Category: Christian

Anything I write about the Christian faith.

Gay rights led to the trans madness

The other day I was watching a Triggernometry interview with Arielle Scarcella – it was called “Trans ideology is the new homophobia”. One of the things I found fascinating about it was the way that a lesbian woman could be called transphobic, simply because she prefers a “real” woman to a transwoman.

Everyone in the interview agreed that gay rights were a good thing – e.g. the fact that same-sex marriage is a good thing was taken as axiomatic. But there was also a general idea that things had gone ‘too far’, in particular the erasure of biological sex.

What I want to do in this piece is argue that the problems we see today with transgender and the erasure of biological sex actually originate with the gay rights movement. In particular, I think the gay rights movement has a very uncomfortable decision to make over the coming months.

Let me explain.

What is real? Pt 1 – Homosexuality

First things first, let’s think about what constitutes reality. (You may think that’s a silly question, but I like silly questions, and the point of this will become clear in a moment).

A key tenet of the gay rights movement is that reality is defined by our inward desires, not our physical bodies. Scientists have not managed to find a ‘gay gene’, for example – and it’s not because they haven’t been looking! We are complex beings, and there are probably many things which contribute to our sexual preferences. This may explain why, according to some surveys, over half of LGB people identity as bisexual.

The point is that our sexuality is not something which is binary (as in our biological sex); it is often complex, fluid, and depends on one’s own preferences. It may even change day-by-day. Many people experience their sexual attraction as something fixed (e.g. being attracted persistently only to members of the same sex); many people do not.

Why is this significant? When it comes to homosexuality, the key thing is that one’s desires are primary. Your body, in essence, is simply a vehicle for fulfilling your own desires. It doesn’t matter that our bodies are designed for male-female sexual intimacy. That is irrelevant: all that matters is that one’s desire for sexual intimacy with a particular kind of person.

So, inner desire wins out over biological function – you could say, inner desire is constitutive of reality.

You may be able to see where we are going here.

What is real? Pt 2 – Transgender

One of the axioms of the transgender movement has become the quote “gender is between your ears and not between your legs”. This is a product of thinking whereby gender is a social construct: being biologically male or female has very little to do with being a gendered man or woman.

Gender is now essentially how you decide that you want to be. In fact, given the proliferation of gender identities (according to one website there are 68 gender identities including “feminine-of-center”, “third gender”, and “two-spirit”), one could say that gender identity has turned into personal preference on steroids!

But the key thing, once again, is that inner desire is constitutive of reality. One’s desire to be a man or woman (or two-spirit, or whatever it may be) overrides the biological fact of being male or female. Your body is simply a conduit to express whatever you feel inside.

A conflict was inevitable

A conflict was therefore inevitable between gay rights and trans rights. Fundamentally, they both argue that personal preference or desire should take priority over biological reality in some sense. The only difference between them is that gay rights stop with sexual preference, whereas transgender rights cross over into gender identity. But both of them take you away from biological reality. Unfortunately, the way they take you away from biology brings them into conflict: the only question was when, not if, they would conflict.

Answering an objection

One objection which could be raised at this point is that gay rights don’t actually deny the reality of biological sex. This is a point that Arielle Scarcella makes in the interview above – she basically said she wanted a woman, not a transwoman.

I agree that gay rights activists are not denying biology in this respect: they do not deny the reality of biological sex. However, they are denying the reality of biological function at some level – the fact that male and female bodies are obviously designed for sexual intimacy together. Only a man and woman are capable of reproducing – that’s simply a basic biological fact.

All transgender activists are doing is taking their argument one step further. The transgender activists of today would not have been able to get their foot in the door if it hadn’t started with gay rights.

Is there a solution?

Is there a way to square the circle? It looks like the LGBT movement is eating itself, and I can’t see it getting better anytime soon.

I think gay rights activists would like to simply roll back the clock a few years to when we believed in both gay marriage and biological sex. But I believe this is chasing a unicorn: it was always going to be an unstable arrangement which wouldn’t last.

In my opinion, the only way this is going to be resolved is by acknowledging biological reality – it’s the only solid thing which we have to go on. However, that will cut across both transgender and gay rights.

