The Feminization of the Church: Past, Present, & Future

There is a handout to go with this lecture. You might want to make sure you’ve got one of those if you don’t. It’s mostly a resource list.
[Available at https://www.andrewsmyth.net/p/the-feminization-of-the-american].
It’s a few items I’ll be referring to during my talk here this afternoon. I have a bit of a difficult task because I basically have approximately 40 minutes to show you and tell you how much of what we have heard and been told and been taught about our modern world is wrong. I’ve titled this lecture The Feminization of the Church, Past, Present, and Future because I want to look a bit at the story of how we got here and where we are and where we might be going.
History is not a mere set of facts. It takes a shape. It has a pattern.
It has a trajectory. Now the common interpretation, the common understanding of history today is a progressive one. I know that’s a loaded word and it can mean a lot of things, but when I’m talking about a progressive view of history, I’m talking about the view that things are generally getting better.
They’re becoming more fair, more just, more prosperous, and have been throughout our modern and enlightened age. This has been the predominant view of history since the Enlightenment, the whole premise of which is that we have thrown off the shackles and restrictions and limitations of the past. We have moved past them.
We have progressed as humanity beyond them, and particularly the Enlightenment was interested in throwing off the alleged past restrictions and limitations of religion. And so history, as we are now often told, so that we are led to believe, is moving towards some great and glorious end. This is why so much of, for instance, our political discourse is built around progress, a desire to make more progress as a society and not undo progress already done.
In this view, history is linear. It’s a line going up, moving towards some ultimate goal. Even if the goal is never specified, progress can even become an end in itself.
But the problem with a progressive view of history is it ignores the fact that humans are finite creatures. We can in fact only learn and grow and advance and accomplish so much. And if we look at the history of the world, the history of civilizations, the one fact that ties them all together is that they go through seasons of growth and progress and improvement, but then inevitably there comes a plateau, and then there comes decline.
I dare say a more accurate picture of history is one that moves in cycles. Civilization ebbs and flows, kingdoms and empires rise and fall, ideas come and go. When one takes this view of history, one which I’d say is not only experientially true and observable from historical evidence, but even portrayed in the Bible, when we see God’s people going through cycles of faithfulness and unfaithfulness, conquest and exile, rise and fall, we start to see the dangers and the pitfalls and the shortcomings of believing in unending progress and progress for its own sake.
And one of the areas where this false narrative of progress that never ends has been the most destructive is that of the roles and relationships of men and women. We have, in the name of progress and freedom and greater liberty, been sold a bill of goods called feminism that threatens societal and ecclesiastical chaos and destruction and is even carrying it out in many ways under our noses. But before we can get to how that has happened, we need to look at how we got here.
Now, truthfully, this story is almost as old as time itself. In Genesis 1 and 2, we are told how God created the world in the space of six days and all very good. God created man, the first man, Adam, to have dominion over the creatures and to work and tend the Garden of Eden.
But there was no suitable helper there found for him. And so from man, God created woman, Eve, to be his helper and companion. There is an ordering to this creation.
God created man first, created woman from man, thus baking into the fabric of creation and ordering a hierarchy. Society is to be structured in family units where the husband and father rules and the woman assists and serves. When Paul describes the proper ordering of the church in 1 Timothy Chapter 2, he appeals to these creational truths in verses 11 through 13.
He says, “Let a woman learn in silence with all submission. And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence. For Adam was formed first, then Eve.”
There is a creational ordering of the home, as well as a creational ordering of the roles of men and women that extends into the church. The church is to be ruled and governed by qualified men who carry out the office of rule and the function of teaching. Now, I don’t have time to give a full treatment to 1 Timothy 2 here today, a text which has been subject to no small amount of modern revisionism, attempts to reduce it to merely contextual and cultural concerns of the first century.
But I’ll just say at the outset, to be very clear, as this teaching is grounded in creation, it is not merely cultural. It is not merely occasional. It is creational and it is plain and clear for all people in all times.
Now, this ordering was built into creation, but it was complicated and exacerbated by the fall. The serpent went to Eve and first tempted her. Eve was deceived.
Continuing where we left off previously in 1 Timothy 2.14, Paul cites woman’s deception as part of the reason for women to be submissive and silent and taught by men in the church. Now, Adam’s failure in this regard was passivity. Eve was deceived and ate and then gave the fruit to her husband who was with her.
Adam was there. Adam knew what was going on. He watched while the woman rejected the very authority of God and the man allowed it to happen.
