Years ago, my coworker and I were sitting at our desks with the office door open. One of our colleagues walked by with his young daughter, and we overheard him say to her, “You can be anything you want to be.” Instinctively, my office mate and I turned toward each other with our eyebrows raised. Although the fatherly intention behind the inspirational pep talk was good, it just wasn’t true. We can’t be anything we want to be. For decades, mainstream culture has told kids that if you’re true to yourself (that is, if you follow your feelings where they lead), your dreams will come true. To this message—also known as expressive individualism—the Scripture says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Prov. 14:12). Acknowledging the folly of expressive individualism doesn’t make you a cynic or a pessimist. It makes you what James Wood has called a reality respecter. A reality respecter is a person who refuses to tell the emperor that his new clothes are magnificent when he isn’t wearing any. They refuse to swallow the lie that a man can give birth or that all religions seek peace. If we believe God made the world and our children, we’ll teach them that the only way to be in touch with reality is to look at the world the way God looks at it. As a believing parent, I have a duty to teach my children to question whether their feelings fit the way things are. Reality Respecters Live in a Redemptive Story Parenting as a reality respecter doesn’t mean you always give your kids the hard truth. (When my 5-year-old finished basketball camp feeling great about his skills, I didn’t point out that he still couldn’t dribble a ball!) It means you help your kids understand their lives in the context of the biblical story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. When God created this world, he pronounced it good. But when the man and woman made in his image ate the fruit he’d forbidden, our good world became a place infested with sickness, death, and sin. This means that if you jump into a pool before you learn to swim, you could drown. It means some people are born with disabilities they’ll never overcome in this life. It means children need loving and corrective discipline (Proverbs 13:24). But that isn’t the end of the story. Through Jesus’s sacrifice, believers have been redeemed and are now God’s children. We look forward to the day he’ll return and make right all that’s wrong with our world. When that happens, we won’t have to fear drowning or contend with disabilities or dispense discipline any longer. As reality respecters living within the story of redemption, we don’t have to ignore the evil around us in order to believe in a happy ending. And we recognize that when someone recommends living a lie as the quickest way to a happy ending, we should run in the opposite direction. Raising your children to see themselves within God’s redemptive story is no guarantee they will. But it does mean you’ll have a framework already constructed for hard conversations. For example, when a teenager going through puberty feels uncomfortable in his or her body, you can talk about the way the fall has affected our bodies. You can also encourage your teen that those who believe can look forward to one day having resurrected bodies that won’t be at the mercy of adolescent hormones. Reality Respecters Encourage Resilience Parenting as a reality respecter doesn’t mean we set low expectations for our kids. Instead, we should encourage kids to grow and do hard things, even if they might not succeed right away. Christian counselor Sissy Goff tells the story of sitting with a 15-year-old girl who’d been stuck for weeks on the same issue. Eventually, Goff gently asked her, “What would it look like for you to grow in this area?” The girl quickly replied, “I don’t wanna grow. I just wanna be understood.” Goff sees this attitude as endemic to the culture most kids are growing up in. She says, “Boys and girls of all ages, they don’t wanna grow. They want relief. They want comfort. They want someone to fix it.” That attitude makes sense if you believe that being true to yourself is the way to make your dreams come true. When you fail, you look for someone else to blame. The alternative attitude—known as resilience—seeks to adapt and grow from difficulty or failure. It accepts responsibility, faces facts, and employs perseverance. As a mother, I long to keep my children from experiencing pain, but the reality respecter knows that pain is a part of life. Instead of protecting children from pain at all costs, we should teach them how to learn and grow from it. The Gospel Makes Sense of Reality Journalist Louise Perry became a Christian after she realized Christian teaching about the sexes lined up with the sociological realities she observed. Activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali professed faith in Christ after learning through experience that neither Islam nor atheism was equipped to “manage the challenges of existence.” High-profile atheist A. N. Wilson turned to Christianity because “asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.” Wood dubbed conversions like these the product of a “reality-respecter to Christian pipeline.” If we raise our kids to believe that they can be anything they want to be and that their feelings are the measure of truth, they’ll one day discover we’ve lied to them. If instead we teach them the Christian story, including the radical fallenness of this world and our need for redemption, we’ll offer them a story that fits reality.

