When Jesus cries out from the cross, some of the bystanders think he is calling for Elijah. I had accepted this for years as background noise in the story, an odd detail quickly filed under crowd confusion. But this year, I kept wondering, why Elijah? Of all the names, of all the possible mishearings, what would make a group of people standing near a dying man hear the word Elijah?

The answer opened up something I had not expected.

He cried out in Aramaic, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, meaning My God, my God, why have you forsaken me. Aramaic was the everyday language of Galilee, the tongue his mother spoke to him. And in Aramaic, Eli (my God) sounds nearly identical to the first syllables of Eliyahu, which is Elijah. They share the same root. Elijah’s name literally means “my God is Yah.” A dying man forcing sound through his chest in the noise of a crowd, and El-ee becomes El-ee-ya fast enough. The confusion is phonetically specific to one language. And that is the detail that opened the first question.

Which languages were actually being spoken that day, and how many of them did Jesus likely understand?

I realize I had never seriously asked this. The first-century world around Jerusalem was layered in a way that is hard to picture now. At minimum, four languages were in active circulation: Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Each one belonged to a different register of daily life, and the story of the cross runs through all of them.

Aramaic was the mother tongue, the language of the marketplace, the household, the fishing boat, the argument with your neighbor, what you spoke without thinking, and almost certainly the language Jesus taught and prayed in.

Hebrew was the sacred language, receding from everyday conversation but preserved in synagogue readings, where a designated translator would immediately render each passage into Aramaic so the congregation could follow.

Greek was the trade language of the empire, the shared medium that allowed commerce across cultures. A craftsman working anywhere in that region would have needed functional Greek to do business, and Jesus grew up only a few miles from Sepphoris, a major Hellenized city that Herod Antipas was rebuilding as his capital during Jesus's childhood. Most scholars conclude he had working Greek.

Latin you would have seen on coins and official inscriptions, the language of empire at its most formal and distant. The superscription nailed above Jesus on the cross was written in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (John 19:20), which is itself a small portrait of that layered world. Nobody in the crowd that day was speaking Latin. When Jesus cried out from the cross, he reached past all of it and chose Aramaic, the language of the home, in which you say what you actually mean when words are running out.

So when Jesus cried out Eli Eli, he was doing something specific. He was reaching for Aramaic, the most authentic expression he could have made. And as I started to understand what he was actually saying in that language, the confusion about Elijah became the smallest part of what I had missed.

He was quoting Psalm 22. In Jewish practice, quoting the first line of a psalm invoked the entire text. Every learned person at the cross who heard that opening verse would have begun running through what comes next.

Psalm 22 was written by David approximately one thousand years before Christ’s crucifixion, and several centuries before it existed as a method of execution. Reading it now, knowing what happened on that Friday, the precision is difficult to look away from. Verses 14 and 15 describe the pain and suffering experienced in crucifixion: joints pulled from their sockets, a heart that melts like wax, a tongue sticking to the jaw from dehydration. The soldiers dividing garments and casting lots appears word-for-word, and John 19:24 pauses the narrative to note these prophetic fulfillments explicitly. The mockers saying “He trusts in God, let God deliver him” are quoting verse 8 nearly verbatim, which Matthew records the chief priests actually saying in Matthew 27:43. And the psalm ends with a single Hebrew verb, asah, meaning “He has done it,” no object, no elaboration. The crucifixion ends the same way, with Jesus’s final Greek word, tetelestai, “It is finished.”

I could spend an entire article on Psalm 22 alone.

But pulling on that thread left me with one more question I had to chase down…

If paying attention to the phonetics of one Aramaic word had unlocked this much, then what else could I be missing? More specifically: when the biblical writers preserved original-language words rather than translating them, were there other instances worth paying closer attention to?

The Gospel writers always faced choices. Matthew and Luke, writing in Greek for Greek-speaking audiences, routinely absorbed Mark’s Aramaic into translation. Where Mark preserved Talitha koum (little girl, arise), Luke gave only the Greek equivalent. The Aramaic kept getting absorbed as the faith moved outward from Jerusalem into the wider world. That is the normal trajectory of how ideas travel. But occasionally, in moments that seemed too important or too ancient or too embedded in practice to dissolve into another language, certain words were left in their original form. When you find those moments inside an otherwise fully translated text, you are usually looking at something the earliest witnesses could not bring themselves to translate away.

I came across one of these moments in a letter Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. The letter dates to approximately 54-55 AD, roughly twenty to twenty-five years after the crucifixion. Corinth was a Greek-speaking city in what is now southern Greece, a Roman commercial hub far from Jerusalem where nobody’s mother tongue was Aramaic. Paul is wrapping up the letter, adding final instructions and greetings, when he writes this: “If anyone does not love the Lord, he is to be accursed. Maranatha.” (1 Corinthians 16:22, NASB) Maranatha means “Our Lord, come.”

Maranatha is Aramaic, dropped into a Greek letter without translation, without explanation, as if everyone already knew it… And they did.

How? How does a Greek-speaking congregation nearly a thousand miles from the land where Aramaic was spoken already know this word?

That’s where this story takes one final turn… and I promise it will change how you view Easter forever.

There is a document called the Didache, which in Greek simply means “the Teaching.” What makes it remarkable is not only what it contains but how recently we rediscovered it. For over a thousand years it was lost entirely, known only by name from references in early Church Fathers who cited or commented on it but whose copies had not survived.

Then in 1873, a Greek Orthodox Bishop named Philotheos Bryennios found it in a monastery library in Constantinople, sitting in a codex that had been on a shelf since 1056. Not kidding.

He published it ten years later, in 1883. The Christian world had been operating without it for nearly a millennium, and then, just over 140 years ago, it came back.

Originally composed somewhere between 30 and 70 years after the resurrection, it is classified as one of the oldest non-scriptural Christian documents we have. It is brief and practical: a handbook for new Christian communities covering ethics, abortion, baptism, fasting, the Lord's Prayer, and how to identify false teachers. Think of it as the short manual a new congregation might have received to understand what Christians did together and why. It contains the earliest non-scriptural use of the Trinitarian baptismal formula: "baptize into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" and is the earliest text to use the word "Eucharist" for communion.

… Ok, so how does this explain how Greek speakers understood an Aramaic word?

At the close of that eucharistic prayer in Didache 10:6, just before the congregation received communion, the church prayed this: “Let grace come, and let this world pass away. Hosanna to the Son of David! If anyone is holy, let him come; if anyone is not, let him repent. Maranatha. Amen.”

There are a few things going on, we need to break down.

1. This looks a lot like how Paul used it: “If anyone does not love the Lord, he is to be accursed. Maranatha.”

2. This was a prayer, spoken over the bread and the cup, happening so regularly by the earliest Christian communities that it made it into this manual. And it is addressed to Jesus Christ, not about him, not in his memory, but a prayer directly to him. It does not ask Jesus to visit the congregation the way you might ask a rabbi to come to your synagogue, or a guest preacher to come to your church. Those words, “let this world pass away”, are not a polite invitation. They are a call for the final divine reckoning, the Day of the Lord, the moment in Jewish theology when God himself arrives in judgment to make all things right. In Jewish thought, that was something only God does. You do not petition a merely human teacher to arrive as the agent of final judgment. You do not ask a dead rabbi to bring history to its close.

3. The people praying this prayer were not doing so because they believed Jesus was dead. If the person being invoked in this prayer is simply a dead man, the prayer is not merely unusual; it is theologically incoherent. The only way Maranatha functions in a eucharistic liturgy is if the people praying it believed that Jesus was alive and coming the way God comes. Not symbolically. In the fullest sense of what that means in Jewish eschatological thought.

4. Don’t confuse this, the Didache doesn’t show us that Maranatha originated with the document, it shows that the practice was prevalent in the Jerusalem church of the 30s and 40s. A group of Aramaic-speaking Jewish believers who had actually known Jesus, who had seen him after the crucifixion, eaten with him, touched him, and heard him say with their own ears that he would come again.

