The idea is fairly simple: healthy churches need healthy leadership, meaningful fellowship, and accountability. We want to help existing churches remain healthy, restore struggling churches to health, and plant new churches.

Here’s why we’re doing it and how we intend to make it work.

Why Another Fellowship of Churches?

Slides 2–4

It’s a fair question. There are already plenty of denominations, presbyteries, associations, and church networks. Why start another one?

East River Church spent several years considering its options after leaving the CREC. What we discovered was that three things made finding a suitable home surprisingly difficult.

First, we have both paedobaptist and credobaptist officers. Most Reformed denominations require their officers to agree on baptism. Joining one would mean asking qualified, faithful men to resign their offices over a disagreement we’ve already learned to live with.

Second, many smaller Reformed denominations and networks are geographically scattered. They might share our theology, but meaningful fellowship becomes difficult when gathering together requires flights and extended travel.

Third, larger denominations often bring significant administrative demands, committee obligations, and internal controversies. We wanted something that would strengthen our local churches rather than consume the time and energy of their pastors.

We couldn’t be the only church facing these difficulties.

What we wanted was accountability, practical help, and close fellowship, with commitments we could reasonably carry.

That’s the need Ohio Valley Mission exists to meet.

Our Mission: Healthy Churches

Slides 5

Our mission has three parts: keeping healthy churches healthy, planting new healthy churches, and restoring unhealthy churches to health.

Much of this work begins with church leadership.

I’ve often said that as the man goes, so goes the household. Something similar can be said about the church: as the board of elders goes, so goes the church.

Healthy churches require healthy, biblical pastors and elders. Consequently, much of our work will focus on assessing, developing, supporting, and strengthening church leadership.

What Ohio Valley Mission Is

Slides 6–10

Ohio Valley Mission is a regional Reformed fellowship of churches.

The distinction between a fellowship and a denomination isn’t always clear, and I’m not especially interested in wrangling over terminology. But there is one important difference between our structure and traditional Presbyterian government.

In a traditional presbytery, ministers hold their membership in the presbytery, which possesses the authority to ordain and defrock them. In Ohio Valley Mission, the churches themselves are the members. We do not possess independent authority to ordain or defrock ministers. Our authority extends to admitting and removing member churches.

We’re also intentionally confessional.

Member churches must subscribe to either the Westminster Standards, in their original or American form, or the Second London Baptist Confession of 1689. Any notable exceptions must be disclosed to the fellowship and communicated to the congregation.

We believe these two confessional traditions share a substantial body of biblical doctrine, even while differing on important matters such as baptism.

We aren’t trying to eliminate those differences. We’re establishing boundaries within which churches can cooperate while maintaining their convictions.

We’re also intentionally regional. Membership is limited to churches in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.

This is not an incidental detail. It’s central to our purpose.

We want pastors who know one another, churches that can readily help one another, and relationships that extend beyond occasional meetings or online conversations. Rather than becoming a nationwide network, we’d prefer to help churches in other regions establish similar fellowships of their own.

Finally, our churches share six commitments: historical biblical Christianity, the centrality of preaching and teaching God’s Word, accessibility to the everyday Christian, addressing contemporary issues, revitalization and church planting, and mutual accountability.

We believe churches should be historically rooted, biblically faithful, understandable to ordinary people, and engaged with the actual challenges of their communities.

Who This Is For

Slide 11

Ohio Valley Mission won’t be for everyone, and that’s fine.

If you’re looking for robust Presbyterian polity, other groups will better serve that purpose. If you’re looking for a recognizable brand or a source of substantial church planting funds, that’s not what we’re building either.

We aren’t trying to meet every need or accommodate every preference. Nor are we particularly interested in competing with other denominations to determine who’s the biggest, most historically authentic, or most impressive.

We have a particular mission with deliberate boundaries.

The right churches for this fellowship will be those that share our commitments, understand our limitations, and genuinely want to work alongside brothers who differ on matters we’ve agreed to allow.

What We Offer: Fraternity, Formation, and Fidelity

Slide 12

We’ve summarized the practical work of Ohio Valley Mission under three headings.

Fraternity. Healthy churches aren’t built alone. We want to cultivate genuine relationships among pastors and elders through regular gatherings, roundtables, pulpit supply, and practical counsel during difficult seasons of ministry.

Formation. Faithful churches need faithful leaders. We’ll help assess prospective pastors, elders, and church planters, provide coaching for men planting or revitalizing churches, and offer ongoing education through the Evergreen Summit and online training.

Fidelity. Churches must remain faithful to Scripture, their confessional commitments, and their own governing documents. We’ll provide counsel and mediation when difficult disputes arise, helping churches preserve their integrity and faithfulness over generations.

Starting Small and Keeping Things Simple

Slides 13–17

One of our guiding principles is to begin with what the business world calls a minimum viable product.

There is a temptation when establishing a new institution to define every detail, construct elaborate systems, and create solutions for problems that haven’t yet arisen.

We’re taking a different approach.

Get the right people in the room, focus on a few things, and do those things very well. The form flows out of that.

Our initial structure is deliberately modest.

A board of up to seven members will coordinate the mission’s work, establish meeting agendas, and conduct initial reviews of membership and mediation requests.

Two standing committees will handle much of the practical work.

The assessment committee will evaluate churches and church planters seeking membership, considering their doctrine, governing documents, leadership, and willingness to cooperate with other churches.

The mediation committee will help resolve serious disputes and investigate claims that a member church has failed to uphold its confessional commitments or governing documents.

That second responsibility deserves some clarification.

Ohio Valley Mission will not function as an appellate court with authority to reverse legitimate decisions made by local churches. Neither will it insert itself into every dispute between church members and their elders.

Churches retain their authority, and anyone requesting outside intervention must first exhaust the remedies available in the local church’s constitution and bylaws.

When intervention is requested, the committee can investigate, report its findings, and recommend corrective measures where necessary.

If a church persistently refuses to uphold its own governing commitments, it can ultimately be removed from the fellowship by a two-thirds vote of the other member churches.

This provides meaningful accountability without transferring the ordinary government of local churches to a distant bureaucracy.

Our voting structure is also simple: one vote per elder, up to a maximum of three votes per church. This encourages a plurality of elders while preventing the largest churches from dominating the fellowship.

Staying Connected and Moving Forward

Slides 18–19

We currently envision two gatherings each year, one in late winter and another in early fall.

We’ll also offer an optional annual conference, the Evergreen Summit, along with online training in areas such as leadership, church government, and conflict resolution. A group chat will help pastors and elders stay connected between gatherings.

Churches interested in membership will enter a candidate phase lasting one year or two gatherings, during which we can get to know one another, review their governing documents, and determine whether there’s a good fit.

We don’t expect to have everything figured out in the first year or two. That’s part of the point.

