We gather on the Lord’s Day not simply to congregate together but to worship together and to fellowship together. We are sojourners and exiles throughout the week, but on the Lord’s Day, we receive a foretaste of home. We can come hungry, and by God’s grace we will leave blessed and filled.
Fellowship before and after Sunday Services
The Christian church has the great gospel reminder that the morning, the dawning of light, brings forth fresh praise and fruitful fellowship of the saints (Lam. 3:22–23). Why is this important? It was in the morning that the Lord Jesus Christ was raised, defeating death and the grave, setting forth the priority of the Lord’s Day (Luke 24:1–7). The worship of almighty God is not an individual practice but a communal one. The Lord’s Day is a day for this community, when we engage in our calling as a covenant people to fellowship with God and with one another.
The fellowship of the saints is vital to our life in Christ and our understanding of being a part of the church. The marks of a true church are the preaching of the Word, the right administration of the sacraments, and church discipline. When we survey the early church, especially as Luke outlines in the book of Acts, we see the necessity of fellowship as it pertains to the marks of a true church. Consider the well-known passage in Acts 2:42–47. Luke puts fellowship in the context of worship. Notice that fellowship isn’t simply a gathering of people who want to be social or those who share similar life experiences. What makes Christian fellowship unique is supernatural unity over common truth and teaching: the gospel of Jesus.
The writer of Hebrews exhorts us:
Consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Heb. 10:24–25)
Here is a call to all Christians that we must not isolate but instead come together. To be sure, there are painful seasons of isolation for some members of the church, and there are also contexts outside corporate worship that can also fit into this exhortation. In our day, however, it is entirely possible to come to church and leave without any real meaningful conversation or investment in relationship. How subtle yet dangerous the temptation to think that church then becomes more about me and what I can get than what I can give. A Christian cannot be an individualist; the church body needs what each unique member has to offer.
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Boys Are Falling Farther and Farther Behind Their Sisters: Should We Care?
In Boys Adrift, I also presented evidence that schools bear some of the blame for the disengagement of boys from education. American schools, with a few exceptions, have become unfriendly to boys. Boys doing things that boys have always done—such as pointing fingers at each other saying “bang bang you’re dead”, or doodling a sketch of a sword—now often get into trouble at school. But reprimanding an elementary-school boy for chewing his pastry into the shape of a gun does not change that boy into a flower child who wants to talk about his feelings.
There is a growing gender gap in higher education. According to the latest figures from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center: as of spring 2021, women accounted for 59.5% of students attending colleges and universities nationwide. Among four-year private colleges, women now account for 61% of all students. Both figures represent new records. Douglas Shapiro, executive director of research at the National Student Clearinghouse, told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month that if current trends continue, within a few years there will be two women graduating from college for every one man.
Well, so what? In 1970, men accounted for 58% of students attending colleges and universities, and there was no great outcry back then about the gender imbalance. Why should we be concerned now that the pendulum has swung in the other direction?
I think there are good reasons for concern, which can be summed up in three words: “educational assortative mating.” Educational assortative mating means that if a woman has earned a four-year degree and she is looking for a husband, she will usually choose a man whose educational achievement is equal to or greater than her own. Fifty years ago, if a man earned a four-year degree and was looking for a woman to marry, he might have many qualifications in mind for his future wife; but educational attainment was not one of them. In that era, college-educated men were happy to marry women who had never attended college. In our era, college-educated women are hoping to marry college-educated men. And there are not enough college-educated men to go around.
This problem is not confined to the college educated. I am a family doctor. A young woman in my own practice, let’s call her Linda, has two small children. She has never been married. She has never attended college. I bumped into the father of her two children. He told me how much he loves Linda. He told me that he has proposed marriage, twice, and both times Linda turned him down. I asked Linda, as gently as I could, why she did not want to marry the father of her two children. She answered: “Dr. Sax, I already have two babies at home. I don’t need a third!”
At every level, not just among the college-educated, young women seeking a man to marry are looking for men who are at least as competent and hard-working as they are. But ever since the 1980s, boys’ academic achievement in high school has declined relative to girls, not primarily because girls are doing better but because boys are doing worse.
Marriage rates in the United States peaked at 16.4 per 1,000 per year in 1946. As recently as 1990, marriage rates were still 9.8 per 1,000. Right now, the marriage rate is 6.1 per 1,000: that’s the lowest on record, going back to the 1880s. Although many factors have contributed to the decline in marriage, scholars agree that one major factor driving the decline is the reality that many women want their husbands to earn more than they do. American women have always tended to prefer husbands who can earn more than they do, but the growing phenomenon of underachieving young men means that there are not enough successful men to go around.
