As many of you have seen our church was struck by lightning this afternoon and a fire ensued. The fire department was there very quickly and many put themselves in danger during the storm to put the fire out. The damage seems to be contained to the middle third of the building. However, Pastor Holcomb’s office was badly damaged, the sanctuary was significantly flooded and the fire knocked out the power.

SURFSIDE, S.C. (WPDE) — The Surfside Presbyterian Church caught fire Monday afternoon [July 4].
Senior Pastor Brian Peterson, at Surfside Presbyterian, told ABC15 News most of the damage sustained is to the bell tower, the second-floor offices and a few other areas surrounding the center of the church.
Peterson said on Monday afternoon, his teenage son was the one who first asked him about the fire.
He said it was just a few minutes after that that he began receiving calls and texts about the flames.
Horry County Fire Rescue said lightning appears to have hit the church’s bell tower.
Crews said the fire is under control with no reported injuries.
Peterson added there’s not much smoke damage, but there is extensive fire and water damage inside.
“It’s a mess. What used to be up is now down; on the floor,” he said. “Water has created damage up and down the hallways, so we’re trying to preserve whatever we can from those offices. The sanctuary seems to be in relatively good shape compared to the rest of the building.”
Peterson said they’re not letting this stop the church from moving forward.
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One of the elders commented on a Facebook page: “As many of you have seen our church was struck by lightning this afternoon and a fire ensued. The fire department was there very quickly and many put themselves in danger during the storm to put the fire out. The damage seems to be contained to the middle third of the building. However, Pastor Holcomb’s office was badly damaged, the sanctuary was significantly flooded and the fire knocked out the power. It is uncertain when we can return. Watch this page and your email about this coming Sunday. Praise the Lord that no one was there and pray that, if needed, we will be able to find a location for our Sunday services!”

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Releasing our children to follow Jesus’s kingdom call is part of how we, as parents, hate our own lives and bear our own cross for Jesus’s sake. And part of what makes his call paradoxical is that this “hating” is not affectional hatred at all. In fact, it’s what love looks like. For as John Piper says, “Love is the overflow of joy in God that meets the needs of others. The overflow is experienced consciously as the pursuit of our joy in the joy of another.” (Desiring God, 141)

A late middle-aged father is standing next to his boat and a pile of partly mended fishing nets, watching his two sons. He has always assumed that his sons would someday take over his fishing business and help provide for him and his wife when they grew too old to work. But now he watches them do something he never expected: they walk down the shoreline with a young rabbi who has called them to leave their fishing vocation — and their father — in order to follow him.
Suddenly, his envisioned future for him and his sons has become a swirl of uncertainty. What is he feeling? What are his sons feeling?
You may recognize this scene. It comes from Matthew 4:21–22:
Going on from there [Jesus] saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.
When I read this story as a younger man, I didn’t give much thought to Zebedee. I tended to put myself in the place of James and John, following Jesus into a future of fishing for men. The uncertainty of it all felt adventurous and exciting. But now, as a late middle-aged father of adult children, I can’t help but put myself in Zebedee’s place.
Recently, I was discussing with my twentysomething son and daughter-in-law the possible call they’re discerning to follow Jesus to another country for the sake of the gospel. I do feel excited for them, but it’s significantly different when the cost is not leaving to follow Jesus, but being left as my son follows Jesus. I find myself wanting to talk to Zebedee about his experience and get his counsel.
Unless You Hate Your Father
Zebedee’s experience casts these words of Jesus in a whole different light:
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26–27)
As a younger man, I mainly heard these words pertaining to my father and mother and siblings and friends. Now, I hear them significantly pertaining to me as a father. In order to follow Jesus faithfully, my children must “hate” me for his sake.
Of course, when Jesus says “hate” here, he’s not talking about the kind of affectional hatred we usually mean when we use that word. He’s talking about treasuring, as he does in this text:
No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. (Matthew 6:24)
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“It’s not a culture war, not anymore. There is no common civic ground on which liberals and conservatives meet and hash things out…The debates are over now. The Woke brigades won’t battle your ideas. The marketplace of ideas offends them—you offend them. Now, they have the power of termination…[T]he Revolution is here and you’re in it…They follow the motto of that brilliant manager of men, Joseph Stalin, who reasoned quite soundly: ‘No man, no problem.’”

