In his sermon 'Burning in the Soul,' Michael Clary addresses the concept of 'loser theology,' a term he uses to describe a passive approach to Christianity that he believes is prevalent and detrimental. This theology suggests that Christians should embrace defeat and retreat from engaging with culture, thinking that suffering and being marginalized are the true paths of following Christ. Clary recounts a significant church split he experienced, which he attributes to differing views on how to engage with the world, rather than doctrinal disagreements. He outlines three themes of this theology: spectator spirituality, which focuses on internal faithfulness while ignoring public engagement; doormat doctrine, which glorifies suffering for its own sake; and white flag Christianity, which sees surrender as a testimony of faith. Clary argues against these views, advocating for a proactive Christianity that engages with culture through the power of the Holy Spirit, promoting godly authority and leadership in society. He calls for Christians to take on roles of influence and authority, suggesting that this is the remedy to the prevalent 'loser theology.'

Good afternoon. My name is Michael Clary and the burning in my soul is something that I've called it loser theology. And I'll take a moment to explain what that means. About three and a half years ago, the worst thing that, like arguably the worst thing that ever happened in my ministry took place. And that was, there was a split that happened in my church.

It was about half the people left. There were six elders and four of the elders left in that split. And I was left trying to care for and shepherd a church that was reeling and hurting and confused and trying to figure out what just happened to us. Because there wasn't a moral failure, there wasn't any kind of embezzlement or any scandal of that sort. And interestingly, there was not even a doctrinal problem, not in the sense of There's some Bible verse we could go to, and there is this flash point where we're all disagreeing about some text of scripture, and the theology of it is ripping us apart because we disagree.

We would agree on all the doctrinal issues, and All the elders were walking in integrity, and yet there was a split that happened. And then after it happened, I've spent the last three years trying to wrap my mind around what happened to us, and it's the same thing that I see tearing churches apart all across the country. We see it in the Southern Baptist Convention, we see it in the PCA, we see it in all different kind of denominations, where churches are at odds with one another, and a lot of it has to do with what do we do about the times in which we live, What do we do about the culture? And what do we see happening in our culture? So think about this.

Evangelical Christians, according to some surveys, represent, do you know how much of our population in America would call themselves evangelical Christians? It's about 25%. Whether or not they're all born again, we'll save that for another day, but 25%, so that's one quarter of all Americans would claim to be born again Christians or evangelical Christians. Now you think about those kind of numbers and we think about who are the power brokers in society. Who is in the upper echelons of running our country, big tech, business, finance, politics, government.

How many of those people can you think of are evangelical Christians? And I can think of precious few of them. Very few people that are really in positions of influence in our society are evangelical Christians. And the reason behind that is something that I've just labeled loser theology. And loser theology basically is the idea that being passive and retreating from culture and being defeated, being stepped on for Jesus, that's the way of Jesus.

That's the faithful path. Because when we are losing, that's when we're most like Christ, because Jesus went to the cross and we want to be just like Christ. And that sounds good. You might hear that and think, I can get on with that, I can understand that. The problem is that that is foreign to the way most of church history has thought about the Christian life.

They've not understood the Christian life as this perpetual defeat after defeat after defeat until Jesus comes back and then we all win and when we're in heaven. If that was the way the majority of Christians had thought throughout history, the United States of America would not exist. The United States of America exists because you had Christians that understood, yes, sometimes we will suffer defeat. Yes, Sometimes we will lose, we will be persecuted. Those things will happen.

But the overall posture of our lives is one of power of the Holy Spirit that enables us to go into the world and assert the supremacy of Christ in all things. And if that's your attitude, then you'll build things. I imagine many of you here today, or here, it's a family conference. And many of us are here, we're concerned about our children. I've got four kids.

My oldest daughter turns 21 today. So 21, 19, 17, and 15. And they're all single, so we can talk if you got single sons and daughters. Perhaps we can barter some camels and some jewelry or something. We'll work it out.

But I have fear for the future. In a way that is hopeful and optimistic, I trust God, I'm optimistic by nature, but when I look at the world I'm like, what is the future gonna look like for our children? And when I think about, okay, what needs to happen for our society to not completely unravel into a godless hellscape of chaos that we can barely imagine, which if my great grandfather, who lived to be 102 years old, if he were alive today, he would say the world that we currently live in is a godless hellscape that he could barely imagine when he was younger. And we're just sort of slowly descending into chaos. And the problem that I see in evangelicalism is there is a strong undercurrent of a lot of Christians who think, well, this is just the way it is.

This is just the way it has to be because Jesus wants us to lose faithfully, to be beautiful losers, to be dignified in defeat. And then whenever the godless pagans are running us down and they're oppressing us, then we get to show off how righteous and holy we are as we're being fed to the lions in the arena. But it doesn't have to be that way. But there's a lot of Christians who think that way. And in my church, what I realized is the undercurrent that was driving us apart was there were some of us that thought we can do something.