Nevertheless, many women still want to have children.
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A Recovered Martyn Lloyd Jones Sermon Describes This Moment in Evangelical Theology
Rome has repented nothing since 1517 and has only changed tactics in attempting to bring us under her tyranny. As with the Anglicans in 1977, so with many evangelicals today. These men have forgotten that false teachers come in sheep’s clothing (Matt. 7:15); that bad company ruins good morals (1 Cor. 15:33); that Rome and the East have buried the gospel in human tradition (Matt. 15:1-6) and idolatry; that God curses those that alter the gospel (Gal. 1:6-9); and so many other things that we might say unto them: “about this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing” (Heb. 5:12).
I have before me a recently recovered sermon by Martyn Lloyd Jones from 1977, titled “The Sword and the Song.” Speaking before the British Evangelical Council, he addressed then recent developments among evangelicals in Britain. Regrettably, they sound remarkably like trends among some professing evangelicals today, albeit ones that are by no means limited to Britain. I recommend you listen to the entire sermon at the MLJ Trust and ponder its similarity to present circumstances.
He says, for example, that at the Evangelical Anglican Congress in April, 1977, there was a man who declared that the Reformation was the greatest tragedy in the history of the church (32:40). Similar things have been said recently. In 2018 Regent College, which describes itself as “both evangelical and orthodox,” saw its then J.I. Packer Professor of Theology, Hans Boersma,[1] state, “I think the Reformation is not something to celebrate but is primarily something that we should lament—that it is primarily a tragedy.”
Elsewhere Lloyd Jones quotes the then bishop of Leicester saying that “throughout the first 40 or 50 years of my life, one was accustomed to a fairly sharp divide between the evangelical and the catholic movements in our church,” but that “during these recent years these lines of demarcation have become blurred” (34:20). That also sounds familiar. In the Center for Classical Theology’s magazine Credo, one can read things like the following.
In a book review of Piercing the Clouds: Lectio Divina and Preparation for Ministry (which book is part of a Romanist press’s “Catholic Theological Formation Series”), the reviewer says:
The contributors argue not only that historical-grammatical and devotional readings of Scripture can happen together but that they should happen. Especially in the spiritual formation of budding Catholic priests. Drawing on the writings of the early church, medieval monks, and Pope Benedict XVI, they offer six essays building their case. . . there is plenty within these pages to be relevant for seminarians across ecclesial boundaries. (emphasis mine)
The reviewer, a member of a non-denominational church in Tennessee, sees no problem with Protestants using a book that is explicitly meant for training Roman priests to train their own seminarians. He later links the two explicitly, saying “what the church needs today are Catholic priests—and Protestant clergy—who are molded by exegetically-informed lectio.”[2] Err, no, we don’t need any Roman priests, so-called, and every man who serves in that capacity should promptly repent and begin to serve God in truth, laying aside the falsehoods of that communion to unite with God’s people as they are gathered in the churches of the Reformation.
But to my point here, that which was the case in the 1970s Anglican church is also the case more generally now. Credo is primarily run by Baptists associated with Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Yet they have no qualms commending books that draw on writings by monks or the pope, nor in giving a platform to people like Boersma – whom they awarded with their “best theological retrieval” book award for 2023 – or members of Roman orders like the Dominicans (as here), nor, for that matter, women who are ordained in Protestant denominations renowned rather for their apostasy and decline than for any virtue, such as Jennifer McNutt of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. McNutt is also a professor at Wheaton College’s School of Biblical and Theological Studies, whose self-profession of evangelical faith needs no elaboration, but which is similarly suspect, not least since they employ two women professors who are also ordained in the Anglican Church in North America, one of whom seems to harbor some Romish sentiments about Mary (see my article here for an elaboration). Again, as in Lloyd Jones’s day, the “lines of demarcation seem to have become blurred.”
