Do ministries suffer from the innovator’s dilemma? Yes, they do. It is hard for us in leadership to see it, though, because often we are living inside the system that is suffering from it. 

A problem we face as leaders is that the original mission is almost always overtaken by the way that mission is delivered. In 2005, the late Clayton Christensen wrote the book The Innovator’s Dilemma. He observed what happened inside businesses when they successfully developed a service or product and brought it to market. The dynamics hold true for ministries as well.
As a business has success with a new product, increased demand requires more organization. The delivery process is refined. There may be investment in the system that produces the service or product. People within the organization become convinced that their service or product – what they see as “The Best Way” – is the best or right solution to getting the mission done. Bureaucracy grows around its delivery and a self-perpetuating loop reinforces the value of The Best Way. New people join the team. Some are specialized and only participate in one aspect of the system that has developed. They do not have the perspectives of the whole, but they are very good at doing what they know how to do.
In the business world, the innovator’s dilemma reaches its peak when a new competitor enters the market. There is often an innovative improvement, and the incumbent organization, focused on delivering The Best Way, cannot adapt. They are experts at doing what they do best, not this new and novel solution. Their success has doomed them because they have become so good at what they do. The organizational culture affords no other means of delivery.
Do ministries suffer from the innovator’s dilemma? Yes, they do. It is hard for us in leadership to see it, though, because often we are living inside the system that is suffering from it. Another reason it is difficult to identify is that our competitors are different. We are competing against worldview and cultural change. We may have developed culturally relevant ministries, but rapid change has now made our Best Way, whatever it might be, irrelevant because the people it was designed to serve are growing old, the next generation is always different from the former generation, and culture has changed.
The classic example from business is Seagate, a company that once dominated the hard disk industry. As customers moved from larger drives to smaller ones, they squeezed more and more profit from the factories creating hard drives. They got really good at creating 5.25-inch hard drives. Then the industry shifted to smaller drives using different materials. Seagate could not innovate fast enough. Smaller players, not invested in the same production facilities, took over and Seagate faded.
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Matthes argues for the power of the pulpit—or what she labels “sermonic influence” on political and cultural life. Such an influence, she demonstrates, has proven especially notable during times of national crisis: it is here that Protestant sermons have resonated with the greatest force.

