The Scariest Thing About Your Church is Its Values
- Jimmy Kinnaird
- 2 days ago
- 14 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Why Truth, Goodness and Beauty Feel Optional
4th in the Wide Witness, Deep Roots Series
A tree doesn’t care how confident you are—it cares what it’s planted in.
Picture a massive tree. Thick trunk. Strong limbs. Fruit everywhere. Now picture that same tree planted in sand. It can look impressive for a while—especially if you prop it up with sticks, stakes, and strategic Instagram angles. But eventually the wind shows up and asks a simple question: “So… what’s underneath all this?”
“If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:2, ESV) If the soil is contaminated, what happens to the tree?
That’s why the foundation soil of the Christian Character Tree matters. In my graphic, the soil in which this tree is set are the Transcendentals, which is shorthand for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. And if you want a short definition that doesn’t require a philosophy degree: the transcendentals are the three ways we talk about what’s ultimately real, ultimately right, and ultimately worth loving.
Here is the main idea behind this fourth blog: Christian character won’t grow in the long run if our churches treat truth, goodness, and beauty like optional accessories. The soil isn’t a vibe. It’s a foundation.
So why do many of our churches in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) ecosystem— feel like they are committed to one transcendental (truth) and vaguely suspicious of the other two (goodness and beauty)? Is it because we assume them? Is it because we’ve quietly swapped in other values in the “soil” like efficiency, influence, winning, speed, and outrage?
Let’s do some digging and see what we find. But first:
What are the Transcendentals—and why should we care?
The transcendentals didn’t originate as a trendy Oprah self-help trio. They are a classic way of describing reality that runs through Christian thought for centuries: “truth” (what corresponds to reality), “goodness” (what is morally fitting and life-giving), and “beauty” (what is worthy of love and wonder).
Peter Kreeft explains how goodness, truth, and beauty are three things we want and need most deeply.
At their deepest level, all three are known by the heart: truth by intuition, goodness by conscience, and beauty by an awareness for which there is no similar name. As truth perceived by the mind gives us knowledge and goodness affirmed by the will gives us virtue, beauty felt by the heart gives us joy. These are our souls’ three distinctively human and spiritual powers (or activities), their three objects (or ideals), and their three ends (or fruits).1
When it comes to theology, Christians don’t worship abstractions; we worship the triune God. But we do confess that God is true, “But the LORD is the true God…” (Jer. 10:10, ESV), “Your word is truth” (John 17:17, ESV), good, “Taste and see that the LORD is good!” (Psalm 34:8a, ESV), and glorious/beautiful, “Your eyes will behold the king in his beauty…”(Isa. 33:17, ESV), “One thing have I asked of the LORD…that I may dwell in the house of the LORD…to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD…” (Psalm 27:4, ESV). In other words, the transcendentals are a shorthand for the coherence of God’s own life and ways.
And the Bible refuses to let these drift apart:
Truth is not just accurate facts; it’s a Person: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6, ESV).
Goodness is not mere niceness; it’s God’s moral beauty embodied: “There is none good except God alone” (Mark 10:18, ESV).
Beauty is not decoration; it’s the splendor of God that captures the heart: “to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD” (Psalm 27:4, ESV).
If you remove this soil, you don’t get freedom. You get confusion. And confusion is very expensive once it grows up and starts running your church budget.
Truth without goodness and beauty becomes… a talking point with teeth
Many of us Baptists have an instinctive reflex: “We’re a people of the Book. We care about truth.” Amen. Keep that. Please do not become the kind of church where “doctrine” means “my feelings plus a worship set.”
But here’s the problem: truth divorced from goodness becomes harsh. Truth divorced from beauty becomes boring. And harsh + boring is not a discipleship strategy—it’s a slow church churn into cynicism.
C. S. Lewis saw something like this coming. In The Abolition of Man, (Yes, I’m using this again. It is just so illuminatingly accurate.) he warned that you can train people to “talk” about virtue while hollowing out the inner formation needed to “live” it. In his famous line he concludes: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.”2 In Lewis’s imagery, you’ve got head (ideas) and belly (appetites), but no “chest”—no formed loves, no trained courage, no moral imagination.
