(red)

⛪ | Christian patriarchist
🧶 | Granny square engineer
📖 | 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

[(red) @redwritingale]

🎶 And it was all yellow...

[(red) @redwritingale]

How you know AI is retarded:

Telling it to summarize an email and the summary is twice as long as the original message. 🫩

Pass. ✋🏻

[(red) @redwritingale]

Be not dismayed whate'er betide;
God will take care of you.
Beneath His wings of love abide;
God will take care of you.

[Michael Foster @thisisfoster]

I have had two articles percolating in my brain for the last two years. One is called How to Leave a Church Well. The other is Pastoring in the Age of AI Psychosis.

I’ve been hesitant to publish the first because I don’t want to come across as passive-aggressive. There’s always someone who has just left your church, and in many cases, you don’t want them to feel singled out.

The second article almost became my talk at the Evergreen Summit. As a matter of fact, a good bit of the talk I gave came from a half-finished draft of that article.

One thing that connects these two articles is that they deal with an old problem that took on a particular shape during the COVID era.

Our church attracted a lot of people who were simply looking for a place that was open without restrictions and willing to speak with clarity about what was happening in the culture. Many of their churches had shut down or had become quite authoritarian. So people left churches they had been part of for a long time to join our church, which had just come into existence.

We always did our best to caution them against leaving without making a real effort to work things out with their elders. I’m happy to say that, on more than one occasion, this led to people staying at their churches, which eventually became more reasonable.

There’s also a pragmatic reason for taking this approach as a church planter or pastor. People tend to leave your church the same way they came to your church. You’re doing your future self a favor.

People often just up and leave with very little conversation. Usually, the conversation is a single phone call or a long, detailed email. Sometimes it’s a list of complaints. More often, it’s an email explaining how they’ve changed, how thankful they are for you, and how God has called them somewhere else.

Frankly, the complaint-filled emails are easier because the conflict is right on the surface. The “it’s not you, it’s me” emails are more difficult because they’re trying to sidestep a conflict that is actually there. It may be a conflict worth leaving a church over, but you still have to have that conversation and work through it.

It is amazing to me how many people seem to think that God calls them to make major spiritual decisions without seriously consulting their pastors. That reveals a very immature doctrine of the church because the importance of pastors is something every form of church government agrees on.

Besides dislodging people from churches and institutions they had long been part of, the COVID era also brought an explosion of podcasting and YouTube streaming. As local pastors failed people, or at least appeared to in some cases, many Christians turned to social media for guidance.

It is incredible to me how much content people consume. Hours and hours of streams and podcasts reshaped people’s entire way of thinking and undid what years of discipleship had built into them.

Now, in some cases, this was a good thing. I’ve been glad to see the poison of feminism and egalitarianism reversed in many individuals. I’ve been talking about these things for more than two decades. Ideas that once seemed to live out on the fringes have entered the mainstream.

But many of the new voices weren’t anchored in historic biblical theology. They also carried a deep current of anger and frustration. For some people, those years of online discipleship took a turn for the worse.

The people caught up in this usually experience it as a spiritual awakening. They had been asleep for so long. Then, by consuming all this content, the dots connected and they finally felt alive. At last, they saw things as they really are. Maybe they became Roman Catholic. Maybe they became an annoying cage-stage Calvinist. Maybe all they wanted to talk about was marriage courts and the Ninth Amendment. Whatever the issue, they became supercharged by a handful of ideas and allowed themselves to be almost entirely reassembled.

Usually they did all this without involving their pastors, at least until the very end.

I can already hear people defending themselves as they read this. “Yeah, but churches are so bad today.” “Pastors are so bad today.” “There aren’t any good men anywhere.” “Look how many people capitulated to feminism.” “Look how many capitulated to government overreach.”

True enough. But the abuse of something isn’t permission to reject it. Much of that is nothing more than a justification for radical individualism.

Now this has taken on another form with the introduction of AI into everyday life.

I think chatbots would be much more helpful if they were bullies. Instead, they’re flatterers. They tell you your thoughts are brilliant. They reinforce your instincts. They rarely tell you that you’re the problem.

So now, instead of emailing their pastor or asking for a meeting, people are having long conversations with ChatGPT.

In both cases, whether it’s social media or ChatGPT, they’re entering into a parasocial relationship. One is with someone who doesn’t know them and might strongly disagree with the decisions they’re making if he actually did know them. The other isn’t even a person.

So here we are, a few years out from the COVID era, dealing with the aftermath of people who no longer trust institutions but do trust YouTubers and chatbots they have carefully curated to tell them what they ultimately want to hear.

Recovering from this will require a revival of robust ecclesiology that begins with the necessity of the local church and its pastors*.

And if you start teaching that, people will get angry. They’ll hand you a long list of failures to justify their individualism.

That’s simply the price of being faithful. You’ll have to bear it.

As kind of a P.S.

*Now, of course, there is much more to be said. Part of that teaching is a return to shepherding, to actually caring for the souls of the people in your church and making yourself available to them.

Even that will be a challenge because shepherding has been reinterpreted through a therapeutic lens and the idea that everyone should have an almost BFF sort of relationship with their pastor. I don’t think that’s true. It’s not bad, but I don’t think it’s required.

