Mark Parrett

@Noor_ADEL85 @tedcruz Except it’s not in Morocco. That’s like saying Alaska is in Canada because it’s not attached to Washington.

@tedcruz This place called Ceuta,,, it's on the African side of Gibraltar strait ,,, in MOROCCO !!!

Very good Q. This is called an invasion.

@rabbriansamuel Festivals are great and point to Christ. Kosher keeping is specifically error. Not the same.

A Gentile Christian adopts a lifestyle law from Torah, such as keep kosher or observe a festival. A) That person is in error. B) That person is walking in obedience to God's Word. C) That person is employing personal choice and is free to do so.

@rabbriansamuel This is a bizarre statement. Christian zionists should have no trouble fellowshipping with supercessionsits. Debate all you want but dividing over that is wicked.

Believers in Jesus should not divide over lesser doctrines. Agree on the primary tenets of faith. Discuss and debate secondary tenets, but don't lose fellowship over them. P.S. God's plan for Israel and the Jewish people is a primary tenet, not secondary.

Have as many kids as you can!

@thewaronbeauty Paging @grog_old12773

Old cars & the analog resistance, a thread🧵

@uaustinorg "As we know it" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. 'The spirit returns to God who gave it' -Ecclesiastes 12:7

At the end of life, your body will disintegrate. The atoms that once joined together to form your limbs, bones, and muscles will slowly but surely separate. Eventually, we will all end up in the same place: in the ground. Our bodies will decompose, and existence as we know it will come to an end.

@tdogswatches Trafford is great as is fellow Austin brand DuFrane. Farer is another brand that does cool color stuff if you prefer your watches to be made by an English farmer instead of a Texan (I have all three and they're all great).

I appreciate watch brands that have good designs with fun colors. Nomos is the most obvious example of this, but Trafford is a good microbrand that fills this niche.

@KDimitratos We always push couples to have 'funny money' line items (separately) in their budgets so that some expenses can be free from anyone else's input. Even if a family can only afford for that to be $20 per month for a time due to other goals or income limitations... it's important.

Let me help with something some of you are going to think is controversial. I spent the beginning of my career in retail banking where I saw couples fighting over money vs those that were 80 and happily married. Happily married couples all had Joint bank accounts for Joint things, but separate bank accounts for their fun spending. Most of their income went into the Joint accounts. The fun spending was for situations like this. So in this case, he would have never seen $85 at Sephora and it would’ve been from an account with money being saved for fun spending. Similarly, if he saw a bill come through that was more than expected he could have communicated to his wife and they both pull money from their “fun spending” accounts for it. In this case, he is guilt tripping her while making himself seem like a savior (which he isn’t).

@ProsperityTime_ @watchking69 @JakesVision @SolanaLake @ProsperityKenz @TimepieceTyler_ @ProsperityCFO @dirtydan1of1 @ProsperityPedro Whiskey Tango.

Personal favorites, straight from the team.

@tdogswatches @avivafashion11 Couples should agree on an amount above which purchases will be discussed. That amount could change over time, but secrecy is toxic. (And yet, my wife has a surprise green box on the way - above our agreed amount - that I didn't consult her on & she's going to be delighted).

@avivafashion11 I think for something expensive like that it's worth a conversation at least, but largely I agree. And it goes both ways. If I want to buy a $5,000 watch of course I'll communicate with her.

“Can you ship it in the smallest box possible? I don’t want my husband to see another big box arriving.” A customer said this to me recently after buying a Dior bag, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Not because I’m judging her, but because, as a luxury reseller, I hear comments like this frequently enough to know that many women feel the need to hide expensive purchases from their husbands. Ladies, the ultimate luxury isn’t owning a $5,000 handbag. It’s having the financial freedom to buy what you want, when you want, without needing to hide the box, explain the purchase, or feel guilty for spending your own money. The true flex in life is NEVER the bag. It’s the freedom.

@VoteTrevorLee Not really. Those of us on the pro life side fight to end abortion because it is the murder of a human being created in Gods image. Not because we are afraid of a slippery slope but would be ok with maybe some limited scope of abortion.

This is why we on the pro life side keep fighting so hard to end abortion. The left always goes too far. Democrat logic: anything alive in the mother’s womb is ok to kill at anytime.

@royalriothayden That was the third missed Gozo cross right…???

SOLANS!?!?!? YOU HAVE TO FINISH THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT CHANGES THE GAME IF YOU TAP THAT IN AT THE BACK POST!!!! HUGE MISSED OPPORTUNITY! #RSL

@robbhurstCPA Working at a day camp and as a ticket scanner for the local parade of homes. She’s gotta put gas in her car!

