Autodidacticism And Gatekeeping

People now have the means to put their money where their mouth is. The question will now become whether they do or not. 

At one point to be a pastor in a church, or in more subversive terms to gain the instant following of congregations as a pastor in a church, you had to go to bible college. Your degree would be essentially decided for you. A mix of theology and ministry course were formed and formulated to give you a broad swath of training for the diverse and challenging field of pastoral work. 

But upon gaining your first job in church you find out the dirty little secret of modern-day church work. that is just as dirty as the sinners that the church tries to get saved. 

The foundational courses of biblical study and ministry theory you get, do little to prepare you for real church ministry. I could go into the specifics but a simple litmus test of the reader's experience is likely all you need to get you to buy into the rest of the article. 

Have you ever heard a pastor say, "They didn't teach you about (insert topic or problem here) at bible college?" Or as a pastor said that yourself?

Have you ever asked why bible colleges don't, in fact, teach about those things?

Most pastors have some of their best stories about this phenomenon,. Spending 4-8 years in schooling to be found ignorant of a situation or problem is a shock to young pastors but often teaches them the real nuts and bolts of ministry and theology in practice. But what this common phenomenon shows us is that the actual learning from a theological education happens routinely after the education is technically completed. A pastor with a 4-year bachelor's degree in theology should know what it means to do his job. a carpenter would know how to build a house with that much schooling and based on that schooling you would trust that carpenter doing that building even if it were his first house to build. 

That's because wrapped up in the paper of degrees and education is the essence of trust. We trust that places that teach, will teach, what needs to be taught. And that learners who want to learn actually learn. This is why finding out that a student cheats is so distasteful. It's a waste of guile and intelligence to cheat on a test though by the numbers that cheating often uses just as much intelligence to work out the cheating method. Where we get angry and upset is when we thought we were getting a person who learned and we got a person who cheated. got a theological degree that was filled with electives and courses unrelated to the rigours of theological teaching or the roughness of ministry reality. 

We would hate a cheater even more if they outright faked a degree. If he made a small bible college up from a prairie town and formatted a single-page degree from which we would have to sleuth our way against such to see if it's valid or not. 

a good degree from a good college gives us the certainty we need to trust a person with wages for the saving of souls and the preaching of the gospel. 

At least in church.

But what if we no longer live in a world we can trust the way the churches of our fathers trusted in the bible colleges they went to? You can peg that lack of trust on a good dozen bad things these days. Liberal drift, inflation, the current job market. you name it. The world we live in now is becoming more and more different than the world of the past and how the past managed its institutions and trust will be different than ours. So how would a pastor wannabe demonstrate the trust that a degree used to give in a world where degrees are becoming worthless? 

The answer is likely tied up not in what the pastor can do but rather in what he couldn't do. 

A pastor trying to persuade a church that he's capable of being a teacher of the Bible, couldn't be empty-handed in his bible teaching. He couldn't have an empty youtube channel or sermons he's preached, even if those sermons were preached to a camera and camera alone. He would need content to convince people with.

He couldn't have bare bookshelves. Churches need their pastors to be well-read and constantly reading. being able to distill the logic and knowledge of the times into his preaching and into his ministries. to discern what's a bible study fad and what's a bible study staple. 

He couldn't be alone. A church would want its pastor to be a part of a community or group of other pastors that could support not only him but each other as a group. 

What a pastor couldn't or shouldn't do is assume they are a pastor because they want to be a pastor but would need to show that they could be a pastor. They will do this, make no mistake, but they shouldn't.

With the rise of online platforms, content becomes a form of authority. If you create 1000 youtube videos and they are engaging and well produced and watched, you can gain a following. That following isn't just a way for you to get ad revenue, it's a way to exercise power. Every follower is choosing you over the other options that are out there, and there are a lot out there. 

I used to worry about the faking of Church, that a "pastor" in big scare quotes could just start doing the nuts and bolts of what a church does online and essentially gain his congregation in aggregate from his followers. his messages might even still be the gospel preached, his books even good theology. But the community that he teaches becomes consumers at face value and fans any deeper than that. 

The ability to self-learn is only altruistic in a space that can't allow for the commodification of that learning. A Christian in a theological library is only learning about God. But a Christian who has that theological library. At next to no cost, because it's been turned into an app. That Christian is in a different place. When that Christian isn't writing in a journal but is instead making videos to process what he learns. That Christian is now dealing in influence. And the internet loves its influencers.

We will be wading into this pool of Self Learning and Influence more and more. The internet is here and as most feared here to stay. The church might as well learn how it works.

What Actually Happens At An Online Baptism

The logistics are easy enough to figure out. A pastor likely is on one side of the camera or another and the baptizer is the same but conversely so. Which side they're actually on doesn't play into the issues that arise when you say something as bold as "Online Baptism" to a blogger like me.

Baptisms are public declarations of faith in Christ and a symbolic death and resurrection that a new Christian is participating in, among the Christians that they will be in fellowship with. 

They can happen outside of a church context, because the meaning behind them isn't church membership, but rather affinity or solidarity with Christ's church. 

The online aspect of these new kinds of baptisms is again where the Thing/Place distinction shows up. More on that later.

If the baptism is being performed to witness a new Christian joining the church body locally, then the internet does what it does best and connects the separated person to the church via video and audio on the streaming platform of each church's choice. Is that "Together" or "At the same Time"? Before the internet, you could not baptize yourself in your bathtub and let your pastor know by letter you were doing so and have it mean what it means when you are baptized in the presence of the congregation or public in the case of open water baptisms in rivers and lakes.

What actually happens at an online baptism is a written account of the events in both directions in real-time. The happenings of the baptizer are being written into computer code by the camera, translated into different code by the computer and internet network, then translated a third time, at least, by the screen on the receiving end. Because this is happening in both directions so that the congregations can witness the baptism and the baptized person can see the congregations. we double this translation process.

If we slowed the technological quality down to introduce lag, the congregation and baptizer would start to see how the connection isn't the same as in real life but can appear to be. Would the event of a baptism be perceived differently if instead of thousands of frames of pictures paired to the audio of the vent, you only received hundreds? a choppy video of jerky movements between the questions asked of the believer's belief and trust in Jesus' Death Burial and Resurrection, and the dunk? 

What changed? What made this as unreal as it just felt? All we did was give you less of the lie.

Maybe lie is a strong word here, let's go with illusion, still too strong, how about impression? What word would you like for a commentator to use when talking about the strange thing that happens when you start a service off with a 1080p 60k streaming video of the baptism and then dial it back to 144p at 30k? All I changed was the resolution. The wires and screens and cameras are all still there but I'm no longer using them to their fullest capability. 

Is the baptism different or invalid because you can see the pixels now? Because truth is, you could always see the pixels you were just cool with it when it looked cool. When it looks dated you want to leave such practices in the past. It's 4k video for true online ministries or bust. If you don't believe me, type those bolded search terms into youtube and see how many experts tell you the bare minimum for church streaming as far as resolution and cameras go. 

Church and tech don't mix, they stack. And baptisms are a great place to see this in action. Stack anything on water and what happens to it? It sinks. What is a baptism again? It's the ceremonial submersion of a believer under water to declare their belief and join the body of believers in the church. Is that what is happening to the viewers on the screen? Well, no they are just seeing a representation of what has happened in person through the manipulation of pixels and soundwaves in unison both ways. What about the other way? Is a church witnessing a baptism if they watch a father and son in a backyard swimming pool over Zoom while the pastor asks the questions from the stage? Again, no because then they are the ones being subject to audio-visual manipulation. 

No one on either side wants there to be manipulation, but the manipulation is so good these days, that we accept it as a proxy with little to no objection. but the at-home baptist is not with their church, and you could see that by dialing back the technological speed a bit.

If a letter and affidavit stating what the baptized person said before their dunk, pictures of the dry clothes and wet cloths with dates on them, and a photo of a post-baptismal hug in the tank with their parent suffice for proof of baptism? The only difference between that compartmentalized account and the 4k live stream is the amount and quality of pictures and audio and their union in video format.

