Brandon Charbonneau

Husband to @JenniferDudley4, Father of three, Presbyterian.

Founder of Serve the King Ministries

Church Planter of Christ the King Church

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

Look, you've seen the world around you, we need faithful men calling the next generation to step up to the plate and follow Christ, not just pay him lip service. We are called to be a light in the darkness, bringing faithful Christian teaching to college students and families. Our mission is to foster deep, lasting change through the transformative power of the Holy Spirit—not just catchy phrases, but true spiritual growth that shapes lives for eternity. We need your support to make this vision a reality!

We’re launching a fundraising campaign to raise $9,000 per month to expand our impact and shine God’s light brighter in Houghton. Here’s how your generosity will make a difference:

Hiring an Associate Campus Minister: Your gift will help us bring on a dedicated minister to provide biblically grounded mentorship, guiding students toward a deeper relationship with Christ. We have a seminary graduate with campus ministry experience from the University of Cincinatti that we would like to call to work with us. This would effectively double our reach on campus.

Establishing Campus Houses for Community: We’re seeking to create campus houses where students can build authentic, faith-filled communities, fostering spiritual growth and lifelong connections. Campus houses are the place where the meat is made, students have to wrestle with one another, theology, and the implications of living a Christian life in all things.

Supporting Our Family’s Mission: As a family of five serving in ministry, we’re aiming to increase our annual income from $28,000 to $50,000 to sustain our work and continue sharing the Gospel.

Your monthly donation—whether $25, $100 or $200—will help us bring faithful teaching and the Holy Spirit’s transformative power to those searching for hope. Here’s the bottom line: Your gift can spark eternal change.

Join us in being a light in the darkness! Give today at https://t.co/pCvdsmNiwo. Every dollar helps us share the truth of Christ and build a stronger faith community in Houghton.

Why give?

Truth: Your support equips students with sound Christian teaching and mentors to prepare for a faithful life in Christ.

Transformation: You enable us to evangelize and find the lost sheep of God each day.

Hope: Your generosity brings light to those in spiritual darkness, freeing them from pornography, video game addictions, depression, drinking, all the things that students at MTU struggle with.

Please share this post with your network to spread the word! You make it possible for us to transform lives through Christ. Thank you for partnering with Serve the King Ministries!

“You are the light of the world… let your light shine before others.” – Matthew 5:14-16

@ServeTheKingMin

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

The hardest truth about authority from God is its basis in loving kindness and not man's desire to corrupt.

10/10 post

[Joseph Spurgeon @Joseph_Spurgeon]

Feminists and egalitarians despise male headship and authority because they confuse authority with mere power. They think authority means having the power to do whatever you want and to force others to also do what you want. True authority, however, is fundamentally about responsibility. All human authority is accountable to God, who judges how they lead. Authority does come with power, but it is the power to fulfill responsibility—the power to do what is right for those you lead and to glorify God.

Male headship isn't a win-lose situation where men sit in luxury and women suffer. It's a win-win scenario where men, accountable to God, act for the good of their family, church, or society. Under such leadership, women and children flourish.

They don't thrive when men neglect their responsibilities and women rebel against God and man.

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

https://t.co/EoH7m90Nvu

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

https://t.co/XCXowTIZzF

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

@Joseph_Spurgeon I dunno if any men in @EvangelPresby could last a month swimming in those waters

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

The sermon I preached on Sunday, a necessary thing in our times.

[Christ the King Church of the Kewenaw @ChristTheKingUP]

Title: Ephesians 5:22-24 - God's Glory in Woman
Speaker: Brandon Charbonneau
Series: Ephesians
Date: May 26, 2026
Bible: Ephesians 5:22-24; 1 Peter 3:1-6

In this bold and timely sermon, we examine Go... https://t.co/ugVtV41ZkK

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

@MTNiemela That's sad brother, hope the kids take it well!

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

@ZacharyGarris As Christianity continues its descent, gotta make money somewhere.

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

I am firmly convinced that to be Christian one must believe God radically changes Sinners for His Good, and anyone who denies that is non-Christian.

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

Godless men forbid marriage as if they were deserving of the best. They have deserted the Gospel and forgotten that God redeems the broken and let's the self righteous burn in hell for all eternity.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

God married a whore.

In Hosea 1:2, God instructs a prophet to marry a prostitute as a living parable of His own relationship with Israel.

I’ll admit my first instinct seeing this post was to recoil. Then I did my quiet time.

