As our roots go deep in Christ, the fruit of our lives is the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22–23). This is an important point. By repentance, we are not making another resolution to “do better next time.” Rather, by repentance, we are asking God to “create in me a clean heart…and renew a right spirit within me” (Ps. 51:10). We are turning from our sin by asking God not only to forgive us from our sins, but to change our lives.

When Matthew abruptly introduces us to John the Baptist, he focuses his remarks on the central theme of John’s message: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matt. 3:2).
Certainly, John said more as he preached in the wilderness; however, this summarization is not an out-of-context soundbite from John’s preaching. Central to John’s ministry and message was the exhortation to repent, in view of the coming kingdom—that is, in view of the coming King. Consider:

John baptized people as they were “confessing their sins” (Matt. 3:5)
John turned away the Pharisees and the Sadducees who did not “bear fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matt. 3:8)
John defined his own baptism as a baptism “with water for repentance” (Matt. 3:11)

God sent John into the wilderness to prepare the way for the coming of King Jesus, and those preparations required repentance.
What, then, is repentance?
The word for repentance in Greek (μετάνοια; metanoia) carries a basic meaning of changing one’s mind. The common word for repentance in Hebrew (שׁוּב; shûb) has a basic meaning of turning—turning away from one thing, and turning toward another.
So, repentance is more than coming to a different opinion in one’s mind about something. Repentance is a whole turning away from our sin, and turning toward Christ.
It’s hard to beat the answer given in the Westminster Shorter Catechism:
Q. 87. What is repentance unto life?A. Repentance unto life is a saving grace, whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin, and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, doth, with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it unto God, with full purpose of, and endeavor after, new obedience.
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Like the Methodist missionaries two centuries ago who risked their reputations to re-awaken America from its slumbers, many Christians today may need to relearn what it truly means to be convinced of our convictions. You must learn to speak them out, knowing that the world—and even a good deal of Methodists—may never forgive you for it. Christianity will land you in some kind of trouble one way or another. They’ll find out what you believe in the end.

The Tale of a Tweet
On March 8, 2023, I was fired from my job as a lecturer and programme lead at an evangelical Methodist Bible college. I had worked in this role for seven years and had never faced any formal disciplinary action previously. I was dismissed on the charge of “bringing the college into disrepute” due to a tweet I posted on February 19, 2023.
Here is what I said that was deemed so disreputable to so many:
Homosexuality is invading the Church. Evangelicals no longer see the severity of this because they’re busy apologising for their apparently barbaric homophobia, whether or not it’s true. This is a ‘Gospel issue’, by the way. If sin is no longer sin, we no longer need a Saviour.
The tweet went viral. I was routinely Twitter-mobbed before being publicly denounced by the college on Twitter, who called my tweet “unacceptable” and “inappropriate.” They also posted the following remarkable sentence:
Cliff College is committed to being a safe and hospitable place where those with differing convictions are welcomed and encouraged to live and learn together as faithful disciples of Christ.
The following day, after I had said I could not take down the tweet in good conscience, I was suspended, instructed to leave the college site within half an hour, and banned from all contact with fellow staff or students. Following a disciplinary hearing two weeks later, I was dismissed for misconduct.
The Investigation Report compiled about that single tweet was 17 pages long. It itemized a selection of the many public and private complaints made against me, and the many institutional and reputational risks incurred by the college as a result. Most of the complainants characterized the tweet (incorrectly) as homophobic, whilst some pro-LGBT+ students declared they would now feel “unsafe” in any classroom where I was teaching. The report further noted that the college was reviewing whether the tweet should be reported under the college’s “Prevent” duty (the UK government’s anti-terrorism and hate speech programme).
Cultural Pressure and Ecclesial Compromise
The wider context of my tweet was the recent Church of England decision to offer official blessings for same-sex couples. Even whilst refraining from fully accepting same-sex marriage (for now), the event was disturbing enough to cause ten global Anglican dioceses to publicly break communion with the Church of England. In the weeks prior to my tweet, I had been debating various pro-LGBT+ ministers and theologians on social media, each of whom were speaking as though the affirmation of homosexuality within the Church was inevitable and that sooner or later the Church simply had to “catch up.” Even prominent evangelical bishops like Steven Croft began declaring how sorry he was for all the harm and distress the Church’s position had caused the LGBT+ community, leading him to make a dramatic public u-turn to affirm same-sex marriage. Croft, like many, believed that now was the time to take the brave stand of solidarity with the powerless: by siding with the majority within secular Western society who were already standing precisely there and had been for some time.
It almost goes without saying that the shifting of the Overton Window on homosexuality in the west has been one of the most successful marketing campaigns of the last thirty years. As shown by the tactics employed in Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s book, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the ‘90s, this was a concerted campaign to present the for/against narrative at its most extreme in order to enact a dramatic shift in public opinion towards the progressive view. As a result of these determined efforts, the LGBT+ movement today has effectively gained not mere cult status but major religious status.
What I found especially reprehensible about the Anglican situation was that these many pro-LGBT+ vicars, bishops, and theologians refused to admit that their theological position on marriage was determinatively influenced by those shifting cultural currents. They were adamant that their view was simply the fruit of diligent Biblical exegesis and prayer. Apparently, it had nothing at all to do with the pressures exerted upon the Church by secular society, nor any burning desire to keep in step with public opinion on LGBT+. Apparently, God’s sheer delight in homosexuality was in the Bible all along, just sitting there in the text, waiting to be exegeted.
Such disingenuity in defense of the recent shifts is precisely why I used the language of “invasion” (the term which seemed to cause most of the trouble, especially for “winsome” evangelicals). If the affirmation of homosexuality did not come from Biblical exegesis then it came from the world, and if it came from the world then it did not come in peace.
The Apology Complex
My tweet, in essence, was not actually aimed at homosexuals, nor even at pro-LGBT+ Christians. It was aimed towards the safe centrist evangelicals who are not pro-LGBT+ but do not speak up because they find themselves stuck in the endless spiral of apologizing for their beliefs rather than proclaiming them. I had already observed far too often how evangelical leaders could no longer simply declare their non-affirming view on homosexuality without marinating it with lashings of heartfelt woe over just how much hurt the LGBT+ community has suffered at the hands of churches just like theirs.
I am not saying there is never a reason to repent of sinful discrimination against homosexuals, if warranted. But many of the mainstream apologies were exhibitions of reputational safeguarding, stemming more from fear of the world than fear of the Lord. And in any case, just how far back in one’s ecclesial history are these apologies supposed to stretch? If even the nice conscientious evangelicals are guilty of systemic homophobia, then who isn’t? What would be the systemic pastoral and theological implications of that? Surely if we now think that most Christian churches have been actively suppressing homosexual people for most of their history, this would have to be one of the greatest oversights of sin in church history, would it not? Given the lack of any historic precedent for explicit homosexual affirmation in the history of Christendom before the (post)modern west, one does wonder: why did God permit all his people to get it wrong for quite so long? Either God’s people really have no ears to hear after all, or else God has a very serious communication problem.
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Let’s rescue the Gentiles together, Gentile to Gentile. Let’s assimilate them to the Kingdom, including them at the table as they repent and believe the Gospel. And then we can teach them English.