Or again, Lloyd Jones says that there was a difference in notions of scripture’s nature and authority in 1977 in comparison to the past, that people were arguing:
It’s not enough to have a translation in English, they say, of the Hebrew and the Greek. Oh no, you must have much more. You must know the cultural milieu, the cultural setting in which the scriptures were written. And they actually go so far as to say this, that you cannot understand the scriptures unless you know something about this cultural setting. Indeed, one of the leaders of this school on the continent of Europe has actually said this, that it is virtually impossible for any men to understand even the New Testament today, because we can never put ourselves into the cultural position and the thought forms of the people of the first century. (40:18)
That sounds like the need to ‘contextualize’ everything some people among us espouse, and reminds me of N.T. Wright’s argument that our previous perspective on Paul (esp. viz. justification) is wrong because we fail to understand the framework of his thought. Lloyd Jones helpfully contrasts this with “what the reformers called the perspicuity of the scriptures” (41:52), and notes that its logical outcome is a complete reliance on the perspective of scholars. In that vein he elsewhere notes the shift in notions about authority:
There has been this great change in the attitude of evangelicals. Towards what? Well, towards tradition. Not only scripture, but tradition. The old position of the Roman Catholic Church that you don’t merely assert the supremacy of the scriptures only, not sola scriptura, [but] tradition also as defined by them. (25:29)
These days it seems that every time one turns about he is being assailed with talk of “The Great Tradition.” There is a contemporary movement of what is called theological retrieval or ressourcement, and outlets like Credo and its associated contributors are at the center of it in the evangelical world. This movement says that this “Great Tradition” (which they always capitalize) that we ought to retrieve includes the ancient creeds and confessions, the catholic doctrine which the church has always believed, and that it provides the necessary framework to properly understand said creeds and confessions, and to be faithful adherents to the faith.
I have written about this elsewhere, including how the thing has its origin with Rome and her contemporary ecumenism, of how it includes Platonism, and of how it leads people to make some bizarre claims (regarding the aforementioned, Rome-sympathizing Boersma as Reformed; arguing that the Eastern communions’ notion of ‘deification’ is native to Reformed theology). It has also led to the present obsession with Aquinas, an idolater, whose fanatical partisans have portrayed him and the scholastics more generally in glowing terms as essential to reviving contemporary theology. Boersma actually has a chapter called “No Plato, No Scripture” in his book Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew, and Credo used the same formula to say “no Plato, no Augustine” in the introduction to its issue on Platonism:
Perceiving the philosophical truth within Platonism, the Great Tradition believed Platonism’s metaphysical commitments could serve Christianity. Consider Augustine, for example, whose conversion to Christianity may have been an impossibility apart from Platonism.
Their broad argument is that the “Great Tradition” is necessary to understand both scripture and the confessions and to escape the stifling intellectual climate of ‘modernity’ that skews our understanding of everything. Enter Craig Carter, whose Substack is called “The Great Tradition” and who is producing a trilogy of “Great Tradition” books, the second of which won the best “Theological Studies” book award from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Journal in 2021. At Creedo he has an article, “The Metaphysics Behind the Reformed Confessions,” that argues this way, speaking of “recovering the riches of seventeenth-century continental and English pastors and theologians who utilized the metaphysics of the Great Tradition to do theology and write and expound the great confessions of Protestantism.”
Compare Lloyd Jones again: “tradition, as defined by them.” Yet this is what leading contemporary Protestant theologians are enamored of just now. Just the other day Credo posted a video titled “Why we love the Bible (and read it with the Great Tradition).” They say that to read scripture for oneself apart from this tradition is to be a ‘biblicist,’ their favorite bogeyman. They say that to be a biblicist is to become a sectarian separated from the church, to risk becoming anti-intellectual and falling into all manner of heresy like anti-Trinitarian and Socinian errors. And so the guardrail to prevent that, on their view, is this “Great Tradition.”
Now I do not consider myself a biblicist, nor propose to enter fully into that debate, but I do say that this bears a frightful similarity to what Lloyd Jones observed in his own day. Leading Protestant theologians are taking their intellectual cues from Rome and falling all over themselves to hobnob with her scholars. Look at what he said of some of the evangelical Anglicans in 1977 on this point:
They’re actually proclaiming and boasting of the fact that their attitude to the Roman church and the Greek Orthodox church and the Russian Orthodox church has undergone an entire change. (32:20)
And:
We are not prepared to recognize all who call themselves Christians as being Christians. This is what these people are doing. They assume that if a man says, I am a Christian and he belongs to a church, it doesn’t matter what he believes, doesn’t matter what he denies. (45:05)
And again, reading what was said by one of its leaders at the birth of the United Reformed Church:[3]
This is a congregationalist speaking, a successor of the men ejected in 1662.[4] “No one,” he says, “who was present at the inauguration of the United Reformed Church in Westminster Abbey is likely to forget the moment when the archbishop of Canterbury, the [Roman] cardinal archbishop of Westminster, and the moderator of the Free Church Federal Council pledged themselves to pursue together that fuller unity of which the URC was a small foretaste.” (17:20)
Union among Protestants was just the first step in a larger movement for union among all professing believers, hence why the leaders of the Anglicans and English Romanists were present.