We’re starting with a clear mission, a workable structure, and the conviction that healthy churches are worth supporting, planting, and preserving.

We believe that a relatively small fellowship of churches, connected by geography, shared convictions, and genuine relationships, can accomplish a great deal without becoming another enormous ecclesiastical institution.

Make Missions Local Again.

Learn more at ohiovalleymission.org.

First, let me give you the premise. Nathan Fielder is a deadpan comic who likes to set up these absurd situations and has had a couple of popular television shows. A couple of years ago, he was contacted by a guy named Billy, who, if I have this straight, is actually married to Elizabeth Holmes.

Elizabeth Holmes, or Liz as they call her in the film, was one of the founders of Theranos, a company that claimed to have developed a device that could run all these health tests with just one drop of blood. The company grew to be worth billions of dollars. Holmes became a superstar because she was a young woman with a strangely deep voice who modeled herself on Steve Jobs.

Problem was, the device couldn’t do what they said it could do. Eventually, she and her business partner and lover, Sunny, were brought up on fraud charges, among other things. After a lengthy court battle, both were found guilty. Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Billy popped into Holmes’ life just as this news was breaking, roughly seven years before the start of the film. They quickly fell in love. They have two kids. And they are working on some new business venture together.

The film picks up 34 days before she goes to prison. Billy’s offer to Nathan Fielder and the film company A24 is that he can, with his crew, actually stay with them and film the last 34 days of Elizabeth’s freedom. The goal, so they claim, is to show Elizabeth for who she really is, help humanize her, and basically rehabilitate her public image.

Believe it or not, it’s hard to say too much about this film without spoiling several wild twists and turns. But I do think I can say it’s basically a game of cat and mouse.

The question being asked is: Is Elizabeth Holmes a full-on liar? For example, she repeatedly claims that she’s not motivated by money and that her device did what she claimed it did. Fielder repeatedly confronts her on this claim, which then makes you ask the question: Is there something innocent or naively broken about Holmes, and has she just been used as a pawn by her lovers, perhaps again? Is there something broken in her form of communication and her ability to understand how she comes across?

That leads to a fascinating scene where Fielder has her watch Abbott and Costello’s famous Who’s on First? bit and asks her, “Why is it funny?” To which she gives a pretty mystifying answer.

And as the story unfolds, the question isn’t just whether it’s a cat-and-mouse game, or who’s the cat and who’s the mouse, but whether these are two cats, and the mouse being played with is Fielder himself.

The reason this film really hit me, besides just being filmed beautifully and having a wild premise, is that it touches on the issue of people being deluded and perhaps lacking self-awareness.

My career, both ministerially and vocationally, has ended up being about dealing with situations that aren’t what they seem to be on the surface. My background includes my early years working in collections and fraud, and dealing with complicated HR issues. As a pastor, I’ve found myself involved in some pretty horrendous abuse cases, three of which eventually involved me working with the police to varying degrees.

In many of these situations, I was dealing with people who had been accused of something that they swore up and down wasn’t true. And my job was, to the best of my ability, to get to the bottom of it and make a decision on how to move forward.

These cases could be disorienting. The number of sweet, innocent-looking people who lie about crazy things in convincing ways and make you feel crazy for questioning the inconsistencies in their stories is legion.

I’ve dealt with people pretending to be dead loved ones for years to take out loans and credit cards in their names. People who falsely accuse others of abuse only to later admit that they did so.

A lot of the people I’ve worked with, I’ve seen grow cynical. And the best way to avoid that, if you work in these fields, is to always remind yourself that you’re kind of like an emergency room doctor dealing with the most intense cases. It’s usually not like this.

However, that brings me to why I’ve been thinking about deluded, lying people. Maybe I’m just getting older and more experienced, but it seems like the number of people who believe crazy things about themselves, things that are at odds with reality in almost every way, is increasing.

And I’ve been pondering: Is this a matter of mental health, where there’s just something wrong with people’s brains? Or is this willful deception?

It’s had me thinking about things like where Paul warns about impostors deceiving and being deceived, and God giving people over to delusions.

And one of my big takeaways is pretty simple: If you engage in lies for long enough, or are allowed to believe lies for long enough, you start to think of them as if they are true, as if they are reality.

Which is why one of the greatest ministries of a parent, a pastor, or someone in some form of leadership is doing the hard work of confronting someone and helping them see the truth about themselves.

Parents who aren’t willing to call out their children are sentencing them to a life of unreality, which will eventually bring them heartache. This actually comes up later in the movie.

There is a fairly understated scene with Elizabeth Holmes’ parents where you can tell that they love their daughter but believe some claims she’s made that they shouldn’t. And now she’s ended up with a man who is a deluded, crazy person, perhaps for the second time.

Anyhow, it’s a really good movie.

I will say that there is a totally unnecessary three- to four-second scene where one of the characters is showering naked and you see everything. It’s not the woman, and it’s not sexual.

And if I had to guess, I would say that scene is left in there to show you the sort of hypocrisy or contradiction of what’s happening in the documentary. In one way, they will let you see everything, even themselves fully nude. But in reality, they’re trying to hide the truth from you, and nothing is as it seems. It’s not a bad metaphor for our age.

In verse 15, Christ says, “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother.” This is the most basic form of church discipline. If someone has sinned against you, Christ commands you to go to him and show him his fault. And if he listens, you have won your brother.

What a wonderful thing it is to win a brother! This is a God-ordained means through which the Spirit is pleased to work. Sometimes all it takes for reconciliation is for a person to point out how he was wronged. It may be that the other person didn’t fully realize it. It may be that humble correction brings him to repentance. Many hard hearts have been cracked wide open through the work of the Holy Spirit.

So just because we think someone might not listen isn’t reason enough to refuse to go. After all, Christ commands us. When we go in obedience to Him, we go relying on His power. This is not merely a natural thing, but a supernatural thing.

But note what Jesus says next in verse 16: “But if he does not listen to you…” Built into this command is the possibility that the first attempt won’t go the way you want it to go. Thinking someone won’t listen isn’t grounds for disobeying Jesus’s command to go to your brother. He has already accounted for that possibility.

As a matter of fact, He doesn’t say, “If he doesn’t listen, oh well. You gave it a good try. You can give up.” Listen to what He says: “But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed.”

The fact that Christ commands a second attempt if the person doesn’t listen underscores the importance of making a first attempt, when he might listen. The second attempt is an escalation. You bring one or two others to help establish the facts and witness the person’s response to correction.

And if he still will not listen, there is a third step: bring the matter before the church. In our Presbyterian understanding, this involves bringing it before the elders who govern the church.

Note that even with this third, serious step, there is still the possibility that it will not lead to the resolution everyone is seeking: repentance and reconciliation. The entire flow of Matthew 18 accounts for the possibility that a person will refuse to hear and continue in stubbornness.