As I said in a previous post, gay marriage ended up effectively denying the biological reality that only a man and a woman can conceive a child together. There is something unique about the relationship between a man and a woman which is written into the fabric of biology, and it is a truth which societies throughout history have acknowledged.

Perhaps the solution is one which is going to be deeply unpopular and unpalatable to our society – to acknowledge that there is something fundamental about biological sex, and that this is applicable to relationships as well as gender.

If you’d like to read a good book about the importance of our bodies from a Christian perspective, check out Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearcey.

June 17, 2022
Abortion is the new slave trade

In a recent article I mentioned abortion as the most egregious example of the barbaric way our society treats children. The other day, I was struck by another angle: abortion could be compared with the transatlantic slave trade. Let me explain.

A question of rights

It seems to me the pro-choice argument largely boils down to a question of rights. In the Roe vs Wade supreme court leak (which I mentioned last time), the biggest pro-choice response was to talk about “rights”. Sometimes you see people say “my body, my choice” – which is the same point, just worded differently. We should have the right to choose.

But rights must be linked with ethics and morality. For example, I don’t have the right to take someone else’s property without their consent. And we are agreed as a society that no-one has the right to murder another human being. Even if they’re really, really annoying!

So, saying that we have the ‘right’ to a particular course of action is neither here nor there, if the action itself is immoral.

A right to … own slaves?

A couple of hundred years ago, I can imagine someone making almost exactly the same argument about slaves. “It’s my right to own slaves… my property, my choice!”

“It’s my right to own slaves… my property, my choice!”

And, legally speaking, they were correct. A man did have a right to own slaves, you can’t deny it. The question is not whether he had the legal right, but whether it was actually a human right. Fortunately, we came to realise as a society – with great help from the work of Christians such as William Wilberforce and John Newton, amongst others – that slavery was wrong, and abolished it.

Some people would argue that abortion is a human right – not simply a legal one. There’s a case that needs to be answered. To help us, let’s look into some of the other arguments that people used to keep slaves.

Arguments for slavery … and abortion?

These arguments are all found on the BBC Ethics page for slavery. As they say at the beginning:

A number of arguments have been put forward to try and justify slavery. None of them would find much favour today, but at various times in history many people found some of these arguments entirely reasonable.

“At various times in history many people found some of these arguments entirely reasonable” – never a truer word was spoken! People were very very keen to defend their rights when it came to owning slaves, but we need to consider the arguments that they used. Likewise, some people are very keen to defend their abortion rights, but we need to consider their arguments carefully.

Are some of the pro-slavery arguments that were used centuries ago anything like the pro-abortion arguments used today? I think so.

“Slaves are inferior beings”

Source

It’s almost impossible now to imagine that people used to think this: the idea that some races or people groups are inferior is anathema to the modern Western world. And yet, this is exactly what people used to argue. A few years ago, someone I was debating with on Twitter was shocked to discover that science had once been used to justify racism. But it’s undeniable!

There is a parallel with today’s thinking about abortion: people agree that a foetus is a human being, but an inferior being – a less-developed being – so it is not worthy of human rights. People once claimed that “blacks” were inferior to “whites” because they were less evolved – and therefore not worthy of treating with equal dignity. People now claim that foetuses are less developed human beings, therefore not worthy of treating with equal dignity.

But the problem with both is – where do you draw the line?

Where, exactly, is the line between a human being and … NOT a human being? How do you draw the line between blacks and whites? How do you draw a line between an embryo and a newborn baby? In fact, you may be aware that some philosophers such as Peter Singer argue for post-birth abortion – it has even been defended in the BMJ, which I wrote about ten years ago.

Do you draw the line in terms of self-awareness? But then what about someone with severe disabilities who never develops? Are they only worthy of life once they are born? Any attempt to divide “this side” as human and “that side” as not human is doomed to fail. That’s because eighteenth century slaves, and modern-day foetuses, are human – just as human as you and I.

If we don’t defend all human life as sacred and worthy of protection, then any line we draw is just a line in the sand. It doesn’t have any scientific or logical basis.

If we don’t defend all human life as sacred and worthy of protection, then any line we draw is just a line in the sand.

