Church Life Benjamin Vrbicek Church Life Benjamin Vrbicek

When He Shall Come with Trumpet Sound

They don’t make songs like they used to.

Today we speak less often about the return of Jesus than we did in the past. This neglect in Christian conversation and in Christian preaching affects our singing on Sundays. And our singing on Sundays certainly affects our living on all the other days.

I doubt any of us know definitively and exhaustively the reasons why, but I suspect part of our aversion to discussing the return of Jesus stems from an overreaction to perceived end-time obsession. Some Christians see every detail about the end times as crystal clear. That’s all they seem to talk about. Other Christians, myself included, look at this certainty and feel that the answers are too clean and tidy, maybe even a little contrived. This can lead to mistakenly overcorrecting by hardly ever talking about the second coming of Christ.

Perhaps our neglect also stems from the relative affluence of the Western world. In our wealth, we forget that we need a second coming to usher in heaven on earth. We try not to even think about our death. This is a relatively new phenomenon. “Throughout the history of the church, from the desert fathers to the Puritans, Christians have used the practice of meditating on death,” writes professor Kelly M. Kapic. “That is partly because the question was not about the possibility of pain but how to live with it.” Building on the work of a historian, Kapic notes, “Prior to modernity the question was not ‘a choice between pain and sickness or relief, but between a willing and a reluctant endurance of pain and sickness,’ since all were constantly in some level of physical discomfort” (Kapic, Embodied Hope, 60). To say it differently, only in our modern era has the desire for perfect health been anything but a fairytale. And the fairytale can cause us to neglect looking to the hope that God will bring in the end.

The experience of the cloud of witnesses, whether in the Bible or from the first century to modern times, was strikingly different. And this neglect of the afterlife and second coming has influenced the worship music we sing together when we gather. So many of the classic hymns so cherished by older generations of Christians featured climactic final stanzas that lifted eyes to the promise of heaven.

Consider the classic hymn “My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less” by Edward Mote from the 1800s. After a few verses that explore the trials we experience in this life and how Christ remains a rock and anchor for believers, the hymn celebrates the return of Christ with a trumpet. “When he shall come with trumpet sound,” we sing, “O may I then in him be found.” These lines celebrate a theme Paul writes about often, as in 1 Corinthians 15:51–52. “Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed” (see also 1 Thess. 4:13–18).

Matthew Westerholm, a professor of worship, conducted his doctoral research on this subject, comparing extensive collections of worship songs from our era and previous eras. “Among many similarities,” he notes, “one difference was striking: Our churches no longer sing about Christ’s second coming as much as we used to.”

I do not want to argue with anyone about the musical beauty of hymns compared to modern worship songs. And I do not want to dictate what churches should or should not sing. But when examining the lyrics of most modern songs, many churches that sing for thirty minutes during their weekly gatherings include few songs, if any, whose lyrics explicitly direct believers to the hope of the end. This should not be.

To shift focus to God’s blessings now, to the exclusion of his blessings at the end, we do not lose a part of Christianity; we lose Christianity. Consider the analogy of the human body. In a tragic accident, a person might lose a finger or an arm and still remain very much alive. We cannot, however, lose the function of vital organs, such as our brain, heart, or lungs, without dying.

When the apostle Paul considers the implications of losing the doctrine of the physical resurrection of believers—the event that happens upon the return of Christ and when the trumpet sounds—Paul states that without the future resurrection, Christian preaching becomes in vain and misrepresents God, while the Christian faith becomes meaningless and futile, leaving us to perish forever in our sins and become the most pitiable of people (1 Cor. 15:12–19). The stakes could not be higher.

Of course, rather than complete avoidance of the indispensable doctrine of the return of Christ and the life everlasting, something more partial typically happens. We may not turn off the faucet completely, but we should not be surprised by our thirst when we only allow a trickle.

To quote Kelly Kapic again, “When the homes of believers are hit by chronic pain or mental illness, they often find the contemporary church strangely unhelpful, even hurtful” (38).

Perhaps songs that major on God’s blessings in the here and now, coupled with little emphasis on God’s blessings in the end, contribute to why suffering believers often find the church so unhelpful. Indeed, from a biblical perspective, to be the most helpful to believers suffering in the now, we must remember that the truth we regularly confess about the end—and the truth we regularly sing about the end—changes how we live today and every day. We must believe it all, and sing it all, to have it all.  

 

* Photo by Madison Oren on Unsplash

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The Christian Life Benjamin Vrbicek The Christian Life Benjamin Vrbicek

In Heaven Even Their Evil Footprints Shall Not Be Known

This quote from pastor J.C. Ryle has become one of my favorites about heaven.

I’m nearing the final stages of completing a full rough draft for my next book. It’s about how the promise of the return of Christ brings hope to every believer, especially to those who are suffering. Unfortunately, it won’t be for sale until June of 2026.

In the meantime, I wanted to share that the project gave me the blessing of reading over and over the passages in the Bible about the end of everything. I also had the blessing of reading a bunch of good books on the topic. A British pastor named J.C. Ryle has become one of my favorite writers from the past, and I loved his collection of remarks about the hope of heaven.

In one place, he writes about God’s complete removal of the various types of evil from heaven such that “even their footprints will not be known.” What a sweet promise. Here’s the quote in it’s fuller context.

There are many things about heaven revealed in Scripture which I purposely pass over. That it is a prepared place for a prepared people; that all who are found there will be of one mind and of one experience, chosen by the same Father, washed in the same blood of atonement, renewed by the same Spirit; that universal and perfect holiness, love, and knowledge will be the eternal law of the kingdom—all these are ancient things, and I do not mean to dwell on them.

Suffice it to say, that heaven is the eternal presence of everything that can make a saint happy, and the eternal absence of everything that can cause sorrow.

Sickness, and pain, and disease, and death, and poverty, and labor, and money, and care, and ignorance, and misunderstanding, and slander, and lying, and strife, and contention, and quarrels, and envies, and jealousies, and bad tempers, and infidelity, and skepticism, and irreligion, and superstition, and heresy, and schism, and wars, and fightings, and bloodshed, and murders, and law suits—all, all these things shall have no place in heaven.

On earth, in this present time, they may live and flourish. In heaven even their footprints shall not be known. (J.C. Ryle, Heaven: Priceless Encouragements on the Way to our Eternal Home, 8).

 

* Photo by Anya Smith on Unsplash

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Church Life, Writing Benjamin Vrbicek Church Life, Writing Benjamin Vrbicek

Book Launch: Broken but Beautiful

I worked with Gospel-Centered Discipleship to collect a team of gifted writers to reflect on the beauty of the bride of Christ. The book launches today.

People have been pointing out church-hurt for a long time. Over fifty years ago, Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, “With much of this criticism of the Church one has, of course, to agree. There is so much that is wrong with the Church—traditionalism, formality and lifelessness and so on—and it would be idle and utterly foolish to deny this” (Preaching and Preachers, 8). I suppose we could grab similar quotes from the Reformation era or any era in church history. We can even find similar sentiments in the New Testament itself. “But in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together,” Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “it is not for the better but for the worse” (1 Cor. 11:17). Indeed, over two and a half thousand years ago, God told his people, “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies” (Amos 5:21).

Certainly, there is a lot of junk that happens in the local church. But please also remember that God still uses the church to bless the world in beautiful ways. He may discipline his church to make her more holy, but he loves his church. His sons and daughters are always his sons and daughters. God even calls the church his bride, dying to purchase her and make her radiant. And one day we will see her in all her splendor.

I worked with Gospel-Centered Discipleship to bundle some of our favorite essays about the beauty of the bride of Christ and put them into a book called Broken but Beautiful. The book launches today!

We adapted the book’s title from the first article by Glenna Marshall. She learned in deeper ways the beauty of the church during the unexpected death of a church member and the way her church served together in the days that followed.

As I think back to my own life, I think of a time sixteen years ago when my oldest son was born. The birth did not go well. There was an evening and morning of hard labor, after which the umbilical cord wrapped around my son’s neck, and they did an emergency c-section. Mom and baby, in the end, were fine—praise God. But recovery from the trauma induced by a night of labor and the emergency surgery lasted weeks. Then postpartum depression bit like a rabid dog that wouldn’t let go. But before postpartum, right when we got home from the hospital, everyone got the flu, including everyone who came to stay with us and help. Yet this is the time, my wife and I often say, that we learned when the church was the church. So many people helped and cooked and cleaned and cared. They sat with my wife when I eventually had to go back to work. We no longer live in that same city, but we saw God’s blessings in that local church so strongly that a dozen years later we named our youngest son after that church.

In the providence of God, somehow you’re reading this email. If your heart is in a season of disappointment with the local church—maybe you’d even use the word hate to describe how you currently feel about the church—we hope these stories will minister to you.

I put the table of contents for the book down below, so you can see all the authors and the entries.

You can buy the book on Amazon’s website, here. If your church would like to purchase books at a significant bulk discount, when you buy twenty on the publisher’s website, they are only $5 each! You can do that here.

As an author with a small platform, it would mean a lot to me if you’d buy a copy and consider leaving a short Amazon review. Those reviews help a ton. Seriously. And the review only needs to be a sentence or two.

Amazon paperback link

GCD Bulk purchase link

 

*     *     *

Table of Contents

        Preface | Benjamin Vrbicek     vii

  1. She Is Broken, and She Is Beautiful | Glenna Marshall     1

  2. Missing Church Is Missing Out | Timothy M. Shorey     7

  3. How God Humbled Me through a Church I Didn’t Agree With | Lara d’Entremont     11

  4. The Dearest Place on Earth | James Williams     17

  5. The Unexpected Blessing of a Rural Church | Stephanie O’Donnell     21

  6. The Local Church Helps Rid Me of Morbid Introspection | Chrys Jones   27

  7. The Church Is Not a Meritocracy | Jessica Miskelly     33

  8. A Family of Redemption for Children of Divorce | Chase Johnson     39

  9. The Warmth of the Local Church for the Suffering | Brianna Lambert     45

  10. The Singles Among Us Deserve a Better Church Culture | Denise Hardy     51

  11. Love Your Church Anyway | Heidi Kellogg     57

  12. For the Love of Liturgy | Erin Jones     63

  13. God’s Good Design of the Local Church | James Williams     69

  14. Finding Beauty in the Local Church in Our Age of Social Media | Cassie Pattillo     75

  15. The Hands of Grace | Amber Thiessen     79

  16. How the Church Shapes Us on Our Faith Journey | Rob Bentz     83

  17. On the Other Side of the Church Split | Abigail Rehmert     89

  18. Dear New Mother, Embrace the Body of Christ | Lara d’Entremont     95

  19. The Gold Mine in the Local Church | Chrys Jones     101

  20. The Local Church Is a Sandbox | Timarie Friesen     105

  21. Unless the Seed Dies | Tom Sugimura     111

  22. Redeeming Love Has Been My Theme and Shall Be Until I Die | Timothy M. Shorey     115

        Epilogue | Jeremy Writebol     119

         Notes     121
        Author Bios     123
        About Gospel-Centered Discipleship     127
        Resources from Gospel-Centered Discipleship     129

 

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Book Reviews Benjamin Vrbicek Book Reviews Benjamin Vrbicek

Reading List 2024

A list of every book I read last year.

My first post of each new year always contains the list of books I read the previous year. If you’d like to see the previous posts, you can do so here: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. Mostly I do this for accountability. But I also know a few other book nerds who enjoy these sorts of posts. For what it’s worth, using my Excel spreadsheet it seems my total from 2013–2024 includes 804 books and 209,316 pages. But who’s counting?

I guess I am.

In these posts I typically offer a few myopic comments that, I hope, offer some color to what would otherwise be a boring list. I figure some discussion is better than none, even if I end up ignoring stuff a few people might have considered more important.

I’ll start by mentioning Harrison Scott Key and his memoirs. I have three of his memoirs on the list, the gateway book being his most recent and seemingly most widely read book, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told. I have to give a spoiler alert and trigger warning in case you venture to read the book: he writes about his wife’s affair and portrays the agony in vivid, raw descriptions. While I liked the book, I struggled with it for several reasons. The language is a bit rough in some places and pretty sarcastic in other places—even though I understand why both the curse words and sarcasm are authentic to the author and his experience. But the deeper reason I struggled with the book is that it maps too closely with a real-time situation I know about in a church—and even though the book ultimately offers more hope than despair and exalts the importance of real, Christian community, the proximity to reality made it hard to read.

Moving on, a good friend of mine encouraged me to read two Wendell Berry books about the people who belong to the fictitious town of Port William (Hannah Coulter and The Memory of Old Jack). I’d only read Jaber Crow before when we read it for a church book club, but that was almost ten years ago. If time allowed, I’d read all the novels and short stories about the Port William membership, as it’s called. Maybe someday there will be time. (Thank you, Joe, for suggesting these books and the heartfelt discussions of them.)

There’s been lots of appreciative buzz in my pastor circles about The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt, which is sort of strange that the book is getting this kind of reception among Christian pastors because Haidt is an atheist. But he’s a strange atheist; he’s warm to religion, even evangelical Christianity, in a way that strikes me as both wonderful and odd. In the book, Haidt persuasively argues that two trends are causing massive problems, namely, overparenting in the real world and a lack of parenting and oversight in the online world. These problems manifest themselves in especially disturbing ways among those who became teenagers after 2010 and the advent of the smartphone. At alarming rates, young girls increasingly tend toward depression and suicide, while young boys tend toward porn and passivity. I encourage you to read the book. His common-sense applications in light of these trends seem sensible and wise (for example, no smartphones or social media for people under the age of sixteen). Someday in the not-too-distant future, I believe we’ll view ubiquitous smartphone usage the way we now view smoking on airplanes.

As has been the case a few times in previous years, I wrote several of the books on my reading list. And this year, all the ones on the list written by me are currently unpublished—and maybe always will be. The first unpublished book I’m calling The Author as Abram: Writing to the Land God Will Show Us (A Memoirish Essay to Encourage Christian Writers). In this book I tell the story of how I became a writer, despite the fact that when I was in high school I hated both reading and writing. (It’s one of the reasons I chose mechanical and aerospace engineering as my college major. I figured I wouldn’t have to read as much.) I really love this book project, even though it’s gotten mixed reviews from the handful of people who have seen early drafts. Not sure if I can fix that or if it is anything that necessarily has to be fixed. I’m currently thinking I’ll self-publish it sometime in 2027. That’s highly subject to change. Right now, it sits at 50k words. The second unpublished book on the list that I wrote is Fire Hammer Rain: Reflections on the Life of the Word of God in the Life of the Preacher. Basically this is a diary of what I’m learning and experiencing as a preacher. I hope many years from now I’ll write more about preaching that will be published, so I’m starting to collect thoughts now.

