After the Diagnosis: The Fellowship on Evangelism’s Real Deliverable

Fellowship Discussion Essay | May 3, 2026

Occasion: Three days earlier, I circulated Eight Strongholds: A Christos Civitas Reading of the ‘Ingredients’ that Joan Swirsky Inventoried. That essay re-purposed Joan’s eight-trait inventory of Democrats as a catalog of cross-tribal demonic captivities, which I diagnosed as the active force underlying the observed behavior. The reception was unusual for one of these pieces — Margo had underlined and forwarded it, John Howard wrote that he had read every word and agreed completely, and Charlie called it a contemporary diagnosis whose category-naming made the strongholds suddenly visible. That a thing has been named is the precondition for working on it. But naming is not curing, and the question that brought us together on Sunday was the natural one: the diagnosis is on the table — now what?

What follows is the synthesis of what the fellowship said. The substantive arc was clearer than the conversation itself made it feel in the moment. Three paradigms collided over the course of the hour, and a fourth synthesis — the one I think we were actually reaching for — surfaced in the second half through the analogies Charlie, Leonard, and Armond brought, and through Susan’s reframe of what the gospel actually offers. The synthesis is the thing I want this essay to fix in premise, argument, and conclusion while it is still fresh.

I. Michael’s Mandala and the Bridging Method

Michael Sherman opened the substantive portion of the meeting with a filing-system question relevant to my organization of the Fellowship Essays. He has spent decades building what is in effect an engineer’s thesaurus of human concern — a hierarchical mandala expanded to six decimal places, organized at its top tier around the grammatical persons (first person, second person, third person), with each tier expanding into the same threefold structure recursively. Religion sits at the personal core, sociology and institutions at the middle layer, and the engineering and physical-chemical world at the outermost shell. Michael described Roget’s 1837 thesaurus as the model that altered him — Roget being not a builder of a synonym dictionary but a structural mapper of human thought — and the mandala is what fifty-plus years of pursuing the same instinct has produced. The structure deserves mining for the meta-messages it offers, and I will return to it for the Renaissance Ministries website organization. But its relevance to Sunday’s meeting was as the engineering version of Michael’s evangelistic method.

His method follows directly from his structure: find the cell of the mandala where you and your interlocutor already overlap, and start there. If you cannot agree on theology, agree on weather. If you cannot agree on politics, agree that black children and white children are equally human. If you cannot agree on Trump, agree that bumblebees are not wasps. Michael’s anecdote from his teenage visit to Atlanta in 1967 was the operational example: he was exposed there to racism so thick that he, a Los Angeles kid, instantly read the room and knew he could not move it on the principle. But he could move it on Hank Aaron, the Atlanta Braves’ Black superstar, who was the city’s hero. He could not get the room to yeah, Black people are equal, but he could get the room to yeah, he’s our guy. That was the single foothold he was going to gain that day. And Atlanta, half a century later, has had Black mayors. The Hank-Aaron-shaped foothold was a real foothold.

This method has strength. It is the method by which one human being who actually wants to reach another human being navigates the asymmetry of conviction without breaking the contact. It is two ears, one mouth. It is what Confucius advised, what Christ embodied with the Samaritan woman at the well, what Paul did at Mars Hill. It is a serious method, and Michael is right to defend it.

But it has a limit, and the limit is the engine of the disagreement that surfaced next.

II. The Force Differential — Why the Bridging Method Cannot, By Itself, Carry the Weight

The Eight Strongholds essay did not name the institutional context in which the strongholds operate. The fellowship discussion forced that context onto the table. My monologue — which Susan and Michael both gently corrected on its dominance, war, and force-framed terminology, rightly — was substantively this: the strongholds are not free-floating in a balanced cultural medium. One side of the political-cultural divide is currently operating with what amounts to institutional irresistible force — control of legacy media’s framing function, control of significant portions of academic credentialing, control of the regulatory state’s discretion, control of the funding circuits that determine which voices acquire amplification. The Khrushchev formulation, we will bury you, is not an exaggeration of the operational posture; it is, allowing for translation, the operational posture itself. There is no symmetric desire on the Christian/Conservative/Natural Law side to bury anyone. The asymmetry is real.

