A church will hold to biblical truth under pressure only if it cares whether something is true. Bishop Gary Hall makes that diagnosis, and it puts the problem where most people don’t look. Churches rarely fold for lack of information. They fold because, on the questions that cost something, they have stopped caring. Hall’s remedy starts with a decision: choose to be a counterculture rather than a churchy echo of whatever is trending, and stay teachable while you stand.
Hall speaks from a particular place. He pastors the West Jacksonville Church of God in Christ and the Harambe Church in Jacksonville, Florida, and he is a jurisdictional bishop in the Church of God in Christ, where he serves as assistant dean of education for its Board of Bishops. He is a Pentecostal leader in a predominantly African American denomination, responsible for how its pastors are trained. When he talks about why churches give way, he is describing churches like the ones he leads and teaches.
Is the problem that people don’t know enough?
The usual diagnosis says yes. Members don’t know enough Scripture or doctrine, and they can’t answer the hard question a coworker or classmate asks. Hall grants that this is real and treats it gently. Ignorance, in his terms, simply means not knowing, and he says plainly that it is not so bad. Many people, he observes, “have the want to, but not the how to.” Give that person teaching and they will use it.
Indifference is the harder case. Hall defines it as a double condition: you “don’t know and don’t care that you don’t know.” The second half changes everything. A teacher can supply an answer. Nobody can hand another person the desire to have one. Ignorance yields to help. Indifference stays put.
Then he aims the diagnosis at specific ground. In the church today, he says, “there are a number of hot button issues that we are just frankly indifferent about.” Hall does not name those issues, and it would be a mistake to fill them in for him. The pressure he describes is the pull of whatever is trending or popular at a given moment, whatever the subject happens to be. His claim concerns how a church holds its convictions, before any particular controversy. A congregation that gives way on a contested moral question has usually not been out-argued. It never treated the question as something it had to settle, so when the pressure came, it drifted.
The lukewarm church fits Hall’s definition
Hall tells the church “we must get off the fence,” and he reaches for the Lord’s rebuke of a lukewarm church. The passage is Revelation 3:15-16: “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” (Spue is older spelling for spew, to spit out.)
The next verse sharpens Hall’s point. The letter is addressed to the congregation at Laodicea, and it names that church’s condition: “Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked” (Revelation 3:17). Set that beside Hall’s definition. This church does not know its real state and feels no need to find out. The letter shows what indifference feels like from the inside, which is comfortable.
The rebuke also goes to believers, not to the pagan city around them. Hall’s critique works the same way. He is examining the church, and the culture outside it gets little of his attention.
Subculture or counterculture
Hall frames the church’s situation as a choice: “are we going to be a subculture or are we going to be a counterculture.” That question tells you more than a list of issues would.
A subculture lives inside the larger culture and takes its shape. It keeps its own vocabulary, music and calendar, but its convictions move when the surrounding convictions move, usually a step behind. Hall describes this as adapting and compromising “from week to week to month to month” because something is trending. The church version of the trend arrives late, sounds more spiritual and heads the same direction.
A counterculture can share a great deal with its neighbors, including their language, their streets and their struggles. At certain points it refuses to move, and it can explain why. Hall’s word for those points is boundaries. A counterculture decides ahead of time where it will stand, and it picks its disagreements on that basis.
His refusal to list issues protects the argument. A list would turn the counterculture into a party platform, with the church choosing sides in someone else’s fight. A church that simply takes the opposite side of every trend is still letting the trend set its agenda. Hall asks for something earlier and harder: settling that God’s word sets the boundary, wherever that boundary falls.
What Daniel actually did
Hall’s example is Daniel. “Daniel was only 16 years old, but he took a stand,” he says, and he concludes that “because he was willing to stand for God, God stood for him.” The book of Daniel does not give Daniel’s exact age, so the number is Hall’s estimate. The book does present Daniel as one of several young captives taken from Jerusalem to serve in the Babylonian court, which fits Hall’s emphasis on his youth.
The details of Daniel 1 support Hall’s counterculture better than a quick summary would. Daniel engaged Babylon fully. He was trained in the learning and tongue of the Chaldeans and given a Babylonian name, and the text says God gave him and his companions knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom. He served inside the empire. Then, at one specific point, he refused: “But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king’s meat, nor with the wine which he drank: therefore he requested of the prince of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself” (Daniel 1:8).
