old cowboy songs to bluegrass to classical to native American chants recorded on the reservations to the soundtracks of Victory at Sea and Hatari! (Yes, on vinyl, but not because it was cool; it was just all we had.) Contemporary Christian music wasn’t really in the mix much at home, although I certainly heard plenty of it at church.

But there’s a much more significant answer: I grew up around people on mission. I never thought Christianity was safe.

My parents weren’t missionaries (although they tried, to the point of attending candidate school once upon a time). My pastor wasn’t a missionary either, but he’d tried, hard. After getting rejected by around 30 mission boards, he concluded that the Lord was telling him to stay stateside, and accepted a pastorate. My pastor’s brother, however, founded a little mission agency called World Evangelical Outreach. WEO (pronounced “wee-oh”) was headquartered in my hometown, first on the church grounds and then in the same little office building as my dentist. I still remember walking into the office and hearing the secretaries answer the phone “Wee-oh, how can I help you?” (Later on they changed their name and moved to a bigger location, then ultimately to a KOA property outside Orlando. You would know them today as Pioneers International. They’re, ah, a little bigger these days.) A lot of their missionaries passed through our church, along with others with New Tribes, Sudan Interior Mission, Arctic Missions, China Inland Mission, Baptist Mid-Missions, Greater Europe Mission, Missionary Aviation Fellowship, and many more.

These people were not safe; they were badasses. Men who smuggled Bibles into Communist countries and evangelized whole villages on their way back out, who made contact with reclusive tribes in deep jungle, seeking to save them from extermination by loggers and oil workers, who spent nights on an Albanian warehouse roof with an AK-47 to protect the winter’s food supply for an orphanage, who flew in and out of tiny jungle airstrips to get someone to life-saving medical care. Women who saved abandoned twins in sub-Saharan Africa, brought girls out of sexual slavery in Saigon, defied apartheid to bring the gospel into villages that would never otherwise hear. Couples who travelled the Sahara together to find nomadic Tuareg camps, built houses in the New Guinea highlands to bring medicine, literacy, and Jesus to remote villages, ate and shared Jesus with Hezbollah fighters, their wives, and their children.

Of course we didn’t stay stuck in our own century either: we read tons of missionary biographies and all kinds of Christian history, too. I learned about Mary Slessor, David Livingston, Amy Carmichael, Corrie Ten Boom, Brother Andrew, John Wyclif, William Tyndale, Polycarp, the Forty Soldiers. So as I write these paragraphs, I have names and grainy photographs and artists’ renditions in my head for some, but I also have memories of men and women around my dinner table. One of them taught me how to play dominos; I showed another how my Transformer worked; a third explained to me how he lost his ring finger. The stories from centuries ago are real to me, part of an unbroken legacy that stretches from the Old Testament prophets through Jesus and the apostles and right on down to the guy sitting next to me at the kitchen table, asking me to pass another of Mom’s sourdough muffins (which are in fact delicious).

Some of them came back every four or five years to tell us how things were going. Some of them came back on medical evac flights. Some of them came back on medical evac flights and then went back again, and again, and again. (Ralph and Maridee Sauers, I’m looking at you.) Some of them didn’t come back at all; we’ll see them again in glory.

Obviously their Christianity wasn’t the safe, Mom-approved path. It was the biggest adventure in the world, far superior even to joining the Peace Corps or the military (which some of them had also done, before). Tourist travel was childish and self-indulgent by comparison — not even in the same league. For the longest time, I thought I was going to join them overseas. I did short-term hitches doing child evangelism in Spain, a building project in Trinidad & Tobago, teaching English and computer skills in central Russia. Closer to home, I served on street evangelism teams in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada, various locations in metro DC, and a series of places in the southeastern US, especially Florida. I knew that God could call me anywhere, and I was ready to go!

Imagine my surprise when He called me to California, of all places. We had a long argument about that, and I lost. After all, I did tell Him I would go anywhere! So I went. After I finished seminary, He took me into the desert for six years, and from there to the heathen wilds of Denver, where I’ve been ever since. I’ve been overseas, training pastors in Australia and such, but it seems likely that the majority of my calling is stateside.

