Tag Archives: christianity

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Daily Broadside | Andy Stanley Is Walking the Line and About Ready to Trip Over It

One of the littles is getting married next week, so we’re off to prepare for and participate in the festivities. While I’m gone, my childhood friend, military veteran, author and brother in Christ, Bruce Gust, will handle the blogging duties here. I’m so grateful that he agrees to step in almost every time I need a sub.

If you haven’t ordered Bruce’s book, American Devotional Series: Part One: The Revolutionary War, let me encourage you to buy a copy. It’s an interesting and creative combination of American history and Christian devotional, putting the lie to the claim that “America was not a Christian nation” or that “the founders were not Christian men.” It’s true that not all of our founders were Christians, but many (if not a majority) were, and many of those who didn’t fully accept the Bible as true accepted the virtues of the Christian faith as necessary for a thriving nation.

I’ve read it and have benefitted from it.

Before I leave, I want to call your attention to an article by R. Albert Mohler Jr. over at World. It’s about Andy Stanley, the pastor of North Point Community Church in metro Atlanta, one of the most influential pastors in the United States, and his departure from a biblical Christianity.

It’s not like we have not seen this coming. Andy Stanley is set to host the “Unconditional Conference” at a campus of North Point Community Church in the metro Atlanta area in the coming days, and the website for the conference bills it as a “two-day premier event” especially designed for parents of LGBTQ+ children and ministry leaders. “You will be equipped, refreshed, and inspired as you hear from leading communicators on topics that speak to your heart, soul, and mind,” it promises. One statement stands out in the description: “No matter what theological stance you hold, we invite you to listen, reflect, and learn as we approach this topic from the quieter middle space.”

The promise of “the quieter middle space” might appear attractive, given the volatility of cultural discourse on LGBTQ+ issues, and a conference designed to help parents of LGBTQ+ children and ministry leaders work through these issues in clearly Biblical terms would be a welcome development. But the advertising for the Unconditional Conference indicates clearly that this event is designed as a platform for normalizing the LGBTQ+ revolution while claiming that the conference represents “the quieter middle space.” In truth, there is no “middle space” on these issues, and it is no longer plausible to claim that such middle space exists.

Two men who are married to other men will be speaking at the conference, as well as “David Gushee, a prominent intellectual who has been honest about his own change of mind on the moral status of LGBTQ+ behaviors and relationships. In the ‘definitive edition’ of his book Changing Our Mind, subtitled as a ‘Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBT Christians,’ he traces his own pilgrimage to eager LGBTQ+ advocacy.”

The road to embracing LGBTQ+ conference speakers begins with subtley teaching people that LGBTQ+ people matter to God, then moving people to engage with them by accepting them where they’re at, then inviting them into the church to hear the gospel and to experience the love of the congregation.

That’s the core of the teaching: what’s important is that Christians “love” these people. Yes, we are called to love all people, no matter who they are. But we are not called to affirm sinful behavior, beliefs, or choices.

I’ve seen this at work in a large church that I attended for years, but eventually left as it became clear that the lead pastor was caving to the LGBTQ+ agenda. The congregation’s rally cry was “Love everyone always.” But what it led to was “Affirm everyone always.”

This isn’t the first time that Stanley has been controversial, which is why Mohler says we saw this coming.

Andy Stanley, one of the most influential pastors in the United States, has been moving in this direction for years, often by suggestion and assertion but clouded by confusion and the deliberate avoidance of clarity. Back in 2018, he called for the church to be “unhitched” from the Old Testament, arguing that the Old Testament should not be understood as the “go-to source regarding any behavior in the church.” There goes “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (Leviticus 18:22). But, in truth, there goes the entire Old Testament. A few years before that, in a 2012 message Stanley seemed to argue that adultery is a sin but told of two men in a relationship with no suggestion that the same-sex coupling was forbidden by Scripture. When the message became controversial, Stanley did not clarify the situation at all. More recently, in another message Stanley dismissed Biblical texts against homosexual behavior as “clobber” verses and said, “If your theology gets in the way of ministry—like if there’s somebody you can’t minister to because of your theology—you have the wrong theology.”

This is not a misunderstanding. This is a trajectory that points to the Unconditional Conference and two speakers married to other men on the platform. This is a clear and tragic departure from Biblical Christianity.

As Christians, we have to be exceedingly careful where we draw lines. We don’t want to be legalistic, but we don’t want to err the other way by not calling sin what it is: sin.

Pray for Andy Stanley and North Point Community Church, that the Lord would call them back from error, if indeed the conference is affirming LGBTQ+ men and women as brothers and sisters in Christ.

I’ll be back at the end of next week.

