The Neo-Evangelical Mirage

And what sense is Andrew Tate masculine? Because he's got muscles because he works out a lot. Is there self -control there?

This is a pornographer. This is someone who himself has, I think, even talked about raping people. This is someone, you know, who doesn't even understand what they believe.

They're Muslim one day, they're sort of Christian, quasi -Christian the next, they're not even a consistent Muslim. This is someone who's very unstable, who seems very insecure, who seems very lonely, who, in my opinion, just doesn't even, he doesn't exhibit a lot of the masculine traits that are pretty fundamental.

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. And I am excited today because I finally have johnharris .substack

.com up and running. And it's not the fact that it's even a sub stack that I have, which you can subscribe to if you want to.

It's the fact that I have John Harris. I've never had John Harris. I always get

John Harris 1989 or John Harris, you know, two or three or 586 or something that's,

I'm not the first, you know, on X, I'm not the first on Facebook.

I'm not the first. When it comes to websites, johnharris .com is a bodybuilder. I joke with people, that's my other career, but it's not.

John Harris music is someone else who ironically does folk music. But I had to go for John Harris tunes because obviously

John Harris music was taken. And finally, I have a John Harris and that really made my day. I have johnharris .substack

.com and I think the only reason I have it is because I created my sub stack years ago and I never did anything with it.

So I got in on the ground floor and I noticed that when I was editing things on my profile, it gave me the option of switching to John Harris, something else that had like three numbers after it.

And I thought, yeah, I got in on the ground floor. This is the first time

I was the first John Harris to sub stack, even though I didn't write anything. Well, now I've written something.

You can subscribe to sub stack, go to, again, johnharris .substack .com. I won't get tired of saying that.

And the piece that I have out there is called the neo evangelical mirage relevance strategies that win crowds and lose the church.

So I wrote this this afternoon and I think what I'll do, depending on how this goes is

I am, I want to at least do more written pieces. In fact, before I even started a podcast, that's what

I did. I wrote things and the podcast was more of a, an attempt to get information out there in a, a form that was less work for me at the time.

It wasn't that much work because it was pretty much just, I think I had a, uh,

I don't know if it was iTunes. It went to iTunes. I had an audio, um, format, uh, that, uh, website that would take my audio and cast it to iTunes and these other places.

And then I had YouTube and that was it. Well, now I have rumble and YouTube and Facebook and, uh, there's a little more editing involved and I'm doing all of that.

I don't know if it's more work. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but I do think that written form is better.

Maybe not for everything, but for most things, especially when it comes to highly controversial subjects.

I think when you're writing, you have, you're forced to think more clearly about things. At least you should be. I know there's exceptions.

And I think that people who are on Substack a lot tend to be a few levels beyond those who are your typical social media user who maybe just consumes video content or audio content.

Cause there's something about the written word. I mean, even our Bible, right, it comes to us in a written form. It requires a reflection, contemplation.

You can stop. It doesn't just keep playing. So I think there's a place for video. I do.

I think, uh, you get to know someone a little better if that's what you're after through a video format. Some of you are listening or watching this right now, and I think you're going to understand a little bit more about me probably from this.

There's also going to be things I can add and I can do it in a short period of time cause I'm talking. But I think in general, if you really want to understand an issue, if you're issues focused, written form is generally better.

So with that, I'm going to try to do some more Substack stuff. I obviously already write for TruthScript for American Reformer for the

Federalist when I can and for, I don't know, other places. I'm not trying to think who else has published me, but I'd like to get into some other places as well.

But I'm also going to be writing on Substack at times there's, there's some articles that just aren't a fit for those other places or maybe they're not interested, but I'm interested in it.

And it could serve as a basis for a shorter podcast. So that's a little update. And please, if you are a

Substack person, go subscribe at johnharris .substack .com. This is the article we're going to discuss.

It's called the Neo -Evangelical Mirage. Like I said, I'm going to just read through it, make some comments as we go.

Recently, it has occurred to me that Neo -Evangelicals are still by and large repeating the contextualization mistakes that ensnared

Bill Hybels and Rick Warren in previous generations. They remain drawn to the pursuit of certain demographics they believe will grant them a cultural advantage.

