A different sort of event for church leaders and their wives... Faithful ministry can be lonely and comes with pressures most people never see. Over time, church leaders and their families can get worn down or stuck in the same ruts. Instead of working on themselves and the ministry, they can end up stuck in the grind of just keeping up and barely surviving. With this in mind, we’re reworking our pastors’ conference into The Evergreen Summit. We’re calling it “Evergreen” because the aim is to equip pastors, elders, and their wives for the long haul of ministry. We’re going to do things a little differently in two main areas. First, no keynotes. Frankly, most pastors’ conferences are largely a summons to hear “big names” preach sermons. We want something more practical and interactive. This isn’t about platform building for Christian celebrities or content generation for media-centered ministries. Second, no recordings. We want presenters and attendees to be able to speak freely about the real challenges of ministry, so this event will not be livestreamed or recorded. We will provide printed materials for all attendees, but all workshops and mastermind group conversations will remain private. So what will we do? We’ll have three workshop blocks, each consisting of three back-to-back 20-minute presentations. Each block will be followed by a 15-minute break, and then the three presenters will take part in a moderated panel and answer questions from attendees. Our full lineup of workshop sessions is still being finalized, but it will include topics like How I Survived a Coup d’État, Cultivating a Leadership Pipeline, and Protecting Your Wife and Kids. We’re aiming to be very practical and brutally honest. There will also be one workshop block just for ministry wives, led by Rosaria Butterfield, Emily Foster, and a presenter TBA. It will run concurrently with one of the main workshop blocks. Another key component of the summit is the masterminds. These are small groups of six to eight people who will identify two real problems within the group and work together to find a path forward. There will be two mastermind sessions for the men’s track and two for the wives’ track. We’ll also share meals together and have a catered party on Friday night for all attendees. The goal is to come ready to work on real problems and return home refreshed and ready to get things done. We will not have childcare available, but babes-in-arms are welcome. Presenters include: Michael Clary • Rosaria Butterfield • Chris Wiley • Michael Foster • Doug Ponder • Bryan Laughlin • Emily Foster • Brian Brown …and more to be announced. Date July 16-18, 2026 Location East River Church, 299 Haskell Lane Batavia, OH 45103 Purchase Tickets here: eventbrite.com/e/the-evergre…

Two somewhat related thoughts… First, recasting Hitler as some misunderstood, persecuted, well-intentioned leader is false. It’s historical revisionism, and no doubt part of a broader effort to corrupt the way people think about evil, power, and history. You don’t have to buy into every prevailing narrative about the twentieth century to recognize that. A society that loses the ability to clearly identify genuine evil is a society that becomes vulnerable to it. Second, so much (which is different from saying all) of what has been going on in the online Reformed world over the last few years is a strange mix of proxy wars, bitterness from soured relationships, and influencers fighting one another over what they treat as a zero-sum audience. It’s a mess. The more things moved in that direction, the more I moved away from it. And I have no intention of getting pulled back into it. Even posting this will bring out the “name names” and “declare your allegiance” crowd. You get it from both sides. Disavow this guy or declare your loyalty to me. If you don’t publicly denounce someone, you’re secretly with him. If you don’t publicly pledge your allegiance to another person, you’re not a real friend. Oh well.

At the Christ is King event at Holland, MI.

I recently saw a new book on masculinity being marketed to young men (Not Chase Davis' book). To be fair, I haven't read it, and it may be a perfectly fine book. But the marketing was so bad that it reminded me I need to finish some of the books I've been working on for years. I will. Anyway, as I thought about it, I realized there is a book I would like to write: a book on masculinity for boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen. The idea interests me because I already have a large amount of material written on various disciplines, virtues, and aspects of manhood that could be adapted for a younger audience. The question is not whether I have enough content. The question is how to frame it. After spending some time walking circles around Casa Foster and dictating notes into my phone, I think I've found the framework. I want to lean heavily on the wisdom literature, particularly Proverbs, and organize much of the book around the theme of fear. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but boys are often ruled by many other fears long before they learn that lesson. They fear rejection, failure, embarrassment, hard work, responsibility, authority, pain, and being thought weak by their peers. Much of growing into manhood is learning to put those fears in their proper place by learning to fear God above all else. So, what follows is a rough first draft of that idea. It still needs refinement. The logic needs tightening, the structure needs sharpening, and the practical application needs to be developed further. But I think the foundation is there... Chapter 1 - Fear Fear is an unavoidable part of life. But you do have a choice about what you will fear, or better yet, whom you will fear. As a young child, I was exposed to rated-R horror movies. I heard things and saw things that, arguably, even an adult shouldn’t hear or see. It implanted in me an irrational fear of the dark. I say irrational because there is a logic to being scared of darkness. One of the pictures of hell is eternal darkness. When you peer out into the black, you wonder if something is peering back at you. But my fear was irrational. Even a small nightlight wasn’t enough. I slept with a light on most every night. When I was very little, I lived on my grandmother’s farm. There was little to no light pollution and no streetlights. So when it was nighttime, and the clouds covered the moon, it was pitch black outside. For some reason, my grandmother was not a fan of curtains, so I couldn’t pull the curtains shut on my room’s window. I would stare at that window, hearing the deafening sound of crickets outside and the tick, tick, tick from the grandfather clock in the living room. And I would wonder if a monster was staring back at me. I remember one night I did see a face. A pale white face pressed against the window, staring at me. My heart rate jumped, and I was almost paralyzed with fear until it meowed. It was the albino Siamese cat that lived on the farm. Almost a decade later, when I was 15 or 16, I was once again at my grandmother’s farm. I don’t recall why, but my uncle was gone, and so were both my grandparents. I found myself alone in the middle of nowhere near Osgood, Indiana. I felt that paralyzing fear come over me again. But I was sick of being scared. I decided I would walk out into the deep, dark forest in my pajamas, with muddy boots on, no flashlight, and meet my fear. So I got about 100 yards into the dark forest and screamed at the top of my lungs, “Come on! Come get me!” Nothing got me that night. All I did was spook some owls and deer and begin to deal with my irrational fears. But as I said, there are rational fears. The book of Proverbs opens with one of the greatest truths of life: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. This is a hard truth for a lot of Christians. The idea that you should fear God is foreign. God has been presented as some soft, pushover, doting grandfather in the sky. I used to refer to this as “Fuzzy Wuzzy Was a God” thinking. God is just there to give you butterfly kisses and hugs. He is a big ball of gushy emotions. He would never harm a fly. He’s simply up there to affirm you and tell you how great you are. This, of course, is pure fiction. Scripture says our God is a consuming fire. Our God is terrifying. He is immense. He knows everything. He is everywhere. And He is a perfect judge. He loves with a perfect love, but He also hates with a perfect hatred. He does not wink at sin. He judges and punishes it. God is the Great Other. Even before you know Him, you perceive His gaze. You cannot see Him, but He can see you. When you look out a dark window, you might not see everything, or anything. But God, as Psalm 139 says, sees even the darkness as day. Such a powerful and holy God is logical to fear because we are sinners. He will not allow sin to go unpunished. Sin simply means that we have not kept His law. We have sinned against our conscience, which is an imperfect guide to right and wrong. But many of us have also willfully broken the Word of God contained in the Bible, particularly in the Ten Commandments. And so we sense a coming judgment from the Great Other. That is a rational fear. One reason the fear of God is the beginning of knowledge is that it helps us understand that we will be held accountable by the Maker of all things and that there is no escape. It teaches us that we are not the center of the universe. Are you a treasured creation of God? Yes. But the world does not revolve around your desires and purposes. It was built for His glory. Understanding that He is the center of all things and that you must give an account to Him someday makes you reconsider where your fear should rest. Now, not all fears are created