So refusing to follow the first step because you think, “What does it matter? He won’t hear me,” is disobedience to Christ and a failure to understand how He works through church discipline.

It may be that the person’s refusal to listen becomes a further matter requiring discipline. He will not hear the individual, the two or three, or even the church. When the facts have been established and correction is biblical, persistent refusal to hear reveals contempt for the community and its God-ordained authority. That is contentiousness. That is rebellion. And how can you live in Christian community if you refuse to live in subjection to one another and to God-ordained authorities? You cannot.

But the person who rejects biblical correction is not the only one who can be in sin. The person who refuses to take the first step for pragmatic reasons can be in sin as well.

We should follow Matthew 18 because we love Jesus, because Jesus tells us to, and because we trust Him to work through His Word to accomplish His will. Some people may flee discipline. We must not flee the commands of God.

So, brethren, has someone sinned against you? Consider whether you can simply overlook the offense, forgive him, and truly let it go. If you can, wonderful. If you can’t, set up a phone call or a face-to-face meeting this week and deal with it.

Keep short accounts. Do it for your own good. Do it for the individual’s good. But by all means, do it for the glory of God.

Painting: Augustus Edward Mulready

As a first-generation Christian, I think and write a lot about building a Christian household. As a church planter and churchman, I think and write a lot about planting healthy churches and building healthy ecclesiastical organizations. As someone who has been a hiring manager and now heads people and culture at a mid-sized company, I think a lot about hiring and developing employees and maintaining a company culture. My life has been dedicated to building things, usually as the senior leader or part of the leadership team.

While your experience may be different from mine, most of us will eventually find ourselves responsible for building something at some point in our lives. We each have our capacities and opportunities and should seek to make the most of them, whether small or large. My early ministry responsibilities were setting up and tearing down chairs and teaching four-year-olds about Jesus. Never did I imagine I would be where I am. But I digress.

Building and authority are intimately interrelated. Think of Nehemiah. He’s most famous for rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. He was able to accomplish that because God gave him favor with the king, who entrusted him with the authority to get the job done. Right at the beginning of the book, enemies of God challenge whether he actually has that authority because they don’t want to see him successfully strengthen Jerusalem.

These were external enemies: men like Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem. And when we’re building something, these are the threats we tend to think about most. People trying to corrupt your household from outside. Competitors trying to take your business down. Spiritual forces and false teachers trying to pollute and undermine the work of your church. Those are real threats, and we must be aware of them. But I want to talk about an internal threat that every Christian builder should expect to face, especially if he builds well.

I would summarize this threat as those who want the benefits of what’s been built and is being built without any regard for, or submission to, the authority that makes it possible.

A few examples.

A husband and wife are both literally and metaphorically building a Christian household. Under their roof are safety, comfort, and provision. If they’re doing a good job, there is no place like home. Their children have clothes, warm meals, and, in this modern age, all sorts of fun, such as video games and so forth. If Dad is a good head of his household and Mom is a good helper, the home is a place of discipleship and true biblical peace.

Yet many children, especially in their teens, challenge the authority of their mother and father while wanting all the benefits of living under their roof. It is easy to raise entitled kids, especially if you refuse to discipline them in a Hebrews 12 sort of way. If you tolerate their disregard for the God-given authority from which they benefit, they can tear down from the inside what you have built. Instead of the peaceful fruit of righteousness cultivated through discipline, you will experience the chaos of unruly, rebellious children.

The best companies hire, fire, and promote based on core values. They understand that even a wonderful product or service producing healthy profits won’t sustain a business that cannot attract and keep quality people. So you must build an environment where those people want to work: good pay, good benefits, and quality people working alongside them, whether in the office or on the shop floor. You must look for people deeply aligned with your mission and the way you conduct business.

One distinction I’ve used in my years of hiring, including the last 400-plus people I’ve been involved in hiring, is something I think I picked up from recruiters at Amazon. I ask: Is this person more missionary than mercenary?

The missionary cares about the mission of the business. He loves the space it’s in and the work it does. He doesn’t just want to benefit from it; he wants to contribute to it. Working alongside like-minded people doing quality work is something he wants to be part of.

A mercenary, generally speaking, is primarily attracted to the benefits. He may think the mission is nice and be happy to contribute, but his loyalty is pay-to-play. Like a mercenary willing to fight for either side in a war, it comes down to who pays best. Obviously, we all work for pay, and there’s no shame in that. This is just a simple paradigm for considering where a person’s primary motivation rests.

I would argue that our social media environment has trained much of this generation to think almost entirely like mercenaries. People come into a business wanting its benefits while deeply resenting the processes and practices that make those benefits possible. If that mindset isn’t corrected, they will undermine the very culture that produces what they came for.

You see this in churches, too. If the elders and deacons do a good job, the church will form a community of different sorts of people around the Word of God. In hard times, people will have support, whether relational or financial. Their children will have friends. Their wives will have friends. Their souls will be nourished. There are incredible benefits to being part of a healthy church, and people will stay in a church for a long time because of them.

I remember being at a church where a friend disliked the senior pastor. I would say he even despised him. I asked why he stayed, and he said he loved the music, all his friends were there, and so forth. I was quite close with the senior pastor and knew he had been instrumental in making almost all of that possible. That was when I began to understand that people can want the benefits godly authority brings without any submission to it.

Back to Nehemiah. In the first six chapters, he deals repeatedly with external threats. But in chapter 5, you see an internal threat: nobles and officials exploiting their own people through interest and debts that cost families their land and brought their children into servitude. Nehemiah has to confront them.

Then, in chapter 6, you see nobles corresponding with one of the chief external enemies, Tobiah. He had married into a Jewish family, his son had done the same, and many in Judah were bound to him by an oath. By chapter 13, Tobiah, who had opposed the work from outside, has been given a room in the temple courts by Eliashib the priest. Verse 28 also tells us that a grandson of the high priest had married Sanballat’s daughter.

Nehemiah had rebuilt the walls, but his enemies found their way inside through relationships, particularly marriage and family ties. These compromises violated the covenant commitments of chapter 10, including the explicit vow against intermarrying with the surrounding peoples. In chapter 13, Nehemiah confronts these breaches and holds the people to their vows.

The wall addressed an outside problem, but walls can’t keep out what the people inside invite in. Some of the gravest threats to Nehemiah’s work came from compromise within Jerusalem.

So it is with any builder, whether he is building a Christian household, a business, a church, or anything else. The more significant the benefits of what you’ve built, the more important it is that those living under its roof preserve the culture that makes those benefits possible. That will always require some degree of submission to the authority over it.

And as an authority, you must practice godly, benevolent discipline. You’ll have to say no. You’ll have to confront entitlement. If you’re a parent, that may mean one of your teenagers screams that he hates you, that you don’t understand his life, and all the other nonsense foolish kids say. If you’re an employer, you may have to fire a manipulative employee who is at odds with the core values and live with the nasty review he posts on Glassdoor. If you’re a pastor, elder, or deacon, you’ll have to deal with people who claim you’re a tyrant, that you’re power-hungry, or that your church is a cult.

