There is no room in the New Testament for a dismissive view of the local church. It requires intentional gathering and going. Our funds (which are ultimately God’s funds) should be given for the promotion of these two goals.

Do you ever find yourself struggling through unexpected changes or shifting sand? When you feel lost and confused, where do you go for clarity and understanding?

Hebrews 3:13 reminds us to “encourage one another daily.” Why? Because we need it!

We don’t like to admit we’re scared. No one wants to be thought a coward. Admitting fear or anxiety feels like admitting weakness, and we constantly encounter the powerful message that weaknesses must be camouflaged and compensated for. Our surrounding culture prevails on us to be self-reliant, self-confident, independent. Even in the church, we can be reluctant to share what might make us appear weak in faith or somehow less spiritual than we hope others think we are. Perhaps we confide only in counselors or therapists because it’s safer to be vulnerable with someone who doesn’t know us and is duty-bound to keep our confidence. Professional help can be good and even necessary. But if we share our fear and anxiety only in the therapy room, we’re missing out on many blessings and encouragements God intends for us to receive in community with other believers. Shared, Not Shameful For 10 years, my husband and I have lived in Southeast Asia, where our ingrained cultural values of independence and individuality have been constantly challenged by values of interdependence and conformity. Living in a communal Eastern culture has profoundly influenced the way I read the Bible. I’ve come to notice how many scriptural exhortations are addressed to Christians not individually but as a community. Ecclesiastes 4:9–10 declares community’s benefits directly: Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Moreover, we find communal exhortations specifically related to fear. In the Bible, wrestling with fear and anxiety isn’t shameful; it’s assumed. It’s a shared human experience that Jesus anticipated among his disciples. He lovingly encouraged them as a group, saying, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). And he was speaking in the plural when he said, “Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (John 14:27). In the Bible, wrestling with fear and anxiety isn’t shameful; it’s assumed. Paul wrote to Timothy that “God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control” (2 Tim. 1:7, emphasis added). And the writer of Hebrews explains that it’s “we” who “confidently say,” “The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?” (Heb. 13:6). We, the family of believers, call each other to this confident faith. If your struggle with fear and anxiety has become too heavy for you alone, it’s time to expose it to the full strength of your Christian community. Share the Struggle How, then, does Christian community help us when we struggle? Proverbs 12:25 explains, “Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down, but a good word makes him glad.” We can’t receive a “good word” from another to ease the burden of anxiety unless we first share the struggle. We need to share our fears and anxieties so we can face them together. As we share our burdens and encourage each other with God’s life-giving Word, it lightens the load of carrying them alone. The apostle James also points to the help we receive from other believers as he exhorts us, “Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” (James 5:16, NIV). Breakthrough comes when a struggle with sin is brought into community, because our mutual intercession is powerful and effective. Fear and anxiety aren’t necessarily sinful, but we can reasonably assume prayer is similarly effective. When we share our struggles in community, we have access to the collective strength of our fellow believers’ prayers. Share the Encouragement But admitting our fears isn’t for our benefit alone. As God helps us and our faith and courage grow, everyone else’s does too. Why is David’s account of his experience walking through the darkest valley but fearing no evil in Psalm 23 included in an anthology of corporate worship songs? Because we all benefit from his testimony—it encourages the whole community of faith. As David Gibson writes in The Lord of Psalm 23, “What God has done already for his people . . . shows me there are more than sufficient grounds to believe that he can do the same for me: God has a track record I can rely on because he’s already done it for my family in the faith.” This is also why we keep telling long-ago stories of martyrs and missionaries and heroes of the faith. We can’t receive a ‘good word’ from another to ease the burden of anxiety unless we first share the struggle. We need the whole community of believers, dead and alive, bearing witness to God’s faithfulness amid our struggles. When we share our struggles in Christian community, we not only find encouragement for ourselves but also serve as an encouragement to others. So don’t mask or bury your fear and anxiety. Don’t reserve them exclusively for the counselor’s office. While professional help can be valuable, it’s not a substitute for the collective strength and encouragement we find in the community of believers. Expect God to work amid your struggles with fear and anxiety. Expect God to work through his people as you share your struggles in community.

