I have learned, that some griefs do not ask permission to enter. They simply arrive, completely uninvited, and rearrange your life, and often your body as well.

It happened to me.

It happened to my neighbor.

It happened to my son.

Let me tell you the story, I think it’s worth telling. Especially this part.

I saw her face first. Before I understood the words, I understood the panic in her face. the particular fear of a mother listening to a voice she cannot yet trust, about a child she has not been able to help find.

Our daughter, who lives with special needs, had gone missing. For a few days the leads, led to, well, nothing. Not until a phone call came in a different language.

It was a ransom call.

I could understand most of it. But understanding isn’t the same as being able to answer back, not in a moment like that, when so much is on the line.

So I ran.

I ran down the hallway of the high-rise we call home, phone pressed to my chest like it was my missing daughter herself, toward the door of my bilingual neighbor, the only bilingual voice I trusted enough to hand this to. I gave her the context, told her it sounded credible, and she sprang into action, grabbing paper, scribing numbers, shoving notes my way faster than I could read them. We were, absurdly, suddenly, inside a Liam Neeson movie neither of us wanted to watch, let alone be in.

But here is what I remember most. It wasn’t the numbers. It wasn’t her words. I remember watching her face as the call went on; a woman who loves her own children fiercely, and mine nearly as much. I watched the panic quickly take up residence in her body. Watching her begin to carry a fear that was never hers to carry. It was devastating to watch.

And it was that. It wasn’t even my own uncertainty about the call’s credibility that made me grab the phone from her, while dollars were still being discussed and hang up, trusting we would find our daughter another way. I could not, in that moment, keep handing my trauma to someone else’s body. Something in me said: my trauma should not become yours. You didn’t sign up for this.

Secondary trauma. That’s what was happening in that Manhattan apartment to my sweet neighbor.

It’s an interesting phrase.

Stay with me a moment, because I need to first talk about words, and the weight they carry.

I have come to believe that a people who lose their words, lose, not long after, the things those words were built to protect.

“Unsafe”. “Trauma”. “Boundaries”. “Triggered”. “Gaslighting”.

These are words that once carried weight. They were words used only in rooms of real crisis, real danger, real cost, real science, and somewhere along the way they’ve become mainstream currency, spent so casually that they now risk losing their value for the very people who need them most: the most vulnerable among us, the ones for whom “unsafe” is not a feeling but a fact, for whom a “boundary” is not a preference but a matter of physical survival.

A word that costs nothing to say will eventually cost a ton to those who needed it to mean something.

Which brings me back to trauma, and secondary trauma, and whether it’s something to push away at all costs, and set up boundaries around, or invite in for the sake of the world.

There is a moment in the gospels where Jesus asks Peter, James, and John to come with him to Gethsemane. He asks them to be present to his anguish. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he tells them. Stay here and keep watch with me.

What, exactly, is the sorrow he’s carrying into that garden?

Not only the physical horror waiting for him at dawn. It is betrayal… layered, specific, and personal. Judas is already moving through the dark with soldiers, about to hand him over with a kiss, love’s most intimate gesture weaponized into a vehicle for death. And a few feet away, asleep, is Peter, the one who swore he’d die first, who will deny the one he said he’d die for, three times, before a rooster finishes crowing.

This means that Jesus grieves a betrayal that’s already happened and one that hasn’t happened yet, both at once, both true, and he invites both in.

Beneath both is the betrayal large enough to hold all the others: God became man to show man love, and man went on to kill God instead. That’s the sorrow underneath the sorrow. Not “I am about to suffer,” but “I came to love you, and this is what you will do with love when it draws close to you”. (Talk about self sabotage).

(A quick note: there’s a credible way to read the Scripture showing that God the Father does not need to kill the Son to save, and love us again. It is instead the violence of men that kills Jesus. Meaning the sacrifice of Jesus doesn’t change the Father’s disposition toward us; He has always loved us and always will. Instead the cross changes our disposition toward the Father. (Another post for another day.))

In the garden, Jesus is absorbing a kind of trauma too, not only his own coming suffering, but the accumulated weight of every fracture, every betrayal, every act of violence ever done to a human being, past and future, pressing into him at once. Judas’s betrayal, Peter’s, humanity’s, all in the same breath. Gethsemane is the moment God enters the trauma of the entire human story, and lets it in. (Without losing himself. Differentiation. Super important, and an article for another time).

Maybe this is the beginning of an answer: Trauma and secondary trauma isn’t a modern therapeutic invention I need to be suspicious of. It’s instead ancient, biblical, and may be necessary to the restoration of all things. And I don’t mean the trauma alone, but the willingness to let another’s suffering register in you, rather than keeping your distance so you can stay comfortable, behind your boundaries. Jesus doesn’t run from Judas’ kiss or Peter’s coming denial or humanity’s betrayal of love; he lets it register, fully, before he ever reaches the cross.

The garden suggests the road to resurrection runs directly through a willingness to feel what isn’t always yours to feel, and not run from it.

Which brings me back to the hallway. Back to my neighbor’s face. Back to a few words that have lost their weight.

My neighbor didn’t invoke “boundaries” that night to protect herself from my daughter’s crisis, she instead ran toward it, pen in hand, letting the terror register in her own chest because she loved. She paid a price she didn’t have to pay. That, and nothing less than that, is what love has always required of the people who carry it forward.

So when these words, trauma, secondary trauma, unsafe, boundaries, get spent as currency for comfort, or avoiding the harder conversation or the harder person, something sacred gets counterfeited. The words that once named the cost of love start to get used to excuse us from it. And the ones who lose the most are the ones who most need someone to run toward them with pen and paper in hand…. the missing daughter, the foster child, the woman caught in an abusive relationship, the vulnerable of every generation who cannot afford for love to learn new ways of staying safe.

I promise, one day, I’ll tell the whole story of my daughter’s disappearance, how the church rose up across this country and outran the systems and institutions of an entire city to bring her home.

That story deserves its own telling. But this one belongs to my son, whom I am very proud of.

Let me introduce you now to Elijah.

Almost two years after my daughter went missing, a woman from our church, a neighbor, called on behalf of another family in our community… a family who also has a child with special needs, a four-year-old we’ll call “G,” a little kid who sits beloved at the center of our church community. He’d gone missing from a day camp in the city. His parents were already out searching. On an island as small as ours, the fear wasn’t that someone would take him. The fear was the water.

The woman on the phone asked us to get to the street and start scanning.

Something in my body remembered before my mind caught up… it was like an old alarm sounding again. I shouted down the stairs to my son Elijah, the only other one home, told him G was missing, that we had to move fast. And what I felt happening inside me, I then watched happen outside of me….in him. Eli came flying up from downstairs… I will never forget, he grabbed his shoes without a single question, and was sprinting down the hallway before I’d finished explaining. We found G within the next ten minutes.

But watching my son run, I started to weep.

Eli has always felt things deeply… the same fierce intensity whether he’s arguing about the state of his bedroom or racing to save a life. And as we ran I realized that two years earlier, he had lived through all of it alongside us: watched his mother and me search frantically for his sister, sat through days of news vans parked outside our building, endured doorbell after doorbell, question after question…what happened? Where did she go? Why are the police here again? He carried all of that in his young body too, and I could not protect him from a single ounce of it.

And here is the thing I understood only as we ran down that street together, scanning for a four-year-old boy: my inability to shield my son from that trauma had become, in some way I never chose and would never have chosen, the very thing that now fuels his pursuit of the most vulnerable. Without the wound of his sister’s disappearance, I don’t believe he would have run with the same fire. His grief has somehow become his compass.

I keep learning that the wounds I cannot spare my children from sometimes become the very thing God uses to make them brave.

Maybe that is what Gethsemane has been trying to teach me; that the wounds we’d never ask for, the sorrows that arrive uninvited, are somehow being gathered up by a God who does not waste a single one of them. Not because pain is good. (many times it is not, please hear that) But because real love keeps finding a way to run toward the missing… through the hallway, through the garden, through my young son’s long legs and swift feet…until, at last, all things, and all people, and even our griefs, find their way home.

Fast forward a few months, and it turns out the kid is a great son, but a terrible employee. There is no follow-through. He hasn’t been able to establish trust with the team. His communication skills could charitably be described as “a work in progress” at best.

So Dad does the hard thing. He calls him into the office, walks through specific examples of organizational expectations that weren’t met, hands him his severance package, and walks him to the door. The son is fired.

He walks out completely dejected. He doesn’t even remember packing his box. He drives home in a total fog, replaying the whole conversation on a loop, somewhere between humiliated and furious, already rehearsing what he’s going to say to his spouse.

He pulls into his driveway.

And there’s his dad’s car. He is parked in the driveway, and is already waiting for him.

His dad gets out, walks toward him, and before the kid can brace for round two of the world’s most awkward conversation...

His dad just hugs him. Throws his arms around his neck and says:

“Heard through the grapevine that you got fired today, kid. I’m so sorry, son.”

The same man. Two different roles.

I relate to that story more than I’d like to admit, because I don’t just wear a hat or two. I wear a closet full of them.

The Family-of-Origin Hats

There are family of origin hats that I wear and roles that I occupy.

I’m son to Terry and Therese.
Grandson to Therese and Daniel.
Brother to Kaitlyn and Anthony.
Husband to my Amanda Jane, going on 22 years now.
And father to six children: Markeysha (22), Isaiah (19), Liam (19), Elijah (17), Lucy (14), and Judah (10).

Some of these kids are biological, and others joined our family out of the foster care system a few years into their little lives. Which means, given how different their backgrounds and early experiences were, I don’t get to parent them all with one philosophy or one strategy. I need several. Which only adds more complexity to my life. (We can get into trauma-informed parenting another day — that’s a whole separate substack.)

The Vocational Hats

Then there’s that closet full of work hats.

I’m the Senior Director of Advancement for City Relief, an organization that cares for around 65,000 unhoused neighbors each year, moving them toward food, housing, health care, and employment.

Work hat number two. I’m the founding pastor of Mosaic Church NYC, an international church on Roosevelt Island. Except I’m no longer the lead pastor there. That’s my wife’s role now. She’s the primary leader, I’m the founder, and we’re also, you know, married. That particular combination is less “dual roles” and more a potential tornado if not managed well.

I’m also the director of the Mosaic Collective, a ministry that has helped resource around 20 new churches led by women and global-majority leaders across the country. These are autonomous, justice-oriented churches, which means I don’t control what happens in them, I just steward resources for them, offering the pastors care, friendship, and support when they want it. No control. Just relational influence. That’s one of the more complicated hats that I wear.

And last, I’m the founder of Half the Church, a ministry that exists to increase the number of women resourced to lead throughout the American church.

So many hats, so many rooms, which means I’m holding dual roles in the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of relationships. And through all those relationships, and the relational wins alongside the many relational losses, here’s what I’ve come to believe:

My capacity to love people and serve people like Jesus hinges almost entirely on my ability to manage the roles I’m holding.

Am I husband in this moment, or colleague?
Am I Pastor, or Director of Advancement?
Am I Friend, or leader?

Get the chair wrong, and even your best intentions become someone else’s worst Tuesday. The wrong hat at the wrong time has continued to be the single biggest barrier to loving people well. It’s rarely a failure of love. It’s a failure to effectively manage dual roles. So I keep picking up new tools for the belt, knowing this is too important to leave to instinct.

Here are a few, not an exhaustive list, just the ways I’m fumbling forward, one hat at a time. Tons of credit to Steven Cuss, and the work of Dr. Ed Freidman, and Dr. Murray Bowen.

One Hat Per Room
Assign each physical or virtual space a single dominant role, and defend it as best you can. The Mosaic Church chapel must primarily be “Pastor Dan.” The City Relief advancement office is first and foremost “Fundraising Dan.” In my living room I need to defend the dad hat at all costs. If a donor conversation starts wandering into pastoral territory mid-meeting, I do my best to name it, and if needed (based on the urgency of topic), schedule a separate conversation, rather than letting one room quietly try to hold both.

The Hat Check
I’ve learned to ask, before any hard or high-stakes conversation: “Which hat do you need me wearing right now; friend, pastor, or director?” It hands the other person the language to tell me what they actually need, instead of me guessing wrong and finding out about it three weeks later in a much worse conversation. (Ask me how many times I’ve learned this the hard way…Actually, please don’t.)

Build a “Role Map,” and Update It Quarterly
Steven Cuss has been enormously helpful here. Write out every role you hold (pastor, advancement director, board member, friend, father, neighbor) and next to each one, list who actually has legitimate authority to set expectations of you in that role. This does two things: it exposes where roles silently overlap (a wife who’s also a colleague, for instance), and it gives you language when someone’s expectation belongs to a hat you’re not currently wearing with them.

The Handoff Line
This one has become essential for me in this past year. A rehearsed phrase I use every time I switch roles mid-relationship: “ Can I shift out of advancement mode for a second and put on my pastoral hat?” Saying it out loud does work that silence simply cannot do. Silence just lets everyone assume you’re still wearing the hat you walked in with.

The Two-Minute Reset
Something I haven’t consistently implemented yet, though I’m committed to the work: a physical ritual between role-switches, a walk around the building, a breathing exercise, closing the laptop before reopening it in a different room. Dr. Murray Bowen would say your nervous system needs a signal that the context and hat has changed. Right now my nervous system mostly just gets whiplash.

The Upfront Disclosure
Something I started this past year: naming the overlap up front, in the first few minutes of a new relationship, before it becomes a problem. “Just so you know, I’m both a pastor and someone who works in development, which means there is a chance I’m eventually going to ask you for money :). But I’ll do my best to be clear which one I’m doing at any given moment.” A mentor once told me: awkward once, up front, beats confusing forever. He was right.

The Rescue Check
When I feel the itch to jump in and fix something for someone, I pause and ask: “Did they actually ask for director-Dan or pastor-Dan right now, or am I just uncomfortable sitting in the ambiguity?” Multi-hat leaders get pulled into over-functioning constantly, because people can sense you have more than one lever within reach. Also, on the record: I owe my wife a formal, public apology for the sheer volume of unwarranted rescuing across 22 years of marriage. Lord, have mercy.

Pre-Negotiate Expectations at the Start, Not Mid-Crisis
Very similar to “upfront disclosure”, most role confusion gets negotiated for the first time in the middle of conflict, which is the single worst moment to do it. When a new working relationship starts, a donor, a new hire, a church member who’s also a professional contact, spend two minutes up front naming how the roles might overlap and what each of you can reasonably expect. It feels awkward in the moment, but it really has saved me from enormous pain later by managing people’s expectations early on.

Get a “Role Sponsor” for Each Hat, Not Just One General Mentor
Steven Cuss and others in nonprofit and church leadership circles often recommend a different accountability voice for each major role, rather than one all-purpose sage on the mountain. This has been genuinely lifesaving, because every time I expected one therapist, one pastor, or one nonprofit executive to speak wisely into every hat I wear, they inevitably let me down, not from lack of wisdom, but from lack of range. A pastoral mentor can’t always tell me if I’m managing donor relationships well. A nonprofit executive can’t help me parent six kids with six different stories. A savvy board member can’t always tell me if I’m pastoring with integrity. Different eyes catch different blind spots, and no single mentor was ever meant to see them all.

Protect a Role-Free Zone
Last, both Ed Friedman and Cuss, in their own ways, warn that leaders who never step fully outside every role eventually lose the “self” that made any of those roles trustworthy in the first place. And so I have been challenged to guard some spaces, or blocks of time where I attempt to take off all of my hats in that present moment.

None of these tools are complicated. That’s sort of the point, and also sort of the trap. The failure has never been a lack of sophistication. It is a lack of attention; attention to which hat I was actually wearing and when, and which hat others are expecting me to wear in any given moment.

So may relationships

So many people to love well

And… so many opportunities to get it right, or oh so wrong. And so I leave you with “the why”, one last time.

I cannot love someone well apart from an awareness of what role I am holding and when.

Every hat I wear; son, husband, father, pastor, director, friend, is really just a different room I’m being asked to love someone in. And my capacity to love the people in front of me will always be downstream of my willingness to notice, honestly and often uncomfortably, which room I’m currently standing in.

Wear the wrong hat, in the wrong moment, long enough, and you stop being a person people can trust with any of them.

You can hear it with me.

One of the best saxophonists of all time is on his alto, climbing toward something, some phrase he’s about to resolve, and the needle catches the groove and jerks him back to the start of the run, over and over, so the line never finishes. You know the part that’s coming. You can practically sing it yourself. But the record, stubborn as all, just won’t let you hear it.

I still play it. Mostly because I can’t bring myself to throw away a Bird record (some things are simply sacred, even scarred), but partly because that stupid skip has started to feel like a parable to me.

There’s a version of American Christianity that does the same thing. It gets right up to the phrase, the dangerous, resolving phrase, and then jumps clean over it every single time, back to the safe part of the song it already knows by heart, the part that doesn’t require anybody to change a single thing about how they live.

But let me get back to Charlie Parker and that record in a bit. First, let’s talk about an old spirit; One that has been spinning its own record for hundreds of years in this beautiful country of ours.

An Earnings Report

There is an old spirit in this country, and last week, like clockwork, and like a very punctual demon, it filed its earnings report.

CoreCivic and GEO Group, America’s two largest private prison companies, announced a combined $1.4 billion in quarterly revenue as immigration detention climbs toward the administration’s stated goal of 100,000 people held at once. That number doesn’t even include the $1.6 billion CoreCivic just made selling four of its facilities to the Department of Homeland Security, a deal that works out to roughly $307,000 per bed. GEO Group’s revenue is up 15% over last year. Somebody, somewhere, is toasting that quarter with something bubbly.

And the money doesn’t move through strangers. Multiple reports, including NPR’s, lay out the names, plain as day. David Venturella, the acting director of ICE, is a former GEO Group executive. He’s told lawmakers he’s since divested his stock, but the seat itself tells you where the pipeline runs. Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, was a paid GEO Group consultant before he took his government post. Pam Bondi, before she became Attorney General, was a registered lobbyist for GEO Group. And President Trump himself holds financial stakes in both companies; an ethics watchdog’s review of his disclosures found his brokers made dozens of trades in private-prison stock since he returned to office, starting within his first two weeks back. The people writing the policy, appointing the enforcers, and cashing the checks keep turning out to be the same short list of people, wearing different name tags depending on the room they find themselves in.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this a story about two companies. But it isn’t just that. It is a story about that old spirit. CoreCivic and GEO Group are just the current address. The spirit that lives here has had other addresses before, and if we don’t name the spirit, it will simply pack its little bags and occupy a different room at a different date, wearing a different name tag, all while humming that same old tune.

The Same Idol, New Clothes

Our nation has done this before. It built its first economy on a doctrine, the Doctrine of Discovery, which declared Indigenous land empty because Indigenous people were declared less than human, and apparently, empty land can be discovered, even if humans were already living on it, farming it, and raising children on it (go figure). It built its second economy on slavery, which took that same declaration and applied it to Black bodies, and did not merely tolerate captivity but industrialized it, bred it, insured it, financed it, and by “it,” I once again mean humans made in the very image of God, and made them collateral for loans and cotton for export and wealth for families who are, this very afternoon, still enjoying the interest.

Look closely and you’ll notice the architecture never really changed.

Then, it was land grants and slave ships. Now, it’s detention contracts and per-bed pricing.

Then, the justification was a doctrine about who counts as human. Now, the justification is a law about who counts as legal.

Then, the profiteers sat in church pews on Sunday and signed bills of sale on Monday. Now, they sit in earnings calls on Thursday and government offices on Friday, and nobody so much as blinks, because we have gotten so very good at laundering greed through the stale, forgettable language of policy.

Scripture has a name for this. The apostle Paul doesn’t say we wrestle against bad companies or bad politicians. He says we wrestle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Mammon is not a metaphor. Mammon is a type of landlord, and it is patient, endlessly patient, and it does not care whose body it stands on so long as the body keeps generating revenue for those in control. It has never needed a specific villain, which is honestly the scariest part. It only needs a system willing to let vulnerability become a casualty, and then, with barely a shrug, turn it into a line item.