This is the cost of leadership. Sometimes it’s steep. But it is never as steep as the cost of abdicating God-given leadership.

I’ll keep this page updated as I write.

Manhood

• The Church Needs Ambitious Men

• Episode 1 | Holy Ambition

• Are You Serious?

• Responding to a It’s Good to Be a Man Review

• Becoming a Man on Mission

• Nine Principles to Develop a Mission

• Man on a Mission: Physical Fitness

• Little Brother Wars

• Ball-field, Bedroom, and Billfold

• Winning the Battle Against Porn

• A Different Type of Revival

• The Glorious Grind

• Being a Complete Man (1 Kings 19)

• Building Brotherhood

• How Men Destroy Their Households

• Clueless Bastards, Rootless Wanderer

• You Probably Are a Jonathan

• Mature Masculinity

• Offensive Christianity

• Young Kings

• A “Young Kings: A Young Man’s Guide to Dominion” preview

Fatherhood and Family Life

• Father as Emotional Leader

• Daddy is Home

• Smash the Patriarchy

• The Perils of Large Families pt. 1

• How many kids should you have?

• Overcoming the Perils of the Large Family pt. 2

• 50 Actions for Clueless Fathers

• The Wealth of the Generations Part 1

• The Wealth of the Generations Part 2

• The Work of Fatherhood is Its Own Reward

• Having Children, Building a House

• A New Legacy

• When Your Kid is Caught in Porn

• Stop Overthinking It and Just Play With Your Kids

• An Ode to Fatherhood

• Children are a Time Capsule of Your Parenting

• Parenting from Under the Tarp

• Seasons of Fatherhood

• Coca Cola and Comic-Cons

• Seeing My Daughter Before She Grows Up

• Long Days, Short Years

• Foxe and Batman

• The Years You’re Rushing Past Are the Golden Years

• An Ode to Aunts and Uncles

• A Few of the Benefits of Large Families

• Raising Up a Generation of Two-Percenters

• Not One Road for All

• Some Thoughts on Parenting, Part 1: An Approach to Spanking

• Some Thoughts on Parenting, Part 2: The Importance of Story-telling

• Last Things

• Dad, I need you.

• A Day in the Life of the Faithful Christian Household

• The House of Foster Expands

• Little Traditions for Big Families

Dating and Finding a Spouse

• Why women test men

• Thoughts on Dating for 1st Gen Christians

• From Acquaintances to Engaged

• Negative World & the Relationship Marketplace

• Thoughts on Finding a Spouse

• Passing Feminine Social Checks

• Thoughts on Courting and Dating Part 1

• Thoughts on Courting and Dating Part 2

• Practical Wisdom on Pursuing Marriage

• Jack Reacher Won’t Ask Girls to Dance

• How to Avoid the Wrong Woman (and Find the Right One)

• Singleness, Celibacy, and the Crisis of Delay

• The Slow Death of the Well-Suited Couple

• Finding a Spouse in the World We Actually Live In

• Overcoming the Potential Spouse Bottleneck

• Prize, Pursue, or Dance

• Before They Date, Court, or Whatever You Call it

Marriage and Sex

• Premarital Counseling Preparation Questionnaire

• Is Masturbation Sinful?

• A Solution-Based Approach to Couple’s Counseling

• Fornication is a Thief

• How do I get my spouse to change?

• Loving Your Wife as the Weaker Vessel

• The Importance of Mile Markers for a Discouraged Wife

• A Marriage Testimony

• One Flesh, Two Persons

• The Space Between

• Sexual Intimacy and Frequency in Marriage

• A Marriage Like Wine

• Marriage as a Dance

• It’s Good to Be Married

• Puzzles and Marriage

• An Anniversary Reflection

• Keep at it

• The Three Purposes of Marriage

• Shrinking the Woodpile

• Sex Advice for Newlyweds

• A Wife Remembers

• “Just Leave”

• Wife-Led Rhythms in Marriage

• 23 Reflections on Marriage

• Get Legit

Womanhood, Motherhood, and the Home

• The Glorious Work of Home-Making

• Some Thoughts on Modest Dress

• The Cherishing Nurture of a Godly Feminine

• Celebrating Motherhood Once More

• Nine Lessons from Motherhood

• Immoral Women and Discipline

• Should a Woman Work Outside the Home?

• How Women Destroy their Households

• Making the Most of the Titus 2 Women God Puts in Our Lives

• Wife-Led Rhythms in Marriage

• April Heart Check-In for Mamas

• The Rhythm of the Household

• The Rhythm of Spiritual Disciplines

• Destructive Mothering

• The Rhythm of the Lord’s Day

• An Ode to Mothers

• The Rhythm of a Woman’s Life

• Long Dresses, Flowing Hair, and a Brash Attitude

• Dare to Love Women

• Welcome to Eyrie

Men, Women, and Patriarchy

• FAQ on Sexuality & Patriarchy

• The Indisposable Legacy

• A Theology of Attraction (slightly updated)

• The Importance of Sexual Dissimilarity

• The Lie of Sameness

• Biblical Patriarchy vs. Unbiblical Patriarchy

• Polygamy is the Fruit of Chaos

• Egalitarianism and Hyper-patriarchy

• The Normalization of Female Sexual Degeneracy

The Christian Life

• Prayer as Warfare

• Teaching Requires Instruction and Example

• The God Who Doesn’t Coddle

• Joy is an Apologetic

• Driven but Content

• Lord, Make Us Meek

• Stop Whining

• Joy to the World

• Hope Fulfilled

• Principles of Everyday Evangelism

• John Craig and the Providence of God

• Every Action Has a Theology

• That Proud and Tight Jackal

• Who We Once Were

• Promises Kept

• Glorious Providence

• Simeon’s Song

• A Christmas for Every Season

• Why do the wicked prosper?