Toward the end of the year, I started the research phase for my current book project, a book about the return of Christ, so you’ll see some books with that theme toward the bottom of the list. (The lists always go in chronological order of when I read each book, by the way.) The working title is The Last Shall Be First: How the Return of Christ Makes Everything Sad Untrue. My hope is that it will encourage Christians, especially those suffering. The book will be my first traditionally published book. It’s scheduled to be released with Baker Books in the summer of 2026. The first draft of the manuscript is due May 1 of this year, so I’ll be busy finishing that in the spring. Among the books on the topic that I’ve read so far, a clear standout is Chris Davis’s book Bright Hope for Tomorrow: How Anticipating Jesus’ Return Gives Strength for Today. His book is so good. I hope I can write something half as helpful.

One final book I’d love to mention. It’s called Broken but Beautiful: Reflections on the Blessings of the Local Church. This book comes out with Gospel-Centered Discipleship in just a few weeks . . . and I’m the general editor! I’m really happy with it. I’ll say more about the book when it launches, but it’s some of the best writing we had on our website about the local church.

Okay, the end.

Did you have any favorites from last year? Let me know in the comments below.

*     *     *

Books per Year

Pages per Year

*     *     *

In order of completion, this year I read . . .

  1. The Author as Abram: Writing to the Land God Will Show Us (currently unpublished) by Benjamin Vrbicek (160 pages)

  2. Murder Your Darlings by Roy Peter Clark (352 pages)

  3. Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic by David Epstein (368 pages)

  4. Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America by Daniel Vaca (336 pages)

  5. Can Women Be Pastors? (Church Questions) by Greg Gilbert (64 pages)

  6. Be True to Yourself by Matt Fuller (192 pages)

  7. Male and Female He Created Them: A Study on Gender, Sexuality, & Marriage by Denny Burk, Colin Smothers, and David Closson (136 pages)

  8. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown (304 pages)

  9. How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy by Terran Williams (400 pages)

  10. The Blueprint of Grace: Seeing and Submitting to God’s Design for Sanctification by Robert Allen (122 pages)

  11. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (288 pages)

  12. Bright Hope for Tomorrow: How Anticipating Jesus’ Return Gives Strength for Today by Chris Davis (240 pages)

  13. The Bible: Romans to Revelation, Part 6 of 6 by God (300 pages)

  14. Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age by Samuel James (208 pages)

  15. Why Should I Be Baptized? (Church Questions) by Bobby James (64 pages)

  16. How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told by Harrison Scott Key (320 pages)

  17. The World’s Largest Man: A Memoir by Harrison Scott Key (368 pages)

  18. The Preacher’s Portrait: Five New Testament Word Studies by John Stott (119 pages)

  19. Congratulations, Who Are You Again?: A Memoir by Harrison Scott Key (368 pages)

  20. The Bible: Genesis to Deuteronomy, Part 1 of 6 by God (300 pages)

  21. Watership Down by Richard Adams (640 pages)

  22. The Art of Stability: How Staying Present Changes Everything by Rusty McKie (155 pages)

  23. Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World by Joe Rigney (120 pages)

  24. Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry (190 pages)

  25. Finish Line Leadership: Setting the Pace in Following Jesus by Dave Kraft (224 pages)

  26. The Author as Abram: Writing to the Land God Will Show Us (currently unpublished) by Benjamin Vrbicek (160 pages)

  27. The Bible: Joshua to Esther, Part 2 of 6 by God (300 pages)

  28. The Memory of Old Jack (Port William) by Wendell Berry (176 pages)

  29. Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson (352 pages)

  30. Church Planter: Nine Essentials for Being Faithful and Effective by Tony Merdia (194 pages)

  31. The Bible: Psalms to Song of Solomon, Part 3 of 6 by God (300 pages)

  32. Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover (368 pages)

  33. Bright Hope for Tomorrow: How Anticipating Jesus’ Return Gives Strength for Today by Chris Davis (240 pages)

  34. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande (304 pages)

  35. Reversed Thunder: The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination by Eugene Peterson (224 pages)

  36. Always Longing: Discovering the Joy of Heaven by Stephen R. Morefield (162 pages)

  37. Heavenward: How Eternity Can Change Your Life on Earth by Cameron Cole (200 pages)

  38. From a High Mountain: 31 Reflections on the Character and Comfort of God by Timothy M. Shorey (157 pages)

  39. Are We Living in the Last Days?: Four Views of the Hope We Share about Revelation and Christ’s Return by Bryan Chapell (256 pages)

  40. Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today by John Stott (320 pages)

  41. The Bible: Isaiah to Malachi, Part 4 of 6 by God (300 pages)

  42. Fire Hammer Rain: Reflections on the Life of the Word of God in the Life of the Preacher (unpublished) by Benjamin Vrbicek (150 pages)

  43. Come, Lord Jesus: Meditations on the Second Coming of Christ by John Piper (304 pages)

  44. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (400 pages)

  45. The Great DeChurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? by Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan P. Burge (272 pages)

  46. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church by N.T. Wright (352 pages)

  47. Blessed: Experiencing the Promise of the Book of Revelation by Nancy Guthrie (272 pages)

  48. The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery by Ross Douthat (224 pages)

  49. How Will the World End? by Jeramie Rinne (96 pages)

  50. Heaven on Earth: What the Bible Teaches about Life to Come by Derek W. H. Thomas (112 pages)

  51. Eternity Changes Everything by Stephen Witmer (128 pages)

  52. Not Home Yet: How the Renewal of the Earth Fits into God’s Plan for the World by Ian K. Smith (176 pages)

  53. Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality by Nancy R. Pearcey (336 pages)

  54. How the Gospel Brings Us All the Way Home by Derek W. H. Thomas (157 pages)

  55. The Bible: Matthew to Acts, Part 5 of 6 by God (300 pages)

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The Blessings of Countless Guides in Christ: Some Preachers that the Preachers at Our Church Find Helpful

I’m so thankful for the many, many great preachers we have in our day. Here’s a small list of pastors I regularly consult when I’m preaching.

This Sunday one of our pastors preached from 1 Corinthians 4, a passage where Paul speaks of being a father to the Corinthian church. Paul contrasts his role as their spiritual father with what he calls countless guides in Christ. In the context of the letter, to have countless guides wasn’t necessarily a blessing because their guides didn’t often sing the gospel in harmony. Additionally, the net effect of countless guides and lack of spiritual fathers made the kingdom of God appear to be more about talk than the power of a changed life. Hence, Paul had the necessary role as their spiritual father, a father who knew the congregation and the congregation who knew him. Perhaps we could think of this distinction as the difference in a child’s maturation between having countless babysitters and having loving, involved parents.

But this passage got me thinking. While countless guides might be a hindrance to growth, they can also be a blessing. We can honor God for the countless guides we have access to in our day, that is, if we hold the guides in the right light. I’m so thankful to God that I could never listen to all the great sermons or read all the great books on a given passage. Even when I preach something less familiar to our church, from what I sometimes call the crispy pages of the Bible, as we did all summer long with the book of Jeremiah, I still can find great resources to help me and, by extension, our congregation.

I’ll say it another way. In Ephesians 4, Paul writes that God has given his church many gifts, including the gift of teachers. If God gives this gift of teachers, then I believe he intends for us to be learners—and those who teach regularly should be the best learners!

In my own preaching, after I’ve studied the passage, having explored my own questions and made my own preliminary observations, I often turn to commentaries for further study. After those commentaries, I often listen to sermons preached from the passage. In a week when I’m preparing to preach on Sunday, as I exercise or drive across town, I might listen to two sermons or I might listen to six. It all depends on how much time I have, how confused I might be about the passage, and how many sermons I can even find. While I’m listening to the sermons, I’ll take notes on my iPhone. And I confess: I almost always listen with the speed at 2x.

I’ll also mention that I’m dogmatic about not doing any peeking at other sermons until I’ve done my own work. The same goes for commentaries. I want to be able to argue in my mind with the preacher (or author) from an informed place rather than being passively carried along. In that Sunday school cliché, I want to be a good Berean.

Below I’m sharing a list of preachers that the preachers at our church find helpful. The list is certainly not my attempt to catalog the best preachers. I put them in alphabetical order by first name just to avoid the connotation of rank. I wouldn’t even begin to know how to assess and narrow a “best of” list. For starters, I doubt I’ll ever have a broad enough awareness for such a task. I wish I knew more preachers than I do, and I love it when I can add someone new to this list.

But I will share the criteria I did use to create the list. I prioritized three traits: (1) faithful local church ministry over a long time, as opposed to mainly conference speaking, (2) a tendency toward expository sermons in series through books of the Bible, which means lots of passages get covered, and (3) an accessible website that can be searched by passages.

For some of the pastors and churches I listed below, I know they have several gifted pastors on staff, and I might have only listed in the headings the one(s) I know best. And there are other preachers who I often check to see if they have preached my passage, but sometimes their websites are not as easy to navigate. Examples include the guys at Immanuel Nashville, such as Ray Ortlund, TJ Tims, and Sam Allberry. I’ll also look for sermons from Crawford Loritts, Paul Washer, Christopher Ash, Sean Michael Lucas, Kent Hughes, Charlie Dates, and others.

There are a few pastors listed below that I feel personally connected to, but perhaps they have either less time in ministry (so they’ve preached fewer passages) or their websites aren’t as accessible. I’ll add my friends below anyway and mark them with an asterisk. And if you’re reading this and you are one of my friends and your name is not on the list, I am seriously not trying to slight you. I could have listed more of my regular preaching friends at nearby churches in our denomination, guys like Trent, Josh, Kirk, and Matt. But I have too many ministry friends to list you all. Perhaps you could say I have countless guides, and I’m thankful to God for that.

Whether you’re a preacher like me or if you just listen to sermons and biblical podcasts for edification, I think it’s helpful to bring close the words from Matt Chandler that the Village Church often puts at the start of their content. Their website is terribly difficult to search by passages, and that’s frustrating. But I love that they remind listeners that the teaching they are about to receive is intended to be supplemental and not replace regular involvement in a good local church.

If you have pastors that you enjoy listening to and they meet the three requirements above, I’d love to expand my personal list and the one we keep for the teaching pastors at our church. Your suggestions certainly don’t have to be famous pastors. I’m always happy to listen to a faithful and fruitful pastor over a famous pastor.  

*     *     *

Alistair Begg
Parkside Church, Chagrin Falls, OH
https://www.truthforlife.org/

Andrew Wilson
King’s Church, London, UK
https://kingschurchlondon.org/talks/

Ben Bechtel and Greg Kabakjian *
Midtown Community Church, Harrisburg, PA
https://mcchbg.org/sermons 

Bob Thune
Coram Deo Church in Omaha, NE
https://cdomaha.com/sermon-archive

Chase Replogle
Bent Oak Church, Springfield, MO
https://bentoakchurch.org/sermons/

Collin Smith
The Orchard Church, Chicago, IL
https://openthebible.org/browse-sermons/#scripture

Dane Ortlund
Naperville Presbyterian Church, Chicago, IL
https://www.npchurch.org/sermons 

Dave Cover, Keith Simon, Shay Roush, and others
The Crossing Church, Columbia, MO
https://thecrossingchurch.com/Resources 

Garrett Kell
Del Ray Baptist, Alexandria, VA
https://delraybaptist.org/resources/sermons/

Greg Lavine and John Beeson *
New Life Bible Fellowship, Tucson, AZ
https://newlifetucson.com/sermons/

H.B. Charles
Shiloh Metropolitan Baptist Church, Jacksonville, FL
https://hbcharlesjr.com/resource-library/scripture-index/?_resource_types=sermon-outlines

Jason Abbott *
Central Church, Jefferson City, MO
https://www.ccjcmo.org/sermons

Jeremy Treat
Reality Church, Los Angeles, CA
https://realityla.com/category/resources/sermons/?type=scripture

John Biegel *
Cornerstone, Annandale, VA
https://cornerstoneefree.org/sermons

John Piper, et. all
Desiring God, Minneapolis, MN (many sermons from Bethlehem Baptist Church)
https://www.desiringgod.org/scripture/with-messages

Jonathan Parnell, Marshall Segal, and others
The Cities Church, St. Paul, MN
https://www.citieschurch.com/sermons  

Josh Moody
College Church, Wheaton, IL
https://college-church.org/grow/resources/sermon-archive/

Kevin DeYoung
Christ Covenant, Matthews, NC
https://christcovenant.org/sermons/
(See also DeYoung’s former church, University Reformed Church or his personal website) http://www.universityreformedchurch.org/teaching/sermons.html
https://clearlyreformed.org/resources/ 

Luke Simmons
Ironwood Church, Mesa, AZ
https://www.ironwoodchurch.org/sermons

Mark Dever and others
Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington DC
http://www.capitolhillbaptist.org/resources/sermons/

Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Westminster Chapel, London, UK (he passed away many years ago, so the recordings are old)
https://www.mljtrust.org/sermons/

Matt Chandler and others
The Village Church, Dallas, TX
http://www.thevillagechurch.net/resources/sermons/

Matt Looloian *
Liberti Church, Camp Hill, PA
https://www.libertiharrisburg.org/sermons 

Michael Lawrence
Hinson Baptist Church, Portland, OR
https://www.hinsonchurch.org/sermonindex 

Mike Bullmore
Crossway Community Church, Bristol, WI
https://cwc.church/sermon-archive

Timothy Keller
Redeemer Church, New York, NY
https://gospelinlife.com/

Precept Austin
A collection of all sorts of sermons and commentaries organized by passage
https://www.preceptaustin.org/

Shad Baker *
Carlisle Evangelical Free Church, Carlisle, PA
https://cefc.church/sunday-messages

The Gospel Coalition
A sermon bank of tons of sermons from various preachers
http://resources.thegospelcoalition.org/

Zack Eswine
Riverside, Webster Groves, MO
https://www.riversidestl.org/sermons

 

* Photo by Kamil Szumotalski on Unsplash

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A Spectacular Burst of Light without Antecedent: A Review of Marilynne Robinson’s READING GENESIS

I both appreciate and am confused by Marilynne Robinson’s latest book.

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024), 344 pages.


I’m conflicted about Marilynne Robinson’s writing.

When I read her essays, I wonder if I can’t understand them because she is so much smarter than me and I lack the minimum intelligence necessary to learn from her, let alone critique her. When I read Robinson, I sometimes feel like Michael Scott from The Office, needing her to stop with the eloquence and “talk to me like I am five.”

Other times I wonder if the problem is not with me. Perhaps Robinson is actually not as good of a writer as everyone says she is because her essays contain too many contorted paragraphs. Sometimes her prose appears to swat at intellectually nuanced “flies” only she can see.

And when I read her material that has an explicit focus on God and the Bible, I become even more conflicted. Sometimes I wonder if her view of God is so much better than my own—and her view of the Bible is so much more sophisticated than my own—that perhaps I understand neither God nor the Bible as well as I should. Yet in other moments, I think of her in the same way as I think of many mainline Protestant pastors and professors, as those who see some truths about God and the Bible rightly and yet also see some really big truths really wrongly.

