We commend your and your husband’s desire to fully participate in the life of the church you are attending. While we can’t provide definitive answers to your questions, we can provide some follow-up questions for you both to reflect and pray through.

I’ve heard people say, “We don’t need more head knowledge in the church today; we need heart knowledge.” But the problem is not that we know too much! The head and the heart should not be pitted against each other. We need both. Bruce Ware says, “If you don’t have it in your head, you can’t have it in your heart.”

Our theology tends to come from sources we trust. Some people, instead of trusting Scripture, believe a hodgepodge of pop psychology and pop religion, with a little New Age philosophy thrown in. And some people think they trust Scripture, but don’t bother to read and know it well enough to recognize truth (or heresy) when they see or hear it.

Most readers have likely heard about individuals having a crisis of faith. We’ve learned terms such as “exvangelical” and “deconstruction.” We are sometimes familiar with entire churches, even denominations, who have lost their faith. But while it is not the first to do so, a poll released last week should serve as a dramatic wake up call to evangelical churches and their pastors.

Ray Ortlund’s directness and humility in this article are refreshing. I SO loved what he had to say here about the importance of orthodox doctrine (truth), and also gracious culture and lasting friendships (grace).

We do not just need the individual pearls of truths; we need the string that ties them together. Without the larger picture of God’s unfolding drama of redemption, and without systematic theology, pastors are constantly throwing out pearls to people, but they have no string to put them on and hold them together, and keep them in relation to each other. 

"Much of the history of Christianity has been devoted to domesticating Jesus—to reducing that elusive, enigmatic, paradoxical person to dimensions we can comprehend, understand, and convert to our own purposes. So far it hasn’t worked." —Andrew Greeley

I loved this post from author and pastor Ray Ortlund. It’s a great reminder that we need to examine ourselves and correct ourselves. We who are truth-oriented, or in Ray’s words, “all certainty,” when it comes to every area of theology, need to go out of our way to affirm grace and choose humility. We who are grace-oriented, or as Ray says, “all openness,” need to go out of our way to affirm God’s revealed truth and anchor ourselves to it.

I think Charles Spurgeon comes as close as anyone I’ve read to articulating what Scripture as a whole reveals. Sadly, though I attended both a good Bible college and a good seminary, I never read Spurgeon or learned anything about him. I’d been a pastor for ten years before I discovered him, and then I couldn’t get enough of him.