Ministry Letter

Dear friends, After another turbulent year, we have seen and continue to testify to God’s providential and gracious work in bringing about ministry growth despite a variety of obstacles to overcome. It’s my privilege to share with you a brief review and update of the past year, and to outline our exciting plans for the year ahead.

Leadership and Growth

After many years of faithful service, 2021 was a transitional year for Ezra at the board level. New members were welcomed onto the board helping to give fresh energy, new impetus, and clear direction for the future of the ministry at a vital time. By God’s grace we have seen growth in every area of the ministry in 2021, including a 700% increase in podcast subscribers, placing the Ezra Institute’s Podcast for Cultural Reformation in the top 1% of global podcasts. Resource sales were up 300% and new donors have been added in 2021 with additional church support coming online. The summer training programs were a great success despite various travel restrictions. Thank you for your ongoing support, and thank God for His goodness in this and for guiding us to this point.

Facilities

Some of you may be familiar with the behind the scenes four-year-long struggle we have been engaged in with local planning authorities for relevant permissions to develop and utilize our present site and facility in a fashion that will enable us to take the residential training component of our work forward at the current location. In the providence of God, in the late summer of 2021, that struggle was finally lost and our development permit application (plans that had been adjusted many times in back-andforth negotiations to try and satisfy regional government requirements) was emphatically rejected by all three relevant planning authorities. Unfortunately, our first enforcement visit from the authorities soon followed. Mercifully, this disappointment coincided with significant increase in interest from Christian leaders in Western Canada to expand our cultural apologetics training into Western provinces.

In view of the planning authorities’ decision and the ongoing steep financial overheads involved in owning and running a large facility capable of hosting 50 students – used intensely for only 4-5 weeks per year – the board has prayerfully deliberated over the past six months and prudently decided we need to rethink our overall training strategy. The decision has been made to redeploy our building asset, putting our God-given means into producing more worldview/cultural apologetics resources, engaging more staff, and hosting more in-person residential training in additional locations in Canada and beyond. Some beautiful suitable facilities are available

to us for our training programs in Ontario, and other venues are being rented for the short, intensive periods of residential teaching in various appropriate settings as demand grows in the West. To this end, please pray for a successful and quick sale of our current property this Spring and our relocation to suitable space in the area for our fabulous staff team where we can continue to host seminars, meet with friends of the ministry, and run the day-to-day activities of the Institute. Our current facility has been a great blessing to Ezra and has helped establish both our ministry identity and further advance our in-person training academies. These programs will go on and are being expanded, but not at this present site.

This was a hard decision, and we recognise that in some ways, after four years of being relatively settled it will be disappointing news, especially for locals who drop in from time to time to help on the land or around the house or just for fellowship. It is normal to develop an emotional attachment to bricks and mortar, especially in lovely surroundings, and we will all miss this place very much. However, we must never allow means to become ends in themselves and when a good thing has served a time-limited purpose and no longer works for advancing a kingdom vision, it is important to return thanks to the Lord for His good gifts and to let go. As such we look forward with hope and excitement to what God is going to do through our resources and training in new venues across Canada.

Launch in Additional Jurisdictions

In conjunction with these developments, we have realized that our present cultural challenges also offer unique and expanding opportunities for the ministry of the Institute. The demand for our resources and training has been growing globally, accelerated by increasing cultural pressure, hostile legal environments, and the gradual erosion of historic freedoms. As opposition increases, the need grows, and receptivity and interest take off. Considered negatively, Canada’s authoritarian drift illustrated in a dangerous new law criminalizing the full practice of Christianity (Bill C-4) and other Federal Bills pending which look to erode freedom of speech and expression (Bill C-10, C-36) make it prudent that the Ezra Institute seeks to protect its intellectual property and access to a growing international audience. To meet the growing ministry interest and demands, as well as to help mitigate risk to the ongoing work of the Institute, we are seizing this unique opportunity to expand and are looking to open additional offices of the Ezra Institute in the USA and United Kingdom, hiring appropriate staff in each location, whilst maintaining the integrity of our Canadian work and expanding the resourcing and training.