Against an organized (overtly and/or de facto) force committed to imposing an ideology/agenda/behavior-set, which is willing to use relational asymmetry (uncaring unfairness, deception, and violence), an un-resisted-by-equal-force opposition will be rolled. This is a physical fact, not a partisan complaint. The question is what equal and opposite force looks like for those of us who hold the Christos position — because we cannot answer institutional capture with our own institutional capture, and we cannot answer state coercion with private coercion. Both would corrupt the answer.

My provocative formulation — I am here to take you over; I am going to take you over with love — was deliberately chosen to expose this. Michael, correctly, flagged the verb: don’t say “take over”; nobody wants to be taken over; say “enjoin.” He is right about the rhetoric. The verb “take over” is not what one says to one’s actual interlocutor. But underneath the rhetoric, the substantive point that needed to be on the table was this: whatever force we bring must be of a magnitude commensurate with the force currently in motion. The bridging method, as the primary national strategy, is too slow against this differential of force. Hank Aaron in 1967 worked because the institutional force was, while ugly, not consolidated against deliberate counter-action; the law and the broader culture were already moving the other way. The current configuration is not symmetric in that way. The institutional force is consolidated and is moving against the position we hold.

The bridging method of relational commonality — establishing rapport before confrontation and ultimately change — is necessary but insufficient in itself. It is necessary at the interpersonal level, where every individual conversion is genuinely won foothold-by-foothold. It is insufficient at the civilizational level, where what is required is something that scales fast enough to alter the weather — the sociological climate where the personal and interpersonal paradigm of loving God and neighbor as self overcomes the anti-Christ agenda with the Kingdom Culture to establish the Christos Civitas. And the question becomes: what is the something?

III. Susan’s Reframe — The Gospel Is Itself the Radical Force

Susan stopped the disagreement before it could harden by reframing what that necessary radical force actually is. The reframe is the breakthrough of the meeting, and I want to fix it carefully.

The radical force is not Michael’s bridging, and it is not my “war waged with love.” The radical force is the gospel itself — which, when actually received, takes a person over. Not metaphorically. Actually. The believer is filled with the love of God, with peace, with joy, with a re-ordering of desire that consumes what was there before. They no longer want to live the way they lived before. The change is visible from outside the person. Family members see it. Friends see it. The change spreads not because the changed person argued anyone into anything but because what they have become is observably different, and that difference is the witness.

Susan’s example was the brutal national leader whose believing wife prayed and fasted for him over years — a man who was a killer, by ordinary measure beyond reach — and who was changed overnight. I will not adjudicate the empirical claims of that case (Susan was relating a testimony she had heard, not vouching for every detail). What matters is the category the example names: there exists a class of transformation in which the person is not negotiated with, not bridged to with common affinity, not converted by argument of consistency and logic — although these elements are almost certainly present to some degree — but is acted upon and transformed internally by the Holy Spirit at a depth that ordinary persuasion, example, and effort does not reach.

If this category exists — and the fellowship’s combined testimony is that it does — then the answer to the force-differential question on which I was stuck is that we need individual transformation, a well-documented method of nurturing transformation, and the institutionalization of that spirit-based force. We need to create holy/Christ-based institutions (overtly or de facto) commensurate with the institutional force on the other side. But without individual transformation, they that labor to build the house without the Lord, labor in vain. The foundation of any institutional or civilizational movement exerting force toward societal sanctification is individual transformation. The workers and leaders of any institution that will actually transform society into the Christos Civitas must themselves be transformed, living the principles and in the spirit of the Kingdom Culture. That transformation arises when the gospel itself is received and lived. The force of internal transformation resonates with, and is the foundation of, the institutional force which sanctifies government. The blood of the Lamb, the word of our testimony, and loving not our lives unto death is the force and program divinely established as the strategy with the transformational capacity to change a person at the level the strongholds operate. The strongholds are spiritual, and only a spiritual force can reach them.

Susan’s confession was important here, and I want to record it: she said that when she was an unbeliever, she held exactly Michael’s view. Let’s find a set of rules everyone can agree on. Let’s figure this out, and everyone will be good to each other. She named what changed her mind: she had been disregarding the power of Satan. She did not, in her unbelief, believe in active evil. She believed everyone, given good rules and good information, would converge on goodness.

