Wallace Henley is a former pastor, White House, and congressional aide. He served eighteen years as a teaching pastor at Houston's Second Baptist Church. Wallace, the author of more than twenty books, now does conferences on the church and culture, church growth and leadership. He is the founder of Belhaven University's Master of Ministry Leadership Degree.
His latest book, Who Will Rule the Coming ‘Gods’?, offers groundbreaking spiritual insight into emerging AI technologies.
This dark outlook spurs the question: Is there any hope for the future? The answer: there is, but we must look to authentic objective hope and not some dreamy subjective figment of our own imagining.
Further, extremists on both sides of the socio-cultural divide are ready with ideological torch in hand to ignite the old prejudices and conflicts that once set the nation itself ablaze. One of the firebrands presently generating heat is critical race theory.
I was coming from a meeting where I had watched an in-your-face media presentation about the way our civilization is collapsing. And I wondered: When will be the climactic moment of this change—or “re-imagining” as some call it now? More important: What will the new nation look like?
The cases of Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, among others, reveal the contradiction of a worldview and system that does not believe in original sin yet wants to punish those it deems sinners.
Therefore, this Fourth of July we must reflect on the sobering truth of what will happen as America’s “DNA” is altered.
Dear Southern Baptists: Though I am an elderly man, I am your kid. And though I am no longer a pastor in a Southern Baptist church, I am employing skills and applying knowledge you nurtured in me beginning in 1950 when I first joined a Southern Baptist church at age nine.
One of the greatest tragedies that can afflict the post-pandemic church is that of getting tangled in a jungle of institutional analysis and missing an opportune moment—a kairos.
“There are so many churches in America,” said Chuck as he gazed at me with querulous eyes. Then the question: “Why If there are so many churches is the nation in such trouble... Why is there so little transformation?”
As I walked among the graves, my mind suddenly shifted to another French beach some 250 miles away: Dunkirk. There, in 1940, more than 300,000 British troops, with their allies and weaponry, were trapped before a surging German army. Winston Churchill was desperate to get his fighters off the beach so that the soldiers could be re-equipped and sent back to fight again.
Is it over for American churches? Are we living in the era of end-times apostasy signaling an inevitable, irreversible slow fade of church life?
But if secular schools taught moral values, then the obvious question is: Whose values? Values arise from worldviews, so what will be the worldview from which the values will emerge?
The Church of Scotland’s General Assembly will soon consider a proposal to erase “husband” and “wife” from its official marriage ceremony.
In a nation ruled by a monarch or dictator, localities would have no authority to ban abortion if unrestricted abortion were the policy at the top. But in a true democracy, as Lubbock showed, the “buck” of authority stops at a precinct ballot box.
The young man and woman said they had come to Washington to, among other things, protest the napalming of Vietnamese villages, only to learn that protest planners were renting big trucks to load with drums of oil that that they would set ablaze in Washington’s traffic circles during rush hour, and incinerate people going home after a workday in the despised institutions of government.
Wokeism now seeks the obliteration of the “four olds” the Red Guard sought to destroy: customs, culture, habits, and ideas. The outcome for China and the tragedies in our time suggest there are “olds” we need to recover.
But this is what identity politics is now destroying, and why the America many immigrants believe they are entering is being changed into something else... something more akin to what they are fleeing.
“Covid, Cocaine Take Europe to a ‘Breaking Point’,” warned an April 12 headline in Barron’s. The problem is that people in search of peace amidst the economic and other crises brought on by the pandemic have turned increasingly to drugs. “We are at the breaking point,” said Catherine De Bolle, a European Union official, in an interview with journalist Jan Hennop.
Who will equip these future voters and leaders with the historic worldview that led to the freest, most prosperous society ever? Who will form worldview in the throngs of immigrant children coming in now who will have strong impact on the future?
Nationalism, for some critics, is the grotesque distortion of patriotism. They believe it to be a form of solipsism, the ultimate of egoism and overblown pride in a nation that might believe itself to be the only geopolitical entity that matters.
When the transcendent Kingdom is forgotten, healthy patriotism, which is essential in the shared life of the national community, turns into chauvinism and militarism.