• Clancy and the Father’s Care

• Bold in Prayer, Bold in Life

• Presuming on the Giver of all Good Gifts

• Water is Thicker Than Blood

Sermons and Bible Studies

Genesis and Job

• Job, the Sons of God, and Giants

• The Judgment of an Apostate World (Gen 6)

• The Sethite View and Jude 1 & 2 Peter 2

Ruth

• Life After Death - Ruth 1

• Fields of Kindness - Ruth 2

1 Samuel

• To Obey Is Better

Psalms

• The Church Attendance Pandemic (Psalm 100)

• The Shepherd’s Song Pt. 1 (Psalm 23)

• The Shepherd’s Song Pt. 2 (Psalm 23)

• The Whole World a Choir

• The King of Glory

• Pulled from the Mud

Proverbs

• How Men Destroy Their Households

• How Women Destroy their Households

• Building a Good Name

Haggai

• God-Centered Localism (Haggai 1)

• God-Centered Localism Pt 2 (Haggai 2)

Nahum

• The Comfort of Wrath (Nahum 1)

• God of War (Nahum 2)

• The Doom of Degenerate Nations (Nahum 3)

The Sermon on the Mount

• Sermon of the King

• The Storms will Come

Philippians

• A Cause for Joy, Philippians 1:1-8

• The Apostle’s Prayer, Philippians 1:9-11

• The Unchained Gospel, Philippians 1:12-20

• To Live is Christ, Philippians 1:21-26

• Dual Citizenship, Philippians 1:27-30

• The Church United, Philippians 2:1-3

Colossians: Put Off, Put On

• Put Off, Put On: Part One: Sanctification for Ordinary Saints

• Put Off, Put On: Part Two: Confessional Roots in a Confused Age

• Put Off, Put On: Part Three: The Steady Joy of a Thankful Christian

Titus 2: Christ for the Generations

• Christ for the Generations, Part One: Godly Older Men

• Christ for the Generations, Part Two: Godly Older Women

• Christ for the Generations, Part Three: Godly Younger Women

• Christ for the Generations, Part Four: Godly Younger Men

Theology, the Catechism, and the Sacraments

• Cremation vs. Burial

• Our Practice of the Lord’s Supper

• “Fencing” the Table

• The First Question

• The Second Question

• Rest in Peace

• Notes on Ecclesiology

• Becoming a Settled Christian

Pastors and Church Life

• Life in the Fishbowl

• The Able Man

• Prayer of Confession

• Pastors and the Dangers of Social Media

• The Death by Managerial Ministry

• Money, Ministry, and Ministry Families

• The Dangers of Rapid Ministry Growth via Social Media

• When will enough be enough?

• Of Podcasts and Pastors

• Beware of Vagabond Ministers

• On Sermon Prep

• What It Takes to Do Bi-Vocational Ministry Well

• A Streamlined Alternative to Small Groups

• Discipline: The Love That Trains and Confronts

• The Churchly Love of Excommunication

• Girls, Gold, and Glory

• Raising Up Pastors

• Truth Said Over and Over Again

• Into the Breach

• Faithful, Not Frantic

• Old Forms, Living Faith

• How Influencer Culture Destroys Pastors

• That’s Not the Problem of Our Day

• A Common Danger in House Churches

• The Three Stages of a Pastor-Congregant Relationship

• From Pastoral Apprentice to Pastor

• Unpopular Church Conflict Advice

• More Thoughts on Church Life After COVID

• Build Something That Outlives You

• Professions of Faith and Hanging Out Around Fire-pits

• The Wounding Healer

• Drive the nail, turn the screw, tell them about Jesus.

Tactics of Manipulative Ministers and Members

• Tactics of Manipulative Ministers

• Tactics of Manipulative Church Members, Part 1: Grievance Farming (Or, why silence isn’t always innocent)

• Tactics of Manipulative Church Members, Part 2: The Representative (or Ambassador) Tactic

• Tactics of Manipulative Church Members, Part 3: The Insider (Or Reverse Ambassador) Tactic

• Tactics of Manipulative Church Members, Part 4: The Survivor—or the Afflicted

• Tactics of Manipulative Members, Part 5: The Projector

• Tactics of Manipulative Members, Part 6: The Quarantiner

• Tactics of Manipulative Members, Part 6: The Diverter

The Overlooked Skills That Make or Break a Pastor

• The Overlooked Skills That Make or Break a Pastor, Part 1: Keeping Critical Distance in Familial Conflict

• The Overlooked Skills That Make or Break a Pastor, Part 2: Choosing Your Quirks Well

• The Overlooked Skills That Make or Break a Pastor, Part 3: Selectively Ignoring People and Problems

• The Overlooked Skills That Make or Break a Pastor, Part 4: Keeping Outside Counsel

• The Overlooked Skills That Make or Break a Pastor, Part 5: Forming Judgments the Best You Can

The Call to Ministry

• Am I called?

• Father Hunger and a False Call

• “If you can do anything else besides ministry, do it” is hogwash.

East River Church, Ohio Valley Mission, and Denominations

• So what’s your status in the CREC?

• Keeping Promises and Confessional Fidelity

• Once Again into the Fray

• Building a Network of Sanctuary Churches

• Resigning Our Membership in the CREC

• Boniface Fellowship Update

• Why I Stepped Away from Boniface Fellowship (For Now)

• The Original Vision of East River Church

• Why East River Is Pursuing a Bivocational Model

• Counting the Cost in the PCA

• Dealing with Shepherdess in the PCA

• Remaining Semi-Independent for a Little While Longer

• Yet Another Resettling

• Ohio Valley Mission

• Let the Referees Squeal

• Make Missions Local Again

• More Ohio Valley Mission Content

• Some Thoughts on Modern Reformed Denominations

• Focused by Design

• Denominations and Such

The State of American Christianity

• The Dangerous Allure of Reactive Externalism

• The Unreality of Internet Christianity

• Avoiding a Lopsided Christianity

• Against Happy Clappy Christianity

• Recovering an Earthy Christianity

• Reformed Hipsters and the Normie Revolution

• Avoiding the “Niche Christianity” of the Reformed World, Part One

• The Age of the Micro-Cults

• We probably aren’t friends

• The Therapeutic Gospel Revisited

• Minds Spinning like a Kite in a Hurricane

• Moving On from the Pandemic Era

• Blue Collar Confessionalism Preview

• The Sons of Boomerdom

• Christmas Myths

• American Christianity as Cul-de-Sacs

• The Vindication Thirst Trap

• A Reflection on Using AI

• The Return to Realness

• The Pietistic Jesus-Juker

• Thoughts on Boomer Christianity

• The Internet Destination Church

• We’re Forgetting the Pandemic. And That’s a Problem.

• The Great Rehab

• If It Has Whiskers, It’s Not a Baby

• The Fall and Rise of American Christianity

• Just Asking Questions

• Just Noticing Patterns

• The Ordering Principle

• My Current Approach to AI

• Life Formula Pushers

• The Madness of Crowds and Bigfoot

• Onward

• Unrefined Observations

• Am I “Jew-Pilled”

Localism, Ownership, and Place

• Six Areas of Focus for Christian Localism

• The Symbiotic Relationship of the Home, State, and Church

• That Rattling Sound Under Society’s Hood

• Reformation for the Real World

• Delocation by News

• Local Missions

• The Christian’s Dual Citizenship

• Make Missions Local Again

• An America First Missionary

• Reformation in 2025

• You Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee

• Now What?

• A Manifesto for Local Missions

• The Three Things to Think About Before You Relocate

• Yeah, but what about the Epstein files?

