Sometimes, the Lord will lay it on your heart to do something you usually would not do. To get outside your comfort zone, follow Him into the uncomfortable, and declare His Gospel in ways you could not imagine. Be open to whatever He calls you to do, be engaged in His Kingdom at every level, and pray that we will see it expand.

As a wild-eyed, inquisitive young lad, I often found myself in very precarious situations. With a couple of green acres of the Piedmont plot to plod around and enough imagination to get me into a heap of trouble, it’s a wonder I made it out of childhood alive. From crashing bicycles, catching black widows in dixie cups, climbing and falling out of trees, and pouring gasoline into the underground nests of unsuspecting miner bees, my younger years were filled with all sorts of unsupervised and unsafe adventures.
If there was a limit, I was the one testing it. If there was a line, I was usually crossing it. If there was some cue the average person was supposed to pick up on, I was oblivious to it. And, on more than one occasion, my grandpa dutifully came outside delivering a message that likely originated with grandma, saying: “Kendall, don’t you think you’d better leave well enough alone?” The point he was getting after was that my life’s homeostatic balance hung in the balance of my next move. A nervous grandma was inside shuddering over the safety of her pride and joy, and a man who wanted to please her had detected that “well enough” was somehow in danger. The status quo was being threatened. Peace and vitality were in jeopardy, and the one accosting it all was me.
As an adult, I realize there are many occasions where “leaving well enough alone” is good. We do not need to poke every sleeping bear, throw rocks at every bee hive, or go to war with every enemy. Sometimes doing nothing is the exact right thing to do, and knowing when that applies takes wisdom and discernment.
Yet, there are other times when doing nothing would be morally wrong, strategically unwise, or giving into cowardice. In truth, there are some hills we need to die on, some enemies we need to face, and some risks we need to take. Again, wisdom and discernment are required here.
In what follows, I would like to sketch out why I cannot leave well enough alone when it comes to Satan Con coming to Boston.
If you are unfamiliar, the largest Satanic conference in human history will be hosted on April 28-30 by The Satanic Temple right in our backyard. In this article, I will provide a few reasons why I am going to Boston, preaching the Gospel on the streets, handing out tracts, and praying like crazy that someone down there will be delivered from darkness and rescued by the Light of the World. As you read this article, I hope it will also encourage you, and by that, I mean to give you the courage to find creative ways to get involved in Jesus’ great mission where you are.
Sometimes, you cannot leave well enough alone because
God is Sovereign
When I heard that the largest Satanic conference in human history was coming to Boston, my first thought was gratitude that I would not be there. I do not go to Salem in October, I do not watch horror movies with occult rituals or pagan symbolism, and I am certainly not inclined to be a stone’s throw away from a burgeoning bevy of Baphomet’s best buddies in the belly of Bean town. I stay away from such things because, you know, leaving well enough alone, right?
But as I thought about it, I realized I was acting in fear. You could have invited me to preach in any church in New England, storm any library, or skydive out of any plane, and I would have relished the opportunity. But, intentionally traveling to a gathering of secular Satanists had unnerved me.
I was then reminded that God is sovereign over all things, which means He has the right, power, and ability to control all things. Nothing occurs outside His administration, governance, and will. Because of that, even Satan cannot afflict us unless He has divine permission to do so (Job 1). His absolute sovereignty is the reason demons shudder (James 2:19). This is why they necessarily obey Him when He issues forth commands (Matthew 8:31-32). And this is also why unclean spirits cannot even speak unless King Jesus allows it (Mark 1:34).
Read More
Related Posts:

This book makes a monumental decision: a decision to put the Bible’s moral language to the side, to call a disorder what the Bible calls sin, to call self-actualization what the Bible calls repentance. This book’s aversion to biblical categories does not empower readers to confront spiritually abusive systems. It instead makes those systems harder to disrupt.