“Slavery is acceptable in this culture”

This is an argument from the way that things are, and it’s not a very good one! All sorts of things have been acceptable throughout history in our culture, and that doesn’t mean they’re right. As the BBC themselves point out:

if ethics is a matter of public opinion (Cultural Ethical Relativism) then some would say that slavery was ethically OK in those societies where it was the cultural norm.

Abortion and slavery are ethical issues which should be argued on those grounds – not on the basis of whether they’re legal or acceptable or not!

“Living in slavery is better than starving to death”

When it comes to abortion, you sometimes hear the argument that it would be better for a baby to be aborted early than born into a home where it was unwanted and unloved. It’s very sad when a child is born in those circumstances, but there are many who could testify to the fact that they would rather be here and around to contribute to society! Even though their start in life wasn’t ideal, they now enjoy life.

As the BBC ethics page points out:

While slavery may be the least bad option for an individual, this doesn’t justify slavery, but indicates that action should be taken to provide other better options to individuals.

If a child is going to be unwanted, the solution is to provide better options – not to kill the child. Pro-life activists are often accused of only caring about abortion and not caring for children, which I think at points has been a valid criticism. If we as a society say that abortion is wrong, we must do all we can to ensure that every child has a safe and secure upbringing.

There are many ways of doing that – I think one such way would be to do more to promote marriage. But we could get into that another time.

History repeating itself

The more I think about the slave trade and its parallels with abortion today, the more I think history is repeating itself. The abortion industry today has many powerful advocates in government and in the media. It is clear there is a lot of money involved – abortion providers don’t work purely out of the goodness of their hearts!

It was the same back in the days of the slave trade: powerful and rich people kept the industry going, because it made them lots of money. And yet, it was ended.

My sincere hope is that, one day, as a society, we will look back at abortion with the same horror that we look back at the slave trade today. In my view, abortion is not a complex ethical issue, it’s about as black and white as you can get: killing a human life is simply wrong. (This is not to say there are other problems e.g. the case of ectopic pregnancies and so on – but those are complex ethical issues on their own and account for a tiny number of the 200,000+ abortions per year in the UK).

As Martin Luther King once said in his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech:

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

All men were guaranteed a right to life. It would be wonderful if we as a society could recognise that all human beings – yes, unborn as well as fully grown – had the same right to life.

May 18, 2022
The barbaric way we treat children will be the undoing of the West
“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If this is true, then we must live in a barbaric society: it struck me forcefully yesterday that our society routinely throws children under a bus.

Consider:
- Young people and especially children have suffered the most from the covid-19 lockdowns, despite the fact that they were the least at-risk group. They have been sacrificed to protect adults. (See the UsForThem campaign, especially the book The Children’s Inquiry which is due to be published next month).
- In addition, children have been given the vaccine (this last few weeks for children aged 5-11), despite the fact that there are serious concerns about the vaccine rollout.
- Children are being increasingly exposed to transgender ideology in schools and elsewhere – I just watched an interview with James Esses where he talks about his concerns. You could add to this the way that children are being used as pawns in the culture wars – where children are being taught Critical Race Theory and the like.
- As more and more families break down and people are not getting married, children are often the worst hit – “Family breakdown is the single biggest predictor of internalised and externalised problems for boys and girls.”
- The most egregious of all, abortion – more and more babies are being killed in the womb before they even have a chance at life. 2020 saw the highest number of abortions ever – 209,917. It’s almost beyond belief.
I’ve been wondering whether that final point – abortion – is the one which underpins the rest.

Abortion and our self-obsessed society

What I simply can’t work out about the “pro-choice” party is the way that people treat it with an almost religious zeal. When section 8 was repealed in Ireland back in 2018, there was literally dancing in the streets.

To my mind it looked like a scene from the end of World War II!

Why? Why the unfettered joy that a woman might have the ‘right’ to remove some unwanted “pregnancy tissue”?

Earlier on today I was watching some of the reactions to the news that Roe vs Wade might be overturned (more on that in a minute). One of the things that was striking to me was how many people saw it as simply a matter of rights.

There’s no complex ethical debate about what’s best. There’s no dilemma about whether a foetus is a unique human being which has its own rights. I’m not trying to paper over the fact that there are complexities and shades of grey. Some dear friends had to go through an ectopic pregnancy a few years ago – I understand some of the nuances involved. But this is exactly my point: for the “pro-choice” side, there is no need for nuance or debate.

