This is about Truth. This is about God’s law and gospel, which calls school board members to repentance—not just in their personal lives but also in their offices. Civil servants are to repent in their offices because of Christ and His office.

Editor’s Note: This is a descriptive essay to help Christians to understand what is happening in our public schools and how to do something constructive about it at the school board level. The authors have included a link to the Wake County School Board meeting they attended near the end of this article. It begins with Andrew’s comments and Rosaria’s pick up at 1:25:25. The meeting opened with reverent silence and ended in plaintive wails and heaving sobs.
No, this was not the funeral of a dignitary.
This was a school board meeting in Durham, North Carolina, where residents shared opinions about a newly passed parental rights law. The new state law prohibits the county school system’s current posture of concealing a child’s transgender identity from parents.
And tonight, the only place we heard the word “perverted” was from a school board member—about Christians.
The Triangle Reformation Banner & Record
Our journey to that night in Durham began months earlier as Andrew learned firsthand that local votes addressing the foundation of reality could come up without much warning. An ordinance that bans you from acting as if male and female are real distinctions is no longer controversial enough to make headlines. Andrew realized if you want to know what’s being discussed, you have to read the local agendas yourself.
So Andrew messed around with a free version of WordPress to make accessing local government agendas and public comment rules less daunting. The Triangle Reformation Banner & Record exists to “facilitate Reformed Christian awareness and witness to the civil magistrate.” How can a family stay in the loop of the town council, county commission, and school board in an age when the very definitions of “male” and “female” are now political?  Could such a website be a diaconal tool facilitating Christians to proclaim the gospel to the civil magistrate? We began to talk about what he was learning.
In May, Kent Butterfield, pastor of First Reformed Presbyterian Church of Durham, Rosaria, and Andrew prepared speeches to testify before the state legislature in defense of bills that took the LGBTQ+ lobby head-on.[1] When those bills became law in August—including a parental rights measure—Andrew surmised that upcoming local school board meetings could be a spiritual battlefield.
What if Christians went?
Durham Public Schools Board of Education Monthly Meeting, August 24, 2023
In a room bursting with rainbow pride, we prepared speeches to deliver to the monthly school board meeting. We signed up on a sheet of notebook paper held to a clipboard on the front table.
The meeting opened with a moment of silence for those “targeted” by the state legislature’s actions.
The first speech supported LGBTQ values and spoke against parental rights, thanking the public schools for the emotionally healthy queer children they are churning out. The supportive crowd cheered, clapped, and celebrated being on the right side of history. Later, a man with the pronouns “he” and “they” reiterated his defiant rejection of the law and celebrated the Biden administration’s support of “transgender girls” (boys)  playing sports with girls as part of Title IX.  All of these speakers were in uniform agreement on a matter that requires a giant leap of faith: that there is such a thing as a “trans kid.” In truth, the “trans kid” is an invention of an evil age.[2]
Rosaria was called up.
She shared her history as a retired, tenured professor of English, Women’s Studies, and Queer Theory from Syracuse University. She told the room that she lived as a lesbian activist for a decade and understood this community’s challenges. To all of this, the school board nodded and smiled. But when she shared that, no longer a lesbian, she was grateful she made no irreparable medical decisions that caused harm to her physical body during her decade of lesbian confusion, a sense of tension—and opposition—rose from the board and audience.
Rosaria explained that children who experience either the medical condition of gender dysphoria or the ideological, social contagion of transgenderism need guidance from their parents—the people who know them best, love them most and can help them heal. She said the transgender movement’s rejection of the stable biological categories of male and female renders it junk science.
When she said, “junk science,” someone gasped.
When the red light on the podium flashed, indicating her time was up, she left the podium and returned to her seat. The rainbow room looked grey, like they were all seasick. The LGBTQ+ movement demands affirmation. Betrayal from one of its own is too much to bear.

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Like Peter, our gaze shifts from Christ to focus on the storm, looking to temporal things for rescue instead of our faithful Lord. This unbelief assaults God’s glory, arrogantly dismissing His all-sufficiency as if He were not enough. It must be confessed and repented of. But thank God He has not left us alone in our idolatry and need! In His rich mercy, He has provided the way for us to batach in Him through the gift of His Son Jesus Christ.