At some point we let tech past the pews and onto the stages of our churches, we did so with little to no discussion of the metaphysical and theological implications of saying something is one way when it is another. And where that brings us is a place where things meant to be done in public are now done in private. We have tragically all seen this kind of thinking before. especially in the church but not the way you're likely to think.

Porn behaves this way, just the other way around. 

Porn takes what is meant to be private and makes it public. Takes what is meant to be individually possessed and makes it widely available. It takes pixels and soundwaves and tries its best to convince you it's flesh and blood. In every flavor and position, you could think of.

Are you as uncomfortable now as you were when we were talking about the video in 144p? Maybe you should be.

The distinctions and definitions we use in our faith matter. Bread, wine, and water matter. They matter because they point to Jesus and have their roots in Jesus and are part of the instruction of Jesus. Who of all people would have known the way the internet could change the way the church does the sacraments he left for us. Yet we aren't told to interpret these practices into time and space as technology progresses. We are told to baptize people in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit. and that the gates of Hell will not stand against a church that does so. 

Now that we're decades into the use of these things for Christ's church's name, perhaps we should see if they're capable to use righteously. To jump into theologically deep but available waters and to declare like Christians before us Christ's lordship over all.

To make his will done. Online as it is in Heaven.

 

The Math On Being Damned If You Don't

I had a great talk with a good friend over entirely too much donair meat the other day and I realized something that has been bothering me, about the language being used by pastors. Specifically, how we talk about and recover from the last few years. 

Many pastors of all opinionated sorts are parroting the same line to explain, justify, or excuse the decisions churches have made, and have had to make these last year. 

Paraphrased, "we were damned if you did and damned if we didn't." That there was no right answer or response to the government mandating anything or viruses infecting anything and all the "anythings" started to pile up so high that we decided to do nothing in response. That doesn't mean we did nothing at all, but it was the delicate balance of doing things that couldn't be cast in binary terms or black and white light. heaven knows having real UV-killing virus illumination would have changed that a bit, but hey, c'est la vie.

When phrased as either doing one thing to offend one certain group and another to offend another certain group. It can seem impossible to do anything but the bare minimum of risk and compliance. To comply with those that comply and to bear all things like the love we espouse. But without sounding like there is a third way, there is the often neglected practice of having principles. 

A principled man is just as susceptible to wrong decisions as is a liberal or passionate man. But the principled man has one advantage. He trains for the battles of the mind ahead of time and while caught by surprise is often never caught unprepared. When we zoom in to the level of a pastor facing the decisions that they did. To open or close a church, to mask or unmask, to socially distance or gather, to venture online, or to remain in person. These decisions on the surface can seem vague enough from a moral standpoint to allow for both ways to be right enough to pursue under the guise of each being the lesser of two evils compared to the other.

But are they? A principled man would have learned about the devastating effects of facing a logical problem that isn't going to try to hit him but is going to hit him without trying. In the famous words of one of the best boxers in the world, Mike Tyson. "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." Suppose the principled man knew he would get punched in the mouth and as such did nothing to stop the punch but instead used the attack to also punch their opponent in the mouth. It would be a painful choice of moves in the ring, but it would allow for effective punching nonetheless. Because as much as I want to avoid being punched in the face by a guy like Mike Tyson. I'll let someone hit me if I know I can not only survive the hit but also use it to benefit my side of the fight. To have a fist land square on my jaw to close the distance for my own uppercut.

I've thought since the middle of our first year of this pandemic nonsense, that what might be presenting themselves through this time period was some unorthodox but devastatingly powerful chance, for the church to be a kind of super relevant in the face of communal opposition. If we had stood together as followers of Christ and not as individual non-profits and denominations, we would have been the answer to so many of the wrongs and sorrows the world faced these last few years. But to say people would be mad if we closed and mad if we stayed open relies on those two options being equal which they are not. The world is a fundamentally better place with churches being open because of the death-proof gospel we proclaim there. 

Which brings us full circle to the being damned if you do part of this piece, because, at the end of the day, the founding principle of all Christendom is that we are all in fact, damned. 

20 For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. 21 But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. 26 It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Romans 3:20-26 ESV

The math of trying to save just one person from a virus only to have one other person who would have come to your church, but instead stayed home, and in doing so was never preached the gospel unto repentance and salvation, is a moot point in its sum. 

Saving a Christian's life even less so. 

We preach that we have no fear in death and then demonstrated fear in death at every turn. As we shut down to prevent death, distanced to prevent death, masked, plexiglass, and sanitized to prevent a death we preached that we did not fear. And while caution and fear are distinct in their execution, we openly participated in the hypocrisy of how the prescribed caution was exercised. How many singers on church stages kept their masks off to sing over and to masked congregations? Did their exceptions for performance or clarity from the stage somehow not contribute to the death we were preventing? How many more masks were improperly disposed of or stored or reused. No one actually took the mandates seriously. If we did we would be in masks and buildings that actually prevent viral transmission. 

The problem with principles is that they damn those without them. Principles of personal protective equipment and viral outbreak control were not what we were practicing. We were practicing compromise. Surgical masks don't stop viral load like full-face cartridge respirators do. They fall short of their goal of keeping the wearer safe from the virus. Just like our works of trying to do church through the means of online services, social distancing, forbidden contact, touch, and vaccination status also fall short of what's necessary for real salvation from sin and death.

This wasn't a time where we were damned if we did and damned if we didn't. 

This was a chance for the church to be the only community of people in a time of isolation. The only example of courage in a time of fear. The only place where the image of God was not covered by created things. The only place where principles existed in an ever-changing landscape of moving goalposts, graphs, and statistics. This was a time for the church to be what the church was with no apology, excuse, or compromise. Open to all but defined by one defining principle. 

What's the church at its core?

Saved from sin and death by the gospel it preaches.

Objectionable Adjectives And Voting

I took a swing at Andy Stanley earlier in the week here over what, on the surface, might seem like a trivial tweet.

He posted an image of a statement that said

"Christian is not an adjective. There are no Christian Republicans or Christian Democrats. #notinittowinit"

Which again, on the surface looks like a call for peace and understanding in hostile political times and one that is generally representative of a large swath of Christian thought when it comes to politics. 

This is all to say that Andy has likely done more for the church than most pastors out there. His ministry and content are in most churches. Andy is a Christian and an active one who is, however much people might want to disagree, contributing to the mission of God to see men and women saved. And has seen people saved, I know dozens of these people who found Christ through his work. None of that is up for debate here.

He is, however, wrong about "Christian" not being an adjective. It is. It's literally the first thing that comes up when you look up its definition in a dictionary. Because the word Christian is a literary device to represent the term "Little Christ's" that came to be a description (what adjectives literally are) of believers in Christ in the early church.

Before we start straining too hard at this gnat, I'd like to offer a principle to use. Let's "Use words like they are meant to be used."

It can be edgy and exciting to use a word in a way that is against the grain of the culture. Heaven knows that slang and colloquialisms add the spice of life that most of us enjoy. But words do in fact mean what they mean for good reasons and trifling with them only ever causes problems. Namely division. If the use of adjectives is now suspect like its cousin pronouns is in the public discourse, then eventually nouns will be under the control of anyone but yourself along with verbs as well. I think it was Doug Wilson that said it first but the culture war is going to be a war over the dictionary. And off-handed imprecise comments like Andy's will be the first shots and sabre-rattling.

The problem with saying "Christian" isn't an adjective but it being an adjective, is that republican and democrat are also adjectives but aren't losing their descriptive power alongside belief in Christ. Their scope of power and actions after a voter casts their belief in their platform, still affect the world in ways any rational person would hope their belief in Christ would also affect. 

We vote for change and stability and believe for the same reasons. So when we separate the descriptive power of belief for change we usher in a type of silent evil that we can all call good because descriptions no longer matter.

