When I Die Young (or Old)
When I die young, please don’t be sad. Know that I am finally free from sin. That beloved and yet hated vice, that secret and yet public sin, that long-fought or recently discovered battle – all are done away with and gone.
When I die young, remember it’s okay to cry. Death is our enemy, and we were created to live forever. It is unnatural to die and even more unnatural to die young. Yet even as you cry, remember that death – although our enemy – is a defeated enemy.
When I die young, I will be forgotten. Although my husband and children will remember me, my grandchildren will only hear stories about me. And my great-grandchildren may not even know my name. When I am forgotten here on earth, know that I am remembered by God. My name is written in His book, and I will never be forgotten by Him.
When I die old, please don’t be sad. Know that I am finally free from pain. The aches and pains that plagued me, the diseases that gradually assailed me, the knowledge of my finitude that always pained me –
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The Amazing Story of Frank Barker and Campus Outreach
In its 40 years, Campus Outreach has seen 55,000 students at evangelistic events. Staff and volunteers have discipled 15,000 students over weekly Bible studies and worship times—1,447 of them have gone on to serve in ministry or missions. Over the last 12 months alone, 712 students have professed their faith in Christ.
More than 20 years ago, Olan Stubbs was trying to share his faith with two guys in his freshman class at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. It wasn’t working.
One sat on the dorm steps outside and smoked weed. When Stubbs attempted to explain verses to him, he said he didn’t believe the Bible. The other was a football player “who could articulate the gospel better than I could. But he was often coming in late at night, drunk. Obviously there was some kind of disconnect.”
Stubbs didn’t know what to say or do. Then he heard about two RAs on the second floor who were leading a Bible study. They’d led someone he knew to Christ.
“I’d love to learn how to share my faith like you guys are doing,” he told them. They handed him a booklet by Navigators founder Dawson Trotman and told him to “get involved in Campus Outreach.”
Campus Outreach was famous for its evangelism, founded by a church famous for its evangelism, planted by a man famous for his evangelism.
Stubbs was hooked. Today, he’s one of nearly 750 Campus Outreach staff serving on 122 campuses in 11 countries. In its 40 years, Campus Outreach has seen 55,000 students at evangelistic events. Staff and volunteers have discipled 15,000 students over weekly Bible studies and worship times—1,447 of them have gone on to serve in ministry or missions. Over the last 12 months alone, 712 students have professed their faith in Christ.
Stubbs works at Briarwood Presbyterian Church, where Campus Outreach began. The church was planted in 1960 and grew to 4,000 members largely on the strength of personal evangelism. “The Great Commission has been our heartbeat,” the website says, and it’s not kidding: Briarwood partners with more than 100 mission boards and organizations and more than 300 ministry staff.
Briarwood got that heartbeat from its founder.
“If you meet a Christian in Birmingham who is 60 or older, and you ask them how they came to Christ, I’d bet my money that at some point they’ll mention Frank Barker,” Stubbs said.
The 86-year-old Barker has led many thousands to Christ—his daughter Peggy Townes estimated 10,000 personally and hundreds of thousands through his ministries. But it wasn’t because he loved talking to people. He’s not a gregarious personality or even a compelling speaker.
“I’d like to just settle in and read a book,” he said. “But the Bible tells us to reach out to others, so I had to discipline myself to do that.”
Turns out, that was catching.
Later to Faith than to Ministry
Barker came to ministry late, and to faith even later.
Beginning in high school, “I was living a pretty wild life morally,” Barker told TGC. From lying to his parents to throwing eggs at people to drinking too much (and then driving), Barker knew he wasn’t living a good life, but couldn’t pull himself out of it.
Playing tennis restricted his rowdiness, but not a lot and not for long. He went to college on an ROTC scholarship, then became a jet pilot in the United States Navy.
One weekend, while in flight training school, “I came back up to Birmingham and had a wild weekend,” Barker said.On his way back to Pensacola, he fell asleep at the wheel, and when the road curved, his car sped onto a rutted-out dirt road. When he finally got the car stopped, the headlights picked up a sign nailed to a tree: “The wages of sin is death.”
“I thought, You know what? I think God is trying to tell me something,” he said. “I started trying to straighten up. I felt I’d been so bad that if I was going to get to heaven, I was going to need to be a preacher.”
Barker kept swinging between resolving to do better and partying until one night, when he felt God was actually listening to the rote prayer he tossed up. He told God he wanted to follow him.
Barker began to stay home from the wild nights with his friends; after his tour of duty, he enrolled at Columbia Theological Seminary. A month in, he inherited from his roommate a preaching gig at an Alabama church.
“The first year, nothing particularly good happened,” he said. “At the end of that year, I thought, Something’s wrong. I wonder if I’m really a Christian.”
It was an awkward question to ask his professors or congregants, but he knew an Air Force chaplain, and asked him. (“Joe, how can I make sure I’m a Christian?”)
The chaplain gave Barker a tract and told him to put his trust in Jesus and receive salvation as a gift.