equally. As I’ve pointed out, there are both rational and irrational fears. But even within rational fears, there is a bifurcation. While it is rational to fear God as a holy Judge, the Great Other, it is also possible to fear Him as the great Father. Once again, this is an idea that can be foreign to many people. Even the idea that you should fear your father sounds like a bad thing. But this is a sort of fear that can exist alongside love. For example, when I spank my younger children with a calm demeanor, they do not run from me. They run to me. They know the discipline they are receiving from me is not judgment or wrath. Rather, it is an expression of my love and my desire to protect them from the destructiveness of simple disobedience. They know that the same hands that spank them for their rebellion are the hands that protect them, cradle them, love them, and provide for them. So they revere me as a benevolent authority in their lives. That is the sort of fear the Christian is to have of God. Not one that makes him hide and run away, but one that allows him to live openly and humbly before his heavenly Father. It is a fear rooted not in terror, but in reverence, trust, and love. In the Garden of Eden, our first parents rebelled against God. Eve was deceived by the serpent. Adam willfully listened to the voice of his wife instead of the command of his God. Consequently, he and all mankind in him fell into a state of sin and misery. At the core of this fall was a fear of God. We see how this fear drove Adam and his wife to do something irrational: hide from God and cover their shame with fig leaves. But there is no hiding from God. He sees all. And there is no covering your shame with fig leaves or darkness. God, in His mercy, called them to repentance and gave them the promise of a Redeemer who would come through their line. A Son who would be bruised but would crush the head of the serpent. Then, as a symbol of hope, God killed an animal, shedding its blood, and clothed Adam and Eve so they would no longer have to walk in shame. This is important for you to understand because while it is rational to fear God, it is irrational to hide from Him. But because sin results in shame and carries with it an awareness of coming judgment, you will try to clothe yourself in other things. Maybe you will try to be a good boy, keeping God’s law. Or maybe you will try to become a strong man, the sort of man other men fear. But God is so holy and powerful that none of these things can keep you from being held to account by Him. Therefore, the only way you can live rationally before God, without the paralyzing fear that drives you to do foolish things, is to be clothed by God. Not in the blood of bulls and goats, but in the blood of Jesus. The Christian is the person who trusts in Jesus by faith alone. Faith is not a work. It does not earn anything. It is simply the empty hand that receives what Christ has done. And when you receive Christ by faith, God justifies you. This means two things. First, He pardons all your sins. He no longer counts them against you. Second, He credits the righteousness of Christ to your account. God looks at you and sees the perfect obedience of His Son. You are forgiven, and you are clothed. Apart from the hope of the gospel, there is no life that is not darkened by coming judgment. But in the gospel, Proverbs says, “The righteous are bold as a lion, but the wicked flee when no one pursues.” The wicked are afraid of all the monsters that are not really there because they sense the reality of coming judgment, but not the Christian. When the Christian knows that he stands before God in Jesus Christ and Him alone, he knows that God no longer sees him as an object of wrath deserving punishment. That verdict is already settled. Nothing can reopen it. So when God disciplines him, it is never to pay for sin. Christ already paid. God disciplines him as a beloved son, for his good, better than the best earthly father. The discipline flows from his sonship. It does not earn it. When you fear God, you begin to fear nothing else. But there is no life that can be lived without fear. There is another kind of fear we see in Scripture: the fear of man. This is the pride and insecurity that turns you into a performer who lives for the praise and approval of others, as though their judgment were the final judgment. The fear of man will make you a weak people-pleaser instead of a bold lion who lives for the glory of God. That is why the fear of the Lord is the beginning of understanding. If you do not understand who God is, what He requires, and how you can be made right with Him, you will never become the man God created you to be. This is why King Solomon begins Proverbs this way. He is writing this collection of wisdom so that his sons will become wise, godly, and productive men. He wants them to live not as boys, but to grow into young kings who live for the glory and honor of God. He wants them to fear nothing but God Himself and, out of that reverence, become the sort of men who rule their own lives with diligence for the blessing of others. You do not have to live your life ruled by irrational fears. You do not need to be scared of the dark. And you do not need to walk out into the woods at midnight screaming, “Come and get me!” like some crazed fool. You do not need to be a people-pleasing pushover. You can be a bold, productive, godly man. And that starts with understanding why you should fear God. In the chapters that follow, we will talk about ambition, money, goals, physical and mental fitness, and girls. But none of it will matter if you do not fear God. The fear of the Lord is the foundation of manhood. Without it, you cannot become the man He made you to be.