All they care about – or at least, the ones who are making the most noise on Twitter – is rights. The right to decide what to do with our own bodies; the right to have sex with whoever we want without consequences; the right to choose; the right to live according to our own rules. Who cares about the complexes of ethical debate when there are rights at stake?

And that seems to be symbolic of the kind of society we have become: we demand our own rights, in the process stamping all over the weakest and most vulnerable in our society – the unborn. We sacrifice children to our gods. Of course, we don’t call them “gods”, but effectively I think that’s what these rights have become. Particularly the “right” to have sex without fear of the consequences – the fruits of the sexual revolution.

This is in complete contrast to the way that God has given for us to live. The Bible often uses looking after “orphans and widows” as a shorthand for doing the morally right thing: protecting the weak and vulnerable is close to God’s heart.

Abortion is a symbol of our society now: self-obsessed, narcissistic, willing to kill even the weakest and most vulnerable to preserve our own autonomy.

Abortion and God’s judgement

Our society is not the first to sacrifice children to its gods. A brief glance down at the Child Sacrifice entry on Wikipedia shows several times in the past where civilisations have practiced it.

The Bible condemns child sacrifice in strong terms. Let me quote just one example, from Psalm 106:

They sacrificed their sons
    and their daughters to false gods.
They shed innocent blood,
    the blood of their sons and daughters,
whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan,
    and the land was desecrated by their blood.
Therefore the Lord was angry with his people
    and abhorred his inheritance.
He gave them into the hands of the nations,
    and their foes ruled over them.
Their enemies oppressed them
    and subjected them to their power.
Psalm 106:37-38; 40-42

This Psalm is a sort of retrospective, looking back at the sins of Israel to lead them where they were. The sacrifice of children to false gods comes as a climax. It’s interesting that it says “the land was desecrated by their blood”. Shedding innocent blood, and particularly children’s blood, has an effect wider than simply the individual concerned. It has an effect on the whole land.

And then we come to the second paragraph I quoted – starting with that key word: “Therefore”. Because of what precedes, “The Lord was angry with his people”. The Lord did not take kindly to a society which shed innocent blood – in fact, it invoked his wrath and judgement.

I believe this is what we are seeing today: a narcissistic society, where people put themselves first over the rights of children, is a society that is under God’s curse. I believe that the problems we see in society today – the way that as a society we seem to be disintegrating – are a judgement from God for abandoning him.

This is not to say that I think you can draw a straight line from one thing to the other, but rather a society which habitually sacrifices children for its gods is a society that is destined for judgement. It was inevitable that a land which killed children would invite God’s judgement. We have sown the wind, and reaped the whirlwind.

The only way back

There is a way back, but it’s not a way which we are keen to consider. This is what it says in 2 Chronicles 7:13-14:

‘When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

If we humble ourselves, seek the Lord, and repent – he will hear, and will bring healing to our land. This is the way; this has always been the way. This is the heart of the message that Jesus came to proclaim – “repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Luke 24:47).

This is why I think the Roe vs Wade news is fascinating: I think covid has brought things to a head – children have been treated so badly over the last couple of years, people have really started to notice. At the same time, there is now a glimmer of hope that things could change. Just because abortion has been legal for years doesn’t mean it always has to be the case. Things can change for the better as well as for worse.

I believe that we stand now at a crossroads as a society – will we choose the road of protecting our own rights at the expense of the most vulnerable, and stand to be wiped out, or will we return to God and his ways?
May 3, 2022
John Stott on speaking out about contemporary issues

Over the Christmas period, I read John Stott’s book I believe in Preaching. The book may be 40 years old, but I found it immensely helpful, encouraging, as well as challenging. One chapter in particular stood out for me as being especially helpful, which is called ‘Preaching as Bridge-Building’. This chapter is all about how preachers must build bridges from the Bible to what’s going on in the world today. It’s not enough simply to “preach the Bible”, but we must apply the Bible to what is going on in people’s lives today.

What really spoke to me was how the book spoke into the current situation about the coronavirus and lockdown. If you’ve been around for a while, you will know that I have been a very vocal critic of the church’s non-response to the lockdowns. I have found it baffling why churches have not seriously grappled with questions of government, freedom, public health, truth, censorship, and so on. These are big issues which people are wrestling with, and yet many churches have left these issues unaddressed.

