It’s been a few months since we received the hard news that our struggle with infertility would require more treatment before we are able to proceed with trying to get pregnant. Few things feel worse than waking up from surgery and hearing the words, “It was worse than the doctor thought, you will need more treatment.” I went into surgery hopeful and came out feeling like I had been punched in the stomach (physically and emotionally). This is not how we planned. This is hardly what we wanted. And this diagnosis only prolonged, and solidified, that we weren’t just a couple who was having a hard time getting pregnant again. We were infertile, at least for the time being.

I wish I could say that my response to this news has always been Christ-like and admirable. It hasn’t. But through this trial, God has taught me some specific things about his character, my depravity, and his goodness in all things. I believe that God is absolutely sovereign over my infertility in the same way that I believe he was sovereign over my miscarriage. It was not a surprise to him. In fact, it was designed by him for my good, and he doesn’t want me to waste this suffering. What I’ve learned is hardly exhaustive, but it’s a start. If you are struggling with infertility, too, I pray that God uses these words to encourage you as we walk this road together.

Not wasting your infertility starts with a deep and abiding trust in the God who knows the end of your infertility.

He knows the end of it because he gave it to you (Gen. 50:20; Job 2:10; Ps. 88:6-7). But he also knows the end of it because only he can truly heal your body and give you a baby. Know God’s Word. Study it. Live off of it. It is in his Word that you will see God and know him more deeply. You will find that he is good all of the time, that he loves you more than you know, and that he wants to give you a greater knowledge of himself through this devastating trial. In his Word you will find comfort for your soul. Not wasting your infertility is a constant fight to see God as good, but it’s a fight worth having.

Not wasting your infertility means you worship even when your heart is breaking.

John Piper says that the “unwasted life is the one that continually puts Christ on display.” That’s what worship is, giving God the glory due his name. Worship means treasuring Christ above all things, even a baby.

Not wasting your infertility means praying boldly.

Only when we trust God as the all-sufficient creator, healer, and sustainer can we worship him and also pray to him boldly. Knowing God enables us to pray to him with confidence that he can and will act in our best interests. Infertility is a disease of the helpless. You can’t change your condition. You can’t make two blue lines show up on a pregnancy test instead of one. But God can. Your experience with being utterly helpless to change your circumstance puts you in fellowship with many biblical characters. Pray like King David in the Psalms (see Psalm 27, 28, 30, 56, 62 and many others). He faced great difficulty and tribulation. His prayers were honest, bold, and worshipful because he trusted in God to be his hope and salvation.

Not wasting your infertility doesn’t mean you can avoid grieving and pain.

This might seem like an odd addition, but the unwasted life isn’t the triumphalistic life. The apostle Paul accurately described walking through this life as, “sorrowful yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6:10). That applies to infertility as well. We are sorrowful because it’s devastating, painful, and sometimes neverending. But we are rejoicing because we have hope that this is not all there is to life. It’s not that we are happy with our circumstances. There is nothing happy about infertility. Oh, but there is a great Savior who has given us everything we need through his death—including comfort in our pain.

Not wasting your infertility means taking your thoughts and emotions captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5).

Infertility brings with it a minefield of scary scenarios and questions (What if I can’t get pregnant? What if I miscarry again? What if I can’t afford treatment?). Those thoughts tend to bring emotions, which then bring stress and worry. Infertility, like all suffering, has a way of putting pressure on us and our relationships. Infertility doesn’t bring with it a free pass on how I treat people, my husband especially. Nor does it give us license to daydream about the many “What if’s” that come with infertility. I have learned this the hard way. God gave us real emotions and feelings, but they are not morally neutral. And our husbands are real people who hurt just as much as we do. Talking to yourself, instead of listening to yourself, is especially helpful when you feel your emotions taking over. Ask yourself, “Is this feeling true?” (Phil. 4:8) If it is, you have a faithful, sympathetic Savior who understands your feelings. If it’s not, that same Savior is able to comfort you and change your feelings for his glory.

Practical suggestions and ways to stay busy can be helpful, but even more important, the practical cannot happen unless we embrace Christ as our greatest treasure in our season of infertility. Sure, we can find ways to stay busy to take our mind off the pain, and those are good things to do (I’ve done it). But busyness in order to run from the suffering is not the same things as busyness in order to fill the season with good things. God has designed suffering to chisel us more into the image of Christ, to draw us closer to himself, and to give us a greater vision and understanding of his glory. We could easily miss that if we fill our schedules in order to forget.

