Category: Reflections

Keeping the Fellowship Complementarian?

This piece has a narrower focus than most of my other writing. It concerns an issue facing my own denomination, the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada, or FEB (or the Fellowship) for short. I wasn’t sure at first whether I wanted to weigh in on this intramural debate, but finally decided to do so after some further thought and conversation.

I will give some disclaimers, some context, and finally my analysis.

Disclaimers

I am not a pastor, or currently an elder (I have served as an elder in my local church), and I do not speak for any group officially or unofficially. I do serve on the regional board of FEB Central, the region that represents Ontario churches and English-speaking churches in Quebec such as mine, and I served as co-editor for the 2023 revision of the Fellowship’s history book (quoted below), so I am at least somewhat familiar with the history and institutional structures of the Fellowship. (I do confess that I love the Fellowship, my home denomination, whose churches and leaders has nurtured my faith and the faith of my family.) What follows are simply my own thoughts and reflections, based on publicly available information.

Also, although I realize that there are disputed claims about personal misconduct, with one pastor and church being suspended in the Pacific region, I have no way of adjudicating such matters, and I think it prudent to focus on the substance of the policies and the history. Therefore I will not focus on the specific actions of any one person or church.

I want to state at the outset that my goal is to lay out some context that I think is important for making a decision on this motion, and then provide what I hope is a fair-minded analysis from my perspective. I have good friends on both sides of this motion and I can understand why someone would land on the other side of where I do.

Context

In a few weeks, on November 3-5, pastors and leaders from all across Canada will gather for the annual National Convention of the Fellowship. As I write these words, pastors and elder boards have been hurriedly discussing and debating what to do about an unexpected issue that arose in early September. A letter was sent to Fellowship pastors informing them of an upcoming motion that would be presented at Convention. The letter presented the issue as urgent.

The proposed motion is quite simple: it would elevate a complementarian position paper (a position paper is non-binding in the Fellowship) to the status of policy (a binding document). This motion is the result of a grassroots movement of conservative complementarian churches across the country who are concerned about the growth of egalitarian practice in the Fellowship, especially out West.

For more context from the perspective of the churches advancing the motion, see here. They have helpfully provided extensive documentation of the relevant communications. Aside from this recent activity, the next most important information is historical, so I now turn to providing some historical context.

Allow me to quote excerpts from A Glorious Fellowship of Churches, and specifically chapter ten, where Steven Jones, the president of the Fellowship since 2011, chronicled the events from two decades ago. I have created a PDF of the five pages that make up the section where this topic is addressed. I consider it required reading for having any kind of informed opinion, not on complementarianism, but on the institutional history of complementarianism in the Fellowship. If you haven’t read the book, let me encourage you to grab a copy. Here are excerpts from that relevant section:

Prior to the new millennium, the subject of women in leadership within Fellowship churches was often debated, sometimes heatedly. What leadership roles could women assume, or not assume, within The Fellowship? At a Fellowship National Convention, a Position Statement on the gender issue in pastoral leadership was affirmed by 83% on November 4, 1997.

While the 1997 Position Statement on Gender was the Fellowship’s official statement, many leaders discussed the possibility of elevating the position to bylaw status, making the position a test of fellowship among our churches.

This alone is a very important piece of information. We have been here before. The text goes on:

Some indicated a desire that this issue be brought to the Convention immediately. Those advocating immediate action graciously allowed National Council to postpone the matter so that the new Fellowship Ministry Plan 2000 might remain the focus of the upcoming Convention. At a National Council meeting in 2001, Council members discussed the ramifications of elevating the Fellowship’s Position Statement to bylaw status. The council reaffirmed the position and asked all churches to fully support the Position Statement. At National Convention in 2001, a notice of motion was presented from the floor informing the delegates that a motion would be presented at the 2002 National Convention, amending the bylaws to make the Position Statement a test of fellowship for member churches. In a letter dated April 24, 2002, National Council informed Fellowship churches about “possible bylaw changes relating to pastoral gender issues.” At the Fellowship National Convention of 2002, two motions failed, one from the floor of the Convention[10] and another from National Council.[11]

Footnotes:

[10] Minutes of Fellowship National Convention, November 4-6, 2002. The motion from the floor was moved by Rev. Willie Oosterman, Westboro Baptist Church, Ottawa. The motion proposed a change to the Affirmation of Faith and Bylaws concerning “qualified men as pastors (elders, overseers).” Thirty-eight delegates spoke to the issue. A motion concluded debate. The motion failed: 564 ballots were cast, 376 were needed to pass and there were 332 Yes to 227 No. There were 580 delegates from 252 churches at the 2002 Convention.

[11] Minutes of Fellowship National Convention, November 4-6, 2002. The motion from the National Council was moved by Dr. Alan Johnson, Église Baptist Evangélique de Gatineau, QC. The motion proposed a change to the bylaws affirming “both men and women are gifted for service in the local church,” but “recognize that office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified in Scripture.” A flurry of motions (5) were offered and discussed until one motion directed the delegates to vote immediately. The original motion failed: 531 ballots were cast, 354 needed to pass. There were 237 Yes and 290 No. Dr. Henry Blackaby spoke on the topic of prayer as the Convention speaker for that year.

I included the footnotes text here as I think the details are important.

National Council informed the churches in a letter dated December 2002 that the motions had failed and that “the vote leaves the 1997 Position Statement as our official statement on this issue.” The council met again in November 2002 where the following motion was passed: “National Council will set in motion a process that will result in a Complementarian bylaw amendment being brought to the floor of the 2003 National Convention.”

As you can see, this issue took up a lot of energy in the early 2000’s, with many motions not at all unlike the one being voted on in 2025 being set forth. We continue the story into 2003:

A letter was sent in June 2003 to all Fellowship pastors and church leaders from the Fellowship National Council with the proposed modifications to the bylaws: “In the New Testament the office of pastor/elder/overseer is gender-specific. Therefore, in Fellowship Baptist churches, this office is for qualified men recognized by the local church for oversight of the doctrine and practice of the church.”

The motion was moved by the National Council at the 2003 National Convention and seconded by René Frey. There was a request for clarification of the motion which caused confusion among the delegates. The parliamentarian attempted to clarify the options stressing the vote was on the motion as presented and not an interpretation of the motion. Delegates were instructed to vote. The motion failed[13] and a motion to suspend the rules of order and extend the session fifteen minutes was carried.

Footnotes:

[13] Minutes of The Fellowship National Convention, November 3-5, 2003.

Motion failed: 524 ballots cast, 346 were needed to pass, 339 Yes and 180 No. Motion failed. There were 537 delegates from 232 churches in attendance.

A new motion from the floor instructed National Council to refrain from presenting any further motions concerning gender and church office prior to the 2005 National Convention, providing adequate time for more consultation on the issue. This motion failed and so the Chair instructed delegates that the Fellowship’s 1997 Position Statement would remain the Fellowship’s official position. The Fellowship constituency was notified of the results of National Convention 2003.

Soon after convention, the National Council received word that a group of over 50 pastors were proposing a notice of motion for a bylaw amendment at the Fellowship’s 2004 National Convention. In March 2004 the National Council gathered a couple of dozen Fellowship leaders from across Canada to continue the dialogue. Dr. Doug Harris facilitated this discussion and the minutes reported: “The options generated were compiled and a poll was done for each option to determine how many participants felt it would be a wise, viable option for National Council to consider.”

In a March 2004 National Council meeting, with the dialogue committee’s report in hand, the Council responded and affirmed the group’s notice of motion and communicated this in a letter dated May 11, 2004, sent to Fellowship church leaders.

At the 2004 National Convention, a new motion was presented amending the Fellowship bylaws and the required two-thirds majority was achieved. “In member churches, the pastoral office is reserved for qualified men recognized by the local church for the oversight of the doctrine and practice of the church.”[16]

[16] Minutes of the Fellowship National Convention, November 1-3, 2004, with 404 ballots cast and needing 271 to pass: 299 Yes and 103 No. There were 418 delegates from 196 churches in attendance.

And so, in 2004, a firmly complementarian position was enshrined in the bylaws of the Fellowship. I am quite sure everyone involved felt the issue had finally been dealt with, after many years of discussion, debate, and dueling motions. But then something happened which I had not heard about until I was editing the book. Here is the very next paragraph in the book:

The Fellowship Pacific Region responded to the new national bylaw by passing a motion at their 2005 Pacific Regional Conference with an 85% vote. The motion specified that the Pacific Region would “apply the new National FEBC Bylaw regarding women and pastoral office as follows: 1. The FEBBC/Y Region only recognizes men as Senior Pastors…”

I don’t have a lot of information about how this precise motion by the Pacific region came about, or why they decided to land on this policy of restricting only the “Senior Pastor” position to men. I can see numerous problems with this policy, the first of which is that “Senior Pastor” is not a biblical category (unlike elder, pastor, or bishop — terms which I understand to be used interchangeably in the NT). The second problem is that the language of the National bylaw refers to “the pastoral office,” which (it seems reasonable to assume) was meant to apply to anyone who uses the word pastor in their job title, even if that was not explicitly laid out.

While I understand that Pacific maintains they are complementarian in light of this restriction, it is understandable that complementarians in other regions look askance at this state of affairs. It looks to many like something of a loophole. Not many complementarians recognize this manifestation—where women can serve as elders or pastors as long as they are not the Senior Pastor—as a legitimate expression of complementarianism. There certainly seems to be disagreement over these terms, which makes the discussion of all this all the more confusing and complex.

I lay out all this history because it is very relevant to the current discussion. Let’s get into the specifics of what this history can tell us and teach us about how to assess the upcoming motion.

Analysis

The first thing to make clear is that I have zero issue with the 1997 Position Statement. I am thoroughly complementarian.

But here is the reality: We already have a binding complementarian bylaw on the books. If anything the existing bylaw is more strongly worded than the position paper. Therefore, is it not wishful thinking to assume that a successful vote on this proposed motion would materially change the situation with FEB Pacific?

And this brings me to another important fact: The consequences of a successful motion are unclear. No one has clearly laid out what exactly will happen if the motion passes. Pacific writes in a letter (dated Oct 16), “if this motion passes, Fellowship Pacific could find itself forced out” of the Fellowship. No one seems to be sure what will happen. It seems to me that clarity on the consequences is critically important for everyone to be able to make a wise decision.