Having read her much anticipated and much acclaimed latest book, Reading Genesis, I now believe all of this can be true at once.

Hence my confliction.

Who Is Marilynne Robinson?

You might not have ever heard of Marilynne Robinson. But in literary writing circles, not just Christian literary writing circles, she’s a legend. I’ll put it this way. When one podcast interviewer had her on his show a few years ago, he said that lots of people want to interview former President Barack Obama, but, he noted, Barack Obama went out of his way to interview Robinson. She’s the sort of author who, even when writing non-fiction about the Bible, has her book reviewed by The New York Times and The New Yorker, as well as Christianity Today and The Gospel Coalition.

I was introduced to Robinson’s writing in seminary. A professor assigned us the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead, the first book in a series of four novels. I loved then and still love now so much about the central character John Ames, an aging pastor in rural Iowa, and how Ames cares for his flock, his young son, and his unlikely wife. I’ve read all the novels in the series at least twice. In fact, for a few years, one of my favorite things on YouTube was to listen to Marilynne Robinson read her own novels. You can hear this example when she reads an extended excerpt from the third novel in the series, Lila. Robinson reads so monotone that her words become engrossing, like a rock ballad that constantly feels on the verge of a big crescendo.

Robinson also has had a key role in carrying forward the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a group connected to the University of Iowa’s master in fine arts program. (You can think of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a kind of Harvard Law for writers.) I don’t imagine my life will ever allow the opportunity, but many times I’ve wanted to apply to the Writers’ Workshop and experience the legacy of writers such as Flannery O’Connor and teaching from instructors such as Robinson.

I cannot do a full review of her latest book Reading Genesis because, as I mentioned above, I might not be smart enough to write that review. I am, however, very familiar with Genesis itself, having preached slowly through different subsections of the book and having worked on an extended writing project that engages with the Abraham narrative. So here we go.

A Close Reading of Genesis

I can say positively that Reading Genesis offers a close reading of the first book in the Bible. Robinson trains her attention on the details using the tools of great literature: repetition, parallelism, inclusio, characterization, foreshadowing, intentional ambiguity, authorial intent, and so on.

I also appreciate how—in the best sense, not the worst—Reading Genesis stands on the author’s own authority. Even when Robinson mentions intricacies of cultures that paralleled Israel’s culture, stories from ancient Canaanite and Babylonian religious texts, her book has zero footnotes and almost zero referencing of “so-and-so” said “such-and-such.” This omission makes for a refreshing departure from traditional commentaries.

And her close reading often leads to profound insights. I’ll quote in full this extended paragraph from near the end of the book, a paragraph about the importance of Genesis for the rest of the Scriptures juxtaposed with the strikingly ordinary lives of the key families within Genesis.

Genesis can hardly be said to end. In it certain things are established—the nature of Creation and the spirit in which it was made; the nature of humankind; how and in what spirit the Creator God enters into relation with His human creatures. The whole great literature of Scripture, unfolding over centuries, will proceed on the terms established in this book. So Genesis is carried forward, in the law, in the psalms, in the prophets, itself a spectacular burst of light without antecedent but with a universe of consequences. This might seem like hyperbolic language to describe a text largely given over to the lives of people in many ways so ordinary that it is astonishing to find them in an ancient text. This realism by itself is a sort of miracle. These men and women saw the face of God, they heard His voice, and yet life for them came down to births and deaths, love, transgression, obedience, shame, and sorrow, everything done or borne in the course of the characterization of God, for Whom every one of us is a child of Adam, made in His image. God’s bond with Jacob, truly a man of sorrows, is a radical theological statement. (224)

I could go on quoting many instances of her helpful insights, the fruit of her close reading, but I’ll only note three final appreciations.

First, when you read between the lines about who she imagines to be her typical audience, you get the sense that she’s probably not only a bit odd to evangelical readers but also odd to liberal readers as well. “If you mapped Robinson’s novelistic reading onto contemporary scholarship of the Bible,” writes Francis Spufford in his New York Times review, “you’d find her in several camps at once.” Frequently when I expect her to endorse without qualification some stronghold of liberalism, such as skepticism toward supernatural elements within Genesis or the documentary hypothesis (which tries to discern supposed multiple authors of Genesis), she doesn’t. Instead of endorsing the skepticism of the supernatural or the documentary hypothesis, she critiques them, or at least nuances the views in a better direction. Indeed, part of the impetus for her in writing the book came from her own frustrations with these modern readings.

To give another example of this, Robinson concurs with modern, liberal understandings that the Genesis flood narrative is downstream and derivative from the creation and flood stories from other religious texts, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. At the point where the stories have the most similarity, however, she argues that Genesis intentionally subverts and betters the picture of God’s character than what is found in the other religious texts. “The Genesis narrative as a whole can be thought of as a counterstatement of this kind,” she writes, “retelling the Creation in terms that reject in essential points the ancient Near Eastern characterization of the divine, of humankind, and of Creation itself” (28).

Second, I appreciate that Robinson does a good job noting the faults of those in the Bible, especially the faults of the patriarchs, rather than casting them as heroes of the stories. “Readers can be shocked by the fallibility of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” she writes. “But the patriarchs are not offered as paragons.” These faults highlight the “breadth of God’s loyalty to all the descendants of Adam” (84).

Finally, I appreciate that all two-hundred and thirty pages have no chapter breaks, having only a gap in the prose every so often, signaled by a blank space or a few asterisks to mark the beginning of a new line of thought. I love it. Robinson uses this same structure in each novel of her four-part series. Rather than finding this breach of convention daunting, I find it aesthetically enjoyable.

A Confusing Reading of Genesis

I also find her reading of Genesis confusing. Sometimes Robinson feels confusing because she seems to simultaneously hold a high view of Scripture along with a view of Scripture so nuanced that I can’t quite understand her view.

I also find her confusing because some sentences get so contorted that I can’t figure out what she is affirming or denying. For example, consider this sentence from a section about the meaning of life. “If [life] is the essence of everything, a breath of the very Spirit of God, it is fit and right that, first, as the basis of all understanding, of all righteousness, life itself should be properly felt and valued” (47). You can try to read that sentence a few more times, and you might get closer to the meaning than I can, but I’m still puzzled. I think she’s saying something like, “If life from God is everywhere, we should respect life more.” But I don’t really know. And so go many such sentences, sometimes even full paragraphs—alas, even full pages. On page 64 there sits a single paragraph that begins on the previous page and extends to the next page. Woof, that’s a big paragraph. All this, again, leads to my confliction.

I’ll give another example, this time from the copy on the jacket cover of the book. I know authors themselves often do not write the promotional material on the jacket cover, but it accurately illustrates the kind of “almost-orthodox-view-but-maybe-not-at-all-orthodox-view” that appears throughout the book.

The cover states that Robinson intends to appreciate Genesis’s “greatness as literature, its rich articulation and exploration of themes that resonate through the whole of Scripture.” Great, I think to myself. I’m here for that. Genesis is not less than great literature, and I’d love to learn more about the many ways the themes at the beginning of the Bible ricochet right through until the end.

Then the promotional blurb continues, “Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis . . . is a powerful consideration of the profound meanings and promise of God’s enduring covenant with humanity.” I’m here for that too.  

But then notice the twist at the end of this final sentence. “This magisterial book radiates gratitude for the constancy and benevolence of God’s abiding faith in Creation.”

Wait, wait, wait—“God’s abiding faith in Creation”?

Reading Genesis well should indeed lead us, I believe, to gratitude. But does reading Genesis produce gratitude for “God’s abiding faith in Creation”? It does not. The dysfunctional family that left Eden clothed in animal skins soon sees one brother kill another brother. And on and on each member of the original family tree goes, sinning spectacularly right through to the end of the book. The only good reading of Genesis is the reading that sees God, in his long-suffering of his loving-kindness, as abiding with a humanity that merits no faith at all. A reading of Genesis that attempts to foreground God’s supposed abiding faith in humanity is not a good reading of Genesis, even when done so with beautiful prose.

Another example of this “almost orthodox” view is seen in a quote I used above. She wrote about how the faults of the patriarchs highlight the “breadth of God’s loyalty to all the descendants of Adam” (84). Later, in a beautiful section of the book on this same theme, she writes “of God’s loyalty to humankind through [all of humanity’s] disgrace and failure and even crime” (174). But the Scriptures do not teach God’s broad loyalty to all humanity and to every person born of Adam, so much as they teach God’s special loyalty and gentleness to the special line of chosen people, a chosen subset within all people. In other places, Robinson seems to know this distinction well. “Out of the inconceivable assertion of power from which everything has emerged and will emerge there came a small family of herdsmen who were of singular interest to the Creator.” Can you see why reading Robinson can be so difficult?

Evangelical readers will also be frustrated by Robinson’s cryptic comments about the historicity of Genesis. At times she seems to suggest that she believes Genesis gives us real history. “From this point in Scripture,” she writes about Noah’s family, “we begin to enter history” (66). But what is she implying about the historicity of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel? At one point in an aside, she writes, “[King] David, whom I take to be historical . . .” (79). Okay, she takes David to be in some sense historical, but do we have a true, historical account of him and others in the Scriptures? It’s not as easy to tell how she views this. Speaking of the exodus, she writes, “Debate about whether these events actually occurred, whether the figures involved are in any sense historical, can never be resolved and need not be” (199). I disagree. When the Bible presents stories as though they did happen in history, it matters whether they did.

I’ll also mention Robinson’s book also has little mention of Jesus. One might respond to this comment with pushback, saying, Yeah, neither does Genesis itself, and it’s only my evangelical gospel-preaching impulse that “needs” to see him everywhere.

I can receive that. I neither expected nor would I require each section of her book to read like a good Christian sermon. But I would have appreciated hearing more about how all these meandering stories in Genesis of nomadic tribes only find their ultimate meaning in the promise and fulfillment of the serpent crusher with a bruised heel prophesied in the third chapter of the book. This is not merely my reading of Genesis but Jesus’s reading. To an audience more familiar with Genesis than any of us, Jesus once said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me” (John 5:39).

Robinson claims in the opening sentence, “The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil” (3). And what the Bible is generally, Genesis (as well as the book of Job) is specifically, a work exploring the tensions between the goodness and sovereignty of God in a world filled with evil. Yet without a robust engagement with the cross of Christ, his resurrection, and the second coming, I am not surprised Robinson struggles to present satisfactory answers to the problem. Yes, she is correct that the story of Joseph underscores with literal words that what his brothers meant for evil, God meant for good (Gen. 50:20). Behold the beauty of providence. But where the story of Joseph only points through the theodicy glass dimly, the New Testament streams in 4k. God the Father put Jesus forward as a propitiation for sins, writes Paul, “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” (Rom. 3:26).

*     *     *

In the end, I can’t say whether you should buy and read Robinson’s book, which I know makes for an admittedly strange and unsatisfying ending to my review. My own reflections echo the both-and in the title and sentiments of Jared Kennedy’s review, “What Marilynne Robinson Sees and Misses in Genesis.”

Like many other brilliant individuals God has blessed with oodles of talent, Robinson can be hard to pin down and put into convenient, tidy categories. It’s not fair for evangelicals to dismiss her as a mere liberal, as I’m sure some will certainly do. It seems to me that as Robinson ministers in her own context, her audience would see her as advocating many views that are more often associated with fundamentalism and evangelicalism. We need to appreciate what she does see so well.

At the same time, here is the best I can say: if you do the hard work of giving her words a close reading, as she gives a close reading to Genesis, you might end up as I did, both blessed and conflicted.

 

* Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

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I Signed My First Traditional Book Contract (And Sort of a Second Book Contract)

I’m working on a book about the return of Christ and hope for those who suffer. (And the other book is about the beauty of the local church.)

Over the years I’ve written a lot of articles and a few books. Those books were either self-published or published by a small, independent Christian publisher. So this summer was a first for me. I just signed my first contract with a traditional publisher. I’m writing for Baker Books. It won’t come out until the summer of 2026, but I’m trying to find moments to work on the manuscript as much as possible.

The book explores the promise of the second coming of Christ, and how his return brings encouragement to believers, especially for those suffering. The working title is The Last Shall Be First: How the Return of Christ Makes Everything Sad Untrue. Here’s what we came up with for the summary:

Despite the confusion and controversy that often exists around the topic of the end times, the writers of Scripture believed that the promise of Christ’s return should comfort believers. With vivid imagery and passionate appeals, the biblical authors announced to Christians the happy ending of our story: justice for the wronged, family for the forsaken, new bodies for the broken, peace for the persecuted, feasting for the famished, and, best of all, faith in Christ becoming sight.

The First Shall Be Last explores seven aspects of Christ’s return, primarily from the amillennial perspective. But the book is not mainly about one specific view. Rather, pastor and author Benjamin Vrbicek encourages Christians to make the biggest and brightest truths about the return of Christ the biggest and brightest truths in our hearts. Every Christian, especially those suffering, needs the hope of the end. We need the good news that what we see now in part, we will soon see in full. When the trumpet sounds, the last shall be first, and, to borrow from Tolkien, everything sad will come untrue.

I started this project almost five years ago, and got seven rejections from publishers along the way. But as I’m getting back into the material, I’m slowly starting to remember why the topic matters so much to me and, I trust, all believers.

When I’ve worked on books in the past, the associated deadlines mainly were self-inflicted. I could hit the deadline or not and little consequence would follow either way. I did not expect the anxiety that would come with a real contract on a real book with a real publisher. Woof. I feel the pressure now.

I’ll share more about the books over the next few years. Please, if you know me and are so inclined, say a prayer for me. Pray that the words would come and that they would bless readers with the truth and hope that in Christ one day everything sad will come untrue.

As an aside, there were no pictures of me signing a contract on social media. Signing the contract was humorously anticlimactic. After months of working on the agreement (after years of working on the proposal), the actual contract took a literal four seconds to sign. It was through the Adobe electronic sign feature. It wasn’t even my signature. I just clicked a button and generic cursive showed up. Oh well. It’s probably better for my heart this way.

I also signed a book contract with Gospel-Centered Discipleship, the company I work part-time for as the managing editor. On this book, I’m not the writer but the editor. We’re publishing some of our best essays from the last few years about the local church. It’s called Broken but Beautiful: Reflections on the Blessings of the Local Church. This book will be released later in the fall. There’s so much bad press out there about the local church. I hope this book shines a light on how the true church still shines bright in the midst of all the junk.

Finally, let me just mention that I wish I wrote more essays on my blog. I still think of article ideas all the time and even make notes about what I would write if I had time. Unfortunately in this season of pastoring and coaching sports and sending children off to college next year and buying our first puppy, I mainly just drop monthly book writing and guest post and podcast updates in the blog. But I thank you for reading and rooting for me nonetheless. It means so much.

 

* Photo by Dominik Dancs on Unsplash

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Two Podcast Interviews: How Improvement in Writing Is Like Bench-Press & How Our Church Stayed “Front-Edge of the Middle” During Covid

Recently I was a guest on two different podcasts to talk about writing and pastoring.

