The church and cultural engagement (particularly in the context of marriage and gender issues)

"‘I just need to preach the gospel’ is a reflection of the collapse of the biblical world and life view within the church… We need to take the time to prepare ourselves with a biblical worldview..."

May 01, 2025

Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)

I found this interview with Joe Boot from the Ezra Institute well worth the time:

For a shorter version (10-15% of the whole), see this video of edited highlights, or just read the italicised parts of the transcript below, which also features additional links and material here and there.

Introduction

[01:36]

[Interviewer] Firstly, could you tell us a little bit about yourself… about the Ezra Institute of Contemporary Christianity which you’ve established and [which] is going from strength to strength…
[Joe Boot] Yes… I run an organisation called the Ezra Institute. I actually lived in Canada for nearly 20 years beginning in 2003, and my wife and family… we came back to England in 2022… we have an office of Ezra in Canada, in the United States in Tennessee, and here in the United Kingdom where we’re called the Ezra Centre.

Our Story from the Ezra Institute website:

As it happens, in the days when I was a homegroup leader, prior to resigning in 2022, Ezra and Nehemiah were two of the books1 on which I latterly led studies — during 2019 and 2020 respectively.

My work is seeking to communicate, defend and explain the Christian faith, and then train… and equip Christians with a Christian world and life view so that they think Christianly… they think in terms of the paradigm set out in Scripture. We have a small publishing house, we have a lot of online digital resources and we offer in-person training. And… like most organizations… we also have our weekly podcast… for cultural reformation…

Where do I get some help talking to my congregation about contemporary issues?

[03:20]

[Interviewer] I was asked just this past week in fact by a pastor, “Where do I get some help talking to my congregation about contemporary issues?”… you find generally speaking pastors don’t want to go near it, and I’m not sure what the reasons are.
I’m talking pastors, and I’m talking outside of the established church. We know what’s happening in the established church in the UK, and it isn’t pretty. But pastors in the independent sector… other sectors… are saying, “How do I engage those who want to engage?”…
For those pastors who want to engage [and] for those pastors who aren’t engaging with the culture and are just saying, “Well, these things come, these things go… my job is just to preach the gospel” — or whatever — how would… you espond?
[Joe Boot] It’s a false assumption that because somebody is ordained as a clergyman, or is a pastor of a church, that they themselves have been adequately equipped with a biblical world and life view… You may have… gone to seminary, you might have a degree, you might have studied the original [biblical] languages and done a smattering of Greek and Hebrew. Those things in and of themselves don’t give you a robust and cohesive biblical world and life view.
Theology tends to focus on dogmatics. There are of course various disciplines within theology… biblical theology, systematic theology, historical theology, pastoral theology and so on and so forth, but actually most seminaries do not equip pastors in worldview and apologetics. They don’t talk about a Christian philosophy. And whenever you come to the Bible — even in theology — you are coming with a set of assumptions. You’re coming with a philosophical grid to Scripture itself. And not enough attention and not enough time is taken for pastors to equip themselves with a biblical world and life view and with a cultural apologetic. It’s often not their fault. Very often… this just wasn’t on the test. They weren’t equipped in this way…
I pastored a church in Toronto at Westminster Chapel for 14 years, and I was an associate pastor in London for some years in England prior to that… pastors are taken up with all kinds of issues in the life of the local church… pastoral questions and issues… and the time often is not there for them to extensively prepare themselves for cultural engagement.
So the first thing I do is… to encourage pastors along that line… to… take the time as a priority to equip and prepare themselves to engage the cultural questions…
[And] the second point in response to your first question… would be that this trope that you’ve correctly pointed out — “Well… I just need to preach the gospel” — is a reflection of the collapse of the biblical world and life view within the church. Pastors of previous generations recognised that part of the message of the gospel included human identity and sexuality… that marriage was a central part of the declaration of the gospel of the kingdom.
When you look at Scripture itself, you will notice that the Bible begins with a marriage… begins with a wedding. Then God goes on to describe his relationship to his covenant people… as a marriage relationship. And he relates to Israel both as a jilted spouse and as father. God describes himself as being as being wed to an unfaithful spouse and also as the father of the bride. And the reason God in Scripture can be both father of the bride and spouse is that he reveals himself as both Father and Son. The Trinity means that God’s marriage relationship to his people is both father of the bride and spouse.
And then you go on in Scripture and you discover… the Lord Jesus Christ comes to us through… the great drama of the Incarnation… through the betrothal of Mary to Joseph, and the miracle of the virgin birth. Karl Marx himself recognised that the key — he said, as an atheistic materialist — to the holy family was the earthly family. And for the former… to be undermined… to be done away, you must destroy the latter in theory and in practice. He recognised that the holy family was dependent on the earthly family in terms of human understanding.