How many of you have kids with summer jobs? What are they doing? Or are summer jobs a thing of the past.

@tdogswatches A Lange.

Tell me your favorite watch brand...

@thisisfoster Fair - I trust you've experienced what you're saying. I should have asked if the majority of those doing this really had a pastoral relationship to begin with or did they stay on the periphery (or maybe those pastoring them aren't the local church elders?).

@markcparrett So when you ask, whether I’m sure anyone does this, are you really asking that because clearly I think that I said it

I have had two articles percolating in my brain for the last two years. One is called How to Leave a Church Well. The other is Pastoring in the Age of AI Psychosis. I’ve been hesitant to publish the first because I don’t want to come across as passive-aggressive. There’s always someone who has just left your church, and in many cases, you don’t want them to feel singled out. The second article almost became my talk at the Evergreen Summit. As a matter of fact, a good bit of the talk I gave came from a half-finished draft of that article. One thing that connects these two articles is that they deal with an old problem that took on a particular shape during the COVID era. Our church attracted a lot of people who were simply looking for a place that was open without restrictions and willing to speak with clarity about what was happening in the culture. Many of their churches had shut down or had become quite authoritarian. So people left churches they had been part of for a long time to join our church, which had just come into existence. We always did our best to caution them against leaving without making a real effort to work things out with their elders. I’m happy to say that, on more than one occasion, this led to people staying at their churches, which eventually became more reasonable. There’s also a pragmatic reason for taking this approach as a church planter or pastor. People tend to leave your church the same way they came to your church. You’re doing your future self a favor. People often just up and leave with very little conversation. Usually, the conversation is a single phone call or a long, detailed email. Sometimes it’s a list of complaints. More often, it’s an email explaining how they’ve changed, how thankful they are for you, and how God has called them somewhere else. Frankly, the complaint-filled emails are easier because the conflict is right on the surface. The “it’s not you, it’s me” emails are more difficult because they’re trying to sidestep a conflict that is actually there. It may be a conflict worth leaving a church over, but you still have to have that conversation and work through it. It is amazing to me how many people seem to think that God calls them to make major spiritual decisions without seriously consulting their pastors. That reveals a very immature doctrine of the church because the importance of pastors is something every form of church government agrees on. Besides dislodging people from churches and institutions they had long been part of, the COVID era also brought an explosion of podcasting and YouTube streaming. As local pastors failed people, or at least appeared to in some cases, many Christians turned to social media for guidance. It is incredible to me how much content people consume. Hours and hours of streams and podcasts reshaped people’s entire way of thinking and undid what years of discipleship had built into them. Now, in some cases, this was a good thing. I’ve been glad to see the poison of feminism and egalitarianism reversed in many individuals. I’ve been talking about these things for more than two decades. Ideas that once seemed to live out on the fringes have entered the mainstream. But many of the new voices weren’t anchored in historic biblical theology. They also carried a deep current of anger and frustration. For some people, those years of online discipleship took a turn for the worse. The people caught up in this usually experience it as a spiritual awakening. They had been asleep for so long. Then, by consuming all this content, the dots connected and they finally felt alive. At last, they saw things as they really are. Maybe they became Roman Catholic. Maybe they became an annoying cage-stage Calvinist. Maybe all they wanted to talk about was marriage courts and the Ninth Amendment. Whatever the issue, they became supercharged by a handful of ideas and allowed themselves to be almost entirely reassembled. Usually they did all this without involving their pastors, at least until the very end. I can already hear people defending themselves as they read this. “Yeah, but churches are so bad today.” “Pastors are so bad today.” “There aren’t any good men anywhere.” “Look how many people capitulated to feminism.” “Look how many capitulated to government overreach.” True enough. But the abuse of something isn’t permission to reject it. Much of that is nothing more than a justification for radical individualism. Now this has taken on another form with the introduction of AI into everyday life. I think chatbots would be much more helpful if they were bullies. Instead, they’re flatterers. They tell you your thoughts are brilliant. They reinforce your instincts. They rarely tell you that you’re the problem. So now, instead of emailing their pastor or asking for a meeting, people are having long conversations with ChatGPT. In both cases, whether it’s social media or ChatGPT, they’re entering into a parasocial relationship. One is with someone who doesn’t know them and might strongly disagree with the decisions they’re making if he actually did know them. The other isn’t even a person. So here we are, a few years out from the COVID era, dealing with the aftermath of people who no longer trust institutions but do trust YouTubers and chatbots they have carefully curated to tell them what they ultimately want to hear. Recovering from this will require a revival of robust ecclesiology that begins with the necessity of the local church and its pastors*. And if you start teaching that, people will get angry. They’ll hand you a long list of failures to justify their individualism. That’s simply the price of being faithful. You’ll have to bear it. As kind of a P.S. *Now, of course, there is much more to be said. Part of that teaching is a return to shepherding, to actually caring for the souls of the people in your church and making yourself available to them. Even that will be a challenge because shepherding has been reinterpreted through a therapeutic lens and the idea that everyone should have an almost BFF sort of relationship with their pastor. I don’t think that’s true. It’s not bad, but I don’t think it’s required. Nonetheless, I learned growing up on a farm that if you want something to trust you, you feed it and spend time with it. The shepherd must live among the sheep. More on that maybe tomorrow. Painting: Frederick George Cotman

