Educating Students in New Gomorrah

By Dr. Barrett Mosbacker

July 30, 2023

We continue slouching towards Gomorrah. We are well along the road to the moral chaos that is the end of radical individualism and the tyranny that is the goal of radical egalitarianism. Modern liberalism has corrupted our culture across the board. The imperative question is whether there is any possibility of avoiding the condition of Gomorrah. What can halt or reverse the march of modern liberalism? What can keep us from reaching a servile condition punctuated by spasms of violence and eroticism?¹

We are no longer slouching towards Gomorrah. We have arrived. By “New Gomorrah” I mean the city we have built in Gomorrah’s image — a society that has systematically rejected biblical norms and replaced them with ideologies and behaviors hostile to the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, producing the moral, social, and spiritual wreckage documented in the pages that follow.

Consider our moral descent in the symbols a nation chooses to illuminate. The Empire State Building, is frequently lit with the colors of the pride flag, proclaiming the moral darkness that has descended on our nation, corrupting our national soul and wreaking havoc on millions of lives.

In New Gomorrah, there are few moral anchors. The idea of moral anchors is anathema in this city. It is a city filled with foolishness, chaos, violence, moral lasciviousness, and perversion. What was once shameful and hidden is now loudly and proudly promoted by the evangelists of evil (Romans 1:32).

The profane spectacle at RuPaul’s Drag Convention, attended by young children, is a perfect example of New Gomorrah. Children mingling around the convention could visit booths sponsored by a spiked-collar company and a sexual lubricant company. A recording from the event captured the song lyric “I’m horny all night long” playing in the background.² Though this particular convention was held in the United Kingdom, similar conventions are held in the United States.

Our decadence is not restricted to drag conventions. A Kirkwood High School (Kirkwood, MO) yearbook showed pictures of condoms and asked students, “For the weirdest place you’ve hooked up.” Student answers included: “Altered State dressing room in the West County Mall and the football field between two field hockey goals.”

It is bad enough that students felt no shame in publishing the material; what is far worse is school administrators’ indifference and passive approval. When asked about the material in the yearbook, the school district responded:

Kirkwood High School has a longstanding tradition of allowing student media to be designated public forums. This practice has led to the Kirkwood High School journalism program being one of 16 programs in the country announced by the Journalism Education Association, National Scholastic Press Association, and Quill and Scroll International Honorary Society as a First Amendment Press Freedom Award school for 2023. As school officials do not engage in prior review, the content of KHS Media is determined by and reflects only the views of the student staff and not school officials or the school itself.³

In other words, the awards won are more important than the character of its students. One wonders if they would have taken such a nonchalant stance had students promoted opposition to policies promoting gender identity and LGBTQ+ lifestyles. The answer is no. They would have expressed outrage and censored the students.

Pornography in Children’s Books

In New Gomorrah, adults defend, even promote, access to pornographic material in schools. Consider former President Obama’s statement in a public letter denouncing the “profoundly misguided” attempts to ban books in libraries nationwide.

Today, some of the books that shaped my life — and the lives of so many others — are being challenged by people who disagree with certain ideas or perspectives. It’s no coincidence that these ‘banned books’ are often written by or feature people of color, indigenous people, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

As reported by National Review, Obama’s comments came amid a wave of parent concern over the addition of highly sexualized content to public school libraries.

Much of the concern has focused on the book Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, an LGBT book that has been introduced to elementary and middle-school students around the country. The book, which received the 2020 American Library Association’s Alex Award, includes erotic scenes of men having sex, illustrations of minors performing oral sex, and a drawing of a man masturbating a young boy’s penis.