Every generation has a defining theological challenge: a doctrine thrust into public view by events and cultural pressures. For example, 25 years ago, the September 11 terrorist attacks required reflection on the nature and character of the triune God of the Bible in juxtaposition to Allah. Our particular moment—riddled with moral issues like pornography, abortion, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, artificial reproduction, and physician-assisted suicide—demands articulation and defense of the image of God. Carl Trueman, professor of biblical and theological studies at Grove City College, has kept publishers and readers busy with his responses to cultural challenges related to theological anthropology. In 2020, Trueman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self introduced many to expressive individualism, an anthropology developed through Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Darwin. After reducing and reworking Rise and Triumph’s content in Strange New World, Trueman produced a treatment of critical theory and identity politics in To Change All Worlds. Trueman’s latest work, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades our Humanity, introduces a wider audience to the importance of theism and theological anthropology for social ethics. This is an important volume for understanding our culture. Importance of Anthropology The book’s setup is a question Trueman was asked on the Triggernometry podcast: “Is it possible to build a moral society without a belief in God?” (2). In prior generations, this question by the atheistic hosts would have been a “gotcha” moment, but in Trueman’s telling it was a sincerely asked question, and The Desecration of Man is Trueman’s sincere answer. In short, he says no. Western morality is grounded in a conception of man as made in God’s image. As Trueman explains, Man is who and what he is because God has made him so. Any significance, any meaning, any value he has is rooted in the divine act of creation that assumes the reality of God as divine creator. . . . Anthropology is inseparable from theology. (6) He goes on to argue, [Morally,] human beings are created by God with a given set of dependencies and obligations, limits, and ends. We are rational, dependent, limited, and teleological beings. And the ways in which we formalize these traits are the moral codes that define what it means to be human. (12) Accepting this definition is particularly important in light of evolving technologies. The anthropological question isn’t a 21st-century problem; it has roots in early modernity. In Nietzsche’s parable of the madman, a prophetic character arrives in a modern city square populated by atheists and accuses them of killing God, with the result that man would need to become gods themselves. Western morality is grounded in a conception of man as made in God’s image. Nietzsche’s prophet is mocked for two reasons. First, though severed from theistic roots, the anthropological and moral flowers hadn’t yet begun to wither. Second, the lack of certain technologies meant there was neither the social imaginary nor the capability to throw off certain aspects of Christian anthropology and morality. Technology has since significantly expanded our capability to pursue “godlike aspirations” by changing the way we relate to time, nature, and our own physical bodies (36). Technology and Humanity Few readers will be surprised that Trueman makes the case that abortion, contraception, and pornography desecrated sex and, therefore, humanity. However, even some conservative evangelicals will likely be uncomfortable as he evaluates other technologies like those involved in assisted reproductive technologies and surrogacy. For example, Trueman argues, By detaching conception from sexual union, IVF reinforces the logic of the sexual revolution. . . . If contraception, legalized abortion, and antibiotics allowed us to think of sex as recreation rather than something that carried obligations and thus commitment, so with IVF the imaginative breach between sex and reproduction is further strengthened. Sexual union of a man and a woman is no longer essential. It becomes merely one option for the creation of children. (123) Trueman handles IVF and surrogacy with care, recognizing the natural human desire to be a parent and the suffering of infertility that often drive people toward those technologies. However, he’s also clear that right-wing tech bros who use IVF and offer surrogacy coverage in their employee benefits aren’t morally blameless. On the other hand, some faithful evangelical ethicists argue for a qualified embrace of reproductive technologies while also valuing theological anthropology. Though I agree with Trueman’s final position on IVF, aspects of the ethical analysis were simplified as he made his bigger cultural argument. IVF is one example of several that Trueman offers, but