Brandon Caples

“One reason that conversations about race are so hard is because too many American evangelicals lack thinking with biblical nuance. Sadly, when it comes to using our God-given brains, evangelicals often have only two speeds. For the evangelical, if something is not essential for salvation, it’s often regarded as unimportant. Issues, then, are either of speed 1: ultimate importance, or speed 2: no importance. Os Guinness reflects on the sin and scandal of evangelicals refusing to love the Lord with their minds: “American evangelicals therefore characteristically display an impatience with the difficult, an intolerance of complexity, and a poor appreciation of the long-term and disciplined. Correspondingly, we often demonstrate a tendency toward the simplistic, especially in the form of slogans or overly simple either/or solutions.”13 This either/or mental proclivity is why evangelicals often pit two good things against each other (e.g., evangelism versus justice, the spiritual versus the social, man’s responsibility versus God’s sovereignty, etc.). It’s why we often see those who disagree with us as a part of the faithful or as a full-blown heretic—we only have two speeds.”
― Isaac Adams, Talking about Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations

“Scripture is not color consumed on one hand or color-blind on the other. It is color-conscious.”
― Isaac Adams, Talking about Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations

“At some point, the rate of dechurching will slow down, not necessarily because the underlying reasons have been mitigated, but simply because there won’t be enough people going to church regularly to sustain the rate of people leaving the church. The dechurched will give way to the unchurched—those who never attended church to begin with.”
― Jim Davis, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?

“As the social pressures to identify as Christian in our culture are removed and as new pressures mount to discourage people from identifying as Christian, many who were never Christians in the first place are finally able to freely walk away.”
― Jim Davis, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?