The mention of Marx reminds me of this post on the Fabian Society:

A wolf in sheep's clothing hidden in plain sight

September 12, 2024

Read full story

And I am reminded that it was not for preaching that gospel that John the Baptist was put in prison and then beheaded.

[Joe Boot] Jesus’ first miracle is performed at a wedding where [he] puts his stamp of authority and approval on marriage. And the church’s relationship to Christ is then described [in terms of] the bridegroom and the bride. And history ends, in the book of Revelation, with what’s called the marriage supper of the Lamb, with a great wedding Feast. Just as history begins with a wedding feast, it’s bookended with a wedding feast at the other end, where the bride of Christ is received by her bridegroom pure and spotless.
So to say, “Well I’m just going to preach the gospel,” and not recognise that central to that gospel is marriage… One of my colleagues, Dr Peter Jones in America, talks about marriage as the cosmological key to the universe… this distinction… male and female, and then the coming together, the unity in diversity within marriage, is a reflection of the being of God himself. Holiness literally means transcendence or distinction, so central to the gospel proclamation has to be… how God has revealed himself as Father and Son, as father of the bride and husband to the bride. And the recognition of the gospel includes the proclamation that we are the people of God, the church, as the bride of Christ. Now if you take away fatherhood and the idea of bride and bridegroom, what is the gospel?
We’ve lost our sense of the gospel. Previous generations of Christians did not struggle with this. It only seems to be… contemporary Christians that struggle with the notion that… the male and female bond of monogamous marriage is the central aspect to the meaning and proclamation of the gospel of the kingdom.

How does a church leader respond to the undermining of both the family and marriage?

[10:57]