That is the doctrine of empire: find the ones with the least power to resist, strategically dehumanize them, and build your wealth on their oppression. You can call it discovery. You can call it slavery. You can call it detention. The name keeps changing. The transactions, stubborn as ever, do not.

The Gospel Nobody Marketed

Now back to that beat-up Charlie Parker record, patient as it’s been with me.

Here’s the part the American church keeps skipping: the same groove, the same jump, the needle catching right where it always, always catches.

When Jesus finally stood up in his hometown synagogue to tell the room who he actually was, he didn’t reach for a passage about an afterlife or a future destination. He didn’t promise anybody a mansion just over the hilltop, streets paved in gold, a harp and a cloud and an extremely long nap. He opened the scroll to Isaiah, an old testament prophet with impeccable timing and a flair for the dramatic, and announced that the Spirit had sent him to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. Luke 4 is not a footnote. It is the inaugural address, the thesis statement for the whole ministry that was about to unravel before the world. Then, after reading it, Jesus rolled the scroll back up, sat down in front of the hometown crowd that had watched him grow up and play in the dirt with friends, and said: today. This is happening today, in your hearing. Not someday in the future. Today.

We have spent so long selling salvation as a one-way ticket out of here that we forgot Jesus opened his public ministry by serving an eviction notice to every landlord of human bondage on earth.

Liberation was not the missions department of a church, tucked into a bulletin somewhere between the potluck sign-up and the next youth group event. It was not some type of fine print under the gospel. Liberation was, and is, the gospel itself: the earthly, bodily, right-now kind, the kind that reaches into a cell and says you don’t live here anymore, pack light, we’re leaving.

So if that scroll is still open, if today still means today, here is what I think it costs to actually live like it’s true.

Embodied Resistance to the American System of Mammon

We need to become Christians who are systems-savvy. People who trace the money the way a detective traces a footprint. People who can see the pattern underneath the headline, who know that a system is not one bad actor in a nice suit but an arrangement, a set of incentives, a feedback loop that keeps rewarding the same behavior until somebody finally has the nerve to name it. People who ask, first and reflexively, of every institution, every policy, every suspiciously cheerful “public-private partnership”: who benefits from this, and does the answer look anything like the Beatitudes? Does it look like the ones Jesus called blessed: the poor, the mourning, the meek, the persecuted? Does it align with who His ministry actually empowered, or does it just align with who already had the power and would very much like to keep it? Jesus talked about greed and money more than he talked about the afterlife... far more, in fact. We built whole denominations on the handful of verses he spent on heaven and skipped merrily past the hundreds he spent on Mammon, on debt, on wages, on who gets to eat and who doesn’t. Why? Because Mammon often helps fund the church’s building project, it can help pay the pastor’s salary, and a distant heaven, never asks a single uncomfortable question. A gospel that can’t read a spiritual system is a false gospel that will keep blessing the spiritually destructive system, by accident at best, and with full, cheerful enablement at its worst.

But a systems thinker with no proximity is just a haughty cynic with scholarly footnotes. This is where I think a certain kind of progressive gets it half right and stops, dusting off their hands like the work is done. Brilliant at the pattern, fluent in systems thinking, maybe even holds a whole theology of liberation. They can diagram the entire machine on a napkin, yet has never once shared a meal with someone the machine is currently grinding to dust. That’s not solidarity. It is instead some kind of weird, well-footnoted intelligence that lacks the teeth for true transformation. Meanwhile there’s a different failure waiting patiently on the other side of the aisle: conservatives who do have the relationship, who genuinely love the neighbor, the cousin, the guy from the old unit who ended up on the street or behind bars, and love him well, truly, but then quietly file the person under “the exception.” They subconsciously crown the persons as “one of the good ones,” who is “not, of course, like the rest”. This lets every stereotype about “the rest” stay fully intact, propped up by the one relationship they’ve decided doesn’t count as evidence of anything systemic at all. Both are counterfeits. What we need is proximity close enough to actually revise our theology, and embody it in daily life.

And underneath both of those, we need people willing to trust Jesus when he says the kingdom belongs to the crushed. America has focused so much on the middle class, that we have quietly slipped into the assumption that Jesus does too. But Jesus says the kingdom belongs to the poor. Jesus yoked himself to the poor, the grieving, the persecuted, and called it citizenship. If that’s true, the posture isn’t rescue, it’s apprenticeship: apprenticeship under those living in poverty, in sickness, with special needs, and in captivity. So the third practice is the simplest to write and the hardest to actually do: We need to stop narrating and let the most vulnerable teach us what the kingdom looks like from the inside, because they have been standing in the thick of it a great deal longer than I have.

Here’s the part that needs to be said aloud. The idol of Mammon has been propped up high and perpetuated by so many of us white Christians throughout American history.

Bondi lobbied for GEO Group and calls herself a Christian. Homan consulted for GEO Group and invokes God in his speeches about the border. This is not incidental. Christian nationalism is not a lukewarm cousin of the faith, or some harmless overreach of patriotism that simply got a little too enthusiastic at the parade. It is Mammon, rocking a cross and fluent in religious language. It takes the name of the One who emptied himself and puts it on the mouth of every system that fills itself instead. It says God and country while quietly meaning God, so long as God blesses our own balance sheet. It has learned to fight for biblical values while opposing Christlikeness entirely.

So the witness has to include this: refusing to let Jesus’s name keep functioning as the trademark on his own betrayal. Every time someone chooses the God of Mammon and its system and calls it Christian, somebody has to stand up, publicly and by name, and say that is not my Savior. Not because we’re above the fight, nor because Jesus needs our defense (He really doesn’t), but because the detangling of greed and gospel is itself the witness to the watching world. A church that can tell the difference between the Kingdom of Jesus and the religion of greed, out loud, in public, at real cost, is the only kind of church left that anyone crushed by these systems has any good reason to trust.

The Solo

I promised I’d get back to that record, so here we are, one more time, needle poised…

The scratch is still there. It will always be there. Bird still climbs toward the fourth bar, the needle still jerks him back, denied, again, the resolution he was reaching for just out of grasp. But here’s the thing I’ve finally noticed after all these years of playing it: the needle was never broken. It has been tracking the groove exactly right the whole time, faithful as ever. It is the record that carries the wound. And a wounded record doesn’t need a harsher needle. It needs someone patient enough, and reverent enough, to lean in close and nudge the arm forward, gently, right past the scar, so the phrase can finally land where it was always, always intended to.

We’ve been circling the same note in the American Church for far too long.

Please…

Name the system.

Draw close and learn from the most vulnerable.

Detangle gospel and greed.

Lift that needle.

And let the man finish his solo.

It’s a beautiful one.

But in case you haven’t had the pleasure. Here’s the play by play,

The Department of War… yes, that’s the actual name now, we renamed it, and we did that, on purpose. That department has put out a slick video for our scrolling pleasure. It really is cinematic glory. A soldier’s face, half in shadow, strings swelling underneath like we’re about to watch someone propose to their beloved. Then a Bible verse, white serif font, center screen: “Here am I. Send me.” — Isaiah 6:8.

Then a quick cut to more soldiers, and then to a flag rippling in slow motion, because flags should only ripple in slow motion. Last, a cut to the mission statement, and call to action with link in bio. It really is mobilization at its finest.

It is, by every metric of the form, a good ad. Somebody in a conference room likely got a raise for this ad. And that’s sort of the whole problem…. it’s good. It’s supposed to move you. It’s engineered in a lab of American sentiment to hit you right in the gut, where duty and God and country all live in the same unexamined cavern.

So let’s examine it shall we.

Two Different Kinds of Sending

There is a moment in Isaiah, the prophet undone, on his face, having just seen something no one is built to see and live, where he says the line every one of us secretly hopes we’d have the nerve to say, once we understood the size of the ask: “Here am I. Send me.”

It sounds like the line of a hero.

(That’s exactly why the Department wanted it).

But turn the page, and you’ll find it is not a hero’s line at all. Our political leaders tend to be brilliant at leaving out important context.

What follows is one of the strangest commissioning ceremonies in the whole of scripture. Isaiah is sent, after a king has died, into a vision that will not let him look away, and told to go preach repentance (agreeing with God about reality) to a people who will not repent. What’s worse is that he is told, plainly that his preaching will harden their hearts, plug up their ears, and shut their eyes, until the cities are ash and the land is bare (that’s not the result us prophetic preachers want).

Isaiah, reasonably, asks: for how long, Lord? And the answer he receives is: “until there is almost nothing left”.

Isaiah is not sent to win.

He is sent to lose. He is sent to lose faithfully, publicly, and consistently, so that something on the far side of the losing might finally be born.

This is the arithmetic error at the center of the kingdom of God, and I say error the way my accountant friends say it; the way you say it when the numbers simply will not reconcile with the world’s ledger, no matter how many times you run them.

The kingdom of God has never once arrived by conquest. The institution of the church has, but the kingdom of God has only ever arrived the other way: through a servant who does not raise his voice in the street, who is despised, who is led like something silent to a slaughter He does not resist.

In Isaiah’s math, the same math you find hanging on a Roman cross a few centuries later, power is not what you accumulate. Power is what’s left standing on the other side of losing everything in some sort of tragic and beautiful way.

Now we hold that up against the other sending.

America sends people too. Mostly the young, sometimes the under-resourced. Sometimes it is those who may have no other viable options to choose from. And it tends to dress that sending in nearly the same religious vestments….sacrifice, glory, duty, honor. We fold the flag and we play the same six notes on the same brass horns for sons and daughters who we’ve lost (1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, Sgt. Angel Rampersad, and Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton). May they rest in peace.

We say the word “fallen” the way you’d say it in a liturgy, because in this country, that’s precisely what it has become. More money, more bombs, more of our sons and daughters sent, more horrific death, more honoring, and then…more money and bombs. The war that is meant to end all wars and bring stability and peace, never seems to be just that.

One of my “mentors-from-a-distance” Brian Zahnd has spent a career naming this thing for what it is: a civil religion, a folk faith that welds the cross to the flag so completely you can no longer tell, in all the bombs, smoke, and emotion, which one is which. A theology where a soldier’s death somehow stops being an awful tragedy and starts being treated more like atonement; redemptive, nearly eucharistic.

We built a liturgy for the god of war, and then, very quietly, started calling it the Christian way.

The two systems do not resemble each other, no matter how similar the language and the vibes. Isaiah’s system, and Jesus’s system, run on weakness. The machinery of the modern military-industrial complex runs on contracts, and appropriations bills, and bodies. But the deeper divide isn’t the machinery, it’s the actual sender.

There are two different motives at play. God sends in order to give power away. Empire sends in order to accumulate it. And if you want to know which is which, you don’t have to guess. You just have to look at what each one leaves behind in its wake.

What Gets Left in the Street

Since 2001, the Costs of War Project at Brown University has put the price tag of America’s post-9/11 wars near eight trillion dollars, and that figure doesn’t even touch the additional two-plus trillion in veterans’ care obligations still coming due through 2050, a bill we’ve agreed to pay for the brokenness, grief, and illness we continue to perpetuate. In that same ledger: at least four times as many active-duty service members and veterans of those wars have died by suicide as died in combat.

And what does the empire leave in the streets of the very nation it claims to protect? At the last point-in-time count, over thirty-two thousand veterans were sleeping without homes in America. That number has fallen a long way since 2009, and still, veterans remain the slowest-declining homeless population of any group we measure.

We sent them. We handed them the vocabulary of glory and honor on the way out the door, and an unconscionable number of them came home to sleep in a car.

This is the part where I want to be more specific.

When men who call themselves Christians in public, a sitting president, a Secretary of Defense, reach for the language of holy war to consolidate power, to posture strength, to move a public toward the next deployment, they are not doing what Isaiah did.

They are doing the exact inversion of it.

Isaiah, and more specifically Jesus himself, emptied himself into a mission where they lost (outside of the redemptive resurrection). A leader who invokes the name of God while assembling an empire is not offering himself into loss. He is offering other people’s sons and daughters into loss, calling it sacrificial, while keeping the throne and enlarging their territory. That is not the sending of the suffering servant. This is not a variation on the gospel of Christ. It is its antithesis.

So What Do We Do With This

We who call ourselves Christians… what now? A few places to start.

1. Be attentive to our language. Kat Armas has written, carefully and at length, about how the vocabulary of empire seeps into our theological imagination long before we ever get around to seeing it. “Kill it.” “Bullseye.” “Take the next hill.” “On the front lines.” “Take back,” “reclaim territory”, even our songs, the songs we sing on Sunday, train the believing body in what it thinks about power. My wife sang about being a Christian soldier long before she was able to flesh out her theology on violence, suffering, and peacemaking. That is formative. As much as I love some of our contemporary Christian music, we should pause when a room of hundreds is singing about “praise being the weapon our enemies drowned in.”

2. Consider our Christology. Just because a biblical figure is a biblical figure does not mean they are speaking Jesus-aligned theology. David was a warrior-king, and scripture is unflinchingly honest about the blood on his hands and the throne he never fully deserved to sit on. Jesus is the one David’s whole line was pointing toward all along, and Jesus rebuked the sword again and again. A theology that reaches backward for David to justify the modern sword, while stepping neatly around Jesus’s explicit rejection of it, is not reading the whole book in light of the full revelation of who God is. We must read all the text through the lens of Jesus and the Jesus way.

3. Consider The Atonement Theory We Inherited. This one may sound blasphemous to some (I get it). A God who requires the violent death of his own son to satisfy his own wrath sounds, structurally, like the gods Israel was called out of, the gods who required child sacrifice as the price of their favor. A theology built on the premise that God needs violence to set things right is a theology that may eventually, find a way to justify violence downstream of itself, whether in the pulpit, in the voting booth, or in the recruiting office. A nonviolent reading of the cross, one where the cross exposes and absorbs violence rather than requiring it isn’t merely the nicer story to tell your kids. It is a different way of seeing the completed work of the cross of Christ. Instead of Jesus having to die to change God’s disposition toward us, Jesus instead allows humanity to kill Him to change our disposition toward God.

A Different Word Over You

So let this be the word spoken plainly, without the strings swelling underneath it:

Every empire that has ever asked God to bless its bombs has been wrong. Jesus will not bless our bombs. Never has, and never will.

We do not need a god who sanctifies the sword. We have never needed that god. We needed, and have always had, a Lamb who was slain.

So hear this, and let it be a rebuke to every throne that has ever borrowed heaven’s name for its own violent campaign: you do not get to call it holy just because you believe it to be necessary. You do not get to call it sacrifice when it was never yours to give.

And to you, friend, reader, neighbor, tired soul who has maybe sung the wrong songs without knowing it, or used the language that has formed so many of us. This is not a word of condemnation. It is a benediction.

You, too, are sent. Not with a rifle slung over your shoulder, but with your hands wide open, which is a far harder thing to march with.

May every bomb you were ever taught to sing about get beaten down, plate by plate, into a plow.

May the language of conquest lose its grip on your imagination, one hymn, one headline, one honest breath at a time until “take the hill” becomes “till the ground”

May every bullet you learned to call righteous be melted back down and poured into something that feeds a table instead of leaving seats empty.

May you learn to call it peace only when it looks like the kind Jesus made, not the kind that requires a body count to be believed.

You are sent. Go. Blessed are the Peacemakers

Four years ago, I drove into the rolling hills of Kentucky for a week of silence at the Abbey of Gethsemane.

It isn’t a museum. A monastic community of men still wake long before sunrise. They still chant the Psalms in the dark. They still work with their hands, and bake their own bread, and they still believe that if you order your life around solitude, silence, and prayer long enough, God will begin re-ordering your heart.

On the first day, one of the directors welcomed us and gently explained the rules:

Rule #1- Silence. At all times.

Rule #2- Stay on the marked paths while hiking

Rule #3- If you come upon a hermitage during any of your day hikes, under no circumstances should anyone go inside. Access into hermitages belongs to monks and family members of those monks alone.

Now, if you know me, you know I’m actually a rule follower. I return my shopping cart. I don’t cut in line. I pay my taxes. But there is something deeply broken inside me….

I follow the rules until someone says “I must follow the rules”. Then I almost always break them. (I’ve been in therapy for years for this. Please know I’m trying).

My best friend Bryon has the same affliction. He looked at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said anything because we were technically on a silent retreat. Which, in retrospect, made planning the crime considerably more difficult.

But that evening, after Compline (evening prayer), we slipped into the Kentucky darkness. We climbed a stone wall that had spent decades keeping retreat attenders honest and on the main grounds. It failed on us. We tracked through woods we weren’t supposed to be in, walked nearly a mile through the dark, and eventually found it.

A small stone cabin beneath the trees. No sign. No gift shop. No plaque announcing its importance. It was the Hermitage of the one and only, Thomas Merton.

If you’ve never heard of Merton, imagine someone with the theological imagination of C.S. Lewis, the contemplative depth of the Desert Fathers & Mothers, the social courage of Martin Luther King Jr., and the literary output of someone who apparently never slept. More than seventy books, thousands of essays, decades of journals. He challenged war before it was fashionable. He confronted racism in when many white churches preferred polite silence. He befriended Buddhist monks while remaining deeply Christian. He became one of the most influential spiritual voices of the last century in the United States. Thomas Merton was the Michael Jordan of Tappist Monks.

And almost none of it came from a big platform. It came from that little cabin, as he sat alone…in solitude.

That matters because most monks at Gethsemani were never granted permission for hermitage. Among the Trappists, solitude wasn’t an escape from community. It was the reward for someone who had already been formed by it.

Merton waited nearly twenty-five years before he was entrusted with that hermitage. And now Bryon and I sat outside that cabin asking the same question that has haunted me ever since.

How does someone disappear from the crowd, and somehow become more useful to it?

How did some of the most consequential Christian thought of the last century come out of a cement hut with no crowd, no platform, no podcast, and no audience at all?

I’ve come to believe the answer is not despite the solitude. It’s because of it.

And I think we need that answer badly right now, not as a spiritual nicety, but as something closer to a survival tool. I want to make the case that solitude, real solitude, is not a retreat from the world. It is one of the only things left that can actually save us AND save it.

The Crowd We Can’t Stop Feeding

I was in Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago with that same friend from the Kentucky woods. Late one night we tried to walk toward the White House and couldn’t get anywhere close. The perimeter had swallowed the block. Behind the fences, cranes stretched into the sky, raising a stadium for the country’s biggest birthday, and, not incidentally, the President’s own.

Say what you want about the current administration, but it has given America the purest distillation of a tone this country has always secretly been addicted to: bigger, better, best, “HUGE”. The bigger the crowd, the more it proves something. And if the latest event crowd broke a record, the next one has to break it again, because the whole operation runs on the assumption that if the applause ever goes quiet, so do you. But I don’t think Trump invented America’s obsession with spectacle. I think he recognized an addiction that was already there and it happened to collide with his temptation to relevance. Pres has discovered there is extraordinary power in feeding our obsession every single day.

He isn’t the sickness, but he is one of the dealers.

I’d love to tell you I’m above it. I’m not. Any time a piece I write starts to get traction, a share, a comment, some small, hungry animal in me whispers “get the next one out before this fades”. That whisper doesn’t just live in the Oval Office, it lives in our notifications, in our quarterly numbers, in our follower counts, in the deal you’re chasing to prove the last one wasn’t a fluke. You don’t need a rally to be addicted to a crowd. A crowd is just any audience whose approval you’ve started mistaking for your worth and identity.

And the American church, God help us, is not immune. If attendance is up, if the prayer nights are packed. If Christmas was standing room only, we call it revival and need to keep it going, never stopping long enough to ask what exactly, what we’re actually forming, or who it’s quietly forming in us.

Which is why Jesus keeps leaving.

He’d just fed five thousand people and the crowd tried to crown him on the spot, and he dismissed them and went up a mountain alone (Matthew 14:22–23). He’d just healed the sick and cast out demons while an entire town gathered at Simon’s door, and before dawn, while it was still dark, he slipped away to be by himself (Mark 1:35–38). His fame was spreading, the sick were lining up, and Luke tells us he often withdrew to lonely places to pray, not once, but as a regular rhythm after the spectacular has just gone down (Luke 5:15–16).