And so emerges the pattern that defines this problem of the feminization of the church all throughout history. God commands, woman asserts, or woman usurps, and then man abdicates. In fact, in the curse given to Eve by God at the time of the fall, Genesis 3.16 and other texts subject to far too much revisionism in our day, God says, “Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.”
And this is what is described. Woman is to be ruled by man, but woman will not want this. This will come with conflict.
This will come in opposition. Just to give you a couple of our Reformed interpreters of this text, John Calvin here commenting says, this form of speech, thy desire shall be unto thy husband, is of the same force as if he had said that she should not be free and at her own command, but be subject to the authority of her husband and dependent upon his will. Or as if he had said, thou shalt desire nothing but what thy husband wishes.
As it is declared afterwards, unto thee shall be his desire. There he’s quoting from chapter four, verse seven. Thus the woman who had perversely exceeded her proper bounds is forced back to her own position.
So note it’s going back. Note that before the fall, this creational order took precedence. She had indeed previously been subject to her husband, but that was a liberal and gentle subjection.
Now, however, she is cast into servitude. Also Matthew Henry here writes on Genesis 3.16, she is here put into a state of subjection. The whole sex, which by creation was equal with men, is for sin made inferior and forbidden to usurp authority.
And then Henry here cites 1 Timothy 2.11 and 12. So in the state of innocence, this ordering, this hierarchy, this subjection of woman to man was harmonious, but sin in the fall brought rivalry, brought disunity. The long standing struggle between the rightful God-ordained rule of the church and the home by men and the desire of woman to not be so subject and to usurp those roles for themselves.
In truth, the feminization of the church goes all the way back to the beginning. All of our current and modern problems can ultimately be traced to this fundamental problem of God’s order, woman’s usurpation, and man’s abdication. Now, while this is a problem that goes back to the beginning, it has been increased and it has been worsened by modern progressivism.
The Past
The current movement of feminism first emerged in the middle of the 19th century, is typically described in three waves. Some will say there’s four or even more, but generally it is seen as three and we’ll stick to three for our purposes here today. Now the first wave was best known for women seeking the right to vote.
That’s not all it did. We’ll come back to that in a moment. The second wave came with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s.
The issues at play in the second wave were things like the rights of women to work for equal pay, so-called reproductive rights, which is abortion, the right to kill their children, which won its largest victory and resulted in the death of millions through the Roe versus Wade decision of 1973. Other issues like no-fault divorce came to be very closely tied to second-wave feminism. It was sold under the idea that women needed the opportunity to leave bad marriages and that’s why no-fault divorce was necessary.
Now the third wave of feminism, starting largely in the 1990s and continuing to now, has become more focused, as with other critical theories, on societal oppression, the distribution of hegemonic power. It uses the similar categories and approaches of intersectionality. So if you are a woman, you are oppressed and disadvantaged.
If you are a Black woman, you are even more disadvantaged. If you are a Black lesbian woman, that’s even worse. If you are a Black lesbian trans woman, don’t ask me how that works, but you are even more oppressed.
So society needs to be reordered to distribute more power to you. Marriage is also much more discarded and disregarded under the third wave, the natural consequence of sex being separated from childbirth and the financial and material support for families being separated from primary work by husbands and fathers. Now it is popular in evangelical circles, even among those who would claim to be complementarians, more on them in a moment, to say that the first wave of feminism was good.
Noble women acting with noble motivations to right real problems, and that only the later and more revolutionary waves were problematic. But is that true? On July 19th and 20th, 1848, very much in first wave feminism, the first women’s rights convention was held at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. I’ve linked that document in your handouts.
This convention drafted a declaration of sentiments basically stating what the budding feminist movement wanted. The primary author was a woman named Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the leading feminist leaders, and there were many other of the leading feminists that were also at this conference. Now there is a list of grievances against men and their alleged tyrannies and mistreatments of women, and I am going to read one of them for you.
The statement says he, so referring to man generally, allows her, so a woman generally, in church as well as state but a subordinate position claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry and with some exceptions from any public participation in the affairs of the church. So one of the first complaints, one of the primary demands of first wave feminism was the right for women to serve as ministers in the church. Now when the feminists object to the claim of apostolic authority, that means they object to the very text and reasoning I cited earlier, not only the creational and fall issues but Paul’s very clear, very not cultural teaching of 1st Timothy 2 and 3. Feminism has always seen this as a target, always seen this as a priority of theirs of something that needs to be changed in the interest of progress and greater rights and liberation.