School districts from Alaska to Florida pulled the book off the shelf following community pushback. Meanwhile, Kobabe insists the book is suitable for younger audiences. “It’s very hard to hear people say ’This book is not appropriate to young people’…There are people for whom this is vital and for whom this could maybe even be lifesaving,” the author told NBC News.⁴

The Slavery and Savagery of Secularism

We are entering a new era in which there is not only no social benefit to being Christian, but an actual social cost. In many places, culture is becoming increasingly hostile toward faith, and beliefs in God, truth, sin, and the afterlife are disappearing in more and more people. Now, culture is producing people for whom Christianity is not only offensive, but incomprehensible. — Tim Keller⁵

Indeed.

Like a tsunami crashing into the coast and destroying everything in its path, secularization has crashed onto our shores, submerging us under a toxic mix of violence, intellectual and moral confusion, loneliness, mental illness, addiction, and decay. The late Cardinal George Pell pulled no punches in describing the devastating impact of secularism:

This truth has gone unsaid for too long. Secularism is an inferior culture, small of heart … The secularists are wreckers and they are busy at work … Chaos is the main characteristic of the way of life the secularist wreckers are imposing upon us, not liberation.⁶

We have raised our national fist to the face of God and declared that we want nothing to do with Him or His Word. But God was not joking when He declared that we will reap what we sow (Galatians 6:7–9).

The fruit of our sin is rotten and horrible.

Mental Anguish and Suicide

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, by 2018, suicide was the second leading cause of death for youth ages 10–24. Do not let a statistic numb you. Young people are killing themselves. From 2018 to 2019, 18.8% of adolescents aged 12–17 seriously considered attempting suicide, 8.9% attempted suicide, 5.7% made a suicide plan, 15.1% had a major depressive episode, and 36.7% had persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.⁷

This is a damning commentary on our nation.

Entertained by Violence

Our screens are filled with violence, and our children are constantly in front of screens. Research compiled by Gitnux reports that American youth are exposed to approximately 2,000 acts of violence annually through media, and that by the time an average child leaves elementary school, he will have witnessed 8,000 murders on television. Violence represents roughly one-third of all scenes in popular films. The relationship between entertainment and physical aggression is well documented: exposure to violent entertainment at a young age increases aggression and antisocial behavior measurably, and more than 1,000 studies have demonstrated a correlation between media violence and aggressive behavior.⁸

Raising children on a steady diet of violence leads to acts of violence, as surely as feeding them junk food leads to obesity. Let me be direct: our children are immersed in this violence because we permit them to watch it and because money is more important to the entertainment industry than the welfare of our children. As Paul warns us, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Timothy 6:10).

From Bullies to Barbarians

I vividly remember the larger-than-life bully determined to beat me up after school. He was always lurking around the bus stop, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. I learned quickly to take an alternative route, appearing only at the last moment to leap onto the bus and avoid my tormentor.

My experience with a bully was challenging, but nothing compared to the emotional and psychological torment experienced by today’s children. While there may be the occasional schoolyard encounter, cyberbullying is far more prevalent and pernicious. Hiding cowardly behind a screen, today’s cyberbullies prey on their victims twenty-four hours a day. There are no geographical barriers. Children carry their omnipresent tormentors in their pockets. And they are nasty. Cyberbullies attack their victims like wolves circling prey in ravaging online packs. It can be devastating to young people.

Bullies are bad; barbarians are worse.

A bully habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those he perceives as vulnerable. A barbarian is a depraved bully. Bullies are mean. Barbarians are uncivilized, uncultured, uncaring, uncontrolled, cruel, savage, and brutal. Barbarians are “foolish, faithless, heartless, and ruthless” (Romans 1:31). Barbarians have shallow and seared consciences.

Barbarism is on the rise. Consider recent events in Chicago, where teenagers terrorized the city. As reported by Fox News:

Hundreds of teenagers stormed the streets of downtown Chicago, smashing car windows, attacking bystanders and sending panicked tourists running from the sound of gunfire … Some teens in the group began jumping up and down on cars, smashing windows and attacking people inside. One woman told a local television station her husband was attacked from the driver side of his vehicle and beaten after a group of teens jumped up and down on the couple’s windshield … “I understand kids having a good time, but this is simply bad parenting,” a Chicago native witness said. “We have to do better as parents. Our kids should not be out here.”⁹

School Killing Fields

Bullies torment their victims. Barbarians kill them.

