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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The Internet Deathtrap and the Need For Wisdom
The more we diminish the role of wisdom in our everyday life, the more inclined we are to unwittingly “delegate tasks that demand wisdom” to the internet, and the less healthy skepticism or suspicion we’ll have as we use it. It is one thing for technology to quicken our typing ability or to optimize some industrial process, it is another thing to absolve us of thinking, reasoning, and relationship opportunities.
Jurassic Park is easily my favorite movie of my early teen years. It was the first scary movie my parents let me see. The symphonic backdrop was awe inspiring, the acting was solid, and the fictitious story line was plausible and, distinctly rooted in real science. The movie has never grown old on me. It seems, at least in my own mind, that the church has entered our own Jurassic Park and I can faintly hear John Hammond uttering a warm welcome, with dramatic irony, “Welcome to Jurassic Park!”
Our dilemma might best be described by one of the greatest philosophers of all time, Dr. Ian Malcolm (yes, he’s also from Jurassic Park). With a bit of foreshadowing and wise premonition, Malcolm, the naysayer of the park uttered these words before everything went off the rails at Jurassic Park. He said, “I’ll tell you the problem with the [scientific] power that you’re using here. It didn’t require any discipline to attain it…You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves so you don’t take any responsibility for it…your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think whether they should.”
The internet is meant to be a thrilling, helpful, and revolutionary adventure like nothing we’ve ever experienced before; akin to the original Jurassic Park. However, for God-fearing men and women, the internet has become an inescapable death trap, the bleaker version of the park with the T-rex and the velociraptors on the loose. It’s not hard to understand why; the endless stream of information and experiences provided by the internet do not require any discipline to attain, are free and unearned, and because of the decentralized nature of the internet, there is no good authority asking whether things should be done, only producers and consumers asking whether things could be done. The result, as Malcom points out, is inevitable catastrophe.
The Problem with the internet is simple: It’s easy. Too easy. As Teddy Roosevelt put it, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.” There’s something to be said about the correlation between lasting value and effort and this concept demonstrates perfectly the problem with the internet. The internet promises (and seemingly provides) things that are naturally very hard or impossible to obtain, with the quick click of a button. Consider the sexual pleasure that the internet markets to us. This is epitomized by pornography, but it is much broader than this and includes all its corollaries; tabloids, forums, pop-up ads, spam emails, meaningless eye-grabbing articles about lingerie or sex scandals or some strange seductive secret. The internet has identified and freely offered a significant part of the beauty of marriage, with no strings attached and disconnects sex from the life-long process of marital intimacy. The pitch is simple: in 30 seconds anyone and everyone can experience instant gratification. It’s too easy.
Consider the nature of social media. A platform that eliminates the need to meet new people, that abbreviates hard conversations into posts and likes, and that allows like-minded people to self-segregate themselves into echo chambers by interests or political affiliations. It sounds amazing, I know. If not for one problem, it’s too easy. Real relationships with real people develop over time, forged or tested in the best and usually the worst of times. Compassion, empathy, comradery, and shared story are formed through daily experiences. The internet short circuits the whole process. Instead of growing to know a person, their history, family, beliefs, and convictions and then wrestling with them through challenging subjects, we pronounce our opinions in one-line-zingers and we feel a prideful confidence in our bold opinions. Truly being in relationship with others means that we’re always having to measure the relational collateral we have and the cost of pressing upon a hard issue.
And this is not to mention the impact the internet has on our perception of truth, its ability to mold us into consumers, or its impact on our capacity to think and formulate opinions on our own. The beauty of the internet is also its greatest problem: it is designed to relieve the critical work of the mind by allowing it to freely and easily receive and store information without having to do the hard work of evaluating and critiquing what it hears and sees. The internet blunts our power of discernment, and we begin to believe whatever it tells us. In much the same way a powerful drug or drunkenness does, it offers an escape from the rigorous processes of life and markets limitless potential at no obvious cost to us. It’s easy. Too easy.
