Seventeen years ago, a diocese in the Anglican Church of Canada voted to bless same-sex unions. Immediately, leaders from eight of its churches stood up and walked out.

Later, when their congregations voted to leave the denomination, the decisions to do so were nearly unanimous. To me, this is the most surprising part of the story. Why did almost all of those people choose a path that would lead to unpopularity, to court costs, to losing buildings?

“We didn’t preach toward leaving our diocese,” said Ray David Glenn, the rector at St. George’s in Burlington. “We just preached the gospel. I remember the last series we preached was through Galatians. When we started preaching through books of the Bible, it became so abundantly clear this is what had to happen.”

And that was his advice, when I asked what he’d tell pastors in an increasingly hostile society. How can you best lead your flock? How can you strengthen them, so that if the time comes, they’d vote to follow Jesus rather than the culture?

“Preach the gospel,” he told me.

If you’re wondering how best to do that, TGC can help. We released Christ Has Set Us Free: Preaching & Teaching Galatians last month. In it, Tim Keller, John Piper, Sinclair Ferguson, and others lay out ways to consider this letter that “deals with matters on which your eternal destiny hangs,” as Piper wrote. “The Christian faith and the 500-year-old Reformation stand or fall with the truth of Paul’s teaching in Galatians.”