There was a conservative and Dutchy denom
That passed a report with indignant aplomb.
But we never bleed,
If our critics can't read,
And so here's to a missing-the-point pheenom.

. . . I don't believe I have ever footnoted a limerick before, so here you go.

One trap that parents fall into is the trap of not wanting sin around their kids. But I suppose this requres some explanation.

The mistake arises because there are a bunch of sins that parents should keep away from their kids -- kidnappers, for starters, and cocaine dealers, and pornographers, and seducers, and Cartesian dualists. One of the accusations leveled against private Christian education is that conservative parents are sheltering their kids. What next?! Parents sheltering children! We feed them too.

But here is where the mistake come in. There is a question of degree here. We are not supposed to keep our children away from the presence of all sin whatever. And that's a good thing, too, because it is impossible. There is a type of sin, common to the human condition, that your children will encounter (on a daily basis) on the playground of the finest Christian school imaginable. If you don't send your kids to that school (because of all the sin there), they will encounter even more of it at church, in their relationships with their siblings, in their bedroom all alone, and in the midst of all the dirty thoughts between their ears. The task of parents in this is not to avoid this kind of sin, but rather to teach their children how to battle it. You cannot learn to battle something if you are constantly endeavoring to stay away from it.

"Before the discussion gets sidetracked on the basis of caricature, lett us grant that the arbiter of long and short ought not to be a particularly strict dorm monitor at a fundamentalist Bible college. Paul says short, not 'less than a quarter inch, with pink sidewalls around the ears.' He says long, not 'over a foot and a half.' Long and short are relative, comparative terms. A short walk could be five hundred yards, and a long drive could be three thousand miles, but if they are comparative terms, what do they compare to? The obvious answer is that they compare to one another . . .  Just as Christian women ought not to wear jewelry in an ostentatious way because they are following the apostolic rule, so also modern Christian women ought not to cut their hair like a boy. And men must not wear their hair long, in that languid soccer-player way that makes other men start looking for the garden shears" (Why Ministers Must be Men, p. 27).

"Gravitas can also be inherited from relatively healthy families who simply tell their stories well. The southern novelists Flannery O'Connor once claimed that anyone who pays attention to his or her childhood could write novels for the rest of his or her life" (Barnes, The Pastor as Minor Poet, p. 50).

Suits and Haircuts from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

"A common evangelical saying is that many miss heaven by eighteen inches . . . the distance between the head and the heart. We also need to remember that many others miss heaven by thirty-four inches" (Why Ministers Must Be Men, p. 23).

"The old seminary professors used to speak about a necessary trait for pastoral ministry called gravitas. It refers to a soul that has developed enough spiritual mass to be attractive, like gravity. It makes the soul appear old, but gravitas has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with wounds that have healed well, failures that have been redeemed, sins that have been forgiven, and thorns that have settled into the flesh. These severe experiences with life expand the soul until it appears larger than the body that contains it" (Barnes, The Pastor As Minor Poet, p. 49).

"When men follow a teacher like Jezebel of Thyatira, they are doing so not because her doctrinal reasons are so compelling and her academic credentials so impressive, but rather because following her will greatly increase their chances of getting laid (Rev. 2:20). If a prophet comes prophesying wine and beer (Mich. 2:11), he is sure to get a following. And if it is a prophetess, declaring that love is grace and grace is sexy, then even better" (Why Ministers Must Be Men, p. 23).

"This is why poetry does not have to be defended, inculcated, or coerced. It only appears defenseless. Its power resides not in the orthodoxy of the verse, and certainly not in the creativity of the poet, but in the inspired word that has the power to untangle the distorted image of God. The truth of holy poetry is buoyant. It will rise to the surface to do all the convicting and compelling once it is freed simply through expression" (Barnes, The Pastor as Minor Poet, pp. 36-37).

So I have been using the phrase mere Christendom. What does the mere mean?

First we need to address what it does not mean. It does not mean Christendom Lite. It does not mean "faith-based" civilization, the same way you might have faith-based soup kitchens, with the content of the faith being diluted enough to not bother those who are providing the secularist tax monies. If Christ is Lord, and He is, then those who believe that He is Lord should also think that it follows that He is the Lord of these United States and, going beyond our shores, that He is the Lord of every other place as well. Once this is accepted in multiple nations, in a formal and public way, you have the beginnings of the next Christendom.

So I do not mean a civilization is grounded on the Christian faith, but in such a way that keeps us from taking it "too seriously" -- because we all know what happens when religiotards start taking their faith seriously. Hands get chopped off, the woman caught in adultery that Christ forgave is condemned at the appellate level, baptistic pastors are flogged for their incorrect exegesis of Col. 2:11, and so forth. That's what will happen, right? Wrong. Or, to be more accurate, mostly wrong.

But why do we think that, and why is it (mostly) wrong? Often our baptistic brethren will lead the way in asking these questions, and it has to be said they have historical reasons for being jumpy.