In keeping with the journalistic tradition of looking back at the recent past, we present the top 50 stories of the year that were read on The Aquila Report site based on the number of hits. We will present the 50 stories in groups of 10 to run on five lists on consecutive days. Here are numbers 31-40.

In 2021 The Aquila Report (TAR) posted over 3,000 stories. At the end of each year we feature the top 50 stories that were read.
TAR posts 8 new stories each day, on a variety of subjects – all of which we trust are of interest to our readers. As a web magazine TAR is an aggregator of news and information that we believe will provide articles that will inform the church of current trends and movements within the church and culture.
In keeping with the journalistic tradition of looking back at the recent past, we present the top 50 stories of the year that were read on The Aquila Report site based on the number of hits. We will present the 50 stories in groups of 10 to run on five lists on consecutive days. Here are numbers 31-40:

Thoughts on the Present State of the PCA: A Series of Theses Presented by a Concerned Member—Part One

That the foremost sufferers of our present deeds are those that are tempted with homosexual lust. For they need to be encouraged diligently with the assurance that their sin belongs to the old man that was crucified with Christ (Rom. 6:6), and that they are new creations (2 Cor. 5:17) who have been cleansed of their sin and who can and will finally overcome it (Rom. 6:12-14). And yet we set before them as leaders and models men who proudly claim their sin as an essential part of their identity, and who name themselves by it.

The PCA Has Fallen into Error, and Can’t Get Back Up (Part 1-Creation)

Though the Creation Study Report is from 2000, Framework proponents are more numerous in the PCA than ever today. Which helps explain many of the PCA’s current problems. Men who are willing to bend scripture to accommodate secularists on creation–God’s foundational act that revealed Him to us as Creator–are more likely to bend scripture to appease the proponents of the latest secular fad.

Revoice Gay-Straight Friends Planning a Life Together

A “deep-dive” Revoice webinar entitled, “Better Together”: In this webinar we discover this gay-straight duo. It is there we discover why couple may be more descriptive than duo. Who are these men? The gay man is Art Pereira, a Student Ministry Director at Hope Presbyterian Church (PCA). His straight-friend is Nick Galluccio, a youth pastor at Stonecrest Community Church. Art describes his friendship with Nick as a family and a household. Those are his words. Why did he use the word household? Because they moved in together.

The Salt That Has Lost Its Savor: The Woke Church and the Undoing of America

This doctrinal malpractice has given us a generation of men, Christian and otherwise, who are what Lewis called “men without chests.”….They are the sort who will, upon reading this article, take great offense at what I have written here and waste no time in letting me know it, but are not particularly offended by the sixty-one million children murdered in the holocaust of abortion since 1973, by universities that are incubators of radicalism, by Democrats who are compiling a “hit list” of Trump supporters, or by the godlessness of the Marxism they openly advocate, which has killed no less than 125 million people in the twentieth century alone.

The Biblical View of Gender and Sexuality

Our denomination itself is experiencing a rise of those who would call themselves “progressives.”  But whatever their intentions are, their “progress” is nothing less than regress—for what they are espousing is far removed from and even blatantly contrary to Scripture and sound doctrine. Much of this error will be proposed or debated by these individuals at the PCA’s General Assembly in another week.

What’s Wrong with Our Church Praise Music?

True praise that God loves comes out of a whole heart, in the gathered assembly, as all the voices of the people together are raised, because the marvelous works of the Lord have been sought out, comprehended, and believed. People who have delighted themselves in Christ and his steadfast love shown to them in his wondrous work won’t have to ask about how to achieve true praise.

A Response to Missouri Presbytery’s BCO 31–2 Investigation of TE Greg Johnson

Note: The Session of Covenant Church, Fayetteville, AR, responded privately to Missouri Presbytery’s distribution of its report concerning our BCO 31–2 request, in an effort to encourage them to clarify their positions and to turn away from their theological errors.

Freidrich Schleiermacher, the PCA, and Side B Christianity

If religious feeling makes confessional truth subservient to the changing aspect of our communities, then it should be no real surprise that what we are seeing happen in the “current” sexual revolution is redefining of what is means to be confessional based on the religious experience of the moment. This is what the PCA is up against and, well, all of us together as believers in Christ.

The PCA Has Fallen into Error, and Can’t Get Back Up: Part 3-David Frenchism

But let’s get to the offences of white Christians themselves. Christians who voted for Trump because of their concerns about abortion, gay marriage, assaults on free speech, oppressive taxation, etc., are condemned for failing to “lay down their political arms.” We must understand, though, that this is only an offence for Trump voters. Those who, like French, took up their political arms to loudly support and vote for Joe Biden are guilty of nothing.

Johnson To The PCA: “Merry Christmas. Here Is A Lump Of Coal For Your Stocking”

There are several serious problems with Pastor Johnson’s reasoning here. First, his speech was highly biographical, emotive, and even prejudicial. He implied that anyone who disagrees with his position “hates” homosexuals. It equates traditional Christian sexual ethics with anti-gay bigotry. Second, he assumes that, except for his commitment to Christ, he might have taken a same-sex husband and had a family and that by not violating God’s natural and moral law thus he has made a great sacrifice for the sake of Christ and his kingdom.

Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Tuesday, November 7, 2023
Many influencers offer teenage boys an aspirational vision of manhood. Some, like Mr. Peterson, say men are important for the sake of others, but present it as part of a heroic vision of masculinity in which men flourish as well. “You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world,” he writes in “12 Rules for Life,” his 2018 bestseller. “You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself.” Traditional authorities, especially in Protestant churches, talk about men being “servant leaders” but reduce that primarily to self-sacrifice and serving others. Pastors preach sermons wondering why men have so much energy left at the end of the day, or saying men shouldn’t have time for hobbies. No wonder young men tune them out.

The name of the violent radical left group Antifa stands for “antifascist action.” On twitter you will sometimes see people say to those criticizing Antifa, “Antifa stands for anti-fascist. So if you don’t like Antifa, you must support fascism.”
The term “servant leadership” functions similarly in evangelical circles. They embue the phrase with particular, specific meanings that transform it from a self-evidently good concept into an evangelical term of art. If you criticize those meanings, you might be accused supporting selfish leadership.
Servant leadership properly understood is an almost self-evident virtue. Of course we want leaders who lead in the genuine service of others and of the institutions they direct.
But there are problems with the way evangelicals talk about servant leadership, particularly when it comes to married men. It’s part of why men turn to online influencers instead of the church. As I noted in my WSJ op-ed on that topic, online influencers provide an aspirational vision of manhood. Traditional authorities like the church provide a “servant leader” vision that is extremely unappealing, and, more importantly, wrong in important ways.
The Call to Servant Leadership
Conservative evangelicals, ones who hold to the so-called complementarian gender theology, affirm that husbands are the head of the home. This is heavily qualified, however, and one such qualification is that headship means service rather than authority. Or at least to the extent that such authority exists, it can only be used for service.
The term “servant leader” was present early in the complementarian movement, though was not especially stressed. John Piper, in his opening chapter from the complementarian ur-text Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, wrote, “The call to leadership is a call to humble oneself and take the responsibility to be a servant-leader in ways that are appropriate to every differing relationship to women.” But the world servant leader only occurs a handful of times in this long book. (I haven’t come across Wayne Grudem, the other principal architect of complementarianism, using it).
Women’s studies professor Mary Kassian, who was among the originators of complementarianism, echoed Piper when she wrote, “Men have a responsibility to exercise headship in their homes and church family, and Christ revolutionized the definition of what that means. Authority is not the right to rule—-it’s the responsibility to serve.”
British evangelical John Stott, shaped in a different tradition but who was a sort of soft complementarian, uses similar language to deny that headship means authority but does mean responsibility. He wrote, “Headship implies some degree of leadership, which, however, is expressed not in terms of ‘authority’ but of ‘responsibility.’” (From Decisive Issues Facing Christians Today).
The main popularizer of the term “servant leader” as applied to husbands today may well be Tim Keller. In their book very popular book The Meaning of Marriage, Tim and Kathy Keller write:
But an even bigger leap was required to understand that it took an equal degree of submission for for men to submit to their gender roles. They are called to be “servant leaders.” In our world, we are accustomed to seeing the perks and privileges accrue to those who have higher status…..But in the dance of the Trinity, the greatest is the one who is most self-effacing, most sacrificial, most devoted to the good of the other…Jesus redefined all authority as servant-authority. Any exercise of power can only be done in service to the Other, not to please oneself.
Nancy Pearcey’s new book The Toxic War on Masculinity has an entire chapter that expands on this topic. She’s gotten a lot of flack over it. While I think it’s fair to say she probably draws from some egalitarian (Christian feminist) leaning material, she’s basically only summing up what conservative evangelicals actually do teach. Here’s just one short passage:
For example, a man attending a nondenominational church said, “Being the head doesn’t mean that you’re a ruler or something. It’s more of a responsibility.” A middle-aged Charismatic man said, “I have learned that being the head, as you say, is really being a servant because you got to swallow hard and put somebody else first.” A Presbyterian woman said a biblical concept of headship “actually makes his burden even heavier, because he is also supposed to be the kind of man that can hear his wife’s needs, that can be there for his wife, that can respect his wife . . . and that’s a big responsibility.”
James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, explains that when a man gets married, he stops living for his own ambitions and instead channels his energies into supporting his family: “He discovers a sense of pride—yes, masculine pride— because he is needed by his wife and family.” Needed not only for protection and financial provision, but also for love and affection.
Because Jesus said that he came not to be served, but to serve, these people would all seem to be on solid ground. But there are some problems with the way they talk about this. I will address two of them today.
What Service Should Be Provided?
The matter of servant leadership immediately prompts certain questions:

What is the service to be provided?
To whom?
Who makes those decisions?
Who decides whether or not the man is doing a good job at serving?

These are pretty fundamental. But evangelicals tend not to address them explicitly. This is the first problem. Their patterns of rhetoric, however, imply that that servant leadership essentially means catering to the desires of your wife and children. And if that’s the case, they also implicitly get to be the judge of whether you are doing a good job.
Kathy Keller said in a Family Life Today interview that, “A head’s job is to use their authority to please, meet needs, and serve.  A head does not get all the perks, all the privileges—you know, choose control of the remote—all this—pick the color of the car you buy, etc.  Your headship is expressed in servant-hood, primarily.” There’s a similar line in The Meaning of Marriage. “He does not use his headship selfishly, to get his own way about the color of the car they buy, who gets to hold the remote control, and whether he has a ‘night out with the boys’ or stays home to help with the kids when his wife asks him.”
We see here that clearly the correct answer is for him to say home and help with the kids when his wife asks him. This is an example of the patterns of rhetoric used to suggests servant leadership means catering to your wife’s desires. “Please, meet needs, and serves” sounds like what a restaurant waiter does.
They are even more direct later in the book, writing, “Jesus never did anything to please himself. A servant-leader must sacrifice his wants and needs to please and build up his partner.” Note that the husband must not only sacrifice his wants but his actual needs as well to “please” his partner. Following Jesus, he’s never to do anything to please himself.
Mark Driscoll operates similarly. In newsletter #77 I quoted him saying:
There are, however, moments in the marriage where the husband and wife don’t agree. And we’re not talking here about a lesser, secondary issue. It’s date night and he wants steak and she wants fish and they can’t agree on where to go. Those are easy. Just give her what she wants. Those are easy. Just love her, just serve her, do what she wants.
Most of the time, husbands are simply to give their wives whatever they want, even if the wife is behaving selfishly.
Russell Moore said similarly in his book The Storm-Tossed Family:
A husband’s leadership is about a special accountability for sabotaging his own wants and appetites with a forward-looking plan for the best interest of his wife and children. Headship is not about having one’s laundry washed or one’s meals cooked or one’s sexual drives met, but rather about constantly evaluating how to step up first to lay one’s life down for one’s family.
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The new heart and new life that Christ gives is the beginning of an entirely new tree. In the gospel, our true and eternal identity is in Christ, even though we still battle with the patterns and baggage of our old ways. Rather than simple self-discipline and willpower, though, the real source of change is new faith and affections in our hearts, redeemed desires, and transformed worldviews—all given to us in Christ.

“But isn’t it just a lust problem?” Mike asked. I was explaining to Mike the Harvest USA Tree Model, the core content of our ministry to both individuals and churches. Mike wanted to believe what I was saying about the deeper aspects of his sin. It gave him hope that there was a path to victory in his fight against the porn habit he’d been losing for years, because willpower certainly hadn’t worked. His objection revealed a problem that most of us encounter when thinking about our sin.
Mike’s question forces us to seek a more complete understanding of sin. We tend to think of sin in simple ways that only scratch the surface: I’m tempted; I fall; I repeat. But a biblical view of sin goes much deeper. This is what our Harvest USA Tree Model illustrates.
Jesus describes sin as having a source deep within us, in the heart, the epicenter of where our intellect, will, and affections all converge. In Matthew 15:18–19, Jesus said, “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.” Thinking of our hearts as part of a tree originates from Jesus’ words in Luke 6:43–45: “For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his heart produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” Building upon these verses, our Tree Model pictures the heart as the source of a tree, the seed.
The Seed: Our Hearts
The most basic characteristic of the seed, or heart, is that it is fallen. The word “autonomy” summarizes the sinful inclination of our hearts. We desire self-rule rather than being ruled by the authority and care of God. Our desire for autonomous independence from God affects every aspect of our lives. It shapes our reactions to our circumstances and experiences; it skews our deepest desires; it taints our functional worldviews. These are the inner workings of sin that bear fruit in what we do. The following three make up the other elements of the tree: the soil, the roots, and the trunk.
The Soil: Our Circumstances and Experiences
The soil is the context for the seed. The parents to whom we were born, our families, and our peers are all part of the soil. It is all the things those people do to us or for us—or neglect to do. It is everything that happens to us, good or bad. We are praised, abused, affirmed, attacked, protected, or wounded. We experience trauma and suffering, or we live in shelter and safety. Together, these experiences comprise the context in which our fallen hearts are active.
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