Because of our fellowship with the Triune God believers are also joined to each other (1 John 1:3). We “are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another” (Romans 12:5). From Christ the head “the whole body” is “joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped” (Ephesians 4:16).

The visible church is an institution. Like any other organization the church has structure. Anyone who takes the Bible seriously realizes that the gathered community of God has leaders, doctrine, and rules for membership. As unpopular as it might be to say, Christianity is a religion and the institutional church is an essential part of that faith (see Chapter 25).
But Christianity is also essentially relational. The God-ordained organization of the church is also a living organism. And the religious and relational aspects of the church are not at odds. Scripture calls the church a body (1 Cor. 12:12); a human body has an intimate connection between its various parts and the head as the command center. To live well the parts must cooperate. The church is also a family (Mark 3:34, 35); in any well-functioning family there is both a form of government and loving communion.
To put it more personally, it isn’t enough to belong to the organization of the church—to be a member of what the Apostles’ Creed calls “the holy catholic church.” Within the church we must also practice “the communion of saints.” This raises two questions.
How Is Communion Possible?
Sin fractures every relationship. The works of the flesh are like acid that corrodes our mutual bonds; people given to enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions and envy do not make good friends (Gal. 5: 20, 21). To fellowship righteously we need to be changed. This means our most fundamental relationship needs to change. The key to holy communion is union with Christ. Nothing but the righteousness of Jesus could bring together people so naturally given to hatred and quarrelling (Titus 3:3-5).
Believers “are united to Jesus Christ their Head, by his Spirit, and by faith.” The call of faith is not simply to believe that Jesus is the Christ but, by believing, to gain life in his name (John 20:31). The gift of salvation is the gift of the life of Jesus. He has come to represent us, granting to us all that he possesses (Phil 3:10 Rom. 6:5, 6). Believers are also mystically united to Christ, like spouses who are no longer two but one. We are like branches that draw real life from our vital connection to Christ the vine (John 15:1-8). Jesus’ experiences are shared by believers. Baptism symbolizes our partnership in Jesus’ death and resurrection (Rom. 6:4). If we suffer with him, we will also be glorified with him (Rom. 8:17). And while Jesus is physically absent from us he is spiritually present. The faithful God gives his children the Spirit of Christ making us share his thoughts and desires and confirming that we are his children.
Union with Christ does not mean that believers are “partakers of the substance of his Godhead” or are “equal with Christ in any respect.” But by his promises we truly “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) in the sense that we share his “divine and blessed immorality and glory” and become “one with God as far as our capacities may allow.”[i]
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The economic rise of women represents a seismic shift in gender relations. It has broken the chains of dependency that held women down—but also held the nuclear family together. The traditional institution of fatherhood, based on a provider and protector role, has been almost completely deconstructed. Millions of men are being benched as a result. A new model of mature masculinity and fatherhood is desperately needed. 

In the span of just a few decades, an astonishing, epochal revolution in human relations has occurred. Since the widespread adoption of agriculture, patriarchy has been the norm in human societies. No longer. Patriarchy has been effectively demolished in advanced economies.
Women are no longer dependent on men for material resources. By tearing down barriers to education and the labor market, feminism has achieved a central goal of securing for women economic independence and power.
In 1970, when these changes began gaining steam, women were locked out of many educational and professional opportunities. On American campuses males dominated. In undergraduate enrollment they were 58 percent of students to females’ 42 percent. Men got more than 85 percent of PhDs. In law schools, about 90 percent of students were men.
Today, undergraduate enrollment has flipped—female enrollment is at 58 percent. Women are awarded 53 percent of PhDs, and they make up the majority of law students. Whole professions, like psychology and veterinary medicine, are becoming overwhelmingly female. Forty percent of American women now earn more than the average man, up from just 13 percent in 1979.
This rise of women has been accompanied by male decline. The statistics here are equally startling. There is the bad economic news: most American men earn less today (adjusted for inflation) than most men did in 1979. This is not because of the mass entry of women in the workplace, but because of the hollowing out of traditional male jobs—factory worker, steelworker, coal miner—as a result of free trade and automation.
But male troubles are not just economic. Almost one in four school boys are diagnosed as having a “developmental disability.” One in five fathers is not living with his children. Men are at three times greater risk than women from the epidemic of “deaths of despair,” from suicide, alcohol, and drugs.
There are now more young women than men with university degrees in every advanced economy. Male wage growth has been sluggish in these countries; and men’s employment rates have been dropping around the world.
Some hear all of this and come to the conclusion that the women’s movement has been a mistake and the solution is to wind back the clock. I disagree. The movement to liberate women has unleashed the power and talent of half of the global population—to the benefit of us all. But like all revolutions, it has generated real challenges, too. You don’t upend a 12,000-year-old social order without experiencing cultural side effects. In this case, it is the dislocation of many of our boys and men.
It is past time we recognized and started to address these problems. Doing so does not signal a retreat from feminism—or a belief that all misogyny and sexism have been eradicated. It is a recognition of our collective responsibility to deal with the downsides of radical change, as well as celebrate the upsides. For the longest time—pretty much all of history—the cause of gender equality has been synonymous with the cause of girls and women. No longer. It is now necessary to consider gender inequalities in both directions.
Doing this is in women’s economic self-interest. A world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women. If men struggle to find work or decent wages, that puts more pressure on women as breadwinners. Except in the richest U.S. families (i.e., the top fifth), all of the growth in household income since 1979 has resulted from the increased working hours and earnings of women.
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Over the past few years, doctors have taken an increasingly liberal view when it comes to defining “reasonably foreseeable” death. Then, last year, the government amended the original legislation, stating that one could apply for MAiD even if one’s death were not reasonably foreseeable. This second track of applicants simply had to show that they had a condition that was “intolerable to them” and could not “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable.”