It was into this context that I found John Stott’s wisdom immensely helpful. Let me quote you a few parts of the bridge building chapter which I think are particularly relevant.

The ultimate relevance of Christ

It should be plain from these quotations that the One we preach is not Christ-in-a-vacuum, nor a mystical Christ unrelated to the real world, nor even only the Jesus of ancient history, but rather the contemporary Christ who once lived and died, and now lives to meet human need in all its variety today. To encounter Christ is to touch reality and experience transcendence. He gives us a sense of self-worth or personal significance, because he assures us of God’s love for us. He sets us free from guilt because he died for us, from the prison of our own self-centredness by the power of his resurrection, and from paralyzing fear because he reigns, all the principalities and powers of evil having been put under his feet.

This paragraph is wonderful. “To encounter Christ is to touch reality and experience transcendence” – I love that phrase. It made me think of another book I’ve read recently – Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto. Schaeffer says that Christianity is not simply true but it is the truth. There’s a subtle but important distinction: Jesus is the rock on which all truth is built. There is no truth in the world apart from God’s truth.

The upshot of this is that Jesus is relevant to every single situation. There is no issue in the world about which Jesus is indifferent. Nothing is too big or too small.

I wonder sometimes whether we as a church have made Jesus too small. J.B. Phillips famously wrote a book called Your God is Too Small, and I think that’s still true today. We have made God too small, we have relegated the gospel to personal morality and made it unable to speak into bigger issues going on in the world today.

Christ and social issues

Christ is not just relevant to our own personal morality, but to the bigger questions of States and governments:

The question of the Christian attitude to the evil-doer and the enemy cannot be confined to the realm of personal ethics either. It immediately raises questions about the state and its officers (legislators, policemen, judges).

As soon as you start talking about right and wrong, you have to move beyond the individual to a society: societies have a concept of right and wrong as well! For example, when the Same-Sex Marriage bill was moving through parliament, a lot of churches stood against it and got involved. Churches saw that marriage was not a purely private thing but had implications for the whole of society.

We also have a responsibility to stand up in situations of injustice:

[These issues] press upon us from every side – human oppression and the cry for liberation; poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease … civil rights and civil liberties, dehumanization by the technocracy and the bureaucracy…
These are the questions which fill our newspapers and which thoughtful university students debate all day and all night. How then can we ban them from the pulpit? If we do so, in order to concentrate exclusively on ‘spiritual’ topics, we perpetuate the disastrous separation of the sacred from the secular (implying that these are distinct spheres and that God is concerned only for the one and not for the other); we divorce Christian faith from Christian life; we encourage a pietistic Christian withdrawal from the real world; we justify Marx’s well-known criticism that religion is an opiate which drugs people into acquiescing in the status quo; and we confirm non-Christians in their sneaking suspicion that Christianity is irrelevant. All this is too high a price to pay for our irresponsibility.

Stott argues here that Christians cannot simply avoid speaking about issues of justice – such as ‘civil liberties’ and ‘technocracy’ – two issues which have been very much at the forefront over the last couple of years. (For example, see what I’ve written about freedom and technocracy). He argues that we must oppose dehumanization wherever we find it:

This respect for human beings as Godlike beings is fundamental according to the Bible to our attitude to them. It moves us to oppose everything which dehumanizes human beings, and to support everything which makes them more human.

That which dehumanizes human beings is offensive to God. Of course, the gospel is the most humanizing thing, and we must make a priority of proclaiming it. But it is also right to speak against that which is offensive to God.

Speaking against the government

From the very earliest days of the church, Christians have stood up against the government:

They [the apostles in Acts 17] were proclaiming the supreme kingship of of Jesus, and this necessarily meant denying to Caesar that which he coveted most, namely the absolute homage of his subjects, even their worship. It meant, further, that King Jesus had a community of subjects who looked to him for directions about their values, standards and lifestyle; who knew they had a responsibility to be the world’s salt and light; and who were prepared, whenever there was a collision between the two communities and their two value-systems, to defy Caesar and follow Christ, even at the cost of their lives.