I don’t know the outcome of my journey of infertility. Right now, I know that I’ve still got a road ahead of me that needs to be traveled. I don’t know where you are, either. But I do know this: no matter where we are in the journey of infertility, God has a sure and good purpose for us. He will test us, he will chisel us, and he will show us more of himself every step of the way. And after he has tried us, by his grace, we will come forth as gold (Job 23:10).

Courtney Reissig has written for The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. She is married to Daniel, and together they live in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Daniel is working to help plant Midtown Baptist Church. She blogs regularly at In View of God’s Mercy.

Add this one to your list: the sonogram machine.

The widespread use of sonogram technology—coupled with liberal abortion laws—has made it easier than ever for women to identify the sex of their child so that those without a Y chromosome can be killed before they’re even born.

In an article for The New Atlantis, demographer Nicholas Eberstadt explains the global impact of this “global war on baby girls”:

Over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female—in fact, almost universally female. The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe—and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls.

The Background: There is a slight, but constant and almost unvarying, excess of baby boys over baby girls born in any population. Until the 1980s the sex ratio at birth (SRB) tended to fall within a narrow range, usually around 103 to 106 newborn boys for every 100 newborn girls and typically centering no higher than 105.

Today, biologically impossible ratios have been found in various countries around the world, including Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Cyprus, El Salvador, Egypt, Georgia, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Libya, Macedonia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Portugal, Philippines, Republic of Korea, Spain,Taiwan, Tunisia, Yugoslavia, and Venezuela. In China the SRB ranges from 120 to 150.

In America, SRBs of 108 were found to be characteristic of the “Asian-Pacific” population (Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Filipino Americans, etc.)

Why It Matters: As Eberstadt notes in his article, “Sex-selective abortion is by now so widespread and so frequent that it has come to distort the population composition of the entire human species: this new and medicalized war against baby girls is indeed truly global in scale and scope.”

The social effect, he notes, can have “perverse and unexpected consequences” including increased demand for prostitution, an upsurge in the kidnapping and trafficking of women, increased crime, violence, and social tensions—all because of an excess of males who will never be able to marry or have a family of their own.

The solution is that cultures and countries will have to learn the intrinsic value and dignity of women. “In the final analysis, mass female feticide is a matter of ‘demand’: no demand, no female feticide,” Eberstadt told TGC. “Ending this abomination will require a moral transformation in the societies currently scarred by the practice: nothing less than a struggle for the conscience of countries can be expected to turn the tide.”

[Note: If you find a story our community should know about, please send the link to joe.carter *at* thegospelcoalition.org.]

Joe Carter is an editor for The Gospel Coalition and the co-author of How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History’s Greatest Communicator.

I have recently noticed a trend of churches giving up on the notion that community is an essential component of church life.

Many are deciding that community is an optional experience that is helpful but not elemental to being a healthy disciple of Jesus. I think this is a significant mistake. There is no biblical support for personal, autonomous Christianity. If we want to truly make disciples who advance the gospel, we must not only see the importance of community, but we must understand it to be essential to the church.

Community is a gift of God’s grace and essential for the Christian life. Community is not a peripheral ministry. Our communities should be the most palpable expression of the gospel within the church. As culture reflects the values of its citizens, Community Groups reflect the values of the church.

“If our church does not place a high value on community, then we are already disconnected from the gospel convictions related to community.

”

My experience has been that most churches consider community a value, but many have a hard time living out that value in a way that is visible and recognizable. The church is constantly pulled to do so many things that it can be easy to neglect or devalue Community Groups within the sea of programs churches provide.

If, however, we are going to breathe life back into the community of the church and see it function as God designed, we need to start thinking differently. Social justice, overseas missions, youth programs, food banks, sports ministries, and so on are acceptable programs, but they are not the center of God’s mission. They are support tools through which a gospel-saturated community can intentionally engage the world.

If we put all our energy into the tangential and neglect the center, we have no fertile ground where people can land and grow. I have heard such tangential ministries described as a funnel, drawing people into the church as they swirl toward the center. Ignoring the visual similarity to being flushed, the problem with a funnel is that it has a hole in the center.

Similarly, this has also been my experience when we neglect building the body of Christ. In order to breathe life back into your small group ministry, you must have a clear sense of its value and importance to your church.

You cannot hope to gain momentum and life in such a ministry while simultaneously marginalizing it through resource allocation or ministry dilution. Elevating Community Groups to the proper (and balanced) level of significance is critical for breathing life back into your small group ministry.