We can help be a part of the solution of working towards a better and more hopeful future, but it's going to mean we have to be a church that has a spine. We can't be these linguine spined, even jellyfish weaklings that just wanna get walked on and stepped on for Jesus and then we'll be happy when we're in heaven. We actually have to have the courage to speak up and to say hard things and to take difficult stands. Half of our church wanted to do that, and the other church thought we don't wanna do that because it's costly and it's controversial and people won't like it. That's what I label loser theology.

I'll give you some of the themes of it, and you may recognize this. And the thing is, it's so subtle. It's so subtle because none of the things that I want to describe to you are in and of themselves absolutely wrong. It is a misplacement. It is an exaggeration of those things, and an emphasis on those things to the exclusion of others.

So there are three big themes that I'll give you here. One of them I call spectator spirituality. Spectator spirituality is the idea that, it's kind of you go to a ball game, and you watch the game playing out on the field, and you feel like you're in the action, but really you're just a fan. And then whenever you walk out of the game, and the team won, your team won, you say, we pulled out a big victory today. No you didn't, you watched the victory.

They did the victory, you were just a spectator. And so the spectator spirituality tends to shrink the totality of Christian faithfulness to the interior life. So I read my Bible, I pray, I've got good doctrine, I'm a churchman, I'm a good husband, I'm a good wife, we raise a good family, that's it. And there's this whole other realm of Christian faithfulness in public that we've cut off. We don't think we have any duty.

Well, the world's just gonna burn. It's rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as it's going down. We don't need to worry about the world. It's gonna burn, it's going to hell in a handbasket. We just need to be faithful and we retreat from culture and we're spectators of what's happening out on the field.

The second theme is what I call the doormat doctrine. And the doormat doctrine is this idea that we are supposed to be in pain in order to be most godly. And that's subtle, it's a little slippery because you'll recognize there's lots and lots of Bible verses that tell us how to suffer well, right? And so we know that the Bible tells us how to suffer, but the Bible never ever commands us to pursue suffering as the end in itself. The Bible tells us, you go out there and do good works.

You go out there and take dominion. You go out there and glorify God in the works you do. And when suffering happens because God sovereignly visits it upon you, suffer faithfully, endure it faithfully. But you're never supposed to pursue it as an objective. You know, I used to know some people back in college and they would sit around late at night talking about Jesus and stuff, and they would romanticize about the early church.

And they see the modern church is fake and plastic. And they're like, man, I remember, I would love to just be out there and just give my life for Jesus and just die in the arena for Jesus. I'm like, okay, if the Lord calls you to do that, do it. But how about you go out there and you take a risk and you say things right now that'll make people hate you that are faithful and good. Nobody's dying in the arena right now, but there's a lot of people who don't have the guts to say the hard thing that needs to be said.

We're caving on homosexuality, we're caving on feminism, we're overrun by Marxism, critical race theory. There's all kinds of godless ideologies that are run and rampant, unchecked, unopposed in our society because the church doesn't have the guts to stand up to them. Third theme is what I call white flag Christianity. And that is a cultural posture that sees strategic surrender as our faithful gospel witness. And so in this view, it is like, whenever we're losing, the world will see us lose, and they'll see how faithful and how hopeful and joyful we are, and then they will say, what is the hope for, what is the reason for the hope that is in you?

And then you'll tell yourself, well, I've been losing my whole life for this moment. And then I'm gonna tell them, and then revival's gonna break out. And they're gonna get saved, and their minds are gonna be blown, but there can't be too much revival though, because if there's a lot of revival that means we're winning and we're not supposed to win, we're supposed to lose. So we can have a little bit of revival that lasts a little bit, but then we have to go back to losing because all the new Christians now need to be taught that, well, you have to lose faithfully to be a good Christian. And so we're in this conundrum where we're believing in absurdities and we're not doing the faithful thing.

Now, there's a remedy for this, which I'm out of time, so I don't have a chance to tell you about. But the remedy for this is high agency Christianity and it is a life of power, a life of embracing the goodness of godly authority to where I would pray that in generations to come that Christians are, there are more Christians starting businesses. There are more Christians being bosses and supervisors in their workplace. There are more Christians running for office at every level because Christians are given power of the Holy Spirit and righteous power and righteous authority is the means that God has appointed to fight evil in society because if good men do nothing then the price we pay for it is to be ruled by wicked men and that's what we're seeing in our society. Forgive the plug here.

If you go to dmichaelclary.com, I've written about this and there's some other articles and things that I write about this a lot, but I've been thinking about it a lot. So if you're interested in hearing more, that's my sub stack and you can find out more on my website. Thank you.