This week on The Minister’s Ordinary Conversation, we talk about the evangelical allergy against thinking.

“We evangelicals need to examine our anti-intellectualism, confess its pervasiveness, repent of its wrongness, and seek God’s restoration to live up to our name—truly being people of the gospel who love God not only with our hearts, souls, and strength, but also with our minds.”

So says Os Guinness in his excellent book Fit Bodies, Fat Minds. He points out that evangelicals’ rampant anti-intellectualism will have dangerous results for their witness in the world. I think he is right and I look forward to discussing it with you.

This week I want to talk about the war in Ukraine. Last week Peggy Noonan released a column in the Wall Street Journal on Ukraine's peril and how it stirred the West's humanity. She said, "It wasn't geopolitics or ideology that determined world reaction to what happened in Ukraine this week, it was normal human feeling. An army of tanks and troops violently invades a border country populated by its cousins – a country a third its size with a tent it might – and people watched and thought: that's not right."

I think she's right.

The first book review episode of The Minister's Ordinary Conversation comes on the heels of Episode 3, which focused on the number of pastors thinking about leaving the ministry. One reason for this phenomenon is criticism. Pastors receive complaints about many things, and a resource for processing that criticism is necessary. In 2020, Joel Beeke and Nick Thompson produced such a resource. I review this helpful book in this episode and wholeheartedly recommend it to pastors as they process criticism.

Today we’re covering a concerning topic: the number of pastors considering leaving the ministry.