The Didache is significant because it was not written to persuade anyone that Jesus is Lord. It was a church manual. It simply instructed new communities how to worship, assuming they already knew what the prayer meant and already believed what it claimed. You do not write a liturgical handbook explaining convictions people don't hold. The fact that Maranatha appears without commentary, without defense, without explanation, tells you these beliefs were not in dispute.

Here is where it all comes together: The community that originated this prayer spoke Aramaic and had known Jesus personally: the Jewish believers in Jerusalem who were present at the crucifixion and saw him resurrected. They were the source. Maranatha could only have originated with them, which means it originated in Jerusalem, in the 30s or 40s AD, among the people who were closest to what happened.

Larry Hurtado, one of the leading scholars of early New Testament Christology, called this word “the Achilles’ heel” of the theory that Jesus was only called divine years later by people far from Jerusalem. That theory collapses under the weight of a single word. By the time Paul drops it into his letter to Corinth, the word had already crossed languages and communities because it was old enough and sacred enough to survive the crossing untranslated. An Aramaic prayer, born in Jerusalem among eyewitnesses, arriving in Greece without losing a syllable.

Within a generation of the crucifixion, the community that had watched Jesus die was praying to him in their own language as the Lord of the final coming, and that prayer was already ancient enough by the mid-50s to require no translation when it reached mainland Greece.

Maranatha has survived two thousand years and more language barriers than I can count, and is still spoken in some liturgical traditions at the close of the Eucharist, most of the people saying it with no idea what it is, what it means, or how old it is, or that the people who first prayed it were Aramaic-speaking Jews who had known a man who died on a cross and then, by their testimony, did not stay dead.

Happy Easter.

Maranatha.

Our Lord, come.

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.

Deuteronomy tells us to fix God’s words in our hearts and minds, to teach them to our children when we sit at home and when we walk along the road, when we lie down and when we get up. The command is clear: if we want our faith to outlast us, it has to be woven into the fabric of daily life.

But life is busy. I care a lot, but follow-through is hard. That’s where the calendar can save you. Holidays and seasons that are already on the schedule can become natural opportunities to disciple our kids without adding more to the pile.

The structure is already there; we just have to work to fill it with meaning.

Holy Week is a great place to start.

For one week every spring, the Christian calendar hands us a ready-made structure for teaching our children the most important story ever told: Palm Sunday through Easter, each day building on the one before. If we’re intentional about it, our kids don’t just hear about these events once a year in a church service. They live through them with us.

Here’s how our family walks through Holy Week together.

Palm Sunday

We start where the story starts: with Jesus entering Jerusalem.

On Palm Sunday morning, we go to church as a family. Our little ones scream “Hosanna!” with the rest of the congregation, waving whatever they can get their hands on. They doesn’t fully understand what they are doing yet, but that’s okay. They are participating in something bigger than themselves, and year after year, we will fill in the meaning.

After church, we talk about what Palm Sunday means. The crowds welcomed Jesus as a king. They expected him to overthrow Rome and restore Israel to glory. But Jesus knew something they didn’t: he was riding into the city where he would die.

And he came in riding on a donkey, not a war horse. His kingdom was going to look very different. It was going to be one focused on loving your neighbor and sacrificing for others. That was the thing that was going to turn the world upside down.

Tuesday: The Temple

On Tuesday, we talk about the cleansing of the temple.

Jesus walked into the temple courts and found them full of money changers and merchants. They had turned God’s house into a marketplace, a den of thieves. And Jesus, the same Jesus who blessed children and healed the sick, made a whip and drove them out.

The sin of the money changers wasn’t that they were just handling money. It was that their love of money had driven them to use it to oppress and hurt other people. They loved money more than they loved God.

This is one of the hardest lessons to teach (and to live). Nothing in our lives can be more important than Jesus, not jobs, sports, success, or comfort, and especially not money, because money promises everything God promises: security, safety, happiness, purpose. It’s the most convincing counterfeit there is.

We talk with our kids about what it looks like when something becomes more important to us than God. We ask them what things they’re tempted to love too much. And we confess our own temptations, because this is a battle we’re still fighting too.

Thursday: Passover

This is the day we’ve built the most tradition around.

On the night before he was crucified, Jesus gathered his disciples for a Passover meal. He broke bread, poured wine, washed their feet, and told them to remember.

Passover was already an ancient tradition by then. For over a thousand years, the Israelites had been celebrating the night God delivered them from Egypt, passing over the homes marked with lamb’s blood and striking down the firstborn of their oppressors. God commanded them to remember it every year, forever. Not because they needed a holiday, but because they would need to remember. Generations later, when their children asked “What does this mean?”, they would have a story to tell.

We do the same thing.

On Passover evening, we gather as a family. We light candles. We read scriptures about the plagues and the deliverance, about the blood on the doorposts and the angel of death passing over. We talk about how the Israelites have continued to celebrate this meal for thousands of years because God told them to remember, and remembering kept their faith alive.

Then we connect it to Jesus. We talk about how Jesus is the true Passover lamb, the one whose blood marks us and saves us from death. We talk about how he chose to have his final meal with his disciples on this night, of all nights, because he wanted them to see the connection.

And then we read from our Passover Document.
(A guide to make your own is attached at the bottom of this article)

The Passover Document is our family’s written record of the moments when God showed up for us: the miscarriages he carried us through, the opportunities he provided when we had no backup plan, the seasons in our marriage that could have broken us but didn’t. We’ve written them down so we won’t forget. Every year, we sit together and read through them, sometimes adding a new story to the list.

This tradition is as good for me as it is for the kids. How easy is it to forget, when you’re facing a hard decision, that God has consistently shown up for you in the past? How easy is it to act like you’re on your own, forgetting the context of his providence and faithfulness? Just the practice of developing this document with my wife has been really helpful for my own faith. Sitting together, recounting the ways God has shown up, reminds me that he is worthy of my trust. Not in the abstract. In the details of our actual life.

As our kids grow, they’ll have their own stories, their own moments when God showed up. And they’ll add them to the record. Eventually, they’ll build their own Passover Documents for their own families. That’s the vision: faith that outlasts us because we taught them how to remember.

At the end of this article, I’ve attached a worksheet to help you build your own Passover tradition, including how to create your family’s Passover Document.

Subscribe now

Good Friday

On Friday, we share the passion narrative.

We’re clear about what happened, but we keep it age appropriate for our kids. This might mean some of them go to bed before we start this reading. We walk through the betrayal and the trial, the beating and the nails, the crowd that shouted “Crucify him!” days after shouting “Hosanna!” We talk about why Jesus had to die, about sin and sacrifice, about the weight of what he carried.

Friday is heavy. It’s supposed to be. We sit in the grief of it, because you can’t really celebrate Sunday if you haven’t felt the weight of Friday.

Easter Sunday

And then we celebrate.

On Easter morning, we go to church as a family. We sing, we hear the story of the empty tomb, and we remember that death didn’t win, that the grave couldn’t hold him, that Jesus is alive.

This is the day that changes everything. Without the resurrection, there is no Christianity. There is no hope. There is no point to any of this. But because Jesus rose, everything we’ve been teaching our kids all week is true. The Passover lamb who was slain is now the risen King.

We celebrate with family. We eat together. We let the kids run around and hunt for eggs and enjoy the day. But they know why we’re celebrating. They’ve walked through the whole week with us. The joy of Easter lands differently when you’ve carried the weight of the days that came before.

Why This Matters

Holy Week gives us something most of the year doesn’t: a built-in structure for discipleship.

The week is already there, waiting to be filled with meaning. All we have to do is show up and be intentional about it.