What she came to see, after conversion, was that there are spiritual forces acting through people whose alignment is not the alignment of universal human reasonableness, fairness, and rapport. There are spiritual forces which tempt men to align with and act out their animal drives. The yielding and eventual commitment to flesh drives by individuals creates its own coalescence into animal-drive-based institutions which enroll and enforce compliance with this worldview — this kingdom of darkness. We now live in such a world. To use the force-opposing-force metaphor, overcoming institutional power requires opposition with institutional power: in this case, the sanctified church, the society-wide holiness of a holy people. The method is personal sanctification, the testimony of personal witness, and the fearlessness to organize and oppose the personal insults and financial and reputational costs to establish the institutions, the movement, the counter-cultural revolution to establish a kingdom with no other king but King Jesus. Our faith rests not in the tools of flesh — of rapport, confrontation, and change. The rules-and-mutual-understanding strategy is structurally underpowered.

This is precisely the diagnosis of the Eight Strongholds essay. The strongholds are not bad opinions held by reasonable people who can be talked out of them. The strongholds are spiritual captivities that ride human beings. And spiritual captivities are not lifted by appeals to Hank Aaron.

IV. The Threefold Weapon — Revelation 12:11

When I asked what force the gospel deploys, Susan read Revelation 12:11 — And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death. The verse names a three-part instrument.

1. The blood of the Lamb

This is the objective fact of Christ’s atonement. It is not something we generate; it is something that exists, prior to us, and that we appeal to. It is the power of the operation. Without it, the operation has no weight. The reconciliation of God and man is the prerequisite to anything else, and that reconciliation was accomplished at the Cross. We do not bring the power; we invoke the power.

2. The word of their testimony

This is what the changed person says about what was done in them. This is where evangelism is not optional. The blood is silent unless someone speaks. The testimony is the channel by which the power becomes locally available to the next person. Christians who do not speak — who hold the inward change but do not carry the word into anyone else’s life — have only half the instrument.

3. They loved not their lives unto the death

This is the costliness clause, and it deserves to be unpacked carefully because four distinct things are happening inside it.

What unopposable faith looks like. The efficacy of faith willing to stand firm, never backing down even with the real threat of paying the highest cost, cannot be overcome except by total annihilation. Such a faith, when exercised, is unopposable. It will prevail, and do so for eternity, for the Kingdom culture which has no end, which will be fit for the King of Kings to return and rule and reign. At the level of optics, a faith that costs nothing carries no force, because the watching world reads cost. A faith willing to suffer at the individual level, multiplied by millions, that cannot be overcome by even the threat or execution of death, cannot be silenced.

What the blood purchased. The enemy — the kingdom of Satan, the ruler of this present world — will use all force to dominate, to win, to retain control for even one more day. But the tools of domination are available for the Kingdom of Heaven to overcome him. Every individual is important; every soul won for the Kingdom diminishes the population, the army of foot soldiers enforcing the Satanic hegemony on earth through its institutions and culture. The blood of the Lamb has freed the captive from his enforced subjugation to serve the Satanic regime, with its flesh drives and rewards, and real ownership of the soul by contract. The debt of Satanic soul ownership — incurred in return for the benefits of sin — was paid in advance by the suffering and death of a guiltless God-man. That debt-cancelling payment is now available for redemption to all who call out for its application. All who long for freedom have this spiritual debt cancellation available.

What surrender obtains. The cost is total surrender to the will and Way of God — living in Christ, taking Him in internally, complete willing submission to the way of holiness. The debt of sin, the forced servitude to the Satanic regime, is broken in the individual who has accepted the “free” gift, free at the cost of total surrender to Christ ruling and reigning inside. The only benefit that may be reliably expected is His promise: I will never leave you nor forsake you. The ownership of the soul is freed from Satanic bondage.

What the freed captive does in the public square. The freed captive can now face the taunts of woke or politically correct culture. He is willing to endure the threat of cancellation, exclusion from employment, and even the threat of death before contributing to the support or progress of agendas and institutions inimical to the establishment of the Kingdom. The institutional forces of darkness depend upon fear and compliance, even if unwilling. When compliance is broken, the power of those institutions to enforce their hegemony evaporates. A person, family, church, city, state, nation, and world committed to the establishment of the Way of Christ — the embodied pattern of loving God, and neighbor as self — will overcome the world, and the Lord can return to a church without spot or blemish. The forces of hell will not prevail against His church because the price has been paid and remains always ready for actualization.

Why the institutional edifice rests on the surrendered heart. When the Kingdom culture establishes its own righteous governments and institutions, the continuity of society-level guidance and enforcement of Kingdom-level guardrails is established, and the framework for Godly personal and social behavior takes hold. But the entire edifice of the walls and laws of the Kingdom rests upon the surrendered heart, and the surrendered heart rests upon the real promise of a transformed heart, which is obtained through complete surrender — an asking to be possessed, owned, adopted into the family of God’s children. The power of that transformation depends upon the blood shed by Jesus Christ, and the acceptance of that blood as atonement, as payment for the debt of sin, as satisfaction for the Satanic claim on the soul. The freed captive is then made effective, an agent of societal transformation as he speaks his testimony and invites others into the same freedom, undeterred by the personal and institutional threats of insult and rejection, removal of sustenance, and death. Such a force of willing martyrs cannot be resisted on a personal or institutional level. With a commitment to assemble together, the natural formation of the sanctified Church — the body of believers, the Christos Civitas — is established.

Susan added Ephesians 6’s armor of God to the picture, with righteousness singled out: many in the contemporary church believe that belief alone is sufficient and that the requirement of righteous living has been somehow waived. The Eight Strongholds essay made the structural version of this point about institutions; Susan made the personal version about individual believers. The strongholds attack the unrighteous Christian as easily as they attack the unbeliever, because the unrighteous Christian has not actually closed the door. Righteousness is the door’s lock.

V. The Magic Lamp Critique — What We Cannot Promise

This is the hinge of the meeting, and I want to fix it before the rest of the synthesis can be assembled.

I have spent thirty years in clinical practice, mostly with Christian patients — many of them strong Christians. I have watched what happens when a Christian comes to Christ as one would come to a magic lamp — rub it, ask, receive. Pray for the marriage; pray for the cancer; pray for the prodigal child; pray for the financial deliverance. The empirical observation, made over thirty years and many hundreds of patients, is that the prayers, in the form they were prayed, were mostly not answered. Marriages were not saved by being prayed for; cancers ran their courses; prodigals stayed prodigal; finances did not turn. The occasional clear answer occurred and was beautiful. But the modal outcome was not delivery in the form requested.

I do not say this cynically. I say it as a thirty-year datum. And the pastoral implication is that we cannot evangelize on the basis of a deliverable we have not been given to deliver. If we tell the unbeliever or the nominal believer ask Jesus, and He will fix this thing you are praying about, we are issuing a promissory note that the New Testament does not actually back, and that our own observation does not actually back. When the prayer is not answered as promised, the inquirer’s conclusion is not I prayed wrong but the salesman lied — and they go to another charlatan, another false religion, another answer-vendor — and they go more hardened against the gospel than they were before, because we taught them to expect what was never on offer.

This is the magic-lamp critique. It is not a critique of prayer. It is a critique of misrepresenting what prayer is for.

Susan’s refinement of the deliverable was the second half of the breakthrough, and it is what I want every member of the fellowship to be able to articulate. The actual offer is not problem-resolution. The actual offer is Presence. The Father will be with you, in whatever the problem becomes. You will receive peace that the world cannot account for, in circumstances that ought to have produced terror. You will receive the strength to stand under what is unbearable. You will receive guidance — sometimes in flashes, mostly in steady incremental clarity — about the next step. You will receive a re-ordering of the desire that asked for the magic lamp in the first place — a re-ordering that often makes you, twenty years later, glad the prayer was not answered as you prayed it. The deliverable is not the outcome you specified. The deliverable is the Companion through whatever outcome arrives.

This is realistic. It is also, on its own terms, the highest deliverable on offer in the catalog of all human options. No other tradition, philosophy, therapy, or pharmaceutical claims this and produces it. The witness to it is empirical, and the witness to it is what the testimony of the changed person actually says when the changed person is being honest.

VI. The Mechanic, Not the Driver — Charlie’s Analogy

Charlie crystallized the same point in a single image we can use as a meme for the fellowship to symbolize the faithful presence of God/Christ/Holy Spirit as companion. In the early days of Indianapolis racing, every car carried two seats: one for the driver, one for the mechanic. A mechanical failure mid-race without an onboard mechanic was the end of the race. The mechanic did not make the race shorter, did not remove the potholes, did not eliminate the wrecks happening in front of you, did not make the competition less ferocious. The race was just as hard. But the mechanic kept the car going through the things that would otherwise have stopped it.