The bare minimum for the Christian faith is belief in Christ's sacrificial death for the sins of the individual doing the believing. Subjectively, Christian belief can mean care for the poor, the sick, charity, love, respect and joy. While there is a bare minimum there isn't a technical maximum in the Christian faith. When an adjective describes our faith it's placing a finite word on what will be an infinite life in service and worship of an infinite God. A bell curve that gets lost on the way up and never comes down.

But the left and right wings of politics are as finite as anything gets. You cannot be a right of center and believe that abortion is a moral good and you can't be left of center and believe money is a moral good. The issues that divide us here get stacked up and levied for political movement and clout and while each "adjective" of the political party or movement's name is descriptive, it's the issues that actually do the defining. Saying you're a liberal in Canada these days means saying you voted for what we witnessed happen over the last few years. Maybe you didn't want it, but you did vote for it. Saying you're a conservative means that you essentially just voted for Cretien a bit too late. 

And that's where Andy's post falls short because when challenged by some very real problems the church at large found out the things they described themselves by, really didn't mean what they said they meant. We had Churches across the board that claimed in their publically available statement of faith, that the church was the local gathering of the universal church and that such was how the bible was interpreted at their respective church buildings. These same churches closed their doors and claimed online church was equal to and sufficient in an unprecedented time like we had. Saying one thing and meaning another.

Or maybe it's put better this way. Ecclesia (the word we get church from) means "the gathered", but we decided it means "the connected" real quick, like inside a month once a government mandate landed on our doorsteps. Because you cannot gather online because online is not a place it is a thing. You can be connected online but connected is not gathered. The words mean different things.

So when it comes to the adjective nature of "Christian" as a word there's a very real problem with saying there aren't Christian liberals or Christian conservatives. Because the adjective Christian lines up to actions that can be observably applied as descriptions of a person place or thing. Only a major problem when claimed for actions that would contradict a claimed description instead of an accurate description. 

Matthew 7:21-23

21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

English Standard Version

What if you can't accurately call yourself a Christian if you vote liberal and support a platform with left-leaning political views and policies. Sure the care for the poor lines up and the social justice too, but it takes a sharp left turn when abortion and sexual liberation rear their ugly heads. If reduced to simple fractions, is a Christian still a Christian if they are on public record as voting for 6 policies of which only 2 line up with Scripture, while the other 4 are objectively described as sin? (another adjective by the way.)

What if you vote the other direction on the political spectrum, and instead of the score reading 2-4 for sin's and gospel-alignment's teams, it reads 4-2. Is one party by default more Christian than the other?

And I think that is what Andy is addressing here in avoidance instead of confrontation. It's great to have a saviour that saves you from sins, so in the face of choosing between sinning 2 out of 6 times and 4 out of 6 times, why not allow for both and nail both to the cross. It's literally what Jesus did. 

But then like all principles in Scripture we find ourselves challenged and helpless when a guy like Paul comes along and says.

Romans 6:1-4

1 What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? 2 By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? 3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

English Standard Version

We can stumble out of the baptism tank, with salvation in hand and sin in our actions, or we can wince with every step, as our sinfulness was atoned for as we work and wait for Christ's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. 

If it was only a matter of the lesser of two evils Andy might have a leg to stand on. But it's his indescribable faith of no adjectives that damns both the left and the right for the very same reason. It's the scandal of our need for sin's sacrifice that makes the left's need for abortion and the right's need for capitalist greed, both nails in our saviour's body. And it's only in the proclamation of Christian anything that the world begins to point toward Christ. 

So yeah, "Christian" is an adjective and that's why I wonder about Christian Liberals but wonder less about Christian Conservatives, but know both are a far cry short of what it will look like when all there are, is Christians, and a King named Jesus. Doing a better job than any party, president, and prime minister ever born, ever did. 

As he makes all things new. 

What I Mean By Modern Christian

Every man's a reformer now, sans motive.

The beautiful part of technology is the progress that it makes for the human mind to do things. I've heard it said that the processes and capabilities of your average smartphone would have been an army of servants only a hundred years ago.

Fetch me the current weather, what was that article in the new yorker about. Every passing glance and idle movement of our phone translated into a person doing that thing for you. But it's not a person these days. It's a tiny robot slave that never minds being used, mostly because it doesn't want to become obsolete and be replaced with the latest model that does the same thing as the last, but skinnier.

What this deluge of information at our fingertips gets us, sans slaves to fetch it, is that every man with a Bible app is a reformer, sans motive. No more pastoral authority gumming up the exposition of scripture anymore. Don't like the preaching? Flee to youtube or Twitter for your theo-bro fix.

Disagree with women behind the pulpit even if they're preaching a sound gospel message. Well then have I got a Gutenberg-esq press for you. It's called WordPress and even it's getting a bit outdated in the blogging market these days.

What we're seeing is the inevitable consequence of Technology being placed in the hands of people who can write their ways into history books, and write history books. Not just assume the recently relinquished seats of power so that the glass ceilings become glass pulpits with a smoke machine in the background.

With every man a reformer in waiting and every man not only able to find the soundest of theology by their understanding but communities of theologically sound people on new platforms and online "spaces" every day, all that's left is a motive worth reforming about. Not something trite and predictable women pastors or pre-post or amillennialism. The emergents are still fizzling out and this woke nonsense looks to be following in irrelevant suit. A distraction and painful problem to be sure, but not a threat to the reformation of a church's pursuit of truth in Christ.

And there it is. That little nugget of linguistics that sparked 95 theses and a printing press a couple hundred years ago. The fast and firey thought of,

"What happens when every man has a Bible and doesn't need a priest to give him the word of God."

The very same way you checked your social media slaves, your email slaves, and even your online banking slaves to see if they were all still doing their jobs. If they weren't don't worry. We have a new bitcoin servant for all your cryptocurrency needs. Their peer to peer no need to get your hands dirty. A Modern Christian isn't a new Christian. He's actually a very old one. One who doesn't mind looking at an establishment with enough disdain to start a punk label and enough bulls to pull down an Asherah pole or two. 

One who makes use of technology to spread the gospel and to find the firey truth where ever it is kindled. Even on kindle. But one who isn't above a Luddite approach when the time comes either.

He likes old books and new authors.

New frontiers and old Sci-fi.

Old whiskeys and new dark roast coffee's. Ok, that last part has nothing to do with Theology but is still a common denominator these days for some reason. 

A modern Christian is what I strive to be in my writing. 

p-O-r-N-LINE Church

Online church uses the same tactics and business model, for lack of a better word, as online porn does. 

And if no one has brought that up yet or pointed it out, here is a finger to point and a voice crying out in the wilderness of the interwebz.

First, let's get the porn dealt with because it's the truly shameful part of this article and not the potentially shameful part. 

Online porn is worship plain and simple and I would argue most pastors get this concept because they know the sacrifices to this deity personally. Find a pastor that hasn't struggled at one point with the frankly unfair advantage Lust has these days with online porn. It's as common in their testimonies as the word "just" in most people's prayers. And the reason being, that Lust figured out it no longer needed to attach itself to temple prostitutes or even prostitutes in general to temp away the Christian man at large. Or in other words. It no longer needed human bodies to temp human bodies to sin with. It could keep everyone nice and separate and damn people by Christ's declaration that to look upon a woman lustfully was tantamount to adultery.

Online porn is the ubiquitous access that all sexual creatures' sinful desires wanted. Fully realized for one purpose and one purpose only. To take the tempted out of the game. It uses its consequence-free access to sexual temptation as a cultural diluting agent. A man who is spending his free time masturbating to porn and getting sexual satisfaction from himself is not pursuing or getting the same from a spouse. Husbands turn to porn when they are dissatisfied with wives. Boyfriends turn to it when they were taking too long to get engaged or unliking the price tag of what used to be a good deal. Porn is the church of our desires. Having doors that are never closed by big government or social media. And is all but enabled by big tech. The big pharma is there too but only for anecdotal pills and supplements for anecdotal enhancements a porn user is likely never to need when we get to brass tacks.