[Interviewer] Wow… even non-Christians can appreciate the model that you’ve painted there. And… the powerful impact it has on culture and society. It’s interesting you raise Marx, because… I suppose there’s… two broad ways in which marriage is being attacked…
[The first attack is] the Marxist way, which is to undermine family in three ways. Firstly, trivialised sex. Anyone can have sex with anyone. You don’t have to be married. Secondly, to undermine gender roles… actually there’s no difference between man and woman… they’re exactly the same… it’s a social construct. And thirdly, to get rid of the nature of long-term relationships… no-fault divorce… walk away whenever you want to… let’s give the same rights and blessings to cohabitation as we do to marriage. That’s the first attack.
[And] the second attack is to say, “You’re absolutely right in everything you say about marriage. And it also applies to same-sex relationships.”
So we’ve got both of those two… attacks going on… How would you help a confused pastor, who essentially is spending a lot of his time looking after the flock and squeezing in some hours to read some commentaries, to prepare for Sunday? How does he get his head round the wealth of stuff that's going on constantly around us in society, that some of us spend all our time keeping abreast of…? How does he get to where he needs to be, to be able to lead his flock, to be salt and light — in both of those two attack areas?
[Joe Boot] It’s certainly the case that, as you said, pastors are busy… at least the good ones are busy… there are some that hide in pastoral ministry because they can’t succeed elsewhere. But the good ones are busy, and there’s a variety of obligations on them...
One of the things that I do, and have always said to pastors, is that the marks of the church fundamentally are the preaching of the word, the administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of church discipline. And we can add in there some diaconal2 care for those within the congregation. Outside of that, you’re dealing with secondaries. The priority for the church as an institute is to preach the word of God, administer to the sacraments and exercise church discipline.
Now I would say [that] with the way we’ve sort of “remodelled” church in our time… clear preaching of the word often takes a backseat… time for pastors to prepare to preach adequately takes a back seat. Administration of the sacraments, which is related to church discipline, is not taken as seriously as it should be. And when we don’t take the sacrament of the Lord’s table as seriously as we should — and of course baptism — then church discipline tends to go by the board as well.
And one of the reasons we’re in the mess we’re in, in the church and in the culture, is that the preaching of the word, the administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of church discipline has not been a priority. We spend far too much time trying to think how we’re going to entertain the congregation, and what programmes… we are going to lay on here, there and everywhere for people, rather than [focusing] on the core marks of the church… our primary obligation.
I would really encourage pastors… to prioritise. You don’t have to be an expert in apologetics and culture. That’s not required of every pastor. But we need to take the time to prepare ourselves with a biblical worldview. As Charles Spurgeon often said, “I have a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.” [And as a pastor] I’ve got to be relating these two. I’ve got to be showing people how the word of God relates itself to all of the issues that are going in our culture, because that is what our congregations are confronting week in and week out. Monday through Friday, they’re in the workplace, with their neighbours, and so on and so forth, and they are grappling with these issues, so we have to be able to help them to understand how the word of God… how the claims of Christ and his lordship for those of us who are Christians… applies to all these different areas of life. And I don’t think we’ve given anywhere near sufficient attention to that.
