Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. A growing number of young Christian men seem to be rediscovering words largely absent from modern evangelical vocabulary, like kingdom, authority, discipline, order, responsibility, courage, civilization.
Well, frankly, this is understandable. Many young people, especially young men, have grown weary of shallow Christianity shaped more, it seems, by therapy than theology, more by self-expression than self-denial. They're looking for something weightier, something deeper. They want roots, depth, conviction, purpose. In other words, they are looking for formation.
This is a good hunger. Across denominations, in fact, pastors have been observing to us that there's a renewed interest, especially among younger Christians, in things like church history, spiritual disciplines, Bible study, liturgy. But like every renewal movement in church history, sincere instincts can become distorted if they are detached from the character of Christ. Recently, a loose constellation of online voices that are sometimes referred to as kingdom bros has emerged around these themes. Though not really a formal movement, it tends to emphasize masculine strength, cultural engagement, civilizational renewal.
And many of the concerns they raise are legitimate. Christians should reject passivity. The gospel does have public implications. The kingdom of God does concern every sphere of life. But confusion arises when the kingdom of God is subtly redefined according to the logic of the world.
In every age, Christians are tempted to exchange holiness for influence, to exchange Christ-likeness for simply winning. Jesus confronted this temptation in Matthew when his disciples were arguing about the kingdom in terms of power and status. He told them, you know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, but it shall not be so among you. That single sentence might be one of the most neglected teachings in modern cultural Christianity. The kingdom of God is not a baptized version of worldly power.
It's not advanced through coercion, outrage, tribalism, or the will to dominate. Chuck Colson certainly understood this. Though deeply engaged in public life, he often reminded Christians, we propose, we don't impose. That's because he was wary of power, especially unchecked power, especially unchecked political power. The Christian vision for society is not imposed through force or manipulation or cultural intimidation.
Christians bear witness to the truth. We persuade, we serve, we sacrifice, we talk of another kingdom, one not of this world, yet profoundly for this world. The church does not grow through conquest. It grows through faithfulness. And that's where many of the modern conversations about winning the culture become so spiritually dangerous, because success is not the same thing as faithfulness.
Remember, the early church possessed almost no cultural power and yet turned the whole world upside down through holiness, through courage, through charity, through an unshakable conviction, through living their faith in the public square. didn't dominate Rome. They outlived it. They redeemed it from the inside out. Christians lived marked by these lesser preached characteristics that were so radically different in the Roman context, and it proved far more compelling than the empire itself.
And that's still how the kingdom advances. As Christians live under the rule and reign of Christ, whether in influence or in obscurity, heaven breaks into the present as a sign of what is to come. This matters especially for young men who are seeking purpose today. They are absolutely right to reject passivity, pornography, consumerism, perpetual adolescence. They are absolutely right to desire brotherhood and to be put on a mission.
The church should celebrate that hunger and then direct it. But if that strength is detached from Christ, it'll be just another form of worldliness. It'll be a masculinity truly toxic, shaped by internet combativeness rather than the Sermon on the Mount. It'll produce pride, not holiness. The model of Christian manhood is not the swaggering conqueror.
It is the suffering servant. It is Christ, the one who washed feet before he bore a crown. Indeed, the central symbol of Christianity is not a throne. It is the cross. That doesn't mean that Christians retreat, quite the opposite.
Christians should build institutions. We should pursue justice. We should cultivate beauty. We should defend truth and strengthen families and serve the common good. But we do so, as Micah 6, 8 put it, acting justly, loving mercy, walking humbly with God.
The kingdom of God begins with surrender. It's formed first within us before it transforms anything around us. And that sort of formation requires far more than online clicks and ideological alignment. It requires... prayer, repentance, worship, humility, spiritual discipline, Christian community, and obedience to Christ in the ordinary places of life.
Tragically, the modern church often produces Christians who are informed, but not really formed. People who are capable of arguing Christian ideas, but not embodying Christian character. We don't have to choose between the two, but character is the apologetic that the modern world finds hardest to dismiss. And that gives us a right to speak. Christian lives should demonstrate the reality of the kingdom that we proclaim, because in the end, the kingdom of God does not belong to those who are the strongest online, but to those who are poor in spirit, meek, merciful.
It belongs to peacemakers and to those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. In other words, the kind of people the modern world oftentimes fails to recognize as winners. And yet, by the grace of God, these are precisely the people through whom Christ will change the world. And I was with a group of those people just this past weekend at the Colson Center National Conference. Colson Fellows' program is designed.
Designed around this particular vision of formation, to go deeper, not to become angry, not just to be able to argue, but to be able to love God with heart, mind, soul, and strength, to understand the truth, to proclaim the truth, to defend the truth, and to do so in love. After all, despite what we hear, truth and love are not in conflict. Truth and love are both personified and sourced in the person of Jesus Christ. If there's a conflict between them, it's a conflict in our perspective. To learn more about the Colson Fellows Program.
And to be the kind of formed Christian that can engage this cultural moment with truth and love, check out the Colson Fellows program at Colsonfellows.org. That's colsonfellows.org. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Michael Craven. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
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