Remember that Pacific voted to interpret the 2004 bylaw by restricting only the senior pastor position in 2005 by a 85% vote. That is an overwhelming consensus. And this overwhelming consensus in the Pacific region is also why the motion that some churches in that region brought to their regional conference on March 5 of 2024 was guaranteed to fail. The motion contained extremely broad language: “BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED, in accordance with 1 Timothy 2:12, Fellowship Pacific will only recognize churches in which their elders, or pastors who preach to or otherwise have authority over men, are Biblically qualified men.”

Given the position of Pacific, this motion was asking a large percentage of the churches represented at the regional conference to vote themselves out of the Fellowship. So it was never going to pass (it failed by 80%). I’m not sure what the point of such a sure-to-fail motion would be; perhaps simply to force the issue.

How does a normal pastor or elder board navigate all this? For most, they received the letter, and then subsequent communications, and they assume that the vote is basically on complementarianism. They are told the issue is urgent and that there is a rising tide of egalitarianism. But with a bit more historical perspective, we can see the situation in a different light. Whatever egalitarianism exists in the Fellowship, it has mostly been there since the early 2000s (sidenote: I think most would agree that having women pastors and elders is an egalitarian practice, but clearly there is disagreement about the meaning of these terms since Pacific considers its practice to be complementarian).

And while many instances of egalitarianism in evangelicalism has been a vector for a broader progressive agenda, honesty demands that we recognize that this is not always the case, and it is not far from bearing false witness to label any church less complementarian than ours as inherently on their way down the slippery slope. Yes, we’ve all seen that story played out a hundred times, but there are exceptions, too. I may wish FEB Pacific was more complementarian than it is, but it would be dishonest to tar them as theological and cultural progressives when it seems like their belief and practice hasn’t changed since the early 2000s.

I personally was quite surprised to find out about the history and the current practice of the Pacific region when I worked on editing the updated Fellowship History book in 2022 and 2023. I had assumed that the Fellowship was more thoroughly complementarian than it is in reality. I think many ordinary pastors are likewise surprised, and a little shocked, to learn this.

In hindsight, it looks to me like the Pacific decision in 2005, and National’s decision not to make a further issue of it, was the establishment of an uneasy truce. I can imagine that, after so much back and forth debate over a number of years, it was felt that it would be better to get back to a more positive emphasis on health and growth. Did some good come out of this uneasy truce? Of course. But it left the heart of the matter unresolved. Ultimately, it was not a sustainable state of affairs. The current hubbub is, I think, the inevitable consequence of not dealing with this more thoroughly. I say this not to fault those who made such decisions at the time.

Concluding Thoughts

If I had to guess, my sense is that the inevitable result, no matter how it plays out, will be a sizable exodus of Pacific churches. I think the Fellowship is, on the whole, firmly complementarian, and uninterested in blurring that line by having women serve as pastors and elders in our churches (although I could be wrong on that). So from my perspective, the question is how do we get to a point of charitable clarity to settle this question once and for all, in such a way that we won’t need to relitigate this next year (or in 20 years) but also without an acrimonious split that does injury to our precious unity and history.

Will the proposed motion accomplish this? Knowing the history, I just can’t see that it would. I can understand why my fellow complementarians are animated by this issue and why, given the short span of time they’ve been afforded to understand, discuss, and decide, they would opt to support this motion to elevate the 1997 Position Paper to a binding Policy. But I remind you: We already have arguably stronger language in the existing bylaws, and it has not been enough to settle this issue. Clearly we need something else. I fear that a successful motion, followed by a chaotic aftermath where the implications are not clear, will lead to a worst state of affairs, angry words, rash decisions, and injury to the body of Christ.

And that brings me to the process that Fellowship National has proposed: 2-3 year process (I would like to see it firmly settled in 2) to hear from churches and come to a place of clarity on what is permissible or not in the Fellowship. Here is what was communicated about this in an Oct 7, 2025 letter:

  • National Council would encourage MEMBER churches to task National Council to steward a two to three-year process to bring congruence between the bylaws and our newly revised Affirmation of Faith if passed. However, this motion to make the 1997 Position Statement a Policy Statement was brought forward by 29 MEMBER churches. The signatory churches were asked on two separate occasions to consider not bringing their motion forward and allow National Council to steward a two to three-year process. These requests were denied.
  • National Council remains convinced that before our churches decide on anything becoming a binding document and test of fellowship, a prudent and reasonable approach would be a longer process (two to three years) of dialogue, consultation, reflection, and prayer. A vote would happen after our constituency has adequate time to prayerfully consider the issue.

All things being equal, I think this is preferable. Clearly the language of the resulting policy or bylaw would need to be watertight, but without being so broad (like the regional Pacific motion quote earlier) that it would enshrine the most hard-edged interpretation of complementarianism possible, such as removing women from any kind of visible leadership (singing on a worship team, reading Scripture, praying publicly, teaching Sunday School), which indeed is the position of some. That would not represent the Fellowship either. Clearly, the time of the uneasy truce is over. We must settle this once and for all. My encouragement is: let’s do that in a thoughtful way that will honour all those involved, bring down the temperature, and properly set the foundation for healthy, biblical complementarian practice for future generations of Fellowship churches.

Related to all this is the need to rightly assess the seriousness and urgency of this issue. I do not think it is so urgent that it requires a hasty and panicked response, as if the Fellowship were about to fall into liberalism should the motion fail. This is not a situation that calls for a thunderous Luther crying out “Here I stand!” in a moment of glorious faithfulness in the face of error and compromise. Those moments do come, and thank God for the Luther-like lions who preserve the church’s doctrine and witness in those days. But we have seen other situations in the history of Protestantism, evangelicalism, and certainly Baptist history, where what was needed was just a wise sheepdog (to continue the animal metaphors) to guide the flock, but instead, the voice of the lions dominated and led to lamentable division, dissension, and rancor.

A cursory knowledge of church history teaches us that the church has always experienced a tension between the priorities of purity and unity. How to hold those two in healthy tension is not easy, and good, godly Christians can disagree on which one ought to be prioritized in this or that situation. J.I. Packer and Martyn Llyod-Jones famously disagreed on this question with regard to the Anglican Church, as have countless other Christians throughout history. I’ve made my case, but I can understand why some would choose to vote for this motion. It’s a matter of prudential judgment and the weighing of priorities. If nothing else, I hope this has been helpful as you think through this question.

May God bless the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada, for our good and his glory.

Letter to a Brother Stuck in Pornography

The following is a letter I wrote to a brother some years ago. It has been anonymized and lightly edited.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Dear Brother,

You have been on my mind for a few days and so I have been praying for you. What prompted it was that I listened to an interview podcast episode with a pastor who struggled with porn for years while in ministry. It was really amazing, but it made me think of you. You were honest and open enough last year to let me into this area of your life. I don’t take that lightly, and I thank you for taking that important step. But unless there have been developments I don’t know about, it doesn’t seem like there has been much traction or forward progress in this area of your life.

Assuming things are more or less the same as they were when you shared this struggle with us, I have a few things I want to share with you.

            1. I Am Not Better

I write to you as a fellow sin-struggler. I write to you as one who knows what it is like to be stuck in that cycle of sinning, repenting, self-loathing, promising God to do better, and falling again. I write to you as someone who spent years turning to broken cisterns filled with filthy stagnant water over and over. This is the language in Jeremiah 2:13-14 “Be appalled at this, you heavens, and shudder with great horror,” declares the Lord. “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

This was my reality and (if you are still continually turning to pornography and sexual sin) it is yours as well. And with this intake of poison over a long period of time come serious effects and consequences. The most dangerous of them all is blindness. You are deceived, and cannot see, your real and true spiritual state. That is probably why your initial reaction to this letter may be negative. Sin and Satan have got a deep, deep hold on your heart by now. So I have been praying that you will have a few moments of clarity as I share some good but difficult truths with you.

            2. You Can be Free

One of the worst deceptions you are believing is that you are going to be stuck here forever. If I was to boil down the Bible’s teaching on sin to a single truth, it would be: The gospel exists to defeat sin! Really, sin is nothing compared with the power of the gospel when it starts to work in a heart. Jesus came and died and rose again to deal with sin. Not just the guilt of it, but the power and grip of it in your life. Countless thousands have experienced true and lasting and supernatural freedom from the chains and slavery of habitual sin, and you can too. “For if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).

I believe that you have experienced the gift of forgiveness, but it seems to me that you have yet to really experience the joy, happiness, and delight, of walking in the light of the fellowship with God that your forgiveness is meant to lead to. I stress those three words: joy, happiness, delight. Listening to that interview with that pastor, I was reminded in fresh ways of just how delightful Jesus is to our souls compared to everything else we try and find satisfaction in. And it reminded me of how miserable it is to be a slave to sin.

Aren’t you just sick of it?

This misery is what those verses from Jeremiah are about – we compulsively dig our own filthy broken cisterns which end up just holding muddy rain water that tastes good only in the moment, while just behind us there is “the spring of living water” that we have forsaken and which truly satisfies the deepest longings of the soul. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “It would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

            3. Spiritual Power

One of the worst effects of giving in habitually to willful sin (making choices by habit or addiction that you know are sinful), is that it saps you of spiritual power. It is like a cup with a hole in the bottom. You never can stay full even when God’s Spirit moves in you and revives you because “the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh.” Yes – “So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” and “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit” (Gal 5:16, 17, 25). How can I be filled with this Spirit when I am continually grieving it? “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Eph 4:30).

It is one thing if I mistakenly trip my friend. I can honestly apologize and be reconciled easily. The tripping was real but it wasn’t a personal rejection or attack. But it is another thing entirely if I slap my friend across the face and call him a pathetic loser. I cannot so easily apologize and be reconciled, since the sin was so personal. It is like that in our relationship with God too – how can I come to Him for the millionth time about the same sin and say I’m sorry? Am I really? I know I’m just going to do it again. My repentance feels shallow and fake, and perhaps it is. Intimacy with God is therefore impossible, and I would rather not face the pain of that distance, so I numb it with distractions.

In this state, I have almost no spiritual power. How can I genuinely share the hope and joy of the gospel when I am not able to enter into it myself? How can I lovingly rebuke my brother for sin when I am secretly indulging it in my own life? How can I look my son in the eye and promise him that virtue, integrity, honesty, and purity are so much better than vice and sin when I am not walking in those virtues myself? So I stay silent, and the voice of my conscience grows quieter and quieter, and in a thousand little ways I therefore fail to minister to those God has placed around me, and my spiritual impact is reduced to almost nothing. What a victory for Satan! Here is a soldier in God’s army that has been rendered almost completely ineffective. Brother, don’t let this be true of you.

