Welcome to the Breakpoint podcast in our Q&A segment Ask the Colson Center. I'm Shane Morris, host of the upstream podcast and one of the writers for Breakpoint. I'm joined by John Stone Street, president of the Colson Center. Today, we are answering your questions. All of these were sparked by Breakpoint commentaries, short courses, articles, and the Colson Fellows program. If you'd like to send us a question of your own, all you've got to do is email us at Ask the Colson Center at colsoncenter.org.

John, I have to confess a little bit of disappointment here that our list of questions does not

feature any seasonal questions. These are very much the sorts of questions we could get in July.

So, you know, it's nice because there's

some good stuff and great concepts we can talk through. But on the other hand, hey, I've already

broken out the eggnog and the trees up and the Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith stuff that I

remember from my childhood, and maybe that makes me sound young, is already playing. So I'm in the spirit.

But anyway, our first question is about subsidiarity. So buckle up. This person writes in,

recently your podcast has spoken about the principle of subsidiarity and the need to handle things at

the lowest level. Would you please address how churches ought to protect their children without

caving to the

you aren't allowed to think unless you're a qualified expert mentality? Sounds a little bit miffed.

Well, yeah, there's a loaded question here. I'm not sure exactly what the question maybe is getting at.

Maybe explain subsidiarity without the jargon.

Subsidiarity is an important idea.

Once you get past kind of the polysyllabic word, it's understandable.

It just means that the one, those closest to the problem are best equipped to handle it.

So if my child disbehaves, then I don't call, you know, in the FBI. If you have a pothole in a street in the

middle of a town in Idaho, you don't need to call Washington, D.C. And it just means that we have to be

responsible, essentially for the sphere of influence that we have.

We do the things that we can do and that there are institutions that are positioned locally

that have God-given authority to take care of local problems and address local issues.

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