A similar ecumenical strain marks certain corners of the contemporary Protestant theological academy. They frequently commend members of Rome and the East and give them platforms and awards. Lewis Ayres, professor of Catholic and Historical Theology at Durham University in England, has lectured at Reformed Theological Seminary Orlando. Credo editor Matthew Barrett’s The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church bears on its jacket the good words of the Roman professor Matthew Levering, a central figure in the ressourcement movement, who says Barrett’s “argument may offer promising ecumenical potential.” Imagine that, a book on the Reformation, and the Romans themselves laud it and say it offers “ecumenical potential”![5] In closing, we might well ask with Lloyd Jones:
What has produced this change? Is there something new? Has there been some new discovery? The answer is, there is nothing new at all. There has been no new discovery.
So it is with us. Rome has repented nothing since 1517 and has only changed tactics in attempting to bring us under her tyranny. As with the Anglicans in 1977, so with many evangelicals today. These men have forgotten that false teachers come in sheep’s clothing (Matt. 7:15); that bad company ruins good morals (1 Cor. 15:33); that Rome and the East have buried the gospel in human tradition (Matt. 15:1-6) and idolatry; that God curses those that alter the gospel (Gal. 1:6-9);[6] and so many other things that we might say unto them: “about this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing” (Heb. 5:12). Heartbreaking, all of it, and we should pray God will grant repentance (2 Tim. 2:25) and raise up witnesses (Matt. 9:35-38), lest he remove the church from our lands (Rev. 2:5) and give us over to unbelief and falsehood (2 Thess 2:11) in punishment for such compromise with the false teaching of Rome and the East (Rev. 2:14-16; 20-23).
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks/Simpsonville (Greenville Co.), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation.
[1] Boersma is ordained in the Anglican Church in North America
[2] This is a slight reworking of what I have written elsewhere on this topic: https://tomhervey.substack.com/p/across-the-tiber-and-into-the-cloister#_ftn1
[3] Not to be mistaken with the more recent United Reformed Churches in North America, which bears a more consistently Reformed character, having largely formed out of the Christian Reformed Church in response to scripturally unfaithful developments in her midst in the 1990s.
[4] A reference to the Great Ejection of 1662, in which 2,000 Puritans were cast from their pulpits by the English government.
[5] Boersma similarly honored J.I. Packer as “a great Puritan,” not because, like the original Puritans, he worked for a pure doctrine, worship, and church that was purified of Romish and other errors, but because of his “ecumenical conviction” that “drove him to irenic dialogue with Catholics and Orthodox in the 1990s” and recognized such as “fellow Christians who upheld the church’s Great Tradition.”
[6] As many do when they say things like “the gospel is indispensable for addressing the complex social, cultural, and political challenges facing the nation,” thus contradicting Jesus’ claim that his “kingdom is not of this world” (Jn. 18:36). If his kingdom is not of this world, how could the gospel of that kingdom be concerned with worldly cares like political and social challenges? Only if one distorts the meaning of that gospel and the nature of that kingdom can it be so.Related Posts:
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Why Daily Bread Is Better
Moment by moment, God answers. This is his daily bread. God shows us the next step, the next right thing to do. He gives us what we need for each conversation, for each moment of suffering, for each anxious thought, for each difficulty that feels overwhelming and beyond what we can bear.
I know God provides, hears my prayers, is powerful to act, gives wisdom and strength, and loves me. I know he gives me the “bread” I need. I trust his baking skills. His loaves are good.
But I don’t like daily bread because I’m impatient. I want all my long-term needs supplied now. I want a year’s supply. Or at the very least, a week’s worth.
The challenges I face overwhelm me. There are areas of my life where I’m not sure I have what it takes. Decisions I’m not sure I have the wisdom for. Leadership I’m not sure I have the gifts for. Fights I’m not sure I have the courage for. Love I’m not sure I have the endurance for.
I want God to take care of all these desires, needs, and fears right now. To lay out every step of the plan for the year. To immediately give some surge of sanctification that fixes all my faults. To offer an upfront payment of provision that lets me know this year, and the next five, will go well.
I don’t want daily installments. I want the whole delivery of his bread to be unloaded from the truck so I can feel secure, ready, and equipped for life now. But in Luke 11, that’s not how Jesus invites us to come. Jesus teaches us to ask for daily bread. He wants us to trust his care and ask for what we need each day. No stockpiling, storing, or saving up necessary.
Come to Your Loving Father
In Luke 11, the disciples observe Jesus praying, and they ask him to teach them to pray. Jesus then gives them (and us) a model for how to relate to God. The prayer begins with “Father.” The entire prayer is rooted in a loving, personal, and covenanted commitment to us from God. Because God is our Father, we can be assured he’s good. In all our struggles, needs, and uncertainties, we can trust him.
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