For almost twenty years after the end of WWII church attendance surged to its highest levels in history, and Christianity seemed to be thriving in the U.S. But it was in the last 15 years that what Kuyper foresaw and what Europe experienced seems to have begun here. Church attendance began to decline across the board, especially among younger people. And the cultural institutions began to take an overtly hostile and adversarial stance toward traditional Christian faith.
As I began to go into shock, I heard a shot close by and felt a body collapse on top of me. Blood ran over me, and I tried to crawl out from underneath it. When I got free, I looked back and could see it was an old man who the police had killed. Then I passed out. When word of the violence spread, my relatives raced to every clinic and hospital searching for me (Xolani had made it out ok). They couldn’t find me, and assumed I’d been killed.
Suddenly, I felt him grip my arm and yank me off the path, crying out, “Attention: serpent!” Look out, a snake! As he pulled me back, he lunged himself forward, and in one swift stomp, Sidiki crushed the snake’s head under his heel. Snakes in this region are deadly poisonous, and the nearest hospital was many miles away. So, on my first night in his village, Sidiki saved me from certain death.
I reached a point where I did not know how to live as a Christian anymore. I became suicidal, thinking my only two options for my future were death or to come out as a lesbian atheist. The former option was birthed out of a summation of the church’s language around this conversation. Sinners were welcome, certainly, but only the heterosexual kind. I did not know how to become more Christian in order to be heterosexual. So, to appease the church crowd, I thought the Christ-following answer was to kill the gay out of me.
After a long illness our dear friend and colleague Dick Kaufmann died and was united with his Savior on February 18th, 2023. Dick served as executive pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church from 1994 to 1999. He then moved to San Diego California where he planted a network of churches.
…Increasingly the culture doesn’t believe in facts or truth. It believes that people create their own truth, they create their own facts. There’s no certainty on what the right take on reality is. And so here we have the Christian church of all things being the center of emphasis on the idea that there are historical facts that can be verified.
In this new video series Tim Keller looks at each book of the Bible and finds threads of the story of the gospel.
It has always been my goal to one day make all of our sermons available for free at gospelinlife.com. Now with the generous and faithful support of our Gospel in Life listeners from our podcast, YouTube and radio ministries, we are in a position to do just that!
Tim Keller's Race & Justice Series
Tim Keller's Series: The Decline and Renewal of the American Church
For an extended version of this series, you can download the PDF here.