            4. Looking Ahead

I want you to think ahead with me. You have two paths set before you. You will definitely walk down one of these two paths. The first path is the one you’re currently on, and the second is quite different. You’ll have to forgive me for being very blunt here.

Let’s imagine the first. You get this letter, you give it a reading, but things don’t change. You’re middle-aged now, so in just a few years, you’re officially a dirty old man, still looking at pictures of much much younger naked women. Let’s be honest – it’s a pathetic picture of manhood that you would not wish for your sons. Hopefully the perversions of your lust haven’t taken you down any darker paths, but they very likely have since that is the law of diminishing returns.

I know it’s painful but follow this through with me. In a few short years, you are confronted with the devastating reality that you are lusting after women the same age as your daughter (who is by then a young woman). You are confronted with the devastating hypocrisy of your actions. Namely, you want men not to lust after your daughter, not to degrade her and fantasize sexually about her (the very thought of it enrages you – as it should), but you are doing that exact thing to other men’s daughters, some of whom are probably brothers in Christ who are heartbroken about what their daughters have gotten caught up in. What else? Your marriage will certainly not be any better, and you will not be any more satisfied, despite giving away more of yourself. You will continue reaping the fruit of the seeds you’re currently sowing, only with compound interest – the cost will continue to rise and you will continue to be more miserable.

The second path is, as I said, quite different. Maybe, in a sovereign act of divine mercy, as you read this you experience godly grief over your sin – the heinous filthiness of it in the eyes of God, the shame and betrayal of it in the heart of your marriage where you are called to imitate the self-giving and self-sacrificial love of Christ, the pattern of failure to set an example at home and in the church in resisting sin and repenting of it. Maybe God grants you this conviction and grief and a blessed repentance as you turn away from these broken cisterns and back to the spring of living water that is the Living God who redeemed you, who gladly laid down His life for someone like me, and someone like you.

This repentance would lead to a painful confession to your wife – there is no other way. “In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife” (1 Cor 7:4). Your body is not yours alone, so you don’t have the authority before God to keep this from the wife He has given you. Not that you must share every gory detail, but she needs to know the truth. This extremely scary and painful step is the very door through which healing will come into your marriage. Jesus holds out free and full forgiveness, but also a cleansing and purifying that you desperately need. He offers you true joy and satisfaction in place of the fleeting, defiling pleasure of sin.

If you do start walking down this new path, you need to know it will be extremely difficult. There are spiritual, emotional, and physiological realities that will push back hard. But you will not be alone. You have brothers here who are more than willing, more than ready to do battle with you, to be there to lean on when you’re weak, and celebrate every little step forward. In ten years, there is literally no telling where you might be in your walk with God, in your marriage, in your family. You could be reaping the fruit of grace and restoration and undeserved flourishing. By God’s grace that is how I feel today, and no words can describe how meaningful it is.

Make no mistake, you will reap what you sow. You already have been. The brokenness in your marriage is not all your fault, by any means, but it is largely your responsibility (don’t miss the difference). Perhaps you have used the brokenness and pain of your unfulfilling marriage as an excuse for your sin, but your Savior did not wait for you to make the first move – He initiated our incredible salvation while we were still enemies, rejecting and crucifying him. This is the pattern for husbands to follow, as Ephesians 5 makes so clear: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” This is something you can only do by God’s Spirit.

Brother, let’s sow something better from now on, for God’s glory, for your good, and for your joy.

Start by taking a long walk (or drive) and getting it all out with God. Pour out your heart. Allow yourself to get to that lowest place where you’re fully honest with yourself and Him just how messed up you are and how badly you need help. This is humility – God likes it. And devour some Scripture. Read Proverbs 5-7 (you’ll recognize yourself there!). Read Hosea. Read the Gospel of John and encounter again this Jesus who is so amazing. Read Galatians and get clarity on the gospel and walking in the Spirit.

I’m also including a passage from C.S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce where he describes an incredible conversation with a man enslaved by lust.

I’ve shared this with our mutual friend and we are both praying for you. We love you.

Phil

Appendix: From The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis:

I saw coming towards us a Ghost who carried something on his shoulder. Like all the Ghosts, he was unsubstantial, but they differed from one another as smokes differ. Some had been whitish; this one was dark and oily. What sat on his shoulder was a little red lizard, and it was twitching its tail like a whip and whispering things in his ear. As we caught sight of him he turned his head to the reptile with a snarl of impatience. “Shut up, I tell you!” he said. It wagged its tail and continued to whisper to him. He ceased snarling, and presently began to smile. Then be turned and started to limp westward, away from the mountains.

“Off so soon?” said a voice.

The speaker was more or less human in shape but larger than a man, and so bright that I could hardly look at him. His presence smote on my eyes and on my body too (for there was heat coming from him as well as light) like the morning sun at the beginning of a tyrannous summer day.

“Yes. I’m off,” said the Ghost. “Thanks for all your hospitality. But it’s no good, you see. I told this little chap,” (here he indicated the lizard), “that he’d have to be quiet if he came—which he insisted on doing. Of course his stuff won’t do here: I realise that. But he won’t stop. I shall just have to go home.”

‘Would you like me to make him quiet?” said the flaming Spirit—an angel, as I now understood.

“Of course I would,” said the Ghost.

“Then I will kill him,” said the Angel, taking a step forward.

“Oh-ah-look out! You’re burning me. Keep away,” said the Ghost, retreating.

“Don’t you want him killed?”

“You didn’t say anything about killing him at first. I hardly meant to bother you with anything so drastic as that.”

“It’s the only way,” said the Angel, whose burning hands were now very close to the lizard. “Shall I kill it?”

“Well, that’s a further question. I’m quite open to consider it, but it’s a new point, isn’t it? I mean, for the moment I was only thinking about silencing it because up here—well, it’s so damned embarrassing.”

“May I kill it?”

“Well, there’s time to discuss that later.”

“There is no time. May I kill it?”

“Please, I never meant to be such a nuisance. Please—really—don’t bother. Look! It’s gone to sleep of its own accord. I’m sure it’ll be all right now. Thanks ever so much.”

“May I kill it?”

“Honestly, I don’t think there’s the slightest necessity for that. I’m sure I shall be able to keep it in order now. I think the gradual process would be far better than killing it.”

“The gradual process is of no use at all.”

“Don’t you think so? Well, I’ll think over what you’ve said very carefully. I honestly will. In fact I’d let you kill it now, but as a matter of fact I’m not feeling frightfully well today. It would be silly to do it now. I’d need to be in good health for the operation. Some other day, perhaps.”

“There is no other day. All days are present now.”

“Get back! You’re burning me. How can I tell you to kill it? You’d kill me if you did.”

“It is not so.”

“Why, you’re hurting me now.”

“I never said it wouldn’t hurt you. I said it wouldn’t kill you.”

“Oh, I know. You think I’m a coward. But it isn’t that. Really it isn’t. I say! Let me run back by tonight’s bus and get an opinion from my own doctor. I’ll come again the first moment I can.”

“This moment contains all moments.”

“Why are you torturing me? You are jeering at me. How can I let you tear me to pieces? If you wanted to help me, why didn’t you kill the damned thing without asking me—before I knew? It would be all over by now if you had.”

“I cannot kill it against your will. It is impossible. Have I your permission?”

The Angel’s hands were almost closed on the Lizard, but not quite. Then the Lizard began chattering to the Ghost so loud that even I could hear what it was saying.

“Be careful,” it said. “He can do what he says. He can kill me. One fatal word from you and he will! Then you’ll be without me for ever and ever. It’s not natural. How could you live? You’d be only a sort of ghost, not a real man as you are now. He doesn’t understand. He’s only a cold, bloodless abstract thing. It may be natural for him, but it isn’t for us. Yes, yes. I know there are no real pleasures now, only dreams. But aren’t they better than nothing? And I’ll be so good. I admit I’ve sometimes gone too far in the past, but I promise I won’t do it again. I’ll give you nothing but really nice dreams—all sweet and fresh and almost innocent. You might say, quite innocent . . .”

“Have I your permission?” said the Angel to the Ghost.

“I know it will kill me.”

“It won’t. But supposing it did?”

“You’re right. It would be better to be dead than to live with this creature.”

“Then I may?”

“Damn and blast you! Go on can’t you? Get it over. Do what you like,” bellowed the Ghost: but ended, whimpering, “God help me. God help me.”

Next moment the Ghost gave a scream of agony such as I never heard on Earth. The Burning One closed his crimson grip on the reptile: twisted it, while it bit and writhed, and then flung it, broken backed, on the turf.

“Ow! That’s done for me,” gasped the Ghost, reeling backwards.

For a moment I could make out nothing distinctly. Then I saw, between me and the nearest bush, unmistakably solid but growing every moment solider, the upper arm and the shoulder of a man. Then, brighter still and stronger, the legs and hands. The neck and golden head materialized while I watched, and if my attention had not wavered I should have seen the actual completing of a man—an immense man, naked, not much smaller than the Angel. What distracted me was the fact that at the same moment something seemed to be happening to the Lizard. At first I thought the operation had failed. So far from dying, the creature was still struggling and even growing bigger as it struggled. And as it grew it changed. Its hinder parts grew rounder. The tail, still flickering, became a tail of hair that flickered between huge and glossy buttocks. Suddenly I started back, rubbing my eyes. What stood before me was the greatest stallion I have ever seen, silvery white but with mane and tail of gold. It was smooth and shining, rippled with swells of flesh and muscle, whinnying and stamping with its hoofs. At each stamp the land shook and the trees dindled.

The new-made man turned and clapped the new horse’s neck. It nosed his bright body. Horse and master breathed each into the other’s nostrils. The man turned from it, flung himself at the feet of the Burning One, and embraced them. When he rose I thought his face shone with tears, but it may have been only the liquid love and brightness (one cannot distinguish them in that country) which flowed from him. I had not long to think about it. In joyous haste the young man leaped upon the horse’s back. Turning in his seat he waved a farewell, then nudged the stallion with his heels. They were off before I well knew what was happening. There was riding if you like! I came out as quickly as I could from among the bushes to follow them with my eyes; but already they were only like a shooting star far off on the green plain, and soon among the foothills of the mountains. Then, still like a star, I saw them winding up, scaling what seemed impossible steeps, and quicker every moment, till near the dim brow of the landscape, so high that I must strain my neck to see them, they vanished, bright themselves, into the rose-brightness of that everlasting morning.