If this feels overwhelming, trust me, the traditions compound. Each year, our kids understand a little more. Each year, the Passover Document gets a little longer. Each year, the rhythms feel more like home. More natural, less effort. Just stick with it.

You are giving your children a way to remember, year after year, for the rest of their lives. And when they have kids of their own, they’ll know how to pass it on.

That’s the goal. Faith that outlasts us. Scripture written on our children’s hearts.

Passover Worksheet

119KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

About the Author:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.

For the organization I lead (Them Before Us) it is all things children’s rights.
For the business I run, (All the Good) it is all things non-profit leadership.
For this publication (EverydayInterpreter) it is a mix of politics, faith, and culture.

Here is a recent selection from across that spectrum in case you missed them:

The Boozer Twins = “Savior Siblings”

A fascinating look at the ethics of creating children to be used for another person’s purposes. Originally published in the Federalist.

READ SAVIOR SIBLINGS

You can also listen to an interview for the article here: ISSUES ETC PODCAST

Can you assign parents at birth?

This article lays out the connection between biological sex and biological parenthood, demonstrating that denying either is injustice to the child. Originally published in the Federalist.

ASSIGNING PARENTS

You can also listen to an interview for the article here: ISSUES ETC PODCAST

Talking to my Daughter about Abortion:

Them Before Us

Explaining Abortion to an 8-Year-Old.

My daughter, Savannah, turned eight-years-old this past Saturday. We went to the beach for a Dad/Daughter getaway in Wilmington, North Carolina. The plan was simple: beach day, dinner together, and then I (Josh) would speak at the local March for Life in the morning before we drove home to Charlotte…

Read more

a month ago · 80 likes · 8 comments · Them Before Us and Josh Wood

My hero George Marshall.

All The Good

The One Person Everyone Needs On Their Team

In December 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt sat across from General George C. Marshall in Cairo and asked him a question everyone already knew the answer to. Who should command Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of France? It was the most coveted military assignment of the century. Churchill assumed it would be Marshall. Stalin had pressed Roose…

Read more

19 days ago · 2 likes · All the Good and Josh Wood

Safety, family structure, and the data.

Them Before Us

“Safe and Loved” means Mom and Dad.

We launched the Greater Than campaign because we believe children’s rights should be at the center of every conversation about marriage and family…

Read more

2 months ago · 44 likes · 22 comments · Them Before Us and Josh Wood

About the Author:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.

Jesus announces to the group that they’re going back to Judea, where people had recently tried to stone him, and the disciples are protesting, and then Thomas turns to the group and says: “Let’s go, too—and die with Jesus.” (John 11:16b)

Wait a second. Die? What is Thomas talking about? I thought they were going to heal Lazarus? Why is Thomas talking about dying?

Examining the Eye-Roll:

To really understand the significance of Thomas’ line: “Let’s go, too—and die with Jesus” you need to back a chapter and pull out a map. A few pages earlier, Jesus and the disciples fled Jerusalem to go across the Jordan River, completely outside the Religious elite’s immediate reach. They’re not hiding exactly, but they’re definitely intentionally out of range. Then word comes that their friend Lazarus is dying, and Lazarus lives in Bethany, roughly two miles from Jerusalem’s city gates. Two miles from the people who just tried to kill Jesus.

So when Jesus says they’re going back, the disciples push back immediately: Rabbi, they were just now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again? Jesus tells them Lazarus has fallen asleep and he needs to go wake him. The disciples, grasping at any reading of the situation that doesn’t end in their collective funeral, suggest that if Lazarus is just sleeping then there’s no need to walk back into a kill zone. Jesus stops them and just says it bluntly: Lazarus has died.

And then Thomas turns to the group with the energy of a man who has run out of counterarguments: “Let’s go, too—and die with Jesus” Alright. Might as well go get killed too.

You can almost hear a sigh… or picture an eye roll. I didn’t catch it on my first read but with context it begins to sound like some kind of reluctant dark humor. As I reflected on the line more, I began to see that this kind of sarcasm is really what honesty looks like when it's tired. Thomas isn't projecting courage he doesn't actually have… he's just grown too weary to dress it up.

This passage is a moment in the story where we truly understand how the disciples were seeing the situation. They weren’t confused about the danger. They were scared, and they knew exactly why (they had seen the stones). Thomas just said it out loud while everyone else quietly hoped someone would talk Jesus out of it. His willingness to think out loud gave all of us an added layer to the story. Jesus was risking his life and the lives of others by traveling to the region. And in his own unique way, Thomas’ obedience in the face of that danger (however comically) is a fresh look at the story.

It made me curious to reexamine other places where Thomas speaks in the Gospels. It turns out it is a short list. He is only mentioned in passing in the first three, and quoted in John only 4 times. However, after looking at his other three quotes — I am convinced we owe him a lot more respect and admiration than is normally given to the “doubting disciple”. His honesty unlocks some of the most insightful and quoted passages of the entire Bible.

The Next Question.

The second time Thomas speaks is the Last Supper, John 14. Jesus is telling the disciples he’s going to prepare a place for them and that they know the way to where he’s going. Most of the disciples apparently let this pass, not Thomas.

“Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”

It was a literal, honest question… and you know what? I think everyone in that room was probably thinking the same thing; Thomas was the only one willing to say so.

And Jesus responds not with gentleness but with one of the most foundational statements in all of Scripture: I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Thomas’s refusal to pretend he understood pulled that answer out into the open, honesty calling forth clarity in return. One of the most quoted verses in the Bible exists because one disciple was willing to admit he was lost and was unafraid to look stupid.

The Doubt.

The third and fourth quotes come together in John 20. Thomas hasn’t seen the risen Jesus. Ten disciples tell him they have. He won’t move. “Unless I see the nail marks and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”

People read this as failure. Maybe John does, but notice that Thomas still doesn’t leave. He’s still there, still in the room with the disciples, eight days later when Jesus appears specifically for him. The most stubborn man gets the most personal appearance of the risen Christ, a scene Christians struggling to hold on to their faith have resonated with for centuries.

It is during this encounter that Thomas says six syllables that most commentators on John agree are the theological summit of the entire Gospel: “My Lord and my God.” He offered nothing else, no speech, no explanation, no hedging: that’s who you are.

What makes those words so striking is where John places them. He opens his Gospel with the declaration that Jesus is God, “the Word was God,” and then spends twenty chapters showing us a group of ordinary people slowly, awkwardly at times, trying to figure out who exactly they are following. Thomas’s confession at the end answers the opening line of the book. The slowest one to come around finally says out loud what John told us on page one. That is not an accident. John built the whole Gospel toward this moment, and he gave it to Thomas.

And don’t miss what those words cost:
To a Jewish listener, declaring a man to be God was blasphemy, the precise charge that had the religious leaders reaching for stones back in John 10. Thomas knows this. He has been in those conversations. He says it anyway.

To a Roman ear the problem was different and equally lethal. “My Lord and my God” was the formal divine title of the Emperor. That was Caesar’s phrase, Caesar’s claim. Thomas looks at a Jewish carpenter who just came back from the dead and hands the Emperor’s title to him instead. John’s first readers would have felt the collision immediately, because one of those claims has to be wrong, and in occupied territory, choosing the wrong one could get you killed. For many early Christians it did.

Thomas went from the dark humor of “let’s go die with him” to a remarkable confession that impacted the world. You can trust his sincerity precisely because you have watched him consistently refuse to say anything he didn’t mean (and to always say all the things he does).

Failing Forward.

God always does his best work through the honest, the broken, and the willing. He doesn’t ever seem to need us to have it figured out first. Some of the greatest lessons in the Gospels didn’t come from the disciples having it all figured out. They came from them collectively working it out, as we follow along. Thomas refused to pretend or fake understanding. He let us watch him think out loud. We should all be grateful that he did.

About the Author:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.

