Signposts with Russell Moore

In this episode of Signposts I talk with author and speaker Jen Wilkin about the local church, men and women in ministry, and how to build a strong culture of teaching for women in the church. Listen below, and subscribe to Signposts to get new episodes when they publish.

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Below is an edited transcript of the audio

RUSSELL MOORE: I have with me today nationally known author and teacher Jen Wilkin. She’s the author of several books, including Women of the Word, None Like Him: 10 Ways God’s Different Than Us and Why That’s a Good Thing, and a book about the Sermon on the Mount. Everything I read by Jen Wilkin not only equips me better but provokes me to think and to pray. She has a column in Christianity Today and I commend the stuff she does to you, and if you’re not familiar with it, find it and you will benefit from it. Jen, thanks for being here today.

JEN WILKIN: Thanks for having me on!

RM: You know sometimes I feel guilty because I feel I’m the only one in ministry who hasn’t used the phrase “I really married up.” And I haven’t used the phrase, not because it’s not true, but because it’s always felt to me kind of condescending. I’ve never heard a woman say this about her husband, but have heard husbands say this about their wives. I can think of all kinds of times where there’s been a panel at a conference, with one woman and a group of men, and somebody will make a comment about “the rose among the thorns.” Do you think that it’s the case that often in our churches there are some subtly condescending ways of talking about women?

JW: I think it’s well-intentioned. When I hear something like that, I never think that person woke up that morning and said, “How can I keep the woman down?” I do think that we can sometimes speak in ways that intend to honor but end up sounding like overcompensating, but I do always assume it’s well intended.

RM: You know, it seems to me in many ways that women, in conservative evangelical churches, don’t seem to be as mobilized as in previous times in church history. When we think about, even when women didn’t have as high a place in society as they do now, we had women who were leading mission movements and all sorts of things. But it seems at least in my corner of the world that we don’t have as much of that anymore. If that’s the case, how can we correct it?

JW: Well I’m in your corner of the world so I would say that’s an accurate statement. Probably what’s driving that is that often in the church, in the last 20 years, we’ve adopted a sort of backlash position when it comes to talking about women. We’ve developed a sort of fear of anything that sounds or looks vaguely like feminism, and become extremely cautious about roles we’ve put women in and developed some narrow definitions of leadership and who can and should lead. So I think we’re dealing with fallout from that, and in some cases men outside the church have been more open handed toward women in leadership than those inside the church. What I’m hoping to see, and what I see happening in many places is that we’d recapture a vision for men and women partnering in ministry together. The language that the New Testament applies to the church is familial language; the church, like a family, has brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. I would love for the church to begin to look more like a family that has both parents in the home, functioning in roles of leadership and nurturing.

RM: One thing I’ve been convinced of, all my ministry but increasingly so, is that whenever there’s a truth that God gives us, there are least two errors that we deviate toward, on either side of that truth. I think that you’re right that when it comes to biblical ideals and pictures of manhood and womanhood, on the one hand, you have the sort of feminism that erases those good, creational differences. But on the other hand, we can have a hyper complementarianism. I say this as a convinced complementarian. But we can say, “In order to make sure we don’t fall into feminism, we’re going to put all sorts of hedges and protections around so we won’t even come close to a problem.” I think you’re right about that sense of backlash, and you’ve written about this in terms of the “ghosts”, the sorts of ideas of women that can be scary to men who are in leadership in the church. What do you mean by that?

JW: Well, I’ve even heard from seminary graduates that they were told in seminary to be leery of contact with women. I grew up with four brothers, a Dad that loved me and now a husband that loves me and sees me as a peer. It was strange to encounter that attitude because I hadn’t encountered it in my relationships with men. I was used to being treated like I wasn’t a threat. I have an outspoken personality, so maybe I am perceived as “Here comes trouble.” But it was a surprise to me though because what was valued in the workplace wasn’t what was valued in the church. It’s a belief system that has been cultivated and rewarded often, that women in ministry were something to be cautious around. And it did result in many ministry structures that were built on erring on the side of caution at every turn.

And when we consistently err on the side of caution, we consistently err. We are operating from a paradigm of fear instead of one of brotherly-sisterly partnership. And fear doesn’t tend to be a good recipe for ministry. There’s been a lot of interesting stuff written on male and female relationships in ministry settings, and the fact that the more forbidden you make them, the more you heighten the tension around those relationships. And I think of it in terms of, the way we dealt with sibling relationship in my homes. If you were not getting along with a sibling, we didn’t separate you, we put you together and gave you a task to do. In the church, we tend to keep people separate, and I think in the church we’ve tended to have a greater fear of adultery than we’ve had fear of men and women not fulfilling the cultural mandate given to them.

