One of the thoughts that has been bouncing around my mind over the past few weeks is this: So much of what I do in life, so many of the decisions I make, are driven primarily by considerations of my own comfort. I do what I do because it is more comfortable than the alternative; I choose to go this way instead of that way because the opposite looks like it may just bring too much discomfort. I’m kind of a coward, I guess, and kind of consumed with keeping life safe and easy. Just like Jesus. Or not.

I think it’s more than coincidence that as I’ve been considering my own comfort, I’ve kept coming across the story of the twelve Israelite spies who were sent to scout out the Promised Land (Numbers 13). You know the story, I’m sure. Moses commissioned these twelve men, one from each of the twelve tribes of Israel and told them,

Go up into the Negeb and go up into the hill country, and see what the land is, and whether the people who dwell in it are strong or weak, whether they are few or many, and whether the land that they dwell in is good or bad, and whether the cities that they dwell in are camps or strongholds, and whether the land is rich or poor, and whether there are trees in it or not. Be of good courage and bring some of the fruit of the land.

For forty days these men did just what Moses asked. They scouted the land and returned with encouraging reports: The land was “flowing with milk and honey,” and was flush with produce. It was every bit as rich and verdant as the Lord had promised. Each of the twelve men agreed on this. But then ten stepped forward and said, “There’s just one problem: We could never take this land. The people there are strong and scary and will destroy us.” Obviously when God had promised them the land, he had forgotten to account for the people who lived there—people who weren’t quite ready to give up their homeland without a fight.

Only two of the twelve, Joshua and Caleb, took a dissenting view and said "The land, which we passed through to spy it out, is an exceedingly good land. If the LORD delights in us, he will bring us into this land and give it to us, a land that flows with milk and honey. Only do not rebel against the LORD. And do not fear the people of the land, for they are bread for us. Their protection is removed from them, and the LORD is with us; do not fear them."

Despite what Joshua and Caleb claimed, the people of Israel believed the other ten spies and grumbled against the Lord. The Lord responded with justice, saying that of that entire generation, only Joshua and Caleb would ever enter the promised land. The rest would be forced to wander until they died; only when the generation was gone would God allow them to cross the river.

I can identify with this kind of fear. It’s the fear that comes when God’s promises seem to conflict with the evidence before us. Each of us encounters times in life where we are forced to decide whether we will trust God despite what appears to be evidence that his way just won’t work, that it’s foolhardy, that it’s impossible. Before us we have the giants and the promises of God; we respond with fear of the giants (which is to say, with comfort) or with faith in the promises.

There is etiquette that surrounds the disposal of a flag. According to VFW, the dignified way to dispose of a tattered or soiled flag is to burn it, but to do so with discretion and to ensure that it has been entirely consumed. The reason flags are treated with respect is that they are symbolic. They are far more than just silk and dye, but actually represent a nation and what that nation stands for. To treat a flag with respect is to honor that flag’s nation.

One of the readers of this site recently asked me, “How should Christians dispose of old Bibles?” It is a good question. Is disposing of a Bible similar to disposing of a flag, a ritual surrounded by rules and etiquette, or is it just like disposing of yesterday’s newspaper? Maybe it is a little bit of both.

Christians are people of the book, people who honor the Bible. However, when we say that we honor the Bible, it isn’t the paper and ink and leather and binding that we reverence, but the words. There are some churches where the worship service begins with a processional that may include a person carrying a Bible to the pulpit. That Bible may be ornate, but it is not the book itself—the form—that is reverenced. The ornate covering is meant to symbolize the value of what that book contains.

As Christians we believe that the Bible is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword; we believe that all of the Bible is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching and reproof and correction and training in righteousness. But when we affirm these things, we are referring to the words, not to the form. This is why a Bible app on the iPad, or the Bible memorized and recited, is just as much the Bible, just as much holy Scripture, as the paper and ink. The Lord works through his words in whatever way they are communicated.