Christians have always acknowledged that there is a Lord above any earthly lord, to whom belongs our ultimate allegiance. Saying ‘Jesus is Lord’ is a deeply political statement, because it says that any earthly government is not the ultimate power. In fact, in those days, you were required to say ‘Caesar is Lord’ – so the apostles were in fact making a very charged political statement!

As Christians we must always be prepared to say when we think the government have got it wrong or when they are over-reaching. We must grapple with a Christian understanding of government. Too often over the last couple of years, Christian leaders have gone to Romans 13 (which talks about obeying the secular authorities) without thinking through what the rest of the Bible says about the secular authorities.

Saying nothing is saying something

It is not possible to say nothing about contemporary issues.

What is certain is that the pulpit has political influence, even if nothing remotely connected with politics is ever uttered from it. For then the preacher’s silence endorses the contemporary socio-political conditions, and instead of helping to change society and make it more pleasing to God, the pulpit becomes a mirror which reflects contemporary society, and the Church conforms to the world. The neutrality of the pulpit is impossible. [My emphasis]

If we do not speak up about issues which people are talking about, then the church will simply go along with whatever the world is saying. People learn their values these days from all sorts of sources – school and university, the media, social media, and so on. The world is constantly preaching its values to us. We as Christians must be prepared to speak up about where the world’s values contrast with the church’s values – even if that means confronting deeply held views in society.

Stott goes on to talk about why we need to say something about issues which people are thinking about today:

This attitude [not speaking out] is understandable, but irresponsible. Christian people are crying out for guidance in these areas. They want to be helped to think about them as Christians. Shall we abandon them to swim in these deep waters alone? This is the way of the coward.

To avoid and duck issues which people are asking serious questions about is cowardly (if understandable). Over the last couple of years I think many people have been asking serious questions about the lockdowns: are they proportional and right? Are human relationships dispensable? Is online church really church? Should a government have this kind of power? All these questions are questions which the Bible can shed lots of light on – but unfortunately many churches have avoided them.

Developing a Christian mind

One of the biggest things we need to do as a church is to develop a Christian mind. A Christian mind is “not a mind which is thinking about specifically Christian or even religious topics, but a mind which is thinking about everything, however apparently ‘secular’, and doing so ‘Christianly’ or within a Christian frame of reference.” A Christian mind is a way of thinking about the world, a way of developing a distinctly Christian perspective on everything going on.

Stott quotes a book by Harry Blamires called The Christian Mind:

Mr. Blamires bemoans the almost total loss of a Christian mind among Church leaders today: ‘The Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history … As a thinking being the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization.’

Bear in mind that Stott’s book was published in 1981! If this was true of 1981, I think it’s even more the case today. Many Christians, even Christian leaders, seem to think in secular categories rather than Christian ones. This is why I think it has seemed so logical and obvious to change almost everything about the church for the purpose of safety. There’s nothing wrong with safety in itself, but it should have a proper place and not an ultimate one. The way that safety has become so important could only happen within a deeply secular culture like ours.

Let me finish with one final quote:

We who are called to be Christian preachers today should do all we can to help the congregation to grow out of dependence on borrowed slogans and ill-considered cliches, and instead to develop their powers of intellectual and moral criticism, that is, their ability to distinguish between truth and error, good and evil. Of course, we should encourage an attitude of humble submission to Scripture, but at the same time make it clear that we claim no infallibility for our interpretations of Scripture. We should urge our hearers to ‘test’ and ‘evaluate’ our teaching. We should welcome questions, not resent them.

Part of the task of a Christian leader is to help people think for themselves, that is, not to simply obey whatever the pastor says but develop a Christian mind to discern the Lord’s will (Ephesians 5:17). We need to educate people in the Christian faith, not simply reset their moral compass every week. I’ve been saying for a while now that we need to do more than ‘preach the Bible’, we need to catechise people. That is – we need to teach them the Christian faith. People have got questions and issues, and what we do is look at the Bible together.

One of the things about the last couple of years which has really got to me is that way that questions and debate have been discouraged, even forbidden (I talked about this a little in my post on truth). This is not the way that the church should be – we should seek to submit everything to Scripture. That is the way that we grow to maturity in Christ, grappling together with the difficult issues in our lives and in the world in the light of Scripture.