In her new book, When Sorrow Comes: The Power of Sermons from Pearl Harbor to Black Lives Matter, Melissa M. Matthes argues for two claims. First and most fundamentally, that Protestant ministers should assume a more active public role addressing political and legal affairs, and that, in doing so, they should be met with greater acceptance as national and community leaders whose guidance truly matters. Second, that Protestant clergy espousing theological liberalism provide the greatest opportunity to enlighten public discourse and strengthen the common good.
Her work succeeds admirably on the first score, but is open to a more ambivalent assessment on the second.
The Public Power of the Pulpit
Matthes centers her work on American Protestantism and justifies her limited purview on the “cultural dominance” of Protestantism in the United States—a position of demographic preeminence still evidenced by how the majority of the religiously self-identified are some form of Protestant, and that over 80 percent of African Americans number themselves as Protestant Christians.
From this Protestant-centered perspective, Matthes argues for the power of the pulpit—or what she labels “sermonic influence” on political and cultural life. Such an influence, she demonstrates, has proven especially notable during times of national crisis: it is here that Protestant sermons have resonated with the greatest force. This is so because, despite the secularization of American culture, many Americans still look to the country’s most prominent confession, especially for consolation in moments of collective crisis and in the aftershocks of largescale national tragedies.
In defending the public role of Protestant ministers, Matthes makes her stand against the claims of some strict separationists like Andras Sajo, who argues that “social, political, and legal arrangement[s]” must “not allow considerations based on the transcendental or the sacred.” Matthes argues that when the nation wrestles with tragedy, ministers should be listened to by citizens and policymakers alike, with their messages taken as sources of politically relevant insight. This follows, she argues, from the first principles of democratic legitimacy. If the people wish religious inspiration to guide their personal and public response to collective tragedy, the people have every right to have just this; to deny it would be to reject in Richard Parker’s lofty words that “here, the people rule.”
We can add to her arguments the recognition that, in times of crisis and grieving, there would be something coldly indifferent about a strong separation of church and state in the way Sajo recommends. If people seek comfort and guidance from religion in times of tragedy, to demand that they have only an aesthetic comfort, without any cognitive guidance—to say that they may lose themselves in dirges and requiems but take no heed of the sermons accompanying them—is to give cold comfort, indeed.
Having shown that religion still plays a powerful role in the limited arena of collective sorrow, Matthes argues that an opening is forged for seeing Protestant religiosity in a more positive light outside times of national tragedy. This positive influence is disclosed, she maintains, in the way the faith engenders a concern for those in need and on the margins of social and economic life. Specifically, she says religion can promote the common good apart from crises because it can speak so helpfully to just what Sajo and others say must remain the province of secular political advocacy: human rights and human progress.
In taking this stand, Matthes responds to the counterargument that, once re-affirmed in the public square, public religion with its diversity of sects might exacerbate existing social tensions. Theological disagreement, she contends, does not negate the positive contributions of religion to the common good. A diversity of ministerial voices can actually serve to stimulate the American people to greater reflection. Her point seems to be that serious debate about the implications of the transcendent truths religion advances witnesses to the seriousness of truth and transcendence in a way that can provoke our increasingly “apatheistic” age—an age indifferent to the claims of religious transcendence—to concern itself with the truth of the matters these ministers debate. Even when expounding differing theologies, therefore, the Protestant pulpit proves its value by stimulating us to enter into a state of mind “where seeking the Truth is a lifelong project.”
A Genealogy of Political Religion
Notwithstanding this recognition of the value of pluralism, Matthes’s work argues that a particular kind of theology should exercise the greatest influence on public life. The liberal theology that underwrote the homilies delivered by mid-century liberal Protestants following the tragedy of the Pearl Harbor attack should be recovered, deepened, and deployed as a religious witness in the United States today.
Matthes develops this claim by providing a fascinating survey of American Protestant sermons delivered in the wake of nationally salient crises: not only the Pearl Harbor attack, but also the assassination of JFK, the assassination of MLK, the 9/11 attacks, and the Newtown massacre. She appears to present this review as a social science exercise, but that approach seems inconsistent with the logic of her project. The samples of sermons she reviews are far too few to serve the purpose of a positivist social science exercise. Instead, the project appears much more to be a selective culling of sermons that advance what she sees as distinct theological types—and an argument for the superiority of one such theological position.
Her work, if not fully described as such, is more akin to a genealogy in the Nietzschean sense. As Allan Parson remarks, for Nietzsche, genealogy is “arrived through processes of exclusion and inclusion” by which our pressing contemporary needs shape our conceptualizations of past events. Genealogy, for Nietzsche, is “not to be thought of as purely historical,” but as the construction of a stage on which values are placed in contention, even as we make use of selected specimens from the “long hieroglyphic record” to build our accounts.
Matthes’s genealogy starts in the Alpine heights of mid-century liberal theological promise. Protestant theology by the early 1940s had liberated itself from the Fundamentalists—a bruising battle quite truculently fought throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and from which liberalism clearly emerged triumphant, as large numbers of traditionalists were driven out of the mainline denominations. This triumphant theology still remained vigorously Christian in self-identification, but gone were notions of special divine providence, or of God working through the course of human events.
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The Psalms make clear that the life of the true believer is inevitably full of conflict, adversity, trouble, danger, and sorrow. The Psalms show us that, for the true believer, life is difficult, indeed, life is a fight. There are external enemies in this fallen world who hate God and His people; our own sinful natures that still reside in us, inclining us to disbelieve and disobey God’s Word; and Satan and his demonic minions who tempt us to sin, pester us with worldly distractions, accuse our consciences, and mock us for our feeble faith. Read the Psalms, and you will see that not all of them are beautiful words of comfort such as Psalm 23 or songs of praise such as Psalm 100. There are many psalms that are expressions of agony, doubt, and fear in the face of spiritual warfare.
Psalm 13 is a good example. How many of us, in one way or another, at one time or another, have felt like crying out with the words of Psalm 13, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?” (Ps. 13:1)? This is one of those prayers—a lament —that, at first, we might be hesitant to pray. We might think that it sounds irreverent or even borderline blasphemous. Since God has said in His Word that He will never leave us or forsake us, it might seem as though we were accusing God of breaking His Word. Should we really cry out to God, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?”
Yes. By the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, God has given us Psalm 13 so that we can be assured that God accepts the honest outpourings of our souls. Most of us, if we live long enough, at some time or in some season, will feel so overwhelmed by adversity or grief that we will simply want to fall face down and cry out, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?” At such a time, Psalm 13 can serve as your personal prayer.
Those circumstances might involve prolonged suffering or hardship; chronic illness or physical pain; caring for a loved one who suffers physically or mentally; a continuing problem that just won’t go away or cannot get resolved; a series of circumstantial hardships, trouble upon trouble disturbing your life; or an injustice, a wrong done to you by a malicious person that has continuing negative consequences in your life; or the replaying of those “old tapes” from long ago—hurts, regrets, failures—that just keeping on playing and playing in your mind. In any of these cases, we might cry out: “Why do I have to keep dealing with this and going through this? Why doesn’t God deliver me from this?”
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Indeed, when a Christian’s best testimony to his neighbors is found in waiting patiently for governing officials to permit churches to gather again, thus denying Christ’s command to gather, we have a new instance of Corban—replacing the law of God with human traditions.

