Tag Archives: substance

A Hollow Church

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I received some interesting responses to the notes I wrote this week about Halloween and its history. If you didn’t see the one that started it all, you can do so by visiting here: https://cruciformstuff.com/2025/10/27/is-halloween-a-pagan-holiday/.

For the record, I’d say my essential premise was not necessarily about being for or against observing the holiday, but rather that many Christians seemed more than willing to simply surrender the event to the secular world entirely, having somehow been taught that it wasn’t the Church’s to begin with—that it was a pagan holiday that the Church tried to baptize. And yet, in truth, it’s really the other way around. Halloween came from the Church’s sanctified imagination and was later hijacked by paganism. It was Christian, but then it was emptied of its Christian meaning and filled with the world’s nonsense.

That right there—the hollowing out of something holy until only the shell remains—maybe that’s the more critical point. I say that because it describes far more than just All Hallows’ Eve. It’s a pattern for our age.

In other words, we live in a world that memorializes things but forgets the reason we memorialize them in the first place. We still hang lights at Christmas, but fewer folks seem to remember that Christ, the light of the world, is the reason for those lights. We still gather for weddings, but we do so assuming that marriage is humanity’s idea. It isn’t. God started it. It was His idea. Nevertheless, holy spaces are exchanged for thematic wedding venues, and favorite rock songs replace sacred hymnody that proclaims marriage’s sanctity. I suppose even beyond the Church’s doors, we celebrate plenty of other civic holidays we no longer understand. Plenty have told me they appreciate Memorial Day, not for its solemn character, but because it extends their weekend.

All around us, the forms remain, but the meanings are gone.

But this is how the world works. It doesn’t always destroy. Sometimes it rewrites in order to repurpose. It keeps the rituals but drains them of their truth. It keeps the beauty but forgets beauty’s essence.

Here’s my concern. It sure seems like Christians are more often tempted to retreat in these situations. Overwhelmed by how corrupt something has become, rather than fight to take it back, they figure the only possible solution is to surrender the field and move on. I know folks who won’t wear a rainbow on their clothes because LGBTQ Inc. has hijacked the symbol.

But God’s people own that symbol. It’s ours. Still, it seems we’re more inclined to surrender it than reclaim it.

That’s precisely how we lost Halloween. And it’s how we’re losing nearly everything else.

For the record, one of the clearest places to see this is in worship. Somewhere along the line, the Church decided that the way to reach the world was to mimic it—that the key to filling the pews was to empty the sanctuary of everything that made it sacred. And in the process, the Church’s worship—its highest demonstration of theology—was rebranded as a form of evangelistic enticement, something meant to attract rather than feed. But that’s never been worship’s purpose. Worship’s purpose is not to entertain the unbeliever or to market the faith (Ecclesiastes 5:1-3; John 4:23–24; Galatians 1:10), but to carry Christians into a place where time and eternity meet—where God tends to His people personally, giving them the gifts of forgiveness that sustain them (Ezekiel 34: 11-16; Matthew 26:26–28; Luke 24:30–32; 1 John 1:9; Revelation 7:9–12).

The tragic irony is that in chasing cultural appeal, we lost something the world needs from us: transcendence. When the Church stops sounding like the Church and starts echoing the culture, she ceases to be a holy and distinct refuge from the noise.

But again, this isn’t merely about worship styles. It isn’t even a critique of instruments or melodies. It’s about forgetting where these good and holy things came from in the first place. The world borrows and bends what it never built. The world didn’t invent most of what it claims to have invented. It didn’t invent marriage. It didn’t invent human sexuality. It didn’t invent justice. It didn’t invent what’s beautiful. It didn’t invent charity. It didn’t invent education. All of these things are fruits from God’s soil, and as a result, are, by right, crops to be harvested from Christianity’s garden. I was just talking with a dear friend this past Tuesday about how the university itself began in cathedrals. It was a place to learn truth as an extension of God. Now the very institutions that exist because of the Church’s intellectual legacy would rather burn incense to the self and its ideologies than bow the knee to the actual Truth made flesh that made their existence possible.

Or take art. I shared with that same friend how the world still paints, sings, sculpts, and builds. But holy moly, it sure seems like it no longer knows why. For example, while walking on the treadmill recently, I was watching a documentary about the 80s band Devo. Essentially, the band members claimed to be a consolidation of art, music, film, and social commentary. At one point in the movie, a founding member noted how one of their goals was to rid the world of Christian influence. Then an audio clip from an early interview played. That same bandmate could be heard saying, “We never said we were opposed to the Church. We just said we’d rather have cancer than Christianity.”

I didn’t keep watching for much longer. It struck me that music, something meant to elevate the soul, is so easily wielded by the culture as a weapon to offend that same soul. Art, which once imitated divine order and beauty, is now used to desecrate. Masterpieces are defaced. Blasphemy is called boldness. Ugliness is praised as authenticity. Chaos is paraded as radical creativity. For me, these are just proofs that when God is removed from something, it doesn’t become better or, as some would insist, freer. It becomes grotesque.

