This isn’t really a “post” per say. This isn’t a thesis delivered through stories, quotes, or persuasion. This isn’t a study, inviting us to dive deeper into an aspect of God’s truth or character. This is more a collection of phrases and thoughts from the last few days.
One of the most moving and amazing things God has shown me over the last few days is the work and person of Christ in what he did.
Often we think of Christ Jesus in terms of what he didn’t do.
Christ didn’t sin (2 Corinthians 5:21).
So all the sins that we are daily, weekly, monthly, familiar with experiencing and committing, Christ abstained from those things. He never submitted to a tempting thought. He never spoke evil. He never did any act which betrayed the Father’s righteous standard.
Often we think about Christ in these terms, what he avoided, fought against, and ultimately didn’t do.
Yet the thought that has grown in me in prayer is the thought of what Christ actively did do. Christ relentlessly committed every thought, every word, and every deed he did to the glory of God the Father.
Read More

In a world of dizzyingly disposable trends, so much seems to collapse as quickly as it arrives: brands, celebrities, movements, institutions, ideas. When we misconstrue faith as just another thing in the consumerist stew, it too becomes a flash-in-the-pan fashion, as fragile and fickle as the latest viral trend on TikTok. The life of Christian faith should be altogether different: a long obedience, a slow burn, a quiet diligence to pursue Jesus faithfully, with others in community, in good times and bad, for better or for worse. 

“Hillsong, Once a Leader of Christian Cool, Loses Footing in America.”
By now, headlines like this one (from a March 29 New York Times article by Ruth Graham) have become sadly predictable. It seems almost every “leader of Christian cool”—whether a tattooed celebrity pastor or a buzzy nightclub church—flames out and loses its footing fairly quickly. Which is not at all surprising. By their very nature, things that are cool are ephemeral. What’s fashionable is, by the necessity of the rules of fashion, quickly obsolete.
This is one of many reasons why chasing cool is a fool’s errand for churches and pastors, as I argue in my book Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide. If you prioritize short-term trendiness, your ministry impact will likely be short-lived. If you care too much about being “relatable” and attractive to the fickle tastes of any given generation or cultural context, the transcendence of Christianity and the prophetic power of the gospel will be shrunk and shaped to the contours of the zeitgeist. Relevance-focused Christianity sows the seeds of its own obsolescence. It’s a bad idea. It rarely ends well.
Lament and Learn
From the Mars Hills to the Hillsongs (and countless others), it’s tragic to see churches fail—however predictable and ill-advised the “cool church” arc may be. We don’t rejoice over this. We should lament and learn.
What are the lessons?
For one, these headlines ought to remind us that relevance is no substitute for reverence and indeed may compromise it. The Christian life shouldn’t be oriented around being liked; it should be oriented around loving God and loving others. Far more important than being fashionable is being faithful. Far more crucial than keeping up with the Joneses is staying rooted in God’s unchanging Word.
Things like confession and repentance, daily obedience to the whole counsel of Scripture, and quiet commitment to spiritual disciplines aren’t cutting edge and won’t land you in a GQ profile about “hypepriests.” But these are the things that make up a healthy, sustainable, “long obedience in the same direction” faith. And with every hip church that closes and celebrity pastor who falls, more and more Christians are hopefully waking up to this fact.
Maybe boring, uncool, unabashedly churchy church is actually a good thing. Maybe a Christianity that doesn’t appeal to my consumer preferences and take its cues from Twitter is exactly the sort of faith I need.
Short-Term Success, Long-Term Failure
It’s counterintuitive, though. In the moment, a large church crowded with 20-somethings—eager to hear the celebrity pastor’s sermon and enthusiastic in their singing of arena-rock worship songs—seems like an unassailable triumph. Because our metrics for success in the American church have for so long mirrored the metrics of market-driven capitalism (bigger is always better; audience is king), we assume if a “cool church” is packed to the gills with cool kids, it’s working.
Read More
Related Posts:

The simple defiant acts of gathering in a community of truth and securing textual truth may eventually seem like moderate or minor measures in view of the challenges that AI will bring. They are, however, priorities we can pursue now, coordinates we can set to navigate the brave new world that lies ahead of us.

It is difficult these days to know if the news around AI is alarmist or alarming. Experts differ, arguments and counter arguments are put forwards, and those of us in the non-specialist world are left somewhat adrift. Is AI tech an existential threat to the welfare of humanity or a virtual storm in an online teacup?
Regardless of where we land on the spectrum of concern, it is clear that major changes are in the wind with regard to our relationship to tech and our relationship to truth. There is a possibility that tech jobs, once a surefire arena for well-qualified people to be well paid, could be changed utterly by the terrible beauty of AI. Perhaps even more concerning is the fact that our relationship with truth, disturbed twenty years ago by postmodernism, could finally disintegrate thanks to its technological incarnation. For a ‘consult Google’ generation the concept that we could eventually be asking for the answers to life’s big questions from the echoes of yesterday’s ignorance is frightening indeed. Our base of knowledge could eventually be reduced to the aggregate of relativism’s unknowing.
There are many angles from which these discomforting possibilities can be viewed, but from the perspective of faith their impact on belief and theological knowledge are groundbreaking. Whether it is the final one, or one in a long succession, this latest ‘strong delusion’ is frightening in its proportions. How can believers think clearly about the issues of faith and AI? What priorities should we be setting now to prepare for what is ahead. Below I suggest two things that we will need to navigate the unknown path before us. Much more could undoubtedly be said.
You Will Need the Local Church
Medium and message have always had a complex relationship. Whether we think of the relative degrees of fidelity that manuscript culture attached to texts, or the seeming certainty and stability of meaning that the printing press introduced, how something is communicated matters enormously.
Until the late twentieth century, truth, text and meaning had physical embodiments. The great theological movements of church history depended on meetings, councils, encounters, premises, and argument, to reach consensus and resolution. The outcomes of those physical meetings was codified in multiple iterations of manuscripts that allowed access to what had been argued and decided.
The internet has at once democratised and relativised what we know as human beings. Ours is a wiki world, with editable data of debatable origins.
Read More
Related Posts: