Grace and peace to you, my friends.
Today’s Kindle deals include a long list of discounts that are going to expire tomorrow.
(Yesterday on the blog: A Freak of Nature (and Nurture))

Is it ever right to lie? This article answers the question quite thoroughly.

This article discusses some of the evidence for Jesus that comes from outside the four gospels.

“There seems to be an awful lot of Perfect! going on these days, at least in my part of the world. I told my server at a restaurant that I wanted fries and steamed broccoli to go with my entree. ‘Perfect!’ he said. A nurse read off my blood pressure. ‘Perfect!’ again. When I offered 8:30 as a possible time for an appointment, I heard ‘Perfect!’ over the phone.”

This is a compassionate letter to Christians who doubt. “Sometimes doubt comes upon me like a foreboding cold. I wonder if that was just a sneeze or am I coming down with something serious. The sniffles of doubt increase when I read of natural disasters that bring unfathomable suffering. Where was God during that hurricane? Other symptoms of wavering faith show up when famous Christians espouse heresy or reveal double lives of staggering immorality. I dare to ask, Does this Christianity stuff really work?“

“Everyone knows that an unborn baby is a baby. Most would not go as far as the State of Alabama, with its ruling that frozen embryos are children, but certainly by the time a woman knows she is pregnant what is in her womb is clearly a baby.”

Wes provides encouraging evidence of why pastors need to take the long view of preaching.

I can’t help but wonder how that “nay” will sound before the throne, before the one who creates life, who loves life, who tells us to protect life. 

The intent of the cross of Christ was to bring you close more than make you good. He, indeed, will produce good in you, but through forgiveness of sins, you are his, and he is yours.
—Ed Welch

It was one of those little pieces of information that helped clarify so much in my mind, that described through data what I had seen with my own eyes and experienced in my own ministry. It is a piece of information we all ought to be aware of and one we all ought to consider. It warns us that one of the most innocent things a Christian does may also be one of the most dangerous.
Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe spent two years conducting a large and comprehensive study of people who have “dechurched”—who once faithfully attended church but now no longer do. The results were published in The Great Dechurching and were widely reported in a host of media outlets. In one article, the authors list some common misconceptions about dechurching, and it was the very first one that especially captured my attention.
The misconception is this: People leave primarily because of negative experiences with the church. Our assumption as we consider people who have left the faith is that they had a negative experience within the church—that they observed or even faced abuse, or that they grew tired of scandals or politicking in the name of Jesus. Or we could assume that they began to critique their faith, perhaps under the tutelage of the many YouTube or TikTok deconstructionists. Then, as they began to doubt the faith, they began to distance themselves from it.
One of the most innocent things a Christian does may also be one of the most dangerous.Share
But that has certainly not been my experience. I have seen quite a few people leave our church and others over the years, and could count on one hand the number who left because they were revoking their faith. Burge and Djupe’s data bears this out. In fact, they found that the majority of people who have become dechurched continue to consider themselves Christian and continue to affirm a basic confession such as “Jesus is the Son of God”—hardly the profession of an acolyte of Bart Ehrman or Richard Dawkins.
So why do people leave? “Are you ready for the number one reason people stopped attending church? They moved.” The study found that around three out of every four people who left the church “did so casually, for pedestrian reasons including moving, the inconvenience of attending, kids’ sports activities, or family changes like marriage, divorce, or having a new child.” In other words, it was not their convictions that led the way, but their circumstances. They didn’t mean to leave the church, but inadvertently allowed their lives and lifestyles to hinder their attendance. Church got displaced by other priorities until it became little more than an afterthought. They became unintentional deconstructionists.
And this was the “aha!” moment for me because it is so consistent with what I have observed. We have had people join our church after moving to Canada from another country. They arrive with glowing recommendations from their former church. They were active, they were involved, they served in many capacities. But they are not with us long before their attendance begins to decline and we begin to see them rarely if at all. We do our best to reach out to them, but find they have stopped attending not only our church but any church. What happened? They moved, and somehow their faith was not equal to that move.
Church got displaced by other priorities until it became little more than an afterthought. They became inadvertent dechurchers and unintentional deconstructionists.Share
It can happen with former members of our church as well—that they move away, perhaps to study, perhaps to work, perhaps for economic reasons, and when we follow up to try to ensure they are integrating into a church in their new community, we find that they are not attending church at all. They moved and it somehow undid what seemed to be a thriving faith.
Neither of these scenarios is universal, of course, and we have had many people move in and move out who commit to their new church and thrive there. But both of these scenarios are common enough that we need to be aware of them.
Every journey begins with a single step and that is true of so many of those who leave the church. They leave by inches. They leave without meaning to. They leave because they have not been adequately cautioned about the coming challenges—that what seems like a time of exciting new experiences and new starts, may actually be a time of unintentional dechurching and inadvertent deconstruction.
I think the caution for all of us is that moving or other major life transitions can be an unexpected enemy. We need to caution ourselves when we prepare to significantly change our lives and we need to caution others when they do. We need to understand that one of the most common things we do is also one of the most perilous. We need to know that one of the most dangerous things a Christian can do is move.

Here’s your occasional reminder that the complete collection of the quote graphics I share each day is available (categorized, organized, and completely free to download in high resolution) at SquareQuotes.church.

Is pastoral work uniquely difficult?
Andrew Roycroft has a good and helpful response to a recent article that made a splash. Is pastoral work uniquely difficult? No, yes, and it’s complicated, he says. (Also, don’t forget that if pastoral work has unique difficulties it also has unique blessings…)
Remember King Jesus
Trevin Wax: “There’s a command in the New Testament we ought to lift up as the orienting aspiration for our lives. It’s from the apostle Paul just before his execution, in the last of his letters. It’s given to Timothy, his son in the faith, alongside other instructions for Christian life and leadership.”
Preemptive Parenting in Proverbs 1:
Mitchell Chase looks to Proverbs to consider the importance of preemptive parenting.
Pride will destroy you, your ministry, and people around you
This article turns to an Old Testament example to sound the warning about pride.
Concatenation
“Concatenation. When you learn a cool theological word like concatenation, you want to drop it in conversation all the time! Of course, there aren’t many contexts that concatenation fits right into. Throwing it around also sounds pretty pretentious, so I’ve contained my use of concatenation to sessions. As it represents a key aspect of growth in sanctification, it’s quite useful there.”
On Converting Our Fears into Requests and Living for God Through Christ
This is a keen observation about the verse we tend to quote when we consider our fears. “Perhaps one of the most important observations to make about this passage is that the test of someone’s faithfulness in handling fear is not in not experiencing it but in what one does with it. It is too easy to pat ourselves on the back for not being anxious about anything.”
Flashback: Parent Love and Grandparent Love
I beg you: Please pray! Please intercede before God on their behalf. Perhaps you can simply commit that you will pray for each of your grandchildren each day. And perhaps you can let them know that you have made that commitment

If we do not believe in hell—if we think the only justice and retribution to be had is in this life—then we must take revenge into our own hands. Without hell, justice must be forcibly executed by us, or it will not be executed at all. —Dane Ortlund