October is here and to ring in the new month I’ve got great new desktop wallpaper for you to download. This month’s wallpaper was designed by Mark Priestap. I asked Mark to introduce himself: 

My wife Meredith and I have one girl (10) and two boys (8 and 4) and we’ve been married since ‘99. We live in Monclova, Ohio and attend Peace Reformed Church in Napoleon, Ohio where we’ve been attending since ‘09. I’m a ‘97 graduate of The Ohio State University and have been working as a designer and front end web developer almost ever since. From 2010 to 2012 I had the privilege being part of the Desiring God web team that redesigned/developed the DG website and created the DG iOS app … and they even let me write some articles. Afterwards, I joined on as the Creative Director of Forge Apps, developer of the DG app and the John Piper Daily Devotional app.

A few notes: Your desktop or laptop may take any of the sizes, depending on your monitor size and a host of other considerations. You can click here to see what your resolution is. Generally you set one of these are your wallpaper by clicking on the link to the image, then right-clicking on the image (once it’s open) and selecting “Set as Background,” “Set as Desktop Background,” or something similar. If you aren’t sure, post a comment and we’ll try to help you figure it out.

Mark says, “These wallpaper designs are in commemoration of how God, despite our stiff-necked opposition to his Law and Gospel, poured out his Holy Spirit on Europe in the 1500’s, opening our eyes afresh to Christ and his gospel, causing the Protestant Reformation. May these help you reflect on God’s mercy and what our terrible hopeless condition would be outside of his grace. Nothing can be added to what he has accomplished and nothing can be added to the Word through which Christ and his benefits have delivered us and continue to nourish and strengthen us! He alone is sufficient and he alone is worthy of glory and honor.”

With Calendar: 1024x768, 1280x800, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1900x1200, 2560x1440, 2880x1800

Without Calendar: iPhone, iPhone 5, iPad 1 or 2, New iPad, 1024x768, 1280x800, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1900x1200, 2560x1440, 2880x1800

Government is one of the facts of life in this world. All of human history has shown that we need to be governed. Not surprisingly, the Bible speaks to government. Here are five things the Bible teaches us.

Every government is put in place by God.

Jesus answered [Pilate], “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above.” (John 19:11)

There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. (Romans 13:1b)

God uses even sinful governments to do his will.

Therefore thus says the LORD of hosts: Because you have not obeyed my words, behold, I will send for all the tribes of the north, declares the LORD, and for Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and I will bring them against this land and its inhabitants, and against all these surrounding nations. I will devote them to destruction, and make them a horror, a hissing, and an everlasting desolation. (Jeremiah 25:8-9)

Truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you [God] anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. (Acts 4:27-28)

We ought to pray for those who govern us.

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. (1 Timothy 2:1-2)

We should honor and submit to those who govern us.

Jesus said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.” And they marveled at him. (Mark 12:17)

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. (Romans 13:1-4)

Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as a cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. 17 Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor. (1 Peter 2:13-17)

All human governments will eventually end and Jesus will reign over everyone forever.

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
7 Of the increase of his government and of peace
there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.
(Isaiah 9:6-7)

Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. … From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords. (Revelation 19:11, 15-16)

Over the past few years I have had opportunity to attend a lot of Christian conferences, sometimes to sit and learn but more commonly in a kind of official capacity as a speaker or reporter. From either perspective I enjoy them most of the time. I will grant that without some vigilance we can overdo it and allow conferences to feed a kind of celebrityism, but I am convinced that they have their time and place and can be genuinely beneficial to the Christian.

One thing conferences do well, and one thing I love about them, is their unique atmosphere of excitement and anticipation. Most people attend a conference expecting that they will be blessed by the teaching they receive there. Enthusiasm runs high and is contagious so that people listen attentively, work diligently to make personal application and go out of their way to express gratitude to the speakers. For the attendee, the reward is directly related to the expectation—they expect much from the conference and therefore they work hard to get much from it. It’s not that the messages or sermons there are so different or so much better than what they might hear in their local church; rather, there is an atmosphere that lends itself to listening and applying.

I’m grateful for this kind of expectation, especially when I am speaking. It many ways it makes my task easier and more immediately fulfilling. However, I also find myself a little bit concerned about it and here’s why: The excitement and the anticipation that marks a conference is often noticeably absent in the local church. A sermon preached at a conference can have a greater impact on a person than the very same sermon preached the next Sunday morning in the context of a church service. Why? Because the person attending the conference has prepared himself to receive that message. He believes he will be blessed, he applies himself, and not surprisingly, he finds in the end that he has been blessed.