Through the internet, churches are being divided by each new social issue, destroyed by pervasive access to junk information and junk idolatry, and afforded ample opportunity to back-bite and gossip through each new social media platform. And, as each year passes these things are being handed down to the next generation as normative tools that are easily compatible with Christian living.
On the one hand, Scripture tells us that the human heart is the problem and not the things outside of us (Mark 7:15). It’s an important observation that keeps us away from legalism. However, as Tony Reinke points out, referencing the historian Melvin Kransberg on a recent Mortification of Spin podcast, “Technology is neither good, nor bad, nor neutral.” Affirming the wickedness and the deception of the heart should not prevent us from evaluating the things around us that move us toward or away from righteousness, holiness, and God Himself. The internet is technically amoral, it is neither good nor bad. It is just a collection of codes and algorithms. But can we honestly say that it is neutral? Does it feel neutral to you? Has the easy availability of pornography been a neutral development? Has the spread of disinformation or the watering down of friendships and relationships through social media been a neutral development? Has the dulling of our reasoning and critical thinking been a neutral development? I’ll let you answer these questions for yourself.
The Answer is maybe as simple as the problem and it’s all about wisdom. I first spent time thinking about the inverse relationship between wisdom and technology while reading Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows.” Carr, an expert in the relationship between technology and psychology says, “The great danger…is that we’ll begin to lose our humanness, to sacrifice the very qualities that separate us from machines. The only way to avoid that fate…is to have the self-awareness and the courage to refuse to delegate to computers the most human of our mental activities and intellectual pursuits, particularly ‘tasks that demand wisdom.’” Curiously, this got me thinking, “What are the tasks that demand wisdom?” And more importantly, “Is there such a thing as a task that does not demand wisdom?” From a biblical perspective the answers to these questions are pretty clear: all of life requires some degree of wisdom. Thus we read, “The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life, that one may turn away from the snares of death” (Proverbs 13:14). Or as the preacher put it, “A man’s wisdom makes his face shine” (Ecclesiastes 8:1).
Everything we do requires wisdom. Everything. And, while wisdom is a gift from God it is also a curated development of character. That is, it ordinarily takes time and experience to develop deep meaningful wisdom. This is why Job will describe wisdom as being something found by the aged and learned (Job 12:12), or James will connect wisdom in James 1:5 with the long and arduous process of trials and testing in James 1:2-4. It is also why we are told that wisdom is costly, and yet that we should pursue it at all costs (Proverbs 4:7), and why discipline, correction, and training are so closely tied together with wisdom (Proverbs 29:15). Wisdom is associated with things like patience, endurance, suffering, fortitude, and perseverance while the internet is associated with things like results, ease, immediacy, promptness, and instant gratification.
The more we diminish the role of wisdom in our everyday life, the more inclined we are to unwittingly “delegate tasks that demand wisdom” to the internet, and the less healthy skepticism or suspicion we’ll have as we use it. It is one thing for technology to quicken our typing ability or to optimize some industrial process, it is another thing to absolve us of thinking, reasoning, and relationship opportunities. Because these are the processes in which wisdom develops, the internet gives us the illusion of having wisdom (with all knowledge at our fingertips) while simultaneously stripping us of the real, genuine wisdom we actually need. Since both the fruit of the Spirit and many basic human characteristics are governed by wisdom and cultivated in the basic activities of life, the easy and immediate nature of the internet slowly and methodically dulls these qualities. And so, through the eroding of wisdom, we see the cornucopia of problems described above.
What’s the answer? I would propose the church’s hope to endure the internet age begins and ends with wisdom. We need more wisdom. We need to want more wisdom. We need more preaching on wisdom from pulpits on Sunday mornings. We need more wise discussion and correction in our homes and at dinner tables. We must spend more time in the wisdom literature of Scripture and meditate upon it every chance we are able. And, when it comes to entrusting ourselves or our children with the internet, we have to remember that the internet is not neutral. It can be useful but it also can be (and according to the statistics, likely will be) dangerous for us and a hindrance to our sanctification.