. @dalepartridge

Michigan bound

Since it has pleased Almighty God, in His great mercy, to receive to Himself the soul of our brother departed, we now commit his body to the ground: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body, by the power that enables Him to subject all things to Himself.

“And this is why chili with spaghetti noodles makes perfect sense when you think about it…” HT: @dmichaelclary @dougponder @JoeHolland

Everyday everyone you know gets a little closer to eternity. Tell all of them about Christ.

Tragedy and the suffering that follows it are a fire. To adapt an old phrase, the same flame that melts the wax hardens the clay. There is no escaping tragedy. It visits every life, sometimes in isolated moments and sometimes in long, relentless seasons. Over the last six years, we’ve been living through what I’ve come to call a swirl of death. Multiple family members and friends have died in unexpected and heartbreaking ways. Each time, we have been forced to decide what that fire would do to us. Would it melt us into a sorrowful but Godward faith? Or would it harden us into self-centeredness and self-pity? Every trial presents a person with an opportunity to confess what he truly believes. Suffering has a way of exposing the deepest convictions of the heart. In the fire, everyone makes a confession, even if he does so unknowingly. We live in a trauma-obsessed culture that treats suffering as a kind of moral exemption. Many people assume that tragedy, even relatively small tragedies, gives them permission to live faithlessly toward God and resentfully toward others. Suffering becomes a license for self-pity and bitterness. It becomes a reason to question God’s goodness without end. How often have grieving people been told, “It’s okay to be mad at God”? No, it isn’t. It may be understandable, but it is not okay. A wise and compassionate person recognizes the frailty of the human heart. In times of suffering, we are tempted to doubt God’s goodness, wisdom, and love. We should not be surprised by those temptations. But neither should we indulge them. Doubt is not something to be coddled. It is something to be confronted. Faith must be reasserted. The truth must be preached to our own souls again and again. God is good. He is good when He gives and when He takes away. He is good when we understand His purposes and when we do not. Christian maturity is not gauged by the absence of tears but by the presence of faith in the midst of them. The immature man allows suffering to turn him inward. He becomes consumed with himself and his pain. The mature Christian grieves honestly while refusing to surrender to self-pity. He learns to say with Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” The goal is not to suffer less but to suffer faithfully. In the last three years, I have buried my younger brother, my mother, my baby son, and three good friends. Yet I know there are many who, in that same span of time, have suffered just as much or more. Suffering is not a competition. We all must face the reality of living in a fallen world. Some endure heavier burdens than others, and those burdens often come in different seasons. But every one of us will eventually walk through the valley of sorrow. Because of that, suffering should not become a scoreboard by which we measure whose bitterness is most justified. Nor should it become an excuse for faithlessness, self-pity, or sinful behavior. Rather, our common experience of suffering should cultivate compassion for one another. It should remind us that we are all frail and dependent upon the grace of God. It should also give us the courage to lovingly confront those whose faith is wavering. The answer to suffering is not to lower our view of God but to raise our eyes to Christ. The reason we need the good news is precisely that we live in a bad world. The reason we need a Savior is that sin, death, and the devil are real enemies. The gospel is not a message for people who have escaped suffering. It is the announcement that Christ has conquered the very things that make suffering so painful. He has defeated sin. He has broken the power of death. He has crushed the serpent’s head. One day, He will make all things new. Until then, we grieve. But we do not grieve as those who have no hope.

