David de Bruyn

Letters to Stagnant Christians #13: Less is Not Always More

The chaos of modern life calls all of us to simplify where we can. Often, the mantra “less is more” is really true in all kinds of areas. But it is a great mistake to think that spiritual life will thrive by challenging your faith less than its current ability. That kind of approach is not mere moderation; it is a softness and ease-seeking that fails to stir the waters of your Christian life.

Dear Belinda,
You’ve asked me why I think you remain spiritually stagnant, since your life evidences regular, committed service for Christ. I think the answer has to do with the very idea of stagnation.
We speak of water becoming stagnant when it has been left standing for too long, and begins to breed bacteria and fungi. Movement and aeration are essential to keep water healthy. It is not without reason that several Levitical laws required running water for cleansing.
This fact from creation is a helpful analogy for spiritual health. The Christian life requires movement and deliberate expansion to be healthy. Mere stasis, mere maintenance, mere repetition can lead to a spiritual dullness and deepening apathy.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not calling for a crisis commitment every Sunday of your life. You do not need to re-commit your life to the Lord every moment you remember to. The Christian life is not meant to be a series of altar-call surrenders, one after the other.
Further, I am a big fan of regular, plodding spiritual disciplines. We grow most when we make incremental progress by small and steady steps of obedience every day. To have routines, rhythms, liturgies, and traditions is not, in itself, an enemy of spiritual growth. A well-ordered Christian life is not to be compared with stagnant water.
Spiritual stagnation, however, is a real threat when any Christian refuses to allow God-given movement and expansion of her spiritual responsibilities and insists on protecting the status quo. This usually takes the form of becoming content and complacent with one’s current level of knowledge, commitment or service for Christ, and scaling back on spiritual responsibilities.
Often enough, a young Christian is aware of the need to accumulate knowledge and understanding. So, the young believer reads voraciously, attends every sermon, listens eagerly to spiritual conversations. He instinctively understands the need to develop his spiritual muscles and volunteers for positions of service.
Read More
Related Posts:

Letters to Stagnant Christians #12: The Paralysis of Analysis

Plenty of Christians have found deeply satisfying and intellectually sophisticated answers to questions that troubled them. But they always found them because they were walking with God at the time, moving in His direction, obeying what they already knew, while waiting on Him to teach them further. The man refusing to budge until he gets answers is really the child with a folded-arms sulky posture: demanding God give an account to him of the secrets of the universe or he’ll refuse to come along. The book of Job answers the man demanding explanations by saying that the answers are a lot more than you could comprehend. Trust and submit to what you do understand, and do not presume that you could squeeze the ocean of God’s ways into the the 2 litre bottle of your own intellect.

Dear Jeremy,
It’s always enjoyable to spend time discussing theology with someone like you. You have a very fertile imagination and a robust logic, which combine for stimulating conversation.
Your strength is also your Achilles heel. It is your intellectual aptitude that is your enemy when it comes to the things of faith. You are one of those Christians who gets “stuck in his head”, and hopes to think his way out of the problem. When he can’t, he assumes the only explanation must be that Christianity is faulty (for if it were not, his brilliance would have solved the mental conundrum, right?).
We call this the paralysis of analysis: the Christian who becomes immobile in his devotion, commitment, or even Christian relationships, because he has to “solve” the problem in his mind first. The problem can be of many kinds: how does Christian growth happen, how does prayer really work, how does God’s sovereignty correspond with human choice, how does God’s foreknowledge work with human sinfulness, why does evil exist in a world made by God, why are there so many religions, what happens to those who have not heard the Gospel, could there really be an eternal hell, or many other questions.
Now most thinking Christians face and tackle these questions in some form and at some point in their lives. The difference between them and you is that other Christians integrate these questions into the broader experience of being a Christian. The Christian experience is more than a mental, cerebral experience of problem-solving: it is a life of loving, obeying, serving, and worshipping. In your case, however, these questions become like errors in an equation that must be solved before proceeding one step further. You become fixated on them, chase them around and around, and become quite despondent if you are unable to resolve them in your head.
What you cannot see is that it is quite arrogant to reduce the Christian life, and indeed all of life, into mental events taking place inside your head. While you chase these questions as if all of life depended on it, there are all kinds needs around you: people needing to be loved, served, and helped. And you cannot see that while you magnify these questions into all-consuming dilemmas, you are being quite lazy, neglectful, and irresponsible in other areas.
Read More

Related Posts:

Letters to Stagnant Christians #9: Confirmation Bias

Listen to understand. Patiently live with moments of perplexity, misunderstanding or oddness. Be determined to discover something new, not merely verify everything you thought you knew. Above all, look for ways that the Word is making demands for change in your life. The more we obey, the more sensitive we become to the Word, and our listening skills increase.