In January, a few members of our church put on our masks, boarded planes, and traveled to the Founders Conference, where we heard from the likes of Voddie Baucham, James Dolezal, Tom Ascol, and the leaders of Just Thinking, Virgil Walker and Darrell Harrison. In short, the trip, drenched in warm Florida sun, was encouraging, and the messages, saturated with biblical truth, were edifying—especially with respect to the subject of standing for Christ in an age that has become increasingly hostile towards Christians.

Addressing that subject and the new religion of universal autonomy and equality, Tom Ascol and Jared Longshore have released a new book called Strong and Courageous: Following Jesus Amid the Rise of America’s New Religion. Falling in line with newer books like Glenn Sunshine’s Slaying Leviathan and Rod Dreher’s Live Not by Lies, as well as older books like Francis Schaeffer’s A Christian Manifesto, and even older books like Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex: The Law and the King and Junius Brutus’s Vindiciae Tyrannos: A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants, this new volume promises to bolster the church at a time when public silence and civil cowardice are spreading faster than COVID.
In other words, this book comes at a time when Christians and especially pastors need courage. And this will be a book I hand to many pastors, as it provides bold and biblical arguments that stand against the online pablum that undercuts biblical courage with Christian civility (read: niceness). Indeed, when a Christian’s best testimony to his neighbors is found in waiting patiently for governing officials to permit churches to gather again, thus denying Christ’s command to gather, we have a new instance of Corban—replacing the law of God with human traditions. But thankfully, some are seeing through this misguided application of Scripture and are providing solid food for God’s flock. And in Strong and Courageous, Ascol and Longshore do just that.
In particular, they observe how Christians have been lulled into a secular idea of love that says, “If you love me, you will affirm me, no questions asked.” Whether Christians recognize the connection or not, too many have been led to believe that loving neighbor means affirming and embracing the edicts of the government, no questions asked. Sure, many want to believe that their governors are doing what is in their best interest, but this gets to a fundamental question about what governors are for and how far governments can reach—do they really have the God-given authority to prescribe how your church worships? The answer is ‘No.’ Strong and Courageous gets into this subject and shows how governors have overreached—both with respect to America’s Constitution (as well as the constitutions of various states) and with respect to God’s appointed design for human rulers. For this reason, I highly commend the book.
Still, government overreach is not the point I want to highlight here. Instead, I want to stem the tide of defining Christian love in worldly ways (i.e., making moral commitments that are based on modern sentiments, rather than inspired Scripture). I fear that many Christians are attempting to bind the consciences of others in the name of Christian love with practices and priorities that do not come from Scripture itself. Rather, love has been (re)defined by a cultural catechesis delivered in public schools, by governing officials, and through an endless stream of social media influencers. Not to mention the fact that churches have done little to teach what Scripture says about church and state.
All told, Christians need to go back to Scripture and ask: What does it mean to love my neighbor? Romans 12 would be a good place to start. But outside of Scripture, Strong and Courageous provides a good counter-argument that the most loving thing we can do is to do all that our governors are saying. Actually, as they argue, the most loving thing we can do is call governors back from tyranny and fellow citizens to know the true love of God.
(N.B. If defying tyrants is an uncommon phrase, or if you are uncertain about what a tyrant looks like, go back to the list of books at the top, starting with Slaying Leviathan, and pick one up. Church history has much to offer in recognizing tyranny and understanding what Christians must do in response. American Christians have lived in relative freedom for so long, our “defying tyrants” muscles are flaccid. Some don’t know we even have them, or need them. But we do. For without that biblical duty, we cannot properly love God or our neighbor.)
Now, here is the quote in full.
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Written by A.W. Workman |
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
Whatever our cooperative situation with other believers—be it church membership, ministry, the workplace, the family—let’s strive to more often view others through the lenses of sovereign gifts that might at some point save the day.

