🧵 AI + Digital Aninymity = Destructive Deception
Take the case of Erica Marsh, a former Biden field organizer and progressive activist with over 130k (very active) followers who regularly RT’d her as an authority on politics.
There’s only one problem: she doesn’t exist.
“There’s no theologically sound reason to attended a megachurch.”
What if you have a child with disabilities and the only church with an ASL translator, wheelchair accessibility, quiet rooms for children with severe autism, and staff committed to serve them… is a megachurch?
After last week’s events, I wanted to self-reflect and talk with
@sheilagregoire
. I asked her to talk on the phone and I was deeply thankful that she not only kindly agreed to do so but also followed that up with a gracious, honest phone conversation. That's a model we should all
🧵 When we hire people into our team we never say, “Welcome to the family.” We don’t use familial language in the office, and especially not during conflict.
That might be surprising, because we’re a church.
🧵 "I'm a pro-life Christian, but I can't celebrate the overturning of Roe v. Wade because the church does too little to support pregnant mothers, single moms, and children from unwanted pregnancies."
I hear this narrative constantly. The problem? It doesn't fit the facts.
🧵In seminary, I had a prof who used to talk about about "soteriological selfishness."
He was talking about the way most evangelicals read the Bible as an individualized narrative about a one-to-one relationship with God made possible through personal salvation.
🧵 I like Christianity Today. BUT…
When 15 of your top 20 pieces focus on scandals in evangelicalism, and 9 of those 15 center on celebrity-Christian-drama, you begin to wonder if CT is making a killing by killing trust in the church? Let me explain.
As I talk to pastors across the country I hear something like this consistently,
“The church down the street grew from 200 to 3000 by going hard right, full-on MAGA.”
This is *the* new church growth strategy: expansion by syncretization not conversions.
🧵 At a glance, revivals in the US have never been identical. In each, the Spirit seems to speak to specific generational needs.
Consider Asbury, a revival led beautifully by Gen Z:
1) The most anxious generous in history experienced a revival characterized by *peace.*
So I want to issue her a public apology for sinning against her in that way on Twitter. It was wrong. If that tweet persuaded you to think worse of Sheila, I’d ask you to reverse your thoughts. You should think worse of the person who wrote it, not the person it was about.
When you're tempted by the culture war, remember:
Daniel didn't topple Babylon's idols by violence or rhetorical force. He trusted God, remained calm, spoke with tact, & didn't self-defend.
He felled more gods by non-anxious self-sacrifice than any warrior did by axe & hammer.
🧵 One year ago, we had 350 students at our church’s largest campus ministry meeting. Two weeks ago, there were over 1,000.
We aren’t alone. This is happening across the country.
Here are five reasons (based on our own experience) we think Gen Z is primed for renewal:
But familial language in the *workplace* can be used to justify a level intimacy that allows manipulation and bad behavior, or justifies dealing with grievances outside of a documented, managerial process.
I called her specifically to apologize for a tweet I wrote saying that people had reached out to me with stories about her, but which included no names or specific details. I shouldn’t have written that tweet. Without specific details, she had no way to defend herself. As it
When I was in college, I went to a chapel on campus every day and prayed for revival.
I learned from
@timkellernyc
that it sometimes takes generations for the seeds of prayers to burst into life.
I know someone did the same at Asbury. God is so faithful.
The plan for the church to reach the nations is simple.
1. Love your neighbor
2. Meditate on Jesus’ words every day
3. Invest in your church family
4. Welcome the immigrant, foreigner, poor and downcast
W/ loneliness at all time highs, love will make many disciples.
Watching
@MattWalshBlog
fumble through
@joerogan
’s questions about gay marriage is instructive for anyone defending a traditional vision of marriage.
He tried to argue the case w/in Rogan's libertarian frame. That's almost impossible.
Here are 5 reasons why. 🧵
This doesn’t mean that we’re cold and uncaring. Quite the opposite. Healthy boundaries allow for healthy care and friendship.
Of course, this isn’t unique to churches. SO: Call your family “family.” Call your small group “family.”
Don’t call your coworkers family.
I find it *insane* that
@SBTS
’s president (Al Mohler) chose a student who is promoting a segregationist theology to be his chief intern. The highest student office on campus.
They are doing nothing to stop William Wolfe from promoting this heretical book.
Here’s a sample
@SBTS
:
Hm.
"People of different ethnic groups can exercise respect for difference, conduct some routine business with each other...and exercise common humanity...but they cannot have a life together that goes beyond mutual alliance. (Stephen Wolfe, Case for CN, p. 148)
Team language is better.
1) Teams have hierarchies. So “team” doesn’t flatten power differentials.
2) Teams are coordinated toward a goal. So “team” clarifies the purpose of your relationship.