It happened again, this time at a small Christian elementary school. On March 27, 2023, three students and three adults were shot and killed at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. As of that date, this was the deadliest school shooting at a United States K–12 school since May 2022, when an eighteen-year-old former student shot and killed nineteen students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Killing children in school is one horrible evil amid a rising tide of violence and disregard for human life. Gun violence incidents and fatalities have continued to increase in recent years.¹⁰

We have become, as Elizabeth Bruenig of The Atlantic so aptly put it, “a society of fear.”¹¹ We live in a society permeated with fear and suspicion.

Worse, we are becoming numb to the violence. While we recoil at the evil, unless we are personally touched by it, we read the dreadful headline of another mass shooting and move on with our lives with a shrug of dull resignation at the inevitability of it all.

Claiming to Be Wise, They Became Fools¹²

Our language reveals a great deal about us. Jesus said, “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person” (Matthew 15:18). What is true of the individual is true of culture. Consider the sheer foolishness reflected in the guidelines given to Portland city employees by The Office of Equity and Human Rights in its Inclusive Writing Guide. The guide suggests avoiding words such as “women,” “Caucasian,” or “citizen.” It recommends replacing “pregnant women” with “pregnant people,” substituting “reproductive rights” for “women’s health rights,” using “menstrual products or period products” in place of “feminine hygiene products,” and replacing “breastfeeding” with “chest feeding.” Rather than using “he” or “she” pronouns to describe people, staffers are encouraged to use “they/them.” Because the word “manhole” is deemed insufficiently gender-neutral, it is replaced by “maintenance hole.”¹³

Indeed, Paul’s description of the Gentiles of his time describes the citizens of New Gomorrah:

No longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity (Ephesians 4:17–19).

This is New Gomorrah. Having surveyed the wreckage, we must now ask how we arrived here.

How We Built New Gomorrah

New Gomorrah has been long in the making.

There is much blame to go around. The secularization of American culture, entertainment of all types saturated with violence, promiscuity, and perversion, progressive policies propagated through our institutions of learning, morally bankrupt politicians across the political spectrum, and other causes too numerous to mention.

While the causes of our moral decadence are multiple, complex, and intertwined, there are three foundational causes: the failure to educate for virtue, bad parenting, and the destruction of the American family. An editorial in the Dallas Morning News sums up our failures well:

We have to ask ourselves what we are teaching our children about the value of human life, about its precious nature, about the way taking a life is the deepest offense one human can commit against another. Are we providing our children with the ethical foundation they need to recognize the ineffable, irreparable pain and loss that killing causes? The popular culture certainly is not. It is enthralled with the stupid glorification of violence. Guns are symbols of power; violence is the expression of power. We need to make sure that children are given messages that run counter to these themes. If parents won’t teach them, schools must. An ethic of the value of every life, of the unique dignity of each person, is essential to confronting the horrible, nihilistic paths that lead young people to decide that killing is an answer to their own torments. What is broken will take a long time to fix because what is broken is us.¹⁴

“What is broken is us.”

We have been broken since Adam’s and Eve’s rebellion in the Garden of Eden. What is different today is that we are failing to ameliorate the damage by laying the foundations to civilize children capable of building and sustaining a civil society. Admittedly, parents and educators have a difficult job raising and educating countercultural children. Our entertainment, news, and tech industries are spewing forth a tsunami of violence and perversion that submerges our children in polluted cultural water foaming with immorality, violence, anger, and hatred. Difficulty, however, is never an excuse for failing to fulfill our duty as parents and educators.

Failure to Educate for Virtue

Plato observed long ago that virtue is honorable yet toilsome, while vice is easy and only restrained by law and opinion. He was nevertheless persuaded that true education “will have the greatest tendency to civilize and humanize the student in their relations to one another.”¹⁵ His counsel has not aged poorly.

