Discernment Bloggers Want to Expose and Destroy Things.

You’re Partly Right.

Cody Libolt

Published in

For the New Christian Intellectual

5 min readMay 8, 2019

What are we up to?

We’re attempting to imitate Paul as he imitated Christ.

“Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them” (Ephesians 5:11).
“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

We accomplish these goals in a way that is appropriately kind, but that gets to the point.

Don’t like it? Please take it up with Paul.

The Strategy

I don’t mind sharing strategic thoughts with you, my friends — and even some of my opponents who may be reading. Those who have truth on their side rarely need secrecy.

Why do we make it a goal to #EndTheERLC or #EndTGC?

The goal of discrediting any particular organization or leader is a carrot we can use to help set our eyes in the same direction. It’s a concrete. It can change later if needed. It’s a symbol.

What it symbolizes is: Leftist collectivism and biblical compromise entrenched within Christian culture and institutions. We fight against disvalues as part of a program to fight for values. We educate people about the need to think in principle about what they are willing to accept and support. We want to see more Christians supporting the truth. To that end, we point out the liars.

After Russell Moore, there will be many more leaders like him. This will be a long culture war. Perhaps centuries long. We do not need to win. We need to fight faithfully. We need only to be seen and heard, and, God willing, the truth will be heard more broadly within the lives of our children and grandchildren than it has been in our day.

What is it that we’re after? What is our end game?

You see people like myself and various friends on social media constantly talking about concerns that we have with things that are said by Beth Moore, or Russell Moore, or The Gospel Coalition, or the ERLC.

Is it really just the passion of our heart to find people out there that are saying things that we disagree with and to cut them down? Is that really what we’re all about? Not at all.

We want to create a better future — a future in which mainstream evangelical organizations are run by people who understand the need for economic liberty and by people who understand the need for biblical fidelity.

Since we don’t see that, these organizations that we are speaking against are simply a focal point: something we can rally about and say “This is something that we need to change.”

It will be something else eventually.

Why do you keep working to discredit people? What’s the point?

There is a great need in the church for biblical discernment.

Right now there is an industry that is pushing biblical compromise on many topics: women pastors, acceptance of SSA identity, socialism, race-based grievance hustling, and the overall oppression olympics and “victim identity” type politics.

This cannot be the message of the church. It’s wrong. And so, to the extent that we can, we speak out against it.

To the extent that we can, we want to be faithful witnesses — even to our fellow Christians — about what the Bible says.

And so when we say, “Let us discredit somebody like Russell Moore, or the ERLC, or Beth Moore, or any other prominent figure” we’re not doing it because we dislike them.

We’re doing it to stand for the truth.

How does a discernment ministry actually help people?

It helps the average Christian: the Christian who buys the Big Eva books and who donates to his church, which then donates to the SBC cooperative program.

The average Christian needs to have a responsibility over his giving.

It’s a matter of stewardship to know what you are supporting.

If you’re giving to programs that are actually not spreading the gospel but that claim to be, you ought to know it. It’s not fair that you wouldn’t know where your money is going.

Discernment bloggers help people be faithful and wise as stewards. And in many cases that means pointing out:

“You don’t want to support this; you probably shouldn’t support this. You should not use that book. You should not go to that conference. You should not support that missions program, because that missions program doesn’t actually do the things that it says it’s doing.”

At its best, discernment ministry is a means of helping Christians think independently, instead of following the “fame = credibility” model.

The best discernment ministry is the one that puts the reader in the driver’s seat. What I mean is: We give the facts, we report, and then we let the reader decide.

So we don’t start out the article by saying “Jane, you ignorant such and such.” That’s not respectful to the reader or the listener.

Rather, we say, “This is what’s happening. This is why we’re concerned about it. Here are the facts.” And we let you decide whether this (person or event of concern) is something worth supporting or not. That respects the individual mind.

Every individual has to be the judge — a noble Berean — searching the Scripture to see if it’s true.

That is what discernment ministry is about at its best. It is opposite from the idea that we have today (in many public ministries), which is that fame produces credibility. That is not biblical.

What Can You Do?

Please consider supporting a worthy discernment ministry — or starting your own. Get involved. Done right, it can be a spiritual benefit to you and those around you.

Discernment is hard work, and it often requires us to check our hearts and motives before God. It is not a task to take up lightly.

But, just as it is true that “If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task” (1 Timothy 3:1), so it is also true that if anyone desires to be a reporter or a source of reliable information, that is also a noble task.

Discernment can be done well; it should be done well.

You may have a part to play.