Christ as mechanic, not Christ as victory-machine. The race remains the race. The world remains the world. The strongholds named in the Eight Strongholds essay remain operational, sometimes more so once one is opposing them rather than under them. And the journey with Christ is immeasurably better than the journey without Him, because there is now a constant companion, a source of strength, a source of ideas and solutions and occasional miracles, sitting in the second seat through everything the race produces.

Leonard’s variation on the same image was his mother’s: we are not driving the bus; let the Lord drive the bus. Leonard’s father had retrofitted an old bus into an RV after his wife refused to camp in a tent again, and the family analogy from that retrofit was that a Christian is in the driver’s seat in cooperation, watching the Lord do the actual driving and learning the route by attention. The man in the mirror changes first; the world the man-in-the-mirror inhabits changes downstream. The Lord does not compel — our agency is not violated — and cooperation that is invited results in genuine cooperation.

These two analogies are saying the same thing as Susan’s Presence-versus-problem-solving distinction, in different idioms. The Christian life is not extraction from the conditions of the human predicament. The Christian life is fully accompanied passage through them, with a new will inside the person and a new Companion beside the person. That is the actual deliverable. That is what we are authorized to offer.

VII. The Lived Witness, Not the Argued Witness — Armond’s Contribution

Armond made the contribution that prevented the synthesis from collapsing into a teachable formula. He said, with characteristic frankness, that in his own life the only person to whom he had been able to communicate the Christos position with any success was his son — because the son was 100% willing to receive it. With everyone else — his mother, his brother, his sister — the message did not arrive in the form he sent it. And his conclusion is this: I am not giving you instructions. I am giving you a strategy. And the only way for you to know that the strategy works for you is to do it.

This is not relativism. The strategy is universal — repent, believe, be filled, walk in righteousness, be present to the Spirit. But the proof of the strategy is not transferable as a propositional argument. The proof is in the doing. Until you have run the experiment in your own life, you do not have the data, and no quantity of secondhand data will substitute for that. This is why the lived witness — what the changed person has become, observable by family and friends and neighbors — is the indispensable component. The argued witness, by itself, can only deliver one as far as the willingness to consider the argument; the lived witness is what produces the readiness to try the experiment, which is the only way the argument completes.

The implication is operational: we cannot substitute our own holiness for the work of evangelism. The holiness must be built first, in private, before the public witness has anything to display. The man in the mirror is the instrument. If the instrument is unrefined, the music will not carry. This is what Leonard kept circling back to — change ourselves first; the Lord then does His part — and it is the consistent New Testament pattern: the Sermon on the Mount is delivered to the disciples, not to the multitudes, and the multitudes only overhear it. The disciples were the instrument being formed.

VIII. The Tare Is the Spirit, Not the Person — Continuity with the Eight Strongholds Essay

Leonard raised the parable of the wheat and the tares, with the suggestion that we might be the angels — the messengers — who help separate the wheat from the tares in this age. Susan flagged the worry that this could slide into a Calvinist position in which some persons are constitutionally unreachable. The reframe I offered, and which I think the fellowship received, is the one already implicit in the Eight Strongholds essay.

The tare is not the person. The tare is the spirit that has the person. The wheat-and-tares operation, on this reading, is not a separation of people into reachable and unreachable categories. It is a separation of spirits from people. When a stronghold lifts off a person, what was the tare leaves and what was the wheat — the human being made in the image of God — remains. The harvest is the lifting of the spirits, and the wheat is what was always under the spirit.

This is the same logic that runs through the Eight Strongholds essay. The eight traits Joan inventoried — negativity, dependence, infantilization, anger, jealousy, victimhood, conceit, intolerance — are not properties of Democrats. They are not properties of Republicans either. They are spirits operative in the culture, riding whichever human host the institutional configuration of the moment offers them. Treat the host as the enemy and you have misidentified the enemy and you will lose the human being you were trying to save. Treat the spirit as the enemy and the human being is recoverable, because Christ already paid for them at the Cross and the tare can be made to leave by the authority of the Gospel, the testimony of the finished work of Christ’s suffering and death. Appropriation of that spiritual gift, the fruit of that finished transaction, depends upon the individual and his willingness to surrender the temporary thrills of the flesh for the eternal benefit of a life lived in the enjoyment of God’s peace, relationship, and sonship.

