Of course they want us dead.
Bootcamps exist because enemies are real.
ECS is a bootcamp.
This is a potentially more controversial letter (and longer!) than I typically write in this space, but I think it’s fitting in the current cultural moment.
The celebration of the assassination of Charlie Kirk on the part of many on the political left has been very revealing. Of course, not all were guilty of this detestable celebration, but that there were any at all is illuminating. What sort of person would find such a murder to be a cause of celebration? What sort of a person poses such a threat that the enemies of God celebrate when he’s sniped by a coward? The obvious reality is that there still are actual people in the world who delight in the high-visibility murder of a godly man…just as in Jesus’ day.
This is not an encomium of Charlie Kirk, though that would not be inappropriate. Rather, it’s a statement of another obvious reality: In a host of ways, ECS is working to produce people like Charlie Kirk. What sorts of people do I mean?
We need people who acknowledge their own shortcomings, repent of their sins, and embrace the free grace of God and identity in Christ. Such people are unfazed by their enemies’ attempts to discredit them on the grounds of past sins for which they’ve been forgiven.
We need people who will fight. For too long Christians have been listening to the world tell us that being loving means not fighting. We let the world set the terms of engagement. We stand by when they tell us how Christians are allowed to behave as they work to discredit us. Acknowledging that we don’t need their help (that is, we’re doing a perfectly good job discrediting ourselves without their assistance), the narrative is still potent: Anyone who won’t turn the other cheek to all manner of blasphemy and slander and violence is unloving and shouldn’t call himself a Christian. This, of course, is hogwash.
Our Christian culture is anemic; it’s weak, lacking the blood-iron of conviction, and so it comes as little surprise when we start to talk like them. How many times were we told during COVID how Jesus would have us to act? And how many of those lessons came from the world? We were ill prepared to engage on intellectual, biblical, and convictional grounds.
Alas. We must fight. It’s been said that grace has a backbone; we need to practice a godly disagreeability. And we should not suppose that we’re going to get out of here unscathed, whether we choose to fight or not. For some, this means staying the course where you are; for others, it means engaging in ways that you’ve been reticent to do in the past.
The fighting we’re engaged in at ECS is deceptive because it involves cute little kids. Nevertheless, the kingdom of darkness suffers violence when our first graders recite the Apostles’ Creed. Satan, Beelzebub, Moloch, Ashtoreth, Baal, and Osiris recoil when we sing “Blessed the Man that Fears Jehovah” at Matins. Why? Because they’re threatened and offended at the notion of generations of the godly enjoying sweet fellowship.
We also need people who fight graciously. Love powers and directs our fighting. It is a love for the truth, a love for the innocent, a love for the marginalized, and a love for the defenseless that energizes and orients us. A compassion for people who are destroying themselves (like the victims of self-mutilation nicknamed “gender realignment”) requires that we share with them that identity is something given by God, not by self.
Our love for people of every skin color comes from the realization that man’s real and infinite value comes from the fact that he bears God’s image. The very thing that gives men value is actually common to all men; therefore, no one human is inherently better or more valuable than any other. Though some cultures produce people who bear God’s image more accurately or potently, it’s not as though they’re inherently superior. Because we embrace an objective standard outside of ourselves, we don’t have to carry the burden of those who try to find meaning, identity, and reality in themselves.
We need people who fight fair. Christians tend to opt for softness while our enemies fight dirty. They lie, we speak the truth. They weaponize Scripture by twisting it; we weaponize Scripture by unleashing it. Charlie Kirk was tender but not soft. We must always wield the truth with love, but the truth often hurts when it hits its mark. Our enemies will call this “unchristian” or “hypocritical.” We must stand firm, and be ready to to repent when we fail.
I could go on, but the point is this: at ECS we are trying to raise up exactly the sort of people who pose such a threat to the enemies of God that they must be dealt with. Very few will engage in such a public context as Kirk, but many will be as threatening to our enemies in their different spheres of influence.
While the celebratory response was surprising, it should not have been. Intellectually, we know that God’s enemies are our enemies, and though we are to love them, they want us dead. Still, when the intellectual reality takes on three dimensions and we see it, we are reminded that Christians are at war.
Since that is the case, training is pretty important! Your kids cannot escape the war; they can be well-trained to fight in it. And it’ll involve far more books and math facts and psalms than it will guns and knives and fists.
Risus est bellum.
Jonathan