• Ten Things I’ve Been Thinking On

• Qualified Localism in a Neo-feudal World

• You Will Own Things, and Actually Care

• Ownership Isn’t Consumerism

• Community isn’t a “Product”

• Investing in Main St America

• Localism and the Tirocinium Militiae

• Main Street Matters

• The Return of County Before Country (and Barnes & Noble)

• Owning a Home, Not Just a House

Wisdom, Discipline, and Leadership

• Steaming Piles of Productivity

• The Discipline of Sleep (paid subscribers)

• Getting Better at Saying “No”

• The Spiritual Obligation of Physical Fitness

• Getting Unstuck When You’re Overwhelmed

• The Hasty Man

• Where is your focus?

• Escaping the Tyranny of Regrets

• Episode 4 | Becoming Wise

• Drunk with Alertness

• Sanballat is Calling

• Blessing by Way of Failure

• Your Most Valuable Asset

• A Commencement Speech

• A Kite in God’s Hurricane

• The Crooked Finger

• A Handful of Feathers

• The Mountain

• Setting Your “No” Goals for ‘26

• What Do I Think About the Latest Online Skirmish?

• Stuck in a Scab-Picking Loop

• Any Benefit Mentality and Redeeming Time

• The Power of Little Habits

• A Framework for Taking Actions

• Tick, Tick, Tick

• The Dog Who Caught the Car

• Momentum Stealers

• Visionaries, Delusionaries, and Growing as a Leader

• Lived-in Lives are Always Messy.

• You Must Become Smaller

• Enough

• The Quest for Stability

Speech, Conflict, and Social Media

• How Emotional Reasoning & Referentialism Undermines Communication

• Nauseating Flattery

• How to develop a discipline of restrained speech

• The Blessing of a Good Insult

• One Simple Trick

• My Social Media Strategy

• Why won’t they listen?

• Coming Out on Top of Internet Debates

• The Sweet Science

• A Content Production Strategy

• On Naming Names

• He loved too much to lie

• On Discernment, Justice, and the Work of Hearing Both Sides

• Straight Talk in a Crooked Age

• Keep Out / Come In

• Social Media Distortion Dilemma

• A Lesson from Father Bill

• Disavowing the Outrage Machine

• Poking Fun at Ourselves

Grief and Loss

• Nostalgia is a Killer

• Surviving the Death of a Child (a preview)

• My Mother and Why We’ve been MIA

• Surviving the Death of a Child, Part One: Where Is Her Heartbeat? (paid subscribers)

• Surviving the Death of a Child, Part Two: Why, God? Why? (paid subscribers)

• Surviving the Death of a Child, Part Three: Training Wheels

• Surviving the Death of a Child, Part Four: Public Pain

• The Before and the After

• The Pain Which Nobody Understands

• Dark Portals

• Pascal Watson Foster is with the LORD

• Words for Those Who Recently Miscarried

• Don’t Look Away

Personal Essays

• On Where I’m From

• In Water, In Blood, In Grace

• Leaving Las Vegas

• Surviving the Fringe

• My Home, Our Home

• Morris the Cat

• Alone on a Levee

• Just Enjoying Things

• Where the Mourning Dove Calls

Stories and Fiction

• Spilled Milk and Hand-turkeys

• Grandpa’s Ranch

• An Unremarkable Man

• The Tree House

• The Hamburger

• Chris Sabo

• The Pendant

Clearwater

• Clearwater, Chapter 1: The House at the Edge of the Woods

• Clearwater, Chapter 2: You’re not Bert. (paid subscribers)

• Clearwater, Chapter 3: Back Quadrant 12

• Clearwater, Chapter 4: Pinky Swear

• Clearwater, Chapter 5: The Standoff at Empire Stone Works

This, of course, is a misreading of Scripture. Scripture especially highlights crucial moments of God’s dramatic work for and through His people. This would be a crude reduction, so don’t take it too far, but in some ways, it is the highlight reel of God’s work. Most of history isn’t full of disembodied hands writing on the wall, astronomical miracles, or stunning conversions. There are much smaller dramas, but life on the whole is pretty ordinary, punctuated from time to time by so-called life events, whether marriage, a windfall of money, or even a national war. For most people, most of the time, life is day after day of the same thing, of the same struggles. And one of the quests, for the sake of your own soul and the souls under your care, is the quest for stability.

But those addicted to drama develop an allergy to stability to such an extent that they’ll throw their life into crisis. They will legitimately manufacture drama to feel like they are properly engaging with reality. You will see people up and quit stable jobs. Or, when they’re already overwhelmed with life, take on some incredible new responsibility—adoption being a very common form I see. Or involve themselves in some sort of online dispute that they tell themselves is the epic showdown of the ages that will determine the future of our nation. They do this because it feels epic. It feels dramatic. And so instead of pursuing stability, they actually pursue crisis. This becomes almost the genetic fabric of a family. And if you want to break these so-called curses, stability is where it’s at.

People need to stay at the same jobs, stay at the same church, have the same schedule. Embrace ordinary faithfulness. Certainly you’ll find yourself in trials and legitimate crises. There’s no escaping that in this life, and you need to be faithful in those situations. But the dramatic changes you want in your life, in your finances, in your children, are realized through faithfulness in the ordinary. Nothing produces resilient children like a stable home. That could be extrapolated even to churches. The healthiest churches don’t jump from thing to thing, from crisis to crisis. They have a stable way of worshiping and discipling, week in, week out.

Pursue stability. It may not feel dramatic, but over the years and decades, it sure is.

Painting: John Brosio

One thing I have observed is that it takes real effort for a pastor not to primarily identify himself with the largest body he belongs to. In Presbyterianism, you have a church, a presbytery, and a denomination. You can think of it as kind of like county, state, country. The church belongs to a presbytery, the presbytery to the denomination. More or less. Even though a minister has the most in common with his church, or at least you would think, he can identify with the denomination even more than his own church.

To a certain degree, this is baked into Presbyterianism because the pastor is actually not a member of his church; he’s a member of the presbytery, and in a sense, the presbytery is his church. But still, I find that they identify more with the denomination than the presbytery. I want to be clear that this is just what I have observed with the men I know. I’m not saying that this is always historically true, but I think it is presently true.

The problem is simple: what’s going on at a national level doesn’t map onto the rest of the nation equally. It’s not perfectly distributed throughout the churches. While there may be general issues that all churches share, particular issues are regional or extremely local. A church right by a military base is going to be dealing with different problems than a church, say, in a stable rural community. A church full of old people would differ quite a bit from a church full of younger people.

As a matter of fact, I was talking to David Schrock out at Grimké a couple of weeks back, and he was telling me that he had done several dozen funerals because he was in a much older church in Indiana. I’ve spent a large portion of my ministry in church plants that tended to have younger people, and therefore I’ve only done a handful.

