Five Reasons to Arm CCL for Cultural Victory This Advent Season
The Center for Cultural Leadership is fighting a winning battle. But we need resources to prosecute the war against Satan and his minions.
Dear friends and supporters,
December is traditionally a month when Christian ministries appeal for funds as the year-end donation deadline approaches. Let me offer you five reasons why CCL is worthy of your support this year.
First, for 21 years we have walked in integrity before the Lord. While many other ministries have tragically succumbed to ideological, financial, sexual, and spiritual malfeasance, CCL has, by God’s grace, walked, though not in perfection, yet in obedience before the Lord. CCL is a faithful ministry in every way.
Second, we have a proven track record of doing just what we claim we do. When somebody asks me to define CCL, I respond succinctly: “A Christian educational foundation dedicated to influencing Christians to influence culture in distinctly Christian ways.” This is what we do, and this is what we’ve done. Hundreds of churches and other Christian ministries and thousands of individuals have been reoriented to a broad, comprehensive cultural vision or steeled in that vision by CCL. Our staff scholars like Dr. Brian G. Mattson as well as many CCL fellows are relentlessly pressing a full-orbed faith, and their influence during what had been decades of withdrawal has been evident and palpable.
I myself just returned from City Church-Corpus Christi, Texas, where my long-time friend Pastor Jack Carter asked CCL to oversee and participate in a large January 2022 conference, whose tentative theme is “The Kingdom of God as God’s Mission in the Earth.” Dr. Joe Boot of the Ezra Institute will be joining me as a main speaker. Then, in early February, Gary DeMar of American Vison will be joining me at Church of the King-McAllen, Texas, for a conference on God and the biblical role of the state, dealing with the growing political economic interventionism and vaccine mandates. In May I’ll be addressing the ReformCon for Apologia in Mesa, Arizona on “Cultural Conditions That Make Biblical Law Possible.” Next summer I’ll be addressing (in person, finally!) the Runner Academy and Worldview Leadership Camp, and the Church & Culture Colloquium for the Ezra Institute in Grimsby, Ontario.
Third, CCL is the “adversarial intelligentsia.” We live in an age of ideologies, comprehensive, coherent — though often perverted — views of reality, like progressivism, radical feminism, Cultural Marxism, and Islamofascism, which require bold, thoughtful, intelligent refutation. Too much of today’s theological and political conservatism is of the boisterous, populist, anti-intellectual variety whose instincts are often in the right place but whose impoverished approach does disservice to the cause. CCL is an unapologetically intellectual ministry. We relish reason and intellect harnessed to the Bible and orthodox Faith as indispensable gifts to press the Kingdom of God and create Christian culture.
Fourth, CCL is producing more vigorous, transformational content than ever. In the last year we have tripled our output of digital books (like Realized Religion: Victory Already, Before the “Not Yet”; Christendom Is the Solution, Not the Problem; and Religionless Christianity: Why the Faith in America is Toothless, Spineless, and Harmless). My weekly Substack e-newsletter “CultureChange” and Brian Mattson’s “The Square Inch” address pertinent topics from a distinctly Christian perspective. The same goes for my YouTube channel and I-Tunes podcasts, lectures, and sermons.
More is coming in 2022. Given the widespread collapse of the church over the last 18 months (a collapse evidencing an internal hollowing out many years in the making), CCL is soon publishing a significant essay collection titled Failed Church: Restoring a Vision of Ecclesial Victory. Judge William Graves has suffered a health setback, but Prudent Jurisprudence (with many new sketches) should be ready to ship before long. My Creational Marriage: Issues and Controversies is scheduled for next August, my and Sharon’s 40th wedding anniversary.
Finally, we are committed to cultural victory. Remarkably, the vast majority of Christian ministries hope only for a limited success here and there, a growing church, scores of unbelievers converted, families surviving against the onslaught of modern culture, a new Sunday school annex. Thank God for them.
But CCL is confident that God has promised much, much more before the Second Advent — a vast expansion of the Kingdom in Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection and the Spirit’s power resulting in Christian culture, the prevalence of God-honoring education, media, technology, art, music, entertainment, economics, architecture, science, politics, and every other sphere of modern life.
We pray and live and think and write and speak as Christ’s victory people, expecting massive pre-consummate revival and reformation, a new Christian culture, not politically imposed but culturally nourished.
CCL is fighting a winning battle. But we need resources to prosecute the war against Satan and his minions. The first resource is mighty, prevailing, faith-drenched, persevering prayer. Pray big. Expect big.
The second resource is money, which God ordains for Kingdom expansion.
Will you arm CCL first by praying, and then by donating? Would you consider including us in your monthly charitable giving? For almost 22 years we have articulated a bold, thoughtful, uncompromising, culturally redemptive Christianity, committed to integrity in a time of so many ethically shipwrecked ministries.
You can donate to CCL via PayPal or Venmo. Or mail a check to CCL, Box 100, Coulterville, CA 95311. God uses you to keep us going — and expanding.
Since I’ll be preparing for the annual CCL symposium December 4 (see below), I won’t be writing this newsletter next weekend. In December I hope to address “Creational Economics,” “Atheism in the Church,” and “The Anti-Intellectual Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost.”
I am grateful to all of you donors, who keep CCL armed for victory. May the Lord grant you a glorious Advent Season.
Yours with much gratitude,
Founder & President, Center for Cultural Leadership
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The CCL phone number is 831-420-7230.
The mailing address is:
Center for Cultural Leadership
P. O. Box 100
Coulterville, CA 95311