As we consider the responsibility entrusted to the hands of shepherds, for those of us who are pastors we must approach our post seriously. As a Christian take time to consider the work of pastors in the life of the church and pray earnestly for the men who are called to shepherd you and your family. Pray that they will be able to engage in the work of ministry with joy and that they will remain steadfast without wavering for the glory of God.

Jesus made a very important, yet simple statement to Peter after his resurrection. In effort to restore Peter after his failure to fully obey him in the midst of the heat of controversy—Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.”1 What a simple little phrase that is filled with such heavy responsibility.
All throughout the Scripture, we find references to sheep and shepherds. “For he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care” (Psalm 95:7). Jesus is the Good Shepherd (John 10:11) who lays down his life for the sheep. Jesus is also referenced as the Door of the sheepfold (John 10:9) which provides another shepherding analogy. When Jesus references his people as lambs, he is spotlighting their nature as immature and vulnerable and in need of tending and care.
As we consider these words of Jesus to Peter and the many references to sheep farming in the Scripture, we must be reminded of the responsibilities of a pastor in the work of shepherding the sheep.
Leading Sheep
One of the key principles of pastoral ministry is leadership. Sheep cannot lead themselves. God has designed the church to be led by pastors are literally shepherd-leaders. The elders of the local church are men who must take their leadership responsibility seriously. An elder (ἐπισκοπή) is one who is given responsibility of overseeing the church.
Such oversight is to be carefully measured through the pages of Scripture. There is no room for error when it comes to the spiritual wellbeing of God’s church. If sheep are not led properly, they will wander off and get entangled in all sorts of theological controversies and become vulnerable prey for false teachers who function as wolves.
Leadership is necessary in the church, and God has designed the church to be led by faithful shepherds. This leadership responsibility is not to be solo-shepherding, or as is often the case within evangelicalism—CEO-shepherding. God has designed his church to be led by a plurality of elders in each church which means biblical leadership in the life of the local church is shared leadership. Tom Schreiner observes, “Every piece of evidence we have shows that elders were widespread in the early church. They are mentioned by different authors: Luke, Paul, Peter, and James. They stretch over a wide region of the Greco-Roman world: from Jerusalem, Palestine, the whole of Asia Minor, and Crete. It is also likely that elders functioned as a plurality in the churches since the term is always plural, and Acts 14:23 says elders were appointed ‘for them in each church.’”2
When a faithful group of shepherd-leaders work together to care for God’s church, it spreads out responsibility, provides internal accountability (shepherding), and creates a healthy church culture where God’s people grow strong and pastors are able to maintain a healthy spiritual life and work-life balance. Regarding pastoral ministry—this is the way.
Feeding Sheep
The pastor must be able to teach the Scripture (1 Tim 3:1-7). In other words, the pastor is not an entertainer or comedian. The pastor is a shepherd of sheep not an entertainer for goats. The word for doctrine is “διδασκαλία” which means, teaching. The pastor must have healthy teaching. Just because a man stands before a congregation and talks doesn’t mean it’s necessarily healthy.
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One major reason for optimism in the Christian nationalist fold is that they have evidently learned from the failures of the conservative movement and are working on developing a positive program, not merely a defensive strategy. And they have a convincing, historically-based case that highlights the deep imprint of America’s Protestant character that remains even today, however trampled upon and bruised. 

The subject of Christian nationalism generates little light but much heat.
Since at least the publication of Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in 2006, the ruling class has used the term as a club to bludgeon evangelicals—especially in the wake of their prodigious support for Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Christian nationalists, the mainstream press tells us, are racist, QAnon-addled election deniers. They want to Make America Puritan Again (in the modern, badly misunderstood meaning of that word). And they believe that the Constitution should be set aside for a Christian divine-right king who will oversee forced religious conversions and impose draconian moral codes upon an unwilling populous.
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin has called Christian nationalism “an authoritarian, racist, dogmatic message donning the cloak of Christianity,” asserting that the GOP is “dedicated to imposing White Christian nationalism” on the country. A coterie of chin-stroking panels hosted by D.C. think tanks, “democracy” experts and sociologists, and (former) Republican members of Congress have condemned it in the strongest possible terms.
Evangelicals who aspire to be accepted by the ruling elite make a point of agreeing in full with the received view. Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore described Christian nationalism as “liberation theology for white people.” David French, who never misses the chance to steamroll his fellow evangelicals in the New York Times, called it “a blueprint for corruption, brutality, and oppression.”
The riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 has been packaged as the perfect showcase of Christian nationalism’s devastating consequences for America. All Americans are required to say that Christian Trump supporters tried to overturn “our sacred democracy” and made an idol of Trumpism at the expense of their eternal souls. (Ethics Professor Daniel Strand has conclusively shown that critics flew to this ready-made narrative before any evidence was presented.)
Mainstream conservatives, for their part, generally argue that liberals indiscriminately and unfairly employ the label against all conservatives, who are for the most part not Christian nationalists but patriotic Americans. However, as that contrast implies, this defense of conservatism takes for granted that the ruling class portrait is an accurate one: Christian nationalism stamps out religious freedom and coerces people into false belief. As Hillsdale College’s D.G. Hart wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that was published close to Independence Day, Christian nationalists long to return the nation to “pre-1776 patterns of government, such as John Calvin’s Geneva or John Winthrop’s Boston,” where “the civil magistrate supported churches and cajoled citizens to practice faith.” Conservatives like Hart worry that Christian nationalists will drag us back, Handmaid’s Tale-style, to a benighted age that we worked very hard to leave behind.
Both the Left and a good portion of the Right then agree that Christian nationalism ought to be rejected by all good and decent Americans. But does it truly represent the ultimate threat to the American republic? Is it the dying gasp of a hidebound folk religion that signifies the closing stage of a less-refined epoch? Is this how Christian nationalists understand themselves?
While the Claremont Institute takes no institutional position on the question, we must take Christian nationalism seriously. The debate over it represents a new stage in the ongoing realignment of our politics and culture, touching directly on how Americans should regard and relate to ultimate questions of the human soul and the highest good. The rise of Christian nationalism, along with post-liberalism, Catholic integralism, and other overlapping yet distinct attempts to answer the deepest theological-political questions facing our nation, speaks to mounting levels of dissatisfaction with our current failing paradigm. Wishing away this obvious reality and holding fast to the dead consensus will only fuel greater levels of discontent with the status quo and heighten the chances of our nation’s disintegration.
Just as President Trump’s first presidential run offered the opportunity for a searching reconsideration of the post-Cold War political consensus, the rise of Christian nationalism likewise offers us the same opportunity in the realm of church and state.
Who Are You?
Critics like to suggest that the leaders of the Christian nationalist movement are universally members of an outlandish coalition: explicit pro-MAGA churches; pastors who hold star-spangled, “patriotic” services; Charismatic snake handlers; prosperity Gospel grifters; and Donald Trump’s less-than-orthodox circle of evangelists. Though these groups publicly promote a certain strain of Christianity, they are not supplying the leading theological and political arguments for Christian nationalism (even though they may reside somewhere in the fold).
Rather, the group leading the Christian nationalist movement is a small pan-Protestant coalition of Christians from multiple denominations (e.g., Presbyterians, Baptists, and Anglicans) who want to restore the political theology of the Magisterial Reformers. Works in this tradition include Martin Bucer’s De Regno Christi, Theodore Beza’s The Right of Magistrates, and Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex. And pivotal Protestant confessions that inculcate such views are the original Westminster Confession of Faith, the Belgic Confession, the Irish Articles, and the Thirty-Nine Articles.
The arguments that buttress this project are limited to a few books—with just one systematic treatment among them so far, Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism—a number of lengthy essays (some of whose authors do not even call themselves Christian nationalists), and assorted private group chats. There are no foundations or nonprofits solely dedicated to advancing Christian nationalism. Very few institutions would dare publish anything sympathetic with its aims.
Christian nationalists see themselves as leading a counterrevolution against the post-World War II order. In a bracing series of aphorisms in his book’s epilogue, Wolfe describes the Left as the managers of New America who have long since discarded the founders’ Constitution. They have captured virtually every major public institution and are working zealously to stamp out any vestige of Old America, with its heroes, traditions, and ways of life. The inheritance our forefathers left us has been rejected in favor of a toxic cocktail of oligarchy, feminism, transgenderism, and wokeism. Even the U.S. military, once thought unassailable, is in service to the Global American Empire—an online moniker given to America’s imperial project of exporting “universal principles” (in truth particularist claims that benefit certain “dispossessed classes”) to foreign lands. All told, Wolfe asserts, “Americans live under an implicit occupation; the American ruling class is the occupying force.”