it’s significant because too often conservative theologians chastise feminists who shout their abortions yet don’t stop to consider the antihuman tendencies of those who hew closer to their own ideology. A robustly biblical worldview will critique trends to both the left and the right. Technology and Ideas Popular books on society and technology, like Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience, are generally uninterested in the origins of particular technologies. Rather, they focus on technology’s detrimental effects and what institutional leaders and parents can do to respond. Yet it’s always helpful to ask where those technologies came from so we can get ahead of their effects. Trueman traces the history of the ideas that drive humanity’s desecration. He notes that in earlier stages of modernity, “the belief that there was such a thing as human nature” kept society “from devolving into pure subjectivism” (52). Technology changes our perception of human nature, but our perception of human nature also shapes the technologies we develop. We exist along a spiral, not a linear vector, of change. That means there’s hope for a recovery of more humane ideas. In The God Who Is There, Francis Schaeffer expresses concern that religious leaders were late in dealing with the movement of ideas through culture. Ideas usually begin in academic philosophy. Then ideas move into art and music, which in turn shape popular culture. Schaeffer observes that because Christian leaders weren’t paying attention to the upstream issues, ordinary Christians were encountering persuasive ideas before the church had a theological framework for them. A robustly biblical worldview will critique trends to both the left and the right. In large part, Trueman is doing what Schaeffer prescribes by wrestling with the ideas that shape our culture before they’re fully entrenched. Yet Trueman and Schaeffer have different approaches. Trueman’s “is not a book of Christian apologetics.” This volume, published by Sentinel rather than an evangelical publisher, points people toward the need to “embrace the Christian faith, with its dogmas, its cultic practices, and its ethics,” but it doesn’t provide a roadmap to get there (xix–xx). It’s a book that points toward the church from outside. In contrast, Schaeffer wrote primarily to the church, so the particulars of the gospel are much clearer. Hopefully, Trueman’s careful arguments will lead readers to further investigate the truths he points toward. Trueman’s title echoes that of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. Both books address the ways subtle cultural trends undermine a biblical view of humanity. Like Lewis’s classic, The Desecration of Man will help church leaders understand the philosophical currents shaping our culture.

In their book The Great Dechurching, Jim Davis and Michael Graham identified a surprisingly mundane reason people stop going to church: relocation. Churchgoers move and don’t find a church in their new location, so they gradually dechurch altogether. To help address this problem, The Gospel Coalition is pleased to announce the launch of our new-and-improved TGC Church Directory. For those struggling to find a good church after a geographical move, or for any other reason, we hope this resource will help connect believers to healthy communities where they can flourish in their faith. History of TGC Church Directory For most of our history, TGC maintained an online directory of evangelical churches that aligned with our confessional statement and vision for ministry. This directory was conceived as a practical way to help individuals find trustworthy churches that had chosen to associate with TGC and its values. Instead of relying on Yelp, Google, or ChatGPT for local church recommendations, believers could geo-search for solid congregations through the TGC directory. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of users accessed the directory, one of the most-visited pages on TGC’s website. Over time, the directory grew to more than 10,000 listed churches that had self-reported their alignment with TGC. But the directory’s growth led to decreasing confidence in its reliability. Church Directory 2.0 In 2026, in an effort to improve the directory’s trustworthiness for TGC-affiliated users, we embarked on a comprehensive update. In 2026, in an effort to improve the directory’s trustworthiness for TGC-affiliated users, we embarked on a comprehensive update. We contacted all churches in the directory and asked them to reapply, a process that involved more pointed questions about TGC alignment and a more hands-on approval system. Going forward, we will also seek periodic updates from each church in the directory to keep the information current. To offset the administrative costs of a more updated, accurate directory, all participating churches will now pay an annual administrative fee of $100. We