GARBC: Four Theological Threats Facing the Church This Decade

I’ve become more and more aware of another huge theological threat to churches now; the failure to help congregants becomes “self-feeders” by teaching them the basics of analyzing Scripture for themselves.

In some cases, I’m almost persuaded that it’s because too many pastors have never learned the art themselves, but have rather learned what to think at their Bible colleges, and thus spend their careers simply repeating what they learned there—leaving their congregations, no matter how well they’ve learned, in spiritual infancy. If you see a pastor more or less using the text as a springboard to go to say what he really wanted to talk about instead of exegeting the passage, this may be what’s going on.

And that has a huge deal to do with why the church is so challenged by things like gender dysphoria, experience-based hermeneutics, personality-driven ministry, and the like. You don’t train people to think theologically, and you’re going to end up having trouble addressing hard questions.

(and as I work through “what DO I think about gender dysphoria myself?”, I find myself challenged as well)