Christian nationalists see the suppression of traditional Christian teachings and practices in public as a defining element of this occupation. This includes: a series of disastrous Supreme Court rulings on the First Amendment’s religion clauses; hoary clichés such as the “neutral” public square and the supposedly impregnable “wall of separation” between church and state; and “religious liberty” that allows Christian business owners to be sued into oblivion. As Kurt Hofer has noted at The American Mind, Christians “have accepted the terms of battle dictated to us by liberalism—we have, in effect, already conceded defeat.”
The pushback to our current regime has either been completely ineffective or nonexistent. The modern conservative movement’s often facile and uncritical embrace of open markets, open trade, and (in many cases) open borders has helped strip mine America of its once plentiful resources and contributed to our present disorders. Meanwhile, Wolfe argues that a group of Protestant regime theologians have been busy reconciling evangelicals to their dhimmitude status, ensuring that they will never pose a threat to unraveling the 21st-century moral consensus.
Longhouse Nation
According to Christian nationalists, America’s men inhabit the Longhouse. In First Things, the anonymous writer L0m3z described that now ubiquitous online term as the “overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.” Christian nationalists argue that modern feminism’s fatwa against “toxic” masculinity pathologizes healthy masculine virtues and renders men subservient and docile. Innumerable pits of quicksand are ready to engulf any man who makes a wayward step: kangaroo tribunals led by college administrators ready to prosecute the merest suspicion of sexual misconduct, heavily biased family courts, and phalanxes of white knights and doxxers on social media apps who seek to destroy the lives of those who run afoul of regime-approved orthodoxies.
Amidst this carnage, Zoomers and young Millennials are searching for a path by which they can achieve greatness, excellence, self-mastery, and vitality. This is why men in these circles have exhorted being in good shape, lifting weights, and eating right—not due to a base materialism but because preserving the physical body is an implication of the Sixth Commandment. And they champion other aims, including getting (and staying) married and having kids, building productive households, buying land and establishing anti-fragile homesteads, and being engaged in every facet of their local communities.
Above all, Christian nationalists reject the status to which Christians have been assigned: naïve patsies who believe that Christ’s teachings mandate the destruction of one’s nation and people. They want nothing to do with year-zero theology, the notion that Christianity best flourishes when Christians have no political power and face routine persecution and martyrdom.
Instead, they are looking to recover the collective will of Christians and confidently assert their interests in public. They would heartily agree with Kevin Slack’s cri de cœur made in this publication that Christianity “must once again become a fighting faith, the inheritance of the battles of Edington, Tours, and Lepanto.”
Defender of the Faith
How, exactly, can a nation be Christian? Crucially, according to Wolfe, the term does not imply that every citizen needs to be a believer. Instead, Christian nations exist when “everyday life is invested and adorned with Christianity (e.g., Christian manners and expectations) and when life orients around distinctly Christian practices such as the worship of God (e.g., sabbath observance).”
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This book is really good. No wonder why many Christians recommend it. It’s time that you read it as well. Let’s encourage and motivate each other in our pursuit of holiness because God says that we should be holy as He is holy. (1 Pet. 1:15) Holiness is the pathway to true happiness because as we become holier, we become closer to the God whose presence is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. (Ps. 16:11)

This is a book authored by Jerry Bridges. I just finished this book today. This book has proved to be a blessing to my soul. It has challenged me to have a radical commitment in my pursuit of holiness. In this article, allow me to share the lessons that I have learned from the book.
One of the lessons that struck me the most is that holiness is my responsibility. Holiness does not just happen when I sit there and do nothing. I need to make every effort in applying Scripture in my life by the help of the Holy Spirit to produce holiness in me.
Jerry Bridges made an illustration about a farmer who does his work to ensure that the crops are good for harvest but also relies on God for rain and sunshine. This is a picture of our pursuit of holiness. We do our part by putting sin to death and obeying God’s commandments and relying to the Holy Spirit in our pursuit. We should do what we must do. God won’t do it for us. But we need also to rely on God’s help because at the end of the day, it is Him who works in us. (Phil. 2:13)
Another lesson is that, in this pursuit of holiness, we would be greatly aware of how sinful we are and how we have violated God’s commandments. That is why, it is important to remind ourselves of our standing in Christ. We pursue holiness not to be accepted by God but because we are already accepted by God. There is a huge difference.
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