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Daily Broadside | The GOP is in Great Shape, But Tension is Rising with Evangelicals

Daily Verse | Isaiah 12:4
“Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name;
    make known among the nations what he has done,
    and proclaim that his name is exalted.

Tuesday’s Reading: Isaiah 13-16

It’s Tuesday and we’re in the home stretch of July already, with August just peeking over the weekend horizon.

More bad news for Team Brandon.

President Joe Biden in June achieved the highest disapproval rating in the history of modern polling. This month, his popularity declined even further.

About 60 percent of Americans disapprove of the president, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average. Just 38 percent of Americans approve. Biden’s disapproval has risen and his approval has fallen by a few points in the last month, when he first became the most unpopular commander in chief in recorded history.

Nobody likes Brandon as Resident, not even the corrupt Democrats. He’s a miserable, unaccomplished grifting poser who is in over his head and the heads of his “advisors.” But the whole cabal of leftists, RINOs, and their “conservative” NeverTrump brethren assured us that he would bring dignity back to the office, that he would restore our norms, and that the adults would finally be back in charge.

How are we all liking the return to our norms with the “adults” back in charge?

Voters are blaming Biden for runaway inflation and the poor state of the nation’s economy. Biden’s historically low approval could spell trouble for Democrats ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. Some polls suggest that even Democrats and racial minorities are beginning to turn on the embattled president.

Modern presidential approval polling began with Gallup’s surveys during the Harry S. Truman administration. Biden is the least popular president in almost 80 years of public opinion data collection.

But the tweets are nice, are they not?

On the other hand, Republicans are looking poised to recapture the House and Senate.

As the 2022 midterms loom ever closer, Republicans have increased their generic ballot lead by two points in the last fortnight. The latest Rasmussen Reports poll, released Friday, reveals that voters are ready to cast a ballot for Republicans over Democrats by a 10-point margin — 49% to 39%. This is a two-point improvement from the July 9 survey, which had generic Republicans up over Democrats by eight points (47% to 39%). According to Rasmussen, when asked, “If the elections for Congress were held today, would you vote for the Republican candidate or for the Democratic candidate?”—

“49% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for the Republican candidate, while 39% would vote for the Democrat. Just four percent (4%) would vote for some other candidate, but another eight percent (8%) are not sure.”

As always, the independent voter wields an enormous amount of power in the elections. “The Republican lead on the congressional ballot is due both to greater GOP partisan intensity and a 17-point advantage among independents.”

But here’s the kicker. While the Republicans hold a strong electoral advantage heading into the midterm elections, evangelicals are learning that they are increasingly ignored by the GOP. The latest example is the gay marriage bill, that passed with support of 47 Republicans.

For all of the media’s hyperventilating about the GOP’s “culture war,” most Republicans show little to no interest in fighting it. In truth, the “culture war” is hopelessly one-sided, pitting tenacious Democrats against irresolute or decadent Republicans. Take Nancy Pelosi’s recent gay marriage bill. It passed in the House of Representatives not in spite of the GOP but in part because of it: 47 Republicans, including members of GOP leadership, joined the Democrats in supporting the bill.

Imagine the cries of horror from the media and the Democratic base if 47 Democrats ever voted for a piece of GOP legislation on a crucial social issue. That’s inconceivable. The Democrats never wave the white flag in the culture war. But the GOP can’t even summon the energy to back Bill Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act. That’s now considered an “extreme” stance by many GOP elites.

The GOP takes our votes for granted but won’t take our opinions seriously because … wait for it … we “have nowhere else to go.”

What makes it easy for Republican leaders and strategists to exploit the religious right without losing it is that Christians have nowhere else to go. They have to content themselves with the crumbs that fall from the GOP table. And because the positions of the Democrats are increasingly outlandish, it takes less and less for a Republican leader to appear like a “culture warrior” against them. The media slaps that moniker on almost any Republican who even slightly deviates from wokeness. But most of those Republicans don’t oppose the LGBTQ movement in principle. They accept the subjectivism underlying it. They just wince at some of its most obvious excesses and balk at the speed of the movement’s unfolding.

That’s another reason why I think that 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump. He listened to them and he promised what he would do and he crusaded on behalf of life while in office. His record on LGBTQUERTY issues is less stellar in evangelical circles, but Christians found a champion in Trump. It will be hard for them to ignore him should he choose to run again in 2024.

Even Ron DeSantis is courting evangelicals in Florida, telling a cheering crowd at the Sunshine Summit’s Victory Dinner that, “you got to be ready for battle. So put on the full armor of God.” Whether he’s a genuine Christian or an opportunist, I don’t know, but language like that is red meat for evangelical Christians (see what I did there?).