And my how things have changed. Around the time of Seneca Falls, in the middle of the 19th century, many churches did begin to ordain women to church office. The first Congregationalist woman minister was ordained in 1853. The first Episcopal woman deaconesses were ordained in 1855 in Maryland and then the Anglicans in England did so starting in 1862.
The first Methodist woman had already been licensed to preach much earlier in 1761 but then the first Methodist deaconess was ordained in 1866 followed by the first woman minister in 1880. The first free will Baptist woman was ordained in 1876. The first Northern Baptists, they’re now known as the American Baptists, in 1882.
In the 1880s, Ellen G. White rose to prominence as the de facto leader of the Seventh-day Adventists. The Cumberland Presbyterians in 1889 ordained Louisa Woosley as the first Presbyterian woman to be a minister. The mainline Northern Presbyterians ordained a woman in 1956 and on and on it went and there were many more besides these.
All mainline American denominations, with the exception of the Southern Baptist Convention, now ordain women as ministers and other officers officially. We’ll talk more about the SBC here soon but this began and it grew all the way at the beginning under first wave feminism. Even now in the SBC, there’s a study that I link in your handout, it’s estimated that over 1900 women are serving as pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention which allegedly is the lone mainline American church that has held the line on these issues.
Now as these compromises occurred, not everyone was on board. There were many church splits, there were many new churches and new denominations formed. While our denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, split over other issues of theological liberalism, it has maintained male-only ordination.
The Presbyterian Church in America split from the mainline later and the women’s ordination issue was much more directly involved in their separation. And yet many of the offshoots as well as many denominations that did hold the line are starting to re-litigate these past debates, failing to learn the lessons of this history. Now the issue within the issue of feminism is egalitarianism, belief in teaching that all people, regardless of any distinction between them, are equal and must have equal rights and privileges.
It is more or less baked into the fabric of America. This language of all being created equal was also in the Seneca Falls Declaration. They heavily cited that language and it has fueled all the other civil rights and liberation movements in our country.
It sounds nice and Americans will almost without question affirm it, but it seems that here we actually end up with two conflicting ideas. In a sense, we were all created equally as we are made in the image of God. We have certain dignity and agency as human persons.
We are equal recipients of God’s saving grace if God so lavishes it upon us. But as I spoke of before regarding creation and regarding nature, we are not all created equally. We are not all created to do the same things.
We all do believe this on some basic level. I was not made to be a professional athlete. I’m not going to go try out for the Denver Nuggets and make the cut.
I’m too weak, I’m too slow, too short, even too uncoordinated for that kind of life. That just has never been open to me. We don’t usually object to making those kinds of distinctions.
But when these distinctions are made along the lines of sex, people start to lose their minds. Yet Paul, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says there is something in creation that is exacerbated by the fall that makes men and women not equal in terms of their function of exercising teaching and authority in the church. And if we believe that Paul’s words are the word of God, inspired and recorded and preserved for us, we must believe this and practice it.
As long as egalitarianism, this belief of equality of all before all else, is the predominant understanding of our culture, and progressivism is our predominant understanding of history, the biblical teachings concerning men and women have been and will continue to be under attack. They will be shouted down and opposed as an injustice, a backwards relic of history that must be banished. That’s why I say that my task is difficult.
We are very much swimming upstream. In order to understand and address these problems, we have to see, and we also have to persuade others to see, the world differently. So I’ve mainly talked about the past thus far, but let us now look at the present.
The Present
I mentioned that many churches, many denominations, have maintained male-only ordination. But does that mean that they have escaped from feminism and egalitarianism? Certainly not. In the late 20th century, there arose a reactionary movement to the advancements of feminism known as complementarianism.
The flagship works on complementarianism were a statement known as the Danvers Statement, something of a confessional document, though all different kinds of people and churches were involved with it, as well as a book edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem called Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. It was a collection of essays on these topics. This movement rose at roughly the same time as what is known as the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement, where many young people began to recover something of Calvinist theology.
You think of people like Piper or Mark Driscoll or Tim Keller, Matt Chandler, and others who were major figures of the YRR, that also latched on to complementarianism in some form and promoted it. Now the idea of complementarianism is that men and women are created equal, but they function in different and complementary roles. Complementary, not in saying nice things about each other, but complementary in that they complete each other.
