The contemporary western church is moving from a post-Christendom relationship to culture back to being a besieged minority. This is the reverse trajectory of the early church. Careful study of the changing relations of church and culture in the first four centuries  has much to teach contemporary western Christians about our relationship with a changing cultural landscape.

The relationship between God’s church and its surrounding culture is complex, dynamic, and fluid. Most of today’s global believers, along with most believers in history, are in contexts where Christianity is a cultural minority—whether the surrounding culture is animist, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or communist. These believers have long learned how to be a godly minority, living as strangers and exiles (1 Pet 2:11), as did Joseph in Egypt, along with Daniel, Esther, and the rest of God’s people during the Babylonian and Persian exiles.
We in the west, and certainly including Australia, are in a fluid context. Our context has the legacy of a dominant Christian culture which is reflected in things like the location and size of church buildings, chaplaincy access to public institutions; legal structures and the general tone of public life in which political leaders at least paid lip service to Christian values.
All that is rapidly changing. Our dominant culture is increasingly one of aggressive and progressive secularism.
In Australia we see widened access to anti-life measures such as abortion on demand and euthanasia. Legislation of same sex marriage a few years back seems a quaint small step in view of the present tsunami of issues around gender identity. As for Christian beliefs and the church, we seem to have moved from some kind of widespread acceptance to indifference and are now seen as holding to dangerous ideas and practices that deserve condemnation and state-sanctioned suppression. The recent debate around the Presbyterian Church’s submission to the ALRC on the right of Christian schools to practise their beliefs throughout the school illustrate this. (Ask John McClean about that!)
How do we make sense of this? How do we respond? Do we take the Benedictine option and retreat to our caves and ignore the world? Do we try and preserve an imagined golden age of “Christian Australia”? Do we spit angry words of judgement on the world as we are pushed back from one foxhole to another?
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Written by Christopher F. Rufo |
Friday, August 5, 2022
Bureaucracies have an instinct for self-preservation, and DEI ideology has embedded itself in the country’s prestige institutions. But nothing is more important for the success of American innovation and self-governance than prevailing over a regime that seeks to supplant “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as the governing principle of the United States.

“The chief business of the American people is business,” President Calvin Coolidge once said. One hundred years later, Americans’ chief business increasingly is managing racial and sexual politics through the ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
I have surveyed the programming of every Fortune 100 company and have confirmed that all of them have now adopted so-called DEI programs. These initiatives are no longer limited to high-technology firms in the coastal enclaves; they have spread to traditionally conservative sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, insurance, and oil and gas. The result is clear: every major corporation in the United States has submitted to DEI ideology and begun to make it a permanent part of its legal and human resources bureaucracy.
No doubt some of these programs are benign. Many companies adopt DEI policies out of pressure to conform. Other companies, however, use diversity, equity, and inclusion to promote the most virulent strands of critical race theory and gender ideology. I have documented many examples: Bank of America teaching employees that the United States is a system of “white supremacy”; Walmart telling workers they are guilty of “internalized racial superiority”; Lockheed Martin forcing executives to deconstruct their “white male privilege”; and Disney promising to abolish the words “boys” and “girls” in its theme parks and inject “queerness” into its children’s programming.
Three factors drive corporate executives to adopt DEI programs. First, these initiatives serve as an insurance policy against frivolous race- and sex-discrimination lawsuits. The legal department can point to mandatory trainings and policies as evidence that the company is “doing something” to prevent discrimination. Second, executives create these programs to appease internal activist groups that want to use the corporation as a platform for left-wing race and gender activism. Third, splashy DEI initiatives, such as Wal-Mart’s $100 million “Center for Racial Equity,” form part of a reputation-laundering strategy, improving a company’s public image and preempting Black Lives Matter-style protests through fashionable philanthropy.
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Written by Andrew J. Miller |
Friday, June 23, 2023
Even when we disagree with how a case was settled, we must trust that God is working through his church. Even when the courts of this world leave us still crying out for justice, Christians find joy and peace in the gospel truth that God will never summon us to face his wrath and judgment. When Christ died for our sins and was raised for our justification (Rom. 4:25), we had our day in court. No matter what the verdict of any earthly court holds, God’s court will never put us in double jeopardy (8:33–34).

Have you been hurt in the church?
The church isn’t always a safe space, as much as we’d like it to be, because it exists (for now) in a sinful world and sinners still inhabit the pews. Ecclesiastes 5:1 says, “Guard your steps when you go into the house of God,” and adds in the next breath that there are sometimes fools offering sacrifices inside.
Thankfully, many churches are concerned to redress the wrongs God’s people suffer from other churchgoers and the errant decisions of church leadership. I encourage you to find and join a local church that takes seriously church discipline, which the reformers understood to be one of the marks of a true church.
Justice demands that those hurt have the right to complain to the church and that those disciplined receive due process, including an impartial appeal of their case. I once heard it said that rightly ordered church discipline is like a fire extinguisher—you don’t give it much thought until a crisis, and then you’re glad it’s there. 
Ecclesiastical discipline is theological. I’m a pastor, not a lawyer. How the church listens to and adjudicates appeals and complaints is shaped by theological and ministry principles. It’s Christian discipline; whether we’re pastors and elders hearing appeals and complaints or a church member making an appeal or complaint, we do well to consider how these matters relate to God.
God Hears Appeals and Complaints
Theology begins with God and extends to all things in relation to God. Church practice seeks to faithfully reflect God’s practice. The church hears complaints because God hears complaints.
David, on the run from Saul and separated from the visible church, raised his voice to God: “With my voice I cry out to the LORD; with my voice I plead for mercy to the LORD. I pour out my complaint before him; I tell my trouble before him” (Ps. 142:1–2).
If you’re crying out to God because of unjust treatment in the visible church, you’re in good company: “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence” (Heb. 5:7).
Christ entrusted himself to “him who judges justly” (1 Pet. 2:23), a reminder our practice derives from God’s character.
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