Christians can strain the relationship with God through our sin. But if we are repentant, we don’t need to fear that we will be removed from God’s family. 

Christians all love the idea of being forgiven. We love to sing of our sins being paid for and know how kind our God has been to us. That is 100% correct. If we trust in Jesus, we are secure knowing that Jesus paid our penalty for us.
This has led many to struggle to understand why Christians should keep God’s law or try to deal with sin. After all, logically, if we are forgiven by what Jesus has done, then our future is secure. It doesn’t depend on us, we are constantly told, it all depends on Jesus. So this should mean, we reason, that we can live however we want. God loves us. Why worry about sin and law at all?
The idea that we can live however we want because of God’s grace is not a new one. Paul deals with it at length in Romans, for example, way back in the first century after Jesus. And in our modern individualistic age, we are very tempted to follow the same line of reasoning. We’re saved by grace, so that means I can live how I want and I am still forgiven!
I think the logic of adoption helps us a great deal when it comes to understanding why how we live as Christians is so important. Let me explain.
Adoption is when a couple decide to accept a child into their family. That child is not theirs genetically, but usually due to some significant problems in their biological family, they are looking for a safe place to belong. When this child is adopted, it is not due to their worthiness. It is due to the gracious act of their new parents. They have a new legal status due to what their parents have done. That’s what Jesus has done for us. When we come to trust in Jesus, we then have a different status before God, and we are part of God’s family. We have that status by grace alone.
Read More

The antagonists in this ecclesial conflict are not conservatives vs. liberals, Christians vs. post-Christian pagans, or even confessionalists (broadly construed) vs. non-confessionalists. The conflict is between radical contextualizers on one hand and advocates of  simple, ordinary means-of-grace ministry, subject to the plain reading of the denomination’s standards on the other.

Revoice theology or the tenets of Side B celibate same-sex attracted Christianity are, at the same time new and not new. They are strikingly current and redolent of revivalism and of the theological liberalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Revoice and Side B do not seek to destroy Christianity or cripple the church. Rather (as with the liberals of yesteryear), they seek to save the church’s mission for a new generation and for some very specific segments of society.
A helpful shorthand term for the clunky  terms “Revoice theology” and “Side B celibate same-sex attracted Christianity” is Johnsonism, after the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) pastor Greg Johnson who personifies the movement. Surely there is range, lexical and doctrinal, in the movement—Greg Johnson is not Revoice and all Side B folk do not agree on every point. But just as Rosaria Butterfield represents one way of dealing with and speaking to believers who struggle with homosexual desires or sexual confusion, Johnson represents another.
Reading Johnson’s 2021 book Still Time to Care (an attack on conversion therapy and an appeal for compassionate ministry to gay Christians) is one way to understand Johnsonism, but now there is another: a very brief booklet meant to supplement the longer work called On Mission with the LGBTQ+ Community .  In barely seven pages of text Johnson has given us  “some thoughts on ministry to the LGBTQ+ community…and a lot of this is personal experience,” per his introductory Facebook post.
On Mission is Revoice applied, and it starts with Revoice. Johnson begins by recounting the opposition to the inaugural 2018 Revoice Conference (hosted by Johnson’s church—he also spoke at the conference) from the local homosexual activist community, who denounced the celibacy encouraged by Revoice, but quickly turns his shame guns to the right: “There is no community on the planet that longs more deeply for what only the gospel can give. But there is no community on earth that feels more threatened by biblical Christians.”
Biblical Christians are presumed guilty and Johnson has strategies to help the conservative church make amends. Johnson points to the Posture Shift curriculum which pretends to be a “missiological framework” for outreach to “nonstraight people,” but which reminds those versed in church history of the Social Gospel and the ethos of Protestant liberal missionaries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Posture Shift pithily exhorts:
Offer enhanced inclusion. Prove justice through visible care. Level the playing field. Collaborate. Be humble. Resist the theological hammer. Avoid trigger words/clichés. Never lead with theology. Avoid politics.
There is not much original there. In fact, the above sounds like a general primer on outreach to cities, college campuses, or culture-making leaders in the arts, business, and culture. Further, given the degree to which homosexuals have penetrated these elite circles, the overlap is natural: The culture is gay so you must be gay (in some way) to reach the culture.
From the familiar “for the city” tropes, Johnson turns to the insights of cross-cultural, international missions for help with mission to (or with , per the title) the LGBTQ+ community.  In quoting a missiologist Johnson clearly implies that the Western “sexual minorities” (many of whom enjoy great privilege and favor at the moment) are as different from conservative Christians as are tribal folk in New Guinea. The quoted missiologist mentions a number of sexual perversions that missionaries encounter in certain parts of the world. Somehow, the tolerant, gentle approach of missionaries to tribal people’s bizarre sexual mores is supposed to be helpful since missiology is “attentive both to the possibilities of syncretism with cultural ideology on the one end, and healthy contextualization on the other.”
Read More

When a culture loses its grip on those foundations, the “experts” (or, as C.S. Lewis called them “conditioners”) step in. They loudly suggest that a college degree in education and a place on the government’s payroll gives someone the vocational and moral authority over kids. Don’t buy it. That authority belongs to God, Who assigns it to parents, along with the responsibility to educate children. If we believe that, we should also trust Him to equip us to rise to the occasion of raising our children.

On Tuesday, Republican Glenn Youngkin defeated incumbent Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor race. The issue that gave Youngkin the edge was education, something that Republicans in Virginia typically do not perform as well on. Things have apparently changed in the Commonwealth, however, after a year and a half of school shutdowns, heated disagreements over masking policies, debates over whether Critical Theory should be taught in the classroom on issues of race and LGBTQ, a horrific cover-up by the Loudon County school board, and, especially, Governor McAuliffe’s comment during a September debate that parents ‘shouldn’t be telling schools what to teach.’ 
As shocked as Virginians were by the statement, the view of education it reflects has a storied history. The late sociologist Christopher Lasch described it in his 1979 bestseller, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. Lasch believed that when industrialization took labor outside of the home, it led many Americans to question whether other responsibilities should leave home, too. Lasch quotes two national education officials who, in 1918, said, “Once the school had mainly to teach the elements of knowledge; now it is charged with the physical, mental and social training of the child as well.”
Around the same time, Sigmund Freud was psychoanalyzing parenthood, often casting parents in the role of villain. This was also the era in which the modern concept of social work was born, and when America launched the juvenile justice system. Entire industries were built upon the premise that parents were largely unqualified to raise their kids, or at least needed a lot of help from the state. In the late 1800s, Ellen Richards, the founder of modern social work, suggested that “in a social republic, the child as a future citizen is an asset of the state, not the property of its parents.”
Read More