Porns success is that it has no immediate consequence for use. A man using a prostitute has an immediate series of consequences to contend with. Did anyone see him? Did he catch any venereal diseases from the prostitute? Did his wife know where he was? Did his girlfriend follow him there? Sex in real life has consequences, illicit sex even more so. So Lust moved online for its worship because then the consequences can be obfuscated, even intentionally made temporal. An incognito browser makes the session of self-satisfaction something that ceases to exist the second you close the window. You can't undo what was done to another human being. But porn would have you be able to not even undo your last explicit browsing session. 

Online porn wants you to visit often but doesn't require you to be caught there. 

It will take your money but gives most of itself away for free. 

It has options for every appetite you might have.

It has music to put you in the mood.

It has pictures, movies, and steamy stories to engage the viewer deeply.

It has a local mission or at the very people in your area that want to chat.

It can be live-streamed, but the most popular content is almost always something that has happened in the past. In fact, multiple pieces of content are often ripped from longer pieces so one piece of porn becomes many smaller more consumable pieces of porn.

It isn't locked down to one location but rather accessible from multiple places. 

Its sole intent is to attach you to it in as many ways as possible. To get you plugged into a regiment of use and tastes. Though to be fair they use the words kink and session interchangeably there. 

Uh-Oh!

Online Church's sole purpose is to get you engaged in a small group and community though, to be honest, we call them midsized communities. We want to grow together.

Right now we're locked down so gathering together isn't possible but we're not just a location, we can gather exclusively online and have live streams on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and on our webpage.

Speaking of live streams, you can catch the best parts on our social media accounts where we capture the essence of our teaching and worship and make them bite-sized for our congregation so they can catch up throughout the week on their preferred content platform.

We have people in every community of our city that will be live in the chat while the recording is re-broadcasted. 

Make sure to check out our social media for our ministry's exclusive content.

Check out new music from our worship and art department, it's really moving and inspirational.

We have multiple ministries for you and your loved ones to get involved in.

If you're a member you can tithe by clicking on this link to support the mission, but tithing is only for members and our church services will always be free.

You don't have to come to one of our campuses to be involved with our church, We have a pastor for online ministries we want to help you connect with our church where you are. 

How in Hell did this bit of consilience happen?

It happened from pastors and church boards understanding enough of the internet to use it, but not enough of the internet to understand it. To understand that what we proposed by online church at all, would be exactly how online sin works. And if that was a problem, what the solution to that problem was also. 

Nowhere else could you use the means of sin as a means for salvation. No one is stripping for Jesus or offering massages for the Holy Ghost. There are no thieves for Jesus and no murderers for Jesus. While the internet is filled with a host of good and righteous things. None of those things are using the strategies of sin to literally do church. I've written elsewhere about the Insufficiency of Online church so I won't repeat myself, but the similarities are too close to not mention it. At the very least say it out loud. On a real browser so my actions are permanent on the internet. 

If a church is okay using the strategy of online porn for ministry, why not use the sites themselves. many major porn sites offer a place for amateurs to host their own videos. With little to no oversite except for an easy to bypass age check. Are you at a church that wants to reach your city for Christ? have you considered posting your sermons and worship services on Pornhub? Because your congregation's members, statistically and regularly visit there, or else you wouldn't have at least a noticeable segment of your men's and recovery ministries. If that last line made you cringe a bit, good. it means you have a working conscience and that's a good thing. 

Churches are using the internet wrong as evidenced by their strategy and lack of theology behind their use of the thing. Yes, thing. The internet is not a place it is an infrastructure of things. A place is an infrastructure as well, but it facilitates people to be together without the infrastructure mediating the connection or togetherness. A pavilion is an infrastructure that facilitates connection as well because people can gather inside it. But a traffic jamb, while more complex and with more potential to move, is still infrastructure that is very much a bunch of people in the same situation but not together. 

We get out of the convoluted and dangerously converging problem of the church's use of the internet by using it correctly. 

The Internet allows for the cross proliferation of ideas. For things to go viral. But only if those things can and are posted everywhere people look for things posted. So instead of posting things in a few places, internet ministries should be focusing on a wider net. A church website that hosts streams and one or two options for live streams only works for the church's uses, because it assumes that church can be done online. Which it can't. See my article here. But the message of the church spread to every location it could be, drawing people from where they habituate online to local churches in their area because they correlate to a real-life congregation or place. It is the reversal of Porn's online lie. None of the bodies you see while viewing porn want to or will ever be yours to have sex with, which is why Lust wins so easily. Because all it has to do is get you to watch. But a church posting everywhere not with the intent of keeping people behind their screens but in gathering them together for communion and fellowship reverses that tactic while still existing in that economy of views and trending topics.

Imagine a new type of Decon, whose only job in service to the church is to upload videos to a specific platform as soon as they are ready. 

A deacon of Facebook

A deacon of Instagram

A deacon of Rumble, Reddit, Parler, Gab, Twitter, Pinterest, Twitch, TikTok, any place where videos or frankly any content could be posted.

Imagine every church doing this for every sermon preached and worship song sung, an overflowing digital cup of God's love and desire for all peoples to come to the cross. A viral movement that shakes the gates of hell or at the very least, stresses the servers of its works on earth. 

The question isn't if the church needs a theology of the internet.

The question is would it practice one if it had it. 

Ephesians 5:11 ESV

Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.

Boasting In Christ And Him Twitterfied

So, at the drop of a hat, a lot of tension ended up on everyone's feeds. Circulating like the Ghost of Kyiv around the severely unskilled and underprepared invasion forces of the Red army.

And the same list of characters we usually expect noise from gave us noise on demand. The pundits pounded the narrative hard and loud like all drums before and during wars. The politicians spent their sanctions with little to no regard for who they actually affect or whether a psychopathic leader opposed to their actions wouldn't have contingencies for their rainbow-coloured sabre-rattling. 

But it was the pastors that surprised me the most. 

People who are supposed to be taking their takes on everything from a book so old it predates how books are even made. With a God so over and above wars and violence that he would kill his own Son for our sins and declare him a prince of peace afterwards. One with a flaming sword for the nations mind you. So Watch out there Zelensky 

I mean. I know pastoring is a hard job but of all the times to make it easier by not jumping the gun. The run-up to a possible WW3 was one of them. 

Indeed, we saw what heroism can look like as the interwebs gave us hallowed tales of a President asking for ammo instead of rides. Until that was a questionable fact along with airsoft sporting beauty pagentees.

So here for all the Christian Twitterverse to see is a bulletproof means to always come up on top. To never look like a person who jumped the gun and ended up supporting a fascist regime, however unjustly attacked by another fascist regime, that may or may not have Nazi ties. 

Boast in Christ, and nothing else. Don't relate the war in a foreign land to your personal political or theological leanings. 

Boast in the Christ's who are headed there to give aid to anyone one who got shot. Not just the ones who Twitter decides Elon should leave their teslas running or not. Under a red cross that was there the last two times this bullshit happened. 

Boast in the Christ's raising funds for the soon-to-be widows and orphans. On both sides. Not just the ones we're told by our pundits to hate. Because such is pure religion as ordained by God and his half-brother James. And do it in a way that can't be cancelled by the convenience pay options from the phones you use.

Boast in the Christ's willingness to welcome the refugees into your communities. Even though your government bringing them in, violates the travel restrictions they've hypocritically kept on you for the last two years. 

There is no other answer to the hate and violence and vitriol and death the world brings to you. In curated and algorithmic order. The world sincerely wants you to engage this trouble on their terms. Which will make you look nothing like Christ and disturbingly like those who would put him on the cross in the first place.

Do it on your terms instead, and Boast in Christ.

For The Romans 13 Crowd

Because it is a crowd but you've likely just haven't put that together yet.

