Remember Covid? I do. It is not a season I ever want to return to, but I am grateful for how the Lord led, protected, and provided for our local congregation during those years. Except for the first six weeks of our county’s mandated shelter-in-place restrictions, we were able to keep our church doors open during the entire pandemic.
We sought ways to accommodate every conscience in our congregation by maintaining social distance requirements and providing various venues for worship—mask-only rooms, non-mask rooms, indoor settings, outdoor settings—as well as campus features like hand-washing and fever-screening stations. By God’s grace, we were able to navigate the challenges of Covid, keep our church open, and shepherd our people.
The Church: The Most Normal Place on Earth
But I’ll never forget a brief conversation I had with one our members during this time. She was a young professional, having recently graduated from college and now working as an elementary school teacher. In light of the the various restrictions that her employer had established at her workplace as well as the broader rules our county had put in place, there was one place she most wanted to be: her local church. Why? Because it was the only place that felt—her words—normal.
What a statement. Even with the changes we had made to Sunday-morning worship, she still viewed our church as the most normal place to be in the county. I believe she felt this way because we were seeking to navigate the pandemic according to the truth. Rather than uncritically accepting everything the media or the alleged experts were telling us, we sought to run everything we heard through the grid of Scripture, ask God for wisdom, patiently think through the issues and challenges, and maintain a course of faithfulness to Christ. It just so happens that such a path proved to be “normal” when the world was in chaos and confusion.
The Pillar and Buttress of the Truth
But this young woman’s comment shouldn’t surprise us. The church should feel like the most normal place on earth because it is God’s family—the gathering of God’s regenerate people who are being transformed more and more into his likeness. It is sin that makes us less human, less “normal,” less like we were designed to be.
Apart from the saving and sanctifying work of the Spirit, our minds are debased (Rom 1:28), our hearts are hard (Eph 4:18), and we often function more like animals than we do humans made in God’s image (Ps 49:12, 20). When a society consists primarily of people who resist God and his wisdom at a foundational level, confusion must reign.
But in salvation, God begins a restoration project in each of his people, transforming us into the image of the most human person to ever live, Jesus Christ, and placing us into a community where our Father puts his wisdom on display (Eph 3:10). Among the various titles Paul gives the church, it is a title found in his first letter to Timothy that helps us understand why this young lady felt such relief when she stepped onto our campus. Paul calls the church the “pillar in buttress of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15). In other words, the local church is the place where the truth about God, Christ, salvation, and the most important matters of life are loved, upheld, and defended. The church is the place where the truth reigns supreme.
When you are immersed in a culture that not only accepts but rejoices over its confusion about the most basic matters of life, it is a breath of fresh air to walk into a place where the people speak and live according to the truth. When a society begins to act in ways that are contrary to logic and the most essential aspects of our personhood, it is mentally and emotionally stabilizing to live among a community of people who are assessing the current cultural moment with biblical clarity and conviction.
Men and Women, Made in God’s Image
When it comes to the contemporary issue of transgenderism, the church should be the most normal place on earth. God’s grand work of salvation and transformation is restoring the image we’ve defaced and disgraced through sin. That image exists as irreducibly male and female, but our minds and hearts have been so corrupted through sin that we now resist the most basic elements of reality—our nature as men and women.
This nature is expressed in a seamless unity of sameness and difference. Men and women are both equally God’s image-bearers, but we are wonderfully different. It was for this reason that Adam rejoiced over his new bride: she was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh (sameness), but she was a woman and not a man (difference) (Gen 2:23).
These fundamental differences are not the result of random (or even divinely-guided) evolutionary processes; they are the direct result of God’s creative work in which he is displaying the glory of his goodness and wisdom in creating two people with complementary bodies, gifts, abilities, perspectives, inclinations, and roles. These differences at the same time glorify God and simultaneously serve as profound blessings to men and women.
God means for our distinctive gifts, perspectives, tendencies, and roles as men and women to complete, balance, and supplement each other so that we might fulfill his will in our homes, churches, and in the world. These differences, therefore, are good and something to be rejoiced over as often as possible. When we marginalize these differences at an ontological or practical level and blur the lines between men and women, God is not glorified, and we forfeit the blessings he intends to bestow upon us.
Upholding these Good Differences
Transgenderism, particularly with the nomenclature of “non-binary” and “gender-fluidity” is basically a declaration that God’s design of men and women and our inherent differences are not good. According to this worldview, our differences as men and women are to be despised, disregarded, even erased. But feminism is also a declaration that the differences between men and women are not good. The differences need to be equalized, marginalized, and obscured. Scripture responds to these two cultural movements with the clear and constant statement that our differences as men and women are good.
What do we mean by good? We mean intrinsically good. Objectively good. Good for all people regardless of religious or cultural or ethnic background. We mean wholesome, beautiful, and truly beneficial for humankind. Ultimately, when we say “good,” we mean that these differences are tied to the nature and character of God who called them very good (Gen 1:31).
As the pillar and buttress of the truth, the church is called to love and defend these essential anthropological realities: (1) Men and women are different; (2) God created these differences for his glory and our blessing; (3) these differences are good. But when society is in the throes of intellectual and moral confusion, merely upholding these simple truths will make the church appear to fellow Christians as wonderfully normal. It will be, for the battle-weary believer, a place of relief and stability—spiritual fresh air for the saint who has been choking on the toxins of a depraved culture.
When the church remains tethered to Christ and Scripture, what it believes, values, and proclaims will be often diametrically opposed to what the world believes, values, and proclaims. In other words, when the church is faithful to God and his Word, it will be markedly different from the world. It will also be the most normal place on earth.