I will grant that conferences have some notable practical advantages over church services: Parents can sit and listen without having to stop the children from squabbling and without having to take them for bathroom breaks. Neither do they have to be concerned about rushing home to prepare lunch for guests or about staying late to put away chairs. I get all of that. But I’m convinced that the primary distinguishing mark is the preparation and the anticipation.

Sometimes we talk about conferences as if they are intrinsically wrong or as if we should enjoy them less. I disagree. Let’s continue to support and enjoy conferences and continue to believe and anticipate that the Lord can use them in our lives as a, occasional, supplemental kind of blessing. But as we affirm the value of conferences, let’s also learn from them that there is value in elevating the preparations we make for worshipping in the local church, and elevating the anticipation we feel for Sunday morning’s sermon. Let’s learn from conferences that we can and should take that excitement and anticipation and bring it to church with us every Sunday.

It’s funny how life works, isn’t it? It is so often the little decisions—the decisions that at the time seem so inconsequential—that have such far-reaching impact. Exactly ten years ago today, rather on a whim, I paid a few dollars to register the domain www.challies.com. A few hours and a few clicks later I had launched a new web site. It was just one of many things I did that day I’m sure, but it was one that, in time, changed my life.

I can barely remember who and what I was ten years ago. Using a bit of math I can reliably say that I was twenty-five years old, I had been married for four years, I was the father of a two-year-old son and I had a daughter due in just a few weeks. I lived in a rented a stone’s throw from where I live now, had just been laid off from my position as a senior network administrator at a high-tech firm, and had recently founded my own web design business. I was a member of a nearby church founded upon the principles of church growth, and, to my recollection, owned exactly one Christian book (It was R.C. Sproul’s Following Christ, a gift from my parents that I hadn’t ever gotten around to reading). Only once or twice since escaping college had I written anything more than a birthday card. I was very, very shy and in front of a crowd could do little more than blush and sweat and stammer.

I had no great plans for the domain and I intended only to use it as a place to share family news. My parents and siblings had all moved down to the United States just a couple of years before. The reason I registered Challies.com is that this was to be the place where the Challies family would exchange news and photographs; it would be a site by and for Challies’.

Within days of beginning the site I had uploaded several sets of photographs, mostly of the children. Then it happened: Sitting in church a week or two later I heard the pastor praise Mother Teresa as the very paragon of Christian virtue. I went home and researched what I knew and what I suspected of Mother Teresa and wrote an article titled "The Myth of Mother Teresa." It was an inauspicious beginning to what would soon become an extensive list of articles.

The early days of the site reflected several realities in my life at the time: I was a father of young children who was eager to share news and information about them (and who lived in a pre-Facebook world); I was an entrepreneur who was working long hours to put food on the table; and I was a Christian who had left behind the Reformed tradition but who was now forced to face my roots in the unexpected context of a church founded upon all the pragmatic principles of church growth. I had been content to leave behind the Reformed theology I had learned as a child, but in the context of this professedly non-Reformed church I found that my conscience screaming at me to examine what I really believed. I was beginning to see, even if in a very hazy way, that good theology really does matter and that a faulty root system will produce faulty fruit.

This church was blown by every wind of Christian marketing: The Purpose Driven Life and 40 Days of Purpose and The Passion of the Christ and everything else that promised great results and was endorsed by Rick Warren or Bill Hybels. Almost without my knowing it, my web site evolved into a place where I wrestled with these things, not in the abstract, but in the context of my own life. As the church led us through The Purpose Driven Life, I wrote a reflection every day, becoming increasingly concerned and perturbed, primarily by the misuse of Scripture. When the church leaders determined that The Passion of the Christ was, to use Rick Warren’s endorsement, “the best outreach opportunity in 2,000 years,” they dug deep and spent tens of thousands of dollars on tickets that they distributed through the community. I made my way to the theater on opening day and wrote a long review.

In these early days I wrestled through the five points of Calvinism, through what it means to evangelize, and through so much of what was popular in Evangelicalism simply because that was what was popular in my church. When I go back and read these early articles I can sense authenticity and urgency. While I had a measure of loyalty for that church, while I wanted to write off Reformed theology as old-fashioned and unnecessary, I was coming to see that the foundation was awfully shaky.