Translate that into church culture:
We can teach “biblical worldview” and still train people to be mean.
We can defend inerrancy and still lie with our clickbait.
We can preach grace and still cultivate suspicion.
Truth is not less than propositions. But if propositions never become a life—if they don’t “take on flesh” in community—then we’ve turned truth into a slogan, not a soil.
Kevin Vanhoozer helps here: doctrine is not merely information; it functions like “stage directions” for faithful living—scripted truth meant to be performed.3 If we treat doctrine as trivia, we shouldn’t be shocked when it produces Christian trivia players.
Goodness without truth becomes… a nice-sounding nothing with a Bible verse sticker
Now flip it. Goodness detached from truth doesn’t stay goodness for long. It turns into a sentimental fog: everyone is “kind,” nobody is courageous, and sin becomes “brokenness” forever—never repentance, never change, never holiness. It’s just a vibe with a Bible verse attached.
D. A. Carson describes how modern culture often redefines tolerance so that any claim to objective truth becomes a moral crime. He notes that the “new tolerance” insists we must treat all views as equally valid, and then makes “intolerance” the supreme sin.4 When that moral atmosphere seeps into churches, we begin to confuse Christian love with ideological surrender.
Christian goodness is not moral mush. It’s holiness plus love. And holiness requires truth.
Beauty without truth and goodness becomes… manipulation with a sound system
Beauty is the third sibling that Southern Baptists love from a safe distance. We like beauty as long as it doesn’t (a) cost too much, (b) feel too “high church,” or (c) threaten our efficiency. I really don’t like saying this, but the evidence is overwhelming: we prefer the beauty of a well-run program over the beauty of a transformed life.
But beauty detached from truth and goodness becomes performance. Aesthetics can become anesthesia. You can make people feel things without making them faithful. You can create “a moment” without creating a disciple.
That’s why the soil has to stay integrated. The true, the good, and the beautiful belong together—because they belong to God.
And if you want a thoroughly Baptist-friendly bridge between truth, goodness, and beauty, John Piper’s famous line is basically a transcendental mash‑up: “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”5
That’s truth (God is gloriously real), goodness (he is worthy of worship), and beauty (he is satisfying) braided into one sentence.
So why are we not more committed to the Transcendentals?
Here’s the uncomfortable part. What I have experienced In SBC life, is that we often act like:
Truth is essential.
Goodness is assumed.
Beauty is suspicious.
Sometimes we’d never say that out loud. We just budget like it. We staff like it. We platform like it. We disciple like it.
You may say, “Okay Jimmy, you have my attention, why do you think it is this way?” I’m glad you asked. Let me suggest several overlapping reasons.
Reason 1: We confuse “right doctrine” with “formed disciples.”
Dallas Willard called this the church’s “Great Omission”: we make “Christians” (in-name) but not disciples (in-life).6 The Great Commission is “make disciples… teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20, ESV). Willard’s point is not that evangelism is wrong—it’s that evangelism without apprenticeship produces “converts without conversion.”
My seminary professor and president, Dr. Charles S. Kelley Jr. said something similar to this and said it repeatedly, referring to our Southern Baptist churches: “We are a harvest-oriented denomination, but we are living in an unseeded generation…. Aggressive evangelism without aggressive discipleship will eventually undo itself.”7 That’s not a partisan critique. That’s a Baptist alarm bell.
When discipleship gets thin, goodness and beauty get thin with it. Because goodness and beauty require time. And time is the one resource we refuse to budget.
Reason 2: Our dominant “soil” is American pragmatism, not biblical wisdom.
If you have ever been in a meeting where the deciding factor was “What’s the ROI?” congratulations—you’ve met the unofficial doctrine of Baptist church leadership.