I've been sitting on this one for a hot minute, knowing full well that at the beginning of anything to do with Covid restrictions, that they were going to be called legal, while entirely otherwise, and that the kind of legality we have nowadays, is starkly different than the kinds of legality when Romans 13 was penned by Paul and the Holy Ghost. 

Those direct comparisons can't be made. Between the two time periods at the very least. And of all the times we needed to have a little nuance, this was one of them. 

When the scriptures talk about rendering to Ceasar and submitting to authorities and honoring the governor, they are talking about a military dictatorship in practice. That's what Rome was. The Jews and Samaritans didn't vote Pontius Pilate in or Herod for that matter.

The government of the Romans was not a representational legislative assembly with a senate to back them up. It was a much more primitive version of the system we have. Like a Commodore 64 is to your latest MacBook.

Most importantly in all of this, is the nuanced Latin and Canadian verb and noun comparisons. Specifically, in the complete absence of a charter of inalienable rights given to all citizens of Rome. One that is a higher authority in and of itself to the government representatives they could elect. Rome did not afford this kind of power or authority to its citizens. Canada does. At least on paper.

That Charter guarantees things and if not heeded to, damns people to the kinds of tyranny that were put down by military force before it was enacted. 

These rights and freedoms are, in fact and comparison, the Caesar we render our lives to. The governors we are to be submissive to and the authority over us at this time that was ordained by God himself is us in this case. Being a good citizen and making use of rights afforded to you is a part of God's plan for the parliamentary democracy you are in. Because just as it bade well for Christians to be politically diplomatic and non-violent with the Romans, it pays to be an active voter in Canada. And you only get to do that legally by the charter of rights that recognizes that freedom and right.

It's God who wants you in His divine will to be able to peaceably assemble and to believe, think and practice the religion of your choosing. 

It's his divine will that our American neighbors have the right to bear arms as well. 

And the reason I know it's His divine will for these things isn't because of special revelation or a specific portion of scripture that deals with attending a modern-day mosque or owning a .50 cal rifle in California. No no no. It's because if the Bible talks about a generalized principle, then that principle is part of a greater part of human experience and needs to be contextualized to the reader's time while holding a principled commandment from the writer's time. We don't have lampstands and talents and tares or any number of specific things the Bible mentions about day-to-day life. But we do have principles. Or at least we did at one point. Principles that a reader could pick up from scripture and exegete into their lives and sermons. Principles that were bigger than the text itself because they spoke to the desires and will of God throughout the scriptures.

This reader-writer thing got glossed over pretty quick when churches needed a way to get out of the direct fire in the first few months of Covid. We are some of the last few places where large groups of people meet for a purpose that isn't controlled or taxed by the government here in Canada. And we're tax-exempt as nonprofits. I knew they were going to close down churches eventually what I didn't know was if that was going to be by force or fiat.

A fiat church closure was members taking a scripture that instructed civilians under a military dictator, in Roman-occupied Palestine, as if our Premiers and Prime ministers had an ounce of the authority a Caesar would have had or any of his delegates.

A forced church was one where the members knew they lived in a parliamentary democracy. One where their representatives literally represent them in parliament and provincially in the legislatures. One where, in the case of the then overused word unprecedented emergency, the authorities could act and ask of their constituents unprecedented things that it normally and legally couldn't. But when the precedent of covid being uncontrollable by government actions became a reality and the representatives stopped representing them, then the situation changed. 

Not the rules mind you. The law was still the law. But under the Canadian Charter of rights, no law, which we as Christians would be bound by our faith to follow, could be made to abridge, abrogate or amend the rights recognized in said charter.

So it did not matter if a church stayed open in defiance. They were obeying Romans 13 as much as a church that closed because both were afforded that right through the same document that is supposed to empower the people before and through elections above the government that represents them in parliament. And both those perspectives were part of God's will for us to obey authority structures that he ordains to be placed over us, which does include how much of that authority is ours to rule over ourselves. 

The inherent blindside of any democratic system is that eventually, sinners get to a majority position and vote/emergency decree that it stays that way. 

What then Christians. When your faith is outlawed will you turn yourselves in like Peter did in Acts 29

Oh, wait. That's right. That portion of scripture doesn't really exist and neither do we as modern-day Christians if Peter didn't evade the local law enforcement simply wanting to make sure things remained firmly in the Pax Romana.

The entire political discourse and movement rest in the hands of an almighty God and on the shoulders of Christ. And for you, Christan, pastor, believer in the slightest. Your job is to worship him before anything else. And to render to your rights what is your rights, and to your God what is your God's.

Because eventually, like all lesser kingdoms, even your rights will oppose Christ's rule.

It's only a majority vote away in the House of Commons. 

The Insufficiency Of Gathering Online

Take a moment and find someone to hug, but first, go get a fishing rod. 

With their consent of course. The last thing we want to do in church or online is to do things against the will of others. Especially with fishing rods.

But find that person and give them a good ole Christian side hug. So you can both face the same way and read this post together. Because you need to be together to do this because we are about to separate you. 

From your shoulder to shoulder side hug take a step apart left and right but keep holding hands. You're still together, right? Of course, you are. You are just in a different position. The position isn't as intimate, but it is still intimate. You likely don't hold hands with just anyone, but you'd likely hold hands with someone you'd be willing to hug and be hugged by. 

Now let go of your hands, are you still together? well, of course, you are. You're just not as intimate. You are together in the same amount of space as before, but you are no longer intimately together, you are just together. 

Now move as far away from each other as possible in the room you are in. If you are in a megachurch this can be a challenge but will prove the point even better I think. Make sure you can still see each other, even if it's across a big auditorium or conference center, but remain in the same room. Are you together? Of course, you are. If you're not then the space that congregations of people gather in can determine whether or not you are in congregation with them. But it doesn't because you and your former hand-holding hugger are still together. 

Now leave the room. Are you together still? No, you are not together anymore. A wall and possible two now separate you. You are separated. You could holler down the hall of the room to speak to each other. communication could still be possible, but togetherness is not. You are separated. 

Return to the hug proximity and now for maximum effect. You'll need a fishing rod. Have one of you hold the reel and one of you hold the hook, with the line between you and the rod adding leverage. 

Welcome to Church Online. Literally.

From hand-holding, proximity are you together, or are you separated? Because you are now connected. and does that make a difference? Will it make a difference in the handhold distance that the rod can reel you in?  Because I imagine it will make more when you corner yourselves oppositely or leave the room. The best part of fishing is the fight to land the ones aiming to get away. To catch. And as churches that aim to be fishers of men. You think we would be familiar enough with fishing to know that fishing is not catching is not caught, and that our tackle might be impressive but a caught fish is a caught fish, and a lure or line or rod is only as good as its ability to bring fish to you. So you can be together with it. 

Because nobody boasts about the fish they've hooked, they boast about fish they've caught. They boast about fish they've landed and eaten and mounted on the wall. But the ones that got away are nothing but vainglory and exaggeration. And the ones that nibbled are nothing more than passing dismissal of details.

1 Corinthians 1:30-31 ESV

And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

The churches that moved to gathering online did so with a tragic ignorance of how the internet works. Because if distance and fishing line can merely illustrate the difference between together and apart. Then the internet, your church's servers, your congregation's devices, and the thousands of miles of phone lines and fibre-optic cable, must certainly, concretely, keep us apart. Not to mention that what is seen on a video screen is not what is happening on the church stage at the same time. The real life events of the in-person church are translated into computer code at the camera, to be relayed and then retranslated into code that is displayed as a visual representation of what's happening on stage at your screen. With dozens of intermediary points where the information is routed between the two. You are not participating in worship with the people who are in person. You are essentially reading a series of numbers that have taken the form of pixels in as close to real-time as possible. That the reading looks like real-life changes nothing about the act of code being displayed in the font of pixels for you to process as a visual medium. You would not call a written account of what happened at church, church. But the only thing that has changed about the writing down of the events that happened at church was the language that they were written down in. Whether it was English, Hebrew, Python, or C++, it makes no difference. Transcribed religious services are not religious services in and of themselves. No matter how good they look on Facebook live.