We recently had a mini team retreat where we looked into the spiritual gifting and personality wiring of the different members on our team. At one point, one of my teammates quoted me as once telling him, “You have the strengths you do for a good reason. Sooner or later, they will save the day. We need your gifts, honestly, so that we won’t die!”
While we had a good laugh together about this particular melodramatic wording, I honestly stand by these words. Not only do I recognize the goodness of the diverse natural and spiritual gifts on my team, I need them. Even if we weren’t engaged in church planting somewhere like Central Asia. My belief in the sovereignty of God is such that I know that he has brought these particular teammates, for this particular season, because their gifts and strengths will be the key to making it through tricky and terrible situations. When I will not know how to thread the needle, when I simply won’t know what to do or what to say—somehow, one of them will. And it will make all the difference.
Consider this quote by Corrie Ten Boom: “This is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for the future that only He can see.”
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Those who pray for no more than they can handle will find joy and comfort in even modest achievements, for they will know and trust that God has given them what is for their best and withheld from them what would be to their harm. 

I know many who long to make a mark in their field. I know writers who long to get that first contract and publish that first great novel. I know musicians who yearn to get noticed and get signed and get recorded. I know speakers who are convinced they could make their mark if only they could be invited to that first conference, deliver that first keynote, inspire that first audience. I know and admire many such people and often find myself rooting for them.
Yet even as I cheer them on from the sidelines of their lives, even as I attempt to encourage them as much as I’m able, there is one prayer I encourage them to pray amidst all their longing: “God, give me only as much success as I can handle.”
It has long been my observation that most people can handle failure better than success. If failure tends to spur innovation, success tends to breed stagnation. If failure tends to occasion humility, success tends to engender pride. If failure tends to stimulate dependence, success tends to generate self-reliance. I have seen people who seemed to be making great strides in godliness, great advances in upright and holy living, until they achieved success and gained acclaim. It was then that their progress seemed to screech to a near halt or even to reverse itself. When they gained the thing they had longed for, they lost the progress they had labored for. I have seen far more people ruined by success than by failure.
The reason is simple enough: Their success outpaced their sanctification. The level of their accomplishments rose faster than the growth of their character. Their vocational achievements came at the cost of spiritual achievements. They gained more success than they could handle and it led to great harm.
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The deep irony of DiAngelo’s work is that she demands exquisite sensitivity from everyone in all social interactions, but her own gross insensitivity is displayed on virtually every page.

