A generation inherits the word “Christian” with none of the weight, catechized by the feed instead of the faith, because we assumed one hour on Sunday could hold its own against ten thousand hours of formation pointed the other way. The culture is not waiting for our permission to disciple our children. It is already doing it, and it is unnervingly good at it. So what do we actually do?

I’m somewhere this week I’m not at liberty to name, in a room with some of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever been around and some of the bravest. The reason I can’t name it is not caution for its own sake. It’s for the safety of the people in the room. Think about that for a second.

The subjects we came here to discuss were mainstream not long ago. Whether a man can say what he believes out loud or whether a parent can raise a child in the faith without a hostile state grading the result. Every red-blooded American who darkened a church door a generation ago could have laid these out without blinking. Today, saying them plainly is enough to make some trans-activist zealot wake up and choose violence. That is the country we are living in now, one that looked hard at the Christian inheritance it was handed and decided that it would rather not keep it

Meanwhile, the other half of the country spends the week dissecting a celebrity wedding. You already know the one. The men and women in this room are bent over questions with a longer shelf life. What is our posture supposed to be? How do we fight an enemy this patient and this embedded? How do we hand something durable to our children and our grandchildren? And if we can already see what the ground will look like should we stand by and do nothing, what do we do instead?

I want to tell you what I keep noticing in rooms like this one, because it surprised me.

The instinct, always, is strategy. The instinct is to reach for the machinery, for the campaign and the counteroffensive. When someone says we have to wage war, every head nods, and mine nods with them, because the war is real. I have no interest in pretending otherwise. But Scripture will not let me leave the sentence there. “For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:3-4). We are handed a war and then told, in the same breath, according to this Scripture, that we have misjudged the weapons.

Here is what that does to a room full of strategists. It moves the decisive battle off the stage and out of the headlines and sets it down somewhere far less flattering. Somewhere like a kitchen table.

The people who will still be standing on solid ground in fifty years are being formed right now, and almost none of that formation is happening in a war room.

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