This is why the political theology of the Christos Civitas position is not coextensive with the political programs of either tribe. We recognize the greater alignment of one tribe over the other in its platform position, but we see the imperfect execution of that platform, and the powerlessness of people operating under the influence of ego — with its rewards and payoffs — can emasculate men who attempt Godly goal achievement when not empowered by the Holy Spirit’s guidance and without the solidity of living in the power of a transformed and redeemed heart. We are not enrolling people in a tribe. We are offering people the lifting of spirits that have ridden them across all tribes.

IX. The Acts Communism Question — A Necessary Digression

Charlie raised, as a side question worth marking for later development, the difficulty of distinguishing the Acts 2 community of goods from Marxist communism. The book of Acts shows believers selling property and pooling proceeds, distributed according to need. On its face, this looks like communism. The South American Jesuits’ social-justice theology has often read it that way. The young or theologically unformed Christian, encountering this text, has a hard time articulating where Acts 2 ends and where Marx begins.

I will not develop the full answer here — it deserves its own essay — but the operative distinction is clear and worth marking.

The Acts 2 sharing is voluntary, originating in the heart of the giver, drawn from souls in whom the Holy Spirit has already changed the desire-structure. The Marxist sharing is compulsory, originating in the threat-monopoly of the state, imposed on souls whose desire-structure has not changed and who would not, without the appearance of personal cost, have given. The two operations have, on the surface, similar economic flows. They have completely different moral structures, completely different effects on the giver’s soul, and completely different historical outcomes. Acts 2 produced the early church. Marxist communism produced the Holodomor, the Cambodian killing fields, the Cultural Revolution, and a mountain of corpses ninety million high. The difference between the two is precisely the difference Christ made in the giver.

Susan’s compressed scriptural answer was the right one: Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it (Psalm 127:1). When the Lord builds the house, the sharing is sustained; when the state attempts to build the house without the Lord, the sharing collapses into coercion and the coercion eventually devours the very people it claims to serve. Jamestown’s first failed colony — communist by charter, dying because no one would work for the abstract collective — is the workable miniature of the larger pattern. Once the Jamestown plots were privatized, the colony survived. The lesson is not that private property is sacred but that the unchanged human heart will not sustain the Acts 2 economy, and only the Holy Spirit changes the heart.

Marxist communism is, in this sense, exactly what Charlie called it: a counterfeit of the gospel. It mimics the economic surface of Acts 2 while reversing its moral substrate. Karl Marx, by historical record, was raised under significant satanic influence — there is a literature on this, and I have referenced one volume in earlier essays — and the counterfeit is not accidental. Satan does not invent; he inverts. The closer the inversion to the original, the more dangerous the trap, and the more important the careful distinction we are trying to fix here.

X. Pre-Trib Rapture and the Avoidability of Revelation’s Catastrophic Destruction

Two related questions surfaced near the end of the meeting and deserve marking, even if we did not fully resolve them. I want to state at the outset that what follows on both questions is a working position rather than a defended one. I hold these views provisionally, am aware that they cut against substantial portions of historic Christian eschatology, and offer them here for the fellowship’s continued engagement rather than as settled conclusions.

The first question is the pre-tribulation rapture. I think the pre-tribulation rapture is, on balance, an escapist philosophy. I do not think the church will be removed before the difficulties. I think the New Testament pattern — be ready, for ye know not the hour — implies wakefulness through the night, not extraction from the night. I think Christ returns to a bride without spot or blemish, and I am inclined to think the spotlessness is achieved not by the sudden cosmetic intervention of a rapture but by the church’s actual sanctification through the period of difficulty.

The difficulty itself, on this reading, is required because of the forces arrayed against the Church and the threat of God’s inevitable victory. The Son will return to a pure Church. Whether by the Church’s gradual adoption of the Son’s transformation, or by the cataclysmic transformation Revelation describes, He will return to a bride made ready. The vision of John on the Isle of Patmos was true, real, and a battle that will occur in the heavenlies. Whether we play out that drama in the struggle of our individual lives as metaphor and microcosm, or whether the spiritual drama is played out writ large on the tapestry of the global human experience, either way the drama is real and will occur.