He understood something we’ve forgotten, or maybe never embraced as American Christians…

Crowds make terrible shepherds.

Crowds are really bad at forming us spiritually.

Without solitude, the crowd begins to shape you, more than you shape the crowd. It changes you quietly, one round of applause at a time, until the crowd stops being your assignment and it becomes your addiction. You start chasing one crowd, then the next. One platform, then the next. One milestone, one metric, one moment of relevance, until you’ve become remarkably good at gathering people and accolades, and you no longer transform anyone. Instead they start transforming you.

Jesus refused to let a crowd tell him who he was. So in the moment the temptation was strongest; full synagogues, standing ovations, a nation trying to hand him a crown, he withdrew, and let his Father say the only sentence sturdy enough to hold him: you are not your platform, or your latest miracle. “You are my beloved”.

The Fatigue No One Is Naming

There’s a second thing happening to us that we don’t have great language for yet, so let me try: decision fatigue at civilizational scale.

We are living through a season where the news cycle refreshes faster than the human nervous system was built to process it. A new executive order, a new indictment, a new impeachment, a new crisis, a new outrage, a new emergency requiring your immediate opinion before you’ve finished having one about yesterday’s. Political turmoil doesn’t just cost us peace, It actually costs us the necessary bandwidth; the actual cognitive and emotional capacity required to make good decisions about our own lives, our children, our relationship, our work.

Every alert is a tiny toll booth.

Pay attention here. And here. And here again.

By the time you get to the decision that actually belongs to you… should I take this job? is this the right school? can this marriage bear one more hard conversation tonight? Should I go to bed right now? You’re running on fumes, because you already spent your daily allotment of discernment scrolling.

Solitude isn’t an escape from the decisions. It’s where you get the clarity to actually make them well.

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The Feelings We Can’t Put Down

And then there’s the third thing, the one I think is quietly the most dangerous: we have become addicted to our own emotional responses to the chaos.

We live in an age of emotional reaction.

On a macro level we see this with Iran/US war. It is tit for tat, one country responds to the other, who responds to the other, who responds to the other. Our President recently highlighted this on Truth Social as he posted , “Every time Iran kills an American Soldier they will pay for that killing many times over!”

On a micro level, Your spouse says something sharp, so you say something sharper back. A coworker sends a passive-aggressive email, so you draft one twice as pointed in return. Your kid slams a door, so you slam it right back with your voice. Someone comments something cutting online, and before you’ve even finished reading it, your thumbs are already composing the reply that will make sure they know you won. Every headline demands outrage. Every election demands panic.Every controversy demands instant opinion.

The pendulum swings. Then swings back. Then swings harder.

But reaction is not vision. Reaction is still allowing someone else to determine your direction. Jesus never let Rome dictate His agenda. Nor the Pharisees. Nor the Zealots. Nor the crowds. Nor even His enemies. Because His life was not built in reaction, but vision for the coming Kingdom.

Howard Thurman observed: “The movement of the Spirit of God in the hearts of men often calls them to act against the spirit of their times.”

The spirit of our time is a time of emotional reaction

But Jesus would not do it. When emotion hit, and his cousin was beheaded, or a best friend betrayed, He withdrew for solitude.

The Thesis

Here it is, plainly: if anything can sustain us, actually sustain us, not just distract us through the addiction to the crowd, the fatigue of endless decision, and the compulsive performance of our own feelings, it is the lost art of true solitude.

Not solitude from people. Solitude for people; the kind Moses practiced before he ever led anyone, the kind Elijah practiced before he ever confronted a nation, the kind a cement hut in the Kentucky woods once produced enough wisdom to outlast the man who wrote it.

Jesus didn’t withdraw to abandon the mission. He withdrew to remember whose mission it was.

So let me ask you what I had to ask myself outside that hermitage: what crowd am I quietly addicted to gathering? What decisions am I making on a nervous system running on empty? And what feeling have I mistaken for faithfulness?

And then, before you answer any of that in public, go somewhere quiet, and let God answer it with you first. The crowd will still be there when you get back. It’s always there. That’s part of the whole problem.

But you might not be, not the version of you the crowd has been quietly shaping. And that’s the version worth going into the woods to save.

In 1857, the United States Supreme Court handed down one of the most devastating decisions in American history: Dred Scott v. Sandford.

Dred Scott was a man who had lived in free territory and petitioned the courts for his freedom. However, in the landmark 1857 U.S. Supreme Court case, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a 7-2 decision against Dred Scott. Authored by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the ruling made three sweeping declarations…

First, the Court declared that enslaved and free Black Americans were not, and never could be citizens of the United States. Because of this, Scott had no legal standing to sue in a federal court.

Second, The Court ruled that Congress did not have the authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories, stripping the federal government of its power to limit the spread of slavery.

But number three…number three was the real deal breaker. The Court stated that slaves were property, and that Congress could not deprive enslavers of their property.

Listen to that conclusion again. Do you hear it? Before they could own his body, they had to rename his personhood.

He had to become “property”.

The Court went further, declaring that people of African descent “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” And just like that injustice was give an official vocabulary, and certain people could begin mistaking oppression for order.

This is how empire works. The first battle is rarely over territory. It is over vocabulary. Words do not merely describe the world. They create worlds.

Words tell us who matters.

Words tell us who belongs.

Who deserves dignity.

Who deserves protection.

And who can be ignored.

History is filled with examples.

Pharaoh never called it slavery. He called it “labor”.

Rome never called it conquest. They called it “peace”.

Segregation was not oppression. It was “separate but equal”.

And civilian deaths have to often become “collateral damage” and torture, “enhanced interrogation”.

The words change. The strategy remains.

Power often edits the dictionary before it edits history.

And followers of Jesus should pay attention whenever beautiful words suddenly become suspicious ones. Because empire has always tried to rename the things it fears most.

The New Dictionary

Consider three words. “Virtue”, “Woke”, and “Empathy”.

None of these words began as threats.

In fact, Scripture celebrates all three.

Jesus never mocked virtue.

He told His followers:

“Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

The Kingdom has always believed goodness should become visible. Not for applause, nor for self-promotion, but because a transformed life becomes evidence that another world is possible.

Yet somehow virtue became “virtue signaling”.

A phrase designed to make every public expression of goodness immediately suspect. Generosity all of a sudden becomes performance. Justice all of a sudden has a villainous motive, and compassion becomes a publicity stunt.

The accusation does not even need to be true. It only needs to make cynicism feel intelligent. But let’s be honest, cynical people rarely build anything, they simply mock the people who do.

Then came “woke”.

Ironically the Bible is filled with awakening language.

“Wake up, O sleeper.”

“Stay awake and pray.”

Biblical awakening has always meant opening our eyes to realities we would rather avoid. Jesus people stay awake to…

The widow.

The orphan.

The immigrant.

The poor at the gate.

The violence hiding beneath political and religious institutions.

The prophets were awake, Jesus was awake, the early church was awake.

To be awake is to notice suffering that comfort has trained us to ignore. Awake people ask uncomfortable questions to themselves and the surrounding culture. Awake people challenge convenient lies, or assumptions that have been handed down. And…awake people are difficult to control.

So eventually “awake” became an insult. Why? Because sleeping people are easier to govern and control.

And then perhaps the saddest theft of all.

“Empathy”.

Some now speak of empathy as though it is a modern political invention. Yet Jesus followers should know better. Empathy is not a trend. Empathy is the logic of the Incarnation.

“The Word became flesh.”

God did not love humanity from a safe distance. He entered our suffering. He experienced hunger. He wept. He touched lepers. He welcomed outsiders. He carried our pain in His own body. Empathy is simply love refusing to remain abstract and at a distance. Which is exactly why empire fears it.

Every system built on exploitation eventually requires the same thing: A hardened heart.

Pharaoh had one.

Rome had one.

And every society, including America’s is tempted toward the same condition. Why? Because exploitation requires emotional distance.

I continue to observe that you cannot comfortably profit from people whose suffering you are actually willing to feel.

So empathy becomes weakness.

Mercy becomes naïve.

Compassion becomes something to apologize for.

And slowly, we become suspicious of the very qualities that look most like Jesus.

An Unexpected Theology from Despicable Me

My youngest daughter Lucy has watched Despicable Me enough times that I can practically quote the movie. One specific scene always makes her laugh.

The villain introduces himself:

“"I'm applying for a new villain loan. Go by the name of 'Vector'. It's a mathematical term, represented by an arrow with both direction and magnitude! Vector! That's me, 'cause I'm committing crimes with both direction and magnitude. Oh yeah!"

Then he finishes his introduction with an awkward little hip thrust that all of my six children can now mimic with gross precision.

It is ridiculous. It is also strangely profound.

Because Vector actually gives us a helpful picture for understanding power. A vector is something with both direction and magnitude. It tells you not only how strong something is. It tells you where it is going, and every word has a vector. Every phrase. Every slogan. Every movement. Every cultural moment.

Language is never simply sitting still. It is always moving power somewhere. Toward someone. Or away from someone.

So I have developed a simple diagnostic tool. I call it….

“The Power Vector Test”

Whenever I hear a new phrase, or an old word suddenly being treated differently, I ask: “Where is this moving power?”

Every use of language is moving power in one of two directions.

Is it moving power toward those who already have the most? Or toward those who have the least?

Is this word being used to accumulate power...or to release it, empowering others?

That’s the test.

Empire weaponizes language to consolidate control. The Kingdom speaks to redistribute dignity.

Empire uses words to protect the powerful. Jesus uses words to lift the most vulnerable.

Empire labels people so it can dismiss them. Jesus specifically names people so He can restore them.

Empire creates categories that justify exclusion. The Kingdom creates belonging and widens the family boundaries.

Whenever a word makes us less willing to see another person’s humanity, be suspicious. Whenever a phrase excuses indifference toward suffering, pay attention. Whenever language allows us to stop loving our neighbor, we are no longer speaking the dialect of Jesus.

The direction of power reveals the spirit behind the vocabulary. Not every new phrase is evil. Not every cultural movement is righteous. But every word eventually reveals the kingdom (And the King) it serves.

Stealing Them Back

But the answer isn’t to invent new words.

The answer is to faithfully embody and inhabit the old ones.

Let’s reclaim virtue by quietly becoming people whose lives are beautiful enough to make cynicism look boring.

Let’s reclaim awakening by refusing the comfort of selective blindness.

Let’s reclaim empathy by entering the suffering of our neighbors the way Christ entered ours.

Empires rename words because they fear what those words create. The Church must refuse the theft, not merely by arguing over definitions, but by embodying them.

The early Christians reclaimed “Lord” by giving it to Jesus instead of Caesar.

They reclaimed “power” by washing feet.

They reclaimed “greatness” by becoming servants.

They reclaimed “victory” through a cross.

This has always been the way of Christ.

Followers of Jesus do not simply define words differently. We live them differently, and perhaps that is our calling in this cultural moment. Not to win the dictionary, but to become the kind of people who make stolen words beautiful again.

Friends, In the Kingdom of God, language is never ultimately redeemed by argument, it is redeemed by faithful embodiment.

Many of us out here on the interwebs have loved ones, (both friends and family), that we regularly share a table with. Same turkey, same prayer before the meal, same hands passing the same dishes for decades. And like many, you have watched over the past decade completely befuddled.

The crazier this country gets, the nuttier this administration’s decisions, the tighter their grip becomes. Every headline that should make a person let go, drives them to hold on harder. You, like many watch it happen and are genuinely puzzled. You are confused the way you’d be confused watching someone grip a hot stove tighter the longer it burns.

And you don’t think they’re villains. Most the time, you don’t even think they have bad motives. But you are still asking why? How? What exactly is going on?

Let me take a swing at this one….

Something has gone wrong with the soul of a large swath of American Christianity, and I think it can be named plainly: we are making our decisions out of fear, and we have called that fear “conviction.”

Fear of globalization, and what it will do to the version of this country we grew up believing was ours.

Fear of progressive ideology, and what it will do to a moral framework we built our identity on.

Fear of people who think differently than we do.

Fear, very specifically, of sexuality and gender refusing to stay where we put them.

And underneath all of it, a fear that if we don’t fight for power, we will lose everything that makes us who we are.

So we’ve doubled down. We’ve traded prophetic imagination for political strategy and power grabbing. We’ve confused “holding the line” with holding office.

And when a large chunk of the American church is driven by fear, we end up choosing a strongman to guard our walls instead of asking what God might be doing on the other side of them. So much of our current administration is the fruit of a fear-driven church. This is what you get when a people mistake fear for wisdom, and certainty for faith.

Here’s what I’ve been fixated on for years: the thing that built the global Christian movement in the first place was the opposite instinct entirely. It was a man having his whole worldview threatened to its foundation, and instead of digging in, he let it go.

That man was Peter. And I don’t think we’ve sat with how terrifying that moment in Acts 10 actually was for him, because if we had, we might recognize ourselves in it a lot faster than we’d like to.

The vision that should have broken Peter

Peter is on a rooftop in Joppa. He’s hungry. He falls into a trance, and heaven opens. A sheet descends, lowered by its four corners, filled with every kind of four-footed animal, reptile, and bird, the clean and the unclean tangled in the same fabric. And a voice says: “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

We tend to read this as a nice little lesson about inclusion. Don’t be so quick to judge people. God loves everybody. Cue the Gentiles (non-Jews). They get in on this gospel too!

But if we stop there, we’ve skipped past the actual cost of the moment, and missed the entire blueprint for how God grows a people who are afraid.

This wasn’t a preference Peter was being asked to consider. It was his entire identity as a Jewish man.

I keep returning to theologian Willie James Jennings’ commentary on Acts for this passage, because he refuses to let us flatten it into a nice moral teaching. Jennings calls what’s unfolding across the whole book of Acts the “revolution of the intimate,” and it doesn’t arrive the way revolutions usually do. It isn’t forced on the world through violence, the way every empire, including Rome, including America, has always expanded. But neither is it cowardice, bowing to the real fears of a scattered, threatened people. It’s something stranger than both: God moving toward joining, intimately, in a way that unsettles exactly as much as it comforts. That’s the room Peter is standing in. Not a debate about menu items, but an invitation into a joining he did not ask for and is not sure he wants.

What was actually on the table

For Peter, kosher law wasn’t a dietary restriction. It was the architecture of his entire belonging, every meal structured by Leviticus 11, the daily practice of being a people set apart in the middle of empires that wanted to swallow them whole. The food laws were a wall, and the wall had kept something precious alive: a people, a story, a covenant.

Jennings has a way of describing what eating meant in the ancient world that I’ve never forgotten. To see an animal was to see a people; eating one was never thoughtless, but bound up in a web of relationship and obligation. Eating was relational, costly, entangled with a whole way of living.

So when that sheet comes down, it isn’t a menu. It’s a cosmos of relationship, peoples, customs, whole ways of being human, offered to Peter as food. To eat what a people eats is to enter their world. The sheet was never about animals. It was God asking: will you join the people you’ve spent your life being taught to stay separate from?

Peter, like many of us church folk, says “no” to God. Three times.

“By no means, Lord. For I have never eaten anything common or unclean.”

But please don’t hear this as stubbornness.

This is faithfulness, the moral compass of his ancestors for a thousand years, built around the conviction that this is how you stay clean before God. To eat the unclean animal is, in his bones, a betrayal of everyone who held the line before him.

That is a different kind of ask than “update your theology.” It’s “let your whole life be rearranged around people you didn’t choose.” It should feel terrifying, and we should not breeze past that terror to get to the nice ending.

A word for those of us digging in

I want to pause here and say something directly to the religious leaders in this story, the Pharisees, the ones who later “criticized” Peter for eating with Gentiles (Acts 11:2-3).

I don’t think they were villains. I actually think they were guardians.

Somebody has to hold the line. Somebody has to remember why it was drawn, usually in blood, usually in exile, because giving an inch once meant losing everything.

I think of all my Jewish friends around the world here. When you’ve watched your people nearly disappear into empire after empire, “holding fast to what we know” isn’t legalism. It’s love; a faithfulness that has earned the right to be suspicious of anyone announcing “God’s doing something new now.”

That fear is real, born from a real history of diaspora and loss. We owe these men our empathy, not our scorn. The wall had protected something true.

The question Acts 10 puts in front of all of us isn’t whether the wall was wrong to build. It’s what do you do when God tells you the wall has done its work and now wants you to walk through the gate?

Coming back to us

I don’t think we’re so different from Peter’s first audience, and I say that as someone who has stood inside this fear, not above it.

American Christianity is living through its own version of that rooftop vision, reacting the way Peter first did: By no means, Lord!

Globalization put us next to neighbors who don’t think, vote, or worship like we do, and it felt like the walls protecting our preferred national experience were coming down.

Progressive ideology pressed into the moral framework we’d built our lives on, and it felt like the floor giving way. The conversation around sexuality and gender moved from “out there” into our own families, our own pews, our own kids, and for many it felt less like a debate and more like an invasion.

The response, broadly, has been the opposite of Peter’s. Rather than staying hungry and prayerful before God, large parts of the American church grabbed for power instead: political alliances, culture-war messaging, a hardening into “us versus them” that treats every compromise as the first crack in the dam.

This is the soil dictatorship grows in, not a fluke of politics, but the harvest of a church that decided defending the wall mattered more than asking who built it. We started protecting our position instead of seeking God’s posture, and a church once known for the wideness of its mercy became known instead for the tightness of its grip.

But a wall built to protect something holy can calcify into a wall that protects us from God. And when that happens, we do exactly what the circumcised believers almost did to Peter: treat the boundary as more sacred than the God who set it, mistake our cultural survival for covenant faithfulness, and miss the Spirit already falling on the people we decided were unclean.

Here’s the word I keep coming back to: A church that chooses Caesar’s methods to protect God’s people will end up worshipping Caesar and calling it faithfulness.

Power was never the Spirit’s strategy. Joining was. Every time we reach for the first instead of trusting the second, we hand the next generation one more reason to walk away from the church of Jesus.

How Peter actually got there

How does anyone move from “by no means, Lord” to walking into a Gentile’s house declaring their belonging, without losing himself?

It wasn’t a debate he won. It was a posture he chose, and it wasn’t the first time God had done this.

Jennings traces the same Spirit-movement back to Pentecost, when the disciples found themselves speaking the languages of people they’d have called foreign their whole lives, something none of them imagined or wanted as the sign of the Spirit’s arrival. It was born from God’s desire, not theirs. The pattern was already set: God keeps initiating “joinings” God’s people would never have asked for on their own.

Three movements carried Peter from refusal to surrender, and I think they’re still the way forward for me and anyone standing on their own rooftop, deciding whether to dig in or open their hands.

1. He stayed hungry and prayerful at the same time.

The vision doesn’t come while Peter is comfortable, or barricaded behind certainty. It comes while he’s praying and hungry, body and spirit both open, both reaching. Peter wasn’t looking for a loophole, and he wasn’t defending one either. He was simply present to God with his full self.

One friend once told me that fear prays to be reassured. Faith prays to be changed. If we want to discern what God is doing in a changing world, we have to stop praying from a fortress.

2. He let the vision interrupt him three times before he trusted it.

Peter didn’t capitulate on contact. The sheet came down three times. He said no three times. Discernment is not collapsing the moment you feel uncomfortable, and it’s not refusing the moment you feel challenged. Peter sat in the tension, “inwardly perplexed,” rather than forcing a premature conclusion, or mistaking his own discomfort for God’s disapproval.

Real spiritual courage isn’t reacting instantly, not with a hard no and not with an easy yes. It’s staying in the discomfort long enough for the Spirit to finish what God is speaking.