You highlighted cultural Marxism and the way this expresses itself through critical theories. In our culture, Critical Theory.. is capitalised because… it’s not just criticism. A Critical Theory… has to be a theory that is liberating people from the shackles of God and Christian culture. That’s the meaning of Critical Theory in Marxist thought. [And] these are theories that give people allegedly the tools with which to liberate themselves from oppression.
And… marriage and biblical sexuality are seen as oppression within the Marxist worldview. We’ve got a culture now that has almost completely lost its sense of identity. And some of this is of course being done through undermining people's sense of who they are through these critical theories that are pushed in the media and in the universities and in our in our education system…
There’s a part of our identity that is pre-established. We’re creatures made in the image of God. We’re his image bearers, male and female. And there’s that which needs to be actualised in our lives, because… even though God knows us from the womb… you look at Jeremiah or David and you see these two examples of people known and called from the womb with a particular purpose… Nonetheless, King David and Jeremiah weren’t born fully actualised as King David… Jeremiah fully actualised as a prophet… They confront choice and possibility. And in this realm of possibility, you still have to choose to be yourself.
Now our modern culture has recognised the challenge that’s there, to be ourselves. And we hear a lot about “being yourself”. But what is the self? To be yourself requires you to understand what the self is. [And] we’ve lost contact increasingly with the self, because we’ve lost contact with the sense of our creaturehood.
And so… when we are confronted with possibility, we experience a vertigo of possibility. It’s just absolute confusion. We don’t know whether we’re coming or going. And the only possible the only way in which we can actually discover who we are is to discover who we are in God. And these various critical theories have thrown all of that into question. They’ve said, “No. You define yourself. You make yourself. You can remake yourself many times over.”
You look at theorists like Judith Butler — probably the most famous amongst them, who wrote Gender Trouble [in 2006] — and the idea that with her critical theory she could throw into confusion the very idea of male and female… that these are… socially constructed fictions of language repetition. In other words, you just create this language regime of male and female, of marriage, of husband and wife… then that creates a social reality. So if you can just change that language then you can make a new social reality.
Pastors… have to come to grips with this. They have to understand this. When this is the dominant philosophy within a culture, shaping an education system, shaping political life. When battles in the culture are over pronouns, you can’t leave that struggle to JK Rowling. You can’t leave it to Sharron Davies… a swimmer and a novelist… who don’t even know the Lord to my knowledge… to take on these principalities, to take on… this false knowledge that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.
As prophets and priests under God, we have an obligation.. and especially pastors and teachers… remember… those who teach, the Scripture says, will be subject to a stricter judgment… We have an obligation upon us to faithfully teach the word of God on these issues, and to equip our people for works of service, to equip them to understand what’s going on, and how they need to respond. I know that sounds like a lot to throw on the pastor and the teacher, but that’s the job. That’s the calling. That’s the vocation. That is the task.