In Hosea, Gomer is not background detail. She is the crux of the whole story. Hosea takes her back after she leaves him. He buys her back out of slavery as God tells him to. Because that is what God does.

Rahab was a prostitute in Jericho. She is in the lineage of Christ. Matthew 1 puts her there without apology or asterisk.

The woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears in Luke 7 was a known public sinner, likely a prostitute. The Pharisee hosting the dinner was disgusted that Jesus let her touch him. Jesus told the Pharisee that the person forgiven most loves most. He did not say she was tolerated. He said she understood grace better than the religious man throwing the dinner party.

The pattern is clear, this is not one story. This is every generation being confronted with the same scandalous imagery and recoiling the same way.

Because the scandal does not stop in the Old Testament. Paul tells husbands in Ephesians 5 to love their wives the way Christ loves the Church. And who is the Church? She is the bride of Christ.

She is not a worthy or befitting bride.

She is a people steeped in idolatry, rebellion, and spiritual adultery, bought back at the cost of His life.

In the Old Testament, God tells Hosea to marry Gomer. In the New Testament, Christ marries us. The parable is the same only that the stage is larger.

This post or this man’s union is not more scandalous than the gospel. The gospel tells us that a sinless God dies in the place of a guilty people who neither deserved it nor asked for it is the whole gospel.

The scandal is not incidental to the story. It is the story. None of us gets to be comfortable.

All of us recoiling at this testimony are doing exactly what the Pharisees did. They saw sinners near Jesus and called it contamination. Jesus said that was the entire point.

So if this makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is not a problem with the post. It is a problem with your gospel.

[Trevor Sheatz @TrevorSheatz]

My wife was formerly promiscuous. I was a virgin.

She was then radically born-again. Committed to church, evangelized constantly, Puritan books in her bedroom, prayer journals, grief over past sexual sin, etc.

We got to know each other well for over a year, dated for four months, engaged for two and a half, and didn't sin sexually with one another. Our first kiss with each other was at the altar on our wedding day (reaction pic attached!).

We've been married for over five years now, and she's been the most wonderful and godly wife, mother to our three children, and homemaker you could imagine.

She's more pure than most virgins, as biblical purity has less to with past sins (though they certainly matter) and more to do with one's current posture of the heart and daily decisions to honor the Lord (Matt. 5:8).

We're far too quick to forget the story of the woman labeled as a known "sinner" (likely a prostitute) in Luke 7:36-50 who was washing Jesus' feet with her tears while kissing them too. The Pharisees were shocked that Jesus let a public sinner do this.

Jesus responded with a parable about debts being forgiven and ended with this powerful conclusion: "Her many sins have been forgiven; that’s why she loved much. But the one who is forgiven little, loves little" (Luke 7:47).

Everyone seems to highlight the benefits of virginity, and it certainly is a blessing. But we forget to highlight the benefits of being forgiven much as well. My wife knows the depths of Jesus' forgiveness more than most people, enabling her to more easily live out a life of passionate love for her Savior.

A woman or man's past sexual sin matters. But what matters far more when it comes to deciding who to marry is if the person is truly born again, if their repentance is real, if they truly have a heart for Christ, if they truly follow Jesus and obey his commands.

"God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God has chosen what is insignificant and despised in the world ​— ​what is viewed as nothing ​— ​to bring to nothing what is viewed as something, so that no one may boast in his presence. It is from him that you are in Christ Jesus, who became wisdom from God for us ​— ​our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, — in order that, as it is written: 'Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.'" (1 Cor. 1:27-31)

"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come!" (2 Cor. 5:17)

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

@Protestia Things like this and Scott Adams will continue so long as Pastors continue to be self-ordained and illiterate.

[Joseph Spurgeon @Joseph_Spurgeon]

We all saw that woman in Minnesota shot during a confrontation with federal law enforcement officers carrying out their lawful duties. It is a tragedy. Any loss of life is.
This woman did not die because she was faithfully living within her God-given calling. She died because she had convinced herself she was the hero of the story. In her mind, she was not interfering with officers enforcing the law. She was standing in the way of Nazis. She was reenacting a moral drama she had absorbed from years of media narratives, political rhetoric, and cultural storytelling.
When people are convinced their opponents are Nazis, ordinary restraints disappear. If Nazis are the enemy, then resistance becomes righteousness. Interference becomes heroism. Risking your life feels noble. Doing nothing feels immoral. In that mindset, larping as a Nazi killer feels like moral duty.
And that is exactly what happened.
But this is not merely a problem on the political left. It is not confined to activism or street protests. It is a deeper cultural and spiritual temptation that affects all of us.
We live in a society that relentlessly trains people to see themselves as the main character. Movies, television, social media, and even music tell us the same story over and over again. Your life should be big. Your story should matter. You were meant for something more than ordinary faithfulness.
One of the clearest examples of this seeped into Christian consciousness years ago through a popular song by Switchfoot. “We were meant to live for so much more.” In its original context, the song was pushing back against living just for sin. That impulse was not wrong. But honestly, most people didn’t hear that.
What people heard was this. My life is supposed to be epic. I am meant to be the hero. Ordinary obedience cannot possibly be enough.
That message did not remain in pop music. It entered the church.
David Platt’s book Radical was written with, let us suppose, good intentions. At its best, it challenged comfortable, consumeristic Christianity and reminded believers that following Christ costs something. That corrective was needed. But the problem was not merely how the book was written. It was how it was received and applied.
For many Christians, Radical communicated that faithfulness only counts if it looks extreme. That unless you sell everything, move overseas, adopt multiple children, or live in visible poverty, your Christian life is somehow deficient. Ordinary obedience started to feel like compromise. Stability started to feel like worldliness. Quiet faithfulness started to feel like failure.
It was baptized FOMO(Fear of missing out).
Most of the Christian life is not dramatic. Most believers are not called to headline moments, public platforms, or radical gestures that make good stories. They are called to faithfulness in the place God has assigned them.
Working hard at the job God gave you because you serve Christ as King. Loving your wife when no one is applauding. Raising children patiently over decades. Showing up to church week after week. Giving faithfully. Practicing hospitality. Praying when no one sees. Training those who will come after you. None of that feels heroic. None of it scratches the itch to feel important.
But it is exactly how God builds His kingdom.
When people are taught to despise ordinary faithfulness, they go looking for meaning elsewhere. Some chase political causes that let them feel righteous and embattled. Some chase outrage. Some chase platforms. Some chase risk. Others grow bitter and restless, convinced their life should have gone differently.
It is main character syndrome.
Scripture gives us something different. You are not the main character. Jesus, our King is. We are at best side characters or extras in his story.
One such extra was a man named Barzillai found in 2 Samuel.
Barzillai was not the main character of Israel’s story. He appears briefly. He serves quietly at the age of 80. He uses his resources to sustain the king when the king is weak. And then he disappears from the narrative. No monument. No recognition campaign. No demand to be remembered.
Years later after Barzillai has long passed away, King David, on his own death bed, remembers Barzillai and gives command to his son to take care of Barzillai’s posterity.
Barzillai was a great man.
Not because he was visible. Not because he was edgy. Not because he took risks that made good stories. But because he was faithful in his station. He did not chase significance. He did not resent obscurity. He did not confuse faithfulness with theatrics. He acted in a time when David was in need and faded away.
God does sometimes call ordinary people to extraordinary moments. Scripture is full of that. But those moments are rare, and they are never the goal. They come to people who have already been faithful in the slow, quiet work of obedience.
Barzillai did not become faithful when David needed him. He had been faithful long before. And when the moment passed, he went home. He passed the blessing to the next generation and was content to live out his days among his people.
That is the life Scripture honors.
In a culture obsessed with being the main character, the Christian is called to something better. To serve the King. To love what God has placed directly in front of him. To embrace ordinary faithfulness without resentment or restlessness.
You were not meant to live for “so much more” in the way the world defines more. You were meant to live faithfully.
And faithfulness, though quiet, outlasts every counterfeit hero story our culture produces.

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

@WWUTTcom Side question: where's profanity listed as sinful?

[Tim Bayly † @tbayly]

Renee Good and ICE riots?
Read this. Tell your friends and relatives, "It's not even close." Note pics at end https://t.co/NkMY4az2Ka

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

Let me explain why so many modern house churches are spiritually dangerous to you and your family…

First, it’s not because they meet in houses. Churches have met just about everywhere throughout church history. In the New Testament, believers often gathered in homes because they were the easiest and most available places to meet (Acts 2:46; 5:42; 12:12; 16:15, 40; Rom. 16:5; 1 Cor. 16:19; Col. 4:15; Philem. 2). But the church was never tied to one kind of space. Christians also met in temple courts (Acts 2:46; 3:1��11; 5:12), synagogues (Acts 9:20; 13:14–16; 17:1–4; 18:4), borrowed halls (Acts 19:9–10), and outdoor or ordinary places like upper rooms and riversides (Acts 16:13; 20:7–9). From the beginning, the church gathered wherever God made space: homes being convenient, but never exclusive.

So I’m not opposed to churches meeting in homes. East River’s earliest gatherings were in a park and in a house.

Second, it’s also not because I reject everything associated with modern house-church thinking. Emily and I have been around house-church leaders since our teens. I read the books early on. I appreciated some of it, and still do. I understand the desire for community, intimacy, and simplicity. You can even see that impulse reflected in one of East River’s foundational commitments: we aim for a streamlined form of church life. We try to keep things tight, centered, and uncluttered.

The spiritual danger I see with house churches is not always intrinsic to the idea, but it is ever-present in the modern movement.

First, the house-church world easily becomes a haven for authority-despising, manipulative men. It attracts those who want influence without accountability, followers without oversight, and power without courts of appeal.

Second, many house-church models operate from a restorationist mindset, the claim that the church quickly fell away from its “pure” New Testament form and that they are now restoring it.

Those two dangers feed each other. Let me take them one at a time.

1. A refuge for unaccountable men

One of the most consistent patterns in unhealthy house-church networks is not intimacy, but insulation. When there is no formal eldership, no recognized courts, no real mechanism for discipline, appeal, or removal, authority doesn’t disappear. It goes feral.

Someone always leads. Someone always teaches. Someone always sets doctrine, direction, and boundaries. The only question is whether that authority is visible, tested, and constrained, or hidden, personalized, and untouchable.

House-church movements regularly attract men who resent oversight, bristle at peer leadership, and despise institutional restraint. They often speak endlessly about “organic church,” “relational authority,” and “the Spirit’s leading,” but what they usually mean is that no one gets to tell them no.

In that environment, families have no protection. If a leader becomes controlling, doctrinally unstable, sexually compromised, financially manipulative, or spiritually abusive, there is nowhere to go. No outside eldership. No court of appeal. Leaving simply means disappearing, and the man remains, unchanged, for the next group.

The New Testament assumes the opposite. It teaches plural eldership (Acts 14:23; Phil. 1:1), tested character (1 Tim. 3; Titus 1), public ordination (Acts 6:5–6; 13:3), discipline (Matt. 18:15–17; 1 Cor. 5), and appeal beyond the local leader (Acts 11; 15). Authority in Scripture is always real, and therefore always bounded (1 Pet. 5:1–3; Acts 20:28; Gal. 2:11–14).

House-church worlds often promise freedom from hierarchy, but what they usually deliver is the most dangerous hierarchy of all: one man, self-appointed, immune to correction.

Side Note:

Right now I can think of almost a dozen men I know who were very pro-structure and pro-institution, until they were disciplined or denied a position they wanted. Almost overnight, they became outspoken house-church advocates and railed against the abuses of the institutional church.

2. The restorationist delusion

The second danger is theological.

Many house-church systems are built on the assumption that the church “quickly fell” after the apostles, was corrupted by structure, creeds, clergy, and continuity, and must now be rebuilt from scratch. The language is usually, “We’re getting back to Acts.”

But this mindset quietly severs Christians from the actual historic church.

It teaches people, often without saying it outright, that for most of two thousand years, Christ failed to preserve His church in any meaningful way. That the Spirit largely abandoned her. That the creeds, councils, ministries, and institutional forms of Christianity were mostly mistakes. And that the real church has finally been rediscovered in someone’s living room.

This is just arrogance.

It also produces theological instability. Once you detach from the historic church, you lose the guardrails that preserved doctrine through centuries of heresy and hard-won clarity. You trade the tested consensus of Christ’s body for the private interpretations of a few modern leaders. And when doctrine shifts, as it always does in restorationist settings, there is no fixed reference point to correct it.

The result is predictable: novelty replaces catholicity, personality replaces office, and “what God is doing right now” replaces “what the church has always confessed.”

The New Testament church was not anti-institutional. It appointed officers (Acts 6:1–6; 14:23; Titus 1:5), guarded doctrine (Acts 2:42; 15; 2 Tim. 1:13–14), disciplined members (Matt. 18:15–17; 1 Cor. 5), and formally transmitted the faith (2 Tim. 2:2; Jude 3). Acts is not a protest against structure; it is the seedbed of it.

To reject the historic church is not to recover the early church. It is to cut yourself off from her.

How the two dangers combine

These two errors reinforce each other.