Now, I don’t want to wander too far here, so I suppose part of my point is that anything emptied of holiness can only go in one direction. It can only collapse into mockery. This trajectory worsens wherever Christians give up ground in retreat.

And by the way, when I used the term “paganism” before, I didn’t mean people dancing around in robes in the woods performing animal sacrifices. I meant a worldview that cannot stand true transcendence. Paganism, ancient or modern, is really just an older name for what we now call secularism. Secularism is paganism in modern clothes. That said, it’ll forever be the same naked humanity trying to exist in creation apart from its Creator.

And that, I think, is why Christians must be very selective when counting their losses and choosing retreat. Every time the world steals something sacred—every time it hollows out what was ours and paints it in its own colors—our response shouldn’t necessarily be to abandon it. We should first consider how to reclaim and refill it. We should labor to turn the world back to what it once knew.

Marriage belongs to God, and so we do what we can to turn the world toward that truth. Life belongs to God, and so we head to the front lines intent on taking back that ground. Beauty, truth, and everything else I mentioned already belong to Him. And even when the world tries to rewrite the definitions, it can’t escape the reality that every good thing it holds remains a gift from a gracious Lord who “gives daily bread to everyone without our prayers, even to all evil people,” as Luther explains in the Fourth Petition of the Lord’s Prayer in his Small Catechism.

So, thinking back on what I wrote earlier this week about Halloween, maybe the appropriate follow-up question isn’t, “How did Halloween become what it has become?” Perhaps we should be asking, “Why do we continue to let the world steal all our stuff?”

Yes, the world has a way of spoiling things. Still, I tend to think that Christianity has a remarkable ability to let that happen. But there’s another, even better ability we possess. We have been empowered to re-sanctify what the world spoils. I mean, if we can take a cross—a dreadful device of torture and death—and put it into our sanctuaries as a foundational symbol of Christianity itself, we can figure out how to snatch back the rainbow from the LGBTQ mafia. I’d say we can even go wandering through the darkness on a cool October night dressed like a scary monster, all the while laughing in the devil’s face as we take back All Hallows Eve.

That’s our heritage—to reclaim, to remind, to re-infuse the sacred into what’s been stripped bare. Because in the end, the world can only paganize what God first sanctified. And if that’s true, then the call to the Christian forces shouldn’t be “Retreat!” but rather “Charge!” And by God’s grace, it’ll be ours to capture and reclaim.

Peeling Back the Layers

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Maybe I should share it and maybe I shouldn’t, but Jennifer asked me recently if I’d ever thought about using a content subscription service like Patreon. I know why she asked. Because as it may also be for you, the need to make ends meet is never far from us. Thinking creatively, she knows that I put out thousands of words a week across various platforms, and I do all of it pretty much because I can, without personal benefit. I’ve said before, I often consider my writing proclivity to be more of an affliction. I’m stricken with the need to observe and then scribble into words what I’ve observed. Most folks with the same disease use it to make a living. I can’t even imagine writing for a living, other than to consider the basics of what I’m already doing as a pastor in service to the Gospel.

Either way, Jen’s questioning prompted at least two thoughts worth considering this morning.

The conversation continued with me saying, essentially, no, I haven’t thought of using Patreon. Although, my response was more, “I’ll look into it when things slow down a bit.” That’s my default reply. It’s not a lie. I’m always hoping for things to slow down. But she and I know they never do. She went on to ask if I sometimes feel like I’ll look back on my life with regret, concerned that I’ll have spent too much time running myself ragged. I didn’t tiptoe around that question. Yes, that thought has crossed my mind. I’ll bet it has crossed yours, too. I do my best to be honest when it does, admitting I’m sometimes to blame for my own busyness. Not always. But sometimes. And I say that with a caveat.

For one, the simple truth is that pastors are often treated like genies in bottles. (By the way, I wrote about this in my book Ten Ways to Kill a Pastor.) No matter the relevance of the need, people rub the pastoral lamp through an email, text, phone call, private message, or whatever (at any given moment at any particular hour of the day) with the expectation the pastor will immediately pop out with a willingness to do whatever is needed. Like other pastors, I struggle with this. But before you take offense at this, let me explain.

For me, the struggle comes because I have a tendency to look at everything as an opportunity for ministry, and as a result, I have a hard time saying no. A real-world instance of how this gets me into trouble could be, for example, those moments when a non-member who just so happens to know me—or is referred by someone—reaches out to ask me to come and pray with a dying friend or a sick relative. As it relates to my official duties, this is not necessarily my responsibility. As it relates to my calling as a Christian, it is. I know this, and so, I wrestle with what to do. More often than not, I find myself willing to commit to just one more thing (on top of an already overwhelming stack of things in a bustling congregation and school requiring a lot of attention) because I’m hoping there’s a chance the Gospel will be heard and take root. I do this fully aware that if I say yes, it’ll be an overtax on my family, my actual duties, and my health. If I say no, it’s likely I’ll be interpreted as cold, ultimately representing the congregation as uncaring, and possibly seeing an extended relationship come undone.

