We don’t pray as much in church these days. Just ask most pastors how well-attended their congregational prayer meetings are. Even on Sunday mornings, prayer is an opportunity for a quick set change or transition, to move things around while everyone has their eyes closed. It’s as if prayer becomes a cover for something else, as if it needs a prop to make it more efficient and practical.

Most of us struggle with prayer in private also. Prayer seems useless. Most of the time, we don’t feel super close to God when we pray (although, I think, this is actually a good thing). We don’t often see “results”—clear answers that are undeniably downstream from your prayers. We can’t measure the supposed spiritual growth we’re told should be happening.

So what’s the point? Why spend time on our knees meditating, talking to God, or reciting psalms, when afterward we don’t have anything to show for it? Surely there must be a better use of our time, a different route to achieving and accomplishing something good.

The Uselessness of Constant Prayer

You will never think prayer is a good use of your time if you’re thinking of prayer in terms of usefulness. That is the wrong starting point.

For prayer to make sense, we must shift our perspective. John Starke says, “Prayer is either the greatest insanity or the most wonderful news.” It’s insanity if there is no God and we’re just talking to the walls. It’s astounding if prayer is real communion with God in the name of the Son with the help of the Spirit.

Inward Impact

What is happening to us, inside, when we pray? A reordering of the heart. Here’s a hard truth: If your prayer life feels superficial and shallow, it’s usually a reflection of the superficiality and shallowness of what’s inside you. Prayer holds up a mirror and shows us the pathetic condition of our hearts. We flit from request to request for what we think we want, while missing the deeper desires God wants to give us.

Over time, praying works on us from the inside out, inviting us into communion with our Father who delights to hear us, even when we sound childish and immature. We’re his kids, and he loves us, and he smiles to see us growing up into the fullness of faith. As we echo the words of the psalmists, as we join our voices to the great saints of old, as we soak in the Scriptures, we find our hearts growing larger. Perseverance in prayer leads to the transformation of our desires.

Outward Impact

But prayer is not just about us, of course. We pray for the benefit of others. Whenever we pray, we join a chorus of voices all around the world who stand with us before the throne of grace. There’s no possibility of ever praying the Lord’s Prayer alone, because someone, somewhere is saying those words right along with you, just as Jesus instructed. Prayer is generosity, devoting a small measure of attention to the needs of others. To pray for someone is to accompany another person, to join your heart and mind to someone in time of need. Prayer is the mystical dissolution of loneliness.

Too many times, we think of prayer as a prerequisite for real ministry. But Oswald Chambers was right: “Prayer is not preparation for the work; Prayer is the work.” Prayer’s inward work turns us outward.

Think on this. Because God is outside time, he can answer prayers from people in previous centuries. You can pray now for something you’ll never see in your lifetime. Think of your prayers like objects you launch into space that continue to float and travel through the universe until God sees fit to draw them into a particular orbit and bring them safely to his desired destination. God might answer the prayer today, or next year, or a thousand years from now. “Prayers are deathless,” wrote E.M. Bounds. “They outlive the lives of those who uttered them.”

Upward Direction

None of this makes prayer easy. It’s hard for everyone. I need help, which is why I’ve developed guides for praying, so that my spontaneous intercessions and personal requests are framed around a regimen of reciting psalms or reading through other portions of Scripture. But even with a guide, it’s easy for my mind to wander. It’s hard work keeping your focus on God, praising him for his attributes, and lifting up to him the needs of others.

Why do this hard work? Especially when it doesn’t seem useful?

Because God is bigger than us. When we pray, we’re not in the realm of results and statistics, “trade-offs” and “metrics” and “measures.” We’re not in a world of success and failure. Prayer is training us to look up to the God whose first and greatest commandment is to love him with our whole heart, mind, and soul. You cannot measure or quantify that goal. You can only give yourself over to that desire and direction.

The reason the triune God calls us to converse with him, Tim Keller wrote, is “because he wants to share the joy he has. Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself.”

Glorious Uselessness

Is it useful to love your spouse? Is spending time with your kids efficient? How productive is your conversation with a close friend? Terms like “useful,” “efficient,” and “productive” are silly when applied to our closest relationships. Here, we’re not talking about whatever feels practical and useful. We’re in the realm of love. This is about joy.

So, take heart. Prayer is useless, gloriously so, because prayer cannot be useful. Prayer is not an instrument, but an end. Its consummation is closeness with God and the joy that comes from his presence. Remember that truth until the work becomes your worship.

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The longer I live, the more often I whisper to myself, “The Lord sees.”

It’s a biblical truth repeated throughout Scripture. The psalmist sees all of life taking place coram Deo: before the face of God. “The LORD looks down from heaven,” he writes. “He observes everyone” (Ps. 33:13). Nothing escapes God’s notice. “The eyes of the LORD are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry for help” (34:15).

The heart’s silent cry, giving rise to tears of anguish no one else sees—the aloneness compounds the heartache. In those moments when you’re wronged, or your name is slandered, or your intentions are questioned . . . In the times when you feel alone or abandoned . . . In the aftermath of saying what’s true and paying a price, when you’ve experienced the deep wounds of injustice or betrayal . . . the Lord sees.

The Lord is the One who untangles all our hidden motivations, the Shepherd who knows our hopes and fears. The Lord knows our desires. The Lord sees the quiet suffering we endure when others sin against us. The Lord sees us in troubled times, notes every unmerited slight and insult flung our way, and observes the chill that descends when those around us fall short of Christ’s call to love.

El Roi: The God Who Sees

“El Roi” is a name given to God in the Old Testament, a source of comfort and peace in times of distress. It first falls from the trembling lips of Hagar, the enslaved woman driven into the wilderness after being caught up in the sinful designs of her master and his wife. There she kneels, despondent and despairing, ready for life to come to an end. And there in that desert of sorrow, the Lord sees. Transformed by the gracious presence of the God of all justice and mercy, Hagar speaks with surprising confidence. She names the Lord who spoke to her: “In this place, have I actually seen the one who sees me?” (Gen. 16:13).

El Roi. The God who sees.

It’s the tender nature of our Father to speak to us in the wilderness of pain, to come alongside us when we feel the sting of injustice, the sadness of lost love, the sorrow of dried-up friendships, the hurt of neglect and rejection. The Lord sees.

The Father Who Sees in Secret

Jesus assures us the Father sees not only when we’re wronged but also when we do right, when we practice our righteousness in secret. The reason he tells us not to perform righteous acts before others is because, once again, the Father is El Roi: the God who sees. We live for the Lord, trusting that the Father who sees in secret will reward us (Matt. 6).

God sees not only the wrongs you’ve experienced but all the righteous deeds no one else has noticed. All the thankless tasks you’ve performed. All the quiet prayers offered in solitude. All the times you’ve met barbs of criticism with a balm of kindness. All the moments you’ve answered evil with good. All your acts of love that were never reciprocated. All the times you’ve overlooked an offense or have forgiven others their wrongdoing.

The God Who Sees Your Sin

Of course, coming to grips with the all-seeing God leads to truth that cuts both ways. In an age like our own, when there’s power in claiming victimhood status, it’d be easy to focus only on the comfort we receive in knowing that God sees the wrongs done to us. But the Scriptures press us further.

God doesn’t only see when we’re sinned against. He sees when we sin against others. “The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are open to their prayer,” said the apostle Peter, quoting the Old Testament. “But,” he adds, “the face of the Lord is against those who do what is evil” (1 Pet. 3:12). Likewise, we read in Proverbs 15:3, “The eyes of the LORD are everywhere, observing the wicked and the good.”

The deeper implication of El Roi should stir up fear of the Lord, a reverence toward him that turns us outward in love for others. The Lord sees. Knowing our sins against others, we shudder. He sees all our careless thoughts, our hateful words, our backbiting ways, our manipulative intentions, our selfish actions, our bitter deeds.

The Lord sees more than just my sorrow; he sees all my sin. When Peter denied Jesus for the third time and the rooster crowed, “the Lord turned and looked at Peter” (Luke 22:61). The Lord’s gaze does more than comfort; it confronts. The Lord sees. And so we rest in the knowledge that God sees all the suffering we endure, and we commit to a life of love—flowing from a repentant heart that seeks forgiveness from others, a life of faithful friendship that rejects selfishness.

Seeing the Lord

The good news of the gospel is that God has compassion on the suffering sinners and sinful sufferers. He sees us when we sin, and he sees us when we’re sinned against, and he loves us through it all. The One who sees now commands us to look to him and live. See the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. See the Son of suffering. See the Servant crushed for our inquiry. Look and live.

El Roi, the God who sees, is the God who will be seen. One day, the pure in heart will see God. Our faith will be sight. “Though you have not seen him, you love him; though not seeing him now, you believe in him, and you rejoice with inexpressible and glorious joy, because you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1 Pet. 1:8–9).

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Want to make a case for the existence of God?

You’re probably familiar with the classic avenues of argumentation for believing in God. There’s the cosmological case, often associated with Thomas Aquinas, that says everything that exists has a cause and so there must be a first cause (God). Or the teleological argument, which points to the complexity and order of the universe as evidence of an intelligent designer. Then there’s the moral argument, popularized by C. S. Lewis, that points to the existence of objective moral values and duties, which require a moral lawgiver.

The Bach Argument

But there’s another argument I’ve come across worth pondering. Philosopher Peter Kreeft lays it out this way:

• There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
• Therefore there must be a God.

He adds, “You either see this one or you don’t.”

Do you see it? Let me help you.

Beauty as Evidence for God

The heart of this argument for God’s existence is in the appeal to beauty experienced as something transcendent, authoritative, and self-validating.

When we encounter beauty (exemplified here in the music of Bach), we’re arrested. As soon as you see beauty, you’re compelled to love it and know it. There’s no proving beauty, only acknowledging it, experiencing it, and giving yourself over to it. Kreeft says our “sense experience does not demand reasons to believe it, and we usually think it should be believed until proved untrue.”

Other philosophical cases for God put the burden of proof on the believer. We offer reasons to believe in God. But this one—the appeal to aesthetics—puts the burden of proof on the unbeliever. What are the reasons we should not believe in real beauty? Why should we deny our instinct that beauty is real and that real beauty transcends subjectivity?

Beauty and Music

One of the best examples of beauty is found in music. Sure, you can break music into its component parts of melody, harmony, and rhythm, but a scientific analysis can’t capture the essence of music or why it moves us, just as a deep and abiding love for another person cannot be reduced to chemicals in the brain.

Music isn’t just something physical and material. There’s something beyond the notes on the page. In great works of art, we touch the edges of the transcendent because the best of our human creations are consciously or unconsciously reaching for the true, good, and beautiful.

Music, like other art forms, resembles the beauty we see in nature. These aesthetic experiences are like cracks in the sidewalks of secularism, through which shoots of grass and the occasional flower appear. They’re pinholes in the ceiling of immanence, laying waste the claim that nothing exists beyond this material world. They’re whispers in the wind that send a chill up the spine and tell us we’re not alone. There’s something more there.

In his forthcoming book Drawn by Beauty, Matt Capps writes,

Capps also recounts an interview with Jeremy Begbie, who referenced Bach’s Goldberg Variations as showing how a simple chord progression developed in 30 variations allows one to hear more and more with each layer. The genius of Bach’s piece is that after an hour or so, after all “variations,” the beginning of the aria is played again. However, we cannot hear the end “apart from the memory of the extraordinary things Bach has shown us” through its entirety. “In other words, now we hear this aria not simply as a replication of what we heard before; we hear it as varied, replete with diversity. It has gathered to itself a richness, a huge variety of moods and colors. Bach makes us hear more in what we hear, so to speak.”

Music and Eternity

Music resonates with us. It should come as no surprise, then, that a heavenly choir was employed at the dawn of creation, as God laid the earth’s foundation and set the stars spinning into motion (Job 38:7). In other words, the creation of the world was scored, much like a composer adds music to a movie.

Lewis imagined the creation of Narnia taking place through a Voice singing, its sound rising “till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose.” Whose is the voice? “It was a Lion. Huge, shaggy, and bright, it stood facing the risen sun. Its mouth was wide open in song.”

Likewise, J. R. R. Tolkien portrayed the world’s creation in The Silmarillion as a work of music, with angel-like creatures fashioning the theme of the great Creator, a sound arising “of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.” Tolkien later describes the intrusion of evil as discord that the Creator somehow overcomes and sweeps into the overall symphony.

Calvin Miller’s The Singer, an allegorical retelling of the gospel story through analogies of song and music, begins with creation and the song of the Word, heightens the drama of opposition by the World-Hater, before climaxing with the death of the Singer and his subsequent triumph, leading to the spread of the song throughout the world.

Gavin Ortlund writes,

A Sign, If Not a Proof

Ortlund doesn’t go as far as Kreeft in saying the beauty we encounter in music can be offered as a proof for God’s existence. But he does think belief in God offers something extra, a perk, when you listen to music. “If you believe in God,” he says, “you have a framework for enjoying music that is more satisfying to heart and mind, and more authentic to the actual experience of that enjoyment.”

The inconsolable longing we feel when we encounter true beauty, when the soaring symphony swells toward a melody’s resolution, is the window to another world, whispering to us, singing to us, “There is something more.”

If you don’t get what Kreeft is saying when he says Bach proves the existence of God, the argument will come off as silly and superstitious. But once you feel the full force of what’s being claimed, it’s hard to beat.

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In 1974, on the 150th anniversary of the dedication of All Souls Church in London, John Stott shared his dream for the church, focusing on five elements of faithfulness that would be for the glory of God and the good of the world. Riffing on Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech directed to the injustices of American society, Stott painted an inspiring picture of the church at its best.

In a time of upheaval, when the church’s weaknesses and sins have been exposed, it’s good to remind ourselves what the church has been and can still be when we’re marked by faith, hope, and love. Here is Stott’s fivefold dream for the church, as later published in The Living Church.

Biblical Church

I have a dream of a church which is a biblical church—
which is loyal in every particular to the revelation of God in Scripture,

whose pastors expound Scripture with integrity and relevance,
and so seek to present every member mature in Christ,

whose people love the word of God,
and adorn it with an obedient and Christ-like life,

which is preserved from all unbiblical emphases,
whose whole life manifests the health and beauty of biblical balance.

I have a dream of a biblical church.

Worshipping Church

I have a dream of a church which is a worshipping church—

whose people come together to meet God and worship him,
who know God is always in their midst
and who bow down before him in great humility,

who regularly frequent the table of the Lord Jesus,
to celebrate his mighty act of redemption on the cross,

who enrich the worship with their musical skills,
who believe in prayer and lay hold of God in prayer,

whose worship is expressed not in Sunday services and prayer gatherings only
but also in their homes, their weekday work and the common things of life.

I have a dream of a worshipping church.

Caring Church

I have a dream of a church which is a caring church—
whose congregation is drawn from many races, nations, ages and social backgrounds,
and exhibits the unity and diversity of the family of God,

whose fellowship is warm and welcoming,
and never marred by anger, selfishness, jealousy or pride,

whose members love one another with a pure heart fervently,
forbearing one another, forgiving one another, and bearing one another’s burdens,

which offers friendship to the lonely, support to the weak,
and acceptance to those who are despised and rejected by society,

whose love spills over to the world outside—
attractive, infectious, irresistible, the love of God himself.

I have a dream of a caring church.

Serving Church

I have a dream of a church which is a serving church—
which has seen Christ as the Servant
and has heard his call to be a servant too,

which is delivered from self-interest, turned inside out,
and giving itself selflessly to the service of others,

whose members obey Christ’s command to live in the world,
to permeate secular society, to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world,

whose people share the good news of Jesus
simply, naturally and enthusiastically with their friends,

which diligently serves its own parish, residents and workers,
families and single people, nationals and immigrants, old folk and little children,

which is alert to the changing needs of society,
sensitive and flexible enough to keep adapting its program to serve more usefully,

which has a global vision
and is constantly challenging its young people to give their lives in service,
and constantly sending its people out to serve.

I have a dream of a serving church.

Expectant Church

I have a dream of a church which is an expectant church—

whose members can never settle down in material affluence or comfort,
because they remember that they are strangers and pilgrims on earth,

which is all the more faithful and active
because it is waiting and looking for its Lord to return,

which keeps the flame of the Christian hope burning brightly
in a dark, despairing world,

which on the day of Christ will not shrink from him in shame,
but rise up joyfully to greet him.

I have a dream of an expectant church.

Such is my dream of a living church. May all of us share this dream, and under God may the dream come true!

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If you were to visit virtually any Baptist or Presbyterian or Methodist church in the late 1940s, right around the time Carl F. H. Henry wrote The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism and just as the neo-evangelical movement led by Henry, Harold Ockenga, and Billy Graham was picking up steam, you’d notice some similarities alongside striking differences.

All the churches would be in some sense liturgical, but the Presbyterians and most of the Methodists would lean more “high church,” while many of the Methodists and Baptists (especially in the South) would exhibit a revivalist culture, with “low church” campfire sensibilities. Churchgoers would likely be aware of their denomination’s theological distinctives and how they affect their worship and practice.

What stands out today when visiting various churches broadly aligned with the neo-evangelical movement is their similarity, regardless of denominational label. The fastest-growing group of churches is “nondenominational”—often full of former Baptists and Methodists, usually with a more pronounced charismatic sensibility. The conservative Methodist megachurch holds worship services that look and feel a lot like the Southern Baptist church down the street, which in turn resembles something akin to the nondenominational church across town.

Theological differences remain, but they’re less pronounced because virtually all evangelical churches have been marked by three waves that have crashed onto the shore and changed the landscape. The influence of these movements is so profound that many churchgoers don’t even notice their effects.

In what follows, I want to describe these three waves and then point to the possibility of a fourth that’s picking up speed today.

Wave #1: Spirit-Filled Worship

The Spirit-filled movement of the 1960s to 1980s was born within Pentecostalism, often emphasizing modern-day healings and sign gifts as well as contemporary worship forms. As this wave grew, it burst out of its Pentecostal box and became a broader charismatic renewal that influenced virtually all denominations, even mainline Episcopalians and the Church of England.

The Spirit-filled movement minimized some of its idiosyncrasies (early adherents insisted speaking in tongues was a required sign of regeneration) to embrace all kinds of evangelicals who sought a deeper, personal experience of the Spirit’s presence and power, more expressive forms of worship, and greater reliance on the Spirit’s guidance in everyday life.

Many church leaders pushed back on the perceived excesses of this movement, stressing a strong form of cessationism (the view that the miraculous sign gifts ceased after the apostolic age). Likewise, the “worship wars” roiled churches in the 1980s and 1990s as leaders sought to stop or slow the move toward contemporary musical forms.

But today, even in churches and denominations that reject charismatic worship and theology, the effects left by the Spirit-filled wave are all around us. If other church members worship with eyes closed and hands raised, if the style and songs are contemporary and expressive, if it doesn’t surprise you to hear a fellow church member admit to praying in tongues privately, if you’ve ever gone through Experiencing God, or if you’ve uttered a powerful prayer for healing in Jesus’s name, you’ve experienced a church world reshaped by the Spirit-filled wave.

Wave #2: Seeker-Sensitive Church Growth

The second wave originated in the church growth movement of the 1960s and 1970s, coming into full force by the 1980s and 1990s when certain strategies and methods for church multiplication were employed as part of a “seeker-sensitive” model for attracting people to church to provide the gospel as the answer to their “felt needs.”

Peter Wagner, Elmer Towns, and other key leaders provided the scaffolding of a church growth philosophy, and leaders like Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, and Andy Stanley constructed a new way of doing church—an attempt at making church comprehensible and convenient for the lost. This wave minimized aspects of the Spirit-filled movement (certain charismatic practices were deemed strange and off-putting to visitors) while adapting and magnifying other features (such as contemporary music and emotional worship).

Like the Spirit-filled movement, the seeker-sensitive model drew significant criticism. New outreach methods and worship styles required change that some churches weren’t ready for. Critics chided the stronger forms of seeker sensitivity for watering down the gospel, or for adopting an overly programmatic view of discipleship, or for incorporating worldly elements into congregational worship, or for focusing too much on attendance numbers as a success measure.

But today, even in churches that never adopted this philosophy wholesale, the wave’s effects are everywhere. Most churches operate with the unspoken assumption that the church’s goal is to grow (and that something’s wrong if the church isn’t growing). What’s more, the measures of growth or stagnation are almost all numeric and program-driven: worship attendance, small group involvement, livestream viewers, service and mission groups.

Nearly all churches have incorporated the most common practices and improvements associated with the seeker-sensitive wave, like clear signage, parking lot or door greeters, coffee in the lobby or fellowship areas, contemporary worship, attractive children’s facilities, preaching that connects to life issues, and acknowledgment of newcomers or unchurched people in the worship service. The seeker-sensitive wave influenced how churches see their purpose and judge their effectiveness.

Wave #3: Gospel Centrality

The next big wave to hit evangelicalism was gospel centrality in the mid-2000s and 2010s—or, as it was dubbed by Collin Hansen, the “Young, Restless, and Reformed.” This wave began, in part, as a reaction to the overly pragmatic solutions and perceived a-theological deficiencies of the church growth and Spirit-filled movements.

The goal was to pull the church back to the center of the Christian faith so the main message—grace and mercy through the cross and resurrection of Jesus—wouldn’t be eclipsed by moralistic behavioral improvements or political causes. The gospel-centered wave marked a return to doctrine, a desire for theological depth over pragmatic superficiality, and a renewed focus on showing how Jesus is at the center of the Bible.

Gospel centrality caught fire for many reasons, including a cultural landscape reoriented toward questions of suffering and God’s sovereignty after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and a church landscape filled with anxieties among Christians who needed the fresh news of grace to break through a pervasive moralism that seemed incapable of saying anything more than “Do better!” The big-God theology of John Piper and the careful exposing of the heart’s idolatries in Tim Keller’s preaching led a younger generation to focus again on the gospel as the ultimate solution to sin and sorrow.

The gospel-centered wave generated a fair share of criticism. Anabaptists chided the movement’s triumphalism in cultural engagement. Non-Reformed traditions expressed frustration at the implication that anything short of Calvinist soteriology was subpar or not really the gospel. An emphasis on the indicatives (what God has done for us) sometimes came at the expense of the biblical imperatives (what God demands of us).

But in all kinds of churches across the denominational spectrum, well beyond the Reformed corner where it began, you see the influence of the gospel-centered wave. If you belong to a church that sings modern-day hymns, or enjoy new worship songs that center primarily on Jesus’s cross and resurrection, or use The Gospel Project for Kids, or hear preaching that distinguishes between “religion” and “the gospel,” or attend a small group that digs into Christian classics or repackaged Puritan theology, you’re seeing the traces of gospel centeredness.

Wave #4: Spiritual Formation?

Is it possible another wave is gathering force that will soon influence evangelical churches?

People who spend a lot of time online might point to a renewed political focus, whether the Christian Nationalists on the right or the social justice advocates on the left. But the best place to look for the next wave is churchgoing college students. As I travel around to various churches and interact with leaders in different denominations, what stands out is a renewed emphasis on spiritual formation—an allegiance to Jesus as Lord of all of life that requires a total reworking of personal habits and spiritual disciplines.

Like the other waves, this one has a reactionary element—the Spirit-filled wave is too shallow, the seeker-sensitive wave too programmatic, and the gospel-centered movement too shy when it comes to stressing a rule of life (perhaps out of fear of returning to moralism). But the spiritual formation wave’s primary focus is positive, not negative—a way of shaping one’s life according to practices and habits that will aid one’s growth in virtue and the development of one’s character.

“If you’re not holding out a challenging and strenuous moral vision, they’re just not going to take you seriously,” an African American pastor in Baltimore told me last year about his college students. Not surprisingly, several best-selling books now focus on spiritual habits, whether from Justin Whitmel Earley or John Mark Comer. When surveying the reading habits of his college students, professor Brad East says, “It’s John Mark Comer’s world, and we’re all just living in it.” That may be an overstatement, but all the trends point to a returning emphasis on serious spiritual formation.

Nothing in this wave is especially new. It’s a popularized and renewed vision of Dallas Willard’s work on discipleship, combined with an A. W. Tozer–tinged evangelical mysticism, sometimes pointing to practices stretching back beyond the Reformation, bringing all the promise and peril of the church in the first 15 centuries. When applied corporately, it’s aligned with the ancient-future vision that Robert Webber talked about for decades.

There’s a trend toward incorporating ancient Christian rituals into one’s devotional life (written prayers, sanctified space, kneeling, making the sign of the cross, serious fasting, seeking solitude) and rhythms of worship that combine ancient creeds and liturgies with newer worship styles bequeathed from the Spirit-filled wave.

The question is, why this wave, and why now? Is the focus on personal growth via methods a sign of a resurgent Wesleyanism alongside a more Reformed gospel-centered theology? (Plenty of young people I know are reading Comer alongside Keller.) Is it the chaos of our current cultural moment leading young people to new forms of structure in both personal and corporate spirituality? Is it a desire for a faith that feels rooted in something beyond the present moment?

Several younger friends of mine feel a fruitful tension in both the third and fourth waves, with a desire for more structure and liturgy and a distaste for hype and performance. They want to hold on to the radical message of grace and acceptance and not slide back into the chains of moralism or behavior management, but at the same time, they’re looking to incorporate more rules and rituals—more spiritual structure—in their walk of faith.

I feel a bit of that tension also, cheering on the trend toward spiritual formation (and seeking to resource it as best I can—see my guides to praying three times a day through substantial sections of Scripture) while wanting to avoid pitfalls the church has encountered in centuries past. In the spiritual formation wave, it’s far too easy for the gospel to be assumed instead of explicit, for Scripture to take a backseat to experience, and for the church to become a sideshow to one’s individual journey.

On Waves and Ripples

Look closely enough and you’ll find troubling elements in all these waves that have influenced evangelicalism over the past 50 years. But you’ll also see the Lord at work in all of them. No movement comes without strengths and weaknesses. History is hard. Ministry is messy.

Maybe I’m wrong about this fourth wave. Readers in 10 or 20 years can look back at this column and tell me if I was right, or half-right, or totally wrong. Regardless, every wave leaves its mark on the evangelical landscape. I’m curious if we’re seeing a fourth wave and what it might mean for the next generation.

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One of the strange ironies of our times: a significant segment of the left pushes back forcefully against the idea of “color blindness” regarding race but demands what amounts to “gender blindness” regarding sex. We’re supposed to assume racial distinctions are inevitable and enduring in most, if not all, interactions in society, while in debates over marriage, relationships, sports, bathrooms, or medicine, justice demands we ignore or minimize the real and meaningful differences between men and women.

Put another way, those most prone to a rigid understanding of race opt for a fluid understanding of sex.

Biologically, this is backward. There’s only one race: the human race. Our understanding of race (in contrast to “ethnicity”) is a societal classification. It’s not grounded in biology or anthropology, even if we acknowledge the enduring effects of historical and social ramifications because of unjust divisions. But sex (including our understanding of gender) is rooted in meaningful bodily difference. To harp on racial identity as all-encompassing and then claim one’s sex or gender to be “choosable” is a masterclass in convoluted thinking.

The Irish aren’t having it.

The Irish Want Moms

Earlier this year, on International Women’s Day no less, Irish voters in a landslide retained statements in their constitution that highlight the dignity of a woman’s “life within the home” that “gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.” A “Care Amendment” had been proposed, a recommendation that would have removed gendered language altogether, opting instead for a generic nod at “the provision of care, by members of a family to one another.” The vote was 74 percent against, the highest “No” vote in the history of Irish constitutional referendums.

Voters also kept constitutional language that describes marriage as “the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State” and rejected an updated, expanded governmental definition of families founded on “other durable relationships.” Even if the Irish unwittingly greased the path for such proposals by green-lighting same-sex marriage a few years ago, they’ve drawn a line here at further tinkering with the family.

Inclusivity as Gender-Blindness?

It’s common today for the buzzword of “inclusivity,” when applied to sexuality, to mean “gender blindness.” While the church has, at times, exaggerated gender distinctions in a way that minimizes our equal worth as image-bearers of God, the culture right now diminishes our image-bearing identity by reframing “equality” as flattening distinctions between men and women, as if mothers and fathers, or men and women, are interchangeable in all aspects that really matter to society.

Those who cheered on the amendments to the Irish Constitution saw the statements about women at home as backward and repressive. But there’s nothing in the constitution that requires mothers to stay at home. The language merely carves out a space for women to resist the pressure to be cogs in an economic machine and acknowledges the governmental debt owed to women who opt for caring for and nurturing their children at home. It honors women whose contributions bring societal benefits that cannot be captured on a spreadsheet.

John Duggan points to journalist Sara Carey, who sought to explain to people inside the media and political bubble why three-quarters of women rejected the proposal to scrub “mothers” from the constitution. “We’re not members of the far right,” she said. “We’re not confused. We’re not misinformed. And if every single Cabinet Minister had walked up to my door, I wasn’t going to vote for it, because I was not deleting mothers from the Constitution.”

Women from all ends of the spectrum—even professional women—hated the proposed changes, with three-quarters lamenting the fact that women who work in the home are less valued by society. One woman told Carey, “If [the line about women in the home] wasn’t in the constitution, I’d be fighting to put it in.”

Celebration of God’s Good Design

Once again, we live in odd times. Many of the same people who argue for discrimination based on race argue against any meaningful difference between men and women, even though sex is biologically determined in a way racial classifications aren’t.

As followers of Jesus, we’re to reject favoritism and prejudice, in part because we belong to the multiethnic family of God—a chosen nation that encompasses more peoples than any other religion in history. We aren’t to be color blind, if by that phrase we intend to ignore ethnicity or minimize our history of racial injustice. We celebrate and give thanks to God for creating us in his image, in all our magnificent variety, and that’s why we stand against unfair treatment and racial injustice.

At the same time, we uphold and celebrate the glorious difference-in-unity that marks men and women—equal before God in worth and dignity, with real and meaningful distinctions based in creation. No matter how often some repeat the phrase “love is love” or adopt slogans of “marriage equality” or try to persuade us “all love is the same,” we can point to the human body and say the truth in love: Nature discriminates. Every person on earth traces his or her existence back to the unity-in-distinction of the sexes. Men and women aren’t interchangeable.

Even if there’s overlap in the qualities and characteristics of “parenting,” we believe fathers contribute something mothers cannot and mothers contribute something fathers cannot. We must resist the erasure of this fundamental biological reality and the Orwellian turn that would have us transform fathers and mothers into sexless “parents” and “guardians” and “caregivers,” or reframe the family as merely “durable relationships.”

I don’t know what the future holds for Ireland. But in this case, kudos to the Irish for refusing to be gender blind.

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In the fall of 2022, I was a scholar-in-residence at The Kilns, the former home of C. S. Lewis—a special place with a storied history.

Last week, I had the opportunity to return to the U.K. and spend a couple more days at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, this time delivering four guest lectures for a course, “Christianity and Contemporary Culture.”

We looked at several aspects of the Western world today—a world influenced (1) by the Enlightenment Story that personalizes God and privatizes religion and (2) by the Romantic Story of expressive individualism, a world that (3) promotes its moral vision as common sense (and Christianity’s as implausible and even reprehensible), and (4) a disenchanted world where a flattened, immanent frame of reference leads people to embrace pseudoreligions to fill their hunger for salvation.

What made this recent trip special was being accompanied by my oldest son, Timothy. Below, I’m sharing a few pictures from our visit for the enjoyment of all my fellow Anglophiles! (See more of The Kilns from my previous visit.)

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I’d like to live a long time. I’d love to see my kids become not just parents but grandparents. I’d love to write my last book in my 90s. (Whether or not anyone would care to read it remains to be seen!)

Based on the longevity in my family history, I’ve got a good shot, but the Lord is the One who numbers our days and plans our paths. Whether he grants me few or many years, I trust his good providence.

Peter Attia’s ‘Outlive’

Last year, several friends recommended Peter Attia’s best-selling book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, and I picked it up, intrigued by the emphasis on not merely extending life but also pursuing health in the latter years usually marked by physical decline.

For most of human history, people didn’t live long enough to experience all the ailments and decline that come with old age. Now, life expectancy has increased, but not necessarily good health in those additional years often called “the marginal decade” at the end of our lives, when we’re still alive but incapable of performing certain tasks.

Attia believes we need to shift our thinking. In ancient times, Medicine 1.0 was a premodern system of diagnosis and treatment based on observation and guesswork. In the last century, Medicine 2.0 focused on testing and, by leaning on technology, produced effective drugs and successful operations. What we need now is Medicine 3.0, an approach that goes beyond passively waiting for problems to appear. We should be proactive in maximizing health and warding off illness and injury.

Outlive focuses primarily on health, offering tips and advice for maintaining muscle mass and cardiovascular fitness. Attia writes about diet (lots of protein, shocker!) but as part of a holistic prescription that includes exercise, lifting weights, relational investment, and medicinal intervention. He performs risk assessments for his patients, based on dozens of tests, screenings, consideration of lifestyle and exercise habits, and the likelihood of diseases that show up later in life.

Dying in Good Health

In a profile of Attia in the New Yorker, “How to Die in Good Health,” Dhruv Khullar explains how the 51-year-old medical guru regained an interest in medicine as he sought “complete physical optimization.” This pursuit of perfect physical fitness has, at times, come at the expense of relational well-being.

Attia recounts a painful episode when he was “a really, really broken person,” and his wife called him while he was on a business trip, terrified, because their month-old son had stopped breathing and had no pulse. She saved his life with CPR and the baby was taken to the ICU. Attia waited 10 days before returning home.

In his 40s, Attia exercised 28 hours a week and was so strict with his diet that he wouldn’t eat cookies his kids baked for him. “I was doing everything to live longer, despite being completely miserable emotionally,” he writes. In another interview, Attia said he recently thought about an event at his son’s kindergarten and weighed the downsides—it’d cut into his time for squats and deadlifts—before finally deciding to make the tradeoff.

Unhealthy Pursuit of Health

Outlive is a fascinating book on how the body works; what the aging process is like; and how a mix of good relationships, healthy eating habits, and regular exercise and muscle-building can benefit your health. But the more I hear from Attia, the more it becomes clear there’s something unhealthy, even sick, in this obsessive pursuit of health. We aren’t machines. G. K. Chesterton warned of this obsession in Orthodoxy:

Longevity can become an idol. “While I’m here, I want to know that I gave it my all,” Attia says. “We have this one shot. Wouldn’t it be a shame if we didn’t make the most of it?” Well, yes and no.

If this life is all there is, then the pressure to optimize your body and extend your life as long as possible makes sense. But if there’s more to life than this existence and more to “making the most” of life than physical prowess, then the pursuit of longevity and health can sabotage itself. The obsessive attempt to avoid a physical decline that is, at some point, inevitable in old age will likely produce anxiety and distraction from what makes for a happy and fulfilled life right now. Making the most of your life doesn’t mean devoting most of your life to extending it.

Idol of Longevity

A century ago, “experts” were already saying doctors should stop treating people just because they’re ill and instead become health advisers for the community. While there’s something to be said for facilitating good health, Chesterton pushed back on the idea that focusing on prevention is necessarily better than treating the sick. That approach leads us to treat the healthy as if they’re sick already:

No one looks to Chesterton as a shining portrait of good health. He’s the anti–Peter Attia. Had he cared a little more about the deleterious effects of his eating and drinking (on top of what was likely a glandular disorder), he might have lived longer and written more. But would that have made for a better life?

Yes, our knowledge of what brings good health, what causes disease, and the interplay between preventative care and medicinal remedies—our knowledge has grown exponentially. But what we need most is growth in wisdom, a proper perspective on life and health in light of eternity. What is health for? Why pursue good health in the first place? A healthy body in itself makes for a bad goal. The right reason to pursue good health is because we want to live a life of love and service to God and neighbor.

Outlive makes a good case for certain practices that can extend your life and health, but to what end? A good life isn’t always long. And a long life isn’t always good.

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A longtime reader responded to my column “Love Your Enemies So You Can See Straight” with a gentle critique. The best way to love our enemies, he said, is to breathe out forgiveness, just as our Savior did on the cross. He noticed I didn’t mention forgiveness until late in the column. I chose instead to foreground godliness. Here’s how I put it:

My friend worries that a focus on godliness can be too easily twisted by our fallen nature. The moment we begin thinking of ourselves as “godly,” or even imagining ourselves on “the road to godliness,” we start separating ourselves from people who aren’t as far along that road or people who may not be on the road at all (and thus are on the path to destruction).

