Death Comes Before Resurrection

Christianity as we have known it in much of the West is dying. That is not cynicism. It is a pastor’s diagnosis. What dies is not the gospel. What dies is not the risen Christ. What dies is not the remnant He keeps by His own blood and His own Word. What dies is the soft, conflict-averse, emotion-ruled institution that still uses His name while refusing His pattern. Too many of its ministers are passive and effeminate, and Scripture is not vague on the point. The apostle wrote that the effeminate will not inherit the kingdom of God. A pulpit that has learned to flatter the age, to treat peace as the highest good and conflict as a failure of tone, is already halfway to a funeral.

They watch their people post what should make a father burn with holy jealousy, and they say nothing. They hand the prayers of the congregation to women as if the apostle never ordered the church. They treat every square inch of life as a place to avoid offense. To flee conflict is not meekness. It is a grievous sin. Our Lord did not avoid the clash. He walked into it. He drove the moneychangers out. He called wolves by their names. He set His face toward Jerusalem when every reasonable calculation said to stay away. A shepherd who is afraid of the wolves is a hired hand. You can smell him because he does not smell of the sheep.

We are surrounded by such pulpits. Men who cannot argue. Men who have been catechized by feminism more thoroughly than by the Fathers. Men who cherish a reputation for kindness more than they cherish the blood of Christ applied to actual sin. They drink from gorged goblets of self-congratulation and pulpiteer soundly about how wicked “those outside” are, while a young couple in the third row has already aborted the third child of their marriage. The pastor will not say it. The elders will not ask. The women are “cherished” in the language of the age, which usually means they are never told the truth that would actually love them. Discipline is neglected because discipline requires a man who will lose friends. Men linger longer and longer in dying churches, ruled by their feelings, ignoring the sober counsel of the saints.

John Owen is still clearer than most living men. He refused to call it schism when a believer withdrew from a church whose worship, doctrine, or discipline had been so corrupted that a conscience bound to Christ dared not remain. “For a man to withdraw or withhold himself from the communion external and visible of any church or churches, on the pretension and plea… that the worship, doctrine, or discipline, instituted by Christ is corrupted among them, with which corruption he dares not defile himself, it is nowhere in the Scripture called schism.” Owen also wrote that if wicked persons are admitted without distinction, tolerated without procedure, and the pious cannot prevail for reformation, then those who care for their own edification and salvation may leave such a congregation and join another where there is more care of piety, purity, and holiness—and they may do it without the least suspicion of schism. That is not restlessness. That is obedience.

Honor Men of Old

The debates of Erasmus and Luther would be dismissed today as tone-deaf. Those men argued with passion, force, desperation, and condemnation because they believed souls and the honor of God were at stake. We have trained a generation to hear any raised voice as violence and any hard word as unkindness. The result is not peace. It is the quiet advance of egalitarianism inside the household of faith, the silencing of male headship, the refusal to name sins that sit in the pews and smile during the greeting time.

J. C. Ryle saw the same disease in another century and named it without apology. “True Christianity is a fight.” He would not let sleepy consciences pass off a religion that “satisfies” but does not sanctify. “The true Christian is called to be a soldier, and must behave as such from the day of his conversion to the day of his death.” He said the Christian is a man of war. “If we would be holy, we must fight.” There are no promises in the letters to the seven churches except to those who overcome. “Where there is grace, there will be conflict. The believer is a soldier. There is no holiness without a warfare.” Ryle was not calling men to petty church fights. He was calling them to the never-dying war with the world, the flesh, and the devil. He also knew that controversy, hateful as it is, is sometimes required. “There is one thing which is even worse than controversy, and that is false doctrine tolerated, allowed, and permitted without protest or molestation… Give me the mighty thunderstorm rather than the pestilential malaria. The one walks in darkness and poisons us in silence, and we are never safe. The other frightens and alarms for a little season. But it is soon over, and it clears the air.” Three things, he said, men never ought to trifle with: a little poison, a little false doctrine, and a little sin.

Ryle wanted more than polite religion. He wanted zeal. “A zealous man in religion is pre-eminently a man of one thing… that one thing is to please God.” Whether he lives or dies, whether he is thought wise or foolish, whether he gets honor or shame, the zealous man cares nothing at all compared with that one thing. And he wanted courage in the remnant. “Let us never stand still because we are in a minority… It is truth, not numbers, that will always prevail in the end.” We want more men who are not afraid to stand alone.

The Fathers were no softer. Ambrose told the clergy that the voice “should not be languid, nor feeble, nor womanish in its tone—such a tone of voice as many are in the habit of using, under the idea of seeming important. It should preserve a certain quality, and rhythm, and a manly vigour.” He would not approve a soft voice or an effeminate gesture of the body, nor would he approve boorishness. “Let us follow nature.” Clement of Alexandria warned against the public denial of manhood, the smoothing away of the sex God assigned, the men who “detest the bloom of manliness.” They understood what we have forgotten: when shepherds become indistinguishable from the spirit of the age, the flock is already half-devoured.

Pastors, the 3rd Sex

As Christianity continues to prattle on meaninglessly, refusing to engage the feminism and egalitarianism in its own churches, refusing to discipline its members, parading how much it loves women by refusing to tell them the truth—listen to the men of old whose voices are sound and against our sin. Female pastors in defiance of plain apostolic order. Prayerlessness dressed up as sophistication. The refusal to speak against the sins that actually destroy households. These are the truest signs of a hired hand and no minister.