I contend — and here I am stating a working preference, not a defended dogma — that playing out the drama in our personal lives is deeper, yields more fruit, and is closer to the path desired by God, who desires that all be saved. Individual sanctification produces the same fruit, a pure church. The price is paid in a distributed way, rather than in bulk. The result is a granular sanctification, a deep holiness established in every heart who must individually renounce the works of Satan, accept the blood of the Lamb as payment for and initiation into the new life, enroll others in the cause, and do so while facing the personal cost of shunning, dismemberment from institutional approval, and the literal threat of life’s premature termination based upon taking a stand for God and His reign in personal and group lives.

I recognize this position will draw pushback from multiple quarters of historic Christian eschatology, and the pushback is not without weight. The pushback would say, fairly, that Revelation describes events on the heavenly register that are not simply allegorizable into personal struggle, and that the church’s final purification is consistently ascribed in the New Testament to Christ’s return rather than to the church’s own progressive work. I take those points seriously. What I am holding for now, subject to revision, is that the difference between distributed and bulk sanctification may be less ontological than it appears, and that the present-work imperative is the same either way.

The second question, raised by Charlie, is whether the book of Revelation is avoidable. My honest answer was: yes, that is my goal. I do not know if it is realistic. I am willing to be told it is not. But it is the goal I am working toward, because the alternative — to assume Revelation’s worst scenes are inevitable and to be merely passive ahead of them — is not, I think, the posture Christ asks of His church. The church is asked to occupy until I come (Luke 19:13), and occupation implies effective work in the present. Maybe the work succeeds enough to alter the trajectory. Maybe it does not. But the assumption that it cannot is a self-fulfilling assumption that authorizes the very passivity that ensures it cannot.

Susan’s qualifier on this was important. She read Revelation as showing that even with boils on their flesh, some will curse God — meaning that no quantity of present suffering will, by itself, produce universal repentance. There will be a class of persons whose hearts harden under any pressure. And — this is her important and — the persecution itself serves a purpose: God wants people who have chosen Him under conditions that made the choice costly, who have been tested and tried, and who have held.

The very structure of creation has insured that faith in, practice of, and spreading of the gospel that frees men from contractual enslavement to Satan will be resisted by the demonic realm, which is committed to retaining the benefits of feasting on the pain and death generated as consumable substance secondary to the willful commission of sin and its associated contractual possession.

I believe we were created for fellowship with God, to participate in His world as co-creators. In the process we are challenged to develop character and grow in our affinity, our relationship with God. The world was created with a polarity — God and not-God as the two poles of choice in every moment. As we develop maturity, we become more like Him, and when He comes fully in mature relationship, we will be like Him. This world provides the opportunity for relationship, testing, and maturation; the joy in each victory is felt both by Him and by us. The creation provides many axes of traversal, all of which provide the opportunity for relationship, maturation, and joy.

We are blessed to have been given the opportunity for incarnation. If we face great trial we will receive great reward, if we resist, if we maintain our testimony to the end. It is for such a time that we were born — whether at the end, middle, or beginning of His-story. Without challenge our character cannot mature. Without trial there is no story or victory. He has promised a world without end, a never-ending story, and we can rest in childlike appreciation of His mystery and care. Our existence is secure and we can rest in Him. A population of the saved, enrolling the unsaved, will eventually prevail and be the spotless bride, the Church, that He desires for His own.

So the difficulty of life — whether in the course of an ordinary life cycle or the end-times drama of a cataclysmic Tribulation — is not pure misfortune; it is also refining into purity. We can pray for less of it and we can work for less of it, and we should. But we should not be entirely scandalized when some quantity of it arrives, because the bride is being made ready for a mature relationship with the bridegroom, and maturity has an entry price.

XI. The Synthesis — What the Fellowship Said Actually Works

Pulling the threads together, here is what I think the fellowship reached, and what I want this essay to carry forward into the Christos Civitas working file:

1. The diagnosis stands. The cultural pathologies named in the Eight Strongholds essay are spirits, not opinions, and they ride hosts across both political tribes. They can manifest in different ways, and naming and attempting God’s way is not the same as rebellion against His way. Differences between tribes that hold diametrically opposed positions on Godliness cannot be justified as absolutely equivalent or as mere matters of taste. Both the saved and the unsaved, the seeker of truth and the rebel against it, can be possessed by spirits that cause moral failure — but of different modes and characters. The diagnosis of spiritual stronghold eliminates the reasonable likelihood of dependably successful treatment by argument alone. A more spiritually powerful and effective strategy must be employed. Treating the pathology as the person loses the captured person.
2. Michael’s bridging method is necessary at the interpersonal level and insufficient at the civilizational level. Hank Aaron is real. The bumblebee landing on the hand is real. Foothold-by-foothold is the only way one human reaches another human across a deep difference. But foothold-by-foothold cannot, alone, alter the institutional force-gradient at the speed it needs altering.
3. The radical force adequate to the gradient is the gospel itself, received and lived. Not bridge-building. Not warfare. The gospel, when actually received, takes a person over by the love of God, changes them inside, and produces in them a witness that scales because it is visible and contagious in the way truth is contagious. The gospel is the only force in the human catalog with demonstrated power adequate to the strongholds, because the strongholds are spiritual and only a spiritual instrument reaches them.
4. The instrument named in Revelation 12:11 has three parts. The blood of the Lamb (objective power, prior to us, invoked). The word of their testimony (the spoken witness; without speech, the operation is half-finished). The willingness to lose everything rather than recant (without risking the cost the battle is not engaged, and the war cannot be won). All three. None of the three is optional.
5. The deliverable we promise is Presence, not problem-solving. The magic-lamp framing — pray and your circumstances will change — is a promise we are not authorized to make and an empirical disappointment we keep producing. The actual offer is the Companion through whatever the circumstances become. Charlie’s mechanic. Leonard’s bus driver. The race remains the race; the journey becomes immeasurably better. This is what we tell the inquirer, and it is realistic, and it is enough.
6. The instrument is the man in the mirror. Holiness comes first, in private. Lived witness comes from holiness. Spoken witness comes from lived witness. In that order. Reversing the order produces the lukewarm Christianity that has spent decades failing to convince anyone of anything because the watching world correctly reads it as not actually different.
7. Assembly is non-negotiable. Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together (Hebrews 10:25). The wolf goes after the straggler. We are designed as herd animals — I am the vine, ye are the branches (John 15:5) — and individual Christianity unmoored from a body of fellow witnesses burns out. This Sunday Zoom is one such body. There need to be many more.
8. The wheat-and-tares harvest is the lifting of spirits from people, not the sorting of people. The strongholds named in the Eight Strongholds essay are precisely the tares. The persons riding them are the wheat. The harvest is the rescue.

XII. What Remains Open

Several questions surfaced that the fellowship did not close, and that I want to mark for future sessions.

First, whether Revelation is avoidable, and what difference our answer makes to the urgency of the present work. I gave my answer; Susan gave a partial qualifier; Charlie’s question itself was the most important contribution and remains live.

Second, how individual transformation scales to civilizational transformation quickly enough to alter the institutional gradient. The synthesis says the gospel scales because the witness is contagious; the question is whether the contagion is fast enough against the counter-contagion currently running. My answer: I have faith that through our witness, God’s will and way will prevail, if we live courageously.

Third, the Acts-vs-Marx essay is owed. The distinction between voluntary giving from a changed heart and compulsory taking from an unchanged one is operationally crucial in an environment where significant portions of professed Christianity have absorbed the counterfeit without noticing.

Fourth, the pastoral apparatus around the magic-lamp critique needs development. We are saying we cannot promise problem-resolution; what exactly can we promise, in language an inquirer can hear, that does not sound like a downgrade? Susan’s Presence formulation is the right answer; the work is making it land.

Fifth, the forsake-not-assembly principle — what it looks like for those of us scattered across geography, in fellowships of six rather than sixty, with no local body that holds the Christos Civitas position in recognizable form. This Sunday Zoom is currently the answer for many of us, but the question of how to multiply such gatherings at a rate commensurate with the work is open.

These are the live items I am carrying into the next session.

Closing Reflection

Susan closed the meeting in prayer, and I want to record the substance of what she asked, because it is the right summary: help us to see how we can be effective; lead us and guide us in our relationship with You as individuals first, and then in how we share this gospel with others. The order matters. Relationship with the Lord first; sharing second. The instrument is formed before the work is done with the instrument. And then — and this is the part I keep coming back to — the work is done. It is not merely contemplated. It is not merely prayed about. It is done.

The Eight Strongholds essay named the disease. The May 3 fellowship discussion named the cure: the gospel itself, received and lived, witnessed in word and life, at the cost of everything if necessary, in the cooperative company of others doing the same. That is what we have. That is the whole inventory. The question for each of us this week is not whether the inventory is sufficient — it is — but whether we are putting the inventory to use.

Soli Deo gloria.