I have two podcast interview updates to share. One interview was about writing and the other about pastoring.

First, the podcast about writing. I was a guest on Amy Simon’s podcast, The Purposeful Pen. The episode released yesterday. It’s a podcast to encourage Christian writers.

On the episode we talk a little bit about what makes for good writing, the article submission process, and some specifics to writing for Gospel-Centered Discipleship, the website I help manage. You can find it here, “Episode 63: Improving the Craft of Writing with Benjamin Vrbicek.”

A piece of advice I give is that finishing one piece of writing often develops a writer more than starting five pieces of writing but not finishing any of them. My metaphor for this comes from the gym. Something about finishing a last set of bench press, especially if you go until failure, produces more physical gains than simply doing a few sets and not going to failure. Pushing individual pieces of writing to the final, public form forces authors to identify problems and find solutions in a way that merely jotting down the “good stuff” and moving along doesn’t do.

Second, the podcast about pastoring. The other week I was a guest on the MemeLord Monday podcast, which often takes a humorous (and sometimes serious) look at the Christian subculture. You can find it here, “What Happened to the Post-Pandemic Church?

The podcast actually released a few years ago, but the host and my friend, Matt Matias, just released the interview to the public. Previously, the episode was only available to his paid subscribers.

Now, you probably have a legitimate question coming to your mind: Why in the world would I want to listen to a podcast about churches and Covid, especially when it’s so old? I get it. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to listen to it either—and I was the guest! Who wants to relive that era, I thought. Let’s forget about Covid and move on.

But I did listen to the interview, and I found it fascinating.

I know, I know, you could say I’m an egomaniac and just love listening to my own voice. I don’t think that was the reason I enjoyed the interview so much. Listening to the interview felt like opening a strange time capsule. I had honestly forgotten all we went through as a church. Our church even had a malicious hacker ruin our online “reserved seating” by signing up fake names. Crazy weird and super aggravating. We had our guesses who hacked us, but we could never confirm it.

You probably remember, too, how there was something of a bell curve regarding how churches handled Covid. In the interview, I explained our unsophisticated guesswork about how to keep our church on the “front edge of the middle” regarding the “uncautious-to-cautious” spectrum. This involved prayer reading the Bible, arguing among ourselves, and talking to doctors, church members, and other pastors—as well as doing exactly whatever the government told us to do without question. Oh, we also cast lots a few times.

Well, maybe we didn’t do all of those. I’ll let you listen to figure it out. But our “front-edge of the middle” strategy was our version of the Goldilocks approach, our plan to hit the bell curve just right. This proved challenging as the backdrop matrix of Covid, culture, and churches kept shifting, and not always in the same direction. Alas, we did our best to be faithful to the Lord. He knows our hearts.

In the interview we also discuss pastoral abuse and why our church has a plurality of pastor-elders, rather than “the guy.” And we tell a few jokes.

If you listen to either podcast, let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your best tips to improve at writing and what your church did that was helpful during Covid.

The Purposeful Pen: “Improving the Craft of Writing
MemeLord Monday: “
What Happened to the Post-Pandemic Church?

 
 

 

* Photo by ConvertKit on Unsplash

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The Reason I’m Most Thankful to Have Timothy Keller as One of My Spiritual Fathers

For all his greatness, we should most seek to imitate the late pastor’s humility and indifference to fame.

I went through all my seminary education largely oblivious to whatever pastor or author was currently deemed the most popular in evangelicalism—or, conversely, which pastor had most recently done something silly or sinful and thus immediately needed to be talked about by everyone. It’s a great way to go through seminary, and maybe life. Sure, I had a few favorites even in the early years of my ministry training, but they were literally just a few. And none of them, back then, were Timothy Keller.

I only met Dr. Keller once in person. He came to my seminary as a visiting preacher and lecturer. I didn’t really know who he was, even though it was about the same year he was co-founding The Gospel Coalition and lots and lots of other people apparently knew him. That anecdote speaks of my blissful ignorance.

Yet now, some fifteen years later, when I think over his ministry and the blessing he was to me and so many others, I’m thankful that God extruded him to a place of prominence. I’m thankful for books like Counterfeit Gods that gave me the language to name and renounce my idolatry, the language of “a good thing becoming an ultimate thing.” I’m thankful for those in our congregation who became Christians as we led a study through The Prodigal God. And I’m thankful for the textbook Center Church, and the way it prepared our leaders to plant a church in our city. In short, I’m thankful for the publishing and church-planting empire the Lord built through him.

The one-year anniversary of his death was last month. Christianity Today published a reflection I had about his life and what I’m most thankful for. This may come as a surprise. It wasn’t his writing or preaching, despite the above picture being from the bookshelf in my office which prominently features most of his books.

If you’d like to read the post, you can do so here, “Would Tim Keller Care If We Weren’t Still Talking About Him? Probably Not.” Christianity Today used this line as the excerpt for sharing, which I think gets at the point of my article: “For all his greatness, we should most seek to imitate the late pastor’s humility and indifference to fame.” The article also talks about the little-noticed detail of a brown banana peel that sat next to Keller in a famous photograph of him.

I can’t republish the whole article here, but I will include the first three paragraphs below. I’d love for you to read and share the article.

*     *     *

In spring of last year, many of us saw a photo of the late Timothy Keller sitting on a park bench. The photo was used on the cover of Collin Hansen’s biography of Keller, and it circulated around the internet in May when he passed away—on social media, blogs, and even Keller’s personal website.

What most of us didn’t see, however, was the banana peel lying on the bench only a couple feet from Keller. The peel has been cropped from most versions of the photo, and understandably so. Who wants to see an ugly brown bit of organic waste in an author’s photograph?

I confess that if I were a world-famous pastor and best-selling author having my picture taken by a professional photographer, I would most certainly have moved the banana peel before someone took my picture. Who wouldn’t? But Keller didn’t seem to care . . .

To continue reading on Christianity Today’s website, click here.

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Thoughts on Coaching Sports as a Christian

Recently, The Gospel Coalition was kind to publish some reflections I have about coaching sports as a Christian and the idea of “rightly ordered loves.”

It’s been almost twenty years since I was competing in college athletics. Since then I have continued to run and cycle and lift weights and all of that—sometimes more and sometimes less. I was talking with a sports medicine doctor last spring after yet another injury, and he said “weekend warriors” like me make for good job security. I bet we are.

Over the last few years, though, I’ve been more involved in sports as a coach. My children attend a small Christian school, and the school has let me help on several teams. Our track and field season is just about over. We had districts last weekend and had great success. One athlete will compete in states this weekend. Super fun.

Last month The Gospel Coalition was kind to publish some reflections I have about coaching sports as a Christian. The title of the article is, “Christian Coach, Help Athletes Cultivate Rightly Ordered Loves” and engages with a concept developed by Augustine a long time ago. I know that can make for an odd mashup, but I think it works.

I can’t post the whole article here. But I’ll include the first few paragraphs. I’d love for you to click over to the full article, give it a read, and share it with others. Maybe you know a coach who would find it a blessing.

*     *     *

 

Christian Coach, Help Athletes Cultivate Rightly Ordered Loves

Benjamin Vrbicek, The Gospel Coalition, April 26, 2024 

 

Track and field athletes want to run fast, jump high, and throw far. I’m a varsity coach at a small Christian school, and I want this for our athletes too. I even want them to win.

This may sound strange, but I hope other schools want to win against us too.

I don’t say this because rivalry draws out better performances, though often it does. I want to coach in a way that cultivates intensity because our effort to win is part of what it means to glorify God in athletics.

Trying to win, however, is only part of glorifying God in sports. And not the biggest part either.

Whether coaches have full-time jobs in athletics or are parent volunteers, they have a wonderful opportunity to cultivate Christian maturity.

A coach can help an athlete rejoice with her teammate even though that teammate beat her in a close race. He can draw out respect for opponents, encouraging harmony with those an athlete is competing against. A coach can cultivate an athlete’s identity in Christ such that she could win the state championship and not become haughty, or tear an ACL and not be devastated.

We could simply call these lessons “coaching,” but this kind of coaching is an opportunity to cultivate what Augustine called “rightly ordered loves.” . . .

 

* Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

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Peace Be with You: The Surprise of the Risen Lord’s First Words

For all the excitement the disciples would have had to see Jesus on that first Easter Sunday morning, I bet they also would have wondered, Does Jesus want to see me?

Both men and women have certain things that can be difficult to admit in public. Sometimes what we find difficult to admit are the same things that we all have difficulty admitting. Sometimes they are different, perhaps even specific to gender.

I won’t give you anything too provocative, but I will tell you one thing I’d rather not: for too long after I got my driver’s license, I was what most people would call a bad driver. I know, as a guy, I’m not supposed to tell you that, but it’s true. At least I think it was true, in the past tense.

In the last twenty years, I’ve not had an accident, and I’ve only been pulled over three times. One of them happened when one of my daughters was very young. We struggled to get her to sleep and only driving her would help, so I drove the neighborhood but didn’t, apparently, come to a complete stop. That one got me a ticket. The point is I have twenty years of safe driving. Praise the Lord.

My first five years of driving? Not so much. I had accidents that totaled into the double digits. Seriously. A few thousand cars were in my high school parking lot, and several of my accidents happened there. My first major accident involved hitting the brand-new Ford F-150 owned by my father’s best friend. That was a wild one because the friend just happened to be in the lane at a stoplight when I moved over without looking. Once I hit part of our garage. Stuff like this. Almost all of them, however, were at low speed. But one was not.

On a rainy Saturday morning in the spring of my sophomore year, I came around a turn too fast. I would tell you that cars had just passed me up the hill and were, thus, going faster than me. Nonetheless, I skidded or fishtailed three times, scraping the guardrail with the front right nose of my car. I slowed down, pulled onto the shoulder, got out, and saw my front right headlight hanging like a detached eyeball. And the door of the minivan looked like someone had taken a knife, jabbed it in the side, and pulled.

I got back in, drove to the high school parking lot, five minutes away, parked my car at the far far edge of the lot, and walked to the locker room. I had driven to the school to catch the bus to a track meet. Reluctantly, I called my father from the phone corded to the wall. I remember staring at the red brick wall, wondering what he would say. 

“I messed up, Dad,” and I told him what happened.

His first words were not, “You stupid son. How many times have we told you?” Instead, he first said, “Are you okay?”

He said other things after that, but he said that first.

I could write a whole lot of true things about the Easter passage of John 20. But what stood out to me this Easter are the four words repeated by Jesus three times: “Peace be with you.” After all their failures, these are the first words to these men (John 20:19–21, 26).

While the greeting “peace be with you” (shalom aleichem) may have been customary in their day and even still today, peace makes for strange first words to these men.

These men have bumbled along throughout the Gospels. They often take Jesus literally when he meant something more poetic (cf., “Lazarus is asleep” in John 11, cf., “he is Elijah who is to come” in Matt. 11, and “beware of the leaven of the Pharisees” in Matt. 16). In Matthew 17, they could not drive out a demon, even though they tried. In Matthew 18, the disciples argued about who the greatest disciple was. In John 6, after a big confrontation where many followers of Jesus stop following, Jesus knows the disciples are grumbling and asks the twelve if they want to stop following. Their response is okay, but it’s not as great as we might hope. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life,” Peter says (John 6:68). This implies they might like to leave but must stay. Again, they just seem to bumble along.

Then consider the final weekend. On the night of the arrest, they can’t stay awake when he tells them to pray. Every single disciple leaves him. In one brave moment, Peter, a leader among the twelve, cuts off the ear of a soldier. But then Jesus rebukes him for fighting as the world fights. An hour later, Peter denies even knowing Jesus.

We receive their failures as familiar material, hardly shocking because we’ve read it all before. But think of what it meant for these men to admit to all this. Think of what it meant to write what they wrote. Think of what it means to show the world you’re a bumbling sinner, not in genric, benign ways, but in specific and ugly ways.

Their failure is only more pointed when you consider the contrast with the women in the story. It’s apparently dangerous to be a follower of Jesus, which is why they hid in a locked room (John 20:19). But not the women; they go early to the tomb looking for his body. In a culture where women were not as valued as they should have been, they were the first to witness the resurrection. They are the first to tell the other disciples that Jesus is alive.

Right or wrong, this would have stung far more than me telling you I’m a bad driver.

These are some of the reasons Christians believe in the reliability of the Gospels. Had it not happened this way and had Jesus not been alive and received them so well, they would never have written the story so transparently.

But the main reason I bring this up is to establish the context for the four words that Jesus says three times: peace be with you.

How can he say that to them?

Well, maybe Jesus is a nice guy, so that’s why he says peace. If we’re talking about whether Jesus is a nice guy or not, and those are the only two options, then yes, Jesus is a nice guy. He’s not a mean guy. He’s not un-nice.

But can a nice judge just let criminals go? Niceness has nothing to do with it. So, how can Jesus say peace to them? How can he say peace to you? It has everything to do with a little phrase in John 19:30. From the cross, just before he dies, Jesus says, “It is finished.”

On Easter morning, even more so than other Sundays we can come to church looking our best and putting on a good show. But the Easter Sunday version of yourself can trick us into thinking we should hear peace from God because we’re not so bad.

On that Easter morning, however, these men were not in their Sunday best. There were no illusions. They knew they had failed, and they knew they had deserted, and they knew they were not the disciples Jesus wanted them to be. This allowed them to experience Easter with more joy than when we come with our religious pretense.

Jesus can say, “Peace be with you,” only because he also said it is finished.

Why was the cross so bloody? Why was the cross so painful? The bloody, painful crucifixion was so physically violent to dramatize the violence of the spiritual reality: when Jesus died, he took upon himself all these sins of his followers. But when he died, it was finished—really finished. No more wrath.

And when he rose, he can preach peace to them and to you.

Many years later, Paul, a man who experienced this peace from God wrote to a church these words:

For he himself [Jesus] is our peace, [and speaking of Jews and Gentiles who didn’t get along, he writes that Jesus]  . . . has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. (Eph. 2:14–18)

All of Paul’s letters begin with some variation of a greeting using the word “Peace”—every one of them. The letters of Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, and Philemon all begin with peace because they all go on to describe how it is finished and how he is risen indeed.

For all the excitement the disciples would have had to see Jesus on that first Easter Sunday morning, they likely wondered, Does Jesus want to see me? Maybe you have wondered the same.

The gospel of John was written, John tells us, so that you would believe that God the Father wants you to have life and peace through the risen Son of God (John 20:30–31).

When I crashed my car on that highway, I mentioned I parked at the far end of the parking lot. I did that so no one would see. When the bus drove away, we went right past my car. Everyone laughed. It hurt to have them see my failure, as I’m sure it hurt the disciples.

But their laughter hurt me less knowing my father loved me unconditionally.

And Jesus loves us even more.