If you’ve never heard of James Talarico, here’s the thirty-second version: he’s a Texas state representative and Presbyterian seminarian running for U.S. Senate, and he’s become something of a media darling — fawning coverage from the New York Times, a viral appearanc…

Read more

There has been a lot of this lately:
“SNAP cuts are sinful. Jesus was a refugee. USAID saves lives.”

Moral outrage about everything from international aid cuts, rollbacks on healthcare, escal…

Read more

A voluntary ecosystem of extraordinary density. Eighteen million Americans in fraternal orders by 1920, roughly one in three adult males. An economy generating wealth at a rate history had never witnessed. Poverty falling. Wages rising. The art of association Tocqueville had marveled at in 1831 still operating at full force, delivering healthcare, insurance, orphan care, job placement, elder housing, and emergency relief through voluntary communities of mutual accountability rather than government bureaucracy.

Add to this a century of technological innovation, the digital revolution, and the greatest accumulation of wealth in human history. By 2025, after all of that plus trillions spent on government anti-poverty programs, we should have obliterated poverty. Right?

We didn’t. The official poverty rate in 2023 sat exactly where it was in 1973. And Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in 1965 (on the cusp of implementing the Great Society), saw exactly why, before the damage was done, before the money was spent, before the programs were fully launched. He said so in plain language. He was denounced as a racist. Yet, nearly everything he predicted came true.

Moynihan: The Prophet No One Wanted to Hear

I have written about the Moynihan Report at length elsewhere — you can find that piece here— but the essential summary is this.

In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal Democrat serving in the Johnson administration, wrote a report titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” He was alarmed. The Black out-of-wedlock birth rate had reached 23.6%. He saw what this number meant with sociological precision.

His core argument was not about race. It was about the family as the fundamental unit of human welfare delivery. The single strongest predictor of whether a child escapes poverty is not the income of the household. It is the structure of the household. Two married parents produce dramatically better outcomes across every measurable dimension: educational attainment, income, health, avoidance of incarceration. Social scientists have confirmed this finding more times than almost any other.

I’ve also written about how this finding persists even today:

Moynihan argued that the proposed Great Society programs would, by design, substitute for the family rather than strengthen it — removing the economic incentives for marriage and family formation among the very populations most in need of them. He insisted on what he called the necessity of dignified independence: the capacity of individuals to provide for themselves and their families as the foundation of human flourishing. Programs that made dependency the rational economic choice were not compassionate. They were degrading. They substituted a check for a father and called it progress.

He was denounced as a racist. The report was buried. Policy went in exactly the direction he warned against.

Read more

This is the honest version of the argument in the pastor’s tweet. The question of what the state owes its citizens and what it is actually capable of delivering is one of the oldest in political philosophy. So let’s explore: What is the government’s legitimate role?

• Can it be merciful?

• Can it be helpful?

• Can it be good?

And what does history tell us when it tries?

What Mercy Actually Is

Before asking whether government can be merciful, we need to be clear about what mercy actually is. Because in common usage the word has been flattened into something like “not being cruel” or “providing material relief.” It is far more than that.

Mercy is an act of the will, freely chosen, at personal cost, directed toward a specific person. It is what happens when someone who has the right and the power to withhold chooses instead to give. It is the Samaritan stopping on the road, not because he had to, but because he chose to. His own oil, his own wine, his own money, his own time, his own promise to return. Every element of that transaction was his. The moment of choice is what makes it mercy rather than procedure.

Mercy is also relational. It requires one person to see another. Not to process a faceless claim, not to assess eligibility, but to actually see a specific human being in a specific moment of need and respond personally. The Samaritan did not submit a report to the Jericho Department of Road Safety. He got off his donkey and touched a wounded stranger. Got blood on his cloak and sweat on his skin. That contact, that seeing, is inseparable from the act.

And mercy is costly to the one extending it. The Samaritan made a promise that obligated him personally. He bore the cost. That bearing of cost is not incidental to mercy; it is what makes mercy morally formative, on a practical level. The person who gives becomes a different kind of person through the giving.

The government can do none of these things. It cannot choose freely, because it acts by compulsion and mandate. It cannot see anyone, because it processes categories of people, adjudicated by eligibility. It cannot sacrifice because it spends other people’s money. What the government performs when it transfers resources is not mercy. It may be justice, rightly enforced. It may be prudent policy. It may be strategic stability management. These are legitimate functions. Mercy is not among them.

To say the government should be kind, generous, or merciful is to misunderstand what those words mean and what the government is. It is not that the government is cruel. It is that kindness, generosity, and mercy are personal virtues that require a person to exercise them. An institution cannot be kind any more than a spreadsheet can love.

What the Government Is Actually For

Read more

Read more

There were lots of opinions:
"Christianity is collapsing"
"The pro-life movement is losing the church"
"Culture is winning"

But before I…

Read more

The February 2026 issue ran a six-page feature titled "Invisible Identities: The Queer Experience at Messiah University." It opened with this premise: "Although the exact number of queer students at Messiah University is unknown, several students have felt that the current policies regarding same-sex relationships and queer identities have negatively impacted their time on campus." From that premise, the piece interviewed students and alumni who felt harmed by Messiah's commitment to historic Christian sexual ethics, with no defense from any alumni who appreciate the institution's courage to hold clearly and faithfully to Scripture. It presented one side of a serious debate under the guise of journalism.

(I have placed a PDF of the article at the bottom of this piece so you can read it in full)

That has compelled me to share what the magazine chose not to: the heart behind Messiah’s adherence to faithful Christian views on marriage, sex, and family. And to be clear, I am not writing as an outsider.

I enrolled at Messiah in the fall of 2009. I played on the men’s soccer team, met my wife, studied cross-cultural Christian ministry, and had some of the best years of my life on that campus. The faculty challenged me in the way good educators should: rigorously, charitably, and with genuine attention to more than one side of difficult theological questions. We try to make it back to campus at least once a year. I have always been proud to call myself a Messiah alum.

What follows is not the work of someone who wishes Messiah harm. It is the work of someone who loves the institution and believes this issue deserves a stronger defense than it received.

First, a Word of Appreciation

President Stuckey deserves credit for his clarity. Asked directly about Messiah’s position on marriage and human sexuality, he stated: “As a Christian university, Messiah University holds to beliefs and practices that are rooted in our humble understanding of scriptural teaching and the historic teaching of the Christian church, both broadly and of our founding denomination the Brethren in Christ Church. Accordingly, the university affirms Christian marriage to be the union of one man and one woman, and that all human sexuality should be understood within this framework.”

That clarity is the bare minimum we should expect from a Christian institution. It is a sad commentary on today’s landscape that holding the line, plainly and without apology, in the face of coordinated activist pressure has become notable. But it is notable, and it is right, and Messiah’s leadership deserves to be affirmed for it.

It is also worth noting what Messiah has done beyond holding the line. The University’s Student Handbook is more welcoming than many Christian colleges on the question of orientation itself, stating plainly:

“It is important to note that Messiah University’s behavioral expectations are related to same-sex sexual expression, not orientation. The University does not hold the view that it is morally unacceptable to experience same-sex attraction or to identify as LGBT+.”

A student who struggles with same-sex attraction and lives faithfully within Messiah’s covenant standards faces no discipline, no diminishment of standing, no exclusion from campus life. The university’s position appears to be that the struggle is not the sin, and that students navigating it deserve pastoral care rather than condemnation.

That pastoral posture extends even to behavioral violations. Dean of Students Doug Wood clarified that a breach of Messiah’s intimacy standards does not result in removal from enrollment. “It’s done in the context of care and counseling and support, as opposed to a formal disciplinary hearing,” Wood said. “So it is done with great care.” Taking even this posture of leniency and pastoral understanding has earned Messiah criticism from those who believe the university should draw a harder line, particularly on its decision to permit students to openly “identify” as LGBT+ while only restricting same-sex sexual expression. That debate is real and justified. But my point here is this: by any reasonable standard, Messiah has gone above and beyond to accommodate a minority constituency on its campus, and the article still paints it as not enough.

