A while ago I was in a major grocery chain's liquor store, and unusually, a young white male was the checkout person.

He asks me if I am Christain. Actually it was more personal than that- I'm pretty sure it was that whole, "have you accepted Jesus..." type line of questioning.

I looked at him and said, "well, yes, a long time ago."

He was quite happy, but I was not, because here I saw a young person full of zeal, who had no doubt had his head filled with nonsense.

If we had real elders, his employment would be important to them, as would finding him a wife, and generally having him settle down, and have good little christian children in what would hopefully be a protected and productive community.

Instead, his elders had no employment for him, so he had to work in a secular environment, but they filled his head with nonsense. I am pretty sure he has lost his job, because I never saw him again. Talking to people buying liquor about Jesus is likely to result in some angry drunk insisting on you being fired.

Most of these leadership structures are operating as revolutionaries, not as Christians. I was reminded of this here: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2018/04/modern-christians-should-not-as-rule.html

The post is good, but Charlton also responded to a comment I made:

Indeed. Good intentions are fine - but not enough; having tried a strategy we must then learn from experience (taking into account the very common phenomenon of unintended bad consequences). Otherwise we would be no better than the Leftist revolutionaries.

Now, I think my comment was good too, but Charlton unintentionally reminded me that the people I tried to collaborate with were actually modelling themselves off of leftist revolutionaries. I had fruitless conversations about this and, of course, I have mentioned the error of revolution many times on this blog.

There is also something else I have mentioned.

God is the God of the Living & If you don't have a garden, life will still spring up in the cracks.

The gardeners no longer tend the garden, and, at least to the extent that they still pretend to the authority they most manifestly and sinful shirk, they should be punished.