What Do You Do When No One Wants to Hear What You Have to Say?

On Tuesday, I will be walking into a room of ministry leaders who don't want to hear what I have to say — because their salaries depend on not hearing it. I need your help figuring out what to do with that. Before Tuesday.

That’s right, I'm headed to Wheaton next week.

I’m attending a meeting of leading digital ministries that have spent eighteen months trying to figure out how to measure success in spiritual formation. These are the organizations whose annual reports get celebrated in Christian publications. Their reach numbers climb every year — hundreds of millions, then over a billion, and now the new buzz is three billion "presentations."

I'm bringing with me data from Pew and from our own SALT Index State of Christianity report that tells a different story. (See this video for an idea of what I'll be presenting: https://bttb.org/paradox). Christianity is in real, measurable decline in America and across much of the historic Christian West — and Pew’s surveys across 36 countries show this is part of a broader global pattern. In many nations, Christianity is experiencing the largest net losses from religious switching of any major religion. By Pew's measures, roughly six Americans leave Christianity for every one who joins. In Germany the ratio is even more stark: nearly 20 leave for every one who joins.

Not one leader who will be in that room welcomes what I have to say. In fact, one leader I've worked with extensively recently insisted her organization "has always believed that technology is a 'net' for the Gospel" — and pointed to those three billion presentations as her proof.

I'm not impugning anyone's motives. I've sat in rooms like this for years and I know how the incentives work. Donors fund hope. Boards fund growth. Newsletters fund testimonies. Decline doesn't raise money. Plateau doesn't fill conferences. Structural shift doesn't get a standing ovation. And clicks, exposures, and "engagements" are not what Scripture counts. Scripture counts changed lives, formed disciples, transferred faith.

For more than twenty years, Jim Engel, creator of the Engel Scale of Evangelism, and our team (until he was no longer able to work) have argued that ministries should measure what actually matters. Recently, a friend looked at me like I was crazy for being so frustrated and gently explained why I keep losing the argument year after year. Hi told me a quote I cannot stop thinking about.

“Arnie,” he said, “remember what Upton Sinclair wrote in 1934: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’”

Sinclair was writing about politics, but this is exactly the dynamic you’re facing in the ministry world. And every time I read it, I see those who will be at Tuesday’s meeting. Then — uncomfortably — I see myself. And I realize that it’s because the truth is, all of us have a "salary" we're protecting. For the leaders in that conference room, the salary is literal. For most of us, it's subtler — our friendships, our family peace at Thanksgiving, our reputation as someone who isn't that kind of Christian, our preferred picture of ourselves as encouragers rather than confronters.

The mechanism is the same. Once our livelihood — financial, social, or emotional — depends on a story being true, we lose the ability to hear evidence that the story isn't.

I'm trying to live this out by expanding the SALT Index worldwide. Instead of counting presentations, clicks, or reported decisions, we're building a global measure focused on actual spiritual formation — counting disciples who know Scripture, who practice spiritual disciplines, who persevere in faith and pass it to the next generation. It’s slower, harder to fund, and far less celebrated, but it’s the only way I know to align our metrics with the way Scripture actually counts fruit.

I know this. Not just from research but from grief.

Years ago, I had a friend who shaped my life as much as anyone outside my own family. He came alongside me when I was new to faith and built something I genuinely believed God had given him to build. At 62 he started demanding that everyone stop asking him to do anything more. He wanted, he said, less time on the spiritual battlefield. I was new enough to faith that I figured I was missing something — so I went looking for the verse that says we earn the right to help people less as we age. I never found it. By 65 he was effectively out of any ministry he and I were involved in. In the years that followed, he brought shame and hurt to almost everything he had told me God had told him to build.

His "salary" wasn't money. It was comfort, weariness, and a story he had started telling himself about what he had earned and deserved. But the mechanism was identical to what will be true of many in Tuesday's meeting. He could not hear what he needed to hear, because hearing it would have cost him something he had already decided not to spend.

Paul didn't shrink away from talking about hard truths. In Acts 20:27 he tells the Ephesian elders, "I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God." He discussed the “whole counsel of God,” not the parts that polled well, not the parts that funded the next quarter.

He also asked the Galatians, "Have I then become your enemy by telling you the truth?" (Galatians 4:16). He knew the cost. He told the truth anyway.

So here's my ask, and I mean it…

Will you email me at arnie.cole@backtothebible.org before Tuesday? When have you had to speak a costly truth to someone who didn't want it? Tell me about a moment you got it right. Tell me about a moment you got it wrong. Tell me what you wish someone had said to you.

I'm going to read every response before I get on the plane. And I'm going to share what I learn — because if we don't get better at saying hard things, the silence wins. And right now, the silence is winning in some very expensive conference rooms.

Thank you in advance. This matters more than you know.

All in, eyes up! 

P.S. You can have a preview of what I'll be talking about by watching this video: https://bttb.org/paradox. Also, this week on the Spiritually Fit Today podcast John Comstock returns as we continue digging into the important topic of overcoming shame.