What I could only see later on, once my perspective had widened, is that the very same questions I was asking were the ones so many others were asking. Maybe you were asking them. As my church embraced The Purpose Driven Life, so did hundreds or thousands of others; as The Passion of the Christ became all the rage with Christians in Oakville, it became equally popular all across the world. Christians everywhere were asking very similar questions and growing in very similar directions. Many others were discovering or perhaps rediscovering Reformed Theology in this movement that would soon be labeled “New Calvinism.” This new medium of the blogosphere allowed me to ask and to attempt to answer these questions out loud and in public. It allowed others to follow along.

It was ten years ago that this all began. I never could have guessed at the time that I would follow “The Myth of Mother Teresa” with more than six thousand other articles and that the blog would some day see over ten million visits a year. I certainly never could have guessed that it would be such a formative influence in my own life, the place where I would work through so many issues, where I would rediscover Reformed theology, and where I would find that I just plain love to write. It would disrupt my plans to grow my business from a one-man operation to a full design studio. Instead it would open up opportunities to attend conferences and to write books and even to discover that I am capable of public speaking. Best of all, it would introduce me to Grace Fellowship Church where I would first meet the pastors, then become a member, then, several years later, be called to the ministry.

Registering a domain name, such a simple and insignificant thing, was one of those little acts that set my life on an entirely unexpected trajectory. I wouldn’t know how to think about this, how to interpret it, if I didn’t believe in the quiet hand of Providence that continually directs events, that knows the end (and the middle) long before the beginning. I look back on these ten years with quiet wonder and profound gratitude. At times I wish I could project what the next ten years might hold, but if I’ve learned anything, it is that I ought to know better than to make predictions.

I felt like this deserved a celebration of some sort, so I’ve gone ahead and put together a giveaway. Check in a bit later today and it should be ready to go. There will be some fun prizes to win.

A couple of weeks ago I invested an hour and a half in watching Lakeland: The Movie, a documentary about Todd Bentley and the Lakeland “Revival.” You may remember that in April of 2008, a preacher and revivalist named Todd Bentley was invited to Ignited Church in Lakeland, Florida. The plan was to have Bentley there for five days of revival services. In the end he stayed for four months. What was meant to be a small, local event soon saw hundreds of thousands of people from 65 countries travel to Florida. Millions more participated through the Internet. Night after night Bentley would hold wild services full of singing, preaching, speaking in tongues, prayer for healing and miracles and, of course, the inevitable collection of money.

The revival was marked by what were said to be great manifestations of the work of the Holy Spirit--speaking in tongues, ecstatic prophecies, miraculous healings and even the claim that somewhere around thirty people had been raised from the dead. Just about every major media outlet covered it at one time or another. Most of them went looking for evidence that miracles had actually happened; not surprisingly, not a single miracle was ever verified.

By August the revival was beginning to slow down a little bit and Bentley decided to leave Lakeland and to take the revival on the road. Teaching that the Holy Spirit could be passed from him to others by the laying on of hands, he would tour the country and take this outpouring of the Spirit with him. But no sooner did he leave Lakeland than the media exploded with reports that Bentley and his wife would be separating. Apparently he had been carrying on an inappropriate relationship with one of the women connected to his ministry. He and his wife soon divorced and shortly afterward he had married this other woman. The revivals and his ministry came to a screeching halt, at least for a time.

This documentary made me both angry and sad. I was outraged to see Bentley's complete disregard for Scripture, his disregard for what the Bible tells us about the miraculous gifts, about maintaining good order in services, about so much else. What made me sad were the many looks at the people who had followed Bentley. There were many people, well-intentioned, I am sure, who gave up everything they had to follow him. They sold their houses, they walked away from their normal lives, and drove down to Florida where for a time many of them even lived together in a tent city. They looked to Bentley as their leader, the one who would be ushering in an age of revival, of constant miracles and supernatural deeds. They were enraptured by him, entranced by him, as they lived in a charismatic glow of constant prayer, prophecy, speaking in tongues and unusual manifestations of the Holy Spirit.

But then Bentley committed adultery and divorced his wife and walked away from his family. And then what? What about those people who gave up everything to follow him? What were they to do? What did they have left? He left them with nothing. He had called on them to follow him. He had gained their trust and their allegiance and their finances. And then he indulged in his sin and walked away. Like so many religious leaders before and after, he promised so much: He promised new life and new prosperity and new depths of religious experience. But in the end he abandoned those who followed him. The ones he hurt the worst were the ones who had trusted him most. The ones he hurt the worst were the ones who had given up the most to follow him.

