Do we indwell a therapeutic culture? In one sense, unfortunately, yes: Rieff, Jones, and Trueman rightly lament the self-centered psychologizing of our society. In another sense, sadly, no: Nearly every aspect of our culture militates against true therapy. The pervasive noise of distractions hinders the gospel’s healing touch.

Talking about the gospel as therapeutic is dangerous. Not wrong, just dangerous. I used to think it was wrong, since Philip Rieff famously inveighed against the psychologizing of the self in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, his prophetic 1966 book. His critique fueled my suspicion of all things therapeutic.
Noted theologians have taken up Rieff’s mantle. Gregory Jones warns in Embodying Forgiveness (1995) that in our therapeutic culture, we are in danger of manipulating forgiveness by turning it into a self-help process: We are told to forgive others not for their sake but for ours, since it gives us psychological relief. The result, Jones rightly insists, is that we no longer “discern whether there are tragic misunderstandings or culpable wrongdoing and brokenness that need to be dealt with through practices of forgiveness and repentance.” Rather than work through the mess to make things right, we turn forgiveness into a tool for restoring our own inner peace.
More recently, Carl Trueman has turned to Rieff to trace the genealogy of contemporary culture. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (2020) follows Rieff’s claim that our therapeutic culture has two baleful effects. First, it treats the community as oppressive and therapy as a means to counter this. This leads to the second effect: It subverts the proper relationship between individual and society. Whereas the individual once learned to take his proper place within the broader community, the community now serves the psychological wellbeing of the individual.
Rieff, Jones, and Trueman all warn against a therapeutic culture’s dangers. In their august company, one might think twice before putting up a defense of a therapeutic culture.
Let me nonetheless give it a try. It’s not that I disagree with the famous troika. Their critique of contemporary culture is truthful, incisive, and indispensable. Still, a caveat is equally indispensable, for the gospel’s very aim is therapeutic.
The Greek verb therapeuein means “to heal” or “to cure.” The purpose of the gospel is arguably that we be healed. Metropolitan Hierotheos discusses theology as a therapeutic science and speaks in detail about how to heal the soul. His book Orthodox Psychotherapy: The Science of the Fathers argues that priests are in the therapy business: They “not only celebrate the Sacraments but they cure people. They have a sound knowledge of the path of healing from passions and they make it known to their spiritual children.”
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Take it from a church-planting veteran who has wept more and laughed with joy more through this journey than in almost any calling (parenting seven kids occupies the top spot). Church planting is not some ministry hack to rid yourself of the baggage that established churches often carry. Nor should you hope to use it as the critical ingredient to revive your church. Nor should your church planting organization build in funding measurements based upon how many and quickly your church or church plant reproduces another church plant. These postures toward church planting do not reflect that we submit to the sovereignty of God’s redemptive plan. 

Every church that claims to make Jesus followers and be faithful to the truth of God’s Word must weave church planting into its fabric. Church planting is the church’s collective mandate of her mission given to her by Jesus. To be committed to the non-negotiable Great Commission means every church must be serious about participating in reproducing disciples who are reproducing disciples of Jesus. Indeed, this doesn’t mean ONLY planting churches, but it does mean ALSO starting new churches in every place that might need a church.
I cannot tell you how thankful I am for the quality of church planting movements I have been a part of and a cheerleader for in the last decade across our country. I have seen a genuine uptick in church planting taking its rightful place as a critical value for many denomination and mission organizations. It is right and a beautiful answer to prayers for our nation.
It also is in jeopardy of becoming a fad.
Fads Are Fickle
When I think of fads, I think of:

The latest social craze that screams, “I am in the innovative now!” (Shout out to the latest social app that I MUST download).
The end-user product that promises quick and easy results. (Shout out to my latest don’t eat this-eat this, diet plan).
A must-have gadget that has become a talking point for success. (Shout out to the latest Apple product).
A flash-in-the-pan packaged life hack that has an over-inflated cost to own. (Shout out to the latest fix-all pyramid scheme).

Fads Do Not Make a Good Mission
When planting churches becomes more of a fad than a mission, we begin to value the following:

Innovation over Biblical Foundations. We are willing to set aside foundational biblical principles on what defines an actual church. Instead, we call our innovations church. Examples? When we equal evangelism efforts such as online, para-church, or Bible studies to being churches planted. If we do this, we are missing several key components of what makes a biblical church and what produces healthy followers of Christ (i.e. regular physical gathering together for sacraments, the ministry of presence within community and neighbourhoods, the function of biblical eldership, deacons and membership, the healthy function of church discipline, etc. etc.).

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Like the Methodist missionaries two centuries ago who risked their reputations to re-awaken America from its slumbers, many Christians today may need to relearn what it truly means to be convinced of our convictions. You must learn to speak them out, knowing that the world—and even a good deal of Methodists—may never forgive you for it. Christianity will land you in some kind of trouble one way or another. They’ll find out what you believe in the end.