Even when you study Scripture, you’ll notice that Colossians has a particular heresy that the church must deal with, and Corinthians has a particular sin situation that it must deal with. While those churches have so much in common, they each are waging their own local battles. If you’re only concerned about things that become issues in the national aggregate, you’re likely going to be disconnected, or not as connected as you should be, from the things most pressing to the people God has entrusted to your charge. In short, you won’t be a very good pastor.

Note that I’m saying this is a tendency and not a necessity. Does it have to happen? No. Does it often happen? Yes. It’s not an argument against Presbyterianism or national denominations. It is a caution.

Anyhow, why do guys so identify with the national over the local, even in the context of church? Obviously, there are going to be multiple factors and motivations. But one I want to zoom in on has really started to stand out to me: being part of something large gives them credibility or legitimacy. They’re not part of some rinky-dink operation that was just thrown together, but part of something big and growing, something old, anchored in history and tradition. They’re proud to be part of something like that, they want to defend it, and they’re invested in its overall health. I get it. I don’t think that way of thinking is entirely wrong. So what is the problem?

Well, this gets back to health. It could be that, at a national level, a denomination has a good reputation for having a certain type of character that doesn’t map onto many of its smaller churches. While it might be growing in numbers, are those healthy fellowships?

One tendency I have commented on before is to start churches not by having a strong lead church planter, but by building around a few local families looking for a type of ministry they associate with the character of the denomination. While this might play out well sometimes, on the whole I find that it leads to very stunted churches, run by one or two really strong-willed ruling elders, that always struggle to get a half-decent pastor to care for them. Therefore, the churches stay small, but even more importantly, don’t have the best overall spiritual health. There are a lot of churches like that in Reformed denominations.

Of course, there are also large churches that have, or were planted by, a gifted pastor with a clear vision that is at odds with the denomination. That’s bad too. But the problem is that this lack of health can be cloaked by the aggregate, by the national average, by the overall reputation.

It could be that a pastor’s own church or presbytery is unhealthy. But since he thinks the entire denomination is doing well, then he’s doing well. Just as you know the quality of a gardener by his garden, so you know the quality of a pastor by the state of his flock. Pastors may be very proud of how they are part of something large and therefore legitimate. They’re taking pride in the wrong thing. They’re not first and foremost concerned about the health of their people, and the very reputation they take advantage of, they’re slowly eroding at their local level.

This brings me back to Ohio Valley Mission. It would be cool to see it grow and really impact our defined mission field of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. But I’d rather be part of an effective team than a big team. Small and effective is much better than large and ineffective. Effectiveness in this context is the ability, through the Word and sacraments, to shepherd people into spiritual vitality in a local church. Those are the sort of men I want to be with. Men who are most concerned about the world right in front of them, the people right in front of them.

https://www.ohiovalleymission.org/

Painting: Keiko Tanabe

This, of course, is a battle that many parents face when a wayward child refuses to live in the light and instead rebels and runs headlong into darkness. In such a situation, the child, even when grown, will attempt to guilt the parent into submission. Perhaps they will say, “You’re choosing your religion, or you’re choosing your church, or you’re choosing the elders over your own flesh and blood. I thought you loved me.”

What you must remember at that moment is that the most loving thing you can do is to stand for the truth and not allow someone to use the relationship to beat you into submission to a lie. Great examples include Nathan speaking the truth to David, Paul speaking the truth to Peter, and Christ telling people that when it comes to ultimate allegiance, it must always be to Him, even if it means putting them at odds with their families.

One of the things I appreciate about Appalachian and Southern culture is their devotion to family. But I’ve seen that go wrong more than a few times, where the natural family is prioritized over the spiritual family in matters of truth. In that sense, the waters of baptism should always be thicker than blood. And it is one thing to be at odds with family for a short period in this life. It’s entirely another to be separated from them for all eternity. All relationships must be subordinated to our ultimate allegiance to Jesus and the truth.

A kid rebelling through sexual perversity will try to guilt their parents into supporting it. You must resist. A spouse rebelling against their God-ordained role in Scripture will attempt to guilt their other half into going along with it, maybe even under the threat of divorce. Friends will weaponize friendships against the truth. You must resist for your own soul, but also for theirs, that you may reclaim them and that they may be disciplined so that their emotions and self-centeredness do not reign over the simple facts of Scripture and reality.

Hold fast, Christian. Your God honors His faithful.

Painting: Eugène Siberdt

I was born in 1980 and introduced to comic books by my uncle in 1986. I read his collection when he was not at home and started my own around that time. I was mostly a Marvel reader and a big fan of the various X-Men titles. Those are the titles I started collecting again about three years ago.

Some of them are really inexpensive. For example, I managed to buy the entire first run of X-Factor for about $200. But The Uncanny X-Men is an extremely popular title, especially because of the forthcoming movie. My goal has been to collect issues 93 through 300, since those were the ones I read as a kid. Some of those comics have gotten insanely expensive. There are more than a couple of issues that would cost what I paid for the entire collection of X-Factor.

So I’ve been looking for what you call raw books. These are books that have not been graded. Grading is where you assess the condition of a comic book on a 10-point scale and then put it in what’s called a slab, basically a sealed plastic container designed so you can view the front and back covers while protecting the condition of the comic book. Graded comics are considerably more expensive than so-called raw comics.

Well, I’m pretty devoted to this quest. I don’t want to overspend money on it. But there’s another problem I have with graded comics in a slab, and that’s the one that relates to this entire conversation about ownership.

The purpose of comic books is to provide a visual story a reader can enjoy. If you slab them up, you can’t read them. And I want to read them.

Now, of course, you could buy two copies: one that’s slabbed and one that’s not. But that’s expensive, and still, the slabbed copy becomes something else. People will say it’s an investment. It’s something you can hand down to your kids. True, but not as a comic book. They won’t read it. They won’t get to know the characters and enjoy it anywhere near the way you enjoyed it as a kid, which is why it matters to you.

For me, I moved from town to town year after year when I was small. Back then, comic books were sold in drugstores and grocery stores, and my mom would let me go to the magazine section and sit there and read comics while she shopped, and often she would buy me one. Then I’d take those comics home, read them, trace the pictures, and read them again. They were kind of like friends. They were a comfort, and that’s why I like them.

I’m buying them to read them again in their original format, and I’m trying to share that love with my kids. But it’ll never be for them what it was for me, because we don’t move around a lot, comics aren’t sold in grocery stores anymore, and the circumstances are very different. But they certainly wouldn’t appreciate them for what they are if they were just slabbed up, like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back.

So I do want to hand these down to my kids, but not necessarily so they can sell them and get the cash. I want them to enjoy something their father enjoyed. If they sell them, that’s their decision. But I’m not presenting them merely as something you can cash in. Their value isn’t primarily monetary, not to me.