Sometimes our spiritual problems come from unexpected places. We expect that people who disagree with the doctrine, preaching, and teaching of the Word will not grow much, and that is certainly the case. But unexpectedly, some people fail to grow because they agree too much. I think this is your situation.
Now by the term “agreeing too much”, I do not mean that it is possible to agree too vigorously or too often with revealed truth. Like love, it is impossible to love what is good too much, provided we do not love it as a substitute for God.
Instead, I mean it is possible to adopt a kind of “agreeableness” that never reflects on what it is agreeing with. Your default response to every teaching, comment or admonition is “I know”. Every doctrine meets a nod, and a knowing smile. But I fear the problem lies just there: there is not as much knowing behind the smiling as there ought to be.
Lana, it is possible to mistake broad agreement with the church’s position for actual agreement about particular applications of truth in your life. In your case, I happen to know that there are some habits and practices which you have not tackled or changed in twenty years of church attendance. Yet you are able to see everything under the visage of “I know. I agree.” You would likely say that you have found the sermons incredibly challenging and convicting. But you have been able to sidestep their demands for change for decades.
This is where I believe you have managed to fall prey to a particular form of the deceitfulness of the heart. The world sometimes speaks of ‘confirmation bias’.
Read More
Related Posts:

Letters to Stagnant Christians #7: Scattershot Attendance

The Bible as a whole is a long, sequential story of God’s revelation to man. A faithful preacher must preach through the whole counsel of God one verse, paragraph, chapter and book at a time. To attend a church the way you do is the equivalent of like hearing a phone conversation that drops the last third of every sentence. It is like reading a book which misprinted every other page as blank, or listening to a tune which omitted a third of the notes. The point is, you would not be able to make sense of what you are hearing. That’s exactly why your kind of church attendance does not promote growth. You can only grow through understanding of the Word, and understanding comes through connecting a very long series of biblical dots. Because your attendance is so sporadic, it is simply impossible to connect those dots.

Dear William,
I’m glad you’re taking the new year as an opportunity to seek real spiritual growth. Yes, I did write to Mike, and he has obviously experienced some benefit, so I am happy to write similarly to you, as you’ve requested.
William, you are a first-generation Christian. That is, your parents were not Christians who practised regular spiritual disciplines. Our parents are the ones who shape many of the routines and rhythms of our adult lives. We tend to model and continue the rhythm of life that our parents bequeathed to us, with modifications. That means, lacking such an example from your parents, you have to learn the disciplines associated with church life from scratch. Your parents did not teach you, so you have to learn elsewhere.
Unfortunately, many people in your position make a fundamental error. Thinking that church is akin to certain other public gatherings, they treat it in the same way. For example, they think a church service is closest to attending a concert, or a speech, or a political rally, or a public lecture, or a hobby club or society. Therefore, they treat it similarly: they attend it as regularly as they would one of those events, they mingle or socialise at about the same level of familiarity or superficiality, and they involve themselves with a similar level of commitment.
What that looks like, at least in your case, is that you attend about three out of every seven Sundays. You probably don’t notice it, but that means you’re in church 22 Sundays out of the 52. Or to put it another way, you’re in church for five months of the year, and absent for seven.
Now lest you think this is all about numbers, let me explain why your Christian growth will be stunted or extremely slow with this pattern of attendance.
The first is the concept of continuity. Many immature Christians think that church attendance on a Sunday is like going to see a standalone movie: an encapsulated whole, with no connections outside itself. They have no concept of one Sunday being integrally connected to the previous or succeeding Sundays. For them, church is like going to the gym, or having your hair cut: it might be good for you, it’s good to go back, but each attendance is a discrete, freestanding spiritual experience.
They couldn’t be more wrong. Church attendance, to have any real benefit in your life, functions by growing in understanding of an ongoing, continuous exposition of the Word. A sequential, weekly, verse-by-verse exposition of Scripture is how we gain a large-scale, coherent, and comprehensive Christian worldview. The Bible is a collection of books that have beginnings, middles and endings. The Bible as a whole is a long, sequential story of God’s revelation to man. A faithful preacher must preach through the whole counsel of God one verse, paragraph, chapter and book at a time. To attend a church the way you do is the equivalent of like hearing a phone conversation that drops the last third of every sentence.
Read More
Related Posts:

Letters to Stagnant Christians #2: Passive Rebellion

Let me tell you what has brought radical awakening to many a passive rebel. Begin treating God’s church as if it really were an extension of God’s authority….you cannot say that a church’s expectations are biblical and reasonable, join it, and then refuse to meet those expectations. That’s just passive rebellion, and it quenches the Holy Spirit’s work in your life.

Dear Robert,
Thanks for pursuing greater growth in the Lord. I am glad you have seen changes in Jake—I have too. I’m even more delighted that you’re asking for a similar pastoral perspective on your life. You asked if Jake’s problem is essentially yours as well. In a word, no, though as sinners in Adam, we often share sinful traits with each other.
Your spiritual block is not “the over-the-hill-commitment.” What I have observed in you is something more easily described, and yet less easily felt. Simply put, your approach to the Christian life is filled with passive rebellion to God’s authority. A low-grade, quiet, stubborn resistance to God retards your growth and ensures that your Christian life has a stop-start feel to it.
Passive rebellion is difficult to recognise in oneself. I’m sure you’re scratching your head right now, wondering how you’re a rebel, since you attend church regularly, serve in ministry, and would consider yourself far more spiritually active than the lukewarm and worldly Christianity that usually claims to be “born again”. But passive rebellion is a quiet and stubborn force which is present in some of the “nicer” Christians you’ll meet.
You can better understand passive rebellion by contrasting it with assertive rebellion. An assertive rebel openly defies God’s principles and commands in Scripture. He knows he is flouting God’s laws, so he instead gives reasons why his rebellion is justified. The passive rebel, however, disobeys by omission. I was too tired to obey. I forgot to obey. It was too hard to obey. It’s the sluggard of Proverbs (Proverbs 22:13; 26:13).
Let me make it really practical. You have joined our church, by your own free will. You joined knowing what our church is, how it runs, and when it meets. You made a covenant that you would regularly participate in worship, as well as supporting the church’s doctrine, discipline, and leadership. Why then do you attend roughly half of the services every week? I know nothing exists in your life that would make attendance at all three services insurmountable. You could be there, but choose to not attend.
Instead, you’ve made the calculation that a passive rebel makes: I don’t want to obey in the way the church expects. I will obey my own way. After all, the church is not God. But this is passive rebellion.
You are correct that the church is not God. You are right that a church’s authority extends only as far as it practises the Word of God. But what you fail to see is that what a church corporately agrees to do becomes voluntarily binding on those who submit to it. And those who refuse what the church expects (be a member, serve others, get involved in ministry, attend every corporate worship service), are refusing to obey God. It just doesn’t feel like it to you, because you think God’s authority and the church’s are completely separate. But this fails to understand how authority works.
Read More
Related Posts:

Worship Should Feel (Somewhat) Awkward

A God who is utterly unthreatening is not worthy of admiration, and does not provoke fear for His justice or love for His mercy. To worship the God of Scripture is to worship a God who, like Aslan, is “not safe, but He is good”. The worship of an unsafe God includes at least some hesitation, some awkwardness, and some intimidation. As Spurgeon said, it is a throne, lest we presume, but it is a throne of grace, lest we fear too much.

The things we take for granted are often our worst errors. Assuming the correctness of what is false can be disastrous.
An unquestioned expectation of modern worshippers seems to be this: Worship should be enjoyable in its entirety. It should feel familiar, and not foreign. It should be easy to do, not demanding. It should set me at ease, not intimidate me.
The theological idea behind this feel-goodism appears to be: God is a welcoming God, with no particular preference as to how we worship Him. He is happy if we are happy.
In order for this theological idea to be true, we would need to see several supporting ideas in Scripture. Among them would be:

Humans who encountered God directly or through a vision felt immediately at ease, at home, and relaxed.

God never required any intermediaries between Himself and His worshippers. All could come as they were, and enter God’s presence directly.

God was never prescriptive or detailed about where, when, or how He wanted to be worshipped, but left this up to the worshippers’ creativity and sincerity.

