Thread by @MargeNAlia

This is what happens when church leaders lack the wisdom and depth of connection to Jesus to help people develop into Christian maturity. The sincere leaders becone exhausted doing their best to disciple people. 1/

https://twitter.com/sheilagregoire/status/1352279755551371264

If after years of toil in the fields of the Lord, men most men don't move beyond white, middle-class, employable, and sincere about the Bible facts, the leaders will subtly drop the standards of maturity for men to what is achievable with their current framework. 2/

This framework is unquestionable in much of white evangelical Protestantism, locking people into a system that chokes out growth because faithfulness to this system is equated with thr gospel and faithfulness to God. 3/

More later after I finish errands...

Here is why white evangelical Protestants get locked into a low ceiling of maturity and why it's so hard to change. Pentecostals/charismatic have their own version of this and any system ("religious" or not) can develop the same dynamic with a different narrative 4/

It all comes down to the question of how we come to know God and how we continue to grow in our relationship with God. 5/

The pneumatology and functional epistemology of much of white evangelicalism (I'm thinking especially the SBC & PCA) mops them into a corner in which the goodness of God is threatened if leadership has massive distortions or blind spots in their maps of reality. 6

In many of these denominations, the role of the Holy Spirit is reduced to convicting us of sin when we encounter scripture, convincing us of Jesus encountered through preaching or reading of scripture, and enabling obedience when we sincerely agree with scripture. 7/

Whether they still admit it out loud or not (and plenty of them do) plenty of members of these communities operate under the assumption that sincere believers don't interpret scripture, they simply receive its self-evident meaning. 8/

The sincere believer's reception of the plain meaning of scripture is then confirmed by the elders, who also sincerely saw the same self-evident meaning in the Word. 8/

The possibility that they see the same things partly because they were formed in the same tradition is not considered, because "Tradition" is for Catholics and other folks who are impressed by mere man rather than God's Word. 8/

The perspicuity of all of scripture becomes a perspicuity of all of reality. Christians in one's own in-group alone see scripture clearly and are therefore uniquely equipped to discern what ought to be done in the world. 9/

If the Holy Spirit does nothing much but convict us internally of the meaning of scripture and help us obey it, the failure of our ingroup to get reality basically right when we have been desperately sincere and well-intentioned threatens the goodness and faithfulness of God. 10/

To face the prospect that we have gotten something big and important wrong is also to face the prospect that everyone we trusted and respected got it wrong too. Basically, all of the trusting relationships that shape our identities are threatened. 11/

(I say subtly, but this is pretty obvious to everyone on the outside. It rarely occurs to anyone on the inside because all human knowledge and perception are ordered around our self-protection)

If all relevant knowledge of the world is easy and accessible to the leader, it's threatening to run into circumstances in which our sincere assent to biblical truth and our confident discernment of how to apply scripture in practical circumstances doesn't yield good results. 12/

We can't investigate too deeply into whether we are missing something because this threatens the goodness of God, who was supposed to guarantee the transfer of the Bible facts to our minds if we were believed them hard enough. 13/

Aside from occasional fits of self-reproach for Just Not Trusting God Enough, we know that we are as sincere as possible in our belief and are exhausted from Just Really, Just Really Trying Harder to Mean it More. 14/

More later after I do some work for school...