 

 

We met in the elevator of our condo building.

Instead of the classic stare down at the ground and avoid eye contact bit, I said hello and introduced myself. I asked him a few non-awkward, basic questions. How long have you lived here? Do you like it? Have you met any cool people?

The following week, I saw him in the lobby, and we picked up the conversation with a longer discussion revolving around the Seattle Mariners and their dim prospects for the year. I checked again to see if he was up for talking more, “If you want to watch a game at Sport, [the appropriately-named Seattle sports pub,] let me know.” He accepted, we figured out a good date and time and within a few weeks, we were grabbing a bite and watching a game together.

 

Breaking the Stereotype of Judgmental Jerk

It wasnʼt long before he found out I was a Christian, went to church, and loved Jesus. He said to me, “Wow, my stereotype of Christians has been blown away. Youʼre normal. You like good food and drink, you love your city and donʼt come off as a judgmental jerk.” I soon invited him to church, where he heard the gospel preached powerfully. He became a Christian and got involved in Community Groups, praise God.

For whatever reason, it’s easy for Christians to clam up and get weird when talking about their faith in the day-to-day. Here are a few tips to make bridge those inhibitions and get the conversation going:

 

1. Find a road that leads to Jesus.

In the course of conversation, be thinking of how Jesus intersects with the discussion, because Jesus intersects and touches everything in our culture: sports, music, art, politics. Look for bridges to introduce Jesus into the conversation. It should be just as casually or passionately as you talk about everything else.

 

2. Donʼt be weird and awkward.

“So…now, Iʼd like to talk with you about Jesus.” If all of a sudden you put on your “Jesus” hat and you are talking to them like a project and not a friend, then you’re entering awkward territory. Now, there will be times it becomes awkward because talking about Jesus and sin can be that way, but don’t let it be because you are socially weird.

 

3. Be winsome.

Included in that word is the word “win.” Be “winning” friends and the conversation by being engaging, friendly, and kind. For more on being winsome, check out Soul Winner by Charles Spurgeon.

 

4. Counter stereotypes and caricatures of Christians.

Many urban, secular folks have a particular caricature of a Christian, which is not very flattering (judgmental, harsh, the “morality police”), although many don’t personally have any Christian friends. Be gracious and talk with them, serve them, and love them.

 

5. Host an open house.

When my wife and I moved into a new apartment building we hosted an open house for the whole building and went over the top with really good food and wine. Dozens of our neighbors came out and it was the foundation for future gospel-centered conversations.

 

6. Be honest about your struggles and failings.

We all fall short. We all struggle and fail. The credit has to be given to Jesus in your life. Many non-Christians donʼt want to talk with Christians as they will feel guilty regarding their own problems.

 

7. Actions also communicate.

Serve your neighbors. Serve your neighborhood. Look for opportunities without being an attention-getter. Your neighbors are watching you and justas James said, faith without works is dead.

There are three well-established facts regarding Christianity and college students that ought to capture the attention of any gospel-loving pastor:

1. College is a time of unprecedented openness to all things, including the gospel.
2. Many awakenings, both major and minor, have started through college students.
3. There is a disturbing age gap in many of our congregations caused by the absence of this group.

We learned the following nine lessons along the way as our college ministry grew and flourished in an area that features many prominent universities.

1. Whatever you do, don’t shy away from depth.

Students are not dumb; nor are the college professors filling their minds five days a week. These students are being challenged with deep questions, and simplistic answers not only fail to persuade them, but actually make them more skeptical of Christianity. So take them deep, and do it often. In almost every sermon we try to have an “apologetic moment,” where the preacher explains how this or that biblical truth counters the cultural norms they absorb in their college. The most popular series we have done have related to straight, deep answers to challenging questions.

Furthermore, teach the hard stuff—like what the Bible teaches about gender roles, sexuality, and divine punishment. Most students already know generally what evangelical Christians believe about these things (if for no other reason than spoofs by their professors and Saturday Night Live), so we gain no ground by ignoring or apologizing for the Bible. Speak truth convincingly with clarity and grace. Recently a practicing lesbian student said that she comes to our church because we at least teach the Bible clearly, even though it sometimes angers her. “I don’t want someone just telling me what they think I want to hear,” she said. “I know what the Bible says. I’m trying to decide if it’s true. I want someone to explain to me what it says and tell me why it’s true.”