To that end, the university has also previously offered SAGE, Sexuality and Gender Education, described officially as an educational program that “exists to provide opportunities for enhanced care and support for students while cultivating learning and leadership development within the broad themes of relationships, sexuality, and gender rooted in Messiah’s biblical understanding.” SAGE operated under the Division of Student Success and Engagement. From outward appearances, it did claim to be an affirmation group of LGBTQ+ identity. That distinction is precisely why the article portrays it as falling short.

Read the article carefully and you find the real disagreement surfacing in the students’ own words. One recent alumna, Ella Shane, expressed dismay at the widespread belief that if you’re queer, you cannot actually be Christian, and that on Messiah’s campus, not being Christian is “pretty much the worst thing you can do.” Another, Alex Hay, declared: “I do believe I was intentionally made by God, and that means my trans-ness and my queerness was made intentionally.” These are not complaints about being excluded from campus life. They are theological assertions. They are claiming that their identity is doctrinally correct and that Messiah’s position is doctrinally wrong. That is not a problem any amount of pastoral care, SAGE programming, or gracious policy language can solve.

The finish line is not tolerance. The goal is affirmation and celebration of a belief the Christian church has historically never held.

One recent alum, AJ Jerome, made this explicit. Jerome declared that the board of trustees should “answer to the fact that they are actively hurting people” because they “can’t get over the fact that God can love people that aren’t straight, and aren’t cis, and that their God might be a little bit bigger than what they thought God was.” That quote was printed in a university-funded publication without editorial comment. It does not ask for kindness. It tells the board of a Christian institution that their theology is threatening. Complete capitulation is the only outcome that will satisfy. Anything less is recast as “oppression”.

On the Question of Motive

The article then goes on to present, without qualification or challenge, the accusation that Messiah’s convictions on marriage and gender are financially motivated; driven not by genuine theological conviction but by donor pressure. The alum making the accusation, identified as JJ, had himself served in a leadership position on the Student Government Association, at a time when, by his own account, the SGA had a majority queer cabinet. His full statement is worth reading:

“At some point in my leadership position, [Student Government Association] had a majority queer cabinet. But we all knew that a change in policy is far from anything this institution will be able to accomplish in the near future. I’ve found out that there is very little we could do when the people who hold all the power threaten with their money.”

Threaten with their money.

Read that carefully. A student who held significant institutional influence, whose cabinet reflected the movement’s priorities, who had genuine access to advocate for change, concluded that the reason policy didn’t move was financial intimidation. President Stuckey explicitly and emphatically denied it. The article printed both the accusation and the denial— then offered no analysis, no evidence, no journalistic accountability. That is not balance. That is the mask of neutrality used to legitimize a smear.

Imputing the motives of deeply religious people, people whose institution has held a consistent theological position for over a century, rooted in a denomination whose convictions long predate this cultural moment, is a remarkable editorial choice. To print it without comment is not brave journalism. It is cowardice parading in the costume of fairness.

What We Actually Believe, and Why It Matters

The Gospel is good and true. Good for humanity, for families, for children, and for society. True in a world that increasingly tells us it is not. We do not hold these positions because a rulebook demands it. We hold them because we are convicted of their Truth in a world that calls them false, and their goodness in a world that does not seek our flourishing. This is not robotic obligation. We defend them from a place of passionate conviction.

The Gospel makes claims about reality. Not just spiritual reality, but human reality. What we are. How we are made. What we need. What families are for. What children deserve. These are not religious preferences layered over a neutral world. They are descriptions of how things actually are. And when the world began insisting, with increasing aggression and intolerance, that biological reality itself was negotiable, that sex was fluid, marriage was outdated, and parenthood assignable at birth, those of us who knew the Gospel recognized the lies immediately.

What I did not expect, when I was a student at Messiah, was that I would one day have to argue for the reality of biological sex and the meaning of marriage, motherhood, and fatherhood as if these were debatable philosophical opinions rather than observable facts. Let alone that abandoning those convictions would be repackaged as faithful Christianity.

Take sex first. The belief that God created human beings male and female is the unanimous teaching of the Christian church for more than two thousand years, rooted in Genesis and reaffirmed across every major Christian tradition in every century of the Church’s existence. The article argues that queer people have “existed for all of recorded history.” Well, so has the Church’s unbroken consensus on this question. If longevity is evidence, the scales do not tip the way the article implies.

But the defense of biological sex is not only theological. It is urgently pro-child. We are living through a period in which young children are being told that their sense of unease with their bodies constitutes a medical identity requiring pharmaceutical and surgical intervention. Puberty blockers suppress normal development. Cross-sex hormones administered in adolescence cause documented risks of permanent infertility. Double mastectomies on young girls. These are not hypothetical concerns raised by ideologues. They are documented medical realities now under serious re-examination in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, all of which have restricted or reversed the pediatric gender medicine protocols that until recently had been expanding rapidly in the United States. To hold that children deserve protection from irreversible interventions is not hatred. It is the most basic form of child advocacy.

Now take marriage. Marriage between a man and a woman is not an arbitrary religious preference. It is the only relationship that unites the two people whose biology is required to create a child. Every child ever born is the offspring of one man and one woman. One sperm, one egg. That biological fact creates a bond as real and observable as the child’s sex. The reason virtually every human civilization has recognized some version of this institution is not bigotry. It is the recognition that children need, belong to, and have a right to the two people who made them.

This understanding did not collapse all at once. Christians failed to defend their definition of marriage in big ways and small— in the pulpit, in the classroom, and in the coffeeshop; in the quiet accommodation of divorce and cohabitation; and in a thousand other concessions that slowly detached marriage from its Christian definition and biological logic long before any court touched it. The Supreme Court did not create the opening. It walked through the door we left open.

In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court extended to same-sex couples the full “constellation of benefits” that marriage confers. One of those benefits is the “right” to become a parent. Previously, this was the recognition of the biological bond between Mothers/Fathers and their children. The centuries-old understanding that a married couple’s union produced children and those children have a right to both of them. But in the wake of the ruling, same-sex couples faced an unavoidable biological reality: two men or two women cannot create children. Extending “equal” access to children, therefore, required a new answer to who a child’s parents are. To say their biological Mother and Father (as we always have), excluded Same Sex couples. So, the the law arrived at a new answer: parents are no longer recognized by biology, they are assigned by intent (I’ve written more about that here). In today’s world, whoever intends to parent, whoever contracts for it, pays for it, wants it badly enough, is declared the winner (parent). The child’s actual biological mother or father is sidelined, compensated, and erased from the birth certificate.

This new legal fiction, Parent Assigned at Birth, requires sperm to be purchased, eggs to be sold, women’s bodies to be rented through surrogacy contracts, and children to lose their mother, father, or both so that unrelated adults who cannot be their biological parents are able to get what they want: a child.

We believe that is an injustice. Not because the adults who form these families are bad people, but because a child’s right to be known and raised by their own mother and father does not disappear because adult desire is intense or love is genuine. The child’s loss is real regardless of the quality of the home they are placed in. That is the true cost of affirming adult desires and identities at the expense of biological reality.

We believe this position to be both scientific and moral: neither your sex nor your parents can be assigned at birth. Both are encoded in your DNA. You can take a blood test and learn your biological sex. You can take that same test and identify your mother and your father.

The decision Messiah is being asked to make is not between donor money or compassion. It is between adult desires and children’s rights.

You may believe that biological sex is fluid. You may believe that marriage can be between any two, three, or five people. You may even believe that children have no particular right to be raised by their own biological mother and father, that any two adults the state assigns are equally sufficient, that the biological bond between a parent and child is a sentimental preference rather than a scientific reality. These are all positions people hold. That is your right. But to treat convictions held by the global Christian church since its founding as rooted in animus, homophobia, or greed, is a tired play.