Believe it or not, these types of situations happen more than you might think. I get requests like this regularly. If you don’t believe me, just ask our office administrator, Georgine.

Still, even when I say no, admittedly, I’m more than capable of making bad choices with the limited free time I do have. I almost always fill it with something I hope will be productive. Perhaps it’s inherent to pastors to be as Longfellow described, which is “up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing….” There’s always something that needs doing in any congregation. Personally, I’d argue that if the pastor isn’t relatively tempted by countless opportunities for service, it’s likely he’s not all that attuned to his role and its surroundings.

Carrying this back around to Jennifer’s question about Patreon, a second thought comes to mind.

I suppose when it comes to using something like Patreon, I also mentioned to Jennifer that I’m not so sure people would subscribe. I say this because the kind of writing I do is far different than what’s popular.

Just look at what’s in front of you right now. My content is rarely brief.

I know, I know. Countless people would say less is more. Mindful of this, I try to be as crisp as I can. It’s just that when I start thinking about something I want to say, I often get lost in the layers, feeling the need to share with the reader what I’ve discovered—or at least pondered—and then fill any potential holes. As a result, a paragraph turns into two, followed by a free-thinking examination of those first two paragraphs that becomes two more, and so on.

I can’t just give a little. I want to be thorough. Remember, everything is an opportunity for ministry. This includes everything I write.

Digging deeper, I’m not sure people would pay a couple of bucks a month to read that deeply. As a society, we no longer exist in an age designed for that kind of content. We’re living in a time of memes, mic-drop soundbites, and pithy Tik-Tok videos created and uploaded while driving. Unfortunately, people aren’t just being entertained by these things. They’re being trained by them, too. They’re learning that life’s important things can be received and understood in 15-second intervals.

In short, the exchange of humanity’s thoughts seems to have become little more than an ever-streaming attempt at witty succinctness that really has no handles, nothing to grab onto. People think what they’re hearing is a truth bomb. But it really isn’t. It’s a superficial statement filled with gigantic holes. Its hook is more emotional than substantial. I suppose folks working at genius levels can accomplish hole-less truth bombs that do both. Admittedly, Jordan Peterson seems capable of such things. Ben Shapiro, too. But that’s two people. Last I heard, there were almost five billion people using social media on any given day. The best any of the rest of us non-geniuses can do is to be as lucid as possible—to take a chance at presenting an intelligible case made from the best words in the best order and sent along with the best of intentions. That takes work on both sides of the digital screen. Most people don’t want to work in this way. They want to be spoon fed the sweeter things. In our internet age, anyone willing to work—whether it be a person wishing to write substantially for public consumption or someone eager to be taught and then employ what they’ve learned in the surrounding world—nowadays, these people risk vicious cancellation. And why? Because sinful human beings prefer what pads the throne upon which they’re already sitting. Soundbite communications are designed to be that padding—to be emotionally comfortable, and ultimately, subjectively moldable to almost anyone’s closely-held ideology.

I don’t recall who said it, but someone once observed that few people would bother speaking at all if they actually knew how much of what they were saying was being misunderstood. To overcome this—to actually understand other people and their ideas in a way that benefits society—we must be working from points of origin that are far more than witty posts from our favorite influencers. It takes deeper levels of interaction, concentration, and contemplation—far more than what Tik-Tok videos and Facebook stories can provide.

Saint Paul wrote in Colossians 4:6 that Christians should be capable of giving an answer to anyone who asks. Saint Peter said something similar in 1 Peter 3:15. He noted the need for “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you….” Giving an answer and making a thorough defense means being equipped for conversation with content. It means study. Study takes work. It understands that being able to answer one question is possible with a little work. But it’ll take more to answer a second and third, or a fourth and fifth. Normal human conversations are rarely one or two sentences in length. They’re dialogues. They require content.

Mindful of people’s New Year’s resolutions, maybe a worthy exercise would be to start thinking through and then challenging (if necessary) your friends’ one-sentence social media posts before clicking “like.” After a little more thought, you might realize the foolishness in the meme I stumbled upon this morning which reads, “You don’t need a lot of friends to be happy, just a few real ones who appreciate you for who you are.”

Neat picture. Very moving. Two women toasting with a bottle of wine between them. However, these emotional hooks don’t change how stupid the meme is. It sounds nice, but it’s foolishly shallow. And it’s inviting moral disaster. I won’t tell you how. Take a minute to think about it. Just know there are a gazillion of these narcissistic messages feeding the egos of billions. I think folks will need to dig deeper to avoid becoming one of the billions.