These folks’ legacy of following Jesus anywhere He leads has informed my decisions my whole life, is with me today, and I’m pleased to pass it on in turn to my students, my daughters, my disciples. There’s another little kid I ate with last week, and I’m the guy at his kitchen table, asking him to pass another muffin while he shows me his Lego model. (And because God’s fun like that, his name is Timothy too. Wild.)

I’m not surprised when God calls me somewhere surprising, if I may put it that way. The darker the corner, the more it needs light. Some of the corners have been pretty dark, but that’s another post. The point for today is, your kids don’t need more vapid CCM; they need time with Christians doing dangerous things for Jesus.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Can We Afford It?

20 November 2024

Treating someone graciously is a form of generosity. As with all forms of generosity, graciousness is greatly cramped when we don’t think we can afford it. This is true whether we can actually afford it or not.

Say we have a single mother in the church who asks one of the men in the church to come look at her tires. It seems to her that something’s wrong, she says. He goes out into the parking lot, and the tire has a great big bulge in the sidewall.

“I don’t get paid until Friday,” she says, “and I have to pay rent out of that. Do you think it can wait until I get paid again in two weeks?”

No, it cannot. Now suppose as they’re talking about how she really shouldn’t delay replacing the tire, another fellow walks over and also takes a look. He agrees with the first guy that the tire should be replaced immediately.

Now suppose that one of these guys has $30,000 in the bank and no pressing need for it, while the other has $700 to his name, and his own rent payment looming at the end of the week. Which one of these guys is going to help this lady pay for tires?

You’d be tempted to say that of course the first guy will do it, but if you’ve been around people a little, you know better than to be so sure. We’ve all known people with tens of thousands of dollars who didn’t think they could afford to part with ten bucks, and we’ve all known people with only a few hundred who would buy you lunch if you looked hungry. Generosity does not depend only on some objective measure of what you can afford. Generosity depends on what you believe you can afford.

The guy with a few hundred bucks to his name, who goes and buys the lady’s tires? He believes that God has been good to him. He believes that God has given him everything he has, and everything he has is therefore at God’s disposal. He believes that God put him here to help take care of the tires, and that God knows the rent is due at the end of the week, and He will take care of it. He knows himself to be living in the lap of God’s largesse; why would he struggle to share? “You can’t outgive God!” he’ll say. Or “I shovel it out, and God shovels it in, and He’s got the bigger shovel.”

I’ve known a bunch of guys like that over the years; had occasion to be one now and again. Let me tell ya: it’s a lot of fun giving God’s money to people who need it! You maybe feel a little dumb come Friday afternoon and you’re still not sure how the rent gets paid, but you know what? I’ve seen God come through over and over and over again. (Standard disclaimer: It’s possible to overdo giving just like it’s possible to overdo anything else. I’m not saying you should just be a moron with your money; I’m saying you should be generally wise, and also know that at any given moment, God might call you to do something that looks really foolish. He gets to do that; everything you have is His. When He does, know that He’s got your back, and He’s good for it.)

To return to the observation I began this post with, it’s not just money. I digressed into money because money is easy to talk about, but you can be generous (or not) with any resource you have. It might be your time, your effort, your expertise. It might be a little space on your web server, or a little space in your garage for someone to store a couple boxes. It might be a late-night run out to the airport to pick up an old friend’s stranded kid, and another run back out there in the morning to get the kid on the next flight out. It might be your sympathy. It might mean showing grace to someone who–this being the meaning of grace–doesn’t deserve a bit of it.

In any of these cases, the key to generosity is the belief that you can afford it, and that, in turn, depends on your gratitude for what God has given you. This is particularly the case with showing sympathy, moral grace.

People who feel a need to signal virtue, people whose virtue is brittle, shallow, only skin-deep, can’t afford to be generous. It would endanger their fragile bona fides. They need to be hard on others, critical, scathing even, lest somebody begin to wonder if they themselves are somehow soft on that particular sin. When you’re about the impossible task of establishing your own righteousness, there’s no audience too small or occasion too petty.

Go thou, and do un-likewise. But this is not something you’re likely to be able to fake, or to muscle through as a raw exercise in self-control. You should be a deep and genuine conduit of God’s grace, and that means you need to become grateful for God’s grace to you. So begin to meditate on God’s grace to you. If you need a place to start, you could do worse than Ephesians 2:1-10. Let’s get about 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.” 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.

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, a decision gets made that involves a zipper, and nobody concerned is somehow unaware of the implications of that decision. 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

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