And in the short term, it appears as if this strategy is correct. Yet the end result is always the same.

The church has become marginalized as a superficial glow that once made it appear bright dims with changing circumstances.

So I am obviously referencing previous attempts to do church growth strategies and Bill Hybels and Rick Warren being probably the premier examples of that.

But whether it's Willow Creek or what's

Rick Warren's called Saddleback or any other form of church growth strategy, there's one thing that they all have in common.

It seems to me at least, and that is they tend to use formulas, gimmicks, they tend to use these tactics that are usually concocted in focus groups and labs and with advisory firms, those kinds of things to target specific demographics that are vulnerable to the message of the church that will be receptive, we'll say, and to put it in a positive light to the message that a church might have.

And so, for example, for Willow Creek and Saddleback, although they were different, I know that their strategy was primarily trying to appeal to the personal taste of mainly middle -class suburban families.

And I went to Rick Warren's church years ago. This was not for a Sunday service, it was for an event they had there.

It was a John Piper's anniversary, like 10th anniversary of Desiring God or something like that.

Maybe it was 25th anniversary, I'm trying to remember now. It was like 2010 or so. And it was at Saddleback, so I was there.

And there were some weird things that came out of that. There were some videos I know Piper did with Rick Warren at that time that were,

I think, kind of controversial, faded in my mind. But I do remember this about it. They had,

I think, five services and each one had a different form of music. And so musical style became so important, so preeminent.

You would choose, you get the same basic sermon, but you get to choose which style you want it in. So anyway, that was years ago.

That was what I witnessed. That was popular at the time. I know I know a pastor who even had folks from Saddleback come out to his church to really look at it and see if there's anything they could do or no, maybe he went to a local.

That's what it is. He went to a local, it wasn't really a conference.

It was more of a clinic, I guess, because it was for pastors specifically on how they could emulate

Saddleback and what Saddleback was doing. And this kind of thing was happening all over the place. Like it was like they caught fire in a bottle and so everyone else could also catch fire in a bottle and do the same thing

Saddleback was doing, the same thing Little Creek was doing, boost the numbers. And it obviously didn't work for all these other churches.

It worked for some and not others. It was it depending on the context, there's obviously a lot of things that go into whether a church is successful in that regard or not.

But I think in the long run, a lot of that was a reshuffling of the deck. It was growth, kind of like what you saw with the

Night Deals situation a little bit. Right. It's you count the numbers and say we've grown. But how much of that is growing, growing from taking

Christians who are already committed to a smaller church somewhere who have now decided the low commitment and better style music or whatever it is you offer, they're going to go for that.

And how much of it is from off the streets? Someone has come in and they are now with no

Christian background converted. You see, I don't know the answer to that, but I suspect that a lot of it was reshuffling the deck anyway.

I'd say in the next paragraph, we've gotten one paragraph and I can't keep out of my own way here. I'm going to have to be a little quicker to understand.

This problem requires some background on what new evangelicalism is and what it attempts to accomplish. I've written about this at greater length in my book,

Social Justice Goes to Church. But it is enough to say that since the 1950s, neo -evangelicals have been an identifiable group of Christians who have attempted to preserve

Orthodox theology similar to the fundamentalists, while also seeking to regain the cultural influence that the rise of modernity and theological liberalism helped destroy.

Their methods for reclaiming social relevance revolve around pursuing dominance in fields that modern people who have discounted the

Bible's authority consider important. And I'm noticing now for the first time, note to self,

I guess here, I did put in links for some of these things that I noticed there's no links, so I'll try to fill in the gaps as we go.

Fuller Theological Seminary brought in its curriculum to include social activism, psychology, certifications, and modern business techniques in order to appeal to a changing demographic that considered these fields more authoritative than the old, old story fundamentalists still wore in their sleeves at their humble, but allegedly academically unimpressive

Bible institutes. It does not take a detective to see that Christianity today, the National Association of Evangelicals and the

Evangelical Theological Society have all drifted from the biblical roots in an attempt to seek relevance and approval.