We should measure our ability to safely use and maintain such a risky tool through the window of wisdom. Do we have enough wisdom to surf the web? Can we exercise enough wise restraint to be able to browse the internet on our phones? Does maintaining a social media presence increase our wisdom or does it fuel discontent, division, and angst? How can we wisely discern the flow of information available on the internet and validate its truthfulness and goodness? Do our children have the wisdom they need to have access to the internet in any capacity and what are we doing to defend them from the subtle seductions, ideologies, and patterns of thinking imputed through the internet? And finally, how are we exercising and pursuing godly wisdom to prepare ourselves for the temptations and stumbling blocks that we will inevitably encounter on the internet? The more I read and the more destruction I see being facilitated by the internet, the more I am convinced the answers to these questions are a lot more restrictive and inhibitive than we suspect. We must hold ourselves to a higher standard. Because when everything is said and done, as we’ve learned from all the Jurassic movies, there’s only one sure way to endure Jurassic Park: never to go in the first place.
Bryan Rigg is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is pastor of Mercy PCA in Lynchburg, VA.
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Anita Barker Barnes, Daughter of Frank and Barbara Barker, Dies Soon After Her Parents
Mrs. Townes said that her sister was able to help nurse their parents at Mrs. Townes’ home before they died. “She was here and by their side when they died,” Mrs. Townes said. Mrs. Barnes died in the same room at Mrs. Townes’ house. “I’m calling it the gateway to heaven,” Mrs. Townes said.
The oldest daughter of Briarwood Presbyterian Church’s founding Pastor Frank Barker has died, within two months of the death of her parents.
Anita Barker Barnes died Friday, Feb. 18, after battling brain cancer, said her sister, Peggy Barker Townes. She was 59.
Mrs. Barnes had been diagnosed with lymphoma in August 2020, Mrs. Townes said.
Briarwood Pastor Emeritus Frank Barker, 89, died on Dec. 27, 2021. His wife, Barbara Brown Barker, 85, died last month, on Jan. 13.
Mrs. Townes said that her sister was able to help nurse their parents at Mrs. Townes’ home before they died. “She was here and by their side when they died,” Mrs. Townes said. Mrs. Barnes died in the same room at Mrs. Townes’ house.
“I’m calling it the gateway to heaven,” Mrs. Townes said.
Pastor Frank Barker had founded Briarwood Presbyterian Church in a storefront in 1960 and led it to become one of Birmingham’s first megachurches. Barker retired from the 4,100-member church in 1999 after 39 years in the pulpit. Mrs. Barker, who studied musical theater at Northwestern University and danced with a professional company in Chicago, had founded the Briarwood Ballet School in 1980 and it now has more than 400 students.
Their oldest daughter Anita attended Briarwood Christian School from kindergarten through high school, graduated from Auburn University, where she was a cheerleader, and then worked on staff at Briarwood Presbyterian Church leading a ministry for high school students. She was also known for teaching dance and exercise classes.
Her husband, Billy Barnes, is an ordained Presbyterian minister. The couple moved to Arizona in 1998 to start Covenant Community Church in Scottsdale and lived there about 14 years before moving in 2013 to Nashville, where Barnes was an assistant pastor at Covenant Presbyterian Church. He’s now on staff at the Center for Executive Leadership in Birmingham.
The family returned to Birmingham after Mrs. Barnes was diagnosed with cancer.
“We had the privilege of her being back here after 22 years away,” Mrs. Townes said.
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Woke: Collectivist or Individualist?