believe this small fee is a reasonable investment for a service that provides critical tools and high-value visibility for subscribing churches. Benefits for Churches Listed in TGC Church Directory If your church isn’t already listed in the directory, consider applying today. The benefits for subscribing churches include the following: Premium Visibility and Trust: Your church will be visible to many Christians actively seeking a trustworthy place of worship in your particular part of the world. Unlimited Job Postings: Subscribing churches receive exclusive and unlimited job postings on the TGC Job Board. Churches will no longer be allowed to list openings unless they’re featured in the directory. Strategic Leadership Insights: Subscribing churches are invited to attend exclusive periodic online gatherings hosted by TGC. These sessions provide high-level, strategic insights on critical topics facing churches today. Discounts on TGC Conferences and Cohorts: Subscribing churches will be given a 10 percent discount on all TGC conferences and cohorts (including leadership training, financial stewardship workshops, Bible/theology seminars, and more). Connection to Like-Minded Churches. Inclusion in the directory can connect you with aligned churches in your area, enhancing TGC Regional Chapters, where pastors gather for support and encouragement. TGC exists to help renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel. We want all our digital, conference, podcast, video, and cohort ministries to point people back to participation in biblically faithful, gospel-centered churches. We believe that providing a trusted church search tool is a vital part of our mission. If you believe your church aligns with TGC’s beliefs and values, and you would like others to know of that alignment, we encourage you to submit your application so your church can be listed.

You’ll find many books on the biblical and practical importance of the local church. I wrote one myself a few years ago with Jonathan Leeman called Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential. But few books can match the way Brad Edwards shows us the need for the church amid rampant anxiety, division, and individualism. Not only our churches but even whole societies would be transformed by implementing the wisdom found in this book, The Reason for Church. Brad is the church planter of The Table Church in Lafayette, Colorado. His debut book has been justly acclaimed. He won the 2025 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award and also finished first in the Church and Pastoral Leadership category. He was the winner of The Gospel Coalition’s award for First-Time Author that year as well. I’m grateful that he joins me to talk about everything from authority and institutions to anxiety and whether unity should be the goal for a church. In This Episode 00:00 – Opening: power, trust, and the temptation toward conformity 00:26 – Introducing Brad Edwards and The Reason for Church 01:41 – Ranking the causes behind declining trust in church authority 04:05 – Accountability, social media, and the limits of online justice 08:25 – Churches, institutions, platforms, and marketplace logic 11:17 – What changes people’s minds about the need for church? 13:27 – Church planting in Boulder County and Colorado’s anti-institutional culture 17:01 – Therapy culture, spiritual abuse, and what the book could not fully address 22:19 – Institution-building, movements, and building a remnant 26:30 – Technology, schedules, and the challenge of spiritual formation 29:09 – Individuality versus individualism 34:39 – Should unity be the goal of a church? 37:49 – What surprised Brad most about becoming a pastor 39:21 – AI, agency, and the future of formation 43:07 – Hartmut Rosa, resonance, gambling, and the desire for control 46:55 – AI, education, responsibility, and authorship 52:05 – The church as remnant and refuge in a changing world 53:19 – What pastors want their congregations to know 56:41 – Closing and Gospelbound outro Resources Mentioned: The Reason for Church by Brad Edwards Rediscover Church by Collin Hansen and Jonathan Leeman Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam A Time to Build by Yuval Levin Bully Pulpit by Michael J. Kruger GIRLS® by Freya India The Reason for God by Tim Keller Center Church by Tim Keller Dominion by Tom Holland Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa PostEverything (Brad Edwards’s podcast with John Houmes) “Child’s Play: Tech’s New Generation and the End of Thinking” by Sam Kriss (Harper’s Magazine) SIGN UP for my newsletter, Unseen Things. Help The Gospel Coalition renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel: Donate today. Don’t miss an episode of Gospelbound with Collin Hansen: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube TGC Updates

Marriage takes work. Marriage takes prayer. Marriage takes God intervening.