In the family, as well as the church, complementarians say men remain in authority, but then great emphasis is also placed on the value and contribution of women. Now on a basic level, this is fine, but the devil is in the details. A phenomenon within the complementarian movement has emerged that I refer to as a complementarianism that can’t stop apologizing for itself, or Zachary Garris has much more simply and eloquently distinguished between a broad and a narrow complementarianism.
I cited an article by Garris and also a couple of his books in the handouts. He’s done much writing on this subject. So broad complementarianism is pretty close to the classical biblical and reformed understanding that I’ve explained to you here, but then narrow complementarianism is not comfortable with many of these creational and sin distinctions.
Garris cites examples like how narrow complementarians reject language of hierarchy and submission, as well as grounding of men and women and their relationship being founded in creation. Garris even talks about how often the language of servant leadership that is often used to instruct men in how they are to lead their wives, and how men are to lead in the church, can be overemphasized to the point where men are being made responsible for and blamed for many things, most things, while the language about submission by wives are often quickly and frequently downplayed in the complementarian movement. So what can often result is that while officially, while on paper, while in confessional documents and things of the sort, the rule of homes and the offices of the church are committed to men, functionally, at every turn, the creational and biblical authority of men and the duties of submission and tendency towards usurpation by women are downplayed to the point where they don’t meaningfully exist at all.
Larger churches that can support multiple staff positions will have men as their pastors, but they will often hire women to serve as directors of certain functions and ministries, where they still exercise authority and oversight over them, doing work that is traditionally done by pastors and church offices, the only real difference being the title. It ends up being a complementarianism in name only. Many churches, while they don’t let women serve as pastors or preachers, will let women teach adult Sunday school classes and mixed Bible studies while still claiming to be complementarian.
This matter has actually come before our own General Assembly a couple of times now, and while the practice of women teaching men in these capacities has been rejected, there has always been a significant and protesting minority. There’s a popular phrase in these narrow complementarian circles that a woman can do anything an unordained man can do, but this is simply not true. Some unordained men preach to test and develop their preaching abilities so that they might be ordained later or teach in a similar capacity.
Pastor Mathis and I both serve on the Candidates and Credentials Committee of our presbytery. We handle men under care and licentiates who are not ordained but are allowed to practice some of the functions of the office. Now, some usurpations are more sneaky.
I’ve heard some comment on a phenomenon referred to as shadow elders, where a church’s male leadership might make a decision, even be unified in it, and for no apparent reason, a few days later, defections start. Guys start calling and say they’ve changed their minds on the decision. Well, what happened? They went home and talked to their wives, and their wives pressured them to make a different decision.
And so, what is happening in this approach is complementarianism is failing in many ways. These biblical and creational distinctions are either eliminated altogether or they are reduced to a point of meaninglessness. They’re put to death by a thousand qualifications, and inevitably, many who might be in this narrow complementarian camp eventually slide down into full egalitarianism.
I’ve often referred to complementarianism as an unstable paradigm in most of its expressions because it wants the outcomes of biblical patriarchy without the biblical and creational reasoning for it. It wants men only in formal office but will surrender everything else to feminism and egalitarianism. Now how does this manifest itself? Well I’ve observed a phenomenon in which beyond even the local church in our day we see women disproportionately get and hold jobs in Christian publishing, academia, and other parachurch organizations.
Now I haven’t even really touched too much on the issue of women working outside the home and I won’t have time to spend much time on that today but even just from strictly an economic perspective this effectively doubles the available labor pool which halves the price of labor. So it means across the board more people work but everyone in the long run ends up working for less money than they did before so it’s harder to make a living, keep up with home and rent prices, save, and things of that sort. Another talk for another time or maybe something we’ll get into in discussion.
But in Christian jobs even among ostensibly conservative and biblical churches and institutions more and more of these jobs are going to women. Seminaries, even those who claim to serve traditional and confessional and complementarian churches, almost all admit women and many of them even to their master of divinity program. Now the very name master of divinity it’s a degree for a divine which is an old name for a pastor.
It’s the pastoral degree and yet ostensibly conservative and complementarian seminaries are now giving these degrees to women. This comes under pressure from the government through things like Title IX which governs financial aid and insists on equal opportunities for men and women. Even more recently homosexuals and transgender individuals in the schools.
This is also wielded through accreditation which has basically become an enforcement mechanism for diversity equity and inclusion in colleges and graduate schools and seminaries. I’ve included in your handout a couple of links to things I’ve written and recorded on those subjects. So women are allowed and marketed and encouraged to get this education to get these degrees for jobs that biblically they are not supposed to have.