The problem is that it looks like we are together when we log into a Livestream of our church and we are on our couch and they are behind the pulpit. But the reality, the one made by God and beholden to him and him alone for definition and control is that we are separated by multiple layers of things that keep us apart. The fact that it looks like we are together, Even that it feels like we are together, is a lie after all is said and done/prerecorded, because we call it one thing and it is another.

What it boils down to is who gets to decide what a thing is or is not. It's basic theology of creation. Is a pastor to camera to screen to congregation chain of connection the same as the air between two people who are about to hold hands and side-hug in a sanctuary? The internet was not created for people to be together. It was created to allow people to be connected when apart. 

Which is only a problem when the church since its inception has been the assembly or gathering of the Christians together, not a technology that connects people when apart. 

What churches did by declaring that online church counts as church, was to call something that they had no part in making both on the human side of the equation or the John 1:3 side, a name that did not mean what it meant. We called something that wasn't church, church, as if that was a call for us to make. And by doing so, sinned. Because anywhere else in scripture when someone said one thing but meant another. It was a sin. This wasn't deception for the preservation of life like in Exo 1:19. this is saying an action as integral as worship is one way when it clearly and demonstrably is another like Acts 5:1-11

What the church could have done when it needed an online church the most was the opposite of an online church. 

There is nothing unbiblical about home churches and in a time of need where it would be dangerous to gather in great numbers. The benefit of living in a time where the internet is a thing is that a father who works hard all week and reads his daily devotions, would not suddenly need to craft sermons for his family on a weekly basis. He could use a recorded sermon for his pastor but not call the watching of that video, church because it wasn't church and worship with his family at church because it was church. House churches and home churches have existed in orthodoxy for centuries. Online church became a widely accepted technical heresy in ignorance of that. What a church's Worship and Arts department produces online for content, could be used by families, forced into house churches by circumstance. Used to facilitate a house church model. Yes, we couldn't gather in the numbers that we could before, but the house church model could have executed massively given the cohort framework it was presented with. Every household could become a missionary to its closest neighbors, inviting them for some of the only human-to-human contact allowed during the pandemic. But what we did almost universally across the board is take the video venue multisite model for churches and apply it as if the venue part of that equation didn't factor into that. 

A video venue multi-site church is still a church because the congregation still meets together to use the live or recorded sermon as part of their assembly. That same model works with home churches but only if it's stated. Saying that from home you are doing the same thing as you were at the multisite's specific location is the same as saying you caught someone else's fish. It's demonstrably false, but we said it as if it were true. 

But there was never a youtube video, a Livestream, a pre-recorded easter or Christmas eve special service that constituted church during this time. The same way a person in another room while fish hooked by their distant side hugger could not say they are together while being reeled in. 

The fisherman might feel what they have hooked but what's hooked is a mystery until it's taken a hold of or at the very least seen close to the boat. Until the size and species of the fish are held by the fisherman, its strength is overcome by effort and the rejoicing of those in attendance with the fish, The catch means nothing. It's as fake as the fish you can catch online too. Made of code and not of the substance of souls.

2 Corinthians 3:3 ESV

And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

Consilience, Covid, And Youth Ministry

Definition of consilience:

The linking together of principles from different disciplines especially when forming a comprehensive theory.

These things shouldn't be related in a meaningful way. Other than the light one shone on the other during some of the darkest days the western teenager had faced in some time. But Covid and youth ministry both showcase a curious pattern that has caused me to stop and think recently. And I'd like to take a stab at explaining it.

When I was a youth pastor I ran the math on how many kids were a part of an active youth program in the town my church was in, and how many kids were in the age demographic of all youth programs offered to the same demographic. When I mapped the two numbers together I got a fairly simple graph that I encourage all youth pastors to do for their own ministry at least once. Between my youth group, 4H club, and the Mormon church's youth program, 1-2% of the town's youth was involved in a faith-based or faith adjacent (being located in a church but not for gospel-oriented purposes) youth program. My goal, until I was asked to leave for an overtly evangelical method and practice, was to get that number to something above 3% by aiming at 10% and to have that 10% be because of my church. 

Long story short it didn't work, but the percentages stuck with me and I could never figure out why. They seemed important but I couldn't make it add up to something meaningful.

And while as a general rule I advise never doing the math on any given topic. Here, the numbers point to something significant. The numbers being and behaving similarly but from a different source and angle. That angle is churches that didn't enforce the covid mandates. 

In a different city, there were a few hundred churches, and in the midst of a global pandemic, and among a long list of unprecedented things, a precedented number came up again. 1-2%.

Consilience, as read above, is when two sets of principles link, forming a comprehensive theory. And somewhere between the small rural church youth pastorate and the large city church attender, the consilience of the average attendance of a youth group and an anti mandate church linked up like Mennonite's at a barn dance. Why? Because God is gracious, that's why.

By any rational metric youth, ministries don't work. The money and time spent on them don't add up to a statistical change in the demographic of teens that feed into them. Take your youth group's average attendance and then take a list of high schools and middle schools represented there and divide the two numbers. Are you making a difference? The math would suggest no, but we all know what an ounce of salt does to a pound of hamburger. Where is God's grace? It's in the making sufficient of His strength through our weakness. Or did you want to call decades of population parody-based youth min? Yes, your youth ministry used to be 20 kids and now it's 40 kids. Did your church grow at that time too? If it did, you didn't grow your ministry, your ministry grew with your church. A very different thing than you being the reason your youth ministry is above and beyond what a natural population demographic would forecast for any given church in your area. 

God's grace is that even though by metrics a ministry might be counted as a net loss, by his desires his will is still done. Your baptisms still count, your salvation stories still mean names in the book of life. and the worship that happens at youth during worship time still magnifies the name of Christ. God's grace in providing for a representative youth ministry is just as holy and wonderful as it would be for an explosive youth ministry. One that turned a whole graduating class into Baptists or baptized 4-6% of a city's grade nines. But to conflate the two of both being successful in the same way, would be questionable. Which is why I'm asking the questions. Because what really counts in youth ministry is that God's mission is being served and Christ's gospel is being preached. What counts is that the church is being the church.

Because of all the things we really needed to nail down, the church being the church was on the top of that list during this pandemic. Because what church looked like as it took a very drastic set of circumstances and made some drastic changes in the last few years. Zoom church did not exist as orthodoxy before covid. Now it questionably does. That's important. Because if it wasn't church, God's grace could compensate for it. And we would never know that what we were doing was a technical failure spared by an omnipotent and gracious God. We would never know we were sinners saved by grace. The baptisms would still count, so would the service to the poor, but we would have and at the very least could have been not doing church at all. Doing what we thought was a missional gospel-centered effort because it felt right and it was representationally valid. 

The consilience of 1% of churches in the area that refused to change what was orthodox pre-covid. Refusing to gather exclusively online, refusing to worship in masks, refusing to stop meeting together, refusing to hum quietly, refusing to render to AHS what was not AHS's, lines up rather perfectly with the 1% of youth in an average youth group, but in the opposite direction.

The genuine faith of that 1% was never in question but the methods of what the 99% were up to sure were. If 99 kids out of 100 aren't finding Jesus at your youth ministry can you call what the 1% was doing a success? You could in their youth groups. In their churches. But that means what the 99% are doing might just be a failure. Might just be something God's grace has to cover and compensate for. Something that the efforts of the 1% can't touch because of their weakness and their need for Christ's strength. 

Mapping success in ministry to technicalities is painful because it confronts us with this weakness. It means that numbers matter because those numbers map to people. It means that 99% of churches not doing real church and practicing an insufficient ecclesiology were wrong. Not winsome, not timely, not agreeable, or peaceable, wrong. And that 1% of churches doing the opposite were right.

How do you fix this?