The attacks on marriage and the family are consistent with the weakening society discussed in this post:

The weakening of society

Jan 20

Read full story

How can church leaders deal with the issues without offending a whole community and making them think they’re not welcome?

[20:33]

[Interviewer] Some ministers have said to me, “We don’t want to offend an entire community, so we're treading very carefully.” And there’s this concept which I’ve brought up a number of times… almost a kind of toxic empathy… “we’re all sinners, we all fall short of the glory of God. There’s no one group of sins worse than any other group, so we don’t want to keep highlighting stuff. And we don’t want people to feel left out, or that they’re not welcome here…” Etc.
How would you deal with that… for a lot of faithful men it’s not an excuse [but] a genuine concern. “I don’t know how to deal with this without offending a whole community and making them think they’re not welcome here.”
[Joe Boot] You made an important distinction there. I think that there are of course some for whom the issue is quite simply fear, and… simply an unwillingness to take on the idols of our age. And whether it’s the prophets or the kings throughout Scripture… they’re judged in terms of their willingness to take on cultural idolatry.
When you look at the the syncretism of Israel… the Ezra Institute [is] named after Ezra the prophet, the scholar, who went amongst a… professing, believing people who were in the grip of syncretism. They had compromised with the gods of the pagan nations around them. They weren’t prepared to walk faithfully. They weren’t prepared to challenge it. Ezra has to come in… teach the law… word of God… call people back from their syncretism with the surrounding culture — their attempt to blend Baal worship and Asherah with the worship of the living God — and call them back to faithfulness.
We have to acknowledge of course [that] there is an element of the modern western church that is actually either in the grip of fear, or actually syncretism. They’re just unwilling, and it’s an excuse. It’s not true for all, but the whole thing about not upsetting people just becomes an excuse. There’s an unwillingness to pay the price of being a prophet. And there is a price to it. Jesus says, “You have to count the cost… The world hated me3 [and] it will hate you as well… The servant is not above his master.” And Jesus did not win popularity contests. The apostles did not change the ancient world by winning popularity contests, and winning the ribbon for being the most sensitive souls, the most irenic… for never offending people. So there’s that group.
And there’s the other group that you allude to. It’s not that they’re in the grip of syncretism or fear, or even an unwillingness to speak the truth to the issues, but they’re not sure how to go about it. And they’ve been sort of told that, missiologically, in terms of the way you should go about this, that careful not faithful perhaps is the priority. “You’ve got to tread on eggshells. The way you win people is actually not by laying things out clearly and truthfully. It’s by… avoid the subject as long as you can… in to win… maybe once they’ve come on a long journey with you, then maybe they’ll be ready to hear something along this line… you’ve got to show… total acceptance of people’s lifestyles and behaviours and… over time maybe the opportunity will arise in which…”
The issue is that just simply isn’t the way it happens in the word of God, and it’s not the way we’re told to do it in the word of God. First off, everybody is a sinner, as you’ve said, from a Christian standpoint. All come short of the glory of God, and that’s precisely why all are called to repentance. Whatever our sins may be, all of us have to come to the foot of the cross. That’s why Paul says, “Such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified…”
So we have to be faithful in teaching the whole counsel of God. That’s what Paul said to… the Ephesian elders on the shores before he left. He said, “I did not refrain… I did not hold back from making known to you the whole counsel of God.” And we have to do that because… it’s only the whole counsel of God that will commend itself to people’s consciences. If we in any way adulterate the word, try and shave off the rough edges, try and hide it, try and cover it, are ashamed of it in some way, or embarrassed about it, we will find that that adulterating of the word will not commend itself to the conscience of people
People today are not interested… in spin. They’re not interested in an approach to things that tries to hide from them what you really believe. This is why people feel disenfranchised in political life… and frustrated and angry, because they feel like they’re misled, they’re lied to, they’re not really told the truth… they don’t do what it says on the tin… the manifestos etc.
The last thing we want in the church of Jesus Christ is for people to get the wrong impression… [for us] to mislead people… They want to hear… [They are asking] “What is the message of the Christian church? At least be honest with me. At least tell the truth about it. What is the truth about human identity from the point of view of the Bible? What does Jesus teach about marriage? What does the word of God teach about human sexuality?”
And I think if we are truthful and honest and loving and faithful in doing that, we will actually find that people are much more receptive than we realise, that they are will be more appreciative of that than us trying to play our cards close to our chest. We need to of course welcome all people to hear the word of God, welcome all people to the foot of the cross, welcome all people to come and worship with us in the life of the church. And when they’re there, they must hear the fulness of the word of God, unvarnished, warts and all… to be confronted with the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And that is love, because Paul says in the most famous passage on love in 1 Corinthians 13, “Love does not rejoice with wrongdoing. It rejoices with the truth.”