It also changes the makeup and the teaching of the seminary that was once narrowly focused on training pastors. Now it’s serving a different clientele and so the curriculum becomes more general and diluted. So they get these degrees they pay tens of thousands even hundreds of thousands of dollars to have them and they have to be able to get jobs to use them somewhere and so these parachurches and other organizations will disproportionately hire these women since these women cannot enter the ministry.
But that’s just one pressure point. You don’t have to look very far in our culture to see people calling the church abusive, misogynistic, patriarchal with patriarchy being treated now as a slur and not what the bible teaches or the history of the world has practiced. And many Christians wanting to be Christians while also currying the favor and approval of the world will seek to accommodate the world’s beliefs and practices about men and women in the church.
Now it doesn’t stop with issues of men and women. Pastor Mathis will be talking about how this has happened with homosexuality and matters beyond and since you get his book for being here you should definitely read it because it’s an important work on the subject that few are willing to undertake. And once this accommodating and compromising attitude and approach is taken it cannot help but eventually give way to this whole embrace of feminism and egalitarianism.
I mentioned before many Southern Baptist Churches now have women to whom the title and functions of pastor is given. Back in February there was a very extensive series of x-threads I’ve linked in your handout by a gentleman in the Presbyterian Church in America that found dozens of churches in the PCA that publicly on their websites claimed to have women as deacons even though the PCA formally does not allow this. Every church that has opened up the diaconate to women in the modern age for modern reasons has inevitably slid down the actually slippery slope to having women as elders and pastors.
And now many of the same churches are fighting over having homosexuals as pastors. Once the restraint is lost, once the prevailing desire becomes accommodation, once the biblical and creational reasoning is lost, there is nowhere else to go. And even beyond offices, churches who are narrowly complementarian start to take on an excessively feminine look and feel.
Much contemporary worship music is very emotional, very self-focused, often written and led by women. A lot of preaching and teaching tends to be very harsh and accusatory towards men but very lax on the prevailing sins of women. I heard an interview the other day with a biblical counselor, it’s linked in your handout, he’s counseled many Christian couples and he said that increasingly often he sees men who want to repent and reconcile in their marriages but they have these reviling wives, wives who scorn them, wives who disrespect them, wives who seek the bad advice of other women and they spurn biblical teaching and tear apart their own homes and families.
And in fact I’ve provided a chart on the back of your handout. Women now initiate approximately two-thirds of divorces in our day for reasons more grounded in modern therapeutic and psychological thought because now no fault divorce is legal thanks to second wave feminism. But they justify their divorce through these therapeutic and psychological approaches and often these feminized churches and pastors are approving even of permissive divorce.
This has coincided with the rise of these psychological and trauma-informed approaches to counseling in the church which have become prevalent. Things that were once considered as sin, matters of repentance, matters of church discipline are now often replaced with categories of oppression and victimhood and an individual’s feelings and experience of these things and their trauma that they have endured from them are prioritized above God’s word. Now this is also compounded by the fact, there’s another chart on the back of your handout, that women, particularly unmarried women, tend to lean much more politically and culturally liberal than men of similar age and status.
And because of this many men have eventually become disillusioned with marriage and family and the church. There’s been a rise online of what is known as the red pill movement or sometimes referred to as men going their own way where men, basically frustrated with all of this, decide that they are anti-church, anti-family, anti-marriage because the system is so stacked against them. Now this is a wrong reaction.
God has instituted family, church, and state. The survival of civilization depends upon them. Many of the approaches and errors of this movement are just as severe and immoral as the feminism they are reacting to but there is at least a frustration that is coming from a real place.
The Future
So we’ve looked at the past and the present and now would be a good time to look at the future and we’ll talk about this more in the discussion time but if all of this is happening and has happened what can we do? What should we do?
Well first we need in the church a renewed and unapologetic and uncompromising regard for God’s word. When we see that when we see what scripture teaches us about men and women we hear it, we receive it, we practice it, and we don’t compromise on it. One does not need to be a Ph.D. in theology to properly interpret the plain and clear teaching of the Bible on the roles of men and women in family and in the church.
We need to hold the line on these teachings all the time every time. We cannot assume that because we are in conservative or reformed or confessional churches or denominations that the drift and subversion are not happening or cannot happen in our midst.
Second we need to develop families and churches and institutions where these things are believed and practiced and taught.