For many people, 2020 was a nightmare that refused to end. For Robin DiAngelo, it was a very good year. In the aftermath of the George Floyd riots, her book White Fragility, surged to the top of the bestseller list. It sold more than 100,000 copies, making her a wealthy woman. This summer, DiAngelo released her newest work, Nice Racism. The most interesting feature of this book can be summarized in three words: It didn’t sell.
On the face of it, there is nothing extraordinary in the collapse of a mediocre book. Bad books drop from the printing press into obscurity every day. Normally, though, the author’s previous work is not still listed by the New York Times. How did DiAngelo’s bright moment pass so quickly? What does this mean for the ongoing debate over Critical Race Theory?
DiAngelo’s work has already received intense criticism from writers across the political spectrum. They found it condescending, hypocritical, or just racist. These charges are probably fair, though it can be difficult to judge, because DiAngelo’s meandering narrative does not readily cohere into a cohesive argument. To a certain extent, this is probably intentional. DiAngelo (under the influence of deconstructionists like Michael Foucault) has a fraught relationship with rational discourse, which she tends to see as an instrument of oppression. She describes herself as an expert in “discourse analysis,” which in her own words is, “a method for identifying how language positions speakers in relation to social others in recognition that language is sociopolitical, not simply a neutral transmitter of a person’s core ideas or self.”
The goal of discourse analysis, in other words, is to look past the truth claims that people make, and instead assess tone, terminology, and the broader social and political context. Who speaks the most, and with whom do they agree or disagree? How do people’s claims and arguments reflect and affect their own social status, and that of their interlocutors?
Within reasonable limits, this sort of analysis can sometimes yield helpful insights. Nearly everyone has the occasional Foucauldian moment, when they notice the nefarious potentialities of narrative. For DiAngelo though, “discourse analysis” seems to have swamped all other forms. She isn’t really in the business of making arguments, or responding to other people’s. On one level, Nice Racism is clearly a follow-up to White Fragility, which was one of the most hotly discussed (and heavily critiqued) books of 2020. But DiAngelo offers almost nothing by way of direct rebuttals, or responses of any kind to identifiable public writers. A few stray paragraphs are devoted to a flyby dismissal of John McWhorter, one of her most eloquent critics, but for the most part she devotes page after weary page to shadow-boxing anonymous detractors, whom we meet through DiAngelo’s anecdotes. She seems to find ignorant, insensitive people around every corner: on airplanes, in taxi rides, and of course, in the diversity seminars that she facilitates for a living. Unsurprisingly, these faceless interlocutors are easily vanquished. One hardly needs reasoned discourse to defeat such opponents.
An Insensitive Subject
As a reviewer, it is difficult to know what to say about such a book. Even when I disagree intensely with a book’s content, I normally try to do the author the courtesy of engaging his argument directly. This book, though, just doesn’t quite rise to the level of argument. Beyond that, the author herself seems to have objections to reasoned discourse. Also, there is the issue of redundancy. I could repeat the critiques of McWhorter, Jonathan Haidt, and others who have already written articulate responses to DiAngelo’s views. Since they remain on the table unanswered, this doesn’t feel particularly worthwhile. It really is not possible to advance the dialectic, because that isn’t a game that DiAngelo plays.
With no argument worthy of the name, readers may find themselves looking back at the author herself. By the end of the book, I was indeed overwhelmed with both pity and revulsion for this wretched-seeming woman. Everywhere she goes, people seem to be shouting, crying, or storming away in disgust. The problem is not limited to her fellow whites! DiAngelo also tells stories about offending or alienating BIPOC friends and associates. One cannot but notice that there is a common denominator across all of these unhappy anecdotes. It’s not white fragility.
The deep irony of DiAngelo’s work is that she demands exquisite sensitivity from everyone in all social interactions, but her own gross insensitivity is displayed on virtually every page. She brags constantly about her “expertise” and deep insight, but this façade falls immediately whenever she starts talking about real human beings. She is astonishingly deaf to the nuances of human relationships and human feeling. She cannot understand the complexities of human motivation. A writer like Chris Arnade brings unseen people to life before our eyes; she seems to reduce everyone to a cardboard cutout. She shows no interest in understanding or learning from the people she encounters, or even in finding more effective ways to persuade them. It’s easy to understand why she is constantly offending people. Her entire perspective on the world just feels bleak and dehumanizing.
Examples are legion, but I will content myself with one. In one chapter, DiAngelo rails against white women who speak in her seminars about their marriages to black men. This, in her view, is extremely insensitive. “There is a long and painful history,” she sniffs, “surrounding white women in relationship to Black men.”
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Although the President said he intends to end the system that allows Imams to train overseas, some have suggested he may be using “radical Islam” to garner public support for the move which would simultaneously undermine the freedoms and rights of Christian parents.

French President Emmanuel Macron has announced on Friday his intention to outlaw homeschooling in 2021 for all children unless they have a medical exemption that forces them to stay away from schools, Life Site News reports.
According to the report, the President said the government would also step up control of self-funded, private and independent schools, through inspections of curricula and by strong enforcement of a new law that requires private schools to teach a “common core” defined by the state.

The announcement comes as part of Macron’s plan to combat “Islamic separatism” and to “free Islam in France from foreign influences.”