In this series, I take our law homily from our church gathering each week (The law homily is where we read from the law of God and let His law examine our hearts so that we can be a tender-hearted and repenting people), and I post them here for your edification. Here is this week’s law homily on the prohibition against mental idolatry. 
“Batach:” A Call to Radical Dependence
In the opening words of the Ten Commandments, God issues a clear directive: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). This command strikes at the heart of what it means to truly trust God – to give Him our undivided loyalty and devotion. The Hebrew word translated as “trust” is batach, which vividly portrays leaning one’s whole weight onto something, relying upon it entirely.
To batach, to genuinely trust and lean wholly on God, requires letting go of all other supports. It means making Him alone the unrivaled object of our faith, confidence, and reliance. The Hebrew conveys the precise image of shifting our total weight onto the Lord’s sure and sturdy foundation.
Imagine a hiker navigating a treacherous mountain pass. The path is narrow and unstable, and hazards loom. Each step poses the real peril of slipping into the abyss below. But this hiker has something to batach in—a sturdy walking stick to lean on, to transfer their total weight to, providing confidence amid the dangers. Without that trusty stick, every stride would be reckless and could prove catastrophic. With it, the hiker can journey safely by bataching, leaning on its unwavering strength.
Such radical dependence is the picture of truly bataching, of genuinely trusting in God. This life is treacherous; the way is strewn with difficulties and unsettling circumstances. To attempt walking it alone, self-reliant, and grasping at flimsy, false supports is to court disaster. But when we batach in the Lord and deliberately transfer all our weight onto His strength, wisdom, and promises, we can journey confidently, no matter the rocky terrain or hazards we face. Our feet remain firmly planted by wholly relying on the immovable foundation of God’s faithfulness.
The heroes of Scripture model this kind of reckless trust for us. The Israelites batached in God as they walked through the parted Red Sea on dry ground. David batached as he faced the giant Goliath, declaring his confidence was in the Lord’s deliverance. The prophet Habakkuk resolved to rejoice in God’s salvation no matter what calamity befell, saying, “Yet I will batach in the God of my salvation.” These examples reveal that bataching is more than intellectual assent; it is the deliberate, continual transfer of one’s whole situation and weight onto the Lord.
Forsaking Flimsy Idols
In stark contrast, we often lean on the flimsy reeds of wealth, power, status, or human relationships for security.
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Satan loves to trivialize and diminish the horrors of sin by cloaking it in soft, therapeutic language. He loves to deceive us into playing the victim rather than the perpetrator. Don’t fall for it, Christian. As the Scriptures testify, sin is real and there is death and hell to pay for our rebellion against God’s kindness and grace. The good news, however, and the ground upon which all our hope is founded, is that Christ is an equally real and mighty Saviour.

Then Aaron shall lay both of his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the sons of Israel and all their transgressions in regard to all their sins; and he shall lay them on the head of the goat and send it out into the wilderness by the hand of a man ready to do this. (Leviticus 16:21 LSB)
In our modern, over-psychologized world, the biblical concept of sin has been all but obliterated. Simply consider the way transgressions have been usurped by “struggles,” iniquities by “trauma,” guilt by “poor self-esteem,” and sins by “breakdowns” and “stress.” Indeed, if any fault is admitted on the part of the person in question (and such occasions are rare), responsibility for these faults is usually off-loaded onto some ready-made excuse like so many sacks of grain onto a Peruvian pack mule.
In other words, we moderns deeply resent the idea that we might actually bear moral culpability for our actions, and thus we are only too willing to shield ourselves from the implications of such a prospect. As Malcolm Muggeridge wisely noted, “The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.” We simply hate that we are sinners.
In the Scriptures, however, sin is not the kind of thing that can be done away with through the mere swapping of terms. It is not, like a stray cat or dog, something that can be renamed and domesticated. In fact, sin is startlingly objective in character, placing us under a real and equally objective state of condemnation and guilt. This is because sin in the Bible is not the mere breaking of arbitrary rules; it is personal and calculated rebellion against the infinitely good and holy God. It is open defiance against the Lord of heaven and earth, rank ingratitude toward the Giver of all grace.
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