It is 2026, we are done having our ancient beliefs blamed for threatening people’s existence. The children harmed by the outcomes of these ideas deserve better.

A Final Word

The Swinging Bridge asked its readers to see these students as victims: victims of an institution that refuses to fully affirm their identities, victims of a theological tradition that will not bend.

Affirm us, or you are the oppressor. But affirmation has a cost, and it is not a bill that will be paid by the adults demanding it. Affirming gender ideology means endorsing the medical interventions described above. Affirming the redefinition of marriage, and as a result parenthood, means endorsing a marketplace in which children are intentionally separated from their biological mother or father by contract. This is the choice being forced: will we deny Christian teaching or remain faithful to it?

These students are not the victims.

Families, kids, and our culture will inherit the consequences of decisions being made right now in our classrooms, courtrooms, hospitals, and legislatures.

We advocate for a Gospel-centered understanding of life, marriage, sex, and family because we believe it is God’s best for everyone. We believe it leads to flourishing.

We will not apologize for defending it.

-JW

Invisible Identities The Queer Experience At Messiah

139KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

About the Author:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.

Each year that goes by, I have grown more convinced by this point. My journey with discipline took on an entirely new dimension when I had kids. It changed in a way that made everything before it feel like a scrimmage.

I might have been grinding, waking up early, hitting PRs, reading books, building habits, and that was great. But the moment I brought my first child home from the hospital, I entered a completely different arena.

Every priority got re-sorted. Every hour got re-weighed. Every dollar got re-assigned. And the version of discipline I practiced as a twenty-something with full autonomy over my schedule suddenly looked quaint.

This new season required something I’ve come to call Dad strength.

Money

When you’re single or married without kids, a frivolous dollar is just a frivolous dollar. An impulse buy feels like a small regret at worst. But the moment your first child arrives, the math changes completely.

Every dollar you spend carelessly is a dollar that affects the kind of wedding you can give your daughter. It’s a dollar that determines whether she graduates with student loans or without them. It could be the margin that gives you and your wife the flexibility later in life to be fully present as grandparents. A surprise bill that used to be an inconvenience now has the power to destabilize the security of your home.

When you bring your first child home from the hospital, your view of money completely changes. Disciplined stewardship of your finances stops being a personality trait and starts being an act of love.

The Power Hours

Here is the part that no optimization podcast can prepare you for.

What used to be a multi-hour post-work gym session, your chance to decompress, listen to a podcast, hit the weights, sit in the sauna, grab a late dinner with your wife, suddenly vanishes. Those hours between 5:00 and 8:00 PM get swallowed whole. This block of time has come to be called the power hours around my house. They are the most grueling three hours of the day. You walk through the door already running on fumes, and you are immediately called upon to stay awake, play with the kids, wrestle on the floor, help clean up dinner, manage bath time, and read a book without falling asleep in the chair.

Post work quickly becomes the most expensive hours of the day. If I am giving them to anybody, they better be worth it. And my workouts were certainly not worth taking from my family.

So where do the workouts go?

They go to the morning. Now the least expensive hours of the day are between 5:00 and 7:00 AM, when the house is completely quiet, the kids are asleep, and you can get a workout in and prepare for your day without anyone paying a cost for it.

Each day now comes with tension: sleeping through those hours means your workout has to come from somewhere else and that somewhere else is almost always family time. On the other hand, sleeping through those hours and never working out at all means your family pays a different price losing years with you because you refused to take care of your body.

Bottom line: get out of bed.

Subscribe now

Work

Traveling to cool new cities for work used to be exciting. You’d think, how awesome is this? Now you think, how many nights away is it?

Your relationship with work fundamentally shifts. You begin to think in terms of freedom and flexibility. What do I need to do to become so valuable within my organization (or so valuable to the market) that I have the freedom and flexibility to protect my family, provide for my family, and be present for my family?

Protect. Provide. Be present. These become the primary goals as your world shifts away from acquisition and success for success’s sake toward something beyond yourself, something bigger. Career ambition doesn’t die it just transforms. You stop climbing for the view and start climbing because people are depending on you at the top.

Faith and the Transmission of Values

Then comes the part that really shakes you.

You watch your children grow up awash in cultural messaging. You hear horror stories from other families… kids abducted by ideologies that would have them deny the goodness of their own bodies, infected by anti-natal sentiments that tell them the greatest thing they could do for the world is not bring another life into it. And you realize something that hits like a freight train: your grandchildren depend on the successful transmission of your faith and values.

Fighting for and promoting life, marriage, the permanence of the family and ultimately the source of all of this wisdom and truth, which is faith in Christ becomes an urgent mission. You realize you need to know culture’s arguments. You need to know what you believe. And you need to get good at teaching it to your children, because the transmission of your faith becomes one of the primary ways you protect them throughout their entire lives… even after you are no longer with them.

Discipline as a single man might mean reading your Bible regularly in the morning. Discipline as a father means knowing it well enough to hand it to your children as armor.

Marriage

Before kids, you don’t even realize how little you depended on each other daily. You don’t really have to coordinate schedules. It doesn’t much matter when one of you leaves the house in the morning or when you’re getting back. You get to preserve a great deal of your independent identity. It feels like freedom.

Kids expose all of that.

The minute you have children, you see how ill-equipped you are to be true teammates. To get on the same page about parenting. To tag each other in and out of daily tasks and chores. To defend one another while enforcing discipline. To stay unified as new decisions crop up that affect the little people you love more than anything in the world. If you have a genuine disagreement about something that affects your children, you had better know how to solve that problem, quickly and humbly.

And you’ve got to do all of this while not losing your romantic connection. Something that becomes incredibly difficult as you walk through seasons of sleeplessness with young children, passing like ships in the night through bedtime routines and stacks of kid’s books, exhausted beyond words.

But you know, looking into your children’s eyes, how devastating it would be for them to endure the breakup of your union. Splitting time between two houses. Watching their world fracture. If the two of you ever devolve into just teammates and stop being lovers, you’ve lost something your kids desperately need. The discipline to choose each other first, to invest time and money into your marriage even when you are completely exhausted, to protect the romance through the chaos that is one of the hardest things a man will ever do.

Dad Strength

I call all of this Dad strength because I really do believe God delivers a new kind of strength to you when you become a father.

I’ve always thought about it like daily bread, like the manna the Israelites gathered in the wilderness. They couldn’t stockpile it. They couldn’t save a two-day supply. They had to trust that it would be there again in the morning.

In my eight years of having kids (four total now) I have never had a two-day supply of dad strength. I’ve only ever had enough energy for the day ahead of me. And honestly? That dependency on God is good.

Whether I think it’s good or not, it’s all I’ve got.

The burden and mantle and blessing that it is to lead a family is only ever made lighter by walking with Jesus and asking Him each and every day for provision and rest.

Now, am I as fit as I was in college? No.
Am I as well-rested? No.
Does my car look as cool with french fries ground into the seats and car seats strapped in the back? Absolutely not.

But this is a new season and a new challenge. Learning to embrace these intense years by being ruthlessly efficient with your time, incredibly disciplined with your sleep, diligent with your workouts, frugal with your funds, and intentional with your wife… these are the new challenges. It is a different kind of hard than the disciplined, intentional life you pursued at twenty years old.

But don’t overlook that dad falling asleep at 8:02 pm, having put his children down after three books and a bath. That legend, nodding off on the couch, has far more grit than the twenty-year-old gym rat will ever know.

-JW

About the Author:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.

Read more

Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good f…

Read more

That should tell us everything we need to know about American Christianity is headed.