That verse is but one of many reasons why it is so important that church leaders speak the truth. I am reminded what I wrote to my own church leaders during the covid era back in early 2021 — that “my main concern at present is that Christians maintain their reputation for speaking the truth.”

A time of great darkness

May 3, 2024

Read full story

For in times of deception, telling the truth is difficult. In words often attributed to George Orwell, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” And we have been living — and still are living — in times of such unprecedented levels of deception that many people have barely begun to appreciate the extent to which we have been — and still are being — deceived. I have found it particularly striking to encounter others at the church I attend who openly state that they are not interested in discussing truth in the context of recent events.

[Joe Boot] We’ve been sold this false idea that evangelistic effectiveness, missiological success, is dependent upon some irenic strategy where we avoid talking about the things that might upset or offend. That was clearly never the strategy of Jesus… never the strategy of the apostles.

How should church leaders address those whose children are transitioning?

28:53

[Interviewer] A question I had… earlier on today… Somebody was saying to me… “I’ve got a friend who’s got a child who’s transitioning… They’re leaving their church because their church just can’t handle it. Do you know of another church in this area which might be able to deal with this a bit more sensitively?” And those are the kind of really difficult pastoral issues that people are having to deal with… the fact that a Christian couple are coming along with their child, and their child… for all intents and purposes wants to represent themselves as a member of the opposite sex… What’s your approach to pastors who are struggling with how to cope with this sort of thing?
[Joe Boot] Well, again, I think one of the things that we can do is point back to the ancient world. Remember that even though we may have sophisticated technologies today… more sophisticated technologies that enable us to… treat certain diseases that are the result of sexual sin, or imitate the bodies of the opposite sex, there is nothing new under the sun…
The emperor Nero married two men, and related to one as a woman and to the other as a man… In modern parlance, he would have been seen as a bisexual. There were crossdressers and what modern culture calls… the queering of culture in the ancient world… There were homosexual temple prostitutes. There were eunuchs and hermaphrodites and so on. And Augustine himself talks about what we would today call a Pride parade in the ancient world.
The pagan approach to human identity… if you look at the Greek philosophers for example… Plato believed in an androgynous original being… The soul in Greek thought is sexless because they had a particular sort of tripartite vision of the human person. So none of these ideas are fundamentally new. Some western sociologists have sought to try and recover this idea of being two-spirited… for example… I was many years, as I said, in North America, and in the LGBTQ2+ plus is the whole idea of being two-spirited… that one individual sort of has the spirit of both male and female in them.
These ideas are not new. They’ve come back in a slightly different uniform… in academic western terminology, in the language of critical theory and Marxism, but they’re not new ideas. [And] they’re not new practices. I try to remind pastors, “Look, you’re not dealing with anything that the ancient church wasn’t dealing with… that the church in the Greco-Roman world wasn’t dealing with. Let’s stop feeling sorry for ourselves. Let’s stop feeling embarrassed about the faith.
I grew up… while Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, and of course… in that time… indoctrination in homosexuality was banned in schools. It wasn’t even legal… When my parents were young adults, these things were crimes. We sort of talk and act as though there’s something astonishingly and tragically new on the scene, and [that] we’re in this terrible situation, and what are we going to do? We’re floundering.
Well, actually we’ve got all the guidance we need in the word of God and in Scripture. And that is faithful biblical teaching and faithful biblical counselling. Now that is why western states are going after counselling. In Canada for example, where I was for nearly 20 years, during the last few years the Parliament in Canada passed unanimously… and by unanimous I mean not a single MP voted against it in the Canadian house… passed Bill C4… an anti-conversion therapy bill which basically captures everything from prayer to pastoral counselling, and criminalises anyone who would seek to teach or counsel or [give] any kind of therapy [to] someone that… the normative understanding of gender and sexuality is male and female within… and the normative understanding of sexuality within the marriage relationship.

If you try and so-called convert somebody practising homosexuality to a normative understanding of sexuality in the Bible… in Canada, that’s now a criminal offence [for] which you can go to prison for five years… in Australia seven years. A parent… with the situation you’re talking about… who would perhaps bring… their child 13-14 years of age, struggling with gender dysphoria or unwanted same-sex desire… brings their child to me as a pastor… If I were to counsel that child and it was found out… not only could I go to prison for five years, the parents could be sent to prison for two years.
So there’s a reason that these tyrannical laws… and they only go one way of course… They’re actually anti-conversion laws. They’re not anti-conversion therapy… They’re anti-conversion-to-Christianity laws is what they are. Because you can do it the other way… you can counsel… therapy… people all the other way… but you just can’t do it in the normative direction. And so there’s a war on.

I am reminded of this post:

A wolf in sheep's clothing

July 26, 2024

Read full story

This is why we need in Britain to be very aware now that we could be facing an attempt to ban so-called conversion therapy in this country as well. But we have to be aware that God has given us the tools… his truth is absolutely clear… there’s nothing new under the sun. We have to be faithful. We have to be bold. We have to be understanding. We have to be empathetic. We have to recognise the challenges that people are facing now in a sort of re-paganising environment. The early church wasn’t insensitive to the context of the pagan world that people were coming out of. We have to show God’s compassion and kindness in these situations without compromising what is true…
Sometimes we want to turn this into some sort of rocket science… that there has to be some sort of incredibly complex therapeutic answer to this question… But human beings haven’t changed since the first century in their essence. Some of our technologies have changed, but human nature hasn’t changed. Male and female hasn’t changed. Human desires and aspirations, human sin and temptation, these haven’t changed. And the word of God hasn’t changed. And that’s our source of stability and constancy. And the word of God calls us to compassion and grace and kindness. And it also calls us to truth and faithfulness. And those things are not incompatible. So I think we just need to recover faithful biblical pastoral care and counselling.

How can the church get involved in promoting marriage?