Notice the order. He decided in his heart first. Then he made a request rather than a scene, and the chapter goes on to describe a ten-day test he proposed. This is narrative, so it describes what Daniel did rather than commanding a diet for every believer. What it describes is a young man who took part in his culture and drew a line where faithfulness required one. That is what Hall means by boundaries. A counterculture can be quiet. It needs to know where its lines are before the pressure arrives.
Hall states the cost honestly. The church has to decide whether it will be popular or stand for God “even if we have to stand alone.” He calls this old ground, something that has happened many times in the Bible and in history. He does not promise that standing will look like winning. The stand came first in Daniel’s story, and vindication followed on God’s timing.
Isn’t “counterculture” just stubbornness with a Bible verse?
This is the strongest objection. Plenty of churches have called their resistance to change faithfulness when it was really comfort, preference or fear. A call to stand can harden into a refusal to learn anything.
Hall builds his answer into the argument. His closing word is meekness, which he defines as being teachable and being learners. He warns against people who hold a view so hard that even God can’t change their mind. He also refuses to make any believer the measure: “Christ is the standard,” and every Christian is still being conformed to his image. In his summary, “we’re all under construction.”
The verse Hall uses to explain why believers should defend their faith already joins these ideas. 1 Peter 3:15 reads: “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” Readiness and meekness come in the same sentence. Peter treats conviction and humility as partners, and so does Hall.
His view of questions makes the same point. Hall insists that “it’s not wrong to ask questions,” and he adds that some of the answers believers treasure most came out of questions. His standard: “Healthy questions, wholesome questions, legitimate questions, but they must have answers and they do have answers.” A fortress fears questions. A counterculture expects them, because it trusts its answers to bear the weight.
Truth does not move with the crowd
Hall’s case rests on a claim about truth itself: “You don’t have to like the truth, but you can’t change the truth.” He adds a warning suited to public argument: “just because you repeat a lie often enough does not make it the truth.” A subculture tends to measure truth by how often and how confidently something is said around it. Hall rejects that method, and the rejection applies inside the church too, where a claim repeated from the pulpit is no more proven by repetition than one repeated online.
His illustration comes from ordinary life. Ask ten people to check their wristwatches, he says, and you may get ten different times. Our phones and devices, he explains, take their time from the atomic clock in Denver by way of a satellite signal, and that time is the truth no matter what any wristwatch shows. The point of the picture is that truth comes from a source outside us, and no amount of agreement among the watches changes it.
Hall ties this to Scripture’s account of human self-trust. Proverbs 21:2 says, “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes: but the LORD pondereth the hearts.” As a proverb, it describes a pattern of human nature, and the pattern is the one Hall worries about: people treating their own sense of rightness as final. His call is to stop worshiping our own opinion and let God say what is true. “So let’s be lovers of the truth.”
A counterculture built from inside the tradition
Hall’s argument also answers a stereotype that his own tradition carries: that Pentecostal and charismatic believers lean on spiritual experience and don’t think critically about their faith. Lisa Fields rejects that generalization, noting that error shows up in every denominational setting, so “you can’t kind of paint with a broad brush.”
Hall’s answer is study, and he does not set it against dependence on the Spirit. He points to 2 Timothy 2:15: “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” He warns that the desire to seem deep must never cost the truth, and he wants Pentecostal and charismatic believers to be known as men and women of truth. His order is simple. Start with Scripture. Ask the Holy Spirit for help understanding it. Then examine what others have written, with a caution in his own phrase: “don’t become commentary cripple.” Writers hold different beliefs, and some of them differ from what the Bible teaches, so reading widely should never replace reading the text.
This matters for the cultural question. The counterculture Hall describes is no outside standard pressed onto Black Pentecostal churches. A bishop charged with training pastors in one of those denominations describes it as the faithful form of his own tradition: the Spirit and disciplined study working together. His whole diagnosis assumes many congregations fall short of that. He is calling his house back to its own best practice.
Where the decision starts
Hall locates the stand after conversion. Once a person is born again, he says, “what must follow then is discipleship.” That is where indifference gets fed or starved. A church that never expects its members to study, to bring questions or to settle where they stand has chosen the subculture without ever voting on it, one trend at a time.
So the first decision is whether truth gets to matter enough to cost something. Which truths to defend comes after. A congregation that has made that first decision can disagree well, ask hard questions and change its mind when Scripture corrects it, because it knows what it answers to. A congregation that has skipped it will end up wherever the crowd is, and call that standing.