This pursuit of relevance, with the assumption that Christianity as usual is not relevant, put neo -evangelicals on the path to all kinds of cultural engagement and church growth strategies.

Progressive evangelicals believe that the church had failed to live up to its own social teaching on matters such as the

Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. In order to be more biblical, the church would need to incorporate new left ideas that were, after all, considered biblical by the advocates of this approach.

From Ron Sider to Russell Moore, the social justice and fugitive evangelicalism has ensured a seat for evangelicals in the last row on the progressive left bus.

So what am I saying there? I'm saying this. If you read my book, Social Justice Goes to Church, I go into detail about this.

But you had guys like West Granberg, Michael Sinn and Richard Mao and Ron Sider and who's the guy with Sojourner's Magazine.

I don't know why I'm blanking on his name, Jim Wallace, you know, and others who were all trying to make evangelicalism relevant, but they had to do so by wedding it with these new left ideas.

And I think they were dyed in the wool progressives or Marxists, if you want to call some of them that. Some of them were members of SDS, and they essentially were convinced that the new left was correct, neo -Marxism was correct, but they still wanted to hold on to their evangelical faith.

And so they tried to blend these things together. And Tim Keller was very influenced by this. Tim Keller is really,

I think, a part of this and someone who really took that whole kind of milieu back in the early 70s into mainstream in the 2010s.

He's not the only one, though. I think people like Ron Sider also impacted Russell Moore. They impacted

David Platt. You got guys like Matt Chandler and others, J .D. Greer. These guys all, whether through direct contact or secondary or tertiary contact, bought into some of this and they spread it in more mainstream circles and evangelicalism.

And it's my book, Social Justice Goes to Church, tracks much of this. And that's what

I'm talking about. I'm saying that neo -evangelicalism was this approach that wanted to regain social acceptance because in modernity, no one's calling the pastor.

I shouldn't say no one, but less people are respecting the pastor enough to call him when there's a problem. They want to know what the psychologist thinks.

They want to know what the business executive thinks. They want to know what the social activist thinks.

You even look at new shows today when moral issues come up. How often are pastors the ones that are on television talking about whatever it is?

I mean, I still see these John MacArthur clips of Larry King from like 15 years ago that are being circulated, maybe 20 years ago.

And it just doesn't happen much. And I think there is a desire in evangelicalism and specifically neo -evangelicalism to regain that,

OK, to try to go back to a time when pastors were more respected. How are we going to do this?

Well, we got to cater to a certain demographic or we have to master a certain discipline. We got to do a thing that's not necessarily just understanding the word of God, preaching the word of God, applying the word of God.

We got to do something else. And that's been the spirit that I think is animated neo -evangelicalism for a long time.

And it's created a leftward drift, essentially. And you even look at folks like Carl Henry, who signed the

Chicago Declaration in 1973. And it's like, why would he sign? And then I think Christina today interviews him after that, and then he's kind of disparaging it.

I think the reason is because. There's obviously there was some energy there with these young leftists who came from evangelicals from McGovern, and they care about social justice, but at the same time, it's like there's also these these scary doctrinal things, right?

They sound a lot like these progressive evangelicals, we call them, that end up trying to merge the social gospel with the gospel somehow, like Tom Skinner, right?

Or Samuel Escobar, who comes up with basically liberation theology for evangelicals, calls it an evangelical theology of liberation.

And and so there's sort of an uncomfortableness with this. But at the same time, well, this is where the young people are at.

I mean, what are we going to do? And right at this is happening. The Jesus movement also being kind of part of this.

Jimmy Carter's presidency fails. There's this big populist backlash against the

Democrats and the religious right is born, and that steals the headlines. Right. And the religious right is for about 10 years, this populist kind of thing.

And then in the presidential election of 1990, I guess it would have been 1990.

The the I was at 92. And I'm trying to remember was 92. I think the.

Republicans and the evangelical religious right groups start to forge a close connection in the primary, so,

George, I write about this for American reformer, but they also start pursuing a seat at the table, influence that kind of thing in exchange for what they don't get much for their agenda.

And this has been the evangelical story. It's like it doesn't really whether the right or the left, they end up sitting in the back seat.

And you could take this out of the political dynamic if it's just pure church growth strategy. They end up trying to ape something that's already popular.

They're not creating something. They're just following in the wake of something else that they think is culturally relevant and popular.

I mean, how often do you still see those videos from usually down in Florida somewhere, some mega church, and they're like riding motorcycles or doing some movie reenactment?

That's that same spirit still exists in some of these places that are more entertainment driven.

I go on, though, I say the most evangelical Christians are on the political right for obvious reasons, the religious right decided to cut a deal with Republican Party machine under George Bush rather than maintain its independent populist position.

Evangelicals gained a seat at the table and a pat on the back, but were not able to advance their moral agenda very far under this arrangement.

I wrote about this last year for American reformer. Of course, the new evangelicals who gained the most ministry related attention were the church growth moguls.

There are numerous places one could begin the story, perhaps the Jesus movement in the 1970s and the replacement of old hymns and liturgies with contemporary music and a more open atmosphere intended to seem authentic, or perhaps the 1990s with superficial suburban middle class tastes motivated a low commitment, simplified an artificial theater, theatrical church with a stage that served as an offering from traditional

Christianity. Some have called this the me church where personal preferences outweighed theological devotion.

To be fair, what came after it as a reaction was often just as centered on personal preference.

There has been a great deal of argument recently about the damage third way thinking has done to the church's reputation.

I criticized this approach years ago, but for a different reason than many of the more recent critiques. Pastor Tim Keller's style of third way thinking was practically accepted as the norm when

I was at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary throughout the 2010s. So was David Platt's radical form of high commitment living, which was supposed to rebuke previous seeker sensitive models, even though it was just as purpose driven and as shallow as Rick Horne's configuration.

The root issue I saw was not simply that a supposed third way between conservative and liberal with other

Christian moral positions to changing cultural dynamics or guarantee compromise when one side was right and the other was wrong, though these are legitimate concerns.

My main problem was that the third way was, as its core, a blue city contextualization strategy intended to allow

Republicans, who most evangelicals were, and Democrats to worship together without serious offense given to either.

The motive was wrong from the beginning. OK, this is so key. The motive is the issue in my mind with all of this.

So the third way stuff, it's fair to say that this does pull evangelicals in a leftward direction.

Right now, what if the left is is. Correct, though, what if the left has the right moral position or they don't? But let's just say they do.

Well, then it wouldn't be wrong. Right. But and that's usually the comeback is like, well, the left is right about some things. The right is right about some things.

Why can't we just have a Christian approach? Well, I mean, the issue is that politically, at least, is that evangelicals are coming from a very conservative background because of their moral principles and cultural affinities.

And now you are subverting them to get them to consider the possibility of maybe voting for Democrats and that kind of thing, because after all,

Democrats have really good policies, too, just like Republicans. And there's sort of a moral equivalency that is often created.

Now, there's people who advocate for third way who deny this, say Tim Keller's third way didn't do that.

Let's put that on the table. We talked about that in other podcasts. Brush all of that issue aside, there's a bigger issue here, and the bigger issue is the motivation for it in the first place.

Why was there an attempt in blue cities initially, at least to kind of create this third way?

Because evangelicals have a bad reputation among blue city voters. They're influenced by the media.

If they've never met an evangelical Christian, they go with what the media says. Evangelical Christians are. They're politically conservative.

They vote for Republicans. Republicans are the bad guys. How are you going to overcome that? You're trying to build a church in an area that sees you as a bad guy because of your evangelical theology, because they see it as a right leaning voting group.

So you try to push back against and say, well, that's not us. Right. And Tim Keller, who is a registered Democrat and admitted this publicly, this is what he he did in New York City.

He and this the tragedy of the situation is that this ended up getting exported and is still being exported into the heartland, into places where it's not even a blue city, but you think that's the demographic you have to appeal to.