RM: What would you say to someone who responds, “Yes, but, we have had just tremendous problems within the church, and we know there is good, created longing for marriage that the devil distorts.” So there are real dangers and many times when we’ve seen these sorts of falls, they typically happen in the context of doing ministry together that has gone awry. So how would you say, don’t err on the side of fear, but do recognize the dynamic that can be dangerous.

JW: Absolutely. If you recognize one problem, what you don’t wanna do is over-correct. We don’t want to be foolish we want to be wise. But I think one thing we’ve done is made one rule fit all relationships, when in reality relationships are different because it’s two different individuals in that relationship. So when you’re trying to gauge what is my ability to have friendships with people of the opposite sex that I’m in ministry with, you have to say first, how healthy is my marriage? And then you need to say, this person who I’m working with, how strong is their marriage and how vulnerable do they and I seem to be? You’ve got to have a great deal of honesty with yourself about how safe it is to move into even low level friendship with them, depending on who the person is.

But as the friendships between two of the same gender, you learn over time which friendships you can trust and which you can’t trust, and I would say the same is true of male-female interaction. But again obviously, you’re going to be cautious because there can be a sexual component–though honestly there can be a sexual component in same-gender friendships as well. And secondly, we cannot live as though we exist in vacuum. There are cultural pressures around us and sub cultural pressures that dictate how we behave wisely in this relationship. Just because I could go have coffee with a person who wasn’t my spouse, in a highly  public place that wouldn’t be questioned, doesn’t mean I should do that.

RM: You know, I get a lot of books sent to me from publishers. One thing that I notice is that books geared toward men or toward generic readers, tend to be very different than the books I get that are geared toward women. And I can even just tell by looking at the cover. Maybe I’m wrong, but usually, with key exceptions including you and others, a lot of the material directed toward women is relational and has to do with one or two aspects of life, but it’s not usually geared toward theology, or Bible, for the most part. Why?

JW: Well I would argue that its a symptom of this “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” mentality that we’ve had within the church. So if you’ve had the courage to crack open one of these book that looks like they painted the front cover with estrogen, you will look at that and say this is incomprehensible. And you’re going to draw one of two conclusions from that: you’re either going to think this is just what women want, the way they’re wired, or you may think this is all women can handle. But the command for us to love God with heart, soul, mind and and strength is not gender specific. It’s not “Hey brother, you love God with your mind and I will love God with my feelings, and these are the gifts we bring the church.”

I will stand and given an account to God for how well I have loved him with my mind. Not Dr. Moore’s mind, not Matt Chandler’s mind, not Beth Moore’s mind–my mind. I need to have a thinking faith as a woman who is a follower of Christ. And what has happened over time is that we have resourced women almost entirely at the feelings level, for the past 20 years. And so women when they are faced with a thought level challenge to their faith, it throws them into complete crisis. They’re not equipped to deal with it. Not only that, but because there’s so much polarization even within church subculture, we think we are straight ticket voters with one teacher vs another. So [according to this mentality] I have to agree with every single thing Matt Chandler says or else he’s a false teacher.

So women in particular are ill-equipped to discern what is a first level doctrine vs a second level doctrine, and to know whether it’s ok to agree with some things and disagree with others. You combine that with a tendency in women to seek consensus and to collaborate, and so anyone who critiques something that has a woman has written can be perceived to be “outside the herd.” So even within women’s circles, there is a danger to any woman who says I need to raise my voice in critique against what another woman has written. So some of the resources that are written at a level that doesn’t honor the intellectual capacity of women sort of never meets with a critique that would help us see more clearly toward other things.

RM: I think you’re about the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” dynamic. When I look at the material that is directly oriented toward men–I think it is starting to change–but for a long time it’s been hyper warrior-spirit, hyper-competitive, which I think feeds into the sort of masculinity-as-velocity mentality that is ending up with a lot of people burned out and devastated at the middle of their lives.

When you think about the local church level–maybe someone is listening to this and belongs to a church where there just hasn’t been any emphasis on Bible teaching for and by women, what can someone do to see that change? Would you say just go find another church, or what would you say to that?

JW: I would not say go and find another church. To me that is a last resort. I would say if you are someone who feels drawn to lead something like that, you should first approach the leadership of the church and say this is something I’d like to do. Often in churches where they say everything is topical or feelings-related, the first thought is: “Let’s stop that, and do hardcore inductive Bible study all the time.” I would say that’s probably not the best response. Instead, it’s better to lay a different foundation and let the other things continue. Getting women to invest in this foundational piece of learning line by line takes time. It starts with one or two women, and then they catch fire and invite their friends, and then those women catch fire. It’s a slow boil, and that’s OK.  It needs to be seen as something you’re going to build into your church over the long term.

And it can be difficult if you’re in a church that overall does not value that kind of study. And it can also be difficult because as church structure has become more and more organic and decentralized, it’s harder and harder to find environments that are dedicated just to the learning of Scripture. So there may be some mechanical difficulty in terms of implementing that. We’re trying to create structures where this kind of learning can take place, and it’s not likely to take place in a home group setting. Home group is great community but it’s not the most structured place for a thought level engagement with the text. So I would urge women in the local church to talk to their leadership but in many cases they might get a blank stare. If that’s the case, gather some women in your home, get some good resources, and trust the Lord to make a harvest out of that.

RM: One thing I’ve noticed, whether it applies to orphan care ministry or any number of things, when you have people who come to church leadership and say “This is a deficiency, you fix it,” there’s typically not a good response. But if you come forward and say “God has laid this on our heart, and we’re not exactly sure what it’s going to look like, but will you support us as we attempt to be faithful,” there’s usually a very good response.

JW: A willingness to partner, yes.

RM: Well thank you for Jen Wilkin for being here today, and I recommend to all of you if you’re not familiar with Jen’s stuff, Google her and get it. And what I appreciate about Jen’s work is that we talked about overreaction here, and I think sometimes when someone is a pioneer and moving in directions that have been deficient for a while, one of the things that you can easily do is say “I want to be super cerebral, so I’m just going to present the omniscience of God in the most arid and abstract way.” But what Jen does is talk about the omniscience of God in a way that is applicable to every day lives as well. That’s a good model for all of us, men and women, to follow.

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How should Christians respond to cultural transformations, many of which actively threaten the beliefs and practices of the church? Journalist Rod Dreher offers a provocative answer in his new book “The Benedict Option,” which encourages believers and churches to abandon the popular models of cultural engagement and focus instead on shoring up our own theological foundations and communities.

In this episode of Signposts I talk to Rod about the Benedict Option and what he hopes Christians take away from his book. Listen below and subscribe to Signposts to get new episodes automatically when they publish.

Transcript coming soon

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How should a teenager who has sinned sexually respond in repentance? How should parents of struggling teens address sexual sin? In this episode of Signposts, I talk to both child and parents about what walking in light of the gospel means for addressing sexual failure.

Listen below, and subscribe to Signposts to get new episodes automatically.

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Below is an edited transcript of the audio. 

I received a question from a teenager who told me he had committed sexual sin, and is trying to think of what steps he should take next. He seems genuinely repentant and broken over this. And I also received a question from a parent of a teenager, who had also discovered their teen in sexual sin and are trying to figure out how to address it as parents. This isn’t the same family! But both this teenager and these parents are grappling with how they should respond to sexual sin.

First, I want to address to this teen, and anyone who might be in the same situation he’s in. First of all, you should know the weight of what has happened. In some time periods that may not have needed to be emphasized as much, but this cultural moment sees sexual expression as intrinsic to one’s authenticity and well-being, which is not the biblical view. Our culture still sees that there are issues of right and wrong, but it usually restricts those categories to the issue of consent (and culture is right that anything without consent is wrong). So we have to recognize that if we’re looking at the world from God’s perspective, sexual immorality is a serious issue. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6 that sexual immorality, unlike other sins that are outside the body, is committed against our own bodies. There is something inherently disordered with sexual immorality, so you’re right to feel the weight of this.

And one thing you may be tempted to do is comfort yourself with the knowledge that no one became pregnant or contracted a disease or is being promiscuous. There are all kinds of ways to think of yourself as having dogged a bullet regarding earthly consequences. But you need to understand that God has designed sex to preach, and to sing, and that what sex teaches is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Ephesians 5 teaches that the one flesh union of husband and wife, with covenant and fidelity and permanence, reflects the gospel. What you have done falls short of that, so you’re right to feel the weight of it.

But I would also say: Feel the weight of your sin, and also receive the gospel and feel liberation from it. Now, you shouldn’t feel liberation if you are “sinning so that grace may abound.” But if you are consciously turning away from this sin and refusing to walk in it, the Bible says that God is faithful and just to forgive your sin and cleanse you from all unrighteousness. If you’re repentant, God is not angry with you or looking to punish you, so receive the liberation from that.

Then there are practical steps you should take, because, and I’m speaking out of experience of dealing over the years with many people involved in various types of sexual sin, it is really difficult to start down the path of sexual immorality and to turn away from it. It happens, and the Spirit is enough to do this, but it becomes very difficult. What you want to make sure to do is notice where all your vulnerabilities are so you can protect yourself from them.

So let’s assume the other party in your sexual immorality is a Christian and is as repentant about this as you are. I think you and she need to talk about why this happened and what kind of boundaries are not in place that enabled this to happen. Also you need some outside accountability. We have one mediator, the man Christ Jesus. You don’t need a priest other than Jesus. But you do need counsel and accountability, especially because sexual sin is a sin of the passions, and when the passions start firing, it is really easy to forget our spiritual commitments and rationalize everything away. If your parents are Christians and can provide some spiritual sustenance for you, then go to them. Now, not everybody has parents like that. Many have unbelieving parents who don’t understand why you’d want to avoid sexual immorality. Or it may not be safe to talk to your parents about this because of how they’d react. If that’s the case, find someone else to talk to honestly about this, maybe your pastor or youth pastor—someone who is able to check on you and ask if you’re putting yourself in vulnerable situations. So don’t put yourself back in those situations that you can easily fall back into sin.

Now it may be that there needs to be a breakup. If the other person does not see this with the kind of spiritual gravity that you do, it will be a very difficult battle to gain victory over this, because the other person will be pulling you, even subtly, in the opposite direction. If they don’t see this as seriously as you, you may need to breakup, and especially if this person is unbeliever.

Now, to the parents:

First, you also should feel the weight of this. There are far too many parents, including evangelical parents, who assume sexual sin is just part of growing up, particularly when it comes to boys. Feel the weight of this sin against God. And I can tell from the question that these parents get this.

So I want to move on and say: Don’t be shocked. Don’t communicate to your child, “I can’t believe what you did,’ or even worse, “I can’t believe you did this to us.” Too many parents take their children’s sin personally, because they don’t understand the weight of sin and temptation and they expect their child to always make the right moral decision in challenging moments. There is no sin except what is common to man. There are extreme sins, but your teen is not inventing a new sin here, so don’t be shocked by this.

Secondly, look at the sort of boundaries that are in place. Having said that, I know there will be some parents who will not have been really involved int heir teen’s life and relationships. So they’ll just assume, “This is all their fault.” But those parents need to ask themselves “Where have WE left our child vulnerable?” But there will also be parents who blame themselves for every aspect of this. And they’re going to assume, “If we only had the right set of guardrails everywhere then we could have prevented this from ever happening.” If you’re that type of parent you should give grace to yourselves. But look and see if there are sufficient boundaries to help your child. If you need to, own this and communicate to your teen that you will help them. But as you do this, make sure you don’t unintentionally cut your child off from you. For disappointed parents, there’s a tendency to back away from the child and give the cold shoulder. But your teen needs you to be closer, not farther away.

So model the gospel. If your child is repentant, whether this is physical sexual immorality or pornography or whatever, model the grace you’ve received. That means not taking on a somber persona where every time you talk to your teen your talking about the Bible and sexual immorality. But you are showing your child that the parental love is still there, the relationship its till there, and you will get through this. Make sure you’re communicating this kind of grace. Especially if either you child is apathetic about this sin or is crushed beneath shame, you have a gospel opportunity here. This isn’t the last time your child will need to hear this from you. Your child will sin against God in all sorts of ways.

We need to know that God takes sin seriously. And we need to know God does not hold our sin against us but has nailed it to the cross of Christ, and we are free to walk in resurrection life. We can come boldly before the Father because we are hidden in Christ. This doesn’t give us license to continue in sin. It gives us a sense of what a loving Father we must have, who intervened in our own personal self-destruction, to give me the life of his own Son and fill me with the presence of the Spirit to ensure that my body is a temple of his presence. We all need to hear that, and your child needs to hear that right now.