The clearest picture you can find is often our modern sins. Lindsay Clancy is indefensible as a moral horror. A mother strangling her three little children is not a puzzle for sensitive branding. Whatever courts decide about legal responsibility, the church that cannot say that the blood of children matters, that motherhood is glory and not a lifestyle accessory, that fathers must guard the home, that despair is not permission, and that some acts are simply wicked—that church has already chosen the hireling’s path. We have learned to speak endlessly about trauma and almost never about the image of God in a child. We have learned to protect reputations and almost never to protect the least of these. When pulpits will not name the blood on our own hands—abortion in Christian marriages, the sexualization of daughters, the abdication of sons, the cowardice of elders—they have already decided that being liked is safer than being faithful.

I remember being dismissed from a ministry, and one of the accusers of my position was adamant that I should not care what happened to those students, that I should not be afraid to preach before them. He was the definition of the biblical fool: loud about a courage he would never have to exercise, indifferent to the souls he claimed to serve, certain that pastoral love is a liability. A man who tells you not to care for the sheep is telling you he is not a shepherd. Believe him.

No, this isn’t Black Pilling

None of this is written because the church is finished. It is written because the Lord is not finished. He walks among the lampstands still. He knows which churches have oil and which have only branding. He removes lampstands. He also relights them. The death we are watching is not the last word. It may be the necessary death before resurrection.

Young men and women, older men and women, all who still feel the call of Christ: take a deep breath. Do not confuse the collapse of unfaithful institutions with the collapse of Christ. Praise God that He is purging His church. Praise God that He can raise all things from the dead. He specializes in remnants. He has always specialized in remnants. Noah in the ark. Elijah by the brook. The seven thousand who had not bowed the knee. The little flock to whom the Father is pleased to give the kingdom. You are not required to save the age. You are required to be faithful in it.

Lay your sinfulness before Him. Do not dress it up. Do not explain it away. Do not compare it with someone worse. Bring the passivity. Bring the fear of man. Bring the love of comfort. Bring the silence when you should have spoken. Bring the harshness when you should have wept. Bring the years you lingered in a church you knew was teaching your children to disobey God. He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That is not a slogan for the already-sorted. That is the only hope of men who have failed at being men and women who have been taught to despise the good design of God.

The repentant will see the kingdom of God. Not the impressive. Not the online. Not the unoffended. The repentant. Those who turn from sin and stand in the gap. Standing in the gap does not mean you are made of iron. It means you take your place between the wrath that is due and the people you love, and you do it in the name of the One who already stood there. Rely on your God. Rely on your Savior. He will sustain you. He does not sustain the proud performance of strength. He sustains the poor in spirit who still get up and do the next faithful thing.

If you are a man, stop waiting to feel brave. Courage in Scripture is usually obedience with your knees knocking. Lead your home. Open the Bible at the table. Correct what is shameful. Protect what is weak. Refuse the joke, the post, the silence that trains your sons to be soft and your daughters to be prey. If your church will not let men be men and will not let women be honored as women under God’s order, do not spend another decade hoping the fog will lift. Seek a church that still practices discipline, still believes the text, still thinks the old arguments were not outlandish but necessary.

If you are a woman, you are not the enemy of this warning. You are often its first casualty. A church that will not tell you the truth does not love you. A church that uses you to signal its progress does not honor you. The Lord does. He dignifies your motherhood, your help, your wisdom, your prayers, your quiet strength that is not weakness. Do not let a feminized pulpit steal that from you by flattery.

If you are young, do not despise the day of small things. A faithful church of seventy that will tell the truth is worth more than a thousand who will not. Learn to argue without hatred. Learn to feel without being ruled by feeling. Read the men who were not afraid of passion: Luther in controversy, Owen in ecclesiology, Ryle in holiness, Ambrose in the bearing of a minister. Their heat was not immaturity. It was love of the truth.

If you are older, do not retire from the fight and call it wisdom. The old, the sick, and the dying, Ryle said, are never known to repent of fighting Christ’s battles against sin. Your scars are part of the church’s memory. Spend them. Tell the truth kindly and plainly. Make room for younger men to lead without surrendering the standard.

Come to church. Not to a performance. To a people. Join us in group repentance. Confess that we have been quieter than our Lord. Confess that we have loved ease. Then stumble forward in faith. Stumbling forward is still forward. The Lord is not looking for a polished remnant. He is looking for a truthful one. He who called you is faithful. He will not let the whole thing die without a resurrection. He raises the dead. He keeps covenant with the broken. He puts backbone in cowards and tenderness in the harsh. He makes shepherds who smell like sheep again.

Do not linger in a church that will not be a church. Do not confuse niceness with faithfulness. Do not wait for a mood. Face the conflict that holiness requires. Tell the truth in the home and in the assembly. Receive the forgiveness that makes such truth possible. The Lord who walked into Jerusalem knowing what waited there still walks among us. Lay down the passivity. Take up the fight of faith. And when your voice shakes, remember: He is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy. That is enough for a dying age. That is enough for a living church.