This brings me to home ownership.

This is a subject I care about deeply because I have children, and I want them to own a home. Moreover, I am a pastor, and I care about the young families in my church, especially their ability to own a home.

The housing market has been insane for many years, and based on what I’m seeing, it will undergo an incredible correction sometime late next year. There are many factors, but a big one is that the older generation is aging out of their homes. Many of these homes have exponentially increased in value, but there aren’t enough buyers who can afford them.

As I read on this topic, I notice that people think of houses primarily as financial investments: something they buy that increases in dollar value, which they can then sell for more dollars and perhaps upgrade to a house that is better in some way.

Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with buying and selling your house for a profit. What I do think is that a house is, at its core, more than a financial investment. It is your home.

It is the place where you share meals together, where kids learn to walk, and, in some cases, where they were even born. It is a place where memories are created, a place of safety and warmth. The doorframes have little lines on them reminding you how tall you were when you were two, five, and thirteen. It’s a home.

It is something that can be passed down from one generation to the next. When a family member gives another family member the childhood home, it’s much more than a financial gift. It’s a little baton of history. It’s the setting of their family’s story. It’s a store of wealth that, yes, has financial value, but that’s only part of it.

I don’t like how we treat comic books and homes first and foremost as financial investments that allow us to get more USD at some point in the future. It seems to me that we are allowing the worldly materialism of our day to rob us of enjoying things for what those things actually are.

I live in a house that’s just under 2,800 square feet on three acres of land, with a large barn and garage. For a family of ten, we’re packed in pretty tight. We have five small bedrooms. But Hudson moved out in January. He doesn’t live there anymore. And while we’re not rushing anyone out the door, our smallish home is going to get more spacious every couple of years going into the future. Soon, except when the grandkids come over, we’ll have more room than we know what to do with.

I don’t want to upgrade to a bigger house. I don’t want to lose the memories. My son Pascal is buried on this property. My son Foxe was born in this house. This is our home, and I want it to stay in the family. I want it to be part of our roots.

The only childhood home I have is my grandmother’s farm, which was sold to a non-family member in 1997. It killed me. I actually cried. All the other places I lived in were rentals, usually for only a year. And the apartment I lived in the longest in Bloomington was such a dump that it was knocked down and replaced when they built a larger bridge over Tanners Creek.

I’ve been unable, to a certain degree, to show my children where I grew up. Yes, the cities, but not so much the homes. I love that my wife’s childhood home is being kept in the family and that my children have stayed the night there with their grandmother.

I am very interested in accumulating wealth for my family, but of a robust sort: a wealth of traditions, a wealth of skills, a wealth of memories, the wealth of a place where you belong.

Stories are written to be read, and houses are built to become homes. And when possible, some houses become homes for generations. In those situations, ownership isn’t just the possession of a financial asset, but a much more robust sort of wealth.

Painting: Sofiya Bryuhovich

First, let me just say you can all unfollow me, and my life will be just fine. This platform has been fun and helped me get my writing out there, but I don't need it. It's just a cool opportunity God's given me. And if it was just for a season, that's fine.

Second comment: unfollowing people because they disagree with you on something is going to increasingly narrow who you allow to speak into your life until you only want to hear your own thoughts. This will make you into an idiot.

Third comment: many know that through my grandma's side, I have Jewish ancestry. And when I first got converted, I heard all the dispensational nonsense about how I was, like, doubly special. And I rejected it because I came to Christ the same way anyone does, which is by faith and through His finished work on the cross. I had people trying to introduce me as a Messianic Jew. I am not. I am a Christian.

And the Judaism that arose leading up to and after the fall of the temple is one that rejected Christ and later took on a very different shape than what we see in the Old Testament. There aren't the same. I was so aggressive about this in my late teens that when we would have Messianic Jewish friends over, I would serve ham and cheese sandwiches to them. In them, I saw the Galatian error, and I wanted to confront it. I still do.

I fully rejected dispensationalism back in 2002 and came to understand that it's wrong to think of the Israel of today as a direct analog of the Israel of Scripture. And therefore, I've never been a Zionist in the way that most people use that word. But people do use that word in all sorts of ways.

My heart toward these Jews would be something like Paul's. I want to see them repent of their many heresies and sins and become biblical Christians. The way I differ from Paul is that these are not my countrymen. I'm mostly Irish white trash from the northern border of Appalachia. If my heart belongs to any people particularly, it's those people. But I do want to see all the nations bow down to King Jesus.

Fourth, it is sad how disgusting and decayed this entire influencer ecosystem has gotten in the Reformed or Reformed-adjacent world. People define themselves by who they pay some small amount every month, get some sort of supporter mug from, and listen to tell them what to think. Instead of helping people discover a sort of biblical individuality, they've traded groupthink of one sort for another sort. Of course, not all of them. But how can we speak if we are constantly required to use mind-numbing precision?

It reminds me of girls back in elementary school who identified themselves by which one of the New Kids on the Block was their favorite. "Jordan is my favorite."

Again, follow me or don't follow me. I follow all sorts of people I disagree with, some in major ways. Sometimes I do it because there was a connection from years ago. I usually don't cut off old friends because they took a turn I despise. If I'm called to love my enemies, certianly I can love those how are outside "my camp." Other times, I think they're worth considering. But having your identity defined by who you follow and whether or not they're telling you what you want to hear is a sad affair. And if that's you, stop it.

Lastly, I guess I'll say that when the crowd demands that I give them something, it is my natural inclination to deprive them of that very thing. And these days, it's the constant scream of, "Declare your faithfulness by talking about the things we want to talk about" or "Disavow this person or you're guilty of whatever we claim they are guilty of."

No, I don't think I will.

I'm just going to keep doing what I've been doing. And if you move on, cool. It's less distraction from the mission.

I appreciate those who give me a hearing. You don't have to. Your time is precious, and you decide to spend a little bit of it with me. Thank you.

If you want to know what I want from you, I'll tell you. It's the same thing that the older Christian men who poured into me wanted from me. I want you to be strong and immovable in the faith. I want you to be a person who thinks biblically and can stand against the crowd when needed. I want you to be a committed churchman whose energy is primarily invested in his local church and his local community, and, of course, first and foremost, the family God has blessed him with. I also want you to know that several years ago I got to look under the hood of the manosphere and conservative influencers from close up and discovered a lot of sad, lonely people who tended to not practice what they preached and often had weird sexual proclivities (a lot of bisexuals in those circles). So, yeah, as pills go, I'm pretty black pilled on those worlds.

What I write, on the whole, is my attempt to help you accomplish those things and, to a lesser degree, avoid getting sucked into some of the worlds I began to venture into.

Just as you have no particular obligation to listen to me, though strangers on the internet sometimes seem to think otherwise, I also have no obligation to give you what you want.

Phil Collins was right.

Alright, back to my regular content...