As hard as it may be to teach virtue to our children, it is nevertheless our sacred duty. Sadly, we are derelict. We are failing to civilize and humanize students in their relations to one another.

We teach our children how to make a decent living but not how to live decently. We teach them how to make babies but not how to create stable marriages. We teach them how to negotiate the deal but not how to navigate the rapids of their vices. We teach them how to dress for success but leave them morally naked. We teach them how to build companies but not how to build a good country. We teach them to be true to themselves but not how to be truthful. Echoing similar concerns, Albert Mohler writes:

We want character but without unyielding conviction; we want strong morality, but without the emotional burden of guilt or shame; we want virtue but without particular moral justifications that invariably offend; we want good without having to name evil; we want decency without the moral authority to insist upon it; we want moral community without any limitations to personal freedom. In short, we want what we cannot have on the terms that we want it.¹⁶

Our failure produces disrespectful, unruly, undisciplined, ill-mannered, entitled, and increasingly violent children and adults. We are raising what one scholar describes as “highly skilled barbarians”¹⁷ — functionally literate students who are morally and ethically bankrupt.

George Washington and John Adams both warned long ago of the danger of neglecting religious and moral instruction:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness … And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.¹⁸ — George Washington

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.¹⁹ — John Adams

The strength and character of our nation depend on the strength and character of our citizenry. Tragically, we have rejected the warnings of our forefathers and have not preserved the personal and civic virtues bequeathed to us. In speaking of Rome’s ruin, Saint Augustine perfectly describes our neglect:

But our age, receiving the republic as a chef-d’oeuvre [a masterpiece] of another age which has already begun to grow old, has not merely neglected to restore the colors of the original, but has not even been at the pains to preserve so much as the general outline and most outstanding features. For what survives of that primitive morality which the poet called Rome’s safeguard? It is so obsolete and forgotten, that, far from practicing it, one does not even know it …

And of the citizens what shall I say? Morality has perished through poverty of great men; a poverty for which we must not only assign a reason, but for the guilt of which we must answer as criminals charged with a capital crime. For it is through our vices, and not by any mishap, that we retain only the name of a republic, and have long since lost the reality.

At present I speak of the decay of morality, which at first almost imperceptibly lost its brilliant hue, but afterwards was wholly obliterated, was swept away as by a torrent, and involved the republic in such disastrous ruin, that though the houses and walls remained standing, the leading writers do not scruple to say that the republic was destroyed.²⁰ — Saint Augustine, The City of God

Passive and Permissive Parenting

Passive and permissive parenting is the root of our problem. By passive, I mean Christian parents who do not take seriously their biblical mandate to systematically and consistently teach the Bible to their children (Deuteronomy 6:4–9).²¹ Few Christian families have family devotions and increasingly skip church to sleep in or to participate in athletic or other activities. According to the Barna Group, fewer than one out of ten born-again families read the Bible together during a typical week or pray together during a typical week.²²

We are raising biblically illiterate children with shallow souls. Our neglect destroys the family, harms the church, and undermines our country’s moral and civic fabric. As Thomas Manton poignantly writes in his introduction to the Westminster Confession of Faith:

A family is the seminary of Church and State; and if children be not well principled there, all miscarries: a fault in the first concoction is not mended in the second; if youth be bred ill in the family, they prove ill in Church and Commonwealth.²³

Divorce and the Destruction of the American Family

Sadly, divorce among those who profess to be born-again is not statistically different from the general population. According to Barna:

Among adults who have been married, the study discovered that one-third (33%) have experienced at least one divorce. That means that among all Americans 18 years of age or older, whether they have been married or not, 25% have gone through a marital split.

Born-again Christians who are not evangelical were indistinguishable from the national average on the matter of divorce: 33% have been married and divorced. The survey did not determine if the divorce occurred before or after the person had become born again. However, previous research by Barna has shown that less than two out of every ten people who accept Christ as their savior do so after their first marriage.