Written by N.S. Lyons |
Monday, November 27, 2023
What we call Wokeism was predated by its previous iteration “political correctness” in the 1990s and political correctness itself was predated a generation before by the New Left. The New Left was composed of both an identitarian vein and an environmental vein and the two veins have been operating symbiotically since. (Think of hippies reading Silent Spring on their way to Montgomery.) I used to think of Woke as primarily identitarian, but the correlation of beliefs between identitarians and environmentalists seems so high that the movements for some reason appear to see themselves as compatible and symbiotic.Note: A while ago reader Charles Pincourt contacted me with some thoughts on the nature of the “Woke” revolution and its challenge to liberalism and civilization. I found that we disagreed in ways that made for an interesting discussion, so we decided to turn the conversation into a mini-debate series of short essays for you all, below. Charles views Woke – through the lens of Friedrich Hayek – as a radically collectivist threat to classical liberalism, while I suggest Woke is instead better viewed as radically individualist, and a product of liberalism itself. This is an important distinction, because it will necessarily shape how we ought to best respond to the challenge.
Charles Pincourt: Woke Is a Collectivist Ideology
In the Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek describes the illiberal nature of totalitarian regimes using the Soviet Union and the Third Reich as iconic examples. When the book was written in the mid-1940s these regimes were (and continue to this day to be) considered antithetical to one another on account of where they fell on the political spectrum. Hayek, however, explains that the regimes were much more alike than they were different. What they had in common, and what characterized them more profoundly, was that they were collectivist regimes. The common and most defining feature of collectivist systems according to Hayek is the “deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal.” What distinguishes different collectivist regimes is the “nature of the goal to which they want to direct the efforts of society.” That collectivist systems seek to organize the “labors of society” towards a singular goal leads them to an “all-overriding desire to give the group the maximum of power to achieve these ends.” This implies a moral or ethical system that places the one goal above all other competing, and thereby subordinate, goals. As a result, the “ends justify the means” “becomes necessarily the supreme rule” to reach the societal goal.
As a result, Communism and National Socialism were not antithetical to each other. They were, rather, the same system albeit with different “definite goals.” The true antithesis to both these systems, and to collectivist systems more broadly for Hayek, is liberalism. To Hayek, liberalism is defined by an inclination towards the individual – and indeed all individuals – relative to the collective, and the many freedoms and negative rights this implies. These rights and freedoms (rights and freedoms that we expect and are accustomed to in the Anglosphere) include: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of movement, and freedom from arbitrary imprisonment. The latter is particularly important since it harkens to another critical characteristic of liberalism: the rule of law. Hayek explains that, while often misunderstood and misconstrued, the rule of law is simply the principle that the law applies to all individuals equally, that all individuals are equal before the law, and, as importantly, that laws also apply to the state. It is typically easier to understand the liberal rule of law not through its definition, but through its ideal manifestation. Under the rule of law, individuals know how the state will act in any circumstance, and that the state will act in the same way towards all individuals. If an individual breaks a law, they know what the consequences will be. As important, the individual knows what the state will not do, e.g. arbitrarily violate their fundamental freedoms.
It would be easy to think that this all sound like ancient history, no longer relevant almost 80 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Thinking this way is wrong and could be catastrophic. We are now living in a time where a contemporary collectivist movement has obtained control of almost all elite institutions, including the executive branch, the Senate, the legacy media, our universities, and the most influential corporate boardrooms. That collectivist movement is known by the name, of course, of “Woke.”
Unlike the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, Woke currently has two “definite goals:” Identitarianism and radical Environmentalism. Identitarianism seeks to retributively redistribute resources from so-called oppressor to so-called oppressed identities. Environmentalism, meanwhile, seeks to eliminate the so-called environmental impact that humans have on the natural world irrespective of the impact on humans themselves.
These two definite goals are both necessarily collectivist. The Identitarian collectivist strain relies on categories into which individuals are placed and which are ranked along an oppressor-oppressed continuum. The categories are used to justify whether resources or opportunities should be provided to, or denied, members of the different categories. Environmental collectivism starts from an assumption that individuals will not, on their own, behave to sufficiently reduce or eliminate their production of various environmental pollutants or effects, such as greenhouse gas emissions. That people will not on their own behave appropriately justifies increasingly invasive and restrictive collective coercion.