For the last twenty years, American Christian has faced an enemy who had the decency to wear a uniform. The secular progressive movement announced itself (and its opposition) openly. It called our convictions bigotry. It labeled our theology transphobic. It had the audacity to tell us that our faith was a relic of a less enlightened age: fine for private comfort, irrelevant to public life.

And for a while, the onslaught achieved its desired effect. The cultural pressure to comply was enormous. Cancellation was real. The implicit bargain was simple: keep your beliefs confined to your private spaces, and we’ll tolerate your existence. Bring them into the public square, and we’ll destroy you, your livelihood, your family.

But something happened on the way to that progressive, inclusive utopia. Women began losing scholarships and podium spots to biological men, while being forced to share their prison cells. Doctors who performed irreversible surgeries on confused adolescents started facing legal consequences. The border crisis was revealed for the demographic shell game it truly was. Roe was overturned as advancing technology made it impossible to deny what many already knew: life begins at conception. And Gay marriage sent us down a slide that now has male couples suing to be considered infertile in order to gain access to IVF coverage, registered sex offenders acquiring unrelated children through surrogacy and foreign billionaires using purchased eggs to manufacture dozens of children simultaneously.

The verdict, still being delivered, is striking: maybe there was some wisdom in the ancient convictions after all. Maybe the traditions we were told to abandon were load-bearing walls, not decorative relics.

This is very good news. But it comes with a warning.

The Age of the Impostor

The next wave of opposition to the church will not come wearing a enemy’s uniform. The new name of this new season of warfare is sabotage, subversion from the inside. The impostor willingly wears your uniform, speaks your language, sits in your pews. He works not to defeat (outright) your faith but to repurpose it.

The overt secular progressive was an enemy. Disorienting, aggressive, sometimes devastating but identifiable.

What I believe we are entering now is the age of the impostor.

The Oldest Trick in the Book

This should not surprise anyone who has read their Bible carefully.

The serpent in the garden did not announce himself as an enemy of God. He asked a question: “Did God really say...?” He reinterpreted. He reframed. He introduced just enough doubt to make disobedience feel like wisdom.

Satan in the wilderness took it further. He quoted God’s own Word. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down — for it is written: ‘He will command his angels concerning you.’”

Direct quote. Psalm 91:11-12. Technically accurate citation. Diabolical application.

What Jesus did next is the key to everything I want to say. He responded with the intent of Scripture. He knew what the text meant, not just what it said, and that knowledge was His defense.

The pattern has not changed. When the enemy knows we have a deep respect for our faith, he is savvy enough to walk through the front door to help us exit the house entirely.

The New False Prophets

The examples are multiplying. Each follows the same pattern: take a genuine piece of Scripture, strip it of its context, and deploy it in service of a conclusion that 2,000 years of Christian thought would call heresy.

On the Sanctity of Life

“Life begins at breath.” Genesis 2:7 (God breathing life into Adam) was recently used by Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico to argue the unborn are not alive. But it rips a passage about the unique creation of the first man from the dust and turns it into a universal biological claim that contradicts the entire witness of Scripture on life in the womb, from Psalm 139 to Jeremiah 1 to Luke 1. The intent of Genesis 2 is to declare that life is a gift from God. The impostor uses it to argue that some life doesn’t count.

“Mary consented.” The Annunciation is recast by Wheaton professor Amy Peeler and others as a reproductive rights proof text. Mary said yes, so she could have said no, so reproductive choice is biblical. One of the most sacred moments in Christian theology (the willing submission of a young woman to the sovereign plan of God) flattened into a modern autonomy narrative. It is not exegesis. It is appropriation.

“Love your neighbor” means fund abortion access. Gavin Newsom ran billboard ads quoting this to promote abortion in California. The greatest commandment reduced to a rubber stamp for whatever policy the speaker wishes to baptize.

On Gender and the Body

“Made in the image of God” means approve of gender transition. President Biden posted that transgender children are “made in the image of God.” Andy Beshear invoked the sacredness of every child to defend funding irreversible gender surgeries on minors. The doctrine of imago Dei, the teaching that God intentionally created each human being, used to justify the chemical and surgical alteration of the bodies God created. The very theology that says God made you deployed to argue that what God made needs to be unmade.

On Marriage and Sexuality

“Sodom and Gomorrah was about hospitality.” The made by Matthew Vines and others, draws on Ezekiel 16:49, which mentions the arrogance of Sodom, while explaining away Jude 1:7, which explicitly names sexual immorality and "unnatural desire." Some take it further, arguing the sin was not same-sex desire but the desire to commit rape, as if narrowing the sexual sin to its most violent expression erases the broader sexual ethic Scripture clearly teaches. This is not competing interpretations. It is selectively quoting one passage to nullify another, then reframing whatever remains until it no longer says what it plainly says.

On Immigration and Borders

“Jesus was an illegal immigrant.” The Holy Family’s flight to Egypt (written about here and here by Russell Moore claim Jesus was “illegal” and a “refugee”. Despite the ironically legal contradiction, the argument has been used to call for mass amnesty and the prevention of any immigration enforcement (I wrote in depth about this here). But Joseph and Mary were Jewish subjects of Herod’s client kingdom under Roman authority. Both Judea and Egypt were under Roman control. A Jewish family traveling from one to the other was roughly the equivalent of an American driving from North Carolina to Virginia, different local governance, same overarching political authority. They weren’t sneaking across a border. They were exercising a freedom that belonged to them within the Roman system. And they returned home when the threat passed. The passage is not about immigration policy. But it sounds compassionate, and that’s the point.

The Reinterpretation Only Flows One Direction

Here is the tell. When Scripture is reexamined and creatively reread by these voices, the conclusion never lands on more disciplined sacrifice and restraint (sexual or fiscal). It never leads to stronger protections for the unborn, higher barriers to divorce that harms children. It always, without exception, lands on the loosening of a biblical standard that conflicts with a contemporary adult desire.

I’d love to see it just once... Just once, I want a reinterpretation of Scripture to conclude that we should have less premarital sex, fewer abortions, should stop sterilizing children, or enforce all of our laws. But it never happens. The hermeneutical innovation only ever loosens. It never tightens. And the pattern reveals its source.

How the Impostor Operates

The impostor does not reject Christianity. The impostor redefines it.

The core move is always the same: take a genuine Christian virtue (love, grace, compassion) and hollow it out. Remove the parts that are costly and countercultural. Refill it with a meaning that only moves in one direction: affirmation. Then tell Christians that this softer, emptier version is what Jesus actually meant all along.

Love becomes affirmation. Grace becomes moral suspension. Listening becomes silence. Compassion becomes complicity.

The target for all of this is not the theologian who can parse the Greek. It’s the everyday believer with a good heart and not enough time to sort through the distortion. The impostor is not trying to convert the whole church. The impostor is trying to peel off enough of the compassionate middle to break the Christian consensus, to weaponize the believer’s own virtue against them.

What Comes Next

We need to recognize the era we are entering. The overt enemy is losing ground. The impostor is taking his place. And the impostor is far more dangerous, because you cannot defend against what you do not recognize as a threat.

Jesus said, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” The emphasis is on the clothing. They look like you. They sound like you. They quote the same book you do.

So be equipped. Like Christ in the wilderness, know Scripture well enough to reject the interpretations that push us away from God’s intentions: that the strong sacrifice for the weak, that life is sacred from conception, that sex is bound within marriage to a partner of the opposite sex, that law and order are good, and that compassion and justice are not enemies but partners.

We have been handed an ancient wisdom that has endured for millennia, not because it was easy, not because it was popular, but because it was true. Have confidence in it. Stop apologizing for it.

And stop letting people who learned our language yesterday tell us what our faith has always meant.

The serpent is no longer hissing from outside the garden. He’s inside, quoting Scripture: “Did God really say...?”

Yes. He did.