Nonetheless, I learned growing up on a farm that if you want something to trust you, you feed it and spend time with it. The shepherd must live among the sheep.

More on that maybe tomorrow.

Painting: Frederick George Cotman

[(red) @redwritingale]

why is the coffee not coffeeing?

[(red) @redwritingale]

@GuyJones1111

[(red) @redwritingale]

Happy birthday, America! 🇺🇸🎆🦅

[(red) @redwritingale]

So, are companies actually getting better candidates for junior roles since they've started making them sit through 17 rounds of interviews? 🙃

[GodlyAction @GodlyAction]

Peter is not the Rock, Jesus is.

Mary is not the mediator, Jesus is.

The Pope is not the head of the church, Jesus is.

The Catholic Church is not the way to heaven, Jesus is.

[Department of State @StateDept]

Happy birthday, President Trump 🇺🇸

[Lady Toad 🍞🌿🎶💚🌙✨️ @whitemagicmaker]

Hoping for lots of elderberries this year.

[Qυincγ🪾🌱 @QuestristHumble]

The rainbow belongs to Christ.

[New Christendom Press @New_Christendom]

.@Brian_Sauve opened up the conference talks with a great message.

“…you will not win your war for normal by simple accumulation of the right theoretical knowledge or the right mental model of an ideal political system, or the same for an ideal ecclesiastical structure.

Don’t let knowledge accrual and theory accrual function in your life like world-building functions for a fantasy novelist. An elaborate mental model of the world as you think it ought to be won’t, by itself, do almost anything.

Worse, it can actually keep you from doing anything, because you get so bogged down in an ultimate and hypothetical future ideal state that you become paralyzed in terms of taking the next three steps in front of you—because of course those steps aren’t good enough. After all, they’re all sorts of mixed up with sub-ideal circumstances and realities.

All of this can become like a relief valve for action—where the mere act of thinking and writing and posting and debating is substituted for the meaningful and concrete action itself.”
-Brian Sauvé

[(red) @redwritingale]

Proof you can't cure retarded. Choose wisely who you look up to, kids.

[Cardi B @iamcardib]

Wow! Just freakin wow! DISGUSTING… This is not justice, this is trying to make an example!!!

[(red) @redwritingale]

Dear Montana,
Some day. 💛🥹

[Qυincγ🪾🌱 @QuestristHumble]

Throwback to June of nine years ago when I was camping beside this beautiful stream in northern Montana.

[(red) @redwritingale]

"How beautiful heaven must be,
Sweet home of the happy and free;
Fair haven of rest for the weary,
How beautiful heaven must be."

[Sharon Welby📷 @sharonwelby1]

Lough Neagh.

[(red) @redwritingale]

Absolutely wild that you think you and your wife deserve more sympathy than the baby you both murdered.

Repent.

[Jesse Ridgway @McJuggerNuggets]

My wife's heart has been shattered since the amniocentesis results (which are definitive btw), yet it has only gotten worse.

These last couple weeks have been the hardest of her life...it's times like these where you want to be able to depend on your family for love and support.

This video is from the evening after the procedure.

My parents drop off an extremely thoughtful gift basket and show unconditional love and support...meanwhile, her family has been nowhere to be found. Some even going as far as joining in on the bandwagon hate PUBLICLY, kicking her while she's down at her lowest point.

She has received text messages from her family accusing me of abuse and that I'm brainwashing her...issuing ultimatums that she needs to LEAVE ME IMMEDIATELY. Audacious shit that will have your head-spinning because of the delusion and lack of consideration.

Downright disgusting gossip and shit-talking amongst important people in her life as if she's not even blood. No backbone, just cowardice as they accuse me of making the decision and controlling/manipulating her over all the years of being together.

We've put up with a lot of shit, but when it's your own family exercising their bitterness and turning their backs when it matters the most, it really reveals everything about their character.

Hell, I've even seen the worst of "friends" publicly joining in on the crusade despite full-well knowing that behind closed doors, they would've made the same decision.

I don't relish in sharing these things because it only furthers a divide, but when you're MIA, complicit and offensive during the hardest times of our life then you will never deserve to be there when it's good.

My wife is the sweetest and strongest woman I know, the last thing she deserves is to be treated this way.

My heart goes out to all of the women who have had to keep their abortions private for fear of judgment from friends/family, it's the last thing you should be dealing with when you're already confronting the hardest/worst of times.

This is the sad reality. It's why I will continue to speak out. It's why sharing is better than hiding. The truth may be hard, but at least you're living freely. Do NOT ever let the opinions of others define your life or else you will be living a life that's not YOURS. ❤️

[Qυincγ🪾🌱 @QuestristHumble]

Things you can see on a random Tuesday if you’re looking.

[🌷 LIZZIE🌷 @farmingandJesus]

People who m*rder their children in abortion should be shunned from society

[(red) @redwritingale]

No, for sure, yeah. It's totally reasonable that everyone who experiences any sort of inconvenience from taking care of severely disabled family members should have the choice to instead kill said severely disabled family members. Yeah...

[Blonde Emergency MD 🇵🇸 @blondemedSJW]

A lot of these people saying “I would adopt a Down Syndrome baby in a heartbeat” would not last a day taking care of a severely physically and intellectually disabled adult.