Friends, there’s no easy way to say this. Yesterday, we lost the baby. We’re not sure why. Emily was 14 weeks along, and everything appeared to be going well. But the Lord saw fit to bring him home sooner than most. He was a boy. We have named him Pascal Watson. Physically, Emily is doing well, but we are all heartbroken. Even so, we trust the goodness and wisdom of God. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord. For us, Pascal has become another reason to long for heaven. We are deeply thankful for the strong community of Christian friends God has surrounded us with through our church, my employer, and the broader community. We are being well cared for and have lacked for nothing. We do, however, appreciate your prayers.

I'm headed up to Holland, Michigan for two events this weekend, one on Friday and the other on Saturday. Both are either free or very inexpensive, and I'll put the links below. The first event is Friday night, where I'll be giving a new talk on Rebuilding the Order of Men. My basic argument is that male relationships have been steadily broken down by modernity over the last century. If we want virtuous homes, virtuous churches, and a virtuous society, we have to start rebuilding these relationships. But where do we begin? I'll try to lay out both a roadmap of how we got here and some practical steps we can take to get back to where we should be. I'll consider three lies or three attacks. First is the attack on masculinity itself. It presents masculinity as something toxic or inherently evil. Quite the opposite. Masculinity is a good gift designed by God. When lived out according to His Word, it is one of the greatest forces for good in creation. Second is the lie that for it to be good to be a man, it must be bad to be a woman. As if there is some sort of zero-sum conflict between the sexes. This too is a lie. It turns men against women and women against men. In reality, when men live virtuously, women, families, and communities thrive. Third is the attack on the relationship between the generations. It is sin and the devil that turn father against son and brother against brother. For men to build things that last, whether families, churches, businesses, or societies, they must learn to work together. We need the wisdom that comes with virtuous old age and the vigor and strength of zealous young men. Big things are built when a brotherhood of faithful men works together across generations. The second event is Saturday at the Christ the King Festival. There I'll be speaking on the importance of having an earthly home. If you've followed me for any length of time, you know I'm all about biblical localism, which I define as giving first priority to the time and place where God has put you. In this talk, I want to challenge the idea that the only way a Christian can live a radical life is by leaving home, traveling far away, and loving people they have never known. There is great honor in foreign missions, and the church should celebrate and support those whom God calls to that work. But it is not the calling of every Christian, nor should it be considered the pattern for ordinary Christian faithfulness. In fact, Scripture repeatedly directs us to begin with the responsibilities God has already placed before us. If a man cannot order his own household, why would he assume he is prepared to order the household of another? I want to show that giving yourself to the time, the place, and the people God has entrusted to you is not a lesser calling. It is one of God's primary means of sanctification. Through the ordinary duties of family, church, work, and community, He shapes us into the kind of people fit for heaven. More than that, rootedness is one of the most effective ways to love your neighbor. Lasting communities, strong churches, healthy families, and thriving towns are built by men and women who embrace their God-given place and faithfully labor there over the course of a lifetime. I hope you'll come. I'd love the chance to meet you, and I'm praying that God uses these talks to encourage the Christians and churches in that region. Men's Event ($5): eventbrite.com/e/its-good-to… Christ is King Event (Free): christiskingholland.org/

A church should be historically rooted, spiritually alive, and fully embodied...

Preaching the gospel in ‘99

Gatekeeping is necessary and good. Every church, family, business, and nation has a gate, whether it admits it or not. The question is never whether there will be gatekeepers, but whether they will be wise enough to know what belongs inside and courageous enough to keep out what does not. The people standing outside the gate will almost always call the gate unjust. The wolf rarely praises the fence, and the counterfeit coin never approves of the merchant’s scales. But the existence of complaints does not invalidate the boundary. It often proves the boundary is doing its job. A world without gates is a world where nothing can be protected, preserved, or passed down. Every healthy institution requires standards, judgments, and men willing to bear the burden of saying both yes and no.

