Responding to the charge that I am a danger to the church Why I won't be writing to Alex personally I want to start by saying something that will perhaps surprise regular readers. Alex's letter is not in itself the problem. It appears to be more careful, more courteous and more genuinely wrestling with scripture than many an angry elder or cowardly YouTube commentator that I've handled elsewhere. He quotes the wonderful Samuel Rutherford rather than openly raging, although I suspect the same rage is lurking just below the surface. He says he sympathizes with my burdens to whatever extent that sympathy reaches, which is worth acknowledging before I say anything else. But courtesy is not the same as having done the work, and sincerity is not the same as engagement. And so I want to explain publicly and just this once why I'm not going to write to Alex a private, bespoke, point by point reply, and why that refusal is not evasion but defiant consistency. The pattern is always the same. Someone watches several videos, they read some content, those words which gloss over a great deal of unacknowledged work, they form an impression, sometimes an accurate one, often not, and then they write to ask me to do personally and for free what I've already done publicly and at length. In three books, in a Q ⁇ A chapter that anticipates most of this exact objection, and in years of podcasting and blog writing. Watching a video clip is not the same as reading. A clip shows you a sunrise and a soundbite. A book shows you the argument, the exegesis, the qualifications and critically, the answers to the very questions being asked of me now. God Closed Church closes its central chapter with a section entitled Some Common and Much Needed Q ⁇ A built entirely from real correspondence with men who raise concerns almost identical to Alex's. If Alex's questions are sincere, that chapter and my wider writing is where sincerity leads, not to my inbox. I do not owe every viewer of a ten minute video a private tutorial in exchange for their attention. I owe the argument made once, made well, made available. That is what the books are. What Alex is actually saying in fairness to him, let me lay out the substance of his letter plainly because it deserves a plain response, even if not a private one. Firstly, he notes I hold to continuationism and otherwise sit within conservative evangelicalism, yet remain dissatisfied with its modern expressions. Secondly, he understands me to teach that the COVID nineteen church closures were a form of divine judgment. Thirdly, he references my rebuke of the banner of truth for not sufficiently calling for repentance. Fourthly, he believes I teach that Hebrews ten twenty five has been misapplied, that it concerns the eschatological gathering at Christ's return rather than a weekly command to attend a building. Next, his chief concern that this amounts to calling Christians out of their local churches into a kind of exile, and this is extreme separatism, with the practical worry that an isolated believer alone has no means of feeding himself, and that quote unquote lone wolf Christians will use my teaching as cover for rejecting all fellowship. Finally, he closes by saying the content feels doctrinally vague, weighted toward anecdote over substance, and cites Sir Rutherford's warning against Brownist separatism, the sin of looking for a perfect visible church. That is a fair summary and it is worth answering, not privately but here, where it can serve every Alex, not just this one. The very bad figs and the charge of vagueness. Here is the irony. The charge of vagueness always arrives from people who have not read the chapter where the boundary lines have been drawn with the greatest precision, or I might add, from those who have read the chapter or the book, but have failed to respond to what has been written. In God closed church I spend an entire chapter, two baskets of figs, on Jeremiah twenty four. Jeremiah saw two baskets at the temple, one of very good figs, one of figs so rotten they weren't fit to be picked up, let alone fit for human consumption. The shock of the passage is not the badness of the bad figs, it is who they were. The bad figs were not the exiles, the bad figs were the ones who stayed, the most religiously zealous, the most doctrinally sound sounding, the most confident that their continued temple attendance proved their fidelity. The good figs, the ones on whom the Lord set his eyes for good, were those who bowed their heads and went into exile in obedience to his judgment. So when Alex says my teaching feels light on substantial doctrine, I'd ask him pointedly, has he ever read that chapter? Because vague is very rarely what critics mean. What they usually mean is unwelcome. A claim that reorders where the danger actually lies, and that is uncomfortable regardless of how carefully it's argued. And here is where Alex's own letter, without meaning to, supplies the evidence for the very chapter he hasn't read, or at least hasn't responded to. He grants, almost in passing, that he quote unquote, sympathizes with a lot of my burdens about the state of the church. One sentence quickly moved past on the way to his real concern, which is that I am harming the harassed and helpless, not helping them, and therefore dishonouring the Lord whose name is jealous. This is exactly what Alex is saying. But that is precisely the posture of the very bad figs. A nodding acknowledgement of the rot offered without cost, followed immediately by a defence of staying put. It is not the same thing as bowing one's head to the ground. The good figs in Jeremiah chapter twenty four did not footnote their concession and move on. They bowed, they wept, they felt the weight of what their own unfaithfulness had cost. A sentence of sympathy sandwiched between a list of accusations is not lament. It is the very bad fig instinct still standing upright dressed in the language of concern. Systemic ills not anecdote. Alex's other worry that this is anecdote dressed as doctrine deserves the same answer from a different book. The glorious few name something I call the Abadian version, the systemic process by which the church's own deradicalization of genuine discipleship gets mistaken for health, while the actual radical, the very few who take Christ's claims at full weight, get mistaken for the danger. The whole burden of that book is that this is not one bad experience generalized into a theory, it is a systemic diagnosis, argued from scripture, chapter by chapter, with the John the Baptist material and the wider biblical pattern of counterfeit versus authentic radicalization laid out in detail. A critic who has watched two videos has not read the argument and has therefore not earned the standing to call it anecdotal. That is not a limitation of the argument, it is a limitation of the critique, and it is not mine to solve on his behalf in a private email on his timescale. The actual answer to the lone wolf concern I will give Alex this much directly because it's the one part of his letter that isn't answered by go and read. No, I am not commending isolated, unaccountable, self feeding Christianity, and anyone who using my work to justify that has misused it. The confession Mary and I published this year says plainly that departure from unfaithfulness must still eagerly desire the gathering, the means of grace, the safeguards of fellowship, even while separating from infidelity. Psalm one hundred and six forty seven makes that longing explicit. Real exile, biblically, is never solitary by design and certainly not by preference. It is a people bowing their heads together, not a man alone with a laptop declaring independence from the body of Christ, and might I just say it is a people bowing their heads together even if not physically joined in doing so. The thousands of comments on recent videos on my YouTube channel attest to such a reality. I'll come to that in conclusion. Samuel Rutherford's warning against Brownist separatism is fair game to raise, but it assumes the church in question has faults, not systemic apostasy. That is precisely the distinction our confession that we published earlier this year draws at length between tolerable imperfection and the kind of doctrinal gangrene that Paul told Timothy to cut away rather than live alongside. Rutherford wasn't writing to a church with gangrene. Read carefully, he isn't actually the objection to my position. He's assuming the very distinction my position depends on. Listen to this. Rutherford's warning presupposes a world with one quote unquote Mother Kirk, and functioning courts capable of distinguishing tolerable fault from disqualifying error, a mechanism we no longer have across today's fractured, mutually contradictory denominational landscape. Applied literally now, his rule would demand loyalty to an ecclesiology that no longer exists. And it's worth remembering that Rutherford himself, a covenanter who wrote Lex Rex in defence of resisting corrupted authority, spent his life distinguishing imperfection to be endured from corruption to be resisted, not counselling passive endurance of whatever church order one is handed. Conscripting him as a blanket argument against departure asks him to contradict his own life's work. No lament, no urgency. There is a further reason I won't be taking this up privately with Alex, and it is not primarily about doctrine, it is about tone, or rather about what tone reveals. I have written before about the gut wrenched anguish of Jeremiah that these conversations produce in me, not because disagreement wounds me, but because of what entrenched spiritual deception costs the church. I have lost friendships, my livelihood and my wife's livelihood over this conviction, and I have wept over all three. Every serious correspondent I engage with, the ones who've actually left, who write to me from genuine exile, often alone, often grieving, writes with that same anguish. There is weeping in their emails. There is a felt sense that the hour is late and that something precious has been lost. Alex's letter, for all its courtesy, has none of that. It reads like a checklist doctrine confirmed here, concern flagged there, source quoted, signature appended. There is no lament in it, no sense that the state of the church he quote unquote sympathizes with actually grieves him. And that absence is not a small thing, because it is precisely the same absence I meet from institutional voices who treat the thousands who have left, often at enormous personal cost, often into painful isolation, not of their own design, as a problem to be managed rather than people to be wept. Alex's letter belittles them without even mentioning them. Every lone wolf jibe, every worry about the dangers of departure is aimed at real people who left with tears, not swagger, and who are patronized by precisely this kind of calm, undisturbed correspondence from within the institution they left. I will engage at length with anyone who writes to me the way Jeremiah wrote, anguished, urgent, willing to be wrong. I have far less to say to a list of concerns that arrives dry eyed. Where this leaves us. If Alex wants the fuller answer to any of this, the exegesis, the qualifications, the pastoral safeguards, the eschatological framework, it is written at length, anticipating almost exactly his list. The books exist so that I don't have to relitigate the same ground privately with every sincere questioner who found me through a video rather than a bookshop. I am glad Alex is asking sincere questions rather than raging, at least not apparently so, but sincerity earns a public, permanent answer that will serve him and everyone like him, not a private essay written for an audience of one who hasn't yet opened the book. Read the chapter, read the confession, then if questions remain, we can talk. But it is to be a talking through tears. Come and weep with us, Alex. Until then, as the Scot Samuel Rutherford would have said, Hodger weished it.