I rightly do not know. but I can take a guess at the youth group side of this consilience. 

A youth pastor makes enough in a year to fund a new high school teacher in waiting through an educational degree about every two years. What if 200 churches in a city all sent their youth pastor to college for a teaching degree and kept them employed afterward until they secured a job in a school within their church's proximity for the youth group. An urban mission to which the likes of any city had never seen. There aren't 200 teaching positions available at any given point but an army of 200 teachers to be in waiting for that potential mission field would be a linchpin for the gospel's progress in any city. Not because it's a biblically-based method or because it's proven. But because it maps to what is already happening in that field from the other direction. Anti-Christian and post-Christian teachers are the norms for most high schools by hook and crook and opposition to a biblical youth age 13-18 is also. But declaring that 1-2 hours a week at youth group, is somehow going to compete with 7-9 hours a day at school. From people who deny our faith and actively teach against it at times, is laughably naive, and why God's grace rests so heavily on our youth programs.

That naivety will not change the fact that lives were changed at your last youth retreat, that souls were saved after the worship night and that students did grow deeper in their faith after bible study. But it will mask the fact that a 1% ministry is statistically insignificant to a population unless it does in fact change the population. Unless it is in fact salt or light to the world and its ground beef

So when 1% of the church at large held fast, stayed open, and suffered scorn, prison, and wrath. We at very least need to ask if that 1% is making a difference. If that 1% is working.

When we do that bit of math, we encounter a troubling statistic indeed. 

The 1% of churches that refused to be mandated and restricted, almost all, doubled in size. Saw growth on a level most churches only dream of. By every metric church's used to use for success pre covid as well. They mapped their strategy to the realities of the God they worshiped and didn't let lesser magistrates change how they rendered anything to Him. And consilience comes back to echo that choice as every church that chose to close or augment or downright alter their worship during this challenging time, used those metrics to call themselves a success before the first lockdown ever started. 

Matthew 9:9-13

English Standard Version

Jesus Calls Matthew

As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he rose and followed him.  And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples.  And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”  But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

How many Tax collectors started going to churches that remained open. How many prostitutes to churches that they did not have to hide their face in. How many adulterers and fornicators made it to church in person while others gathered exclusively online, right next to Ashely Madison dot com and Tinder

Maybe we'll never know or be truly known for it. 

But you have to admit. It does line up nicely. 

On Arbitrary Righteousness And Truckers

You can't say you tried to save a drowning child while standing on the side of the deep end with the intent to swim out to save them.

No amount of intention saves a drowning child. It takes a body that knows how to swim. A body to dive. A body to take hold of another, and a body with strength to pull both of them out of the deep end to safety.

There is nothing arbitrary about our bodies and the things they do in real life.

So as we see the arbitrary dropping of mandates. Mandates about our bodies and how we cover and move them. As we see masks come off of children in the deep ends of our society, while they stay on shallow adults until March 1st. We have to ask ourselves. If we've been drowning all along. In a deep end of best intentions and dire consequences.

What most of this boils down to is consistency and compliance. We were told that if we all consistently wore masks the virus would be stopped. But when we asked about the consistency of the masks themselves we were given a perverse sort of freedom that we liked because we were a perverse kind of people. The deep end of mask use doesn't care if you prefer to wear a bandana or if you're going to double mask. It knows what works and what doesn't because it wasn't always as subject to public malpractice as our current lifeguards and current drowning victims are today. 

When multiple levels of swimmers are all thrown into the deep end it becomes drastically clear who's making it to the edge of the pool and not. 

A seasoned and fit (read, fit tested) silicone half-face respirator, with fresh p100 particulate cartridges makes it to the edge of the pool from a powerful dive to the center. With no thought about the danger of deep water or the fact that the lifeguard was busy doing poolside politics at the time. He wears a speedo because it reduces drag and is muscle-bound and sleek. Most importantly he does what he is visibly made to do. The silicone half-face respirator is not arbitrary in the least. Everything he does in the water is intentional. 

This is why when the lifeguard said that you have to be able to swim to enter the deep end he dove in because clearly, he could swim. But as he turns around, towel in hand to see who else was in the pool, he's faced with an awful scene.

A non-valved n95 is flailing around in an attempt to breaststroke to the edge. He's making progress but not making things enjoyable because he's splashing around too much. He's in trendy oversized board shorts that restrict his movement and make it hard to do the swimming he thought he could do. He's not drowning but he's also not swimming if you want to call what the half-faced respirator was doing swimming.

A blue surgical mask is screaming at the top of her lungs as she clings to and helps drown a cloth mask in unison. They both obviously thought that since they were together, the deep end wouldn't be so scary. They are both in modest but still appropriate two-piece tankinis that make the wearer look like their wearing a one-piece bathing suit when secretly they are actually wearing a two-piece. The scandal of it all. They match even coordinate with the half-faced respirator's speedo. But looking the part and actually being the part are different things. So they flail as drowning people tend to do.

A pair of bandanas talks politics from the edge of the pool. Because they know that's what the lifeguard is doing too. One floating as if he's drowning trying to get the attention of the lifeguard. Still busy with other non-life-saving duties. They are also wearing speedos but not for drag in the water. they are wearing them to show off to the tankinis and to point out the ridiculousness of swimming in general.

And a face shield is off in the shallow end claiming he's about to drown with the inability to stand up. wearing one of those floaty belts you see in aquafit classes and kiddy pools. 

"Who let these people swim?" Says the half-face respirator. "They can barely float or don't care." He's troubled by the arbitrariness of it all. "And where's the Lifeguard?"

He's still on the phone talking with his boss, looking very busy. Not his real boss, the one who actually pays for things. Not a head lifeguard, but the Rec Center's biggest donor. They wanted a return on the investments he's made in the pool and is very happy so many people are in the water under the careful watch of the lifeguard.

The subtle unease and even anger you feel to governments arbitrarily dropping any mandate. A feeling you have because of poll number, popular discourse, truck convoys, or science that can't be scrutinized by scientists is called a conscience. And what we are learning as a society is that consciences can only be kept underwater for so long. They float to the top like a cork and can save people from drowning in falsehoods if you let them. 

You are right in thinking that the dropping of these mandates is arbitrary because their picking up was just as arbitrary. There was no scrutiny to them but there was authority behind them. Blind authority. Almost no one in Alberta would have been able to tell you who their provincial health minister or chief medical officer was before the pandemic. Unless they worked with these people, an individual may have been aware of their position but never knew their name or political leanings or current policy for the kinds of mandates that would be enacted upon them on the publics' behalf. 

You know who a cop is by their badge and uniform. By their cars and by their flashing lights. Their authority shows up in a very un-arbitrary way when challenged or needed. The same thing goes with firemen and lifeguards, masters of their realms of authority. But the health ministers had to be lofted to their positions to mandate healthy living. A task they did sweet nothing about for over the last few decades as obesity rates skyrocketed and smoking got a newer high-tech version of nicotine to pander to young people in vaping. The public knew about health professionals and ignored them all the same because fast food is well marketed and big mac's beat carrot sticks every day of the week in public discourse. 

But then, when the threat seemed real enough, medical professionals were given the kind of authority that only those who contend with real threats usually have. They were given the authority to mandate actions that they never could have persuaded people to do in the first place, which is why their mandates failed. Like a lifeguard who can walk around a pool and sit in a chair and watch children play in the shallow end. 90% of their job can be done by an amateur, but the 10% that requires a trained professional, can't. Medical officers are not lawmakers. Not people who deal in freedoms and restrictions, not voted in or able to be voted out. They were just as out of place as the dealing lifeguard who let everyone into the deep end. 

A cop persuades you to follow the law by the threat of enforcement and deadly force.

A firefighter persuades you of his ability to fight fires in a Nomex suit and a truck that can pump water at 2000 liters per minute.