If we’re to be tenderhearted (Eph. 4:32) instead of hardhearted (as the Gentiles are described in v. 18), wouldn’t it be better to foreground forgiveness instead of godliness? Wouldn’t forgiveness do a better job of bringing to mind our need for pardon?

Dangers of Pursuing Godliness

I appreciate this pushback. I knew my choice of the word “godliness” might raise an eyebrow, which is why I described it as a churchy word that has fallen out of favor. It conjures up the notion of superiority, much like “righteous” easily gets twisted into “self-righteous” these days. And for good reason. The distance between righteousness and self-righteousness is a chasm, but crossing it takes just a step.

The pursuit of godliness can get sucked into a vortex of self-referential pride, where we feel satisfied in how Godlike we’re becoming or we look down on others who aren’t as “far along.”

Seen this way, it’s understandable to assume the best way to love your enemies is to emphasize forgiveness, a virtue more closely associated with God’s grace. A focus on our need for forgiveness helps us avoid the elder-brother syndrome that hinders our ability to rejoice at the return of the prodigal.

Perils of Forgiveness

The problem is, forgiveness too can get twisted. I’m not persuaded that focusing on forgiveness instead of godliness will resolve the self-righteous tendencies of the human heart.

I’m reminded of Katerina Ivanovna in The Brothers Karamazov, who stays with Dmitri, a man who has shamed her and treated her abominably. She forgives him over and over again. From the outside, everyone looks at her and says, “What a model of selfless suffering and heroic virtue!” But Dmitri’s brother, Ivan, pierces the facade. Her forgiveness is rooted in self-love, not enemy-love. She finds delight in her role as martyr-victim. She doesn’t love Dmitri; she loves the image of herself as long-suffering and virtuous.

Training in Godliness

The apostle Paul commands us to train ourselves for godliness because “godliness is beneficial in every way, since it holds promise for the present life and also the life to come” (1 Tim. 4:7–8). We’re to pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness (6:11). Likewise, Peter says we’re to “make every effort” to “supplement . . . endurance with godliness” and “godliness with brotherly affection” (2 Pet. 1:4–8). John Stott comments,

Becoming More like God

My friend would agree with all this, of course, but he might say the best strategy for achieving godliness would be to focus on forgiveness so we don’t lose sight of our own need for grace. Perhaps. But the apostles command us, without an asterisk, to train in godliness—to pursue a godly life. They don’t assume this focus will devolve into a source of rotting self-righteousness.

Of course, the pursuit of godliness is a dangerous path; it’s easy to be ensnared in pride, to wander into pomposity and fall into self-righteousness. Those dangers are real.

But rightly understood, pursuing godliness ought to remind us of the massive distance between us and God. The bigger God is in our vision, the smaller we feel. The more we look up to him, the less we could even think of looking down on our neighbors. The closer we get to God, the more we see how far is left to go. The pursuit of godliness is a journey ever deeper into being entranced by the beauty and bigness of God.

And so we must walk the dangerous path, with eyes wide open, knowing the command to love our enemies immediately precedes Christ’s command to “be perfect, as [our] heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). Godliness supplemented with brotherly love—a holiness that receives the forgiveness of Christ and then breathes the same out to the world—is the goal. The more we love our enemies, the more we resemble the God who forgives.

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A few years ago, my childhood home came up for sale. Out of curiosity, I visited the house—built by my parents in the 1980s—on the day it was open to prospective buyers. I marveled at the backyard trees, now robust and mature. I walked through the bedrooms, observing the changes made over the years and noting the fixtures and elements that had stayed the same.

When I got to the kitchen, I saw the refrigerator. An old, white General Electric. The same one from when I was growing up. Nearly 40 years later, that refrigerator was going strong. I opened the door, astounded it was still humming along.

“They just don’t make things like they used to,” everyone says. That’s right. It’s called planned obsolescence. Everything is supposed to work . . . for a time, and then it’s replaced. Most appliances and gadgets these days, while improving in their efficiency, no longer last as long as earlier models did. The upside? Things are cheaper. The downside? Nothing lasts.

Does anyone still use their first iPhone? Would a Blackberry even work anymore? Nothing stays new for long.

Decay Rate

In his work on social acceleration, German philosopher Hartmut Rosa applies the physics of the scientific decay rate—the amount of time it takes something to dissolve in relation to the environmental conditions—to contemporary society. The decay rate tracks the time it takes for something to move from being “present” or “current” to being “part of the past” or “obsolete.”

Bring a fresh loaf of bread home from the store and set it on your counter, uncovered. Within a day, it’ll be hard and crusty. By day three or four, you’ll see mold growing. The bread is “dead.” Your fresh loaf is now fit for the trash.

Socially, our fast-paced cultural conditions create a world where things move ever more quickly from “new” and “fresh” to “old” and “stale.” When I discover a song that came out just a few years ago, my kids tell me it’s old. Really? A chart-topper in 2020 is already “old”? What does that make the music popular when I was their age? Ancient? Anything from the 2020s is still “new” to me!

Why does it seem like everything is moving faster—technologically, socially, morally? One explanation says we feel the meaninglessness of life in a world without transcendence. Because the present moment feels empty and hollow, we’re always looking forward to what’s around the corner, whatever seems new, innovative, or exciting. The way to distract ourselves from our present feeling of insignificance is to shorten our experience of it, to compress it.

The consumer habits of late-modern society reinforce this ever-shortening decay rate, so we’re perpetually distracted by things that come into fashion and then quickly fall out of favor.

Christian Worship and Decay

A couple years ago, a research study showed a rapid decrease in the length of time a worship song remains popular today. The average lifespan of a widely sung worship song has dropped to about a third of what it was 30 years ago. In the 1990s, a popular song would stay “current” for 10 to 12 years. Now, it’s only three or four.

The researchers pointed to multiple causes for the speeding-up of worship songs rising and falling. “Songs have always changed,” one researcher says. “But we want songs to change faster now. It’s the culture. It’s the soup we’re swimming in.” Exactly. Another commentator expresses an instrumentalizing perspective on worship songs: our choice of song should be determined by whatever works right now, whatever connects today in terms of appeal.

It’s clear the faster rise and fall is what we want. (The people have spoken!) But is it what we need? Does the rapid turnover of worship songs create a sense that nothing is solid and nothing lasts? Does it give the impression that Christianity is a constantly changing style or fashion? If Christian worship models the fast-paced, ever-changing decay rate of other aspects of culture, are we missing something special?

Power of Time in Worship

Rightly understood, Christian worship is the opposite of a shortening decay rate. We don’t compress time into the present by riding the wave of novelty or looking for the next best thing. Christian worship extends and lengthens time by helping us reach backward and forward.

When the apostle Paul addressed the Corinthian church about the Lord’s Supper, he said we proclaim (in the present) the Lord’s death (in the past) until he comes (in the future). At the table of our Lord, our proclamation stretches backward to the Last Supper and signals forward to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Every Lord’s Supper is another train stop on the journey from the upper room to the everlasting feast. When we eat the bread and drink the cup, the past and future rush into the present, extending the moment in both directions, eternalizing an experience that grants spiritual nourishment.

Something similar happens with other aspects of worship. When we sing the songs of our forefathers and mothers in the faith, when we recite psalms and creeds, when we preach the same Scriptures, we’re lengthening and extending time, stretching back into the past and leaning forward into the future. We’re mixing old and new in ways that defy the decay rate.

Worship with the Accordion

I receive spiritual benefit from multiple styles of worship. I appreciate variety in music. The psalmist says to sing new songs to the Lord, so I do. And I enjoy them. I’m grateful for fresh songs that faithfully celebrate the gospel, and I’m cheering on singers and songwriters who repurpose old hymns and ancient psalms.

At the same time, I recommend pastors and worship leaders intentionally ensure every service features songs or elements deliberately designed to lengthen and extend our experience of the present by connecting past and future. Let’s resist the decay rate and communicate to everyone in attendance that something timeless is taking place in time—that something ancient has a place in the present, and the present is a taste of future hope.

Think of Christian worship like an accordion. In the fast-paced consumer culture, the accordion is closed and compressed. In Christian worship, we extend the instrument, pulling the bellows apart, so the accordion’s airy sigh releases a cascade of musical notes. As the accordion expands, new melodies arise. Christian worship mixes old and new in a way that brings past and future into the present.

There’s an inexplicable sense of power in a Christmas Eve service that ends every year with the congregation holding candles and singing “Silent Night,” not only because of the theology expressed in that great carol or the soft yellow glow in the sanctuary but also because the accordion is extended.

This Christmas Eve is connected to all the previous ones, and as you look down the aisle at your family, and see your friends and the worn and weary saints still worshiping alongside you year after year, time stands still. All other Christmas Eves are stacked, one on top of the other, which deepens the significance of the moment. (I once attended a Christmas Eve service at another church, and the last song was a celebratory adaptation of “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” a terrific closing if you want to stress the missional call to take the Christmas story to the world. But in skipping “Silent Night” with the candles, the accordion didn’t expand that year, and I sensed it was a missed opportunity.)

God’s People in God’s Time

The church should be the one place where everything slows, where in the mix of old and new, something of permanence is communicated. There’s no planned obsolescence here. We are planning for eternity. We are God’s people. We live in God’s world. We inhabit space and time. We are grounded in the past, and we anticipate the future.

So whatever we sing on Sundays, whatever creeds and Scriptures we recite, whatever Bible passages we hear preached, whatever practices we incorporate—we must communicate that here, in the presence of the Spirit, we stand apart from our throwaway consumer culture. Here, connected to all the saints who’ve gone before us, we lean forward in pursuit of the prize that awaits. Here, in our intergenerational church full of children scampering around, where high school seniors stand next to senior adults, we take another snapshot in time, one flash in a history of 20 centuries of faithful Jesus-followers dotting the landscape all over the world.

We’re not up to date. Neither are we out of date. Worship takes us to another plane altogether.

Let that accordion expand in worship. Defy the decay rate.

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In the Great Commission Report, issued ahead of this year’s meeting of the Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization in Seoul, South Korea, Victor Nakah and Ivor Poobalan offer a theological basis for “the Great Commission” as one of the most-used phrases within global Christianity today.

Matthew 28:18–20 records the mandate King Jesus entrusted to the church through his apostles in the period between his ascension and return. (Also important are Mark 16:15; Luke 24:46–49; Acts 1:8; and John 20:19–23.) It’s a climax to a summons issued by God in the Old Testament, a theme evident in the call of Abraham (Gen. 12:1–3) that unfolds throughout Scripture. “The Great Commission was issued as a directive to follow, a command to obey, and a decree to execute,” Nakah and Poobalan write.

I’m grateful for this contribution in their introduction to the Great Commission Report, especially for opening my eyes to the four “alls” in the missionary mandate Jesus gave his disciples, as seen in Matthew’s formulation.

1. All Authority

The Great Commission begins not with a command but with a coronation. Jesus makes the stunning claim that “all authority in heaven and on earth” has been given to him. He didn’t grasp or steal such authority; it was granted as part of his exaltation (Phil. 2:9–11). Nakah and Poobalan comment,

2. All Nations

The Great Commission has a worldwide scope. The assignment is global and cross-cultural. Here we see God’s passion for all peoples, tongues, tribes, and languages of the world.

We’re called not only to proclaim the gospel but to make disciples. And not only to make disciples but to “make disciples of all nations” (as Nakah and Poobalan explain, to “bring people from all people groups to a true followership of the Messiah”). The church is on the move even now, they write:

God will have his worldwide family of faith. We’re commissioned to the task of discipleship, which itself will have an outward, nations-focused element of missionary obedience. “The call,” they write, “is to establish Christ-loving, sin-hating, God-honouring communities of worship” under the banner of Jesus as Lord.

3. All the Commands

The call of discipleship includes teaching everything Christ taught. The goal isn’t just a cognitive level of doctrinal understanding but total obedience. To obey all that Christ teaches. Nakah and Poobalan comment,

As beautiful as it may be to see the explosion of Christian witness in many parts of the world, we must recognize the importance of deep discipleship and lament its absence. “We are forced to concede that today, global Christian spirituality is at risk of becoming ‘a mile long and an inch deep,’” they acknowledge. We seek a harvest of evangelistic conversions, but together with our evangelism, there must be a commitment to deep discipleship that results in obedience and the rejection of syncretism.

4. All the Way

The fourth “all” of the Great Commission is the promise of Jesus’s presence, no matter the circumstances or obstacles we face, whether the cultural conditions are favorable or hostile. Jesus says he’ll be with us always, all the way to the end of time. His statement here gives us the courage to go to the uttermost parts of the world in the face of danger, perils, and trials. “With this statement,” they write, “comes the certainty, the prestige, and the power of his all-time presence.”

Where do these four “alls” leave us? With faith in the power of God to make us disciples—“students and followers”—of Jesus, whose good news is ever on our tongues. “That is the nature of the Christian faith and the direction of the Holy Spirit, who is always leading us to testify about Jesus and glorify him (John 15:26 and 16:14).”

After all, Nakah and Poobalan remind us, “The Great Commission is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end. The future is the presence of all tribes, tongues, nations, and languages worshipping the King at the end of the age.”

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This September, 5,000 participants from every region of the world will gather in South Korea for the Fourth International Congress on World Evangelization, hosted by the Lausanne Movement. (Thousands more will engage the Congress through satellite sites.)

This will be the 50th anniversary of the First Lausanne Congress, which saw the release of The Lausanne Covenant with John Stott as the chief architect. That document remains a rallying cry for evangelicals around the world. (See my selection of some of the best quotes.)

State of the Great Commission

This week, the Lausanne Movement released “The State of the Great Commission,” a compendium of dozens of charts, graphs, and essays from more than 100 contributors around the globe, looking at world Christianity in light of current trends, with an eye to enhancing evangelical mission efforts in both declaring and displaying Christ in the world.

As with most multicontributor projects, this one is a mixed bag—some essays are fantastic, others do a dutiful job in summing up current thinking without breaking new ground, and a handful make unqualified statements or veer into disputable theological territory among those who affirm the Lausanne Covenant.

Reading through this volume, I noticed four major themes that kept resurfacing—four aspects of mission in the modern world worthy of consideration.

1. Polycentric Mission

This graph from the World Christian Encyclopedia floored me—the shift from 1900 to 2050 in the regional distribution of Christianity.

Christianity’s growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and its fading in Europe and North America is no secret (it has been pointed out by Mark Noll, Philip Jenkins, and others), but this graph captures the significance of the shift. By 2050, Africa is projected to have the highest percentage of Christians globally.

What does this mean for cross-cultural mission? An essay from Décio de Carvalho, Larry and Stephanie Kraft, and Stephen and Rosemary Mbogo, “Polycentric Global Missions,” builds on Allen Yeh’s important work in showing mission endeavors now are “from everyone to everywhere.” More and more, we’re seeing collaboration in evangelism and social ministry that upends traditional geographical categories.

We see this development on display in several essays, including “Rise of Asia” by Bong Rin Ro, Babu Karimkuttickal Verghese, and Fenggang Yang on cross-cultural missionaries in the same country. One example: over 60 percent of India’s missionaries work within the country, reaching out to other ethnic groups with different languages and cultures. The upshot is that, around the world, we see a deepening of relational and financial collaboration in getting the gospel to all peoples.

2. Institutional Rebuilding

Another theme running through the essays is the decline of institutional trust (including among religious organizations) in the Global North, a development that often hinders evangelistic effectiveness.

Andrew Love, Kevin Muriithi Ndereba, and Mary Jo Sharp lay out the challenges of religious pluralism to the gospel’s objective truth claims, and their fine essay is then followed by Manfred Kohl, Lazarus Phiri, and Efraim Tender, who lift up integrity as a crucial component of discipleship. Lamenting the hypocrisy of many church leaders and the corruption of some churches and organizations, these authors point out how “our failures to exhibit integrity—or consistency between our whole life and the teachings of Jesus—do make the gospel seem less credible.”

We must aspire to pierce through the clouds of moral relativism with the gospel’s truth claims, and our witness must be backed up by healthy institutions and by individuals who live in light of Jesus Christ crucified and raised. I appreciate this report’s emphasis on institutional health and rebuilding after a season in which much rot has been revealed.

3. Demographic Shifts

The demographic shifts in the this report’s charts show not only the movement of Christianity from North to South but also other trends in world population: migration rates around the world, displaced peoples, diaspora missions, and more. Likewise, we see a rising middle class in India, a stagnating middle class in China, and a noticeable decline in subsistence-level poverty worldwide.

Most interesting to me is the unprecedented arrival of predominantly aging populations now affecting every region of the world, as birth rates fall and life expectancy increases. The church must reckon with a very young Africa (in comparison with the rest of the world) and an increasingly older Europe, North America, and Asia.

These demographic shifts are snapshots in time—a look at the mission fields in which we’re called to be faithful followers of Jesus. They provide food for thought and give us wisdom in planning for the future as we continue our gospel work.

4. Anthropology and the Digital World

The big theological challenge for our times is anthropology: What does it mean to be human? This report grapples with the question of humanity in light of new technologies, assumed identities, sexual behavior, and medical interventions. Several essays focus on topics such as transhumanism, artificial intelligence, gender and sexuality, and biotechnology and gene editing.

As a natural follow-up to the anthropological challenges, we find a section about the digital life—reflections on recent developments in online connection, social media algorithms, and how the digitalization of human self-perception and “digital communities” affects the church and our mission. Most of these essays identify the challenges and opportunities, recognizing the ingenuity of humanity alongside our idolatrous bent in terms of how we create and use tools. They’ll serve as conversation starters for some of the most pressing issues of our time.

My takeaway is that ministry in a digital age—increasing Scripture engagement, discipleship efforts, gathering as the church, and the like—must flow from a robust, holistic understanding of the Bible’s portrait of humanity, not from the reductionist, materialist, technological flattening of humanity all too often on display in the world today.

I look forward to seeing the fruit of collaboration as we draw nearer to the historic gathering of evangelicals from around the world this September in Seoul. May the Father of all good gifts grant us wisdom from above, and may the Spirit fill us with passion and compassion, as we seek to obey the commands of King Jesus.

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Multiple subscribers to Reconstructing Faith told me they listened more than once to the second season’s first episode—“Sledgehammers Don’t Build Anything”—hoping to glean more insight from one of my guests, Brad Edwards. He’s a Colorado pastor who had some great things to say about institutional renewal versus counterfeit institutions. Brad will be writing more on this topic in the future, but in the meantime, the podcast PostEverything he hosts with John Houmes takes a closer look at important institutional dynamics affecting our world today.

A recent episode with Andy Crouch focuses primarily on Andy’s 2013 book about power and authority, Playing God. Toward the end, when Brad and John ask about restoring faith in institutions, Andy gives a somber but hopeful word that deserves close attention.

Andy points to the Christian ordering of the Old Testament’s historical books: Judges is about the collapse of Israel. “In the days when the judges ruled, everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” Judges ends horribly, with a civil war. The following books, 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings, tell the story of rebuilding, although with complications of an institutional order, culminating in David’s kingship and the reestablishing of a nation.

Andy then draws out application for us today:

Why does this matter? Because of God’s work in fulfilling his promises and our hope in God’s ultimate plan.

Brad Edwards encourages us to think about hospitality as a thread from which a tapestry can be woven. The problem is, we’re out of thread. We may not have enough thread to build institutions because there isn’t enough trust. And trust cannot be manufactured.

So in this moment of institutional decline and distrust, we must take the long-term view, trusting that God will use simple, quiet acts of faithfulness and friendship for his ultimate purposes. The one thing we can do is plant seeds for our descendants to harvest.

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Tyler, a subscriber to my email newsletter, recently wrote me to ask how I filter my news intake. He was curious about how I keep a pulse on the goings-on in culture today and how I determine what news sources to read and trust. As a pastor, he feels overwhelmed at the thought of preparing sermons with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other (as the old saying goes).

I’m happy to share a few tips I’ve learned over the years when it comes to news and commentary, especially because this could come in handy if you find it difficult to stay on top of cultural developments.

But first, it’s best to address the matter of calling.

Question of Calling

We all have different callings in life, and I don’t presume your calling looks like mine. After observing Tyler’s life and ministry, perhaps I’d ask how he as a pastor finds the time to do so much counseling of his church members when he also manages to devote significant time to sermon preparation, or how he keeps his family a priority when his congregation has so many needs.

I’m a writer. First and foremost. I love preaching, teaching, leading, and serving, and the Lord has opened various doors for me over the years to exercise multiple gifts. For that, I’m grateful. But the core of my calling is to write, and if I’m to have something to write about, I must always be reading. Unless I fill the well, I have nothing to draw from.

So my reading and news intake is connected to my personal calling. No one should look at the number of books I read every year or the suggestions for news intake below and think they’re failing, somehow, because they don’t cover as much ground. Different callings.

With that caveat, here are habits I’ve found helpful in getting a grasp of the news and following cultural developments over the years.

1. Pick books over magazines and your phone.

If you have limited time for news and commentary, reach for a book before a magazine or before you start scrolling on your phone. I can’t stress this enough. The best thing you can do to stay on top of the news is to dig deeper into the state of our culture so you have a greater understanding of the world and a way of interpreting the day’s news. Study the climate, not just the weather.

Prioritize books that distill and unfold a sustained argument; don’t chase the ephemeral all the time, staying on top of whatever’s “current.” Scrolling is like jet skiing across the surface, and reading is like a deep underwater dive.

2. Pick print magazines over online-only resources (mostly).

I’m old-school in that I subscribe to magazines in print. I do so for three reasons: First, they’re handy on a plane when I’m traveling and convenient in the bathroom or tub. Second, print is usually superior because whatever gets printed most often represents the best of the magazine’s offerings. And third, print forces you to encounter news stories or articles the algorithm wouldn’t serve up. You turn the page and have to decide if you’re going to read, skim, or skip the next article.

I like the way The Week serves up news summaries and delivers bite-size morsels showing what columnists from different outlets said about what happened. World has long been established as a trustworthy Christian resource on events here and around the world. I’ve long appreciated the essays and book reviews in Christianity Today and First Things, and in Touchstone, which always make me think, even when I don’t agree. National Review is the flagship magazine for the neoconservative movement. The Atlantic and The New Yorker can be hit or miss, but even though they lean left, they usually include at least one or two great articles worth my time, and they help me see how different thinkers interpret today’s cultural developments.

3. Pick thoughtful and reasonable online writing over hot takes.

Avoid online-only outlets that are one-sided politically, with right-wing or left-wing takes that merely summarize other news stories in reactionary ways designed to give another hit to the addled online junkie. I don’t have time to name them all because they are legion. Skip them all.

In the realm of church, ministry, the arts, and cultural engagement, several online journals and sites have consistently helpful resources. The Gospel Coalition sets the standard here, but you can find terrific, thought-provoking long-form essays regularly at Mere Orthodoxy, devotional substance at Gospel-Centered Discipleship, and a mix of pastoral and practical helps at Desiring God.

It takes an enormous amount of time and effort to build and sustain an online platform with consistently good material, so you can expect every outlet to lay an egg once in a while. But most of the time, perusing these sites will serve up something nourishing.

4. Pick podcasts over cable news.

The dearth of intelligent, reasonable conversation on cable news is the best reason to avoid it altogether. It’s more beneficial to listen to podcasts on the go—in the car, doing household chores, mowing the lawn. (I hope my Reconstructing Faith counts as an edifying resource.)

For politically oriented podcasts from different perspectives, I dip into The Editors (National Review) and The Dispatch, as well as Matter of Opinion from the New York Times (featuring an always outnumbered conservative, Ross Douthat). I also appreciate great interviewers like Ezra Klein and Bari Weiss, and I’ll listen whenever the subject or guest intrigues me. Podcasts are one way to stay on top of cultural developments without feeling like you have to read all the news. (Here’s a counterpoint from Brad East.)

These are just a few principles I hope make for a healthier news and commentary intake. Whatever you do, be intentional. At all costs, avoid the dreadful “scroll” as your primary (or even secondary) news source. Look for sources that stimulate thought and reflection, and avoid any site or writer that confirms all your previous opinions. Get off the jet skis and go diving.

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Not long ago, I sat across from a pastor of a church known for its attractional (church growth) ministry philosophy. We discussed the methods common to seeker-sensitive megachurches in the 1990s and early 2000s—the attempt to find points of connection with the culture through sermon series based on popular movies or TV shows, the edginess of starting a service with a secular song to demonstrate cultural IQ (and how rocking the worship band was!), and the strict policing of language that could come across too “churchy” or off-putting to the newcomer.

Many of these well-intentioned efforts were built on showing how “relevant” or “in touch” the church was with the world around it. Today, these methods are cringeworthy. Young people who visit a church expect to experience, well, whatever church is. The strangeness is the appeal. Now that fewer people have any family background in church, no one hears a worship band cover an Imagine Dragons song and thinks, “Wow! This isn’t my Grandma’s church!”—in part because Grandma is in her 60s and never darkened the door either.

Young Churchgoers Today

Listen to Gen Z churchgoers today and you’ll hear conversations about powerful worship songs that facilitate an experience with God, about the realness of the preacher who just “tells it like it is” from the Bible, and about the beauty of church architecture and older traditions and recitations.

When young people accept the invitation to visit a church, they’ve already committed to experiencing something unusual. Attempts at being overly accommodating or making the church seem “cool” come off as desperate and insecure. If your ministry is seeker-sensitive and attractional today, remember that the churchiness of church is a draw, not a turnoff.

Unfortunately, many pastors have yet to figure this out. Too many churches still think the way to reach young people is to replicate the entertainment you can get anywhere else, or to lean into the social activism you find at the local university, or to offer the practical advice a podcaster delivers better.

Serious Faith

Young people are swimming in pools of superficiality, with torrents of information flooding through their magical devices. Adrift in a sea without navigation, in a world where moral strictures have been blown up in the name of freedom, many long for paths of formation, growth, and maturity.

It’s no surprise the spiritual disciplines have become an entry point to Christianity for some. Even secular influencers are hawking all kinds of “rules for life” that promise maturity and wisdom. Many students are running toward discipline, not away from it.

Previous iterations of attractional ministry too often made discipleship the “fine print” at the bottom of a gospel presentation. Today, if you want to attract young people, lead with the fine print. Shock them with the seriousness of a faith that requires rigor, a rule of life that brings structure for spirituality, grounded in the grace of the gospel. Churches that make an impression on young people take faith seriously. Gone is the superficiality of making Christianity just a religious accessory, and in its place is a religion that resembles its Latin root—religare, “to re-bind”—a faith that requires a reorientation of life.

Seriousness and Humility

To be clear, seriousness doesn’t refer to a somber sensibility or dour expression that comes from a scrunched-up self-righteousness. I’m referring to gravity—a weightiness in our worship of God and the eternal stakes in what we believe.

Seriousness is the one thing that can break through the irony-laced meme culture of Gen Z. Younger people instinctively recognize when someone is showy and superficial, and they know when someone’s trying to sell them something. It’s the combination of humility and earnestness (“I take my faith, but not myself, very seriously”) that stands out.

Unfortunately, our methods and strategies are too often built around what older people think young people want (levity, for example) rather than what young people crave (an otherworldly experience of God, built on something more durable than the latest trend).

Young people want to be courted by the church, welcomed into fellowship, entrusted with responsibility, and shown they matter. But more than anything, they want to be ushered into splendor, not superficiality. They’re looking for an antidote to the shallow life of swiping and scrolling through endless entertainment.

If you belong to an aging church, the one thing you have going for you is age. Look for ways to invest in relationships so you can mentor and train the next generation, passing on your wisdom.

Moral Ballast

It’s possible the cultural winds blowing so hard against the church right now will serve to highlight the significance and sturdiness of this majestic oak tree. A tree that can sway and bend without breaking, that demonstrates remarkable flexibility in cultural expression and missionary fervor yet never snaps, never falls, never breaks, and will stand out in a world of moral decay.

What does a generation crippled by anxiety, given over to digital compulsions and performative impulses, broken by relational fallout due to the corrosive effects of diminishing moral boundaries—what does this generation need? A clear and compelling vision of morality, a serious faith that’s meaningful and rooted.

Seriously Joyful

The serious and joyful news of the gospel—that the Messiah crucified for our sins has been raised from the dead—leads to lifelong repentance and faith, a turning from sin toward God, a rigorous pursuit of righteousness as we pick up the cross in the Spirit’s power. In the church, we encounter hope and healing. Grace for the guilty. Cleansing for the ashamed. A renewed walk of faith where we stumble forward in holiness, knowing every time we fall, we fall into the arms of a Savior whose hands bear the scars of his redemptive love.

In a world marked by coddling and canceling, let’s call up the next generation. The gospel is true. God is real. The church that reaches the next generation will not be riddled with insecurity but will hold out, with confidence and humility, a serious faith.

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When Oprah Winfrey ended her long-running daytime talk show in 2011, I tuned in to the final episode, recognizing the significance of the host’s presence and influence on American life. A moment that stood out to me from the finale was the exhortation she left her viewers and fans with: that they see themselves as worthy. She repeated a phrase, mantra-like, to her audience: “You are worthy.”

This is one of our world’s favorite statements, an inspirational saying that shows up on Instagram squares, on TV and in movies, in conversations both private and public. Telling someone “You are worthy” goes hand in hand with the push for stronger self-esteem we’ve seen since the 1980s and 1990s, and it’s now part of our therapeutic culture’s focus on mental health and emotional stability. Say it enough, and perhaps those feelings of inadequacy or the lingering guilt you feel for the undeserved blessings you’ve received can go away. You are worthy.

Worthy or Worm?

The theologically minded Christian, the regular churchgoer accustomed to singing countless worship songs that declare God alone to be worthy of worship and devotion, recognizes immediately something is off base when we go around affirming each other’s “worthiness.” The whole point of grace is that God bestows unmerited favor on the unworthy, right?

The parable of the prodigal son hinges on the young man’s acknowledgment he’s “unworthy” to be called a son (Luke 15). Another parable describes the faithful as “unworthy servants” (7:7–10). The apostle Paul claimed he was “unworthy to be called an apostle” (1 Cor. 15:9). The Book of Common Prayer casts us in the role of “unworthy sinners” who approach the table of the Lord only through the cross.

Many of the most beloved hymns in Christian history emphasize the canyon between God’s grace and our sin. John Newton thought “amazing grace” a “sweet sound” because it saved him, a wretch. Isaac Watts marvels at the question “Alas, and did my Savior bleed and did my Sovereign die? Would he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?” And Charles Wesley’s great Trinitarian hymn “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” juxtaposes the singer’s admission (“So poor a worm as I”) with the glorious calling of holiness (“May to thy great glory live”).

These hymns take their inspiration from the psalmist’s despair (Ps. 22:6) and from Bildad’s speech to Job, using worms and maggots as a striking description of human mortality and finitude (Job 25).

Paradox of Human Sinfulness

In these Scriptures and songs, we find a good corrective to the temptation to overestimate ourselves. But the answer to a wrongheaded emphasis on humanity’s “worthiness” isn’t to focus solely on what has sometimes been called “worm theology.” There’s a way of going astray here on the other side, of debasing humanity to the point we lose the power in the paradox of original sin.

The Bible teaches two truths simultaneously: (1) we have tremendous worth and value because of the image of God in us, and (2) we’re lowly sinners, undeserving of salvation, in desperate need of God’s grace.

An overemphasis on human worth will make grace expected: Well, of course God sent his Son to save us. We’re so worthy, after all! Go in that direction and repentance is unnecessary. Why wouldn’t God save you? An overemphasis on human depravity will make grace powerless: I’m nothing more than a worm and will never amount to anything. Go in that direction and repentance is impossible. Why would God care?

The portrait we see in the Scriptures is more compelling. There we find both the utter sinfulness of humanity before a holy God and the truth that we’re made in his image and likeness. To be faithful to the text, we must uphold both truths: the inestimable worth and value of humans made in God’s image and the pervasiveness of human sin that renders us totally unworthy of salvation.

Both Wretched and Wonderful

The Oprah-fied version of American folk religion fails to take sin as seriously as the Bible does, leading us to imagine ourselves as something nearly divine, the center of the universe. But the more extreme reactions to that mistake among theologically minded believers fail to do justice to the implications of being made in God’s image, leading us to imagine ourselves as hopelessly debased, mere worms crawling for a time on this earth.

The scriptural picture will not allow us to occupy the deified state, where we think of ourselves (not God) as worthy, but neither will it allow us to see ourselves ever and only in a debased state, nothing more than worthless worms. No, we’re both wretched and wonderful. We’re beauty and the beast. Blaise Pascal believed our wretchedness proved our greatness: “It is the wretchedness of a great lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king.” Peter Kreeft sums it up this way: “We are metaphysically better and morally worse than we dream.”

John Stott speaks to this:

Two Wonders

What does this mean for us today?

First, we must be on guard against statements and sayings that seem to recast Oprah’s version of self-love and worthiness in Christian terms, baptizing an overly positive view of humanity that fails to reckon with our sinfulness. Such an approach gives a Christian veneer to our culture’s obsession with self-esteem.

Second, we must be on guard against an overreaction, as if the way to counter the first falsehood is to overemphasize a “worm theology,” stressing so strongly our sinfulness that we lose sight of our worth and value as people made in God’s image. Such an approach hides the beauty at work when God’s Spirit awakens in us a desire for nobility, where through repentance and faith our sinful chains fall away and we begin to live into God’s high calling for the humans he has redeemed.

As Keith and Kristyn Getty sing with Fernando Ortega:

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I usually save up my book recommendations for the end of the year so I can point to my favorites all in one place, but there’s something to be said for sharing a few recommendations from my “recently read” pile. So here’s a selection with a few different kinds of books, in case you’re interested in one of these genres.

1. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translation by Michael Katz

I’m confident this translation of Dostoevsky’s classic will make my top 10 list this year. It’s superb. It’s been at least 15 years since I last read Crime and Punishment, and it was the older Constance Garnett translation. Even then, despite the older, more stilted prose, I was left breathless several times. Katz takes the experience to another level. This is certainly one of the most disturbing books in Dostoevsky’s corpus (and, I warn you, it’s not for the faint of heart) because the reader is simultaneously drawn to Raskolnikov and horrified by his philosophy and actions.

2. THE WAGER: A TALE OF SHIPWRECK, MUTINY AND MURDER
by David Grann

With Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann burst onto the scene, joining people like Erik Larson, Hampton Sides, and Candice Millard known for their masterful abilities in recounting history as an unfolding adventure. This newer book about a shipwreck in the 1700s started a little slow but got better as the narrative progressed, to the point where I wondered if parts of the tale could be true. There are so many angles in approaching the story—from the leadership lessons and societal implications of a community stranded on an island with dwindling food supplies to the naval code of conduct and what constitutes “mutiny” or “abandonment.” There’s the added wrinkle of competing narratives that take shape back home as each survivor tells their side of the story.

3. THE UNCONTROLLABILITY OF THE WORLD
by Harmut Rosa

I mentioned this book in a recent column on how we can’t engineer an experience with God (and why that’s a good thing), but I want to recommend it again. Rosa is a German philosopher, and this work, though brief, is one of those books that helps you notice things in society you otherwise might miss. Rosa believes “the driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern’ is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable. Yet it’s only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive.”

He continues, “A world that’s fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.” But “because we, as late modern human beings, aim to make the world controllable at every level—individual, cultural, institutional, and structural—we invariably encounter the world as . . . a series of objects that we have to know, attain, conquer, master, or exploit. And precisely because of this, ‘life,’ the experience of feeling alive and of truly encountering the world—that which makes resonance possible—always seems to elude us. This in turn leads to anxiety, frustration, anger, and even despair.”

4. A DOUBTER’S GUIDE TO WORLD RELIGIONS
by John Dickson

I’ve been reading through John Dickson’s Doubter’s Guide series over the past couple months. This was my first foray, and I appreciate his approach here as almost something of a “pre-apologist” for Christianity. He does something similar with his Doubter’s Guide to the Ten Commandments. Eminently fair, curious, scholarly but easy to understand—this is Dickson at his best. Church leaders who dip into these books will find “hooks” on which to hang some of their teaching or, at least, a model of how to engage others in a conversation that prepares the way for sharing the gospel.

5. THE ARTS OF LIVING IN SEASON: A YEAR OF REFLECTIONS FOR EVERYDAY SAINTS
by Sylvie Vanhoozer

This forthcoming book from Sylvie Vanhoozer draws on lessons and experiences from her childhood in her native Provence, in southern France, and weaves together traditions and insights from her world travels. It’s an invitation to consider, with greater attentiveness, the world around us and what it means to follow Jesus. Alongside the devotional reflections are ideas and applications for how believers can lean into the rhythms of nature and the church calendar.

6. THE LORD OF PSALM 23: JESUS OUR SHEPHERD, COMPANION, AND HOST
by David Gibson

Overfamiliarity with Psalm 23 can keep us from being wowed by all the truth and beauty packed into this ancient song. David Gibson does what he does best, drawing out the implications of the Scriptures and refreshing the reader with glorious truth expressed in powerfully affecting ways. I loved this book. I lingered in the pages, sitting still before the Lord as Gibson pressed the truths of this psalm more deeply into my heart.

7. CULTURE BUILT MY BRAND: THE SECRET TO WINNING MORE CUSTOMERS THROUGH COMPANY CULTURE
by Mark Miller and Ted Vaughn

I’ve always got one or two leadership and business books in the mix when I’m reading, and this one had some good insight into what makes an organization special, with the often overlooked role of culture in determining the brand. The culture component can help break through the inertia of organizational life and deliver better results and a more loyal base of people to serve.

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An often overlooked element of Christian witness is holy stubbornness—the unbending refusal to go along with what the world says, no matter the cultural pressures or ramifications.

We don’t usually think of being obstinate as something good. A harmonious home life is impossible if there’s no “give and take,” no opportunity for conversation and compromise. The workplace suffers when coworkers come to loggerheads, unwilling to look for common ground. The pursuit of societal cohesion becomes more difficult when an individual or group won’t countenance the thought of “meeting in the middle” in building a peaceful commonwealth.

To be sure, stubbornness in these and similar situations can be a sign of pride. Obstinacy can be unwise and counterproductive, especially when the stakes are low. Rigidity isn’t necessarily righteous. Flexibility can be faithful.

But sometimes the Christian community is called to be an irritant to polite society. It’s good and right for the church to become a threat to social harmony if the intended aims of a culture are evil. (Think of the resistance of Le Chambon, the small village in France that defied the Nazis.) Obstinacy, the refusal to “go along to get along,” has long been part of a Christian’s witness.

Crime of Obstinacy

The early Christians were seen as a threat to the Roman Empire’s social order not only because of their strange beliefs and practices but also because they were guilty of the crime of contumacia, “obstinacy.” In his letter to Trajan, Pliny writes,

Christopher Hall points out how common this charge of obstinacy was in martyr narratives. “Since they remained unbending, obstinate, I have condemned them,” said one Roman magistrate.

The Roman community was perplexed by the Christian refusal to engage in certain practices. Why not sacrifice your pinch of incense on the pagan altar to the Roman emperor? Why not demonstrate your loyalty to the Roman way of doing things? Why not show tolerance and appropriate respect for your neighbors? Roman leaders at the time were puzzled, irritated, then angered by the stubbornness on display among Christians who repudiated the Roman religions, renouncing worldliness and vice.

Saintly Stubbornness

The roots of this stubbornness go back to the Old Testament, perhaps seen most clearly in the example of Daniel and his friends. Here we find servants of the king who truly seek the benefit of their rulers and the good of the empire that sought to strip them of their identity and heritage. When forbidden food is set before them, they ask politely to be exempted from the meal (and their request is granted).

But as the king arrogates more and more power, the occasions requiring defiance multiply. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego will not bow down with everyone else to the statue, even if it means facing a fiery furnace. Daniel will not stop praying to the one true God, even if it means a night in a lions’ den.

In the case of Daniel and his friends, God comes to the rescue. But in the intertestamental literature, the seven Maccabean brothers experience torture and are put to death. In the early centuries of the church, when sporadic outbreaks of persecution swept over the Roman Empire, we see similar testimonies of faith under fire. “Stand fast in the faith,” Perpetua told her brother just before entering the arena.

Even today, Christians must sometimes embrace our role as holy irritants, not because we’re jerks who hate our neighbors or despise our country but because faithfulness to Christ means we cannot “get with the program”—whatever the trajectory may be politically, socially, or morally. We aren’t cranks, digging in our heels. We’re simply standing, with a smile of faith and the dogged determination that we will not be moved.

Obstinate Witness

It doesn’t matter how kind or winsome our approach may be. There will be times when our polite refusal to go along will be seen as a threat to societal cohesion. When we refuse to name good evil and evil good, or be complicit in certain forms of injustice, or deny the nature of bodily givenness, or go along with a lie simply because it’s socially acceptable, or say the lesser of two evils is somehow good, or sacrifice key principles as we engage in public and political life, or deny the core teachings of Christianity when they’re unpopular, our quiet “no” will be scandalous.

But, some say, such stubbornness will hinder our witness. To that we reply, in certain cases, stubbornness is our witness.

There are times when all attempts at living in social harmony with the world around us will fall by the wayside. Our allegiance to King Jesus must always outstrip any earthly authority. There’s no triumphalist attitude here, no chest-thumping on social media that somehow showcases our virtue or righteousness. Obstinacy isn’t part of a pragmatic plan for changing the culture. Stubbornness isn’t practical. Sometimes it ends in ostracism, not tolerance; marginalization, not acceptance; political defeat, not victory; the loss of influence, not its gain; the Gulag, not the palace. On occasion, obstinacy ends in death, literal martyrdom.

Yes, it’ll take wisdom and prudence to know where and when holy stubbornness is required. Not every line is one that must never be crossed. Not every hill requires a martyr. But in those cases where the call of Jesus requires faithful firmness, we take our place in a long line of stubborn saints who pledge allegiance to Christ the King, no matter the cost.

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Recently, a pastor friend asked me what comes to mind when I think of God’s goodness. My first thought was God’s goodness to me personally, the countless reasons I have for gratitude, all the blessings of God that have flowed into my life.

Not even a minute passed before the words and melody of the worship song “Goodness of God” were in my heart. It’s a song I’ve come to love. A couple years ago, my brother sang that song as he walked through every room of the house he’d just moved into, a quiet expression of gratitude for God’s provision of a new home for him and his family. It’s a song I sang last year at the funeral of a children’s minister I had the honor of serving alongside for several years. “I have lived in the goodness of God.” It’s no surprise we think first of God’s blessings or that our gratitude wells up into song.

Goodness to the Undeserving

The longer I reflected, the larger the circle of God’s goodness grew. It’s good to exist. It’s good to be. Every breath we take testifies to the goodness of creation and the goodness of a Creator. And this fatherly benevolence flows to undeserving, often ungrateful creatures.

Jesus remarked on the Father’s goodness when he spoke of both righteous and unrighteous people enjoying sunshine and rain. Everyone on earth is a beneficiary of God’s goodness, whether they acknowledge him as the source of their blessings or not. God is so good that he sustains the breath of even the person who defies him. He grants life to men and women who deny his existence. He’s the fountain of all that’s good, the source of all life and love.

Compared to God’s magnificence, we’re mere ants, and yet God is good to us, small and weightless though we might be. It’s only because of his goodness that we have value and worth. We’re dust. We came from the ground and will return there. And yet, wonder of wonders, God is a dust-lover.

Goodness of Jesus

The Christian cannot long ponder God’s goodness before being drawn toward Galilee and to a hill outside Jerusalem. There we see Jesus, the eternal Word, who not only announces but embodies this goodness.

Many in our world find a measure of comfort or spiritual benefit in offering generic thanksgiving to a generic God. But it’s only when we look to Jesus that God’s goodness becomes like the sun: we can’t take in the brilliance, but it’s what gives light to everything else. The goodness we see in Jesus chases away the shadows of our sin.

When we read the Gospels, we see Jesus’s goodness on full display. There we see him tussling with the Pharisees, calling out the self-righteous, embracing those on the outside, showing compassion and love while making radical claims about his identity. Like Aslan, “he is not a tame lion, but he is good.”

The goodness of Jesus isn’t safe. He’s revolutionary in his words and deeds, a firebrand in his passion, a preacher of the kingdom coming, a prophet who warns us away from the path of destruction, a healer who restores people to wholeness, a storyteller whose tales delight and disturb, an agitator and annoyance to those most committed to the status quo, an exorcist whose presence causes demons to shriek and evil to flee, a wonder-worker whose miracles gives us a glimpse of the world the way God always intended it to be, a king whose crown is made of thorns and whose first throne is a cross.

Everywhere we turn, we’re confounded and overcome by the undeniably fierce and ferocious goodness of Jesus Christ.

His is a goodness that startles us, a perfection we long for and shrink from. The more we gaze on Jesus, the more we see where we fall short, whatever in our lives requires repentance and restoration. And yet the more we gaze on him, the more we also see what God wants to make of us, the greater our hope in God’s promise to renew us and all the world.

Goodness Stored Up

The second-century bishop Melito of Sardis sought to capture the glory and goodness of Jesus:

“How great is your goodness,” the psalmist exclaims, “which you have stored up for those who fear you!” (Ps. 31:19). God is the fountain, the storehouse, the depository of all goodness; the cross is the key that unlocks the inexhaustible, boundless riches of his grace. His goodness is pursuing us, running after us like the father hot on the tracks of the prodigal son. And so, “With every breath that I am able, I will sing of the goodness of God.”

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A couple weeks ago, I contributed an article on preaching for The Keller Center and why it’s important for pastors to “find the edge” in their sermon preparation. Finding the edge means asking these questions: How does this biblical text—its world of assumptions, attitudes, and application—cut against the grain of what passes for “common sense” in our world? Where’s the encounter or confrontation of this text with worldly ways of thinking and living? Where’s the sharp point of contradiction?

Finding the edge helps us hold the interest of our congregations instead of settling for overly long and often boring sermons.

Whenever I start talking about sermons being deeply engaging, or the need to find the edge, some will protest that this is the road to compromise because it means I must deliver a message on the terms set by my congregation’s interests. Won’t this force us into caring too much about what people want to hear instead of what they need to hear? Won’t we start basing our sermons on people’s “felt needs,” or shave off the rough edges of Scripture so we can be “seeker sensitive,” or sacrifice our convictions because we’re trying to be “attractive”?

We shouldn’t dismiss these concerns. Even in New Testament times, we see the temptation for pastors to satisfy itching ears. It’s possible to captivate the interest of your congregation in unhealthy ways, by sidelining the Scriptures in favor of the stories you want to tell, by rallying your people for the political or social cause that revs them up, or by giving good advice disconnected from the good news. If the preacher’s sermons are inclined toward winning a popularity contest, then we can expect shallow and superficial engagement with the text of Scripture.

Still, there’s no reason for solid, biblical preaching to bore people. Crafting a sermon well, with intention, and being passionate in your delivery so your tone reflects the seriousness of the substance, isn’t something new. This has been and remains a perennial concern of Christian exegetes.

Augustine on Eloquence

In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine wrote,

In his essay “The Sweetness of the Word,” John Cavadini sums up Augustine’s approach:

What’s the point of a speech if not persuasion? What’s the point of a workout if it doesn’t leave us stronger, or a meal if the plate remains half full, or a prescription if the bitter taste keeps the patient from receiving the right dosage? Augustine leans on the medicinal metaphor:

Augustine’s commendation of eloquence isn’t motivated by pride, as if our sermons would be designed for people to walk away saying, “Isn’t that preacher amazing?” It’s based in the desire for people to experience the awesomeness of God. They appreciate the message because it helped them tap into the beauty of the Christian faith, to fall more in love with the Truth.

Relentlessly Interesting

I love to preach. A few years ago, I served as the primary teaching pastor at my church. Since 2021, I’ve stepped into two interim pastorate positions and provided weekly messages, and I get the opportunity to preach in different churches or at conferences and universities around the country.

One of my main goals, no matter where I’m preaching, is to be relentlessly interesting. I want it to be hard for a listener not to pay attention, because the sermon is so interesting it continues to pull them back toward the text. The preaching is relentless in that way. I want it to be harder to tune out than to tune in.

I don’t always do well at this, which is one reason I usually don’t preach lengthy messages. I think I do OK at achieving that goal for about 25 to 30 minutes (and even then, it takes a lot of effort), but I have a harder time once I’ve surpassed the 35-minute mark. I remember my preaching professor, when asked how long a sermon should be, telling us, “There’s no set length. Preach as long as you can keep most everyone with you. Just remember: most preachers think they can keep people about 15 minutes longer than they actually can!”

One of the best things a preacher can do is request and receive critical feedback from a few trusted sources. Without this feedback, it’s hard to get better. It’s hard to know how the congregation is experiencing your messages. It’s hard to know if you’re holding the attention of your people or not.

Encounter with God

Your content and delivery matter because preaching aims to lead people to encounter God. John Stott writes of the aspiration of every preacher:

Tim Keller said something similar—a sermon should be full of insights worth writing down, but by the end, the sermon will have failed if there’s not a point at which the pen and notepad are set aside and the hearer is left in awe of God and his accomplishment of our salvation. Ray Ortlund reminds us,

An unengaging message won’t cut it, not if we want people to encounter Christ. Seeing glory is glorious. Let’s preach like it is.

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“Most of the time when I pray, I feel I’m talking to the walls. I don’t feel anything. How do I change that?”

A college student asked me this question a couple months ago. My first response: Welcome to prayer! Almost everyone who starts this journey will admit it feels like speaking into a void. And I don’t know anyone farther along in the journey who hasn’t endured seasons where they don’t “feel” much of anything at all.

Prayer can be frustrating. We’re fully aware of prayer’s importance in the Christian life, but it’s easy to be disappointed by lackluster results. Maybe you see God answering your prayers, but maybe you don’t. Maybe you feel a sense of God’s closeness at times, but maybe you don’t. Maybe your Bible reading pops with insight that leads you to respond to God with thanksgiving, but maybe it doesn’t.

World of Technique

You can find various tools and techniques that promise to make Paul’s instruction to “pray without ceasing” easier to practice (1 Thess. 5:17). I benefit from some myself: a prayer bench in a corner of my home office for three-times-a-day kneeling; a frankincense candle reminiscent of temple incense rising to God; a prayer book (I alternate between several, including my own Psalms in 30 Days, Life of Jesus in 30 Days, and Letters of Paul in 30 Days); a list of family members, coworkers, and church members with different needs.

Some Christians rely on apps with built-in reminders, on audio prayer experiences, or on prayer structures like ACTS (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication). Others prioritize prayer in community, interceding with others, reinforcing each other’s requests, passionately pouring out our hearts to God as we lean into the work of prayer.

But the feeling of God’s nearness—that palpable sense of being in the presence of God, where shivers run down your spine; that tingling sensation that rolls across your body; or a less physical but no less profound sense of deep peace that washes over you, similar to a powerful worship service where the space between heaven and earth suddenly gets thin and you taste the blessedness of sensing with spiritual sight the God you love . . . That experience cannot be engineered. It cannot be manufactured. You can’t make it take place, no matter your tools or techniques. Neither can you stop it if God wants to give it to you, and sometimes he shows up when you’re not using tools at all.

Resonance for Life

In The Uncontrollability of the World, German philosopher Hartmut Rosa claims the driving cultural force of modernity is the attempt to make the world controllable. We try to make the world knowable, reachable or accessible, and manageable, so we can then make it useful, press it into service, “make it into an instrument for our own purposes” (17).

Instrumentalizing the world doesn’t make us happy, though, because “it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world” (2). (This is a phenomenon Max Weber described as “disenchantment.”)

Soul-satisfying mystery starts with wonder awakened in the soul by something that cannot be engineered, like the first snowfall of winter, or seeing the beauty of birds in flight, or encountering another person who isn’t predictable, someone not under your control. Rosa names that feeling of awe “resonance.” Something calls out to you. Something echoes in your heart. “Resonance demands that I allow myself to be called, that I be affected, that something reach me from the outside,” he writes. It’s like falling asleep. “The harder we try to make it happen, the less we succeed” (37).

Rosa’s focus isn’t religious or spiritual experiences, although he does mention the uncontrollability of the God described in Scripture. But his point applies well to spiritual disciplines in the Christian life. We cannot make resonance happen through knowledge of theology, mastery of the Bible, or management of prayer practices. Experiencing God is unpredictable.

Prayer Isn’t Controlling God

The presence of God can feel elusive to us, even when we ask for it, because prayer isn’t magic. We aren’t conjurers. We cannot manufacture a true religious experience. Prayer is an encounter with the living God. The feeling that sometimes results from an encounter with God is uncontrollable because we’re dealing with a personal God, not a force we can harness through incantations.

If every time you prayed you felt something deeply spiritual in your soul, you’d probably pray less, not more. This is counterintuitive, I know, but think about it. If every time you summoned God he manifested his presence in the way you wanted, you’d suspect you’re not summoning God at all. The God of the Bible isn’t a magic genie. He isn’t an idol on the shelf. He isn’t controllable. It’s he who summons us. Even if it were possible to arrive somehow at the pinnacle of prayer, satisfaction would still elude us because there’d no longer be any resonance, no more possibility for growth.

In contrast, in eternity we’ll find God more and more “reachable” as we gaze at his beauty, coming to know him more yet never completely plumbing the depths of his essence. The beatific vision maintains the precise conditions for everlasting resonance. We’ll be simultaneously satiated by God and compelled to know him more—our desires both fulfilled and intensified.

That’s good news for those of us who struggle in prayer, who feel like we’re just “going through the motions,” who wonder if it’s really true we’re pressed up against the thin space between heaven and earth. Spiritual formation sometimes takes place through the powerful experience of God’s presence. But most often it comes through routine and habit, through a type of tediousness, where you may not feel the God whose name you invoke and yet you continue to kneel before him, trusting that when you raise your voice in prayer to the Father above, the Son stands beside you, interceding for you, and the Spirit prays through you.

A simple morning prayer, in your bedroom or at your desk, presses you up against the thin space of another dimension, at the veil between this world and heaven. You’re surrounded by wonders of which you’re unaware. We don’t engineer these wonders. We aren’t in control. We don’t harness the wind for our purposes. The Spirit harnesses us for his.

Maybe that’s why Jesus told us to keep asking, to keep seeking, to keep knocking. You never know which knock will open the door.

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Here’s a one-sentence overview of several streams of thought and practice that have given shape to the landscape in which we’re called to live on mission:

We live in a world influenced by (1) the Enlightenment Story that shrinks God and the transcendent to something personal and private; (2) a world where the Romantic Story of expressive individualism is just common sense; and (3) a world where the Consumer Story gives birth to practices and choices that reinforce a flattened, disenchanted view of life, turn the gospel into a commodity, and relegate the church to little more than an association based primarily on preference.

There’s a lot more that could be said about those three stories and how they shape our common life together. But I believe they represent the three most dominant cultural narratives in the West today. It’s important to identify them so we can reduce the likelihood of the church being seduced by the world and so we can better understand the outlook of our friends and neighbors who need the gospel.

Standing Out

Whenever we talk about cultural narratives and stories that grip the imagination of people in our time, it’s easy to wonder if we can get to a clear picture of faithfulness. Is it possible we’re just too infected with these worldly ways of seeing the world? Can we expect to stand out in a culture when we can’t escape cultural influences? Who are we really? What time is it? How does our when affect our who?

At times, the task of standing out seems too enormous. There’s always a temptation to try to retreat from the modern world. But this would be a kind of unfaithfulness on par with syncretism and compromise.

What we need is radical holiness. We’re to remain in the world, just as Jesus prayed—not that we’d be removed from the world but that we’d be faithful here. We’re to be a prophetic witness that resists some of the worldly currents that would sweep us away. We don’t do this out of resentment. We don’t do this out of selfishness. We do it out of love. We believe God wants to work through us to bring salvation to the world, and the best way we can stand out in the world is by conforming ourselves to Jesus Christ and inviting others to join us in following his way.

Purify Your Hearts

Once we’ve looked up to God and his Word, and once we’ve looked around at the world where we’re called to serve, we’re well equipped to look inside ourselves, to root out areas of compromise and rediscover a renewed sense of spiritual purpose.

In his sermons, Augustine urged his congregation this way: “Purify your habits again and again, with the help of God, to whom you make your confession.” In Augustine and the Cure of Souls by Paul Kolbet, we see a picture of Augustine as a pastor, a man who advised his people to engage in spiritual exercises every day, starting with seeing God’s Word as “our daily food on this earth” and always within the context of a community that gathered to worship the one true God. Augustine would speak in terms of “training ourselves” for faithfulness:

“Remind yourselves what you are,” Augustine would tell his listeners.

Four Apologetic Questions from Augustine

Josh Chatraw and Mark Allen have laid out four apologetic questions that arise from Augustine’s approach:

1. What are you ultimately seeking?

2. Who do you trust to deliver it?

3. How’s that going for you?

4. How will it make you whole?

Here’s another way of putting it, based on how Augustine often spoke in terms of medicine and cure for the soul:

1. What will make you whole?

2. What physician are you trusting?

3. What are the current results?

4. What’s the long-term prognosis?

This is just a start, not only for looking into our own hearts but for knowing how to engage others with the gospel.

Christ Over Time

As we fulfill the call to be transformed, not conformed to this world that’s passing away, we must learn to discern our times properly in order to have a missionary encounter that shines light on the gospel that proclaims Jesus Christ as the hope of the world. This missionary encounter is the proclamation of hope—true hope in a world of myths.

Abraham Kuyper famously said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” We could add to that famous phrase: “There is not a split second in the whole history of our cosmos over which Christ, who is sovereign over time, does not cry, Mine!” Christ—sovereign over every acre, sovereign over every hour—redeems the time and confronts any cultural story that would displace his cross and resurrection from the center of history.

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There’s a new documentary from Dan Partland and Rob Reiner, God & Country, that seeks to sound the alarm about Christian Nationalism as a political movement. The film has stirred controversy, not only because some high-profile evangelicals are featured in it but also because Reiner has long been a champion of left-wing causes and some of his statements reflect a distorted vision that sees Christian involvement in politics as a threat to democracy (except when the church is supporting progressive causes).

In a recent podcast for Christianity Today, Mike Cosper interviewed Partland and Reiner about the documentary, gently pushing back at times and giving voice to concerns from conservative evangelicals. There’s a lot I could say about this documentary, the interview, the role of Christians in politics, and the increasingly meaningless catchall phrase “Christian Nationalism.” But I want to highlight one aspect of the conversation because of an unchallenged assumption—one that gets to the heart of the gospel.

Christianity and the World’s Religions

The assumption I’m referring to shows up in the context of a wider conversation about politics and world religions. Reiner says the Christian Nationalist movement (as he defines it) is “completely divorced from what [he understands] Christianity to be and the teachings of Jesus.” Reiner, who grew up in a secular Jewish home, traces the outline of his spiritual journey and his epiphany related to world religions:

Reiner contrasts this focus on humanity’s “interconnectedness” with political extremism that advocates the use of force or compulsion. Partland echoes a similar view of Christianity. He hopes the documentary will inspire American citizens to “get back to those real teachings of Jesus.” If that were to happen, he says, “What a great country this will be and what a great world we’ll have!”

Real Teachings of Jesus?

Listening to this interview, it’s clear Partland and Reiner are inspired by the moral vision of Jesus in loving neighbors and enemies. They admit “the Christian message” surprised them, causing them to reflect on their own responses when facing criticism—how to turn the other cheek, how to imitate Jesus, how to love their enemies and show compassion to their critics, and so on. The interview ends with Reiner saying his hope for the documentary is that viewers take away “the real teachings of Jesus.”

It’s heartening to hear two Hollywood liberals extolling the virtues of Jesus’s call to enemy love. When even non-Christians aspire to treat others with kindness and compassion, it’s a sign of Christianity’s leavening effect on society and culture.

But it’s telling that Reiner and Partland equate these aspects of Christian morality with the central Christian message and the “real teachings of Jesus.” This is the assumption that goes unchallenged. It’s as if they appreciate some of the sun’s rays but have missed the blazing ball in the sky.

The Center Is Jesus

Here we must be clear. The Christian message isn’t “do unto others.” The Christian message is Christ. The central teaching of Jesus isn’t “love your neighbor.” The central teaching of Jesus is about Jesus. The essence of Christianity isn’t showing compassion to your critics or loving your enemies. The essence of Christianity is Jesus Christ, and the center of his message is the kingdom of God he inaugurated as the Son of God, the Messiah of Israel, and the King of the world.

Reading the Gospels reveals the reductionism in Reiner and Partland’s assumptions about Christianity’s core.

First, the Gospels counter the filmmakers’ truncated understanding of Jesus’s moral and ethical vision. For example, based on this interview and the documentary, it’s clear these men see the pro-life cause as an example of Christianity gone wrong, of Christians failing to love their neighbors well, as if the overturning of Roe v. Wade is a threat to democracy. But it’s the teaching of Jesus that inspires Christians to extend, not shrink, the circle of humanity so preborn children are included among our neighbors we’re called to love.

Reiner and Partland would also see opposition to same-sex marriage as a threat to democracy. But the unflinching moral vision of Jesus, which reserves sex for lifelong marriage between a man and a woman (and the natural family as the fundamental unit of society), inspires Christians to uphold and conserve the traditional view. The Jesus who calls us to love our enemies is the Jesus who—in the same Sermon—forbids lust, divorce, and extramarital sexual behavior.

Second, the Gospels reveal something else: the message of Jesus is surprisingly, frequently, and unapologetically about himself. His teaching about himself is what led to consternation from his opponents. His works indicated he stood in the place of God. His self-understanding and the statements he made about his identity scandalized the religious leaders of his day. Unless he was truly the Son of God, his words about himself were the egotistical ravings of a madman.

You don’t get the “real teachings of Jesus” or the “central message of Christianity” without a Jesus who says he’s the only way to God, who lays down his life as a sacrifice and rises again in power, calling everyone everywhere to repent and believe in his name.

Instrumentalizing Faith

I’m glad Reiner has devoted time and attention to the religions of the world, but it’s unfortunate to see him arrive at the patronizing conclusion that the world’s great faiths are all basically the same.

This perspective fails to properly honor distinctive religious beliefs and practices while boiling down their essence to a generic principle of neighbor-love. It not only fails to do justice to the cultural influence Jesus has had on the world but also misses why Jesus’s teaching is so scandalous. The basis for enemy-love is the cross where Jesus died for his enemies. The power for enemy love comes from faith in ultimate justice, displayed on the cross and ratified by his bodily resurrection.

In the end, these filmmakers are right to spot the danger in a political movement that harnesses and instrumentalizes the Christian faith toward some other end. Unfortunately, they can’t see they’re doing the same thing. They want to harness and instrumentalize the parts of Christianity that resonate with them as a way of bettering society according to their core, left-wing values.

But Jesus isn’t an instrument for achieving anyone’s political objectives, whether right-wing versions of nationalism or left-wing versions of pluralism. The only reason his message to love our enemies and do unto others still matters today is because he’s King, and he’s alive.

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One reason we’re to love our enemies is so we can see straight.

Animus blinds us to the truth about reality, giving us a distorted vision of the world. Nowhere is this clearer than in the grip of war, when one people’s hatred or disdain of another people leads to unconscionable attitudes and actions.

But we see this also in political battles. Partisanship can become a drug, especially when your political identity is shaped less by your party’s philosophy and more by the outright disdain and contempt you feel for the other side. Whether we call this “negative polarization” or “partisan brain,” or we see it through a theological lens like “hate” or “contempt,” we cannot miss how animus distorts our field of vision. We lose touch with reality. Consistency and coherence fall by the wayside. Out goes reasonableness. Our minds become malformed by our hatred for the other side.

Love Enemies and See Rightly

The connections between seeing straight and loving our enemies are in the Sermon on the Mount. In the Beatitudes, Jesus declares the pure in heart will see God (Matt. 5:8). He warns of the eye that objectifies another human being for selfish purposes (vv. 28–29). Later, he emphasizes the importance of a good eye, the person whose life is marked by a shining generosity (6:22–23). The Sermon overturns our expectations so we can see rightly.

The pinnacle of Christ’s counterintuitive commands comes at the end of Matthew 5: “You have heard that it was said, Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”

Jesus tells us to love our enemies so we’ll mirror the goodness and perfection of God. If our righteousness is to exceed that of the Pharisees and scribes, and if we’re to surpass the ordinary virtue of unbelievers who treat their friends well, we mustn’t settle for loving those who love us. We must pursue a life that reflects the God who loved his enemies all the way to the cross. Only from this mountaintop will the fog dissipate. Only from these heights will we see rightly. Hatred obscures our vision. Love pierces the clouds.

We Love to Hate

It’s easy to say we should love our enemies. Much harder is orienting our lives toward this goal. In a recent article in The Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs writes of the pleasures of hate that pull at Americans:

Jacobs worries we’re moving toward “an ever-blooming festival of contempt and blame” that will result in self-loathing. It won’t be enough to chide people, he says, telling them not to hate because it’s bad for their hearts or because it keeps them from seeing straight. Instead, we’ll have to concern ourselves with “the education of the passions.” The critical question for our times is this: What pleasure, what gratification, can we offer to people that exceeds the pleasure of hating?

The historic Christian response to this question is a churchy word we don’t use often: godliness. The pleasure and gratification that exceed the pleasure of hating can be found ultimately in a life of growth toward God, as we come to resemble him more and more. There’s no Christian response to hatred that doesn’t involve a call to holiness.

Hate Hurts You

One of the early church’s commentators on Matthew 5 connects love for enemies to holiness and warns of the self-damage hatred causes:

Martin Luther King Jr. drew on this tradition when laying a foundational plank in the civil rights movement. In his famous sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1957, he pointed out the way hatred distorts the hater and alters his or her vision:

King’s namesake, Martin Luther, also teased out the implications of Jesus’s command to love our enemies:

Luther went on to explain how this love must be shown in both words and actions. It’s no surprise that Jesus tells us specifically to pray for those who persecute us. This tangible response to opposition and disdain is one of the most striking ways we kill our contempt, adopting a posture or action that may or may not align with our attitude at the moment.

Enemy Love Is Divine

If we want to see straight, to make sure our vision isn’t distorted by disdain, we must ascend the mountain of enemy love. The beauty of the gospel is that this ascent is only possible because of the descent of God to us—his love for us while we were still sinners, his enemies. He has come down to us so that he can sweep us up into his divine love.

John Chrysostom pointed to Jesus as the key to enemy love. We’ve seen God become man, Chrysostom preached, descending so far and suffering so much for our sake. How could we not forgive others when they injure us? The Jesus who intercedes for us is the same Jesus who cried out “Father, forgive them!” from the cross.

Chrysostom’s sermon ends with a vision of the believer right now on earth, filled with enemy love, enjoying a taste of heaven, “walking as angels among men,” “abiding apart from all lust, from all turmoil” because enemy love has transformed us into the likeness of the God whose love is eternal. Surely that’s a greater pleasure than hatred and contempt. Surely that will enable us to see better, to get beyond the slogans and slurs of disdain so we can see the neighbor we’re called to love.

If you want to see straight, love your enemies.

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I love Tim Keller’s definition of revival: “The intensification of the ordinary operation of the work of the Holy Spirit, occurring mainly through the ordinary ‘instituted means of grace’—preaching, pastoring, worship, prayer.” It’s broad enough to not overly specify the forms a revival might take while narrow enough to give you a sense of God at work, helping you identify the signs of revival when you see them.

Today, I wonder if we’re seeing the beginning of a revival among Gen Z, particularly those in college. As I survey the landscape, I see signs of hope and renewal that strike me as unexpected and remarkable.

Generational Awakening?

Late last year, Kyle Richter and Patrick Miller reported on the renewed interest and enthusiasm of the college students in their area and pointed to similar outbreaks of spiritual fire elsewhere. They believe this generation may be primed for spiritual renewal.

As I meet with pastors and church leaders or visit churches and universities, I see signs of this spiritual hunger. The Asbury Awakening in 2023 was a big news story—an ordinary chapel turning into an ongoing service of praise and worship, confession of sin, and celebration of salvation, which garnered attention from all over the country and sparked similar stirrings of spiritual intensity in other colleges and universities.

I pondered the question Asbury presses upon us, and I noted Asbury Theological Seminary president Timothy Tennent’s wise hesitation to call the awakening a “revival.” “Only if we see lasting transformation,” he wrote, “which shakes the comfortable foundations of the church and truly brings us all to a new and deeper place can we look back, in hindsight and say ‘yes, this has been a revival.’”

In the last two months, I’ve spoken at two churches associated with The Salt Company—City Church in Tallahassee, Florida, and Cornerstone Church in Ames, Iowa. Both churches are teeming with students—passionate, spiritually hungry, mission-minded. “On fire for Jesus,” as we used to say. Cornerstone Church has experienced tragedy in recent years. In 2022, two young women were shot and killed before the start of a Thursday night service. The church has come through a season of grief, but God has been at work in it all, bringing about evangelistic fruitfulness.

Signs of God at Work

During my visit to Cornerstone, I asked pastor Mark Vance, who’s in contact with a wide range of leaders in churches and ministries across the country, what he’s seeing. What are the signs that God is up to something?

1. Conviction of Sin

Vance notes intensified conviction of sin among believers. Repentance is normal. Consistent. There’s deep remorse and a heartfelt desire to turn from sin.

Some of the repentance stories are remarkable, including a girl who was living with a boyfriend and came under conviction during a message on holiness—and decided to move out that very night. The church scrambled to facilitate lodging for her so she could follow Jesus in this area. Vance can recount many stories. Conviction of sin, assurance of salvation—these are the signs that sleep-walking Christians are waking up.

2. Heightened Desire for Spiritual Disciplines

Another rumbling of revival among young people is the yearning for spiritual discipline, for an encounter with God through ordinary means, such as deeper study of God’s Word, and a yearning to pray well and often.

Old traditions are back. Fasting during Lent. Rituals deeply rooted in church history. Kneeling prayer. Prayer at fixed hours of the day.

“Believing prayer,” Vance says. He tells me of a young man who—inspired by godly older women in the congregation who’d been coming alongside students in faithful prayer—started a voluntary “boiler room” ministry. He took the name from members of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in the days of Charles Spurgeon who met in the boiler room every week to cover the service in prayer.

Vance believes the embrace of spiritual disciplines is motivated, in part, by the chaos of the world, a false understanding of freedom that thinks restrictions are inhibitive. Christianity offers a fuller vision of freedom that sees patterns and rhythms as the necessary conditions for flourishing and growth. The spiritual disciplines provide a rule of life, one way of experiencing a gospel-centered source of stability.

3. Missionary Fervor and Purpose

Young people are experiencing an increased intensity of passion to live on mission for Christ.

When I’m visiting Cedarville University or a Salt Company church, or watching the spread of Send Network churches, I see college students engaged, often renouncing physical comfort or better career prospects if it means joining in the work of kingdom expansion through church planting. I couldn’t count all the stories of students moving across the country, making life decisions based not on financial considerations but on the bigger mission of building up the church and extending the kingdom.

There’s sacrificial movement taking place, a real sense that life is more than money, more than influence, more than endless scrolling, more than political battles—there’s something bigger afoot, and it’s the advance of the gospel amid cultural opposition.

4. Ground Zero for Apologetics

Speaking of opposition, apologetics is still a key focus for students—but, Vance tells me, the focus has shifted away from the traditional questions of proving the existence of God or explaining the evil and suffering in the world. Almost everything now centers on the question of identity: What does it mean to be a human person? What’s the significance of being made in God’s image? What behavior is appropriate for us as sexed beings? Are our bodies sacred? What do they signify? What do they tell us about ourselves, about creation, about God? How do we relate to one another as male and female?

Naturally, the hot-button issues of sexual attraction, sexual identity, and transgender theories all show up here. The old way of thinking about apologetics or seeker ministries was to avoid the hot topics. But Vance can testify that young people aren’t put off by these conversations. On the contrary, they lean into them because they’re hot.

The cultural craziness of the moment is an opening. Students first encounter the ministry, saying, “I know what they’re telling me at school about gender is wrong.” They see close up the wreckage of the sexual revolution. They’re hungry for someone to speak sanity into their lives—to testify to reality. To dispense with the fads and fashions that stir up more confusion and to deliver good news that accords with nature, God’s good design in creating us as creatures.

5. Increase in Conversions

Vance mentioning conversions is no surprise. In a season of revival, Tim Keller wrote last year, churches grow. “Many in the community come to faith in Christ, partly because when sleepy Christians wake up and nominal Christians get converted, it beautifies the church. The church becomes an attractive place. It becomes a powerful place.”

At Cornerstone, the number of adult converts being baptized, which for years has been significant, has doubled in the past year. Vance receives similar reports from other churches associated closely with college ministries across the country.

The conversion stories fall into two categories. For many churches, the students have grown up around the gospel and have some kind of church experience, and yet suddenly they come alive as if the Spirit just electrified their hearts. For others, the background stories are crazy, including dramatic circumstances, total turnarounds, and people far from God who are suddenly on the church’s doorstep primed and ready for salvation.

6. Beautified Church

In the end, the most powerful apologetic for Christianity—whether it’s the nominal Christian who needs to encounter grace afresh or the person far from God who’s entering a church for the first time—is the presence of God’s people. And not just young people. Vance notes the spiritual fervor among college students and teenagers, but he sees the fire spreading through the prayers of older believers who love to cheer on God’s work.

The display of grace-filled gospel Christianity is irresistible for many. To see the joy of intact families, of young people striving for holiness—this is desirable because it’s profoundly beautiful.

The moral witness of the Christian faith shows why it’s better to desire the commitment and stability of marriage than to settle for casual hookups or the loneliness of pornography. It’s better to desire to invest your life in kids born from the fruit of your love than to seek ever more comfort and material wealth in the name of independence. It’s better to live sold out for Jesus as a single man or woman, in community with God’s people, than to experience the grim life of self-reliance and self-independence that, in the end, implies being alone.

I don’t want to name something a revival too soon. There are good reasons, prudential and wise, to refrain from naming what God may be up to. But I do wonder if we’re seeing the rumblings of a revival among Gen Z, if this is the start of something that will bear fruit for generations to come. Lord, may it be so.

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Pew Research Forum, one of the best and most consistent centers for research into religious belief and observance in the United States, recently released a report on religious “Nones”—the category of “religiously unaffiliated” that includes atheists, agnostics, and a sizable majority who describe their religion as “nothing in particular.”

Right now, 28 percent of American adults are classified as religiously unaffiliated. We’ve seen this percentage increase over the years as the process of secularization continues to move forward in the United States. The trend is most evident among younger people—69 percent of the Nones are younger than 50, in contrast to U.S. adults in this age group who identify with a religion (45 percent).

The overall findings of the Pew study are what we might expect, but taking a closer look at religiously unaffiliated Americans brings a few surprises, upending presuppositions and assumptions of what our friends and neighbors think and how they live.

Ambivalent, Not Antagonistic

It’s clear from the surveys that most Nones in America aren’t hostile toward religion. Yes, you find occasional opposition, especially among those who identify as atheistic. For the most part, though, the Nones are marked by ambivalence, not antagonism, toward religious people and organizations. Some point to religion as the cause of certain problems in society, such as intolerance or superstition. But many say religion helps give people meaning and purpose and that it can encourage people to treat each other well.

Takeaway: Don’t assume your religiously unaffiliated neighbors are actively opposed to your beliefs or your church. They’re much more likely to be ambivalent than antagonistic—to look at you with a mix of curiosity and respect than with disdain or hatred.

Scientific but Spiritual

The Nones place a high value on science, but most believe in God or a higher power (70 percent) or in spiritual forces beyond the natural world (63 percent). Only 17 percent identify as atheists. Half of those whose religion is “nothing in particular” maintain a belief in heaven, and 41 percent believe in hell. Nearly a quarter of all Nones believe in God, the human soul, the supernatural, and heaven and hell.

Yes, the Nones see themselves as more scientifically minded than their religious friends and neighbors, but they don’t necessarily believe science can explain everything about our world. About half say spirituality is very important to their lives. Most believe spirits and spiritual energies exist in the world, in nature, in animals, in the connections between humans, and so on. More than half engage in some type of spiritual practice (centering themselves, spending time in nature, meditating, exercising, or practicing yoga) as a means of connecting with something bigger than themselves.

Takeaway: I’m reminded of N. T. Wright’s illustration of secularism as a sidewalk with more and more cracks, through which patches of spirituality are irrepressibly pushing their way like the grass. We should welcome the spiritual interest of the Nones as a starting point for spiritual conversations.

No Religious Observance, but No Civic Involvement Either

Pew’s research shows most of the religiously unaffiliated Nones (excluding those who identify as atheist or agnostic) tend to be civically unengaged. This is an important point to consider as we see the decline of institutions, associations, and community involvement across the country.

The “nothing in particular” Nones are less likely to vote, less likely to volunteer their time, less likely to express satisfaction with their local communities, and less likely to say their social lives are going well. Seen in this light, the lack of religious observance coincides with a general disengagement from civic life altogether.

Takeaway: Many of the religiously unaffiliated likely feel they’re on their own. We can look for ways to tap into or give voice to the longing in the human heart for strong relationships, good institutions, and healthy communities.

Skeptical of Religious Teachings and Institutions

The main reason the Nones aren’t religious is that they question the teachings of organized faith. Sixty percent say their doubts about religious teachings are the primary reason for their unbelief. They’re religiously unaffiliated due to a mix of skepticism, unbelief, and, for a substantial minority, a dislike of religious organizations. Only 30 percent cite bad experiences with religious people, but 55 percent mention religious organizations or religious people as a reason they stay away.

Interestingly, about 4 in 10 Nones say they don’t feel a need for religion, and 12 percent say they don’t have time for religious observance.

Takeaway: Our witness matters. Are we the best neighbors? Are our churches contributing visibly to the common good? And if many friends and neighbors see no need for religion yet still maintain belief in God and some kind of spiritual practice, how can we get better at answering questions when doubts arise and demonstrating the link between a person’s longing for connection with God (expressed through a generic spirituality) and the Christian faith in all its fullness?

Much more could be unpacked from this Pew Research study on the Nones. But it gives us a glimpse of a significant and growing segment of our mission field in North America.

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Last year, the rapper NF (Nathan Feuerstein) released a song that expresses something profound about our cultural moment.

“Happy” describes a life marked by mental health struggles, stresses and obsessions, sins and selfish patterns. NF describes his desire for God and a longing for happiness, while giving voice to his fear that finding happiness would mean losing himself. Who would he be without his pain? The refrain of “Happy” is an admission:

In the second verse, NF acknowledges his bouts of depression (“baggage,” “demons,” “traumas”) and interpersonal conflict (“hurtful words,” “bridges burned,” “insecurities”)—challenges that have marked his life so long he can’t imagine himself apart from these problems. He admits he’s “a lonely soul” in need of “a hand to hold,” but he hesitates to ask for healing because, if the pain were gone and his issues resolved, who would he be?

Generational Identity Crisis

“The truth is, I need help, but I just can’t imagine who I’d be if I was happy.” That’s a line as powerful as it is profound, especially in this cultural moment.

We live in a time of self-creation. The traditional markers of identity that once came from outside ourselves—from our family or friends or community or past—are viewed as subpar, even repressive. We’re supposed to chart our own course, to look deep inside to discover our desires and define ourselves as we determine.

This way of life sounds exhilarating at first, but the result is fragility. What happens when we adopt the therapeutic assumptions of our age, when we look into our hearts and find only failures and frailty? Many of us begin to define ourselves by our maladies, to base our identities in suffering.

There’s truth here, of course. All of us are marked by suffering and struggle. We cannot deny we’re influenced by life’s circumstances and shaped by personal sorrow. We’re human beings, not robots. We’re not invulnerable to the vicissitudes of life.

But NF’s confession captures the tendency of young people to self-diagnose, to base their identities in their issues, whatever they may be. Once you make this turn, you feel a visceral reaction to the hope of healing. You’re both attracted and repelled by the thought. You can get to a point where you so strongly identify with your pain and struggle that the prospect of healing feels like a threat to your identity. Overcoming the suffering would mean losing yourself.

There’s a tinge of this sadness in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work. We encounter the laudable desire to see the eradication of anti-black racism coming into conflict with the chilling thought that if all traces of racial injustice were to disappear, something integral to the black experience—endurance through suffering—would be lost. A key component of black identity would vanish. Give me justice, Lord, just not yet!

Would Happiness Erase Me?

Sociologists and commentators have recognized this conundrum more broadly. Many young people are increasingly drawn to establishing and expressing their identities through their psychological maladies.

The problem, of course, is that the more we identify ourselves by our pain, our past, or our present struggles—putting these at the center of who we are, rather than as one of many contributing factors to our personalities—the more we risk missing the path to happiness. Or worse, we resist the road to happiness out of fear that “being happy” would mean no longer “being me.”

These are the questions that arise: If my attempts to address my anxiety reduce my drive and ambition, then what does that mean for who I am? Am I the same person if, through counseling, I become emotionally healthy? Am I only a product of the pain in my past? Am I forever marked by the sin or evil that has been done to me? If I were to be healed, would I still be me? If I were to forgive, would I lose myself? Who am I, if not a tortured soul? Would happiness erase me?

Do You Want to Be Healed?

NF’s song reminds me of Jesus’s encounter with the paralyzed man on the steps near the pool of Bethesda (John 5). Here was a man defined by paralysis and the dashing of dreams. Every time the waters were stirred, he watched, helplessly, as others made their way to the source of healing. Jesus asked him point blank: “Do you want to be healed?” The man doesn’t say yes or no. He sinks back into the sad situation that defines him.

Several of the characters in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce face this quandary. There’s the woman so wrapped up in her desire to control others that she cannot imagine eternal happiness that excludes her machinations. There’s the man so defeated by his lusts that he can’t countenance the idea of the lizard on his shoulder being put to death, out of fear he’d die with it. There’s the lady so given to grumbling that she fades into oblivion until she’s nothing more than a grumble herself.

NF’s song speaks to the tension felt by many in our generation—the “be true to yourself” mentality steeped in therapeutic assumptions. Perhaps we, as God’s people, should back up one step from assuming everyone wants happiness. We should instead look beyond the crippling self-consciousness that keeps a person enchained and ask the question Jesus asks: “Do you want to be healed?”

The call to faith is to invite people into the healing waters where a new self awaits.

There’s no way around it: Loss is inevitable. To find yourself, you must lose yourself. To live, you must die.

As the people of God, we can sympathize with the frightful feeling that comes with taking this step of faith, but we can’t eliminate the adventure. What we can do is beckon people from the other side, urging them to cross the line and receive a new identity. We can model the joy that comes after we renounce the breadcrumbs of an identity based primarily in sorrow and rejoice at the feast God spreads on the table of redemption.

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The life of discipleship begins not with doing but with being. We are to be with Jesus.

I love the description we find in the Gospel of Mark. When Jesus chose the disciples, it wasn’t first to preach the gospel and cast out demons but simply to “be with him” (Mark 3:14). Proximity comes before power.

We see the same truth in the Gospel of John, when the disciples follow and “stay with” Jesus (John 1:35–39). That language of staying, of remaining, of being with Jesus soars to new heights when Jesus tells the disciples, “Abide in me” and “Abide in my love” (15:4, 10).

Being with Jesus Means Being with Others

One way to interpret this idea of “being with Jesus” sounds lofty and mystical, as if the point is to sit quietly in God’s presence, soaking in the stillness. Or as if spending time with Jesus means reading the Bible and praying, primarily as individuals. Not for a moment would I want to minimize these practices. They’re integral to the life of discipleship, of living into the reality that our identity is determined by our relationship to Christ.

But this is only one side of what it means. To be with Jesus isn’t a solitary life of devotion to the Lord. To be with Jesus will require us to keep company with the people Jesus keeps company with.

Remember, Jesus called the disciples not just as individuals but into a new family. He put Simon the Zealot in the same group as Matthew the tax collector. He dined in the home of Simon the Pharisee but also took heat for sharing a table with sinners. Jesus’s ministry was marked by being around people who were sick, or diseased, or excluded. He spent time with the religiously scrupulous and the sexually immoral. Abiding in Jesus means we’ll keep company with a motley assortment of people, with prodigals and elder brothers alike.

When Mary of Bethany poured out expensive oil on his feet, Jesus defended her extravagant display when his disciples complained that the funds could have been put to better use in social ministry. “You always have the poor with you,” he told them (Matt. 26:11). Some have used that phrase to minimize ministry to those less fortunate, when instead, Jesus’s comment presupposes proximity to those in need. The poor will be with you. The disciples had walked with Jesus for three years, so raising this question indicated how clearly their hearts were shaped toward mercy ministries.

Gospel Awkward

A church planting pastor in Maryland, Richard Pope calls this kind of environment “gospel awkward.” Pope’s story is inspiring—a harrowing past, a beautiful story of redemption and calling, and now a terminal cancer diagnosis—and has been told in both written form and in a multiepisode podcast.

One of the marks of Pope’s ministry is how beautifully messy it is. Sarah Zylstra describes his church:

I love that phrase. I yearn for more churches that know the beautifully awkward tension of being both a hospital for sinners and a school for saints. What we find in the words of Jesus and the apostles is a rigorous commitment to the otherworldly ethic of the kingdom combined with a wide-open door that welcomes in all who fall short of the standard. The school of sanctification is now in session . . . and the field hospital is receiving the wounded. “Gospel awkward” is one of the best phrases I’ve seen that captures the beauty of that combination.

Beauty in the Mess

Not long ago, I was speaking at a vibrant and growing church, filled with people from across generations, all at various places in the journey of discipleship. I met one of the older men who was new to the congregation, and the pastor told me later, “He’s a mess.” He said it without even a tinge of moral superiority or judgment. He wasn’t saying, He’s a mess and so he doesn’t belong here, but the opposite: He’s wrecked his life, he’s found Jesus, and he’s making progress, so this is exactly where he belongs.

I loved the mix of pastoral patience—a heart of unconditional acceptance no matter the present state combined with an aspirational vision for who the man could become.

We need more churches like this. We need more conversations that are awkward because God has brought together into one family people from different backgrounds, with different struggles, from different economic situations, and with different expectations. Those further along in the journey of sanctification need this gospel awkwardness just as much as people new to the faith.

Supernatural Community

We usually try to minimize discomfort, disagreement, debate, and personal tension. We hate feeling awkward. That’s natural. That’s why gospel awkwardness is so necessary: it’s supernatural.

When the world sees unity persisting through the awkwardness of it all, open acknowledgment of our messiness on the road to holiness, a dogged determination to live with and love people and make decisions with people unlike us in so many ways . . . that’s what testifies to the power of the gospel.

“Gospel awkward” should be the norm, not the exception.

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There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the causes and the effects of dechurching in the United States over the past 25 years, prompted by an informative book by Michael Graham and Jim Davis, The Great Dechurching, which contains research on why people have left the church and includes suggestions for how to woo them back. I interviewed Graham, Davis, and Ryan Burge for an episode of my podcast Reconstructing Faith on the dechurching phenomenon because this is a hot topic among the pastors and church leaders I meet across the country.

In all the talk about dechurching, there’s a related question that deserves more attention: Why does anyone go to church? Often, we’re so interested in figuring out why people don’t attend that we forget to probe the reasons they do. What’s in it for them?

Why Do You Go to Church?

Just as there isn’t a simple answer to why people leave the church (as The Great Dechurching demonstrates), neither is there a one-size-fits-all answer to why people attend. If you were to survey your congregation or engage in deeper conversation with your fellow church members, I bet you’d be surprised at the variety of reasons given.

It’s easy for church leaders to think everyone on a Sunday morning is there for lofty, theologically robust reasons. They want to hear a Word from the Lord. They know they’ll encounter God through our stimulating worship experience. They’re here to bring glory to God by obeying his instruction to gather for worship. In reality, the reasons people go to church are often more down-to-earth.

The Regulars

One reason people attend church is out of sheer force of habit. In an article for The Lamp, Matthew Walther argues that “the most common reason” Catholics go to Mass “is that it is simply what one does, like voting in presidential elections or serving turkey on Thanksgiving.” You go to church just like you go to the grocery store, or to the mall, or to your local high school’s football games. We go to church because, well, that’s what we do, and that’s what we’ve always done.

There are still pockets in the U.S. where church membership is assumed, where asking someone in the neighborhood, “Where do you go to church?” isn’t unusual or off-putting. The Regulars see churchgoing as a habit, an important routine for social cohesion and family stability. If the trends are correct, the Regulars are getting older. Fewer young people fit this category. These are the parents and grandparents who show up on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day with children and grandchildren in tow, hoping the routine will rub off on their heirs.

The Responsibles

A second reason people go to church is because they’re involved in some way. I call these the “Responsibles.” They’re ushers or deacons, or they teach Sunday school, or they keep the nursery, or they sing in the choir, or they volunteer for parking duty, or they belong to a small group where their absence would be noticed. Why do they go to church? Because they’ve got a responsibility to fulfill.

In an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, Ray is shamed by his parents and family for not attending Mass. Eventually, he reconsiders his reluctance toward churchgoing and decides to follow in his father’s footsteps and start attending again, only to discover his dad really goes to church every Sunday because he collects the offering and enjoys time with his church buddies when they do the counting.

The Respectables

A third reason people go to church is for the social benefits that accrue to family life. I call these “The Respectables,” because they believe the church is there to help them and their children develop and maintain a moral instinct. Church is a place of moral respectability, a connection to like-minded people who share the same values.

Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk’s Handing Down the Faith features extensive research into families where the parents have successfully transmitted the faith to their children. In their interviews, again and again, words like “grounding” and “base” and “foundation” came up. The Respectables believe churchgoing is what gives their kids a moral grounding that will set them up for a good life. It offers something that helps them be good, moral, decent people. (This is why parents will frequently send their teenage children to youth group meetings and church camps when they rarely attend themselves. They think they’ve already undergone the moral formation the church is there to deliver.)

The Reachers

A fourth reason some people go to church is that they’re searching for truth. Every week in churches across America, you’ll find people who are spiritually seeking but not yet committed to the faith. They’re reaching for something beyond themselves. They’re interested in the Christian faith and its teachings. Most of them visit when invited by someone in the other categories, but some will wander into a church on their own or take the step of attending after doing some research online.

The Reachers are the smallest category here, simply because churchgoing is often a later step in their spiritual journeys, not one of the first. But we’d be remiss to overlook them.

The Resolute

Last but not least, you have those whose faith is marked by firmness and determination. These are the churchgoers whose lives most obviously bear the fruit of regeneration, whose hearts are alive in an evident way to the work of the Spirit through his people.

In stressing the passion and commitment of the Resolute, I don’t mean to imply the people in the first three categories are all unbelievers. The human heart is complicated, and it’s safe to say no one attends church solely for biblical reasons. But the Resolute are the most devout in terms of seeing churchgoing through a biblical lens.

The Resolute gather with believers because they love Jesus and his people, because the New Testament commands it, because they long to hear God’s Word preached, because they yearn to meet Christ at the Table, because they need the God-centered reorientation that worship can provide, because they cannot conceive (rightly) of a life of following Jesus that doesn’t include his Bride, because they know the family of God is essential, not optional, for spiritual formation.

Too many pastors and church leaders think the majority of people attend for the reasons most closely associated with this devout group. It’s more likely a congregation includes people from all five categories, at varying levels of spiritual maturity. People may also belong to multiple categories: the Regulars who are also Responsibles, and so on.

Future of Churchgoing

What does this mean for the future of churchgoing?

We’ll likely continue to see a decrease in the Regulars category, simply because a generational shift is taking place and fewer “churched” people go every week as they’ve always done.

Among the Responsibles, we can expect continued decline, simply because as dechurching continues and as our society grows more isolated, there are fewer needs to address, fewer services and activities taking place, and, therefore, fewer places to plug in and fulfill an obligation.

Among the Respectables, a good chunk will leave the church if the social price is too steep, when holding to Christianity’s moral vision puts them out of step with mainstream society. But there’s a sizable number here who, in response to the craziness of contemporary culture, may dig deeper roots into their faith and see the church as a source of moral sanity, and therefore draw closer. The sexual revolution will have its casualties in need of healing.

Among the Reachers, we could see an increase in the spiritually curious attending church, but this depends on the warm and hospitable spirit of believers and the intentional ways churches and leaders acknowledge the Reachers’ presence and provide wisdom and guidance.

The Resolute will remain, and if cultural shifts continue, this group may become the majority at some point. The question is, Will they be successful in reproducing themselves in the next generation? Will the Resolute find and invite more of the Reachers who are open to considering Christianity?

Good News for Church Leaders

All this is preliminary thinking as we consider why people attend church. I welcome others to build on or critique these categories.

For now, a word for pastors and church leaders. If you’re disappointed to discover that the reasons some people attend your church line up more closely with the first three categories, don’t miss the silver lining. They’re in your church. That’s a start! Meet people where they are and then shepherd them toward the Resolute category.

To do this, we must trust the work of the Spirit through the power of the gospel. Through the gospel, the Spirit convicts and compels nominal Christians and brings about genuine conversion. Through the gospel, the Spirit makes obedience not just a duty but a joy. Through the gospel, the Spirit frees our hearts for service, not from a place of self-importance but from neighbor love. Through the gospel, the Spirit enables us to stand without fear when the world jeers at our beliefs. Through the gospel, the Spirit matures and sanctifies us so our reasons for gathering with God’s people increasingly align with his.

The more our communities give off the fragrance of Jesus, the more it’ll make sense for someone to say, “I want to go to church.”

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Conflict between brothers and sisters in Christ can be wearying, especially when groups and organizations with significant commonalities are at odds, led by men and women marked by faithful service and gospel influence. It’s discouraging to see friendships fracture and movements splinter.

We’ve seen a fair share of conflict in the past decade, and what I’ve seen up close always leaves me with a sense of sadness and resignation when people I admire for different reasons can no longer find any reason to admire each other. Even the best leaders with the deepest desires for unity will run into areas of disagreement. Sometimes, they’ll part ways. If the apostle Paul’s feud with Barnabas was so strong it led to separation, why are we surprised when similar conflicts arise among us today?

What gives me hope is the sovereignty of God. The Lord can and does work in and through human conflict, repurposing even our flaws and failures for his greater plan. Acknowledging God’s sovereignty doesn’t excuse sin or minimize selfishness, of course. But it does give us confidence our hardheadedness won’t thwart God’s mission. We may botch a lot of things in life, but God’s ultimate plan isn’t one of them.

Conflict and Collaboration in the Lausanne Movement

I recently read “Conflict and Collaboration,” a thesis from Doug Birdsall, who served as the executive chairman of the Lausanne Movement and provided leadership for the 2010 Congress in Cape Town, where more than 4,000 evangelicals gathered from around the world. (An abridged version of Birdsall’s thesis was published in 2019.) It’s easy to look back at the years leading up to and following the first Lausanne Congress in 1974 with admiration and awe—the leadership of Billy Graham and John Stott, the beauty and power of the Lausanne Covenant, the convening of such a large group of global leaders.

Birdsall reminds us that the extraordinary success of Lausanne didn’t happen without conflict, some of it significant. When you try to harness the energy from so many big personalities and overlapping organizations, you’re going to face challenges.

• Some of the leaders from the World Evangelical Fellowship worried that establishing a Lausanne Committee after the Congress would create a sister organization and lead to competition for resources. (Relationships were bruised because Billy Graham had initially assured them there wouldn’t be a new organization.)
• Some of the leaders pressing for a holistic understanding of the church’s mission believed Lausanne didn’t go far enough. Heated conflict with Peter Wagner, an advocate of a singular focus on evangelism and church growth, led to a splinter group called the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians.
• In the late 1980s, a mix of cultural misunderstanding, theological differences, and personality conflict led to the birth of the AD 2000 Movement, as a result of a falling out between Thomas Wang Yongxin (a passionate Chinese theologian) and other Lausanne leaders.

Reading Birdsall’s work, I was reminded of what was so good about these people and their organizations, while marveling at how their legacy was forged through fragmentation and conflict. They all affirmed the Lausanne Covenant’s emphasis on cooperation in the evangelistic task because “our oneness strengthens our witness” and “our disunity undermines our gospel of reconciliation.” And yet despite their confession of “sinful individualism and needless duplication” and their pledge “to seek a deeper unity in truth, worship, holiness and mission,” their efforts ran aground due to rocky relationships.

The conflicts were, at times, theological and organizational, but in the end, the intractable problems were primarily personal. The breaking of trust made honest communication a challenge. No matter how much of the division could be traced to theological or ideological differences, the parting of ways was always personal.

Conflict Is Inevitable

The peacemaking idealists among us tend to think conflict can be eliminated, or at least avoided most of the time. Familiarity with church history should disabuse us of this notion. Even Birdsall the optimist concludes, “Within the limitations and finitude of our human condition, miscommunication and misunderstanding are bound to occur, and to occur frequently. With this comes tension and conflict.”

The same is true today. Leaders with big personalities will often fail to see eye to eye. There will be debates over emphasis, prudential concern, the outworking of theological principles, and the investment of resources. Even in the healthiest relationships and strongest organizational partnerships, we can expect a good deal of disagreement and debate.

How to Navigate Conflict as Christians

Birdsall concludes his study with four suggestions that can minimize the negative effects of conflict among men and women devoted to Christ and his church. I sum them up below.

1. Be precise and discerning in how you define the nature of the problem. Birdsall counsels us to identify the true source of the conflict. Is it primarily theological in nature, relational in essence, or a matter of organizational and cultural difference? We won’t be able to work toward solutions until we recognize the true source of the conflict. Precision here is key.

2. Suspend judgment until you agree on a clear baseline of facts. Conflicts spiral out of control when leaders and their teams jump to conclusions and allow a narrative to form that may not be accurate. Too often, people in conflict don’t agree on the precipitating event, the nature of the conflict, or why trust has been broken. Without agreement on the basic facts, relationships will deteriorate because everyone interprets whatever happens next as more evidence for their reading of the situation.

3. Articulate the theological convictions under the surface. Evangelical leaders should be clear not only about their theological convictions but also about the Christian qualities that must be on display in conflicts. We should be characterized by our integrity, humility, hopefulness, faith, and love. What does it profit us to be correct on the truth of a theological point if we misrepresent and distort another’s position to maintain power or gain an advantage?

4. Engage advisors and mediators who can bring perspective and counsel. When conflict takes place, and it will, we should engage wise and fair-minded people—men and women in whose lives the fruit of the Spirit is on display. John Stott was one of the bridge builders during his time (although not averse to or absent from conflict himself). Respected leaders can provide perspective and then help usher in reconciliation after the conflict dissipates.

No era of church history is free from conflict. Every movement of God is marked in some way by division and debate. Perhaps the reason the New Testament letters emphasize unity and reconciliation so often is precisely because the apostles presuppose the inevitability of conflict.

When you experience conflict in your circles or your church, when you see disputes arising and relationships breaking, ask God how you might be of use in mitigating the effects of the division. Ask him to use your grief to galvanize your heart and mind, until you discover old paths of reconciliation and new paths of cooperation, ever trusting in God’s promise to turn even our strife toward his saving purposes in the world.

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Residents of middle Tennessee received an unexpected blessing in January. It started snowing one Sunday evening and didn’t let up for 24 hours, then a polar plunge in temperature ensured a snow-covered landscape for more than a week—much longer than the typical Tennessee dusting. This snow was significant. We measured eight inches in our backyard.

The world was transformed. On the rare occasion our neighborhood turns into a wonderland, I like to raise the shades throughout the house so that every time I glance outside, I see the beauty. The frigid temperatures don’t stop me from bundling up and walking the streets, admiring the snow-covered branches and bushes, smiling at the makeshift snowmen waving from front yards, hearing kids yelping and playing amid the sounds of sleds and snow-crunch. My youngest son and I trudged our way up to the small hills within walking distance and then to a large hill off the interstate ramp close to our home. It was magnificent.

Ten days later, I was overcome with a sense of sadness while I drove through the neighborhood. The normal gray, rainy days of a Tennessee winter had returned, washing away the charm, leaving the yards a dirty brown, the grass moist and the bushes saggy. The sense of loss was palpable after rain extinguished the delight, and bleak skies cast a pall over the landscape.

In Andrew Peterson’s “You Came So Close,” there’s a line that’s always resonated with me:

That’s almost always true. But this year we did get snow. And somehow, the grayness was worse once the snow went away.

I can handle a couple months of cold and dreary winter when snow is a far-off hope that never materializes. But it’s harder to endure the drabness of a Tennessee winter after the magic has vanished, to feel the sense of loss when you look at the empty yards that days before were playgrounds for chirping children, to see the snowy hill once the center of excitement and laughter for dozens of dads and sons now reclaimed by barren winter sadness, to see the trees returned to their lifeless state as if the rainy mist signals their weeping at the snowmelt.

Sometimes it’s the loss after happiness that hurts the most. Remembered joy intensifies present sadness.

The northeast United States was once called the “burned-over district” because after the fires of revival spread through the Great Awakenings, these places turned into desolate wastelands where the soil was hard and the Spirit seemed absent.

There are burned-over districts in other areas of life. Maybe you know this feeling in your church: the spiritual drought is difficult because you remember vividly when God was at work in undeniable ways. The quietness of the nursery is a stab of longing every Sunday morning because you remember the joy when that part of the building was abuzz with activity.

Maybe it’s returning to your childhood home or a town you once knew well, seeing all the changes, or seeing in new light what has stayed the same.

Maybe you know this feeling with your friends and family. A relationship with a now-grown son or daughter has broken down, and the distance you feel is compounded by earlier joy and happiness. Maybe you’ve lost a family member, and your grief is heightened by the joy you once shared. The magic of your years together, marked by snowcapped mountains of happiness, has disappeared, leaving a barren silence—the absence of your loved one is itself a presence, a haunting reminder of what once was.

When the Jews returned to their homeland and began reconstructing the temple decades after Solomon’s house for the Lord had been destroyed, the older exiles had the hardest time seeing the new foundation laid. While the younger generation celebrated the first signs of renewal, the older folks wept—mixing tears of celebration with sorrow and loss (Ezra 3:10–13). They’d seen the old temple. They knew what had been.

There’s no evading sorrow in this life. The older we get, the more we appreciate joy and wonder when it appears and the more we look back with wistfulness on joys after they depart. No matter how much we try to hold on to happiness, the world often settles back into sadness. The spell cast by the snow over the landscape is broken. We’re thankful when we recall the happy moments, but there’s a pang of loss, for they have passed.

Day recedes. Night falls. But as Andrew Peterson reminds us,

We may not feel the closeness of those heavens. We may have a harder time seeing the beauty in barrenness. But even the moments of joy in our past are just a prelude to the unending happiness that awaits the children of God.

Right now, even as I look out over the dreary world of late winter in middle Tennessee, giving thanks for the snow that gloriously interrupted our routines with its quiet majesty, I look ahead. There are patches of green showing up in some of these brown yards. The birds are back. A breeze is blowing. The first signs. . . . Spring.

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You’ve probably heard of Godwin’s Law—the idea that as an online discussion progresses, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler increases. Godwin’s Law is meant to be humorous, but it says something serious about our society that one of the last remaining vestiges of moral coherence is that we all know Hitler was wrong.

Richard John Neuhaus once described the Holocaust as “our only culturally available icon of absolute evil.” We may not know what’s good anymore, but we know that is bad. This is why many rush to Hitler as a shortcut to or substitute for making a moral argument.

The often tenuous attempts to link certain attitudes and actions to Hitler—as if we can’t name something as bad unless it’s tied to our culture’s agreed standard of what constitutes evil on a massive scale—signal that many in our society are increasingly incapable of recognizing evil unless it shows up without ambiguity, perpetrated by people already in the category we’ve deemed “morally problematic.” Our moral imagination is impoverished. And this may be why we have a harder time recognizing evil deeds by people who don’t seem to be villains.

Heroes and Villains

I recently watched Netflix’s adaptation of All the Light We Cannot See, a book by Anthony Doerr I appreciated several years ago. It’s been too long since I read the book to remember how the German villains were portrayed in the original text, but the miniseries made them out to be sadistic animals, gleefully inflicting terror and trauma wherever possible. It’s as if the German commanders know they’re the bad guys. They seem to relish their role.

The truth is scarier. Yes, the historical record reveals the brutality of some of the worst officers in the German army (the entire enterprise was evil through and through), but most soldiers believed they were on the right side of history. They were the heroes, preserving their fatherland by eliminating the Jewish menace and paving the way for their superior race to install a new kingdom in Europe. Don’t forget: for the highly educated, culturally sophisticated, technologically advanced German society in the 1930s, Hitler was a hero.

The Germans saw themselves as the good guys. That’s why a clip from the British sketch comedy show That Mitchell and Webb Look went viral, where one Nazi looks to the others in a moment of self-assessment and says, “Are we the baddies?” It’s funny, but the point is serious.

Frighteningly Ordinary Face of Evil

Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is a deeply unsettling book about WWII. Browning reminds us of the sheer scale of the killing that took place in Eastern Europe, much of it outside the concentration camps and most of it done by ordinary people without much investment in the fight—simple men and women conscripted into Hitler’s killing machine. Browning claims the majority of individuals in this particular battalion weren’t zealous Nazis. They were ordinary, middle-aged, working-class men who nevertheless perpetrated heinous acts.

Browning’s book shows three distinct groups emerging within the battalion: a core of enthusiastic participants, a majority who executed their responsibilities reliably but lacked initiative, and a small minority who avoided involvement in the acts of violence but were engaged in other activities that did nothing to diminish the battalion’s overall efficiency in carrying out atrocities. Hardly anyone seriously resisted. Ordinary Men shows how easy it is for people to yield to the influences of those around them, leading to actions they’d never consider otherwise.

I recently read Romania’s Holy War: Soldiers, Motivation, and the Holocaust by Grant T. Harward, a new study in military history that demolishes the myth that Romania was a reluctant part of the Axis powers in the early years of WWII, before they switched to fight on the side of the Allies late in the war.

The people’s fear of Bolshevism and Russian influence far outweighed their fear of a fascist dictatorship. The toxic mix of Romanian nationalism, antisemitism, and folk religion led to disaster for Romania’s Jews and dissenting religious groups. (By far the creepiest figure of the era was Corneliu Codreanu. Just picture a young man in the prime of life, strikingly handsome and vigorous, dressed in white robes and riding on a horse, calling for a crusade as the head of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, his surreal piety a mask for shocking brutality and violence.)

No one should walk away from these books thinking, I’m so glad I’m not like those men. No, you say, God, help me never to face such pressures, and if I do, help me to do good, not evil. When we look at evil up close, we hope to walk away with a greater sense of moral clarity, and part of that clarity is the realization we’re all capable of justifying, minimizing, or engaging in evil.

Line of Good and Evil

A few years ago, the New York Times interviewed a nationalist, Hitler-loving man from Ohio, describing his “cherry pie” tattoo and “Midwestern manners” and enjoyment of Seinfeld. He seems so normal, even though “books about Mussolini and Hitler share shelf space with a stack of Nintendo Wii games.” The response to the article was loud. The writer and editors were blasted for “normalizing hate” and for offering too sympathetic a portrayal of a Nazi fan.

The critics thought we should maintain a clear separation between the virtuous and the malevolent. They seemed to imply evil individuals are monstrous, belonging to an entirely different class of humanity than the enlightened and good. But surely history teaches us it’s self-deception to believe that evil is confined to “monsters” or that malevolent beliefs reside exclusively in one political party or in a distinct class of humanity. The unsettling truth about evil is its pervasiveness, often manifesting in subtle and seemingly normal circumstances.

Every Southerner likes to think they’d have spread abolitionist literature in the 1850s or been on the front lines of the civil rights marches in the 1950s and 1960s. Most likely, you’d have gone with the societal flow, because when you look closely at history, that’s what actually happened. And that’s what still happens. All of us are capable of doing evil deeds or being complicit with evil, but that self-knowledge seems to be missing from our moral imagination today.

It’s not hard to figure out who the good guys and the bad guys are when watching a movie about the Nazis. But it’s a little harder to recognize evil when it’s closer to home, when it appears respectful and reasonable, urbane and sophisticated: When a bishop desires to protect the church’s reputation and quietly moves a child-molesting priest to another part of the country. When an esteemed ethics professor makes a winsome case for infanticide. When we support a candidate as the “lesser of two evils” but then only apply the “evil” description to the opposing side, while seeing the “less evil” candidate, in the end, as good.

Moral Justifications

There’s another sign our society’s moral calculus is broken. Even when moral wrongs or evil deeds happen right before our eyes, we’re more likely to explain away the actions if we find a different moral judgment would upset our categories or shock our senses.

Foreign propaganda machines may be at least somewhat responsible for the slew of videos of young people recently reassessing 9/11 after having come across a fake letter from Osama bin Laden. He had legitimate reasons for grievance. Wow! This is rocking my world! Maybe 9/11 was understandable. Still, this development is disturbing.

