To begin with the month of June was marked by a month-long celebration of two deadly sins, according to God’s divine revelation:  pride and sexual immorality.  For one, rainbow flags were flown everywhere—especially at the White House.  They were also flown with the American flag at many of our embassies in far off places. Such flags celebrate and flaunt diverse sexual acts and relationships God has clearly communicated to be evil.  The most evident one relates to homosexual acts and relationships. 

June 2022 closes and ends today.  Weather-wise, it was a mixture of exceptionally high temperatures accompanied by milder temperatures.  Precipitation-wise, it was normal.  At least, these facts relate to where I live.  Climate-wise, this is just a short recap.
Definition-wise, climate primarily refers specifically to weather conditions.  It’s the science of Meteorology.  However, there is a third definition given that communicates climate also refers to “the prevailing attitudes, standards, or environmental conditions of a group, period, or place.”  It’s the condition of a culture.  These thoughts relate to the latter definition.
June 2022 was sadly and lamentably a month clearly revealing this nation’s, this society’s low ebb in moral integrity and steep decline in righteousness.  Such a decline, of course, relates to a spiritual climate defined as “a headlong fall or rush.”  In this regard it was as precipitous as rainfall.
To begin with the month of June was marked by a month-long celebration of two deadly sins, according to God’s divine revelation:  pride and sexual immorality.  For one, rainbow flags were flown everywhere—especially at the White House.  They were also flown with the American flag at many of our embassies in far off places. Such flags celebrate and flaunt diverse sexual acts and relationships God has clearly communicated to be evil.  The most evident one relates to homosexual acts and relationships.  God created and gave the rainbow as a covenant reminder of his past condemnation of his earthly creation due to horrendous sin and rebellion and promise to never again use water to destroy the entire earth.  It is ironic and blasphemous to use it to celebrate sinfulness.  All month long, the media forced us to be witnesses to such open and unabashed flaunting of a sinful nature and practices he named as “shameful, indecent, abominable, detestable, unnatural.”  To be proud of a sinful sexual orientation or acts has to be unimaginable to say the least.  Just think, no one boasts of pride in a natural sexual orientation or acts.  One’s primary identity is not based on one physical or emotional area of life.
Some might prefer to remember June 2022 with its 24th day in which the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, wherein abortion policies were returned to the states.  Yes, that was a historic day and a positive ruling.  However, the outpouring of protests against the decision hyped by the media over a lengthy period of time has diminished to some degree the joy expressed believing more babies would be allowed to be born and to live.  The culture of death is ironically very alive and well. Isn’t that a strange paradox?  In fact, one state even seeks to legalize infanticide up to so many days following birth. It’s disheartening to see so many in favor of killing the most innocent and vulnerable among us.  The methods of destroying the unborn, the about-to-be born, the partially-born, and the just-born match, if not exceed, methods the Nazis used in the mass murder of millions.  How can anyone approve of poisoning, burning, cracking open the skull and sucking out the brain, or the dismemberment of these tiny, precious souls?  Additionally, some churches and pro-life organizations have been attacked and vandalized.
June of 2022 revealed something about us as a nation and a society.  It revealed we have as a culture returned to the paganism of the ancient empires of Greece and Rome.  In fact, we may have exceeded them in sacrificing innocent human beings and flaunting sexual immoralities.  Yes, this latter is plural because it doesn’t relate only or solely to deviant lifestyles and practices, but also to heterosexual immoralities.
For Christians, these are indications of grave rebellions against a holy, just and righteous God.  There are, nonetheless, others including Jews, Muslims, other religions, and even non-religious people who sense we have seriously lost our way.
Was June 2022 sadly and lamentably a month clearly revealing this nation’s, this society’s low ebb in moral integrity and steep decline in righteousness?  If there is agreement to this perception—even if partially—perhaps there is something we could do to July to manifest our great sadness and lament.  Let’s make July 2022 the opposite of a month of Pride by making it a month of Humility.  Let’s call it such and let’s practice it as such by confessing our sorrow and lament for the condition of our nation and society.  Godlessness and indecency have taken over our culture.
The Jewish prophet, Jeremiah, was called “the weeping prophet.”  He wrote a book called Lamentations.  We can reiterate Jeremiah’s words:
This I recall to my mind; therefore, have I hope. It is of Jehovah’slovingkindnesses that we are not consumed, because his compassionsfail not. They are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness. . . Let ussearch and try our ways and turn again to Jehovah. Let us lift up our heartwith our hands unto God in the heavens. Lamentations 3: 21-23, 40-41
As we bid farewell to June 2022, let’s respond to July’s opening door with its emphasis on Independence by complementing it with an emphasis on Dependence, that is, dependence on a gracious God to forgive and spare us and inter-dependence on one another to stand for humble godliness and decency.  It will take prayers and vocal speaking the truth in love to make a difference—not anger or hate.
America deserves men and women who care for her soul and who promote genuine justice and righteousness.  The vehicle to those blessings for all is a spirit of humility.
Helen Louise Herndon is a member of Central Presbyterian Church (EPC) in St. Louis, Missouri. She is freelance writer and served as a missionary to the Arab/Muslim world in France and North Africa..
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He shows how leaders must cultivate trustworthiness, cherish the teams they put in place, and insist on accountability for themselves and others. He writes about stewarding money well, communicating clearly, and fostering just the right kind of culture. He continually uses the turnaround at Midwestern as an illustration of these principles in action. I have long observed that some of the most effective books are those that describe principles through the lens of narrative, and in this book Allen does that with great effectiveness. 