3. He let the fruit confirm what the vision had already shown him.

Here’s the part we skip past fastest, and the part that should anchor us most. Peter didn’t act on the vision alone. He watched. At Cornelius’s house, while Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell on the Gentiles exactly as it had at Pentecost. His response wasn’t a theological argument. It was: “Can anyone withhold water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”

He let the evidence of God’s actual presence in actual people confirm what the vision had already told him. He watched for the Spirit, and when he saw it unmistakably alive in people he’d been taught to call unclean, he had the humility to ask: who am I to stand in God’s way.

Where this leaves us

If you’ve felt the ground shift under your feet, by the world, by your kids, by an election cycle that keeps asking you to choose power over peace, the answer is not to grip the wall tighter, and it isn’t to tear every wall down because it’s uncomfortable to hold one.

The answer Acts 10 offers is slower and humbler than either: stay hungry, stay prayerful, don’t rush past your discomfort in either direction, and watch for where the Spirit is already showing up in places your old framework told you to call unclean. That is the opposite of doubling down, and the opposite of caving. It is the move that built the church in the first place, and the only move that will keep the American church from becoming a cautionary tale instead of a prophetic witness.

Jennings’ phrase keeps coming back to me: “God joins without destruction, except what humility sheds.” Nothing essential about Peter died on that rooftop. His love of Torah didn’t die. His Jewishness didn’t die. What died was the certainty that the wall and the covenant were the same thing. That’s the only casualty intimacy with God ever asks for, not our convictions, but the parts of our convictions that were really just our fear, masked as our faithfulness.

Peter didn’t lose his faith on that rooftop. He found out how much bigger it was than the wall he’d built to protect it.

You and I, and the rest of the church in America gets to decide which one we’re known for.

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It wasn’t falling apart. It wasn’t dangerous. People had lived there in the recent past. Small businesses had run on the first floor for years. The bones of the building were good. The structure was still solid. And yet, it was coming down anyway.

Why?

Because someone did the math and decided something bigger should stand in its place.

More units.

More square footage.

Higher rents.

Greater returns.

In New York, we see this constantly. The perfectly good demolished so the maximally profitable can rise from its dust.

Sometimes that’s necessary, but most of the time if we are honest, it is not.

Every time I watch another building fall, I think about a strange little parable Jesus once told.

It was about a man with a barn problem.

He wasn’t poor. He wasn’t desperate. He wasn’t facing scarcity.

His problem was his excess.

His fields had been so generous, so wildly abundant, that his barns could no longer hold everything they produced. Thus, the man faced a question; the question abundance always eventually asks:

What shall I do?

The man could have fed his neighbors. He could have released people from debt. He could have expanded opportunity, shared the harvest, and opened his gates for a year of Jubilee!

But instead, he made a real estate decision. He tore down the barns and he built bigger ones.

And Jesus tells us that God looks at this man, this successful, prosperous, hardworking man, and calls him a fool.

Not because he was wicked, but because he was blind. He was blind to what abundance is actually for.

Enter the world’s first trillionaire…

This month, Elon Musk became something the world has never seen before. After SpaceX went public, his combined wealth crossed $1.26 trillion, a number so large it doesn’t fully live in the human imagination, only paper.

In the same way that the man in the parable outgrew his barn, Musk has outgrown the mathematical imagination of the human.

Spending one million dollars every single hour, it would take more than a century to spend a trillion. His fortune now equals roughly 3% of the entire American GDP. Musk is worth nearly four times the second wealthiest person on earth. The next four richest humans combined cannot match him.

However, this is not just success. This is also barn problem.

Let’s ensure we have some good context here….

With $1 trillion, we could bring clean water to every person on earth who is dying of thirst right now. We could end global hunger… not reduce it… end it. We could fully fund America’s most neglected public schools for a generation and give every child the start they were promised. We could build enough affordable housing to get every unhoused person in every American city off the street. We could provide health insurance to every uninsured American.

And he would still have hundreds of billions left over.

These are not fantasies. They are math problems with known solutions and insufficient will.

And while that wealth was accumulating, while the barn was being built bigger, something else was happening.

Musk and DOGE drove the dismantling of USAID, the most effective humanitarian infrastructure the world has likely known. Models tracking those cuts estimate that more than 762,000 people have died as a result. More than 500,000 of them were children. Conservative projections placed 200,000 children under five dead in 2025 alone, marking the first rise in under-five child mortality in this entire century.

One child….every forty seconds.

The barn kept getting bigger, and the children kept dying.

Now, I know the response many of you will give me after reading the first half of this article. I’ve heard it a hundred times….

“Dan, why would you expect Elon Musk to do what the church of Jesus should be doing for the world?”

It’s a fair question. And I’ll give you a straight answer…

I’m not overly concerned with Musks’ trillions (though I think he should give away billions of dollars to the stuff I listed above). I am concerned about those of us claiming the way of Jesus in our time. I’m attempting to leverage our opinions of the newest king of capitalism (Elon) to show where our preferred economic world view has shaped us more than the words and ways of Christ.

What I have watched is far too many church folk across this country become more committed to defending our economic framework that has led to this type of disparity than to the Sermon on the Mount. More comfortable protecting an economic ideology than standing with our most vulnerable neighbors. We have too often confused prosperity with blessing, accumulation with faithfulness, and the American dream with the Kingdom of God.

That’s not a conservative problem or a liberal problem.

That’s a theological problem.

The man in the parable asks a very important questions, “What shall I do?”

Abundance always asks that same question.

He could have chosen differently. The land was his. The harvest was real. His success was legitimate. But the imagination he brought to his abundance was tragically small. He could only see one future for it: More for me.

Two thousand years later, we are still building bigger barns.

We just call them different things now.

Investment portfolios.

Corporate mergers.

Luxury developments.

Market expansion.

The modern economy has become extraordinarily efficient at answering How do we make more? And it is far less interested in asking Who benefits? Or Who gets left behind? Or Who never got a chance to begin with?

The issue is not wealth. The issue is what we worship.

The issue is what kind of people we have become, that we can look at one man holding more wealth than most nations, while children die from preventable diseases in countries we defunded, and call it the inspiring fruit of a capitalistic framework, or shrug it off while thinking to ourselves “Well at least it’s not socialism”.

By the way, hear me out before you think I’m promoting socialism. I know capitalism can be an effective economic framework at times. It can generate innovation and opportunity and remarkable prosperity (clearly).

But it is a terrible moral framework. Markets are designed to reward value creation, not justice. Profitability and righteousness are not the same thing. The market can tell you what something costs. It cannot tell you what a human being is worth (though it tries).

And when Christians forget that distinction, we become vulnerable to the oldest temptation in the Book: rationalizing greed and calling it blessing, while we defend specific systems because they have kept us in power.

Dr. Malcolm Foley reminds us that greed is not simply one American sin among many. It sits much closer to the center of our story than we’d like to admit.

The American project was fueled by extraordinary aspirations, liberty, self-governance, dignity. It was also fueled by greed.

Greed for land.

Greed for labor.

Greed for wealth.

Greed that justified the removal of Indigenous peoples. Greed that rationalized slavery. Greed that always, always found theological language to bless what Jesus would have confronted.

Race became the tool, but greed was the engine.

Frederick Douglass saw it clearly. He watched Christians sing hymns while benefiting from systems of exploitation. He watched people confess faith while protecting structures that enriched some at the expense of others.

And he concluded there was a profound difference between the Christianity of Christ and the Christianity of America.

Douglass’ distinction is worth revisiting, urgently, because greed remains the most respectable idol in this country.

Greed gets promoted.

Greed gets profiled.

Greed gets keynote speaking slots and magazine covers.

Greed even gets called vision and leadership.

The Church has long been more comfortable confronting private individual sins than public systemic ones like our collective greed. But Jesus had the opposite instinct. He talked about money relentlessly, not because He was obsessed with economics, but because He understood something we still resist:

Greed doesn’t merely affect what we own. It slowly reshapes what we love.

It trains us to see neighbors as competitors, and communities as markets. It trains us to see housing as an asset class, and people as consumers. And it trains us to see abundance as something to be protected rather than distributed with radical joy. hospitality, and celebration.

Which means following Jesus requires more than personal generosity.

It requires counter-formation against the ways our capitalistic framework spiritually forms us.

We must become the kind of people who resist the pull to build bigger barns, even when the culture applauds their construction.

We distribute power instead of hoarding it.

We resource women, immigrants, the poor, and communities that have been historically locked out of optimal opportunity.

We challenge policies that preserve inequality while insisting everyone started from the same place.

We support affordable housing, fair wages, quality education, not as political positions, but as theological ones.

We practice generosity that actually costs us something, knowing that there is a difference between charitable giving and transformative generosity. (Charity maintains the distance between giver and receiver. Transformative generosity collapses that gap almost every time.)

We reject excess as a marker of spiritual maturity, and we reject any language that automatically equates our excess to God’s favor or blessing.

And we recover the radical, ancient conviction that abundance is never given solely for the benefit of the person holding it.

The Kingdom of God does not measure success by what I accumulate.

It measures faithfulness by how much love flows through me.

That’s why Jesus wasn’t ultimately talking about barns. He was talking about my soul. Jesus was talking about what happens when accumulation becomes my purpose, when an entire culture starts applauding the bigger barn while ignoring the people sleeping outside of them.

America just produces its first trillionaire before it figured out how to house its neighbors, feed its children, and reckon honestly with the inequalities embedded in its foundations, Christians should not be leading the applause or defending capitalism like it is our religion.

We should be asking the question Jesus asked from the very beginning.

How much is enough?

Pneuma pythona. The spirit of the Python. A young girl in Philippi, described by Luke with almost clinical detachment, carries this python spirit. She is economically productive. Her bondage has become lucrative, her captivity is organized, and her suffering is monetized. Her owners don’t want her to be healed, they would rather have her useful.

The Python, in ancient mythology, was the great serpent coiled around the oracle at Delphi, the keeper of secrets, the guardian of prophetic access. Slain by Apollo but never fully gone, some say the Python’s spirit lingered, its primary function to speak on behalf of the powerful and silence everyone else.

To be wrapped by the Python was to have your voice strangled from the inside out.

I’d like to suggest to you that we are living in a Python moment.

“Quiet. Quiet, Piggy.”

Last week, President Donald Trump walked off the set of a Meet the Press interview with Kristen Welker, calling her “either crooked or stupid” before leaving mid-conversation. It was a spectacle. It was also a normal pattern.

In November 2025, Trump told Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey to stop talking, calling her “piggy.” He told ABC’s Rachel Scott she was “the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place.” He called a Black female reporter “a dumb person” for pointing out that a White House renovation project had doubled in cost.

He has attacked women journalists by name, by demeanor, by perceived smile (or lack thereof). There is no way around, POTUS has shown a pattern of silencing women who ask questions of him.

(Now…hold tight and remember the Python spirit as we talk empire for a hot sec.)

Empire, and make no mistake, what we are watching is the operating logic of empire, runs on controlled narrative. The first casualty of every consolidating power is not the opposition party. It is an interrogatory question. The inconvenient, persistent, expensive question that is asked by someone who was not supposed to speak.

When a president calls a female reporter “piggy” and tells her to be quiet, he is not just being rude. He is showing whose voice matters. He is enforcing a hierarchy. He is saying, I will decide who speaks, and about what, and for how long. (Big Python vibes here)

The girl in Philippi didn’t choose her condition. She was in it, and her captors had dressed her suffering up as some type of spiritual significance. When Paul finally sets her free, the text states, her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone.

This wasn’t about a theology or worldview. The trigger for a chain of events that would lead to Paul and Silas’ imprisonment was profit margin.

It’s always the profit margin. It’s always about the power.

Now on to the Epstein Files

The House of Representatives voted 427–1 to release all documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. That is as close to unanimous as American governance gets.

And yet, the files have been delayed, redacted, slow-walked, and selectively released in ways that have protected the powerful at every turn. Three million documents were released in January 2026. Already released emails include Epstein referencing Trump and writing of him: “Of course he knew about the gir—” The sentence trails off in the document. The redactions seem to hold.

(More python vibes)

What is the Epstein case? It is the story of powerful men, Democrats and Republicans alike, financiers, royalty, and celebrities, who built a system that trafficked in the bodies of young women and girls (just like the one in Acts 16), who used money and access and silence as the operating mechanism, who found that every institution meant to expose them could also be leveraged to protect them.

This is the Python’s most sophisticated form. This Spirit is not about some crude and overt street-corner silencing. But instead the systemic kind, where silence is baked into the architecture. Where NDAs replace open conversations, and where money replaces accountability.

Willie James Jennings, writing about the book of Acts, says something that has stuck with me for years: “Acts is not primarily a manual for church growth, it is a story about the Spirit of God moving through Empire, exposing what empire needs to stay intact. And what empire always needs is someone to exploit.”

Egypt needed it. Rome needed it. The Spanish Crown needed it. The antebellum South needed it.

Every empire needs a group of people whose suffering funds the comfort and power of everyone above them, and a Python-like spirit to ensure that this group cannot speak coherently or in unity about what is happening to them.

The Epstein files reveal the shape of a system designed to coil around the most vulnerable, extract from them, and silence anyone who tries to name it.

And now, let’s talk about the Southern Baptist Convention

This week, in Orlando, Florida, the Southern Baptist Convention voted 6,028 to 2,026, a 3-to-1 margin, to advance a formal constitutional ban on women serving as pastors. The amendment would expel any church that affirms, appoints, or endorses a woman “serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, specifically preaching to the assembled congregation.”

To understand this moment, you have to understand the history.

The SBC was founded in 1845. The reason it split from Northern Baptists was not a polite theological disagreement. It was slavery. The SBC broke away to defend the right of slaveholders to be missionaries. This is the institution’s origin story.

In 1995, the SBC formally apologized for its role in supporting slavery and racial segregation. That was 150 years after the founding. (Yes, Church folk are slow sometimes).

But let’s name the pattern once again. The Spirit of the Python seems to be moving these days.

The Python’s method is always the same: identify the voice that threatens the arrangement. Give that silencing theological language. Build it into the constitution so that it is no longer a preference but a requirement. Then enforce it with exclusion.

The SBC has, in recent years, also been rocked by devastating sexual abuse scandals, a years-long investigation revealed that hundreds of church leaders had been accused of abuse, and that SBC leadership had, for decades, actively worked to protect the institution rather than the victims. (That is some python work right there).

Many of those victims were women. Many of the voices calling for accountability were women. Many of the people the SBC has expelled have been churches that allowed women to preach.

I am asking you to sit with that architecture.

In a denomination still reckoning with the systemic silencing of abused women, the convention this week voted, overwhelmingly, to constitutionally prohibit women from speaking from the front of the room.

A system where the people most harmed are also the people most officially silenced is not a theological position. It is the Philippian ownership structure.

It is that python once again.

Why Is the Python Stirring?

Here is a question I have been sitting with for the past year: why now?

Why does the silencing seem to be getting louder? Why is the suppression so aggressive? Why does it feel like every institution political, religious, financial is working overtime to keep certain voices from being heard?

Because the Python stirs when the Spirit is moving.

That is the logic of Acts 16. Paul and Silas didn’t set out to cause a riot, they set out to pray and announce the Kingdom of Jesus. It was the gospel itself alive, disruptive, economically inconvenient that created the crisis. The Python doesn’t coil tighter around silence that isn’t threatening. It coils tighter because something is trying to get free from its grip.

In the antebellum South, slaveholders did not become more violent and more elaborate in their defenses of slavery when abolition was losing. They became more violent when it was gaining. The Python tightens when the ground shakes!!

We are living in a shaking moment.

Women are speaking. Survivors are naming. Journalists are pressing. The documents are trickling out despite the redactions. The questions are being asked despite the walkouts, the insults, the “quiet, piggy.” And every time the Python tightens, it is also ( if you have eyes to see it ), revealing itself.

A system confident in its permanence does not need to silence its critics. A system that is afraid must.

What Gets You Arrested

The gospel Paul and Silas were carrying didn’t get them in trouble because they said it wrong. It got them in trouble because of what it was. It was the content that disrupted. This is what the liberating gospel of Jesus does.

It freed a girl from a Python. It disrupted a profit margin. It converted a jailer, a man who was Roman infrastructure in human form , and gave him new hands. Hands that hours before had locked them in stocks. Now washing their wounds.

Here is the uncomfortable question I am sitting with this week, watching a president tell women reporters to be quiet, watching a denomination constitutionally silence women’s voices, watching powerful men delay documents that name what happened to powerless girls:

Whose interests does my Christianity serve?

Not my theology. My embodied Christianity. The practiced, economic, social, political shape of how my faith actually moves through the world. Whose interests does it protect?

Because the Python doesn’t mind a Christianity that stays in the head. It doesn’t mind a Christianity that governs private morality and shows up on Sunday to church service. It doesn’t mind a Christianity that talks about heaven as long as it doesn’t talk about this.

It only minds a Christianity that threatens the arrangement the powerful have made to accrue more power and more profit.

The girl in Philippi was set free. Her owners were furious. Her freedom was expensive to the people who had built their lives on her captivity.

The question is not whether you believe in the Python spirit. You can see it this week in the news cycle.

The question is whether the Jesus you follow is the kind who walks into Philippi and, knowing exactly what it will cost, knowing the arrest is coming , says the words anyway.

“Come out of her”.

This summer, on the White House lawn, America turns 250 years old. There will be fireworks, flyovers, and a celebration of our national greatness. And somewhere in the atmosphere surrounding all of it, the UFC will likely be playing on a screen near you.

I find it genuinely fascinating, and theologically revealing, that members from the Pentagon and competitors in the octagon will share the same lawn.

And as much as I enjoy a good fight, I’m more interested in what we’re really watching when this whole celebration goes down on June 14th.

The Octagon Has Always Been With Us

The Romans had a phrase for it: panem et circenses, “bread and circuses.” The poet Juvenal wrote it as a critique, not a compliment. This is how you manage a population while the empire does whatever the empire wants to do. You keep them fed and entertained. You give them a contained, thrilling spectacle of controlled violence so they never look up and ask hard questions about the uncontrolled violence happening in their name, with their tax money, in places they’ll never see.

The spectacle is not the problem. The strategy of sedation is.

We are the most entertained population in human history, and we have likely never been less curious about what is being done in our name.

The Department of War by Any Other Name

Here is a fact worth sitting with: the United States Department of Defense was called the Department of War until 1947.

They changed the name, but I promise you they did not change the logic.

The United States currently spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined.

In 2026, as you read this, American military strikes in Latin American waters have killed over 200 people in operations targeting drug traffickers; operations whose legality is contested and whose effectiveness is questioned, but whose continuation is not seriously debated in Washington. Kyiv is burning under Russian missiles. Israeli forces are pushing deeper into Lebanon. Gaza has been reduced to rubble, and in the halls of power, leaders who wear crosses and quote Scripture are the loudest voices for military escalation, defense budget expansion, and the glorification of national strength.

But again, Empire doesn’t ask for your permission. It just asks for your attention.

And so next week, for millions across our great land, our attention will shift from the wars being fought across nations to the battle unfolding inside a cage…

Panem et circenses, “bread and circuses

This is not new. This is empire doing what empire does.

What is new, or at least newly urgent, is the theological cover being offered for it.

Rome Is Calling Itself Christian Again

When Jesus walked the roads of first-century Palestine, he lived inside a war economy. This is not a metaphor. Rome’s entire existence depended on military conquest, tribute extraction, and the ever-present threat of crucifixion as a public deterrent. The roads Jesus walked were built by Roman military engineers. The coins in his pocket bore Caesar’s image, a military symbol, a claim of divine authority by a conquering emperor.

So when the Pharisees tried to trap him with the question about taxes, “Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar? “ they thought they had him. Say yes, and you’re a Roman collaborator. Say no, and you’re a revolutionary. Jesus asked to see the coin. He looked at the emperor’s face stamped in metal and said, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

We have domesticated that line into a permission slip for paying taxes, and submission to a political party.

But the subversive question underneath it is: what actually belongs to Caesar? And what is Caesar claiming that was never his to begin with?

Human lives and human dignity, the allegiance of the human heart, and the narrative of history.