Imagine the following scenario.
You are approached by two people in your church, both people that you know, love, and trust with equal measure. Person A needs to tell you something about Person B. Person B, according to Person A, has been spiritually abusing them. Person B has been using their leadership and influence to convince other people that Person A’s beliefs and opinions are wrong. Moreover, according to A, Person B has persisted in a pattern of manipulation toward A: saying things to belittle, minimize, or ignore A. Person A feels incredibly victimized by Person B, and does not know how they can persevere at this church while Person B remains.
Person B, meanwhile, believes that Person A is being disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst. Person B tells you that Person A has been going around different groups and individuals in the church, spreading false information about Person B because the two simply don’t agree or get along. Person A, according to Person B, is angry that they’re not more influential in the church, and they blame Person B for that. Person B says that Person A wants to steamroll over several policies and even people in the church in order to get their way, but has thus far been prevented. This is why, according to Person B, Person A has now accused Person B of being a spiritual abuser, and B feels very strongly that A needs to be sharply rebuked for dishonest and misleading behavior.
I would imagine that if you’re reading this and have any pastoral DNA in you, you’re sweating a bit. This is exactly the kind of scenario that church leaders dread with all their heart. And why is that? It’s not just because nobody likes being in the middle of two accusatory opponents. It’s also not just that this situation represents a significant use of your relational bandwidth. Part of the reason this scenario is so daunting is that you have to decide not only whom you believe, but what to even call this. Is this an issue of spiritual abuse? Is this an issue of colliding personalities? Is it sin? Is it rivalry? Is it schoolyard name calling? So much of how you proceed from this point on depends on what kind of situation you think you are dealing with.
When it comes to the topic of spiritual abuse in the church, conversations and debates so often get stonewalled because people decide that someone is “just trying to protect” a certain class. Conservative-leaning evangelicals are wary of victim advocates because they perceive a looseness with truth telling in the name of satisfying demands. Left-leaning evangelicals often express frustration with those who instinctively defend pastors or ask for evidence, intuiting that these deflections come from a desire to prop up the successful system at all costs, even the cost of trauma to real people.
My concern with Chuck DeGroat’s book When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse is not that I think he takes the “wrong side.” In fact, I think he does a pretty good job for the most part of avoiding tropes and caricatures in either direction. My concern with the book is that I think it fails significantly on the question raised above. DeGroat’s book is good at tracing out a recognizable portrait of spiritual abuse and waving red flags at leaders and systems who may be trampling over people. But it is much less good at calling those things what they are. DeGroat seems to go out of his way to avoid calling spiritual abuse sin. He abandons the language of sin, repentance, and discipline in favor of therapeutic language like narcissism, vulnerability, and gaslighting. The problem is not that those words are fake or unreal. The problem is those words aren’t enough. They leave spiritual abuse in the realm of the psychological, not the moral.
Defining Spiritual Abuse Down

This is the first of several indications throughout the book that the primary mechanism for identifying narcissism is how people feel toward those who may be narcissistic. I know it may sound very pedantic or even callous to call out this opening illustration from DeGroat’s youth. I don’t doubt that he really did feel slighted and that this was tremendously disappointing. But the fact that a book with “emotional and spiritual abuse” in its subtitle begins with this kind of story is potentially telling. It raises the question of whether the discussion of spiritual abuse that follows will be tethered to realities above the psychological, or not. In fact, the book struggles to do this.
In chapter two, “Understanding Narcissism,” DeGroat defines narcissism by reproducing the diagnostic criteria from DSM-V. This is slightly overwhelming and takes up a page and a half. What’s more, the DSM’s language is clinical and describes behavior typical of narcissistic people; it does not define narcissism ethically or theologically. DeGroat comments on the DSM’s criteria, which clarifies how he will understand narcissism throughout the book. “Grandiosity and attention seeking” are there, which makes sense. The narcissistic person develops a “false self” and tends to use people and relationships to feed this identity. So far, so good. But importantly, DeGroat does not connect narcissism to the biblical problem of inflated self-regard. In fact, he explicitly rejects this. In one particular case study, DeGroat determines that “Gary” suffers from a lack of self-love. His “entitlement, his lack of empathy, his pattern of grandiosity” flow from shame and trauma from his own childhood.
Read More
Related Posts:

Students who are taught that answers to algebra problems depend on the color of their skin and that calculus professors are oppressors are not only not going to unlock the mysteries of the universe, but they will also believe what is not true about who they are and the world in which they live. Woke educators may hope to liberate students. But by depriving them of objective truths they are subjugating them to bad ideas. It’s a tragically ironic and disastrous miscalculation. 

Few subjects seem less political than math. There is little room for subjective judgment because its truths are universal. No matter what you look like or where you’re from or how you feel about it, two plus two will always equal four, and the area of a circle will always be π r². Math is so objective, in fact, some scientists have theorized that prime numbers could offer the basis of communication with supposed intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos.  
However, even if aliens know that math has no racial or gender bias, some educators on Earth seem to think otherwise. Even amid plummeting math scores in the latest Nation’s Report Card data, a growing chorus of progressive voices insists that racism and sexism are the biggest problems we face in how to teach math.  
A couple years ago, in an article in the Scientific American, Rachel Crowell complained about the racial and gender disparities among those who make a career out of mathematics. She pointed out, for instance, that “fewer than 1 percent of doctorates in math are awarded to African Americans” and that only 29.1 percent “were awarded to women.” More mathematicians, she writes, have been pushing to discuss these issues and “force the field to confront the racism, sexism and other harmful bias it sometimes harbors.” 
Though, undoubtedly, examples of identity-group bias in all fields exist, Crowell chose to root her complaint in intangibles: Math doctorates are not “earned” or “received” or “completed;” they are “awarded,” a word choice that not so subtly reinforces her conclusion that something about math education is racist. 
Writing at Newsweek, Jason Rantz cited examples of public schools teaching students that math itself, and the way it has always been taught, is oppressive. 
Read More
Related Posts: