I’m encouraged by these questions and am glad you are wrestling with them. Scripture calls us to honor the Lord with our wealth (Prov. 3:9). Yet many of us struggle to see the connection between having retirement savings and following Christ.

Heart-Level Response

From my work in financial services, I have seen the financial pictures of many individuals and families. Even among Christians who worship at the same church, one couple might approach retirement with millions while another will retire with very little. Additionally, their cost of living may vary widely.

This reality makes it unwise to give specific answers to “how much” without tailoring it to the individual. As J. D. Greear helpfully elaborates, from a biblical perspective there is no single rule for answering “how much” but rather a matrix of principles to guide our money decisions.

My thoughts on retirement savings are shaped by at least four biblical concepts.

1. Diligence

From the beginning, God blessed people to be fruitful and to work (Gen. 1:28; 2:15). God’s image-bearers are called to reflect his creativity, productivity, fruitfulness, and labor in the world.

One natural place to display productivity and diligence is the workplace. Our approach to work should not be How little can I get away with doing? but How much can I honor God, bless others, and maximize my gifts here?

In many cases, diligent work can lead toward an income that exceeds the minimal cost of living, creating greater financial capacity (Prov. 10:4b). As noted in the Theology of Work Project, “God’s intent is that people would not merely subsist, but have good things in abundance.” Fruitful labor is God’s way of allowing us to create this abundance.

2. Responsibility

As a general guide, Scripture encourages people to support themselves financially—to “work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may . . . be dependent on no one” (1 Thess. 4:11-12). While Scripture calls us to support those in need (i.e. gleaning laws, supporting widows), those who can work should aspire to be self-supporting whenever possible (2 Thess. 3:7-10).

Given our American context, most of us would be wise to plan to support ourselves financially beyond a reasonable working age. This is not an endorsement of the media-hyped dream of retirement, but simply an acknowledgment that we should plan to meet our future needs, like the ant (Prov. 6:6–8).

We should plan to meet our future needs, like the ant.

Providing for the needs of ourselves and our household is a biblical priority (1 Tim. 5:8). The question of “how much” leads us to consider the expenses we and our dependents will likely incur after our working years. And, where possible, believers can also aspire to leave a financial inheritance to future generations (Prov. 13:22).

3. Generosity

Biblical thinking about saving does not stop with supporting our household, but goes beyond to sharing with others in the community. As Paul pointed out, “these hands ministered to my necessities . . . by working hard in this way we must help the weak” (Acts 20:34–35).

Generous giving is not an optional add-on for wealthy Christians; it’s a core characteristic for all disciples. Even single parents and adults in the “sandwich generation” are called to show generosity according to their means (2 Cor. 8:12). We can all be generous with something, whether time, money, or abilities.

Generous giving is not an optional add-on for wealthy Christians; it’s a core characteristic for all disciples.

Saving for retirement should never become an excuse to hold back from giving. Responsibility and generosity must grow together and be held in tension. A long-term savings plan can actually enable you to be more responsible and generous over time.

4. Wisdom

Only a few topics in financial management are universally right or wrong from a biblical perspective, such as honesty or paying your taxes. On the other hand, many decisions about saving and investing are matters of discernment.

Yes, it is true that wisdom may lead you to avoid consumer debt and review your lifestyle expenses. Wisdom may lead you to buy insurance and save a large portion of your income for the future. But since we don’t know what the future may bring, we apply God-given wisdom and seek advice along the way. In this way, we combine doing our best with leaving an unforeseeable future in God’s hands.

Numeric-Level Response

After all these principles are considered, believers still have to decide what number to plug into their long-term saving rate. Will they save 5 percent? 10 percent? More?

Online calculators illustrate how a particular savings rate may affect your future financial picture. But when taxes, children, insurance, social security, and investing get more complicated, many seek out the advice of a financial planner. Thankfully, the Lord has raised up literally thousands of dedicated Christian professionals to help believers with this level of detailed planning.

Can Retirement-Investing Align with My Values?

Increasingly, people are asking questions about the companies in their investments. Should you be worried about the companies listed there? Thoughtful Christian professionals hold a range of views on this topic. Some feel an obligation to avoid certain investments; others see it as a matter of discernment and Christian liberty.

The short answer is that employer-sponsored retirement plans are restricted to a set number of pre-approved investments. Therefore, most employees have little to no options within their retirement plan for biblically aligned, values-based investing. (Some churches and ministries are an exception.) You can always reach out to the plan provider to see if their plan offers self-directed options, or request them to add biblically responsible fund options.

In the context of a traditional or Roth IRA, though, investors likely have a broad range of options. In recent decades, great strides have been made by several Christ-honoring fund companies. This is an exciting opportunity, as many of these funds not only pursue financial returns but also seek to make an impact through community development, supporting medical research, reducing human trafficking, advocating fair wages, and avoiding harmful businesses.

Yes, God cares about your retirement savings because he cares about you, your family, and all those around you. Long-term, values-aligned investing can be one way to meet your needs while simultaneously blessing others and honoring Christ the Lord.

The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. No investment strategy ensures financial success or protects against loss. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. All investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal.

Securities and advisory services offered through LPL Financial, a registered investment advisor, member FINRA/SIPC. WaterRock Financial, LLC is a separate entity from LPL Financial.

Consider the bipartisan nature of the incivility. Many on both right and left perceive the politically “other” as morally reprehensible, persons in whom no good can be found. Then they leverage that assessment to justify degrading, demeaning, and misrepresenting those persons. Finally, consider that we—evangelical Christians—often engage in political discourse in ways that reflect the broader culture rather than the gospel.

Evangelical Christians often engage in political discourse in ways that reflect the broader culture rather than the gospel.

Despite the temptation to answer antagonistic political opponents according to the same measure of their willingness to malign and misrepresent us, as gospel-changed people we must conduct ourselves in the more excellent way of love to which Paul calls us (1 Cor. 12:31). In pursuit of helping Christians consider this more excellent way of engaging the public square, we propose three diagnostic questions to help us identify the primary issues that underlie our responses.

Perhaps these three questions will help us provide a more compelling defense for our positions and remind us that such engagements are not merely defenses of the gospel and its implications, but also opportunities to embody and share it.

Primary Lens: Political Preference or Gospel Concern?

One of my (Matt’s) first teaching assignments was a class called Urban Missiology. The class spent significant time discussing the multiethnic makeup of most large North American cities. During one class I argued that, of all society’s institutions, the church is best equipped to guide racial conciliation because Christians operate from a conviction of essential human unity. Clearly agitated, one student raised his hand and accused me of promoting leftist propaganda.

This tendency to see contested public-policy issues—such as those concerning immigration, religious liberty, or economics—through the lens of modern political ideologies and party platforms before seeing them through the lens of the gospel is problematic. This proclivity to politicize every social issue is especially evident on social-media platforms such as Twitter, where Christians who actively confront certain injustices are accused of being in uniformity with a given political party.

Such deference to political categories demonstrates that we have ceded our ethical concerns to the artificial binaries imposed by America’s two dominant political parties. In light of this unfortunate penchant, therefore, it is incumbent on Christians to ask themselves a salient question: “Am I more concerned to argue this position as a gospel-changed person, or as a proponent of a given modern political ideology or party platform?”

Primary Audience: Strawman Opponents or Image Bearers?

A second question that needs to precede our engagement with the politically other is, “Am I speaking to this person in a way that reflects my conviction that he or she is made in the image of God?” Too often our political discourse dehumanizes or demonizes our opponents by impugning their motives, or unfairly categorizing and then dismissing them with labels such as
“ethno-nationalist” or “Marxist.”

This type of engagement is judgmental and unfair, and rarely allows for clear communication or persuasion in regard to contested ideas. Instead, these ad hominem attacks are the adult equivalent of a grade-school name-calling. Certainly in the political sphere there are ideas that need to be laid bare and exposed as corrupt and immoral. But we—as gospel-changed people—should be careful not to treat the proponents of these ideas as manifestly bad-willed or stupid.

Indeed, even if their ideas are antithetical to the gospel, we can’t engage politically “other” persons in ways that are less than Christlike without maligning the gospel we stand for. Even if your opponents are defeated by public opinion, you’ve lost any opportunity to witness to them by attacking or purposefully humiliating them.

Primary Message: Gospel Demand or Gospel Proclamation?

And finally, in a pluralistic nation, are we asking for room in the public square to argue for the beauty of the gospel, or are we demanding that all implications of the gospel be legislated for us so that our nation will conform to the standards of the New Jerusalem? Some biblically revealed truths are also naturally revealed and applicable to all of society, while other such truths are not. While the pro-life cause, for example, certainly applies to all of society (rather than merely to Christians), the command to honor the Lord’s Day shouldn’t be legislated for everyone.

Consider the example of religious freedom. While as Christians we don’t hold the same doctrinal convictions as Muslims, Buddhists, or Hindus, we should be willing to share the gospel—and the truth that the gospel is freely given and freely received—in how we stand up for religious liberty, rather than merely demanding our freedom.

Indeed, God intends for the gospel to transform us so that we’re not merely concerned with our own well-being, but also with the well-being of others. By linking arms with non-Christians in support of religious freedom for all, we show the others-focused attitude that should correspond with our proclamation of gospel grace. Though these are political discussions, they can easily turn into evangelistically fruitful relationships as we seek the good of our neighbors and have opportunity to give a word of defense for the hope that is within.

Truth without grace makes us political bullies and jerks. Grace without truth makes us political non-entities and wimps.

In light of the degraded nature of our nation’s public discourse, therefore, evangelical Christians must model the “more excellent way” to which Paul refers (1 Cor. 12:31). This more excellent way goes beyond the mere intellectual evaluation of political ideologies and policies. It also includes the practice of convictional civility.

Instead of degrading the people on the other side of the political aisle by demonizing them, questioning their motives, and caricaturing their arguments, the Bible instructs us to speak the truth in a way that communicates Christian concern and respect. We should represent our debate partners accurately, not misrepresent them. We should recognize the good in their lives and their arguments, not glorify ourselves and demonize them. In other words, we must cultivate a public demeanor that is worthy of the Lord whose name we carry (2 Cor. 4:10).

If the gospel message is true—and if it truly transforms—then gospel-minded Christians should expect to be radically different in every arena. As those convinced of the gospel’s truth, it is right and proper for us to defend it in public. However, the manner in which we defend it can either defraud or reflect its truth. Truth without grace makes us political bullies and jerks. Grace without truth makes us political non-entities and wimps.

But Jesus’s powerful combination of truth and grace exemplifies for us the more excellent way of convictional civility. With confidence, then, we must stand firm in our convictions—but do so winsomely in ways that honor the Christ whose gospel we cherish.

In over two decades working as a full-time minister, I’ve learned that personal testimonies are one of the most influential tools the Holy Spirit uses to stir spiritual interest and point people toward Christ. There’s no more poignant and powerful way to communicate the gospel than by sharing our story—not because we’re so great, but because Jesus is so great.

Personal testimonies are one of the most influential tools the Holy Spirit uses to stir spiritual interest and point people toward Christ.

Your story is authentically and uniquely you. It’s versatile and can be used in a variety of situations—from sharing with an individual to addressing a group. It’s not a debate, it’s not pushy, it’s not fake, and it doesn’t feel like religious propaganda, since it’s coming from your heart. Very rarely will people argue with you about your story. In fact, they’re more likely to engage and ask clarifying questions, which in turn pushes the dialogue about Jesus to a more personal level.

Six Simple Principles

If you’ve never thought about preparing and communicating your story, that’s fine (most Christians haven’t). Here are six simple principles to get you started.

1. Keep it short.

Communicating too many details about your life can distract listeners from the central point: how you met Christ. Keeping it short can help with that. Three minutes is a good target. Remember that the purpose of telling your story is not about you; it’s about God. Clearly and succinctly communicate what he has done in your life. Listeners today have a very low tolerance for long-windedness. Being concise helps keep people engaged.

2. Have a before, how, and after.

There should be a pretty clear timeline and logical flow to your story. Talk about what your life was like before Christ, how you met him, and what your life’s like now. This timeline is different for everyone, of course, but it brings a sense of structure to what you’re saying and helps keep your listener tracking.

For those who’ve been Christians since childhood, be vulnerable about your struggles as a growing Christian—the “how” may be a time when the gospel really sank in, and you understood it at a deeper level. Everyone’s story is unique, and there’s flexibility in how to share it, but thinking in terms of a timeline can be very helpful.

3. Have a theme.

A theme helps people walk away from your story remembering one main idea. There may be many themes in your story, but try to boil it down to one. Loading your testimony with multiple main points makes your story muddier, not more poignant. It’s much more likely to stick with people when there’s a single, memorable theme.

4. Clearly present the gospel.

You want people to clearly grasp the source of your transformation: Jesus Christ. If people aren’t pointed to Christ, they’ll be pointed in another direction, which will (of course) ultimately fail them. We want people to come away from our story thinking, “Isn’t Jesus amazing? I want him in my life, too.”

Your testimony should show people that God loves them, they’re sinful, Jesus is the payment for the penalty of their sin, and they need to trust Christ as the payment for the penalty of their sins in order to have a personal relationship with God.

If you haven’t shared the gospel in your testimony, you haven’t really shared your testimony.

Don’t be tempted to omit this part of your story—it’s the most important element. It’s the message that changed everything about you and brought you to where you are now. If you haven’t shared the gospel in your testimony, you haven’t really shared your testimony.

5. Avoid ‘Christianese.’

Avoid Christian slang—those words believers use all the time in everyday Christian circles but make no sense to anyone else. We’re trying to be clear about what we’re communicating, and we need to understand the importance of speaking a language that can be easily understood. We want anyone and everyone to have intellectual access to what we’re saying, so eliminate alienating language (or at least be willing to quickly define it).

6. Practice, practice, practice!

You should know your testimony by heart without having any notecards or outline in front of you. If someone asks about your life at the public swimming pool, you won’t be able to whip out a piece of paper for reference—so have your story memorized and ready at a moment’s notice. It’s a good idea to write it out or make an outline, then practice it aloud on your own or with a friend. Eventually you’ll know it by heart.

Your Story as Part of God’s Story

Remind yourself as you prepare that it’s not just about how God and the gospel fit into your story, but also about how your story fits into the greater story of the gospel. God will use your testimony to affect those around you if you’re faithful to speak up. How he has changed you can change someone else. Isn’t that amazing?

Remember it’s not just about how God and the gospel fit into your story, but also about how your story fits into the greater story of the gospel.

Your testimony is significant because it’s the personal miracle of how God transformed your heart of stone into a heart of flesh, and only you can uniquely bear witness to that miracle. He has been behind every detail of your life, even using the ugly and terrible things to form and shape you with the utmost care and attention. He is still working on you right now. What a joy to tell others of his miraculous work!

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About Evangelism as Exiles

These transformations explain all kinds of apparently unrelated features of our culture. They explain why we believe in human rights, free trade, liberal democracy, and religious pluralism; they ground our preference for authenticity over authority, and self-expression over self-denial; and they account for all kinds of phenomena that our great-grandparents would have found inconceivable.

We are who we are because of 1776. That involves a combination of two claims. One relates to the world we inhabit today, and the other to the world of two and a half centuries ago.

The first claim is that the most helpful way of identifying what is distinctive about our society, relative to others past and present, is that it is WEIRDER: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. We may not embrace all of those labels as individuals. We may be African or Asian, get by on very moderate incomes, have no history of Christianity, or live without any romantic attachments. But the broader culture within which we live is characterized by all seven of them.

What is distinctive about our society is that it is WEIRDER: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic.

We frequently refer to it as the West, which needs definition but is widely accepted. Education for children is widespread, free, and usually compulsory, with literacy at virtually 100 percent. Recognized qualifications carry significant social and economic prestige. We are clearly industrialized, with only a tiny percentage of the population still working in agriculture, and unprecedentedly rich: the diet, amenities, healthcare, and leisure options available to someone working on minimum wage today are in many ways better than those available to Mansa Musa or Louis XIV.

We are democratic, not only in our system of government but in our assumptions about society. We are ex-Christian, with formal adherence to the Christian faith diminishing both in public and in private. Still, our civilization remains saturated with Judeo-Christian assumptions that show no sign of fading; as such we are decidedly ex-Christian, as opposed to ex-Communist, ex-Islamic or even pre-Christian.

And we are romantic, in the sense that our beliefs and practices have been indelibly marked by the Romantic movement, from our concept of selfhood and identity, to our expectations of art, music, and literature, to our erotic and sexual habits. For better or worse, we live in a WEIRDER world.

Influence of 1776

The second claim is that all seven of those things are true because of 1776. This may sound like pure hyperbole. No year creates a future world on its own. History does not consist of Big Bangs, with new worlds and laws appearing out of nowhere, but rather of little evolutionary steps, each one building on the thousands before it and dependent for survival on the thousands after it. Yet some evolutionary steps matter a lot more than others. Some become game-changers (the camera eye, for instance), while others turn out to be a cul-de-sac. The year 1776 was the former. It was an astonishing year of innovation and upheaval, and the world has not been the same since.

All seven of those things are true because of 1776.

Telling that story would take an entire book. But we can see it in outline by considering just 10 prominent events from that year.

• In January, Thomas Paine released his pamphlet Common Sense in Philadelphia, arguing that the American colonies should pursue independence from British rule; it caused an immediate sensation, and became one of the fastest-selling and most influential books in American history.
• In February, Edward Gibbon published the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which set new standards in writing history, while also challenging the established church and providing a skeptical narrative of early Christianity that endures to this day.
• James Watt’s steam engine, probably the single most important invention in industrial history, started running at the Bloomfield colliery in Staffordshire on March 8. The very next day, Adam Smith released the foundational text of modern economics, An Inquiry into the Natures and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
• The best-known transformation of the year took place in the American summer, with the establishing of a nation that would play an increasingly dominant role in the next two centuries: the signing of the Declaration of Independence (July 4), the ringing of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia (July 8), the Battle of Long Island and the taking of Brooklyn by the British (August 27), and the formal adoption of the name United States (September 9).
• On the other side of the Atlantic, Captain James Cook was sailing southward in the Resolution in the last of his three voyages to the South Seas, the effect of which can still be felt throughout the Pacific islands, New Zealand, and Australia.
• Immanuel Kant was in Königsberg, writing the outline for his Critique of Pure Reason, which would bring about a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy.
• In Edinburgh, David Hume finally completed his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, one of the greatest arguments against Christian theism ever written, before dying on August 25.
• The Autumn saw Friedrich Klinger write his play Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”), which soon gave its name to the proto-Romantic movement in German music and literature.
• And in December, Benjamin Franklin arrived in Paris on a diplomatic mission to bring France into the war against Britain. It would eventually prove successful, and lead ultimately to the American victory at Yorktown (1781), and the collapse of the French ancien régime into bankruptcy and revolution (1789).

Between them, those 10 events represent a series of transformations that inaugurated the WEIRDER world. Some are so prominent that they have passed into everyday speech. People freely refer to the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the Romantic Revolution and the Enlightenment. Others are less recognized but no less significant.

You could argue that the long-term influence of Cook’s voyages, or what Gibbon or Hume said about Christianity, or what Smith said about markets, have been just as revolutionary in the realms of geography, religion, and economics as American independence was in politics.

Those are just the best-known examples; there are many others, even if we confine ourselves to the West. The same year saw Laura Bassi, the first woman to work as a professional scientist, appointed to the chair of experimental physics at the Bologna Institute of Sciences. Mozart wrote his Concerto for three pianos in Salzburg. Phillis Wheatley, the first African American woman to publish a book, presented her poetry in person to George Washington. The Illuminati were founded in Bavaria, and Phi Beta Kappa started in Williamsburg, Virginia. Toussaint Louverture, the future leader of the first (and only) successful slave revolt in history, was released from slavery in what is now Haiti. We could go on.

But the influence of 1776 cannot be measured simply by adding up all the key events that occurred. It was a year in which ideas were written down, and the ideas were often transformative, and the writing often magnificent. Again, consider 10 examples from the English-speaking world.

It was a year in which ideas were written down, and the ideas were often transformative, and the writing often magnificent.

• Two have passed into folklore in America because of their rhetorical power in the context of the revolutionary war: Thomas Paine’s “These are the times that try men’s souls” and Washington’s “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?”
• Two others are noteworthy for how well they articulated the logical implications of the revolution: Lemuel Haynes for his fellow African Americans (“Liberty is equally as precious to a black man as it is to a white one, and bondage equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other”) and Edmund Burke for Britain (“I can hardly believe, from the tranquillity of everything about me, that we are a people who have just lost an empire. But it is so.”). (See Lemuel Haynes, “Liberty Further Extended.”) 
• One is remembered for the metaphor it introduced, which it is hard to imagine economics without: “he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” (See An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 456.)

The other five statements are remembered because they encapsulate the spirit of an age: a spirit of confidence in human reason and potential that was almost tangible in the late 18th century, the aftershocks of which can still be felt today.

• “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Paine declared in one of the most audacious sentences ever written (see Common Sense).
• Matthew Boulton, revealing his phalanx of steam machines to James Boswell, drew his optimism from the possibilities of technology: “I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER.” (See James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, March 22, 1776.)
• Jeremy Bentham attempted to renew human ethics on an entirely rational basis without any need for Christian morality: “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” (See A Fragment on Government.)
• James Madison, making adjustments to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, insisted that the final section include the phrase “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”
• Most influential of all, Thomas Jefferson declared it “self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

These are pithy and quotable statements, and they may help us find our bearings in a world with which we are not familiar. But that is not the main reason for citing them here. The main reason for citing them is that they brought about change, much of it seismic, and we live with their legacy. These ideas, and the individuals, institutions, and inventions with which they are associated, made us WEIRDER. We are who we are because of them.

So What?

I am a Christian pastor. I find history fascinating, and I am convinced that it can help us become wiser, humbler, and more loving citizens. But my primary motive in writing is to help the church thrive in a WEIRDER world.

These ideas brought about change, much of it seismic, and we live with their legacy.

What challenges and opportunities emerge from Westernization, or Romanticism, or industrialization, and what should we do about them? How should Christians act in an ex-Christian culture? What does faithful Christianity look like in the shadow of 1776? And here, I believe, we can draw a great deal of wisdom from an obvious source: faithful Christianity in 1776. How did believers in this turbulent and transformative era respond to what was happening around them? And what can we learn?

As it happens, several strands within the contemporary church look back to 1776 as an especially formative year. It was a crucial period in the development of early Methodism. John Wesley secured, and began fundraising for, a site on which to build a new headquarters in London. John Fletcher, whom most people assumed would succeed Wesley as the next leader, caught tuberculosis, which prompted a complete rethinking of how things would be led in the next generation. And the American Revolution began a chain of events that would lead the Methodists to ordain their own ministers, and finally separate from Anglicanism. The need for new premises, new leadership, and a new denomination would prove catalytic for the rapid growth of Methodism in the following century.

It was a landmark year in other Protestant denominations as well. American dissenters, as we have just seen, saw the crucial words “free exercise of religion” appear in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and subsequently in the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Former slave trader John Newton was working on the Olney Hymns, which would be published in 1779 and include his “Amazing Grace” and William Cowper’s “God Works in Mysterious Ways.”

The 15-year-old William Carey, who would grow up to become the father of modern missions and translate the Bible into six Indian languages, had the experience that led to his conversion. Calvinist vicar Augustus Toplady published his hymnal, which included “Rock of Ages.” Holy Trinity Church Clapham, later attended by members of the Clapham Sect including William Wilberforce and Hannah More, opened for worship.

Most of these names are familiar in evangelical circles. But I think two individuals who are far less recognized, Olaudah Equiano and Johann Georg Hamann, have even more to teach us. Equiano was born around 1745 in what is now Nigeria, and sailed into 1776 on a ship in the Caribbean. He became one of the most remarkable Christians of his or any generation, and was understating it somewhat when he called his autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.

Hamann was a friend and critic of Immanuel Kant’s—hailed by Hegel as a genius, by Goethe as the brightest mind in his day, and by Kierkegaard as (alongside Socrates) one of the two most brilliant men of all time—as well as a Christian, and in some ways the first post-secular philosopher. Though miles apart in their experiences and writings, both Equiano and Hamann have a lot to teach us about living as Christians in a WEIRDER world.

Need for Roots

A few years ago I noticed how many of my favorite authors—George Orwell, C. S. Lewis, Graham Greene, Leszek Kołakowski, Dorothy Sayers, Isaiah Berlin, W. H. Auden, Flannery O’Connor, J. R. R. Tolkien, James Baldwin, T. S. Eliot—were writing during or immediately after World War II.

It had not occurred to me before, and I wondered why it might be the case. There are probably some stylistic reasons. Their language is near enough to our day not to sound arcane, and the crispness, simplicity, and visual quality of their prose has been shaped by the advent of the cinema. Their works are also marked by a deep awareness of radical evil, which is hardly surprising given the times in which they lived. It gives their essays an urgency, and their poetry and fiction a cosmic drama (think of Big Brother and Room 101, Sauron and Saruman, the White Witch, Animal Farm, or the darkness of sin and the devil in Greene’s novels), that few writers before or since have achieved.

So it is fascinating how often their responses to radical evil involve an appeal to history. Sometimes this comes as a direct address to the reader, like Baldwin’s writings on race, or Kołakowski’s on communism, or Berlin’s on liberalism, or Sayers’s Creed or Chaos. Eliot and Auden do it through their numerous references and allusions. O’Connor and Greene draw on their Catholicism. Simone Weil’s greatest work is L’Enracinement (usually translated The Need for Roots), and is an extended argument for our need to be more connected to our past.

Lewis makes the point through essays on why we should read old books, and by skewering chronological snobbery at every opportunity, from That Hideous Strength to The Screwtape Letters to the fates of Uncle Andrew and King Miraz in the Narnia stories. Tolkien does it through his medieval language and setting, his complex prehistories, and his plot (remember Sam on the edge of Mount Doom, reminiscing about the Shire and reminding Frodo of the old stories long before totalitarian evil seized the world).

Most powerfully of all, Orwell creates worlds where nobody remembers the past, and where those in power—the pigs on the farm, the Party in 1984—are free to manipulate it for their purposes, and throw unwanted recollections down the memory hole. “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” All of these writers had witnessed the near-collapse of the West in recent memory, and they knew the dangers of losing their history, and the importance of not allowing it.

It is important for us, too. Every generation needs a genealogy. The arrogance of amnesia is always a threat, not least in periods of great technological and medical progress. So it is vital, as the Psalms and the prophets remind us, to remember: remember the deeds of our fathers and mothers, remember the rock from which we were hewn, and the quarry from which we were dug. It can help us understand why our world is the way it is—how it got WEIRDER, if you like—and how to love, live, and thrive in it.

But God places no expiration date on serving him. There is no moment until our last breath that we aren’t to live our lives for his glory. Your church body needs you. We need the gifts and unique life experience of all generations. And there is something particularly helpful to your church family that points to God’s faithfulness when you continue to serve—even if the ways you serve may change across the years.

As Psalm 92:14–15 expresses it, “They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green, to declare that the LORD is upright; he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.”

Your church body needs you. We need the gifts and unique life experience of all generations.

Sometimes you may not feel that your church wants you to serve. I will tell you, as a pastor in his early 40s, that you are loved and needed. We may not always be good at expressing this, but most of us want to grow in communicating our love for you and in helping you find ways to serve in the church body. What a blessing it has been to me when a senior has taken the initiative to ask me how to serve. Maybe it is time for you to take that initiative, or maybe you need encouragement to continue what you’re already doing.

Six Ways to Serve

I want to cheer you on with six ways you can serve your church. There are more, but I hope this will give you several ways to pray and consider. I hope they give you the boldness you may need to continue to serve God all your days.

1. Pray

The ways you can serve God through serving your church will change as you change across the years. You may need to change from serving in the music ministry to serving on the greeting team. You may find you don’t have the energy to teach the children’s class anymore, but you can still serve in the nursery.

The ways you can serve God through serving your church will change as you change across the years.

But one thing that will never change is the gift of serving your church through prayer. I have often seen the gospel advance and then heard from a senior that she was praying. It doesn’t matter if you’re fresh out of retirement or homebound. You can make an eternal difference through prayer. Sometimes, contrary to all appearances, it’s a bent-over little old lady who makes the gates of hell tremble as Jesus uses her prayers to build his church.

2. Encourage and Love

Recently I listened with a smile and praised God as a lady in her 80s told me she was bringing soup to a man in our church who’s in a wheelchair and has been sick. Could you thank young moms for bringing their babies to church, as you remember how hard it was to attend church with a baby? Ladies, is there a single lady or a recent empty-nester you could call, asking her how you could pray for her? Men, is there a young man in the church you could talk to this Sunday about his job and family, asking how you could pray for him? Could you send a note to someone in the church body this week or visit someone in the hospital or someone who is lonely?

3. Be Present

Once I invited an elderly member of our congregation to come over for our coffee after the worship service. She held onto her walker in the foyer with both hands and said she would love to, but she has to go home immediately after worship because of her strength and health. That conversation has stuck with me. She hardly misses a Sunday, but her presence during the worship service is her sacrificial way to serve God and love others. Each Sunday I see her hugging someone in the congregation and shaking her head in agreement as I preach God’s Word. We need her. The day will come when we will need to go to her rather than her coming to us, but until then her ministry is to be present for one service a week. God sees that effort and is pleased. And he is using it to bless me and others.

4. Talk About God’s Faithfulness

“One generation shall commend your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts” (Ps. 145:4). We need to hear your stories of God’s provision, of him helping you through the loss of your child, of him saving the hard relative that you prayed for across years. We need to hear of your marriage struggles and triumphs, and of what God is teaching you right now through your cancer fight.

We need to hear of your marriage struggles and triumphs, and of what God is teaching you right now through your cancer fight.

This may happen through a phone call or a note, through a comment in Bible study, or through a conversation after church. There are things God has taught you that only come through marinating in his Word for decades, experiencing some of the disappointments of life, and realizing that he is your greatest treasure and joy. Don’t hesitate to share with us what God has taught you. We need to hear it.

5. Look for Ways to Help

My grandmother, who is turning 90 this summer, goes into her church office weekly and folds the bulletin. This not only saves the office manager time, but my grandmother blesses her each week. (The office manager went out of her way to tell me this.) Our church has recently been helped by church members in their 70s who have used their knowledge of home repair and construction to do things from installing new light fixtures to overseeing a remodel on our sanctuary.

They’ve saved us thousands of dollars that we can devote to ministry and missions because they were willing to use daytime hours to help with a project when others were at work. Would you serve your church body by praying about how you could help, and then ask your pastor or ministry leaders if you could serve in specific ways?

6. Ask Us For Help

One of the ways that you can best serve us is sometimes in not meeting a need, but in allowing us to meet your need. I have found the body of Christ is resilient and responsive when needs are known, whether it is helping with meals during a sickness or giving a ride to the doctor or a Bible study, or helping with a needed home repair. One of the ways that seniors have blessed me the most as a pastor is by being open with me about what their needs are, giving others an opportunity to serve them. We are at our best when we look like the family of God that we are, and you can help us by letting us know if there’s a specific way we can serve you.

The enemy wants you to believe that you’re rejected and useless. But God speaks a better word over your life: “Even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you” (Isa. 46:4). Let’s believe this together.

“[F]or a number of observers through the years, the term ‘riot’ itself seems somehow inadequate to describe the violence and conflagration that took place,” say historians John Hope Franklin and Scott Ellsworth. “For some, what occurred in Tulsa on May 31 and June 1, 1921, was a massacre, a pogrom, or, to use a more modern term, an ethnic cleansing.”

Here is what you should know about one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.

1. Newspapers inflamed a racially charged incident into an attempted lynching.

On May 30, a black teenager named Dick Rowland entered an elevator operated by a young white woman named Sarah Page. What happened in the elevator remains unclear, but Page screamed, and Rowland fled the scene. No record exists of what Page told the police, but Rowland was arrested the next morning. Newspaper reporting of the incident claimed that Rowland sexually assaulted Pate. The reporting inflamed white residents of Tulsa, and a crowd gathered in front of the Tulsa County Courthouse where Rowland was being held. The crowd demanded he be turned over, but the mob was rebuffed by the sheriff. By 9:30 p.m. the mob had grown to nearly 2,000 people. An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 white citizens would eventually participate in the riot.

2. The riot began with an attack on a black World War I veteran.

At 10 p.m. a group of several dozen armed African American men went to the courthouse. They offered to help the authorities protect Rowland but were refused. As they were leaving, a white man approached a black World War I veteran who was carrying an army-issue revolver. “N—,” the white man said, “What are you doing with that pistol?” “I’m going to use it if I need to,” the black veteran replied. The white man tried to take the gun away from the veteran, and a shot rang out. A firefight broke out and within minutes an unknown number of black and white Tulsans lay wounded or dead.

3. Black citizens were rounded up in internment centers—and were killed for resisting.

After the initial round of shooting, the black men retreated to the African American district, where they were pursued by white men. As many as 500 white men and boys were sworn in by police officers as “special deputies.” One police officer told the newly deputized, “Get a gun and get a n—.” Whites began gunning down African Americans who were found in the downtown area. By 1 p.m. they were setting fires to homes and businesses in the black community. These attacks and looting continued in the early morning and throughout the day. As historian Scott Ellsworth says, “armed whites broke into the black homes and businesses, forcing the occupants out into the street, where they were led away at gunpoint to one of a growing number of internment centers. Anyone who resisted was shot.”

4. Black citizens made a valiant attempt to protect themselves.

Black Tulsans made a valiant, though ultimately futile, effort to protect their homes and community. As one report notes, a group of black riflemen positioned themselves in the belfry of the newly built Mount Zion Baptist Church and were temporarily able to repel the white invaders. They had to fall back, though, after a barrage from a machine gun blasted the church (the church was set on fire soon after). These acts of self-defense were undercut by the Tulsa Police and the local National Guard unit, who focused on imprisoning African Americans rather than the white rioters. The Tulsa Fire Department was also stopped from putting out the fire by armed whites. The only black church that was not set on fire, the First Baptist Church, was spared from arson only because it was in a white neighborhood.

5. Nearly 9,000 black residents became homeless, and thousands had to spend the winter in tents.

Following the declaration of martial law for Tulsa County at 11:29 a.m. on June 1, Oklahoma state troops disarmed the remaining white people and turned them away from Greenwood. But by then the damage had been done. Approximately 40 square blocks of the African American community were destroyed (no fire damage was found in white areas). The offices of two newspapers and more than a dozen doctors, dentists, lawyers, real-estate agents, and other professionals were destroyed, along with dozens of family businesses, a YMCA, and a skating rink. The fires started in the riots also destroyed a post office, an elementary school, and nearly a half-dozen churches. According to a later Red Cross estimate, 1,256 houses were burned, and 215 others were looted but not torched. Altogether, the cost of the property damage was estimated as more than $48 million in 2021 dollars.

6. Between 39 and 300 people died in the massacre, and the white community blamed African Americans.

A minimum of 39 people died in the massacre. Credible evidence suggests that at least 75 to 100 people, both black and white, were killed. The man who directed the relief operations of the American Red Cross in Tulsa said in an official report that fatalities may have been as high as 300. As historian Scott Ellsworth notes, “Despite overwhelming evidence, no whites were ever sent to prison for the murders and arson that occurred.” Even after exonerating Rowland, an all-white grand jury blamed black Tulsans for the lawlessness.

7. The massacre all but ended lynching in Oklahoma.

Lynching is defined as a form of violence in which a mob, under the pretext of administering justice without trial, executes a presumed offender, often after inflicting torture and corporal mutilation. Statistics of reported lynchings in the U.S. indicate that, between 1882 and 1951, 4,730 persons were lynched, of whom 1,293 were white (27 percent) and 3,437 were black (73 percent). From the time Oklahoma became a state till the time of the riots, 32 people had been lynched, including 26 African Americans. But during the 20 years following the riot, the number of lynchings statewide fell to two. “Although they paid a terrible price for their efforts,” says Franklin and Ellsworth, “there is little doubt . . . black Tulsans helped to bring the barbaric practice of lynching in Oklahoma to an end.”

8. The massacre was mostly forgotten for half a century.

For almost 50 years after the massacre, there was a concerted effort to downplay or forget the atrocity. The newspaper that helped spark the riot, the Tulsa Tribune, removed the front-page story of May 31 from its bound volumes. State police and militia archives about the massacre also went missing. Oklahoma history textbooks published during the 1920s and 1930s did not mention the event at all. In 1941, the riot was finally mentioned in an Oklahoma history text but only in one brief paragraph. The massacre didn’t even receive much notice from scholars until the 1970s. And it wasn’t until 1997 that the Oklahoma legislature established the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission (in 2018 the panel was officially renamed the 1921 Race Massacre Commission).

9. A 107-year-old survivor of the massacre recently testified before Congress.

Earlier this month, on May 19, Viola Fletcher testified before Congress about the massacre.

“I am a survivor of the Tulsa race massacre,” Fletcher said. “Two weeks ago, I celebrated my 107th birthday. Today, I’m visiting Washington, D.C., for the first time in my life. I’m here seeking justice, and I’m asking my country to acknowledge what happened in Tulsa in 1921.”

]]> https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/contending-faith-confused-culture/ Sat, 29 May 2021 04:00:30 +0000 https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/?post_type=article&p=358422 A Christian is not simply someone who lives a certain way. A Christian is someone who believes certain things.]]> We live in a time of great theological confusion. According to Ligonier Ministry’s latest State of Theology survey, 30 percent of professing evangelicals reject the deity of Christ, 46 percent believe people are good by nature, and 22 percent think gender identity is “a matter of personal choice.”

Perhaps if surveys could’ve been taken in centuries past, we would find it has always been so. But our culture has definitely injected a strong dose of relativism and individualism that makes it hard for people to recognize any authority above themselves. As a result, people prefer a faith that resists clear definition and a Christianity empty of specific content.

All of which makes it a good time to reflect on Jude 3, in which Jesus’s half-brother urges us to “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” I want to look at this verse from three angles, which will clarify what it means to contend for the faith in an age of moral and theological confusion.

1. Faith with Definite Boundaries and Content

This word “faith” usually refers to that act of the heart by which we put our trust in Jesus Christ as our only hope in life and death. But “the faith” refers not to the act of believing, but rather to what is believed.

This suggests that even in the first century, there was already a recognized body of teaching that all Christians were expected to embrace. Jude can urge Christians in AD 65 to contend for “the faith” and assume they know what he’s talking about. Unlike some modern skeptics, Jude doesn’t speak of multiple “Christianities.” Like Paul, he believes that there is “one faith” (Eph. 4:5), and that those who taught contrary to it were not simply offering valid alternatives, but were preaching false gospels (Gal. 1:6–9). Christians don’t have to agree on everything (see Rom. 14), but they do have to agree on some things (1 Cor. 15:3; Gal. 1).

Jude can urge Christians in AD 65 to contend for ‘the faith’ and assume they know what he’s talking about.

It also suggests that though the Bible is a big book, its teaching can be accurately summarized. This is what a good creed or confession does. If a church’s website doesn’t contain a section telling me “What We Believe,” I’m reluctant to point people to that church. You can’t contend for something you can’t define. The faith wasn’t an empty bucket for Jude—it had content. Which raises the question, what was in that bucket?

2. Faith Filled with Moral and Doctrinal Truth

For Jude and the early church, the faith would have included both fundamental moral and doctrinal truths.

Moral Truth

First, the faith includes fundamental moral truths about sin and righteousness. Indeed, Jude was making this appeal precisely because “certain people [had] crept in unnoticed . . . ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (v. 4).

Living in sensuality and then creating theological rationalizations for it is a denial of the faith—and of Christ. In a stroke that makes this passage extremely relevant for our culture, in which some churches are flying the rainbow flag in the name of Christian love, Jude cites as a warning the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, which “indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire,” and thus “serve as an example of undergoing a punishment of eternal fire” (v. 7).

Make no mistake: our apostolic faith states that “we believe in the forgiveness of sins” (1 Cor. 6:9–11; Col. 1:13–14). But that also assumes we know what sin is. If “Christ died for our sins” is a matter “of first importance,” then a right understanding of sin must also be of first importance.

Jesus didn’t come to relax the commandments, and he didn’t die to change the moral grain of the universe (Matt. 5:19). He died so we could be forgiven and released from sin’s bondage; he was raised so we could walk in newness of life. That’s the faith. And that’s what these false teachers were denying—both in Jude’s day and in ours.

If ‘Christ died for our sins’ is a matter ‘of first importance,’ then a right understanding of sin must also be of first importance.

And lest I seem one-sided, let me add that we can deny the faith not only by affirming sexual immorality, but also by refusing to care for our aged parents: “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8). The same faith that teaches us to flee fornication also teaches us to honor Mom and Dad.

Any attempt to reduce the faith to the doctrinal truths contained in the early creeds (usually in an effort to avoid conflict with the sexual revolution) is a pipe dream that puts people’s souls at risk.

Doctrinal Truth

If one ditch sees Christianity as simply affirming a set of doctrinal teachings (regardless of how you live), the other ditch sees Christianity as simply being a good person (regardless of what you believe). After all, surely one can be a good neighbor without believing in the Trinity!

Of course, no one should deny that atheists and Hindus can be good neighbors, or that loving neighbor is the heart of the faith. But it’s not the whole heart. Don’t forget the first great commandment, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart.” According to Jesus, “this is eternal life”—to know “the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom [he has] sent” (John 17:3).

If one ditch sees Christianity as simply affirming a set of doctrinal teachings (regardless of how you live), the other ditch sees Christianity as simply being a good person (regardless of what you believe).

A Christian is not simply someone who lives a certain way. A Christian is someone who believes certain things. The faith affirms that certain events really happened—like the creation of the universe ex nihilo and the resurrection of Jesus (Heb. 11:3; 1 Cor. 15). It affirms that certain statements are really true, such as “Jesus is Lord,” “the LORD is one,” and “all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols” (Rom. 10:9; 1 Cor. 12:3; Deut. 6:4; 1 Cor. 8:6; Ps. 96:5). And it affirms that certain events really will take place, like the judgment of the wicked and the resurrection of the body (Jude 6, 14; 1 Cor. 15; 2 Tim. 2:18).

Beliefs without behavior may be dead, but behavior without beliefs is deadly, too. The faith isn’t simply about being a good person—it’s about recognizing that you haven’t been a good person. Claiming that “good” people can be saved regardless of what they believe about Jesus is moralism, pure and simple. It’s a denial of the faith.

3. Faith That Outlasts the Zeitgeist

Orthodox Christians have repeatedly been told “Christianity must change or die, since modern man simply cannot be expected to believe in ________.” Here’s what’s interesting: Trevin Wax points out that 100 years ago the things that “modern man” couldn’t be expected to believe were usually the doctrinal truths—teachings like the virgin birth or the resurrection. Modern man in 1920 was fine with the Bible’s morality, he just couldn’t be expected to believe in miracles.

A Christian is not simply someone who lives a certain way. A Christian is someone who believes certain things.

But today it’s almost the reverse. It’s the Bible’s moral teachings that our culture finds offensive—especially on sexuality. And once again, we’re told that we must evolve or die. Yet if you look back over the 20th century, you see the exact opposite. The churches that evolved were the churches that died. It’s the churches who were willing to lose their lives who saved them.

Jude could’ve told us. The faith isn’t something we can tweak to fit the zeitgeist, because the faith isn’t something we invented—it’s something that was “delivered once for all to the saints.” And it’s still the same today.

And though human cultures may alternate on which aspects of the faith they find most offensive, the same basic stumbling blocks remain. People still want a God who allows them to indulge their sensual appetites and who accepts them based on their good deeds. The Christian faith offers neither. Instead, it offers something better.

We do indeed live in a time of great theological confusion, and the temptation to give people what they want instead of what they need remains as strong as ever. But fallen people have never been good judges of what they need. So the most unloving thing we could do is tweak the faith in order to give people what they want. And the most loving thing we can do is exactly what Jude said: contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

The current president of the SBC is J. D. Greear, pastor at The Summit Church in North Carolina. The Summit Church has sent out more than 1,400 missionaries and planted more than 40 churches. Over the past few years, Greear has watched the SBC wrestle through sex-abuse scandals, COVID-19, and the contentious presidential election. He’s got a pretty good handle on where the denomination sits and where he hopes it’s going.

Senior writer Sarah Zylstra wrote about Greear in her book with Collin Hansen, Gospelbound: Living with Resolute Hope in an Anxious Age. In this episode of TGC Podcast, she sits down with Greear to discuss his experience as SBC president, future hopes for the SBC and the global church, and the importance of keeping the gospel at the center of it all. 

I remember wrestling with uncertainty, trying to figure out what was next as I attempted to answer the bombardment of What’s next? questions. I felt the suffocating pressure to have my life plan mapped out by graduation day. I’m sure many 2021 graduates can relate.

In the five years since I received my diploma, I’ve experienced numerous twists and turns that have taught me there is something crucially more important than my life plan: my life’s purpose.

Are We Missing the Purpose?

Do you ever wonder if we’re missing the point? In the midst of making plans, applying to prospective colleges, and setting out on desired career paths, are we unintentionally overlooking the purpose of our lives?

Are we unintentionally overlooking the purpose of our lives?

Culture understands purpose mainly through the lens of external success. Your purpose is packaged within a university, degree, career, or bank account, and you arrive at your purpose by choosing the route that will lead to the greatest success.

But look at purpose through the lens of a biblical worldview and the perspective diametrically shifts. Scripture offers us a life purpose far beyond the transient things of this world: to enjoy and exalt God in all of his glory and to spread his glory among all people and nations. This isn’t a purpose we select for ourselves, but it’s one we either accept or reject from God’s hand.

Pursuing Eternal Success

Instead of emphasizing earthly success, Christ calls us to focus on the kingdom of God (Matt. 6:20). Instead of guiding us to greater ease and comfort, Jesus challenges us to shoulder our cross and follow him (Luke 9:58). Jesus commissions us, instead of promoting our names, to go out and proclaim his (Mark 16:15). Life purpose for the follower of Christ has little to do with external success; instead, glorifying, exalting, and obeying the One we follow becomes our goal and the true measure of eternal success.

But new graduates aren’t often encouraged to think about life purpose. We weigh our career or college choices on the scale of preferences and financial gain—not on how we can most effectively fulfill our commission. We’re encouraged to fulfill our dreams but not challenged to fulfill the purpose of God’s heart. Our decisions often take on the tinge of a secular worldview as we focus on external plans and accomplishments instead of our greater role in God’s worldwide story.

In doing so, we miss a critical window of opportunity—the chance to build our lives around the central focus of God’s glory from the very beginning of our adulthood. We should move into the future with a God-centered, heavenly focused, commission-driven perspective.

In wrestling with the uncertainty of the future, grads don’t simply need encouragement or guidance in college or career choices. We need a challenge to leverage our lives for the glory of God and his gospel.

Leverage Your Life for God’s Glory

Every graduate is standing at the place where numerous paths converge—talents, passions, and resources in hand. At that crossroads, we have a decision to make: Take the road that promises the greatest earthly return? Or evaluate our choices with the priority of God’s kingdom?

Every graduate is standing at the place where numerous paths converge—talents, passions, and resources in hand.

If grads choose to invest in God’s kingdom, does that mean we automatically abandon our original plans in order to go into full-time ministry or pack up our bags to move overseas? It may for some, but not for all.

One of the greatest hindrances to the spread of the gospel is the belief that only missionaries or pastors are called to glorify God and share the gospel in all nations. If we believe that, we exempt ourselves from the ultimate purpose of God and the commission he commanded. We miss out on the blessing of spreading the gospel if we disobey and disregard our commission.

Whether or not vocational or overseas ministry is a part of our futures, the call to leverage our lives for the glory of God remains. The question all graduates should ask themselves is not necessarily Should I go overseas? or Should I go into full-time ministry? but How can I expend this one life God has given me to serve and exalt his name and to be obedient to the commission I’ve been given?

Purposeful Graduates Will Change the World

Can you imagine the global and local effect if the graduates of 2021 decided their next steps and life plans by answering this question? See your college and career paths not merely as opportunities for promotion or accolades but as mission fields ripe for harvest. Work hard in ministry and voluntarism to meet the physical and spiritual needs in your communities, neighborhoods, and workplaces. Consider your finances not as personal gain or security, but as a resource from God to meet needs around the globe.

In a world of urgent spiritual and physical need, we must ask God to reorient the priorities and passions of our hearts to align with the purposes of his. As Jesus said:

If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? (Matt. 16:24–26)

Dear grad, there’s a great big world in front of you. May your goal not be to gain this earthly, temporal world (and in doing so lose your soul), but to win the world for God’s eternal glory and to surrender your life for the sake of the gospel.

I asked my editorial colleagues to share what they’ll be reading this summer. Perhaps you’ll be prompted to add one or two to your own list. 

Quina Aragon

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1960). I was never assigned this book in school, and I’m curious why it’s adored by so many. 

James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (Dial Press, 1972). I’d like to get to know James Baldwin better after having read The Fire Next Time, and this book is filled with his reflections on his experiences. 

Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom (Knopf, 2020). I was floored by Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing. As she traced the lineages of two Ghanian sisters, it felt like a personal journey for me since ancestry tests for black Jamaicans (my dad’s side of the family) don’t tell much of a story. I’m also brainstorming ways to approach a (poetic) fictional story I’m working on, and Gyasi’s writing inspires me.

Chris Colquitt

J. Gresham Machen, Things Unseen: A Systematic Introduction to the Christian Faith and Reformed Theology (Westminster, 2020). I’m excited to learn from Machen’s defense of the faith in these newly republished radio addresses. His era has many lessons for our own.

Eric Nelson, The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God (Belknap Harvard, 2019). My two academic loves are theology and political theory—and Nelson’s recent work combines both, exploring how debates between Augustinians/Calvinists and Pelagians/Arminians shaped the development of small-l liberalism (the political philosophy). I’m interested to see how Nelson’s work informs recent debates over classical liberalism among Christian thinkers.

Marilynne Robinson, Jack (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020). Robinson is my favorite living fiction author, and I’m looking forward to diving into the fourth volume in her Gilead series. If I have time, I may just go back and read the others again too!

Justin Dillehay

Andrew T. Walker, Liberty for All: Defending Everyone’s Religious Freedom in a Pluralistic Age (Brazos, 2021). There are few Christian political thinkers I respect more than Andrew Walker, and one of them wrote the foreword to this book. How could I not read it?

Christiana Hale, Deeper Heaven: A Reader’s Guide to C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy (Romans Road, 2021). I’m never quite sure whether I like Narnia or the Space Trilogy better. But I am sure that good books about the Space Trilogy are harder to find. For that reason, Hale’s book is a welcome offering—one I’ve been looking forward to for several months now. 

John Milton, Paradise Lost. I’ve only read this epic poem once, and it’s been almost 20 years. I must confess that for me poetry is like vegetables—I wish I liked it more, but I hope by force of will I can train my palate just a little before I die.

Megan Hill

Ann Patchett, The Dutch House: A Novel (Harper, 2019). I’m cheating a little, because I intended to save this for a summer read—but I couldn’t resist opening it right away. Patchett is one of my favorite novelists, and her exploration of how people can be shaped by a physical setting did not disappoint. The book was a sort of World’s Most Extraordinary Homes (another favorite) in novel form. I loved it.

Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload (Portfolio, 2021). I’ve been meaning to read this for a while now, but my overflowing inbox keeps demanding my attention. Maybe the summer months will provide the needed respite to evaluate the way I work and how I can better communicate with and care for my coworkers.

Rebecca McLaughlin, 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (And Answer) About Christianity (Crossway, 2021). During the pandemic, my husband and I have been having a weekly book discussion with our preteen and teenaged sons. Most recently, we’ve been reading and discussing John Owen’s Glory of Christ a chapter at a time. When we finish, we plan to read 10 Questions; I expect some lively conversation and mutual iron-sharpening.

Doug LeBlanc

Stephen King, On Writing (Scribner, 2003). King’s horror stories were never of interest to me, but his occasional nonfiction writing, including a regular column for Entertainment Weekly, is a model of brevity and elegance. Reading him is an effort to learn a few lessons, albeit late in my career arc, from a master.

Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1987). So far, Percy’s comic novel is similar to The Children of Men by P. D. James: plausible at the time of its publication, and all too familiar decades later. It should bring some comic relief to what John Paul II has called our Culture of Death.

Paul C. Vitz, Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious (Guilford Press, 1988). Freud, one of the most consequential critics of faith in our time, was Christ-haunted. Vitz, who taught Freudian psychology for years at New York University, reports his findings about a most influential Christian nanny in Freud’s childhood.

Brett McCracken

Richard Adams, Watership Down (Scribner, 1972). I’ve decided to only read fiction this summer, and more than a few people whose tastes I admire call this children’s-literature classic their favorite novel of all time. That—plus its being about British rabbits—is enough reason for me to add it to my summer reading list. 

Wendell Berry, Nathan Coulter (North Point Press, 1985). Reading Berry’s fictional stories in the Port William series is, for me, the literary equivalent of resting on a hammock on a warm summer day, the sound of a bubbling brook nearby. I’ve yet to read this entry in the series, which was the first Port William novel Berry published.

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021). The latest from Nobel Prize–winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, this dystopian novel sets out to explore questions of humanity’s meaning in a technological world, much like his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. We need more novels probing these urgent questions. 

Ivan Mesa

Frank Hebert, Dune (1965). For a lover of fantasy and science fiction, it’s a glaring omission that I haven’t read Hebert’s classic. With the planned film adaptation directed by Denis Villeneuve (of Arrival fame), I’m excited to finally dig in. 

Daniel R. Bare, Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era (New York University Press, 2021). As we witness the breaking apart of the Reformed evangelical movement (largely owing to divisions over public theology), I find it helpful to look to the past for insight. Bare looks at the often-overlooked black fundamentalists of the early 20th century who held on to the doctrinal essentials of their white counterparts while differing on the topic of racial justice.

Peter Leithart, The Gospel of Matthew Through New Eyes, vols. 1 and 2 (Athanasius Press, 2017, 2018). I’ll teach a few lessons through Matthew’s Gospel in Sunday school this summer. I always learn from Leithart’s attentive reading of the biblical text, so these books will be close guides.

Matt Smethurst

Daniel Silva, The Cellist (Harper, 2021). I’ve read every novel in the Gabriel Allon series and don’t plan to stop the streak this summer—the newest installment releases July 13. Silva is a master storyteller and one of the greatest spy novelists alive today.

Gordon T. Smith, Institutional Intelligence: How to Build an Effective Organization (IVP Academic, 2017). As I prepare to plant a church in Richmond, Virginia, I’m trying to internalize some principles of effective leadership. (It’s my first rodeo, so I need whatever help I can get.)

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (Doubleday, 2016). I enjoyed The Nickel Boys (Anchor, 2019) and so I’m interested to check out Whitehead’s previous novel. He illustrates racial dynamics with poignancy and verve.

Sarah Zylstra

Abraham Kuyper, On Business and Economics (Lexham Press, 2021). At heart, I’m a deeply practical person, which is probably why I love thinking about faith and work. I’m curious to dig into the ways Kuyper applied theology to the uber-practical areas of business and economics.

Jeff Robinson, Taming the Tongue: How the Gospel Transforms Our Talk (The Gospel Coalition, 2021). Like Jeff, I love to talk. I’ve also gotten in trouble from not being careful enough with my words. I’m looking forward to hearing wisdom on this from a brother I greatly respect.

Greg McKeown, Effortless (Currency, 2021). I really enjoyed McKeown’s Essentialism a few years ago, so I’m eager to see what common-grace insights on productivity and efficiency he’s offering this time.

But sometimes, captivated by the simplicity of this relationship, Christians can be tempted to contrast it with the more complex-sounding affirmation of believing and serving the triune God. Anti-trinitarians, of course, portray this as an absolute contrast: rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity, they claim to simply follow Jesus. But even Christians with sound doctrine can still feel the tension between simple Christ-following and complex Trinity-worshiping.

Even Christians with sound doctrine can feel the tension between simple Christ-following and complex Trinity-worshiping.

In reality, the two belong together, and always have. In fact, the doctrine of the Trinity provides the deep foundation for what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

Transposing Discipleship into a New Key

Think about the nature of discipleship. When Jesus called the first disciples to follow him, he meant “follow” in a direct and literal way. He was walking down the road and they were to walk along with him. He went to the next town, and so did they. The point was “that they would be with him” (Mark 3:13) to hear what he said and see what he did, so they could in turn be sent out in his name.

But the gospel story that starts with that call also ends with Jesus’s ascension to the right hand of God. To put it bluntly, following an ascended, enthroned Lord is bound to look different from following an itinerant, pedestrian Master. The whole theme of discipleship, even for the first disciples, had to be transposed into a new key. And that new key was trinitarian.

Following an ascended, enthroned Lord is bound to look different from following an itinerant, pedestrian Master.

Jesus put discipleship into trinitarian perspective when he taught that he would ascend to the right hand of the Father, from which he and the Father would send the Holy Spirit (John 14:16; 14:26; 15:26; 16:7). It was the Spirit who would enable these first followers to complete their discipleship to an ascended Lord—precisely because, as Jesus promised, “he will not speak on his own authority,” but “he will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine” (John 16:13–14).

The intimacy of direct, personal discipleship is completed in this threefold movement. All that the Father has belongs to the Son, and all that belongs to the Son is declared to us by the Holy Spirit. The unity of these three is so profound that we shouldn’t think of ourselves as being shuttled back and forth between three different heavenly committee members, but as being ever more fully at home in the reality of the Son’s identity precisely because of the involvement of the Spirit. The Spirit explains to us all that belongs to the Son and the Father (who is the principle and source of all that the Son has). What the disciples had in personal fellowship with Jesus, they came to have even more fully by having it in the Father and by the Spirit.

The unity of these three is so profound that we shouldn’t think of ourselves as being shuttled back and forth between three different heavenly committee members.

All the trinitarian substructure of discipleship becomes gloriously apparent at this point in salvation history. To mark its meaning, the Christian calendar places Trinity Sunday immediately after celebrating the ascension of Christ and the descent of the Spirit (Pentecost Sunday). These events mark the consummating work of the Son who has gone to the Father, and the Spirit who is sent from them. Disciples are Christ-followers not just because of the Son, but because of the Father and the Spirit. Jesus meant it when he said, “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away” (John 16:7).

On the basis of this great fulfilment, we should take a moment to notice two more things.

Revealing What Was Always There

First, seeing discipleship fulfilled and completed in the coming of the Spirit reveals to us that discipleship was a trinitarian reality all along. The dramatic events of Christ’s ascent and the Spirit’s descent changed the way those first followers experienced discipleship from that moment on, but also revealed the trinitarian structure of the discipleship they had already been living. None of them had come to Jesus without being drawn by the Father, and none called Jesus Lord except by the Holy Spirit (John 6:44; 1 Cor. 12:3).

Once you notice this, you begin to see that the Gospels are full of moments when Jesus’s teaching about the Father and the Spirit soars right over the heads of his followers. The evangelists, writing after Pentecost, can tell readers “they did not understand that he had been speaking to them about the Father” (John 8:27), or “this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7:39). Discipleship always was and always will be trinitarian all the way down.

Encountering the Whole Trinity through Jesus

The other thing to notice about discipleship’s trinitarian fulfillment goes even deeper, and reaches back even further.

The ultimate reason that the Father and the Spirit are not distractions from the Son, or displacements of Jesus from his central place in our lives, is that God is one. The unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a deeper, stronger, more intimate union than anything in creation. It’s simply not possible to know one person of the Trinity without the others. Any experience of Father, Son, or Holy Spirit is strongly, inwardly bound to the fullness of triune deity. In that perfect triune oneness above all worlds, which would have eternally been itself in divine blessedness whether disciples existed or not, the Son is never without his Father and their Holy Spirit.

This is why, when we live as disciples of Christ, we can focus our attention on Jesus and in that very event encounter the Father and Spirit. This is why, if you follow Jesus, you follow him to his Father by the Spirit.

Instead, she threw out promises like “Heaven has the best trampoline parks!” I interrupted with the crushing news: the Bible never promises eternal trampoline parks, but it does promise eternity with Jesus. Now I had not one but two skeptical faces staring back. The younger one broke the silence: “It doesn’t sound very fun to me.”

What do we do when our children are unimpressed by the promise of God’s holy presence in heaven? How do we react when the idea of eternity downright terrifies them? First, don’t panic. Most of my children still think McDonald’s is better than a five-star steak dinner. Still, we should remember the high calling parents have to “teach them diligently” (Deut. 6:7). 

Here are four ways to set aside panic and help shape your child’s view of heaven.

1. Talk about death.

Instead of shielding kids from the topic, speak openly about saints who have passed from this life—a world peppered with pain and disappointment—into an eternity of endless joy with the Lord. Speak of those saints in the present tense, because they’re in the presence of God and are now more alive than ever. 

Speak of those saints in the present tense, because they’re in the presence of God and are now more alive than ever.

Do you speak of death in a way that could lead your children to fear? Or perhaps you avoid the topic altogether, causing them to fill that void of information with fear of the unknown? 

Rather than only focusing on the end of earthly life, sprinkle into your talks specific promises you look forward to experiencing in heaven. It’s OK to distinguish between the temporary unpleasantness of dying with the eternal joy that awaits Christians on the other side of it.

2. Showcase the greatness of Jesus.

Let your children see you enjoy the Lord—in a corporate worship service, in private prayer, in service to your church, or even as you enjoy a beautiful day he provided. Connect the dots between the good things you love and the God who gave them to you. 

I often point out a beautiful sunset or full moon and quote Psalm 19 to my children. Make note of how the Lord created the beauty they see around them as a gift and a reminder of his glory. Ask them to imagine how beautiful heaven must be with the glory of God on full display.

3. Speak directly to your children about their fears. 

As a child, I was overwhelmed by the idea that heaven had no end. Even the best day of ice cream sundaes and swimming with friends seemed downright miserable when I imagined it on repeat for-ev-er. But as I grew older, I realized the magnitude, intricacy, and beauty of God meant I would need an eternity to explore the depths of his character. 

Think about the complexity of the universe and how long it would take to investigate every galaxy, star, planet, and black hole in the entire creation. Genesis tells us “God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars” (Gen 1:16). “And the stars” isn’t even a sentence, yet it would take us millennia to explore this one aspect of God’s intricate creation. 

The Lord made his creation for his glory, and he made us to enjoy his endless glory. We already know that God’s creation is endlessly interesting, so there’s no chance that spending eternity exploring God himself will be a snoozer.

We already know that God’s creation is endlessly interesting, so there’s no chance that spending eternity exploring God himself will be a snoozer.

Maybe your child’s fear isn’t boredom but separation from you. What a great opportunity to talk to your child about how God is a good Father. Or maybe your child fears the unfamiliarity of heaven. Discuss how God is going to make all things new, and how there will be no need for any tears in a believer’s new home. Soothe your child’s specific fears with comforting truth found in Scripture.

4. Give them biblical theology.

Teach your kids theological truth about who God is and how he has revealed himself. Bring them into the grand narrative God tells in the Bible with simple categories like his goodness in creation, our fall, redemption through Christ, and the new creation that awaits believers. 

Christ has defeated and will destroy death forever. His resurrection proves it. So, we can tell our kids that the culmination of the greatest story ever told ends not with death but with all God’s people living with him happily ever after. 

We can tell our kids that the culmination of the greatest story ever told ends not with death but with all God’s people living with him happily ever after.

Heaven is where humans fulfill their purpose of knowing and enjoying the One who designed us to do just that! No trampoline park on earth could be as exciting as eternity with the King who came to ransom his people from death and reward them with abundant life.

Parents, we can encourage our kids with our confidence of being in heaven with Christ. We must remember to live like we believe God will one day wipe away every tear (Rev. 7:17). That includes tears we shed out of fear for our children. 

Our sons and daughters learn most from us as they observe us. So let us prayerfully and deliberately trust God with them and offer them something much more eternally satisfying than even the best trampoline park in the world: the Lord himself.

As a Lutheran pastor with a commitment to the ministry of Word and sacrament, I appreciate both the centrality of in-person worship to the Christian life and the fears that online worship experiences could pull people away from these vital activities. There are some things you just can’t do virtually.

The technology many fear will disconnect people from authentic Christian community can actually become a catalyst for people to experience that very community.

And yet in my seven years of experience with streaming—both as the church planter of a young congregation and now as the pastor of a 110-year-old congregation—I’ve discovered the technology many feared would disconnect people from authentic Christian community can actually become a catalyst for people to experience that very community. That includes, for our church, an increase of in-person attendance.

Over the years I’ve seen three key benefits to streaming worship.

1. Connecting with the disconnected outside our community.

In the digital age, people research everything online—what phone to buy, what restaurant to try, even what church to visit. Most new people who attend our church in person have watched up to three messages before walking through our door. Our livestream made them comfortable on the front end, and when they finally came to our church they felt a deeper connection because of their time spent connecting online.

In the digital age, people research everything online—what phone to buy, what restaurant to try, even what church to visit.

Moreover, in an age when everyone has personal platforms via social media, people make it a point to share things online—whether funny videos, powerful quotes, or even their pastor’s message. When things make their way online, they can find new life through people sharing the content. This leads to the message going places you would least expect. At one point I discovered our Sunday messages were being used in a secret house church in China!

You never know whom God will touch with his message when you post it online. In a culture that’s becoming increasingly post-Christian, is it wise to limit the places we’re sharing the gospel?

2. Connecting with the disconnected inside our community.

We often hear the arguments for how streaming pulls people away from the community of the church, but for some the livestream may be their only lifeline to the church. We can focus so much on the potential attendance benefits of online worship that we miss the benefits for spiritual care.

The pandemic has given us a new sympathy for those who are shut in and cut off. Overnight our congregations were given a firsthand look into the life of a shut-in—what it feels like to be cut off from the place you receive Word and sacrament and experience life-giving Christian community. Online worship was a vital connection to a message and a community you depend on in a season of uncertainty.

The pandemic has given us a firsthand look into the life of a shut-in—what it feels like to be cut off from the place you receive the Word and sacraments.

When we launched a livestream in a pre-COVID world, the main responses were from the hospitalized and the homebound. Feeling connected to the community, even for just one hour on a Sunday, gave them a sense of joy amid their trials. This is one of the main reasons ours will always be a church that streams worship—it connects the otherwise disconnected in our community.

3. Fostering a love of gathered worship through consistency.

The final benefit of streaming touches on an issue all churches wrestle with and lament: gathered worship no longer seems to be a central priority in the lives of many Christians. We live in a highly mobile culture in which regular church attendance has dropped from once a week to once a month. Vacations, youth sports, and other priorities seem to pull on people more in our generation than in our parents’ or grandparents’ generations.

In a time when everyone’s on the move, broadcasting your services online can keep people connected to the teaching series even when they won’t be there in person. This creates a new consistency in the teaching they’re receiving. The person who was only engaging with one or two worship services a month is now engaging with services every week, some in person and some online. The person who missed a message is now able to go back and watch.

By engaging online when they’re away, they can develop the rhythm and habit of hearing and engaging with the Word. This regular engagement with the Word preached creates an increased hunger for it.

There are certainly understandable fears that an online option will pull people away from the in-person worship that’s central to Christian life. But in our experience, the opposite has been true. Streaming worship has been a catalyst to in-person connection with authentic Christian community.

How Can They Hear?

I’m reminded of Paul’s words as he shares his desire for God to turn the heart of his people:

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of this who preach the good news!” (Rom. 10:14–15)

This principle reminds me of the importance of getting the word out by every means possible. If the road for online ministry has been opened, let’s use it to proclaim the unchanging gospel to our ever-changing world. And when people connect with that gospel—even if online—the work of the Spirit will lead them to the community of God’s people in his gathered church.

We believe it is time to cut the feed.

The Point of Gathering

Worshiping as a church is an embodied experience, in both its individual and communal dimensions. The Bible is clear that gathering is essential for the life of the church. In Matthew 18:17–20, in the context of Jesus speaking about the church, he makes his beloved promise: “where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” Paul admonishes Christians to celebrate the Lord’s Supper when they have come together (1 Cor. 11:33). The author of Hebrews tells us to not neglect meeting together (Heb. 10:25).

We are not simply minds that passively take in the prayers, teaching, and worship of a worship service. Rather, as those created body and mind after the image of God, we must experience what is sung, prayed, taught, and tasted in worshiping God with our whole selves.

Our voices lift up together in corporate confession in song. Our hearts bow in corporate submission in prayer. Our bodies partake in a corporate meal in the Lord’s Supper. We are corporately commissioned with a blessing from the Lord in benediction. The sermon is the pinnacle of this corporate gathering, through which God addresses his people.

These are actions of a covenant people in covenant assembly worshiping the covenant God. Trying to accomplish these things by yourself through a device pales in comparison to the real thing.

A faint hint of that experience can be felt in a livestream, but at its best, livestreaming is the spiritual equivalent of a deployed soldier having a Zoom relationship with his wife: necessary, but nothing you’d want to get used to.

Livestreaming is the spiritual equivalent of a deployed soldier having a Zoom relationship with his wife: necessary, but nothing you’d want to get used to.

At its worst, it’s like playing a football video game and claiming to be in the NFL. Even more, satisfying ourselves with this little taste actively works against our desire for the real thing. We’ve all learned this year that we stream what we have to, but we show up for what is truly important. In-person worship is one of those things.

How Streaming Hurts Us

We have enough data now to see that streaming fuels consumeristic church, enables laziness, and fools people into thinking they’re being nourished and built up. Online church is the Cliff’s Notes of worship. It’s a cheap substitute.

But what about the evangelistic opportunities?

We are sympathetic to this argument and appreciate the heart behind it. Churches claim that their reach is far greater now as their analytics soar, and non-Christians might see the service in their social-media feed. There may well be new Christians out there from a livestream, but the vast majority of these clicks are from people who couldn’t attend their church and picked the best online experience that Sunday.

Online church is the Cliff’s Notes of worship. It’s a cheap substitute.

We are thankful for the ways technology has enabled people to hear sermons and music outside the walls of the church. But even the best online experience is not better than in-person worship, and all parties suffer.

Well-meaning churches that hire online pastors to reach more people may well be doing the opposite and contributing to the dechurching of America. We continue to lower the bar, keep people from what they need most, and make it easier to stay disconnected from the body of Christ.

But this allows us to reach people who have moved away.

The best way to serve those who have moved away is not keeping them tied to your church’s worship, your finances, and your membership roll. The best way to serve them is to push them to connect with a church where they live, and to assist them in every way possible in finding a healthy church. It is simply a game of make-believe to pretend that they’re still in the fellowship of your local body of believers when their body is hundreds of miles away.

But what about the homebound?

This is the most compelling argument to us. As much as we want to serve these people and should work hard to minister to them, the principle still holds true that to livestream a worship service is to say something patently false about what worship is at its core.

While we may be swayed to provide a recording of the service afterward for them, we believe it is important to maintain the integrity of the gathering by not acting like a livestream is the same thing, even for those unable to partake.

When to Cut The Feed?

So when do we pull the plug? We’ve decided that we will pull the plug when everyone older than 18 who wants a vaccine has access to it. In our context, that means late May. After we cut the livestream at Orlando Grace Church, we will still provide sermon videos because they’re helpful in many ways. They just aren’t a substitute for in-person worship.

We’re thankful for the technology that got us through this pandemic, but we’re looking forward to diverting our resources elsewhere. We will continue to use technology to build the church through sermons, podcasting, live devotions, and social media, but we won’t continue to provide an imitation of embodied worship now that it’s reasonably safe to gather together again.

She discusses:

• The negative temptation of sexual desire (0:00)
• Loving those who identify as LGBT while remaining true to biblical beliefs (3:06)
• Leading with the gospel of grace (4:11)
• Invite, listen, protect, and invest (5:10)
• Referring to a transgender person by their desired pronoun (6:23)
• Struggling with sexuality and maintaining faith (9:30)
• Confession, conviction, and comfort (10:43)
• God’s Spirit, God’s Word, and God’s people (12:26)

Explore more from TGC on the topic of sexuality.

Rachel’s recommended resources:

• Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church, and What the Bible Has to Say by Preston Sprinkle
• Gay Girl, Good God by Jackie Hill Perry
• 7 Myths About Singleness by Sam Allberry
• Born Again This Way by Rachel Gilson

I volunteered to take this question because I’ve had to spend far too much time thinking about these issues.

From the time I became a teenager until I joined the Marines (at 19), I worked a dozen different jobs. At various times I worked as an assistant to an oilfield electrician (fixing motors on pump jacks), an assistant to an irrigator (putting pipes in soil), and an assistant to a farrier (pulling horseshoes off ponies). Often I had multiple jobs, such as when I worked as a telemarketer, waiter, and pizza delivery driver. I also worked at a fast-food restaurant making fries and at an auto-parts factory making emergency brakes for the Ford Taurus.

Five Factors

I had a lot of jobs, but not much guidance. Here’s what I wish I’d had known back then.

1. Pay and Hours

The primary question to be answered when considering this issue is What does my teen most need from of this job? For many families, the answer is simply money. Many teens take summer jobs because they need money to supplement the family income, often by allowing them to partially pay for their own consumption. In such cases the key formula is “earnings = pay x hours”—you want to maximize the amount earned by taking the job that either pays the most or offers the most hours the teen can work. This may seem obvious, but many a teen has turned down a job paying $7.25 for 15 hours to take “more money” at $8 for 10 hours a week.

2. Working on Sunday

There’s no prohibition in the Bible about Christians working on Sunday. Sunday is not the Christian Sabbath. What we find in Scripture is an admonition against “neglecting to meet together” as the church (Heb. 10:25). You and your teen need to consider what this means in your situation, and how taking a job will affect fulfilling that command.

3. Resume-Building

If your teen’s taking a job because it will “look good on a resume,” then he’s likely on a privileged path and doesn’t need a summer job for a successful career. Jobs that do look good on such resumes are called “internships.” They often pay nothing—or pay with “experience”—because the teen isn’t perceived as adding value. The exception is “blue-collar” jobs in which the skills are directly transferable to a specific trade. If your child is thinking of taking up a skilled trade requiring manual labor, then working in that area now will give him an edge on future competition.

4. Work Environment and Culture

The primary concern about the work culture should be about avoiding sinful influences. Scripture has a lot to say about the company we keep: “Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm” (Prov. 13:20); “My son, if sinful men entice you, do not give in to them” (Prov. 1:10); “Do not be misled: ‘Bad company corrupts good character’” (1 Cor. 15:33). For better and for worse, your child will be influenced by the people he associates with during a summer job.

I know that in my experience as a young worker, I was more likely to be led astray than to lead others to Christ.

In our attempt to be caring and compassionate, we sometimes put our children in relational danger. We encourage our child to befriend peers the apostle Paul would deem “bad company,” and justify the relationship by telling ourselves our child will be a good—perhaps even godly— influence on a wayward neighbor. But we Christian parents tend to overestimate the moral influence and leadership abilities of our children. Instead of being a role model, our children may be the ones enticed to sin. I know that in my experience as a young worker, I was more likely to be led astray than to lead others to Christ.

5. Transportation to and from Work

The burden of transportation should be on the teen, not on Mom—and definitely not on the manager (Phil. 2:4). It’s better for him to take a low-paying job where he can walk to work on time than a higher-paying job he’ll frequently be late for due to lacking a ride.

The Nature of Calling

I will include one other factor: the teen should understand the nature of calling.

A survey by the Barna Group found a majority of Christian workers believe most occupations can be categorized as “callings.” But Barna also found Christians think there is a hierarchy in this regard, with ministry-related jobs at the top and more technical jobs at the bottom. More than half of Christians say being a pastor, missionary, worship leader, or parent is “usually a calling,” while slightly fewer than half believe that being an accountant, pediatrician, firefighter, or non-pastoral church staff is “sometimes a calling.”

Know which of the jobs I had that were my “calling”? All of them. The same is true for your teen.

Our calling is whatever work God has called us to do wherever we are at any particular time. If you have a legitimate job, it’s because God has called you to that work. God calls us to such work because our labor serves the needs of our neighbors. In fact, for most of us, the labor we’re engaged in for our jobs is the primary way we serve our neighbors (1 Pet. 4:10).

Let your teen know that whatever job he takes, he is to “work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving” (Col. 3:23–24).

You can read other installments in the Thorns & Thistles series.

When it released in theaters I took about 30 of my closest friends to watch it at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood (the most iconic screen to watch the most iconic movies). I hosted a post-film party and discussion at a nearby hotel that went late into the night. Over the top? Yes. But it was fitting for an over-the-top beautiful masterpiece like Tree of Life. Back then I had more margin in my life to “go big” on things like hosting parties and film screenings. In May 2011 I was 28, single, and had just started dating Kira, who is now my wife. The season was spring, but that was my life stage too.

‘The Father’ and the Forces of Time

A decade later; 10 years older. Spring is transitioning to summer. I’m a husband now, and a father of two boys. And like it did then, my life stage now is a lens through which I interpret films. The Tree of Life hits me differently now than it did a decade ago, largely because I’m a dad. It’s true of other films too.

I recently watched The Father, the film for which Anthony Hopkins won the Oscar as best actor this year. It’s a heartbreaking, too-real look at aging. Anthony (the character purposefully shares the same name as the actor playing him) has dementia and the film puts us in his shoes, as we watch his daughter (Olivia Colman) and others try to help him sort through the puzzle of past memories and present realities. The film brilliantly puts audiences in the same confusion Anthony experiences. As we watch, we become painfully aware: this will happen to our parents one day. It will happen to us.

Every human life is a progression of seasons. The newness of spring. The prime of summer. The past-your-prime decay of autumn. And then the final season: barrenness and death.

Deciduous trees go through this cycle annually, as the world turns. But humans go through it once. Ours is a brutally singular journey—a one-shot deal. For this reason, time can feel like a too-fast foe. We blink and a decade has passed. Can’t our spring and summer be a bit longer? Solomon was right in Ecclesiastes 3: A time to be born and a time to die (v. 2); dust to dust (v. 20); the pull of eternity set in our hearts (v. 11). Time’s finitude feels cruel and unusual.

I’m in a sweet season right now. My boys are a delight. My wife and I sit in our backyard as our boys play under the avocado tree, and the force of time momentarily abates. But it won’t last. Just like that another decade will be gone. I’ll be 48 and Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life will be 20. And then another decade, and another.

Losing Leaves

In some ways, The Father and The Tree of Life could not be more different films. Malick’s epic is sprawling in scope, spanning the globe and the history of the universe (including dinosaurs). The Father is an intimate drama set mostly in an apartment. Directed by Florian Zeller, the film is based on his acclaimed stage play of the same name (Zeller has also directed plays called The Mother and The Son).

But the films have much in common too. Both are about memory and the mixture of both painful and healing remembrance. Both are about the stabilizing force family can be in a hostile universe. Both are about grieving the death of a loved one, and the various letting gos that constitute a life.

The final words of The Tree of Life are iconic words of release, spoken by Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) in a prayer to God (that could just as easily be words spoken by God, back to her): “I give him to you. I give you my son.”

One of the final lines in The Father also speaks to release, but in a more reluctant sense: “I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves.” Indeed, the final minutes of The Father are a painful, grievous exhale as Anthony comes to terms with the fact that he can’t control the degeneration set in motion (“I don’t know what’s happening anymore”).

Life in time is constant release. A constant goodbye. An onward march of endings—some we can bear, and some we can’t.

Life in time is constant release. An onward march of endings—some we can bear, and some we can’t.

The Tree of Life is full of endings. A boy dies young. A star dies in a supernova. An asteroid hits Earth and ends the age of dinosaurs. One ending in particular—when the O’Brien family packs their car and drives away from their beloved Texas house for the last time—always gets me.

I remember the same experience, driving away from my boyhood home in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. I cried as I looked out the back windshield, feeling an ache in my gut. Life’s transience. A moving scene in The Tree of Life captures this ache well, and the words we hear from the mother in this moment are among the film’s most memorable: “Unless you love, your life will flash by.”

How do we cope in a world of constant loss and relentless speed? We love.

Loving Leaves

One of the other memorable lines in The Tree of Life is a paraphrase of Dostoevsky, again spoken by Chastain’s character: “Help each other. Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive.”

Love every leaf. We must love things in their precious fragility; otherwise we’ll be too paralyzed by the reality of their impermanence. To love God and love what he made—creation, especially his precious image-bearers—is to do what we were created to do (Mark 12:30–31) and thus to flourish in a world of contingency. Absent that love, all we can do is worry about what we’ll lose, and how fast we’ll lose it.

The breathtaking final scene of The Father finds Anthony in the tender, motherly embrace of his nurse (Olivia Williams). He’s losing it, but she soothes him. She holds him and suggests going on a walk in the park, “just the two of us,” because “it’s sunny outside.”

“We have to go while it’s sunny,” she tells him. “We have to take that chance. Because it never lasts long when the weather’s this good, does it?”

Indeed. It doesn’t last long. So take someone’s hand, and go for a walk in the warmth of the sun. Love every leaf. As if to underscore the idea, the final shot of The Father lingers over the rustling of green, verdant leaves outside Anthony’s window. You can almost hear the words of Simon and Garfunkel singing in the distance:

I was 21 years when I wrote this song
I’m 22 now but I won’t be for long
Time hurries on
And the leaves that are green turn to brown

Holding each other in love and tenderness doesn’t stop time, but surrounds it with grace and hope. The final words of The Father capture the hope of something beyond: “Everything will be all right.”

Between Two Trees

It’s spring now, summer soon, but then it will be fall. The cycle goes on. Summer never lasts. In the meantime, we live in the tension of life between the two trees: the Tree of Life in Eden (Gen. 2:9), and the Tree of Life in eternity (Rev. 22:2). Another tree—the cross of Christ (1 Pet. 2:24)—gives us concrete hope that our present “momentary affliction” will one day give way to an “eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:16–18).

For now, we live, and we love, in the ruins; in a fallen and fragile world where anything might be lost at any moment. We decay. It’s painful to watch. We gradually lose our leaves—our loved ones, our memories, our bodily functions.

But look at the trees, and the leaves, around you. Look at nature’s seasonal renewal cycle. It testifies to a hope that one day, those of us in Christ will live in springs once again, and perpetually.

On the other hand, we don’t want to undermine practical biblical authority by declaring that all we have are “interpretations.” The existence of rival interpretations does not preclude that one of them is right or at least more correct than another. “Come now, let us reason together” is necessary advice for God’s people today as much as it ever has been (Isa. 1:18).

With that in mind, let me address a number of common objections to complementarianism.

Objection 1: Galatians 3:28

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

For some Christians, this text settles the question of sex roles in the church. While Paul’s teachings in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy were more occasional, they argue, this is clearly transcultural. Galatians 3:28 is the verse. Nothing can be understood about men and women apart from it, and every verse must go through it in order to have validity.

But aside from the questionable approach of making this verse the final word on the subject, does it teach what some Christians claim? Does Galatians 3:28 obliterate sex-specific roles in the church?

Consider the broader context of Galatians. Paul is trying to forge a theological path through the Jew-Gentile controversy ravaging the church. The main issue at stake is whether Gentiles have to start living like Jews in order to be saved. This in turn brings Paul back to the larger question of what it means to be a true Jew in the first place. Do we receive the Spirit by the law, or by believing (3:2)? Are we justified by the law, or through faith (2:16)? Paul’s clear answer is that we are declared right before God through faith in Christ.

But some Jews were in danger of missing the boat. Peter, for example, had to be rebuked because he refused table fellowship with Gentiles (Gal. 2:11–14). Apparently, some in Galatia were making the similar error of thinking Jews and Gentiles were on a different spiritual plane. Against this error, Paul strenuously argues that we are all one in Christ.

So what does it mean that we are all one? In what way is there neither male nor female? Does sexual difference cease to matter for those in Christ? Certainly not, or the logic behind Paul’s condemnation of same-sex sexual intimacy would not make sense (Rom. 1:18–32).

Nowhere in Paul’s letters do we get the smallest hint that male and female have ceased to be important categories for life and ministry. Paul is not obliterating sexual difference across the board. Rather, he is reminding the Galatians that when it comes to being right before God and being together in Christ, the markers of sex, ethnicity, and station are of no advantage.

Nowhere in Paul’s letters do we get the smallest hint that male and female have ceased to be important categories for life and ministry.

At the risk of importing our modern sensibilities into the biblical world, we can say, in a carefully defined sense, that Paul teaches an equality between the sexes. Both men and women are held prisoners under the law (3:23), both are justified by faith (3:24), both are set free from the bonds of the law (3:25), both are sons of God in Christ (3:26), both are clothed in Christ (3:27), and both belong to Christ as heirs according to the promise (3:29). Paul’s point is not that maleness and femaleness are abolished in Christ, but that sexual difference neither moves one closer to God nor makes one farther from him.

Objection 2: Ephesians 5:21

“submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21).

No one should deny that we are to love one another, prefer others above ourselves, deal gently with each other, respond kindly, and treat others with respect and humility. That’s a kind of “mutual submission” I suppose, but is that what the text is talking about? Some Christians maintain that mutual submission cancels out differences in marital responsibilities and structures of authority. Even if wives are told to submit to their husbands (and the Greek word is implied but not stated in verse 22), this is only in the context of already submitting to one another. That’s the argument, but does it hold up?

The key to understanding verse 21 is to look at what comes next. Following the injunction to submit to one another, Paul outlines the proper relationship between different parties. Wives should submit to husbands, children obey their parents, and slaves obey their masters. Paul has in mind specific relationships when he commands mutual submission.

His concern is not that everyone deal graciously and respectfully with one another (though that’s a good idea too) but that Christians submit to those who are in authority over them: wives to husbands, children to parents, slaves to masters. Submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ means that we submit to those whose position entails authority over us. (It is also worth pointing out that the “one another” language does not always imply reciprocity. See, for example, Matt. 24:10; Luke 12:1; 1 Cor. 7:5; 11:33.)

Any other meaning of Ephesians 5:21 does not do justice to the Greek. The word for submission (hypotasso) is never used in the New Testament as a generic love and respect for others. Hypotasso occurs 37 times in the New Testament outside of Ephesians 5:21, always with reference to a relationship in which one party has authority over another.

Thus, Jesus submits (hypotasso) to his parents (Luke 2:51), demons to the disciples (Luke 10:17, 20), the flesh to the law (Rom. 8:7), creation to futility (Rom. 8:20), the Jews to God’s righteousness (Rom. 10:3), citizens to their rulers and governing officials (Rom. 13:1, 5; Titus 3:1; 1 Pet. 2:13), spirit of the prophets to the prophets (1 Cor. 14:32), women in churches (1 Cor. 14:34), Christians to God (Heb. 12:9; James 4:7), all things to Christ or God (1 Cor. 15:27–28; Eph. 1:22; Phil. 3:21; Heb. 2:5, 8; 1 Pet. 3:22), the Son to God (1 Cor. 15:28), wives to husbands (Eph. 5:24; Col. 3:18; 1 Pet. 3:1, 5), slaves to masters (Titus 2:9; 1 Pet. 2:18); the younger to their elders (1 Pet. 5:5), and Christians to gospel workers (1 Cor. 16:16). Nowhere in the New Testament does hypotasso refer to the reciprocal virtues of patience, kindness, and humility. It is always for one party or person or thing lining up under the authority of another.

Objection 3: Slavery

Christians are often embarrassed by the Bible’s seeming indifference toward, or even endorsement of, slavery. Since the New Testament household codes command the wife’s submission and the slave’s obedience, some Christians conclude that both injunctions must be cultural. They argue that God did not create slavery or male headship; he simply regulated them. And even though the New Testament does not overturn these patterns, it does encourage equality and respect among all people, sowing the seeds for the full emancipation of women and slaves in the future.

What are we to make of this argument? The best way to approach this objection is to start with an honest assessment of the Bible’s perspective on slavery. It’s true that the Bible does not condemn slavery outright. Remember, however, that slavery in the ancient world was not about race. In America, you can’t talk about slavery without talking about blacks and whites. But that wasn’t the context in the ancient world. Slavery was a lot of things, but it wasn’t a race thing.

But still, why didn’t Paul, or Jesus for that matter, denounce the institution of slavery? For starters, their goal was not political and social revolution. To be sure, political and social change followed in their wake, but their primary goal was spiritual. They proclaimed a message of faith and repentance and reconciliation with God. They simply did not comment on every political and social issue of the day. In fact, Paul in the book of Acts is eager to demonstrate that being a Christian did not make one a rabble-rouser or insurrectionist.

More to the point, the New Testament does not condemn slavery outright because slavery in the ancient world was not always undesirable (considering the alternatives). Some persons sold themselves into slavery to escape grinding poverty. Others entered into slavery with hopes of paying off debts or coming out on the other side as Roman citizens. Slavery didn’t have to be a permanent condition. It could be a step toward a better lot in life.

Of course, we don’t want to paint a rosy picture of slavery in the ancient world. It was dehumanizing and unbearable. Masters could treat their slaves cruelly and force them—male and female, young and old—into sexual degradation. Nevertheless, slavery could be a manageable way out of dire poverty.

In the Old Testament, for example, there were a number of ways for slaves to gain their freedoms. In some circumstances, you were set free after six years. Other times, a relative could purchase your freedom or you could purchase it yourself. And at the Year of Jubilee, Hebrew slaves were released and received back their inheritance. The Old Testament regulated slavery in a number of ways without ever explicitly condemning it.

While the Bible does not condemn slavery outright, it never condones slavery, and certainly never commends it. Slavery is not celebrated as a God-given gift like children are. Slavery was not pronounced good before the fall like work was. John Chrysostom, preaching in the fourth century, explained the marriage passage in Ephesians 5 and the slavery passage in Ephesians 6 in very different language. On why wives should submit to their husbands, he writes:

Because when they are in harmony, the children are well brought up, and the domestics are in good order, and neighbors, and friends, and relations enjoy the fragrance. . . . And just as when the generals of an army are at peace with one another, all things are in due subordination . . . so, I say, it is here. Wherefore, saith he, “Wives, be in subjection unto your husbands, as unto the Lord.”

Chrysostom assumes submission in marriage to be an unqualified good. But when it comes to slavery in Ephesians 6, he comments:

But should anyone ask, whence is slavery, and why it has found entrance into human life . . . I will tell you. Slavery is the fruit of covetousness, of degradation, of savagery; since Noah, we know, had no servant, nor had Abel, nor Seth, no, nor they who came after them. The thing was the fruit of sin, of rebellion against parents.

Clearly, Chrysostom’s approach to slavery is much different than to submission. Headship and submission in marriage were self-evident to him, even when justification for the institution of slavery was not.

Slavery is never rooted in God’s good purposes for his creation. In fact, slavery as it developed in the New World would have been outlawed in the Old Testament. “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death” (Ex. 21:16). That command alone would not allow for anything like the African slave trade. Likewise 1 Timothy 1:8–10:

Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.

The Bible clearly condemns taking someone captive and selling him into slavery.

While Paul did not encourage widespread political revolution and the overthrow of the institution of slavery, he did encourage slaves to gain their freedom if possible. “Each one should remain in the condition in which he was called. Were you a bondservant when called? Do not be concerned about it. (But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity)” (1 Cor. 7:20–21). When Paul sent Onesimus, the runaway slave turned Christian, back to his Christian master, Philemon, Paul gave Philemon this advice:

For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother—especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord. (Philem. 15–16)

Far from commending slavery an inherent good, Paul encouraged slaves to gain their freedom if possible. He exhorted masters like Philemon to welcome their slaves, not as slaves, but as brothers.

The bottom line is that the Bible, without commending it to us, regulated the institution of slavery where it existed. I imagine if Paul were writing to families today with stepchildren and stepparents, he might say something like, “Children, obey your stepdads, for this is right in the Lord. Stepdads, love your stepchildren as if they were your very own. For God loves you though you once did not belong to him.”

If that’s what Paul wrote to us, we would know how children and stepdads should relate to each other, but we wouldn’t have any warrant for thinking that Paul was in favor of divorce and remarriage. We would realize he is not commenting one way or the other on the situation. He is simply regulating an arrangement that already exists and has no signs of going away, even if the arrangement was not a part of God’s good design from the beginning.

Objection 4: Women in Ministry in the Bible

“What about all the women engaged in ministry in the Bible?” some may ask. Women in ministry is not the problem (it is to be encouraged). The problem is women in inappropriate positions of ministry. Some Christians, of course, argue that there are no inappropriate roles for women.

To bolster their claim, they point to what they see as myriad women throughout the Bible in positions of leadership. For example, one might argue that the commands in 1 Timothy 2 must be uniquely for the situation in Ephesus, because a number of women throughout the Bible taught and exercised authority over men.

The existence of rival interpretations does not preclude that one of them is right or at least more correct than another.

Let’s look briefly at several of the most common examples and see if these women exercised the kind of authority and engaged in the kind of teaching out of step with the pattern in Genesis and the activities prohibited by Paul.

Deborah

Deborah seems to be a glaring exception to the rule laid out in 1 Timothy 2. She was a prophetess, and a judge, and she oversaw a period of victory and peace in Israel (Judg. 4–5). While Deborah fulfilled these important roles, she performed them uniquely as a woman and in different ways than the men who had served in these capacities.

First, she seems to be the only judge with no military function. Deborah, instead, is instructed to send for Barak (a man) to conduct the military maneuvers (4:5–7). Even when Deborah goes with Barak into battle, he is the one who leads the 10,000 men into the fray (4:10, 14–16).

Second, Barak is rebuked for insisting that Deborah go with him in the first place. Deborah willingly handed over the leadership to Barak and then shamed him for his hesitation (4:9). Hence, the glory would not go to Barak but to Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite (4:9, 22). Third, whatever sort of authority Deborah shared with Barak, it was not a priestly or teaching authority.

Prophetesses

Besides Deborah, several other women are called prophetesses in the Old and New Testaments: Miriam (Ex. 15:20), Huldah (2 Kings 22:14), Noadiah (Neh. 6:14), Anna (Luke 2:36), and Philip’s daughters (Acts 21:8–9). Two comments may help put the ministry of prophetesses in its proper context.

First, recall that New Testament prophecy was not identical with other forms of word ministry. Congregational prophets in the New Testament were given occasional Spirit-prompted utterances that needed to be weighed against accepted teaching. Philip’s daughters and the prophets at Corinth were not the same as preachers or authoritative teachers.

Second, in the Old Testament, where prophecy carries absolute authority, we see women prophetesses carrying out their ministry differently from male prophets. Miriam ministered to women (Ex. 15:20), and Deborah and Huldah prophesied more privately than publicly.  In contrast to prophets such as Isaiah or Jeremiah who publicly declared the word of the Lord for all to hear, Deborah judged among those who came to her in private (Judg. 4:5) and instructed Barak individually, while Huldah prophesied privately to the messengers Josiah sent to her (2 Kings 22:14–20). Noadiah, the only other prophetess mentioned in the Old Testament, opposed Nehemiah along with the wicked prophet Shemaiah. The example of Noadiah, disobedient as she was, tells us nothing about God’s design for women in ministry.

Priscilla

Mentioned three times in the book of Acts and three times in the Epistles, Priscilla/Prisca was obviously well known in the early church (Acts 18:2, 18, 26; Rom. 16:3; 1 Cor. 16:19; 2 Tim. 4:19). She is most often listed first before her husband, Aquilla, which may or may not be significant.

Perhaps she was the more prominent of the two, or maybe she converted before her husband, or maybe the disciples just got to know her first (like when you are friends with Sally for a long time and then she marries Joe so you refer to them as “Sally and Joe”). In any case, together they instructed the influential teacher Apollos. But again, this teaching was done in private (Acts 18:26). Priscilla may have been learned, wise, and influential, but there is no indication that she exercised teaching authority over men.

Phoebe

Paul commends Phoebe to the Romans as a diakonos of the church in Cenchrea (Rom. 16:1). This may mean that Phoebe was a deaconess or that she was more generally a servant. The word itself is ambiguous. In either case, there is no indication that Phoebe the servant was a teacher or leader over men.

Junia

Paul gives Andronicus and Junia greetings, hailing them as “outstanding among the apostles” (Rom. 16:7, NIV). Some Christians use this verse to argue that a woman can exercise authority over men because Junia (a woman) was an apostle. This is a thin argument for several reasons.

First, it is likely that Junia (iounian in Greek) is a man, not a woman. Second, “outstanding among the apostles” suggests that Junia was held in esteem by the apostles, not that she was an apostle. Third, even if Junia was a woman and was an apostle, it is not clear that she was an apostle like the Twelve. “Apostle” can be used in a less technical sense as a messenger or representative (2 Cor. 8:23; Phil. 2:25).

Euodia and Syntyche

Euodia and Syntyche (both women) were fellow workers with Paul, who contended at his side in the cause of the gospel (Phil. 4:3). Nothing here implies teaching or authority over men. There are hundreds of ways to work for the cause of this gospel without violating the norms established in 1 Timothy and the patterns found in the rest of Scripture.

Without apology, we ought to fully affirm the important work Euodia and Syntyche performed, and millions of women continue to do, in the cause of the gospel, without thinking that their presence in ministry somehow overturns the biblical teaching on men and women in the church.

Elect Lady

Some maintain that the “elect lady” in 2 John is the pastor/elder of the church. The elect lady, however, is not the pastor of the church; she is the church. Not only is the letter much too general to be addressed to a specific person (cf. 3 John), and not only is female imagery often used of the church (cf. Eph. 5; Rev. 12), but, most decisively, John uses the second-person plural throughout 2 John, indicating that he has not an individual in mind but a body of believers (vv. 6, 8, 10, 12).

Objection 5: Gifts and Calling

Women have vital spiritual gifts, including gifts of teaching and leadership. We all know women who are great organizers, administrators, communicators, and leaders. No one wants to waste those gifts. But the Bible stipulates certain ways in which these gifts are to be used. Women can, and should, exercise powerful gifts of teaching, provided it is not over men. Surely teaching children and other women is not a waste of a woman’s gifts?

Moreover, the fact that people have benefited from women’s gifts wrongly used (having teaching authority over men) is an argument based on effect more than obedience. That God uses us at all, when we as a church seem to stray from his word so frequently, is a testimony to God’s grace, not a blueprint for ministry.

God has blessed the public teaching of women over men despite themselves, just as God has used me to bless others despite myself. The goal in both cases is to know the truth more clearly and approximate it more nearly. “But it works” is the wrong measure of our faithfulness.

That God uses us at all, when we as a church seem to stray from his word so frequently, is a testimony to God’s grace, not a blueprint for ministry.

Likewise, we cannot make decisions about church leadership by a general appeal to the priesthood of all believers. I’ve heard it said, “Yes, yes, the priests in the Old Testament were all male, but that has no bearing on New Testament leadership models, because now we are all ‘a royal priesthood’ and ‘holy nation’” (see 1 Pet. 2:9). It is true that we—women as well as men—are a royal priesthood.

But Peter’s New Testament description of the church was simply a reiteration of God’s word given to the people at Sinai when he declared, “You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6). The priesthood of all believers is an Old Testament idea (and it is about our corporate holiness, not our corporate gifting). If an all-male priesthood was consistent with an every-person kingdom of priests in the Old Testament, there is no reason to think that an all-male eldership is inconsistent with the priesthood of believers in the New Testament.

Similarly, the appeal to calling is not very convincing. Years ago, the Roman Catholic periodical First Things ran two essays on the ordination of women (for and against). The woman writing in favor of women’s ordination concluded her piece by appealing to a sense of calling:

Much has been said here of why there is no reason not to ordain women. A word or two as to why it should be done is yet needed. . . . As Sister Thekla once said, “The only justification for the monastic life lies simply in the fact that God calls some people to it.” By the same token, the only justification for the ordination of women lies in the fact that God calls some women to it.

Though a call may be honestly felt, making such an appeal the decisive factor is dangerously subjective. I have no problem with people referring to their vocation, pastoral or otherwise, as a “calling,” if by that they simply mean to acknowledge a spiritual purpose in their work. But as a decision-making tool, trying to discern one’s calling by internal feelings and impressions is an unsure guide. God’s objective revelation in Scripture must have priority over our subjective understanding of God’s will for our lives.

Their friendship extended to their families, who sometimes celebrated New Year’s together. In one memorable photograph, Scalia and Ginsburg can be seen riding an elephant together during a shared family vacation in India. In an age when friend is often taken to mean someone who sees the world like I do, it is a remarkable image.

In recent years, their “odd couple” friendship has been the subject of many op-eds, radio shows, and even an opera. Their strangely countercultural example made people ask: why did they want a friendship like that? How did it work? Did they stay friends by ignoring difference, or did their relationship flourish precisely because of it? How did they understand the nature of friendship in general? Do I need friends from different ideological camps? These questions, of course, are relevant to Christians: should we also value friendships like this?

Odd Couple

To answer those questions, we might consider a similarly intriguing friendship between a Christian and a radical skeptic—Herman Bavinck (1854–1921), one of the greatest Christian theologians of the 20th century, and his lifelong friend Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936), a liberal skeptic who later converted to Islam. In their context, the Netherlands in the late 19th and early 20th century, Bavinck and Snouck were similarly high-profile public figures whose deep friendship marked them as something of an odd couple.

These questions, of course, are relevant to Christians: should we also value friendships like this?

Bavinck and Snouck were both pastors’ sons who first met as students at the University of Leiden in the 1870s. Despite those points in common, their lives could scarcely have been more different. Snouck’s father was a pastor in the mainstream Dutch Reformed Church who was deposed for “faithlessly abandoning” his first wife, and fled to London with a younger woman (Christiaan’s mother). The double-barreled Snouck Hurgronje family belonged to the Dutch nobility. As a young aristocrat, Christiaan came from a questionable branch of a prestigious family tree.

By contrast, the Bavincks came from humbler stock. Herman’s father, Jan, was a carpenter’s son who became a pastor in the smaller, theologically conservative Christian Reformed Church.

Having become friends as students, Herman and Christiaan remained in close contact for the rest of their lives, despite their difference in outlook only increasing across the years. We have no photo of them riding an elephant together. We do, however, have a lifetime of letters in which they share personal struggles, attempt to persuade each other on matters of faith and politics, read and critique each other’s writings, and share in life’s joys and struggles.

Their letters are a window into a rich and frank friendship between deep thinkers and friends who held radically different beliefs about Christianity. They prompt us to think Christianly about the nature of friendship in a culture where friendship is increasingly ordered around package-deal political ideologies, and where we are encouraged to look for friends in echo chambers.

Pragmatic Beginning

In their student years, the culture around Leiden University—the Netherlands’ oldest and most prestigious university—was dominated by the sons of the aristocracy: the typical Leiden student in the 1870s had a double-barreled surname, came from a noble family, and was related to many of his fellow students by blood or marriage. In principle, Snouck belonged in that environment, and Bavinck did not.

And yet both quickly found out they were outsiders there: Bavinck’s family background was not sufficiently high-class, and Snouck’s family was tainted by scandal. Alongside this, both young men were critical of the liberal theology taught by their professors: Bavinck was committed to orthodoxy in doctrine and life, while the radical doubter Snouck was suspicious of their bold and easy heterodoxy.

Friendship is increasingly ordered around package-deal political ideologies, and where we are encouraged to look for friends in echo chambers.

Although both were outsiders (albeit for different reasons), Bavinck and Snouck did not become friends through lack of other options: Bavinck was not the only theologically conservative student at Leiden, and Snouck mixed with a group of other liberal aristocrats. Why, then, did they choose to invest in this particular friendship?

In their first two years at Leiden, students had to take common courses before moving into a degree major. In that period, Bavinck and Snouck first bonded through one of these courses—an Arabic class—which Bavinck found dull and difficult. Their friendship began when they were study partners; it soon became clear that they were heavily invested in each other.

In 1878, both young men sat the same exam. Bavinck received a cum laude, whereas Snouck merely passed. Bavinck saw this as a grave injustice, thought it was motivated by a professor’s personal dislike of his friend, and refused to accept his diploma until the cum laude was removed. Snouck’s written reply to Bavinck was that “such a friendship is worth infinitely more to me than words on a piece of paper.” By the close of their student years, their friendship had become intensely loyal.

Different Directions

As their lives progressed, Bavinck and Snouck followed different paths: Bavinck became a celebrated theologian, and lived by his distinct brand of orthodox, socially engaged Christian piety to the last. Snouck gained a doctorate in Islamic studies. He traveled to Mecca—converting to Islam en route in order to gain entry to the Muslim-only city—where he took some of the first photos of Mecca during the Hajj pilgrimage, which he soon published as a book that brought him international fame.

He lived for years in what is now Indonesia, living there as a Muslim (under the name Abd al-Ghaffar), marrying Muslim wives and fathering Muslim children, before returning to the Netherlands, where he resumed a liberal Dutch identity and married a Dutch woman. He was without doubt the most famous Orientalist of his generation, and was at that time much more famous than his theologian friend (although this has now changed).

Despite the astonishing contrasts between their beliefs and lives, Bavinck and Snouck remained in regular contact—both in person and by letter—during their lives. From their letters, it is clear that both valued “critical friendship,” and believed that one’s insights soon grow dull when surrounded by those who think in the same way.

A truly sharp thinker, they believed, needs a close friend whom he can trust, but who does not share his most basic assumptions. Bavinck once described their friendship as that of “opponents who are also friends.”

A truly sharp thinker, they believed, needs a close friend whom he can trust, but who does not share his most basic assumptions.

For that reason, they regularly read and discussed each other’s writings—often to strong disagreement. Their interactions on Islam, secularization, the authority of Scripture, and, above all, the truth claims of the Christian faith leave us in no doubt that their beliefs were worlds apart.

It is also likely, as I show in Bavinck: A Critical Biography, that Bavinck probably knew nothing of Snouck’s Islamic double life in Mecca and Indonesia. He did not seem to realize, for example, that Snouck had become a Muslim to enter Mecca, and it also seems true that Snouck lied to Bavinck when confronted about his marriage to a Muslim teenager. Clearly, their friendship was not always easy to continue.

And yet continue it did. Bavinck’s book Philosophy of Revelation, written as a work in apologetics and aimed at skeptics, seems to have been written, in part at least, in an effort to persuade Snouck—although from their later discussions of the book, it does not appear that he was won over by Bavinck’s arguments.

Although both men were aware that their distance only seemed to increase with the years, they remained committed to their “critical friendship” to the end. On the day before Bavinck died, for example, Snouck wrote to his friend’s wife, Johanna Bavinck-Schippers, about his last visit to Bavinck’s deathbed: “I am still deeply affected by my last visit: despondent, but also edified. I have never known my good friend to be anything other than pious: 1874–1921.”

There is certainly something intriguing about such a friendship. In the Bavinck-Snouck story, we see two people who asked the same questions, both theological and social, but from entirely different presuppositions and perspectives: is it possible to know God? If so, how? Is religion merely a matter of human culture (Snouck), or a reality that points to something higher (Bavinck)?

Seen over their lifetimes, their friendship is an honest, and very long, conversation between two thinkers who shared a twofold motivation: to convince the other, as well as to learn from him. A century later, that example remains instructive: it played no small role in making Bavinck the insightful, sharp, and persuasive writer now loved by many. However, it also remains an all too rare example—as rare, perhaps, as sightings of rival judges on the same elephant.

A similar hope can be seen in seminary education. One of the greatest success stories can be found in Kansas City at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The president there is Jason Allen, and under his leadership, the school has grown in enrollment and resources and in quality of education. We shouldn’t take this good news for granted, because it’s not the case at most schools. It’s exciting to consider what this turnaround means for generations of churches in the Southern Baptist Convention and beyond.

Jason says that “never before in the history of the church has theological education been so accessible—and so needed.” And he joined me on Gospelbound to discuss his new book, Succeeding at Seminary: 12 Keys to Getting the Most Out of Your Theological Education (Moody).

In this episode, we talk about the promise and peril of online education, why students should still consider residential relocation, and how you know if you’re really ready for this momentous step.

“Human rights are also co-equal; there is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others,” Blinken said at a press conference. Then he took a shot at the Trump administration: “Past unbalanced statements that suggest such a hierarchy, including those offered by a recently disbanded State Department advisory committee, do not represent a guiding document for this administration. At my confirmation hearing, I promised that the Biden-Harris administration would repudiate those unbalanced views. We do so decisively today.”

He didn’t come right out and say it, but the news media knew what he was talking about. The advisory committee, pulled together by former vice president Mike Pence, didn’t prioritize religious liberty but did point out that it was prominent among the founder’s “unalienable rights.”

“Blinken blasts the Trump administration’s ‘unbalanced’ emphasis on religious liberty over other human rights,” USA Today reported. “State Dept. Reverses Trump Policies on Reproductive and Religious Freedoms,” read the New York Times headline.

“In a sharp rebuke to Trump-era policies, Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday formally scrapped a blueprint championed by his predecessor to limit U.S. promotion of human rights abroad to causes favored by conservatives like religious freedom and property matters while dismissing reproductive and LGBTQ rights,” AP wrote.

Religious-freedom advocates heard the same message the news media did. The Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea called it “telling.”

“Declaring that ‘there is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others,’ he took a line from the Clinton administration, which used it to argue against the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) in 1998,” she wrote for National Review.

But even though the Clinton administration and the State Department opposed it until just before the vote, IRFA did pass—both contentiously and unanimously.

For the past 23 years, the office it created has been tracking religious-freedom abuses across the globe. Its reports are used not just by American diplomats, but by foreign governments. It is a major reason we know about Uighur Muslims in China labor camps, Christians in North Korean prisons, and missing Yazidi girls in Iraq. And by shining a light on religious abuses, IRFA also paved the way for other human-rights campaigns and legislation.

So why is international religious freedom still getting pushed around?

Exporting Religious Freedom

Religious freedom has always been one of America’s favorite things, from the Pilgrims to the First Amendment to a spate of religious-freedom wins at the Supreme Court in the past few years. Today, the New World reports fewer government and social restrictions on religion than any other region.

Today, the New World reports fewer government and social restrictions on religion than any other region.

But America didn’t always export that freedom. Before World War II, she mostly kept to herself. Afterward, as she came into her own, President Franklin Roosevelt cemented her status as a world power by leading the formation of the United Nations. Three years later, his wife Eleanor spearheaded the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which included freedom to believe, practice, and change one’s religion.

But pure idealism always runs into practical reality. The U.S. spent the next four and a half decades staring down the U.S.S.R. While some Christians were worried about believers behind the Iron Curtain—Brother Andrew published God’s Smuggler in 1964 and Richard Wurmbrand published Tortured for Christ in 1967—they were also worried about the Berlin Wall, nuclear missiles, and bomb shelters. And many Christians in the U.S. were unaware of the persecution altogether.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, travel and communication suddenly increased. As the number of Baptists and Pentecostals and Methodists grew around the world, their spokespeople became a resource for Congress.

“[R]eligious groups are viewed by committee members as the key source of information (independent of the administration) on conditions inside strategic countries,” wrote researcher Allen Hertzke in his 1988 book, Representing God in Washington: The Role of Religious Lobbies in the American Polity. “Said one House Foreign Affairs staff member: ‘They [church groups] are useful. . . . They have religious networks that we don’t have.”

The religious lobbyists were helping their representatives know what was going on—with governments, economies, and human rights. But it was harder to know what to do about it.

Who Will Figure It Out?

By the mid-1980s, John Hanford was on his third career path. While in college, he’d worked hard to get into top law and business schools. But increasingly, he’d been drawn to vocational ministry.

“When I sat down and told my dad I wasn’t going to business school, I literally broke in two the pencil in I had in my hands from the tension I felt of disappointing him,” he said.

Hanford knew his dad well. “That’s the last thing I’d ever do,” his dad told him. “In fact, I’d even go into politics before I’d go into ministry.”

Despite his reservations, Hanford’s dad supported his pivot to Plan B, which was an MDiv from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. (He even stayed supportive when his son later combined both “bottom of the barrel” options into one career.)

“After seminary, I was very blessed to work in a mostly blue-collar church in Virginia, with a brilliant pastor no one had ever heard of named Tim Keller,” Hanford said with a laugh. “I had the joy of living with the Keller family, and it was a phenomenal experience learning from their example.”

Eventually, Hanford sought Keller’s counsel on a new sense of calling he was wrestling with—Plan C. He wondered if he could find a way to work through the U.S. government to champion religious freedom around the world.

“I remember being impressed—it was a terrific ambition and idea,” Keller told TGC. “It wasn’t going to be easy, but . . . I thought he had as good a chance as anyone to do it.”

One reason for Keller’s confidence was Hanford’s aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Bob Dole. But Hanford was determined not to use those connections. “I told my aunt I didn’t want any help,” said Hanford, “because if this was the right thing for me to do, I wanted God to open the door.”

Opening the Door

Hanford moved to D.C. in the mid-1980s and spent months having coffee with people in the White House, State Department, and Congress.

His goal wasn’t to publicize religious-freedom issues—groups like Open Doors were already doing that. Instead, he was looking for an effective way to tackle problems directly and to intervene through the established diplomatic channels that exist with every country.

His sources encouraged him to base his work in Congress, and Hanford eventually approached Senator Richard Lugar—a Republican from Indiana who had chaired the Foreign Relations Committee. Lugar said he’d give him a six-month trial.

“We had some early success,” Hanford said. Some substantial success—including a pledge from the Soviet Union to release more than 200 religious prisoners and to establish new policies that would grant greater religious freedom.

Hanford got to keep his desk in Lugar’s office. After a while, his work attracted a couple of other like-minded staffers. One was Will Inboden, who began doing what Hanford was doing in the office of Democratic Senator Sam Nunn. Another was Laura Bryant, just coming off a stint acting as human rights officer at the American embassy in Romania.

At their first meeting, “I grilled John on everything from how he thought Christians should be involved in politics to how his faith worked itself out,” she said. She loved how Hanford didn’t seek the spotlight, how he’d built good relationships with others, how he prayed consistently about how to do the work. “When he asked me to consider focusing with him and a few others on religious-freedom work, I was so excited I felt like I’d been proposed to.”

But like a marriage, the daily work was a lot harder than the proposal.

Afflicted, But Not Crushed

It isn’t easy to keep people’s attention on a problem that’s far away—even if it’s as troubling as someone being tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs. Even more difficult is verifying what’s happening on the ground, deciphering how the government in that country functions, and figuring out a strategy for change that involves American senators, representatives, or State Department officials.

“It takes an enormous amount of time,” Hanford said. “You’re trying to influence a country halfway around the world to change their laws or let someone who has converted out of a death sentence. That’s a huge challenge.”

There were thrilling successes: for example, in 1990, three young men in Egypt were arrested for converting to Christianity and sharing their faith. They were beaten, hung from their arms, burned with cigarettes, tortured with electric shock, and denied food. Twice Egyptian judges found them innocent, but they were quickly rearrested for showing “contempt for Islam” and “threatening the unity of the country.” Hanford organized repeated appeals by multiple senators, then by vice president Dan Quayle, then by president George H. W. Bush with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. After 10 months in prison, they were released.

But there were also heartbreaking setbacks: when Hanford learned of the imminent execution of an Iranian pastor, he was able to work through an Iranian official at the United Nations to get it stayed. Six months later, determined to continue preaching rather than flee abroad to safety, the pastor was kidnapped and tortured to death.

When the Soviet Duma passed a law in 1993 severely restricting religious freedom, Hanford gathered 170 senators and members of Congress on a letter to president Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin vetoed the law. But four years later the Duma again passed a restrictive law, and despite another Congress-wide effort that helped secure an initial veto, Yeltsin signed it into law.

Persecuted, But Not Forsaken

Still, Hanford and his colleagues kept at it, buoyed by some hard-won victories overseas and rising interest at home.

In 1994, Republicans—supported by the Christian Coalition (the No. 7 most powerful lobbying group in 1997), Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council (FRC), and Concerned Women of America—swept the midterm elections, picking up the majority in the House of Representatives and solidifying their lead in the Senate. They kept both majorities in the 1996 election. With both political interest and votes, things began to heat up.

The National Association of Evangelicals released a statement calling the government to help persecuted Christians overseas. House representative Chris Smith held committee hearings on the persecution of Christians and Jews. Christianity Today ran a cover story on “the suffering church.” The World Evangelical Alliance initiated a National Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. The House and Senate called on President Bill Clinton to create an advisory committee on religious freedom, and he did. In 1997, FRC president Gary Bauer testified about China’s persecution of Christians at the House Ways and Means Committee.

Then, in May 1997, Representative Frank Wolf and Senator Arlen Specter introduced the Freedom from Religious Persecution Act.

FRPA to IRFA

Wolf was a Virginian elected to Congress on issues of economics and transportation. But a few years in, he took a trip to see the famine in Ethiopia, followed by a trip to Romania where Christians passed him secret notes asking for help. (“My son is in prison.” “My husband has disappeared.”) Wolf, a believer, couldn’t look away.

He got the United States to drop its favorable trading terms with the communist dictatorship in Romania. Then he started in on China’s forced abortions and religious persecution. His Freedom from Religious Persecution Act followed suit, focusing on halting egregious actions—“widespread and ongoing abduction, enslavement, killing, imprisonment, forced mass resettlement, rape, or crucifixion or other forms of torture”—performed against Christians and other minority religions.

Here’s how it would work: a director on the White House staff would decide which countries were guilty of those types of intense persecution. That finding would trigger automatic economic sanctions and cut off foreign assistance to nations and entities carrying out the persecution—unless the president halted them with a waiver.

The vibe was all-or-nothing, and many cheered it for taking persecution seriously. But some found it both too tough (automatic sanctions were the only response) and not tough enough (it only addressed the worst offenders).

President Clinton bluntly told evangelical leaders that the automatic sanctions would put “an enormous amount of pressure in the bowels of the bureaucracy to fudge the finding.” Secretary of State Madeline Albright said the bill would create “an artificial hierarchy among human rights” and “establish a new and unneeded bureaucracy and deprive U.S. officials of the flexibility required to protect the overall foreign policy interests of the United States.”

The Wolf-Specter bill didn’t get much traction in 1997. After some changes in committee, it passed the House 375 to 41 in May 1998—then died in the Senate.

Meanwhile, Hanford and his team were concerned that the all-or-nothing approach would limit the reach of the Wolf bill to only one or two countries. So Hanford, Bryant, and Inboden wrote another bill, introduced in March 1998 by Senators Don Nickles and Joe Lieberman, called the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA).

The cornerstone of IRFA was the Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, a high-level diplomat who could negotiate on behalf of the U.S. government. An annual report would cover the status of religious freedom in each country, requiring embassies to investigate and report back on what they had done to promote religious freedom that year. A commission would provide independent policy recommendations.

But the key underlying structure was the process for designating “countries of particular concern,” which required an annual decision as to whether a country had reached the threshold for gross violations of religious freedom. If a country reached the list, it would trigger a series of negotiation and actions, including sanctions.

“As we researched how to create the greatest incentive for change, the one place we found was most effective in using sanctions was in trade laws,” Bryant said. “Those laws use a tit-for-tat, step-by-step process that has an end date. So we used that pattern.”

The authors also pulled a model from trade law that had never been tried in human rights law: “if you could reach a binding agreement with another country to reverse the violations, then no sanctions would be imposed,” she said. “It’s the ideal outcome—securing meaningful change for oppressed believers on the ground. We were hopeful, but we didn’t know if it would work.”

Last Minute Vote

There were two days left in the 105th Congress when IRFA came up for a Senate vote.

“It was the last substantive vote of that Congress,” Hanford said. “We were still negotiating with opposing Democrats until hours before.”

The holdout Democrats finally came on board, and the bill passed the Senate 98-0. Then it raced over to the House. With no time to reconcile the two bills in a compromise, which is what usually happens when similar bills pass the House and Senate separately, Wolf took one for the team.

He accepted an amendment that substituted IRFA in its entirety for his bill. It passed the House unanimously (on the same day it approved Clinton’s impeachment inquiry).

“Had the legislation swept through Congress more easily, its impact would not have been as dramatic,” religious-freedom expert Allen Hertzke told Pew in 2006. “Because there were such deep divisions, partisans continually groped for the proper solution. If the process had been less dramatic, there might have been a more mixed vote. As it was, the contentiousness led to the last-minute passage of the legislation in the waning days of the congressional session in 1998.”

“God used all the pieces—even the bad—to move things along,” Hanford said. “It’s a testimony to God’s mercy.”

Did It Work?

A year and a half after IRFA passed, Hanford asked Bryant to marry him (and she was just as excited as when he’d asked her to work on religious-freedom issues).

“Writing legislation can be romantic,” he told Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer during his confirmation hearing in 2002. He was stepping into the job he’d made up—Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom.

“Our office was tiny and marginalized, and the person we were connected with at the State Department was hostile to the issue,” Hanford said. He negotiated for more staff, then worked on building out the list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPCs)—and keeping countries off it.

The process is long and complex. You have to make multiple trips overseas for dozens of meetings with government officials and religious leaders. You need to sort through a lot—the atrocities on the ground, the denials, the vague answers—to get to the facts. You work through long, difficult negotiations on what needs to change, then you follow up, then you follow up after that. You take the issue up the chain of command, both in the persecuting country and back at the State Department. If necessary, you persuade the Secretary of State to add a country to the CPC list, spend months negotiating a binding agreement or sanctions, and then work just as hard to persuade them to make substantial improvements so they can get off the list.

Sometimes it works. Vietnam was designated a CPC in 2003 for closing hundreds of churches, forcing tens of thousands of people to renounce their faith, and imprisoning dozens of religious believers. After Hanford negotiated a binding agreement in 2006,  Vietnam worked its way off the CPC list by releasing all known religious prisoners, reopening hundreds of churches, allowing expanded registration of religious groups, and outlawing forced renunciations of faith.

Over months of similar negotiations, Saudi Arabia publicly affirmed a commitment to stop sending out extremist textbooks and curb harassment of certain religious practices. Turkmenistan made sweeping changes to their laws, which had previously permitted only two religions to legally exist.

And sometimes it doesn’t: North Korea hasn’t budged.

Often it’s slow and frustrating—Hanford once stayed up nearly all night along with his staff as they fought to secure approval to state publicly that North Korea has religious-freedom problems. The Ambassador at Large position isn’t always a presidential priority, and has been left open for long stretches of time. (It’s open now.) The pushback from Blinken—that religious freedom doesn’t need to be prioritized—is the view of many in Washington.

But “with the majority of the world’s population living under outright persecution or serious restriction of religious freedom, we have no choice but to step up and advocate passionately for their suffering to end,” Hanford said. “No other country comes close to our level of commitment, and conditions would surely trend far worse if we withdrew from the struggle.”

Cause and Effect

“Few would question the importance of the International Religious Freedom Act and its influence on U.S. foreign policy over the past 20 years,” reported 21Wilberforce, a religious-freedom organization co-founded by Frank Wolf.

To be clear: it didn’t wipe religious persecution from the globe. From 2007 to 2017, the Pew Research Center found government and social restrictions on religion “increased markedly around the world.” And Aid to the Church in Need, a Catholic organization, reported that nearly a third of countries do not respect religious freedom; in those places, 95 percent have grown worse over time.

But along with real changes on the ground, IRFA has given religious freedom serious, up-to-date information (diplomats can no longer ask, as one did before IRFA, “What is a house church?”), the CPC process as a tool for change (no one wants to be a “country of particular concern”), and the annual deadlines for action and reporting (while the annual report isn’t often covered by the mainstream media, Christianity Today has reported on it every year). IRFA’s structure has proved so effective that it was used as a model for human-trafficking legislation in 2000.

But IRFA’s biggest gift is hardest to quantify.

“A funny thing happened on the way to passage of the International Religious Freedom Act,” Hertzke told Pew Research Center. “A coalition was formed. A human-rights architecture was created that continues to grow and manifest itself. The campaign itself helped to galvanize the movement for a broader focus on human rights in American foreign policy. In the wake of that legislation, Congress passed trafficking legislation that has some real teeth; in 2002 it passed the Sudan Peace Act; in 2004, the North Korean Human Rights; this year, domestic-trafficking legislation and legislation to advance democracy around the world. A whole sequence of legislative acts has grown out of the campaign to focus on international religious freedom.”

“Simply put, the IRF movement influenced a long line of faith-based, international activism, affecting millions globally,” 21Wilberforce’s former executive director Sharon Payt wrote.

Simply put, the IRF movement influenced a long line of faith-based, international activism, affecting millions globally.

“There’s arguably no human right more foundational to our lives than religious freedom,” Hanford said. “You can ask people in countries all around the world what right is most precious to them, and so many will say ‘religious freedom,’ because it gives them the ability to seek to know God and pursue what they view as the most important part of their lives.”

If yes, the news team will arrive tomorrow.

John Beckett, chairman of R. W. Beckett Corporation in Elyria, Ohio, received this call. He didn’t give an automatic yes––he’s not the type to believe all press is good press. He knew of potential risks. The company had been burned by the media before, caricatured and mocked. What if it happened again, but now on a national stage?

Difficult Calls

Earlier in Beckett’s career he took some other, more difficult calls. Soon after joining the family business in 1963, he received a call on a cold Saturday morning from the local police. Police found his father slumped over the steering wheel of his car, dead of an apparent heart attack while driving to work. The dream of being mentored by his father—and eventually succeeding him many years later in the business—ended too early. Beckett, 26 years old, was now in charge.

A few months later, the phone rang again, this time at 2 a.m.

“Flames are shooting 20 feet above the roof of your factory,” the North Ridgeville Fire Department told him. “Is there anything that can explode in there?” When he arrived at the scene, he knew what he needed to do. He led reluctant volunteer firefighters, whose experience with large fires was limited to neighborhood barns, into the industrial building, pointing to key doorways and areas where volatiles were stored. (The ending of that story is told in Loving Monday: Succeeding in Business Without Selling Your Soul.)

Decades later, when Beckett agreed to an ABC News interview, he knew it wasn’t without risks. He could get burned, not by the intensity of white-hot flames like earlier in his life, but by smoke-stained reputational damage—his, and even possibly the Lord’s.

The broadcast aired to 12 million viewers, highlighting the company’s exceptional maternity coverage and generous tuition assistance, as well as the outworking of its core values in day-to-day business. The positive program prompted the largest number of favorable phone calls ever received by the network at the time.

In 1998, InterVarsity Press published Beckett’s first book, Loving Monday, which is now available in 20 different languages. In 2006, he wrote a follow-up, Mastering Monday—both books on the leading edge of the current faith and work movement. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Beckett and ask him what advice he would give to pastors about how to serve people in the marketplace.

Though much of his personal story is extraordinary, he highlighted three ordinary ways any pastoral leader can serve people in the marketplace.

1. Quiet People’s Doubts

Beckett shared that many Christians in the marketplace are haunted by the notion that they are in the wrong vocation, and they should be doing something more “spiritual.” This sense of insecurity comes not in times of job loss or conflict at work, but often through success and achievement. Many believers question whether they are succeeding at the wrong thing.

Many Christians in the marketplace are haunted by the notion that they are in the wrong vocation, and they should be doing something more ‘spiritual.’

He struggled with these doubts, too. And it made a huge difference when a pastoral leader in Beckett’s life affirmed his work and calling in the marketplace.

“It unleashed an energy in me,” he said, to know that he could worship God through his work.

2. Ask Good Questions

Christians in the marketplace also face significant ethical and moral issues. Whether it is how to handle releasing an employee or determining how to gain a competitive advantage without compromising integrity, people need wisdom. “They need someone who has a firm grasp of Scripture,” he said.

Here a pastor might feel insecure because of a lack of experience in a business workplace, but Beckett explained how “the pastor can do a lot by the questions they ask.” People need help thinking through complex issues rather than being given solutions, he added.

3. Cultivate Friendships

In the foreword to Loving Monday, businessman Jeffrey H. Coors shared about a time when a ministry leader asked, “How can I pray for you?”

His reply, which surprised even himself, was, “I need a friend.” Coors was at a good place in his career and with his family, but his response revealed an important insight—we all need trusted friendships outside of our work and family.

We all need trusted friendships outside of our work and family.

Offering that friendship is the third way pastoral leaders can serve people in the marketplace, Beckett said. “Everyone needs to rub shoulders with someone who has a different calling to help broaden and challenge one’s views and perceptions.”

A pastoral leader can’t be everyone’s good friend, but everyone a pastor serves needs friendship.

You and I aren’t likely to receive a call from ABC News, like Beckett did. But we can embrace a posture of curiosity and ask key questions to stimulate fresh ways of looking at issues. We can affirm the goodness we see, including in everyday work, and help the people we serve think through the challenges they face. And if we are being completely honest, we need friendship too.

Reading James Eglinton’s biography of Dutch theologian and neo-Calvinist polymath Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) brought that experience to mind, with at least one major difference. Bavinck: A Critical Biography is saturated with color, brightness, and contrast. But unlike the old HD TV, this volume is sleek and sturdy, and will doubtless draw attention for generations to come.

James Eglinton is the Meldrum Senior Lecturer in Reformed Theology at the University of Edinburgh. But by this point he might as well be called the Favorite Reformed Lecturer in the Universe of Things Bavinck.

For those unfamiliar with the stream of literature emerging on the greatest Reformed theologian of the last century, much of it follows on the heels of Eglinton’s scholarly case for Bavinck as a consistently Reformed dogmatician, a new reading that is effectively supplanting the older perspective that falsely detected conflicting orthodox and modern signals in Bavinck’s writings. By examining the complexities of Bavinck’s background, this latest biography shows that in addition to harboring theological problems, the “two Bavinck” thesis suffers from historical and sociological defects as well.

Bavinck the Man

But that’s not all, folks. Eglinton describes his biography as being “critical” in the sense that it draws from a wide array of original sources (diaries, letters, newspapers, etc.) to present the complexities of Bavinck’s life accurately and honestly within the context of his times. One might add that the word “critical” also applies to the way Eglinton deftly fixes a number of blips that appear in some of the older models of Bavinck biography. I appreciated learning, for example, that (1) a strand of Bavinck’s “Seceder” tradition was not opposed to cultural integration; (2) he did not face parental disapproval when leaving to study at Leiden; and (3) he and his wife, Johanna, were fit theological spouses.

So what kind of man does Eglinton bring into focus as he presents what his method impels him to say? The author answers, “I present my subject as a modern European, an orthodox Calvinist, and a man of science” (xxii).

Set within five organically unfolding parts (“Roots,” “Student,” “Pastor,” “Professor in Kampen,” and “Professor in Amsterdam”), these chronological segments of Bavinck’s life and work reveal him as a Reformed theologian who in various ways confronted, developed within, and wrestled with the shifting landscape of a late modern world. This basic theme is too intricately presented in the book to capture in a short review. But at a general level it is fair to say this narrative of this orthodox man within his times opens lenses on both smaller and larger scales, each carrying lessons for today.

Formed Through Suffering

On the smaller scale, Eglinton zooms in on Bavinck’s struggle to relate his relatively isolated Dutch tradition with his potent intellectual gifts and broad theological ambitions. At times, the former did not satisfy him, evidenced by his decision to leave the Theological School in Kampen after one year to study under the modernist scholars at the University of Leiden.

At other times, his tradition was not pleased with him. For example, Bavinck languished for a decade seeking to marry his teenage sweetheart, only to be denied by her father on each occasion. Years later, after returning to Kampen to teach, Bavinck faced endless conflicts within the faculty over that institution’s resistance to the scientific academy, particularly the prospect of a joint venture with Abraham Kuyper’s Free University at Amsterdam.

From his tortured romance with a hometown girl, to his encounters with drunkenness at Leiden, to his frustrations within a seminary faculty, Bavinck unexpectedly becomes relatable to the reader. Even pastors who labor in isolation or whose lives remain stubbornly out of step with their surroundings will resonate with Bavinck’s “crushingly lonely experience” (121) during his brief pastorate in Franeker.

Each of these struggles teaches us that Bavinck’s many writings did not drop from the sky, but were forged by a real man who endured the cross after his Savior.

Each of these struggles teaches us that Bavinck’s many writings, including his magnum opus, the four-volume Reformed Dogmatics, did not drop from the sky, but were forged by a real man who endured the cross after his Savior.

God-Centered Theology

But Eglinton also pans out for a widescreen shot of Bavinck’s persistent hope to see Reformed theology intersect with and transform the movements and ideas of his time. Over against Friedrich Schleiermacher—as well as the entire modernist tradition, for that matter—Bavinck believed that only as theology comes faithfully from God and remains about God, and not man, will it fulfill the neo-Calvinist vision of bringing the lordship of Christ to bear on every human endeavor.

This commitment to what Eglinton calls “the self-governing nature of theology” (138) provides a helpful corrective for those in our day who are tempted to build their case for Christianity on fleeting modern intuitions that formally resonate with a Christian worldview. Apologetically, worldly reference points may be useful conversation starters, but for Bavinck, as Eglinton presents him, a truly Christian understanding of the world must proceed winsomely and unapologetically from God’s redemptive revelation in the Scriptures.

As Bavinck wrote to a friend steeped in modern criticism of Scripture, “This is the difference between you and me . . .  you want, through and after research, to reach this viewpoint [i.e., a judgment on Scripture reached a posteriori]; I move forward from it [i.e., a view of Scripture asserted a priori] and go on researching” (139).

For Bavinck, a truly Christian understanding of the world must proceed winsomely and unapologetically from God’s redemptive revelation in the Scriptures.

And yet Bavinck’s allegiance to such Reformed principles appeared to weaken a bit later in life. With the rise of Friedrich Nietzsche’s militant atheism, Eglinton notes, Bavinck advocated in public for a “generalized notion of Christianity” (242) rather than a specifically Reformed Calvinism.

What accounts for this strategic change? Intimidation by the magnitude of the task? Disillusionment over Calvinism’s then apparently dim prospects? While Eglinton offers hints of explanation, perhaps the growing cadre of Bavinck scholars will examine this question in greater depth.

A final word about the artwork for the book’s cover: it’s a portrait of Bavinck painted by Eglinton’s friend and fellow theologian Oliver Crisp. The face is pensive, eyes closed, suggesting a deep thoughtfulness about the greatness of the triune God and of his majesty made known throughout the earth.

Eglinton has elaborated that image by presenting a man who throughout his long and fascinating life aimed to promote God’s glory in and through all things. May his readers take up this goal for themselves, and one day see it realized in refulgent colors and clarity on the last day.

While Scripture calls us to care for the weak and to guide and protect the oppressed (Ps. 82:1–4; Prov. 31:9; 103:6; Heb. 13:3), helping victims is a difficult task. To complicate matters, some victims are not aware they are being abused, and others live with so much fear they have learned to hide what is happening.

Three Starting Points

It’s hard to speak into a friend’s life when you’re uncertain about a situation. To complicate matters, domestic abuse often means there’s danger. The situations are challenging. Walking with these tender souls takes patience and gentle persistence.

When I first sat with abused wives and listened to their stories, I made many mistakes. I was overwhelmed by what I was hearing. I didn’t think through the responses I gave or how they might affect the victims.

Over time, I have learned from my mistakes and want to share this hard-won knowledge so you know how to care for your friend. Most important, try your best to:

• not take over her choices by telling her what to do;
• avoid minimizing her abuse; instead, carefully listen to what she shares with you;
• connect her to the help of others who have experience with domestic abuse.

These are the basics, and you may need to return to them when you feel confused. Here are eight suggestions to guide you as you help your friend.

1. Express Concern Gently and Be Patient

When you suspect abuse, approach your friend sensitively. Let her know your concerns for her. You might say, “I am worried about you because you seem really stressed.” It’s OK if she’s not ready to talk about her abuse. She may feel defensive, afraid to trust you, or ashamed.

By taking a gentle approach, you give her room to share when she is ready. If you are too forceful or speak of abuse too soon, she may not see you as approachable when she is inclined to share.

2. Believe Her

Speaking up about abuse is a considerable act of courage. Victims are more likely to cover up or downplay abuse than to make it up or exaggerate it. You may find it hard to imagine that what she is saying is true—especially if her oppressor’s public presentation is good.

In time, you will be able to verify the details of her story—but when she first starts to tell it to you, it’s not the time to ask questions to satisfy your disbelief or doubt. Instead invite her to tell you more, with questions like:

• Has that happened before?
• Can you tell me more about that?
• Are there other times you feel fearful around your spouse?

Remember, victims tend to tell repetitive, sometimes incoherent, and circular stories. This is an effect of trauma, so be careful not to discredit what your friend is saying by judging how she is saying it.

Be careful not to discredit what your friend is saying by judging how she is saying it.

3. Realize She May Be Watched and Monitored

Many victims’ communications and locations are monitored electronically. Assume that any emails, texts, or messages will be read by her abuser. You might even gently warn her, “It’s common for men who struggle with control (or anger) to monitor a woman’s communication. Let’s be extra cautious about how we exchange messages.”

4. Criticize His Behavior, Not His Person

Be careful that your criticism of her abuser is not a global attack on his person but is focused on his abusive behavior. Say things like, “It was wrong for him to throw that at you and frighten you.”

You may be tempted to say, “He is so selfish” or “How can you live with that monster?” But if you criticize her abuser’s overall character, it will likely make her want to defend him. Be precise and condemn his actions and motivations, not him directly. This will help her label sin and gain important clarity.

Be precise and condemn the abuser’s actions and motivations, not his person.

5. Don’t Excuse Abuse

Make every effort not to excuse the abusive behavior. Your friend might attribute her abuser’s behavior to drunkenness, drug use, job stress, or hurt feelings. But you should never offer excuses for abuse. It is always wrong and always inexcusable.

I often remind victims that two things can be true: “Your abuser can have an addiction and be abusive, but not all addicts are abusers. Abuse is always a choice.”

6. Resist Telling Her What to Do

Do not sweep in and take over her life in an attempt to rescue her. Believe me, you will be tempted. It’s hard to witness oppression. But keep in mind that being oppressed means someone else is controlling all her choices. It’s important that your friend makes her own choices, since she will have to live with their consequences.

It’s important that your friend makes her own choices, since she will have to live with their consequences.

Instead of saying, “Here’s what you should do,” brainstorm some options with her and then ask, “What do you think is a wise next step?” “What would keep you from doing that?” “What feels doable to you?”

Helping her think through her next step signals you believe she is capable, with God’s help, of making wise choices. Take the time to help her think about what she can do, but keep in mind that it may take her months to decide. Then see how you can help her achieve it.

7. Support Her as She Shares Her Story

Your friend may have to go to court, the police, a lawyer, or her church leaders. She should not do this alone. Offer to go with her or help her find another woman who will. Help those involved in church meetings with her (pastoral staff or elders) see that their authority or sex may be intimidating. Ensure she has someone in the room who can advocate for her and help her discuss her experience afterward.

8. Seek to Connect Her with Care

Oppression is a big problem. Your friend will need lots of support and wisdom. To complicate matters, you may fear that she is in danger, learn that her children are also being abused, or her suffering is more intense than you know how to support.

Help her reach professionals who are trained in how to deal with abuse. They will work for her safety and that of her children. Friends and church leaders can call the Domestic Abuse Hotline (800-799-7233) for a victim and see what resources or options for protection might look like. It is ideal to have these supports in place before a crisis emerges.

Even though you are not an expert, your role is vital.

If you keep these items in mind, you will likely avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made. And remember, even though you are not an expert, your role is vital. You will greatly bless your friend by walking alongside her, praying with her, and reminding her that Jesus identifies with the powerless, and stands against those who harm the vulnerable (Luke 4:18). Even after you’ve connected her to professional counseling, church support, and community resources, continue to support her in these life-giving ways.

Two Further Principles

First, sometimes a victim is not ready to take steps to protect herself. When this happens, you should gently remind her of the danger she’s in and connect her with someone who will help her plan for safety. But don’t push her to take steps she’s not going to take. It’s more dangerous for a woman to leave an abusive situation and then return to it. She should flee when she’s ready to apply measures that can keep her safe, such as avoiding physical contact and having little if any communication with her abuser. I have a safety plan and assessment in my book Is It Abuse? A Biblical Guide to Identifying Domestic Abuse and Helping Victims. The National Domestic Violence Hotline offers this guidance. Remind her that even Jesus fled from danger (Matt. 2:13–14; John 8:58–59; 11:53–54), as did Paul (Acts 9:22–25; 14:5–7; 17:8–10, 14). There is wisdom in having a plan and taking steps that lead her and her children to safety.

Second, if a mother discloses child abuse, a report should be made to the authorities. But as the report is investigated, the victim may be in more danger when her abuser is made aware of the report. If this occurs, seek expert help and guidance immediately. Do not wait! Connect your friend with someone who will work to establish safety for both the mother and children, before the investigation.

We see in John 17 that the unity of the church is important to Jesus. So how do we walk in unity when ethnicity seems to be such a divisive subject? We take some instruction from God’s Word on this in Ephesians:

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. (Eph. 4:1–6)

In verses 4–6, we notice that, guided by the same Spirit, the apostle’s teaching lines up exactly with what we saw in John 17. He grounds the unity of the church in seven objective realities:

One body. One Spirit. One hope. One Lord. One faith. One baptism. One God and Father.

Paul’s point is that the church in Ephesus is one. God, by his grace, has made them one. They have trusted the one triune God. They were baptized into one body. And this is all according to the one faith that was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3). Paul is saying, this is what you are, church. Now walk in it. And if you want to know what that looks like, the answer is in Ephesians 4:2: “with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.”

There are many conversations about ethnicity in the church today. I see a lot of anger. I see a lot of sarcasm. I see a lot of unforgiveness and mockery. What I don’t see is a lot of humility, gentleness, patience, and bearing with one another in love.

That’s what the pursuit of unity looks like for the Christian. There are many conversations about ethnicity in the church today. I see a lot of anger. I see a lot of sarcasm. I see a lot of unforgiveness and mockery. What I don’t see is a lot of humility, gentleness, patience, and bearing with one another in love.

Let’s look at these in turn.

1. Humility

Humility is seeing ourselves rightly before God. In the ethnicity discussion, it means actually listening to those who disagree with us, instead of just waiting to talk so we can get our points in. Humility asks, “Is there anything I can learn from this brother or sister?”

Humility is being willing to admit that what we learned growing up (even in church) was actually wrong. Humility is a willingness to freely acknowledge the wrongs of those who belong to our ethnic group. Humility is an openness to correction when we miss the mark. We would go a long way in the pursuit of ethnic unity if we walked in humility toward each other.

2. Gentleness

Gentleness is related to the word often translated “meekness,” which is strength under control. It is the disposition of a heart submitted to God. In the ethnicity discussion, it means refusing to lash out in anger toward believers who don’t share our perspective.

Gentleness governs how we speak, knowing that “a soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger” (Prov. 15:1). Gentleness is restrained, rather than explosive. Gentleness resists the temptation to vent, but instead chooses to ask, “Can we pray?” Gentleness is unwilling to sacrifice a relationship for the sake of winning an argument. We would go a long way in the pursuit of ethnic unity if we walked in gentleness toward each other.

3. Patience

The word translated “patience” means “to be long-tempered” as opposed to short-tempered. This is why it’s translated in the King James Version as “longsuffering.” It implies slowness to anger, even in the face of opposition. In the ethnicity discussion, it means not being easily offended by brothers or sisters who speak out of ignorance on the subject.

Patience understands that it takes time for people to grow and is therefore willing to endure the dusty seed in hopes of one day seeing the flower in full bloom. Patience will sit for hours to discuss and work through an issue, even if it doesn’t change the other person’s beliefs, because patience is content with greater understanding being achieved by two siblings in Christ.

Patience resists the urge to be outraged by every misstep or error other Christians make when dealing with ethnicity. We would go a long way in the pursuit of ethnic unity if we walked in patience with each other.

4. Bearing with One Another in Love

Bearing with one another in love means avoiding resentment and bitterness toward our brothers and sisters in Christ with whom we disagree. It’s resisting the impulse to retaliate or punish those who have hurt us. In the ethnicity discussion, it means moving toward—rather than away from—fellow church members who just don’t seem to get it on ethnicity.

Bearing with one another in love means having open arms, ready to extend forgiveness when a believer says something insensitive or hurtful regarding ethnicity.

Bearing with one another in love means not automatically “canceling” a Christian who says something foolish, unhelpful, or even sinful regarding ethnicity. Bearing with one another in love means having open arms, ready to extend forgiveness when a believer says something insensitive or hurtful regarding ethnicity. Bearing with one another in love means pressing through layers of misunderstanding, trusting that God is at work to sanctify both you and the Christian you disagree with. We would go a long way in the pursuit of ethnic unity if we were serious and intentional about bearing with one another in love.

I Can Only Imagine

Imagine what our churches would be like if pastors modeled humility and gentleness when discussing ethnicity. How much progress would be made toward unity if congregations were patient with their pastors in this area? What if Christian personalities were known more for their gentleness than their sarcasm? How much ground would be gained in foreign missions if missionary agencies and missionaries on the front lines were characterized by humility toward the cultures of the ethnic groups they’re trying to reach with the gospel?

What if churches refused to split over nonessential differences because they were committed to bearing with one another in love? Imagine if seminary staff, professors, and presidents took a posture of humility regarding the ethnic sins of founders, treating the students who struggle with that with the utmost gentleness and patience?

Imagine what our churches would be like if pastors modeled humility and gentleness when discussing ethnicity.

What would this world be like if these things were so? My pre-millennial readers will read that and say, “It sounds like Christ has begun his millennial reign!” The rest of us will say it sounds like the new heavens and new earth. All jokes aside, brothers and sisters, we can be sure that this is the very thing that Jesus desires for his church. Careful readers may have noticed as you read the characteristics from Ephesians 4:2 that each one of those virtues is attributed to God elsewhere in Scripture. So in essence, these verses are anticipating Paul’s exhortation a chapter later for Christians to be imitators of God (Eph. 5:1).

Concerning these commands, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that all of us fall short on each of these things and that none of us can obey them in our own strength. The good news is that God has forgiven us for our failure in this regard and covered us with the righteousness of Christ, who perfectly modeled how it looks to live a life characterized by perfect humility, gentleness, patience, and forbearance. And by his Spirit, he empowers Christians to live out, albeit imperfectly, these virtues as we seek to walk in ethnic unity together. May it be so, for the glory of God.

Part of the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and government funding bill signed by President Donald Trump last December included a line stating the Pentagon and Director of National Intelligence must deliver a non-classified report with a “detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data” collected by the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI. That report is to be submitted to Congress next month.

That provision was added by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who says his concern is not extraterrestrials, but the threat the objects pose to national security. “Anything that enters an airspace that’s not supposed to be there is a threat,” Rubio told 60 Minutes, in an episode that aired last week. He added that “the stigma of UFOs” should not keep the U.S. government from “seriously investigating” the unidentified flying objects seen by many military pilots.

Last month, the Department of Defense released videos of what Rubio is referring to. Three unclassified Navy videos, one taken in November 2004 and the other two in January 2015, have been circulating in the public domain after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017.

The other two videos are here and here on YouTube.

What Is a UFO?

The term UFO is an abbreviation for “unidentified flying object.” The only requirement to be classified or defined as a UFO is that an object must be flying (that is, traveling through Earth’s atmosphere) and not be readily identifiable as a known flying object, such as a bird or aircraft.

While that is the technical use of the term, the colloquial sense is often associated with an extraterrestrial aircraft being piloted, either directly or remotely, by alien lifeforms. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an officer in the U.S. Air Force claims to have invented the term in 1957 to replace the term “flying saucer,” which had been in use since the 1940s.

Because of the connotation of UFO, the U.S. Department of Defense uses “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

What Is the History of Sightings?

Reporting of UFO sightings are all but nonexistent before the advent of manned flight. The first reports of UFOs began in the late 1890s, about a decade after the invention of the hot air balloon and four years after the creation of the first airships (i.e., steerable balloons).

Since then, public sightings of UFOs have often been related with an increase in interest in three factors: space-age technology (such as the launch of satellites), paranormal activity (events or phenomena such as clairvoyance or ghost-sightings that appear to be beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding), and conspiracies (especially those involving government cover-ups). Public fascination with UFOs appears to have peaked sometime between the 1970s and 1990s. The rise of communication technology, such as cell phones with cameras and the internet, seems to have led to the decline in the general interest of the topic.

“Look at all the people who now have personal cameras,” said David Clark, UFO adviser to the U.K.’s National Archives, in 2012. “If there was something flying around that was a structured object from somewhere else, you would have thought that someone would have come up with some convincing footage by now—but they haven’t.

“The reason why nothing is going on is because of the internet,” Clark added. “If something happens now, the internet is there to help people get to the bottom of it and find an explanation. Before then, you had to send letters to people, who wouldn’t respond and you got this element of mystery and secrecy that means things were not explained.”

Surprisingly, the decline in interest is happening at a time when reported sightings of UFOs has been increasing. The National UFO Reporting Center (an unofficial private group dedicated to UFO information) documented 147 sightings in 2006. But by 2014, that number had nearly jumped to 9,000.

Can Christians Believe in Aliens?

Orthodox Christians already believe in at least one form of intelligent life that exists and was not created on Earth: angels (Neh. 9:6, Col. 1:16). For this reason, some Christians believe that, if aliens exist, they are a form of fallen angel (demons). But is it possible that other forms of intelligent alien life exist in the universe?

The answer depends on how we interpret the Bible and what we believe about God’s sovereignty.

The Bible does not explicitly affirm or deny the existence of non-angelic extraterrestrial beings. Some take the position that this implies such beings not only do not exist but that they cannot exist. For instance, some have pointed to a statement in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1:6)—“The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture”—and applied it to the issue of aliens. They claim that if aliens existed, God would have told us about such beings.

Other believers take the silence of Scripture as an opening from which we could conclude that it is possible such beings exist. Why would the Bible need to mention them if they were not to be discovered for 2,000 years after the founding of the church? Why would such knowledge be necessary when it would not affect billions of Christians throughout history?

Another factor is our perspective on God’s sovereignty, the right and power of God to do all that he decides to do (Job 42:2). Does God have the right to create intelligent alien beings without telling us about them in his Word? Many Christians would say he does have such a right, since he has made it clear: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (Isa. 55:8).

The reality is that such beings either do or do not exist, and that fact is known to God since he would have had to create them (Col. 1:16). Indeed, if aliens do not exist, it is because God has sovereignly chosen not to create them. Perhaps we should be more enamored with God’s sovereign power than with the question of whether he has used that power to create aliens.

Ultimately, since belief in aliens is neither commanded nor forbidden in the Bible, we should consider the issue one of the “disputable matters” (Rom. 14:1). While we may fruitfully enjoy discussing the issue, we should not let it divide us.

What About Ezekiel’s Vision?

During the height of UFO speculation, there were claims that the prophet Ezekiel’s inaugural vision (Eze. 1:1-28) was a UFO sighting. For example, in 1974 an aerospace engineer at NASA wrote The Spaceships of Ezekiel, which argued that the prophet’s heavenly vision of wheels within wheels was not an encounter with God but one of several encounters with ancient astronauts in a shuttlecraft from another planet.

There is also the contention, often made cheekily, that the vision was a UFO in the literal sense of being an unidentified flying object.

But both claims are wrong. The vision was neither of an alien nor unidentified; it was a theophany.

One thing that has been vividly unearthed is the American church’s relatively weak commitment to regular attendance of Sunday worship. According to Barna research, approximately one in three Christians have stopped attending church altogether (whether in person or online) during the pandemic. An additional third have admitted to streaming a different church service online other than their own—digitally “church hopping,” basically—reflecting a certain consumeristic mindset endemic to much of the evangelical church. 

All of this provides a fresh chance to consider basic questions: Why do we go to church? What is so important about regularly gathering as God’s people? While there are certainly many good answers to this question—it’s commanded of us in Scripture, Sabbath rhythms are important, worship is critical to discipleship and evangelism, among others—one key answer is simply this: We go to church because we are forgetful.

Remembering God’s Story

Throughout the Bible, we see that God is uniquely concerned about his people’s memory. We likewise see that spiritual amnesia is a serious and unremitting problem for these very same people. Endless are the commands to not forget God’s deliverance and provision (Deut. 8), to remember his faithfulness (Ex. 13:3), to call to mind his wonderful works in history (Ps. 106). God’s people are to know, love, and remember his story. In fact, this story—God’s story concerning his people—could reasonably be summarized as: God’s people are faithless and forgetful, but the God who has covenanted himself to them in love is faithful and steadfast; he remembers his people. 

Our forgetting and God’s remembering, then, are part and parcel of the story—the very story God calls us to, well, remember. 

What does this have to do with attending Lord’s Day worship? We are, as James K. A. Smith and many others have explained, storied beings. We crave stories; we need narrative. In a real way, we “tell ourselves stories in order to live.” In fact, we need stories to tell us how to live, to provide us a script for living, as it were. Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” 

Story must always ground action; the narratives that constitute our being necessarily inform our becoming. 

Worship Forms Us in God’s Story

As storied creatures, we’re always imbibing and living out some story—be it true or false, good or bad. As Christians we have been summoned by a gracious God to enter into the true story of the whole world. And while it ought to be our duty and delight to do so, we— much like God’s people of old—often fail at this task.

We forget God. We fail to remember who he is and who he has called us to be. We imbibe false stories and thus live falsely. This is perhaps especially the case in a world as digitally addicted as ours, where artifice, novelty, and disconnection from the past seem to carry the day. In this overstimulated new media age, we desperately need reminding of who God is, who we are, and what story we’re in. 

In this overstimulated new media age, we desperately need reminding of who God is, who we are, and what story we’re in.

This is where church worship is crucial. In our gathering together as the people of God, we come into his presence to be retold the story of reality; retold what God has done in the person and work of Jesus Christ; and retold what God is now doing in and through his Spirit to redeem and purify a people for himself. This happens in the ordinary liturgy of the church: through prayer and praise, through Word and sacrament. In his provocatively titled Against Christianity, Peter Leithart writes:

Through rituals of worship, we begin to realize together who we are together; of course, we are a sinful people who need to break away from the world, to make a weekly exodus from Egypt; of course, we are an ignorant people who need to be instructed and reminded each week of our language and our story; of course, we are the children of our heavenly Father, who has given all things freely in his Son and displays that gift in the gift of food; of course, we have been engrafted into the community of the Trinity, for each worship service begins in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and ends with the triune name spoken over us. 

For Leithart, it’s obvious (as the repeated and italicized “of course” would indicate) that God’s people, feeble-hearted and fuzzy-headed as we are, should need to make a weekly exodus from the world to come into God’s presence. Worship forms us into the people of God. It instructs us in our story and thereby allows us to, as Leithart later puts it, “name the world Christianly.” It reminds us, once again, that we are God’s children and called—and empowered—to live as such. 

Pressing Need

For a forgetful bunch like us, the regular rhythms of church remind us who God is and who we are—that we are his people in his world. 

This, of course, has always been a reason Christians need church, but perhaps it’s an even more pressing reason now, in a sped-up digital world where attention spans are shrinking and allegiances are fragmenting. Every day, the internet pulls us in a hundred different directions, into different (and competing) tribes and stories. This was especially true in the last year, when pandemic isolation resulted in our spending even more of our time on the internet. 

In a world like this—increasingly artificial, distracting, and, in a way, unreal—if we don’t carve out at least one day a week to be powerfully reminded of our place in the Christian story, our already fragile, fickle, and forgetful hearts will invariably stray from this story. In a world so often distorted by online life, we need the clarifying force of God’s Word read, preached, prayed, sung, and tasted.

To stay in and live out God’s story, we need to remember it. And to remember it, we need to go to church.

The answer to both questions is a resounding no. Lewis believed very much in the authority of Scripture, but he knew many of his readers did not. Indeed, he knew that swaths of the post-Christian England to which he addressed his book—which began as a series of broadcast talks he delivered for BBC Radio in the early years of World War II—not only did not recognize the divine status of the Bible; they were cut off from the worldview the Bible assumes.

Living in a Two-Tiered Cosmos

That worldview is two-tiered—it takes for granted that there is an unseen world,  greater and ultimately more real than the visible world we perceive with our five senses. The natural world we see around us was created by a transcendent God who exists outside of time and space but whose presence fills and upholds all creation. As the psalmist proclaims: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork” (19:1 KJV). God is not silent but speaks directly through the prophets, the Scriptures, and his Son, and indirectly through creation, conscience, reason, imagination, and desire.

I still vividly remember the moment I realized just how much our age has lost that two-tiered worldview. The light bulb flashed when I learned that in the Middle Ages, a realist was not, as he is today, an empiricist who only believes in the material things that he can see or hear or taste or touch or smell. He was a supernaturalist who believes that there exist, behind the things we see and the words we use, universal, eternal realties. Plato’s Forms, which Augustine put in the mind of God, were not, to the medievals, relics of an arcane philosophy, but acknowledgments that our earthly notions of goodness, truth, and beauty reflect real, absolute, divine standards of goodness, truth, and beauty that transcend our human reason and logic but that we can glimpse and know in part.

If that worldview—the only one that can support a belief in the historical reality of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection—has been lost, then how can the Christian evangelist hope to convince someone to confess Christ as Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead (Rom. 10:9–10)? The materialistic worldview of today cannot conceive of God becoming man or atonement for sin or the resurrection of the body. It cannot even conceive of a divinely inspired book as a vehicle for God’s eternal Word to bridge the gap between the unseen and the seen, the supernatural and the natural.

Apologetics as Pre-Evangelism

It is for that reason that the work of the evangelist must often be preceded by the work of an apologist who, rather than present the gospel, prepares the hearts of post-Christian materialists so they will be receptive to the message of salvation. Among the practitioners of this vital pre-evangelism, the most successful, and the most enduring, has been Lewis. The reason for his success is that he took a two-tiered approach to helping restore the lost two-tiered worldview.

In such nonfiction works as Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles, he argued logically and rationally for the existence and involvement of the supernatural in the natural. Simultaneously, in such fictional works as The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy, he allowed his readers to experience what it would be like to live in a world filled to overflowing with the presence of divine goodness, truth, and beauty. Or, to use the terminology of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, Lewis’s pre-evangelistic fiction transported readers from a modern, buffered world (one “safe” from divine intervention and accountability) to a medieval, porous one (where the supernatural is real and tangible, provoking emotions of wonder and awe, beauty and terror).

Lewis allowed his readers to experience what it would be like to live in a world filled to overflowing with the presence of divine goodness, truth, and beauty.

Though this aspect of Lewis has been known and touched on by various scholars, Brian M. Williams has done the world of apologetics a great service by exploring in detail the theory and method that allowed Lewis to open the eyes of post-Christian people living in a safely buffered, materialistic world to the possibility of a porous, supernaturalist world where a loving creator just might enter his creation and die on behalf of the rebellious creatures he made.

On the Trail of Desire

C. S. Lewis: Pre-Evangelism for a Post-Christian World: Why Narnia Might Be More Real Than We Think begins with a lengthy biography of Lewis. Williams carefully traces how the creator of Narnia was drawn to Christ by a slow process that began in his imagination and worked through his desire for something that pointed beyond the natural world. It was not his reason but his imagination that drove him to seek a supernatural source for his desire, a search that made him receptive to the transcendent yet immanent God that his logical mind had, for many long years, held at arm’s length.

Lewis’s imaginative life, Williams writes,

was full of desire, and the various visitations of Joy seemed to beckon to him from another world. Yet, his reason, shaped as it had been by naturalism, denied the existence of this other world. He had been influenced heavily by the Enlightenment assumption that intellectual history was the story of older superstitious thinking steadily giving way to new, and by unjustified extension, more true and concrete thinking. (79)

His rational mind could never have leapt over that deeply instilled Enlightenment assumption if his imagination had not impelled him to look for answers beyond the confines of the naturalistic worldview into which he had been born.

Students and longtime fans of Lewis, particularly if they have read his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy, will be aware of most of what Williams discusses in his first chapter. They will likely be less aware of the analysis that follows in the ensuing chapters. By combing carefully through Lewis’s nonfiction books and essays, Williams, who has taught courses on the history of ideas and philosophy at the College at Southeastern in Wake Forest, North Carolina, identifies two recurring themes that are essential to the success of Lewis’s pre-evangelism. In all of his written work—directly in the nonfiction, indirectly in the fiction—Lewis advocated a “return to the belief in universals and the sacramental nature of reality that attends this belief” (133).

Shadows Pointing to Solids

For Lewis the Christian Platonist, our visible world, though real, is a shadow of the greater unseen world. Williams helps his readers understand the pre-evangelistic power of this observation by means of a simple but incisive meditation on the nature of shadows: “A shadow can only be cast when light hits an object solid enough to block it from shining on the surface behind or beneath it. The shadow gives to you and to me a clue that something more solid than it is present. Lewis’s sacramental view of reality bears a close affinity to this ‘shadows-pointing-to-solids’ phenomenon” (81).

Post-Christians whose naturalistic presuppositions will not allow them to acknowledge the existence of the supernatural may yet be willing to acknowledge there are things in this world that provoke desire (Joy) in them and seem to point beyond themselves. Pre-evangelism need not argue God is the source of that desire; it merely needs to open the possibility that there might be a solid behind the shadow, an archetype behind the copy.

From there, the next step is to suggest that the particular things of our world not only reflect universal realities (goodness, truth, beauty) but participate in those realities. Lewis, Williams explains, “employed the term ‘transposition’ to convey this participatory nature of reality” (91), but the pre-evangelist can use a word like enchantment or sacrament or even magic to convey the same message. The vital thing is to build a structure, and a desire, for a trafficking between the seen and the unseen.

Image and Imagination

Most Lewis scholars today highlight the distinction he made between reason as the organ of truth and imagination as the organ of meaning. Williams takes that key distinction one step further by closely analyzing a Lewis essay that Walter Hooper published for the first time in 2013, “Image and Imagination.”

In this somewhat arcane essay, which Williams does a fine job unpacking, Lewis explains that the imagination, far from merely conjuring images, provides the context that makes meaning possible. If a fantasy author writes about a princess in a high tower, those words will not have any meaning unless our imagination constructs a world like our own that could contain a princess and a tower.

Imagination, far from merely conjuring images, provides the context that makes meaning possible.

Williams offers a powerful example of how imagination, rather than reason, fills in the context by surveying the different ways the observers at Golgotha interpreted the image they saw of Christ on the cross. Whereas all of them saw the same physical details, they “differed, significantly . . . regarding the meaning they assigned to what they saw. Some saw a charlatan and blasphemer receiving the punishment he deserved. Others saw the Son of God, who, although guiltless, was suffering a criminal’s punishment. Some jeered. Others wept. The difference cannot be explained by a description of what was seen. It can only be explained by what the whole scene was taken to be” (148).

Because “the imagination serves both to arouse desire and to help one grasp meaning” (180), it must often precede the work of reason, which, as long as it is trapped in a naturalistic worldview, will understand neither the need for something beyond nature nor the context in which such a need might be answered. Only when “reason works together with the imagination in response to joy, [will a person] go beyond mere longing to looking” (180).

Constructing Other Worlds

Lewis the fantasist succeeded in conveying and inspiring that longing through his Space Trilogy and Chronicles of Narnia by building worlds in which the imagination can encounter and find meaning in a two-tiered reality. By sojourning in such worlds, which are both like and unlike ours, the imagination finds itself baptized into a new worldview, a new manner of perceiving that will allow it to find the same type of sacramental meaning in our world. Then—and, for many post-Christians, only then—reason can step in and turn the longing into a looking, the desire into a search for the divine.

Of course, to be effective, that other reality must be constructed well, must contain good metaphors that can reflect and participate properly in the greater realities, both of the fairy-tale world and of our own. It was precisely because Lewis succeeded in finding and bringing to life such vivid, sacramental metaphors that his Narnia stories and science fiction continue to possess the apologetical power to open the heart to a porous cosmos and so make way for the head to embrace the gospel message.

Williams sums up with precision the move from heart to head, imagination to reason, that makes Lewis’s myths perfect models for the would-be pre-evangelist of the 21st century: “When, in time, the Christian message is presented plainly, Lewis hoped that the person would recognize that these were the very truths he had been delighting in all along, disrobed of their fantastical costumes, and he would therefore in turn make the rational and finally the volitional move to follow Christ” (266).

It may be with the head that we surrender to God. But for most post-Christians, that surrender will not occur until the heart and its imaginative desires have been reignited.

COVID-19 has offered illustrative examples of this. There are plenty of people on the political right whose approach to the pandemic is more informed by their political narrative, and its resultant posturing, than by a good-faith commitment to reality.

Their narrative—“nanny state” big-government overreach, corrupt Big Pharma, encroachments on personal liberty, vaccines as government control—becomes their reality. No level of scientific consensus or statistics will cause them to rethink or at least complicate their narrative.

There are plenty of people on the political left who act similarly, allowing their entrenched narratives and biases (e.g., taking off your mask in public signals you must be a vaccine-hating, genocide-loving conservative) to take precedence over objective reality.

In a piece for The Atlantic on the overcautious progressives “who can’t quit lockdown,” Emma Green observes: “Even as scientific knowledge of COVID-19 has increased, some progressives have continued to embrace policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence, such as banning access to playgrounds, closing beaches, and refusing to reopen schools for in-person learning.”

Where are the people who live in light of the facts about reality more than their feelings about it? Where are those whose understanding of the world is shaped more by evidence and logic than by narratives and anger? Where these people exist, they’re the true radicals. 

The biggest emerging fissure in Western culture is not necessarily between political left and right as much as those fiercely committed to reality (even when it goes against the narrative) and those who elevate the narrative (whether left or right) above reality.

Too many of us are too committed to partisan narratives, and not committed enough to reality. It’s tragic that this is true even within the church—where Christians’ politics often shapes how they interpret and apply the Bible. In a world of competing and ultimately subjective narratives, we need more people radically committed to reality. And Christians are well positioned to be such people.

But first we must be aware of why narratives are so magnetic in today’s information landscape. 

Why We’re Drawn to Narratives

Humans have always been tempted to prefer convenient narratives over inconvenient reality—it started with Eve’s choice to believe the serpent’s narrative, after all (Gen. 3:1–7). But there are specific dynamics in our modern, technological age making the problem worse. Here are three.

1. We’re Too Overwhelmed. (Narratives Are Easier.)

In a world utterly glutted with information—far too many articles, studies, statistics, opinions, and “expert” recommendations to ever sort through—getting to the heart of reality is hard. Sometimes it seems impossible.

When a relentless barrage of information hits our brains, it’s easier to file things away in tidy narrative boxes (“This is proof of that”) than to lay them out on a table and see what reality emerges from the evidence. Quickly plugging data into established narratives is a coping mechanism in a world of information overload.

Quickly plugging data into established narratives is a coping mechanism in a world of information overload.

It’s understandable, but also kind of lazy and even quite dangerous. Reality is often more complex than our narratives demand. The pursuit of reality is a necessarily laborious endeavor. And it requires patience.

2. We’re Too Impatient. (Narratives Are Faster.)

Facts take time to gather, but narratives offer quick answers. Uncovering reality—in all its complex glory—is a slow burn. Who has patience for this in a world of instant gratification? Hot takes that neatly turn reality into narratives are more satisfying. And they sell.

When a breaking-news event happens, the narrative machine kicks in—jumping at the opportunity to shoehorn new “evidence” into a given narrative. When the Pulse nightclub massacre happened in 2016, it was immediately framed within a narrative of homophobic hate—and it remains framed that way in most of our memories.

But over the years as evidence emerged, the “homophobic hate crime” narrative was debunked. In a too-fast news cycle, we rarely revisit old news to correct false narratives. If a narrative is adopted en masse, it becomes “reality” for posterity, regardless of the facts.

3. We’re Too Self-Oriented. (Narratives Serve Us.)

We’re tempted to prize narratives over reality for another, more basic reason: we’re self-centered, sinful creatures. We like narratives because we can control them. Reality resists our attempts at control. We prefer narratives because it feels good to “be right,” even if reality would indicate we’re wrong.

And because we like how narratives make us feel (confirming our biases, patting us on the back for the supposed rightness of our views), narrative-driven news sells. Algorithms that feed us more of what we want to believe make us more addicted to social media and more lucrative to advertisers.

It’s a vicious cycle, but it feels good. Only an intentionally self-denying, “I may be wrong” posture is our way out of the quagmire. Only a humble deference to truth outside the self can free us from the prideful prison of narrative-skewed bubbles and self-serving distortion.

Truth Over Tribe

I love how former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss describes the goal of her Substack newsletter: “This newsletter is for people who want to understand the world as it is, not the world as some wish it to be. It’s for people who seek the truth rather than the comfort of a team or a tribe.”

People who seek the truth rather than the comfort of a team or a tribe. If that characterizes anyone in the world, it should be Christians. But it will only happen if we give up our comfortable attachments to narratives—cultural, political, personal.

The church is well positioned to be one of the clearest defenders of reality in a world of narratives. We have the foundation of truth (Scripture), and the truth that liberates (Jesus). This is the one entirely true narrative—the narrative that doesn’t just spin reality, but establishes criteria for evaluating it and a lens for illuminating it. 

For these reasons, Christians of all people should be contending for transcendent truth rather than clawing for partisan power or in-group status, as I argued last year in “Exit the Echo Chamber. It’s Time to Persuade” and “We Need Prophets, Not Partisans.” Sadly, many Christians on all sides are now stressing narratives over reality, or letting narratives determine their perception of reality—and it’s ripping evangelicalism apart.

Christians of all people should be contending for transcendent truth rather than clawing for partisan power or in-group status.

This is why, in my book The Wisdom Pyramid, I call Christians to spend less time being fed by narrative-pushing sources (the internet and social media) and more time being nourished by sources that ground us in reality (Scripture, the church, nature): the transcendent, the time-tested, the tangible.

There are ample resources in Christian Scripture and tradition that can help us be people of reality in a world of narratives. Let’s avail ourselves of these wisdom-shaping resources. Let Scripture drive your understanding of reality more than QAnon conspiracy theories. Be shaped less by fleeting, viral narratives and more by the church’s 2,000-year tradition. Be constrained by the beautiful biology of God’s design in creation more than ethereal abstractions and expressions of self.

God-made, God-glorifying reality is so much more satisfying than self-made, self-serving narratives. Christians should be fighting for the former instead of falling for the latter. 

As social-media celebrities and influencers connect online with millennials searching for hope, they easily become quasi-spiritual leaders. Stein calls them “Instavangelists” because they use social-media platforms like Instagram to pedal their brand and their promises of hope, just like Christian evangelists of the 1950s.

It’s a comparison that should cause Christians to take note and action: online, millennials are finding and following false-gospel preachers and becoming their digital disciples. Stein explains: “American women are desperate for good vibes, coping skills for modern life, and proactive steps,” and they’re looking for modern answers to spiritual questions. They’ve created their own self-centered gospel, scripture, and functional theology that is a “blend of left-wing political orthodoxy, intersectional feminism, self-optimization, therapy, wellness, astrology, and Dolly Parton.” 

Chances are you know someone looking for answers to life’s biggest questions from a branded star on Instagram. But when their answers prove empty, the search will begin again. And you may be the influencer the Spirit uses to lead them to true and lasting hope in Christ.

Consider three ways Christians can serve millennials in an empty Instavangelist culture.

1. Labor humbly, to bring true knowledge.

Christians wanting to help their millennial neighbors need to begin by relating to millennials’ needs by beginning from a position of humility, like Jesus did. Without his sacrifice, we too would be selfish deniers of God, looking for answers apart from Christ. 

Chances are you know someone looking for answers to life’s biggest questions from a branded star on Instagram. And you may be the influencer the Spirit uses to lead them to true and lasting hope in Christ.

We can graciously identify with millennials’ corrupt desires, because we’ve had our own. We know how itching ears once tempted us to accumulate “teachers to suit [our] own passions” (2 Tim. 4:3) in order to find hope. Rather than shaming millennials, praise them for admitting need and seeking help. 

At the heart of the Instavangelist culture is a desire to provide answers of hope to people who feel empty. It isn’t wrong to desire to feel filled; it’s wrong to fill emptiness with lesser substitutes. An unbeliever’s experience with emptiness is an opportunity for Christians to fill their neighbor’s hearts and minds with the true knowledge of Christ. God fills those he first forgives. The lost will remain empty until they are filled with the saving hope of Christ. 

At the heart of the Instavangelist culture is a desire to provide answers of hope to people who feel empty.

When a friend announces on Instagram that she didn’t score her dream job and her feed blows up with words like “You’ll get there!” or “You’ve got this!”—she will need a friend who isn’t prompting her to try harder or believe longer. She needs encouragement to think through her discouragement biblically, with the promises of God that are hers in Christ Jesus. 

She needs to learn to identify and destroy arguments and lofty opinions “raised against the knowledge of God” (2 Cor. 10:5). She needs the Holy Spirit to expose her “empty deceit” and fill her with the knowledge of Christ’s fullness. 

2. Labor to invest in real-life discipleship.

Social-media influencers and Instavangelists rarely engage or follow up with millennials who seek their help. When online posts draw out readers’ vulnerable comments, readers often experience digital silence. Stein calls this relationship “a confession without a confessor.” Scripture calls it “sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36). 

Instavangelists rarely engage or follow up with millennials who seek their help.

As those who’ve experienced the gentle leading of the Shepherd, we should be the first to demonstrate his compassionate care to others. And to the millennial generation, gentleness and compassion—or a lack of it—is often first reflected by our online persona. 

Have we considered that every word we type online has the potential to attract and gather others toward Jesus, or to repel and scatter lost wanderers? Our online words should be a gracious and conversational entry point, inviting others into our lives. 

While it is good to convey the love of Christ online and to shepherd unbelievers through posts and DMs, these means of communication are limited. Pray your online friends might be willing to invest in real life, through discipleship. Meeting face to face will enable you to draw near, to note wounds that need healing, to pray and read Scripture together, perhaps even to offer a real hug or a warm meal. 

Millennials need to experience the good gift of in-person, Christian fellowship. Consider the millennials you’re currently following and whom you might invite to join you for coffee. Labor online and offline, investing in friendships for the purpose of discipleship. 

3. Gather God’s sheep into the safe pasture of the church.

Stein’s article ends on this poignant note: “Instead of helping [millennials] to engage with our most important questions, our screens might be distracting us from them. Maybe we actually need to go to something like church?” I concur. Please do come in. 

Don’t startle millennials; welcome them warmly. As unbelieving or searching millennials enter our church doors, keep in mind that doing so is no small step. They are likely moving their search offline and seeking real answers and community. As they bravely step out of online anonymity and into a church filled with strangers, welcome them as Christ would: affectionately. 

As grateful members of the body of Christ, we are privileged to help millennials acclimate to the blessings of abiding in the sheepfold, cared for by an earthly shepherd, and being known and loved by the family of God. 

As millennials observe our lives or enter our church, do they want to know more? Do they see why Christians love to flock together weekly, in real life? Point out the ways the local church is a good blessing in your life because of your choice to gather together, break bread together, celebrate the ordinances together, listen to God’s Word together, and pray together.

Is there a wandering millennial you could begin to pray for and begin a friendship with? Ask the Lord to give you opportunities to welcome millennials into your life and your home for fellowship. Invite them to study Scripture over coffee. Ask them to attend a small group or your church’s worship gathering. You don’t have to agree on everything in order to begin a welcoming friendship. You can serve a millennial by listening well, asking deep questions, and looking for opportunities to share the true gospel.  

Be Patient With the Sheep

Christians, we are not, like so many Instavangelists, peddlers but men and women of sincerity, commissioned by God (2 Cor. 2:17). Speak Christ to millennials online and offline. Bring his hope to a world wearied by empty promises. You don’t have to have a celebrity-sized platform online or aspire to be this generation’s Billy Graham or Elisabeth Elliott to show others your consistent love for Jesus. Be patient; God is already at work leading his lost sheep to follow behind those who follow Jesus. You can trust he will use your ordinary life, by his grace, as a source of influence and evangelism for advancing his kingdom.

Discussion Questions:

1. How does Tim Keller define mishpat?
2. How does Irwyn Ince define shalom?
3. What inferences are drawn as to the relationship of mishpat to shalom?
4. As you observe our cultural moment, what things bring you to a place of lament?
5. As you observe our cultural moment, what things bring you to a place of encouragement?
6. What are some of the negative consequences of failing to pursue mishpat and shalom in this particular conversation?
7. What does good leadership look like in such difficult and complex conversations?

In this episode of TGC Q&A, we kick off a new five-week series titled, “Gen Z’s Questions About Christianity” with Josh Butler, who answers two questions regarding hell and judgment.

He discusses:

• Reconciling God’s love with eternal judgment (0:00)
• A broader storyline for hell (1:24)
• Getting hell wrong (2:55)
• Reconciling heaven and earth (3:38)
• Getting the hell out of earth (4:37)
• Is hell a scare tactic? (6:45)
• Pruning the branches of the wicked tree (7:27)
• The impact of sin (9:48)
• The good news of the gospel (10:40)

Explore more from TGC on the topic of hell.

The foil to Gray’s proposal is the homogeneous church movement loosely connected to a seeker-sensitive philosophy. A homogeneous church is one in which 80 percent or more of the congregation is of one ethnicity. Many homogeneous churches implicitly assume that the way they “do church” is right, and that others need to learn from them. Many church planters are called to have target audiences, but Gray tells the story of how he told trainers: “My audience will be sinners. Latino sinners. Asian sinners. Black sinners. White sinners.”

Gray’s book functions as a rally call. Jesus’s vision for the church is multiethnic and presses for recognition, repentance, and revolution in our ministries.

Encouraging Coach

So much is to be commended in Gray’s book. For one, Gray has a way of speaking to you that isn’t demeaning or disparaging; he instructs as a coach who presses for excellence because he believes in you and the better future that lies before us. The influence of his sports background is evident. You never get the sense that Gray has done it right and others need to learn from him. Rather, he inspires, cheers, and paints a beautiful multicolored vision.

Jesus’s vision for the church is multiethnic and presses for recognition, repentance, and revolution in our ministries.

It’s evident from Gray’s writing that he truly loves God and his people. It almost oozes through the pages that Gray isn’t passionate about this because it is culturally cool, but because this is what he sees God calling the church to do. He truly believes we will be stronger as many members with different gifts come together to serve and encourage one another.

Gray is also to be commended for a book written at a popular level but filled with biblical teaching. He works the most with Ephesians, but the Gospels and Acts are peppered in as well. Gray doesn’t base his call primarily on sociology, philosophy, or politics, but on the Bible. He is captured by the vision God presents, and he wants others to see it too.

I appreciated how Gray acknowledges the call is not simply a black and white issue. No, for Gray multiethnic means a wider variety of cultures, including Asians and Latinos. He also includes not only biblical material but sociological, philosophical, and practical advice. He tells stories about his past and his congregation that help bring the book to life.

Pushing Forward

There was so much I appreciated about the book that I have little in the realm of critique. I do wish there was more practical advice on some of the struggles Gray has faced, or guidance for those who seek to move in this direction. Gray intersperses this throughout the book, but I would’ve liked more details on how his church’s worship services look; how he identifies leaders from other ethnicities; and if people have left the church because it is not black, white, Asian, or Latino enough. Gray is a person who grew up in multiple spaces (black, white, and more), so I wondered if he had a unique ability to speak to each culture.

He mentions the differences between first-generation and second-generation immigrants, which raised this thought: Every church chooses a culture by what it does. This naturally includes and excludes some people, and it’s most evident with language. By having services in English, we exclude those who don’t speak it. While some churches have their services in multiple languages, it’s still impossible to be a culturally neutral church (not that we would want to).

In sum, everything we choose to do leans toward some cultures and away from others. In some sense we can’t be completely like the church in Revelation, in which every tongue is represented, because we have to choose a culture. As America becomes more diverse, there is still a unity to our cultural moment, even among different subcultures. We can see this in sports, business, and neighborhoods. Even though there are differences, we come together for a common goal. Gray encourages the church to be that place.

In some sense we can’t be completely like the church in Revelation, in which every tongue is represented, because we have to choose a culture.

However, this reality also raises the question of whether it’s necessarily wrong to have some of these subcultures lean into their distinctives and reach those areas and people. I don’t defend the homogeneous church, but sometimes I wonder if a multiethnic reality will lean toward the lowest common denominator (like certain forms of ecumenicism). Without more specific practical application, I question how we can avoid a cultural flattening. Gray doesn’t say it is wrong to have culturally specific churches, but affirms we must have pathways to connect with the rest of the body of Christ.

Heart Awakened

Overall, my heart was awakened anew for God’s vision for a multiethnic church. I want to see this happen in our churches, seminaries, and relationships. I wanted to talk to my wife about how we can live this out more in our family. I need to repent for how I haven’t sought this with more intentionality.

Gray’s book doesn’t pull the guilt lever. He calls us to recognize what God is doing in the world and join him on his mission. If people want to critique Gray for that, let them. We need to keep our eyes on Jesus’s call and our future, in which every tribe, tongue, and nation will stand before God’s throne in a harmonious yet diverse song.

In traditional origami, there are no cuts. That’s the case with Ryujin 3.5. The entire piece is of a single large and unadulterated sheet of paper. Tutorial videos on YouTube are 12 hours long. Even highly skilled and experienced origamists take weeks and even months to complete it.

It’s hard to fathom the patience and precision required. But when applied with the necessary care, commitment, and skill, the shapes and stories one can tell with the single sheet of paper, whole and intact, is beyond imagination. This is what the completed Ryujin 3.5 looks like:

Following Jesus usually begins simply enough. We believe and receive the gospel story and learn to live as God’s beloved. The early days of faith feel as light and free as a paper airplane. But as life marches on, the crease patterns become more complex. Questions about the Bible, the church, and our stories begin to populate the page. Soon enough, navigating faith feels nearly impossible. In frustration, we crumple up the paper and stop folding altogether. 

I can empathize. In my early college years I went through doubt, deconstruction, and eventual deconversion. The Bible stories I cherished as a kid and the fond youth-group memories of my teenage years couldn’t bear the complexity of my questions. The crease patterns began to blur my vision and I crumpled up faith altogether.

But doubt and deconstruction need not be enemies of faith.

Faithfulness Amid Doubt

Most of us are familiar with the passage in Scripture we call the Great Commission:

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:16–20)

Until recently, I’d neglected a key part of the story. As the 11 remaining disciples gather around Jesus for the last time, the story tells us, “some doubted.” And in the midst of their doubt, Jesus gives them all the Great Commission. History tells us that all 11 of these men would live the rest of their days committed to the gospel, helping establish the Christian church. All of them, including the ones who doubted.

Even after encountering the risen Christ, the questions lingered. Some of these men were deconstructing their paradigms, questioning what was and wasn’t true, wondering if any of this made actual sense. Yet they stayed. And God changed the world through them. 

More recently, giants of the faith like Martin Luther, John Calvin, Charles Spurgeon, and C. S. Lewis, among many others, admitted personal wrestlings with doubt. In the words of Parker Palmer, “the deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure.”

What the first disciples who doubted and the more recent doubters share in common is patience. Deconstruction of previously held ideas didn’t lead them to denounce or depart from faith. From the very early days of the church, faithful commitment to Christ amid and in spite of doubt was normal.

This is in stark contrast to the typical deconstruction stories of our day, when departure from faith often seems inevitable at the first sign of dissonance.

Patient Faith

In his book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, Alan Kreider highlights the early Christians’ slow, methodical approach to discipleship. Complete belonging in the community of faith came only after months and years of catechesis.

Rather than an attractional approach to evangelism, early Christians made discipleship intentionally rigorous. Becoming a Christian and learning how to live as a Christ-follower was too important to rush, these early Christians believed. Transformation into Christlikeness took time—time they were willing to commit.

From the very early days of the Christian church, faithful commitment to Christ in the midst and in spite of doubt was normal.

This isn’t to take anything away from stories of sudden, radical conversions. My mother’s story of faith began like that in 1981. But she is who she is today because of 40-plus years of patient, faithful commitment to Jesus, through many seasons of doubt. Her conversion was immediate but her formation has taken a lifetime.

She has modeled patient faith—something glaringly missing from today’s deconstruction stories. Perhaps instead of focusing on whether our faith is weak or strong we should give more attention to whether our faith is impatient or patient. A patient faith can withstand seasons of ups and downs, strength and weakness. But an impatient faith can’t. 

Our lack of patience today is fueled by a lot of things, including a pervasive consumerism that hooks us on instant gratification, and a sped-up media landscape in which narratives, debates, and viral sensations can blow up, become a Very Important Thing for a brief period, and then die off with astonishing speed.

Our culture of short attention spans favors bursts of opinionated intensity over slow, considered simmers. Our addiction to novelty also places a high value on leaving the old and discovering the new. As A. J. Swoboda writes, “Being post-anything is now a sign of arrival and maturity.” Rethinking is valued over remembrance. Innovation is valued over continuity.

Truth established over a long span of history matters little in the chronological snobbery of the digital age. 

Slow Growth Bears Fruit

Rather than constantly vacillating between pre- and post-anything in our faith, what if we valued patience? When we’re overwhelmed by the crease patterns of questions and doubts, we need deep breaths and even deeper prayers. We need grit and resolve to stay awhile, inviting the Holy Spirit to do his slow-growth work. 

A patient faith can withstand seasons of ups and downs, strength and weakness. But an impatient faith can’t.

This is just as true for those called to care for and shepherd others through doubt as it is for those deconstructing themselves. While it would often be easier to give up on those who don’t see things the way we do, where would we be if God gave up on us that way? If you’re pastoring someone asking hard questions, be patient. Quick answers to complex questions, or quick dismissals of real doubts, can do great harm. Go slow. Invite the person to go slow with you.

In our backyard is a small garden. While the leaf lettuce, radish, and green onions grow quickly and easily, we have to practice more patience with the basil and perilla leaves. I’ve never had a green thumb, but I’ve discovered the quiet joy of watering, watching, and waiting. Gardening isn’t about immediate results; speed and expediency have no place in dirt and soil. 

So it is with faith and doubt. This is why Jesus says “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). The word “abide” here is the Greek word menō, the verb form of “dwelling place.” It indicates an extended stay in a particular place, dwelling amid hospitality and grace.

Following Jesus, even through deconstruction, begins and ends in his presence—staying put with him, remaining, dwelling in his hospitable grace. There is more than enough space here for all our questions, uncertainties, confusion, and doubt.

Everywhere I look—even as I write this—I’m reminded of both sweet and bitter memories. The almost perfectly painted walls remind me of the times my extended family took off work to renovate our home. The hodgepodge assortment of chairs in our living room reminds me of all the sweet times we’ve spent huddled with our Thursday night community group. The unused nursery filled with unworn baby clothes reminds me of the baby girl we never brought home from the hospital.

We have rejoiced within these walls. We have wept within these walls. Even though our house is not alive, it bears witness to our living. This is why locking the front door for the last time will feel like a sort of death. It is the fading away of a physical reminder. It is the death of a dwelling place.

Even though our house is not alive, it bears witness to our living.

I know this kind of nostalgia may seem overwrought (or maybe even laughable) to some. We must surely beware of the debilitating idolatry of sentimentalism. But we must also be aware of cold utilitarianism. We must beware both of elevating good gifts to the status of gods and downplaying God’s good gifts with stoic—even gnostic—indifference. 

Make no mistake, in whatever form it takes—be it a tent or townhouse—having a home is a good thing. Home is God’s idea.

Living in Eden’s Shadow

In the beginning, God placed man within a perfect garden home (Gen. 2:5–9). Eden was made for man, and Eden was not made to end. God graciously gave the man and woman their “forever home” (no house-hunting or shiplap required). At the fall, however, Adam and Eve were rightfully and forcibly evicted from what should have been their eternal home (Gen. 3:24). Ever since, humans have wandered from one temporary abode to another.

That’s why it’s appropriate when we mourn the death of a dwelling place. We were not created for this. We were not created for moving boxes, “sold” signs, and turned-in keys. We were not made for walking away from home.

We were not created for moving boxes, ‘sold’ signs, and turned-in keys. We were not made for walking away from home.

Instead, we were made for expanding our home. Man was made to “multiply and fill” the world (Gen. 1:28). Humans were given the joyous responsibility to “subdue” the earth and exercise care-taking “dominion” over creation (Gen. 1:28). I believe Lewis articulates this mandate well when he describes our experience in the New Eden as a return to a never-ending “further up and further in.”

Mankind’s God-given home in Eden was meant to expand. It was not created to end.

This is why leaving home feels unnatural. We were not made for good things to end. We were not made for series finales on screens, sold signs in yards, and dates on tombstones. We were not made for locked doors and closed caskets. The reason why all these endings feel foreign is because they are foreign. Endings—especially of good things—will always haunt those who live east of Eden. 

Nostalgia is no mere byproduct of evolutionary processes. It is (at least in some sense) the uneasy longing to return to the dwelling places—the “edens”—of yesterday. For the Christian, though, the death of dwelling places need not debilitate us. Because in Christ, these edens are but foreshadowings of the New Eden—the perfect garden-city home to come (Rev. 22:1–5).

New Eden’s Increasing Nearness

As those who live on this side of the consummated kingdom, we still experience the effects of the fall. Yet we shouldn’t mourn these effects as if we’ve been evicted from Eden yet again. Instead, we should allow all sorrow on this side of the better Adam’s final triumphant entry to remind us that a New Eden is before us.

Mankind’s God-given home in Eden was meant to expand. It was not created to end.

Don’t be mistaken: this New Eden hope must not be confused with a sentimental hope in a never-realized future. Yes, our future hope in Christ is eternal (1 Pet. 1:4), but this hope will not eternally be in the future. One day, the future kingdom will be a present reality. Our resurrected King will split the sky, and the coming kingdom will no longer glow from behind the horizon. It will crack the eastern horizon, rise to noonday, and never retreat westward. Yes, the New Eden is before us, but it will not forever be before us. And, it is not so distant that we cannot taste its increasing nearness.

Eschatological Mile Markers

In the passing of shadows, we taste the nearness of the new Eden. Every sorrow on this side of Christ’s return is an eschatological mile marker—a signpost telling us we’re one mile closer to the New Eden. For the Christian, sorrowful endings are signposts reminding us that all our passing earthly joys are just shadows of a lasting joy to come.

“Sold” signs are signposts on the narrow road to New Eden. Locked earthly doors remind us of heaven’s open gates. The death of an earthly dwelling place reminds us we have a new and better homecoming—one not subject to peeling paint, weather damage, or financial foreclosure, but designed and built by the Lord (Heb. 11:10).

For the Christian, sorrowful endings are signposts reminding us that all our passing earthly joys are just shadows of a lasting joy to come.

So yes, mourn when you lock the door for the last time. Lament when arthritis keeps you from running or epilepsy keeps you from driving. Weep when a loved one falls sick. Weep when the casket is closed.

In the midst of the mourning, however, remember: the passing of a shadow means we are that much closer to the object.

Good questions! God commands us to care for the poor, and Jesus’s first sermon proclaimed good news to the poor. Still, actually caring for the poor is difficult and complicated. The causes of poverty are complex, and efforts to alleviate or prevent poverty often backfire.

The real question is not whether the church should replace the welfare system. I really don’t see that happening, given the scope of the need and the level of coordination and organization involved (see chart), but whether the welfare system interferes with the ability of the church to do its job. I don’t think it generally does.

The Church and the Poor

First, there remain so many ways that churches can support the poor and needy. The overwhelming bulk of welfare is medical insurance, disability benefits, housing aid, and money for food. That still leaves a tremendous variety of needs unmet.

When I was in graduate school, I helped lead a church in which most households received welfare. Our church never ran out of ways to support our congregants. Welfare provides money for food, rent, and healthcare, but Christians recognize that human flourishing extends beyond these necessities.

I helped lead a church in which most households received welfare. Our church never ran out of ways to support our congregants.

Welfare benefits don’t take away the need for job training, basic life skills, access to education, rides to job interviews, childcare, mentoring, counseling—not to mention the relational and emotional consequences of poverty or the community-development needs of poor neighborhoods. Crucially, welfare doesn’t take away children’s needs for mentoring, tutoring, and loving relationships from adults they can trust.

Second, and most important, the task of the church is not primarily to meet felt needs but to proclaim the good news of Jesus and make disciples. Can welfare money for food, rent, and healthcare make it harder for welfare recipients to hear and receive the gospel? Perhaps. But I doubt they’re more resistant than affluent Americans who have sufficient money for food, housing, healthcare—and a wealth of other luxuries. For example, the people in my church’s neighborhood were far more open to the gospel than my classmates in graduate school.

Welfare Concerns

Perhaps you’ve heard stories of people gaming the welfare system, maybe by choosing not to work so they can live off government handouts, or by misrepresenting their income levels so they can qualify for aid. Stories like this should not surprise us—we live in a world corrupted by laziness and greed and sin. There is no system on earth that escapes some level of manipulation and fraud.

There is no system on earth that escapes some level of manipulation and fraud.

But the system isn’t as riddled with deception as you might think. One estimate is that about 1 percent of SNAP payments were made in error—but most of that is due to mistakes made by the household and the agency, not deliberate fraud. For Medicaid, 10 percent of the annual costs are due to fraud and systematic overcharging. But that’s not committed by welfare recipients. It’s the healthcare providers claiming reimbursement, not the poor patients, who game the system.

A second major concern is whether the welfare system provides incentives to not work because welfare benefits phase out as households earn more. For most families living below half of the Federal Poverty Line, the phaseouts are equivalent to an income-tax rate of 13 percent or less—strong incentives to work if they can. But for others the phaseouts are disastrous.

Here’s how a recent study by economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research explained it:

Earn $1 too much two years back and your Medicare Part B premiums will rise by close to $800. Earn $1 too much and, depending on the state, lose thousands of dollars in your own or your family’s Medicaid benefits. Hold $1 too much in assets and forfeit thousands in Supplemental Security Income.

If this frustrates you, imagine how frustrating it is to a person in poverty. If the economic incentives are to stay where you are, then you never improve. To earn enough to climb out of poverty, you’ll have to slog through a period (who knows how long?) when you’ll make less than your family can live on, but without any extra support. Unless, that is, you belong to a church community that can see you through; a church that prays for you, loves you, encourages you; a church that offers job training or employment fairs; a church that offers to help with transportation or childcare.

There are multiple ways a church could move that direction, from reviewing outreach ministries to make sure they’re building relationships, to working through the Chalmers Center’s Helping Without Hurting in Benevolence Ministry training.

Most welfare recipients don’t want to be trapped in dependence on the government. But the gospel does not reduce them to what they can produce or have achieved. For most welfare recipients, government benefits have not taken away the incentive to work to earn more, nor the incentive, for believers, to follow Jesus and the joy of his salvation.

Much of my pastoral ministry involves caring for and rehabilitating those who have suffered church hurt. I’ve discovered that we’re hurt in relationship, and we find healing in relationship.

Resist the Urge to Withdraw

When we’re sinned against by others, the natural tendency is to move away from everyone else. When we sin and are shamed by others, it’s similarly natural to withdraw into ourselves. But while this withdrawal may be a natural survival instinct, it won’t lead to complete healing. At some point, we must move toward others to find comfort and healing.

While this withdrawal may be a natural survival instinct, it won’t lead to complete healing.

If you’re a child of God, you have been called and commissioned to live for him with purpose, dignity, and giftedness. Don’t let those who’ve sinned against you determine your future. You may need to invest in wise counseling and spiritual direction—and from your pain, a new and deeper version of yourself can emerge. You can move toward others with trust and hope again, not because your next community won’t fail you, but because God will never fail you, and he often ministers to us through others.

We’re hurt in relationship, and we find healing in relationship. Before you move fully and finally away from the church, consider if you might never find what your soul truly needs until you move toward healthy, loving Christian friends and spiritual community again—or for the first time.

Rediscover Spiritual Community

The good news is that spiritual community is possible. True belonging can be found. And God loves you enough to use your pain to bring about much good, both in your life and in those around you.

What does it look like to rediscover Christian community as someone who’s considering leaving the faith or the church?

1. We Must Learn That Christian Community Is Built, Not Found

One of my pastor friends has often told his church, “This isn’t a great place to find community—it’s a great place to build community.” In other words, if you’re looking for a community that will welcome you into its club of happy, non-dramatic, non-demanding friends, good luck. Maybe you do find a group that says, “Come on in; it’s perfect in here. We’ve been waiting just for you. We have everything taken care of.” But that’s either a false promise or it’s a cult—or maybe just an overeager group workout class. No, Christian community must be built, not found.

Christian community is hard because people are hard (yes, that includes you). But it’s worthwhile. And in my experience, the more time and energy you invest in helping others feel connected, the more you tend to feel connected. If you work to make a place for others, you’ll likely always have a place yourself. If you’re willing to take the initiative, build relationships, and care for others even when it’s boring, repetitive, or messy—and if you can expect this journey to count by years and not months—you will find yourself in a true and living community (Rom. 12:9–21).

2. We Must Reset Our Lives for Relationships

If community is built and not found, then we need to reset some aspects of our lives. We have to slow down and resist the culture of hurry around us. We may not be able to work late into the evening or on weekends. We need to plan ahead with the tenacity of a project manager to make a weekly small group or Bible study fit and remain in our schedules. We will need to recognize that moving every few years will significantly damage our relational connectedness and sense of belonging. A deep, connected life with others requires a new set of priorities and a new set of life rhythms. But it is so worthwhile.

3. We Must Be Honest and Vulnerable

If you’re deconstructing the faith, have you discussed it with those around you? More often than not, my friends who have left the faith (or simply their local church, while not joining another) have never shared their frustrations and concerns with their communities or leaders. Sadly, others don’t hear of these struggles except through Facebook, Twitter, or Medium.

If you want others to be more honest and vulnerable with you, then you may have to begin by being more honest and vulnerable with them.

But if you want others to be more honest and vulnerable with you, then you may have to begin by being more honest and vulnerable with them. If they don’t respond well, don’t be too discouraged. Perhaps they’ve never really considered the foundations of Christianity and they feel threatened. Perhaps their identity is so wrapped up in a tradition or group that they can’t imagine critiquing it. But in the long run, being honest and vulnerable with others will lead to deeper relationships—if not in one community, then in another.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that might be the death knell of Roe v. Wade.

The Background

On Monday, the Supreme Court granted review of the state of Mississippi’s petition in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. That case involves a 2018 law passed in Mississippi called the Gestational Age Act, which allows abortions after 15 weeks of gestational age only in medical emergencies or instances of severe fetal abnormality. The law was blocked by lower courts as inconsistent with current judicial precedent that legalizes access to abortion.

The court agreed to take up only one of the three questions posed by the petition: “Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” The court will hear oral arguments on the case in its next term, which begins in October.

Current abortion precedent regarding viability and abortion is based on Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which said the “essential holding of Roe v. Wade should be retained and once again reaffirmed.” As applicable to the Dobbs case, the ruling in Casey says:

It must be stated at the outset and with clarity that Roe’s essential holding, the holding we reaffirm, has three parts. First is a recognition of the right of the woman to choose to have an abortion before viability and to obtain it without undue interference from the State. Before viability, the State’s interests are not strong enough to support a prohibition of abortion or the imposition of a substantial obstacle to the woman’s effective right to elect the procedure.

The willingness to hear the case signals that at least four justices on the Supreme Court believe some pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions might be constitutional.

Why It Matters

Could this finally be the case that dismantles Roe v. Wade? It’s certainly possible. As Ed Whelan says, the Dobbs case “provides the best opportunity this Court will ever have to overturn Roe.” But even if the Court does not directly overturn Roe, a ruling that determines prohibitions prior to viability are constitutional could undermine abortion’s legal precedents.

Viability refers to the stage of development at which an unborn child is capable of living, under normal conditions, outside the uterus. But as the biomedical researcher G. H. Breborowicz explains, “Viability exists as a function of biomedical and technological capacities, which are different in different parts of the world. As a consequence, there is, at the present time, no worldwide, uniform gestational age that defines viability.”

The use of viability as the criterion for when a child in the womb might be killed has always been considered arbitrary, even by bioethicists who otherwise support abortion. Because viability is based in part on technology, it can vary by location. For example, in the United States viability occurs at approximately 24 weeks of gestational age. In Nigeria fetal viability is at 28 weeks of gestation—four weeks later than in the United States. What consistent moral standard says a child is worthy of moral protection if in the womb in the United States but not in Nigeria?

In a recent issue of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, Elizabeth Chloe Romanis argues that “there is incoherence in the meaning of viability and argues that it is thus a conceptually illegitimate basis on which to ground abortion regulation.” Romanis adds:

There are also pragmatic problems with using a viability threshold to regulate because it is innately arbitrary. Viability is wholly dependent on geography and resources. Moreover, it is moveable and uncertain. The standard of viability in medicine is based on the “human interpretation of statistical probabilities” applied to fetuses as a class.

Despite being arbitrary and incoherent, the viability standard is the primary prop supporting federal legal precedents regarding abortion. If viability falls, Roe will soon follow. As Notre Dame law professor Gerard Bradley points out, “the removal of the judicially created barrier of ‘viability’ could let loose a cascade of pre-viability prohibitions, and in due course test the hypothesis that there is no principled, coherent stopping point between removal of the ‘viability’ standard and flat-out reversal of Roe.”

If the ruling in Dobbs removes the viability standard, then future pre-viability prohibitions are likely to withstand challenges in federal court. “[The viability standard is] one of the few things SCOTUS has not tinkered with since 1973 when it comes to Roe,” says legal historian Mary Ziegler. “If respect for precedent is progressives’ best argument, eliminating viability makes that precedent even more unrecognizable. And the case for overruling gets stronger.”

“And there has never been a strong alternative to viability proposed by pro-choice forces,” Ziegler adds. “So if not viability, what? Abortion foes are banking on six/eight weeks. But once viability is gone, all bets are off.”