Surely the most frightening example of this impoverished moral imagination is the sight of young people tearing down posters of hostages in Gaza and marching in support of Hamas while justifying the brutality the terrorist organization has intentionally inflicted on civilians. The horseshoe effect is real, as far left and far right fringes appear to shake hands when it comes to antisemitism, regardless of their differing reasons.

Deliver Us from the Evil One

All this gives me a greater sense of urgency when I pray the Lord’s Prayer. As I recognize the dark forces that stand behind their human manifestations—the principalities and powers arrayed against the living God—I shudder at a simplistic moral calculus that absolves “people like me” from complicity or fails to discern the human heart’s surprising capacity for justifying atrocities.

Deliver us from the Evil One. Lord, hear our prayer.

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In the final season of The Crown on Netflix, multiple themes once again come to the fore: unbending tradition vs. adapting ancient rules for a modern era, appearances vs. reality, institutional requirements vs. individual self-expression, and the demands of duty vs. the tug of personal freedom. The Crown plays with all these contrasts, never resolving the tension, sometimes veering too far in one direction over another.

But three scenes in the final season stood out to me, each with lessons that go beyond the monarchy and apply to the church. “Worship” is a royal term, after all, from the old English worth-ship. We’re to recognize worth when we see it and give honor where it’s due.

Magic and the Mystery

In the first scene, Queen Elizabeth discusses the future with several members of the royal family. After Prince Charles proposes to run the monarchy on more rational and democratic lines, she responds,

Were these words spoken by anyone else, they’d crumble under the weight of self-importance and self-exaltation. But delivered by Queen Elizabeth, known for her selflessness in carrying out her duties even if it meant sidelining her personal desires, the words carry weight. She intuits something significant: the magic of the monarchy is in the mystery. As queen, her role is to lift the heads of her subjects, to point them to another realm, something beyond the ordinary.

Genuine worship with God’s people should share this aim. We lift our heads and hearts to our Creator. We enter another world. We’re given a taste of heaven on earth. We’re transported into another realm.

It’s good when we seek God in the ordinary, see the sacred behind the common, open our eyes to the beauty of the world, and meet God in the everyday rhythms of life. There’s something right in the impulse to emphasize God’s nearness. But not at the expense of his transcendence. Nothing is casual or common about encountering God in reverent worship.

To be clear, I’m not referring to musical style or dress code or specific liturgies. I’m saying it’s a problem when our church services lean so far in stressing God’s closeness that it becomes unthinkable that we’d tremble before his holiness. We lose the mysterious paradox of being drawn to his goodness and frightened by his glory. We can’t imagine an encounter with God that resembles that of Moses at the burning bush, where the Great I AM compels us to come closer yet commands us to remove our sandals.

Many well-intentioned evangelicals in the previous generation wanted to make non-Christians and nominal Christians so comfortable in church that they recommended we reduce our celebration of the sacraments. The Lord’s Supper is strange to outsiders. It’s off-putting. It creates a dividing line between believer and nonbeliever. To that, we should reply, yes. That’s why it’s powerful. The discomfort is the draw, a combination of God’s majesty and mercy, a touch of the transcendent through elements that may seem weird to the newcomer. This is what lifts us into another world.

Look Back to Look Forward

In another scene, Queen Elizabeth sits across from prime minister Tony Blair after finishing an investigation of positions and practices deemed unnecessary in the modern world. Although initially open to adjusting or eliminating some rituals, she has concluded some of the practices Blair believes to be old-fashioned are essential because of the continuity they establish across generations:

The same is true for the church. It is, of course, possible for human traditions to encumber the mission. Not everything passed down from our forebears is infallible. The church is always to be reforming in light of the Word of God. Many a congregation has fallen for empty traditions and dead traditionalism. Renewal is key.

But renewal doesn’t only come from whatever is new. Wisdom requires us to discern the difference between what’s faithful and what’s faddish. All too often, we believe old is bad and new is better. We must resist the impulse to think innovation is always an improvement. Instead, we must look to the past with gratitude, recognizing our forefathers and mothers have left us treasures that may assist us in the challenges we face today. Sometimes, we find what we need not in modernity but in antiquity.

Miracles and Mystery

There’s one last scene I’ll mention, this one without the queen. Tony Blair tells his wife, Cherie, that surely the royal family is aware of their need to “change in order to survive.” Cherie isn’t convinced the queen thinks along those lines. “They don’t want to change,” she says. Then she compares the monarchy to the Catholic Church. The Church modernized, she says. They got rid of the Latin and the incense and the miracles and the mystery. “And people stopped coming.”

The common sense of our time would have us think the only way to appeal to a modern world is through the elimination of mystery. But this is exactly backward. Mystery is what makes the church stand out. A. W. Tozer wrote,

No mystery? No worship.

I must register two caveats here. First, there’s always the temptation to manipulate the mechanics of a worship service to create a sense of artificial awe, insist on the most arcane liturgical details, specify the wording of every possible prayer, or get lost in the minutiae of a program. The mission of the church isn’t to preserve an ancient pattern but to propagate good news both old and fresh. We gather for otherworldly worship that catches us up “in the process of being slain and made alive by the gospel,” as John Webster put it.

Second, there’s the temptation to make worship all about the pursuit not of God but of the feeling of mysterious awe we get in his presence. In harping on mystery, I run the risk of making worship all about something we feel, which ironically turns the church back into something centered on us and what we prefer.

Still, in the end, we do well to remember that worship of the triune God should always bring about the collision of worlds—the kingdom of God into the earthly, the foretaste of the future into the present, the unfathomable God into the patterns of corporate praise. Do away with the mystery of it all, and you miss the whole point.

Evangelism isn’t well served by human-centered worship. We won’t reach more people by eliminating the awe-inspiring elements that follow from an encounter with the living God. We’ll reach fewer, and the ones we do reach will experience less.

Worship is an aid to mission, and worship is mission’s ultimate aim.

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One of the most remarkable women in history, Joan of Arc, has long been at the center of various conversations and controversies because, while no one can deny her significance, the meaning of her words and actions eludes easy explanation.

Was she, as Shakespeare cast her, a witch? Were her visions heretical, as church leaders at the time concluded, or was she the saint the later Catholic Church canonized? What do we make of her commitment to a shining chastity and her insistence on her physical virginity? How should we interpret the rationale for wearing men’s clothing while leading armies into battle? Was she a reluctant warrior who wished for an ordinary life or an ambitious girl who desired the spotlight? What do we learn from her martyrdom?

In First Things, Dan Hitchens reflects on recent attempts to enlist Joan of Arc for the LGBT+ cause. Many today want to reimagine her as a nonconforming, prototransgender revolutionary. Hitchens reclaims Joan for a conservative and biblical understanding of sex and gender, as opposed to the cultural trend that makes her a founder of trans identity.

The questions about Joan of Arc’s life and legacy fascinate me, but they go beyond my purpose here. Instead, I want to lean on Hitchens’s description of the most important yet often unnoticed contradictions at the heart of today’s transgender theories. He believes one of the transgender movement’s most remarkable achievements has been to conceal the internal division at the heart of gender theory. “There is no single trans narrative,” he says. There are two, “wholly incompatible and mutually destructive, which have somehow been fused into a single, all-conquering cause.”

‘Wrong Body’ Narrative

Here’s how Hitchens describes the first narrative:

‘What Is Truth?’ Narrative

Here’s how Hitchens describes the second narrative:

Why These Narratives Are Incompatible

It doesn’t take long to recognize the internal inconsistency between these two narratives. The first depends on maleness and femaleness being something real, for a binary must exist for it to be transgressed or transcended. The second questions reality altogether, falling for a radical skepticism that reimagines the world in terms of linguistic power plays.

It’s no surprise to see debates arise over speech nowadays. If you refuse to acquiesce to someone’s preferred pronouns, you run afoul of the first narrative because you seem to be imposing something objective on someone’s subjective experience. You also run afoul of the second narrative because, if all reality is linguistically constructed, your failure to follow the new rules will keep the new theories from appearing true.

This is why it’s not enough for someone to self-identify in a certain way; everyone must echo and affirm that person’s self-identification too. As Abigail Favale points out, “If gender identity only exists in language, our language must be manipulated, or else the whole thing falls apart. This is what’s at stake in the battle over pronouns: our understanding of reality itself.”

Open Your Heart, but Close Your Eyes

I was recently perusing Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, a resource book written by and for “the transgender community,” and I was struck by how often and how seamlessly the authors alternated between the “wrong body” narrative and the “what is truth” narrative.

In the introduction, there are no fewer than eight ways of “being trans,” including everything from merely adopting an alter ego to trying to escape “the binary poles of gender” or rejecting the medical community and the whole idea of a “gender destination.”

“There are so many, many ways of being us,” the book says, before offering one piece of advice for allies: “Let love prevail. . . . Open your heart, and see what happens.”

The problem with this advice, of course, is that it requires us to close our eyes to the internal contradictions that erase the meaning and significance of manhood and womanhood. It redefines love as the embrace of illogicality and as the denial of reality. It reinterprets history through an ideological lens, so even a Catholic saint gets culturally appropriated for a cause she would have abhorred.

In today’s controversies over transgender theories, opening your heart requires closing your mind.

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The church is supposed to be a family, right?

What does it mean for the church to be a family in a world where fewer people experience healthy expressions of family life?

Can we expect the church to become a family for those who know nothing more than family breakdown and heartache?

I’ve pondered these questions for a while now. I wrote two columns last year (here and here) and devoted an episode of Reconstructing Faith to the topic, featuring Joseph Hellerman as a guest, whose book When the Church Was a Family makes a good contribution to understanding the church’s familial identity.

No Place like Home

I remember the discussion I had with PhD colleagues about When the Church Was a Family. Some thought the book was a welcome correction to churches satisfied with superficial relationships, while others worried that leaning too heavily into family metaphors can lead to something more akin to a cult, where the distinction between an individual’s walk with Jesus and their life in the church disappears. The individual can get so absorbed into “the family” that the ability to differentiate between Jesus and his Bride gets lost.

We could call this the flip side of seeing the church as a family. It’s the realization that the sentimental line in the popular Christmas song “There’s no place like home for the holidays” can take on a double meaning in some situations, a darker connotation. There really is no place like my home for the holidays . . .

The Church Is like a Real Family. It’s Messy.

Samuel James examines this angle in a recent article, “The Local Church Is Not Olive Garden.” One way we can prevent “church hurt,” he says, is by managing expectations. When Christians apply Olive Garden’s old marketing tag—“When you’re here, you’re family”—to the church, we often overlook the less-than-positive connotations of seeing the church as family.

Of course, we’re right to insist on the Christian being part of a local congregation. We’re right to fight “lone ranger” Christianity. We’re right to see the church in familial terms, because the New Testament is our source for such a vision.

But there’s a flip side to the high regard we have for the church as family. An idealistic portrait of family can saddle us with overly ambitious, “enormous expectations” for church life. The appeal to family life can lead us to fall for a fantasy. James writes,

The Church Isn’t a Fantasy Family

When we preach and teach about the church as family, following the Scriptures’ familial language, we often dwell on the upsides of family life. We think of brothers and sisters in terms of closeness, and honor, and loyalty. We don’t think of how common it is for real brothers and sisters to, well, fight. Even in healthy families, there’s conflict. In unhealthy families, the conflict can become debilitating. The whole reason the apostles spend so much time appealing to unity is because they assume there will be frequent occasions for infighting and sin.

When we screen out the odd, the cumbersome, the dysfunctional, and the challenging aspects of family life and when we expect churches to always function like a healthy, thriving, idealistic family, we set the stage for church hurt. We begin to see the church as “something less than human, less than flawed, less than something that’s capable of breaking your heart or even perhaps not making a spectacular difference in your day to day life at all.” James continues,

Flawed Family of God

Wise resources on the church manage expectations of church life. Marva Dawn’s book on the communal life of God’s people points out the flaw in looking to the church for satisfaction that only God himself can give:

It’s paradoxical but true. You can only truly benefit from the community of faith in its healthiest expressions when you don’t expect something from the church that God alone can give.

The church doesn’t solve loneliness. Only God does that. Yes, often he does that through his people. But the way he accomplishes this work is by putting you through the difficult, sanctifying process of loving people who don’t seem to love you back and remaining fiercely committed to people who may be a source of heartbreak in your life.

This is the hard part of seeing the church as family: bearing with your siblings through thick and thin, recognizing Jesus in them but also realizing they’re not Jesus. That’s the only way we can live and love as the family of God, without idealistic expectations crushing our spirits.

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The past five years have been challenging for the box office. The pandemic turned theaters into ghost towns. More and more people stream movies online nowadays. Production delays, and now a writers’ strike—all this has slowed the output from Hollywood.

Moviemakers have done their best to beckon us back to the theater, lifting up the big screen as a place to set aside distractions, gather with friends and family, and immerse ourselves in the stories being told.

Nicole Kidman and AMC

The cinematic promise is epitomized in AMC Theatres’ one-minute spot featuring Nicole Kidman. It begins as she strolls through a rainy night to the theater, gently lifting her hood as if she were a Jedi. Meanwhile, her voice describes the “magic” of the cinema, where we learn to laugh, to cry, and to care. As she ascends the stairs, she celebrates the “indescribable feeling as the lights dim” and we get the chance to go to another world. Kidman is the high priestess of this spiritual experience. We’re not there “just to be entertained,” she says, but to be “somehow reborn, together.”

The AMC ad was an unexpected hit, its rhapsodic script inspiring a parody on Saturday Night Live that expanded Kidman into a superhero and surrounded her with moviegoers who salute the screen as new adherents to this quasi religion. The ad elicited numerous memes and good-natured ribbing, especially for the unintentional campiness of the line “Heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”

Deeper Longing

Every effective marketing campaign taps into deeper longings than the surface-level issues it addresses. It’s a running joke every year when Super Bowl commercials wow us with attention-grabbing humor or inspiring stories that often have little to no connection with the brand being represented. (A longer Christmas ad for Chevy last year, a tearjerker if ever there was one, emphasizes the nostalgic power of the brand while implying a Chevy truck can reverse dementia.)

It’s no surprise, then, that AMC wants to portray itself as more than a place where you can see a good movie at a decent price with comfortable seats; the theater offers an experience that fulfills a more profound need. Something deeper than mere entertainment. Rebirth is the goal. The cinema becomes a portal through which we escape the confines of our ordinary lives. This is where we experience the full range of emotions (laughing, crying)—a place “we all need,” Kidman says, if we’re to make progress in personal growth and fulfillment. (It’s where we learn “to care,” she tells us.)

All this is spiritual language. When the lights dim, spiritual illumination begins. All this is tapping into the deepest longings of humanity—for connection, for growth, for inspiration, and for stories that bring resolution.

Promise That Can’t Be Kept

Here’s what stands out most to me about this ad. Despite Kidman’s repeated use of plural pronouns and her emphasis on being reborn together, she’s alone in the theater. The emptiness of the cinema strikes me—no one in the parking lot, hallway, or the theater itself. The only others present are the stars on the screen. Here we have the paradox of a supposedly shared experience in a cavernous room where the moviegoer is all alone. Right there, we can see why the cinema can’t deliver on its promise. Entertainment today is more likely to isolate us than bring us together.

We’re the most entertained generation in human history. Entertainment is so prevalent and prominent that it takes a conscious choice to avoid it. The number of choices available on various platforms can lead to decision paralysis and a sense of loneliness. It’s not uncommon for people to watch a television show at 1.5 or 2x speed, increasing their capacity to digest even more entertainment. “Bingeing” isn’t a word that refers to healthy habits in any context, and yet now we use it to describe the practice of stuffing ourselves with television and movies.

We’re more entertained than ever, but this hasn’t increased our happiness. We’re not better off. The screen tends to isolate us, to draw us up into ourselves rather than turn us outward in love for God and neighbor.

Does the Church Do Better?

How wonderful if we could provide a striking contrast between the unkept promise of the cinema and the church as a refuge of true spiritual renewal and rebirth, where we experience fellowship with God and with others. But all too often the values of Hollywood are on display in our churches also. Our production may be excellent, our sermons memorable, our musicians professional, but what happens when, like in our trips to the theater, we gather with other individuals, experience “the show,” and then depart as lonely as before?

The inability of entertainment to deliver on its promises gives us the opportunity to do something different, to live and worship in a way that resolves the paradox of the AMC ad. The high priestess of Hollywood assures us we can be reborn together, but there she sits—alone in a cold, dark theater. Meanwhile, the church lifts up the Great High Priest who made it possible for us to be truly reborn—born from above into a new family, given a truly perfect and powerful story that far exceeds anything on offer in movies, and welcomed to his table where we draw close to him and each other.

Worship should feel less like spectators in a theater and more like a gathering around the fireplace, where in song and story, we warm our hands at the hearth, learn to see and to be seen, as companions who savor spiritual food for the journey and lock arms in mission to the world around us.

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There’s a dramatic moment in Augustine’s Confessions where, before his conversion, he lies to his mother, Monica, as he leaves North Africa and sets sail for Rome.

No one prayed for Augustine’s conversion more than his mother. “Rivers of tears that flowed,” he wrote, “day by day bedewed the ground wherever she prayed.” Augustine’s departure must have seemed like an enormous setback to Monica. How could she keep an eye on him, or influence him, or prod him toward faith if they were no longer together? It made no sense.

Yet looking back, Augustine sees the finger of God in this scene of sadness:

The “real reason” he left, Augustine realized later, was so God would bring him into contact with Ambrose, the preacher whose life and words prepared his heart for salvation. At the same time, God was at work in Monica’s life, planning her sorrow for her good. She was right to desire her son’s conversion, but at times she’d hover over him, unable to see how God might effect his conversion apart from her constant presence. God would make use of this setback for her growth in holiness.

‘Real Nub of Her Longing’

Here’s how Augustine describes the night before his departure:

What Monica experienced as the silence of God was actually his grace. The event she thought would foreclose the possibility of her desires being fulfilled was the path God would use to answer her many prayers. When she pleaded with God that night to keep Augustine in Carthage, God said no. He was setting plans in motion to fulfill her deeper wish.

“You were snatching me away,” wrote Augustine later, “using my lusts to put an end to them and chastising her too-carnal desire with the scourge of sorrow.” God was at work in both these lives, in Augustine for salvation and in Monica for sanctification.

God Knows Your Deeper Desire

God knows what you really want, not just what you think you want.

Remember that truth on those nights when you moisten the pillow with your tears . . . after months and years have passed in seeming silence, when you’ve begged God to bring back your prodigal child, or rekindle the heart of your indifferent spouse, or bring healing to a painful church experience, or remove you from a difficult work situation. You make a particular request in a particular moment, perhaps you even appeal to Christ’s promise to grant whatever we ask for (John 14:13), but God goes quiet. Or worse, he declines. And now your tears multiply—your yearnings mixed with hurt, confusion, and betrayal.

“Everything is needful that God sends; nothing can be needful that he withholds,” wrote John Newton, the 18th-century pastor best known for “Amazing Grace.” Tim Keller applied the truth of Newton’s words to his own experience of disillusionment when God rejected a heartfelt request: “As I look back, God was saying, ‘Son, when a child of mine makes a request, I always give that person what he or she would have asked for if they knew everything I know.’”

Prayer Underneath the Prayer

God is a good Father who gives us what we most deeply want. “The real nub of her longing” is how Augustine describes his mother’s prayer underneath the prayer, the essential petition beneath the depths of surface-level requests. Commenting on this passage from Confessions, Peter Kreeft writes,

God is painting a portrait. Dark strokes are part of the canvas. The Artist knows his subjects better than his subjects know themselves. Trust his hand. Yield to his brush. God often says no to our particular pleadings in order to say yes to our most profound prayers.

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Not long ago, I came across an insightful column in the print edition of Wired that spoke of our generation’s penchant for “self-soothing” on social media by “crowdsourcing therapy.” As people turn to their online “community” for validation, they increasingly turn to “therapy-speak” as a means of understanding and expressing themselves. This tendency is downstream from therapy influencers who may or may not be real practitioners but have gained an audience online.

Just as perusing WebMD engenders false confidence when we quickly diagnose ourselves or our family members after a cursory look at medical symptoms, we’ve become overly trusting of the self-help gurus and self-proclaimed therapists online who give advice about various psychological maladies. There’s an audience for this, as confirmed in The Atlantic, which notes that many social media feeds are now crowded with “therapy influencers who tell us to be more aware of our anxiety, our trauma, our distress. Instagram is full of anxious confessions and therapy-speak. The TikTok hashtag #Trauma has more than 6 billion views. . . . More than 5,500 podcasts have the word trauma in their title.”

No one can deny there’s such a thing as real trauma, and abuse, and depression, and anxiety, and toxicity, and all kinds of social and psychological challenges that deserve attention. But surely we should differentiate between therapy with trained professionals who take an individual interest in your life and what The Atlantic dubs “Therapy Media,” an ecosystem filled with nonexperts broadcasting their thoughts about mental health for strangers. “The way we talk about the world shapes our experience of the world.”

Recent studies show it’s possible for people to “consume so much information about anxiety disorders that they begin to process normal problems of living as signs of a decline in mental health.” Surely that’s a factor when we consider all the dumbed-down diagnoses and simplistic solutions on offer.

Self-Soothing and Relational Breakdown

Nowhere do we see this problem more clearly than in the attempt to apply online therapy-speak to real-life relationships. The Wired column notes how the world of social media gives you the illusion of community while you burrow further and further into yourself. And self-indulgence these days shows up whenever you privilege your sense of identity, what you feel, often to the detriment of your relationships.

Not surprising, then, that we see relational breakdown as the result of some of the pop-level therapy-speak out there—suspicions that heighten interpersonal tension and raise the stakes in every interaction.

• “She didn’t just lie to you or mislead you. She’s gaslighting you.”
• “That person isn’t just wrong. His take is harmful.”
• “The reason you don’t see eye to eye with him is because he must be a misogynist.”
• “She doesn’t get along with you because she’s racist.”
• “Your boss says ‘You’re difficult to work with,’ but that just means ‘You’re difficult to take advantage of.’”

When you’re safely cocooned in an online world that constantly validates your perspective, you interpret the words or actions of people in the real world in distorted and damaging ways. If a conflict takes place, or if a difficult conversation must be had, it’s easy to lob an accusation against the person who made you feel uncomfortable. If they disagree with your assessment and stand up for themselves, that’s proof they’re narcissistic. If they don’t push back, well, you must have been right.

Self-Soothing and Suspicion

Relationships cannot thrive under these conditions. Living with the suspicion that all disagreement or conflict is just a way for someone to exert power or maintain control poisons normal human interactions. Everyone has an ulterior motive? No one could possibly want the best for you or to see you aspire to something better?

What’s more, diagnoses like this are impossibly broad. There may be cases where the analysis is true—maybe your boss is trying to run over you; maybe that person is a racist—but how could an article or meme or social media guru tell the difference? Therapy-speak applied indiscriminately to all contexts isn’t helpful but harmful. It flattens the context.

Even worse, social media self-validation enshrines bad behavior as a sign of goodness. The very attitude or action that may be your problem, something to work on or try to modify, gets turned into proof of your goodness. Are you stubborn and obstinate? No, you’re standing strong when everyone else is trying to take you down. Are you manipulative and crafty? No, you’re shrewd in navigating relationships so no one can take advantage of you. Are you too sensitive and anxious? No, you’re rightly attuned to personal slights and the atmosphere of injustice that surrounds you.

That’s the biggest problem with therapeutic crowdsourcing online. We take comfort in the idea that all our problems and challenges can be attributed to other people, to injustice, to the sins and selfishness of others—whatever keeps you from being your true self. You find affinity with others who feel the sting of the same critiques, and soon you think you’re entering a community when you’re actually individualizing more and more.

Self-Soothing and the Lonely Prison

Wired also pointed out something I alluded to last year: the dilution of language around words like “trauma” and “abuse.” These words carry weight in the mental health community, but now they get applied in situations where ordinary stress and conflict take place. A boss has a tough conversation, and suddenly the employee thinks, I’m uncomfortable, therefore I’m experiencing trauma. Or, This hurt my feelings, therefore my boss is an abuser. Or, I’m feeling stress, therefore my job is “triggering” me, and I may be in a toxic place. The Wired article said,

And that’s right where we are. People have thrown up walls, thinking they’ve secured protection, while in reality, the security is a prison cell.

All this kills real community. Close community is impossible without conflict. Only the most shallow and superficial of friendships can be maintained without occasional disagreement and distress.

Self-Soothing and the Church

What might all this mean for the church?

Bonhoeffer in Life Together reminded us that as Christians, we bear the burdens of our brothers and sisters. Even more, we sometimes bear our brothers and sisters as the burden. That’s when you know you’re family, when your brother is a burden and you remain with him anyway, “not merely [as] an object to be manipulated.” God bore with us to maintain fellowship. And now we do the same.

So, for starters, we must become more aware of the digital formation that leads to therapy-speak. We need to recognize it when it shows up in conversation and conflict.

True Christian community cannot coexist with the idea that someone’s feelings must always be right or must be treated as objective truth. We cannot live together in harmony if all we have is “my truth” and “your truth” as synonyms for experience or personal fortitude.

Unless we appeal to Scripture, unless we heed the wisdom and experience of other believers, unless we find ways to be formed by deeper truth than today’s therapy-speak, unless we maintain categories of sin and repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation, acceptance and aspiration, we’ll get sucked into the superficial online world that promises community but delivers isolation.

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In the fall, multiple listeners to my podcast Reconstructing Faith sent me a clip from season 2 of Loki, one of the shows from Marvel Studios now streaming on Disney Plus. Loki involves thought experiments and ideas common to the sci-fi genre, including time travel.

The show raises a question about institutions and their importance—and how we should respond to injustice and failure. It’s a debate between those who believe the only way forward is deconstruction and those who work for reformation. That’s what’s at stake in a conversation between Loki and Sylvie in season 2, episode 4. Sylvie asks, “What if you’re wrong? What if you’re wrong to believe that this place can be any better? . . . It would just be easier to burn this place down and start from scratch.” Loki replies, “Sure. Burn it down. Easy. Annihilating is easy. Razing things to the ground is easy. Trying to fix what’s broken is hard. Hope is hard.”

If there’s a takeaway from the second season of Loki, it’s not just that it’s better to be a reformer who wants to preserve and improve the institution, to make it better. It’s being aware that the methods you use for preserving an institution can go horribly wrong, as we’ve seen in many cases where—out of a sense of obligation, maybe even concern for the church—people defend the indefensible or excuse the inexcusable. Institutional renewal, rightly understood, requires personal sacrifice.

‘Reconstructing Faith’ Season Two

This desire to reform and rebuild is central to the second season of my podcast Reconstructing Faith. All 10 episodes are now available for streaming, each focusing on the formidable obstacles that stand in our way as we strive to rebuild the church’s witness in our time. Here’s a quick rundown of the episode topics.

1. Sledgehammers Don’t Build Anything

The continuing decline of institutional trust represents a seismic shift in our culture and society today. Some of that distrust is warranted. But some comes from an overly idealistic expectation of what institutions can provide and from the acids seeping into all areas of our culture, slowly dissolving the structures of the past. How do we rebuild in the aftermath of so much institutional turmoil and destruction?

2. The De-churching of America

Recent research shows about 15 percent of American adults—that’s 40 million people—have stopped going to church, and all this within the past 25 years. It’s a drop that has affected every region in the country, every theological tradition, every age group, every ethnicity, every education level, every income bracket. This episode examines what rebuilding looks like in the aftermath of this massive cultural decline in churchgoing.

3. Boys to Men, for Mission

What happens in a society where markers of manhood—the passing from adolescence into adulthood—become obscured, where men stagger forward without mentors or friends? What happens to a society that pathologizes competition, achievement, roughness, and the aggression required to protect the weak or pursue what’s good? How does it make sense to push back against toxic expressions of masculinity without a clear picture of actual manliness, a positive vision that shatters the caricatures?

4. The Secret Catastrophe

More and more commentators speak openly about the social and mental health consequences of porn: the degrading nature of warped expectations, the ever-more-transgressive practices, the normalization of violence, and the dark underside of human trafficking. The pervasiveness of pornography affects the church as well—young people and old, men and women.

5. Gender Sanity in a World Gone Mad

There will be no avoiding conversations about sex and gender in the days ahead, and, as Christians, our starting place must be our convictions about reality. When the world is falling en masse for a bold and terrible lie, the most important and compassionate thing the church can do is uphold the courageous and irrepressible truth. How can we best present the Bible’s vision of the body as good, as a gift, in a time of radical individualism, digital reinvention, and technological promises? 

6. No One Knows What’s Real Anymore

AI is the most powerful predictive tool we’ve ever created. What will happen when, in the future, it becomes even harder to discern truth from falsehood, human fingerprints from AI creations, when we no longer agree on common narratives because we’re living in parallel online, AI-influenced universes? What do unity and division look like in the church when these problems arise? And how will we address some of the ethical questions that arise?

7. The Spiritual Burnout Society

For the past few years, sociologists and journalists have been describing millennials as “the burnout generation.” Now, there are reports that burnout and stress are on the rise with Gen Z as well. And then there’s the reality of spiritual burnout: the inability to feel the presence and power of God, a loss of desire for spiritual things. Burnout isn’t just a pastor problem. It isn’t just a workplace problem. It’s a spiritual problem, and this challenge affects the church.

8. After the Worship Wars

In the latter decades of the 20th century, many churches across the country shifted from a formal style of worship, with traditional and classical music, to a more informal style, with praise choruses and rock-influenced instrumentation. Today, we may be well past the worst of the worship wars, but we’re never going to be in a season where discussions over what we do as gathered members of the body of Christ go away.

9. Family Breakdown and the Family of God

Challenges to family life aren’t new. But the challenges in our day have multiplied. And these problems aren’t unrelated to the difficulties we face as God’s people, especially since we see in the New Testament how the church is to be the family of God. We are in relationship to one another as brothers and sisters, as fathers and mothers in the faith.

10. Better Together: Denominations and the Hope of Evangelical Renewal

Rebuilding requires sacrifice . . . a dogged commitment to seeing the task through. If this is the case for churches, it’s also the case for families of churches, for networks, partnerships, conventions, and denominations. How can we look beyond our congregation to the health of the evangelical movement as a whole?

Find a Place on the Wall

You may wonder if there’s anything you can do when so many of these obstacles seem insurmountable. Let me encourage you to find a place somewhere on the wall. Like the men and women in Nehemiah’s day, who were tasked with rebuilding the fallen wall around Jerusalem, find a place on the wall where you can be part of the restoration. No, you can’t do everything. But everyone can do something.

Which challenge to the church’s witness do you feel most passionate about? Where might your gifts match up with the church’s needs? Where could your strengths match up with a church’s weaknesses?

Restoration emerges in the crucible of faithful service. Remember, tearing stuff down is easy. Trying to fix what’s broken is hard. Hope is hard. Let’s not take the easy route of just pointing out all that’s wrong. Let’s be part of making things right. And let’s trust that God will be with us as we navigate through the stormy waters.

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Maybe you’ve noticed it too. On various apps and sites, the calendar has shifted to Monday as the first day of the week. If you want to keep Sunday as Day 1, you can sometimes tailor the calendar to your preference, but the default has changed.

This comes as no surprise. Most people look at Saturday and Sunday as a pair—two days at the end of the week. “What is a weekend?” asked the elderly Lady Grantham in Downton Abbey, delightfully clueless as to how the working class a century ago conceived of time. Since regular business hours are Monday to Friday, it makes sense when people assume Monday is the best candidate for Day 1. It’s the start of the workweek.

But that’s just it. Collapsing the week into the workweek is what troubles me.

Week and Workweek

The way we orient ourselves in time—how we think of our days—makes a difference in how we conceive of our life and purpose. Our choices in how we order time contain moral instruction.

Starting the week with Monday indicates we see our lives primarily in terms of work. Productivity matters most. Contrast a Monday-first mindset with a Sunday-first outlook. When the week begins with worship and rest, everything that follows gets cast in the light of grace and gratitude. Work becomes a subset of worship. We begin not with what we do but with who we are in Christ.

Are Sundays Special?

But Trevin, you say. Sundays aren’t that different anymore. So the calendar shift doesn’t matter that much. True, unfortunately. Even for many Christians, aside from an hour or so spent in church, the rest of the day slips into the same leisure activities as Saturday—or for some, becomes just another day of work at one of the countless places open all week long.

But the way we treat Sunday puts us out of step with our forefathers and mothers in the faith. The original consensus statement adopted by Southern Baptists nearly a century ago, The Baptist Faith and Message, not only devoted an entire article to the Lord’s Day but also specified what proper stewardship of Sunday looked like:

When the statement was revised in 2000, the last portion—about refraining from worldly amusements or secular employments—was dropped in favor of a generic appeal to “the Christian’s conscience under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.”

There’s no doubt the more recent version better captures the consensus of Southern Baptists today, but is the change an improvement? Is the absence of restriction—which coincides with a cultural shift away from treating Sundays as special—a sign of increasing faithfulness or cultural accommodation? I wonder if I’ve been too quick to treat Sunday just like Saturday but with a morning of churchgoing thrown in.

Why Sunday?

In A Brief History of Sunday, Justo González explains why Christians chose Sunday for public worship. It’s the Lord’s Day because it’s the start of new creation, when Jesus rose from the grave, a day that points forward to eternal rest and joy.

As Christianity influenced and shaped the culture, the merging of Sunday worship and Sabbath rest became commonplace, even for nominal and non-Christians, a sign of the gospel’s leavening effect.

The Calendar Teaches

A calendar teaches. I have a pastor friend whose family celebrates the Sabbath from Friday evening to Saturday evening, complete with candle lighting, liturgical recitation, and the absence of internet access from sundown to sundown. He leads his wife and kids as they enter the Sabbath. Their practice is deeply formative and instructive. Setting apart “a holy day,” wrote Marva Dawn, is one way the kingdom “reclaims us, revitalizes us, and renews us so it can reign through us.”

The calendar matters. During WWII, the Italian priest Don Gaetano Tantalo hid two Jewish families in his home and church for nine months. He facilitated their religious observance, even to the point of seeking out the special foods they’d need for the Seder. In Israel’s Museum of the Holocaust, there’s a piece of paper with numbers written down. It’s from 1944, and the numbers were calculations—Tantalo’s effort to quietly kept track of the Jewish calendar so his Jewish friends would know the dates of their holy days.

The calendar doesn’t only teach; it reveals. One reason the 12 Days of Christmas seems strange (decorations still up in January!) is because the “Christmas season” has been shaped by consumerism. I confess I’m a “deck the halls” early kind of guy, despite the warnings of Chesterton and others, but I understand and commend those who think it best to resist this cultural deviation by establishing counterformative practices.

Congregations are shaped by the calendar too. Churches that frown on the traditional Christian year—with its distinctive seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Eastertide, and Pentecost (and the marvelously titled “Ordinary Time”)—usually replace those great moments in the biblical storyline with cultural markers, mostly driven by consumer impulses: Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and the bookends of summer (Memorial Day and Labor Day).

No one claims there’s a divine command to follow the traditional church calendar, but let’s not underestimate the pedagogical power in how we mark time. Big government and big business recognize the calendar’s influence. Why else is there “Pride Month” if not to celebrate expressive individualism (transposed in the key of the sexual revolution) and thereby form and educate the citizenry on identities and behaviors now considered worthy of moral recognition and affirmation?

Back to Sunday

Calendars aren’t neutral. So when you notice the shift on your electronic device away from Sunday as the first day of the week, resist going along. Push back by changing your preferences. Even better, let’s give more thought to the way we inhabit the Lord’s Day.

We’re Christians. We follow King Jesus. We mark out one day a week—the first, not the last—to worship the risen Lord. We sing of his goodness and grace and trust his promise to return and blast away death forever. Sunday is his day. And he comes first.

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At the close of every year, I share a list of the books I most enjoyed reading during the calendar year. There’s usually a mix of theology, cultural analysis, biography, and fiction. Here’s hoping a few of this year’s favorite reads will make their way onto your Christmas wish list or provide good gift ideas.

Here are my picks for 2023.

#1. THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY
by Amor Towles

One of the best novels I’ve read in years, with memorable characters, a page-turner of a narrative, and some unforgettable scenes, including a frightening conclusion that paints in vivid colors the biblical teaching on your heart following your treasure. Duchess is one of the most lively and memorable fictional characters I’ve come across in literature. This is a coming-of-age story, where your understanding of the significance of the book’s events progresses along with the protagonist. 