There are a lot of people in the world who are in positions of leadership, but there are not a lot of true leaders. There are many people who achieve positions of prominence, but few who can back up that position with the ability to lead. And though the shelves of bookstores are groaning under the weight of all the books dedicated to the topic, and though they seem to sell in such vast quantities, still few of us can say we are being led well.
New to those shelves—the shelves, at least, of stores that sell Christian books—is Jason Allen’s Turnaround. For the past 10 years, since he was 35 years old, Allen has been the president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He took on the position at a time when the seminary was in grave peril—it was mired in controversy, burdened with debt, and financially upside-down. Its campus facilities were in a state of disrepair and its faculty undistinguished. Little wonder, then, that there was talk of closing it down.
Today, though, MBTS is a thriving and world-class institution that is financially solvent, that has strong campus morale, that features some lovely new buildings, and that is the envy of many other seminaries.
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Some in Christendom resented Keller’s stumbled-upon celebrity. Others hailed him as the C.S. Lewis for a new generation. As for Keller, he stayed focused—there was a gospel to preach, cities to reach, souls to save. Even when he was diagnosed with cancer in June, 2020, he scarcely slowed, continuing to work, write, lead, and think—even amidst the chemo, right to the very end.

Long before he planted Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, taking New York City by storm; before City to City galvanized an international urban church planting movement, starting nearly 978 churches and training thousands of Christian leaders; before his endlessly churning mind birthed some two dozen books, many of which are already hailed as Christian classics; Tim Keller was just a kid in Pennsylvania, growing up and grappling with God and reason and himself with all the strength his head and heart could muster.
Born in Allentown in 1950, Keller became a Christian through Intervarsity Christian Fellowship while a sophomore at Bucknell University. He was bookish, even then, nose down in the works of John Stott, F.F. Bruce, A.W. Tozer, and C.S Lewis (to whom he would later be compared). He inhaled words like air (the better written and more sharply reasoned the better), swam in seas of ideas, and wrestled with both the intellectual plausibility and the emotional heart of the Christian faith. By the time he graduated, his path was set: Tim Keller would be a minister of the gospel.
He attended seminary at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary right after college, earning his M.Div in 1975. There, he met his beloved wife, Kathy, and plunged even deeper into the questions of the faith, engaging with Reformed doctrine and learning in the era of Meredith Cline, David Wells, Jack Davis, and J. Christy Wilson Jr.
“1970s Gordon-Conwell [was] a distinct theological phenomenon, and if you don’t understand that then you really don’t understand Tim Keller,” said Reformed Theological Seminary Chancellor Ligon Duncan. “Gordon-Conwell had a ton of confessional Calvinists there in the mid ‘70s, [and] Tim exudes the kind of intelligent, apologetic, reformed evangelical Christianity that was being fostered.”
M.Div in hand, the 24-year-old Keller signed on to pastor West Hopewell Presbyterian Church in Hopewell, Virginia. He served that congregation for the next nine years, slinging sermons like hotcakes (three per week, more often than not), pastoring congregants, and serving his local community. Along the way, Keller found time to earn his D.Min from Westminster Theological Seminary in 1981, and serve as director of church planting for the PCA’s mid-Atlantic region.
In the 1980s, Tim and Kathy Keller moved to Philadelphia, where the couple did urban ministry together. There, Keller taught leadership and communication at Westminster, served as Director of Mercy Ministries for the PCA, and authored his first two books—both related to mercy ministry. By 1989, the Kellers had moved yet again, this time to New York City to plant Redeemer Presbyterian Church. The Big Apple was more dangerous back then, a gritty mission field beset by crime, money, and skeptics. And though most of the other boroughs were chalk-full of churches planted by Christian immigrants from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, Manhattan was overwhelmingly dominated by secularism, with less than 1% of the population identifying as evangelical Christians.
Redeemer started small—with only around 50 members at first. But under Keller’s leadership, the little church began to grow. By the dawn of the new millennium, nearly 3,000 people attended Redeemer’s Sunday service. After the September 11 terror attacks, some 5,400 reeling Manhattanites poured through the church’s doors, searching for meaning, comfort, and hope. Trauma and tragedy fueled a growth spurt, and numbers of new converts soared.
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