A couple of years ago Microsoft put together a clever marketing campaign for Windows Phone 7, their new mobile operating system (which is to say, the software they were introducing that would power the new generation of Windows-based cell phones). The commercial poked fun at the fact that so many of us spend so much of our lives staring at tiny little LCD rectangles. And then it asks the simple question, "Really?"

Microsoft acknowledges that mobile phones are an integral part of life today and that we will be unwilling to get rid of them altogether, so what they suggest is that their software can make your time staring at the phone more productive, allowing you to get in, get out, and get to the rest of life. They want you to "be here now." Of course Microsoft's new software doesn’t actually do anything to solve the problem--we all know that. They make a half-hearted attempt to suggest that this software will make a difference but obviously they are hoping that in identifying a problem many of us are feeling guilty about, they'll convince us that they have found a solution. It's nonsense. It’s like a commerical that shows a bunch of drunken people staggering around and that presents a new high-octane vodka as the antidote. The problem cannot be the solution!

Microsoft is acknowledging in their advertising that we depend upon our phones and that these phones call us to depend upon them. The slave has become the master; we've become tools of our tools. They do a great job of showing life experiences missed, of displaying the distraction. But in the end they've really got nothing to offer by way of solution, except, as is so often the case, more technology to solve the problems caused by our technology. If only our phones were a little smarter or a little faster, then we'd get back to living. That's always the way we try to solve these problems. But it rarely works. And in the case of Windows Phone 7 (or the iPhone 5, for that), it definitely won't work.

Read any book dealing with technology and before long you'll run across Marshall McLuhan and his famous aphorism "the medium is the message." What McLuhan meant to say in that phrase is that buried within every technology is some kind of an ideology, some kind of an idea, that will make itself known in time. And that message is the most important component of the technology. When we look at our cell phones today--the latest generation of smartphones, that allow us to make calls, send text messages, check our email, update Facebook, surf the web, listen to music, watch movies, etc, etc, etc--we can quickly start to see the ideology buried within. These phones demand all of us. They accelerate the pace of life, they demand constant attention.

Here's an interesting phenomenon. On the one hand we have become dependent upon our mobile phones. After all, they bring us great benefits that we do not wish to give up. But on the other hand, we need to face the truth that these devices are prone to draw us away from the important things in life, including—or perhaps especially—the people who are closest to us.

We live in a culture of celebrity, a culture where fame and greatness have little to do with heroism and accomplishment. The people who influence us, the people who dominate the headlines and the covers of magazines, are so often people who are famous for being famous rather than being people who have contributed anything profound and lasting to the human experience.

I have been finding myself thinking a lot about Christian celebrity—not the people as much as the phenomenon itself. It’s undeniable that there is a celebrity culture in Christianity and it is equally undeniable that we New Calvinists like our celebs as much as anyone else.

Now let’s be clear: The fact that we esteem some people is not necessarily wrong. The Lord has gifted certain people to such an extent that we admire them for who they are and what they have contributed to the church, usually through the written word or the spoken word. There are others who may have less natural gifting or talent, but who have been consistently faithful with the remarkable opportunities they have been given and we admire these people for what they have contributed through words or through example. As we honor them, we honor God who has so gifted them. Well and good.

So where do we cross a line into some kind of celebrity culture? This has consumed my mind for some time now. It feels like a celebrity culture exists in the church, but what makes it so? Can I prove it?

Here is where my thinking has led me. We cross into a culture of celebrity when we assume that merit in one field or one discipline necessarily carries that merit to other fields or disciplines. More particularly, it comes when we transfer the authority of one field into another, so that we assume the guy with the popular blog must be a great expositor of the Bible (thus transferring the authority of his success in social media into authority the pulpit). Christian celebrity comes when we assume that the songwriter must be a noteworthy teacher, that the YouTube phenom is worthy of our pulpit, and that the guy who sells so many books must be able to craft a sermon on any topic or any text. Merit in one isolated field convinces us that this person has earned the right to every other platform. When we do this we have elevated not on the basis of merit, but of celebrity.