“That’s wrong,” Barker told him. “God’s not going to just give this thing away! You’ve got to work for it.”
The chaplain insisted, and Barker began to realize “I had totally missed that salvation was about grace. I surrendered my will and transferred my trust from me to Christ. When I did that, life began to change dramatically.”
Storefront Church
Among the first people Barker tried to evangelize were his parents, who were already saved. Then he told his sister, who accepted Christ. He told the handyman. He told his friends. He told his congregation, which began to grow.
After seminary, the Birmingham presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in the United States asked Barker if he’d organize a new church in the rapidly developing area of Cahaba Heights.
Intent on a PhD, he told them no.
They asked for the summer.
Just the summer, he agreed.
Barker knocked on doors and found so much interest in a new congregation that he skipped the Bible study stage of church planting and went right to the rented building, setting up in an old barber shop in a strip mall. That first Sunday, 70 people showed up. Three months in, Briarwood Presbyterian Church was chartered with 90 members.
Barker packed out the storefront church. Three years in, with 290 members, Briarwood moved into its own facility that could fit 400. (It was there the Presbyterian Church in America held its first meeting in December 1973.) A few years later, a 1,000-seat sanctuary was added.
In 1988, Briarwood moved into a facility that could fit 4,000. By the time Barker retired in 1998, membership had grown that large.
But they weren’t necessarily drawn in by the preaching.
“Kind of Boring”
“My father was not a dynamic orator by any means,” Townes said. “He’d shuffle up to the pulpit and say, ‘Uh, turn in your Bibles to 1 John 3,’ and then quietly read it and start preaching. There was nothing dynamic or big about it.”
“When I first visited Briarwood as a freshman in college, I was like, ‘This guy’s kind of boring,’” Stubbs said.
But Barker had the zeal of a new convert and the discipline of a Navy pilot.
“I had to train myself” to evangelize, Barker said. “You know, you get on an airplane thinking about the person you’re going to be sitting next to.”
At first, he didn’t know how to share his faith—“I didn’t learn it in seminary”—so he just kept telling the story of his own conversion.
“A lot of people in the 1960s could really identify with that, because they had a religious worldview: ‘There is a God, and I’m supposed to be a good person,’” Stubbs said.
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What Lia Thomas Means
Roughly three dozen bills that would ban trans women’s participation in women’s sports are currently wending their way through state legislatures. If they are passed, courts will almost certainly strike them down as unconstitutionally broad. These legal battles might eventually make their way to the Supreme Court, where their fate would be anyone’s guess.
If a single image could sum up Lia Thomas’s victory in the 500-yard freestyle event at the NCAA swimming championships last week, it would be that of Thomas and the runners-up taken right after they were awarded their medals. Behind a sign with the number “1” on it stands Thomas, who seems barely able to conceal embarrassment at what is undoubtedly an awkward situation. To the right, noticeably keeping their distance and a full head or two shorter, are the runners-up. Their smiles seem no less awkward.
The scene resembles an eerie propaganda video, in which a jubilant dictator can be seen waving at fawning crowds who know their lives depend on making it all look authentic. Thomas’s competitors will not face firing squads should they choose to complain, but they will almost certainly face a social media pile-on (assuming that Twitter doesn’t preemptively suspend them for suggesting that transgender women are not biological women). Their names and reputations will be dragged through the mud, their career prospects destroyed or severely curtailed, and their place on the college swim team—and, with it, their scholarships—jeopardized. A teammate of Thomas’s who criticized her participation in women’s sports told a U.K. newspaper that she would speak only on condition of anonymity, for she was concerned that future employers might Google her name and deem her “transphobic.” Meantime, those who support Thomas’s participation in women’s sports speak their minds freely and without fear of repercussions. What was that about transgender people being powerless?
Thomas, argue her defenders, is both a woman like any other but also a transgender trailblazer. Only in the minds of ideologues for whom reason and logic are oppressive social constructs can these two claims peacefully coexist. If gender identity alone is what makes one a woman, and Thomas has a female gender identity, then her transgender status is simply irrelevant to her achievement. Indeed, it doesn’t technically exist. Many transgender people prefer not to be recognized as trans at all, as this qualifies their self-identification as “real” men or women. “They hate, and I mean hate, the word trans,” reports trans activist and child psychologist Diane Ehrensaft. And how could it be otherwise?
The Human Rights Campaign warns that “contrasting transgender people with ‘real’ or ‘biological’ men and women is a false comparison” that “can contribute to the inaccurate perception that transgender people are being deceptive or less than equal, when, in fact, they are being authentic and courageous.” This is a strawman wrapped in a non sequitur. Critics of gender self-identification do not argue that people like Thomas are “being deceptive,” but rather that they are themselves deceived. HRC’s use of “authentic” here really means “sincere”: transgender women are being sincere, not deceptive, when they say they have a strong inner sense of being a woman. But that sincerity is irrelevant unless one first assumes that what makes a belief true is the fact that it is sincerely held, rather than its correspondence to objective reality. Who, apart from academic postmodernists, believes such a thing? Surely not those who display signs insisting that “science is real” on their front lawns.