Pragmatism isn’t always evil. But it becomes spiritually corrosive when it replaces the question, “Is it “true?” “Is it “good?” “Is it “beautiful?” with “Did it work?”
Scot McKnight puts it bluntly: “Every church is a culture.”8 Culture isn’t neutral. It forms you. And a culture shaped primarily by efficiency will eventually produce efficient Christians—who may or may not be holy.
I stated something similar to this in a previous blog:
What you measure shapes what you value; what you value shapes what you become. If the most celebrated outcomes are the easiest to report, then leaders will naturally shape churches to favor these outcomes. Over time, a church can become an institution that excels at production while slowly starving formation. And the institution must be protected at all costs, even if it means sacrificing some of its members.
I write this because I have lived it. Some of you reading this have lived it too.
Reason 3: We traded thick formation for thin outrage.
Outrage is easier than sanctification. It is also more profitable in an attention economy.
Carl Trueman describes modern “expressive individualism” as a cultural shift where personal feelings and authenticity become the ultimate moral authority.9 In that atmosphere, truth becomes personal preference, goodness becomes self-expression, and beauty becomes “whatever moves me.” That cultural air gets into churches, and then we’re shocked when people treat discipleship like an Apple or Spotify playlist: skip the hard parts, keep the parts that match my mood.
Outrage fits expressive individualism perfectly: it feels like moral clarity without the inconvenience of character. If you don’t believe me, just watch the national news for 5 seconds and you will be convinced.
Reason 4: We turned “being conservative” into an identity rather than a posture of faithfulness.
Sometimes we’re not defending the faith—we’re defending our tribe.
A decade ago, Russell Moore warned that when Christians imagine themselves as a “moral majority,” political strategy can eclipse the strangeness of the gospel. He argues that if our vision of engagement becomes “a politically viable network,” then “Christ and him crucified will tend to be a stumbling block, not a rallying point.”10 No matter what you may think of him today, he saw this as an unfolding political reality in our churches.
When politics becomes the frame, truth becomes talking points, goodness becomes public optics, and beauty becomes branding.
Reason 5: We suspect beauty because we fear it will soften our convictions.
Many evangelicals are nervous that beauty is a backdoor to compromise. And yes—beauty can be weaponized. But that’s like refusing food because some people become gluttons.
Tim Keller, reflecting on Pascal, argues that we often need to help people see Christianity’s attractiveness—its “existing features”—before they are willing to consider its truth.11 That doesn’t mean making the faith “cool.” It means showing that the gospel is not only true, but desirable; not only correct, but glorious.
Beauty is not the enemy of conviction. Beauty is the friend of love.
The problem is not the soil, but what we bring to it
The foundation of truth, goodness and beauty is not the problem. The problem is that we keep showing up to the garden with a bag of salt and wondering why the tree is rotting and the fruit tastes bad. Most of our "sanctification struggles" boil down to two things: we don't know what we’re doing (Ignorance), and we care about the wrong things (Flawed Values). It is not all the problems that we have, but in my opinion, most of the struggle for Christian character stems from these two.
Ignorance in its various forms
First is the issue of ignorance. Not all ignorance is the same. And ignorance makes us incompetent.
Willful Incompetence (The “Ostrich” Phase)
You have probably heard of self-imposed ignorance. That is when you don’t know something because you did not want to know it. A person is incompetent because they have chosen to be. Perhaps you have heard the saying: ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law. This kind of ignorance is a result of the flesh exerting its influence over a believer. While this afflicts all of us in one way or another, there is a different kind of ignorance that I want to address.
Unconscious incompetence (The “Delusional” Phase)
This is not knowing what you don’t know. It is a terrible situation because you don’t even see the problems coming, know that you even have them, where they are coming from, or what to do about them. You are doing things but what you are doing actually causes more harm than good over time.
Conscious incompetence (The “I Need Help” Phase)
This is knowing what you don’t know. It is when you know that something is either missing, wrong or incomplete. You are not sure which it is. You have cognitive recognition, but you still are not sure what to do about it. Your solutions at best are incomplete and at worst feed the problem. Your solutions today become your problems tomorrow.