The church is always situated in a cultural context. Ever since the early church, Christians have grappled with how to speak the gospel into culture and become all things to all people while remaining true to biblical teachings. And yet contemporary Western societies have largely lost their meaningful engagement with, and connection to, history. This has left them disconnected from the full scope of the cultural context of the church. I have coined the term “Ahistoric Age” to identify the way in which this plays out. There are five major characteristics of the Ahistoric Age: 1. We believe that the past is merely a source of shame and oppression from which we must free ourselves. 2. We no longer think of ourselves as part of historical communities. 3. We’re increasingly ignorant of history. 4. We don’t believe history has a narrative or a purpose. 5. We’re unable to reason well and disagree peaceably about the ethical complexities of the past—the coexistence of good and evil in the same historical figure or episode. When I discuss the effects of ahistoricism in the church, I’m not suggesting we need to reject contemporary culture completely and simply reembrace everything we did in the past, as if the past were somehow by definition superior. Rather, I’m alerting us to some ways ahistoric attitudes are affecting the church so we can be aware of what’s going on and better equipped to engage with those issues. Attitudes of Ahistoricism Ahistoricism is by no means everywhere in the church. But where ahistoricism is present, it manifests itself in three broad attitudes towards the past: irrelevance, ignorance, and ideology. First, irrelevance posits that the way we did things in the past is simply not relevant to us anymore. We don’t think of history or our traditions as a guide or helpful resource for us. Second, people are increasingly ignorant of history in general, as well as of Christianity’s history, teachings, and practices. Do we know the role Christianity has played in the founding ideas of our societies? Do we know how our core doctrinal beliefs and traditions developed, and are we aware of what they could offer us? Do we know how our core doctrinal beliefs and traditions developed, and are we aware of what they could offer us? And, finally, ideology is when we approach the past with an ideological attitude and framework, which we then use to judge the past. These three attitudes often overlap and influence one another and have multiple outworkings we can observe, but I’d like to focus on one in particular: a doctrinal drift from orthodoxy. Ahistoricism’s Effect on Doctrine By this, I mean the attempt to redefine or dispense with historic teachings and doctrines of the faith. Two attitudes underlie this attempt: an attitude of irrelevance and an ideological attitude that dismisses the historic teaching or approach as ignorant, oppressive, or prejudiced. There is an idea that the church ought to reinterpret, or has always reinterpreted, doctrine to suit the times, especially to reverse long-established teachings, is overly simplistic, theologically impoverished, and historically inaccurate. There are some issues on which large numbers of Christians have developed their biblical interpretations over the centuries, but these aren’t cases of completely revising key doctrines to produce a position entirely at odds with the history of biblical interpretation. Nor are these instances of simply discarding the history of theology in light of new information or experience. When Martin Luther wrote his Ninety-five Theses, for example, he was advocating a return to a biblical understanding of salvation held by the early church from which the late medieval church erred in its fairly recent institution of indulgences and overemphasis on a causal relationship between penance and justification. The church’s understanding of slavery is another example, in which many abolitionists not only sought to recover a biblical understanding but also had precedent throughout history of Christians opposing slavery and actively buying the freedom of slaves. Moreover, for centuries, Christians have been engaged in discussions about certain issues on which they continue to hold a variety of positions, such as the just war tradition and capital punishment. These, however, aren’t hills to die on, to use Gavin Ortlund’s helpful metaphor. In short, there can be different opinions on these issues within orthodox Christianity. But how might we determine which issues are hills to die on and which issues can support multiple orthodox positions? It’s enormously helpful to know how the history of doctrine and orthodoxy has developed over the centuries, as this can be an excellent resource to help us think through and discuss issues. It can also help us see which hills are worth dying on. G. K. Chesterton’s famous fence analogy is helpful here. Chesterton wrote that when we approach a fence or a gate erected across a road, a reckless person may say, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” However, a more intelligent person would know that the “gate or fence did not grow there. . . . Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable.” Likewise, when we approach the historic, orthodox doctrines of the church, an ahistoric approach will often say, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” If we know our history, however, we can see how people came to that biblical interpretation. The doctrines held in the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed are examples of “fences” built around Christian orthodoxy. We must know their history so we don’t recklessly tear these fences down. Doctrine Rooted in History, Not Cultural Whims Biblical interpretation is a complex and weighty process. Arguing that ahistoricism partially underpins attempts to redefine key Christian doctrines today by no means implies the authority of historical teachings over the Bible or that Christians never reinterpret Scripture passages. The doctrines held in the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed are examples of ‘fences’ built around Christian orthodoxy. We must know their history so we don’t recklessly tear them down. When Protestants grapple with an issue of interpretation, the ultimate source of authority is the Bible. However, having the history of biblical scholarship is also beneficial, particularly on doctrinal matters. Consequently, we ought to be suspicious of those who dismiss two millennia of theological teaching on doctrinal matters like Christ’s divinity as irrelevant. Historical grounding can provide a handbrake on rapid and profound doctrinal changes that undermine orthodoxy and sweep churches along the currents of culture. We find a profound ahistoric attitude when we look at what lies at the heart of doctrinal drift in churches, especially on many contemporary issues. One of ahistoricism’s primary outworkings in the church is the claim that centuries of teaching on key issues of doctrine or Christian ethics can simply be dismissed because they’re now deemed irrelevant; the past is just “outdated dogma,” to use Spong’s term.