In fact, when evangelicals and non-evangelical born-again Christians are combined into an aggregate class of born-again adults, their divorce figure is statistically identical to that of non-born-again adults: 32% versus 33%, respectively.²⁴

These numbers are not merely sociological; they are a spiritual indictment. When the family fractures, children bear the wound. When Christian families fracture at the same rate as the rest of the culture, the church loses its most basic instrument of moral formation — and the consequences, as the preceding pages make plain, are generational. Having named the disease, we must now consider the remedy.

What Can School Leaders Do?

Start with a Healthy Dose of Humility

The place to start is with humility. Most Christian schools have rather grandiose mission statements about changing the world. While laudable, the truth is that our schools are not likely to “change the world.” Lord willing, our schools are being used by the Lord to change individual lives, which, as pebbles dropped into water, will ripple outward to change the lives of others and make our communities better. But cultural change is far too complex, with too many influential people and institutions, to suppose that Christian schools are numerous enough and influential enough to “change the world.” The sad truth is that, too often, the world is changing us. As Andy Crouch has honestly acknowledged:

Indeed, the great irony with the North American Christian community’s obsession with becoming world changers, as outsiders like Alan Wolfe and insiders like Ron Sider have documented, is that so far and on the whole we are much more changed than changing. The rise of interest in cultural transformation has been accompanied by a rise in cultural transformation of a different sort — the transformation of the church into the culture’s image.²⁵

While it is unlikely that the Christian school movement will “change the world,” we can, by God’s grace, change lives, and those lives can in turn change their worlds, their spheres of influence and impact, as they graduate, start careers and families, and serve in the church. We may not change the world, but we can change individual worlds.

Pray

This is not a cliché; it is an absolute necessity. For too long, we have labored under the proud delusion that electing the right people to office, engaging in cultural warfare, and teaching a worldview to our students will “change the world.” While these efforts are laudable and necessary, they have not and will not change the world. Our cultural warfare may win a political skirmish here or there, but it will not win our culture. The fact is that we have become New Gomorrah despite our cultural warfare. This is not to say that engaging in politics, confronting evil, and promoting good is unimportant. Doing so is vital and godly.

But fundamentally, our battle is not political; it is spiritual. Political weapons cannot fight spiritual battles. As Paul tells us, “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). Prayerless fighting will always end in ultimate defeat. This is why Paul tells us to pray for those in authority (1 Timothy 2:1–4).

When did you last pray for government officials, including those from the “opposition party?”

Share the Gospel

The Gospel, not our political battles, will change the world. Again, proper political engagement is good and necessary — but it is not sufficient. It is the Gospel that changes lives and nations. This is why the last words of Jesus were the Great Commission.

When did you last sit down with someone to share the Gospel?

We will not save our country if we are not saving souls.

Help Students Realize They Are in New Gomorrah

This is more challenging than it sounds. Like the air we breathe, we absorb a culture’s zeitgeist — the “spirit of the age,” the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of a particular time and place.

Our students did not travel to New Gomorrah; they were born into it. They are citizens of New Gomorrah by birth, not immigrants from another time. They know no other city. Everything in New Gomorrah appears normal because they have never lived in a different city with a different zeitgeist. Because they are young, they have limited experience and perspective to judge the goings-on in their city. To them, everything is as it always has been and should be. They suffer from a kind of cultural nose-blindness — unable to detect what those with longer memory and broader perspective can smell clearly.

To overcome their cultural nose-blindness, our students need the “Febreze” of the Bible. They need to be shown — in concrete form — what should be in contrast to what is, and helped to understand that what is proclaimed “normal” is abnormal and perverse. They need to see that at one time, we lit our buildings with crosses, not Pride flags. They need to see from whence we have come so they can see how far we have traveled in the wrong direction. They need to read, understand, and heed the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. They need to be trained to be thoughtful critics of culture, not merely imbibers of it.