“The goal of training and promoting in France a generation of Imams and intellectuals who defend an Islam fully compatible with the values of the Republic is a necessity,” Macron told an audience in Les Mureaux, Paris.
Although the President said he intends to end the system that allows Imams to train overseas, some have suggested he may be using “radical Islam” to garner public support for the move which would simultaneously undermine the freedoms and rights of Christian parents.
According to Macron, his aim is to “protect children from religion,” and that includes Christianity.
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The seeker-driven church movement may have a formula for drawing a crowd but don’t for a second think it means they’re drawing people to Christ. Countless people are attracted to programs, entertainment, and even the casual nature of anything deemed “worship.”

I recently met a pastor in passing who offered me encouragement regarding our upcoming church plant. He pastors a massive church (several thousand) so he took the opportunity to overflow some of his wisdom in our direction.
After the brief conversation, I quickly realized that his methods weren’t exactly going to help me grow a church spiritually, but they would certainly help me launch a social club. Here are 4 of his heavy-hitting growth tactics:

Drop all churchy language. The Bible is old and dated. Try to use slang whenever you can.
Play golf with influencers more than you study. Preaching doesn’t matter, just use sermons from other preachers and focus on hanging out with people. Playing golf with influencers grows the church. Preaching isn’t that important.
Put sports on all the TVs around the church campus if you have one. Men will come to church and hang out for that.
Make children’s ministry a party. If the kids have fun everyone comes back.

In that list (which is not exaggerated), there are a few ideas that aren’t bad. Golf is a great chance to bond with brothers, we all want children to enjoy church, and some pastors would do well to explain things in simpler language. But, that’s not the driving motive behind advice like this. The goal of this advice is church growth. It’s pragmatism; the idea that if it works it must be good. Or in the church world: if it works it must be God. In this sphere of thinking the Bible is a footnote, Jesus is a good luck charm, and the church is a social gathering for suburb folks who dabble in soft moralism.
Is that what Jesus died for? Is that what discipleship is? Did He call His Church to turn on the playoffs to make His house more attractive?
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Misunderstanding and mischaracterizing the Christian life is a favorite pastime of Hollywood…Faithful Christians are consistently portrayed as buffoons while, in this particular film, the ex-ex-gays are beacons of enlightenment.

Netflix’s latest original documentary, Pray Away—about the reparative therapy organization Exodus International—is yet another thinly veiled attack on Christianity by Hollywood. It’s not surprising that Netflix would seize on a false gospel to surreptitiously proffer a hit piece on Christianity in a lopsided tale of woe. Much of the media can hardly resist glomming on to extremes to further an agenda that denigrates Christians. What is surprising is how poorly made this doc is. Not only does it lack a cohesive and compelling narrative, but it attempts to throw any sort of anti-Christian spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.
As someone who worked in Hollywood for decades, I’ve seen firsthand the contempt the entertainment industry has for Christianity. But only after I left my gay identity—in exchange for a new identity in Christ—did I realize the special resentment Hollywood reserves for converts like me. Pray Away is a case in point.
Celebrating Ex-Ex-Gay
The film opens on Jeffrey McCall, a former transsexual who had a powerful encounter with God and is now transformed by the gospel. The camera follows him on the streets of Georgia offering prayer to strangers. It’s clear the director capitalized on McCall’s lilting and effeminate Southern accent in an attempt to discredit him. Oh, those Bible-belt rubes and their quaint coming-to-Christ stories! But the focus on McCall is an odd choice and, as we see later, seems like a story from another film that somehow got mixed up in the editing room and mistakenly attached to this one.
The narrative inexplicably segues to former key leaders of Exodus International who have since come out as ex-ex-gay. Exodus was born in 1976 at a large conference in Anaheim, California, seeking to help homosexuals who wanted to rid themselves of unwanted same-sex attractions through a series of ad hoc and unscientific therapeutic methods. It’s no surprise these dubious methods failed. Attempts to “pray away the gay” all too often fail, leaving struggling folks not only mad at God or personally scarred but, far worse, in a state of apostasy. Tragically, the baby (the possibility of any change of affections) is usually thrown out with the bathwater (the problematic brand of “change” aimed at in conversion therapy). 
Producer/director Kristine Stolakis seizes on the faulty science—and unbiblical theology—of conversion therapy to castigate anyone who would dare leave, or desire to leave, the LGBTQ community. The message is clear: if you are denying your sexual desires in order to follow Christ, you are just fooling yourself. Those desires are what define your identity, and to tamper with who you really are is dangerous and delusional.
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