On Saying Boo in Babylon

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Introduction

I think that it is fair to say that our church plant in Washington DC has garnered more than a little bit of attention. What I want to do here is explain once more about what we intend by all of this, and more importantly, what we do not intend by any of it.

I trust that this explanation will be helpful to our friends, and an encouragement as we continue to ask them to pray for us. As for outside observers, the case is necessarily a little different.

I don’t believe that this explanation is going to “give the game away” to the secular media because I actually think we are in a paradigms-in-collision situation. I call it paradigm bumper cars—we just bounce off of each other. What do I mean by that? The problem is not that the secular observers are stupid—obviously not—but rather because we are trying to explain chess moves to them while they are looking at a backgammon board. We really do inhabit different worlds, and that makes all the difference.

Let’s see if I can make sense of what seems to me to be an impasse.

Our First Service Was This Last Sunday

Our inaugural service was this last Sunday, and one of our ministers from here in Moscow, Jared Longshore, conducted the service. Among the journalists who attended that inaugural worship service at Christ Kirk DC was Jack Jenkins with Religion News Service, who wrote this summary of what was going on with us. Apart from his estimate of the number of people in attendance (he said 120, and there was 230), his article gave a pretty solid round up. He did a good job with the facts on the ground. Check it out, and thank God with us.

Word Choices and Outlooks

At the same time, the paradigmatic differences insisted on peeping through by means of various word choices. For example, the article said that Christ Kirk DC was an “outpost” of our Christian nationalism project. Here is where the paradigmatic assumptions come in. Moscow, Idaho is where we are doing our Christian nationalism thing, to the dismay of some of our locals, and Washington DC is where teeming hordes of mountebanks are doing their secular globalist thing, to the dismay of everyone else. And regardless of what you think of my description in the previous sentence, I want you to notice that the real action lies in the use of the word outpost.

We have before us a small town, and we have before us a huge and influential city, and the small town has decided for some reason to march on the big city in order to build an outpost there. This is all horizontal. It is what two nations at war would do. It is how one city would besiege another. They would start their attempted takeover with an outpost, and it is all horizontal. Not only is it horizontal, but if it is horizontal, then the small town is an idiot. Jesus teaches us that the man with a small army should come to terms with the man who has a big army (Luke 14:31). Otherwise his clock, as the French would say, is going to get le cleaned.

But we are not engaged in a horizontal conflict at all. We are engaged in a conflict, but it is not of that nature. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, Paul said, but against principalities and powers (Eph. 6:12). In our pursuit of this, our weapons—true weapons, mind—are nevertheless not carnal weapons. Paul again:

In short, we believe in the reality of the spiritual world, and we are attempting to do something there. If God blesses it, this will have an impact on our day-to-day world, Washington included, but we don’t believe the influence goes the other direction. We would regard any suggestion that we try to make it go the other direction as a temptation to be resisted and fought.

Pointed Questions

Over the last several months, I have talked to quite a few journalists about all of this. One of the assumptions underlying many of the questions I get is that of thinking that we are coming to Washington to network with important people, pull significant strings, and make all our Christian nationalist things happen.

I was talking to one reporter a few weeks ago, and she knew that I had met Pete Hegseth one time at church, and that I had also met Russ Vought, currently the head of the OMB, when we served on a panel together one time. And the line of questioning had to do with whether I was talking to any other influential people. And my answer, quite honestly, was “Well, you guys mostly.”

Whenever we say boo in Babylon, it startles people.

Not Surreptitious Lobbying

So we believe that worship is warfare, but we don’t believe that worship is the same thing as networking or lobbying.

Our goal is to establish a vibrant worshiping community in the DC area, where people can gather in response to the summons of God, in order to worship Him in the name of Jesus Christ. Such worship, conducted in Spirit and truth, will be culturally potent—but entirely apart from any conferences, mailing lists, networking, lobbying, influencing, and so forth.

What do we make of the fact that Pete Hegseth and family attended? We are most grateful they came, and they are certainly most welcome. But the most significant thing about it—and this is crucial—is that Pete Hegseth was publicly acknowledging that he answers to God in Heaven. He knows he has a duty to bow down and worship Him. This was not about us meeting him, or of him meeting us. Rather, it was about all of us . . . meeting with God.

That is what a worship service is.

Witnessing to the Powerful

When Agrippa remarked cryptically that Paul was trying to make him a Christian, Paul didn’t hold back. The apostle’s reply was this:

Paul wanted everyone to become what he was—a Christian—only without the chains.