Much of that progress belongs to Leading on Opportunity, the organization created in the wake of the Task Force to carry its recommendations forward. LOO brought structure and alignment to the work of countless nonprofits, churches, and community leaders who had been mobilizing since the Chetty study hit. Foundation For The Carolinas, the LOO team, and Charlotte's generous neighbors deserve real credit for what's been built. In 2022, LOO launched the Opportunity Compass, a data visualization tool designed to measure and align the city's collective efforts around shared goals in real time. It started with 33 indicators. Today it tracks 82.

But when you create a measurement tool this comprehensive, every indicator you track (and every one you don’t) tells a story.

What’s Missing?

When the Leading on Opportunity team announced last Fall that they had updated the Compass with several new indicators, I jumped on the site to scroll through. Four of the five main determinants are improving or stable. But one continues to decline: Child & Family Stability.

That stuck out to me. So I dug into the category. Child & Family Stability contains 26 indicators organized into four drivers: Health & Wellbeing, Family Formation, Financial & Housing Prosperity, and Safe & Stable Homes. Most of the indicators seemed reasonable: teen pregnancy, child abuse and neglect, incarceration rates, evictions, housing instability, infant mortality, drug overdoses. Good things to track. They even include some things I would consider less critical: proximity to parks and adults with high blood pressure.

But as I scrolled through all 26, I noticed something was missing. No marriage rates. No divorce trends. No tracking of father presence. Out of the 26 indicators in the determinant most connected to family structure, not a single one mentioned marriage or fathers.

What the Research Shows:

The missing indicators nagged at me. If the Compass wasn’t tracking marriage or father presence, maybe there was a reason, maybe the research didn’t support it. So I went back to the original studies and reports that preceded our Compass to find out.

What I found was the opposite. Family structure isn’t just relevant to Child & Family Stability, it may be the single most important factor in upward mobility, period.

The original paper “Where is the Land of Opportunity?” (that ranked us last) authored by Raj Chetty and others didn't bury this: "The fraction of children living in single-parent households is the single strongest correlate of upward income mobility among all the variables we explored." Not one of many. The strongest. Charlotte's own Task Force paraphrased this in their work: "Chetty and his colleagues identified five correlating factors that are the strongest predictors of upward mobility… Of these, family structure was found to be the most predictive of economic mobility."

The depth of data backing this assertion is striking. Brookings scholar Richard Reeves found: “Four out of five children who started out at the bottom income quintile but who were raised by parents married throughout their childhood, rose out of the bottom quintile as adults. In contrast, children raised in the bottom quintile by a parent who remained unmarried throughout their childhood had a 50 percent chance of remaining there.”
Same starting point. Dramatically different odds (80% vs 50%).

The pattern was clear. The indicators our Compass was measuring as declining: incarceration, evictions, teen pregnancy, child abuse and neglect, weren't independent problems. They were symptoms pointing to a common root: a family structure issue. More specifically, a marriage issue.

The Evolution

So now I’m sitting with a question: Did Charlotte ever get this right? Did we always overlook family structure, or did something change along the way? I went back to the beginning, to the 2017 Opportunity Task Force Report, the document that ultimately led to the creation of Leading on Opportunity and the Compass itself. If our current tools weren’t measuring what the research said mattered most, maybe the original report had.

It had. The Task Force, after consulting with a notably diverse array of researchers from Harvard, Brookings, the American Enterprise Institute, Pew, and the Manhattan Institute, spoke with remarkable specificity:

• “Family structure was found to be the most predictive of economic mobility...”

• “Statistics show that children receive substantial long-term benefits and opportunities when raised in a two-parent household, even more so when a couple is married.”

• “Promote marriage, which research shows is the most reliable route to mobility…”

• “Advocate for the active involvement of fathers in the lives of their children.”

The Task Force even specified how to promote and track this:

• “Develop culturally appropriate communications and data-rich messaging strategies to increase awareness of the value of marriage, committed relationships, and co-parenting…”

• Measure “Relationship status of parents at the time of birth” a single metric capturing biological parentage, marital status, and father involvement.

Today, though, the Compass only describes family this way:

“Though families come in all shapes and sizes, the presence of two (or more) loving and caring adults in a child’s home-life offers more opportunities for learning, bonding, and the development of healthy social skills.”

Both statements contain some truth. The 2025 language (we can all see) is trying to be more “inclusive” of diverse family experiences—I do understand the intent. But when you’re talking about a data-driven tool and are trying to measure what actually moves the needle for children in poverty, specificity matters. Two (or three) parent homes do not have the same impact on mobility that growing up with a married mother and father.

The research relied upon in 2017 by the original team hasn’t become less true in the intervening decade. But somehow our city’s measurement language became much less specific. And when the Child & Family Stability determinant is declining while others improve, it makes me wonder if that trade off, specificity for inclusion, came with a cost—specifically for kids.

In all, out of the Compass’ 82 indicators, family structure appears exactly once, a metric called “Two-Parent Homes” that makes no distinction between married and cohabiting parents, biological fathers and stepfathers, or stable households and temporary arrangements.

The Compass dedicates more indicators to library card participation and proximity to parks than to whether children have access to their married mother and father.

The Opportunity

If we believe Family Structure is the most predictive factor, we need to measure it with the same specificity we apply to housing, education, and healthcare. The original Task Force already identified potential metrics, including relationship status of parents at the time of birth. I'd add marriage and divorce rates and father presence in the household as additional indicators that would strengthen the tool. Adding them now wouldn’t need to replace anything, it would instead complete the picture and align the Compass with the research Charlotte paid for and cited extensively in 2017.

The 2017 Task Force admitted “This topic was one of the most challenging issues we tackled. Some members strongly advocated that we take a firm stand on “marriage for all” as a value to uphold. Others recognized that changing trends in family structure are unlikely to reverse and cultural realities can make marriage less attractive.” Some members advocated for strong marriage promotion. Others recognized changing trends.

But in the end, they let the data guide them: “Promote marriage, which research shows is the most reliable route to mobility, recognizing it may not be the choice of all couples.”

That willingness to follow research wherever it led, even knowing it would be controversial, even after internal disagreement, distinguished Charlotte’s response.

When Chetty’s study ranked us last, many cities dismissed the findings or made excuses. Charlotte took the data seriously. We consulted the best researchers we could find, asked hard questions, and made evidence-based recommendations.

And it worked. That progress came from Charlotte’s commitment to measuring what matters, not just what’s comfortable.

The Stakes

If you’re a teenager in Charlotte making decisions about when to have children, who to marry, and what to do to ensure your children have a better life than your own, you deserve to know what research shows. More importantly, if you’re a teacher, counselor, nonprofit leader, or policymaker working with that teenager, you deserve measurement tools that point toward what actually works.

A compass should point north, specific and unwavering regardless of the challenges we face taking that path. North doesn't move because the journey is hard. And clarity isn't condemning. It's kind.

I spent most of my career working in Charlotte’s most vulnerable communities, through nonprofits and churches. I now advocate for children’s rights as the Executive Director of Them Before Us. I support early education, healthcare access, housing stability, and safety nets. Our progress on these fronts deserve praise.

But our continued progress will require honesty about all the indicators that matter. Family structure isn’t the only factor in economic mobility. But it’s consistently identified as the most impactful one. Measuring everything else while omitting this isn’t just incomplete, it makes solving the declining Child & Family Stability determinant nearly impossible.

You cannot solve a problem you refuse to define clearly.

Charlotte has done this before. The 2017 Task Force proved we can follow data wherever it leads. The families navigating poverty deserve measurement tools built on that true foundation.

They deserve a compass that points North.

About the Author:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.

Read more

All told, I made it through about 70 books this year covering economics, faith, parenting, leadership, history, …

Read more

So I did. I spe…

Read more

I paused longer than I expected. How much does she need to know?

It has almost become a ritual on social media: every MLK Day, the tribes suit up, and the debates erupt. Conservatives point to his unorthodo…

Read more