Roman Catholic Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò describes the globalist “Great Reset,” devised by Davos billionaires and powerful politicians, as the work of Satan and “Luciferian Globalists.”[1] Protestant American believers warn that “America is writhing in the grip of a full-scale Marxist political and cultural revolution.”[2] Some conclude that the two movements are deeply related. As responsible citizens, Christians must certainly consider what role the church should play in seeking to hold back the progress of godless political power in their own nation.
It may seem unduly sensationalist to describe progressive current politics as Marxist, but wisdom dictates that we think seriously about how the future could pan out. Slow changes can suddenly speed up, causing us to regret not having seen a movement coming. As Mark Bauerlein, professor at Emory University and senior editor of First Things, states: “One moment you’re a citizen of a well-running republic. The next moment you see that the federal government seems unable to fulfill its most basic responsibilities.”[3]
I continue to be motivated by the serious, yet delicate, challenge of showing believers how their faith and gospel witness must be applied to this changing culture, just as Moses warned Israel when going into Canaan. He warned them to be aware of the dangers of living among people who worship false gods, citing the Lord’s judgment: They made me jealous by what is no god and angered me with their worthless idols (Deut 32:21).
When I arrived in America for the first time in 1964, as a naive young European, I was struck at both how “Christian” and how anti-Communist America was. Now recent arrivals from China, like Lily Tang-Williams, and from North Korea, like the youthful and brilliant Yeonomi Park, warn that they see much in America that reminds them of the horrendous cultures they left behind. Ms. Park recently studied at Columbia University and was shocked to see that the Marxist ideology she was taught in North Korea was now being taught in every class at this well-respected American school.[4] As I study Critical Race Theory and the antiracism movements of the day, I realize how ideologically Marxist these movements are; yet they are spreading throughout the culture with relative ease and increasing power—even in the country’s churches. These movements are successfully dividing American culture down the middle, in typical Marxist fashion!
Let’s be clear. The Marxist grab for social power has always sought to divide culture into antagonist segments: the oppressors and the oppressed. In Russia the divide was created between the bourgeois oppressors (land and business owners) and the proletariat oppressed (workers). In China the division was made between the “Black” (professionals) and the “Red” (under-class ) Chinese, whom Mao convinced to murder millions of fellow “Black” Chinese. In Cambodia the divide was between the intellectuals (which included anyone wearing glasses – true!) and the agricultural workers, who were roused by the Khmer Rouge and their cruel leader, Pol Pot, to murder nearly a quarter of the Cambodian population. In our time, Marxist-inspired Critical Race Theory divides Western culture into the oppressors (Whites) and the oppressed (Blacks and other minorities). Some leaders of this movement have clearly stated Marxist goals.
This is not new. According to a first-hand witness, black American Manning Johnson, in his book Color, Communism and Common Sense (1958), describes a vast attempt by Soviet and American communists in 1934–35 to undermine faith in American institutions through a program that would convince the general public that America is deeply racist. Mr. Johnson signed up for this revolutionary program. The goal was to create “a common front against the white oppressors.”[5] Johnson documents that the plot to use “Negroes as the [expendable] spearhead” of the undermining of America was created by Stalin in 1928, ten years after the creation of the Commintern (the World Organization of Communism). This was employed by “the top white communist leaders” hypocritically playing the idea of racial conflict in “a cold-blooded struggle for power” to “advance the cause of Communism” in America.[6] The goal was “to make the white man’s system, the white man’s government, responsible for everything.” He noted: “Smear is a cardinal technique,” seeking to “divide America” that can only be called “a propaganda hoax.”[7] “Black rebellion was what Moscow wanted. Bloody racial conflict would split America. During the confusion, demoralization and panic would set in.”[8] Apparently, the movement had little time for black people. Marx dismissed the black race as much closer to the animal kingdom.[9] Finally understanding his role as a pawn, Manning abandoned the program.
As Black Lives Matter (ironically awarded the Nobel Peace prize of 2021) ultimately shows, the controversy over racism is not so much an attempt at purging real racism as it is a Marxist-driven attempt to divide our culture between the oppressed Blacks and their White oppressors, in order to overthrow civilized Judeo-Christian American culture. The accusation that police brutality is causing black genocide has been shown to be false,[10] but BLM’s self-definition as emerging from Marxism is certain. Using racism as its cover story, Marxism pushes forward with its goal to divide America and to cause a revolution that will “upset the set-up!” An anonymous first-hand ex-participant in BLM (like Manning Johnson, years earlier) states: “I have seen this [racist] ideology up close and seen how it consumes and even destroys people, while dehumanizing anyone who dissents.”[11] In other words, BLM’s Marxism is an essential part of the neo-Marxist revival that seeks to bring an end to traditional Western civilization by the age-old technique of antagonistic cultural division.
Ibram X. Kendi, founder of Boston University’s Center for Antiracism Research was recently given a $10 million “no strings attached” grant by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.[12 ] This is a clear example of “woke capitalism,”[13] by which Dorsey uses his financial power to promote his vision of social justice while silencing opposing views on his Twitter platform, thereby undermining the democratic process. This money will help create a U. S. Department of Antiracism, with the power to overturn any law or policy at any level of government if the department determines that such policies do not contribute vigorously enough to antiracist theory. With the subjective notion of “equity” as the defining term, such a branch of government could, by fiat, redefine public morality. Fallible, omnipotent, moral busybodies will apply inscrutable rules to everyone except themselves. Nothing could be more Marxist! Ironically, Kendi, richly supported by successful businessmen and profiting hugely from the free market system, has announced that he opposes capitalism and free enterprise: “To love racism,” he states, “is to end up loving capitalism.”[14] Equity now determines action, and we will define what it is
Professor Bauerlein understands precisely where we now are.
“It’s not a culture war, not anymore. There is no common civic ground on which liberals and conservatives meet and hash things out…The debates are over now. The Woke brigades won’t battle your ideas. The marketplace of ideas offends them—you offend them. Now, they have the power of termination…[T]he Revolution is here and you’re in it…They follow the motto of that brilliant manager of men, Joseph Stalin, who reasoned quite soundly: ‘No man, no problem.’”[15]
Stalin had many of his dissenting colleagues shot through the head. With cancel culture, it is now, as Bauerlein perceptively observes: “No conservatives, no problem.”[16] Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, and a careful social analyst, says, reflecting on Norway’s recent law declaring illegal speech against transgenderism, even at home:[17] “Free speech in the United States these days is becoming described as a danger that needs to be controlled as opposed to a traditional value that defines this country as a democracy.… [F]ree speech…is under fire and may even be a minority view today.”[18] He refers to President Biden who selected Richard Stengel to take the “team lead” position on the US Agency for Global Media. “Stengel has been one of the most controversial figures calling for censorship and speech controls, a person who rejects the very essence of free speech. He promises the “unity” of a nation silenced by government speech codes and censorship.”[19] He is one of those who knows what equity is.
If this is true, we may be increasingly close to the situation of the German church in the 1930s. It watched the political rise of Hitler and the promotion of NAZI ideology. Individual Catholics and Protestants spoke out, but the church made no public opposition to antisemitism or to state-sanctioned violence against the Jews.[20] After 1945, the silence and even complicity of the church during the Holocaust produced major issues of guilt and recrimination. We may ask, without any sense of superiority: What should the German church have done to stop the slaughter of 6 million Jews, a bloodbath going on right under its nose?
Now is the time to ask what our Christian response must be to a dangerous political program that seeks to the divide culture and may well end up in far more physical violence than we have yet seen. May God grant us wisdom to face such a possible cultural future, not in order to produce a “Christian nation” but out of respect for God and for those made in his image. Yet while we live in this fallen world, we must also defend biblical principles of sound living, and of fair and polite discussion. We have the blessing of a First Amendment, which we would do well to defend. We must also defend the rule of law, any policy that promotes the nobility of the individual, normative male/female distinctions, and defense of the pre-born.
Clearly, truth must speak to power, whatever response it receives—even if it is a violent one. We must preach the gospel fervently both to the oppressors and the oppressed, for we all share a world temporarily under the oppression of the Evil one. We have true peace with God only through the suffering, sacrifice, death and resurrection of our coming King. We must make known the truth about God, the good Creator, whose common grace is extended to everyone and whose special grace is shown to all who will hear and respond to the saving death of his Son, which will produce the redemption of the entire creation (Romans 8:18–21), for God’s final glory—and for perfect, divinely defined, equity.
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.