For Shai, the cultural differences in music and dress never seemed to matter compared to unity in the crucified and risen Christ. Shai became a key figure in the growing movement of Christian hip-hop, musically like Wu-Tang Clan but lyrically like Billy Graham. The style was appealing, but the crowds seemed more excited about Jesus than anything else. He’s convinced that we’ll look back one day on this era, between 2002 and 2012, as a revival much like the Jesus Movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s.

In 2012, ethnic differences began to re-emerge with the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. As Shai writes in his new book, The New Reformation: Finding Hope in the Fight for Ethnic Unity (Moody), the subsequent high-profile shooting deaths of black men and women did not surprise many African Americans. His sense as a 16-year-old was that police beat up black people all the time. But Christian hip-hop began to decline when white and black Christians realized they did not see these incidents the same way. He writes:

White Christians were happy to have us as long as we just rapped about the gospel and kept quiet about the things we talk about among ourselves all the time that deeply affect us. But the moment we expressed the pain we felt about ‘racial injustice,’ many White Christians were quick to dismiss us, rebuke us, or silently ignore us.

Even so, Shai’s book points to hope for ethnic unity. It’s a book that cuts through the anger, sarcasm, unforgiveness, and mockery that characterize much Christian discourse today on this sensitive subject. He points us toward a better way of humility, gentleness, patience, and bearing with one another in love. Apart from massive revival, we may not expect the world to overcome these divisions. But in the church, through the power of the gospel, we can strive for unity and be a clear and compelling witness to the world.

Shai Linne joined me on Gospelbound to discuss the importance of ethnic unity and how we might get there.

Today, workplace complaints are big business. I know this because it is my business. As a labor attorney, I help companies respond to employee complaints. And the venues for complaining are myriad: human resources, confidential hotlines, union shop stewards, specialized government agencies, or private attorneys.

One venue is easy to overlook: speaking directly with the person in charge. Of course, some leaders are uninterested, or even abusive. And some serious problems demand immediate escalation. But generally, the best way to resolve routine workplace disputes is to raise them with a supervisor, in the field, as they arise. Once outside parties are involved—especially attorneys—expense and delay often hijack what could have been a simple fix.

So I am thankful your supervisor is interested in the input of his workers. An open-door policy makes good business sense. I am also thankful that your supervisor wants to apply biblical principles, such as Matthew 18:15–20, to the workplace. But you’re right to point out that the passage does not directly address the relationship between supervisor and subordinate. Let’s take a closer look.

Christian Love in a Sinful World

Like all admonitions from Scripture, Matthew 18 must be applied with wisdom, in a manner appropriate to the particular circumstances. That passage is not aimed at workplace challenges specifically, but at something more significant, and of eternal value—the relationship between Christian brothers and sisters in a local church community. Nonetheless, we can still find guidance for handling difficult situations between believers who happen to work together, especially at a Christian ministry.

Generally, the best way to resolve routine workplace disputes is to raise them with a supervisor, in the field, as they arise.

Christians bear the mark of Christ by loving each other well, as Jesus loved us (John 13:34–35). But the reality is that we still sin (1 John 1:10). We are grumpy. We do things that are annoying, selfish even. We grow angry and use words that bite. Sometimes—and this is a real danger for Christians in leadership—we make foolish and ugly choices that harm people who depend on us. Our sin breaks fellowship with God and each other.

Thankfully, God knows our weaknesses and tells us how to handle conflict due to sin. The first step is to carefully evaluate whether we are the one at fault. Perhaps there is a big fat log sticking out of our eye, impairing our vision (Matt. 7:4–5). If we have wronged someone, our obligation is to confess to God and each other immediately (1 John 2:9; James 5:16). We must also show our repentance by making things right, to the extent possible (Luke 19:8).

But what if the other person—in this case, your boss—is truly in the wrong?

Cover or Confront

At that point, Christians have two choices. The first choice is to cover over the sin in love (1 Pet. 4:8; Prov. 10:12). Sometimes an offense is minor, inadvertent, a one-off. Escalating such incidents does not benefit anyone. With the Holy Spirit’s help, we should overlook and forget such sins.

Yet other offenses are more serious. Fellowship between Christians, as well as the offender’s fellowship with Christ, may be threatened. In such cases, covering over the sin would not be loving at all. These are the sins we address directly, also in love (Eph. 4:15; Gal. 6:1; James 5:19).

Neither choice is easy. When we cover over someone’s sins, we intentionally set irritation aside, sacrificing personal comfort. But confronting sin can be even more difficult. It requires courage to speak the truth, gently, with no guarantee of how the offender will respond.

When we cover over someone’s sins, we intentionally set irritation aside, sacrificing personal comfort.

Scripture is clear these are the only two options for addressing the sin of a fellow believer. God does not permit us, for example, to stew in resentment (1 Cor. 13:5) or to vent our frustration in gossip (Eph. 4:29, 31). The Matthew 18 discipline, in particular, is designed to minimize gossip and false accusations (Matt. 18:16).

Matthew 18 in the Office

I do not know the nature of the problem that is bothering you and your colleagues. But let’s say your supervisor has acted in some way that you cannot in good conscience ignore.

According to Matthew 18, you should first confront him privately. (Again, we are drawing principles, not prescriptions, since this isn’t a church context.) If your supervisor is a man and you are a woman, I encourage you to use ordinary discretion—meet during business hours, with others in the general area, preferably in an office with windows, or outside. If he doesn’t listen, try again with one or two other Christians. If he still doesn’t listen, talk to the elders of your local church. They will be able to provide guidance on whether further Christian resolution is possible.

As you have noted, speaking directly to your supervisor is intimidating, due to the power imbalance. Yet Matthew 18 does not contain exceptions for a poor person harmed by a rich person, an official harmed by a subject, or even a slave harmed by a master. We are equal in Christ (Gal. 3:28), and equally responsible for handling our disputes in a godly manner. Whether the believing offender responds in a godly manner or chooses to retaliate is his responsibility.

Let’s say your supervisor shows stubborn unrepentance, despite your pleas and the efforts of the church. At that point, you can consider your secular options for complaint. Depending on the gravity of the situation, it may be necessary to involve a government agency or find an attorney. On the other hand, it’s also possible that you uncover new information through Matthew 18 that helps you better understand your supervisor’s perspective, allowing you to cover over the offense after all.

Regardless of how your supervisor responds, the time and effort you spend using Matthew 18 is not wasted. Christians must try to resolve disputes as Christians, whenever possible, for the sake of our witness (1 Cor. 6:1–8).

My answer, and the answer Dave Harvey offers in this excellent book, is a resounding yes.

Bad Ecclesiology Hurts People

I once heard J. I. Packer say that “bad theology hurts people.” So too does bad ecclesiology. That statement may catch you by surprise. Perhaps you struggle to believe the way a church is organized, led, and governed could cause much damage.

And yet unbiblical leadership structures can wreak havoc on the people of God and bring reproach on the name of Jesus Christ. A failure to honor the clear teaching of Scripture on how a church should be governed is a recipe for disaster. Simply put, as Harvey repeatedly asserts, the quality of elder plurality determines the spiritual health of a church.

A failure to honor the clear teaching of Scripture on how a church should be governed is a recipe for disaster.

One need only survey the landscape of recent train wrecks in several churches to see how true this is. In virtually every instance where a gifted leader or pastor succumbed to temptation—be it sex, pride, isolation, bullying, or monetary mismanagement—the problem can be traced to a singular, authoritarian pastor who largely avoided meaningful accountability and built the ministry around his giftedness and personality.

I have in mind the sort of senior leader who never loses a vote; regularly intimidates his staff, elder board, or deacon board; and is rarely willing to admit that others might have greater insight and wisdom on a particular issue than he.

There are numerous reasons I highly recommend Harvey’s book. He is a veteran of ecclesiological train wrecks. He has experienced firsthand what happens when churches fail to heed the clear teaching of Scripture. His wisdom and humility combine to chart for us a clear path as he describes the countless reasons why plurality of male leadership in the church is the most beneficial and spiritually healthy model to embrace.

This should not be taken as an indictment of every church in which “the man of God” mentality or “Moses model” of leadership is endorsed. Some of you may attend a church of which the senior pastor is the sole elder. I’ve known a handful of such men who functioned reasonably well in this capacity. In most instances, however, the deacons (or elders) exist only to rubber-stamp his decisions, and his unavoidably limited perspective is the sole factor shaping the church’s vision. There are always a handful of exceptions in which, by God’s mercy, an unbiblical model of church life succeeds. But that is no justification for ignoring inspired Scripture.

One of the challenges in a plurality of leadership is the relationship between the lead or senior pastor and members of an elder board. Many envision the senior pastor as the boss, while in other churches he’s held hostage and rarely permitted to provide the sort of leadership and influence essential to a healthy spiritual family.

Insights for Plurality

One of the many strengths of this book is that Harvey argues for a plurality of leadership while simultaneously making a case for the principle of a “first among equals.” In the latter model, a senior or lead pastor’s gifts, calling, education, and spiritual maturity qualify him to exercise a greater degree of influence and cast vision for the body as a whole.

Harvey’s practical counsel on how a senior pastor works in tandem with a plurality of elders is nothing short of profound. Harvey does far more than simply defend the biblical reasons for plurality. He speaks directly and with great wisdom about the many concrete issues that arise daily in virtually every church.

He points out that the lead pastor does not possess unilateral veto power over the consensus of the other elders. Harvey is alert to the dangers of a top-heavy, authoritarian, celebrity-pastor mentality. He is also wise in the way he warns against a failure to let leaders lead. Harvey also reminds us that plurality is not an egalitarian enterprise that denies individual gifts, removes roles, or demands equality in function or results. Even among equals, there must be leadership. And this calls for the all-too-rare combination of humility and courage.

Even among equals, there must be leadership. And this calls for the all-too-rare combination of humility and courage.

Harvey addresses other critically important issues and questions with a balanced convergence of biblical instruction and common sense. He stresses the need for lay elders, provides practical insight on how much a pastor or elder should share with his wife, and speaks wisely on the sticky issue of how the lead pastor should negotiate his salary and benefits. One trend spreading among numerous megachurches today is an external board of advisers that in many ways supplants the authority of local elders. Harvey’s critique of this decidedly unbiblical model alone makes the book worthwhile.

Go-To Book

I’ve been reading books on the structures and dynamics of local-church leadership for many years. I wondered if Harvey would have anything to say that I hadn’t heard countless times before. You may be asking the same question as you decide whether investing time in reading this volume will prove profitable. I assure you it will, beyond what you can imagine.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the go-to book on the nature, role, and responsibility of local-church elders. I will happily and energetically recommend it to others in the days ahead.

At the conclusion, a jury convicted Scopes of teaching evolution, following a deliberation of just nine minutes, and the science teacher was fined the minimum $100 allowable under state law.

Yet the trial’s hold on the popular imagination extended far beyond the verdict. The play and movie Inherit the Wind later portrayed it as a Pyhrric victory for McCarthyite fundamentalists—they had won in the courtroom but lost in the court of public opinion.

Some historians of evangelicalism concluded that the trial had shamed fundamentalists and propelled them into an extended period of retreat from social issues. As George Marsden wrote in Fundamentalism and American Culture, “It would be difficult to overstate the impact of ‘the Monkey Trial’ at Dayton, Tennessee, in transforming fundamentalism. . . . [The movement] quickly lost its position as a nationally influential coalition.”

Other historians echoed this conclusion in their depictions of fundamentalism in the 1930s, portraying it as bereft of a social vision and focused instead on spiritual reawakening. For a time, this interpretation of the trial’s effect on fundamentalism became a kind of standard account. It is now being reconsidered. Scholars of fundamentalism, including Barry Hankins and Matthew Avery Sutton, have challenged it.

My study of newspaper reporting before, during, and after the trial supports their challenge and reveals an alternative story.

My study of newspaper reporting before, during, and after the trial supports their challenge and reveals an alternative story.

First, media coverage of fundamentalists was consistently mixed throughout the trial, never uniformly critical. Second, no decline in fundamentalists’ public engagement can be discerned. Indeed, the trial seemingly had the opposite effect. Fundamentalists left Dayton with a renewed enthusiasm to oppose teaching evolution in public schools.

Why Does It Matter?

Interpreting the trial is important because of its place in a larger narrative. One common summary of evangelical history says: the movement was born and shaped by the First and Second Great Awakenings; achieved broad cultural influence during D. L. Moody’s era; faltered and retreated after fundamentalists’ early 20th-century defeats, especially the Scopes Trial; and returned after World War II under leaders like Billy Graham and Harold Ockenga.

If this narrative is correct, the period of retreat would represent an anomaly in evangelical history. One of David Bebbington’s four hallmark commitments of evangelicalism is activism, within which he includes both evangelism and attempts to “enforce the ethics of the gospel in the world.” But if fundamentalists abandoned cultural engagement after the Scopes Trial, they severed an otherwise consistent tradition of evangelical social action.

They were, in short, insufficiently evangelical.

Why Doesn’t It Matter?

Yet newspaper articles throughout the 1920s and early 1930s reveal that the Scopes Trial was not a turning point. Newspapers were the dominant medium of the era, at a time when radio had not yet penetrated most households and magazines and books reached far fewer readers. A credible case that the Scopes Trial embarrassed fundamentalists and prompted a public retreat can’t therefore be made apart from newspapers.

Further, reporters in the 1920s covered fundamentalists and evolution regularly. Any defeat or wide-scale disengagement that left no trace in newspaper coverage couldn’t be considered consequential.

As part of my recent dissertation, I reviewed articles on the Scopes Trial in every newspaper cataloged within the NewspaperArchive.com database for New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio—the four largest states in the nation at the time—from 1920 to 1933. These states represented nearly a third of the U.S. population and supported hundreds of newspapers. Fundamentalism made headlines throughout the decade.

Fundamentalists in the News

Shortly before the trial, Pennsylvania’s Chester Times ran an article that claimed “a tremendous wave of fundamentalism is sweeping the country. . . . Legislatures, school boards, college faculties, prominent attorneys, free-thought leagues—all these have been brought into the controversy, with the anti-evolutionists crying ‘God or gorilla?’”

A version of the same article in a Sandusky, Ohio, newspaper listed 14 states in which anti-evolutionist efforts were underway, including Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Arkansas, Iowa, West Virginia, and North Dakota.

Coverage of the trial was so intense that it could be expected newspapers would devote less attention to evolution and fundamentalists when it concluded. Indeed, no year matched 1925 for headlines related to the issue. Yet subsequent years saw the publication of many more articles on evolution and fundamentalists than at any time before the trial. The debate had become big news.

Subsequent years saw the publication of many more articles on evolution and fundamentalists than at any time before the trial. The debate had become big news.

Immediately after the proceedings ended, the Canton Daily News speculated that Bryan might run for president and write fundamentalism into the Democratic Party platform. The article suggested he could even “attract independent and Republican fundamentalists to the Democratic banner of the new [anti-evolutionist] crusade.”

Bryan died the very day of this article, so his potential run at the White House—which would have been his fourth attempt—never occurred. A number of fundamentalist leaders emerged to continue the fight.

A newspaper in Indiana, Pennsylvania, reported in April 1926 that a wealthy Florida businessman named George Washburn had arisen as a standard-bearer for the cause. Washburn, described in another article as an “enormously rich descendant of the Mayflower Puritans,” donated $1 million to a new anti-evolution organization. His aim: to “save the orthodox Bible from the onslaughts of modernism.”

Marginal figures occasionally made common cause with fundamentalists. For example, one article about Washburn featured him alongside E. Y. Clarke, a former Ku Klux Klan organizer who had started an organization called the Supreme Kingdom. This organization sponsored an exhibit of a live monkey inside an Atlanta street-front window, with a sign nearby: “He May Be Your Grandfather—But Not Ours!”

Still another new, anti-evolutionary organization, launched by the Chicago fundamentalist Paul Rader, garnered a report in a Freeport, Illinois, newspaper in January 1929. Called Defenders of the Christian Faith, the organization offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could disprove through science a single fact of the Bible. Rader said his organization was populated not by “bigots,” but by people exercising simple “horse sense.”

Minnesota fundamentalist William Bell Riley’s efforts against evolution also captured headlines. A short piece about his World Christian Fundamentals Association reported that the organization planned to begin its fight against evolution in Georgia and then go to neighboring states, the rest of the nation, and finally to “France, England, China, South America, and Australia.”

Numerous other articles tracked post-Scopes conflicts over evolution in states and denominations. In Mississippi, legislators decided against passing a law to oppose evolution, even though the state’s population was considered largely fundamentalist, because of the volatility of the issue. Meanwhile, an organization founded in Wilmore, Kentucky—home of Asbury College—announced it would seek to pass such a bill, with an eye toward eventually achieving the aim nationwide.

By far the most covered fundamentalist leader post-Scopes was New York City pastor John Roach Straton. A 1927 profile article highlighted his views and effectiveness and speculated about whether he would take up Bryan’s political mantle. Another newspaper printed his rebuttal of a book written by well-known fundamentalist opponent Albert Dieffenbach. Yet another reported on him swapping pulpits with the pastor of First Baptist Church of San Jose, California, during which Straton announced he would “attack evolution, the present trend of public school education, and modern religious tendencies.”

Resistance to Fundamentalist Efforts

Just as fundamentalists generated news, so too did their opponents. Many newspapers seemed to enjoy stoking the conflict.

During the trial, the Canton Daily News reported on a group of French scientists who had released a statement in defense of Scopes. Notable among the group was Marie Curie. The article quoted the two-time Nobel Prize winner as saying, “Among the forms of oppression, those which tend to limitations of the rights of thought are the most horrible and also useless. . . . We protest with indignation against the Dayton lawsuit.”

Just as fundamentalists generated news, so too did their opponents. Many newspapers seemed to enjoy stoking the conflict.

The year after the trial, a number of newspapers printed an interview with Thomas Edison, the celebrity inventor, who dismissed Bryan’s fundamentalism as “obsolete long ago.” “There is more truth to be found in nature than in the Bible,” Edison said, “for nature never lies.”

Dieffenbach was a Unitarian minister and journalist at The Christian Register and then The Boston Evening Transcript. He appeared regularly in newspaper articles, with the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune reporting in 1927 that he was “gathering modernistic forces to combat the alleged onslaught of the fundamentalists.”

Dieffenbach foresaw a fundamentalist state church in America’s future and portrayed fundamentalists as destroyers of religious liberty. In one of his books, reported on by the Washington Court House Herald, he accused other modernist leaders of failing to oppose fundamentalists effectively, naming Harry Emerson Fosdick, Henry Sloane Coffin, and the deans of Harvard’s and Yale’s divinity schools among the vanquished.

Most famous among fundamentalist opponents, perhaps, was the Baltimore columnist H. L. Mencken. In one of his pieces, reprinted by the Syracuse Herald, he described fundamentalists as “Homo boobiens”: “Half educated themselves, [fundamentalists] have sought to crowd an impossible education upon their victims.”

Still, despite opposition, fundamentalist efforts to defeat the teaching of evolution could not be doubted. After the Scopes Trial, Straton, Riley, Rader, and Washburn emerged as leaders in the anti-evolutionist movement, as did organizations like the World Christian Fundamentalist Association, Defenders of the Christian Faith, and William Jennings Bryan University.

Fundamentalists engaged other issues after the Scopes Trial as well, particularly Prohibition. Their active campaigning for Herbert Hoover—the dry candidate in the 1928 presidential election—typified this anti-alcohol commitment.

Carl Henry and Neo-Evangelicals

If fundamentalists did not withdraw from cultural engagement after the Scopes Trial, then the overarching narrative of evangelicalism is in need of revision. But one question remains. Why did neo-evangelical leaders accuse their fundamentalist predecessors of withdrawing from the public square if they never did?

Carl Henry leveled such a critique at fundamentalists in his 1947 book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. In it he accused fundamentalists of having “no social program calling for a practical attack on acknowledged world evils. . . . The great majority of Fundamentalist clergymen, during the past generation of world disintegration, became increasingly less vocal about social evils.”

One possible explanation is that Henry was simply wrong, perhaps purposefully so. As Sutton concluded in his book American Apocalypse, “Henry did bad history. He mischaracterized pre–World War II fundamentalism in order to give his generation a fresh start and a clean slate in the postwar period.”

Alternatively, Henry may have been employing rhetoric, overstating his case in order to call fundamentalists to a broader vision of cultural engagement. Or he may have been focused on fundamentalists’ theology, as many were dispensational and certain tenets of dispensationalism undermined confidence in what Christians could expect to achieve in the public square.

Most likely, however, Henry was focused on the fundamentalism of the years immediately preceding him. His sweeping denouncement of fundamentalist disengagement was flawed, but fundamentalists were likely stymied in their social efforts after the failure of Prohibition in 1933. Historian John Woodbridge has suggested that the defeat of Prohibition represented a greater turning point for fundamentalists than the Scopes Trial, and I tend to agree. Fundamentalists may never have lost their desire to “enforce the ethics of the gospel,” but they did lose momentum. The campaign against alcohol had been broader, longer-lasting, and more successful than their anti-evolution efforts. Its defeat left them diminished.

Historian John Woodbridge has suggested that the defeat of Prohibition represented a greater turning point for fundamentalists than the Scopes Trial, and I tend to agree.

Their retrenchment was temporary, though. Nine years after Prohibition’s demise, the National Association of Evangelicals was founded, and several years later Billy Graham and Carl Henry would begin to lead theological conservatives back to public prominence.

The efforts of neo-evangelical leaders launched a new era in evangelical history, one that continues to wield influence today. Like many others, I owe much of my spiritual development to institutions founded by such leaders. Yet they did not rescue fundamentalists from irrelevance. Fundamentalists were never insufficiently evangelical. They had sought to engage the culture for Christ just as American evangelicals did before them and continue to do now. Whether successful or unsuccessful in our causes, we evangelicals have always shown this is part of our DNA.

This feeling is sharpened for believers who have had to flee their country. Since Syria’s civil war began in 2011, more than 11 million of its 17 million people have had to leave their homes. Thousands ended up in refugee camps in neighboring Lebanon, where churches are offering assistance, and where conversion from Islam to Christianity is allowed under the law. Others were able to resettle in countries such as Canada and the United States, where Christian organizations and churches are working to care for many of them.

In a similar vein, we see churches caring for the Chinese diaspora—helping their congregants as they struggle with their identity and opening their services to other languages in order to reach their neighborhoods. Hispanic churches become family and cultural centers for believers away from home, and we hear testimony after testimony of these churches energizing majority culture congregations around them. In a very visible way, this is the gospel at work—a glorious reminder of our spiritual citizenship and a powerful spearhead for gospel advancement.

Ways to pray:

1. Thanksgiving for the care and belonging that diaspora churches provide
2. For pastors to know how to serve their unique congregants, while also serving the communities where they’re planted
3. For a kingdom mentality in Christians around the world, that we might wait eagerly together for our true home with Jesus

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28–29

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Relatively few Americans—including Christians—read the Bible often. Here’s how to change that.

The Background

A slight majority of Americans agrees that Scripture’s message is particularly helpful, with 54 percent saying the Bible contains everything a person needs to live a meaningful life. But fewer than half bother to engage regularly with the Bible, according to a new report by the American Bible Society and Barna Group.

About one-third of U.S. adults (34 percent) read the Bible once a week or more, while half (50 percent) read the Bible less than twice a year (including never). In between these two extremes, the study found that about one in six adults read the Bible more than twice a year, but not weekly. Combining all these categories reveals that about one in six U.S. adults (16 percent) read the Bible most days during the week, up from 12 percent in 2020.

Nearly two in three Americans (63 percent) report their Bible usage is the same as last year, while one in ten (9 percent) says it has decreased. One in four U.S. adults (24 percent), however, report a more frequent Bible-reading habit.

The State of the Bible survey defines “Bible users” as individuals who read, listen to, or pray with the Bible on their own at least three or four times a year outside of a church service or church event.

Who are these Bible users? Not all are Christian; 37 percent of those who self-identify with other religions also read the Bible at least three to four times a year. They tend to be older (Boomers are about twice as likely as Gen Z to be a Bible user.) They are ethnically diverse but also more likely to live in the Southern states.

What to Do

The prophet Jeremiah said about God’s revelation, “When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight, for I bear your name, Lord God Almighty” (Jer. 15:16). Can we say, like Jeremiah, God’s Word is “my joy and my heart’s delight”? Has reading Scripture become more drudgery than joy? About one in ten Americans (11 percent) say they struggle to feel excited about Bible use. We can take comfort in knowing we are the problem.

That may not sound encouraging, but there is a reason we can be thankful the fault lies with us: We can do something about it. If you are one of the millions of Bible users who are falling on the lower end of the usage scale (or have fallen off completely) there are a few things you can do to get back in the habit of engaging with Scripture.

Read more/read less

Sometimes we lose our delight when we try to gulp down the Bible in huge chunks. This can often occur when we try to read multiple chapters each day. If this is your situation, scale back and focus on reading a single chapter, or even meditating on a few verses.

Other times—and this is more common—we lose our delight because we are taking small bites of Scripture (a chapter or less a day). Focus on a broader survey of the Bible and then read longer sections to find the nourishment you need.

Get help/Go it alone

There has never before been a time in history when believers have had so much access to resources for Bible study. There are thousands of learned and wise Bible handbooks and commentaries, and ten times as many useful articles, videos, podcasts, and sermons. These resources can be both a blessing and a curse.

If you find your delight has waned because of a lack of understanding Scripture, seek these resources for help. But if you find you spend more time reading about the Bible than you do reading the Bible, it may be time to rely less on helpful tools and focus your attention directly on the Word of God.

Pray and begin again

The most common reason we lose our heart’s delight in reading Scripture is we’ve stopped reading Scripture altogether. We’ve told ourselves that we do not enjoy reading the Bible. The longer we go without reading the more we lose our delight, since it’s hard to see and appreciate beauty when we have our eyes tightly shut. Open your heart by asking God to give you a desire for his Word. And then begin reading again.

One example is Kabwata Baptist Church (KBC) in Lusaka, Zambia. KBC has planted more than 30 churches across Africa. Of those, about 15 are now independent. And two new works are scheduled to start in Kigali, Rwanda, after two Reformed student groups asked KBC for its oversight in establishing them as churches.

Because the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way believers give towards the work of missions—moving much of it online—some of KBC’s churches are reporting that this has resulted in higher giving than ever before. Praise the Lord that he has supplied their need!

Ways to pray:

1. Praise God for solid churches in Africa that take seriously the training of pastors and the work of missions
2. For God’s people to learn to trust him to provide needed resources
3. For many conversions, so African churches may be filled with true Christians for the glory of God

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:19–20

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1. Who are you (are you tempted to think of yourself higher or lower than you ought)?
2. What do you want (does it align with God’s desires)?
3. Where are you going (do you live with an understanding of the coming judgment)?
4. What have you done (are you allowing your sin to be exposed in order to overcome it)?

“If you and I are discipling people, leading people to faith in Christ, and leading people in the Word of God,” he said, “we must understand what it means to wrestle, not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers in the heavenly places—which means we have to understand the nature of temptation as it intersects with discipleship.”

What if pastors were willing to spend substantial effort caring for their souls?

In my pastoral ministry (and in my recent doctoral studies), Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST) has helped me understand the surprising importance of investing in oneself for ministry leadership.

Leadership’s Relational Nature

Anyone who has tried to lead a ministry knows there are no quick fixes or easy solutions. Leading people is hard. Most of its challenges arise from the web of relationships involved—relationships among God, the congregation, and its leaders. Navigating these relationships is often the decisive factor in good leadership. Negotiate them well, and ministries tend to thrive. Guide them poorly, and they can flounder.

At its heart, BFST gives insight into the relational tension every leader has experienced. This tension, which BFST calls “anxiety,” occurs in every group and tends to lead people in one of two unhealthy directions: in the face of conflict, they’ll either fuse emotionally with others in an effort to get along, or withdraw and cut them off. Either approach leads to a ripple effect in other relationships within the group. Conflict and anxiety beget more conflict and anxiety.

Why Self Matters

Because of the position they occupy, a leader’s management of such anxiety has an outsized effect on the larger organization. Their ripples are larger and more influential on the organization than others’ are. And the less they’re able to deal with this anxiety, the more it will be felt by those around them.

Because of the position they occupy, a leader’s management of anxiety has an outsized effect on the larger organization.

Recognizing this dynamic, Murray Bowen, the father of BFST, advised that real leadership requires a “leader with the courage to define self.” He advised that leaders, rather than focusing on others to relieve relational anxiety, begin by first dealing with the anxiety inside themselves. A leader’s ability to enter relationships in a non-anxious way is a starting point for health within the larger organization.

Non-anxious leaders are grounded in who they are and can remain calm, engaged, and even challenging in spite of potential opposition. Just as anxiety begets anxiety, healthy leaders can reproduce healthy dynamics simply by their presence.

Develop Your Sense of Self

Non-anxious leadership does not come easily. But by pursuing emotional and spiritual health, ministry leaders can foster a healthy sense of self. In 2 Timothy 2:5, Paul likens his protégé’s pastoral call to that of an athlete. Athletes who don’t train well or eat well also don’t play well—and ministry leaders who don’t put time and effort into being emotionally fit and spiritually fed won’t do well either.

Ministry leaders who don’t put time and effort into being emotionally fit and spiritually fed won’t do well.

Healthy leaders will focus their attention on changing themselves, whom they can control, rather than the people around them, whom they cannot. They’ll develop a clear vision and purpose for themselves; this will in turn flow to the rest of the ministry, providing a similar clarity, purpose, and wholeness for the larger organization. And as they do so, the communities in which those ministries are engaged will also move toward health.

Such leaders will clarify where they end and others begin, while seeking to understand how the various members of the body work together in their common goal. Others can have thoughts and feelings about an issue or topic, and yet a non-anxious leader will not be threatened.

In delegating tasks, healthy leaders will ask self-defining questions such as What are the core things that only I can do? and Why am I not doing only those things? As they answer those questions, they’ll work through the process of clarifying themselves and helping others to do the same.

In all of these efforts to clarify a leader’s sense of self and direction, trusted counselors, regular exercise, and a disciplined routine of prayer and Bible reading are foundational practices. In so doing, they’re preparing themselves for the hard work of shepherding God’s people.

Healthy Leadership’s Benefits

Because of the relational nature of ministry, the ability of leaders to hear the anxiety of others without losing their sense of self is crucial. Like Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold, God takes the ordinary elements of these leaders’ lives—the presence and character of themselves—and uses it to build things of eternal value in the communities around them.

God can take the ordinary elements of leaders’ lives—the presence and character of themselves—and use it to build things of eternal value in the communities around them.

Christian leadership that integrates the principles of BFST recognizes that God’s people not only need leaders to tell them what to do, but also to show them how to be. Virtues such as holiness, humility, patience, and love are the work of the Spirit. But they’re usually found in communities where leaders model these same characteristics in an engaged and non-anxious way.

In our culture’s particularly anxious moment, let’s pray that more leaders would walk in this wisdom.

Note how he says, “if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching.” There are smaller wrongdoings that precede greater wrongdoings, and a process of corruption that we can either resist or help.

In my work with church leaders and abuse victims, I’ve noted patterns of sin that precede almost every crisis. Had someone repented sooner, nipped sin in the bud, or held colleagues accountable, most abusive situations could be handled responsibly in a God-honoring way, rather than escalated or exacerbated.

Here are six sins that—by themselves—are common, garden-variety problems but have led many to remain silent in the face of evil. They may also serve as “gateway sins,” enabling the sinner to move into more serious sins. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it, “Some sins in themselves, and by reason of several aggravations, are more heinous in the sight of God than others.” My hope is that if we can recognize smaller sins before they take root, we can do what is right and give no foothold to the Devil (Eph. 4:27).

1. Pride

Pride is a sin we’re all sometimes guilty of, but it can lead us down treacherous roads. I can’t think of a church-abuse case in which pride was not a factor. Often, church leaders can’t believe they’ve been fooled by the perpetrator. Surely, they think, if our friend or colleague were an abuser, we’d have noticed.

Surely, they think, if our friend or colleague were an abuser, we’d have noticed.

And this isn’t just a problem for church leaders. Congregants hate to be wrong, too. We consider ourselves wise and discerning. We are overly confident in our ability to judge character. This overconfidence makes us easy prey for those who flatter and manipulate. 

And so, when a victim tells someone their friend is an abuser, they refuse to believe it. They may explain away the behavior, saying, “That’s doesn’t sound like the man I know; you must be mistaken!” They’re too proud to consider that they might have been conned, that the person they trust is dangerous. And because they’re unwilling to admit they’re wrong, they cover up abuse and it continues.

2. Gossip

Congregations with prevalent gossip are playgrounds for abusers. Everybody is already talking about everybody, so it doesn’t strike anyone as odd when an abuser spreads rumors about the victim: “She’s unbalanced! She’s a liar! Pray for her anger and mental-health struggles!” When the victim finally seeks help, everyone assumes she’s lying or delusional. 

Another tactic of many abusers—particularly those in leadership roles—is to manipulate Christians to “confide” in them. A pastor, counselor, or ministry leader may encourage the congregation to go beyond the bounds of propriety and gossip about their fellow congregants to him. He may even express false concern for the victim and ask people to “report back” should the victim say anything critical about him. This way, as soon as the victim seeks help from anyone at church, the abuser is notified and can go into damage control. 

It’s important to establish a culture in your church that discourages gossip but encourages speaking the truth in love (Eph. 4:15). Discerning between the two requires spiritual maturity, and for that we need to seek the Holy Spirit’s help.

3. Idolatry

When a church-leadership team covers up the sins of an abuser, it’s often because they love the abuser—or their church brand or personal reputation—more than they love Jesus. The same is true in families. When a wife covers up the pedophilia of her husband, or a parent the crimes of a child, it is often rooted in idolatry. When we love anyone or anything more than Jesus, terrible things happen. 

When we love anyone or anything more than Jesus, terrible things happen. 