 

* Photo by Warren on Unsplash

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Preaching Benjamin Vrbicek Preaching Benjamin Vrbicek

A Boring Preacher Is a Contradiction in Terms

Reflections on an encouraging and challenging quote from Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a great preacher from the past.

For the last few years I’ve had a growing desire to study more intently the craft of preaching. I get regular reps on Sundays, typically over thirty a year, and I have the responsibility of mentoring our other preachers. Yet I still feel the gaps between the preacher I want to be and the preacher I am. I say this even as people often compliment my preaching and notice improvements, particularly in the areas of boldness and confidence. In short, after ten years in one church, I’m hungry.

So, this is the year it begins. In January I grabbed all my preaching books that were scattered in alphabetical order on my bookshelves and created an entire shelf devoted to the topic. I’m buying other books and making Amazon wish lists of books to buy in the future. I signed up for a six-week cohort course with The Gospel Coalition led by Jeremy Treat. I’ve also committed myself to writing each week a five-hundred-word entry in a preaching journal about what I’m learning. The journal has nearly seven thousand words so far. I even have a working title and even a preface written for a book on preaching. I do this not because I’m necessarily going to write the book, though I want to, but because I learn best as I write and dream and pray and envision. I’m calling the book Hammer Fire Rain: Reflections on the Life of the Word of God in the Life of the Preacher. It would major on the many metaphors for God’s Word and how those affect not merely the sermon but the preacher across his life. I consider this book a “ten-years in the making” type of project. Preaching books, like marriage books, are best written by those with a long obedience in the same direction, unbroken vows, some gray hair, and a few ugly scars—yet also with a community of people who love them anyway.

The volunteer pastor at our church who did my annual review heard some of these rumblings and got me a gift for Christmas: the famous book Preaching and Preachers by Martyn Lloyd-Jones. I’m glad he did. I’d never read it before. The book is adapted from a series of lectures he gave in the late 1960s. Lloyd-Jones had a long and celebrated career. He’s famous for several things, including being a medical doctor before a pastor and preaching through book of Romans at Westminster Chapel from 1955 to 1968. Those sermons have been published in a fourteen-volume series and have a page count of over five thousand.

I’d love to tell you more about what I’m learning from Lloyd-Jones, what I’m learning as I preach, and what I might someday write about preaching. For now, I just want to pass along a little section from the book in a chapter titled “The Art of Preaching,” in which Lloyd-Jones suggests that boring preachers should not be. In fact, they cannot be, he says. Even the idea of a boring preacher he calls “a very serious matter.”

Whether you preach or lead any Bible studies at all, I hope you’ll find the words encouraging and challenging.

The preacher must never be dull, he must never be boring; he should never be what is called “heavy.” I am emphasizing these points because of something I am often told and which worries me a great deal. I belong to the Reformed tradition, and may have had perhaps a little to do in Britain with the restoration of this emphasis during the last forty years or so.

I am disturbed therefore when I am often told by members of churches that many of the younger Reformed men are very good men, who have no doubt read a great deal, and are very learned men, but that they are very dull and boring preachers; and I am told this by people who themselves hold the Reformed position. This is to me a very serious matter; there is something radically wrong with dull and boring preachers. How can a man be dull when he is handling such themes?

I would say that a “dull preacher” is a contradiction in terms; if he is dull he is not a preacher. He may stand in a pulpit and talk, but he is certainly not a preacher.

With the grand theme and message of the Bible dullness is impossible. This is the most interesting, the most thrilling, the most absorbing subject in the universe; and the idea that this can be presented in a dull manner makes me seriously doubt whether the men who are guilty of this dullness have ever really understood the doctrine they claim to believe, and which they advocate. We often betray ourselves by our manner. (Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers, 85–86, paragraph breaks added)

At church on Monday our staff discussed this long paragraph in our weekly “preaching debrief” meeting. We, of course, agreed. But our solution for having less boring sermons was not so much that preachers should rack their brains on how to add more pop and pizazz, say, by adding spicy illustrations or dramatic gestures or having the tech booth turn up the volume to eleven.

Instead, we believe that Lloyd-Jones—and more importantly the Bible—tells us to focus more on our personal intimacy with God and rightly divided doctrine, and this, in time, will lead to riveting preaching, the kind of sermons that cause people to put down their phones, lean forward, and listen with their face. This is the view Paul takes when he writes to the church in Colossae. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,” Paul writes, “teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”

Our teaching and admonitions—and for that matter our singing—should overflow from “the word of Christ dwelling in [us] richly.” When Paul speaks of the word of Christ, he means a kind of shorthand for the gospel, the good news story of the life, death, resurrection, and promise of the second coming. When this good news dwells in us richly, good things happen.

In a recent podcast episode of the Expositors Collective, seasoned pastor Ray Ortlund shared some cautions about focusing too much on preaching. The cautions felt timely as all these grand thoughts about preaching bubble up within me and spill out in my journal entries, and as I add books to my shelf and enroll in courses. Ortlund said early in his pastoring he essentially overestimated the singular role of preaching. He has since learned, he told listeners, not that preaching is less important but that gospel preaching is always meant to exist within a broader pastoral and warm relationship between preacher and people.

To this, I say amen. As I give all this time to preaching and thinking about preaching, I don’t want to overestimate the singular role of preaching. To consider again Paul’s words in Colossians 3:16, he says “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.” The you is plural. The relationship of preacher and parishioners—both immersed together in the gospel—matters.

So I’ll press on, encouraged but cautioned, striving not to be a boring preacher by dwelling more and more richly in the word of Christ among a congregation dwelling in the same.

And what I learn about the craft of preaching and word of Christ, in time, I hope to share with others, maybe with you.

 

* Photo by Kristina Paparo on Unsplash

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Book Reviews Benjamin Vrbicek Book Reviews Benjamin Vrbicek

Reading List 2023

A list of every book I read last year.

My first post of each new year always contains the list of books I read the previous year. If you’d like to see the previous posts, you can do so here: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. Mostly I do this for accountability. But I also know a few other book nerds who enjoy these sorts of posts.

As has been the trend over the last few years—as my children have gotten bigger and my responsibilities in life and at church have also gotten bigger—I read fewer and fewer books. I hate the phrase “it is what it is,” but . . . it is what it is. I’m content to know that, before the Lord, I’m making the right choices.

Small as the totals were this year, I had a few favorites. Twice in the early months of the year I read Timothy Keller’s book Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I?. And, yes, that means I count the book on my list twice. Such a great book, by the way. I also enjoyed Collin Hansen’s biography of Keller. If you happen to listen to the audiobook, Hansen included a few classic Keller sermons.

I typically read several books about writing. This year the best two were Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies and Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. The Stein book has some PG-13 rated content, so be aware. And the Klinkenborg one has an interesting structure, but I loved it.

I reread All the Light We Cannot See in anticipation of the Netflix series and my article on the book for Christianity Today. No, I didn’t love the series as much as the book, but it did get better and better across the four installments. I also had a cool email exchange with Anthony Doerr after the article, which made my day. . . or maybe my week.

Also a re-read for me was Everything Sad Is Untrue: (a true story) by Daniel Nayeri. Oh man, this is a good book. I read it again for our church book club, and I’m glad I did. It can be a little goofy, but it makes serious points.

I’m a sucker for books about fathers and sons, and I already love Bret Lott, so I really enjoyed his book Fathers, Sons, and Brothers, which is a memoir of his growing up as the son of an RC Cola salesman. The book is not new, but new to me. Related to this theme of father and sons, I also re-read The Road by Cormac McCarthy around Father’s Day, which has become something of a semi-annual tradition for me.

Probably my favorite book of the year, although it came out last year, was Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith by Russ Ramsey. I know so little about the art world yet I’m fascinated by it. The phrase “in the wind” from the title has a double meaning. Rembrandt painted himself into the disciples’ boat on the Sea of Galilee, so that’s one meaning. The other meaning comes from the art world. For a painting to be “in the wind” means that it’s stolen, which happened to that particular Rembrandt. Ramsey’s chapter on Rembrandt, along with the epic story of Michelangelo carving the epic David statue, made the book for me. Ramsey is a top-shelf Christian writer, and I echo what one of my writing friends said of Ramsey: “I want to be like him when I grow up.”

I don’t want to skip over the handful of books I endorsed, so I’ll mention those as well. I wrote endorsements for Memorizing Scripture: The Basics, Blessings, and Benefits of Meditating on God’s Word by Glenna Marshall, Trading Faces: Removing the Masks that Hide Your God-Given Identity by John Beeson and Angel Beeson, A Time to Mourn: Grieving the Loss of Those Whose Eternities Were Uncertain by Will Dobbie, and A Call to Contentment: Pursuing Godly Satisfaction in a Restless World by David Kaywood. I’ll say that Will’s book is particularly interesting in that it’s a book written on a needed but underrepresented topic, the time when a believer has someone close to them pass away who likely was not a believer. Will brings pastoral and biblical wisdom to the topic.

I also wrote a review for The Gospel Coalition of Drew Dyck’s excellent book Just Show Up: How Small Acts of Faithfulness Change Everything (A Guide for Exhausted Christians). Drew loves his books with two subtitles, but I don’t hold that against him because so do I.

Did you have any favorites from last year? Let me know in the comments below.

*     *     *

Books per Year

Pages per Year

*     *     *

In order of completion, this year I read . . .

  1. Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? by Timothy Keller (272 pages)

  2. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden (368 pages)

  3. Fathers, Sons, and Brothers by Bret Lott (208 pages)

  4. Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: It’s Impossible to Be Spiritually Mature, While Remaining Emotionally Immature by Peter Scazzero (240 pages)

  5. Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? by Timothy Keller (272 pages) [Yes, I read this twice and I’m counting it twice.]

  6. Recovering Eden: The Gospel According to Ecclesiastes by Zack Eswine (264 pages)

  7. The Author as Abram: Writing to the Land He Will Show Us (currently unpublished) by Benjamin Vrbicek (160 pages)

  8. Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies by Sol Stein (320 pages)

  9. The Bible: Romans to Revelation, Part 6 of 6 by God (300 pages)

  10. Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End by David Gibson (176 pages)

  11. The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis (160 pages)

  12. All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir by Beth Moore (304 pages)

  13. Memorizing Scripture: The Basics, Blessings, and Benefits of Meditating on God’s Word by Glenna Marshall (160 pages)

  14. Trading Faces: Removing the Masks that Hide Your God-Given Identity by John Beeson and Angel Beeson (248 pages)

  15. The Bible: Genesis to Deuteronomy, Part 1 of 6 by God (300 pages)

  16. Spare by Prince Harry The Duke of Sussex (416 pages)

  17. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir by William Zinsser (240 pages)

  18. The Word within the Words (My Theology, 3) by Malcolm Guite (96 pages)

  19. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (592 pages)

  20. Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making by Andrew Peterson (224 pages)

  21. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (287 pages)

  22. Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg (224 pages)

  23. On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) by William Germano (208 pages)

  24. Church History 101: The Highlights of Twenty Centuries by Sinclair B. Ferguson, Joel R. Beeke, Michael A. G. Haykin (100 pages)

  25. The Bible: Joshua to Esther, Part 2 of 6 by God (300 pages)

  26. Go Outside: ...And 19 Other Keys to Thriving in Your 20s by Jared C. Wilson and Becky Wilson (144 pages)

  27. Understanding and Trusting Our Great God (Words from the Wise) by Tim Challies (244 pages)

  28. Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel by Anthony Doerr (608 pages)

  29. The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase by Mark Forsyth (256 pages)

  30. The Winners: A Novel (Beartown Series) by Fredrik Backman (688 pages)

  31. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (416 pages)

  32. The Gospel Waltz: Experiencing the Transformational Power of Grace by Bob Flayhart (255 pages)

  33. The Bible: Psalms to Song of Solomon, Part 3 of 6 by God (300 pages)

  34. A Time to Mourn: Grieving the Loss of Those Whose Eternities Were Uncertain by Will Dobbie (96 pages)

  35. Where the Light Fell: A Memoir by Philip Yancy (320 pages)

  36. Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation by Collin Hansen (320 pages)

  37. Just Show Up: How Small Acts of Faithfulness Change Everything (A Guide for Exhausted Christians) by Drew Dyck (192 pages)

  38. Abiding Grace: Unmerited Favor for Salvation and Life by Glen Whatley (158 pages)

  39. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (531 pages)

  40. Diary of a Pastor’s Soul: The Holy Moments in a Life of Ministry by M. Craig Barnes (240 pages)

  41. A Call to Contentment: Pursuing Godly Satisfaction in a Restless World by David Kaywood (176 pages)

  42. Everything Sad Is Untrue: (a true story) by Daniel Nayeri (368 pages)

  43. The Chosen by Chaim Potok (272 pages)

  44. The Bible: Isaiah to Malachi, Part 4 of 6 by God (300 pages)

  45. Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith by Russ Ramsey (272 pages)

  46. Creationland (a currently unpublished play) by Stuart Reese (150 pages)

  47. Christmas Uncut: What Really Happened and Why It Really Matters by Carl Laferton (80 pages)

  48. The Bible: Matthew to Acts, Part 5 of 6 by God (300 pages)

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Church Life Benjamin Vrbicek Church Life Benjamin Vrbicek

God Loves-Loves the Local Church

Here are some resources to help you see the local church the way God sees the local church.

We speak of being in a love-hate relationship with different aspects of our lives. We can speak of both loving and hating exercise. It’s fun and makes us feel and look better, but exercise also hurts and takes up time. Maybe you speak of being in a love-hate relationship with your job. Maybe you speak this way of your extended family.

A lot of people could speak of both loving and hating the local church. They see the blessings the local church pours into people’s lives, the way healthy churches teach about the love of God and provide counseling and friendships and genuine community and care for the poor and a voice for justice. But people also see in local churches the hurt, the neglect, the hypocrisy, and the defaming of the glory of God rather than the exalting.

I wouldn’t say I have a love-hate relationship with the local church. The most I could say is more of a love-and-occasionally-annoyed-or-disappointed relationship with the local church. I’m thankful God has spared me from experiencing the worst parts of the church.

Wherever you fall on this spectrum, it’s my impression that it’s easier to write about what makes us mad and what we hate than it is to write about what we love. Consider how easily we write a 1-star Amazon review. The time and effort, however, to write a 5-star review—the time and effort required to offer fitting praise—is so much more. When I write book endorsements, those one hundred words can take forever.

Some of you know that, in addition to pastoring a local church, I serve as the managing editor for a ministry called Gospel-Centered Discipleship. I work with our online and book publishing ministries—including overseeing our editors, staff writers, and guest posts—to cultivate writers and resources that help make, mature, and multiply disciples of Jesus.

At Gospel-Centered Discipleship this fall, I wanted us to try to do the opposite of what was easy. I wanted us to publish articles about the many and varied blessings of the local church. It’s not that we wanted to ignore or whitewash the bad stuff. It’s just that there has been so much of that lately. And, as I said, I think the bad stuff can be easier to write—at least most of the time. Sometimes, of course, the hardest stuff is terribly painful, even nearly impossible, to write, let alone publish. So I’m not saying that dumping on the church is always easy.