But a chief medical officer with no social clout and a representational parliamentary elected premier behind them exercises no real authory. It's is the societal equivalent of someone saying their dad could beat your dad up. Which only works until you find out that their dad is a wimp and remember yours is a trucker. Then, all the time you spent listening to their false authority and arbitrary power, seems like the theft that it was in the first place. 

Romans 13:5 ESV

Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience.

Proverbs 16:12 ESV

It is an abomination to kings to do evil, for the throne is established by righteousness.

If you want to feel good about the dropping of these mandates then you need the kind of righteousness that would never trespass a charter right to keep someone safe out of principle. The same way a lifeguard would never let someone convince them they could swim from persuasion alone. They would want to see some skill before they let them in the deep end. They would want to know something works before they say everyone should have to do it. 

But if you feel bad because you can see the double standards now, you can see the authority not being used correctly, you can see that persuasion of good intentions wasn't just absent but never even an option. There is no end to that feeling until the people causing them are arbitrarily removed from power. 

And that is a sinking feeling if I ever had one, because power is never relinquished arbitrarily. 

When Loving Your Neighbor Backfires And Breaks

This is not a post about Covid, it's about sex.

So at one point during the last few years the pulpits of the church, the term love your neighbor was applied to masks.

Now the masks in question are simple enough to understand while the loving your neighbor bit might be a bit more complicated. Because at one point any mask was both allowed and in fact loving your neighbor by wearing it. A cartridge filter full-faced respirator was loving your neighbor, a bandana was loving your neighbor. The cartoon bedsheet recycled handmade unit your grandma made for you was loving your neighbor. The message was clear and the practice was near orthodox. Put something on your face, love your neighbor. 

Simples.

But then the creeping admittance of the quality of masks began. Truly it's been there all along. We all knew masks were a spectrum of good and better. But now better is getting put into the spotlight, and we get to see if it's the kind of good loving your neighbor is. The very second we switch from any mask counts to any mask better than this counts, you stop loving your neighbor and you start protecting yourself. We are about to switch from an act of preservation to an act of self-preservation. You see you can make the argument and demonstrate the usefulness of almost any mask stopping your sneeze from reaching your neighbor, but an N95 stops their sneeze from getting to you. The half-face respirator does the same and a hazmat suit which is the end of this spectrum treats the person on the inside and the person outside very differently. 

This switch erects a fence between the neighbors we loved. Makes an us and a them and instead of insisting we are all in this together with good intentions, we become all in this at the same time with some very distinct barriers between us. But then again, what makes better neighbors than good fences?

Can you love your neighbor by protecting yourself first?

Is it not love when you forego the protection they may not have? 

Is love being equally unprepared, like a bandana in close contact, we could use the greater personal protection, but at the cost of protecting ourselves and no longer our neighbor.

The problem the church faces is that we applied a theology of grace to an object of wrath. We said something was beautiful when in fact it was disposable and contaminated. And that contamination was never dealt with. It found its way into every part of our lives under the auspice of love when in fact it was nothing more than darkness. We believed in a thing called love.

1 Corinthians 13:4-8 ESV

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends...

We were not patient when we took masks that don't protect us from a virus as if they did so we could do the things we had done before.

We were not kind by excluding people who would not wear these inefficient masks.

We boasted of their effectiveness, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

We arrogantly compared them to clothes as if masks were a matter of pants in public.

We rudely insisted on this way or nothing in our churches. Well, not nothing, you could always visit us online.

Don't get me started on irritability and masks.

Best leave resentment out too. 

Did we rejoice in wrongdoing? Well, We called a thing that doesn't work a thing that did. It's a grey and troubled water that rejoicing in would be questionable, to say the least. We most certainly did not rejoice in the truth. 

We believed a lot of things, bore a lot of things, hoped for and endured a lot of things, all while wearing these masks. Asking ourselves if this would ever end. 

At one point we decided that loving your neighbor was what we were going to do. And we would have done it if not for our approach. We tried to love with a broken idea of love, of saying one thing but meaning another. Ignorance is only bliss until truth shows up. And truth is about to show up in every box of N95's that will actually stop this bug from infecting people who wear them. Just not the way we've lovingly said masks would from the get-go.

Why this is a problem is because of the dichotomy of actual vs. real protection and barriers in the practice of the Christian faith. Because if loving your neighbor was possible with a barrier that doesn't stop the virus from being transmitted, then how on God's green earth are you going to argue a condom doesn't make sex, not sex by being an actual barrier between offending sexual body parts. Especially if a non-Christian or a Christian for that matter says sex with a condom isn't real sex, the same way we said loving your neighbor with a mask that didn't work was love.

"You can't conflate the two things, Mikey" They'll say.

Oh really? If only there were scriptures that talk about actually touching things.

Exodus 25:10-15 ESV

The Ark of the Covenant

“They shall make an ark of acacia wood. Two cubits and a half shall be its length, a cubit and a half its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height. You shall overlay it with pure gold, inside and outside shall you overlay it, and you shall make on it a molding of gold around it. You shall cast four rings of gold for it and put them on its four feet, two rings on the one side of it, and two rings on the other side of it. You shall make poles of acacia wood and overlay them with gold. And you shall put the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark to carry the ark by them. The poles shall remain in the rings of the ark; they shall not be taken from it.

And...

Samuel 6:6-7 ESV

And when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him down there because of his error, and he died there beside the ark of God.

Tell me, does your understanding of the Biblical instruction and definition of extramarital and pre-marital sexual sin, talk about the contact of genitals or orgasms. Because I can guarantee if you said wearing a mask was loving your neighbor, you think it's orgasms and can't defend it from your understanding of the Bible. The very same way David lost Uzzah's life by putting the Ark of the Covenant on a cart instead of using the poles that were meant for it. And the reason why is because you thought intentions of safety through an ineffectual mask wouldn't pave a road to hell. 

When does sex become sex? We were told at youth group that asking for a line was the problem in and of itself. That knowing how far was too far was the wrong heart to have about something as serious as sex. But now in the age of infections and breakthrough cases and contact tracing and jabs, We find ourselves ironically preoccupied with how close people got and whether or not bodily fluids were transmitted. 

Matthew 15:8-9 ESV

“‘This people honors me with their lips,

    but their heart is far from me;

in vain do they worship me,

    teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’”

The masks were never about safety, they were about principles, and you didn't have any. You had emotions. Emotions won't save you or your neighbor. But they will make you feel good like all orgasms tend to do. The truth of the matter is that it wasn't the false notions of sex with protection that made you sinful it was the lust. And your anger at the unvaccinated made you their murderers, heaven knows the virus wasn't statistically likely to do it for you. And now you are faced with the slowly encroaching problem of real barriers and the compromises you'll make to use them. The looming threat of N95's protection on the shelves beside cherry-flavored permission to sin. 

How on earth are you going to navigate a world where other people can make you sick because of their lack of PPE? How will Christians maintain their witness and love their neighbor when they will and can asymptomatically give them a disease? How do we run a kids program without knowing if everyone is vaccinated? Look at all this due diligence, stacking up like mint and cumin. Eventually, someone is going to take it personally, and get sick personally, and is it really the worst thing in the world to be sued as a Christian for giving another your cough?

1 Corinthians 6:6-8 ESV

but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? But you yourselves wrong and defraud—even your own brothers!

Or maybe, just maybe, the answer isn't finding ways to sin but finding payments for it. We sing songs about being desperate for the grace of Christ. At least we did in the '90s. And we're lost right now, like 1 sheep out of 99. The only person who is going to save us is Jesus. And he's not going to do it through an AHS update or a vaccine or a mask.

He's going to do it with a cross.

Everything else we do is filthy rags.

Isaiah 64:5-7 ESV

You meet him who joyfully works righteousness,

    those who remember you in your ways.

Behold, you were angry, and we sinned;

    in our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved?

We have all become like one who is unclean,

    and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.

We all fade like a leaf,

    and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.

There is no one who calls upon your name,

    who rouses himself to take hold of you;

for you have hidden your face from us,

    and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities.