Mark Driscoll was less a pastor and more so an all encompassing charismatic personality that tried to fill the space of relationships and institutions in your life.
That evangelical model is not worth emulating in any sense.
This is perfectly good and reasonable advice from spiritual leaders in the church. Good & normal.
You want your friends, siblings, and cousins to tell you to date, what to wear, how to text, etc. Not spiritual leaders. The fact evangelicals expect this from pastors is insane.
Singleness can be a gift that the Lord uses for your good and His glory.
Watch as Rebecca VanDoodewaard encourages single women to be fruitful with the time God has given them.
"The 'focus on word and sacrament ministry' response, especially when the world is burning, can feel like pastoral negligence. For those who are struggling with any kind of existential concerns, it seems only fitting to harbor suspicions that everything, even the church, is broken and needs to change, now.
I’m not going to tell folks caught in the middle of that rumination that they simply need to chill out. Decadence, neglect, and acedia are real vices that far too many leaders are far too comfortable with."
— @calebwait
https://t.co/7q1R9QvwHo
If you're interested in the Protestant Christian Nationalism or Catholic Integralism discourse, check out the full conversation between @MichaelHorton_ and political philosopher @kvallier. Vallier talks about the rise of illiberalism, why he thinks Protestant CN lacks rigor and is doomed to fail, and the line between enforcement and violating human dignity. I'm a third of the way through Vallier's OUP book on integralism, and I've been impressed by his ability to steelman opposing arguments. In this conversation I thought it was interesting how aware he was (as an Eastern Orthodox Christian) of the different voices in the Protestant CN camp: Wolfe, Wilson, Webbon, etc.
What does Tolkien have to teach us about our cultural moods of cynicism and despair, and boomers who "don't know what time it is"? Well, a lot, I think. I wrote some thoughts about all this and some personal experience at Modern Reformation @solamediaorg.
https://t.co/eAabUfdzYu
Brilliant piece by @johnehrett. I've long thought that throwing around 'Nature/Grace' as a catch-all excuse for illiberal politics not only jettisons inconvenient passages in the NT, it turns 'Nature' into a wax nose for whatever is trending on 4Chan.
https://t.co/WbynMV5yhb
This is all painfully obvious now. Somehow, the most valuable companies in the world have set things up where bot farms and scam artists control everyone's attention with trash content. Awesome.
Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients.
The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show.
In April, Justin Bieber headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server writer Lane Brown had been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber’s Coachella performances, offering clippers — people who are hired to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments — as much as a dollar per thousand views.
“On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas,” writes Brown.
“Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.”
Brown reports on how the same techniques are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip: https://t.co/hlcdfSmzPc
Recently had the privilege to lecture on the Scripture as Covenant Canon for the Theology class at Igreja da Trindade, a Reformed Church in Brazil, led by Pastor Felipe Wieira who have embarked on a two-year study through my systematic theology, The Christian Faith
https://t.co/rUfPx32IoO
Fascinating report on temple ruins in Turkey for Hekate, the goddess of magic. (She plays a big role in my book, Shaman and Sage if you want to know more about her). Especially interesting is that its visitors today are spiritual pilgrims, not just tourists.
https://t.co/V2zBBd1Hdk
𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗽𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝗮 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴.
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No one is worthy of worship.
I was recently on Ben Sasse’s Not Dead Yet podcast, and man what a great conversation we had. We talked about faith, family, success and so much more. If you don’t know, back in December Ben was diagnosed with stage four metastasized pancreatic cancer and he started this platform to navigate life with his diagnosis. Super proud of this one and being able to chat with two extraordinary guys! Please give this a listen and show your support: https://t.co/lhkWbKhmJe