Re-enchantment and the Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God

The year of our Lord 2023 was the first full year of whatever era comes after the second Elizabethan age, what we might call the long twentieth century. As we turn upon this hinge of history, if you’ll permit me a mechanical metaphor, it feels as though the transmission long left in neutral is grinding its gears and lurching us all forward towards some foreboding edge.

In the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s passing in 2022, I wrote a few words of reflection and poetry. What I tried to express in that piece was the combination of two strong impressions at work in my mind: the decline of our civilization and the hope of renewal. After reading the stimulating but pessimistic Rod Dreher, as well as the piercing but somber insights of Paul Kingsnorth, I feel as though that second element, the hope of renewal, is perhaps more of a distinctly Protestant posture than I had previously realized. Why might that be?

Well, I don’t think it’s terribly complicated. It was the Protestant church which was born in the midst of a bona fide revival as it recovered the glorious gospel which had too long been obscured. For a tiny taste of how that spiritual outpouring was experienced by normal everyday people in medieval Europe at the time of the reformation, see this short clip of pastor Mark Dever holding forth about assurance of salvation. It was the Protestant church which served as the vehicle for the Great Awakening which revitalized not only the church but affected the whole of the British empire (including the American colonies).

This heritage of revival and renewal is part and parcel of evangelical history, it shapes our imagination, and ever directs our hopes and prayers. I’m not at all sure this is true of Roman Catholic or Orthodox believers in the same way.

How fitting then that in the midst of all this talk about re-enchantment and the end of our godless era, it is a Protestant who decides to write a book called “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.” Justin Brierley, the author, is ideally situated to comment on these shifts in public thought as he is perhaps the one person who has moderated the most high-level conversations between Christians and skeptics over the last decade and a half in his role as moderator and host of the UK-based radio show and podcast Unbelievable, as well as The Big Conversation and Re-Enchanting. And also another podcast by the same title as the book. The guy keeps busy.

In contrast to the more pessimistic takes on the decline of culture, which abound for understandable reasons, this book looks at the silver lining which we might characterize as the surprising appeal a number of influential public figures (and regular people like them) have been finding in the claims of Christianity. Brierley argues that this may be the first fruits of a coming harvest, the first wave of a newly rising tide of faith.

The metaphor of the tide is taken from Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach. The key lines are as follows:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Dover Beach (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach)

Brierley opens the book with a stirring reflection on the idea that the powerful pull away from faith that characterized the two hundred years since the Enlightenment is now exhausted, the New Atheists of the 2000s being the last gasp of this spent force. I appreciated the well-researched summary of the New Atheist movement, from its confident rise to its fracturing and dissipation. Its bombastic, overheated rhetoric was matched only by the speed with which it collapsed into infighting and bloviating on Twitter. This dovetails with my own thinking and writing over the last few years, so I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly.

The term that kept coming back to me as I read the book was ‘plausibility structures,’ coined by the sociologist Peter Berger. The idea has a lot of overlap with Taylor’s ‘social imaginary’ in the sense that it tries to capture the intangibles of why certain fashions of thought prevail at certain times. What Brierley describes, through profiles of recent converts like Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw, and Christian-friendly thinkers like Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, and Tom Holland, is a profound shift in our culture’s plausibility structures. Suddenly, it doesn’t feel ridiculous to posit that Christianity might be true. Rather, in an unexpected turn, it is those like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Steven Pinker, still bravely holding the line that Western moral values are self-evident from materialistic premises – despite the incoherence of this view and the rapidly accumulating counter-evidence in the accelerating moral disintegration of our societies – who now seem just a little bit ridiculous.

Time will tell whether Brierley, and I with him, are too optimistic about a turn back towards Christ. One of the interesting aspects of the “surprising rebirth of belief in God” is to note which streams of Christianity these people are being drawn to. There is certainly a draw to Orthodoxy that I never encountered until a few years ago, with the rising popularity of Jonathan Pageau and now Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw. In my own circles I certainly see many people being drawn to faith and baptized into healthy evangelical Protestant churches in a way that wasn’t typical five years ago. As Protestants firmly in the tradition of the great revivals, I think we cannot help thinking in the categories of renewal and longing for the same in our day. How could it be otherwise? The evangelical Protestant heart studies those high points of church history and says, “Lord, do it again.”

This brings me to another point which I have been pondering since Rod Dreher picked up on my psychedelics piece over at Mere Orthodoxy and wrote about it on his Substack. It’s behind a paywall, but Dreher interacted robustly and appreciatively with the claims of the piece before turning to a reflection on his own college LSD experience and the metaphysical questions it brought up for him.

He goes on to clarify what he does and doesn’t mean:

Let me be clear: we are NOT animistic! We do not believe that material things are God. There is an ontological gulf between Creator and Created. Yet we also believe that the divine energies (as distinct from the divine essence) fills all things. It’s like when the sun warms a meadow in the summer, we believe that the energies of the sun penetrate the meadow, and in some sense become part of the meadow’s existence. The lesson for us in this newsletter’s context is that the barrier between matter and spirit is far more porous than most of us moderns think. This is how the cosmos is truly constructed. This was far easier for pre-modern people to perceive; the use of psychedelics is a way to temporarily recover some of that pre-modern perception.

I find this all extremely interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the idea of modern and pre-modern metaphysics. Canadian Baptist theologian Craig Carter, author of the highly regarded ‘Great Tradition’ books, has written very helpfully on his Substack about these different approaches to metaphysics. Here is what he writes in a post called ‘Can Theology Do Without Metaphysics?‘:

The classical metaphysics of premodern Western culture sought to articulate what C. S. Lewis called “the Dao,” that is, the natural law that many cultures have recognized as built in to the fabric of reality. This natural law or wisdom has functioned as the foundation of cultures from Egypt to China to Israel. Positive law is an elaboration of it. Religion reinforces it. Political arrangements are judged by it. Morals are based on it.

After explaining how Plato made the foundational contribution to this project, he argues that “[d]uring the first five centuries of church history, the Platonic tradition was integrated with biblical revelation and the result was the Christian Platonism of Augustine.” He goes on to claim that the medieval synthesis of Aquinas was a high water mark for metaphysics, the undoing of which gave us modernity. After discussing how modernity manifests in three different modern approaches to theology (liberal, fundamentalist, and Barthian), he writes the following conclusion, which I will quote at length:

What can we take away from all of this? It seems to me that three points stand out as most important:

  1. Christian theology is not merely a narrative we tell each other to express our experience of God. Rather, it is a metaphysical description of reality, that is, of God and all things in relation to God. It deals with objective truth, not merely subjective opinion.
  2. Since metaphysical realism is a deduction from biblical revelation and necessary for an adequate statement of Christian orthodoxy, we must go back before the Enlightenment to the period of Protestant scholastic orthodoxy to pick up the thread of the Great Tradition and build further on the foundations of the tradition handed down to us from the church fathers, medieval schoolmen, and Protestant reformers.
  3. Evangelicalism, as the heir of fundamentalism, has failed us and so we need a revival of historic Protestantism. We need “Evangelical Protestantism” not merely “Evangelicalism.”

Theological liberalism, reactionary fundamentalism, and neo-orthodox Barthianism involve various degrees of compromise with modernity. But we should read the signs of the times and conclude that modernity has run its course and is now in the process of self-destruction. Those who marry the spirit of the age will soon find themselves widowed.

We are entering into a period of Ressourcement in which premodern exegesis, doctrine, and metaphysics are being recovered and used to reinvigorate twenty-first [century] theology. The recovery of Christian metaphysics is a massive task that will require the efforts of many historical and systematic theologians in the decades ahead. But it will be worthwhile because ultimately a theology without classical metaphysics can never be classical orthodoxy.

What’s the point of all this? In sum, that there is a core agreement between Dreher, an Orthodox believer and astute observer of culture, and Carter, a Canadian evangelical Protestant like myself, that modern metaphysics is a dead end, and that the future involves a ressourcement or a return to classical (pre-modern) metaphysics, which includes a more enchanted view of the world.

The second thing I find fascinating about the quote above from Dreher is the talk of a porous barrier between matter and spirit:

The lesson for us in this newsletter’s context is that the barrier between matter and spirit is far more porous than most of us moderns think. This is how the cosmos is truly constructed. This was far easier for pre-modern people to perceive; the use of psychedelics is a way to temporarily recover some of that pre-modern perception.

This is very important. I think you will find that many people in our society today are intuiting this porousness in a new way. Not everyone, of course, but there is a sizeable shift. For instance, many have noted that the events of the last three years have awakened them to the reality of evil, even of supernatural evil – Naomi Wolf would be one example of this. We see also the long-ridiculed and suppressed testimonies of those who have had some kind of contact with entities (extra-terrestrial or otherwise) finding unprecedented coverage and attention. We see a fascination with lost ancient civilizations and alternative narratives to the standard historical model teasing at lost high technologies and abilities. We see, as I’ve written about, a renaissance of interest in psychedelics and other ways to achieve altered states of consciousness. In other words, lots of weird stuff.

I recently got my hands on a book of essays by the philosopher Charles Taylor, in which I found the following quote in an essay titled “Disenchantment-Reenchantment”:

But the big change [brought about by disenchantment], which would be hard to undo, is that which has replaced the porous selves of yore with what I would describe as “buffered” selves. Let’s look again at the enchanted world, the world of spirits, demons, moral forces which our predecessors acknowledged. The process of disenchantment is the disappearance of this world, and the substitution of what we live today: a world in which the only locus of thoughts, feelings, and spiritual élan is what we call minds; the only minds in the cosmos are those of humans (grosso modo, with apologies to possible Martians or extraterrestrials); and minds are bounded, so that these thoughts, feelings, and so forth are situated “within” them.

I agree with Taylor that, circa 2011, when this book was released, there seemed to be no chink in the armor of the buffered self. New Atheism was at its height and materialism had the glossy shine of triumphant explanatory power. But today we seem to be entering a different moment, the plausibility structures have shifted, and many today experience a porousness that I think Taylor may find positively medieval, or even pagan.