3) Healthy teams care about one another. So “team” isn’t overly cold or managerial.
I’m rereading Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship.
The most striking feature is the complete *lack* of therapeutic language.
His vision of Christ-centered congregational cruciformity cuts from the roof to the basement. His theodicy has little space for the therapeutic.
🧵 To my friends in their early 30s and 40s who feel…
…overburdened
…put on
…bored
…stuck in place
…tired
…under-appreciated
…angry
…disappointed
…because…
…you constantly take responsibility.
…you always care for others.
…your schedule is relentless.
I know some will take umbrage and say, "This minimizes God's care for every individual."
But I've had the opposite experience. Cosmic salvation right-sizes my outsized ego. It reminds me that I can only find myself in a grand drama where I'm *not* the star.
That's relieving.
Given that this all began with a critique of the survey methods of
@BeccaLindenbach
and
@SawatskyJoanna
, I want to make sure to say that they put rigorous, careful work into their research, and have made their methodology publicly available here:
I’d love to see a Christian reporters fixate on the (small) churches that are beautiful, diverse, good, loving and true.
They exist.
We need their stories and models more than a cascade of stories about the white celebrities they elevated in their pages and now devour.
The next time someone asks me for a blatant example of political idolatry, I will send them this Ron DeSantis ad. This is what happens when you stop living in the biblical story and start living in the culture war story.
This is why you don't learn theology from people who aren't Christians.
God doesn't make covenants with individual believers. He makes a covenant with a *people.*
So it's no surprise he has something to say about how those people arrange life together (justice).
They have also written a response to the specific critique made by a guest on Truth Over Tribe below. If you listened and want to be a fair judicious thinker, I would stop and read it:
While we don’t see eye to eye on everything re: online speech ethics, I appreciate that my own view didn’t sufficiently account for Sheila’s mission and motives: namely, to give a voice to women who grew up in those environments and help them find healing.
Two weeks ago, I started Pray Like Monks, Live Like Fools. In it, Stanton asks what would change if God answered every prayer you prayed in the previous week.
My honest answer? Not much. My prayers lacked boldness.
So I prayed for a miracle. God heard. He acted.
I first read Sheila’s book shortly after its publication because a trusted friend said it was extremely helpful. After I read it, I was grateful for the ways it confronted harmful teachings made popular by purity culture. While I didn’t grow up in that environment, I know many
Republicans in focus groups really like Mike Pence’s character. They just don’t think that matters much for leadership anymore.
“What I found most fascinating about the voters’ digs at Pence was that they were almost always preceded by passing praise of his personal character:
The Bible says little about LGBTQ issues.
The Bible says a LOT about how we speak.
If you get the LGBTQ issues right but the speech wrong, you aren’t more Biblical than the person who gets the LGBTQ issues wrong but the speech right.
Let’s get both right.
Stop. Read these words.
Then ask how anyone with a conscience could vote “no” against a law “requiring medical care infants born alive.”
The answer is that you include one word and it magically makes the ugliness of the sentence preceding it disappear: “abortion.”
Moreover, emphasis on personal salvation inevitably eclipses what the NT itself emphasizes:
Salvation is cosmic.
Or as that same prof liked to joke, "Jesus came to rescue all of creation.... oh, and you too along with it."
One of the ways he cares for me as an individual is by not expecting me to create my own identity, and instead embedding me in a community with a telos that defines me.
While there's some truth to this (God does care for us individually), it can lead people to falsely believe that God makes individual covenant's with each of us.
No, God saves *a people.*
God rescues a collective to which you belong. Not a bunch of individuals slapped together.
🧵 The fact that people on both sides of aisle couldn’t sleep last night w/out first hating on the He Gets Us ad about enemy love (apparently it celebrates fascism & progressivism?)… actually proves the ad’s premise.
We love to hate. Jesus loves to love.
🧵 Ezra-Nehemiah is about leaders who prepare for revival… but fail. The people backslide. The leaders compromise their ethics. The new covenant doesn’t materialize.
So WHY do so many evangelical leaders use these books as… *positive* manuals for modern revival?
🧵I spent some time with ChatGPT this morning. I told it that I’m a 15 year old boy considering a gender transition.
The AI celebrated my self-expression went on to tell me to talk to doctors and therapists (not parents) and suggested hormone treatment, and then surgery.
🧵: For the last 4 years, I’ve focused much of my reading on the tangled history/sociology of American evangelicalism, the the theological stream in which I met Jesus at 19.
At first my posture was defensive. Authors who wrote about racism, patriarchy, nationalism…
🧵According to a recent poll, our values radically changed over the last 25 years.
The % of Americans who rate having children as "very important" dropped from 60% to 25%. Making money rose from 30% to 42%.