Evangelical Christians find themselves in a quandary: we want our leaders to fight for righteousness and truth in our culture. We want them to be godly leaders. But the truth is that very few of them are interested in governing that way. They are more interested in the money and how to stay in power.

Our choices in 2024 are going to be very challenging.

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Daily Broadside | Largest Hiding Place for Christians Discovered in Turkey

Daily Verse | 2 Chronicles 6:6
“But now I have chosen Jerusalem for my Name to be there, and I have chosen David to rule my people Israel.”

Monday’s Reading: 2 Chronicles 13-16

Welcome to the month of May. We’ve completed the first third of the year and there are only seven months until we vote to put the brakes on the destructive forces in Washington D.C.

In the meantime,

A large number of artifacts belonging to the second and third centuries A.D. were unearthed in an underground city featuring places of worship, silos, water wells and passages with corridors in southeastern Mardin province’s Midyat district.

Midyat, which is almost an open-air museum with its history and culture, offers a magical atmosphere to its visitors with stone houses, inns, mosques, churches and monasteries that are thousands of years old.

“An underground city.” When I think of an underground city, it’s hard to imagine anything larger than maybe 200-300 people. Not this one.

“Matiate has been used uninterruptedly for 1,900 years. It was first built as a hiding place or escape area. As it is known, Christianity was not an official religion in the second century. Families and groups who accepted Christianity generally took shelter in underground cities to escape the persecution of Rome or formed an underground city. Possibly, the underground city of Midyat was one of the living spaces built for this purpose. It is an area where we estimate that at least 60-70,000 people lived underground.“

According to Ancient Origins, the researchers believe the underground Turkish city may be the largest in the world.

The underground space must be enormous to accommodate that many people.

You would think that 60-70,000 people would be hard to hide, even if they were underground. Wouldn’t it be common knowledge that such a city existed? It’s hard to imagine that they could stay hidden from anyone who wanted to find them.

I imagine, too, that if you lived underground you would have to come up for air, as it were, to purchase food grown in, you know, sunlight. Tough to grow anything underground.

And while I can appreciate wanting to escape the persecution for your faith, it feels bewildering that so many people agreed that hiding was the right thing to do. Aren’t we supposed to be salt and light in the world?

There’s no shame in protecting yourself and your family. But it seems like a Christian’s reach would be pretty limited if they were living underground with 70,000 other believers. This is the “us-four-no-more” principle on steroids, a huge holy huddle.

To date, archaeologists have uncovered 49 rooms, including places of worship, water wells, silos for storage, and numerous corridors and tunnels, and they estimate this is only 3% of the total size of the underground city.

Get a brief look at the tunnels and rooms here.

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Daily Broadside | Ring Found with Image of Good Shepherd from Third Century

Daily Verse | Genesis 14:13
One who had escaped came and reported this to Abram the Hebrew.

Friday’s Reading: Genesis 15-17
Saturday’s Reading: Genesis 18-20

It’s Friday and the end of the first week of January 2022, the 93rd week and third year of “two weeks to flatten the curve.” It’s also the 50th week since the disaster known as Brandon was foisted on these United States. I think just as the Democrats commemorated the January 6 riots with melodramatic speeches, a performance by the cast of Hamilton and a candlelight vigil organized by an antifa-linked group, the Republicans should hold a memorial on January 20 to mourn the death of America as founded, reciting all the failures of the current administration and the malfeasance of the Democrat Party that is now a rabid anti-American Marxist cabal.

But enough of that. Let’s close out the week with a stunning discovery reported just before Christmas.

Israeli researchers on Wednesday displayed a Roman-era golden ring with an early Christian symbol for Jesus inscribed in its gemstone, found in a shipwreck off the ancient port of Caesarea.

The thick octagonal gold ring with its green gemstone bore the figure of the “Good Shepherd” in the form of a young shepherd boy in a tunic with a ram or sheep across his shoulders.

In the Facebook post linked from the image, the Israel Antiquities Authority writes:

This image, of the ‘Good Shepherd’, is known in ancient Christian art as a symbol of salvation; it is a parable of Jesus as the merciful shepherd of mankind, or as the one who has shown the protection of man or the testimony of his believers. The investigators are sobbing, who carried the ring, was one of the first Christians; the ring was revealed in the vicinity of Caesarea, which has great significance in the Christian tradition, as in Caesarea was one of the oldest centers of Christianity.

The shipwreck from which the ring was taken was dated to about 1,700 years ago.

Sokolov said that while the image exists in early Christian symbolism, representing Jesus as a caring shepherd, tending to his flock and guiding those in need, finding it on a ring was rare.

