As I have studied and taught about being a disciple of Jesus over the better part of a decade now, there is something that keeps bothering me that I can’t let go. There is something that we are not teaching people that they need to know.

 

A.W. Tozer wrote in The Crucified Life:

 

“What a bunch of unworthy people we evangelicals have become, daring to stand up on our feet and preach to an intelligent audience that the essence, the final purpose and the cause of Christ is to save us from hell. How stupid can we get and still claim to be followers of Christ.

 

“The purpose of God is not to save us from hell; the purpose of God is to save us and make us like Christ and to make us like God. God will never be done with us until the day we see His face, when His name is on our foreheads; and we shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is.

Over 15 years ago I made a prediction to my Evangelical friends that the legalization of same-sex marriage was inevitable in the United States.

 

My argument was that there simply wasn’t anything in the Constitution to stop it. The only way it could have been slowed down, is if we would had preemptively adopted a constitutional amendment stating that marriage was between one man and one woman alone, a long time ago.

 

At the time I argued that rather than waste our political capital trying to stop same-sex marriage; we should have been putting that political energy into ending abortion, where we could make a constitutional argument under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that unborn children are not receiving equal protection (but that is another article).

 

However, what I did not foresee at the time was the number of Evangelicals who would turn to progressive Christian theology in order to attempt to make same-sex relationships acceptable within the Evangelical church.

I’m admittedly a church nerd.

 

That means that not only am I a disciple of Jesus, but that I also love to study churches;

 

…what makes them succeed or fail; why some people stay committed to Christ and others fall away; and why some try to change Jesus by rejecting orthodox Christian theology.

 

To that extent, I have had a morbid fascination with the recent trend of “de-conversion” stories.