While on the face of it the definite goals seem very different, the two collectivist movements have found common cause in their desire to accumulate power to organize “the labors of society for a [their] definite social goal.” Increasingly this is done through the subordination of individual freedoms. This is seen in the contemporary Anglosphere informally, and more ominously and increasingly, formally, through legislation or the administrative state.
Informally, the subordination of individual freedoms such as those of speech and conscience is observed daily around the Anglosphere. People are publicly shamed, “canceled,” lose their livelihoods, etc. for expressing views contrary to the diktats of Woke collectivism. Moreover, Woke collectivists find evidence for insufficient progress towards ever-more fine-grained indicators of their definite goals. The response to this is to find more and more ways to subordinate personal freedoms and the rule of law to achieve these goals. Identitarians advocate, enshrine, implement, and legislate different forms of affirmative action whose goal is to ensure that people are treated unequally according to their group identities. Radical environmentalists, on the other hand, try everything from banning plastic bags, to replacing automobile with bicycle lanes, to setting automobile emissions standards that are only achievable by electric vehicles.
As noted by Hayek, the most notorious past examples of collectivist regimes (Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) were characterized by singular definite goals: Nazi Germany with German “racial” supremacy and the USSR with communism. The current Woke collectivist movement on the other hand is characterized by the competing Identitarian and Environmentalist streams. Given the collectivist orientations of both these movements, one wonders whether their coalition can be maintained. Should Woke collectivism continue to gain more control over the levers of power in the West then, given the different definite goals of these two movements, won’t there eventually and necessarily be a conflict between them? The answer seems obviously to be yes, therefore begging the question: “which would win?”
While both streams of Woke collectivism are fanatical, they don’t appear to be equally so. For example, while questioning the narrative of apocalyptic human-induced climate change may result in a Twitter storm and the loss of current or future research funding, there are no cases of tenured professors being fired for such Environmental Woke-heretical views. The same is not true for those challenging Identitarian doctrines – indeed most cases of tenured professors or other high-profile cases of being fired seem to be due to Identitarian transgressions.
Similarly, both streams of Woke collectivism are able to co-opt almost any domain, although not to the same extent. Environmental collectivism does this to almost any area of enquiry through the adoption of the word “sustainable”: from sustainable investing to sustainable architecture. Likewise, Identitarian collectivism is able to subordinate any discipline with the word “justice” such as corporate justice or educational justice. Importantly, however, while Identitarian collectivism has been able to subordinate Environmental collectivism through the term “environmental justice,” the opposite is not true – there is no racial environmentalism.
Both of these examples point to a more effective, extreme, and ruthless militancy that Identitarian collectivism appears able and willing to impose upon unbelievers. As a result, if I had to make a bet, I would put my money on Identitarian collectivism as the winner in a face-off with Environmental collectivism. That collectivist movements seem to coalesce around one definite goal, suggests that an impending clash may soon be at hand.
Personally, I am against collectivism in any form, be it Identitarian, Environmental, or Cuddly Stuffed Animal collectivism. At the same time, the most threatening collectivist strain currently appears to be Identitarian collectivism. Given the power that the Woke collectivist coalition now has, it needs to be fought and overcome if we are to keep our society free. If we are unable to, we may very well end up living under an Identitarian collectivist regime – only this time it will not be called National Socialism.
N.S. Lyons: Woke Is Individualist
Charles, I find your classification of racial idenitarianism and radical environmentalism as the two competing “pillars” of “Woke” to be particularly interesting, and want to hone in on that. This is because I think this classification misidentifies the true competing forces among the Woke, and in doing so accidentally elides its true origin and character, and therefore the broader nature of the challenge to our societies. Obviously this diagnosis is important to get right because the answer will structure how we should respond.
To me, the existing internal divide among the Woke doesn’t appear to be between identitarian racialism and environmentalism (the latter of which notably long predates Wokeism and seems to have simply agglomerated itself to Woke via common association among the people involved in Progressive political movements). Instead the obvious divide seems to clearly be between the two big camps of Race and Trans.
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