This is the theme of professor (of religious studies) Diana Pasulka’s recent book, Encounters, which traces the stories of a number of people who experience encounters with… beings, or entities, beyond normal classification. Scratch beneath the surface of people into these fringe topics, and what you find is precisely the opposite of what Taylor asserts about the modern mind: the “only locus of thoughts, feelings, and spiritual élan,” “bounded, so that these thoughts, feelings, and so forth are situated ‘within’ them.” Rather, you find people whose experience is that there are others who can reach into our lives, our homes, and our very minds seemingly at will.

The last thing Dreher turned to is the way in which Orthodoxy, in his view, is uniquely positioned to meet this porous reality:

I believe that Orthodoxy — which is a Way of Life attached to a religious institution — is the best and most complete way to prepare oneself for that encounter [with God]. This is something hard to express to a Western Christian, whose idea of Christianity typically has more to do with propositional thought — with thinking about God, as opposed to experiencing Him.

I’m not sure how to respond to this as a Protestant. In fact, it’s a question I’d like to pose to Mr. Brierley and other evangelicals who are attuned to this whole discussion: How does evangelical Protestantism address this desire for the supernatural to infuse our everyday reality? How can those who are searching for some touch of the transcendent through psychedelics or other pursuits find their true heart’s desire in the form of faith our churches teach?

I think Protestantism can and does meet those desires through, in part, its stream of warm-hearted pietism – the intimacy of a close walk with Christ – but I’m also open to the idea that we have something to learn from the Orthodox in this regard. What would you say?

Whatever the case, we certainly live in interesting days, and my hope and prayer is that by the Father’s good will we might see a glorious outpouring of the Spirit causing a glorious ingathering of souls into the divine enchantment of Christ. Lord, do it again.

Four Lessons from Writing History

“Of making many books there is no end” – Ecclesiastes 12:12

Last week I traveled to Toronto for the annual convention of my denomination, the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada – or The Fellowship for short. It was there that every delegate from around the country received a free copy of the book I’ve been working on for over a year, a revised and expanded second edition of A Glorious Fellowship of Churches, which tells the history of our little denomination. This was a collaborative effort with the esteemed historian Dr. Michael Haykin, our second such partnership. In this post I describe a bit of what that process was like and then reflect on what I took away from the experience.

These things are subjective but I think the new cover is quite nice.

As I’ve mentioned before, this was a special project for me to work on because the first edition, published in 2003, was worked on by my mother, Ginette Cotnoir, who served as the editor of the Fellowship’s magazine: then called The Evangelical Baptist and subsequently rebranded to Thrive. She worked with longtime missionary pastor Ernie Keefe on the chapter dealing with Quebec. For the second edition, updating that chapter to cover the time period from its publication in 2003 to current day (2023) was my main writing assignment. This meant interviews with several key leaders and research through annual reports, books, etc. The chapter was already quite long, so there was quite a bit of tightening up to do to make room for the new content. Then the whole thing needed a careful edit so that the narrative voice of the chapter was consistent and enjoyable to read. The main challenge there was to create a bit of distance between the narrator and the narrative. Mr. Keefe – a good and godly man – was a bit wordy and wrote in a style more reminiscent of a missionary update than a history book.

Beyond the writing, the project required a lot of communication, coordination, and editing. Each chapter needed to be expanded to cover the last twenty years, but aside from one chapter, none of the original authors were available to do the work. So this meant finding someone willing to take on the unenviable task of researching and writing a few thousand words of recent history and trying to meld it smoothly into an existing chapter written by someone else completely – with nothing but a “Thank You” and a free copy of the book to show for it. No wonder we had such a hard time finding willing souls for some of the chapters. But in the end we got contributors lined up and I gave them clear instructions as well as a deadline. All of this started well over a year ago, in August of 2022.

Once I received all the chapter updates, I simply blocked off chunks of time in the evenings and went through all the new text with a fine-toothed comb, and then the entire chapter as a whole. There was also one entirely new chapter, written by Steven Jones, the president of the Fellowship since 2011, which dealt with national ministries and how the head office has morphed and changed over the years. It was a needed addition as the first edition did not really deal with the big picture national issues at all.

The last few weeks were a blur of proofreading, sourcing pictures, and putting the finishing touches on the book. Then off to the printers it went, with no small worry in my mind that they might not actually be ready in time for the convention. I could just imagine showing up there and having to tell everyone it would be a week late. But then an email came in on the Friday, just three days before the opening day. The books had arrived! I slept well that night.

My first glimpse of the physical copies happened as I approached the registration tables to get my lanyard and nametag. Then my name wasn’t in their system, and I had to go to another table. After a few minutes, they printed one up for me, and handed me a tote bag with pamphlets and brochures for the conference, but no book. I pointed a bit sheepishly at the pile of books and asked if I could perhaps have a copy. “Sorry, the book is only for those registered as delegates.”

I was not a delegate that year, so I wasn’t sure what to say. I knew I’d be getting a free copy somehow, but I didn’t really want to plead my case at the busy registration table, so I was about to smile and walk away when my friend spoke up and told them that I had worked on it and pointed out my name on the front cover. How nice to have an advocate. So I got a copy of the book and held it in my hands, a very satisfying moment. It looks and feels great. It’s a bit thicker than we expected, but the font is quite large, with generous margins, and lots of colour pictures throughout. So while it feels a bit thick in the hand, it doesn’t feel dense, and therefore not overly intimidating.

So what did I take away from all this? Let me single out four things:

  1. The Importance of Roots

We all love a good tree analogy, do we not? Trees need strong roots. They cannot grow tall or broad without them. Christians and churches and denominations are similar. If there is a consistent weakness in evangelical Baptist groups, it is historical rootlessness. Many of us simply do not know where we came from. This was certainly the case for me growing up. And although this was probably exacerbated by the unusual context of my upbringing, being a part of a church filled with first-generation Christians coming out of a dead French-Canadian Catholicism, it is still a defining feature of evangelicals more broadly. This explains to some part the exodus from evangelicalism to Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism – three branches of Christianity which emphasize their historical continuity far more than we do.

This was illustrated powerfully by a comment made by Dr. Haykin during a workshop session he gave at the conference. He described how, upon coming to Christ as a young man through the ministry of Stanley Park Baptist Church in Hamilton, he asked his leaders: “Where do Baptists come from?!” But he received no real compelling answer, aside from a suggestion that maybe the folks at Wycliffe College could help him, and that set him on the path to becoming one of the foremost Baptist church historians in the world.

This rootlessness has driven a lot of my own reading and intellectual curiosity over the last two decades. I’ve become convinced that within historic Protestantism, which is in continuity with the best of the ancient and medieval church, we have abundant resources for growing deep, healthy roots. So the problem is not a lack of nutrients but the prevailing alienation from those nutrients and, even worse, an attitude that assumes that the modern church has no need for all that old stuff.

Working on this book reminded me in a fresh way how stabilizing and encouraging it can be to discover one’s roots. The history of the churches that make up the Fellowship in some cases go back to the 18th and 19th centuries. The list of faithful men and women who built and sustained all those churches is long, and we shuffle onto the stage in their wake, holding their props, and seeking to carry on the faithful work they left us. Each new generation receives this legacy from the one before. And that, if it sinks down deep, helps us chart a path that is straight and true.

2. The Nearly-Forgotten Faithful

There are a few names in church history that everybody knows: Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Whitefield, Spurgeon, Billy Graham. We continue to read and write books about them because of their compelling personalities and the momentous nature of their ministries. But for each of us, there is another, closer set of ancestors – locally, regionally, and nationally – who more directly shaped the church family in which we find ourselves. It is good and right for us to make the effort to remember these men and women. Unlike with Luther and Augustine, if we don’t remember them, no one will. As the spiritual descendants of these saints, it is our responsibility to remember them, to rehearse the works God did through them, and to honour their memory. This seems to me to flow naturally out of the repeated chorus we find throughout the Old Testament to remember the works of God in previous generations.

I’m so glad to have been a part of writing a history of The Fellowship, for I think it helps preserve the health and future of that movement of churches. It helps us remember who we are, and what we’re a part of. The narrower scope means that the book won’t sell thousands of copies, that’s true, but I think it has the potential to have a deeper impact on those who are part of The Fellowship as a result of that narrower focus.

3. The Forgotten Faithful

But here is the reality that we all must embrace: the vast majority of God’s people are, in a human sense, utterly forgotten within a short period of time after their death. This was a curious effect of my research and reading. As I came across name after name I had never heard of before, it impressed upon my mind the reality that there was simply no end to the names or the stories. I could never hear all of them, know all of them, or capture them rightly in words. And yet each of them played their parts through prayer and service and teaching and outreach and building and sowing and reaping, no less than anyone else.

Friends, this is going to be case with you and me, almost certainly. Few will make it into whatever history books are written, and that’s okay. As I heard it put many years ago, there will be only one name lifted high in the new heavens and new earth, and it won’t be yours or mine. The sooner we get on board with that, the better.

4. Don’t Live for the Next Achievement

If you had told me three years ago that I would have gotten multiple articles published and edited a couple of books with real publishers I would hardly have believed it was possible. I had wanted to explore the writing and publishing world for years, but never really saw how that could happen. So I find myself both deeply grateful for these opportunities and also sobered by the fact that the buzz I get from every new venture doesn’t last long.

Thankfully, I am not looking to my writing and editing to give my life meaning; it already has that. I get a joy from using my gifts and all the usual human sensations that come with trying your hand at something new and getting positive feedback. And on the flip side, when that new article is submitted to a new outlet or the new book manuscript sits almost finished but unsent to the publisher, there’s a typical insecurity wondering if it’s any good at all. This is par for the course for writers (and a recurring joke – Anne Lamott’s writing is pretty hilarious on this point). I hate to think how neurotic I would be if I was looking to these kinds of achievements to give my life meaning or secure my identity.

Let me close with an application of this truth. It may not be writing in your life, but maybe there’s some next thing that you’re aiming for and investing just a little too much security and joy into. Maybe it’s a new ministry position, a new relationship, a new church, a work promotion, or even a new car. Well, get ready to be disappointed. None of these things can fill our cup to overflowing.

But there is something which can: a living union with the risen Christ through the Holy Spirit; knowing and being known by God our exceeding joy.

(Update: The book is available to purchase via this link: https://www.fellowship.ca/GloriousFellowship70thAnniversaryEdition)

For the Sheer Joy of It

Photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash

This is the reason you shall do it. For it brings you a pleasure which is unalloyed, an unmitigated good. I don’t know what it might be for you, this thing. I can think of a handful of things for me: writing, driving (not commuting), reading a good book, going for a walk with my wife, playing with my kids until the giggles and shrieks mingle, building or fixing something with my son, and so on.