It is genuine love for Jesus, and a fervent desire to honor God no matter what the cost, that protects us from becoming complicit in abuse. In words often attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

4. Deception

Whether we’re lying to ourselves or to others, deception is perhaps the most delusory and common of all the sins I’ve listed. Too often, when we encounter clear cases of abuse, we explain them away, thinking, I’m sure it was a one-time fluke, or He said sorry, so we don’t need to report, or Perhaps the alcohol, stress at work, or a mental illness made him do it. In our desperation to disbelieve that our friend is an abuser, we do mental gymnastics—telling ourselves lies—to avoid holding him accountable. 

We lie to ourselves and to others, saying, “We should forgive them 70 times seven times,” as if forgiveness negates justice or helping the oppressed. We fail to hold others accountable, thinking, We all struggle with lust, or Lots of people have hot tempers, or, This guy is probably just having the same struggles I have—who am I to call him out? We see the battered man on the side of the road, but we keep walking (Luke 10:25–37).

We claim, “As Christians we extend grace to sinners,” yet we neglect to extend grace to traumatized children and heartbroken wives. We justify our silence, saying, “Love covers a multitude of sins,” as if Jesus would ever fail to protect the innocent or pursue justice. 

We justify our silence, saying, ‘Love covers a multitude of sins,’ as if Jesus would ever fail to protect the innocent or pursue justice.

The sins of the repentant are covered before God by Christ’s righteousness, but there are still consequences for evil in this life. Even after King David genuinely repented, the kingdom ultimately fell into war and his family was devastated. God forgave David, yet did not spare him the consequences of his sin (2 Sam. 12:10–12).

5. Selfishness

Sometimes when we see red flags, we reason, That’s none of my business. Like Cain we ask, Am I my brother’s keeper? (Gen. 4:9b). We don’t want the stress, heartache, or blowback of intervening. We’d rather remain blissfully ignorant, or pretend we didn’t notice the man on the side of the road, rather than be the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). Selfishness and deception work together, enabling abuse or the toleration of it. 

In my life, I’ve had family members, friends, and even an entire church blackball and shun me because I reported child abuse. This is the risk we take when we pick up a cross and follow Jesus. Crosses are not fun. They’re certainly not easy. But at the end of the day, we should be able to say that we loved others more than our relationship with them, that we loved our community more than our standing in it, that we loved Jesus more than this life.

6. Lust

A failure in some churches to call out lust and sexual sin paves the way for all manner of perversion. For example, when a church leader looks at pornography, he may become desensitized to sin and begin to objectify and dehumanize people. Then, when he encounters abuse, he is complacent, unconcerned, and unoffended. Perhaps he minimizes this sin or feels hypocritical for calling it out, since he has lusted too. His eyes are acclimated to darkness. His mind is accustomed to deviancy.

And because these sins no longer trouble him, he will fail to call them out or protect his congregation from wolves. He becomes like the poor souls whom God “gave over” to their evil: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Rom. 1:21).

There are, no doubt, many other sins that may lead to abuse or enable its tolerance. As individual Christians, we must be careful to guard our hearts against even the most socially acceptable sins. As the church, we must hold each other accountable, so that sins don’t take root in our hearts like seeds and grow into evils that destroy. The toleration or covering up of abuse in the church doesn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of repeated sin and chronic unrepentance—layer upon layer of unchecked transgression—until wickedness and folly overtake us.

All around the world, churches that espouse theological education often suffer from a tendency to neglect the mission of the gospel and gradually internalize it. At the same time, churches that desperately try to reach out tend to move toward pragmatism and using extra-biblical approaches.

We need both. And we see the Lord raising more theologically trained evangelists, maybe now more than ever in the history of the church. But the need is great, the challenge is at hand, and the flesh is weak.

Ways to pray:

1. Thanksgiving for the incredible doctrines of the gospel and the zeal of hundreds of thousands to proclaim it
2. Repentance for our reluctance in presenting the gospel to those around us, and for God’s grace to provide both opportunities and boldness
3. For the Lord to raise up more theologically sound evangelists and missionaries throughout the world

“But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first.” Revelation 2:4–5a

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Now, 28 years into Christian ministry, with 10 years as a senior pastor of a large church, I understand that the natural dynamics of leadership tempt us toward myriad other corruptions, too. I discuss these themes at greater length in my article “Facing and Fighting the Corrupting Power of Leadership.”

Four Dangers

What is it about leadership that seems to propel us into the service of idols such as power, comfort, and control? In addition to the temptations that come with leadership, its wearying effects can leave us increasingly vulnerable to corruption for at least four reasons.

1. Authority is intoxicating or disheartening.
2. Responsibility is exhausting.
3. Disapproval is intimidating and approval is alluring.
4. Complexity is bewildering.

And we can face all of these in the same season—even in the same decision. How do we protect against these corruptions? Accountability has long been our go-to safeguard, but let’s face it: even the most comprehensive safeguards only work if we don’t lie.

Even the most comprehensive safeguards only work if we don’t lie.

What, then, can be done to help us stand firm amid the eroding forces of leadership? In my experience, the following are critical elements of a robust defense against corruption in leadership.

Five Defenses

1. Consider spiritual constitution as a qualification for leadership.

James 3:1 is quite direct: not every believer should be a teacher or leader. Assessing a person’s biblical qualifications for leadership includes not promoting someone into leadership (including yourself) who does not yet have the spiritual constitution to withstand the pressures and temptations of the role.

2. Emphasize sanctification above leadership development.

In my seminary days, we flocked to leadership conferences and were told to be always reading at least one leadership book. These books were beneficial—for maybe the first 2,000 pages.

Meanwhile, Scripture, church fathers, and men like John Owen and John Wesley confronted me with ideas like mortification and holiness that went beyond the positional sanctification familiar to me from my Reformed background.

I began to realize that I could not let my fear of self-righteousness keep me from the pursuit of real righteousness. Only godliness can stand against the flesh and the continual corrupting enticements of leadership (Matt. 5:6; 1 Tim. 4:8).

3. Attend to primal wounds.

God has seen fit to make humans emotionally complex. Clinical issues often rooted in primal wounds complicate growth and bewilder the Christian pilgrim. Our neglected soul wounds can create hiding places for the flesh that our conscious selves overlook or ignore. If the church is to be led well, we must help people overcome these wounds in ways faithful to the gospel.

This may mean devoting personal or church funds to ensure leaders and ministry staff receive the help they need to face issues related to abandonment, trauma, sexual abuse, family dysfunction, unexplained depression, intense anxiety systems, and so on. Invest in this before they do something that splits the church or makes the news. This also means looking for and supporting high-quality counselors and spiritual directors—and not complaining about what they charge.

4. Be ready to let it go.

Many have said that if you can’t walk away from a negotiation, you’ve already lost. Similarly, if you can’t risk losing your place of leadership in order to keep the integrity of your stewardship, you aren’t free.

If there comes a time when feeding and protecting God’s sheep under our care means to losing our place of leadership, then it’s a glorious and blessed thing to be deposed and rejected. Being prepared (emotionally and practically) to let go of your place of leadership will produce the freedom and noble spirit that make one content to be either “consecrated to the dignity or removed from it,” as John Chrysostom wrote in On the Priesthood—an invaluable safeguard against temptation and corruption.

5. Practice vigilant compassion.

The more we understand about the weight leaders carry, the corrupting influences they face, and the particular intense enticements endemic to this work, the more we will be both vigilant and supportive, investing in both accountability and rejuvenation.

Our church has made it a priority to invest in the health of other church leaders in our community, too. Examples include paying the guide fee for pastors’ fishing trips and sponsoring a pastoral retreat for the local African American Council of Churches. My elders (and family) also support me when I leave for eight days to hunt elk, because they know I come home a completely different, better person than when I left.

Who and How

If you’re reading this, maybe you feel frustrated with yourself or the leaders around you. In an age when we’re disheartened by reports of one fallen leader after another, we may ask ourselves, Who will rescue me from this body of death? (Rom. 7:24).

My elders (and family) also support me when I leave for eight days to hunt elk, because they know I come home a completely different, better person than when I left.

I’m not arguing against accountability, leadership training, or the promotion of young leaders. Rather, I’m calling for us to return sanctification to its rightful place as our only true hope of improvement, along with a reminder that the crucified and risen Christ is the both the who and the how.

Jesus is the only uncorrupted leader in the history of his church, and it is by his Spirit—working in the places of groaning too deep for us to understand, crying out to God for his power to conform us to his Son—that we ultimately grow into glorification.

Understanding how leadership tears us down should give us both renewed urgency in our vigilance over our hearts and supportive compassion for those we encourage. Let us not take lightly that underappreciated promise: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matt. 5:6).

“One of the shows was about Martin Luther King Jr. leading people to freedom,” she said. “The narrative was that King had solved racism, and I remember crying, because I thought, When I grow up, I won’t be able to fight for anything!”

Porter wasn’t a Christian, but she prayed anyway, asking God for a cause she could give her life to.

Years later, Porter came to a saving faith in Jesus. She took classes at Reformed Theological Seminary in Mississippi, lived and worked with TGC Council member Kevin DeYoung in Michigan, then worked in campus ministry while earning a Master’s degree from Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey.

When she was asked to serve on the board at CSW, which advocates for persecuted Christians around the world, she jumped. “I called my mentor Beth Paul and said, ‘This is it.’ I have to use what God has formed in my heart in order to produce freedom for his people.”

The London-based CSW felt the same way about her. Two months ago, CSW-USA announced that Porter had been appointed its new CEO, signaling a shift toward both youth outreach and the strategically important U.S. government.

TGC sat down with Porter to ask how 2020 affected religious freedom around the world, if some strategies work better than others, and what gives her hope when she can’t stop the kidnappings, imprisonments, and killings.

How did 2020 affect religious freedom around the world?

It’s interesting, because you’d think the COVID-19 restrictions would’ve lessened the amount of religious persecution, since fewer religious groups were able to meet as frequently in person. But that was not what happened. The number of religious-freedom violations stayed steady or even went up in some places, as governments used the restrictions as a cloak for persecuting behavior.

However, I do think the church was able to be more innovative in finding ways to worship and assemble. It reminds me of the first-century Christians under Roman rule—when persecution comes, the Holy Spirit finds new, ingenious ways to move.

Which areas of the world are doing particularly poorly with religious-freedom abuses? Which areas do well? Is there any pattern we can discern there—what’s the tell on whether a country is going to do well or poorly in this area?

Unfortunately, most areas of the world are doing poorly. Religious-freedom violations are on the rise around the world—in much of Asia, across the Middle East and North Africa, in East and sub-Saharan Africa, and even in Europe and the Americas. Four out of five of people live in countries that restrict religious freedom.

Four out of five of people live in countries that restrict religious freedom.

Of course, the violations range in severity and types, but the religious freedom we have in the U.S. puts us in a small minority of the world’s population.

Countries with strong democratic institutions that have robust protections for minorities, a functioning justice system, and an educated population with a good understanding of basic human rights—both their own and those of others—are all signs that a country will tend to do better on religious freedom. In China, for example, as the government moves toward more authoritarianism, religious freedoms for both Christians and Uighur Muslims are disappearing.

It seems counterintuitive that atheist countries, such as China, would be so limiting of religious freedom. I would’ve thought they wouldn’t care. What is it about atheism that makes it hard on religious freedom?

It’s not so much atheism, specifically. Many one-party states or dictatorships are based around a model of control—social control, economic control. Theocracies like Iran are like this, too. The government fears that which is outside of its control.

Religious belief, by its very nature, is far outside the control of any government—what you believe is in your head, in your heart, your soul. A government can try to penetrate that with fear or indoctrination, but it can never truly control someone’s fundamental beliefs. Religious freedom is a direct threat to their whole system.

A government can try to penetrate that with fear or indoctrination, but it can never truly control someone’s fundamental beliefs.

You’re tracking religious-freedom abuses—and advocating against them—all over the world. Are there strategies you’ve found to be more effective than others?

We’ve found two things, prayer and advocacy, to always be the most effective.

Over the years, we have cultivated specialized research and advocacy officers for each part of the world, and we have worked hard to develop trusting relationships with the people on the ground. We can then develop tailored strategies for each country, or even for specific issues in each country. What works well for one country may not work at all for another.

For example, a country like Iran may not be very responsive to condemnation from the U.S. or Europe but will respond to discrete diplomatic pressure from a country it considers to be friendly. In one country, a very public campaign may be counterproductive to the people we are trying to help, while in another country it could help protect an individual under threat.

We put a lot of thought into how we develop strategies based on what we know about the government, the culture, the political realities, and what the people directly impacted are telling us. In every case, though, whatever we do is supported by prayer—sometimes quiet and confidential, sometimes public. I am currently fasting or praying every Friday for Leah Sharibu, an abducted Nigerian schoolgirl who remains enslaved by terrorists because she refuses to convert to Islam.

I’m learning how much you have to be purposeful in your spiritual disciplines to do this work. You have to be disciplined before the Lord, in worship and fellowship with him, in order to see things the human eye cannot see.

Are Christians in America particularly well-placed to have an influence on religious freedom worldwide? How and what can we do to improve things for our brothers and sisters overseas?

Religious freedom is at the core of our country’s principles—it is something we should always be vigilant of and work to protect here at home. We should also use that freedom, not just to practice our faith but also to advocate on behalf of our brothers and sisters who are suffering because of the same faith. We are well-placed because we have this freedom and because we live in a democracy where our elected representatives are accountable to us.

There are lots of things Christians in America can do—it could be something as simple as sending a letter or card of encouragement to a person in another part of the world who is in prison or in a very difficult situation. One Christian received a letter from a child written in crayon, and it encouraged him through 20 years of imprisonment.

Or it could be highlighting a specific case or situation (like Leah’s) by sending a letter or even joining in a peaceful protest outside an embassy or consulate. It could be getting together with members of your church and contacting your representatives in Congress to use their position to raise a case. It could be sending an email to President Biden to ask him to make appointing an ambassador for international religious freedom a priority.

As you do these things, tell others what you are doing and why. Encourage them to join you. The more individuals our government hears from, the more likely they are to take action.

And in all things, please pray.

Some might say that fighting for religious freedom is counterproductive, because you’re making space for false religions, and because Christianity doesn’t need government protection. What would you say to that?

I’d say religious freedom does mean that people have the freedom to choose from an array of religions or beliefs, but it also ensures their right to hear the gospel and gives them the opportunity to respond to God’s invitation.

From a Christian perspective, religious freedom echoes the free will that God has given all human beings. He didn’t make us to all be puppets. And free will isn’t a result of the fall—it was given to Adam and Eve back in the garden, before sin even entered the world. So if I’m trying to work for the restoration of the world, I have to believe in God’s good intent and head in his direction. God set it up that way, and I’m going to go where he goes.

Free will isn’t a result of the fall—it was given to Adam and Eve back in the garden, before sin even entered the world. So if I’m trying to work for the restoration of the world, I have to believe in God’s good intent and head in his direction.

What gives you hope? What keeps you going when it seems like everything is a mess?

There’s nothing I’d rather do with the rest of my life. Honestly, it makes me want to cry. It is a privilege that I would find my purpose in the pages of Scripture—to advocate and fight for the blood of the martyrs (Rev. 6:9-11). That is crazy to me. My whole purpose, my whole mission in life, is to speak for those whom God has given and entrusted us to speak for.

You get to a place where you’re seeing the most total depraved space of humanity. It makes you hold onto the cross in a way you never thought you could. My hands right now are calloused from holding onto the cross while learning about the most depraved situations of men, women, and children being brutally slaughtered, raped, and imprisoned for a belief.

I know I’m in the right lane. It is the way of the persecuted Prince. I get to live it out, and that’s a privilege.

Enter Sidney Greidanus, the dean of preaching Christ from the Old Testament, and his new book Preaching Christ from Leviticus: Foundations for Expository Sermons. Having written books on preaching Christ from most other Old Testament genres (narrative, wisdom, prophecy/apocalypse, psalms), he turns in this book to the major genre that remains: law.

The main thing Leviticus did for me over two decades was deepen my understanding of the very work Jesus came to do.

He could have done this by focusing on Exodus or Numbers or Deuteronomy, but he chose Leviticus because of how little focus it has received in the church. And I couldn’t be more thrilled. The main thing Leviticus did for me over two decades was deepen my understanding of the very work Jesus came to do. There are deep riches to be mined in Leviticus; Greidanus sets out to help preachers know how to do it.

Helpful Approach to Law

Leviticus is primarily a series of laws, some focusing on ritual matters and others on non-ritual matters. This presents an immediate challenge, since it’s not uncommon for believers today to have negative impressions about Old Testament law. Only last week I surveyed a class of 30 seminary students and asked if the phrase “Old Testament law” raised more negative or positive impressions; almost everyone chose negative.

Without going into the cultural, historical and theological reasons for this, the fact remains that the longest psalm in the Bible—Psalm 119—models a completely positive perspective on the law. It is something the psalmist delights in (vv. 16, 24, 35, 47, 70, 77, 143, 174), longs for (vv. 20, 40, 131), and loves (vv. 47, 48, 97, 119, 127, 140, 159, 163, 167). And one must not forget that he’s talking—at the least—about the Pentateuch, which includes Leviticus. What might help us to have room for Psalm 119 in our theology of the law?

Greidanus helpfully reminds us that laws are based on principles that reflect the lawgiver’s values. We understand this intuitively. Why do we have laws against murder? We value life. Against stealing? We value the right to private property. Similarly, God’s laws are based on his values, meaning that studying a book like Leviticus is actually a chance to have a window into God’s heart. That’s not typically how we think of Leviticus.

Studying a book like Leviticus is actually a chance to have a window into God’s heart.

What’s more, looking for the principles underlying a law opens up avenues for application. Greidanus explains by way of Gordon Wenham’s insight: “The principles underlying the OT are valid and authoritative for the Christian, but the particular applications found in the OT may not be. The moral principles are the same today, but insofar as our situation often differs from the OT setting, the application of the principles in our society may well be different too” (12). True, finding the principle is not always easy, but a little spadework can return wonderful results when studying law through this lens.

Helpful Model for Preaching Leviticus

Readers familiar with Greidanus will know that he has developed a 10-step process for preaching Christ from the Old Testament. In the bulk of the book, he applies this method to 10 chapters of Leviticus. What he models is helpful in at least two ways.

First, he provides a good model for what a series on Leviticus might look like by choosing chapters that cover most of the book’s major themes: offerings, priests and worship, ritual impurity and holiness, the Day of Atonement, loving one’s neighbor, the Sabbatical year, and the Year of Jubilee. If other themes were to be included I would suggest sexual practices, a key issue today (Lev. 18; 20); feasts as central to Israelite life (Lev. 23); and blessings and curses central to understanding the covenant (Lev. 26). For other sermon series suggestions for Leviticus, see my list of resources.

Second, and even more important, the exegetical process he uses to examine each chapter of Leviticus models the work necessary for good expository preaching. If a sermon can be compared to building a house, the preacher’s goal is to use planks in the passage to build it. Greidanus’s method will help preachers focus on the text as the source of the planks, and to make sure they don’t miss any important planks. Skipping over the literary context is easy to do in Leviticus, yet the literary-context plank is necessary to build the house well.

If a sermon can be compared to building a house, the preacher’s goal is to use the planks in the passage to build it.

It’s also important to note that Greidanus is quick to say that the “sermon exposition” sections—which make up almost half of each chapter—“are not actual sermons” (xv). These read more like homiletical commentary, and it will be crucial to follow his advice: “preachers may have to omit many of the verses and details provided (lest their sermons lead to information overload) and add illustrations and applications relevant to their particular congregations” (xv). For examples of how to do this, Greidanus provides four sermon manuscripts at the very end of the book, the last three of which do especially well in managing the number of details provided and including a healthy degree of application.

Would You Dare to Preach from Leviticus?

A friend of mind recently did an informal survey of a pastors’ group on Facebook. Two of his questions were “Have you ever preached on Leviticus?” and “If not, do you ever intend to?” A significant number answered no to both questions.

I understand why. The task is not easy. Greidanus goes a long way in helping overcome the difficulties and modeling how preachers might actually go about the task.

Are you willing to give it a try?

At the same time, the trend in scholarship seems to be leading the opposite direction. Two major works in the last couple years reveal the essential role of Christianity in shaping the West.

First, Joseph Henrich, chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, argues that Christianity shapes our very psychology. It made us WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. One major reason: because the Christian church didn’t allow cousins to marry, societies began to disfavor clan relationships. In their place during the Middle Ages arose trade guilds, impersonal markets, and universities, among other Western staples. Even today, the spread of Christianity across Asia and Africa corresponds to the rise of literacy, so that followers can read the Bible for themselves.

Second, award-winning historian Tom Holland, in his 2019 book Dominion, describes Christianity as a revolution that remade the world. “How was it that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world?” he asks. In Holland’s narrative, the church is a victim of its own success. Maybe church membership has declined because Christianity has so thoroughly stamped its moral vision on the world outside the church. When Christians in Hong Kong defend democracy, or when Christians in India fight caste-based racism, they’re seen as acting for universal progress and not merely a Christian worldview.

Maybe church membership has declined because Christianity has so thoroughly stamped its moral vision on the world outside the church.

“The genius of the modern West in recent centuries has been that it has been able to export its profoundly Christian values, concepts like human rights, the notion of consent—all these things are deeply rooted in the seedbed of Christian history and Christian theology,” Holland told me. A key example would be the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which owes much to Christian assumptions but does not mention God.

“If they cast them as Christian values, then they’d come to seem more culturally contingent to people in India or wherever,” Holland said. “If you say, well no, they’re universal, then you can export them.”

In other words, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled on the church was convincing the world that Christian beliefs were universal.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled on the church was convincing the world that Christian beliefs were universal.

Big Picture: Christianity’s Reputation

Henrich and Holland may be world-renowned in their fields, but crediting Christianity for the best of the West remains an uphill climb in popular opinion. My own travels among Christians and skeptics confirms the challenge. Shortly before the 2016 presidential election I met with a group of Christian students at Cornell University. They had invited me to Ithaca to speak on the history of the Religious Right—not exactly a powerful force on their Ivy League campus. Still, the topic was relevant because of how Christians in far-flung corners of the United States could harm their reputation and mission in upstate New York.

I asked these students what their classmates associate first with Christianity. I couldn’t believe their answer. But since then I’ve repeated the question with audiences around the country. And every time I hear the same thing.

Westboro Baptist Church.

So, I said with some bemusement, when students at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities consider the world’s largest religion, they think about an overgrown family cult in Topeka, Kansas.

How can this be?

For a religion like Christianity that seeks to persuade, perception can dictate reality. Who wants to join a movement known for hatred and bigotry instead of human rights and consent? And yet that’s exactly how Christianity comes across to many today when they see crosses held up during the January 6 attacks in Washington, D.C., and when they learn the mass shooter in Atlanta on March 16 was raised in the Southern Baptist Convention.

It’s enough to render some of the most wise and mature Christian leaders helpless in the wake of breaking news. Andy Crouch told me that on the weekend after January 6, he went to bed on Friday night at 6:30 p.m. and only emerged from his bed for two hours before Monday morning.

“I was so grieved,” he said to me on the Gospelbound podcast. “I felt so impotent. I felt like such a failure to shape anything in our country.”

Any and every ignorant comment from a Christian leader, let along the murderous act of a rogue church member, confirms the narrative of decline. In this media climate, no rational defense of Christianity or award-winning tome of Western history will likely change many minds.

So maybe we need to think smaller.

Small Picture: Christianity on the Ground

A few years ago, I began looking around at what normal Christians were doing in their everyday lives. The stories Sarah Zylstra and I found have been deeply encouraging. (We’ve compiled a series of them in our new book, Gospelbound: Living With Resolute Hope in an Anxious Age.)

We’ve met Christians who are teaching low-income second graders to read, Christians who are opening their homes to foster children, and Christians who are showing up after natural disasters with hot meals. We know Christians who are working long hours at hospitals in Africa, Christians who are running programs for those struggling with addiction, and Christians who are moving into under-resourced communities.

We’ve met Christians who are teaching low-income second graders to read, Christians who are opening their homes to foster children, and Christians who are showing up after natural disasters with hot meals.

We also know Christians who are staying in New York City or Silicon Valley, even when it hasn’t been the most comfortable financial decision. But Christians believe their faith calls them to love their neighbors—perhaps in this case especially the less mobile—for better or worse. And Christians seek the good of their whole communities and not just their own churches (Gal. 6:10).

Simply by staying put, or by inviting someone over for dinner, or by volunteering at a pregnancy center, Christians don’t get the same attention as Westboro Baptist. And maybe the lack of positive media attention is one reason churches we attend are getting smaller.

But across history, and around the world, Christians bring extraordinary change through ordinary means such as setting another seat at the table, caring for the weak, and suffering with joy because they love their enemies. When Christians “obey the truth” (Rom. 2:8), they remind us how the West was really won—not mostly through arguments but through love in close-knit community. Facing today’s challenges, we will only move forward—together—when we get back to the only gospel that saves. No evil can overcome us if we resolve to do nothing but good (Rom 12:21).

Imagine how difficult it must be for pastors in non-ideal circumstances. Over the past decade, pastors in Chinese churches have faced increasing persecution, interrogations, loss of meeting places, lack of stability in fellowship, and reduced financial income. When pastors face internal and external problems, they often feel anxious, discouraged, and afraid. What’s more, our Chinese brothers and sisters say these strenuous circumstances have increasingly affected many marriages among key leaders in the church.

Serving in ministry can be challenging and burdensome anywhere, and it’s proving increasingly difficult for our brothers in China. Thankfully, they are not alone, and we have Someone who hears our prayers and can give comfort, strength, and joy even in our suffering.

Ways to pray:

1. Thanksgiving for God’s faithfulness in raising up pastors in China over the decades of struggling and persecution
2. For pastors to continue to pursue growth in the truth so they will be renewed in their hearts
3. For the stability and growth of marriages of pastors, leaders, and Christians in China

“And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to fall, and I am not indignant?” 2 Corinthians 11:28–29

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They discuss:

• Identity (:00)
• Preparing to address identity in our churches (2:00)
• Overcoming the “media view” of Christianity (3:40)
• A new vocabulary based on the gospel (5:28)
• Reaching and engaging the culture (6:31)
• Every Christian and the Great Commission (7:48)
• Fringe culture church (8:34)

Explore more from TGC on the topic of church.

But the next verse is also crucial: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world.” In the context of sports, one way for Christians to do this well is to reflect on the broader meanings and messages of the games we play and watch. What is their cultural significance, and how are they forming and shaping us?

These five books, written by scholars and experts, help Christians consider such questions. I’ve selected one book for each member of the American sports “trinity” (basketball, football, baseball), as well as two books that cover broader themes related to religion and national identity.

1. Playing with God: Religion and Modern Sport by William J. Baker

If you’ve ever wondered how religion and sport have been intertwined in American society, Baker’s well-researched and fast-paced book is a good place to start. He provides a broad and sweeping picture of faith and sports in the United States, with fascinating stories and examples throughout. While a good portion of his book focuses on Christians, Baker also includes Jews, Muslims, and other religious adherents in his analysis.

There are other important books that cover similar ground, including Shirl Hoffman’s Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports, and Tony Ladd and James Mathisen’s Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of American Sport. But those books tend to use history as the background for sociological analysis. Baker brings the historical narrative to the fore. His credentials as a historian and compelling writing style make his book stand out.

2. Basketball: A Love Story by Jackie MacMullan, Rafe Bartholomew, and Dan Klores

Basketball was developed at a Christian college by a Christian instructor for the purpose of cultivating Christian values and spreading the gospel.

But James Naismith, basketball’s founder, did not try to hold the game close. He let it out into the world for all to enjoy and appreciate. Over a century later, the breadth and depth of the game’s appeal is remarkable. It has a special bond with men and women, big cities and small towns, the adaptive sport community, and religious groups including Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and Muslims. Although soccer still reigns supreme on a global scale, basketball is right beneath it in international popularity.

While Basketball: A Love Story barely mentions the game’s Christian roots, its collection of stories and interviews nevertheless testifies to God’s goodness and the ways that a sport can resonate at a deep level with human beings across cultural divides.

3. Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football by Derrick E. White

There is no shortage of excellent books on the history of American football. In fact, if you want to expand your options, I put together a set of eight recommendations in 2018 for the Evangelical History blog.

I’m picking a book that was published a year later because Blood, Sweat, and Tears provides crucial insight into the ways football has been linked with ideas about race and masculinity. “To appreciate coach Gaither and FAMU football,” Derrick White writes, “is to understand one of the most critical sources of Black pride and producers of Black manhood in the twentieth century.”

More than a biography of Gaither, this book is a work of cultural and intellectual history, using sports as a lens to better understand American society. There is a Christian angle, too. The son of a preacher, Gaither saw his work on the gridiron as something akin to the calling of a minister. White shows that Gaither built a team culture infused with religion, including pregame prayers and mandatory church attendance.

4. Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography by Michael Long and Chris Lamb

While religion is present in Blood, Sweat, and Tears, it isn’t a central theme. This is true of most of the best sports biographies. When trained historians or expert journalists take on a sports figure—even when that figure is a devout Christian—religion usually receives surface-level treatment. Readers who want more details on the faith journeys of important Christian athletes and coaches are left with few options besides hagiographical books that trade thorough analysis for inspirational platitudes.

Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography is an exception to the rule. It centers on Robinson’s religious life, and combines accessible prose with scholarly rigor. Long and Lamb have done their research, and they know the ins and outs of both Robinson’s spiritual life and the broader religious contexts in which Robinson was involved.

It’s difficult to peel back the layers of mythology that surround the Robinson story. But this book provides an honest look at the ways Christianity shaped Robinson’s life, both before and after he reintegrated Major League Baseball.

5. Patriotic Games: Sporting Traditions in the American Imagination by S. W. Pope

First a warning: of all the books on the list, Patriotic Games is the most academic. It began as a dissertation, and you can tell from the prose.

Yet this book is also incredibly useful for understanding just how and why sports have such a powerful hold in American society. If you’ve ever wondered how amateurism became a central feature of college sports, or why football became a Thanksgiving tradition, or why the national anthem is played at sporting events, Pope’s book will give you the details. He shows that things we take for granted today in sports were not always so, but that they developed and emerged during specific moments in history.

He shows, too, that our sporting traditions are part of broader national project of moral and intellectual formation—they’re designed to articulate and advance certain ideas about what it means to be a citizen and an American.

Persistent Goodness

Consider these five books as a starting point to better understand American sports culture. On their own, of course, they won’t transform or renew our minds. But they can be a tool to help us recognize and notice the waters of American sports culture in which we swim.

While they will confront us with the brokenness and distorted priorities of American sports—with the “pattern of this world”—they also provide glimpses and signs of God’s persistent goodness.

This insight is not original to me. Nor is it even originally intended for human parents. Charles Spurgeon had this to say about our heavenly Father in his devotional, Morning and Evening:

Here is authority: “If I be a Father, where is mine honor?” If ye be sons, where is your obedience? Here is affection mingled with authority: an authority which does not provoke rebellion; an obedience demanded which is most cheerfully rendered—which would not be withheld even if it might.

If our heavenly Father mingles affection and authority, how much more should earthly parents seek to imitate him?

Authority

God has given parents real authority to exercise for our children’s good. He commands our children to honor us and to obey our words. This is for their benefit, not ours.

As Ephesians 6:3 states, we do this training so that it may go well with them. When we teach our children to place themselves under our authority, we are training the same spiritual muscle that will later more easily place itself under our heavenly Father.

While obedience cannot regenerate the heart, it can shape it. As J. C. Ryle observed, “You must not wonder that men refuse to obey their Father which is in heaven, if you allow them, when children, to disobey, their father who is upon earth.”

If we don’t train them to obey, we train them to disobey.

God calls us to exercise our authority lovingly. We should feel comfortable giving commands, direction, and wisdom to our children. But we should also feel comfortable training their character by bringing consequences after the inevitable disobedience. If we don’t train them to obey, we train them to disobey.

Affection

In addition to exercising authority. we must also be comfortable expressing affection. God doesn’t merely show us a detached, objective love. We are told the Father’s love is affectionate and tender (Zeph. 3:17). It is warm and intimate. Isn’t this affection what also made Jesus so attractive to sinners?

We exemplify our heavenly Father when we foster a warmhearted, emotionally connected relationship with our children. When we smile, hug, and talk with them, we are showing them the Father’s love. When we listen to and laugh with them, we reflect his affectionate care.

Boundaries and Warmth

The sociologist Christian Smith, who has written about religious parents passing along their values, records these exact components in different words:

Though the influence of parenting style is known to vary somewhat by race and ethnicity, it is broadly true that the religious parents who most successfully raise religious children tend to exhibit an “authoritative” parenting style. Such parents combine two crucial traits. First, they consistently hold their children to clear and demanding expectations, standards, and boundaries in all areas of life. Second, they relate to their children with an abundance of warmth, support, and expressive care. It is not hard to see why this parenting style works best for raising religious children. The combination of clear expectations and affective warmth is powerful in children’s developmental formation.

Affection and authority are key characteristics of gospel parenting. Really, these are key components of any gospel leadership. For most parents, however, one will come naturally while the other will feel more difficult. It will take effort to grow in both expressions of care for your children.

I have said to young parents on many occasions, ‘When it comes to affection and authority, this generation is nailing the affection part of parenting but is missing the authority part.’

We must fight against the pressure of our current culture. Authority is now suspect, and parents are fearful of messing up their children with correction. But as we have seen, it is loving to have a home with expectations, boundaries, and consequences.

I have said to young parents on many occasions, “When it comes to affection and authority, this generation is nailing the affection part of parenting but is missing the authority part.”

Parents, you have been given the privilege of influencing an eternal soul. Imitate your heavenly Father as you care for your children. “Affection mingled with authority” should be our two great bedrocks as we build both our household and the household of God.