In Luke 19, as Jesus enters Jerusalem for the last time, he stops on the ridge and weeps. The Greek word is eklaien, he wept openly, and bitterly. Jesus says through his tears: “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace.” The word for peace here is eirene, the Greek translation of the Hebrew shalom. Not just the absence of war, but comprehensive flourishing. The thriving of every person and the restoration of all things.

He saw what was coming. The Roman war machine. 70 AD, the temple burning, the bodies piling up. He didn’t celebrate it as divine judgment. He grieved it. Note: The Prince of Peace wept at the advance of empire. Lament is not weakness. It is the most honest thing a human being can do in the presence of violence.

And then, in the garden, when soldiers came to arrest him and his disciple drew a sword and struck, Jesus said: stop. He healed the man who came to arrest him. And in his trial before Pilate, he said something that should reorder everything for those of us who claim to follow him:

“My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight.” (John 18:36)

The empire’s logic, the only logic empire has ever known, is that power comes through the capacity for violence. You are powerful when you can destroy your enemy. Your nation is great when its military is feared.

When the Empire Wears a Cross

The dominant political movement in America right now is explicitly, loudly, self-identified as Christian. It invokes Jesus in campaign speeches. It puts crosses on stage at rallies. It speaks of divine destiny and national greatness in the same breath. And it is, simultaneously, one of the most militaristic political formations in American history, celebrating violence, glorifying strength, and naming enemies with the fervor of a holy war.

Right there on the White House lawn… next to the octagon…under the fireworks.

This is not unprecedented. It is, in fact, exactly what every Christian empire has done.

Constantine did it.

The Crusaders did it.

Manifest Destiny did it.

The Third Reich tried to do it.

The logic is always the same: God is on our side, therefore our violence is righteous, therefore our enemies are God’s enemies. The prophets had a word for this….

They called it idolatry.

But here is the danger for those of us who see this clearly: the temptation is to simply mirror the energy back. To get angry, to fight fire with fire, to use the same weapons, same outrage, same condemnation, same political force, just pointed in the opposite direction.

And if we do that, we’ve just switched corners in the same cage.

So what do we do?

Three Counterintuitive Ways to Follow Jesus In Violent Times

What does it look like to actually walk in the way of Jesus in this moment? Not as a political strategy. Nor as a brand, but as a genuine disciple who longs to embody the way of Christ in our time?

Here are three practices that will feel strange, even wrong, if you’ve been breathing the air of empire for too long.

1. Name the Violence (Including Our Own)

Empire depends on abstraction. “200 killed in maritime strikes” is a statistic. If you knew their names, the fisherman, the nineteen-year-old, the father of three, it becomes something else.

Jesus never watched from a distance. He climbed into the crowd and touched the leper.

He stopped for the bleeding woman. He asked the blind man: “What do you want me to do for you?”, as if the answer weren’t obvious. He made people specific. The prophetic act right now is insisting on the specificity of the suffering our war economy produces, and doing it without partisan selectivity.

This means grieving the Ukrainian civilian killed by Russian missiles and the Latin American fisherman killed by American ones. Weeping with the Palestinian mother and the Israeli father. Refusing to condemn only the violence of our enemies while ignoring the violence done in our name.

This will cost you readers. It will cost you alliances. It is what cost Jesus his life.

But a community that names all the violence, not just the violence of the other side, is a community with actual moral authority. And right now, that is extraordinarily rare.

2. Refuse the Enemy Script

Every war economy requires an enemy. An enemy justifies the budget. An enemy unifies the nation. An enemy makes the sacrifice feel worthwhile. Right now, the enemy-production machine is running at full speed. Immigrants. Liberals. Media. The radical left. The deep state. The globalists. MAGA. Pick your flavor.

Jesus operated in a world with equally vivid enemy scripts, the Romans, the tax collectors, the Samaritans, the sinners. He refused every single one. He ate with tax collectors. He made the Samaritan the hero. He healed the Roman centurion’s servant. He told his followers to love their enemies not as a nice idea but as the defining mark of what it meant to be children of God.

The testimony of a Jesus community is not having the correct enemy. It is being the community that refuses to organize itself around an enemy at all.

What does this look like practically? It means being genuinely curious about the person on the other side of the political divide. It means finding the human being inside the ideology. It means not building your platform on opposition, even righteous opposition. (This one is hard for me.)

It means being so committed to the dignity of every person that people can’t quite figure out which side you’re on, and finding that more interesting than threatening.

3. Build the Alternative Economy Now

Prophetic words without prophetic communities are just content. Good theology that doesn’t bleed into Tuesday is just a better brand of empire.

The early church’s witness against the Roman war economy was not primarily rhetorical. It was material. They shared resources. They ate together across class and ethnic lines. They cared for the widows and orphans the empire’s economy discarded. When plague hit Roman cities and the wealthy fled, Christians stayed and nursed the sick, because they believed death had already been defeated and fear no longer had ultimate authority over their choices.

That was their testimony. It was a better argument, or the perfect doctrinal statements, it was a different way of living.

What does that look like now? It might mean your community of faith becoming a genuine place of economic solidarity, where someone who loses their job doesn’t fall through the cracks, where immigrants are welcomed and resourced, where the elderly are not left alone in their last days. It might mean refusing to let your church’s calendar be organized around national holidays more than the rhythms of the Christian year. It might mean taking Romans 12 seriously: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

The war economy’s deepest claim is scarcity: not enough safety, not enough resources, not enough room, and therefore we must fight. The kingdom’s counter-claim is abundance. Every time a community lives that visibly, they are doing something the White House, the Pentagon, and the cable news cycle cannot explain.

The Grief and the Hope

Jesus wept on that hillside not because he had given up, but because he loved. The grief was proportional to the love. He saw what was coming; the violence, the waste, the bodies, the burning city, and he didn’t look away. He didn’t call down judgment. He just wept.

But the Jesus walked into the city anyway.

That is the shape of prophetic witness in a war economy. You do not pretend the violence isn’t happening. You do not rationalize it. You do not mirror it. You grieve it with the grief of someone who actually believes human beings are made in the image of God and that their deaths are not abstractions.

And then you keep walking. Into the city and into the conversation. You walk the relationship with the person who disagrees with you. Into the hard, unglamorous work of building something that looks like the kingdom.

Friends, the empire always looks permanent until it falls.

And it always falls.

But as it falls, the people who were quietly building the alternative are suddenly the ones with something sacred to offer.

I have walked into rooms two different ways, and I have watched what happens in each.

The first way: I walk in carrying something unresolved inside me; a fear I haven’t named, a pressure I haven’t processed, a weight I’m trying to move through sheer speed. The room feels it immediately. And what I have noticed is that my anxiety doesn’t just sit with me. It distributes out to others, and in response some people shrink, and some people over function. They start solving problems that aren’t theirs to solve, managing me instead of the mission, running themselves ragged trying to fill a gap that no amount of effort will close, because the gap isn’t in the strategy, it is in me.

That is the cost of leading with anxiety. It doesn’t stay in you.

The second way is harder to describe because it feels less like doing and more like being. On the days I walk in having already settled something, having sat with God long enough to remember what’s true, the room opens differently. People lean in, they are inspired, and they move. Not because my anxiety or position pushed them but because something steady in me gave them permission to go urgenlty after a mission worthy of their resources.

I have a phrase for this these days: Safe Speed

Safe as in: people are not managing you, they are following you. Safe as in: the pace you’re setting doesn’t require them to react to you, but to the urgency of your God given mission. Speed as in: we are absolutely moving, there is a Kingdom breaking in, there are people waiting, there is no time to drift. Together they produce urgency that doesn’t unravel the room, but unites it.

When Jesus stood up in the synagogue in Nazareth and read from Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor”, and then sat down and said, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,”

Luke 4:18–20

The room was riveted. Not because he was loud. Because he was safe. All eyes fixed on him, not bracing, not scrambling. Resting into what he carried. Urgency for healing, liberation, and shalom, with a confidence that He knew who he was, and what time it was.

When a leader moves with Safe Speed, the people around them don't overfunction. They don't hemorrhage energy trying to manage the leader's unresolved interior with their own output. They simply run; freely, clearly, toward the thing, because the person at the front has already done the lonely work: absorbed the weight of the why, walked the dark terrain of their own insecurities and temptations, and arrived, not performing confidence, but inhabiting it.

Safe Speed

• Settled before you enter

• Urgency rooted in vision

• Your steadiness gives them permission to run and risk for that which matters most

Anxious Urgency

• Unresolved before you enter

• Urgency rooted in fear

• The room contracts or scrambles

• People overfunction around you

• Your anxiety becomes their task

Safe Speed is not slow. Nor is it soft. It is what happens when a leader has done the interior work before they ask anything of the exterior world.

So before you walk in, wherever that room is today, whether the office, board room, or your kid’s bedroom ask yourself: am I bringing speed that feels safe, or speed that feels like I’m outrunning something? One sends people toward the mission. The other sends them toward you, trying to help you hold it together.

I remind myself once again this week.

God’s mercies are new. His grace is sufficient.

Do the interior work first. Then walk through the door.

The room will know the difference.

“All eyes in the synagogue were fixed on him.” — Luke 4:20.

At this point, our NYC apartment is usually overflowing with too many snacks, too many sports schedules, too many theological debates, loud dinner tables, and at least one person frustrated with me at any given moment. We are, to put it gently, a very passionate bunch.

Amanda and I spent our early years in Detroit helping pastor a large megachurch before moving to New York City thirteen years ago to help build multicultural faith communities rooted in the justice of Jesus.

If you had asked me during the early years of our marriage whether I believed in gender equality and the empowerment of women in society, and within the Christian Church, I would have easily answered: “Without a doubt!”

I held what most people would call an egalitarian theology; Women and men made equally in the image of God, equally empowered by the Holy Spirit, and equally capable of holding the same spiritual authority and leadership positions within the church.

Like many young Christian couples, Amanda and I read the pre-marital books, attended the marriage workshops, listened to the experts and mentors, and built our roles as a newly married couple around gifting, wiring, and unique competencies.

We thought we were building a healthy partnership.

Early in my ministry, I discovered I was decently gifted in a few specific areas; organizational leadership, communication, and starting new things. Church folk would say I had an “apostolic” gifting, which is a spiritual way of saying I constantly launched new initiatives and ministries that required compelling vision, risk, mobilization, leadership development, and serious productivity.

Amanda, meanwhile, is what author Malcolm Gladwell would label a “Maven” in his best selling book “Tipping Point.” She is extraordinarily intelligent and competent in nearly every area of life, which is both impressive and deeply inconvenient for someone married to her.

Naturally, she filled in the gaps. (Even during times she wasn’t directly asked to)

She handled logistics better than I did.
Finances better than I did.
Scheduling better than I did.
Managed the home better than I did.
Did extended family relationships better than I did.

Honestly, she’s even better at home repair projects than I am. I once watched her fix a water heater with no prior experience. This woman….she is hard core.

And because she was so capable, everyone benefited from it, especially me.

Over time, Amanda and I began to name something uncomfortable: competency, left unexamined, becomes one of patriarchy's most elegant traps. The more capable a woman is, the easier it becomes to mistake her exploitation for her “God given role.”

Despite all our egalitarian language, we quietly built a life where my vocational calling was protected, while Amanda’s calling adapted around everyone else’s needs.

My leadership was platformed, supported, and funded.

Our egalitarian church sent me through graduate school (Thanks Be To God!), while Amanda never received the same investment. Looking back, I’m not even sure she would have imagined asking for it given the organizational culture surrounding us at the time.

In 2013, we moved to New York City with five children under ten years of age. After a few chaotic years, life finally began stabilizing enough for Amanda to dream again about her own future and her own vocational goals.

Then we unexpectedly had child number six. My one true New Yorker.

Judah Robert.

Suddenly the math stopped mathing.

It became impossible to ignore the disproportionate weight Amanda carried while helping lead the church, raising children, managing our lives, and somehow trying to remain connected to her own gifts, ambitions, and humanity.

What we had called “partnership” was often Amanda absorbing the overflow of my ambition.

That realization brought conviction…

The kind of conviction that exposes the gap between what you preach and what you embody. It seems it is entirely possible to preach equality while quietly benefiting from systems that suppress the leadership, ambition, and flourishing of women.

For many men like me, (egalitarian men), repentance is often still required.

Patriarchy is not merely a doctrine. It is a discipleship system deeply embedded in both culture and the church. This means that unless we consciously repent of it (agreeing with God about reality, in an embodied way), we will continue to be formed by it.

And just to be honest, this revelation did not suddenly transform me into an enlightened husband floating through Manhattan joyfully doing equal amounts of laundry, dishes, and bills while sustaining my vocational responsibilities. This has turned into the ongoing practice of repentance for me.

Repentance is rarely instant transformation. More often, it is the slow reordering of love, power, ambition, habits, and attention.

And so, here are three ways men like me can begin to repent, not only of the patriarchy we inherited, but of the ways we have too often benefited from it, protected it, or remained silent while it continued unchecked.

Repentance As Slowing Down

One of the hardest practices of repentance for me has been slowing down.

And I know that sounds ridiculous if you know me, because I always seem to be doing something, building something, or going somewhere, but what you need to understand is that I have had to intentionally train my body to say no to the endless stream of ideas (some actually good) and the relentless ambition that lives in my mind and spirit.

Amanda is not going to feel particularly sorry for me here, but I’ve had to keep asking a steady question: “if I say yes to this, what is Amanda now saying no to?”

Left unchecked, I would probably have another degree by now, or started another church, or launched another organization. Good opportunities. Meaningful work. None of it inherently wrong.

But I haven’t moved forward (at least not with every opportunity)

Not because those things were sinful. But because my yes to ambition almost always requires Amanda’s invisible labor underneath it and unintentional restrictions then placed upon her dreams (or placed upon her dreaming)

So for a season, I have had to learn a slower, and sometimes more painful, practice of saying no to me, in order to say yes to her.

Amanda recently completed her master’s degree! We made a decision years ago that before I pursued any further academic work, it needed to be her turn first. And honestly, this is not “sacrifice” in the heroic sense that I’m tempted to romanticize it with. I have had to remind myself that equality and mutual submission can feel like sacrifice, when equality wasn’t there to begin with.

I’ve also had to confront something a bit uglier in myself: how easily I spiritualized ambition. Men like me are fluent in the practice of camouflaging drivenness in kingdom language, as if every internal restlessness is somehow part of the mission of God.

We call it vision. We call it calling. We call it mission.

But sometimes it is simply ego, other times unhealthy comparison, trying to climb another hill to prove I still matter. And that instinct is not just unhelpful. It is often antithetical to the way of Jesus.

The Spirit of Jesus continues to have me ask a very uncomfortable question:

Does my ambition make room for the flourishing of the women closest to me, or does it quietly consume them?

Creating a culture where women are seen

Seven years ago Amanda took over leadership in the first church we started as the Senior Pastor.

Seven years later, I still walk into rooms where people call me “Their pastor” or call her the “First lady.”

Not because they are malicious, but because systems have discipled their instincts and perceptions. Complementarian culture runs deep in the American Church, even inside communities that claim egalitarian theology.

People still naturally look to men first, trust men first, center men first, and give more generously when a man asks versus a woman in leadership.

This means churches cannot simply say they believe in women leaders.
They must actively create a culture that naturally empowers women.

I have had to practice refusing to answers a congregant’s question when they should be asking it to the lead pastor (even though I likely know the answer). There are moments where I have to re-position my body in a meeting so that people stop looking at me for direction, and start looking at her for it.

Culture changes through the repetition of small intentional and faithful practices

If we want churches to hire women pastors naturally, then congregations must first be discipled to recognize women’s authority spiritually, intellectually, pastorally, and organizationally. This is hard work. And work that our churches are still in the thick of.

So many “egalitarian” churches are not there yet.

In denominations like the ECC, we have deeply gifted, called, Spirit-filled women ready to lead. But too often there are limited openings because the cultures of churches have not actually been formed to imagine women as their next senior leader. I spoke with a 8,000 person church last year that was looking for their new senior pastor. They are a stated egalitarian church, that had hundreds of applicants come through, but not one woman made it to the second round of interviews. How? Because the culture was not yet cultivated.

This is why theology alone is insufficient. Culture eats theology every single time. You can preach equality while unconsciously practicing hierarchy. People always learn from embodiment more than doctrinal statements.

Egalitarian theology, without an egalitarian home

Another practice of repentance has been the slow, often clumsy work of shared responsibility at home.

And it is still a work in progress.

Sometimes Amanda gets frustrated because I cannot carry certain things around the home with the same instinctive capacity she has developed over twenty years.

And honestly?
She’s right.

But I also have to remind her gently: the same way she feels like she has not had as many reps preaching in churches, I have not had as many reps managing laundry, bathrooms, deep cleaning, doctors visits, and veterinarian appointments, etc. (I know I know, cue the violin music)

Unfortunately I have found that patriarchy does not only wound women. It under-develops men.

Many men simply have not built the muscles of domestic attentiveness because someone else always carried it for them. So learning mutuality requires patience. Practice. Humility. Failure. And then the Repetition.

It means I have to do things badly, long enough, to eventually become competent instead of retreating back into helplessness.

It means refusing to weaponize incompetence (Which I’ve been guilty of)
It means refusing the lie that men are naturally incapable of emotional labor, caregiving, organization around the household, or attentiveness to extended family needs.

You Cannot Stay Quiet

Lastly, one of the final things I’ve had to repent for, is silence.

Because silence is rarely neutral, especially for men like me.

Silence often functions as social currency inside societal institutions including the church. It keeps relationships intact. It preserves invitations, platforms, partnerships, and funding streams. Silence allows me to remain “safe” to everyone while costly truth gets quietly displaced onto women to carry alone.

And if I’m honest, there were years I knew exactly what my silence was protecting. I remember being invited to teaching retreats back in our megachurch days, gatherings where the room was filled with strong voices, laughter, great food, theological debate, and leadership formation. But there was something else too: not a single woman communicator was ever invited. And we definitely had them.

There was never a stated reason. Because there didn’t need to be one.

It was just easier.

Easier to curate a space that felt unguarded.
Easier to keep the tone unchallenged, informal, and yes, at times marked by a level of crude humor and cultural posturing that we subconsciously knew would need to be restrained if women were present.

And I went along with it… quietly.

That is what silence often looks like.

I have no doubt lost trust with complamentarian leaders over the years because of convictions like this, that I now speak about and write more openly about it. But if I’m being equally honest, I’ve also lost trust with some egalitarian leaders who prefer ambiguity, who know better but still choose strategic silence because it keeps the room comfortable, the relationships intact, and the funding stable.

There is a version of egalitarianism that loves the language of equality but becomes deeply uncomfortable once equality starts costing influence, access, or money. And this part has been harder than I expected.

There are conversations that shifted.
Rooms that became colder. A loss of potential friendships.
Networks that quietly loosened their grip, and stopped inviting me to the table. Funding opportunities that disappeared once people realized this conviction was not rhetorical, but embodied.

And I understand why. Because once mutuality becomes real, systems built around male comfort begin to feel uncomfortable. The Church has often tolerated women leading right up until it threatens the emotional economy of male-centered power.

And this is why silence becomes so seductive. Silence allows men to privately affirm women while publicly protecting themselves. But complicity does not become holy simply because it is polite.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

And honestly, I think many women in the Church feel this more than anything else, not outright opposition, but the weight of being consistently unprotected by the very people who agree with them in private.

And so, as I continue learning, (often imperfectly and clumsily), the slow and ongoing practice of repentance, mutuality, and surrender, I offer this blessing:

May we become the kind of men who no longer need to be centered in order to feel secure.

May we have the courage to repent not only of obvious domination, but of the quieter ways we have benefited from imbalance, silence, and the exhaustion, of the women around us.

May the next generation of daughters and sons inherit something better from us: not only the language of equality, nor doctrinal statements alone,
but communities where shared power, shared sacrifice, shared leadership, and shared dignity are normal because the Spirit of Christ has reshaped us all.

And….

To the women who walk with me, mentor me, challenge me, and love me: this is your invitation to continue to gently point out the places where my instincts, assumptions, or silence still reflect the systems I long to resist.