No one was ever punished for a worship-offence, because sincerity covers a multitude of sins.

God preferred worshippers to express themselves freely through a multitude of words – the more, the better.

God liked His people to mimic those worship practices found among the pagans, and adapt them for Jehovah-worship.

Once a person was converted, no growth or maturity in worship was needed. A newborn Christian had instant, perfect discernment as to who God is, and what He deserves.

Read More

Related Posts:

The Worship of Worship

I fear many people today are caught in the childish rut of worshiping their emotions. For this reason, they dislike the sober worship of conservative churches, because such worship seldom inflames the emotions to the intensity desired. Why? Plato told us: “Beautiful things are hard.” God is beautiful, and a singular focus on His beauty is demanding. If you want to feel your feelings, you don’t want subtlety of musical and poetic metaphor, persuasive appeals, and demanding art. You want the taste-burst of the loud, the moody, the maudlin, the mushy, the gushy, the romantic, the sexy, the intense. 

Many people do not worship the living God. They worship their worship.
The great secret (and great difficulty) of true worship is that when we worship truly, our focus is to be exclusively on the object of our worship: God. If our eye is on how our worship is being perceived by others, it falls under the condemnation of the Sermon on the Mount, for we are then performing our worship to be seen by men and lauded by them.
More subtle, and less visible to us, is if our eye is on our own worship experience.
Many people judge whether worship is occurring by whether they are sensing or feeling certain emotions. In other words, they are actually watching themselves. God receives a glance or two, but then the focus returns to self. Am I feeling anything? Do I feel joy? Do I feel intense intimacy? Do I feel ecstasy? Here, our focus is not on the worth and qualities of God, but on the quality of our own worship experiences.
You are supposed to enjoy God in worship. You are not supposed to try to enjoy your joy. You are supposed to wonder at God in worship. You are not supposed to wonder at your wonder. You are supposed to love God in worship. You aren’t supposed to love your love.
Loving your love, enjoying your joy, or being in awe at your awe is a subtle idolatry. It turns the gaze from God to self, and feels satisfaction in yourself for being such an intense worshipper. We begin to watch ourselves worship, and admire ourselves for being so full of admiration; we adore our adoration; we weep over our own intensity. But this is pseudo-worship.
God is the object of worship. He is not supposed to be the means by which we achieve joy, or ecstasy or religious happiness. If God, or biblical truth, or anything in a worship service is simply a means to achieving a religion emotion, then the religious emotion is the true object of our affections.
Read More
Related Posts:

AI, ChatGPT and Ministry—Part 2

Someone with a ubiquitous AI pastor in their pocket never learns to chew any food; he remains spoon-fed on the milk of the word…AI will repeat biblical fact, but lack insight into the person’s life. AI will summarise biblical teachings well, but fail to give appropriate application. AI will be intelligent, but not wise.
AI will transform how many jobs are done, and will completely replace many others. Tools like ChatGPT will reduce the task of writing to command-line prompts for professions ranging from medicine to law to office administration. The heavy lifting of writing will be done by an increasingly smart machine. How will this affect ministry: those who write, teach and preach the Bible? I suggest a few possibilities.
AI will tempt some to laziness and “cheating.”
For those tempted to skip the labour of study and original writing, AI will offer such men decently written sermons or Bible studies. This is just the next generation of copying and pasting from the web, except that now the material will be “original”: created from scratch by a machine. Or, if you like, it is the next generation of ghost writing: employing another to write on your behalf, and then taking the credit for the product. Strictly speaking, it is not cheating to have a computer write your sermon for you, for the work is original and ‘commissioned’ by the preacher. But it is cheating in the same way that it was cheating for jocks to pay nerds to write their term papers for them.
AI will tempt the marketers to deepen the phenomenon of fake church.
During Covid, we found out that many churches had a quasi-Gnostic view of the human body, and a passive-entertainment view of worship. That is, it made no difference to them if humans were actually present with each other in worship, because to them, live images on a screen are as much the reality of worship as in-person worship. With those views already in place, we are ready for the next level of worship simulations. AI will be able to produce Deep Fake versions of a church’s preacher or pastor preaching either sermons he has written or sermons produced by AI. These can be streamed or played on the big screens on Sunday—for those who want to show up. If worship can be a screen, who can object?
Read More