And so that was one contextualization strategy, and I say, why not just simply preach the truth, apply it to all circumstances and do so for the sheep who hear

God's voice. Let the chips fall where they may. This does not mean a lack of awareness. For example, when preaching against abortion, part of the preaching, the full counsel of God to one's congregation will likely include preaching the forgiveness

God offers to those who have committed the sin of aborting their children. They are likely sitting in the congregation and need this assurance, but this does not mean sugarcoating or deemphasizing the things

God emphasizes in his word. In the early 2000s, I remember clearly the rise of the emergent church.

Eventually, it became evident that they were directly tampering with doctrine. And this is what separated their movement from mainstream evangelicalism.

Yet lighter versions of what they attempted continued. Tim Keller's third way became the popular contextualization strategy by attempting to transcend the right left political divide at a time when that divide was becoming impossible to ignore.

Evangelicals had a poor reputation in blue areas for their culturally conservative positions, and Tim Keller offered a way to soften that perception.

He only massaged the doctrines of sin and hell, unlike Doug Padgett and Brian McLaren, who outright denied them.

So I'm referencing emergent church leaders who went totally heterodox, totally heretical, actually, and just started denying very basic biblical things like the hell even exists.

I'm pretty sure those guys did. I know Rob Bell did. Right. And and so someone like Tim Keller comes in and he doesn't say the hell doesn't exist.

He says, I agree with the Westminster standards, but he softens the idea of hell. You know, hell is locked from the inside.

People choose to go there. It's not God's presence isn't there. Right. He uses the

C .S. Lewis thing when it comes to sin. He doesn't use the his primary way he describes it is not the missing the mark, that sin is a violation of God's law,

God's standard. It's more of like a violation of the best for yourself. You're inhibiting your own self -actualization, becoming the best version of you and that kind of thing.

And of course, this resonates in blue city areas and it offers the idea that you can keep your orthodoxy and still try to overcome the bias that you're up against.

And I remember years ago I was at this church planting thing and I was

I really wanted this to work. It was in a neighboring town. And the guy who was doing the planting was doing a

Keller series. And I wasn't a fan of Keller, but, you know, whatever. At the time, this was a while ago.

I was like, I don't know much about Keller. What I know, I don't care for, but I'll certainly give him a chance.

And I remember that Keller was doing this. They were talking about these doctrines.

They're talking about sin and hell and the existence of God and just very basic kind of Genesis one things,

Genesis one, two, three. And every time something would come up that was controversial, that would have been a disagreement between.

What Christians believe and then what a secular liberal New Yorker believes Keller would have some kind of a fortune cookie that he'd pull out, and I think this impressed some people.

They thought, wow, you know, look, I couldn't have done that. I mean, I'm just kind of meat and potatoes about the Bible. The Bible says this and look what

Keller did there. He comes at it from this different angle where he he really takes apart the negative perceptions that someone has about Christianity and changes the frame and makes that person consider maybe

Christianity is true. Now, there's ways, I think, that you can do this if you're accurate to the scripture and you do so skillfully.

There's nothing wrong with having a profound thought. And but when it comes to things like homosexuality,

I think this was the big one where Keller was just obviously off. He he dances around it so much.

He really so badly wants you to consider. He wants you to sort of jump out of your secular perspective to consider the truth of Christianity.

And he doesn't want any inhibitions to that. That's the best face you can put on it. And so what he'll do is something like homosexuality.

And there's a video of him doing this online. If you start saying that, well, straight people can't go to heaven just because they're straight.

So why would homosexuals go to hell just because they're homosexual? Right. And you have to like stop for a minute and think, but he's already talking.

So you don't get a chance to really absorb it. It just kind of confuses you. It's like smoke in the conversation.

And then in that confusion, he's able to keep talking and give you good reasons for considering Christianity and thinking that maybe you've misjudged it.

And this is, I think, the whole enterprise is trying to make blue city dwellers think that they maybe they misjudged

Christianity. Maybe the media got something wrong. Maybe they're not just quite as anti -homosexual as you've been told, that kind of thing.

Right. And I understand the attraction to this. But this is this is the third way kind of model,

I would say, or at least it jumps out of this. The genesis of this model is in this kind of approach where the attempt is to make it acceptable to be left leaning in the church.

Another contextualizer was Mark Driscoll, though contemporary evangelicals often want to forget how popular he was.