And to my male colleagues: may you join me in the difficult but liberating work of repentance, as we learn to more fully affirm the imago Dei in our sisters, not merely with our theology or language, but with our attention, our shared power, our advocacy, and our embodied lives.

Searching for My Daughter and the Kind of Evangelism That Actually Looks Like Jesus

One day I’ll write a book about the week our oldest daughter with special needs went missing in New York City.

Not because trauma sells. Nor because suffering makes for good content. But because for one terrifying week, the veil dropped, and underneath all the performance in the American church, the branding, the political tribes, the and the church-growth strategy, I caught a glimpse of the Church Jesus actually died for: the Bride of Christ mobilized.

In the middle of the worst fear my wife Amanda and I have ever experienced, a week where my daughter was lured out of our home and into a highly dangerous system, we witnessed something so breathtakingly human, so deeply sacred, that it changed the way I will understand the church forever.

I watched a fractured, distracted, cynical age suddenly become laser-focused on one thing: bringing a vulnerable kid home.

For one holy week, the things we normally organize our lives around; politics, vocational success, ideology, platform, all got crushed under the weight of love. (Can I get an Amen!)

It was pastors and police officers. It was neighbors and Navy SEALS. It was TV producers and homeless men and women on the streets of New York. Friends in our church and strangers in Sweden. People with massive platforms and people nobody sees. Everyone carrying whatever they had in their hands and placing it on the altar.

I remember standing there exhausted beyond words, watching people organize in real time with an intensity that felt holy.

Not performative, nor theoretical, just people running toward pain instead of away from it. (The type of stuff that is almost impossible to get the masses to do in our day and time.) But this week, they did it naturally, and almost intuitively.

The Kind of Evangelism That Doesn’t Need Marketing

Something haunted me during that week, outside of the fact that my daughter with special needs found herself in grave danger.

The modern church often struggles to mobilize people for evangelism (sharing our faith with others).

We can gather crowds (sometimes). We can build platforms (sometimes). We can manufacture moments (sometimes). But getting ordinary people to meaningfully join the mission of God? That’s become strangely difficult.

We can barely get people to invite a neighbor to church. We build campaigns, create strategies, and hand out scripts, but most of it still feels forced. Like pulling teeth from people already overwhelmed by chaotic schedules and survival-mode lives. As a pastor, it can feel like we’re asking exhausted people for something they barely have the energy to give.

And yet this was different.

People came alive. Hundreds, if not thousands of them, joined the search, shared the information, and leveraged so much of who they are as humans. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about “why” for the past 18 months.

The week we searched for my daughter exposed three things that are often missing from the modern church.

1. People Came Alive When They Are Allowed to Bring Their Whole Selves

One of the quiet tragedies of American church culture is how often people are asked to leave their real gifts, competencies, and daily reality at the door.

The entrepreneur gets told to hold a door as a greeter. The strategist is begged to become a parking volunteer. The artist gets reduced to making announcement slides or singing the most simplistic and repetitive contemporary Christian song you could ever imagine.

Meanwhile, the Kingdom of God is sitting on billions of dollars of wisdom, creativity, strategy, compassion, leadership, craftsmanship, and lived experience that rarely gets activated because churches often only know how to use people institutionally instead of missionally.

And while humility matters (and everyone should be willing to set up a chair now and then, especially the rich folk that never have to set up chairs), there is something deeply unbiblical about creating environments where people cannot fully offer what God has actually formed inside them.

But during the search for our daughter?

Everyone’s competencies suddenly mattered.

Navy SEALS were sending me documents of the different quadrants in various buildings, attempting to trace where my daughter had last tapped into routers in hopes that we could trace any device she may have had in those last seconds with us.

A television producer leveraged decades of storytelling instincts, media relationships, and influence to amplify her story beyond what Amanda and I could have ever done ourselves.

An investigator with major crimes experience started working angles and patterns most of us would never even think to consider.

Pastors across the city interrupted normal church programming and began gathering congregations to pray. Not performative prayer. Not vague religious optimism, but desperate prayer. (The kind that reminds you the Church still believes heaven breaks into earth.)

The people good at logistics built systems, and the organizers organized. The connectors connected. Those with the extravagant gift of hospitality fed our family of 7 for days. Those who trained as competitive runners strategically ran throughout the blocks of Manhattan with intent, searching for my sweet girl.

Social media experts amplified information faster than any institution could. Security professionals coordinated search patterns. Spanish speakers fielded ransom calls that came through in Spanish, while compassionate caregivers stayed with Amanda and me when we were too shattered to function.

And then there were our unhoused neighbors downtown. (I may write another book about this one.)

Men and women the city often overlooks suddenly became some of the most attentive eyes in New York because people who survive on the streets notice things many others miss. And maybe that was one of the most prophetic parts of the entire week:

The Kingdom of God kept refusing to move according to status. Everyone mattered. Everyone carried something. Everyone became necessary. Nobody needed a title. Nobody waited for permission. Nobody argued about platform. The mission was too important.

And honestly, it looked more like the Book of Acts than most modern church structures I’ve seen. Not polished. Not stage-managed. Just ordinary people possessed by costly love, ready to leverage whatever competencies they had for a kid that needed to be brought home.

The Body of Christ is not meant to function like an audience. It’s meant to function like a nervous system. Every part alive. Every part responsive. Every part connecting in mission, bringing what it uniquely carries.

That week I realized something:

People don’t disengage because they’re lazy. Often they disengage because we only let them serve in ways that are institutionally convenient instead of spiritually alive.

2. Everybody Moved Because Everybody Knew It Mattered

A vulnerable child was missing.

This wasn’t a sermon series. No vision night or members meeting. People moved because love made urgency insanely obvious.

Nothing clarifies human attention like love colliding with danger. Nobody needed a sermon explaining why this mattered. Nobody asked whether the search was aligned with their political ideology. Nobody paused to debate optics.

When someone you love is in danger, disoriented, or missing out on what will bring them life, urgency becomes instinctive.

And I wonder sometimes if part of the modern church’s paralysis is that we no longer actually believe resurrection matters in real life. (And I don’t mean for the afterlife, I mean for today.) I wonder if instead we have reduced Christianity into lifestyle enhancement, moral inspiration, political identity, and therapeutic spirituality. Meanwhile, Jesus spoke like eternity was breaking into the present moment.

We say eternity matters. We say loneliness is not okay. We say addiction unravels the soul. We say no one deserves to live in despair. We say people are spiritually starving. But many of us live and lead as though none of it is particularly urgent. Church growth? Yes, that seems to be urgent to us, (especially if our salaries are tied to it). But the rest of it? It is easily able to be placed upon the back burner. Meanwhile, the world is drowning in anxiety, isolation, depression, addiction, rage, and meaninglessness.

People are desperate for hope. We are desperate for belonging. We are desperate for transcendence. We are desperate for someone to tell us we are not disposable and that there is something true and good and redemptive still at hand. That the best is yet to come (and not the way televangelists say it), but in the way that means your cancer, your loved one’s mental health issue, and the death of your child will not have the last word. And yet the church often communicates the gospel with the emotional intensity of a corporate training seminar.

But when my daughter disappeared, everyone understood immediately:

This matters. This cannot wait. This kid is precious and needs to be brought home.

Maybe one of the reasons the early church exploded across the world is because they actually believed Jesus meant what He said. That the poor mattered. That the lost were the priority. That the marginalized needed to be centered. That people were worth interrupting your life for, and that the Kingdom was at hand if people could see it.

I think about Danielle Strickland, Liz Rios, Rich Johnson, Lisa Rodriguez-Watson, Dave and Faith Cho, Drew Jackson and so many other nationally known leaders and speakers who were flying into New York that week for a conference we were hosting just as my daughter went missing.

Danielle arrived only hours before the event began, having already seen on social media that Markeysha had thankfully been found earlier that same day. She later admitted she was genuinely surprised the conference was still happening at all. In her mind, she wasn’t flying in to speak from a stage anymore; she was flying in to throw on gym clothes, walk block by block through Manhattan, and spend the next three days helping us search for a vulnerable little girl until she was brought home.

And honestly, that response told me more about the Kingdom of God than the conference ever could.

All of them were ready to move, and everything else took a back seat.

3. Vulnerability Created More Unity Than Strength Ever Could

There is a kind of vulnerability most of us spend our lives trying to avoid.

The kind where your need becomes undeniable. Where you look weak, exhausted, and paralyzed without answers.

There is no polished leadership language. There is no curated spirituality. There is no ability to project strength. Just exhausting desperation.

Amanda and I were completely undone. There was no more polished pastoral language. Just two devastated parents begging God to bring their daughter home while they cried themselves to sleep each night.

And strangely, I think that unlocked something sacred in the people around us. I assume because deep down, people are starving for reality. And unfortunately, the modern church has become frighteningly good at performance.

We have built entire ecosystems around image management. Leaders pretending they’re okay. Christians pretending they don’t doubt. Families pretending they’re healthy. Pastors pretending they’re not exhausted. Yet raw need has a way of cutting through all of it. When people saw our pain, they didn’t encounter religous platitudes. They encountered crushed parents.

Parents who continued to look at one another saying, “I can’t believe this is happening.”

And I think that vulnerability created room for real love to emerge. Not admiration, nor celebrity. Just love.

I think people are actually longing for communities where honesty is valued over image. And maybe that’s part of why Jesus was constantly surrounded by desperate people. Because unlike religious systems built around appearances, Jesus never recoiled from need. He almost always moved toward it.

The Church Is Still Beautiful

Please hear this….

I know it’s trendy to only speak about the failures of the church right now (the algorithm loves it). And to be clear, many failures are real. I’ve seen manipulation. I’ve seen abuse. I’ve seen power distort. I’ve seen institutions protect themselves instead of people. It is devastating.

But I also saw something else.

I saw the church become stunningly beautiful, and I saw ordinary people become extraordinary through sacrificial love.

I saw men sleeping three hours a night to keep searching. I saw women carrying emotional weight that wasn’t theirs to carry. I saw strangers praying with tears. I saw people leveraging influence, platforms, relationships, and resources for that missing kid.

And maybe that’s the thing I can’t shake.

When the mission became clear enough, people didn’t need to be entertained. They didn’t need to be manipulated. They didn’t need to be constantly inspired. They simply needed a high-stakes opportunity to love.

Friends, the church is still at her best when she forgets herself. And maybe that’s the tragedy of modern Christianity. We have become experts at gathering crowds while remaining emotionally unavailable. We know how to build stages but struggle to carry burdens. We know how to create content but not always community that functions like an extended family, creating family for those that do not have it.

But for one week searching for my daughter, I watched the Church become a family again. When the church stops trying to look powerful, when she stops chasing relevance, when she stops battling against culture she is really the best that the world has to offer.

That Friday night, only two hours after my daughter was found, the conference Amanda, Danielle, a few others, and I were scheduled to lead somehow still began. My daughter, weak and sick from a full week without her critical medications, wanted to stay close to her family and asked if she could join us for the opening session. We said yes.

She walked into the gathering and sat in the front row beside me. And the moment the worship music began, so did the tears… not just from us, but from what felt like nearly everyone in the room.

It was not polished. It was not performative. It was relief, gratitude, exhaustion, worship, and heartbreak all colliding together in real time. Honestly, it was a night of praise that will likely surpass every worship service I attend until the day I stand before Jesus Himself.

And that following Sunday, one of our church leaders stood before the congregation to address what everyone in the room was already feeling but struggling to put into words.

Penelope Makgati greeted the congregation and said, “Church, it is time to celebrate. We must. One of our own was lost, and has now been found.” It was a tear-filled party. It was what you want a church service to be.

And so, friends, no matter how disoriented and despairing you may be…

No matter how cynical of the church you have become…

May you go with open hands into a world that is still aching for love.

May you carry more compassion than cynicism.

May you resist a faith that stays comfortable when others are in need.

May your gifts no longer sit unused in the margins of the Kingdom.

May your eyes be opened to the overlooked, the forgotten, and the afraid.

And may the God who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one find you, form you, and send you, again and again, into love that looks like Jesus.

For I have been keenly aware that not all stories end this way. There are far too many sons and daughters out there on their own who do not have a church mobilized to find them and reawaken them to love…and to bring them home.

Which means… there is no time to waste. Let us become the people Jesus always intended us to be.

Amen

This week (Tuesday), a new proposal from the Trump administration introduced what has been described as a “fund for victims of government weaponization.” In remarks tied to the announcement, President Donald Trump and his allies framed the initiative as a “corrective measure”; an attempt to restore dignity and financial restitution to individuals who have, in their framing, suffered at the hands of politically motivated prosecution and state overreach.

The rhetoric is sharp, familiar, and emotionally charged: the idea that the machinery of government has been “turned against” certain citizens, and that now, finally, justice must be financially repaired.

A reparations fund of sort?

But the question beneath the surface is not simply “who gets paid?”. It is “who gets believed?”.

Redefining Harm

The proposal, as it has been publicly described, positions itself as a moral correction: a ledger finally being balanced for those who believe they were targeted by state institutions.

Yet the moral framing is doing something more complex. It is redefining harm.

Because in America, “government weaponization” is not a neutral phrase. It is not evenly distributed language. It carries a weight that shifts depending on who is speaking, and who is being spoken about.

For some, it names decades of real injustice: wrongful convictions, and the slow violence of systems that rarely admit error. For others, it risks becoming something else entirely: a political rebranding of consequence as persecution.

And history teaches us this pattern clearly; when power begins to describe accountability as oppression, something deeper is being negotiated than policy. This is about narrative control.

And this is where spiritual clarity is required, because whenever a nation begins calling accountability persecution, it is not just shifting language, it is revealing what spirit is actually shaping its imagination. Which brings us to America’s rededication to God (Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving)

The Revival Weekend and the Language of Return

All of this lands in the same week as a highly visible wave of Christian revival gatherings, public worship events, and renewed calls for national recommitment to God and moral order.

Across stages and stadiums, the language was unmistakable: America must return. “America must be restored. America must be made spiritually whole again. And as Mark Driscoll continued to scream into the mic this weekend, “You must return to Jesus”

There is always something compelling about revival language in a fractured nation. It promises clarity in chaos. It offers transcendence over division, and it speaks of repentance, renewal, and a second beginnings in the name of Jesus.

But revival, historically, has always carried a question alongside its passionate fire:

What exactly are we repenting for?

If revival is only aimed at personal morality and individual decisions while ignoring structural injustice, if it is loud about individual sin but quiet about oppressive systems, then it risks becoming less about spiritual transformation for a country and more about reassurance for the individual.

It ends up meaning that a nation can lift its hands in worship in DC on Sunday, singing about a “Good Good Father”, and still struggle to lift its conscience on Monday, unwilling to actually embody that same '“Good Good Father”.

The Collision: Revival Without Reckoning

Now this is where the tension becomes impossible to ignore.

In one event; a public theological language of revival, recommitment, and national spiritual renewal.

In the next big sweeping announcement: a political framework that seeks to define “weaponization” in ways that will almost certainly be interpreted through existing lines of loyalty, power, influence, and dare I say “whiteness”.

And somewhere in between: a history that has not been reckoned with.

So yes Mr. President….A fund for people who have been victimized through the weaponization of the United States government , especially for those who potentially ended up in prison due to that systematized weaponization. Yes please. Beautiful!

So let us start by cutting those checks to Anthony Ray Hinton who lost 30 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit. (Black man)

Or Glenn Ford’s family, wrongfully convicted in Louisiana, who spent 30 years on death row, exonerated in 2014, died just a year later after being given 20 dollars by the State of Louisiana. (Black man)

And while we’re opening the vault, maybe we can compensate Indigenous communities whose children were stolen, Japanese families interned by America, refugees treated like threats, women silenced by systems built to protect powerful men, and immigrants detained just for existing in the wrong ZIP code with the wrong accent.

But forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.

Because in this current moment, “government weaponization” likely becomes code for: “a powerful white man experienced consequences once.”

Which brings me to the deeper issue underneath all of this…

We are not watching the correction of injustice. At least not in the biblical sense of repentance (When led by those in power). We are watching a familiar story find new language to protect the powerful while clothing itself in the rhetoric of victimhood.

And when that happens, we are not dealing with a new fund.
We are standing in front of the same old spirit again. The principality and power of White Supremacy.

We want revival. We even know how to market it now. Worship anthems, giant LED screens, “return to God” rallies, and preachers screaming into microphones like volume itself is a spiritual gift.

But revival without repentance has never existed in God’s story.

Not in Nineveh.
Not in Israel.
Not in the early church.
And certainly not in a nation still unwilling to tell the truth about race, power, violence, greed, and whose suffering gets remembered.

Before any true renewal comes, we will have to reckon with the principalities and powers of white supremacy, and the long American temptation toward power without accountability, a temptation that has haunted this country from its very beginning.

And thus, when revival language rises in a nation still marked by these fractures, and financial redress is framed in ways increasingly aligned with political allegiance, the contradiction becomes impossible to spiritualize away.

This is not merely inconsistency. It is exposure.

We are attempting to speak the language of renewal while still protecting the architecture of unequal memory, deciding, once again, whose suffering counts as injustice and whose suffering gets filed under “collateral consequence.” And that is where the discomfort sharpens.

At some point, revival stops being a moment and becomes a mirror for both the individual and the nation.

At some point, revival stops being a moment and becomes a mirror for both the individual and the nation..

And what it is revealing right now is not merely political division. It is moral fragmentation: a nation trying to experience resurrection without first passing through collective confession, repentance, and truth-telling.

And that is not revival. That is repetition and unchecked supremacy singing worship music.

So yes, let Jesus come in power. I want this so badly, and you should too. But let Him come the way He historically has: not first to the empire, not first to the stage, not first to those protecting their influence, but to the margins, the outcast, the oppressed, the prisoner, the refugee, the forgotten, and those crushed beneath the weight of systems pretending to be righteous.

Because if our revival does not sound like good news to the wounded, then it sadly may not be revival at all.

But Which Gospel Will We Hand Them?

This is the third essay in the series following The Rise of the Barbarian
and From Sacred Stories to Rape Academies

For the first time in modern American church history, men are beginning to attend church at higher rates than women. According to new research from Barna Group, 43% of men now report regular church attendance compared to 36% of women. The reversal is somewhat historic.

Some pastors are celebrating this like a revival.

I am not there yet.

Not because I don’t long for revival, but because over the years I have learned that crowds do not equate to spiritual fruit, growth alone is not necessarily coming from Jesus-centered discipleship, and more testosterone doesn’t equate to more transformation.

The question is not simply, “Are men returning to church?”
The question is: What kind of men are we forming once they arrive?

If the Church disciples disoriented men with the same power-addicted theology, unwilling to provide prophetic truth telling leadership, then I promise we are not witnessing revival, we are simply watching a grotesque type of recruitment.

Part I: The Disorientation of White Men

Something tectonic has shifted in America over the last twenty-thirty years.

The cultural ground beneath the country moved, and it moved fast.

The United States became dramatically more diverse ethnically, with Census data showing that nearly all population growth over the last decade came from nonwhite communities, and that children under fifteen are now majority nonwhite nationally.

Women entered the workforce and leadership pipelines at historic rates, now earning the majority of college degrees in America and stepping into executive, political, and professional leadership in ways previous generations never witnessed.

Global voices, immigrant communities, and historically marginalized perspectives increasingly shaped conversations in business, education, media, politics, and even the Church. This meant that terms like systemic racism, equity, privilege, representation, gender dynamics, and institutional power moved from graduate classrooms and activist circles into dinner tables, boardrooms, pulpits, podcasts, and HR departments.

What had long been invisible to many white American men suddenly became unavoidable public conversation.

For many people, this was long overdue.

But for many white men, especially those of us raised with an assumption of cultural centrality, it felt like the room itself was being rearranged while we were still standing in it.

(Now to be clear, disorientation is not the same thing as oppression.)

Sometimes disorientation is simply what happens when a room you always controlled finally starts adding more chairs.