@Roseofvictori @McPherson_Josh1 You’re making a lot of (false) assumptions. I should have said *many of* though. We love reformed folks because they love the Word. They do trend, oftentimes, towards knowledge about God over knowing God intimately. YMMV.

@markcparrett @McPherson_Josh1 I am a member of a reformed baptist church that boldly preaches the gospel ( in church and on the street) and speaks boldly into the culture. I thought all reformed baptist churches were like this. I’m sorry to hear that yours is not.

Hot take (and controversial) on church history and modern American culture: I think it’s undeniable, especially when reading original source material, that the first two Great Awakenings in our nation drove significant societal restructuring through reforms that reshaped American institutions, morality, and politics, and resulted in massive national reformations. The first set the stage for the birth of a nation (The War for Independence). The second brought about the abolition of slavery (the Civil War). Yes and amen. Without question. These spiritual awakenings were lead by strong pulpits, “fighting parsons”, and well-discipled people who took their faith boldly into the public square (often in-spite of the established church). Then something shifted. During the Jesus Movement, there was a markedly different phenomenon. The pulpits weren’t aimed at broader culture, and faith wasn’t encouraged to be taken into the public square. The change that resulted from the Jesus Movement was largely inside evangelicalism as a Christian sub-culture reform. It spawned youth ministries, popularized worship movements (CCM, modern praise music), led to more casual worship styles (Calvary, vineyard), spawned seeker-sensitive movement, and launched tons of non-profit para-church orgs, etc. While the ripple was significant inside evangelical sub-culture, it barely touched or influenced larger American culture. In fact, it was during this very time that some of our most morally devastating legislative and judicial rulings took place… -banning school prayer -banning school bible reading -no-fault divorce -contraceptives (the pill) -abortion All of this accelerated societal decay. Which is to say…while the Jesus Movement emphasized a privatized experience where the focus was on “accepting Jesus into your heart”, it appears to have failed, or at least de-emphasized, discipling people to live out an “on earth as it is in Heaven” kind of Christianity in the public square. Perhaps it was a product of its time, when institutions were being rejected as a whole. But suffice it to say, the impact in American Church psyche was real. This is more observation than criticism. Lord knows I have my own massive blind spots. And I’m sure the history books will show errors of my own generation and personal life. I get it. No chronological snobbery here. Which is why I want to learn from history. We took a massive moral turn in the 60’s and 70’s, and the church’s response was to create bands that mimicked culture and work hard to not offend the unbeliever. The Jesus Movement, and the ministry philosophy that came from it, may have had some short term benefits, but appears to have produced long-term problematics. In other words, I think it laid the ground work for the negative world we have now inherited. That may not feel fair to some. And I say this as someone deeply grateful for some of the restless of the Jesus Movement. But I think there’s also room to ask questions. For instance, in the short span of my dad’s adult life, how did we as a nation go from not being able to run for president unless you identified as Protestant (or Catholic, as with JFK, but that was new), to a President celebrating g*y marriage (Obama) and transgenderism on Easter (Biden), and both doing so as concessions to cultural vibes? How did we go from Christian morality being the center of cultural life, to Christianity being a moral offense to modern American culture, in one lifetime? While there are many factors to be sure, we cannot ignore the Church and her faltering pulpits as contributing culprits. When not offending man’s sensibilities becomes the guiding operating principle of a church, there will be collateral damage. Sadly, it’s often salt losing its preserving power, and light ceasing to penetrate the darkness. And that’s how a society begins to rot in sin and wander in darkness. It is a sobering thought. Lord have mercy.

@TheBigDeal1953 @brysondech Respect is clearly important to you

@markcparrett @brysondech Right, continuing to disrespect the game is the way to go…eat a d1ck @brysonsech. Cheater.

Obviously disappointed with the ruling. I don’t agree with it, but it is what it is. This fires me up. Onto the weekend. Let’s get it.

@grog_old12773 @TheAimAndAuthor Need one.

It's so hard for me to care about what happens to Vermont - what with their wool socks and Birkenstock sandals. Mine is shipping. @TheAimAndAuthor