AI, ChatGPT and Ministry

Just as we made machines that can lift more than we can and move faster than we can, we have now designed machines that can know more and communicate more in a shorter period of time. If thinking is defined as memory, factual recall, and the ability to swiftly convert factual recall into written (or verbal) communication, then we have designed machines that can think better than we can.
We have always produced machines to reduce our labour. These machines are necessarily stronger than we are. The Industrial Revolution produced machines that could build bigger, better and faster than human hands could manage.
In the 20th century, we produced machines that could calculate more and faster than we could, machines that could store and remember more information than we could. We then produced machines that could combine this and beat us at chess. In other words, by one metric, even the computers of the 20th century were ‘smarter’ than us. Our software could reveal more in seconds than our library research could have produced after hours of page turning.
The last years represent another threshold. We have now produced machines that can mimic and understand language. Combined with massive storage, and a huge range of examples, we now have machines that can write faster, and sometimes, better than we can: essays, descriptions, instructions, poems, riddles, jokes, speeches, or sermons. Similarly AI can now code software better than we can, and perform visual design of graphics, websites, presentations and eventually, live-action movies, and simulations. Whereas we thought that creative activity would always be the domain of the human, we have now trained computers to mimic the creative process and perform it faster than we can.
For example, I asked ChatGPT to write a prayer by Charles Spurgeon. After about ten seconds, it had the following:
“O Lord, we would delight ourselves in You who are the chief of all delights. We thank You that of Your own good pleasure You bring salvation to sinful men. We confess that before You made us to differ, we were as others are, dead in trespasses and sins, having no hope and without God in the world. We bless You for the eternal covenant by which You foresaw us and chose us to be Your own, and for the precious blood of Christ by which we are redeemed. We pray that we may never lose sight of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, the infinite mercy of divine love, and the fullness of grace that dwells in Jesus. May the Holy Spirit who has begun the work of grace in us carry it onward to completion until we are complete in Christ, and find our joy and satisfaction in His service; for the Lord’s sake. Amen.”
Read More

Why We Need the Worship Wars

We should not be surprised that there exists in our era contention over proper sensibilities toward God. The truly alarming thing would be if there were none. What is somewhat different in our era is the post-modern mood that despises debate and clear definition. This pseudo-tolerance has long ago compromised the doctrinal integrity of professing Evangelicals. The same worldly mood that abhors necessary conflict and clear definition in doctrinal matters, is even more incensed at the thought of anything similar in the more subjective realm of orthopathy. In some ways, the most problematic people are not the combatants in the worship wars, but those who insist there should be none.

For some Christians, the worship wars are much ado about nothing. They regard these conflicts as the dying thrashes of hide-bound traditionalists, raging against the waning popularity of those songs most familiar and nostalgically precious to them. Such Christians think that debates over worship reveal only the immature clamor of people who do not understand the Romans 14 principle, and want to elevate their preferences to the level of orthodoxy.
If you believe that it is possible to have correct or incorrect affections towards God, appropriate or inappropriate responses to God, acceptable or unacceptable worship, then the worship wars are a natural, and indeed, essential part of church life. While no Spirit-filled Christian delights in conflict, no Spirit-filled Christian doubts that some conflict is inevitable and necessary. Consider how important doctrinal conflict has been.
We should be very thankful for the heretics and their heresies. Without them, we would not know all the ways that Christian orthodoxy can be denied and twisted. Before heretics come along, orthodoxy is assumed, without clear definition. Through the heresies of Gnosticism, Ebionism, Apollonarianism, Eutychianism, Nestorianism, Arianism, and Sabellianism, the church hammered out orthodox Christology and trinitarianism. The Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds represent early responses to heresies, and defining points for orthodoxy. The creeds represent points of definition. After these definitions were in place, deviations represent deliberate heterodoxy. A certain amount of vagueness or imprecision is expected before the point of definition that becomes intolerable after the point of definition.
For that matter, we can be “thankful”, so to speak, for the heresies of transsubstantiation, indulgences, baptismal regeneration, Mary as co-redemptrix, and others, for leading to the Reformation with its five solas. In many ways, our propositional statements of faith, as ornate as they now appear, partly represent a kind of timeline of doctrinal combat. Our liturgies, polities, and ministry philosophy represent a practical version of the same.
Read More
Related Posts:

Scroll to top