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7 Ways to Get Your Whole Family Excited to Go to Church

There’s an irony at the heart of modern Western life. We have more freedom, wealth, opportunities, and technology than any previous generation, yet many feel more anxious and restless than ever. We chase success, but it never feels like we can get enough of it. We pursue happiness, but it always seems to disappear like a vapor as soon as we grasp it. We strive to craft our identities, but the pressure to define ourselves is exhausting. This isn’t just a problem for our late-modern culture—it’s in the church too. Christians aren’t immune to the cultural scripts shaping the world around us. We may profess faith in Christ, but we often live by the same cultural stories as everyone else: that our productivity measures our worth, that the good life is found in self-definition and self-expression, and that our struggles with identity and purpose can be solved with the right career, relationship, or life upgrade. But what if the real problem isn’t our circumstances? What if it’s the story we’re living in? We live within stories that shape how we see the world and make sense of our lives. These cultural narratives often go unnoticed, yet they influence us. Through Scripture, we can uncover these hidden scripts, confront their distortions, and learn to live the gospel way. How Cultural Narratives Form Us Every culture has a catechism. It may not be printed in a book or recited at a sporting event, political speech, or business dinner. But it still teaches and shapes us. A catechism is a set of guiding truths, sometimes structured as questions and answers with supporting commentary and explanations. Christians aren’t immune to the cultural scripts shaping the world around us. We’re being catechized daily—not just in the local church but through advertising, social media, entertainment, and the unspoken assumptions of our time. Our experience of this isn’t so much that the culture around us tells us what to think as that it tells us who to be. And if we don’t recognize the scripts we’re following, we’ll live by them without questioning their validity. Consider these recent trends in our cultural moment. Take hustle culture. Perhaps the dominant cultural script, hustle culture insists that your worth is tied to your productivity, that meaning is found in work, and that success is the highest good. “Rise and grind” isn’t just a slogan; it’s a worldview. Burnout has become a badge of honor, proving you’re pushing hard enough. But many are exhausted and empty beneath the bravado of endless striving. Hustle culture promises significance and delivers anxiety. Or consider cancel culture. Today, righteousness is no longer about repentance and redemption but about ideological purity. Those who fail to conform to the trending cultural view are cast out, often without any path to restoration. Cancel culture echoes a deep human longing for justice, but it’s justice without grace. Unlike the gospel, cancelation offers a person no way to be made whole again. Even the “tradwife” movement, a growing trend on social media that glorifies traditional gender roles as a return to a purer, simpler past, reveals our longing for stability and identity. In reaction to the breakdown of modern gender roles, some women are embracing domestic life as a form of self-expression, even as a rebellion against feminism’s influence. Scripture upholds these roles as good gifts (Titus 2:3–5; Prov. 31). Still, the modern tradwife trend is less about submitting to and worshiping Christ and more about curating an aesthetic identity. Scripture and the Better Story Over the past year, my work on developing a catechism has been a journey into these kinds of unseen stories. I’ve found that these cultural narratives can only be unmasked when we hold them to the light of Scripture. God’s Word doesn’t just tell us what to think; it tells us who and whose we are, revealing the better story that answers our deep heart questions. Take happiness. The world tells us happiness is something we must chase at all costs and that it comes from achievement, possessions, or self-fulfillment. But Scripture offers a radically different vision. Psalm 1 describes a truly blessed person not as someone endlessly striving but as one who delights in the Lord’s instruction and meditates on it (v. 2). Jesus makes the same point when he reveals that he aims at giving joy to his people (John 15:11). Happiness isn’t something we manufacture—it’s a by-product of abiding in God. Or take freedom. The world’s vision of freedom is freedom from—no limits, no obligations, no constraints. But Jesus says that it is acknowledging and submitting to Truth that leads to freedom (8:32). True freedom isn’t found in self-rule but in surrender to the One who made us. Just as a fish is free only when it remains in water, we’re most free when we live within God’s design. God’s Word doesn’t just tell us what to think; it tells us who and whose we are. Even our search for identity finds its answer in Scripture. In a world that tells us to define ourselves—to build an identity through work, relationships, or lifestyle choices—the gospel offers us something radically different: “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). The pressure to self-create vanishes when we realize our identity isn’t something we achieve but something we receive. Live in the Better Story If cultural narratives shape us unnoticed, then we must become people who intentionally immerse ourselves in Scripture’s better story. The gospel isn’t just an argument against falsehood—it’s an invitation to something deeper, more authentic, and more satisfying. So here’s the challenge: What stories are shaping you? What narratives have you unknowingly absorbed? Where has the culture discipled you more than Christ has? This week, take five minutes at the end of each day to examine a message you’ve received—through media, work, or a casual conversation with a friend. Hold it up to Scripture. Does it align with the gospel or subtly lead you in ways you’ve never questioned? We don’t have to be swept along by the scripts of our age. We can recognize them, unmask them, and replace them with the truth of Christ. The world will keep offering us stories, but only one will truly satisfy. The gospel doesn’t just counter false stories; it replaces them with a better one. A story in which joy is not found in self-fulfillment but in knowing God. A story in which freedom is not limitless autonomy but belonging to Christ. A story in which our worth is not self-made but secured in our Creator’s love. What story will you live in?