On another occasion, Paul wrote something similar. God is not willing for anyone to perish, and desires all kinds of men to come to Him. Even kings.

This is not just a prayer for political stability so that the kings will let us witness to all the peons. No, more is involved than that. God wants “all men to be saved.” This is not an “each and every” all, as in “all triangles have three sides.” The Greek word pas also has the meaning of “all kinds of,” “all manner of.”

Those four-word phrases in English are actually two-word phrases in Greek. All sickness, all disease. When it says “all sickness” and “all disease,” it does not mean each and every case. Rather, it means all kinds of sickness, all kinds of disease—epilepsy, lameness, leprosy, blindness, and so on. All kinds.

So when Paul says that God wants all men to be saved, I take this as “all kinds of men.” This is reinforced by the fact that Paul was explicitly talking about different sorts of men in this passage—he wanted prayer for kings and those in authority, after all, and why? Because God wants all kinds to bow before Him. Including the powerful.

So do we. And Washington is one of the key places were multitudes of powerful people refuse to do anything of the kind. There is no fear of God before their eyes, and so the nation has suffered many downstream consequences of our civic atheism and infidelity.

If the Answer is Christ, Someone Should Tell Them

All day long, every day, politicians get approached by people who want them to do something for them. A small minority of them may want whatever it is for altruistic reasons, which is not the case most of the time, but all of them still want the politician to do something for them. Now we want them to do something also, but not for us. We want them to really hear the call to worship at the beginning of the worship service. “Let us rise and worship the triune God.” That is what we want them to do. We want them to worship God.

After having heard the call to worship, we also want them to prepare themselves spiritually so that they might enter into the presence of a holy God. This means that they (and we right alongside them) need to kneel down and confess our sins. Does anybody really believe that confession of sin is unnecessary in Washington DC? And no, this is not a jab at the Democrats. There are hordes of young Christless conservatives drifting around that city who are living desperate and wretched lives. But mammon-scratching and hooking up and getting wasted are not made acceptable to God just because you understand Murray Rothbard. The message is simple. Repent and believe the gospel. Come, worship God.

But more of the service remains. We want more than a spasm of repentance, with no substance or content behind it. Everyone in the service needs to be consecrating themselves to God, presenting their bodies as spiritual worship (Rom. 12:1-2). This means that we all must say, like Isaiah, “Here am I, Lord, send me.” Send me to do what? We need instructions from the Bible on how we must live. This is what the sermon is for. This is not so that the preacher can ride his own political hobby horse, but rather so that the Word can be exposited and applied to us in our respective vocations. This is why all the preachers we are bringing in are simply going to be preaching through the book of Ephesians.

Unlike ecclesiastical lobbyists, we are not going to be dragging policy proposals in by the ears. But at the same time, unlike deracinated and rootless evangelicals, we are not going to banish any obvious applications of the divine Word to the political sphere. We are not going to dilute the calls for civic repentance. When John the Baptist told Herod that Herodias was not his to have, he was not “meddling in politics.” And we are not meddling in politics when we say that killing babies is an iniquitous practice, that the worship of power is rank idolatry, and that all the churches in the DC area that are currently festooned with rainbow flags need to take them down, with tears of repentance. Yes. Take them all down. In this way Episcopalians really could become a non-abominational church. Listen to the Word preached, and then go do it.

We observe the Lord’s Supper every week, at the conclusion of each service. This corresponds to the peace offering of the Old Testament, where the worshiper partakes of the offering, in communion with his God. The covenant is renewed, and the covenant-member is strengthened for his assigned task, which is to live straight and do right.

When the service is completed, the parishioners are then blessed and commissioned. They are sent back out into the world, seeking to live in a way that is distinct from the way that world does things. They are being sent out to run the play. And seven days later, God gathers us back into the huddle again. And why? So we can run another play.

So this is what we are up to. This is what we are seeking. We really are looking for transformation, but we are not trying to wash the outside of the cup at all (Matt. 23: 25-26).

If You Want to Help . . .

If this explanation has been helpful to you, and you want to help with this ministry, there is a way you can pitch in. Here is a link to our web site.

And you may also have noticed that we are going to be doing something similar in Hillsdale, Michigan, starting at the end of August. If you want to help us out with that ministry, here is a link. That site will be updated as we settle on a location.

And please continue to pray for us. Ask that we live straight and do right.