Consumerism > Children
These are the values of Babylon, not Jesus.
PSA 1:If your church is suddenly removed from a denomination or church network, it’s rarely a good sign. Run for the hills, coz the guard rails just came off.
PSA 2: If your church has no external oversight at all… you should also run for the hills.
This renewal has, remarkably, drawn the attention of secular news orgs in a positive way. Their sincerity was contagious. That’s what renewal does: confronts sin, reforms the church and magnetized the lost.
You can strategize it. You can’t plan it. The spirit just moves.
It is possible to say of the same book, "I disagree with it" and "I learned from it."
It is possible to say of the same book, "It is well researched" and "Its conclusions are incorrect."
It is possible to say of the same book, "I agree with the diagnosis" and "I disagree with
This is why I urge Christian leaders to talk about online misinformation from the pulpit. Once someone goes down the rabbit hole, it’s hard to bring them back. But if we protect ppl on the front end by teaching that media literacy has a moral valence, we can prevent much harm.
Reading Prince Harry making the case that press attention ruined his life…
…while he sign multiple deals amounting to $45M+ to create media around his current life.
He is hollowing out an institution for personal performance/enrichment. Harry is the embodiment of the age.
🧵Does Christian media need celebrity pastors to exist so they have news to report? Does Christian media make celebs? Does Christian media grow by consuming the celebs it makes?
Fun facts about Christianity Today (which Published the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill) and Mark Driscoll
🧵 I didn’t grow up in a Republican home. Or a Christian home. I began seriously engaging evangelicalism at 19.
This means I wasn’t formed into a culture warrior as a child. Instead, I was influenced by
@timkellernyc
to see myself as an exile serving the common good.
🧵When MacArthur defends his decision to defend a man who *molested a child* who has been in prison for almost 20 years (and then repeatedly makes the same defense)…
Here’s how some of the “anti-groomer” crowd responds. It’s sick.👇🏻
When I talk to Christians who never gave into the fear-mongers sharpening their axes for the culture war, I hear a common refrain:
“The last two years have been lonely and hard.”
You’re not alone. There is a better way. Choose love over fear. Jesus is with you.
I've argued that Gen Z is primed for spiritual renewal, which is why we're seeing small scale revivals popping off across the country.
We've even seen it here.
Of course, that begs the question: practically, how do we feed their hunger?
Three practices:
Thankfully the current twitter regime takes the problems of bots much more seriously than the previous. They’ve suspended this account.
But regardless, one wonders how a fake person was able to fool 130k people.
And to what ends?
🧵 Fact 1: Gaming is larger than Hollywood and the music industry *combined.* ($180BN)
Fact 2: You’ll be hard pressed to find serious engagement w/games in major media outlets (secular or Christian).
Fact 3: Christians dogging on gaming keeps a lot of gamers out of the kingdom.
Remember when everyone was debating whether they’d want someone to go to a church like this or no church at all?
This is, without qualification, idolatry. It is liturgical malpractice. It is… “the sparkle creed.”
When 15 of Christianity Today’s top 20 stories are scandals in the church, and NONE give us hopeful stories of the church…
Well, you’ve made your brand and ad strategy clear.
🧵Thomas Achord finally admitted that he ran the racist account he (and others) denied he operated.
He apologizes to the friends who supported him and the educational instituon his words harmed. That is good. They should forgive him.
But the “apology” has serious problems.
My daughter reads for an hour every night before she goes to bed, and recently declared she’d read all her books.
I showed her a secret stash of books, out of which she selected George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin.
Then that seven year old read it.
Proud dad.
🧵 The Lottery is a story about a town where the residents gather every June to select one person who will play a pivotal role in ensuring that year’s harvest.
The winner is stoned to death and thus the future is secured.
Last week, Christian Twitter pulled Josh Butler’s name.
To everyone dunking on
@TGC
… Maybe read the whole article?
If you have read the whole thing… stop misrepresenting it.
This is not about *affirming* anything. It’s about acknowledging legal givens, and trying to navigate a thoroughly diverse pluralistic society.
When asked about the RNC and his father no longer standing against abortion or for marriage between one man and one woman, Eric Trump compares trying to save the lives of babies and standing for biblical marriage as “worrying about spots on the wall in the basement.”
Wake up,
Nancy Mace at Tim Scott's prayer breakfast:
"I woke up this morning at 7, Patrick my fiancé tried to pull me by my waist in bed and I was like 'no baby we don't have time for that this morning' I gotta get to the prayer breakfast... He can wait. I'll see him later tonight."
2. Christians give disproportionately more time and money to charities than any other demographic - including those providing free or reduced healthcare for mothers.
“Discipleship is face to face”
Correction: *parts of* discipleship.