Courtney Doctor and Melissa Kruger talk with Elizabeth Woodson about the true meaning of contentment and how to find it. They discuss how discontentment springs from the attitude of our hearts rather than our circumstances and will only be overcome by trusting God’s goodness. They talk about the enemies of contentment as well as how the psalms of lament show us that grieving is compatible with contentment. We can confess that God has withheld no good thing while also asking, “How long, O Lord?” Recommended Resources: Embrace Your Life by Elizabeth Woodson The Envy of Eve by Melissa Kruger Related Content: Looking for Contentment? It’s Not What You Think Will God Provide for Your Needs? Your Church Needs Your Contentment Discover the Grace of Lament Discussion Questions: 1. In what areas of life do you struggle with comparison? How have you experienced comparison feeding feelings of discontentment? 2. What regular practices help you remind yourself to find contentment in the “past certainty and future hope” God provides instead of your current circumstances? How is this challenging for you as well? 3. Can you think of an example in your life where God has made the “boundary lines” fall in pleasant places (Ps. 16:6), even if you didn’t immediately recognize it? What past circumstance has taught you that what he has given (or withheld) is enough? 4. What might it look like to “delight yourself in the Lord” in your current season of life? 5. How have you experienced God transforming your desires into what he desires? 6. What current circumstance is God using as a “schoolroom” to teach you how to trust him more deeply?

When I was a student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), the admissions department hosted a brainstorming session. They asked for our input on recruiting. When you don’t boast a big endowment, you live and die with enrollment. At least eight of my friends from our time as undergraduates in the Chicago area went on to graduate from a seminary. Four chose the nearby school, TEDS, featuring a world-class faculty of professors like Don Carson, Kevin Vanhoozer, and John Woodbridge. Four others chose The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS), a few hours south in Louisville on Interstate 65. I asked the admissions staffer how they attracted students choosing between the two schools. Backed by the Cooperative Program of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), SBTS offered much lower tuition, then and now. Not to mention, since he assumed the presidency in 1993, Albert Mohler has recruited a world-class faculty featuring several professors who had taught or studied at TEDS, such as Gregg Allison, Tom Nettles, and Bruce Ware. It wasn’t an easy decision for my friends and me. Everyone seemed happy with their education, however, whichever school they chose. But the answer I heard that day from the TEDS admissions officer discouraged me. He said they didn’t know many students looking at SBTS. That’s when I knew TEDS was in trouble—more than 15 years ago. This week, TEDS announced a merger with sister school Trinity Western University in British Columbia. And the TEDS campus, 2,147 miles away in the Chicago suburbs, will close after the 2025–26 school year. Select faculty and staff may follow to Canada. But a long and illustrious chapter in one of the most prestigious seminaries in the United States has come to a close. Shaping Evangelicalism TEDS, as it rose to prominence under its second dean Kenneth Kantzer and employing other post-war evangelical leaders such as Walt Kaiser and Carl F. H. Henry, helped American evangelicals recover from the fundamentalist/modernist controversies of the early 20th century, as well as the inerrancy dispute that erupted at Fuller Theological Seminary in 1962. By the early 21st century, TEDS alumni including David Wells, Mark Noll, Doug Moo, and Craig Blomberg held research positions in other seminaries, while Michael Oh led the Lausanne Movement. TEDS also hosted the first meeting of The Gospel Coalition nearly 20 years ago, in May 2005, when Carson and Tim Keller convened several dozen North American pastors who shared their concern for restoring a confessional core to evangelicalism. TGC held its first national conference at TEDS in 2007, shortly before I left my job at Christianity Today and enrolled at TEDS. I first met Keller in the TEDS chapel, where he delivered his famous address on gospel-centered ministry. TEDS hosted several subsequent meetings of TGC’s Council, and Carson hired me at TGC upon my graduation from TEDS in 2010. With this history of evangelical leadership, the reason for the closing of the TEDS campus near Chicago is ironic. TEDS couldn’t survive the growth and spread of neo-evangelicalism across the United States in the last half-century. When Kantzer stepped down as TEDS dean in 1978, the evangelicalism we know today—populated and sometimes dominated by prosperous Southern Baptists—didn’t yet exist. That same year, a group of concerned Southern Baptists led by Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson met to discuss how they could shift the largest Protestant denomination in a conservative direction. That plan began to unfold in 1979 with the election of Adrian Rogers as the convention’s president. But it took until 1993 for that strategy to result in Mohler’s presidency at SBTS. And where did Mohler turn for a speaker at his inauguration? Henry, who reunited with Billy Graham, his longtime collaborator in such neo-evangelical ventures as Christianity Today. TEDS couldn’t survive the growth and spread of neo-evangelicalism across the United States in the last half-century. For much of Mohler’s 32-year tenure, SBTS has been the largest SBC school and one of the largest seminaries in the world, with 3,281 students. By contrast, in about a decade between 2013 and 2022, TEDS’s full-time equivalent enrollment declined by more than 40 percent to 491. According to the most recent reports, SBC schools educate nearly 20 percent of all theology students in the United States. And they do so in a way that more closely resembles the TEDS of Kantzer than SBTS before Mohler. A faculty colleague of mine will often joke that his church growing up was so fundamentalist that they thought Southern Baptists were liberal. It’s not a description many would use for the SBC today. But before 1979, the SBC was more of a mainline Southern denomination with a wider spectrum of belief. That year, SBTS hosted the liberal World Council of Churches. Henry, though a member of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and a world-famous theologian, wasn’t getting invites to Louisville before Mohler. Foy Valentine, executive director of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission (now the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission) from 1960 to 1987, talked to Newsweek magazine for its landmark “year of the evangelicals” cover story in 1976. The moderate Baptist leader, noted for his support of the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, told Kenneth Woodward, We are not evangelicals. That’s a Yankee word. They want to claim us because we are big and successful and growing every year. But we have our own traditions, our own hymns and more students in our seminaries than they have in all of theirs put together.1 Today, one of Valentine’s successors, Russell Moore, works as editor in chief of Christianity Today, which Henry served as the first editor. Mourning the End On the other side of the conservative resurgence, few would dispute that Southern Baptists are evangelicals. And anyone who attends the meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society or browses book catalogs from evangelical publishers knows how much power and influence Southern Baptists wield among their born-again peers. And it’s not just SBTS any longer. This year, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri, celebrated its 12th consecutive year of record enrollment and has surpassed SBTS for the most full-time equivalent students with 1,862. In the end, it was hard for TEDS, with a small endowment and increasing tuition costs, to compete against these growing schools to the south and west. As a TEDS alumnus, I mourn the end of the school that trained me for ministry, even as I hope for what God might do in a new form for its future. I still wonder if better decisions by leaders could have avoided this outcome that weakens a longtime pillar of evangelicalism, not only in the Midwest and United States but in the entire world. Students today, ministering in confused and often hostile cultures, need more seminary training, not less. I couldn’t have prayed for a better preparation for ministry, in everything from Greek exegesis to Christian history. And almost every day, I thank God for the generous donors who made that education possible. As a TEDS alumnus, I mourn the end of the school that trained me for ministry, even as I hope for what God might do in a new form for its future. But from the broader historical vantage point, TEDS was caught between two eras. Indeed, TEDS helped rescue evangelicals from one era and deliver them into another. TEDS never benefited from the ample endowments that propped up other Protestant schools such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Duke despite their declining enrollments and liberalizing doctrine. Nor did TEDS benefit from the generous support of the largest Protestant denomination as its conservative turn transformed seminaries and delivered record enrollments. For a time that feels too brief for those who love her, TEDS gave evangelicals an academically rigorous, confessionally serious alternative to death-dealing liberalism and soul-stifling fundamentalism. In the end, TEDS helped midwife another new evangelicalism that spanned the Mason-Dixon Line, with brighter prospects than Kantzer and Henry probably ever imagined. ________ 1 Quoted by Kenneth L. Woodward in “Born Again! The Year of the Evangelicals,” Newsweek 88 (October 25, 1976): 76.