By dint of our individual natures and life experiences we will each have some set of activities which tap into some simple and primal creaturely mirth. My exhortation is: do that. It’s good. Obviously some caveats are in order, such as, don’t sin, since sin by definition does not satisfy nor is it aligned with who we were made to be. But aside from that, there is broad freedom here.

For some, there are kinds of manual work which fall into this category. Probably not shoveling – though who knows? I’m thinking of something a little bit more skilled which passes the time and brings pleasure. The pleasure should not be dependent on the accomplishment of some task or goal. The thing I have in mind is not done for the sake of productivity or efficiency; it is anti-utilitarian. It’s the kind of thing that fills in the open spaces on the hourly planner, which doesn’t really cross any items off any list, but which never feels like wasted time.

In short, it is good to do some things for the sheer joy of it, and not for any other purpose. There is something here which we share with other creatures. While animals are guided largely by instincts, they each have their own personalities and they also engage in playfulness which has no strict Darwinian logic to it, not that I am a Darwinian. Sometimes a dog just wants to run around the yard in big loops as fast as it can. There’s a pleasure inherent to the sensation of motion, balance, and even the aesthetics of a finely executed jump or swoop. See for example how the birds seem to enjoy playing in the wind, for the same reason children and child-hearted adults enjoy holding their hand out the car window on the highway, playing on the flowing air like the aileron of a jet.

If your life is so full of lists and efficiency and every-moment-scheduled activity such that there is no room for these kinds of things, or if the thought of it induces a mix of anxiety and guilt because you’re captive to an inflexible productivity mindset, I shake my finger at you, though in a friendly way.

My friend, we are human beings, not machines. We are mind, body, soul, and spirit, not algorithm, subroutine, and hydraulics. A human life, at a human pace, is one of those universal aspirations of all people everywhere (with varied manifestations of course). The French term, joie de vivre captures something of this essential joy in being. To lose this thing I’m trying to describe in any measure is to slide towards the mechanistic, robotic, slave-like inhumanity. Chesterton makes a related point in his chapter called The Maniac in the book Orthodoxy. Allow me to quote the relevant section:

The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything. The madman would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities. He would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on private property. He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice. If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

I rarely read Chesterton without a smile on. His writing is so colourful, even playful. His mind jumps around between ideas and is always running here and there on the page, the reader at times struggling to keep up. And then at the end of a few paragraphs he puts the finishing touches on some zany idea and it comes into focus for the reader with a shock, like having been led into the Sistine chapel in darkness and then having someone suddenly flip on the lights. (Does the Sistine chapel have artificial lights? My metaphor depends on it.) I remember when I first read this paragraph above, how delighted I was. I had never thought of reason and madness that way before, and it gave me a new and permanent enjoyment of little ’causeless’ and ‘useless’ actions. Children are, of course, the ultimate example of this. They are playfulness incarnate, and have much to teach us in this regard.

G. K. Chesterton, the so-called prince of paradox.

Another fine example comes from the movie Chariots of Fire, where a conflict arises between the gifted runner Eric Liddell and his ministry-focused sister. She thinks he should quit running since it accomplishes nothing for the kingdom, but he sees something in the running that she cannot – some worth that is in and of itself, not dependent on some other measurable accomplishment. “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” But lest this attitude be taken as a being fundamentally at odds with a life lived fully for God’s glory, I want to point out that after his epic performance in the 1924 Olympics, during which his conviction to keep the Sabbath engendered no small amount of publicity, he became a missionary to China where he eventually died at the age of 43, a prisoner in a Japanese internment camp during World War 2. His love, concern, and self-sacrificing generosity towards his fellow inmates left an indelible mark on those who survived.

Eric Liddell

There is an application here for those in demanding and important vocations, perhaps especially ministry, since it concerns eternal things. There is an understandable way of thinking that says something like I can’t possibly read a novel or take up a hobby or learn a new instrument when there are people suffering and I can do something about it. This can work for a while, but I see at least three problems with it. First, this mentality is at odds with the natural rhythms of work and rest that God has designed us for. This attitude leads towards burnout. Second, there is a messiah complex, or the seeds of it, in that approach. Third, a life crammed to the ceiling with work is not a good model for others to emulate. Those in ministry especially are to be ‘an example’ to regular folks. But a life with no margin, no niches carved out for the simple pleasures described above, is not balanced or healthy. This is not to say we should not work hard, put in long hours, or have certain seasons of especially intense exertion. One can do all those things and yet preserve the kind of childlikeness, freedom to rest, and simple pleasures I’ve been trying to describe.

So to return to my opening exhortation: go ahead and do that thing for the sheer joy of it. Who knows? You may even find yourself feeling God’s pleasure in it.

Ministry & Finances – Extra Interview Question with Jeremy Pryor

Earlier this week my interview with Jeremy Pryor was published at TGC. If you haven’t seen that yet, do check it out. As I wrote in my intro to the interview, Jeremy consistently makes me think about things differently and see them from a new angle. Recently he managed to ruin a new kids’ TV show that I thought was pretty good – Bluey. Well, considering many of the alternatives, it still manages to shine, but the issues he raises about its portrayal of fatherhood and motherhood are valid. He offers some further thoughts here. My kids even noticed it: “The dad never goes to work!” While I was charmed at first with the portrayal of a fully engaged father, which is a course-correction of sorts from the absent and disengaged father, and which I try hard to be for my own kids, I also noticed a number of subtle things that didn’t sit quite right. Jeremy merely helped me put words to what those things were.

So back to the interview. At TGC we had a certain word-count that limited us from including the longest interview question and answer from our conversation. I thought I would include it here below. My question was trying to point in one particular direction, but Jeremy took things in a slightly different direction with his answer, and it gave me a lot to think about. Until recently I haven’t ever thought about the categorical difference between working for a wage and owning assets which generate income. But that’s why I read people like Jeremy who force me to examine my own assumptions.

Here is the Q & A, with some further comments afterwards:

Phil: Looking back at the history of evangelical leaders, we see quite a wide range in terms of family life. On one end we might look at John Wesley, who famously did not seem to be a stellar husband; On the other end, we can look at Jonathan Edwards and see not only a vibrant and loving family but a multigenerational family legacy. Pastors and Christian leaders today have a demanding and complex vocation that places unique stresses on their families, and I know most of them want to emulate Edwards here rather than Wesley. What is your advice to them? What do you think ministry minded Christians can miss when it comes to the family?

J.P.: I have a pretty unusual position with regards to this question. One of the things you see with Abraham is that a big part of how a man grows into fatherhood is through facing the multiple challenges of providing for his family. Working to provide for one’s family disciples a man into fatherhood; it’s a really important element. But one of the problems with ministry is that it’s a difficult vocation for that kind of discipleship to take place in appropriate ways. So you have Paul saying in 1 Timothy 3 that the people who should be overseeing the church are essentially the most successful fathers in the city — that’s how I read what he’s saying there.

This is really strange when you think about the challenges of ministry because a lot of times the ministry pathway has not properly discipled men to become the kinds of fathers who know how to manage a complex household. They can tend to live a very atomized life where they have disintegrated their spiritual lives from their ministry lives and their family life. There’s a lot of strangeness that can happen when you’re not working in a more traditional way to provide for your family.

I see it as an alternative pathway or narrative: a ministry narrative. In this narrative the driving concerns are things like what it means to grow a church, or to expand in ministry. Part of the goal of that pathway is freeing up one’s time from having to do the kinds of things that men typically do: pleasing a boss, serving clients, building assets, and doing traditional fatherhood things. In Jewish culture this is very different, and I think maybe this is one of the things we can learn as Christians. For example, most Rabbis have businesses. So I’m drawn much more to a bi-vocational approach.

One of the things I’m very concerned about for every family, whether they work in ministry or not, is what happens to the father when he’s in his 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. This is where I think the wage-earning model breaks down the worst. This is a season of life where you should be dedicated to your grandchildren and available to disciple and lead that growing and expanding household. This requires you to have access to your time in a unique way. But in the way most career paths are designed in our culture, that is the time when you reach your peak earning potential, when work responsibilities are heaviest, and so you have less access to your time. So that’s just one example of where living this disintegrated life, where your source of money is distanced from your household and how it functions, causes problems.

There’s a lot more to be said, but I do believe every family should pursue asset building at a young age, even young ministry families. Build assets. Churches should be assisting people who have a ministry calling to acquire assets and not to be endlessly dependent on the church for their income all the way into their old age. To me that’s bad family design.

It’s important to say as well that there is one group that is totally exempt from this kind of thinking and that is single people who have made a lifelong vow of singleness. I think they represent one of the most untapped resources in the church. Many if not most of the stories in the NT are of single people who are on mission who are “undivided,” as Paul describes it in 1 Corinthians 7. They have particular gifts and they’re an incredible resource to the kingdom. There’s a constant synergy happening between the single missionaries going out in teams and the households supporting them in various cities. You see this throughout the book of Acts and Jesus talks about this specifically as a strategy in Luke 10. This ministry strategy seems to have been almost completely abandoned, and so you have this epidemic of single people living like they’re married and married people that are in ministry living like singles. 

Photo by Skull Kat on Unsplash

This whole issue of the financial viability of entering full-time ministry is increasingly important in our Canadian context. With the price of living increasing year over year, especially near urban centers like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, and the salaries of pastors being very slow to follow, what was already a very dicey prospect is becoming simply untenable. I personally know of multiple ministry families forced to live in small apartments with two or three children long after their age cohort has by and large found semi-detached or detached housing where one can have just a bit more room and a little yard for the kids to run around in.

One such family had a bit of a sweet deal in terms of the rent they were paying for their apartment. Then all of a sudden the owner announced he was selling the place and they would have to move out. There was literally nothing available in their price range, given his salary as an associate pastor. So now they are leaving that city and looking to take up a pastorate where they can afford even basic housing. In a number of these cases the churches themselves are healthy and, as far as I know, not ungenerous. But the economic realities are simply brutal.