Maybe you remember back during the height of Covid when John Krasinski (“Jim” from The Office) launched a YouTube channel called Some Good News. He shot the videos from what appeared to be his home office and talked about good happenings in the world. He did this during a time when we were all very aware of bad happenings in the world. As Christians we can learn from this. We often forget that to be evangelical is to be those who major on the euangelion; we major on the very Greek word for gospel or good news.  

Certainly, there is a lot of junk that happens in the local church. Please also remember that God still uses the church to bless the world in beautiful ways. He may discipline his church to make her more holy, but he loves his church. His sons and daughters are always his sons and daughters, even when they live less holy lives than he desires. God even calls the church his bride, dying to purchase her and make her radiant. And one day we will see her in all her splendor. God loves-loves his church.

Rather than writing my own post in December, I wanted to share with you all the articles we published this fall about the local church. We published over twenty of them, so I’m not suggesting you read them all. But maybe you can skim the titles and find two or three that catch your attention and read those.

And if your heart is in a season of disappointment with the local church—maybe you’d even use the word hate to describe how you currently feel about the church—then consider praying to God, asking him to show you some good news. God loves to answer those prayers.

Indeed, I’m saying this kind of good-news prayer for you now as I write.

 

Gospel-Centered Discipleship’s “The Blessings of the Local Church” Series

 

The Church Is Not a Meritocracy, Jessica T. Miskelly | November 27, 2023

After restless years in systems where you have to earn your keep, it was so refreshing to come back to the church and be welcomed for reasons other than what I can offer.

The Hands of Grace, Amber Thiessen, November 20, 2023

While we were in our deepest pain and the most chaotic season of our life—the fear of potentially losing our six-month-old daughter—the church served as our pillar of prayer. 

The Warmth of the Local Church for the Suffering, Brianna Lambert, November 15, 2023

To start a fire and to keep a fire going, you need both smaller and bigger logs. In a similar way, suffering people need care of all sizes to keep their faith in Christ warm.

How the Church Taught Me God’s Varied Grace after my Husband’s Bike Wreck, Lisa Spence, November 13, 2023

When we faced unexpected adversity, our local church provided help and support.

The Church: A Family of Redemption, Chase Johnson, November 8, 2023

Not only did the dynamic within my house change but my whole life was shaped through the local church.

The Unexpected Blessing of a Rural Church, Stephanie O’Donnell, November 1, 2023

I wanted nothing to do with the church. Then everything changed when a guitar teacher quit his job and planted a church in our town of 700 and became our gospel preacher.

For the Love of Liturgy, Erin Jones, October 30, 2023

I didn’t know how much my heart craved liturgy until I experienced it.

Redeeming Love Has Been My Theme and Shall Be Until I Die: Faith Reflections from a Cancer Oven (#15), Tim Shorey, October 27, 2023

Tim Shorey, one of our staff writers, is journaling through his struggle with stage 4 cancer. In this entry he reflects how deeply moving songs about a Christian’s death have become.

The Local Church Helps Rid Me of Morbid Introspection, Chrys Jones, October 25, 2023

During some of my worst moments of deep introspection, Satan has fired darts at my mind to make me question my salvation and usefulness in my home and local church.

The Pastor as Curator, Ryan Kucera, October 23, 2023

Help lay the building blocks for your people to become life-long readers.

Counseling in the Community of the Local Church, Tom Sugimura, October 18, 2023

Through biblical reflection and long experience, we have come to believe that counseling works best when connected in meaningful ways to the local church.

How the Wonder and Weirdness of a Bus Reminds Me of The Blessings of the Local Church, Melinda Wallace, October 12, 2023

My life would be so different without the manifold blessings of the local church.

God’s Church Is the Lifeline We Need in Times of Trouble, Grace Strijbis, October 11, 2023

Although we were in a different part of the country with people we barely knew at all, we were still surrounded by God’s family.

Finding Beauty in the Local Church in Our Age of Social Media, Cassie Pattillo, October 4, 2023

We’ll tend to focus on the imperfections within our local church while only seeing the highlight reel of another church via social media. That’s dangerous.

The Diversity of Gifts in Christ’s Body Invites Us to Embrace Humility, Adam Salloum, October 2, 2023

Not every part of Christ’s body serves the same purpose. And that’s good for us to remember—for so many reasons.

7 Encouraging Quotes for Pastors from a New Book for Pastors, Benjamin Vrbicek, September 30, 2023

If you’re looking for a book to buy your pastor during Pastor Appreciation Month, I’d suggest Jeremy Writebol’s Pastor, Jesus Is Enough.

The Singles Among Us Deserve a Better Church Culture, Denise Hardy, September 13, 2023

Most church cultures slight the singles among them. This must stop.  

Love Your Church Anyway, Heidi Kellogg, September 11, 2023

Sometimes I would rather be done with the local church than remain. But the Lord continues to bless me with his church in too many ways.

God’s Good Design of the Local Church, James Williams, September 4, 2023

To call the church man-made is like giving a worm credit for the Mona Lisa or saying a fly painted the Sistine Chapel.

On the Other Side of the Church Split, Abigail Rehmert, August 18, 2023

Truths God taught my heart the hard way.

Family Partners: Men and Women Serving Together in God’s Church, Denise Hardy, July 12, 2023

I’m a woman who worked on staff at a church for more than thirty years. My experience was almost all positive. I wish my story was less rare.

* Photo by Simone Viani on Unsplash

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The Christian Life Benjamin Vrbicek The Christian Life Benjamin Vrbicek

The Too-Many Ways the Lord Is Teaching Me to Number My Days

Reflections on gaining a heart of wisdom.

When I officiate weddings, the brides and grooms always seem young. Yet I keep noticing something in that moment when I ask the father of the bride, “Who gives this young woman away?” and he answers, “Her mother and I.” The fathers and mothers seem to be getting younger and younger.

Of course, they are not getting younger. I’m getting older.

Which means if you are over a certain age, I might owe you an apology. If you are around 65 years old today, I’m sorry. I apologize because if you go back about 15 or 20 years to when you were younger than 50 years old (and I was younger than 30), then I was probably confused about your age. I know it’s not kind to admit, but I probably thought you were already 65 back then. Please forgive me.

This hit me the other day because something at work got me thinking about one of my seminary professors. So, I looked online for his current age. Today he is 68 years old. Today. Something didn’t seem right because 15 years ago I thought he was already 65. How, I wondered, did he only age 3 years over the last 15? Hence the apology.

In so many more ways than I would like, the Lord has been teaching me to number my days.

Where am I going with all this? The psalmist asks God, “Teach us to number my days.” He requests this so that we might, “get a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12). I haven’t necessarily spent a lot of time asking God to teach me to number my days, and I wouldn’t say I’ve necessarily gained a heart of wisdom, even though I hope I’m wiser than I was a decade ago. But I can say this: in so many more ways than I would like, the Lord has been teaching me to number my days.

The other day, for instance, the news app on my phone suggested an article from The Wall Street Journal called “The Age When You Stop Feeling Young.” The subtitle indicated that the oldest millennials (of which I am one) have reached the decade when people often start noticing signs of aging. I couldn’t tell whether the suggestion to read this article was altogether random or my phone was taunting me.

I noticed my age this last summer while our family vacationed at the beach. (Beaches have a way of showing us our age, don’t they?) Our family often plays checkers on vacation, and my oldest daughter beat me, and, no, I didn’t let her win or let her have that triple jump. They both just happened. Also at the beach, my oldest son and I went for several runs, some together and some by ourselves. Whether together or on our own, he always ran faster and usually further. No, I didn’t let him beat me either.

To some extent he ran faster because I’ve had a hip injury hampering my training since the spring. Here also my age shows. I coach a local track team, and I got hurt as I participated in a sprint workout. Since then, I’ve been doing physical therapy off and on. When I showed up for my final session of PT, the receptionist told me I had met my insurance deductible. I’m glad to have my insurance costs reduced, but it made me feel like people probably feel when asked if they want the senior discount. Meeting your insurance deductible is not a prize you want to win.

Soon, when I look at my wedding photos, the father who gave his daughter away will be younger than me.

I could go on and on about getting older, but I suspect that if you were on the receiving end of my apology because you’re older than 65, you already know everything I’m saying—and you could add more stories of your own. And if you’re 25 right now, the more I keep blabbing about the signs of aging, the more you’ll think I am already 65.

Surely gaining a heart of wisdom must mean more than realizing you can’t outrun your teenagers.

When Moses asks the Lord, “Teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom,” he does not mean, “Lord, help us to list all the ways we feel old, that we might feel bad”—even if numbering our days and listing ways we feel old does have some overlap. Surely gaining a heart of wisdom must mean more than realizing you can’t outrun your teenagers.

Indeed, it does mean more.

When we sing the stanza that asks God to teach us to number our days, we also ask for the blessing of the Lord to serve him with purpose to the end of our days. “Let the favor of the LORD our God be upon us,” we sing. “And establish the work of our hands upon us; yes, establish the work of our hands!” (Ps. 90:17).

As we age, rather than cultivating gloom and apathy, we can pray that whatever God calls us to do, we will do it with joy and vigor. We can ask God to let our extra trips to the doctor remind us that God watches over the lilies and even more so watches over us as the Great Physician. And we can pray that whatever our hands find to do, we can do it with all our might, knowing that our labor in the Lord is not in vain (Eccles. 9:10; 1 Cor. 15:58).

When you feel the signs of aging, are these the kinds of prayers you pray? You can. You and I have a choice. As my phone reminded me, this may be the decade I stop feeling young, but it doesn’t have to be the decade I stop serving the Lord with zeal.

 

* Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash

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Pastoral Candidating Benjamin Vrbicek Pastoral Candidating Benjamin Vrbicek

Could It Be Time for a Pastoral Transition?

How do you know whether it’s time to leave your church? Some advice for those considering a job change.

“All the time,” said John Piper, “I’ve been thinking about it for thirty years.”

What had Piper been thinking about for thirty years? A potential transition in pastoral ministry.

He said this around the time of his retirement from his long tenure at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minnesota. “I thought about quitting a lot,” he added. But then Piper mentioned the way God didn’t give him a chance to move at the same time he wanted to move. “Here’s the beautiful thing that I look back on with such thankfulness: the Lord never let those ‘ready-to-move’ feelings come when there was an opportunity to move. The opportunities to move came when I didn’t want to move. He timed it perfect.”

If you’re reading this post about pastoral transitions, perhaps you’re only doing so “for a friend.” But my guess is that you’re a ministry leader who might be in one of these ready-to-move seasons right now, the kind of season Piper mentioned. (If, however, you’re a member of a church, and you want one of your pastors to move to another church, well, that’s a different situation entirely! And if you’re a pastor who wants some of his members to move churches, that’s also another post, one I won’t be writing.)

As the summer ends and fall arrives, I suspect you might not be alone, as the fall is a common time for pastors to begin thinking about transitions. In fact, I’ve recently been writing a draft of an article for another publication about the blessings of not transitioning away, the blessings of what I’m calling “the ministry of staying put at your church.”

But if these thoughts of transitions are rattling around in your heart, I thought I’d offer a few things to consider. Because before you go looking for the tips and tools you need to transition well from one church to another, it’s worth backing up to ask the question: are you sure it’s the right time?

For some pastors, a looming transition is obvious. This is your last semester or two in seminary, and you’re ready to work in the field. You’re being influenced by both “push” and “pull” factors, not just one or the other. You’re being pushed out of seminary and pulled into a new local church. When this is the case, it’s fairly straightforward. Let the transition begin.

Some of you, however, feel like you’re on a rollercoaster. You feel anticipation and excitement as your church grows in size, but then a loop-de-loop and a double corkscrew induce fear and instability. How do you know when your time is done? If you were terminated, others decided the ride for you was over. But what about when the decision is yours?

Determining God’s will is often tricky. Gideon used a fleece, but I’m not sure this was to his credit. So we probably shouldn’t try something similar.

When I was a kid, my parents gave me a choice about a summer vacation. I couldn’t figure out what to do. My parents told me I could go with them on a short trip to visit my grandparents or I could stay home with a friend to attend a local basketball camp. I had no idea what God wanted me to do. One morning I distinctly remember staring at a small bowl of cereal and asking God this very question. As I twirled the last few Lucky Charms with my spoon, I asked God to make the cereal into the shape of the state—either Missouri (basketball) or Iowa (grandparents)—to indicate what I should do. I’m not encouraging you to go and do likewise. After all, when I was a child . . .

Kevin DeYoung wrote a whole book about how to discern the will of God. “‘The will of God’ is one of the most confusing phrases in the Christian vocabulary,” he writes. “Sometimes we speak of all things happening according to God’s will. Other times we talk about being obedient and doing the will of God. And still other times we talk about finding the will of God” (Just Do Something, 16).

Too often we feel as though we need to divine God’s will (say, with Lucky Charms). But DeYoung argues we should stop “thinking of God’s will like a corn maze, or a tightrope, or a bull’s-eye” (23). Instead, we need to realize God gave us brains and passions and mentors and friends and education and experiences and longings. As we listen to all of these—as well as when we adequately take into account our proclivity for sinful, mixed motives—somehow God shows himself faithful to lead us to where we should go.

In his book Before You Move, John Cionca explains thirty-five different categories to help pastors sense whether God is moving them to another ministry. He uses the metaphor of red and green traffic lights. The more red lights, the less likely God may be moving you, and the more green lights, the more likely he may be. So, if you get nineteen green lights and sixteen red lights, that makes things clearer, right? No, it’s not a simple math problem, and neither do each of the thirty-five categories carry equal weight.

Yet I do find it helpful how this approach forces one to think broadly about the situation. Often when a pastor wants to move, it might be that a few persistent annoyances have provoked his restless desire. It’s better to consider the whole picture.

I won’t list all of his thirty-five categories, but here are some I found especially useful.

Red Lights to Moving Green Lights to Moving
Congregational Hunger Congregational Apathy
Vibrancy and Growth Stagnation and Decline
Good Giftedness Match Poor Giftedness Match
Enthusiasm for the Task Restlessness or Withdrawal
Good Opportunity for Impact Limited Opportunity for Impact
Family Happy and Growing Family Distressed and Stifled
Appropriate Compensation Insufficient Compensation
Tenure Less than Six Years Tenure More than Six Years
Compatibility with Staff Poor Staff or Key Relationships
High Integrity and Credibility Low Integrity and Credibility
Advisors Confirm Ministry Advisors Suggest Major Change
Ideal Geographical Proximity to Extended Family Less than Ideal Geographical Proximity to Extended Family

Again, these don’t provide a full-proof plan; they’re simply tools. If the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah had used these categories, the score would have been a shutout: 0–35. These prophets were certainly in one of those ready-to-move seasons. Often, a prophet’s congregation didn’t want to fire him but to kill him.