The story many of us white men inherited was simple:
Work hard. Lead well. Provide. Build.
And you will naturally occupy the center.

But then globalization reshaped labor.
Manufacturing collapsed across entire regions.
The economy shifted toward relational and service-based industries.
Women advanced educationally and professionally.
The language of diversity and equity emerged.
And for the first time, many white men began feeling a small taste of what marginalized communities have navigated for generations:

uncertainty.

Not exclusion from power entirely, but unfamiliarity with sharing it.

And honestly, I have felt pieces of this personally.

As an NYC pastor and church planter with proof of concept, years of leadership, spiritual fruit, impact, and experience, I watched rooms slowly shift. Invitations changed. Funding conversations quieted as it was mobilized elsewhere. There were moments where leaders of color were prioritized in spaces I once occupied naturally.

Now hear me carefully before someone screenshots one paragraph without reading the entirety of this article.

I do not say that resentfully.

Some of those shifts were necessary.
Some of those doors should have opened long ago.
Some of that decentralization needed to happen for the Church to look even remotely like the Kingdom of God instead of a suburban networking event with some fog machines added in.

But if I, someone deeply committed to justice, shared leadership, and the global Church could still feel moments of disorientation, how much more the man whose identity was built entirely around cultural centrality?

Many white men were not spiritually prepared for a world where they were no longer instinctively centered.

And the Church largely failed to pastor and prepare them for that moment.

Not because churches talked too much about systemic sin, power dynamics, or privilege. In many spaces, we barely talked about them at all. Whether for fear of losing the charitable giving that white men brought to the organization, or the fear of becoming too polarizing, or simply not having the language, we discipled men to pursue influence before teaching them how to surrender it. We taught platform before meekness, strength before servanthood. Leadership before repentance. Churches gave men language for authority, vision, conquest, overcoming, and winning, while quietly neglecting the deeply subversive teachings of Jesus about enemy love, mutual submission, economic justice, shared power, confession, washing feet, and becoming last.

We formed men to feel entitled to power before teaching them how to lay it down the way Jesus does.

And whenever people experience disorientation and lose clarity, eventually someone arrives promising certainty….and usually with a microphone, a podcast, and a list of enemies.

Part II: The Prophets of Clarity

Disoriented people rarely run toward nuance.

They run toward clarity.

This is why figures like Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Nick Fuentes, the late Charlie Kirk and pastors Mark Driscoll, Doug Wilson, Josh Howerton, and others continue to become compelling to so many young men.

These men are highly intuitive communicators. They understand male anxiety. They understand the longing for impact. They understand humiliation. And they understand the intoxicating promise of reclaimed power.

They looked at disoriented men and said:

You are not lost. You are under attack.
And we can help you take your place back.

In politics and in the church.

That message is emotionally potent.

But notice the irony:

Many of these leaders openly mock empathy toward women, immigrants, the poor, or people of color as weakness. But their entire movements are built on empathy for disoriented white men. That is the hidden engine underneath much of this moment. They sensed male confusion and repackaged it as righteous certainty.

So yes, in my opinion, churches built on certainty, hierarchy, aggression, and cultural warfare are growing through the addition of men, because they are offering something modern men desperately crave: clarity, a common enemy
a tribe, and the promise of restored power.

But clarity can become an idol too. Especially when the lines are drawn everywhere Jesus erased them.

Many churches today are not teaching men the empowering way of Jesus, but instead teaching them how to recover dominance.

Not how to surrender power, but how to sanctify it.

Not how to become meek, but how to become respected, or even feared.

And this is where the Church must become deeply discerning.

Folks, Jesus did not come to make insecure men feel culturally dominant again. Jesus came announcing a Kingdom where the meek shall inherit the earth.

Part III: What Do We Do With the Men Who Are Coming?

So here is the tension: many men are walking into churches looking for clarity, power, tribe, and certainty, but then again, so did the disciples (And Jesus still accepted them).

The first men who followed Jesus were not drawn by dreams of foot washing and enemy love. They came looking for a King who might crush Rome, restore power, and place them near the center of the coming Kingdom. Jesus did not reject them for arriving with mixed motives. But neither did He leave those motives untouched.

He loved them enough to subversively confront them as he shared life with them. Which means this moment requires neither panic nor celebration.It requires an intentional counter-formation. And if we are going to pastor this wave of men faithfully, then three things must become central.

1. We Must Disciple Men Through the Lens of Surrendered Power And Power Dynamics

The framework matters.

If young men arrive disoriented and power-hungry, then we cannot center the Church around conquest narratives.

This is not the hour to build theology primarily around kings, warriors, empire builders, victors, princes, heroes, or “heads of households”

The center must be Jesus. And the center of Jesus’ teaching must be the Sermon on the Mount and His beatitudes

The Beatitudes are not soft spirituality.
They are resistance training against empire.

Blessed are the meek.
Blessed are the merciful.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
Blessed are those who mourn.

Not:
Blessed are the dominant.
Blessed are the culturally victorious.
Blessed are the men who have religous impact

The language we use matters.

If every sermon sounds like war, conquest, domination, winning, taking territory, crushing enemies, and masculine victory, then we should not be surprised when men come looking for power instead of transformation.

The Kingdom advances differently.

In the Kingdom, to lead is to kneel.
To become first is to become last.
And to win is to give in

2. We Must Change Who Is Discipling Them

If young men are only formed under voices that mirror their own cultural dominance, they will inevitably mistake familiarity for authority and dominance for discipleship. But you cannot learn the holy use of power from a position that has never been taught to relinquish it. And you cannot be trained in surrender, suffering, or cruciform love from a place that assumes it already deserves to stand at the center.

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We need women teaching us. Not just the token female pastor who gets to speak four to six times a year, but lacks authority within the church’s leadership. We need to see mutuality in day to day and week to week leadership as men and women lead together. We need to witness mutual submission.

We need global voices. We need theologians from outside American empire.
We need perspectives shaped by suffering, marginalization, wisdom, and communal survival.

We need to learn from voices like Esau McCaulley, Beth Allison Barr, Sandra Maria Van Opstal, Willie James Jennings, Brenda Salter McNeil, Dr. Liz Rios, Lisa Rodriguez-Watson, Dominique DuBois Gilliard, Soong-Chan Rah, Susie Gamez, Tammy Swanson-Draheim, and I could name so many more.

And we need this not because white men have nothing to offer (We do).

But because discipleship is distorted when every voice reinforcing your worldview already shares your social location, past experiences, and cultural expectations

3. We Must Change Where Formation Happens

This may be the most important piece.

Formation cannot happen only in curated spaces of privilege and shared cultural experiences.

If The Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 25) is true, and Jesus mysteriously resides with the hungry, thirsty, naked, poor, and imprisoned, then proximity to the vulnerable is not optional spirituality.

It is proximity to Christ Himself.

Which means the last thing the American Church needs right now is more elite masculine spirituality built around retreats that cost 4K (though I love a good retreat), celebrity pastors (though some of my friends are), curated Christian cigar lounges (though I don’t mind a good cigar and will share one with friends this week), green rooms, and conferences where powerful men teach other powerful men how to become slightly more spiritual versions of powerful men.

Men do not merely need better podcasts. We need proximity to the poor

We need to learn from refugees.
We need to sit with the grieving.
Know the poor by name.
Learn from single mothers.
Share meals with the unhoused.

Because the poor do not simply need ministry.

They carry revelation.

So friends,

May we not mistake attendance for transformation.
May we not confuse clarity with Christ.

May we stop forming men into victors and start forming them into those who lose their lives on purpose, because only there do they find them.

And may the Church become again what it was always meant to be:
a strange, upside-down kingdom where the last are first,
where the meek are not dismissed but revealed as strong,
where power is always suspect and surrender is always sacred.

And may Jesus, not masculinity, not ideology, not dominance, not cultural reaction, be Lord again in our pulpits, in our leadership, in our imagination, and in our bones.

The crucified Christ is not a symbol of weakness.
He is the final word on what power looks like when God holds it.

And…may we see revival.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, investigative reports came out last month documenting online networks, often referred to as an “online rape academy”. It was a platform where men exchanged explicit material and shared strategies involving the drugging and sexual assault of women, often their own wives or partners.

And these were not hidden in the abstract sense of rumor or fringe myth. They were digital, organized, and sustained through repeated participation and normalization. What began as something almost hard to believe quickly revealed itself as structured: conversations, coaching, and reinforcement loops that turned unspeakable harm into something discussed with familiarity, even routine, lowering any type of moral resistance over time.

What is often shamefully hidden in the dark, was now being celebrated as normative in the light.

It forces an uncomfortable question before we go anywhere else:

Why are we surprised?

When stories of sexual violence surface in our world, the choreography is always the same, shock, outrage, analysis, distance. A kind of moral whiplash, followed quickly by emotional distancing.

But shock is a luxury we indulge when we don’t want to trace the roots.

This kind of evil doesn’t erupt out of nowhere, it grows where it’s permitted, multiplies where it’s ignored, and eventually organizes where it’s never confronted.

What is rehearsed in secret is always waiting for permission to step into the light.

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And so when power at the highest levels refuses accountability (i.e Epstein Files still not fully disclosed); when truth is buried, delayed, or negotiated at the top, why would we expect anything different downstream?

If accountability is absent at the top, don’t be surprised when evil stops hiding at the bottom.

Violence Inside the Story We Call Sacred

So how do we get to a place where this kind of permission exists at all? How do we actually become a people who struggle to hold even the highest offices (whether presidential or pastoral) accountable?

We get there slowly, through formation. Or more accurately, through malformation.

We are shaped, over time, to protect what feels powerful, familiar, or beneficial to us. We learn to minimize what threatens that power. We delay truth, negotiate accountability, and look away when the cost of seeing feels too high. And eventually, we don’t just tolerate the absence of accountability, we expect it.

This isn’t just political. It’s spiritual. It’s cultural. And It’s deeply personal.

And if we’re honest, many of us have been formed this way, even in how we read Scripture.

In the biblical narrative, women are not background figures in a clean moral world. They stand at the intersection of power and vulnerability.

Hagar is pulled into a decision she did not create. (Genesis 16)
She is not the architect of the system, but she becomes its instrument.
When conflict breaks out, she is not protected by the household that used her. She is sent away. And the text does not soften it, it records it with moral weight.

Dinah is not a footnote in Genesis 34.
She is raped, named, and then largely spoken around.
What follows is not clean justice, it is male negotiation, retaliation, and honor management that still leaves her voice absent from the center of the story.

Bathsheba is drawn into a system defined by royal power.
A king can salaciously summon, while the subject cannot meaningfully refuse.
What follows is concealment, institutional protection, and delayed confrontation, until prophetic courage breaks the silence.

These are not side stories. They are exposed fractures in the narrative; evil acts that strip dignity from women made in the image of God perpetuated by patriarchal systems set up to maintain power.

But Here’s Where It Gets Uncomfortable

Even when these stories are in front of us, we don’t always read them at their moral center. We reorganize them. (Especially many of us men)

We remember Abraham’s faith more than Hagar’s displacement.
We remember Jacob’s lineage more than Dinah’s violation.
We remember David’s divine calling more than Bathsheba’s vulnerability.

And we teach others to remember the same.

The weight of the story quietly shifts toward: promise over pain, leadership over harm, divine calling over human cost. And in that shift, something gets lost. Not the story. But the moral pressure of it. Almost as if these women are a sacrifice we can bear for the greater redemptive good.

We are trained, often without realizing it, to see heroic arcs faster than harmed bodies. Why?

Readers, this is where our honesty matters.

Men like me often keep reading Scripture this way not because we are indifferent to harm, but because this reading protects something:

• It protects my identification with the powerful

• It protects the comfort of not having to interrogate desire

• It protects a vision of leadership that does not require surrender or mutual submission.

If we read from David’s vantage point, we can admire.
If we read from Bathsheba’s vantage point, we have to reckon.

And reckoning requires a kind of formation many of us have never received.

So we default to readings that:

• center male agency

• soften the violence that happened against women

• and move quickly to redemption without sitting in harm

Not because we are malicious. But because the system works for us, even if it is violent to others.

And so we arrive back where we started, not shocked, but revealed. Because if we cannot be honest about the violence embedded in our own sacred texts, if we refuse to center the vulnerable as Jesus did, then we shouldn’t expect to recognize harm when it scales into rape academies.

How We Are Formed Differently

So how do we push back?

We don’t correct this with awareness alone.
We correct it with formation under Jesus.

Specifically, through the vision laid out in the Sermon on the Mount and the beatitudes that retrain instinct:

• Blessed are the poor in spirit → I no longer assume I see clearly

• Blessed are the meek → I refuse to use power to override

• Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness → I don’t move past injustice quickly

• Blessed are the merciful → I take harm seriously without hardening

• Blessed are the pure in heart → I confront desire at its root

This is not self-improvement. It is re-formation under a different kind of King and kingdom. We choose to navigate power structures the way Jesus did. We choose Jesus’ way over Abraham’s. We choose Jesus’ Kingdom ethics over David’s.

What This Looks Like Practically

If this is formation, then it must become practice:

1) Read differently
Read Scripture asking: Where is the vulnerable person in this story, and How does God/Jesus center them?

2) Decenter yourself
Refuse to always identify with the hero. Sometimes the most faithful reading is to try and experience the scripture as the one being harmed, or the one in power doing the harming.

3) Submit your instincts
When you feel the urge to move quickly to resolution, stay longer. Stay with what disrupts you.

4) Be taught by voices that may be able to name what you often overlook
Start with St. Teresa Avila, then move Dr. Natasha Sistrunk Robinson, Beth Allison Bar, Dr. Oneya Fennell Okuwobi, Ines Velasquez-McBryde, or Dr. Liz Rios.

5) Let the Beatitudes interpret the story
If your reading does not produce humility, mercy, and a deeper hunger for justice, it is not yet formed by Jesus.

The Real Question

So when harm surfaces, the deeper question isn’t just: How could this happen?

It’s: What formed us not to see it?

And so, Of Course…

Of course stories like the rape academy surface.
Of course networks form to normalize what should never be normalized.
Of course harm becomes organized when it is not confronted early.

We should not be surprised.

Because when accountability erodes at the top, the message is unmistakable: power can act without consequence.

And that message does not stay there.

It disciples everything downstream.

When we refuse to hold power accountable, we do not just tolerate evil. We form a world where it no longer needs to hide.

From Andrew Tate to Doug Wilson, from Mark Driscoll to Pete Hegseth, very different voices are echoing a strikingly similar message to men across our nation and world:

“You’re losing ground.
The world is against you.
Take it back.”

And men are listening. (Of course we are).

Because nothing disciples insecurity quite like a microphone and a little confidence.

Something is rising.

A generation of men, across politics, business, and yes, even the Church stepping forward with a renewed intensity. A desire to reclaim strength. To reassert control. To make American men “masculine” again.

Chest out. Voice up. Grip tighter.

But beneath that rise is a deeper question:

What kind of men are we actually forming…
and why?

Especially for those of us who claim to follow The Crucified King.

Because not all masculinity is properly formed.
And not all strength is redeemed.

Some strength builds.
Some strength bruises.
Some strength carries others.
Some strength needs others beneath it.

And when masculinity is shaped more by fear than by love,
it doesn’t lead to flourishing, it leads to the distortion of men.

So over the next four weeks, we’re going to name that distortion:

THE RISE OF THE BARBARIAN

Not the loud kind. The normalized kind.

Together, we’ll ask a better question…
Not “how to take power back”, but “how to become the kind of people
who don’t need to”.

Join me over the next four weeks, as we talk about men and women working together to help men across our world learn how to give power away, (because the only power worth having is the kind you’re free enough to release). Let’s recover a Christ-shaped way of being a man in the world.

Today’s Installment: The Power Preservation Reflex

There’s a moment in the story of Pharaoh where everything begins to shift.

Pharaoh is the ruler of Egypt, and there’s a people, the Israelites, who are growing… rapidly.

At first, it’s just an observation.
Then it becomes a concern.
And then, almost without noticing, fear grabs the wheel. (And fear rarely asks permission.)

Pharaoh’s violence doesn’t begins with cruelty. It begins with a question:

What if we lose what we have?

A people are multiplying.
My future feels uncertain.
My control feels like it’s slipping.

And just like that, fear becomes strategy. So Pharaoh does what powerful men have always been tempted to do:

He tightens his grip.

He preserves.
He secures.
He reinforces.

We could call it the power preservation reflex.

Pharaoh doesn’t wake up and choose evil.

He just chooses not to let go. He will preserve his power. He will preserve his position. He will preserve his preferred version of order.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly,
he begins to diminish others.

First economically.
Then socially.
Then physically.

What begins as policy becomes oppression.
What starts as caution becomes violence.

Because the preservation reflex always tells the same lie:

If I don’t hold on, I will lose everything.

But what Pharaoh, and many after him, fail to see is this:

Power that is not surrendered in love
does not remain neutral.

It calcifies.
It contracts.
It curves inward.

And eventually, it hunts.

The Preservation Reflex in Modern Life

The preservation reflex didn’t die in Egypt.

It just rebranded, picked a podcast, and gained a following. And it shows up wherever power feels threatened, personally, culturally, spiritually.

And for many white men in America, the last two decades have felt… disorienting.

The election of Barack Obama was, for many, a moment of hope and progress.

For others, it felt like something else entirely; like the ground was shifting.

Like influence wasn’t guaranteed anymore.
Like the world they knew was quietly changing. And when that happens, the preservation reflex doesn’t just whisper…. it trains.

We stop adapting.
We start resisting.

We stop listening.
We start controlling.

We stop loving neighbors.
We start managing threats.

People become problems to be solved, instead of those to be loved.
Belonging becomes guarded. And tables get smaller.

And we’ve seen what that produces.

The rise of Donald Trump is not just political, it’s diagnostic.

Take it back. Reassert. Secure it. And the truth is that the power preservation reflex doesn’t stay out there. It finds its way in here. Into the church. (Usually dressed a little nicer.)

The Reflex in the Church

Christian spaces are not immune.

We just massage the language, and call it conviction.

Conversations about masculinity, leadership, authority,
same urgency, better vocabulary. Voices like Mark Driscoll, Doug Wilson (Seen above), and Josh Howerton now speak into a moment where men feel unsettled. And it resonates. Because disoriented men don’t just want direction, we want solid ground.

Something firm.
Something clear.
Something to stand on.

But when the preservation reflex becomes our spiritual guide,
power stops being something we steward, and starts being something we guard.

Control replaces compassion, certainty replaces humility, and winning replaces becoming.

We stop asking, “Who am I being formed into?”
And start asking, “How do I take back what’s mine?”

And slowly, and subtly, we drift.

Away from the way of Jesus. Away from His beatitudes and His Sermon On The Mount. Away from the shape of the cross. Away from the kind of strength that bleeds instead of boasts.

When the church talks about “biblical manhood,” we often start in familiar places. We point to David, warrior, king, decisive, strong. We revisit the fall in Genesis and see Adam’s passivity, drawing conclusions about responsibility and leadership. We turn to Paul’s letters, especially passages like Ephesians 5, where “the husband is the head of the wife,” or 1 Timothy 2, with its restrictions on teaching and authority, and build frameworks of male headship and order (We will revisit contextual studies in the weeks to come). We quote Paul’s charge to Timothy; be strong, endure hardship, stand firm. And while each of these texts matters deeply, they are often isolated, systematized, and emphasized in ways that can unintentionally reinforce a version of masculinity still centered on power, control, and certainty.

But Scripture does not culminate in David.
It does not end in Genesis.
It does not find its fulfillment in our readings of Paul.

It is finalized in the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ.

And when we look at Jesus, we are not simply given a better example of manhood, we are given its truest definition.

Jesus does not form His masculinity through domination, but through the Beatitudes: blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers. He does not ascend through control, but through surrender. In the Sermon on the Mount, strength is redefined as enemy-love, integrity of heart, and hidden faithfulness. Power is not displayed in taking ground, but in laying down rights. Authority is not asserted over others, but exercised for them. And ultimately, at the cross, we see the clearest picture of manhood in the kingdom of God, not a man preserving his life, but a man pouring it out.