[37:26]

[Interviewer] Picking up on that theme of recovering, my last question for you… recovering the truth around marriage now… we… know… as you referred to at the beginning… the benefits of marriage for a society. We know that marriage is… like the grow bag from which a flourishing society develops. And the church has always been historically foundational in promoting that and supporting that. We know that fewer people are getting married, they’re getting married much later in life… it’s a capstone, not a cornerstone etc.
How can the church get involved in promoting marriage? How can it get involved in encouraging young people to get married earlier… to stay married… to support marriage… all those things? So we have more kids, so we don’t have to import people… because we’ve actually got people to fill the workforce ourselves. All the outflowings of the fact that we don’t need so much housing, so it’s not so expensive because actually you’ve got multiple occupants in a house not so much single occupancy because people aren’t married etc. How do we… as a church community… how do we promote that positively going forward, and reclaim some of the truth and the beauty from that?
[Joe Boot] Well, a couple of reflections on that very, very interesting point…
The first one would be that I think this is one of the areas where non-Christian people, who are not overt haters of British history and our Judeo-Christian tradition and heritage, are deeply disappointed — and justly so — with the church. And especially with the established church, the Church of England. Here is where I think we as a church could have had a much clearer, more faithful, more robust voice that would have been a tremendous blessing to our society.
The Bishops in the House of Lords failed monumentally on this with the redefinition of marriage. We continue to fail… publicly on this issue. And actually people are crying out for some clarity. Rather than the church trying to be an NGO, why can’t the church just be the church? I hear this a lot, from people who aren’t Christians. “Just tell us what the church believes. Just tell us what Christianity teaches about this. Just… help us understand.” And a faithful witness in the church could have actually resisted this tide… it really could, both in terms of the collapse of marriage and our understanding of marriage and on the whole identity issue. This is an area where the church needs to repent and get itself right and recover this aspect of the gospel.
When you think about the whole male and female identity issue that of course is the foundation of the marriage relationship… if you can’t distinguish between a man and a woman, and you don't have fathers and mothers anymore, then how can you preach the gospel to somebody where God is their father? How can you preach about the son of the living God if the family has collapsed? It doesn’t have any meaning to people if these terms are all meaningless or interchangeable.
Secondly, you’re absolutely right to say that the link between the bedrock… the cornerstone of society and the family and the condition of society are so numerous that it’s almost impossible to elaborate them if you had a 10-hour podcast on the subject. From people’s personal, mental and emotional health… to prosperity… wealth… to academic failure, criminality, delinquency, gainful employment… the list goes on… and even… your lifespan.
And you mentioned some other ones that are often not commented on, which is things like the housing crisis. It never gets talked about that one of the reasons we have this housing crisis in the UK is because of the divorce rate. And because people are delaying marriage and so on. Well, of course there’s a housing crisis when people aren’t getting married… or they’re getting divorces and marriage is breaking down, and then they are owning two homes. There are so many connection points on these issues, and of course fatherlessness… the fallout of that is catastrophic.
And so… what I would say on this issue is that, as you mentioned at the beginning of the show… the issue of marriage is not even something that [only] Christians can defend. There are plenty of people right across the board in this country who may not be professing Christians but [who] recognise that marriage is actually absolutely vital to the basic health of a society… that we should be favouring, as we used to, marriage in the tax system for example. And so on.
But specifically, as a Christian church, what can we do? Well we have to recover our prophetic voice. That’s one thing. So we have to be prepared to speak to the issue… The church has become largely like an Arctic river today… it’s frozen at the mouth. And we have to get unfrozen. We have to speak. And speaking matters. It counts… When people speak up, others listen.
And then of course we have to model something different in the life of the church. That would start of course with faithful teaching on the issue in the church. And then… we have to get serious about church discipline on the issue. We can’t talk one game and live another. In the life of the church we’ve got to be consistent… whether it upsets people or not, whether the people leave and go somewhere else, that is not in the end our ultimate responsibility.
In the life of the church, church leaders… elders… pastors have to exercise church discipline in the area of sexuality and marriage. And we have to get serious again about discipline around infidelity and adultery and fornication in the life of the church… It has been shown… studies have shown that… if you want a lasting, stable fulfilling — in every way — marriage, the latest stats and studies have shown… marry a committed Christian man, ladies. That’s how you get a lasting, faithful, stable marriage.
Do you know what the worst outcomes were in those studies? It wasn’t secular people. It was liberal Christians. The worst thing you can do to… book yourself a failed marriage is to marry a progressive, liberal, professing Christian who doesn’t really believe the word of God. Better to marry somebody who’s not a professing Christian than that. The stats better bear it out… still the most stable, lasting marriages are within a faithful Christian context. And we have to talk about that, and we have to model it.
And we have to exercise… church discipline [which] is a right and a privilege of every Christian. It’s a blessing. It’s a right and a privilege to be part of a church that will hold us accountable and help us when our marriages or relationships are in crisis. And as a pastor we had many situations of church discipline that we had to exercise over… a 15 year period. And some were amazing testimonies of God’s restoration of a situation. And some of course led to excommunication. But then… at least there’s clarity… And this is what Paul requires… that… in the church, touch not the unclean thing. There has to be a clear distinction. These are not a perfect people, but they are a sanctified people. They are a people that honour the Lord. They take seriously the word of God.
And then we have to make sure that we are encouraging marriage within our own Christian communities within the church, and of course within the community itself. Not delaying marriage… we’ve… talked about some of the knock-on effects. Well, another one of course is infertility. The longer you delay marriage, the less likely it is that you’ll be able to have a child, or several children. And if you can’t, then we’ve got the demography problem... the demographic winter facing the West… the collapse of fertility in the country.