On September 7, Margaret Marsilla called Joshua Tepper, the doctor who planned to kill her son.
Marsilla is 46, and she lives outside Toronto with her husband and daughter, a nursing student. She had known that her 23-year-old son, Kiano Vafaeian, was depressed—he was diabetic and had lost his vision in one eye, and he didn’t have a job or girlfriend or much of a future—and Marsilla asked her daughter to log onto Kiano’s account. (Kiano had given his sister access so she could help him with his email.) He never shared anything with his mother—what he was thinking, where he was going—and Marsilla was scared.
That was when Marsilla learned that Kiano had applied and, in late July, been approved for “medical assistance in dying,” aka MAiD, aka assisted suicide.
His death was scheduled for September 22.
In a September 7 email from Tepper, the doctor, to Kiano and Tekla Hendrickson, the executive director of MAiDHouse, the Toronto facility where Kiano’s death would take place, Tepper mapped out the schedule:
“Hii,” he emailed. (Apparently, Tepper did not use spell check.) “I am confirming the following timing: Please arrive at 8:30 am. I will ask for the nurse at 8:45 am and I will start the procedure at around 9:00 am. Procedure will be completed a few minutes after it starts.”
The procedure entailed administering two drugs. First, a coma-inducing agent. Then, a neuromuscular blocker that would stop Kiano’s breathing. He would be dead in five to ten minutes.
Apparently, Kiano wanted to bring a dog with him. In an email to him that same day, Hendrickson said: “Dogs are welcome in the space as long as there is someone there who will be responsible for them during the time at MAiDHouse.”
Marsilla was terrified. She had tried to do everything for her son, but it had been rough for him. She and his dad had gotten divorced when Kiano was still a kid. On his sixteenth birthday, she had given him a BMW. When he was 17, he had been in a bad car accident. He wasn’t up to college. He smoked a ton of weed. He’d lived with his dad, then with his mom, and now with her sister, Kiano’s aunt.
Wherever he went, whatever he did—he was unhappy. Going blind in his left eye, this past April, was the tipping point.
The day after she discovered the email, Marsilla called Tepper. She pretended to be a MAiD applicant. She called herself Joann and said she “wanted to go through the whole process in general, from A to Zed, before the Christmas holidays—if you know what I mean.” Tepper indicated he understood.
Tepper, sounding matter of fact, ran through the list of requirements: “You have to be over 18. You have to have an OHIP card.” (He was referring to her Ontario Health Insurance Plan.) “You have to have suffering that cannot be remediated or treated in some way that’s acceptable to you.”
Marsilla, who recorded the conversation and shared the five-and-a-half-minute recording with Common Sense, told Tepper that she was diabetic and blind—more or less, her son’s condition. Tepper said he’d “had patients a lot similar to you.”
Then, the doctor said, “If you wanted, I could do a formal assessment with you.” Marsilla asked if she should come in. Tepper replied: “We do them remotely, often by video of some type: WhatsApp, Zoom, FaceTime, something like that.”
A few minutes later, Marsilla hung up. She had just over two weeks to stop her son from dying.
“Poised to Become the Most Permissive Euthanasia Regime in the World”
When we think of assisted suicide or euthanasia, we imagine a limited number of elderly people with late-stage cancer or advanced ALS in severe pain. The argument for helping them die is clear: Death is imminent. Why should they be forced to suffer?
In 2015, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide was constitutional. In June 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, otherwise known as the Medical Assistance in Dying Act. MAiD was now the law of the land. Anyone who could show that their death was “reasonably foreseeable” was eligible. In this respect, Canada was hardly alone: The Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, among others, allow assisted suicide. So do ten states in the U.S.
In 2017, the first full year in which MAiD, which is administered by provincial governments, was in operation, 2,838 people opted for assisted suicide, according to a government report. By 2021, that figure had jumped to 10,064—accounting for more than 3 percent of all deaths in Canada that year.
There have been a total of 31,664 MAiD deaths and the large majority of those people were 65 to 80 when they died.
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