Even among those of us who love the Lord and have seen His faithfulness for many years, when life throws awful things at us, yes, there is faith, but there are also fears and doubts that intrude into our minds and hearts, cropping up repeatedly as we pray. This may rob us of our confidence, of our hope, just when we need it most.

Practical instruction and intervention will never be truly effective unless it is explicitly rooted and grounded in the magnificent, foundational, theological, doctrinal frameworks set forth in the great confessions and catechisms. Leaders and lay folk need to be clear about, and orthodox on, core doctrines, not skip past them to get to so-called practical teaching. These theological truths and principles are the necessary foundation for addressing decline in belief and practice in specific moral and practical areas.

I was born on the original Memorial Day and lived it as a child. Changes haven’t all been bad. But along the way, we have lost sight of the original and essential thing.

My reflections on retiring from Grove City College after 28 years. It ha been quite a ride.

One of the fatal weaknesses of modern Christians who profess to hold to orthodoxy is that we have not demonstrated, to a watching world, a radical commitment to honor our marital vows through thick and thin. We allow the slightest things, even variations in our feelings and personal emotional states, to serve as excuses to walk away from our marriages and, when we deem it necessary, our children. Leaving our spouses to find greener pastures appears to be about as common among professing Christians as everyone else.

Here I address evangelical and Catholic college and university faculty and staff who affirm Biblical truths about sex, sexual orientation and gender identity, but hope that designating their offices as LGBTQIA++ “safe zones” will open up avenues for ministry to students and others who have embraced and/or are struggling with things like transgender, same-sex attraction, “non-binary” sexual and gender identity options, and so on.

Some professors and staff at conservative Catholic or evangelical colleges embrace the idea that faithful, professing, Biblical believers in Jesus Christ can be practicing and positively identified homosexuals, bisexuals, transgender, pansexual, queer, and so on. In posting symbols that their offices are “safe zones” such as rainbow stickers, their intent is to help students live out such alternative sexual identities and/or orientations comfortably, happily, ideally (now or in the future) within and enjoying the full acceptance of the professing church. It is to this group that this blog post is directed.

What could be wrong with a professing Christian faculty or staff member with orthodox beliefs about sex and gender identity declaring his or her office to be a "safe zone" for LGBT persons, a place where they can discuss their trials, joys, questions, and challenges with someone who truly cares about them and is committed to relating to them as Christians should? For sure, the offices of every Christian faculty and staff member should be “safe” in these respects. But a rainbow sticker to prove you are a loving and caring person? Not so fast.

One of the fatal weaknesses of the modern church is that we have not demonstrated, to a watching world, a radical commitment to honor our own marital vows through thick and thin. We allow the slightest things, even variations in our feelings and personal emotional states, to serve as excuses to walk away from our marriages and, when we deem it necessary, our children. Leaving our spouses to find greener pastures appears to be pretty common these days, even among those who claim to have a conservative, committed Christian faith.

Two predator-prey wildlife videos. In one, antelope just look on as one of their fellows is attacked by a cheetah. In the other, a neighboring herd of elephants rushes over to protect a mother and her trapped baby from a pride of lions. Which of these — the antelopes or the elephants — should we emulate?

The separation of children from marriage has skyrocketed over the past sixty years or so, though with some levelling in recent years, but still at high rates of disconnecting children from marriage. One would think that the widespread availability of legal contraception and abortion would have led to the opposite outcome. Advocates of both often “sold” them to the public at least in part by assuring folk that, all other things being equal, more contraception and abortion would mean more children raised by married parents. This has not been the case.

In the modern detachment of sex, marriage, and the procreation and rearing of children from one another, one of the most obvious breakdowns is the separation of sex from marriage. For example, the briefest of comparisons between popular, prime time television shows of the 1950’s and 1960’s with those we saw by the 1980’s and 1990’s through today makes it clear that folk having sex outside of marriage is now widely considered to be normal, moral, and even necessary to good health. Think of I Love Lucy and My Three Sons versus Golden Girls and Friends.

In continuing my discussion of separating sex from the procreation of children, I look at some implications of same-sex marriage. Then, I tackle in vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy.

This is the first in a series of blog posts I promised, looking at each type of separation in our culture’s overall separation of sex, marriage, and the procreation and rearing of children. In this post and the next, I will overview the major ways in which we are increasingly separating sex from the reproduction of children. In this post, I focus on contraception and abortion. In the next I will look at same-sex marriage as it relates to the separation of sex from the reproduction of children, in vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy.

Imagine marriage, sex, and the procreation and rearing of children as three spheres united reciprocally. As recently as the time many of us were born and passed our childhood, every major social institution agreed that these things ought to be joined together. Today we are witnessing the severance of these three entities to a degree that most people even a hundred years ago, including many self-identified progressives even a couple of decades ago, would find stunning. We are constantly seeing new ways these breakages are occurring, some of which are exceedingly extreme and even, occasionally, downright bizarre.

One of the hardest logs to stand balanced on is “truth or love.” Speaking the truth in love is something Christians should be doing corporately and individually. It is integral to the Church growing in unity and believers developing in their Christian walks.