He provided a template for reaching blue cities as well. He did not have the sophisticated public intellectual persona that helped

Tim Keller appeal to NPR listeners in New York City. Instead, he adopted a more aggressive in your face approach to issues such as sexuality, once considered taboo to teach on in graphic terms and evangelical circles.

Driscoll was not only graphic at times, but also used profane language, shouted at his audience and dressed in a more casual blue collar way.

While his satellite church empire collapsed after his dismissal, so did his contextualization strategy.

And Keller then became the main template and the one the Gospel Coalition and other influential evangelical organizations championed in their quest to reach the young post -Christian millennial.

I think that's important also, because I remember this. Those guys were both kind of like the way forward.

So a lot of conservative evangelicals were thinking, how are we going to deal with this world that seems to be so much more opposed to Christianity, especially on sexual issues?

And it was like, well, you got Tim Keller over here and you got Mark Driscoll over here. They're both different approaches, but these are both paths forward.

And after things went south with Mars Hill, it was like Tim Keller was the last one standing. Tim Keller was now the de facto strategy.

In a way, the political instincts of Richard Mao and the church growth appeal of Willow Creek types found their nexus in Keller's Redeemer Presbyterian Church, where else in the evangelical world would someone commission an audit to determine how comfortable

LGBTQ people felt in a major congregation? I remember a friend of mine who attended on occasion telling me how many single adults in their 30s and 40s were present.

Perhaps it worked. But what exactly about it worked? While David Platt and Tim Keller tapped into the dissatisfaction millennials had with their fundamentalist or 1990s secret sensitive versions of church they grew up with, another generation was emerging with an outlook incompatible with this new contextualization strategy.

Younger millennials and zoomers grew up in a media driven world, completely destabilized by moral anarchy and the broken families it produced.

If anything, the anti -Christian portion of this demographic is very anti -Christian. There is no accommodation that will attract them to a church that brands itself as not your grandfather's church.

They do not care. Meanwhile, another portion of this generation wants something solid and rooted to belong to, and the gimmicky church with the drywall bank photography and rock band does not appeal to them.

The inevitable reaction from new evangelicals is to formulate a new strategy, one that attempts to address the felt needs of a demographic accustomed to chaos, bleak economic prospects and moral instability.

Ironically, more liturgical churches outside the evangelical tradition, such as Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, appear well positioned to receive some of these people without changing anything about themselves.

The neo -evangelicals who reinvent themselves every decade will find it difficult to persuade a generation looking for stability that they possess it.

Some may argue that evangelical doctrine is stable, given that it is rooted in the solos of the Reformation. And this is true.

But the emphasis of the past 50 years has been on outward aesthetics and novel ways to do church.

More traditional forms of Protestantism, including fundamentalism that have kept their liturgies and doctrine, are well positioned to benefit from renewed interest in older forms of religion.

Another strategy that I already see emerging is the attempt to attract Gen Z males by catering to their grievances and reinforcing their sense of victimhood.

Many of them are indeed victims of severe social engineering against men and white men in particular, unlike anything our country has previously seen.

Through managerialism, HR departments and DEI, every institution has betrayed them. But perhaps the church has not.

Perhaps the church can position itself as the one place where Gen Z men can find encouragement and support. Recognizing this, the next steps are extremely important and will shape the future of the fractured neo -evangelical movement.

Either neo -evangelicals can abandon the contextualization project or they can lean into it more intensely.

It will be difficult to discern which course is being taken in the initial stages, but it will become clear soon enough.

A church that decides to preach the full counsel of God, let the chips fall where they may, offer a clarion call to all kinds of people in its local community and lean into the doctrines and traditions that have made the church a unique institution will become a healthy place.

Even if its growth is slower on the margins, it will be good growth that adds not only numbers, but maturity.

It will attract people who are interested in God, church and service. A church that decides to target

Gen Z males in particular by reinforcing their grievances with boomers, Jews, women and others, whether those grievances are legitimate or not, will enter a tailspin it cannot avoid.

A constructive, providential view of life's transitory struggles will be seen as downplaying the concerns of young men.