Some people are genuinely delusional. They’re just not delusional about everything. Their break with reality is confined to a particular area, while the rest of their life functions well enough to make the delusion harder to recognize.

One man, six kids. On our way to South Carolina (for a company event).

My go to for something funny to listen to online when I need just to chill out is old Johnny Carson, Norm Macdonald stuff, or any story making fun of Steven Seagal.

The Refreshing Beauty of a Faithful Wife...

A few years ago I looked around and realized I had caught most of what I had been chasing. I had set goals that felt ambitious when I set them. I wanted to build the church and rise at work and write a meaninful book. One by one those things came. Opportunities opened up that a nobody from Lawrenceburg, Indiana had no business expecting. Larger platforms were circling, and people who could make things happen were asking for meetings. You probably follow men like me because of things like that. You see the results and you want them, and I understand that because I wanted them too. But what I need you to understand is what happened after I got them. I caught the cars, and I was not satisfied. My first instinct was to go looking for another one. There is an old image of a dog chasing a car. He runs after it day after day and never really believes he will catch it. But suppose one day he does. He would not know what to do with it, so he would lose interest and start chasing the next one. That dog is the thing I want to warn you about, because that dog was me. Like many men, I loved the chase more than the prize. And here is what no one tells you while you are still running. The prize does not do what you think it will do. You tell yourself a story about it. You say you will be satisfied when you make VP. You will be satisfied when the church reaches a certain size. You will be satisfied when you finish the degree or publish the book. Then you get there, and life keeps going. Movies end at the climax, but real life does not, except for death itself. You reach the summit and take a breath, and then you discover that tomorrow is Tuesday and the alarm still goes off at the same time. The accomplishment becomes ordinary much faster than you expected. The possession loses its shine and the promotion becomes yesterday's news. Augustine had the diagnosis right when he said our heart is restless until it rests in God. No car on the road will quiet it. You can catch every one of them and still lie awake at night, already scanning for the next. This is the part that younger men do not believe until it is too late. You think the problem is that you have not caught enough yet, and that one more will finally do it. It will not. The chase is not broken because you are after the wrong things. The chase is broken because you have asked it to do something it was never able to do. What saved me was not catching more. It was learning where my wings actually work. I keep returning to the story of Icarus and his father Daedalus. I have heard it preached as a warning against ambition, but I do not think that is what it means. It is about flying at the proper height. Icarus did not die because he flew. He died because he flew too high and ignored the boundaries that were built into his own design. His father flew the middle course and reached Sicily alive. A wise man knows there are heights he can reach and heights he should not pursue. For me those boundaries did not arrive as wisdom. They arrived as difficulty. I was a bivocational pastor with a large family, and I had to pass on much of what was opening up in front of me. Then our family entered a long season of death. Over several years we buried family members and close friends, and some of them died in tragic ways. Between the losses and the demands of ministry and the weight of work and family, I did not have the capacity to chase what was circling. At the time it felt like loss. Looking back, I can see that it was instruction. God sent difficulty into my life to teach me something I would not have learned any other way. I have enough. To keep climbing past that point would cost me things worth far more than influence. This is not a call to abandon ambition. God made men to build and to extend, and there is a real and honest satisfaction in doing hard things well. So keep building. But build at the altitude where your wings actually work. Learn that faithfulness matters more than endless expansion, and learn that some of God's best gifts are not new opportunities but boundaries. At some point a man has to be able to look at his life and say that this will do. I decided to stay at this altitude. If I climb much higher it may cost me my soul. Here, my wings will not melt. Painting: Thomas Smythe

It’s both a privilege or honor to be part of this. We need to flood America with gifted and trained God-fearing church planters.