If you realize the three issues of ignorance above and start to learn and change you will move to a place where lasting solutions can be found.
Now for the second issue we bring to the transcendental soil: flawed values.
Flawed Values: the invisible toxin shaping our soil
Now we get to the place of my current struggle for real connection: how do “values” relate to the transcendentals for the nourishment of Christian Character?
Values are the operating priorities we actually live by—what we reward, what we fear, what we chase. And here’s the key: values don’t just influence behavior; they shape what we “call” true, good, and beautiful.
Values that quietly sabotage the transcendentals in church life
Efficiency (Speed) over Faithfulness (Patience).
If your highest value is speed, you will treat formation as “too slow.” But the fruit of the Spirit doesn’t ripen in a microwave (Galatians 5:22–23).
Platform over Presence.
Platform turns truth into performance and goodness into optics. Presence—the slow, embodied life with people—makes truth believable and goodness tangible (1 Thessalonians 2:8).
Winning over Witness.
Winning loves the short-term spike, the rush. Witness loves the long-term faithfulness. Winning asks “Who is with us?” Witness asks “Who needs Christ?” (2 Corinthians 5:20).
Certainty over Wisdom.
Certainty is not the same thing as truth. I once served under a team leader who took our team to lunch early in my time there. One of the team members asked me, “What is it like working with him?” I answered, “He is never in doubt, but often wrong.” To our leader’s credit, he laughed and agreed. Maybe you know someone like this. Truth can handle questions. Wisdom knows what to do with truth. Proverbs calls wisdom “better than jewels” (Proverbs 8:11), but our value system sometimes treats it as optional—like a church library.
Image Management over Repentance.
If the value is “protect the brand,” then confession is dangerous. But without confession, goodness becomes fake and beauty becomes plastic (1 John 1:8–9).
These values didn’t arrive by accident. They are native to American life—especially in a market-driven, media-saturated society. Our churches inhale them the way fish inhale water. Nobody notices until the oxygen runs out.
Two Really Important Questions with Some Imperfect Answers
Question 1: How did this happen? (A very short, very incomplete diagnosis)
A few streams converged:
Decisionism without apprenticeship. We learned to count decisions but struggled to form disciples.12 (Okay, “decisionism” may be a made-up word but you get the idea.)
Market logic. Churches adopted the metrics and instincts of consumer culture: product, brand, target audience, growth strategy, etc.
Media incentives. Outrage and hot-takes outperform slow wisdom. It is what gets the attention, the clicks and the views.
Postmodern moral air. Culture demands “tolerance” defined as “no truth claims,” and Christians respond by either (a) screaming, or (b) surrendering.13 Certainly you have not forgotten our own SBC “church too” issues involving our Executive Committee.
Expressive individualism. The self becomes the center; community and tradition become obstacles.14
Put those together and you get a Southern Baptist Convention that is excellent at asserting truth—and often weak at “displaying” it as goodness and beauty.
Question 2: What can we do about it?
Let’s get practical. If the soil is the transcendentals, then we need practices that cultivate truth, goodness, and beauty together—because you can’t “think” your way into character.
First, rebuild truth as discipleship, not trivia
Teach doctrine as “how to live,” not “how to win arguments.”15
Recover biblical catechism: teach the whole counsel of God as a coherent story, not disconnected proof texts.
Train people in “gentleness” and “respect” as part of apologetics (1 Peter 3:15). Truth is not just asserted; it’s embodied.
Second, rebuild goodness as habit, not hype
N. T. Wright describes virtue as what happens when repeated wise choices become “second nature.”16 That implies practice, repetition, community, and time.
So:
Normalize confession and repentance (James 5:16).
Make service ordinary (Ephesians 2:10).
Put spiritual disciplines back in the toolbox: prayer, fasting, generosity, Sabbath, biblical priority (Matthew 6:1–24) among others.