Family and Home

As founder and president, I will be dividing my time for our in-person training academies and conferences between the three national locations. As a ministry engaged and concerned with distinctly Christian thought leadership for culture, seeking to speak prophetically into the crisis facing the West, aside from of our main residential programing in Canada about 5 weeks per year, the work of the Institute consists in our writing and scholarship, publishing (including books and Jubilee), itinerant speaking, podcasts, and various digital resources. This work can be effectively accomplished from almost any location. In light of all this, after lengthy prayerful deliberation, my family has decided we will be making our family home again in England as we seek to establish an office for Ezra in the United Kingdom. Being British and a UK citizen I am the obvious person to take on that challenge. In addition, with elderly parents and in-laws in England needing our help and presence after 19 years living in Canada, as well as my children entering British universities this year, this move seems the wisest course for the family in the medium term. We recognise that for some of our Canadian friends and supporters this change will be a significant adjustment and for those who love us most, a tough pill to swallow when we are not so close to hand for a visit. However, we are convinced that this is the best thing, not simply for family, but for the kingdom mission of Ezra to develop, grow and expand. And we will be back in Canada frequently to be together at key times throughout the year.

For example, I will be present in Canada with the Canadian staff team for all our training programs and conferences, and will be working closely with them in every aspect of the ministry in conjunction with our international director on a weekly basis. Our popular Podcast for Cultural Reformation, Jubilee journal, and publishing work will continue in its present form with considerable expansion coming in the area of print publishing as we seek to integrate Paideia Press with its numerous and unique reformational titles into the Ezra ministry. It is very exciting to contemplate what God is going to do as we develop not only our Canadian work but grow into the USA and the United Kingdom. There are wonderful partnership opportunities for us in the USA and UK with like-minded organisations where the influence of Ezra’s reformational vision can spread pray for us as 2022 will be a year full of work and change, and we trust, great fruitfulness in Canada and beyond.

In This Issue

We’re pleased to bring back a slightly enlarged format for Jubilee this season, and we hope that it continues to be not only an informative update on the activity of the ministry, but a meaningful resource for your ongoing edification.

In this issue, Dr. Ted Fenske, Ezra Institute Fellow for Medicine and Public Christianity, considers some of the inevitable fallout over Bill C-4, now signed into law in Canada, which effectively criminalizes Christian counselling in the area of gender dysphoria.

Global Training Portal

Tied in with these exciting developments is our new subscription-based remote digital training platform currently in development. This major new initiative is being launched Spring 2022 in order to help us reach a much larger audience and effectively augment our in-person training programs. It also allows for broader partnership with like-minded organisations and institutions and helps meet the global need for affordable equipping in Christian worldview, cultural apologetics, and Christian philosophy. With increasing numbers of students either rejecting woke institutions or being denied access to higher education because of state medical mandates, this platform will enable the Institute to serve the broader Christian community more efficiently. The platform also provides us with an excellent opportunity to access and utilize the gifts and abilities of our global team of Fellows much more efficiently. We look forward to working together with you for the extension of the Kingdom of God. To preview and help us test this new portal before official launch, please contact us, we would love to share it with you and record your feedback.

Thank you for your support, friendship, and partnership in the gospel and for standing with us in these days of great challenge and opportunity. Please Tim Dieppe, Fellow for Public Policy, reviews Robert Louis Wilken’s book on the Christian origins of religious freedom, in which he traces the doctrines of freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and the separation of church and state, to the early church fathers, and clearly demonstrates that Enlightenment rationalism boldly appropriated these doctrines and stripped them of their distinctive Christian language, grounding them instead in the laws of nature.

My own article discusses the many recent appeals to Romans 13 in arguing for churches to comply with increasing state overreach into issues of Christian worship. I assert that there are clear scriptural limits to the normal Christian exhortation to civil obedience, and that the Christian’s first duty is to stand with Christ – even against the state if need be.

Pro Rege,

Joe Boot,

FOUNDER & PRESIDENT