The post Signposts: How Should Teens and Parents Address Sexual Sin? appeared first on Russell Moore.

This special episode of Signposts features a portion of my sermon at our 2017 Evangelicals For Life gathering in Washington, D.C. You can listen to the full message at the Evangelicals For Life page here.

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The post Signposts: What Human Dignity Means For the Church appeared first on Russell Moore.

What should Christians think of New Year’s resolutions? Are they a helpful way to make changes, or do they merely represent a modern from of legalism? In this episode I talk about how resolutions can help us form godly habits, and why this doesn’t need to be a slavish, performance-obsessed way of life.

Use the links to subscribe to Signposts and get new episodes automatically as they are released.

Below is an edited transcript of the audio.

As the old Christmas song says, “Fast away the old year passes; hail the New Year, lads and lasses!” As we head into a new year, one thing that many people begin to wonder about is New Year’s resolutions. Recently I received a question from a listener, asking if Christians should have New Year’s resolutions.

Perhaps the reason someone would ask this is the reality that most people don’t keep their resolutions. That’s a reason why, for example, gyms will make a lot of money in memberships around the first of the year. People tend to come in January and February and then taper off toward the end of the year.

But I think New Year resolutions can be a good thing. Some Christians have said that these resolutions can feed into a performance mentality that undermines the gospel. I think they can do this, but I also think one positive element of New Year resolutions is the building of habit. That’s a good thing, because we know that habits shape us.

What a New Year’s resolution is ultimately trying to get us to is the sort of habit in our life that we don’t have to map out and say, “This is what we’re going to do today.” It’s just something that we naturally do. In the same way you probably don’t make a list and include, “Brush my teeth tomorrow.” It’s just part of your routine, and a resolution is trying to imitate that.

What we need to do is think through what are the resolutions we want to pursue in our life, and decide whether these are realistic. One thing many people will do is choose a big abstraction, like, “I will be a kind person.” That’s a good abstraction, but what’s better is to say, “I am going to give one word of affirmation every day to my spouse or a coworker.” Try to build into your life something specific and concrete.

This is especially true in your own spiritual life. If you don’t have a consistent plan for Bible reading and prayer, for example, you may say, “I am going to self consciously set aside time for these things.” In doing this, though, make sure you have something that is doable. If you don’t have any sort of Bible reading in your life, don’t resolve to read 3 chapters a day. Resolve instead to read 1 chapter a week, and start with something manageable that you can build on as time goes on.

One thing I’ve noticed in my own life is that if I look back on journals that I’ve written in from years ago—I just found a whole stack of them recently—I can look and see all the ways God was with me in the past. And I can also say, “Look at what I was so worried about then that never came to pass.” So I’ve realized that I want to get back into the practice of journaling, not because it’s something everyone needs to do but because I’ve found it’s beneficial to me. And since I’m in a very fast paced season of life with work and the ages of my children, I’ve found it helpful to use some technological ways to journal. That’s a good thing to do, to just sit down and say: What’s one thing I want to change and build into my life?

And this isn’t something to be a slave to. If you have a resolution that you see as something that’s going to be a drudgery for you throughout the year, don’t do it. That’s not going to be helpful. But find a way to build these patterns into your life in a way that will benefit you in the year to come. This isn’t a legalistic “performance” mentality, as long as you keep it in perspective.

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Should Christians take offense when the signs say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”? If not, how can Christians cope with a rapidly secularizing public square?

In this episode of Signposts I talk about what is and what is not evidence of a transforming culture, and the right way Christians ought to respond to both.

Use the links below to subscribe to Signposts and get new episodes automatically when they publish.

Below is an edited transcript of the audio.

I found myself really, really irritated one day. I was on a plane, and they had one of those airline magazines, and I was flipping through it, and there was an advertisement from Budweiser, I think, one of the beer companies, that had the headline, “Silent nights are overrated.” And then I flipped the page a couple more pages through, and there was an advertisement for this really expensive, high-end, outdoor grill, and it says, “Who says it’s better to give then to receive?” And my response is Jesus is the one who says it’s better to give than to receive! And I was really irritated because I just sat there and thought you know, would they put an ad in their airlines in the Islamic world during Ramadan that says, “Fasting is overrated” or, you know, put something in one of their airlines in India that says, “Who says everything is one with the universe?” And I thought, you know, why would they do that with us? And the issue was that I was totally missing the point, and I was seeing things out of perspective because I was taking a kind of personal offense at these issues rather than seeing the bigger picture.