Restorationism creates leaders who believe they are rebuilding Christianity from scratch. Unaccountable structures give those leaders room to act like apostles. Together they produce small, intense, personality-driven communities that feel pure and radical... until they fracture, burn out, or wound the people inside them.

And families pay the price.

Wives sit under unstable teaching. Children grow up in doctrinal experiments. Marriages get entangled in informal authority structures. And when things go wrong, there is no church, only a man and his followers.

That is why the danger is not the house.

The danger is a church with no past, no courts, no officers, no accountability, and no protection.

Again, these things are not intrinsic to the house-church movement. Any model of church can be twisted into something unhealthy. And it ought not to be. For example, there is such a thing as an overly systematized, overly litigious church.

But in an age of collapsing institutional trust, my inclination is that I don’t have to warn about those dangers the way I once did. The cultural current is already running hard in that direction.

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

And He said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
John 1:51

What an incredible promise Jesus gives to Nathanael, and to us! In these words, He points back to Jacob's dream of the ladder (Genesis 28), but now He declares Himself as the true ladder bridging heaven and earth.

John Calvin beautifully captures the wonder of this verse in his commentary: "This passage teaches us, that though the whole human race was banished from the kingdom of God, the gate of heaven is now opened to us." Because of Jesus, the gates of heaven stand wide open! No longer are sinners shut out in fear and separation. Through Christ's life, death, and resurrection, the way is made clear: access is granted, mercy flows freely, and angels rejoice as heaven and earth are united in Him.

If you've ever felt too far gone, too broken, or too unworthy... hear this today: The gates are open. Jesus, the Son of Man, invites you in. Heaven isn't locked against you, it's flung wide because of His grace!

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

There isn't a single "best" English Bible translation in the absolute sense; different versions serve different purposes well, and yes, some are weaker than others when it comes to accuracy and faithfulness. What matters most is the underlying conviction that shapes how we approach the whole question: the doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration.

Christians believe God has breathed out every word of Scripture, not just the big ideas, not just the general thoughts, but the very words themselves (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:20–21). Plenary means "all of it"; verbal means "the words." This isn't dictation in a mechanical way, but divine superintendence so that what was written is exactly what God intended, down to the individual terms, tenses, and structures He chose through human authors.

Because of that high view of inspiration, we have good reason to prioritize translations that stay as close as possible to the original wording, grammar, and structure. This is often called "formal equivalence" or "essentially literal" translations. These seek to let the text speak for itself as transparently as possible, rather than smoothing it over or interpreting it too heavily for the modern reader. When we drift too far into dynamic equivalence (thought-for-thought), we risk inserting more of the translator's understanding and less of the Spirit's precise wording.

So, practically speaking, translations like the ESV (even with its errors such as in 1 Cor 6:9-13), NASB95, and even the classic KJV (with its historical strengths) align better with this commitment. They aren't perfect: every translation involves some level of interpretive choice, and none carries the inspiration of the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek manuscripts. However, they aim to keep us tethered closely to what God actually said.

The goal isn't wooden literalism that makes the Bible hard to read. It's humble reverence: we want to hear God's voice as clearly as possible, trusting that His inspired words are sufficient, powerful, and worth preserving as faithfully as we can in English.

We must use a good, literal-leaning translation as our main diet for study, preaching, and memorization. Supplementing with others when helpful (like the NIV for readability or flow in certain passages) is good, but we must always let the more literal versions serve as the anchor. In that way, we honor the God who didn't merely inspire concepts. He inspired words, and those words still speak with life and authority today.

(I just had a seminary class on this so it's thick in my head)

[Brandon Charbonneau @Charb_izard]

No, God is not trying to save the non-elect.
Christ's death is sufficient for all sin, able to save any sinner, even the worst, but it is efficient (actually effective) only for the elect, those whom the Father gave to the Son before the foundation of the world (John 6:37-39; 10:11, 15, 26-29; Eph 1:4-5).
God does not have a frustrated desire or unfulfilled wish to save those He has sovereignly passed over in reprobation. The atonement is particular in its design and application: Christ laid down His life for His sheep, His church, His bride, not for those who are not sheep, vessels of wrath fitted for destruction (Matt 25:33; Rom 9:22-23).
The universal gospel call goes out to all (“whosoever will”), but the effectual call reaches only the elect, irresistibly drawing them to faith (John 6:44; Acts 13:48). God is not “trying and failing” to save the non-elect; His saving purpose always accomplishes exactly what He intends (Isa 46:10; Eph 1:11).