2. Preach the gospel.

The beauty of the gospel, as well as its outrageous claims, intrigues most students. It engages both believer and unbeliever. It exposes the root idolatry that drives our behavior and reveals God’s radical agenda for the world that calls for a dramatic response. The gospel “secret” is that everything we want to see in students, things like “radical generosity” and “audacious faith,” are produced not by telling them what they must do for God, but by exalting in what God has done for us. (For more, see Gospel: Recovering the Power that Made Christianity Revolutionary.)

3. Love on display is often the most effective apologetic.

Jesus said so himself (John 13:34-35). We often think we can convince unbelievers by showing that our smart guys are smarter than their smart guys. True cynics are more often convinced, however, by the beauty of Christ’s character in us than by meticulous logic. (This is not to diminish, at all, the vital role of giving intelligent answers to hard questions.) Note that it was when the first church “shared all things in common” and “there was no need among them” that Luke says they had “favor with all the people” and “God added to their number daily those that are being saved.” Serving is the church’s greatest persuasive power (cf. 1 Peter 3:15; 4:7-11).

4. Remember that we live in the Bono generation.

Serving the community and the poor around the world is now, for lack of a better term, “cool.” And while TOMS Shoes certainly has a different agenda than does the church, this generation’s awareness of global suffering ensures that any message that fails to address global and societal needs will fall on deaf ears. The awareness of global suffering actually provides a wonderful opportunity for the gospel. We can show the gospel provides a better, more holistic answer to the problems of the world.

Our church has identified five groups (the homeless; the orphan; the prisoner; the unwed mother; and the high school dropout) that we ask students to serve. We use these ministries as opportunities not only to win our community, but also to disciple students, both believer and unbeliever alike (many unbelievers will gladly serve alongside us in projects directed toward these groups).

5. Lift their eyes to the nations.

God’s agenda for the world is nothing short of people from every people group worshiping Jesus (Rev. 5:9-11). We should teach students to choose their life’s path based on this ultimate goal. Even those students who do not go into full-time paid ministry can choose their career path in light of the Great Commission. They have to get a job upon graduation somewhere, so why not do it in a place where they can be a part of church planting? We teach our students that unless God has put a better plan before them, they should spend two years in one of the places we have a church plant (both domestic and abroad).

6. Aggressively develop summer projects and overseas opportunities.

Summer projects and mission trips are great “farm teams” for training students in mission. We have seen tremendous returns from students who served on one of these projects. Currently, we have projects each summer in our city, in places we have church plants domestically, and overseas.

7. One-on-one meetings and small groups are often more effective for evangelism than large gatherings.

The “come and get it” approach of many churches and campus ministries has become less effective with today’s students. Plus, there are usually a lot of groups already doing that on campus, so that “market” is already glutted. There are still tons of lost kids on campus, however, and most of them won’t go to those large groups. We have found that one-on-one meetings and small groups reach many of these “radically unchurched” students. Also, it’s easier (and cheaper) to draft younger, “just out of college” workers than it is to hire a career “college pastor.”

8. Providing multigenerational connections within the church is essential to discipleship.

Students need a connection with older men and women (Titus 2). This can happen in both formal and informal settings: encouraging healthy couples and families to integrate students into their families; hosting multigenerational small groups; and having students help out with children’s and student ministries are all ways students can connect. Five college students guys hanging out together sharing their collective wisdom is not the “manifestation of God’s varied graces” God promised in the church (Eph, 3:10; 1 Peter 4:10); it’s Lord of the Flies.

9. Cultural adaptation is important, though not essential.

Why do churches hold on to the cultural mores and styles of previous generations if they are trying to reach this one? We can’t make the gospel more attractive through our “coolness,” but let’s face it: if the 1950s ever come back, many of our churches are going to be ready. That said, ultimately the appeal of the church has more to do with its timelessness than its trendiness. The essential element is not a cool pastor or loud music but an authentic message.

Traditionalism is a killer not because it is “uncool” but because it is a counterfeit of the gospel. Some churches that are very effective in engaging students have more of the ancient, reverent feel than a vibrant, energetic one. Our church has more of a modern feel, but we think the gospel’s power can reign in both settings. We would encourage you to lay all cultural elements of your church at the feet of Jesus and ask him to show you how to prioritize the mission over preference. Every effective missionary in every culture has thought this way. God help us if we value our cultural traditions more than our children!

 

There is no magic bullet for reaching students, but we hope these timeless values will help spur you to expect great things of God for this generation, and then attempt great things for God in it.

J. D. Greear is the lead pastor at the Summit Church in Durham, North Carolina, where Rupert Leary is the college pastor and Campus Outreach director.