I mentioned briefly I could say much more and have said much more. These things are online linked in the linked in your handout about seminaries and education but we need to build and support mechanisms for training pastors and supply men to be trained in these mechanisms who will provide the sound and biblical leadership that the church needs. We also need to hold those institutions that are compromising on these matters accountable.
We should reject calls for false peace and false unity with those who seek to dilute and abandon clear biblical teaching. These are first order issues. These are issues that compromise the very authority of scripture and we should never allow them to be treated as anything less.
And recognizing that feminism and egalitarianism and their bitter fruits have infiltrated even many ostensibly biblical and traditional and conservative churches. We need to encourage churches, plant churches, form networks and alliances of churches even perhaps across traditional denominational lines that are holding the line on these issues. Now to those disenfranchised and cynical towards the church because of its capitulation, the failure of the church does not excuse your duty to unite and remain united to a true church.
Now maybe that means you join a church that may not perfectly align with all of your theological particulars but at least holds this high and uncompromising view of scripture. Maybe it means you have to commute some distance to go to church. Some of you probably do.
Might even mean you might have to ask some questions about where you live and where you might go. It is amazing to me that all the reasons people will move in our day but so often the consideration of finding a sound church to join is never factored in. Maybe if you’re a young man, maybe if you’re aware of these issues, God is calling you into a more active role of leadership and service in ministry and church office.
Though I can tell you if you are going that route and if you are going to stand fast on these convictions you may face a hard road. You will face trouble and opposition but God is faithful and the church will stand at the grave of this present evil age. Church discipline needs to be practiced fairly and righteously and biblically not according to the pressures and pulls of the world and of our culture but according to scripture and sound doctrine.
Sheep need to be protected from wolves. If your church is part of a denomination it ought to be active in the denominational meetings and decision making, regional and national meetings if able.
Feminism is revolutionary. It was born and it was raised and it has flourished on activism. It has become very competent at seizing and wielding power even in churches. The revolution will need to be met with a counter-revolution. Those holding fast to the truth and opposing error and working to bring those things about.
Now third we need to have robust theologically and ideologically aligned communities. As marriage is in decline we need provide opportunities and networks and connections for young Christian men and women to meet and marry and have and raise children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord while being fed the truth of the word and protected from the lies of our age and corrected where these lies have made inroads.
Again the corruption of our day does not invalidate God’s institution or the necessity of marriage and family. Now those couples need to be committed to strong churches where the truths about marriage and about men and women, what the Bible teaches on these things are faithfully taught and upheld. Not only does the church situation need to support this but there needs to be for instance jobs available that can support young and growing families seeking to honor the Lord.
There needs to be housing available for these young families. There needs to be freedom to raise and educate children as one pleases. I know that you have recently experienced some bitter providences here in Colorado regarding new legislation and we grieve with you, we pray that perhaps righteousness will once again prevail in this state.
But all of these things that we need to have and need to do might mean some hard choices. It might mean those that God has blessed with wealth and property need to be more deliberate in using these resources to build and support these kind of people and communities. There’s also a tendency in these conversations to very quickly move on to political action and that does have a place but politics will only change so much so fast.
Put the greatest effort if you are going there into local and state politics where these efforts will be most productive but also expect resistance because just as feminism and egalitarianism have infiltrated everything else so they have influenced the government and broader society. You can use the internet for networking and community but don’t depend on it as the young people in our day say, touch grass. Build real relationships with real people and take real actions to build a better future.
Now I won’t pretend that the road ahead is not difficult. The things we do may fail. It may only produce small and incremental change.
We may not even be building for change that we will see and experience ourselves. I’ve heard it said that we need to be willing to plant trees that we may not live to sit under. But this is a fight not only for ourselves but for our children, grandchildren, generations yet unborn and unknown. Most of all we should trust in the Lord.
While the nations rage and the heathens plot in vain, God is still present and working. There will always be a true church. There will always be a people of God in this world that will continue as long as this world does.
At times it may be smaller and weaker but it will always be here and ultimately if we are in Christ we have the hope of glory. We have the hope of the Gospel. Whatever troubles this world brings, they are many, our lives are hidden with Christ. Christians should never black pill.
That’s another one of the terms the young people use. It means that we should not give in to despair. We have a hope bigger and greater than anything in this world.
So even as we face troubled times, even as we face attack and compromise and all of these issues around us, let us hold fast to our hope. Let us hear the word. Let us pray.
Let us practice what it teaches even in a hostile world and let’s trust in our great and mighty and sovereign God to work.