An intergenerational church filled with wisdom will be harder to maintain. The congregation will demand a continuous level of hostility toward its perceived enemies, including the moral elevation of secular masculine figures over Christian leaders who failed them.

I already see signs of this taking shape, and it is not because neo -evangelicals tested it in a lab.

It is because the mentality of neo -evangelicalism is to chase growth instead of chasing Christ as a means to growth.

I have not yet mentioned that the prominent churches that will inevitably double down on their third wave blue city strategy, these churches will simply diminish in influence even if it takes some time.

Either that or they will intensify their progressive credentials in order to continue pursuing the demographic they always sought.

In that case, their end will resemble that of the mainline churches. If there is any hope for evangelical theology, it will be found in abandoning the neo -evangelical pursuit of novelty and influence at the expense of tradition and theology.

So here's what I'm I'm I'm somewhat making a prediction here, and that's why I think this is a relevant piece, probably for most who read it.

I'm saying that we are at the cusp of something. We are noticing something. There's a shift going on.

And one in this shifts also can change. Right. But right now there seems to be at least a trajectory that young men, there's at least an opportunity with young men to try to pull them into a church.

They're seeking something of stability. More young men than young women, perhaps. And. The neo -evangelical mindset is to capitalize on wherever the growth is and then sort of like think about it like fishing, like, you know, the seems like more bass are biting today, right, than bluegill or trout.

Well, I'm going to only fish for bass and that's it. And like I'm going to tailor everything around bass, like all my equipment, everything's going to be about bass.

So you become a bass fisherman, right? Not just a fisherman. And I think what I'm trying to argue against is that I'm saying.

Really, regardless of where the trends are, where certain demographics are, the idea that what

Christians should be pursuing is essentially fishing for everyone, just being fishers of all men, it's men, it's not certain men, it's men.

And I understand this is where contextualization comes from, that the Apostle Paul would reach out to different audiences in different contexts, namely

Jews and Gentiles. He would start with the synagogue. And then during this transitional period of into the new covenant, he would then go to the

Gentiles. And when he was rejected by the Jews, which I think that's not normative, that is a that is specifically about old the new covenant.

Right. But Gentiles was Gentiles. It wasn't like he was only going to certain groups and making them certain

Gentile groups, the only groups worthy of attention. If you are in an area where there's only

Greeks or something like that, of course, he's going to be talking to Greeks because that's who lives there. But the idea of a local church is it's actually local, like it's actually for the people who exist and live in that area.

And yes, there may be barriers between cultures, especially linguistic barriers that might require other churches to use different languages for the purpose of clear communication.

It's different, though, than using things like. Style emphasis, the changing the message around to appeal to certain age demographics or certain racial groups that also speak

English, but they they happen to be black in the ghetto or something. I've seen that before, too, where it's like we're only going after these ghetto

Christians who are black in this region. And so this is how we're going to do it and not we're going to ignore the others.

We're going after this group. And the best thing, honestly, is just to be normal.

And I wish I could just like say like that's the general rule and all of this, just be normal, but just like be someone who maintains the liturgy, the traditions, the and most of all, the theology of the church and the message of the church, regardless of the circumstances around you, regardless of what group is resonating, when you you appeal to all of them and a healthy church is going to have, especially when it comes to like different age groups, a healthy church is going to eventually have all the age groups represented.

And there's obviously there's regions where you're going to have more retired people or less retired people and you're going to be reflective of the region.

But the point is, you want a church that has older women with younger women, older men with younger men, families.

You want the full spectrum present that's available in your local community. You don't want to just be the church that's like the hip church that only the 20 something year olds go to or the 30 something year olds go to.

And I've seen that my whole life, that that's been the new evangelical experiences. Usually it's chasing younger people.

What are the young kids like? What are the cool kids like? Let's do that. Let's try to attract them. Let's do their music.

Let's dress like them. Let's find identify the cool ones in the youth group and make them the leaders, push them to seminary because they're the key to our growth.

It's popularity. And I'm saying right now we're in this phase where things are shifting and there's a new kind of desire coming from a younger demographic for a more rooted tradition.

Now we'll see how much this grows. I don't know, but the motive is going to be key.

