Let’s talk about women, polemics, public teaching, women's ministry, the culture war, and sundry other uncontroversial issues. First things first—if I may point back at my own public teaching on these things in various podcasts, sermons, etc.—note that I've made the following very clear in many ways and places:

Last week, I wrote about the root of our modern culture’s hatred of babies and insistence on the glory of elective chemical sterility. Remember, our culture hates children because our culture hates God, and every single aborted baby bears his image. In John 3, the Lord Jesus identified this sin-begotten antithesis towards God as the root judgment standing over us:

Lexy and I recently welcomed our fourth little one into our home, Cyril Wilson Sauvé, our third boy. There he is with me on the couch, a true scholar. Just look at that deep thinking. We are tremendously pleased and grateful to God for his gifts, and hope to welcome future houseguests in the Lord’s timing.

I am Edmund. I am a cold-blooded traitor, a brother-despiser, a sister-scorner, a world-corrupter. I have ruined days and friendships. I have murdered legions with my bitter heart and defiled endless scores in the hidden places of my imagination. I have grown bitterness and envy like a cash crop; no field long remains fallow—I have handfuls of thistles to sow, in season and out.

It’s that time of year again! When articles lamenting the pagan origins of Christmas—held in queue since August the 17th—flood the feed of discernment bloggers nationwide. When the condemnations of stodgy pastors fly like brimstone from dusty pulpits onto the supposed Sodom of JC Penney’s one-day-only holiday sale. (“Do you see the materialist hordes, church? Walk not in their counsel!”). When Christmas trees and mistletoe find themselves unmasked as nothing more than the green groves and high places of our modern idolatries.

I have the privilege of pastoring a wonderful church out in Ogden, Utah—home of the Wasatch Mountains, the Utah Jazz, a large number of well-dressed men on bicycles (if you know what I mean), and a very small number of Evangelical Christians. One implication of my pastoral role is that I often find myself sitting across from a married couple for counseling. Sometimes there’s a catastrophic issue to deal with; the couple is clinging to their covenant with fading grip. More often, there’s just some maintenance to work out.

Last week at Refuge, I preached on a major decision that our plurality of elders came to with respect to our corporate worship gathering. We decided—after over a year of prayerful deliberation—to integrate our service, meaning all of the children will join us from now on in the main worship service.

In the last year, I've preached, podcasted, and penned articles about the glories of Complementarian theology at home and at church, the necessity of holding the line on LGBTQ issues, the tragicomedy of transgenderism, the beauty of Calvinism, the dangers of Dispensationalism, and the inhumanity of abortion. In spite of the fact that the aforementioned topics are the verbal equivalent of Claymore mines, none of those things have been the most controversial thing I've said this year.

Emotion is one of our culture's favorite currencies. Emotion sells cars and churches, lawn care and luxury vacations. Marketers and ministers use it like salt in every sentence, seasoning the most mundane of things with emotionally-supercharged jargon. Maybe you've noticed this already; we pastors and church leaders often feel the need to use the word "excited" and its synonyms for literally everything the church does.

Church is hard. What did you expect when you redeem a people from every tribe and tongue and age and slam them together into one building, one body, one family? It's hard because people are hard, and that's what the Church is. This has been true at Refuge; we've had many difficulties. We've had adulteries and we've had gossip. We've had our doctrinal divisions and our spiritual valleys.

One of the deepest wells of delight in my life at the moment is located in the fact that I am the father of a daughter. Lexy and I have been enjoying the ruckus of parenting boys since 2013—and man, is it a ride! We've found that boys are like the wilderness: Often loud, never safe, and mostly comprised of dirt. But being the daddy of a daughter? So good. I can't wrestle the English language into an adequate shape to tell you how much joy little Daphne brings me.

We are big on the Gospel at Refuge Church. In fact, you could say it's our thing. We aim to herald it in everything we do and in every passage of whole books of the Bible. We've been trying to figure out how much weight it can hold since this thing was the size of the average Mormon family meeting in an apartment.

Nearly 60,000,000 people die every year on planet Earth. This is one of the things that makes human beings so bewildering. I'm not talking about the fact that they die, but the fact that they take so little time to consider death. Human beings will do nearly anything to avert their eyes from death; it's a pathological and universal impulse.

One of the great projects of progressive Christianity is to fix those parts of the Bible which run afoul of its own highly developed sense of morality. You know, the moral code over there in the corner, waiting in quivering anticipation to strain out some microagressive gnats and swallow a handful of black-market baby parts. In this noble project, Jesus is often called in to help—at least, a big sieve with "Jesus" written on the handle, perfect for straining out all of the retributive violence and penal substitution from the text.

Long before I began teaching the Bible as my primary pastoral duty, I served as a worship leader. You know, the guy with the Taylor guitar and the poor stage presence? The one who talks too much between songs, occasionally forgetting that he's not the preacher? Yeah, that guy.

We all have that one friend. You know, the one with the mouth that seems permanently arranged in a smirk? The one who is fluent in two languages: English and sarcasm? The one with battery acid under his texting thumb? The one with with a godlike gift for drawing blood a pointed word? Maybe you don't know him; maybe you are him.

Daphne,

Where to start, daughter of mine? Do I try to wrestle these 26 characters and 14 punctuation marks into a two-dimensional sculpture of my joy at your arrival? Such a thing is beyond me, I confess; I've never been much good at wrestling. Do I convert my love into black and white and publish it to the annals of a silly blog in some obscure corner of this incomprehensible tornado of nonsense we call the internet? Such a thing seems laughably inadequate, but here I am, attempting exactly that.

In the last entry here at Mouse & Mane, I wrote about my family's nightly practice of catechesis, hymn-singing, Bible reading, and prayer. As mentioned, we are currently making our way through Solomon's Proverbs—instruction from a father to his son in wise living before God. Pondering his proverbial wisdom has lately caused me to consider the man himself.

Most evenings, should you peer through the front window of the Sauvé homestead, you would see two little men gathered around mommy and daddy on the living room couch (with the addition of one little lady in Russian-nesting-doll-mode), having a lively of discussion. We gather thus to look to Jesus for grace through Scripture reading, catechism, prayer, and the singing of hymns.

Today is as good a day to be disliked as any, I suppose. Herein, I plan to opine on LGBTQ issues, transgenderism, and, if I'm feeling especially cranky, maybe women pastors. I can hear the internet creaking in protest already. I hit "publish" on this one with a trepidation born of…