January 6, 2022
God does not fall asleep on the job – Revelation 11

In this part of Revelation, the seventh seal, we see “the end” – and we find that God has not been asleep on the job.

September 12, 2021
Responding to “No jab, no job” … in the church?!

Someone asked me how to respond scripturally to a “no jab, no job” policy in an Anglican diocese in Canada. This is my response.

Article: “Why I walked” by Jim Packer

September 10, 2021
A message that can destroy empires – Revelation 10-11

In Revelation 10:1-11:14 we see that the church is given a prophetic witness to the church, a message which has power even over kings and nations. But has it lived up to that calling in the last 18 months?

September 6, 2021
The conservative evangelical obsession with preaching

A few days ago I read an interesting blog post by Sam Allberry called Reigniting Our Churches. There he says:

Many, if not most, of my friends are at churches regarded as being among the best in the country for Bible teaching. But the repeated feedback I keep hearing from so many is that things feel dry. Sermons are warm but predictable. The text is handled faithfully, but there’s often a lack of connection with real life. There’s little sense of spiritual reality. Imagine the White House staffers diligently discussing matters of national policy, all the while not really believing in the power of the President or the Oval Office to enact any real change. I fear many of our churches are starting to resemble this.

It reminded me of a post I wrote a few months ago, What conservative evangelicals get wrong about preaching. That post seemed to touch a nerve, and so has Sam’s article – which I hope is a positive thing. There’s clearly a problem, but the fact that it’s being recognised means it can be addressed.

What I’d like to do in this post is touch on another issue which I think conservative evangelicals often get wrong about preaching. And before we begin – these are mistakes which I, myself, have made. I think my previous post came across as having a dig at conservative evangelicals, which was unintentional. I want to write this as critiquing ‘from within’, as it were, as a critical friend.

So, all that said. This is the problem: I think conservative evangelicals are obsessed with preaching to the exclusion of other important ministries of the Word.

An obsession with preaching

When I started attending a conservative evangelical church (when I was a student), it was very clear to me that the sermon was a big deal. The person who told me about the church sold it to me by saying “When you hear a sermon, you think ‘wow’”. You didn’t have to be around the church for long to realise that sermons were immensely important.

Throughout my time in conservative evangelical circles – first as a layman, and then as an ordained minister – this message has been constantly reinforced. For example, at college we spent a fair bit of time learning ‘homiletics’ (how to preach). Each day in college chapel there would be a sermon, and most days one of us students would preach. The topic of preaching was never far away from our discussion as students, I think it was simply a tacit assumption that being at college was a lot about learning to preach well and effectively.

In the conservative evangelical world – on conferences or online blogs etc – there are a lot of books about preaching. I’ve seen recommended (and bought!) books such as Christopher Ash’s book, The Priority of Preaching, or Tim Keller’s book on Preaching, or Zack Eswine’s book Preaching to a Post-Everything World. But it’s not just books about the task of preaching – there are also commentaries and books to help you preach particular books of the Bible.

One of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical world is the Proclamation Trust. They declare, on the front page of their website, that they serve “the local church by promoting the work of biblical expository preaching in the UK and further afield”. They put on many conferences which are explicitly to do with preaching. A few years ago I attended the Younger Ministers Conference, which was very much focussed on preaching – the afternoon sessions were by Bryan Chappell about application in preaching, and we had small groups focussed on preaching particular books.

In short, you could be forgiven for thinking that preaching was about the ONLY thing conservative evangelicals are interested in!

But here’s the problem. I ask myself: how many books and conferences have I read or been on which are to do with other aspects of Word ministry? For example, how many conservative evangelical books are there to do with pastoral visiting, or counselling, or catechising, or one-to-one work? There are a few, and they are growing (especially thanks to organisations such as Biblical Counselling UK), but I’d say there are not as many as there should be.

A Holistic approach to Word ministry

Gospel ministry should be “pulpit-centered, but not pulpit-restricted”
Peter Adam

I think this is a really helpful quote. Pulpit-centered, but not pulpit-restricted. This captures well the ministry of the Word. In the book of Acts we see the ministry of the Apostles described like this: “Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.” So the Apostles devoted themselves to the ministry of the Word – but sometimes that looked like proclaiming from the pulpit (in the synagogue), and sometimes that looked like teaching in someone’s house. Each was ministry of the Word.