The Tale of a Tweet
On March 8, 2023, I was fired from my job as a lecturer and programme lead at an evangelical Methodist Bible college. I had worked in this role for seven years and had never faced any formal disciplinary action previously. I was dismissed on the charge of “bringing the college into disrepute” due to a tweet I posted on February 19, 2023.
Here is what I said that was deemed so disreputable to so many:
Homosexuality is invading the Church. Evangelicals no longer see the severity of this because they’re busy apologising for their apparently barbaric homophobia, whether or not it’s true. This is a ‘Gospel issue’, by the way. If sin is no longer sin, we no longer need a Saviour.
The tweet went viral. I was routinely Twitter-mobbed before being publicly denounced by the college on Twitter, who called my tweet “unacceptable” and “inappropriate.” They also posted the following remarkable sentence:
Cliff College is committed to being a safe and hospitable place where those with differing convictions are welcomed and encouraged to live and learn together as faithful disciples of Christ.
The following day, after I had said I could not take down the tweet in good conscience, I was suspended, instructed to leave the college site within half an hour, and banned from all contact with fellow staff or students. Following a disciplinary hearing two weeks later, I was dismissed for misconduct.
The Investigation Report compiled about that single tweet was 17 pages long. It itemized a selection of the many public and private complaints made against me, and the many institutional and reputational risks incurred by the college as a result. Most of the complainants characterized the tweet (incorrectly) as homophobic, whilst some pro-LGBT+ students declared they would now feel “unsafe” in any classroom where I was teaching. The report further noted that the college was reviewing whether the tweet should be reported under the college’s “Prevent” duty (the UK government’s anti-terrorism and hate speech programme).
Cultural Pressure and Ecclesial Compromise
The wider context of my tweet was the recent Church of England decision to offer official blessings for same-sex couples. Even whilst refraining from fully accepting same-sex marriage (for now), the event was disturbing enough to cause ten global Anglican dioceses to publicly break communion with the Church of England. In the weeks prior to my tweet, I had been debating various pro-LGBT+ ministers and theologians on social media, each of whom were speaking as though the affirmation of homosexuality within the Church was inevitable and that sooner or later the Church simply had to “catch up.” Even prominent evangelical bishops like Steven Croft began declaring how sorry he was for all the harm and distress the Church’s position had caused the LGBT+ community, leading him to make a dramatic public u-turn to affirm same-sex marriage. Croft, like many, believed that now was the time to take the brave stand of solidarity with the powerless: by siding with the majority within secular Western society who were already standing precisely there and had been for some time.
It almost goes without saying that the shifting of the Overton Window on homosexuality in the west has been one of the most successful marketing campaigns of the last thirty years. As shown by the tactics employed in Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s book, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear & Hatred of Gays in the ‘90s, this was a concerted campaign to present the for/against narrative at its most extreme in order to enact a dramatic shift in public opinion towards the progressive view. As a result of these determined efforts, the LGBT+ movement today has effectively gained not mere cult status but major religious status.
What I found especially reprehensible about the Anglican situation was that these many pro-LGBT+ vicars, bishops, and theologians refused to admit that their theological position on marriage was determinatively influenced by those shifting cultural currents. They were adamant that their view was simply the fruit of diligent Biblical exegesis and prayer. Apparently, it had nothing at all to do with the pressures exerted upon the Church by secular society, nor any burning desire to keep in step with public opinion on LGBT+. Apparently, God’s sheer delight in homosexuality was in the Bible all along, just sitting there in the text, waiting to be exegeted.
Such disingenuity in defense of the recent shifts is precisely why I used the language of “invasion” (the term which seemed to cause most of the trouble, especially for “winsome” evangelicals). If the affirmation of homosexuality did not come from Biblical exegesis then it came from the world, and if it came from the world then it did not come in peace.
The Apology Complex
My tweet, in essence, was not actually aimed at homosexuals, nor even at pro-LGBT+ Christians. It was aimed towards the safe centrist evangelicals who are not pro-LGBT+ but do not speak up because they find themselves stuck in the endless spiral of apologizing for their beliefs rather than proclaiming them. I had already observed far too often how evangelical leaders could no longer simply declare their non-affirming view on homosexuality without marinating it with lashings of heartfelt woe over just how much hurt the LGBT+ community has suffered at the hands of churches just like theirs.
I am not saying there is never a reason to repent of sinful discrimination against homosexuals, if warranted. But many of the mainstream apologies were exhibitions of reputational safeguarding, stemming more from fear of the world than fear of the Lord. And in any case, just how far back in one’s ecclesial history are these apologies supposed to stretch? If even the nice conscientious evangelicals are guilty of systemic homophobia, then who isn’t? What would be the systemic pastoral and theological implications of that? Surely if we now think that most Christian churches have been actively suppressing homosexual people for most of their history, this would have to be one of the greatest oversights of sin in church history, would it not? Given the lack of any historic precedent for explicit homosexual affirmation in the history of Christendom before the (post)modern west, one does wonder: why did God permit all his people to get it wrong for quite so long? Either God’s people really have no ears to hear after all, or else God has a very serious communication problem.
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