My anecdotal observations of ministry families is that more and more of them are adopting the modern two-salary approach where both parents work. While some of this may be preference, it is also increasingly a necessity. As someone who has been considering pastoral work on and off for the last ten years (that’s a story for another day), and who has even gone through one candidating process, I can tell you that it’s really hard to make the numbers work on one salary. In fact, our conclusion was that the math simply didn’t work no matter how we sliced it. And it wasn’t like we had a penchant for expensive dining out or regular tropical vacations that made the math difficult. We stripped that budget down to the bare necessities (as the song goes) and could not find anywhere to rent or any mortgage where we’d have enough left over to live on, as in have basic food to eat, second-hand clothes to wear, and a beater of a car that I keep running through doing my own mechanical work and ordering parts on rockauto.com, which I like to do anyways.

This experience had us wondering just how the heck ministry families are making this gig work. And the answer, for many, is to have both parents working. Another avenue would be to have a generous patron, such as a grandparent who provides housing or some other significant assistance. For families who feel strongly about the wife staying home with the children, or even homeschooling them, is vocational ministry even possible? As I think of the Millennials I know currently in ministry, only two of them among more than a dozen are able to survive on the one income. And in both of those cases, they either got into the housing market before it went crazy or have free housing as part of the position.

See this Facebook post by Paul Carter, as well as the comments, for a sense of how pressing this issue is for the Canadian church. Over the years I’ve often come across the attitude that says something like “keeping the pastor poor will keep him holy.” There are other variations of it: “When I started in ministry I made $200 a month but God always provided.” For which, let me be clear, I certainly praise God. But the premise leads some to say we needn’t worry about paying pastors a fair wage on which they can support a family. Surely God’s past provision does not mean we ought to presume upon it when He has given the church the financial resources to be the vehicle of that provision.

What Jeremy Pryor describes in the answer to my question above is an interesting alternative track. By and large the modern ministry pathway follows something like the Charles Spurgeon trajectory: early identification of spiritual gifts, encouragement to take on roles of spiritual leadership, perhaps some special training like Bible College or Seminary, and then entry into full-time paid ministry in one’s early 20’s, perhaps as an associate or youth pastor, or perhaps as a lead pastor of a smaller church. The trajectory then is increasing responsibility and ministry success with increasing wages over the years. And obviously in many cases this has worked just fine.

But the alternative is interesting to consider as well. We would be mistaken to assume the sequence above is somehow the only Biblical model. A lot of it is cultural and a reflection of the forces at work in our modern society to professionalize every vocation. The bi-vocational model can be controversial. I admit that when I think of it I often picture a man pulled hard in two opposite directions, working two jobs that demand too much time and deliver not much money, so that it ends up being a kind of trap. He can’t focus enough on the ministry to grow it and make it financially viable, nor can he devote enough time to advance in the other job and earn a significantly better wage. But that is just one poor variation of it. I think it would be good if the church at large elevated multiple models providing alternative approaches to how this can be done well.

As the boomer generation retires from church leadership these matters will take on ever-increasing urgency, and I’m thankful for those who are doing their best to raise this issue. We may have to start thinking outside the box, learning from other models and adapting to the needs, while being careful to remain faithful to the clear teaching of Scripture about the qualifications for ministry.

Trees & Flames: Reweaving the Threads

The following is an excerpt from a longer work I’ve been chipping away at for a few months. It’s a mix of storytelling and reflection. My vision for this work is that it would be an ideal companion for sitting quietly and enjoying a half hour of pleasant reading; in a word: enjoyable, thoughtful, at times edifying. If this is something you’d be interested in, let me know in the comments below!

I love trees. They fascinate me, they enchant me. I can stare at a massive tree for a long time, just soaking in the size, solidity, solemnity, and sagacity of that being. I don’t believe trees are conscious like we are, but they do have life as well as a kind of wisdom. They know how to grow, how to find the sun, and how to dig roots down when they feel the wind. Did you know that trees that don’t feel any wind do not put down strong roots? Some researchers found this out when they grew trees inside a completely sealed dome. The trees grew tall but then broke and fell over under their own weight much younger than in the wild. It was discovered that the lack of wind and stress on the body of the tree meant it never put down deep roots. If that’s not a kind of wisdom, I don’t know what is.

A live oak with Spanish moss. Courtesy of David Price, Bok Tower Gardens

My family and I have traveled down to South Carolina a few times near the end of winter to get a jump start on summer. One of my very favorite things about being in the lowcountry (as they call it down there) is the massive live oaks covered in Spanish moss. These behemoth trees have sprawling branches that reach out and up in a way that our trees up here just don’t. It makes for a tree of mesmerizing size and branches with lovely whimsical shapes. The Spanish moss adds a delicate beauty as it hangs down silvery gray from those great limbs, similar to the way freshly fallen snow adorns our northern trees and makes them lovely to behold.

Photo by Ashley Knedler on Unsplash

Despite my romanticism about trees, I accept that they must be cut down for our use; and because of my romanticism, I don’t take that reality lightly. It means something to me when I put those logs of fragrant maple, solid oak, or sinewy ash into the fire. These great trees did something we cannot do: transformed CO2, sunlight, water, and ground nutrients into solid substance (and solid fuel). It’s a kind of alchemy, isn’t it? We let the familiarity of it rob us of the proper wonder. You try to take those ingredients and make something that can hold up a house for 100 years (as the logs in my basement have done) and also keep it warm and cozy.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Modern man is alienated, buffered. In our suits of technology and mass culture we are far removed from the primal realities of the wilderness from which we all came. Our ancestors knew how to make fire, or they died. They knew how to find food, or they died. They also knew the night sky. So much of our modern fiction and storytelling wrestles with this desire to reconnect with that lost world. A part of us admires the man or family who leaves all behind to live in a remote cabin; a part of us envies the blessed simplicity of the castaway’s life. We cope with this in all kinds of ways: We go camping, we put our kids into scouting or other nature programs, we watch Survivor or other similar survival-themed entertainment.

We do need technology to protect us from the elements. Clothing is the first technology; it shows up in chapter 3 of Genesis. It creates a layer of protective distance between our vulnerable bodies and the things which can harm them. Every subsequent technology adds more protection or helps to facilitate survival; but in so doing it further distances us from the raw experience of nature. And so a part of us always longs for those raw unmediated experiences of nature. As a teenager I walked to my local park in the middle of a violent thunderstorm to better see, feel, hear — to experience the raw power of that event. I wanted to feel small. At the ocean I love to feel the big waves crashing onto shore as they push and pull my body. I want to feel a little bit of the incalculable power of the waters.

Let me bring this back to chopping wood. There’s something raw and real about taking a tree, chopping it down, drying it, and then burning it to keep myself and my family from freezing to death during the long harsh winter months. Unlike electric heat, which needs massive infrastructure to produce and then deliver the energy, or heating oil, which is extracted out of some faraway hole in the ground, refined in some dystopian maze of pipes and tanks, and finally delivered to my house by a large truck, the process of producing the wood to run my woodstove doesn’t need to include anyone or anything outside my own property. And my point is that this distinction is significant, and that this is part of the reason why I — and so many others — enjoy chopping wood and heating with it.

Humans have been gathering around fires since beyond the horizon of memory. Warmth and light. Hands outstretched to thaw stiff fingers. How many endless hours did our distant ancestors spend staring silently into the dancing flames? The flickering light and unpredictable leaps and licks of flame casts a spell over us. It is a kind of hypnotism, and we fall into a trance. The conversations that take place at such a time are of a different quality. They are slower, lower in volume, punctuated by longer silences, and more confidential. It is around the fire that the previously untold chapter is revealed, that some hidden pain or secret hope is unveiled. Time passes differently when we gaze into the fire. And unlike time spent gazing at a screen, I have a hard time imagining that time spent staring into the flames was wasted; some good thing is communicated to the soul.

Photo by Vladyslav Cherkasenko on Unsplash

One of my favorite chapters in the whole Bible is John 21, the restoration of Peter. It’s a masterfully human story of failure, dejection, and doubt. Though the prose is sparse, the scene is charged with emotion. Peter, once a self-strong man, is an empty husk, gutted by his own betrayal of Jesus. The way Jesus takes him aside and gently restores him is, for me, one of the most moving episodes of the entire gospels.

But I’m getting distracted. My point is that tucked away in the first half of that chapter is a little detail which takes on a special significance in the context of this discussion. Namely, in this passage we find the only instance in the gospels of Jesus sitting around a fire. Doubtless it was an almost daily reality, given the nomadic nature of his public ministry, but here is the only time we are given a clear glimpse of the scene. We find Christ having kindled a fire on the shore and cooking some fish for breakfast. And it makes me wonder: what did he think when those first few smoky flames were lit?

Did he think back to the first blast of heat and light on that first day of creation? Did he think of the flaming sword in the hand of the cherubim at the entrance of the now-forbidden garden? Or did he think back to an astonished Moses standing before a flaming, burning bush, somehow unconsumed by the One who calls himself a consuming fire? Or how about the pillar of fire that held back the Egyptian army on the shores of the Red Sea? Perhaps for a moment he thought of that memorable day in Babylon when he (surely it was he, the fourth man in the fire?) stood in the midst of the raging fury of the king’s furnace with his three faithful followers, unscathed.

Who knows what he thought. But here was Jesus, the Lord of heaven and earth, making a fire on the quiet morning shores of Galilee, kindling flames that share their essence with every fire which came before, flames which harken back to all those sacred scenes.

Some important thread holds all those moments together in the mind of God, the architect of history. For in reality there are no unsacred places or moments at all – that is an illusion of the unbelieving mind. Meaninglessness itself is an illusion, it is alien to the world as God made it. All of us are somewhere along in the process of learning to see the world rightly, which is to say, shimmering with meaning. And part of that process, it seems to me, is learning to weave back together the separate and disconnected threads of our experience by following the master key of the Scriptures. This is re-enchantment.

So here are the few threads I’m fumbling with at the moment: God describes himself as a consuming fire. He manifests his presence as fire to Moses and the Israelites. And we all experience fire, its radiant light and warmth along with the dangers of burns and destruction. But do we make the link from the flame to the Father?

Do we, as Lewis said, run back up the sunbeam to the sun?

Do we weave back together what our fallen minds have pulled apart?

On Writing

For as long as I can remember, I have loved writing. But I have always resisted the idea that writing might be a part of my identity and calling in life. I’m not sure why. Recently that has been changing.

I realize now that my childhood home was filled with books in a way that was unusual. My parents were often to be seen reading. My older brother Alex quickly became a devoted reader, blasting through stacks of novels. All of this rubbed off on me, and things which I took to be unremarkable I now see as a foreshadowing of things to come.