In fact, when God explains to Isaiah that his job description involved preaching until the pews were not only empty but until they were burned to ashes, Isaiah’s “Here am I! Send me” quickly became “How long, O Lord?”

For Isaiah (and many other prophets), faithfulness meant staying put when all the lights appeared to be green. Why? Because the voice of God became to them like Gandalf thrusting down his staff and roaring, “You shall not pass!”

If, however, God is telling you it might be time for a transition, I would bring several other trusted friends and ministry leaders into that conversation. Ideally, if your situation allows such disclosure, do this with someone in leadership at your church rather than blindsiding them later. Not all situations allow such honesty, however. You might not feel free to discuss this with anyone local until the process progresses.

In the meantime, if you’d like more help thinking through a transition—help finding the right job in ministry with excellence, integrity, and respect for everyone involved—then you might find helpful my book on this topic, Don’t Just Send a Resume: How to Find the Right Job in a Local Church.

* Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

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The Christian Life Benjamin Vrbicek The Christian Life Benjamin Vrbicek

Moths Have Eaten an Infamous Armstrong Poster

I’ve always liked Lance Armstrong. But he teaches me different lessons today than he did twenty years ago.

The basement in my home is a dungeon. Construction workers poured the concrete walls over a hundred years ago, and when it rains, the walls leak like an old pirate ship. I store my road bike in the basement, a corner of the dungeon tucked inside a small alcove. During the winter or when it’s really raining, I come inside the leaky dungeon, put my bike on a trainer, and ride for an hour while I stare at the posters on the walls.

I collected most of the posters in college, and one poster catches my attention each time I ride, especially times like right now, for the three weeks in July when a hundred professional riders compete in the two-thousand-mile race called the Tour de France.

The poster is of Lance Armstrong, his famous “What Am I On?” poster. A blurred Armstrong rides along a country road in his iconic Postal uniform on his Trek bicycle frame. The red, white, and blue colors evoke the best of American, even Texan, pride, the ideas that happiness can be pursued and success is democratized to everyone willing to work hard. In the background behind Lance is a white building resembling a country church. Perhaps the church signifies devotion and zeal, even worship. In the upper right-hand corner the poster reads:

This is my body and I can do whatever I want to it, I can push it, study it, tweak it, listen to it. Everybody wants to know what I’m on. What am I on? I’m on my bike busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?

The poster was actually part of a broader marketing campaign by Nike. A television commercial employed the same brash and polemical wording on the poster to rebuke the early rumors of Lance’s steroid use and blood doping.

As I said, I’ve had this poster since college, and many times as a college athlete, I would look up and think, If I work hard, if I do the work with excellence and effort, passion and devotion, if I put in the six-hour days and I’m smart about it, then I will get ahead. It. Will. Happen.

I did this because, more than just celebrating Armstrong’s work ethic, the poster promised—indeed the “Legend of Lance” promised—similar results to all who had ears to hear. The way the poster shows Lance riding slightly uphill underscores this promise. His skills and determination shined brightest on French mountains, so the climbing posture fits. But the posture also extends the promise of progress to any devoted viewer, any true believer in hard work. You can do this too, it whispers. Armstrong climbed back from cancer by riding his bike uphill six hours a day. What are you on?

Needless to say, that poster looks different to me today than it did in college.

Not only was Lance Armstrong stripped of all seven of the titles he won in the Tour de France, but during that era the governing body of the race has chosen not to award other winners because of such pervasive use of performance-enhancing drugs. Most top riders have confessed to cheating or been credibly accused.

I ponder these realities and see the potential to make what some call a “Jesus juke,” that is, to quickly move from one story—whether a sad or sappy story—to a fairly obvious connection to Jesus, often some sentimental truth. But in all seriousness, the story of Lance and this particular “What Am I On?” poster has often led me to reflect upon Jesus’s words about treasure. “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,” Jesus said. “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal” (Matt. 6:19–20).

The promise, however, offers more than we likely realize at first. God offers forgiveness for cheaters. Instead of standing trial for our failings, God offers to let the death of Christ stand as the public reckoning for wrongs. And here is the real treasure, forgiveness from God and friendship with him that never fades.

I know he’s controversial, but I like Armstrong—not only back in the day when he raced but now. I appreciated the early autobiography It’s Not About the Bike written with Sally Jenkins, and I appreciate now his predictably arrogant hot takes on his podcast The Move. And I can appreciate his recent attempts to engage the conversation of transgenderism in sports, chiefly biological men playing against biological women.

Yet of course I understand the polarization, like on Twitter for instance. The comments under his posts fall almost exclusively in the categories of either “I love you, Lance” or “I hate you.” This is because he’s also hurt people, not only back in the day when he squashed his accusers, but the way his hot takes still cut down others. For all the other falsehoods about Armstrong’s integrity in his that early autobiography, it really was true that it’s not about the bike. Lance is about Lance, then and now.

And I feel this same temptation tug at me, even as I preach and lead a church and love my wife and kids and point others to Jesus. Too often it’s about Benjamin.

So I guess I long for Armstrong to know—as I long for myself and others to know—the treasure of God’s forgiveness and what it means to be caught up in something bigger, indeed Somone bigger, than myself. Because while the promise of the poster has rusted, the promise from Jesus has not and will not.

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Miscellaneous Benjamin Vrbicek Miscellaneous Benjamin Vrbicek

How to Grill the Best Beef Tenderloin

A lesson from my father that keeps on giving—just like him.

I’ve probably written three hundred blog posts, but I’ve never written about grilling meat. Today, however, is Father’s Day, and as an ode to the ten thousand ways my father has blessed me, I offer you my best rendition of my father’s instructions for grilling a beef tenderloin.

I’ve watched him grill tenderloin several times, but two weeks ago, I tried myself. We had company coming over. Our church was hiring a new pastor, and we invited the new pastor, his wife, and the pastoral search team for dinner. With the help of others, we cooked for fourteen adults, plus my children.

By the way, we’re in the middle of a kitchen remodel, and we didn’t have countertops yet. You could see into our unfinished basement through a hole in the floor. My giant new stainless-steel refrigerator sat in the living room. You get the picture. It was a mess.

Despite the remodeling chaos, the grilling turned out so good that others asked for the recipe. I tried to text it to my friend but realized it might be more fun to write it out here with more detail. Posting it to my blog will also help me not be typecast as a blogger who only writes about church stuff.

One more bit of background before I begin. I’m sure this is an overstatement, but in my memory, every Sunday night when I grew up, Dad would grill, and we’d have a huge family dinner. I miss that. A lot. My wife and I have tried to follow the Lord where he’s sent us, but that following has always put us too far away to join in Sunday night meals, except for when we’re all visiting each other on vacation. But when we do, and Sunday night comes around, Dad still doesn’t disappoint.

Below is my best attempt to recount his recipe. It’s derivative, of course, but it comes from a master griller, so the recipe should still serve you well.

And thank you, Dad, for being an even better father than you are a griller.

*     *     *

The Best (Grilled) Beef Tenderloin

STEP 1: Buy the meat     [the day before dinner]
The first step to having a great meal, my father always says, is to “buy nice meat.” And it will probably be better if you bought the meat recently and never froze it. If the meat starts frozen, make sure you thaw it slowly in the fridge for several days before you want to cook it. This seems to not damage the meat in the way blasting it under hot water does. You can do that with frozen hot dogs, but you won’t want to do that with beef tenderloin because . . .

Beef tenderloin is expensive. The cut of meat is a long cylinder of high-quality cow. A tenderloin is about as round as your forearm and probably as long as from your elbow to your fingers. The “filet mignon” is the last portion of the beef tenderloin, which is why buying a beef tenderloin costs a lot. It’s basically two feet of filet.

I try to get mine from Costco because that’s how—as with everything else in this recipe—my dad does it. They come in packages of about 4–5 lbs. and at a price of about $20–25 per pound. You’ll need about half a pound per person unless you’re also serving another main dish, something like chicken, which can help keep the cost of the meal down.

I’ll insert a quick comment here about “side dishes.” This one also comes from my father. Make sure you have nice sides to go with the meal. It makes the meat taste better, he says. I agree.

STEP 2: Marinade the meat     [6 hours before dinner]
Take the meat out of the fridge and poke lots of holes in it. You can poke the holes with something like a kebab or a corn-on-the-cob holder. Last time my son and I used a marshmallow roaster to poke the holes.

After adding the holes, put the meat in a metal tray and pour a marinade over the meat. I’d suggest something like Dales Original. After you cover the meat, put it back in the fridge. This sounds weird, but you want a marinade that will make the meat taste like better meat, not a marinade that will make the meat taste like something else, like a Greek salad or stir fry. Save those kinds of marinades for other meals.

STEP 3: Dry the meat and apply a rub     [4 hours before dinner]
Take the meat back out of the fridge and dry off the meat using paper towels. You can end up putting the meat back in the same tray, but you’ll need to rinse it off and dry it as well.

Once the meat is dry, apply a liberal amount of black pepper all over the meat. You’ll also want to add salt or meat tenderizer. If I sprinkle on meat tenderizer, then I don’t also use salt because it can make it too salty tasting. You can also rub other spices onto the meat, such as a light touch of rosemary or crushed red pepper. Our house likes spicey food, so I use both. Return the meat to the refrigerator.

STEP 4: Let the meat warm     [2 hours before dinner]
Take the meat out of the fridge to let the meat begin to warm to room temperature.

STEP 5: Get the grill hot     [90 min before dinner]
Begin heating your charcoal grill to 450 degrees. You can use a gas grill, of course. I do that too. My Dad has bought me the best Webber Grill version of each, and I’m super thankful for that. I love the convenience of the gas grill and use it more often, but when I’m cooking something expensive, such as beef tenderloin, I try to use the charcoal grill because I think it tastes better. My family agrees.

STEP 6: Sear the meat     [65 minutes before dinner]
Place the meat on the hottest part of the grill, and turn it every 1–2 minutes to sear all sides. Make sure you cover the grill each time, so you don’t lose all your heat.

STEP 7: Cook the meat     [55 min before dinner]
Now it’s time to do the main portion of cooking. Place the meat in a metal tray on the grill. Continue cooking at 450 degrees. Turn the meat every 15 minutes.

Apply drizzles of olive oil each time. To do this, I like to put the olive oil in a bowl and just use a spoon. Don’t be stingy, especially at the ends of the meat. You don’t want them to burn, as they will be thinner. And if you can, try to keep the ends away from the hotter parts of the grill.

One other trick. You have to build little ridges made of tin foil along the bottom of the tray. You can actually buy them, but I just make them by rolling up little strips of tinfoil. These ridges sit at the bottom of the metal tray, so the meat doesn’t sit on the bottom. This helps get airflow underneath and not burn the bottom.

STEP 8: Remove the meat     [20 min before dinner]
Remove meat when the internal temperature of the “thick” part of the tenderloin is about 130–135 degrees. This will set you up for a final cooking of “medium-rare” in the thick middle of the tenderloin and more like “medium” on the thinner ends. This spectrum is good when you have company who likely have different preferences about how they like their steak cooked.  

You’ll need a meat thermometer for this. And as has been the theme, my dad bought me a fancy Bluetooth one by the company Meater. It literally sends the external and internal temperature to your phone and makes a graph as it cooks. You don’t need anything this fancy, though.

Once you remove the meat from the grill, place the meat in a new tray and cover it with tin foil to keep the heat in. It would be best if you now let the meat “rest” for 20 minutes. While the meat is covered and resting, it will stay warm and continue to cook a little. The resting lets the juices stop moving, so they won’t rush out when you cut the meat. That’s my non-technical explanation. I’m sure my dad or Bobby Flay could explain it better.

Cooking the meat to the right temperature and taking it off at the right time is the most important step. You can always cook it more, so error on less-cooked than over-cooked.

STEP 9: Check the temperature     [10 min before dinner]
If you’re nervous about what the meat looks like, whether too rare or too well-done, you can cut part of the thickest section of the meat to see how it looks and whether you have your desired amount of pinkness. If the meat is too pink, you can cut the meat into a few chunks and put it on the grill for a few more minutes. Cutting it into smaller chunks is not ideal, but it speeds up the process.  

STEP 10: Cut the Meat     [1 min before dinner]
Now, put the meat on a cutting board and cut the meat using an electric knife. If you don’t have one, just use your best steak knife. Try to make circle sections of about 1/4”–1/2” in thickness.

Then put the meat on a serving tray and cover it with tin foil. If you have a serving dish that has a lid, you can use that instead. It will look nicer. And if you’re serving $130 of beef tenderloin that took six hours to prepare, you might as well make it look nice. When we had company the other week, since people had already seen the holes in my kitchen floor and my fridge in the living room, I just covered the meat in tin foil. No one complained.

STEP 11: Eat the meat     [dinner time]
Enjoy with friends and family and give thanks to God.

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Writing Benjamin Vrbicek Writing Benjamin Vrbicek

Exploring the Nuance of “The Tim Keller Rule” for Writers

Christian writers should consider waiting to publish books until they are older. But they shouldn’t wait to write.

[Author’s Note: I started writing these reflections nearly two years ago and only recently took them back out to complete them, entirely independent of knowing about Keller’s declining health. Then, like everyone else, I learned how sick he was and then that he so quickly passed away, and thus I paused on publishing this. In light of his death, I would have rather written a more overt tribute to him, sharing my deep appreciation for his ministry. But maybe—when rightly understood—this post can serve as a kind of tribute to Keller’s ministry, specifically his writing ministry. The way he lived his “rule” and avoided the pitfalls that came with fame can serve as an excellent model for every believer, no matter the size of their platform.]

*     *     *

Despite what seems to be the case, all authors write far more words that do not get published than they write words that go viral.

And that’s okay. In fact, it’s even good for us. God has a good purpose for Christian writers in what often feels like the frustrating slowness of our progress in the craft and the expansion of our platforms.

Consider what God says to the Israelites in Exodus 23 about the way he will cause them to inherit the Promised Land. “I will not drive them out from before you in one year,” God says, “lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply against you.” Instead, God tells them, “Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land” (Ex. 23:29–30).

This principle of slow-and-steady and providentially governed progress should temper a writer’s publishing angst, that anxious fretting many of us do about how much to publish and where to publish, who is reading us and how to get more people to read our work. This principle should also help us understand why books are often better written by authors without velvet fluff still on their antlers.

The young prophet Jeremiah had fire in his bones, but it would be years, even decades, before he understood what it meant to run with horses in the thicket of the Jordan (Jer. 20:9; 12:5). And consider young Elihu from the book of Job. Four times in just four verses the narrator tells us Elihu burned with anger. “Then Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the family of Ram, burned with anger. He burned with anger at Job because he justified himself rather than God. He burned with anger also at Job’s three friends because they had found no answer, although they had declared Job to be in the wrong. Now Elihu had waited to speak to Job because they were older than he. And when Elihu saw that there was no answer in the mouth of these three men, he burned with anger” (Job 32:2–5). Despite all the burning anger, we’re told he “had waited to speak to Job because they were older than he” (32:4).