Educate for Virtue, Not Just a Worldview

Our students need a biblical worldview, but they desperately need Christian virtue. A professor once observed that “the heart of the matter is the matter of the heart.” Thinking biblically is critically important but not sufficient. It is too easy for professing Christians to parrot biblical truth while living contrary to it. James warns us against hearing the Word but not obeying it. It is the doing that demonstrates the authenticity of saving faith.

Sadly, the distance between the professed faith of many Christians and their character is vast. Gossip, slander, backbiting, bullying, lying, cheating, immorality, drunkenness, abortion, pornography, materialism, rudeness, unbiblical divorce, pride, and other vices are prevalent in the Christian community and our Christian schools.

We will never be sinless on this side of heaven, but we desperately need to sin less. Our accommodation of sin is draining our spiritual power and destroying our Christian witness. How can we expect to change the world when we cannot change our own lives and families, and when too many students, families, and employees consistently, willfully, and unrepentantly sin?

We need to be honest with ourselves and our students. Following Christ is costly. It means that we are called to live contrary to the prevailing zeitgeist. It means we will be attacked, ridiculed, canceled, and worse. Following Christ — not just a worldview — means we must die to ourselves. It means we need to pursue sanctification more and worldly success less. This means that the way we live our lives, what we teach, and the policies we develop and enforce should promote and cultivate the Fruit of the Spirit:

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires (Galatians 5:16–25).

Double Down on Teaching the Bible

I was dismayed.

I had written three themes to guide our strategic plan. I was particularly pleased with one of them: “Create exceptional and unique world-class programs to develop our young men and women to reflect the intellectual and spiritual virtues of Daniel and Esther.” I was thinking to myself, “This is great! We need more Daniels and Esthers!”

I shared my theme with my senior team members, expecting an enthusiastic response. Instead, though they agreed with the goal, they told me that too few in our school community would understand the significance of developing modern Daniels and Esthers. They argued persuasively that most would have no idea who Esther was, and that if they knew anything about Daniel, it would be that he had been thrown into a fiery furnace and a den of lions — with little understanding of his broader influence in Babylon or what his life might mean for ours.

This lack of biblical knowledge is not unique to my school. It is, with rare exception, the sad situation in most of our schools. Given the absence of regular Bible reading, we cannot assume any level of biblical literacy. We must begin with the basics and build from there. This means that our curriculum, even at the high school level, should include courses in fundamental biblical theology and New and Old Testament survey courses. Moreover, our communications should consistently reference relevant biblical principles and verses, effectively using every available channel to teach biblical truth to our communities.

Double Down on Staff Training in Theology

Like everyone else, faculty and staff are also subject to the proverbial Frog in the Kettle Syndrome. It is a dangerous mistake to assume that all employees hold a consistent biblical worldview or that they are not being influenced by the cultural air they breathe. Accordingly, school leaders must maintain a systematic onboarding program consisting of biblical training for all new professional staff and ongoing multi-year, scaffolded training in biblical theology. Jesus said the student, when fully trained, will be like his teacher (Luke 6:40). If we want our students to have a biblical worldview, we must ensure their teachers have not compromised theirs.

Conclusion

We are educating students in New Gomorrah. The flag of perversion flies high throughout the city. They live in a city where its citizens “call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! … who are wise in their own eyes, and shrewd in their own sight! … who are heroes at drinking wine, and valiant men in mixing strong drink” (Isaiah 5:20–22).

God’s people have often lived in Gomorrah. In many ways, we are like Lot, who was “greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard)” (2 Peter 2:7–8). Though we are rightly troubled by the sin around us and weep for our children, we do not despair. We place our hope in a sovereign God who “turns [the heart of the king] wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1). We rest in the promise that “the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials” (2 Peter 2:9).

Humility, prayer, the gospel, cultural discernment, virtue, biblical literacy, and theologically grounded teachers — these are not throwaway clichés. Together they compose the foundation for revival and reformation. They are, in fact, the very essence of the Great Commission:

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:18–20).