I remember having two truly excellent English teachers who both left a mark on me. The first was Mr. Wiggins, who taught me in both grade 5 and grade 6. He was an extremely tall man with large glasses. For some reason I don’t remember what his voice sounded like. He was funny. He would write long sentences across the blackboard and then when he got to the end of the space he would continue writing on the walls of the classroom. To a schoolchild, even a hint of playful rebellion in an authority figure like a teacher is delightful. He got ten and eleven-year-olds to learn words like extemporaneous and calamity and vociferous. I ate it all up, the lessons and the assignments.

Once, when we were told to bring something to read quietly in class, I brought one of our treasured Calvin & Hobbes books along with a dictionary for looking up words I didn’t know. Mr. Wiggins was impressed. I still think Calvin & Hobbes is pretty brilliant and a great way to expand one’s vocabulary:

“Pathetic Peripatetics!”
I probably had to look up “transcendental.”

The other excellent English teacher that left a mark on me was a Mr. Bellamy in high school. He also was a popular teacher. He taught us to write. I don’t remember how he did it, but the end result of it was that I very badly wanted to write the most excellent pieces of creative writing in order to impress him. I worked at it diligently over that year and submitted papers I was proud of. As someone who mostly breezed through school, that level of effort was a new experience. He read those papers carefully and handed them back with copious comments and sometimes a personal conversation too. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly how, but I know for a fact that I’m a better writer today for having had Mr. Bellamy as a teacher.

Some years later, and after my spiritual rebirth at the age of 19, I wrote a short reflection on writing. I recently found it tucked away in an old file in my computer backups. I had forgotten I had ever written it, so it felt like I was reading someone else’s words:

What is writing? It is notation. But there is writing and then there is writing. And the latter sparks revolutions, both quiet and cataclysmic. Writing is communication bordering on impartation. It is a medium so broad that the loftiest ideas imaginable have room aplenty to cross the great divide between these independent entities we call minds.

I wonder, I wonder; am I a writer? Oh I can notate just fine, but can I impart? Can I, with the finesse and restraint of an artist, craft and swirl, lift and push, yes and with finality make a collection of words that imparts the ineffable? Can I sow seeds of the good without the soil’s knowledge, at least until after the fact? Can I teach the eye to see, and yes even to love, the beautiful even as it lusts for the profane? Can I in some small way affect that impenetrable centre of being, the heart, with what I can only pray will be a taste, an appetite, yes a hunger, for that essence which is sourced entirely in the threefold Spirit of the I AM?

Can I be a writer? Probably not. But can I write? Well I hope so. 

I think I wrote that in my early 20’s, about 15 years ago. What I like about that reflection above is that it expresses something I still feel deeply, namely that words have this mysterious but undeniable power to nudge us towards virtue or vice, towards God or away from Him.

Despite writing occasionally on this blog and receiving some affirmation here and there, it has only been in this last year that these lingering questions have been answered for me as doors have opened up for writing and editing in a more public way. One of those open doors has been over at TGC Canada, where I’ve been able to write a serious book review, a piece of cultural criticism, and a piece of spiritual reflection. In each case I’ve been blown away by the positive responses.

In addition, I’ve been given opportunities to do some editing by an extremely accomplished author and editor, Dr. Michael A. G. Haykin. Here is the first look at the fruit of that partnership:

Dr. Haykin is very generous with his time and advice, giving me a chance to work in the world of publishing like this. In addition to this volume on John Gill which will be published this year, we are working on two other projects.

This all has seemed too good to be true. It’s almost like I’m a writer!

Well, I guess I am. I’m just going to have to get used to the idea.

_________________________________________________________________________

As I was waiting for the Rogan piece to be published, I was rather nervous. I had worked on it for months. I had really pushed myself to weave together a narrative that was compelling, intellectually stimulating, and edifying. And as such it felt like more of a risk, and like more of my self was wrapped up in it. When it finally came out, the response was a bit overwhelming for an almost-complete novice to the online writing world. Tim Challies linked to it, and then the main TGC USA site featured it in their Around the Web links for a day. Collin Hansen tweeted it out. I got asked to do a radio interview for a Christian station in Pittsburgh.

And all this happened on the week of the 10th anniversary of my mother’s death, in early March. I tried to write about that at the time, but nothing seemed to come together. It was a strange mix, the marking of a sad milestone along with success in the sphere where my mother had the most influence on me. She was a writer and an editor too. And although I don’t remember sitting down with her to get tips on writing and editing, I know I picked up a lot of things along the way.

I noticed how hard she would work at finding just the right word, as evidenced by the scribbled and scratched-out notes covering her text. I saw how she stressed out over the regular column she had to write for the magazine she edited, yet somehow always found something to submit by the deadline.

Looking back now I guess it makes sense I would end up so involved with words. But all along the way I see how people in my life—my parents, teachers, and others—earned themselves an unpayable debt of gratitude by investing in me and giving me opportunities. Ultimately my writing and editing, like every other aspect of a Christian’s life and calling, is a stewardship of what has been given by God, and faithfulness is the call.

I have tried to write well even when only one person would ever read my words. I have tried to think and write well even when the number of readers of this blog was less than ten. In a sense, the numbers truly don’t matter, and until they don’t matter, the writing itself is tainted. That is something else I learned from Bill Watterson: to do a thing for the love of it and no other reason. (I got this from his only public speech). It is analogous to Eric Liddell’s feeling that God was pleased when he ran, for He had made him to run. My own motives are always mixed, but this is the north star I try to orient them by.

The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
    indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.

Psalm 16:6

Reentering the Matrix?

I’m sitting down today to put down some thoughts on my month-long absence from social media. Actually I thought today was the last day of April but—lo and behold!—’tis the first day of May. As I write this then the thought occurs to me: I could go check my Facebook right now! What juicy notifications await! But I will finish writing this first.

The simple conclusion here at month’s end is that the role of technology and social media in my life has been healthier this last month than at any time I can remember. That isn’t to say there isn’t still room for improvement—there is—but it’s been a very significant step in the right direction. As a family we have spent more time together, and I have been more present when present. I’ve also had time to read and write more than usual, although I didn’t have any great outburst of creative productivity. I guess a part of me was hoping I’d wake up two weeks into April and have a brilliant novel or short story just pouring out of me. Alas!

Twitter I did not miss at all. Even with the Elon-buying-Twitter drama playing out in real time, I don’t really feel I missed anything by my absence. The constant screeching of real (and manufactured) outrage, the preening self-righteousness, the craven virtue-signaling, the over-active users who somehow tweet a hundred times a day (but how?!), and the creeping notion that Twitter somehow is or even represents real life—good riddance to it all. The best part of Twitter for me is interacting with people I have some existing connection to and being able to share bits and pieces of my writing. But that was perhaps 10% of my time on there. The rest of it was just a yielding to the power of the algorithm.

The Algorithm knows what we like.

Facebook is a bit more complex. Of course the same addictive neuro-hijinks are at play. The reason people become enslaved to gambling machines is the same reason many of us check Facebook dozens of times a day: the delicious possibility that something amazing might be there the next time. So we need to break that stranglehold with honesty, wisdom, and self-control. The positive side that I do miss is interacting with friends and the genuine exchange of ideas that, despite everything else, does occasionally happen. l do enjoy “thinking out loud” and hearing from people who have something to say. I’m a weird guy who thinks about things most people in my life do not and so Facebook puts me in touch with other folks who are likewise interested.

But is that reason enough to step back onto Facebook?

I’m not sure.

What is clear is that it needs to stay off my phone. The role of the “phone”—a ridiculous misnomer at this point—is a key piece of this whole techno-puzzle. It would be more truthful to name them rightly, for the word “phone” does not even begin to represent honestly the role they have come to play in our lives. And “smartphone” is no better. So what shall we call them? Our glowing rectangles, our pocket super-computers, our handheld digital universe gateways, our AI-powered attention absorbers, our voluntary surveillance devices (too conspiratorial?). A bit of a mouthful, but closer to the truth. I increasingly hear the word devices used. That’s not bad—it trades a sleight-of-hand, as if phoning is what we used our phones for, for ambiguity; a device might be used for anything, as is in fact the case with these.

All this highlights the need for more and better thinking about technology. I’m thankful to be finding that many fine thinkers and writers are answering the call. I’ve written before about many of these, but let me just list them all in one place. Older writers worth revisiting: C.S. Lewis, Neil Postman, Jacques Ellul; contemporary writers who are Christians: Paul Kingsnorth, Andy Crouch, Chris Martin, Samuel D. James, Tony Reinke; and those who are not: Jonathan Haidt, Erik Hoel, Tristan Harris, and many more. Please feel free to comment with a name or two I missed.

My hope is that the collective effect of all these will be to shift the thinking of a critical mass within the church and the culture on these questions. And to correct many parents’ unthinking embrace of every new techno-gizmo for their kids. Indeed there seems to be a shift taking place, as indicated by the springing up of grassroots movements like 1000 Hours Outside (“The entire purpose of 1000 Hours Outside is to attempt to match nature time with screen time“).

As for me, I will not be stepping back into the social-media Matrix like before. I don’t want to. The challenge will be, given my personality and various weaknesses, to dip a toe back in without being pulled in entirely.

“Swim at your own risk.” Spillway from the Monticello Dam in California.

A Christian View on Psychedelics

Just a quick little post to say that my article got published on Rav Arora’s Substack, Noble Truths: Click here to read it. And I hope you will. I consider it a notable act of hospitality on his part to invite me to publicly disagree with him on this important topic and to offer my perspective.

In the process of writing and editing the piece, Rav and I have had two phone conversations as well. He asks a lot of really good and challenging questions, and forces me to think more carefully about my own positions. I appreciate that. The plan is to record a podcast where we revisit these themes and questions together.

I really didn’t plan to think and write so much about psychedelics, and I’m an unlikely candidate for the job, but here we are.

As I mentioned in a recent update post, I’m at T4G this week. We just finished the first day. It’s quite a production, let me tell you. But it’s been tremendous: encouraging, edifying, enjoyable. And the highlights are the random breakfast conversations in the hotel and reconnecting with people I haven’t seen in 10 years as much as the main sessions – which have been excellent. And I haven’t mentioned the singing or the books. Well, I can see why it’s been popular.

There’s been lots of discussion in the panels about the meaning of the current ‘moment’ in reformed evangelicalism, the conference’s role in that, and what comes next. I’ll surely have more thoughts, but for now I’m enjoying taking it all in.