Now, as you know, I think we have tremendous problems when it comes to a militant kind of secularization with some of the church-state questions that the late Richard John Neuhaus used to call “the naked public square,” but I think that this outrage that we are expressing toward the commercial marketplace sometimes is overblown. We see things as persecution, that really aren’t. Sometimes there are. You know, sometimes we do see situations of a school system penalizing a child for writing “Merry Christmas” instead of saying that this is a holiday card. But the huffing and puffing that we tend to do when marketers don’t get our Christian commitments is, I think, a little bit off base.

First of all, I think we need to keep in mind most of these issues that we take offense at are done by corporations, and these corporations are trying to sell products. They are really not trying to offend constituencies. It really isn’t good business to go out of your way to offend

constituencies. That’s not good economics at all for anybody. And I think the problem is with those ads that really got me upset, I am willing to bet that whoever came up with these ad campaigns didn’t even know that they were making fun of Jesus Christ and of the birth in Bethlehem in the case of Silent Night or with Jesus’ statement that Paul records in his letter to the Corinthians that it is better to give than to receive. They just know we’ve heard it’s better to give than to receive, probably something from Benjamin Franklin or somewhere. We know Silent Night, that’s a Christmas carol that people sing. They didn’t trace that through I’ll bet. They just know it’s just part of the background music. And so for them, it probably is the same as saying something about decking the halls or reindeer games or Heat Miser and Snow Miser, any other kind of Christmas background music that’s around there. And so, it’s just people who don’t get all of that because they are living in a time in American culture that is much more secularized.

So, our response to that I think ought not to be a sense of outrage as though we’re victims. I think instead we ought to say okay, this tells us that our culture is less and less connected with the more basic roots of Christianity, and many, especially in the culture-making sort of sectors in American life, see Christmas kind of the same way that most Americans see Hanukah. We know about—we know what a menorah is. We know what dreidels are, but most people don’t really know about the Maccabean fight. They don’t really know about the miraculous provision of oil to the Maccabeans. They don’t know the background story there. And that ought not to make us angry. It instead ought to say let’s take the opportunity to understand our neighbors here and understand that they see us, when they think of us and when they think of Christmas, they think about it more in terms of the trivialities than they do in terms of incarnation and blood atonement and the kingdom that dawned there in Bethlehem. So, they know about Silent Night like they know about Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, and they don’t see just how momentous it is to say Emmanuel, God is with us.

And so, I think that ought to tell us we need to spend some more time engaging our neighbors with exactly why the incarnation is good news, why the incarnation is scary news, why Herod receives this as bad news, and if you think about it, the Christmas message really is one that if it is really understood, it just doesn’t fit with all the trivial trappings of the holidays anyway. It’s much, much stranger than that, and I think that’s a good thing. We ought to embrace the strangeness at Christmas and all year round because frankly, a gospel at Christmas or any other time that is safe enough to sell beer and barbecue grills isn’t the kind of gospel that is going to be able to make blessings flow far as the curse is found, as Isaac Watts put it.

And so I think we ought to, when we think about this war on Christmas, we shouldn’t turn this into a fight for our right to party. I think instead we ought to remind ourselves that we live in, as every other generation before us has done, what Isaiah in Isaiah 9 calls a land of deep darkness. That’s what he said would settle over Galilee of the Gentiles. And we need to remember that that darkness isn’t overcome by sarcasm or personal offense or retaliatory insults or boycotts of Wal- Mart or whatever it is. The light of Bethlehem shines in the darkness, and that’s what we need to recover in our churches, in our families, in our communities.

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In this episode of Signposts I respond to an email from a listener, who is facing a volatile situation at her church between a new believer and an older member. How should churches gently shepherd new believers who may bring in “baggage” to the church, and how can more seasoned saints come alongside them in fellowship and support?

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In this episode of Signposts I respond to a listener’s question about video games, and what parents should remember as they make decisions about this.

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In this special episode of Signposts I sit down with professor and author Rosaria Butterfield to talk about her conversion to Christ, her previous life in the LGBT community, and what Christians need to remember when reaching out to the world around them.

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In this special episode of Signposts, I sit down with award winning musician and author Andrew Peterson to talk about creativity, marriage, the gospel, and more. Listen below, and use the links to subscribe to Signposts and receive new episodes when they publish.

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