#2. THE ESCAPE ARTIST
The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World
by Jonathan Freedland

In a time like ours—when despite decades of saying “Never forget,” it seems many in the world, even in the West, are dead set on not only forgetting the horrors of the past but repeating them—we need books like this one. Jonathan Freedland tells the incredible story of a man who escaped Auschwitz and shared the truth with the world, only to discover passivity and indifference in many cases. The story is true, which keeps Rudolf Vrba from becoming a one-dimensional hero. We see him in later life, with all his sins and missteps, resentment gnawing away at his relationships. A harrowing account of heroism that shines light on human frailty. I gave this book to my teenage daughter after I read it, and she couldn’t put it down either.

#3. TIM KELLER
His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation
by Collin Hansen

I lost a hero in late May when Tim Keller died of cancer [read my reflections]. Collin Hansen has done us all a great service by penning the first biographical treatment of Tim, which—true to form—focuses less on Keller himself and more on the influences that shaped the man he became and the legacy he left. Collin takes us through the major moments of Tim’s life, but always with an eye to the experiences, writers, and thinkers who formed Tim spiritually and intellectually. This is the only book on my list this year that I read twice.

#4. CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT
The Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania
by Paul Kenyon

Within the span of one century—from 1900 to 2000—Romania went from celebrating a monarchy, to sliding into a nationalist dictatorship, to fighting in WWII on the side of Germany before switching to fight on the side of the Allies, to deposing the monarch and installing a Communist regime, ending in a revolution that brought the birth pangs of freedom. From monarchy to fascism to Axis to Allies to Communism to free markets. All in one century. Paul Kenyon gives us a gripping historical overview of the tumultuous century experienced by the country my wife hails from, the place where I once made my home. This book traces the arc of Romania’s history while featuring the personal stories and testimonies of ordinary people. In this way, it never becomes a dry historical recitation of facts but instead helps the reader feel the promise and peril of the moment. Read my full review.

#5. WHY WE ARE RESTLESS
On the Modern Quest for Contentment
by Benjamin and Jenna Silber Storey

The highest-ranking book of philosophical reflection to make my list this year, Why We Are Restless provides a deep dive into four French thinkers—Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville—giving us the outline of their thought, the ways their philosophies react to each others’, and telling a story about their influence on society today. The Storeys know how to distill elements of these thinkers to their essence in an admirably brief span of pages. A profound and relevant book, I recommend it to anyone who wants to go deep with some of the most influential men who’ve ever lived. (On another note, the Storeys joined me for an interview on an episode of Reconstructing Faith this season to talk about Pascal, who incidentally occupied the number one spot on this list in 2019.)

#6. PAX
War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age
by Tom Holland

Tom Holland is one of the best history writers on the planet, and his newest book doesn’t disappoint. In Pax, he takes us through the ups and downs, twists and turns, of the Caesars who vied for power and prestige during the golden age of the Roman era. Not to be missed is his account of the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the eruption of Vesuvius and its aftermath. A history at once strange and fascinating, Holland’s book pulls us into a world simultaneously grotesque (Nero’s brutal treatment of a man he sought to turn into a woman) and glorious (the feats of Hadrian).

#7. THE LORD’S PRAYER, THE BEATITUDES
by Gregory of Nyssa

The oldest book on my list this year comes from Gregory of Nyssa. Long-time readers of my column may know I bring a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount with me on vacation every year and work through it during my morning devotions. This year, I picked one of the church fathers, and Gregory’s treatment of both the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes is striking in how relevant its application remains today. I underlined full paragraphs, nodded my head, felt pangs of conviction, and yet puzzled over some of the interpretative moves and conclusions. In the end, I was stimulated by this ancient author whose passion for purity of heart remains palpable to the contemporary reader.

#8. SILAS MARNER
by George Eliot

My daughter was assigned this novel from George Eliot this year, and as someone who never made it all the way through Eliot’s masterpiece Middlemarch (don’t throw stones!), I was fairly confident I wouldn’t care for Silas Marner either. But when my daughter raved about it, I decided to read it myself so we could discuss it. Not only was I not disappointed but I knew I’d have to include it in my top 10 list. Without giving anything away, I’ll just say . . . terrific characters, the biblical themes of justice and past sins being made manifest, and the truth of Jesus in saying what we treasure reveals our hearts—it’s all here. The other good thing about this book? For a classic, it’s short! Less than 200 pages.

#9. FAITHFUL DISOBEDIENCE
Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement
by Wang Yi (and others)

Faithful Disobedience [read my full review] isn’t the story of China’s tragic crackdown on Early Rain and other churches. It’s a collection of essays, pastoral letters, and conference talks that give you a glimpse into the theological perspective of this church and its pastor before the hammer fell. And this is the first time these resources have been made available in English. Some of the essays are academic. Others are pastoral or devotional. Read the book to be informed and inspired.

#10. SURPRISED BY DOUBT
How Disillusionment Can Invite Us into a Deeper Faith
by Josh Chatraw and Jack Carson

I hope this book gets a wide reading. It’s pastoral in all the right ways, gently guiding readers into the treasures of the Christian faith while recognizing the cross-pressures of a secular age that make it difficult to believe. Josh and Jack look not only at different ways of walking away from the faith but also at the many avenues for returning to, even deepening, one’s faith through the experience of disillusionment and doubt. The book deals with intellectual questions and challenges, warns us away from reactionary versions of Christianity, and helps us process the experiential side of seeking faithfulness in our world today.

HONORABLE MENTION

LAURUS
by Eugene Vodolazkin

I love novels that put me squarely in a world that’s foreign to me—religiously, temporally, culturally—and Laurus succeeds on this front, dropping the reader into 15th-century Russia in a time of plague and pestilence. It’s a remarkable book with thought-provoking images and scenes that lead to various interpretations. I’ve been pondering some of the themes since I finished the book (here’s just one example). 

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David Baddiel’s punchy little book The God Desire is an apologetic for atheism—not the kind of unbelief that disrespects religion and its benefits (Baddiel is Jewish), but still, a naturalist’s take on the world that says we’re better off dispensing with fantasies intended to shield us from death.

“I desperately want to believe in God,” he writes. “That’s why I know He doesn’t exist.” This is, in a way, the inverse of the argument we find in writers such as C. S. Lewis, who contended that the human longing for something beyond the material world suggests the existence of a transcendent reality that fulfills these innate desires. The experience of hunger indicates the reality of food.

Baddiel acknowledges his desire for God but leans on this experience to arrive at the opposite conclusion:

In other words, desire doesn’t provide the frame for reality. “The God Desire should not have to lead to the God Delusion,” he says (8). Your desire for water in the desert, after all, is what leads you to fall for a mirage.

Shield from Death

So why is the desire for God so widespread, Baddiel wonders. Why is it so strong?

We could point to what a divine being provides for human psychology. God offers story. “He storifies life,” Baddiel writes. And with story comes meaning—“a sense on an individual level, that your own narrative has significance: that it matters in some way” (9).

But these benefits flow downstream from the real reason the God desire is so strong: we’re scared to death of death. As we shrink back from death, we reach out to God as “an archetype, a super-projection, of a parent who can be both blissful and terrifying.” All the other psychological benefits are “spin-offs” from this primary reason. “Oblivion is the issue. Nothingness is the issue” (11). And Baddiel admits nothing freaks him out more than the thought of no longer existing—the extinguishing and annihilation of his life.

People are swayed by religious faith because of their fear of death. He mentions the Jewish funeral service that speaks of God swallowing up death, making it “disappear in the most visceral way, like a parent sucking a poisonous bite from a child’s arm.” He admires the idea that God would swallow up death forever even as he assumes this description of God’s power implies “the fragility of the belief underneath”—that perhaps death could reemerge to taunt us again (44). Christianity is effective because the story of Jesus is the “Greatest Story Ever Told”—a tale that “hits a lot of the correct commercial storytelling beats” (69).

In the end, though, we’re better off dealing with the bleakness of our future decay in the aftermath of death. We should plant our flag on this naturalist terrain. Believers find comfort in the idea of God, but does anyone really believe? When asked about atheists who are said to have recanted on their deathbeds, Baddiel shrugs: “It’s just a scream in the dark” (56). Religious or not, we’re all terrified of death, and so we cope in one way or another.

Wonder and Morality

What about religion’s other benefits—the beauty of the world, the moral frame of good and evil, or a sense of wonder at the mysteries of the world? Baddiel believes wonder is a distraction from a better path—being “obsessed only with truth.” Wonder is, like God, merely a projection, something we use to fill in the gaps when we lack understanding (51).

The more we progress in knowledge, the fewer mysteries remain. We’ll eventually understand even something as strange as dark matter, including its cause. In any case, “the fact that we don’t know stuff doesn’t mean that the stuff we don’t know is God” (48), he says.

Here, Baddiel’s line of thinking resembles that of the 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte who imagined the story of human ascent in various stages:

• In the first stage, people attributed mysterious events to the gods.
• The second stage was metaphysical, with abstract entities replacing the gods.
• The third stage is interpreting the outworking of nature in terms of natural laws.

As you can see, at each stage of human development, a supernatural explanation for something was replaced with something else. There used to be a “God gap,” but as those gaps continue to shrink, we’re right to hold out for a purely naturalist explanation for whatever we find mysterious.

Baddiel realizes the nonexistence of God undermines the basis for morality in our world. He doesn’t deny the societal implications of naturalism. He’d agree with Yuval Noah Harari and others who admit there’s no metaphysical grounding for an idea like “human rights.” Such a notion exists only in the fertile imagination of human beings. It’s an invention. Human rights are neither self-evident nor endowed by any transcendent Creator.

Yes, the denial of a transcendent source for morality might lead to moral collapse, Baddiel says, yet he takes pride in insisting on the truth anyway. Severe as the consequences may be, the truth is still the truth, whether we can handle it or not.

“Basically we’re all going to die and there’s no point to life and yes, The End,” Baddiel says. “I am bound to the truth. And the truth hurts. We can’t handle the truth” (86). All we can do is “laugh at our own futility,” to laugh in the face of our eventual nothingness, knowing that “the living are just the dead on holiday” (88).

‘You Can’t Handle the Truth’

David Baddiel is a terrific writer, with a penchant for smooth turns of phrases and a chatty, breezy style. He makes his case with panache and verve, never taking himself too seriously, perhaps partly because there’s no point in taking anything too seriously (with the world’s inevitable demise and everything).

And yet I see nearly every point of evidence Baddiel offers for his atheism as a reason for God.

• The nearly universal desire for God is merely an attempt to evade the horror of death, he says. But what if the nearly universal desire to evade death is an indication we were made for eternal life?
• We’ve invented God to shield us from the face of death, he says. But what if the modern world has invented atheism to shield us from the face of God?
• Our thirst leads us to fall for a mirage under the illusion that water is there, he says. But what if our thirst is so powerful that we can be fooled by a mirage when there really is a flowing stream somewhere?
• What was mysterious in the past has now been explained by science, he says. But what about all the new questions that every discovery elicits? How, the more we know, the more wondrous and intricate we see the world to be?
• Christianity is compelling because it’s just a great story, he says. But what if the story is compelling because it’s true, and what if we find it great because this is the truth we were made for?
• It’s best to come to terms with our mortality and laugh at the futility of life, he says. But how much better to laugh in the face of death, to taunt a defeated foe who has lost its sting?

David Baddiel’s The God Desire is a good-natured expression of what, as Charles Taylor pointed out, has become an axiom today: religious belief is childish, and the truly courageous will stare into the abyss of nothingness. “We can’t handle the truth!” But what if an obsession with truth, no matter the consequences, leads not to opposition to wonder but to wonder as its ultimate end? What if wonder isn’t a projection but a Person?

In a secular age, perhaps the greater courage comes not from the naturalist determined to stare down death but from the believer who peers into an empty tomb in Jerusalem and shivers at the incredible implications.

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The “Be true to yourself” and “You do you” slogans of expressive individualism show up everywhere these days. Even dangling from a tea bag.

One morning last week, I heated the kettle and got out my mug, tea, and stevia packet, preparing my first cup of the morning, and I noticed a small note attached to the string of the tea bag. “Trust your identity,” it said. “Be in touch with your reality.” An inspirational call to action, I suppose, with a little philosophy to kick off the day. And it got me thinking.

Tea Bag’s Call to Faith

“Trust your identity” is the tea bag’s call to faith. I’m the one who must decide what my identity will be. I must trust my decision, and I should express my faith in my identity to the world.

It’s interesting the tea bag didn’t say “Trust yourself,” which is the more common slogan. Self and identity may be similar these days, but the command implies they can be distinct in some way, separated from each other. We’re to choose our identity and trust we’ve made the right choice. It’s as if, after we’ve created the Instagram persona we feel most comfortable with, we’re told to trust the image we’ve decided to project.

The second piece of instruction on my tea bag provoked more thought than the first. “Be in touch with your reality.” This means I’m supposed to discover and remain connected to my reality. But what about, well, just reality? To lose touch with reality is to lose your mind. The deranged man is very in touch with his reality. It’s the real world—the reality outside himself and his own perspective—he’s lost contact with.

Ancients vs. Moderns

My tea bag exemplifies the contrast between ancient wisdom and contemporary thinking. The ancients believed the goal of life was to seek knowledge of the truth. Our choices in life are an important aspect of conforming our souls to a reality that’s bigger than and apart from us. There’s objective truth, goodness, and beauty. We grow as we pursue these realities.

Common sense today is the other way around. The goal of life is to seek your truth. Your choices in life are an important aspect of conforming reality to whatever you feel. The idea of bringing your identity in line with the real world has morphed into bringing the world in line with the real you. Gone is the notion you would conform yourself to the nature of things or submit to a revelation that comes from outside yourself. Your reality is at the center, and nature and religion must bend the knee.

Tea Bag Philosophy in Real Life

The clearest example of this way of thinking today is the debate over sex and gender. Trust your identity. (You are whatever you say you are.) Be in touch with your reality. (Don’t let anyone disconnect you from your own thoughts and experiences.) The only reason the term “gender confirmation surgery” makes sense is because so many people view the world through the framework of the tea bag’s philosophy: the alteration of the human body is a “confirmation” of the identity you’re called to trust, a medical attempt to conform the natural body so you can stay in touch with “your reality.”

Controversies about sex and gender may be the most obvious outworking of the tea bag philosophy, but we do ourselves a disservice if we fail to see its influence in other areas.

Take the diminishment of persuasion, for example. Civil debate has fallen on hard times. We’re increasingly mired in conflict without any tools to navigate the new world. How can we resolve conflict or discover creative solutions when everyone is striving only to be in touch with “their reality?”

Or consider the therapeutic impulse to privilege your interpretation of whatever takes place in a social setting. What matters most is your truth (a strange synonym now for your experience), even if your interpretation of reality is incorrect. If you feel someone has slighted you with the intention of causing harm, then your reality says this must be the case, even if the slight was truly unintentional. If you feel others are out to get you, then your reality will lead you to interpret all interactions with this defensive posture, even if the reality is the reverse. We become bound by our experiences, slaves to feelings that can’t be bothered by facts.

The tea bag philosophy has an effect on the church too. This way of thinking doesn’t make us give up on God. Instead, God gets roped in as a divine source of support for the identity we trust and the reality we want to be in touch with. God doesn’t go away. He blends into the decor, just one more item in the personal project of identity we’re building. Instead of conforming ourselves to God and his Word, we seek to bring his revelation into conformity with the desires of our hearts. We want him in the mix, but on our terms, as a bit player in our reality rather than the blazing center of all things—absolute reality itself.

Lost in a Haunted Wood

The tea bag philosophy is popular as an approach to life, but it’s powerless in helping us achieve lasting satisfaction. Trusting your identity doesn’t provide a strong enough source of self. Being in touch with your own reality doesn’t satisfy the longing to know a true, good, and beautiful reality—something bigger and better than anything you could dream up.

No wonder we see more and more people asserting their identities with ever more force, demanding recognition and affirmation. It’s because they feel their fragility. It’s as if we want to feel alive, to feel our own reality, and some of today’s controversies—even the pain we experience—at least give us the illusion of significance.

For others, the way to escape the world marked by the tea bag philosophy is one of distraction, a burrowing into our own individual “reality” so we don’t have to be confronted with the real world in all its glorious danger. And thus we become like those in W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1939”:

The tea is steeped now, the fragrance wafting through the air on this chilly morning. And as I take my usual place, kneeling on my prayer bench, with God’s Word in front of me, I sense the heart of Jesus: Trust me. Find your identity in me. Lose yourself and find yourself in me. I loved you into existence. I loved you all the way to the cross. I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. You want to be in touch with reality? I AM reality. Be in touch with me.

My thirst is slaked, and not from the tea.

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A few years ago, I was in London for a conference in honor of the greatest Baptist preacher of the 19th century, Charles Spurgeon. A highlight of that trip was visiting Spurgeon’s grave together with Susannah Spurgeon and her children.

Susannah is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Spurgeon. She’s a faithful believer whose family loves God and cherishes his Word. At the conference, as she addressed those in attendance, she revisited her great-great-grandfather’s account of his conversion, nearly choking up as she read about the night he was saved.

Visible Answer to an Old Prayer

As special as that moment was, nothing could have prepared me for the power of what came next. It was August 1. There we were in London, nearly 130 years after Spurgeon died, and Susannah decided to read one of the prayers he had composed for a devotional, dated that very day. Here’s what Charles Spurgeon prayed:

This was a prayer of Charles Spurgeon for his offspring, for his descendants yet unborn. When you read these words out loud, you can’t help but sense his yearning for the spiritual well-being of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He was praying for future generations.

Years have passed. Decades. More than a century. But there, in London, I listened to those words read by Spurgeon’s great-great-granddaughter—the living embodiment of God’s answer to those prayers from the 1800s.

For Future Generations

One of the Christian songs of the 1990s that has stuck with me is 4Him’s “For Future Generations.” It’s about the importance of holding on to the faith, no matter the cultural winds that blow, not only for the sake of those alive today but also for the generations to come.

Another song of that era expressed a similar sentiment—Steve Green’s “Find Us Faithful.” The lyrics paint a picture of those who have gone before us, the cloud of witnesses surrounding us as we run the race, cheering us on. The chorus then imagines the moment we’ll be in that cloud and the legacy we’ll leave for those who run the race in the future.

Both these songs are striking for the responsibility they place on the believer today. We must be a light. We must be faithful. How we live today matters for tomorrow. All this is true. But the emphasis in Scripture falls more on a holy desperation for God to be faithful to keep us and our descendants. Any faithful example we leave is due to the faithfulness of God in preserving us. And that reminds me of a song we find in Scripture.

Song of Zechariah

In Luke 1, the song of Zechariah (the father of John the Baptist) expresses joy in and gratitude for God as the One who keeps his promises. He celebrates God’s promised salvation through the line of David, singing for joy as if he’s fist-pumping the air because God is good to save his people from their enemies and from the hands of those who hate them. God is dealing mercifully with the people of Israel out of love for their ancestors.

Zechariah’s name means “God remembers.” Fitting, isn’t it? That’s why Zechariah praises God. God remembers you and keeps his promises to you. Even better, he keeps the promises he made to our ancestors, to those who’ve gone before us. God remembers every prayer your mom prayed over you, every prayer your grandfather made on your behalf, all the prayers godly men and women of old have prayed for their descendants.

In the late 300s, when Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, saw the fervency and tears with which Monica prayed for her son, he was so moved that he told her, “It is impossible that the son of so many tears should perish.” God answered Monica’s prayer and not only granted her son salvation but gave the church one of the greatest and most influential theologians to ever live: Augustine of Hippo.

Pray for Those Yet to Be Born

Even today, when we sing songs like “The Blessing,” with its call for God’s favor “to be upon us, and a thousand generations, and your family and your children, and their children, and their children,” we’re laying hold of the promises of God, trusting him not only for today but for those who will come tomorrow. And even for those of us whom God may not bless with children, we can still be fathers and mothers in the faith, making disciples who make disciples, with spiritual grandchildren and great-grandchildren who leave an eternal legacy.

If it’s true that God answers prayer, if it’s true that he keeps his promises, if it’s true that—in the words of the Puritan pastor Thomas Boston—“his promise chains mercies together,” perhaps we should widen our horizons, lifting our hearts to the Lord on behalf of all those who will follow in our footsteps. Like Spurgeon, we can pray not only for those alive today but for those who will run the race in the decades and centuries after us. We pray for those yet unborn to one day be born again. O Lord, save our children and our children’s children!

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I’ve been told by many an aspiring author they’ve got a book brewing inside them. More often than not, they’ve got a chapter. Or a blog post.

Sometimes it’s other people who’ve told them they should write a book. Someone has given them a great book idea. Still, this doesn’t mean there’s a book there.

Maybe that’s you. There’s something about the idea or practice of writing that’s appealing. You wonder if you’ve got something to say, maybe a book to write or an article that shares an insight you’ve not seen elsewhere. How do you know if you should write?

I’ve been in these conversations many times. When I sit down with writers, I either put on my publishing hat or my author hat. Sometimes, I switch between the two, having been on both sides of the conversation. I try to help them understand what goes into the writing process so they can uncover whether their idea would make sense as a book or perhaps as a good column, essay, or blog post.

Writing Starts with Reading

If you want to write and publish a book, you need to realize you’re entering a new world. That world must begin with a terrific proposal. And a proposal begins with other books.

Writing starts with reading. If you’re going to write well, you have to read, a lot. Samuel Johnson said, “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”

Once you read up on a topic of interest, you may start to see the outline of a book coming together. It’s not enough to see it in your mind though—you’ve got to see it mapped out in a proposal. And this is where you discover if you have enough content to fill a book.

For many, the book idea goes away at the proposal development stage. You find you’re not ready to write a book yet. But don’t fret. The growth you’ve experienced—the capacity you’ve cultivated in working on a proposal—isn’t wasted. Keep reading. Keep thinking.

The Platform Question

Most people I talk to aren’t interested in writing a book for their own sake. They want to write a book people want to read. The problem is, people are highly unlikely to pick up a book from someone they don’t know, someone without a track record. That’s why, especially these days, most writers have to go through the hard work of building a platform or establishing credibility before entering into a publishing agreement. Like it or not, publishers look for a platform or for credibility for an in-demand topic.

This can be the most discouraging aspect for a first-time writer, but it’s also where developing a rhythm of writing can make a difference. If you engage the habit of writing and start publishing your work to a blog or on social media, it’s possible you’ll serve a small audience. You may make connections with other writers or perhaps branch out to other online platforms. Your motivation, however, has to be service to others, not getting published.

Get Started; Keep Going

When I talk to aspiring authors, I never want to discourage them from writing. But I do want them to know what they’re getting into. I want to help them see if they have a good book idea or maybe an article instead. I also want them to understand the stamina required.

When a writer asks me about starting a blog or website, or posting brief thoughts on Facebook or Instagram, I respond with the same advice: plan out your first month prior to the launch. If you want to write three times a week, remember consistency is what matters. For a blog create 9-12 posts, two or three for each week of that launch month. Create your posts and schedule them as drafts before you launch a website. For other sites, create at least 15-20 examples of what you are hoping to do, long-term.

I could count on one hand the number of people who have actually gone through with this. Most find they have a couple of good articles in them, or a couple of Facebook or Instagram reflections, not the 10–12 articles a month they’d hoped for.

Oftentimes, writers start out with big aspirations for a big project. They want to blog twice a week from now on. Or they want to write a book in a couple months. They come to the work like first-time runners who set their sights on running a marathon before they’ve tried running a mile or two. It’s true in writing as well: you must walk before you run.

To write well, you’ll first write poorly, and you’ll write a lot. Training is required. Regular rhythms of writing matter.

Let’s face it: most of the time, writing is a slog. If you don’t see great metrics on your posts, you may get discouraged. Remember this: the point of writing regularly is the discipline, not the audience. It’s what it does for you as a writer that matters over the long haul. The point isn’t to go viral (bad writing can do that) but to grow in your skill. It’s like trying to run a marathon—you can’t hit the major goal without hitting a bunch of smaller goals first. You’ll become a better writer the more you practice and try to improve your craft.

Leverage Your Learning

Nobody sets the pace for your writing. Don’t compare yourself to the more prolific person you see over there. You’ll always find someone who writes better, or more frequently, or for more people than you do. Not everyone has to fulfill the same calling in writing frequency or length. Don’t normalize one writer’s output. Some are like Alexander Hamilton (“Why do you write like you’re running out of time?”), while others make one or two contributions and yet may still change people’s lives through what they’ve put on paper.

To sum up then, if you’re an aspiring author: (1) read everything you can on the subject that interests you; (2) begin writing often, even if few are reading your work; and (3) develop a full proposal with chapter outlines, summaries, and knowledge of other books in the same field. See where your discoveries take you. Keep honing your craft and remember: writing is learning. So don’t stop.

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C. S. Lewis died on November 22, 1963, a few days short of his 65th birthday.

We tend to see Lewis’s death at a relatively young age as a tragedy, especially when considering the longer life of his older brother, Warren (Warnie), who survived him by another 10 years. But Lewis, fully aware of his failing health, didn’t see his demise in tragic terms. The last months of his life provide a model of Christian contentment in anticipation of eternal happiness.

Decline

Lewis faced challenges to his health throughout his life, but in June 1961, he experienced nephritis, which resulted in blood poisoning, and this setback kept him from teaching during the autumn term at Cambridge that year. Though he returned in the spring of 1962, he wasn’t well. To one of the students under his supervision, he wrote,

Biographer A. N. Wilson blamed Lewis’s friend, the doctor Robert Havard, for his early death, claiming he failed to treat his maladies properly. But other biographers disagree with that assessment. Aside from the dietary restrictions Havard recommended throughout the 1950s (which Lewis never followed for long), there wasn’t much else a doctor could’ve done at the time.

Lewis drank an inordinate amount of black tea, and the correlation between caffeine consumption and high blood pressure hadn’t yet been established. Now-typical treatments for an enlarged prostate weren’t developed until after his death. And though some reports were sounding the alarm about the deleterious health effects of tobacco, there was no consensus at the time.

Summer of 1963

It’s a mark of human beings, Lewis once wrote, that they’re “wise enough to see the death of their kind approaching but not wise enough to endure it.” By the summer of 1963, Lewis was wise enough to see he wouldn’t enjoy a long life. He wrote a letter to Mary Willis on June 17, appealing to the Christian’s hope. “Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret?” he asked. “There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.” He signed the letter as “a tired traveller near the journey’s end.”

Later that month, Lewis wrote Mary again, painting a picture of one’s earthly time running out:

Lewis’s health worsened over the summer. His kidneys were no longer functioning properly. Blood transfusions helped, but dialysis treatment was still uncommon back then. Alarmed at his fatigue and loss of mental concentration, he went to the hospital for evaluation on July 15. As soon as he arrived, he suffered a heart attack and fell into a coma. The next morning, he was thought to be near death, and he received extreme unction.

But Lewis surprised everyone when he woke up at 2:00 that afternoon and asked for tea. In the following weeks, he slowly recovered, though he was sometimes confused.

Maureen Blake, the daughter of Mrs. Moore and the sister of his friend Paddy, visited Lewis in the hospital. The two had known each other ever since she was a little girl, and she had lived at the Kilns for a time. They’d not seen each other since Maureen had become an heiress—a surprising turn of events due to her unexpected inheritance of the estate of Sir George Cospatrick Duff-Sutherland-Dunbar, Baron Dunbar of Hempriggs, in Caithness, Scotland.

Lewis hadn’t recognized any visitors on the day she visited, so she entered quietly and said, “Jack, it’s Maureen,” to which he replied, “No. It’s Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs.”

Stunned, Maureen said, “Oh Jack, how could you remember that?”

“On the contrary,” he said, grinning, “how could I forget a fairy tale?”

Back to the Kilns

Once discharged from the hospital, Lewis returned to the Kilns. He was forbidden from using the stairs and was thus cut off from his bedroom and study. A bed was set up in the common room, and a male nurse stayed in the Kilns for six weeks as Lewis regained some of his strength.

Lewis was clearly too weak to continue teaching. He resigned his post at Cambridge with great sadness, and when he wrote his lifelong friend, Arthur Greeves, in September, he expressed disappointment in his brother Warnie’s absence. He “has completely deserted me,” he wrote. “I suppose, drinking himself to death.” He described himself as “an invalid” but also as “quite comfortable and cheerful.” His last letter to Arthur concludes with a cry: “But oh Arthur, never to see you again! . . .”

As summer turned to fall, Lewis described himself in letters as “an extinct volcano, but quite cheerful.” He seemed surprised and perhaps a little sad to have been so close to death only to be pulled back from the brink. He connected his experience with that of Lazarus, whom he’d earlier described as the protomartyr, the man who had to die twice. Looking through Lewis’s correspondence, one finds candid acknowledgment of his pitiful health alongside continual declarations of his “cheery” and “contented” spirit.

In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis had imagined evil forces at work in keeping people from facing their frailty. “How much better for us,” writes one devil to another, “if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence, and even if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition.” There was no such deception with Lewis. He faced his frailty and death in a manner consistent with his principles.

Warnie returned in October, taking responsibility for his younger brother during the last weeks of his life. Friends would sometimes stop by and visit or take Lewis for a ride somewhere. On a cool and sunny day that month, his friend George Sayer drove him along the London Road, up Beacon Hill, to see the beech trees in full fall color. “I think I might have my last soak of the year,” Lewis said as he stepped out of the car. A “soak” was the term he used to describe the joy of stopping to rest and soak in the beauty of creation after walking the countryside.

The Kilns as a Waiting Room

In his last weeks of earthly life, Lewis puttered around the Kilns (“I rarely venture further afield than a stroll in the garden,” he wrote), answering letters and revisiting his personal library. “I doubt whether I can ever leave this house again,” he wrote on October 29. “What then? I’ve just re-read the Iliad and never enjoyed it more, and have enjoyed to the full some beautiful autumn weather.” The next week, he reread Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Tennyson’s In Memoriam.

The Kilns had turned into a waiting room, a quiet refuge of refreshment as Lewis prepared to make the journey from this life to the next. He penned his last letter of spiritual direction on October 31, answering questions about the virgin birth, the glorified body of the risen Christ, atonement theories, and the wrath of God. In the days that followed, he kept up his correspondence, writing a young Kathy Kristy (later the wife of Tim Keller) twice in the weeks leading up to his death.

Last Week

Lewis’s last week of life was one of quiet activity. He met friends on November 15 at the Lamb and Flag (the pub across the street from the Eagle and Child), and Roger Lancelyn Green came to the Kilns that evening in time for dinner. Lewis was busy correcting the proofs for what became his last essay, “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’” for the Saturday Evening Post, a remarkably prescient analysis of society’s turn toward privileging “sexual happiness” above all else.

Later that week, J. R. R. Tolkien and his son John came by for a visit, choosing not to dwell on Lewis’s failing health in favor of a conversation about Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and the lives of trees. Lewis went to the Lamb and Flag for the last time on November 18, where he visited with Colin Hardie. Mostly, he stayed at the Kilns, awaiting his earthly departure and enjoying the company of his brother.

“The wheel had come full circle,” wrote Warnie later, harking back to those early years in which the brothers as little boys had clung to each other in sorrow, having experienced the painful loss of their mother:

On November 21, he wrote a kind and warm letter to a child, praising him for his “remarkably good letter,” thanking him for saying how much he enjoyed the Narnia books and promising to pass along a correction in one of the reprints.

November 22

Friday, November 22, 1963, followed the now-established routine. Lewis and Warnie enjoyed breakfast, dashed off a few letters to well-wishers, and then did the daily crossword puzzle.

After lunch, when Lewis fell asleep in his chair, Warnie suggested he’d be more comfortable in bed. Across the hall, the “music room” had been turned into Lewis’s bedroom now that he was no longer allowed upstairs. Warnie took him some tea at 4:00, finding him drowsy but comfortable.

At 5:30, Warnie heard a crash. Arriving in the bedroom, he found Lewis lying unconscious at the foot of the bed. “He ceased to breathe some three or four minutes later,” he wrote.

The news of Lewis’s death that afternoon was overshadowed by another event taking place at almost the same time—the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World also died that day. This strange confluence of deaths became the backdrop for Peter Kreeft’s magnificent Between Heaven and Hell, an imaginary conversation with all three men, standing in for three divergent worldviews, on the outskirts of heaven.

Legacy of Lewis in Dying

On November 26, 1963, a funeral for Lewis was held at Holy Trinity Church, where he attended most frequently. He was buried in the churchyard. A decade later, Warnie was buried with him.

The last months of C. S. Lewis, the renowned Christian apologist and storyteller, give us a poignant picture of the hope he championed with ardor: the promise of eternal life in the arms of God.

Lewis said goodbye to his closest friends, perhaps like Reepicheep as he headed over the wave in his coracle in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader—“trying to be sad for their sakes” while “quivering with happiness.” The joy—the stab of inconsolable longing—that animated his poetry and prose was on display in how he died, in those weeks of quiet rest, as he endured his physical maladies with patience and good humor, in full faith that this earthly realm is just a prelude to the next chapter of a greater story, a new and wondrous reality suffused with the deep magic of divine love.

Further up, and further in!

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One of my heroes in the faith, John Stott, made popular the idea of “double listening.” What we need, he claimed, is a Christian mind that’s “shaped by the truths of historic, biblical Christianity and also fully immersed in the realities of the contemporary world.”

Stott framed this call for double listening within the context of a “double refusal.”

Double Refusal

First, we refuse to escape from the world. We must not become so absorbed in our Bible study that the Word never comes into contact with the world. Second, we refuse to conform to the world. We must not become so enamored with contemporary events, trends, or theories that we fail to judge the world by the Word (or, worse, start to judge the Word by the world’s standards).

This double refusal means refusing the path of escapist retreat and the path of syncretistic conformity. Stott’s vision resembles the “missionary encounter” espoused by the missionary theologian Lesslie Newbigin. Both aspects—missionary and encounter—matter. Conformity with the world will lead to encounter without the missionary edge. Retreat from the world will lead to the illusion of purity but without an encounter with those we’re called to reach.

Need for Double Listening

Stott describes double listening as the positive side to the double refusal. He writes,

We listen first to the Word, but we listen also to the world so we become aware of how best to bring the Word to the world. Stott explains,

At his best, Tim Keller was a model of double listening. Rooted in Scripture, steeped in theological reflection from his reading of the Puritans and his engagement with the wider Reformed tradition, ever-curious about trends in society, and well-versed in literature and analysis from non-Christians, Keller brought biblical truth into contact with contemporary idolatries in ways that cut to the heart. It was double listening—careful attention to the Word and curious analysis of the world in light of the Word—that made Keller so effective.

John Webster’s Crucial Reminder

If I hesitate at all when it comes to Stott’s proposal for double listening, I do so not because of Stott but out of concern for the way the phrase can be misused. Listen to the Word and to the world can easily turn, for some, into the notion that one must do extensive study of the world before knowing how to hear and apply the Word. Whereas Stott’s vision begins with the Word and then seeks to apply the Word to the world, those who talk about double listening can assume a pastor or teacher is steeped in Scripture but then focus primary time and attention on the cultural analysis. The world gets more attention.

Here’s where John Webster, in his “Discipleship and Calling” lecture, offers a crucial reminder. He’s singing Stott’s song but in a different key, reminding us that our task must always begin with and continue an emphasis on the Word, not the world. The faithful church, he writes,

If the church is as trendy and excitable as the changing culture around it, the church will lose the ability to offer something truly distinctive—a stable steadfastness that comes from gazing at Jesus. As if to immediately anticipate the other pitfall Stott’s “double refusal” seeks to avoid, Webster clarifies,

No escapist retreat here! Webster’s point is that in listening to the world, the faithful church “will not be mesmerized or overawed by what is said.” The gospel is what mesmerizes us and fills us with all.

Attending to Jesus

Webster goes on:

This is why double listening is a never-ending process. We should never think we’ve completed the task of listening to the Word so we now can engage with the world. We must always return, again and again, to the Word, because it’s there we hear the gospel. We’re ever-learning the Word, ever-listening to the voice of the Shepherd. Listening to the Word is what will reveal the truth about the world.

The world spins. The Word stands.

The world is light and fleeting. The Word is weighty and everlasting.

For double listening to work, we must give the Word not only temporal priority but our steadfast attention. We look to the world but we gaze at Jesus, so that when we do engage the world, it’s truly the Word we bring.