This question-begging contrast of biological reality with “authenticity” and “courage” appeals to the therapeutic ethos, that powerful current in American culture. Elite support for transgenderism was never rooted in philosophical arguments about human sex differences or new discoveries in the human sciences. It derives from a narrative that stresses the harm to a person’s mental health if that person’s gender self-identification is not “affirmed.” The claim that only affirming someone’s internal sense of gender can release her of her agony has been subjected to serious and sustained criticism, but activists continue to tout it as gospel, and America’s power brokers seem unable or unwilling to resist it.
The sudden prominence of transgenderism in the West owes in large part to compassion having become unmoored from reason, and to ethics having been reduced to compassion. The proliferation on college campuses of mental health bureaucracies is one the more visible aspects of the rise of the “therapeutic state.” When the parents of female University of Pennsylvania swimmers wrote a letter to the university complaining about Thomas being allowed to swim on the women’s team, the university responded with a brief note reiterating its commitment to “inclusion” and providing a link to campus mental health services.
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Your Friendly Neighborhood Christian Nationalist
The real story told by this data is completely missed or ignored by the report. Namely, the strong polarity represented in the data. That is, the divide between the adherents and the zealots. Both occupy relatively the same statistical positioning and they are diametrically opposed to one another in their vision for the American way of life. Each considers the other a political threat and, on this point, they are right.
Neighborly Faith has published a new study on Christian nationalism. It began making the rounds this past week. The report is branded as a “new approach,” an improved measurement. You can read the whole thing for yourself, so an exhaustive breakdown is uncalled for. There are some things worth discussing, however. Most commentary on the report has fixated on the fact that, as the Washington Times put it, “Christian nationalists may not be the demons that some claim.” Whilst that’s obviously true and there are commendable elements to the report, we shouldn’t be so easily impressed. There are deeper problems with the report’s approach, and, in the end, it misses the real narrative of the data completely—and these things are always telling a story.
Groupings in the report are as follows: Christian nationalist adherents and sympathizers, Christian spectators, pluralistic believers, and zealous separationists. Of course, there is an undecided category as well. The percentage breakdown is a fairly even split, 11%, 19%, 18%, 19%, 17%, and 16%, respectively.
Everything in the survey is geared toward openness, tolerance, multiculturalism, and democracy. None of these things are defined but rather assumed as normal. This conforms to the culture, we might say, and mission of Neighborly Faith which, per their website, is dedicated to interfaith dialogue in a pluralist society, the latter being the assumed baseline—that is, an assumed good.
The tenor of the report reveals the apparent audience, the concerned observer. At many points, this posture makes it hard to take the report seriously. Imagery of January 6 MAGA enthusiasts and the like fill the graphics of the document. We will return to this point of partisanship shortly, but note, for instance, that the first topic addressed after outlining the percentage breakdown is the “threat” of Christian nationalism. The first line in that explanation points out that adherents and sympathizers “generally lack the aforementioned commitments so essential to a pluralistic society.” (p. 5). And, “Naturally, CN threatens institutions, legislation, and cultural norms that protect or promote pluralism in its many forms—such as religious diversity, multiculturalism, etc.” Not exactly dispassionate, is it? That does not invalidate the data presented but it is worth noticing.
The report’s executive summary tells us that only 30% of respondents are either adherents or sympathizers to Christian nationalism. The smallest population is that of adherents. Only 11% are true believers and only 5% self-identify as Christian nationalists. The import of these stats, given the reports intended audience, is to assure everyone that Christian nationalism, as (very roughly) defined by the report is probably not a big threat, even though it contains definite threats to democracy et al.
And yet, the survey has some “surprising findings” which amount to the unexpected fact that Christian nationalists are not rabid racists and are willing to work across socio-political and religious lines for the good of society (p. 5).
We must also note the problematic and confusing style of the questions presented in the survey to the some 2000 participants. As with any survey data, there are obvious limitations inherent in any questions included. That goes with the territory and shouldn’t be overly criticized. In this case, however, the report is frustrating for its perpetuation of bad question forms.
For instance, all Christian nationalist surveys to date fixate on the activity of federal government, e.g., “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.” Participants were asked to answer on the typic “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” scale. I’ve self-professedly embraced the Christian nationalist label, but I could easily disagree with the proposition. I would not disagree in principle. The idea of this federal declaration is desirable. But my answer, given our federalist polity, would be that the proper place for such declaration is the state level. In those jurisdictions I would also be pro-establishment of religion. Again, its not that I would disagree in principle, but what if someone did disagree for these reasons? They would then not fit the Christian nationalist bill per the report, at least in this regard. All that to say, surveys usually lack nuance and are therefore of limited utility.
Similarly, the proposition that the “federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state.” A non-Christian nationalist adherent could easily answer in the negative purely on the basis of constitutional theory. Similarly, asking whether prayer should be allowed in public schools—the survey scale doesn’t specify whether Christian or non-sectarian—or whether religious symbols should be allowed in public spaces gets you almost nowhere.
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