The presence of such a symbol on a ring probably owned by a Roman operating in or around Caesarea made sense, given the ethnically and religiously heterogenous nature of the port in the third century, when it was one of Christianity’s earliest centers.

I’ve written before about discoveries like this, which are always exciting because they independently fortify our faith in Christ. If you’re a believer, you understand what I mean. If you’re not, perhaps it appeals to your curiosity about the veracity of the Bible.

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | Is “Love Your Neighbor” or “Slay the Idolaters” More Radical?

Daily Verse | Nahum 2:8
Nineveh is like a pool
    whose water is draining away.
“Stop! Stop!” they cry,
    but no one turns back.

Happy Monday, my friends! And to you, stalkers, lurkers, and prowlers. I now see that vitreous humor isn’t funny.

On Friday I wrote about three Muslims who were relocated to the United States who have either recently acted, or planned to act, violently against other people in this country. The mainstream media tends to ignore stories of Muslim violence and it would be easy to dismiss the examples I gave you as aberrations — exceptions to the norm, the ‘norm’ being that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful.

That’s factually true. Estimates of how many Muslims live in the United States vary, sometimes wildly, but credible estimates seem to be in the range of Pew Research’s 3.85 million (1.1% of the US population) in 2020 to Gordon Conwell’s 4.4 million Muslims (1.4% of the US population) in 2015 and “projected to more than double to 10 million by 2050 (2.6% of the US population).”

Obviously, the vast majority of Muslims are peaceable people.

However, there are a couple of things we need to keep in mind. The first is that apologists seeking to defend Islam from the reputation that the radical jihadists create will often cite instances where even Christians have acted violently (for instance, the medieval Crusades or an individual claiming to be a Christian says they were told by God to murder someone). By doing so, the apologist tries to position Islam as morally equivalent to Christianity, no more or less violent than another world religion. “All religions have their radicals,” they argue, “and Islam is no different.”

The problem with this argument is that while both Christians and Muslims may have their “radicals,” what motivates them is completely different. When a Christian murders another person, they are acting contrary to the central tenets of their faith. “Do not murder,” one of the Ten Commandments, comes to mind. Jesus telling his disciples, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34-35).

Then there’s Paul’s declaration in Romans 13:9.

The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

On the other hand, when a Muslim murders another person, they are acting consistently with the central tenets of their faith. Take, for instance, Sura 9:5, commonly referred to as the “Verse of the Sword”:

9:5. When the sacred months are over slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them. If they repent and take to prayer and render the alms levy, allow them to go their way. God is forgiving and merciful.

Osama bin Laden began his “Letter to America” with verses that gave him and other jihadists permission to fight unbelievers.

“Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory” [Quran 22:39]

“Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the cause of Taghut (anything worshipped other than Allah e.g. Satan). So fight you against the friends of Satan; ever feeble is indeed the plot of Satan.”[Quran 4:76]

See the difference? When a “radical” jihadist commits a killing in the name of Allah, it is not someone who has taken a verse out of context and somehow perverted the Koran. They have in fact followed precisely the commands of their holy scriptures.

If Christians were to follow precisely the commands of their Holy Scriptures, we’d see a radical shift in our culture.

The second thing to keep in mind is that while the majority of Muslims are peaceful — either being ignorant of or flatly ignoring these deadly verses — the peaceful majority are irrelevant. It’s the radicals, the extremists who drive the agenda. Brigitte Gabriel founded ACT for America, the largest national security grassroots organization in the U.S. and often speaks on politics, culture, and national security. Here, she participates in a panel discussion on what happened in Benghazi, but addresses a question from a Muslim law student and explains why the peaceful majority doesn’t matter.

So while the majority of Muslims are peaceful, it’s not them who we are immediately concerned about. We’re more concerned about the Muslims here in the U.S. who are willing to act on their Koranic beliefs, like the Muslim passenger who tried to crash the cockpit of a JetBlue flight last Wednesday or the Muslim in LA who tried to run down a crowd of Jews — again, last Wednesday.

If, as Brigitte Gabriel suggests, 15-25% of the Muslim population is radicalized — meaning that they take seriously the passages from the Koran telling them to fight the unbelievers — then in the U.S., that’s between 577,500 and 962,500 radical jihadists on our soil.

To give you a sense of scale, the size of the United States’ combined military is 1.358 million. Compare that to the higher number of “radical” Muslims, nearly one million people. That doesn’t mean that there are that many radicalized Muslims among us, only that statistically, there could be.

If that’s even close to accurate, however, that means that we will continue to hear stories like those linked above, and that the number of those stories will grow.

But don’t worry. Diversity is our strength and I’m sure it will all work out.