Although one wonders if Elihu should have waited longer than he did to speak up, perhaps waiting another few dozen years for his youthful angst, we would hope, to meld into wisdom. As it is, his juvenile berating became canonized in the best-selling book of all time. “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child” (Prov 22:15).

These issues around when to write and how much to write lead me to consider what I’ve heard called “The Tim Keller Rule.” It’s a rule that haunts the conscience of many writers in the evangelical world, including mine. Do not publish a book until you are sixty years old, the rule goes. The government has rules about how old a person must be before they can work a job, drive a car, get married, enlist in the military, smoke tobacco, drink alcohol, and many other activities. Should Christian publishers have an age rule? Would we want it to be sixty?

A former understudy of Keller wrote a tribute to him in one of his books. “Tim waited until he was almost sixty years old to publish his first trade book,” he writes. “Humbly, he wanted to wait until he was old and wise enough to write the best possible book he could on any given subject. No doubt, his book writing pace since then has made up for lost time.” Keller’s understudy doesn’t state this so much as a rule but more as a description. The clear implication is that humble and wise authors should consider doing the same. One writer on Twitter recently referred to this as the Keller model rather than the rule.

Yet the word choice of publish in this tribute is key. Is sixty when Keller began writing? If Keller never wrote anything from high school to the age of early retirement, would his books be so insightful, so clear, and well-written? Could Keller have published a book every year from age sixty to seventy if he never wrote anything from his twenties through his fifties?

To be clear, God’s blessing has rested upon Keller in ways and to degrees no one could manufacture—even Keller himself. The full credit for Keller’s tremendous writing output and exceptional quality belongs only to God. I praise God for the benefits his ministry has poured into my life and the life of our church.

When considering Keller’s output, however, we are also beholding the effects of compound interest. When you squirrel away a few dollars here and a few dollars there in mutual funds, the money not only increases by addition but by multiplication. Keller may not have published before he was sixty, but he certainly wrote.

In the introduction to Hidden Christmas he writes, “In this book I hope to make the truths of Christmas less hidden. We will look at some passages of the Bible that are famous because they are dusted off every Christmas” (4). The Christmas story is not only dusted off by parishioners but also by pastors, which is why in the acknowledgments of the book Keller notes, “The ideas in this book were forged not in writing but preaching. Each chapter represents at least 10 or so meditations and sermons on each biblical text, delivered in Christmas services across the decades” (143). Keller was sixty-six years old when Hidden Christmas was published, but the seeds of the book were planted and watered long before the food was harvested and packaged commercially.

In Keller’s book Center Church, we read similar words when he mentions that the book has roots in lectures he gave to an international audience nearly ten years before the book was published (385), which were ideas and lectures, we assume and he implies, that had been written and field-tested the previous decade at Redeemer Church and beyond.

Perhaps some of the mystique about The Keller Rule comes from Keller himself. In an interview about the subject of young pastors writing books, Keller encouraged writing “essays and chapters, not books yet. Hone your craft through short pieces and occasional writing.” Then he warned, “But don’t tackle books yet. Writing a whole book takes an enormous amount of energy and time, especially the first one.”

In this way Keller encourages the “both-and” we find in Paul’s letter to Timothy. On the one hand, Paul instructs that someone in spiritual leadership “must not be a recent convert.” The command exists not because he won’t do the job well but because he probably will, and success may cause him to become “puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1 Tim. 3:6). Yet, on the other hand, in the next chapter Paul tells Timothy, “Let no one despise you for your youth.” Timothy is instead to “set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Tim. 4:12). If Timothy was to set an example “in speech” among his congregation, surely he should also set an example, albeit a youthful one, in his writing.

Thus, aspiring writers need to hear the helpful warning of The Keller Rule about publishing words. Young writers often need their publishing ambitions chastened. But at the same time, young writers must not fear writing words. Indeed, those called to write should write, even if they only plod along at the pace of a few pages here and a few essays there. The literary version of compound interest can only happen when you squirrel words away in the bank, making regular and faithful deposits.

Returning to the idea of “little by little” in Exodus 23, if you’re a young or beginning writer, you probably can’t handle all the success you think you want right now. You probably can’t handle all the criticism that comes along with that success. The “wild beasts” mentioned in Exodus 23 eat famous yet immature authors for breakfast. If you had written Gentle and Lowly, you might have become brutal and haughty.

So take heart. The writer who sows words slow and steady, generously and obediently, will also reap generously—whether in this life or the next. Just as no one gives a cup of cold water to a needy person in the name of Jesus without a permanent divine accounting, no one who writes words for God’s glory does so without God’s notice. Your labor in the Lord, Paul says, is not in vain.

 

* Photo by Brad Neathery on Unsplash

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Church Life Benjamin Vrbicek Church Life Benjamin Vrbicek

Striving for Warm Complementarianism in a Cold, Mostly Egalitarian World

Oh that we might better live and love God’s good design.

Our church recently posted a job opening for another associate pastor. I’ve thought a lot about the church hiring process, even writing a whole book about the topic. And in my experience, most job descriptions sound vanilla. They’re boilerplate. Sure, churches will write a bunch of details about what they want from their new youth pastor, lead pastor, or what have you—but in the end, most job descriptions for a men’s ministry pastor look an awful lot like all the other job descriptions for a men’s ministry pastor. Churches say they want applicants to have theological education and previous church experience. They also want, cliched as they are, self-starters and people skills.

Churches looking for pastors—not unlike the pastors looking for churches—typically have few opportunities to distinguish themselves from the rest. This is why in our job description we have one particular bullet point that, we hope, makes us stand out.

In the job requirements section we mention that a candidate should have “a shared theological and philosophical DNA with the pastor-elders,” and then we add, “including warm complementarianism, a humble embrace of Reformed soteriology, and a gospel-centeredness in all of ministry.” That threefold set of phrases is not vanilla. Depending on the candidate, “complementarianism” and “Reformed soteriology” will not taste vanilla but either as repulsive as a shot of vinegar or as delightful as a slice of red velvet cake.

But we’re also hoping a candidate who reads those words will pause for a bit. We hope that stringing together these particular theological concepts with those particular modifiers—warm complementarianism, humble Reformed soteriology—will cause intrigue to arise in the candidate’s mind. We want a candidate to think, “I like the sound of that, but I wonder if they mean what I would mean by those terms.”

In fact, we not only want them to wonder about the phrases but to actually ask us what we mean. And so far, some have.

I don’t want to take time in this post to explain what we mean by “humble Reformed soteriology” or “gospel-centeredness.” For those, I’ll flag J.A. Medder’s book Humble Calvinism and Jared C. Wilson’s book Gospel-Driven Church as helpful resources. I do want to explain what we mean—and what we do not mean—by the phrase warm complementarianism.

Warm complementarianism strives to actually be complementarian. Most pastors looking at our job description will be familiar with this term, but I’ll begin with a brief definition for those newer to the discussion. Broadly speaking, two theological positions exist on men’s and women’s roles in the home and church. They go by the names of “complementarianism” and “egalitarianism.” Both views affirm that God created men and women in his own image and, consequently, that both men and women have equal dignity, value, and worth. Here we all agree.

God created men and women in his own image and, consequently, that both men and women have equal dignity, value, and worth.

And yet, there are differences. Egalitarians believe that there should be no distinctions in roles in the home and the church that are based on the innate qualities of gender but rather that all roles should be decided on the basis of competency. In other words, if you can do a task well, regardless of your gender, then you should do it.

Complementarians don’t believe the Bible teaches this. They believe that while there is tremendous overlap between what it means to be a man and a woman, they also believe that manhood, in distinction from womanhood, means something—something beautiful. And complementarians believe that womanhood, in distinction from manhood, means something—something beautiful. In short, men and women are both fearfully and wonderfully made, but they are not interchangeable.

What, then, are the distinctions? Space does not allow me to explore this in detail, but I’ll mention one area. Our church believes God desires godly men to take the role of spiritual leadership in the home and the church, and that the office of pastor-elder is open only to qualified men.

This view is, of course, controversial. So let me mention a few of the places we see this taught in the Bible. Support for male eldership is seen in the following:

  1. the responsibilities given by God to Adam before and after the fall (Gen. 2–3; Rom. 5:12ff);

  2. the pattern of Old Testament and New Testament spiritual leadership being placed mainly among men (e.g., Jesus had many women who ministered with him, and he was no stranger to poking socially taboo topics when necessary, such as the religious leader’s man-made rules about the sabbath, but Jesus chose men to be his twelve apostles);

  3. the parallels between male leadership in the church and the headship of men in the home as taught in places like Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, and Titus 2;

  4. no explicit mention of female pastor-elders in the New Testament; and, finally,

  5. specific passages like 1 Timothy 2:8–3:7 and Titus 1:5–9 which require male pastor-elders.

Now, back to where I started. By saying we strive to be complementarian, we want to actually be complementarian. But what we mean by this is something quite different from the stereotype of simply keeping women from doing certain roles.

Warm complementarianism encourages women to passionately pursue ministry. The perception of many churches that hold complementarian views is that they don’t encourage women to pursue ministry, even that they stifle women from significant leadership roles.

I concede that the perception is the perception because it can often be true. Indeed, in our own church I’m sure that at times, no matter how hard I might try not to do so, my leadership in this area has left certain women feeling deflated. For all those times in the past and all those that will come in the future, please know that I’m sorry. Our hope—indeed my hope—is to see women passionately use the varied ministry gifts God has given them. Over and over again in the Bible we read of women serving in wonderful, significant, and courageous ways. There are well-known examples like Mary and Esther, but also lesser-known ones like the little girl who cared for Naaman (2 Kings 5). 

To explain this better, I’ll use an anti-analogy analogy. Most student ministry leaders have been asked some version of the question “how far is too far” when it comes to the physical relationship that the student has with his girlfriend or the girlfriend has with her boyfriend. The proper response to this question is that God desires sexual purity, and thus the goal shouldn’t be to get as close as you can to “the line.” The line of sexual sin is a line you want to stay pretty far away from.

This is not the way God wants us to view “the line,” if you will, for what is biblically appropriate for women and men in various ministry roles. There are some ministry roles that God has given only to qualified males, such as being a pastor-elder, but this doesn’t mean churches should take the approach of staying away from that line as far as possible. Actually, I’d suggest we should want to get as close as we can. In every ministry role that God intends for women and men to do, we should have men and women doing ministry. In the case of “the line” of sexual intimacy between unmarried people, getting too close to the line becomes sin, while in the case of men’s and women’s roles, backing away from the line is sin.

I should probably give a few concrete examples where women lead in our church. We have women teach on Sunday mornings in some classes. Our staff worship pastor is a man, but we typically share the leading of individual Sunday mornings with different leaders, and sometimes a woman leads us in song, and almost every week on the stage, women play instruments, sing, and read Scripture. I know complementarians debate whether women should be deacons; we believe they should, and we have several.

I’ll mention one more example. At our church we wrote a prospectus for a two-year “pastoral residency program.” It’s a program for men who are currently in seminary or have completed seminary and want more church experience before they launch into a full-time vocation. But we also wrote a “mentored ministry program” for any ministry-minded person, whether male or female, who wants to prepare for local church ministry. We haven’t made these programs open to the public yet, but as we’re beta testing the mentored ministry program, we currently have one man and one woman receiving pastoral care from me, the lead pastor of our church. I think our church currently has more women than men enrolled in seminary courses. And in the coming years, I hope and pray God uses our small church to raise up dozens of women who love the local church and have the ability to teach God’s word faithfully.

In every ministry role that God intends for women and men to do, we should have men and women doing ministry.

So where is the line? We understand Scripture to teach that in church settings where the sacraments would be practiced (i.e., Sunday morning worship services), teaching is preaching and should be done by elder-qualified men. However, in church settings where the sacraments would not be practiced (i.e., Bible studies and youth group), teaching is not necessarily preaching and can be done by both qualified men and women. I get to this conclusion seeing the verses near the end of 1 Timothy 2 intricately connected to 1 Timothy 3.

Much of this focus on a line, however, can shift undue focus to Sunday mornings. There are, of course, six more days of the week. Pastors often get teased about working only one hour a week, but we know best that the ministry of a church consists in far more. Which is to say that so much of what women (and non-elder men, for that matter) contribute to a church can’t necessarily be seen while sitting in a pew during a service and watching the stage, as though it were the only place of ministry. As Paul writes to the church in Corinth, “Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman” (1 Cor. 11:11). Though we often forget this truth, we need each other and are interdependent, as the very name complementarity implies.

Almost monthly I get comments from newcomers about the beauty of the interior design of our building, which is largely overseen by one gifted woman. And I get regular requests to host weddings, funerals, baby showers, and other events here because it’s such a welcoming place. We have a few women at our church studying counseling, and these women meet informally with those young and old and with those in our church and those outside. And this is not to mention the host of friendship and discipleship relationships among our women that cultivate faith, hope, and love. Also, we have a meals ministry for those with a health challenge or after the arrival of a baby. It’s a ministry much appreciated by those who receive it, and a ministry led almost exclusively by women.

I could go on and on, but this post is long already, so I’ll close by speaking about our posture as leaders toward this doctrine.

Warm complementarianism humbly and openly embraces God’s design as good. There are plenty of ways for a man to be a lousy complementarian. He can be angry about it, wearing the doctrine like a chip on his shoulder, always ready to take offense and pick a fight. He can also be boastful, a prideful windbag who fails to see God’s calling first as a responsibility, not a privilege. I wish these were only straw man caricatures. But they really exist.

There are plenty of ways for a man to be a lousy complementarian.

A man could also be indifferent or cold to complementarianism. In this scenario, he might believe complementarianism comes from the Bible but fail to see how the doctrine is actually for our good. So he hides his complementarianism under the proverbial bushel. He keeps the doctrine out of his sermons, and the church keeps it off its website. We may believe this, they think, but it’s better that we not tell anyone.

Warm complementarianism, instead, embraces God’s truth humbly and openly. Warm complementarianism believes that if God is actually good and he gives good gifts, then whatever the Bible actually teaches—to allude to Jesus’s words in Matthew—is him giving bread to his children and not stones.

This is why we write about complementarianism in our membership material. We want our perspective members to know where we stand and why we stand there. We want to model the apostle Paul’s approach when he wrote to the church in Corinth, saying, “We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God” (2 Cor. 4:2). To quote from our denomination’s statement of faith, the Bible “is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises” (Evangelical Free Church of America Statement of Faith, Article 2, “The Bible”).

And this is why, to come full circle, we not only write about our complementarian convictions in our membership booklet, but we put it in our job description.

Now, may God our Father, help our belief of these doctrines to be more than mere aspirational belief, more than words on paper. And may he help us be the kind of warm complementarians who adorn the doctrine in such a way that people taste red velvet, not vinegar.

 

* Photo by Amanda Congiuv on Unsplash

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