Here are some recent figures on births and total fertility rate:

For context, here is what happens with a fertility rate of 1.5:

According to the calculator, a country with an average of 1.5 births per woman will lose 74% of its population over four generations.

And the majority of countries in the above table currently have a fertility rate of less than 1.5. I find the contrast between 2024 and 2015 particularly striking.

Well, that’s related to the collapse of marriage, and it’s also related to delayed marriage. People will delay marriage for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s just pure selfishness. Sometimes it’s because of career reasons. Other times, it’s actually because they would like a child, but they don’t want to have children until… a woman feels that she’s got a committed man in her life who’s prepared to… put the ring on the finger. And often that takes a long time. And then by the time… she wants to start thinking about children, it can be too late. Or you can only have one. So we need to be encouraging young people not to delay marriage forever…
One of the surest ways, by the way, to avoid one of the biggest killers of women in our country — breast cancer — is to nurse a child in your early 20s. Did you know that…? Breastfeeding an infant… as a young woman is one of the surest ways to avoid breast cancer. There are so many knock-on effects and knock-on benefits, but we have to model it. We have to set the example for it. And as Christians I don’t think we should be delaying marriage into our 30s and 40s. Let’s be encouraging marriage. Let’s get married at a time when we’re still fertile… get committed to one another… build faithful families… raise faithful children. And let’s give the Lord the heritage that he deserves. That’s our calling.
[Interviewer] I love it… You’re essentially saying, “Look, faithfulness trumps unity. And that’s something we seem to have got the wrong way around, because there’s no point in having a united group of faithless people who have got the whole thing wrong.
[Joe Boot] It’s a false unity, isn’t it? It’s an artificial, false unity…

Unity can alas be more appealing than speaking the truth. In various contexts.

Where can people go if they want to find out more?

[48:56]

[Interviewer] Where can people go if they want to find out more about you, and maybe even if pastors want a little bit more help in this area… Where would you point them first?
[Joe Boot] Thank you… if people visit ezrainstitute.com, they will find all of our resources. And wherever you get your podcasts, you can find the Ezra Institute’s podcast for cultural reformation, and our podcast for cultural engagement. So we have two podcasts… one that I primarily lead… and my colleague in Canada leads the other one… At Ezra Press you can get our books, and I would encourage people to start with my books Gospel Culture and The Mission of God… as starting points for pastors to begin to reflect on these bigger issues.

Here is Gospel Culture (120 pages):