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Often when we talk about temptation, our minds run to certain attitudes and actions that exert a magnetic pull on our hearts. We know the experience well: what it’s like to lash out in anger, to indulge a lustful fantasy, to take pleasure in words that cut down someone else, or to dwell on a wrong done to us, nurturing and nourishing a root of bitter self-pity.

When we think of temptation, we think of sin. We think of selfish impulses. And we hope to fight sin and temptation with the truth of God’s Word in the power of the Spirit.

Overlooked Temptation

But I wonder if, in all our good and godly resistance to particular sins, we sometimes overlook a far greater and all-encompassing temptation, a deeper source of selfishness, a disposition that matters for the direction of life. This temptation lies at the heart of other transgressions, with consequences far more profound than those of individual sins or petty attitudes.

It’s the temptation of godlessness.

I’m not referring to the atheist’s refusal to acknowledge God’s existence. Nor am I referring to spiritual or religious people who deny certain biblical teachings about God. I’m talking about the temptation to elbow God out of daily life, to push him out of the center, to live without reference to our Creator. We may still nod to him, of course, but he’s secondary. We shrink the Author of life to a footnote in a story we write ourselves.

It’s fitting to name this temptation “godlessness” because, even if we don’t deny God, we can live as if he doesn’t exist. He simply isn’t relevant for most of what constitutes daily life.

Absence of God

In our secularizing society, it isn’t the presence of sin that defines our culture but the absence of God. We’ve constructed a human-centered world where God is peripheral, flitting here or there at the edges of life, waiting to be summoned as a source of therapeutic benefit or comfort in distress but otherwise safely ensconced in a different realm from our day-to-day. We let God out of the prison of personal and private religion on occasion, but always on our terms. We’re safe from his bothering us, his impinging on our freedom, his interfering with our aspirations.

This is the great temptation of life in a secular age—to live as if God doesn’t exist, or to live as if the God who’s there is who we’ve made him out to be, not who he’s revealed himself to be.

Temptation for the Christian

If you’re a Christian reading this, you may nod and think, Yes, how terrible it is that so many in our world live as if God is irrelevant! But we mustn’t shield our eyes when the spotlight turns back on us. This temptation applies to the Christian and non-Christian alike.

How often do I as a Christian live as if God were absent? How often does the all-powerful “I” crowd out the Great I Am at the center of my thoughts and aspirations? How much of our worship, our gatherings and goings, our service and ministry is done without any real thought to the presence and power of God?

The church in a secular age faces the ever-present temptation to busy ourselves in all sorts of activity in the name of a God we rarely invoke aside from the pleasantries of our normal Christian lingo. We recite the Christian creed . . . as functional secularists.

Prayerlessness

The clearest sign we’ve succumbed to the temptation of forgetting or sidelining God is prayerlessness. The absence of prayer is what exposes and unmasks our self-sufficient spirit. The absence of prayer is what proves we see the “real world” as one of power, of politics, of work and leisure, or even of ministry—that we’ve accepted a dichotomy between the spiritual realm of churchiness and the earthly rough-and-tumble.

Meanwhile, the One who is realer than real—the God who strips away our illusions of grandeur and self-dependence—is set aside. Were we to truly see our need, our dependence on the One who has called us, we would summon his presence with quiet desperation, begging that he might allow us to taste and see his goodness, to experience the freshness of his tender touch alongside the white-hot fire of his holiness.

Sidelining God

The deadliest temptation in a secular age, for the Christian and non-Christian alike, is the sidelining of God. The more we push God to the periphery, the more we take center stage. It’s our activity that matters. Our goals and aspirations. Our strategies. Our techniques. Our purposes. Our plans. We lose eternal perspective because the Eternal One plays only a supporting role. And thus the things we think are most important in life are never shown up as the nothings they are, and the One who is everything remains hidden.

The sidelining of God, as demonstrated by the absence of fervent prayer—surely this is the great temptation of our times.

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It goes without saying these days. The church should be a place of mercy and kindness in a world of constant judgment, a refuge of compassion in a world of cruelty, a source of clemency in a time of canceling. Yes to all this. It’s a mark of the church to embody a fierce commitment to welcoming sinners and exalting the Father who lavishes grace on the prodigal.

But what form should mercy take? What does mercy look like? What does it require?

In an era of expressive individualism in which the purpose of life is to find and express yourself, and in a time when we often turn to therapy to help us sort out the problems we face or look to our past and environment to better understand the sins we’ve committed, the aspiration to “be a place of mercy” or to “show compassion to sinners” is vague. Only the sinner fits into the frame. Mercy toward the sinned-against disappears. And even mercy toward the sinner gets diluted.

Sinful Split

Consider a local church where a small group leader leaves his wife for another woman in the congregation. His wife is heartbroken, his children crushed. Nothing is done in the church. There’s no response to the man’s sin. When asked, the pastor talks about the need to extend mercy toward those who mess up.

Later, the man goes through counseling and attributes his adultery to his environment growing up. He regrets the hurt he’s caused, but he doesn’t think he’s to blame. Two years go by, and the man and his new wife attend the same church, and he’s hoping to lead his small group again. The pastors in the church want to show compassion, so they celebrate the new marriage and reinstall him as a teacher.

Meanwhile, the children dealing with the aftermath of their father’s sin watch him across the aisle, an upstanding church member once again, sitting every Sunday with a woman who isn’t their mother. The woman whose life was upended sits alone. Anyone who questions the injustice of it all is told to be more compassionate—less rigid when it comes to discipline and moral standards.

In this case, Christianity has been reduced to “mercy” for the sinner, absent the corresponding call to holiness and Christlikeness. The cross that’s preached is one nobody is ever called to carry.

Dostoevsky and the Environment

Gary Saul Morson points to an essay from Fyodor Dostoevsky titled “Environment,” in which the Russian novelist opposed the idea that “mercy” means tracing all sins and crimes back to one’s environment. Blame-shifting for sin is a perennial challenge: Society is at fault for forming me this way. The wounds of my past are the reason I’ve wounded others. My wrongdoing is the result of my circumstances.

Dostoevsky described the state of Russian juries that exhibited a “mania for acquittal.” He mentions a peasant recently acquitted after brutally beating his wife in front of their daughter. The man’s humiliating treatment of his wife was sadistic. He’d starve her while leaving out bread and forbidding her to touch it. He’d hang her upside down in the house as he beat her. After enduring such ghastly torture, the woman hung herself. “Mama, why are you choking?” asked their little girl.

The jury found the peasant guilty of the crimes, yet still recommended clemency. Why? Because the poor peasant must be understood in context, as a product of his environment. It was the “backwardness, ignorance, the environment” ultimately responsible for his egregious behavior. Therefore, the jury said to show the peasant “mercy,” and his daughter was returned to him.

Dostoevsky was appalled. How could environment alone explain such behavior? After all, millions of peasants in poverty don’t treat their wives this way, he said. What kind of mercy is this?

Ennobling Mercy

Dostoevsky contrasts the jury’s clemency with Christian teaching about the nature of man. Yes, we can acknowledge and account for someone’s social environment and circumstances when considering their wrongdoing. And yes, a fuller understanding of someone’s background, or the wounds and suffering in the past, may lead us to sympathize at some level. The environment matters. But Christianity “still places a moral duty on the individual to struggle with the environment, and marks the line where the environment ends and duty begins.”

It isn’t merciful to reduce someone’s choices to their environment or upbringing. “The doctrine of the environment reduces him to an absolute nonentity,” Dostoevsky writes, “exempts him totally from every personal moral duty and from all independence, reduces him to the lowest form of slavery imaginable.” This kind of “mercy” dehumanizes the sinner, removes moral agency, and reduces one’s choices to social formation.

By contrast, Christianity—in holding people responsible for their actions—ennobles the sinner. Christianity affirms the value of human life and the reality of human freedom. Holding someone accountable is an aspect of showing mercy, of saying, You are a man and not a beast.

Takeaway for the Church Today

Self-righteousness carries a stench, and we’re right to root it out of our hearts and communities. The church is to be a place of mercy and love. The Bible’s vision of mercy and love, however, is expansive, not reductionist. We don’t pit mercy against justice, or compassion against doctrine, or grace against morality.

Christianity teaches that we’re designed by God. We have a destiny, a telos. We make choices within a moral framework designed to help us become what God has called us to be. Mercy doesn’t suspend morality. Compassion doesn’t dispense with doctrine. Kindness doesn’t attribute all our sinful acts to wounds in our past. Grace doesn’t keep us from making judgment calls.

True mercy extends forgiveness toward those who have engaged in real moral wrong. True mercy treats people as more than products of their environments. True mercy doesn’t excuse or minimize sin. True mercy ennobles us, reminding us of our glorious calling toward righteousness, while taking into account the need for compassion toward those who’ve been hurt by our sin.

Beware the mercilessness that masks itself as mercy.

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A few weeks ago, a video clip made the rounds on social media of John Piper responding to a question about a believer who says, “I’m not walking away from Jesus, but I’m done with the church,” after an experience of church hurt or failure in leadership. While not ruling out the choice of a believer to walk away from a particular congregation, Piper stressed the impossibility of thinking someone could follow Christ and leave the church altogether. “To walk away from the church is to walk away from Christ,” he said.

That this statement was controversial says something about our contemporary, individualistic context. It’s true we’ve experienced a season of rot and corruption being exposed in a number of high-profile churches, so it’s not surprising that some might conclude a personal relationship with Jesus is what matters most, to the exclusion of organizational Christianity in all its messiness. In a survey from a decade ago, a minority of self-identifying Christians claimed the church was essential to one’s faith.

Church as Mother

But if you zoom out of our contemporary Western setting, you find that Piper’s comments about following Jesus and belonging to the church are standard fare for nearly all Christians around the world today, as has been the case for nearly all of church history. Cyprian of Carthage (AD 210–58) is the one who said you cannot have God as your Father unless you have the church as your mother, a statement reiterated by the reformers, including John Calvin who pointed to the motherly terminology as a sign of “how useful, indeed how necessary” the church is for believers (Institutes 4.1.4).

We can go back even further, to the New Testament itself, to see this connection between following Christ and belonging to his people. The church is the body of Christ (Rom. 12:4–5; 1 Cor. 12:12; Eph. 1:23; Col. 1:24). It’s impossible to cling to the head of Christ without doing the same to his body.

The apostolic letters assume the first Christians were committed to each other in covenantal fellowship, and since the author of Hebrews commands believers to gather (Heb. 10:25), it’s a contradiction to claim to follow Jesus and yet disregard the apostolic instruction. An unchurched Christian, as John Stott pointed out, is “a grotesque anomaly. . . . The New Testament knows nothing of such a person.”

Disappearing Agency in Dechurching

The recent dustup over Piper’s comments on walking away from the church has helped crystallize some thoughts I’ve entertained for a couple of years now, an aspect of the discourse on dechurching that bothers me. I discussed it briefly on an episode of Reconstructing Faith with Megan Hill.

In the way we talk about dechurching, it seems like personal agency disappears. We talk as if dechurching is a phenomenon that just happens, much like a snowstorm or hurricane blowing through and leaving the landscape changed. The reality is, dechurching is the result of personal choices extended over time. Dechurching doesn’t happen to someone, as if people are passive spectators. Leaving the church is something people do.

The statistics in The Great Dechurching demonstrate that the decision to leave the church, for many, isn’t always conscious. For a good number of people who’ve dropped out of church, the process is like a slow leak in a tire, or drifting away due to a change in life circumstances, inconvenient schedules, and superficial relationships. There may never be a conscious choice to “walk away.”

Still, dechurching requires decisions. We choose to invest our time in something other than our local congregation. We put off the decision to join a local church when we move to a new town. We prioritize other activities over worship with other believers. We leave a fellowship if we experience hurt and distress there, and we choose not to look for another church where spiritual healing might be found.

Dechurching doesn’t just happen to us, as if we have no moral agency. Thinking you can pursue the Christian life on your own, apart from a local body of believers, isn’t only wrongheaded; it’s wrong. It’s disobedience to King Jesus. By removing the moral frame of dechurching, we do a disservice to believers who need to be wooed back into community.

Moral Problem of Churchlessness

I can hear the howls of protest already—as if insisting on church membership is just another way to minimize, justify, or excuse the abominable behavior of some who claim the name of Christ. Let’s be clear about the rot in the church. God will not be mocked. He will deal justly with bad shepherds who misuse his name to commit atrocities and prey on his precious flock. No sin against his people goes unnoticed.

I sympathize with those whose experience in the church has left them spiritually battered and bruised. But most of today’s dechurching is the result of our wayward hearts, not church leader scandals. The human heart tends toward sin, and when we walk down a disobedient path, we’re inclined to rationalize our direction and decisions. “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,” the old hymn goes. Most of us haven’t borne the brunt of church scandals, at least not personally, which means if we rely on these stories as the reason for our churchlessness, it’s likely we were searching for the slightest justification to do what we wanted in the first place.

Road to Unbelief

Matthew Lee Anderson points to a letter J. R. R. Tolkien wrote his son who had written to him about his “sagging faith.” Tolkien acknowledged the church’s sins and failures and how corruption might weaken a believer’s devotion, but he warned against the temptation to find in the church’s scandals a “convenient” opportunity to “turn our eyes away from ourselves and our own fault to find a scape-goat.”

Leaning on the work of historian Philip Jenkins, who claimed it wasn’t the church’s transgressions that sped up secularism but a rapid secularization that looks for more church scandals, Anderson comments,

We think people are leaving the church today because of all the church scandals. But it’s possible we hear more about church scandals today because people seek to justify their decision to leave.

Church as Glorious and Complicated

Why is the New Testament so insistent on gathering with believers in covenant fellowship? Perhaps it’s one way we’re inoculated against the Docetist heresy that said Christ only appeared to have a body when he was actually just a spiritual being.

C. FitzSimons Allison writes,

The Christian needs the church. Working out our salvation with fear and trembling is a corporate exercise (Paul’s instruction is plural), not an individualistic pursuit (Phil. 2:12–13). We must not lose sight of worship as the most important thing we do—our duty and our joy. To gather and celebrate the risen Lord on the morning of the first day of the week is to say something about the nature of the universe, to align our hearts with the wonder at the heart of the world, to give testimony to the still-glimmering truth of King Jesus crucified and raised.

Jesus remains committed to us, no matter our many sins. Perhaps it’s our call to match today’s church scandals with a scandalously determined commitment to Christ’s people.

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In Christianity Today, Sophia Lee has written a 5,000-word essay, simultaneously inspiring and illuminating, on the migration crisis in Colombia. She describes the Simón Bolívar International Bridge from Venezuela and the thousands of migrants making their way into Colombia since 2015, and she reports on how churches have responded to the humanitarian needs at their doorstep.

Lee’s report focuses on a pastor who sensed the Lord telling him to feed the hungry and give water to the thirsty, and who did just that while also renting a bus to bring them to church. In spite of their financial hardship, the pastor and his wife followed the Lord’s prompting, and they’ve seen a thriving ministry of compassion at the border, where they meet physical needs and share the gospel.

C. René Padilla and Holistic Mission

What makes Lee’s article compelling isn’t just the firsthand stories of churches meeting the needs of neighbors in distress but also the additional context she provides. The dominant perspective on the breadth of the church’s mission among evangelicals worldwide (what’s often called holistic or integral mission, encompassing both evangelism and social ministry and justice) is due in large part to the influence of Ecuadorian theologian C. René Padilla, who argued that evangelism and social responsibility are “inseparable” and “essential” to the Christian mission.

Padilla came of age as a migrant in Colombia, and in an era of social unrest, he urged evangelicals worldwide to develop a social ethic that would neither compromise with Marxist solutions nor accept a dichotomy between “spiritual” and “earthly” mission that leaves pressing political and cultural questions unanswered.

Although the holistic understanding of the church’s mission, as expressed by the Lausanne Movement, has become dominant, tensions remain among evangelicals globally. John Stott and Billy Graham, though disagreeing at one point about what the focus should be for Lausanne, believed Christians were called to both evangelism and social action, with the priority given to evangelism.

David Hesselgrave describes this position as “restrained holism” because it attempts to preserve the traditional priority for evangelism while elevating social action. Evangelism and social action are made to be more or less equal partners, although a certain priority is reserved for evangelism.

Other analogies and words have been adopted to describe the relationship between evangelism and social work. If the right word for evangelism isn’t “priority,” then “ultimate” might be best to describe the aim for personal conversion. Or we might say evangelism is like the hub of a wheel, with the spokes representing the different ways gospel faithfulness is worked out in compassion and justice as the church engages with the world. Shift the frame in a temporal/eternal direction and you see why, in Cape Town in 2010, there was discussion at Lausanne about Christians working to alleviate all human suffering and especially eternal suffering (thereby putting weight on the need for evangelism with eternal stakes).

Maintaining Emphasis on Evangelism

The worldwide evangelical consensus on holistic mission differentiates the movement from the dichotomies and dualism of fundamentalists who, in response to the “social gospel” of modernism, gave nearly exclusive attention to Word-based evangelism and saw social ministry as a possible distraction from the church’s true mission. But the evangelical view of holistic mission also stands out from the World Council of Churches and other mission movements that eventually baptized humanitarian aid and sociopolitical agendas with Christian lingo and a quasi-universalist or inclusivist position that displaced evangelism altogether.

Yet the tension remains. At times, some evangelical churches fail to address the situation of neighbors in need, thinking their only task is to speak to spiritual maladies. To this, in the 1970s, Padilla said, “There is no place for statistics on how many souls die without Christ every minute if they do not take into account how many of those who die are victims of hunger.” Meanwhile, other evangelical churches devote themselves to ministry among the needy but eventually lose sight of proclaiming the cross and urging people to trust in Jesus and follow him.

Some thinkers wish the differentiation could be done away with altogether, with the Christian responsibility to evangelize and do works of mercy being seen as equally vital, with no distinction between obedience in meeting spiritual versus physical needs. In his essay “Evangelism and Social Responsibility: The Making a Transformational Vision,” Al Tizon laments the tendency among some evangelicals to affirm social ministry “with a caveat.” He thinks prioritizing spiritual needs or qualifying our call to meet physical needs only perpetuates a dichotomy that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

I disagree. While we should take care not to set forth a reductionist understanding of humanity by splitting up “body” and “soul,” as if the needs of one could be divorced from the other, we find biblical warrant for prioritizing the eternal over the temporal. In Jesus’s ministry, we see him meeting needs both physical and spiritual. He feeds people in the wilderness yet then delivers the Bread of Life discourse and distinguishes between the bread that perishes and the bread that lasts (John 6). We see him healing a paralytic yet then forgiving sins (Mark 2:1–12). We hear him warn about gaining the world while losing our souls (8:34–38).

We Can’t Assume Evangelism

Sophia Lee’s article is commendable in how it shows Christians meeting needs. The latter two-thirds of her report shows churches getting more involved in compassion and relief work and thus rejecting the dualistic tendency to focus only on “saving souls.” Yet most of Lee’s report covers the economic uplift for migrants and the personal sense of spiritual transformation and purpose that believers experience when they get involved in social ministry.

I’ve seen this happen before: a Christian or church that failed to serve the community well gets a vision for making a difference, discovers a newfound spiritual enthusiasm for serving in Jesus’s name, yet over time loses the earlier emphasis on calling people to personal faith. It’s as if once the holistic vision is embraced, the “saving souls” part of Christian mission gets assumed while the social ministry aspect gets attention.

This is an ongoing concern I have for evangelicals (like myself) who agree with the evangelical consensus and espouse a holistic vision of mission, even if it’s the restrained type that prioritizes evangelism. Unless we continue to give weight to gospel proclamation in our understanding of the church’s mission, we’re likely to lose our prophetic and evangelistic urgency.

Padilla was right. If we fail to meet the physical needs of neighbors in distress in favor of keeping a spiritual-only mission of gospel proclamation, we run the risk of being like the priest and the Levite who passed on the other side of the wounded man left for dead. But Padilla’s critics had a point too when they warned about the possibility—as demonstrated throughout Christian history in multiple churches and movements—of social work and action sidelining personal evangelism and urgent calls to repentance and faith.

We’ve been given a holistic mission that secures our eternity and frees us to invest in the temporal world. But we can never allow our attention to temporal compassion ministry to supplant our concern for the eternity-focused ministry of gospel proclamation.

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Across the left-right spectrum today, we find commentators chattering away about the crisis of manhood—a quest for significance and identity among men who seem lost and lonely in our strange new world. In Of Boys and Men, cultural observer Richard Reeves calls out the negative views often associated with masculinity. “The problem with men,” he writes, “is typically framed as a problem of men. . . . It is men who must be fixed, one man or boy at a time.”

Many today seem to view masculinity as a problem rather than a gift. Masculinity is a word now synonymous with descriptors like “toxic” and “problematic” instead of a glorious and courageous calling—leadership that comes from an inner sense of security and steadfastness.

Questions for Our Time

What happens in a society where markers of manhood, the passing from adolescence into adulthood, become obscured, where men stagger forward without mentors or friends?

What happens to a society that pathologizes competition, achievement, roughness, and the aggression required to protect the weak or pursue what’s good?

How does it make sense to push back against toxic expressions of masculinity without a clear picture of actual manliness, a positive vision that shatters the caricatures?

Role of the Church

In the third episode of season 2 of my podcast Reconstructing Faith, “Boys to Men, for Mission,” I point out how some churches seem to have fallen for a self-centered script of manhood, dressing up all sorts of wrongheaded, worldly notions of masculinity with Christian wrapping paper so as to make the church more attractive to men.

Meanwhile, other churches can rail so much against wrongheaded notions that they fail to offer a better vision, leaving men with the impression they’ve got to sacrifice something of their true, God-given masculinity at the door to be a faithful Christian. As if imitating Jesus makes you somehow less of a man.

The church could take a different path, giving our ailing culture a vision of a positive, glorious, biblical masculinity that’s in harmony with man’s nature. Yes, masculinity gets twisted and distorted by sin, but there’s a real and enduring good there—an aim to pursue. If the church is going to respond wisely to the challenges facing men today, we’ll need to get a better picture of what masculinity is aiming for.

Characteristics of a Holy Man

John Seel and I have sparred on different topics over the years, yet even amid disagreement, I always come away from our discussions sharpened. John has been pondering the crisis of masculinity in our society, and I found his recent article with Jeremy Schurke compelling. They’re doing constructive work as they think out loud about what it means to be a holy man.

Not everything in their list of 18 characteristics applies only to men, of course, but I appreciate their tentative proposal—their desire to paint a picture of a consecrated man of God on a mission. We’re going to need more imagination, not less, as we seek to offer a compelling vision for Christian men in the future. I’ve summed up the characteristics below.

• A Holy Man possesses wild eyes. As a citizen of another world, he takes initiative as a difference maker—unsettled, yet with an entrepreneurial drive that sees beyond what is to what can be.
• A Holy Man moves mysteriously. His pervasive dependence on God and his otherworldly orientation demonstrates he’s “set apart,” or as was said of Dallas Willard, “he lives in another time zone.”
• A Holy Man reveres the sacred everywhere. Life is an adventure of holistic not compartmentalized discipleship, with the purity of heart to “will one thing” (as Kierkegaard said).
• A Holy Man establishes rituals, disciplines, and traditions. He gives attention to daily routines and details, recognizing how habits shape his life and character.
• A Holy Man walks a spiritual pilgrimage. He trusts that his destiny as a man, joined to Jesus his King, is a story unfolding by the sovereign hand of God.
• A Holy Man abides in God. He seeks a consistent and transformative friendship with God, who provides power for the Christian life.
• A Holy Man seeks a spiritual father. He deliberately chooses close friends and a mentor—all of whom speak into his priorities and direction.
• A Holy Man fulfills a life mission. His life is an ongoing answering to God’s call, direction, and authority over him. His life mission is to uncover God’s calling and faithfully walk in it, exercising godly authority in the spheres where he has influence.
• A Holy Man leaves a legacy. He invests time, talent, and treasure in and for others, seeing his life within the larger story of God’s kingdom advancing.
• A Holy Man seeks kindred spirits. He draws close to others who call him up to his best self and spur him on as he experiences the burden and responsibility of his calling.
• A Holy Man catalyzes a tribe. He relies on others by creating a dense network of people who share in the causes that animate his life.
• A Holy Man is a savage servant. He leads by serving, putting others first, sacrificing himself, and committing his best to a team.
• A Holy Man fosters emotional intelligence. He works effectively with others through increased self-awareness, empathy, and interpersonal sensitivity.
• A Holy Man burns with the fire of a poet and walks with a limp. He ignites the imaginations of others, casting vision while being honest about his failings, leading from a place of love and suffering.
• A Holy Man is a perpetual student. He embarks on a quest for knowledge and wisdom that expand the mind and heart.
• A Holy Man takes his body seriously. He’s comfortable in his own skin—committed to taking care of his body, in pursuit of the virtue of chastity, determined to treat others with honor in a world where people are too often objectified.
• A Holy Man is consciously countercultural. He appreciates the goodness of creation and mourns the distortion of sin, and he’s willing to take a lonely, courageous stand for truth, goodness, and beauty.
• A Holy Man becomes a saint. He’s committed to a lifelong process of growth, formation, and development, being consciously set apart for God as a poet, warrior, and monk. He has a vision of becoming like Jesus by being an apprentice of Jesus—to walk in his ways and love as he loves.

This is a good start in painting a portrait of a man committed to Jesus Christ. We do well to imagine a positive vision of manhood; to appreciate and encourage men in the silent yet heavy burdens they carry; to paint a picture of fatherhood, both physically and spiritually; and to help men step into their inheritance as sons of God who carry the mantle and high calling to serve the world that Jesus gave his life for.

Men must aim at this vision: to love our neighbors and fight for their good, to love our wives self-sacrificially and without restraint, to instruct our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, to set aside the sins that entangle us and run the race with endurance, trusting that the Lord will help us leave a legacy for those who come behind us.

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Not long ago, I was preaching a portion of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and because in the passage Jesus talked about eternal judgment, I did too. I didn’t patronize the congregation by tiptoeing around the uncomfortable truths that came from the lips of our Lord. If he thought it mattered to warn his listeners away from the broad path that leads to destruction, to insist we can’t serve both God and money, and to remind us that anger and lust lead to hellfire, then how could I as a follower of Jesus and a preacher of his Word do anything but pass on the message—no matter how terribly it falls on contemporary ears?

After the service, a woman visiting the church told me it was the first time in forever that she’d heard any pastor anywhere mention hell. She thanked me for saying it out loud. She almost whispered the word, as if it had lost its power due to overuse as a curse word but still remained something of a secret, a reality the faithful know is part of orthodox Christianity yet that remains a destination of which we must not speak.

All this made me wonder, How can anyone preach Jesus without mentioning judgment? How do you deal with his parables? With his constant and consistent warnings about perdition? With his either-ors and contrasts? Even if you fashion yourself a “red-letter Christian” who waves off Paul and the other apostles, you can’t miss the red letters that warn about destruction and losing your soul, images of a worm that won’t die and a fire that never goes out.

Goodbye, Satan

Closely related to the absence of hell is the disappearance of Satan. In many circles, it’s rare to hear a word about the Devil or demons or powers and principalities that wage war against God and his people. Satan has gone missing. Yes, he shows up in charismatic or Pentecostal churches, but in evangelical denominations whose ranks are increasingly affluent and educated, we squirm when we encounter what Jesus and the apostles say about the Accuser.

I know there are pastors who want to avoid the exaggerations prevalent in other faith traditions, where demons peek out behind every problem, where Satan’s influence gets overstated in ways that warp the biblical witness. Better to go the way of understatement, right? The only obstacle to this approach is the Bible. Well, not just the Bible, but also church history. And, well, our brothers and sisters in the global South. So basically, the Bible . . . and all believers before us and most believers around us.

We’re the outliers, our silence supposedly sophisticated.

Ripple Effects of Satan’s Disappearance

Here’s the problem. If you’re not talking about Satan, you’re probably not talking about sin and salvation in ways that go beyond therapeutic, secular categories of doing whatever’s good for you versus what’s bad for you.

If you never mention hell, you’re probably not sharing the gospel with any sense of urgency but just calling people to a better and more fulfilled way of life, which is basically what everyone everywhere is doing too, from the Instagram influencer to the Buddhist down the street.

If you never talk about demons, you probably don’t think often about angels either, which signals an impoverished imagination, a disenchanted view of the universe that rarely considers the spiritual and unseen realm that the Bible says is real, the ancient church affirmed, and the global church insists still matters.

What’s more, an anemic view of angels, demons, Satan, and hell puts us at a disadvantage when we fight sin, when we seek to worship God aright, and when we pursue the purity of heart by which we come to know and love God more. The loss of Satan means a change in the context of the Christian life, a transfiguration of the spiritual battlefield into a place of peacetime comfort and fulfillment.

Diminishing of Eternal Stakes

The problem with lowering the eternal stakes of Christianity is that we wind up raising the stakes on lesser matters. If we don’t accept the life-or-death urgency that Jesus and the apostles convey in their teaching, we’ll insert life-or-death urgency into other challenges, making earthly problems appear bigger than they are.

And that’s just what we see in the church in the West. When we lose a cosmic perspective, and when we stress only those aspects of life that involve “this world” and downplay the reality of future judgment, we lose the hope of eternal justice, which means earthly justice is all that’s left. Unless we achieve total justice here and now, we’ll never see it, which makes every pursuit of justice in this world a life-or-death struggle. In search of something to care deeply about, we’re enthralled by a myriad of lesser battles rather than the main war that rages on. Once we lose sight of the great drama, the earthly stakes of little dramas are raised.

Do We Sound Like Jesus?

I don’t recommend we speak about Satan, hell, angels, and demons with no self-awareness, giving little thought to how these realities might come across to people today. Contextualization matters. That’s why God gave us preachers to expound on his Word rather than just read it out loud. What’s needed is a careful explanation of what the Bible teaches, acknowledging the cultural distance while inviting people into a different way of seeing the world.

But even when we show great care and consideration, we will not remove the weirdness of it all. Nor should we try. The strangeness is what stands out.

If we’re to be heralds of Jesus who imitate and proclaim him, then we must grapple with everything he said, even the parts that make us uncomfortable today—his double offensiveness toward anyone whose self-righteousness fails to extend the grace and mercy of God or anyone whose sophistication sneers at warnings about judgment.

It’s possible for a church to be orthodox and adhere to a sound confession of faith yet fail to give weight to what the Bible emphasizes. It’s possible to check off the right doctrines yet fail to treat them with the gravity they deserve.

One of the easiest ways for the Enemy to dull the senses of believers today is for pastors to preach true things about Jesus while failing to ever sound like him.

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“Guilt has not merely lingered. It has grown, even metastasized, into an ever more powerful and pervasive element in the life of the contemporary West,” writes Wilfred McClay in his seminal essay “The Strange Persistence of Guilt.” This growth of guilt has taken place “even as the rich language formerly used to define it has withered and faded from discourse, and the means of containing its effects, let alone obtaining relief from it, have become ever more elusive.”

One might think in an increasingly secular society that when God goes away, so does guilt. But the reality is the reverse. When God goes, guilt has nowhere to go. It pools. Like a patient with internal bleeding, there may be no signs anything is amiss. But the danger remains.

Idealism and Identity Politics

As a fan of long Russian novels (Dostoevsky is my favorite, alongside Tolstoy, Turgenev, and the more recent writers Solzhenitsyn and Vodolazkin), I’ve been working my way through Gary Saul Morson’s new book Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. This is Morson’s lifework, the capstone after decades of teaching Russian literature, hours of study and wisdom now distilled into a textbook.

Early on, Morson describes three types you often find in Russian literature: the wanderer, the idealist, and the revolutionary. His chapter on the idealist reminded me of some of the middle-aged and younger activists for social justice in the United States today.

The “disappointed idealist,” Morson writes, feels unresolved guilt for unmerited privilege. They see the world as divided up into categories of oppressed and oppressor, and while Russian literature focuses on economic and social class distinctions, today’s debates in the West focus more on race and gender. There’s an outstanding debt that must be paid if we’re to improve the conditions of “the common people,” and yet we despair when it seems nothing can be done to bring a lasting solution.

The list of things for affluent people in the West to feel guilty about is ever-growing, Wilfred McClay points out. There’s “colonialism, slavery, structural poverty, water pollution, deforestation.” No one is blameless. No one can be blameless, “for the demands on an active conscience are literally as endless as an active imagination’s ability to conjure them.” Some of today’s activism can be traced back to this weight of guilt, he writes, “the pervasive need to find innocence through moral absolution and somehow discharge one’s moral burden.” The only way to be innocent is to obtain the status of a certified victim or to identify with the victim in advocacy that will shift the moral burden of sin.

Reductionist Anthropology

The problem with overly simplistic classifications is that righteousness and unrighteousness don’t sit neatly in categories. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, after experiencing the horrors of the Gulag,

George Yancey, professor of sociology at Baylor University, sounds a similar note, reminding readers of the distinctively Christian contribution to these discussions: a biblical understanding of human dignity and depravity. Sin affects us all, and the historically oppressed can become the oppressor, if given the chance.

There Is None Righteous

Returning to Morson’s examination of Russian literature, we find a common thread among idealists: an overly idealistic vision of the common people and their innocence—a vision that runs into the rocks of reality when sinfulness and depravity show up among the groups who are supposed to be favored. Confronted by sin among the “innocent,” the idealists recoil, but instead of rethinking their unthinking support, they descend into a pit of “nauseating despair” due to their feelings of disgust toward the depravity of the favored group and toward themselves for feeling disappointed.

The end isn’t the enactment of justice but merely the ethos of justice. Guilt for unmerited privilege increases but now as the motivating factor for pursuing justice, which leads to various spiritual and social ills. Advocates and activists wind up adopting “whatever solution promises psychological relief even if it does not help—or even positively harms—the victims on whose behalf guilt is felt” (145). Morson points to Levin, the hero of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, who says at one point in the novel, “The important thing for me is to feel that I’m not guilty.” It’s not bettering the lives of poor peasants that matters most but alleviating the guilty conscience of the aristocrat.

Ugly End of Idealism

If you walk all the way down the road of disappointing idealism, wracked with guilt over unchangeable realities and intractable problems, you may experience something Dostoevsky warned about: love being transformed into its opposite.

“Those interested in motivating people to help others do not usually appreciate the danger of inducing guilt,” Morson writes. It’s a strategy that often backfires. “Contrary to what we usually assume, guilt for having injured people can make us even crueler to them” (145). Morson explains,

Guilt vs. Grace in Seeking Justice

The problem with identity politics and any appeal to justice motivated by guilt is that the diagnosis doesn’t go deep enough, and neither do the solutions. The result is guilt-driven, a guilt-inducing performance—everyone is conscripted into the great drama of being on “the right side” of this or that group. Everyone acts the part.

But performative justice only takes us so far and often leads to more problems than it solves. As Christians, we must go deeper.

Our desire for justice is rooted in our being made in the image of a God of perfect justice. We pursue justice not because we feel guilty but because we’ve been graced. We’ve awakened to the goodness of God’s creation and we’ve experienced his grace in redemption. Joy and gratitude free us to seek the good of others—their good, not our goodness. We are, in the words of Martin Luther, “both joyful and happy because of Christ in whom are so many benefits are conferred on him; and therefore it is the occupation to serve God joyfully and without thought of gain, in love that is not constrained.”

Set free from sin and guilt, we’re set free to love not the abstract “neighborhood” but real flesh-and-blood neighbors. Not “humanity” but real human beings. We pursue the benefit of others, not to assuage our guilty conscience but because we’re the beneficiaries of divine grace.

No one is merely a sinner. No one is merely a sufferer. Sin levels us. Grace lifts us.

Christianity goes beyond the disappointments of idealism and the reductionist solutions of identity politics, offering a more substantial basis for solidarity and a more enduring motivation for seeking justice in society. In a world of disappointment, our pursuit of justice should testify not to the strange persistence of guilt but to the stronger power of grace.

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It’s one of the world’s most beloved stories of courage and compassion—a Dutch family of watchmakers who joined a rescue network that shuffled more than 800 Jews through their home during the German occupation of the Netherlands in WWII. With her father, sisters, and brother, Corrie ten Boom turned the house into a refuge for the persecuted, with a secret room—a “hiding place”—constructed to shield the innocent during raids and searches.

Later betrayed and delivered into the hands of the Gestapo, the family was taken away, with Corrie spending time in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her father and one of her sisters perished, and her brother succumbed to tuberculosis shortly after the war.