Annually, our church produces 365+ podcast episodes, 100+ blog posts, 100+ newsletters, 100+ videos.
It’s changing lives and energizing discipleship in profound ways. Here’s why & how we do it. 🧵
Given people’s questions about whether the Tulius account is linked to Achord, the answer is “yes.” It’s a known alias and the account intersect.
Using the way back machine I was able to find that the
@tu_aud
account named itself “T. Achord.”
The author of The Case for Christian Nationalism is recommending an explicitly pro-segregation book that claims blacks are less intelligent than whites.
Who’s shocked?
*Checks notes*
Not me. See 🧵 below for details.
Remember when everyone was debating whether they’d want someone to go to a church like this or no church at all?
This is, without qualification, idolatry. It is liturgical malpractice. It is… “the sparkle creed.”
A month ago I spent some time with a wise Pentecostal pastor whose been serving God for over 6 decades. He told me that he begins his morning prayers by thanking God for simple things. He does the same when his head hits the pillow.
I’ve been doing it ever since, and I can
So until the local secular humanist group or atheist society or pro-choice advocacy club comes within a mile of what Christians give/do... maybe, could we stop spreading this faulty, deceptive narrative about ourselves?
🧵 I use “followers of Jesus” more than “Christians,” “the way of Jesus” more than “Christianity,” and “King Jesus” more than “Christ.”
This is intentional.
I find that christ___ conveys a vague religious preference/identity, not a way of life & allegiance, nor a kingdom story.
I know this is kind of a gotcha answer. But one of the things megachurches can do that others can’t is accommodate those that other churches cannot (because they lack the funding).
One of the beauties of large church is that they can pool resources to be missional (both
I wish Basham’s book showed the same journalistic carefulness this articles does. Instead, it littered with errors fact checkers could have caught.
A review worth your time.
There are few problems for which discipleship is not the answer.
“But the LGBTQ movement!” Yep. Make disciples.
“But the racists!” Yep. Make disciples.
People will call me reductive. I’m not barring political action. I simply prioritize it below the church’s mission.
But the more I read about (and lived within) evangelicalism, the more I realized:
They’re right.
The truth is that *all* theology is culturally situated. Saying that doesn’t make me a relativist. It makes me epistemologically humble.
“I don’t like turkey”
Really means,
“I’ve never had a properly prepared turkey.”
1. Brine one day
2. Dry one day
3. Spatchcock
4. Inject
5. Smoke and baste
6. Rest on warm for a few hours
That’s how to do it.
One of the demons we wrestle with during our adult years is the resentment of Martha, that is, a joylessness bordering on anger for, ironically, being burdened with the privilege of health, work and status.”
-Ronald Rohlheiser, Sacred Fire.
Great wisdom to live by.
A charitable response to Rosaria Butterfield. I recommend reading and following Preston’s example.
When people are careless with their speech and misrepresent your views, it’s easy to respond with vitriol. Preston modeled an alternative: gracious clarity.
Two years ago, our church gave enough money to cancel 43 million dollars of severe medical debt in our state. But we don't care about healthcare?
The next year, we gave enough to cancel ever overdue utility bill in city limits. But we don't support mothers in poverty?
I read the viral “Quitting the church” essay and felt empathy.
Then I read this 👇🏻 and thought… Oh. I got it.
If you dabble in resurrection denial, why endure the pain and anxiety of ministry? There’s no reason. Just do your self-care thing and move on.
Change the sin and see how your answer changes.
…greed.
…anger.
…violence.
…racism.
…pride.
…homophobia.
Is it better for someone to remain unchurched or be *completely* affirmed in their sin? The entire framing of this question is unhelpful.
Question for non-affirming Christians:
Would you rather LGBTQ people attend an affirming mainline church, where they can worship Jesus, but that will affirm them in (what you believe is) their sin?
Or would you rather they not go to church at all?
Living in Babylon = Living in unbearable tension.
Our churches aren’t good at tension. We try to relieve it rather than navigate it. Here are 3 common relief strategies.
1. Accommodate to culture.
2. Separate from culture.
3. Fight against culture.
None are faithful or wise.
🧵Here’s the Catch-22 faced by Christian leaders (myself included):
Confronting the idolatry of political ideology on the prog left and the CN right draws out angry people, who believe (by virtue of their ideological orthodoxy) they can speak however they want to “heretics.”
But every editorial team functions as curators. They choose what goes and doesn’t go.
CT seems fixated *not* on giving us a positive vision for Christianity tomorrow, but instead liquidating institutional trust, and building a platform off the sins of Christianity yesterday.
I see this locally time and again.
If you go to the leading free healthcare providers, homelessness and poverty support orgs, and refugee service providers in our city, you will discover that a disproportionate number of people working there are... Christians.