Thus we have men who have never preached a sermon in their lives standing before hundreds or thousands who have been told that this man will necessarily bless them. We put these celebrities in the difficult position of raising them to a platform they are just not equipped to handle well. We do them, and we do ourselves, a disservice. This leads to books written by authors who are well-known rather than authors who are truly equipped; it leads to conferences that boast a-list celebrity speakers even though there are other men who could be much more faithful and much more skillful in expositing those texts or preaching on those topics.

I believe I can speak to this topic because in some ways I have been the recipient of this transfer of authority. I have had to reconcile myself to the indisputable fact that many of the opportunities I have been given have come not by way of merit, but by way of transfer of merit (which is to say, by way of celebrity). There have been times where I’ve been asked to stand before a large crowd and speak on a topic that is near and dear to me and which I have studied deeply; I love to do that and can do that with a measure of boldness and confidence. But there have been many other times I’ve been asked to stand before a large crowd and to speak on a topic on which I really have no business speaking and where I bring so little authority. I have sat on panels and been in way over my head, put at the front of that room because of a measure of success in an entirely different field.

What I have come to see plainly and simply in my own life is that achieving a level of social media success does not make me a theologian, but that people may begin to treat me like one. Writing thousands of blog posts and collecting millions of page views will open up many opportunities to speak on an endless variety of topics, but it will do very little to equip me to do this well. There is no necessary correlation between social media success and the ability to understand and exposit God’s Word, but there is a definite correlation between social media success and the assumption that I must be a gifted preacher. So many of the opportunities I have been offered have far exceeded any kind of legitimate merit. Yet both I and others have bought into the belief that success in one area equips me for success in others.

I am still grappling with these things, still trying to understand the implications in my own life. There are two measures I’ve quietly tried to put into place. The first is that whatever ministry I have in the wider Christian world ought to grow out of ministry in my local church. The authority to speak on a topic will grow outward from here to there. I would never want to travel to a conference and speak on a topic for which the people closest to me see no authority and no growth. The second measure is that I have tried to narrow the scope of the topics I speak on to those few where I have expended a lot of effort, where I have studied the Bible closely, where I have emphasized personal application, and where I believe that by God’s grace I may have something to say.

Earlier this week I posted a short article showing how the Toronto District School Board has chosen to effectively drive churches out of the public schools by pushing through a massive fee hike. In a city of small congregations and expensive real estate, renting space from public schools has long been one of the few affordable options for churches. Grace Fellowship Church of East Toronto, a recent plant of the church I attend, is faced with a 391% increase in the fee they pay to rent a gymnasium for their worship services; Grace Toronto, another local church with which we have a close association, has seen their fees rise by 142%, up to $192,000 a year for just four hours of weekly use. Many other local churches face similar circumstances.

At the time I wrote the article I asked for action and for prayer. Both must have happened in abundant measure!

I posted the article on Monday morning and by the next day I had been contacted by several local and national newspapers, radio stations, and television channels. I opted to direct all media inquiries to Julian Freeman and Dan MacDonald, the pastors of those two churches. In the few days since, it has been a thrill to see those men appear all over the news.

• CTV News covered the issue immediately and headlined their article “Churches scramble after school board raises rental fee.” They published another titled “Church stunned by major TDSB rental fee hike.”
• The Toronto Star published an article titled “School rental hike wallops small faith groups.”
• The National Post went with the long headline “Church groups see rent for meeting rooms spike as much as 400% as Toronto schools try to fill budget gap.”
• WORLD Magazine titled an article “Blatant Discrimination.”
• Christianity Today published a brief story titled “Toronto Churches Face Eviction As School Rental Fees Skyrocket”

And that was not all. This issue was the subject of discussions on local talk radio, including 1010 CFRB, a station well-known to Torontonians. WDCX, a Christian radio station based in Buffalo (but which broadcasts across Lake Ontario into the Toronto area) had a feature. Global TV, a national television network, apparently intends to air a feature this weekend.

I’d ask you to continue to pray and, if you are a Toronto resident, to continue to take action by getting in touch with your Member of Provincial Parliament and your School Trustee. While I have not yet spoken to the Toronto School Board representatives, I am hearing from one pastor they may soon be willing to offer some kind of a compromise to the churches. Please pray that they do. From other pastors I am hearing that the School Board is digging in their heels.