[1]WND LINK: “…corrupt civil and church authorities have joined forces to exploit the coronavirus pandemic in their quest to bolster global sovereignty.”[2] “How Big Tech, Big Media, lying Democrats, deep staters and vote fraudsters cheated Trump – and America,” WND (September 02, 2021).[3]AM GREATNESS LINK, see also FRONT PAGE MAG LINK[4] Alex Newman, “Critical Race Theory: Marxist Poison Infecting America,” The New American (August, 9, 2021), 11-17.[5] Manning Johnson, Color, Communism and Common Sense (Martino Fine Books,1958), 7 and 15.[6] Johnson, ibid, 37.[7] Johnson, ibid., 44, 52 and 54.[8]FREE REPUBLIC LINK Joseph Hippolito BLM, Antifa and the Communist Strategy to Destroy the United States Frontpagemagazine | Sep 24, 2020 |[9] According to the recently deceased Walter Williams, see NEWS HERALD LINK[10] The BLM myth is turning the many encounters law enforcement had with African-Americans in 2019 into a racist genocide. In fact, only 9 unarmed blacks were killed by police in 2019 and, according to police records, a majority of the fatal encounters were the outcome of fully justified police actions of self-defense. In the same year, 19 unarmed whites were shot dead by police; yet no one hears or even seems to care about these victims, because they don’t fit the Left’s narrative of black genocide. 93% of all black homicide victims are killed by other blacks. This is the true genocide that needs to be stopped. Police are NOT waging war on African-Americans. This is a profound lie. This is NOT a nation mired in systemic racism. No one knows leftist radicals better than David Horowitz. He says Black Lives Matter, Antifa and Occupy Wall Street all seek the same thing: a progressive, socialist revolution in America – and they are far closer to achieving it today than ’60s radicals ever were.[11]NEW DISCOURSE LINK[12]BU EDU LINK[13] See Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, (Center Street, NY, 2021), 19.[14] by FRONT PAGE MAG LINK [15] Art.cit.[16] Art.cit.[17]FAITHWIRE LINK[18]THEHILL LINK[19]JONATHANTURLEY LINK[20]ENCYCLOPEDIA LINK