Are you going to like switch the way you're doing church and become more trad because that's what's in if you're if that's the reason you do it, it won't last.

Or are you going to lean into theology traditions because that's what's actually best for everyone?

That's that's part of being a mature, fully orbed, functional church. And I'm saying these two motivations are going to become clear,

I think, in the coming years. I had a link and I don't I guess I'll have to try to edit the sub stack.

I don't know how to do that yet. It's probably easy, but I had a link from Dale Partridge.

Actually, it was a tweet that he had put out earlier in the year where he's saying Andrew Tate is more masculine.

He's more masculine figure to look up to than most pastors. Right. And I think the thing that caught my eye the most was most pastors.

Like, like really, like in America, like we've run the numbers on all the pastors and our impression is that most pastors are like this.

Maybe maybe a lot of influential pastors are not very masculine. That's sort of the managerialism.

But most pastors, you know, and then I'm thinking of Andrew Tate and I'm like, Andrew Tate's masculine. And what sense is Andrew Tate masculine?

Because he's got muscles because he works out a lot. I actually don't see him as a very masculine guy in many sense.

Like the only thing I see is that there's an aggression, there's testosterone there. Right. Which which that's obviously part of being a man.

But there's is there self -control there? This is a pornographer. This is someone who himself has,

I think, even talked about raping people. This is someone who is a cancer on traditional hierarchies in society.

This is someone who tempts young men and men of all ages to do evil things.

This is someone who doesn't even understand what they believe. They're they're Muslim one day.

They're they're sort of Christian, quasi Christian the next. They're not even a consistent Muslim. This is someone who's very unstable, who seems very insecure.

He seems very lonely, who, in my opinion, just doesn't even he doesn't exhibit a lot of the masculine traits that are pretty fundamental to being a man.

And if you're going to compare, like, you know, Andrew Tate to J .D. Greer or something like who's more masculine, you know what?

I don't really know. Like depends like Greer has a family. Greer has built an institution that I would say in many of the wrong ways.

I mean, I'm picking him because he's a guy. I just read his book and I really don't care for it. I don't think he speaks straight. I think there's many things that aren't very masculine about him.

I think he's he's unclear. It's a mess, in my opinion. But like there's some basic moral things he seems to at least get right from the outward vantage point that Andrew Tate wears on his sleeve, that he's gotten wrong.

All that to say, if you're a church that starts to lean into making these comparisons more and trying to attract young men who are coming out of the manosphere, red pilled stuff and you like you're using that kind of bait, if that's what it is,

I don't know. But if that's what it is, you're trying to get them in by being like, we're the masculine church. We recognize every, you know, all the pastors out there, they're just effeminate.

They're just gay. That's what Christians are. That's what pastors are. You know, kind of like Russell Moore from 10 years ago, ripping down the church.

But now you're ripping it down for different reasons. Because you want to appeal to a certain demographic.

I think that isn't going to work long term. That's my prediction. OK, I think that is you're going to have to change strategy at some point.

Like it's not it's not sustainable. And you're going to end up attracting a lot of people who are probably unstable themselves.

And are you going to be able to bring them into a place of stability? That's the question. And if you're specifically like just trying to focus on that, that demographic to the exclusion of others, then you won't have the others there to provide any stability.

And you do need the older people there and older women to provide stability. You really do. So I've seen this train before.

I think it's just a new evangelical mindset. It's just very it's big on shortcuts, big on gimmicks, big on formulas, big on running the numbers and finding out who the receptive people are and then catering to them and trying to gain influence through the through numbers and through that influence.

And I think it's just wrong. I just don't think we should even be thinking in those terms. Really, our thought should be, how do we reach men and women?

How do we get the truth of God into them? If they are attracted by the Holy Spirit, praise

God. It's my sheep who hear my voice. So if the sheep come because they're hearing the voice of the Lord, that's what we want. That's the good kind of growth that might be slower, but that's actually healthy growth.

And you're not going to face plant. You're less likely to, at least. So that's my my warning, my message, my prediction.

And I hope that is helpful to you. Subscribe if you are on JohnHarris .substack