This is the great distinction we must recover:

There is a version of “biblical manhood” that still clings to power, carefully curated from selective texts, shaped by fear, and reinforced by culture.

And then there is Christ-like masculinity.

One grasps.
The other gives.

One secures itself.
The other surrenders itself.

One needs to be in control.
The other trusts the Father enough to let go.

If we are not careful, we will defend a version of manhood that uses the Bible, but looks nothing like Jesus.

But the call of the church is not to produce men who merely act “biblically” as they define it. It is to form men who look like Christ.

And So let us take caution

For if we are not careful,
we will raise up strong men
who have never been formed, and loud men
who have never been surrendered.

We will send out powerful men who have never been shaped by the cross.

(We might even platform them.)

But Scripture calls it something else.

Unformed.

Ill-equipped.

And immature.

If we are not cautious we will have empire-perpetuating Barbarians that look a lot like Pharaoh, but nothing like Christ.

On Palm Sunday, two kings enter the city.
Two very different processions.
Two very different parades.

One comes riding on the colt of a donkey. Deliberately slow.
No army, no sword, no shield. Just the quiet coordination of a King’s coronation. (Yes, Jesus orchestrated his own parade.)

Every step is intentional. Every movement measured.
The palm branches, the cloaks, the “Hosannas”. They all fall into the rhythm of a king who does not rush or coerce.

The other, Pontius Pilate, comes riding in from the west.
The tide of empire, armed, commanding, decisive, on a white horse.

Soldiers march in lockstep, flags wave, and his motion is choreographed to impress, intimidate, and enforce power.

Every detail is calculated to ensure dominance.
Every signal demands attention.
Victory is coordinated by force, and control is maintained by fear.

Two parades. Two kings.
Both strategically and intentionally impressing their power and kingship upon the public, waving two drastically different symbols in the air.

Swords and palms.

The two symbols and strategies that seem so different.

And yet, throughout the history of the Church, we learn that just because one hand waves a palm does not mean the other is not holding a sword.

It is entirely possible to celebrate Jesus while still longing for Caesar.

Palm Sunday forces us to ask:
How do we know what we hold?
Palms or swords?

Palm Sunday and the United States

This week, a prayer rang out. One that was public, confident, and unapologetic.

Pete Hegseth, former Army Ranger and host at Fox News, tied to the highest levels of military power in our nation, read a prayer in a “Christian Worship” service asking God:

“Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.”

It was clean.
It was sharp.
It was chilling.

Not because it came from outside the Church, but because it sounded like the very kind of prayer many looking for the Messiah might have lifted on that Palm Sunday:

God, bless our strength.
God, secure our victory.
God, stand behind our definition of righteousness.

It’s a prayer that imagines Jesus riding in on a war horse from the west.
It wields the sword and calls it a branch.
It claims the cross but carries the empire.

And it should unsettle us, because we are watching a Church that can sing “Hosanna” while still bowing the knee to Caesar.

We are watching people wave palms while their hearts clutch swords.

And yet…

It is easy to see the sword in another’s hand, but what about your own?
How do you and I know whether we are waving a palm or gripping a blade?

1. What do you wield when pressured?

Violence or Self Sacrifice

When pressure rises, you do not choose your weapon. You reveal it.

In conflict with your neighbor.
In support of a policy.
In your own defense when you are critiqued.
In response when gossiped about.

We show where our allegiance truly stands when pressured.

The empire is known to respond with swords, but the kingdom of Jesus advances through surrender, not force.

Rome knew how to keep peace, with domination.

But here comes Jesus.
No horse. No sword. No army.
Just a donkey and a slow procession.

Two kingdoms entering one city.
One built on coercion and violence.
The other on surrender.

The people wanted liberation, but they wanted it the Roman way.
Faster. Stronger. Decisive.

And let’s be honest, it is easy to critique them until we recognize how deeply we have been shaped by the same instincts.

We are a nation fluent in strength. Our budgets, our policies, our global posture all reflect a belief that peace is secured through power.

From decades of military entanglement to ongoing tensions with places like Iran, the sword is never far from reach. It is what we leverage again and again.

And when prayers emerge that ask God to guide the aim, to make every strike effective, it does not feel foreign. It feels familiar.

But Palm Sunday invites a different imagination.

Jesus does not teach His followers to become more precise in their violence.
He teaches them to become more faithful in their surrender.

So when pressure rises, when you are misunderstood, threatened, overlooked, or betrayed, what do you reach for?

Because you do not choose your weapon in that moment.
You reveal it.

2. What do you trust when delayed?

Hurry or Patience

The promise and prophecy of a coming king, gentle and riding on a donkey, had lived in Israel’s story for centuries. See Zechariah 9.

Generation after generation waited.
They prayed.
They hoped.
They died without seeing fulfillment.

And then Jesus arrives quietly, deliberately, without urgency. Right on time.

God is not in a hurry.
But the crowd is.

They are tired of waiting. And honestly, who could blame them?

When you want salvation, when you need salvation, you want it now!

Hosanna means “save us now”.
Not eventually.
Not mysteriously.
Not through suffering.
Now.

Here is something about empire.
Empire does not wait.
Empire accelerates.
Empire demands results.
Empire rewards speed.

And we have learned to trust that pace.

We measure success by immediacy.
We equate delay with failure.

The problem is that empire moves fast, but rarely does it move fast for the powerless.

So when God does not move fast enough, something in us starts reaching toward the strategies and speed of empire.

To force.
To manufacture.
To take control.

But here is what I have started to learn, very slowly over the years:

If I have to rush it, I may be building my kingdom instead of God’s.

On Palm Sunday, Jesus refuses to rush.
He does not seize power.
He does not meet their timeline.
He does not conform to their urgency.

And that delay exposes something in all of us:

Do we trust the slow work of God, or do we reach for faster kingdoms?

3. What are you holding onto?

Symbol or Substance

It is possible to wave the symbol and still resist the King.

Picking up a palm branch is easy. Alignment with Jesus is costly.

Palm branches were not neutral.
They were symbols loaded with meaning.

National pride.
Hope for revolution.
Longing for victory.

The crowd was not just celebrating. They were signaling:
”We are ready for a king who will take power.”

But Jesus refuses to become that kind of king.

And this is where the tension moves from ancient history into present reality.

We are surrounded by symbols.

A nation called Christian.
Scripture in public speeches.
Faith language woven into policy and power.
Prayers invoking God over national strength.

But symbols can create the illusion of alignment without the cost of obedience.

You can hold the symbol and still resist the substance.
You can wave the branch and still reject the way of Jesus.

His way does not look like grasping for control.
It does not look like securing dominance.
It does not look like asking God to sanctify our violence.

Picking up palm branches is easy.
They cost you nothing.

But substance will cost you everything.

To forgive when it is costly.
To yield when you could dominate.
To trust when everything in you wants to force an outcome.

Substance is embodied.

It looks like the man on the colt.
Unhurried and Unarmed.

It sits at tables others would never build.
Breaking bread with women and children, with the leper and blind, with fishermen and failures, with the kind of people empire forgets.

It does not grasp for power. It releases it.
It does not resist violence with greater violence. It absorbs it.

Trusting, somehow, that surrender is not the end of the story.

Because this kind of faith believes that the power of the Father’s kingdom does not dominate death. It outlasts it.

It does not crush empire. It redeems what empire could never imagine restoring.

And in the end, it is not the sword that writes the story, but the One who laid it down.

My wife Amanda and I get asked the same question constantly:
“How do you do it?”

Six kids.
In Manhattan.
In a 1,000 sq ft apartment.

“They seem relatively normal. Occasionally kind. Mostly clothed. What’s your secret?”

The question usually comes with a mix of curiosity, admiration, and just enough concern to suggest we may have lost our minds somewhere between the third and fourth child.

People assume there must be a system; some secret formula of discipline, efficiency, and color-coded Google Calendars.

But the truth is both simpler and far more demanding.

We don’t always have a system, and rarely do we have all the right tools.
Instead we have a theology (or theologies)

And that theology, lived, wrestled with, and embodied, has given us the resilience, grace, laughter, and tears to survive (and sometimes even enjoy) a very full life.

Over time, Amanda and I realized that what sustains our family isn’t better techniques (though techniques matter), It’s a set of convictions about God, about people, and about what it means to be human in a complicated city with a complicated family.

And here’s the thing: every one of these convictions often runs against the grain of our cultural moment.

Here are four theological convictions that keep us moving forward:

1. A Theology of Suffering

We live in a culture engineered to eliminate suffering. Every app, every algorithm, every innovation is designed to make life faster, smoother, and more comfortable. Discomfort is treated like a design flaw.

But the Christian story begins somewhere else.

Suffering is not an interruption to life, it is part of it.
And somehow, mysteriously, it is central to the good news of Jesus.

From Genesis to the prophets, from the book of Lamentations to Jesus’ crucifixion, scripture tells the story of a God who does not avoid suffering but enters it, absorbs it, and transforms it.

At the center of the Gospel is not success. Not dominance. Not “winning.”

It is a crucified Christ.

In a moment where political leaders and even the church can sound obsessed with platform, influence, victory, and winning at all costs, Jesus insists that redemption often comes through losing and through suffering, instead of maneuvering around it.

Social scientist Arthur C. Brooks has argued that happiness is not the absence of suffering, but the ability to transform it into meaning. That insight echoes something ancient in the Christian tradition. From walking into the funeral of our first foster daughter, who died in a tragic accident on her 21st birthday, to raising children whose lives were marked by trauma long before they found us, suffering hasn’t been a guest in the Sadlier home, it’s been a resident.

We are not the polished, picture-perfect family that Focus on the Family likes to parade as the Christian ideal. Ours is louder, messier, and grace-soaked.

It is held together not by perfection, but by presence.

We’ve had to learn, sometimes against our will, that suffering can shrink your world, or it can deepen your soul. The difference is whether you treat it as something to escape, or something God might somehow redeem.

2. A Theology of Covenant

If suffering confronts our addiction to comfort, covenant confronts our addiction to individualism.

We live in a time where relationships are increasingly treated as provisional. If it stops working, move on. If it stops serving you and your agenda, let it go.

But Scripture offers a different vision.

Love is not transactional.
It is covenantal.

From the beginning, God binds Himself to people with enduring, faithful, stubborn commitment; promise that outlasts circumstances.

Amanda and I have tried, (very imperfectly), to build our marriage on that kind of covenant. This means something that surprises people: we prioritize our marriage over our parenting. The funny thing is that our children know this, and actually find comfort in it. This isn’t the case because our children matter less, but because the greatest gift we can give them is some type of stable, loving, resilient relationship to grow up inside of.

When a home is built on covenant, children learn something the world rarely teaches:

Love is not disposable.
Commitment does not collapse under pressure.

(Note: Now, let me be clear, as a pastor, I have actually counseled people to leave marriages where safety is at stake. Covenant is never a cover for harm, and I have a deep compassion for so many of my friends that have had to walk away from a relationship)

But in a culture that constantly whispers, “Look out for yourself,” we’re trying to live a louder story: one of self-giving, enduring love. This is so messy, so hard, but so far, it has been so worth it.

For what it’s worth, 21 years in, our marriage has been a party, fight, party, fight kind of marriage (Enneagram 7/8-wing meets and enneagram 8/7-wing… you can imagine the chaos). But we’re still here. Because covenant, in our time, is actually a quiet act of resistance.

3. A Theology of Mutuality

This one has required the most embodied repentance, and is still a real and raw work in progress.

Like many couples, Amanda and I stepped into marriage carrying assumptions about gender roles and responsibilities that we had never fully examined. Over time, we realized something uncomfortable:

Amanda was carrying too much.

Too much of the home.
Too much of the emotional weight.
Too much of the invisible labor.

It wasn’t sustainable. And it wasn’t biblical.

In Ephesians 5, before anything is said about husbands and wives, there is a command that often gets overlooked: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

That is mutuality.

And it sits right at the heart of a long-standing theological conversation:

Complementarian theology teaches that men and women are equal in value but have distinct, often hierarchical roles, especially in the home and church, with men typically holding primary authority.

Egalitarian theology affirms full equality in both value and function, shared authority, shared leadership, shared responsibility across every sphere of life.

Here’s the tension we’ve observed:

Many Christians say they are egalitarian, but functionally live as complementarians within the church. Others hold complementarian theology, but quietly depend on egalitarian practice to survive real life. And still others hold egalitarian theology in the church, but still remain committed to complimentarian practices at home.

Mutuality cuts through theory.

It asks something more demanding:

It asks that both voices shape the home.
That both people carry responsibility.
That both lead, serve, and submit to one another

Not perfectly. Not evenly every day. But intentionally.

And when that happens, something shifts. The family becomes stronger, because leadership becomes deeper and shared.

We are still learning this. Still unlearning old patterns. Still repenting where needed. (Mostly me)

But we are committed to building a home where power is shared, not hoarded.

4. A Theology of Becoming

Finally, this might be the one that holds all the others together.

We believe the goal of life is not arrival. The goal is transformation.

Our culture is obsessed with outcomes; milestones, achievements, benchmarks. Life becomes a ladder to climb. But the Christian vision is slower, deeper, and more demanding.

It is about becoming the kind of people who continue to become more like Jesus because we live in union with Jesus.

In Romans, Paul writes that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope.

Friends, Parenting accelerates that process.

Every sleepless night stretches patience.
Every conflict demands forgiveness.
Every chaotic dinner table becomes a training ground for grace.

Our children are not projects we are managing. They are image bearing participants in our formation.

They are helping us become people of deeper love, deeper humility, deeper dependence on God.

The Real Answer

So when people ask how we’re raising six kids in Manhattan, here’s the honest answer:

We don’t have a system.
We have a theology.

A theology that refuses to run from suffering.
A theology that chooses covenant over convenience.
A theology that practices mutuality in a world obsessed with power.
And a theology that believes life is not about arriving, but becoming.

None of this removes the chaos, and the last few years have been filled with it. But it does give the chaos meaning.

And so, to the parents, the weary, the ones holding more than they ever imagined they would:

May you find God not after the chaos, but within it.
May your suffering be met with a grace that does not waste it.
May your commitments outlast your feelings.
May your homes be marked by shared strength and shared surrender.
And may you become, slowly, imperfectly, and beautifully the kind of people who look a little more like Jesus than you did yesterday.

Keep going. I am cheering you on.

Israeli families shattered on October 7. Iranian mothers burying their children. Palestinian civilians in Gaza digging through dust and concrete for the people they love. Sudan, Somalia, and other nations most of us will never visit, bleeding quietly in conflicts the world can barely keep track of.

And closer to home, the suffering is just as present. In the United States, homelessness continues to rise, and the gap between wealth and poverty, power and powerlessness, is wider than at any point in modern memory.

The vulnerable are no longer far away.

They arrive in our algorithms, on our screens, and in our newsfeeds all day long.

And when we see them, something in us wants to respond.

We post.
We protest.
We argue.
We donate.
We pick sides.

We want to do something.

But beneath that urgency may be a deeper, more unsettling question:

In a world drowning in violence, the most important question may not be “what will we do for the most vulnerable,” but “who are we becoming for them?”

Power and the Sword

Our instinct in moments like these is almost always the same: we try to solve issues, often caused by the misuse of power, with even more power.

Violence with stronger violence.
Domination with greater domination.

It is the logic of every empire in history. And if we are honest, it is a reflex that lives quietly in our own hearts. We see suffering and instinctively reach for whatever form of power we think might fix it.

Political power.
Economic power.
Military power.
Social power.

But the story of Jesus interrupts that instinct.

When the soldiers came to arrest him in the garden, Peter reached for the only solution he knew. Steel flashed in the dark of Gethsemane, and a servant’s ear fell to the ground (Matthew 26), as if the kingdom of God could be defended the same way every other kingdom in history has been defended.

But Jesus stopped him.

“Put your sword back in its place.”

In that moment, Jesus was not simply correcting Peter’s behavior. He was revealing an entirely different way to live in a violent world, and an entirely different kind of person the vulnerable actually need.

The People of the Beatitudes

On a hillside outside Galilee, in the manifesto we now call the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus described the kind of people who inherit the kingdom of God.

And they are not the people our world typically celebrates.

Not the dominant.
Not the triumphant.
Not the ones who force their will upon the world.

Instead, Jesus points toward three quiet but revolutionary values:

Meekness instead of strength.
Mercy instead of fairness.
Suffering instead of triumph.

Meekness Instead of Strength

If I am honest, I have been called many things in my life.

Meek has never been one of them.

To most of us, meekness sounds like weakness. The meek get pushed around. The meek get forgotten. They certainly do not change the world.

We prefer heroes like William Wallace charging into battle or Maximus defying an empire.

But then Jesus, holding all authority in heaven and earth, begins his kingdom campaign with these words:

Blessed are the meek.

Meekness is not weakness; it is power restrained by love.

It is choosing humility in a culture obsessed with dominance.
Gentleness in a society that rewards aggression.
Stillness in a world addicted to outrage.

If we are not intentionally formed into meek people, the world will form us into strong ones.

But the kingdom of God runs on a different kind of strength.

And the vulnerable do not need more domination in their lives.

They need meekness.

Mercy Instead of Fairness

Jesus continues:

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

This confronts one of the deepest instincts in American culture: fairness.

At City Relief, the organization I serve in New York, we will connect this year with nearly seventy thousand people experiencing homelessness across New York and New Jersey.

And beneath many conversations about poverty is a quiet narrative many of us carry, myself included on some days:

“Maybe they deserve it.”
“Maybe they didn’t work hard enough.”
“Maybe life simply gave them what was fair based on the decisions they made.”

But the gospel dismantles the framework of fairness.

Christianity is built on the stunning reality that God does not give us what we deserve.

God gives mercy.

Extravagant mercy.
Undeserved grace.

As Thomas Merton once wrote:

“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.”

And here is the real danger in valuing fairness over mercy.

When we prioritize fairness, we begin to sidestep the very people Jesus says hold the keys to the kingdom.

If Jesus resides with the poor (Matthew 25),
If he comes for the sick (Luke 5),
If God is near to the meek and the mourning (Matthew 5),

Then the poor may need my presence in their lives. But the deeper truth is this: I need their presence in mine.

And mercy is the only way I am going to get there.

Suffering Instead of Triumph

The final value may be the hardest for us to embrace.

Suffering.

I am grateful to live in the United States. But we must recognize something formative about the American imagination: it is deeply rooted in a narrative of prosperity, victory, and triumph.

From the left to the right, our nation has often been described as “the promised land,” and that imagination shapes how we think, live, and even worship.

Consider this.

Most Americans have sung the national anthem, a song celebrating triumph in war, hundreds of times.

Yet many Christians could not quote more than a sentence from the Sermon on the Mount.

That repetition is not neutral. It shapes our hearts, our expectations, and even how we understand the gospel.

Because when we read the life of Jesus, we discover something radically different:

The central victory of Christianity comes through suffering.

Jesus wins by losing.
Life emerges through sacrifice.
Resurrection comes through death.

Which means the power of our faith is not proven by whether we avoid suffering, but by how we walk through it.

The earliest witnesses of the church; people like Paul, Mary, the apostles, and even Jesus himself, did not testify to God’s power because life went well.

They testified because even in suffering they carried hope, love, and faith.

In the kingdom of God, the paradox remains:

To win, we give in.

Becoming the People the Vulnerable Need

Meekness over strength.
Mercy over fairness.
Suffering over triumph.

These are not strategies.

They are the kind of people Jesus is forming in a violent world, and the kind of person I hope to become.

Unless the powerful among us are willing to be shaped by the Beatitudes, we will continue to perpetuate the very problems we are trying to solve.

Every day the suffering of the world arrives on our screens.

We see it.
We feel it.
We want to act.

But perhaps the deeper invitation of Jesus is not first to do something.

It is to become someone.

Because until we become Beatitude people, our power will always recreate the very violence we claim we want to heal.

And the vulnerable deserve better than that.