It’s this ‘house to house’ kind of ministry which I think is maybe lacking in conservative evangelical circles. Perhaps it’s because so many conferences, books, etc. emphasize the need for a good preaching ministry, but don’t emphasize the need for Word ministry in other contexts.

So I think the conservative evangelical world has become unbalanced. But what are the effects?

The negative effect of a preaching obsession

Are people really taking it on board?

Richard Baxter

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been re-reading Sinclair Ferguson’s book Some Pastors and Teachers. In the same chapter I quoted in that post, he also quoted from Richard Baxter’s famous work The Reformed Pastor:

For my part, I study to speak as plainly and movingly as I can … and yet I frequently meet with those that have been my hearers eight or ten years, who know not whether Christ be God or man, and wonder when I tell them the history of his birth and life and death, as if they had never heard it before. And of those who know the history of the gospel, how few are there who know the nature of that faith, repentance, and holiness which it requireth, or, at least, who know their own hearts? … I have found by experience, that some ignorant persons, who have been so long unprofitable hearers, have got more knowledge and remorse of conscience in half an hour’s close discourse, than they did from ten years’ public preaching. [My emphasis]

As a preacher, I can sympathise here with Richard Baxter! I can think of times when people have asked me questions about things which I know I’ve preached on recently. I sometimes get the impression with preaching that it goes “in one year and out the other”! Richard Baxter found something similar. But, crucially, he did something about it. Sinclair Ferguson summarises:

It was this discovery that led Baxter to arrange for every family in his parish area to have a catechism. Then, together with his two assistants, he spent two days of each week, from morning until evening, moving from house to house in his parish, teaching, gently quizzing, and with great sensitivity leading people to Christ and to the Scriptures.

Baxter rediscovered the importance of ministry ‘from house to house’. So here’s my question: why is it that modern-day conservative evangelicals seem to have lost touch with this? Why is it that so many of our books and conferences seem to focus around the public ministry of the word, and not about the house-to-house ministry? Why aren’t we having conferences about catechising? I appreciate things have changed a lot since Baxter’s day – but surely the problem remains?

I wonder if a typical conservative evangelical ministry could be made more effective by spending a bit less time on preparing sermons and a bit more time spending time with individuals to disciple them.

Preaching is not an intellectual exercise!

In my previous post about conservative evangelicals and preaching I argued that, in conservative evangelical circles, preaching could become an intellectual pursuit rather than a spiritual one. One of the problems with making preaching the only thing we really talk about is that it puts preaching on a pedestal, where it shouldn’t be.

Preaching is one aspect of the ministry of a pastor-teacher – a very important and fundamental one. But our primary calling is to love: to love God, and to love people – especially the people God has given for us to minister to (e.g., for Anglicans, in our parish). Preaching is an aspect of love – but it mustn’t be divorced from it.

I wonder if the books, the conferences, etc. ultimately send out a message that preaching is a matter of technique: simply get the Biblical theology right, read the right books, have the right small groups – and you’ll become a better preacher. You just need to know a bit more information…

And this is the problem – preaching is primarily a spiritual endeavour. Going back to Sam Allberry’s article we started with, perhaps the problem with preaching that’s dry is that it’s become an intellectual business. Ironically, it could well be the obsession with preaching in conservative evangelical circles which has led to the problem with preaching in conservative evangelical circles!

I wonder whether the best thing we could do would be to start obsessing about God – to focus more on worshipping him, on his goodness to us. Perhaps if we were so full of him and the good news, we’d find our preaching naturally followed suit? “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks”. If our hearts were full of Christ, we would speak about him. Sam’s post was about a book, Truth on Fire, which looks like it might be a good start.

September 5, 2021
What’s worse than lockdown?
Over the last few months I’ve been thinking a lot about the problems of lockdown and its effects. But I believe there was something already going on in our society, the effects of which are (IMO) worse than that of lockdown.

Links
September 3, 2021
A wake up trumpet call! – Revelation 8-9

In this section of Revelation, we look at the seven trumpets. We see that this is a wake-up call, and think about how it might apply to what’s going on at the moment.

August 29, 2021