Dallas Willard called this apprenticeship: a “24/7 life with Jesus.”17 That’s not mystical. It’s mundane faithfulness—done over years.
Third, rebuild beauty as honesty, not aesthetics
Beauty in church life is not “better stage lighting.” It’s integrity and wonder.
Let worship be reverent and joyful—God-centered, not performer-centered (Psalm 96:9).
Tell the truth about suffering and sin; beauty that lies is just propaganda (Psalm 42; Romans 8:28).
Create space for art, poetry, testimony, and silence. We are forming loves, not merely transferring information.
Keller’s Pascal point matters here: we don’t “make” Christianity attractive by editing out the hard parts. We reveal the faith’s real beauty—Christ himself.18
Fourth, audit and repent of our value system
Ask your church the questions nobody wants to put on a slide:
What do we celebrate? Numbers? Or faithfulness?
Who do we honor? The gifted? Or the godly?
What do we fear? Decline? Or sin?
What do we reward? Results? Or Christlikeness?
Al Mohler’s “theological triage” is helpful for ordering doctrines by urgency.19 But we also need “moral triage”: the ability to tell the difference between “scraped ego” and “gunshot wound to character.”
Fifth, build a discipleship pipeline that expects transformation
If your church has a clear process for onboarding volunteers but no clear process for training saints, you have accidentally become a nonprofit with hymns.
Make disciple-making boringly normal:
A clear pathway from “new believer” to “maturing disciple” to “disciple-maker.”
Older believers actually invest in younger believers (2 Timothy 2:2).
Character aims stated explicitly: truth + goodness + beauty shaped into Christlikeness (Galatians 4:19).
Finally, stop choosing one transcendental
If we plant the tree of Christian character in the soil of the True while neglecting the Good and the Beautiful, we get brittle Christians who can argue but can’t love.
If we plant in the Good without the True, we get sentimental Christians who want to be kind but can’t name what kindness is.
If we plant in the Beautiful without the True and the Good, we get emotionally moved Christians who confuse goosebumps with holiness.
The goal isn’t to become a “truth church” or a “justice church” or an “aesthetic church.” The goal is to become the kind of people who can say, with integrity, “Follow me as I follow Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1).
So, yes: our values affect our view of the transcendentals. And yes: American church culture can quietly sabotage the soil. But the solution isn’t despair; it’s repentance and replanting. If we don’t get the soil right, nothing else will be right either.
Because the soil is not an idea. The soil is the living God—true, good, and beautiful—calling us into a life where character is not a brand, but a witness.
Endnotes
1Kreeft, Peter. Wisdom of the Heart: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful at the Center of Us All. p. 173. Kindle Edition. p. 173.
2Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. HarperOne, 2001, Ch. 1.
3Vanhoozer, Kevin J. The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology. Westminster, John Knox Press, 2005. For a representative quotation, see a review citing p. 362 at: https://www.faith-theology.com/2007/06/kevin-vanhoozer-drama-of-doctrine.html
4Carson, D.A. Sermon: “The Intolerance of Tolerance (Part 1),” The Gospel Coalition. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/sermon/the-intolerance-of-tolerance-part-1/ A full treatment of this is found in Carson’s award-winning book “The Gagging of God.”
5Piper, John. Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. Multnomah Press, 2003. pg. 288.
6Willard, Dallas, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship. HarperOne, 2006.
7www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/sbc-digest-rainer-receives-mcgavran-church-growth-award-wright-speaks-at-southwestern/ and also in the book: Kelley, Jr., Charles S. The Best Is Yet to Be: The First 100 Years of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 2018. pg. 114.
8McKnight, Scot, and Laura Barringer. A Church Called Tov: Transforming a Toxic Culture into a Culturing of Goodness. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2020. Chapter 1.
9Trueman, Carl R. Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022. Pg.26.
14Trueman, Ibid.
15Vanhoozer, Ibid.
16Wright, N. T. After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters. HarperOne, 2010.
pg. 21.
17Willard, Ibid. pg. 158.
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