Years back, my heart got large for missions — especially urban missions to those on the ‘other side of the tracks.’ At about the same time, I became Reformed (a high octane, old school Presbyterian no less!), putting me in a a sub-subset of a subset. My life and ministry has ever since lived somewhat in the frontiers the unlikely and the implausible. A straightlaced, tall gringo Presbyterian goes out among immigrants, trying to evangelize in broken Spanish and recruit sinners to the “outward and ordinary means” in a humble, little Reformed church 15 minutes to the south. And to sing Psalms. Without musical accompaniment. In English.
I admit that there are all kinds of problems with this model, from a human perspective. But it is actually more plausible than one might think. Yet before I deal with the plausibles, let me first set forth some principles.
The first principle is principle! Principle precedes the practical. We must first determine whether something should be done before we decide whether or not we think it is practical. We ought to go out and bring the Gospel to all. None excluded. Politics quite aside, we may and must not discriminate based on sex, ethnicity, gender, or for that matter even sexual ‘preference.’ By the mandate of our King, we must go and tell them. Yes, as Calvinists, we know that not every “all” means “all.” But “every creature” does in fact mean “every creature.” Even if they don’t look like us, eat like us, or even use our language. It doesn’t matter whether they ‘have papers’ or not, vote Democrat or not. How they got here and whether they should by law be here, is a separate issue for a different discussion (and full disclosure: I lean quite “red” when it comes to immigration policy!). But that they are here means they are here for us to evangelize. And not just gripe about and avoid them as much as possible.
In this vein, we must evangelize our urban cities and their immigrant populations as we are Gospel debtors. Have we (or our ancestors) freely received? We must therefore freely give. All of us Gentile Christians owe it to Jewish fishermen, tax collectors, and especially one rock-ribbed “Hebrew of Hebrews,” that we are even at the Kingdom table, seated with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. My ancestors were Viking savages, raping and pillaging their way across the world. But someone left home, came, learned their language and brought them the Gospel. And now I believe, thanks to their heroism. Some of those who read this have Irish and Italian surnames, but now consider themselves generic, American evangelicals. Yet their great-grandparents lived and died under Romish superstition in their Italian- or Gaelic-speaking ghettos. I don’t know anything about Protestant urban missions to Federal Hill in Providence back in the 1920s. I hope my Swedish Lutheran ancestors did me proud and went into these “highways and hedges.” But it was their duty regardless. Or someone’s. Someone who had freely received and should have left their comfortable, upwardly mobile realization of the American dream to go to these “barbarian” huddled masses in need of the pure Gospel.
Further, the Visible Church is one. “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:4-5). Not only is the Jew-Gentile barrier dissolved under the Gospel, but all lesser, non-essential distinctions as well. “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:27-28). All functional divisions of privilege and prejudice must die at the cross, that all people who confess Christ may be one. And that, even one under the same roof when God in providence places people in the same locality (James 2:1-13). Even self-sorting is not in the spirit of the ‘Reformed catholic.’
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