You may be familiar with the Ten Boom family’s courage in showing compassion to those in need, inspired by their Dutch Reformed faith, and the story of their struggle for survival. The drama has been adapted into books and plays, and an award-winning film in 1975. This year, an excellent film version of a play by A. S. (Pete) Peterson was released by the Rabbit Room.

The legacy of the Ten Boom family remains a testament to courage and love, and yet there’s an often-overlooked aspect of the story that staggers the imagination: after the war, Corrie ten Boom housed Nazi collaborators who were suffering as outcasts in society.

Hiding Place Once More

During the season of severe austerity that followed the war, as grief-stricken, traumatized people began to pick up the pieces of their lives and deal with the aftermath of so much death and despair, the Ten Boom hiding place for Jews became a place of healing and forgiveness for their captors. Yes, the very home that had once been used to hide Jews on the run from their persecutors became a place of refuge and healing for collaborators with the Nazi regime.

I didn’t realize the extent of the Ten Booms’ commitment to compassion until reading The Watchmaker’s Daughter, a new biography by Larry Loftis. The book shows Corrie seeking to admit some of the collaborators into a house nearby, a place that had been set apart for victims recovering from injustice, only to find some of the patients boiling with anger, understandably, at the thought of men responsible for their distress being accepted. In response, Corrie relocated the collaborators to her old home. And so, “the home that had once been the center of underground resistance now worked to heal the very persons who had betrayed them.”

Across town in a house of healing for victims, Corrie started morning and evening worship services. She organized a system whereby doctors, psychiatrists, and nutritionists would help those still struggling. No one visited the collaborators in her home, however, until hearts softened, and the victims from the one house began to send food to collaborators in the other.

Instinct of Forgiveness

One of the most explosive evidences of the gospel’s power is when Christians extend forgiveness in unexpected ways.

Earlier this year, there were some on social media who were scandalized on hearing that the families at the Covenant School in Nashville, where a former student took multiple lives, had pooled their resources to pay for the funeral of the killer.

The actions of the Covenant families reminded me of the Amish community in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, where in 2006, a 32-year-old milkman burst into the schoolhouse and shot 10 girls, killing five of them before killing himself. As shocking as the tragedy was, the more stunning scene was that of the Amish men and women attending the funeral of the gunman, standing with his wife and children in the graveyard of their Methodist church, and later setting up a fund to take care of the killer’s widow and her kids.

In a world of selfishness and superficiality, what’s substantive stands out. And nothing is more substantive than a person who exceeds all expectations of virtue. Yet that’s what we find, consistently, in the actions of Christians steeped in their Savior’s instructions on forgiveness and reconciliation.

Forgiveness Beyond Duty

Let’s be clear. There was no biblical command for the Amish to attend the funeral of a man who had shattered their idyllic community. Neither was there an obligation for the Covenant families to cover expenses for the burial of the shooter. There was no biblical command that required Corrie ten Boom to offer her home—the same house where she’d once hid the innocent from their tormentors—to the Nazi collaborators now tormented by their guilt and shame.

And yet what’s striking about all these cases is the absence of any deliberation about the matter. Corrie ten Boom knew, as a matter of instinct, that to follow her Lord’s example of gratuitous grace, she would love her enemies beyond anyone’s expectations. These Christians did what they did not because of an external command but because of an inner compulsion, an indescribable urge to respond to evil with good.

Forgiveness That’s Edgy (and Hard)

This kind of forgiveness is edgy. There’s not a whiff of sentimental, sappy superficiality. There’s no downplaying or denying the heinousness of the atrocities committed. The evil remains evil. The dead remain dead. The grief and pain endure. The consequences are horrendous. The Nazi collaborators who received the compassion of Corrie ten Boom engaged in terrible evils. None of them “deserved” the forgiveness they found. But that’s what makes the kindness all the more compelling. Grace is nothing if not unmerited.

This kind of forgiveness is hard. However “second nature” it came to Corrie ten Boom first to hide Jews and then to make a place for their captors to experience grace, it was a struggle when she encountered one of the cruelest and most sadistic of the camp guards, a man recently converted who held out his hand and asked for forgiveness. Loftis describes the pivotal moment:

The world often recommends forgiveness because of the therapeutic benefits the person forgiving might experience. As Christians, we forgive not out of a desire for psychological relief but as a response to the forgiveness we’ve been shown. Grace comes first. Then spreads.

I’ll never think of Corrie ten Boom and The Hiding Place the same way again. In a world marred by so much evil and suffering, the edgy and transformative power of forgiveness still pierces the darkness. Loving our enemies is one of the most astounding ways a Christian says, “Jesus the King is alive.”

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In the early centuries of the church, the questions that vexed Christians and church leaders were Christological. How do we understand the divinity and humanity of Jesus of Nazareth? What does it mean to confess the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of God? The crises of the church during that era centered on getting God right—what it means to receive God’s self-revelation as Father, Son, and Spirit.

In the late medieval era, Western church controversies shifted toward salvation, how a sinner is made right with God. What must one do to be saved? What is the relationship of faith and works? Other debates surfaced during this time over the nature and number of the sacraments; the relationship of scriptural authority to church tradition and papal authority; and the definitions of assurance, justification, and sanctification.

Today we’re facing a third major crisis. This time the focus is on anthropology, the nature and destiny of humankind. What’s a human being? What does it mean to be made in God’s image? To be created male and female? Do we receive our identity and purpose or do we create identity and meaning for ourselves?

Humanity in a ‘Create Yourself’ World

In the late modern world, it’s common to see humanity as something to be crafted, a project awaiting creation. Our creatureliness gets sidelined, replaced by a “you can be anything you want” approach to life, set against the narrative backdrop of resisting outward conformity to some other standard of life. You must define yourself, goes the idea, even when it’s in opposition to whatever the past, your family, your society, or (increasingly) your biology says you are.

Meanwhile, the acids of postmodernity have eaten away at the idea that humanity has an essence, that there might be a givenness to things. Also lost is the idea that humanity has a general telos—an inherent purpose or supreme goal to which we strive.

The spread of a technocratic understanding of the world whereby we make the world we want, rather than work with and cultivate the world as it is, puts us in situations previous generations would find incomprehensible: the logic of rectifying the “injustice” of biological men not being able to give birth, or removing healthy body parts in the name of health to accommodate someone’s self-perception as disabled or belonging to a different gender.

We Believe in the Body

What does it mean to be embodied? What do our bodies signify? What does our design say about our identity and purpose?

The church that will be relevant in the days ahead will not make peace with reductionist visions of humanity that downplay the significance of the human body and eliminate a transcendent telos. As we recount the grand narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration, we’ll give more attention to the implications of biblical teaching on creation and the fall. As we proclaim Christ crucified and raised for the forgiveness of sins, we’ll give more attention to the incarnation and the implications of our confessing “the resurrection of the body.”

Today’s crisis is every bit as volatile and destructive as the Gnosticism faced by the ancient church. The Gnostics claimed that what matters most about us is a divine spark, a spirit inside that one day will be released from the human body. They insisted the “real you” was imprisoned in this world of matter and the “spirit” mattered more than the body. Writers like Valentinus described the encounter with God in the heart, the reception of “secret knowledge of the divine,” as the source of truth and wisdom.

Against them stood church fathers such as Irenaeus who defended the goodness of the body. He refused to narrow the truth, to choose “spirit” over “matter,” or “soul” over “body.” Christianity holds together what Gnosticism would separate.

‘What’ and ‘Why’

As we preach and teach and catechize and disciple others in the days ahead, we’ll need to devote an extra measure of attention to the what and why of Christian teaching:

• We believe God created us male and female, in his own image, to know and love him and share his everlasting joy. The good life is found not in inventing our purpose but in bowing to God’s design and reflecting his glory.
• We believe sexuality is a God-given aspect of our embodied existence as people made in his image, male and female, ordered toward the physical and life-giving union of a man and woman in marriage. Sexuality is embodied, not imagined; physically grounded, not psychologically determined.
• We believe we are persons beloved by God, created to love God, love others, and care for the good world he has made. We become like what we love. Our identity is found not by looking within ourselves but by looking up to God.

In rising to the challenge of this present moment, it’s crucial to acknowledge how today’s anthropological challenges have already permeated the church. They’re shaping the moral perspectives of our congregations.

It won’t be enough for a church to merely affirm the right beliefs related to sexual behavior if our sexual ethic is built upon a quasi-Gnostic understanding of expressive individualism. We’ll need to explain not only to the world what we believe but to the church why we believe what we believe. This is the task before us—a momentous opportunity to dig deeper into our faith as we uphold a vision for humanity that reaches far higher than anything the world offers.

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Right now, many Christians wonder how best to respond after a season of significant crisis for the church. So much rot has been exposed—whether seen through the proliferation of false teaching or authoritarianism or moral hypocrisy. Looking back, we can see some of what previous generations of the faith have gotten wrong—the elements that need revision, adjustment, or rejection.

We can rail against the mistakes of others all day long, and yet if we know the church will still be here in 50 years, we should be asking, What will the church look like then? Next come the corresponding questions: What should it look like, and how can we build a healthier future?

If the credibility of the church has taken a beating in the last half-century, then our job for the next 50 years will be rebuilding our witness so we look more like the Jesus we’re proclaiming. We want to be a church that walks the walk and doesn’t just talk the talk.

Need for Perspective

In the season 1 finale of my podcast Reconstructing Faith, Tim Keller, in one of his last interviews, explained that one of the things lacking in the church right now is perspective. He said we need the perspective of church history and the global church to understand the moment we’re living in. This notion sums up the whole point of my podcast: to encounter the global church and the church throughout history to better interpret the moment we’re in.

If you have a good understanding of church history, you won’t be completely shocked or shaken by scandals today, because you’re familiar with the dark times the church has faced in the past. And you’ve seen how God does amazing things in seemingly hopeless times.

If you stay connected to the global church, you’ll remember that in other parts of the world—like China, Africa, and parts of the Global South—the church is exploding as we speak. We all face challenges in the faith, but (thankfully) not all our challenges are the same. Engaging with Christians in other parts of the world can help us keep our sanity amid heated debates on different issues, helping us recognize the core of the Christian faith that unites us and the spaces where we can afford to have lively and respectful disagreement.

New Season of ‘Reconstructing Faith’

In the second season of Reconstructing Faith, I’ve pulled together a line-up of incredible guests seeking to do constructive work. It’s easy these days to find those in the business of critiquing. I wanted to seek out those who are building something, helping us envision a better future.

Season 1 covered the credibility crisis facing the church today, those areas where the church has taken a reputational beating (often for reasons well deserved). The second season assumes listeners have a heart for rebuilding and reconstruction. So we’ll look at some of the obstacles, both internal and external, that the church is facing in this time of rebuilding. This season is about gaining awareness of the challenges we must face.

Going in this direction for the podcast opened the door for us to deal with challenges not directly related to church failure but regarding current cultural challenges and those on the horizon.

We’ll address institutional distrust across the board, not just within the church. We’ll talk about dechurching, examine the crisis of masculinity, and assess the secret catastrophe of pornography, both inside and outside the church. We’ll talk about gender identity controversies, discussing the need for conviction and compassion in our congregations. We’ll talk about AI, the reality of spiritual burnout, the challenges of family breakdown, and even issues related to worship, liturgy, and how denominations and church networks can cooperate in an anti-institutional age.

Season 2 is about putting on our gloves and getting busy with the task of reconstruction and rebuilding.

Our Ultimate Hope

Through all this, let’s not forget there’s no cultural exegesis or strategy podcast that can make someone trust in Jesus Christ for salvation. Every conversion is a miracle. But if we’ve seen this miracle happen for 2,000 years—as implausible as it seems for billions across the world to believe that Jesus is risen from the dead—then our hope lies in the amazing reality that people are still believing and building their lives around this truth.

My goal is to equip the church to better understand the challenges of the recent past, as well as those we’re up against today and will continue to face in the future. We’re not responsible for rebuilding every aspect of the church’s crumbling walls. But I hope listeners will walk away from Reconstructing Faith’s second season knowing what section of the wall they can restore—the specific places they can help rebuild trust and credibility. We can’t do everything, but we can all do something.

It’s time to get to work. Enough carping against the church from the sidelines. We get it; the church is a mess. It has always been a mess, but if it’s going to be around in 50 years—and it is—then we must ask, What is it going to look like? What role do we have in what that church will look like then?

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Most of us know the feeling at some point. We reach a level of familiarity with the Bible or we grow so accustomed to our church routine or we sing the same song so many times that we get, well, bored. We lose our interest in the things of God. We go to church, open the Bible, and send up a few words to God in the morning, but we no longer feel any real passion or sense of excitement at contemplating the realities of the Christian faith. Our senses grow dull. Our vision is dim. Our tastebuds don’t work anymore.

In a fallen world, we can count on feeling bored at some point, even in our walk with God. Ironically, the solutions to boredom provided by our phones and technology (where at any moment we can find a morsel of entertainment) can be the source of spiritual boredom, keeping us perpetually distracted from truth and substance.

Boredom often coincides with feeling jaded. Sometimes that jadedness arises from being disappointed in others. The more experience you have in church, the more likely you are to experience some kind of church hurt. The more time you spend with God’s people, the more likely you are to see hypocrisy.

Other times, the jadedness shows up when you’re frustrated with yourself. Reading the Scriptures doesn’t do anything for you. Following Jesus well feels forever out of reach. You wonder if you’re doomed to a life of spiritual failure, or at the most, an ordinary, not-exciting Christian life where you do what you’re told but no longer feel joy in your salvation.

What Boredom Is Not

We shouldn’t confuse boredom with predictability. Or comfort. Or settled rhythms. It’s unrealistic to expect or desire to experience a lightning bolt of inspiration every time we open the Bible, or to feel as fervently “on fire for Jesus” as we may have felt earlier in our Christian lives. If sanctification is “a long obedience in the same direction,” we should expect much of our growth in holiness to take place through settled patterns of life. The long-married couple whose love has endured 50 years may not gush or feel the same butterflies they felt when they first started dating, but their deep and enduring love is no less powerful.

Likewise, we shouldn’t confuse jadedness with wisdom. The older you get, the more you see. The more you see, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more discerning and wise you become. It’s a sign of health and maturity when we get a clearer picture of the world, when the rose-colored glasses come off and we no longer see the world through stained-glass naivete.

The Boredom We Should Fight

The spiritually dangerous kind of boredom shows up when we settle into extended periods without spiritual joy and satisfaction, when our cynicism becomes an excuse for other vices, such as acedia and sloth. “There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.” That’s a good reminder when it comes to both God’s world and God’s Word.

When we experience this kind of spiritual apathy, we have the opportunity to pursue a richer and better life with Christ. Our goal isn’t to feel forever like a couple “in love,” as C. S. Lewis reminds us—as if our life could be based on fleeting feelings. Our goal is the experience of something more profound: “a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.” That’s the way we hope to love God, pursuing a deep-rooted joy in him that helps us grow in grace and truth.

Remember Your Epiphanies

The older we get, and the more we’ve been around the block, the more likely we are to experience boredom and cynicism. In a new book on boredom, Kevin Hood Gary recommends we counter boredom by “remembering our epiphanies.” Elizabeth Corey sums up his approach:

Remembering your epiphanies means looking back at moments in the past when you’ve had a transformative educational experience, whether it was a sudden insight or practice that disrupted your normal routine, or the discovery of an ethical good or value, or a way of integrating something you learned in the classroom into your life.

Spiritual Epiphanies

How might these insights from the academy apply to the spiritual life?

We should look back at the spiritual epiphanies in our past. Tim Keller often described the moment when a familiar truth would drop from your head to your heart, leading to a renewed sense of wonder and appreciation. We can start reflecting on moments in the past when we were struck by a fresh experience of an old truth.

To ensure we don’t lose “the love [we] had at first” (Rev. 2:4), we can develop strategies and practices to help us remember past epiphanies—when our routines were disrupted by the movement of God, when we felt the thrill of first putting into practice some of the Bible’s commands, or when we felt the rush of realization at the power of biblical truth.

To keep the fires of my love for God burning, I find it helpful to put on praise and worship songs that once meant a lot to me, Christian songs I sang during the early years of my passion for Jesus. I pick up books that rocked my world the first time I read them. I peruse older Bibles filled with my marks and highlights, going back over the terrain, noticing what jumped out at me, returning to passages the Spirit of God pressed deep into my heart. I look over my journals and pictures from mission trips. I listen to sermons that gripped my heart and influenced my behavior. I catch up with brothers and sisters who have been a source of encouragement to me through the years. I confess my apathy and boredom to trusted Christians who’ll stir in me a desire for “love and good works” (Heb. 10:24–25). I return to particular places where I felt God’s presence in palpable ways.

Overcome Boredom

I’m not saying the solution to boredom is nostalgia. The solution is reawakening. We want to kindle the fire and stir the embers of the love we’ve felt before, trusting in God as the love that will not let us go.

We remember the kindness of the Lord to us in times past and yearn to sense his presence and power again. We recognize the blandness of boredom as part of this fallen world but fight to keep apathy from characterizing our walk with God. We let boredom shine a light on our disinterested hearts so that we look again to the Savior, seeking to marvel once again at his beauty and glory.

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It’s never been easier to step into the role of a would-be prophet, to stand in the long line of men and women over the ages called to “speak truth to power.” Social media has amplified the ability to speak out on any number of issues—to expose the hidden corners of injustice, to rail against the abuses of the strong against the weak, and to point out the flaws in institutions and the people who lead them.

Much of this prophetic sensibility is good. As a result of people expressing critique or concern, we’ve seen institutions and individuals move toward health. We’ve seen rot exposed and expunged. We’ve seen repentance and restitution. The ability of more people to speak out can lead to greater awareness and accountability in the church.

Heartless Prophet

But there’s always the danger of having a prophetic voice without a prophet’s heart.

When this happens, we sound less and less like Jeremiah, passing on the Lord’s command through tears (“Return, you faithless children!”) alongside the corresponding promise of mercy (“I will heal your unfaithfulness,” Jer. 3:22). Instead, we look more like Jonah—happy to rail against the culture and the coming destruction of our enemies, only to pout at the thought of God actually redeeming anyone (Jonah 4:1–3). “Jonah enjoyed preaching wrath,” Tim Keller comments. “He did it with glee, not tears, because he couldn’t wait for God’s hammer to fall on them.”

Prophet’s Heart

The prophetic impulse is an important one. Andy Crouch points out one of the central purposes of the Old Testament prophet—to unveil the true nature of power. Idolatry and injustice often grow unnoticed in the hearts of people, insidiously creeping under the cloak of righteousness and justice. When we’re most gripped by idolatry and injustice, we’re least likely to see these sins in ourselves. Our good intentions blind us, and our self-righteous self-analysis brings about some form of justification.

The prophetic word, however, can cut through this fog of idolatry by boldly proclaiming the truth of God in a way that upends and exposes the falsehoods and counterfeits. The prophet is a gift to the community of faith, a source of edification in the truth. But the apostle Paul reminds us we’re nothing if we speak truth, even hard truths, without love (1 Cor. 13:2).

Tearless Prophet

Having a prophetic voice without a prophet’s heart leads us to ground our righteousness in the stances we take, regardless of whether or not we feel compassion or love toward the people who most need the truth. Crouch recalls the example of Daniel who relayed God’s message of judgment when interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. Daniel didn’t savor the thought of this unjust king receiving his comeuppance but instead expressed hope that the dream wouldn’t be fulfilled (Dan. 4).

As our hearts grow cynical and cold, we no longer desire the good of the people who deserve critique; we take delight in their destruction. We’re more like Jonah than Jeremiah, complaining about God’s long-lasting compassion toward the undeserving. Weeping at the thought of God’s judgment seems soft and silly. And so the tenor of our online discourse reveals a heart inclined to revel in the “Woes” that thunder from our accounts while dismissing the blessing Jesus gives to those who mourn the injustice and sin of the world (Matt. 5:4).

“The truth is that there are such things as Christian tears,” wrote John Stott, “and too few of us ever weep them.” This is what we see in Jesus, whose harsh words for the leaders in Jerusalem led to his weeping over the impenitent city (Luke 19:41–44). This is what we see in the psalmist, whose cries for justice are mixed with his “streams of tears” because people fail to keep God’s law (Ps. 119:136). This is what we see in the apostle Paul, who stood unbending against false teaching while weeping over the many enemies of the cross of Christ (Phil. 3:18–19).

Prophetic Impulse as a Game

In today’s era, with the algorithms and platforms that lend themselves to outrage and attention, the prophetic impulse can lead us to a place of perpetual and unending critique. We fail to recognize the difference between the normal flaws and failures of overall good leaders who steward their authority well and the egregious sins and injustices that require a forceful and unequivocal response. Everything receives the same level of outrage.

When this happens, we walk the road of cynicism, no longer trusting that power can be stewarded properly by anyone at all (except, of course, for those with the gift of the prophet!). We’re no longer for the people or the institutions we hope to hold accountable. Instead, it’s all a game where we “one-up” each other online, excited when we’re able to “ratio” those we criticize or stir up a mob against whatever we perceive as “problematic.” We win the game when we rack up “points” as we “score” against the opposing side. We show contempt and call it candor.

Heart of Jesus in a World of Would-Be Prophets

We should be slow to step into the shoes of the prophet these days, if only to avoid the temptation of grandiosity and the insidious “rewards” that come to the prophet who performs well on the social media stage. Being provocative doesn’t make you a prophet. True prophets do more than condemn and confront; they also bring comfort and hope (Ezra 5:1).

When we do speak truth to power and when we do call out injustice in the church and in the world, we should ask faithful friends to speak truth to our own hearts, to ensure we don’t adopt the prophetic voice without the prophet’s heart.

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One year from now, should the Lord tarry, 5,000 participants from every region in the world will gather in Seoul, South Korea, for the Fourth International Congress on World Evangelization, hosted by the Lausanne Movement. (Thousands more will engage the Congress through satellite sites.)

The year 2024 will also mark the 50th anniversary of the First Lausanne Congress, which saw the release of The Lausanne Covenant, with John Stott as the chief architect. This is one of the most significant documents in modern church history, serving as a rallying cry and commitment for evangelicals around the world.

In recent weeks, I’ve been reading again through some of the documents from and following the First Lausanne Congress, and I’ve been struck by their clarity of vision and consistency of conviction—words as relevant today as they were five decades ago. No other document better sums up the heart of the worldwide evangelical movement for mission and evangelism.

The entire Covenant is worth reading, but I’ve selected 10 of my favorite quotes below.

1. ‘We affirm our belief in the one eternal God, Creator and Lord of the world, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who governs all things according to the purpose of his will. He has been calling out from the world a people for himself, and sending his people back into the world to be his servants and his witnesses, for the extension of his kingdom, the building up of Christ’s body, and the glory of his name.’

In his commentary on the Covenant, John Stott said, “We cannot talk about mission or evangelism without first talking about God.” I love the dual image of God calling us out and sending us back, as well as the emphasis on the kingdom being extended through our work as both servants and witnesses. All for his glory! (For more on the question of the church’s identity, see my lengthy response to a critique of the church’s missional understanding.)

2. ‘Through [the Bible] the Holy Spirit still speaks today. He illumines the minds of God’s people in every culture to perceive its truth freshly through their own eyes and thus discloses to the whole Church ever more of the many-colored wisdom of God.’

After a strong affirmation of the inspiration, truthfulness, and authority of God’s Word comes this important statement about the Spirit’s work in illuminating the Scriptures, and the importance of reading the Bible alongside believers across the world, so we can see afresh and with more clarity the truth of God revealed. (I’ve gathered some examples of how our connection to the global church enhances our Bible reading.)

3. ‘To proclaim Jesus as ‘the Saviour of the world’ is not to affirm that all people are either automatically or ultimately saved, still less to affirm that all religions offer salvation in Christ. Rather it is to proclaim God’s love for a world of sinners and to invite everyone to respond to him as Saviour and Lord in the wholehearted personal commitment of repentance and faith.’

Universalism and inclusivism sever the nerve of evangelism, cutting us off from the apostles who proclaimed the exclusivity of Jesus Christ for salvation and urged us to invite everyone everywhere to turn from sin and trust in him alone. It’s the universality of the gospel that drives the universal call to salvation.

4. ‘To evangelize is to spread the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures, and that, as the reigning Lord, he now offers the forgiveness of sins and the liberating gifts of the Spirit to all who repent and believe. . . . The results of evangelism include obedience to Christ, incorporation into his Church and responsible service in the world.’

Here is the heart of the First Lausanne Congress—a focus on the good news of Jesus that brings about both forgiveness of sins and the presence of the Spirit, resulting in personal obedience, a commitment to the church, and service to the world.

5. ‘Although reconciliation with other people is not reconciliation with God, nor is social action evangelism, nor is political liberation salvation, nevertheless we affirm that evangelism and socio-political involvement are both part of our Christian duty. For both are necessary expressions of our doctrines of God and Man, our love for our neighbour and our obedience to Jesus Christ.’

Evangelicals have long debated the priorities of evangelism, social ministry, and political action (and continue to do so). The First Lausanne Congress insisted on holding together a commitment to evangelism with the responsibility of believers to express their love for God and neighbor through social action and political involvement.

6. ‘In the Church’s mission of sacrificial service, evangelism is primary. World evangelization requires the whole Church to take the whole gospel to the whole world. The Church is at the very centre of God’s cosmic purpose and is his appointed means of spreading the gospel.’

Evangelism must be primary because of the immensity of the task, the eternal stakes in accepting or rejecting the call to salvation, and God’s intention for the church to take the gospel to the nations. (The significance and interpretation of this part of the Covenant became a point of controversy between John Stott and Billy Graham, but their debate was over the focus and direction of Lausanne more than disagreement on the relationship between the Word and mercy ministry.)

7. ‘A church which preaches the cross must itself be marked by the cross. It becomes a stumbling block to evangelism when it betrays the gospel or lacks a living faith in God, a genuine love for people, or scrupulous honesty in all things including promotion and finance.’

Here is a clarion call for the church to pursue a cruciform life of holiness. We don’t care what the world thinks merely because we want to be popular. We care what the world thinks because we want Jesus to be glorified! Lesslie Newbigin was right: “The only hermeneutic of the gospel is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it.” We should care about the credibility of the church, not because we want to see approval from the world but because we want to see the salvation of the world.

8. ‘We believe that we are engaged in constant spiritual warfare with the principalities and powers of evil, who are seeking to overthrow the Church and frustrate its task of world evangelization. . . . We need both watchfulness and discernment to safeguard the biblical gospel.’

The previous quote enjoined us to watch our lives. This quote emphasizes the reality of spiritual warfare, especially in the context of guarding the good deposit, watching our doctrine. Is it possible that, even among people who take the Bible seriously and believe demons to be real, we have psychologized or downplayed the unseen realm to the point of losing any sense of real spiritual warfare? I believe so, which is why we need the reminder from the global church of the spiritual forces at work against world evangelization.

9. ‘The Holy Spirit is a missionary spirit; thus evangelism should arise spontaneously from a Spirit-filled church. A church that is not a missionary church is contradicting itself and quenching the Spirit.’

Here’s Stott again: “If we have resisted the missionary dimension of the church’s life, or dismissed it as if it were dispensable, or patronized it reluctantly with a few perfunctory prayers and grudging coins, or become preoccupied with our own narrow-minded, parochial concerns, we need to repent, that is, change our mind and attitude. Do we profess to believe in God? He’s a missionary God. Do we say we are committed to Christ? He’s a missionary Christ. Do we claim to be filled with the Spirit? He’s a missionary Spirit. Do we delight in belonging to the church? It’s a missionary society. Do we hope to go heaven when we die? It’s a heaven filled with the fruits of the missionary enterprise. It is not possible to avoid these things.”

10. ‘We reject as a proud, self-confident dream the notion that people can ever build a utopia on earth. Our Christian confidence is that God will perfect his kingdom, and we look forward with eager anticipation to that day, and to the new heaven and earth in which righteousness will dwell and God will reign forever.’

As much as we might work to see people come to faith and bear the fruit of righteousness, we recognize our hope is ultimately in the promise of God to bring about his kingdom on earth as in heaven. Our vision of the kingdom isn’t the same as a utopian fantasy; we participate in the work of God, yet with chastened expectations as to the good we might accomplish, while awaiting the full consummation of his plan. This is one aspect of eschatological discipleship, and it guards against an overrealized missiology, whether it comes in the form of social justice or Christian nationalism.

The Covenant ends with this call to prayer and dedication. May this be our heart today!

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In the 2019 biopic Tolkien, there’s a moment when the young novelist, fresh from the horrors of trench warfare, talks with his father in the faith, a priest who walks with families through grief after the carnage of the Great War.

“I spend my every afternoon with mothers, widows,” the priest says. “What can I say to them? Your sons have died in the war to end all wars.”

“What do you say?” asks Tolkien.

“Words are useless,” he replies, before catching himself. “Modern words, anyway. I speak the liturgy. There’s a comfort, I think, in distance, ancient things.”

I speak the liturgy. Ancient things.

He’s referring to the powerful combination of something foreign yet familiar, something old yet fresh, a comfort that comes from relying on time-tested patterns instead of searching for a novel approach. There are moments when modern words prove useless. We need the formula. The old vocabulary.

Our Need for Repetition

For a liturgy to have power, there must be repetition. But in evangelical circles, we tend to think repetition means ritual which means stale, dry, or even dead. That’s why we feel the need to spruce things up, to liven up the atmosphere, to do whatever it takes to keep things from becoming so familiar we wind up (Lord forbid) just “going through the motions.”

Of course, there’s something right in the desire to see afresh the beauty of the faith, and there’s something noble in doing whatever we can to apply old truths in fresh ways as we seek to fulfill the Great Commission. We should be ever on the lookout for new ways to express old truths. Surely we don’t want to become the people described by Jesus—honoring God with our lips while our hearts are far from him.

But this desire for sincerity and passion can lead us to prioritize whatever is new, often at the expense of the old. And here we go too far, for repetition is one of the most formative elements of spiritual development.

In Deuteronomy 6, the children of Israel are told to commit the words of the law to memory by repeating or reciting them over and over again, all throughout the day. Repetition is part of spiritual formation. It’s likely Jesus’s disciples knew all the psalms by heart. The Didache, one of the earliest Christian documents to follow the New Testament, instructed believers to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day.

Repetition can lead to a cold-hearted formalism, but it can also work against it. The deeper I dive into the meaning of familiar words, the more likely my heart is to be transformed. The constant search for novelty can be a setback, like wearing a new pair of shoes every day—they may dazzle on the outside, but we stumble around in them. We don’t give ourselves time to adapt and align our hearts to the truths we profess.

When You Need Words

The day will come when all that repetition—memorizing Scriptures and reciting prayers and singing the same songs—will be a balm to your soul. Those truths you know in your head you will need more than ever in your heart.

In Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren recalls the harrowing account of a complicated miscarriage. In the hospital, with nurses scurrying around recommending a blood transfusion, Tish cried out to her husband, “Compline! I want to pray Compline!” (That’s the every-night-before-bed portion of The Book of Common Prayer.) “It isn’t normal—even for me—to loudly demand liturgical prayers in a crowded room in the midst of crisis,” Warren writes. “But in that moment, I needed it, as much as I needed the IV.”

Moments later, the familiar rhythms of Christ-centered exaltation were flowing: Keep us as the apple of your eye, Hide us under the shadow your wing. . . . Lord have mercy, Christ, have mercy, Lord, have mercy. Later, Warren reflected, “Why did I suddenly and desperately want to pray Compline underneath the fluorescent lights of a hospital room? Because I wanted to pray but couldn’t drum up words.”

This is where repetition becomes a blessing. When the world goes crazy and the roof caves in, you can slip into the familiar, well-worn grooves you’ve established through the constant repetition of Scriptures and prayers. When the well has run dry, you still find furrows in the desert, plowed through years of praying the Word deep into your heart.

No one at a funeral is looking for the pastor to deliver a creative twist on an unusual passage of Scripture. There’s a reason we go back to Psalm 23 or John 14 or Revelation 21. We need ancient salve applied to fresh wounds.

This is why I’ve come to appreciate structure in my prayer life, something that goes beyond a particular pattern to the very words I hope to plant deep in my heart. In praying through the psalms in a month, or through the life of Jesus, I feel the power of repetition—the familiar phrases and prayers, the scriptural songs, and the words of believers who have gone before me.

Need for a Worship Canon

Repetition matters for singing too. The average lifespan of a widely sung worship song is about a third of what it was 30 years ago.

Attending the memorial service for Tim Keller last month, I was encouraged by the hymns he’d chosen for the occasion and what he’d written about each song. But most meaningful was the closing song, a newer hymn but one with great resonance for the people there—“There Is a Redeemer” by Melody Green. This was the song that Redeemer Presbyterian Church sang at the end of every service during the early years of Keller’s ministry in New York City, and in that moment, with so many Redeemer members present, it was as if the whole gathering fell into a groove, the congregation slipping into the sweetness of the old rhythm, allowing the familiarity of words and melody to overtake them once more.

Today’s worship leaders would do well to look beyond the latest hits on Christian radio and develop a “canon” of time-tested hymns and songs that will be the standards we can turn to for funerals in 20 or 30 years. Every congregation needs their “go-to” songs—old hymns like “It Is Well” and newer ones like “In Christ Alone.” If we fail to sing the same songs and hymns, choosing instead to chase only whatever is most popular in a given moment, we may one day face moments of deep grief, searching for words and yet unable to find them.

Let’s not fail to appreciate the gift of repetition. Ancient words bring solace in ways modern ones will not. The well-trodden paths of prayer and Scripture, etched deep in our hearts, will sustain us when words falter, giving us a rhythm of faith and establishing a legacy for future generations.

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Justin Brierley’s new book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God recounts the stories of various public intellectuals, commentators, scientists, and novelists who have come to believe in God or confessed faith in Christ.

As the host of the U.K. radio show Unbelievable for more than a decade, Brierley had a front-row seat to hundreds of debates over the most contested issues facing Christianity in a secular society. He found his faith not weakened but fortified as he saw “the intellectual strength of the Christian story as it has been tested by atheists, agnostics, and people of other faiths who have appeared on the show.”

Unfortunately, both in the world and in the church, it often seems like Christianity is expected to take a back seat to philosophy or science.

Faith Is for the Unenlightened?

In the Western world, there’s the Enlightenment myth—the idea that it’s bold and courageous to set aside the silly superstitions of past eras and that the thinker “come of age” must reckon with the reality that this world is all there is. It’s immature, a bit childish, to cling to religion for comfort. Immanuel Kant’s “Dare to know!” is the rallying cry, and Bertrand Russell’s “unyielding despair” in the face of meaninglessness is the only “firm foundation” on which to build your life. If you’re smart, you’ll look reality in the face and roll your eyes at the pedantry of the peasants.

In the church, there’s the fideist myth that assumes Christianity doesn’t need to make intellectual sense for it to be emotionally satisfying. The whole point of faith, we’re told, is to take the leap, to believe what’s unbelievable. No wonder, then, that many believers water down the truth and dismiss as highfalutin the idea of a serious education in philosophy and science. We expect to run aground when we debate the scholars and intellectuals, and thus we reduce our faith to a personal, private thing that “works for us” whether or not it can be properly defended in the public sphere.

Cabin and the Castle

Believers battle feelings of inferiority, and we often feel patronized by the world. It’s as if the church’s intellectual tradition is a crumbling cabin, poorly constructed, barely able to keep out the rain. Oh, it may provide a cozy fireplace of personal warmth, but not much more—nothing we expect to prove deeply compelling to others. Meanwhile, the atheists and agnostics of our time inhabit an imposing edifice of unassailable arguments.

The reality is, we’re the ones living in a great castle, an intellectual tradition that goes all the way back to the Hebrew Scriptures, an inheritance that incorporates what’s best in the great Greek philosophers, a pattern of thought refined by the great medieval and modern theologians, a movement that has bequeathed the towering minds of Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas (and those are just the As).

Why should we shrink back when secular writers say this world is all there is but still hope we’ll live as if there’s a moral order to the universe? Why accept such logical incoherence? Why narrow our minds to a reductionist philosophy that cannot allow even a speck of the supernatural lest all of naturalism be exposed as a sham?

There’s no reason to think the world’s condescension toward Christianity is deserved. Nor is there any reason to feel shy or awkward about what we believe, as if no intellectual could possibly entertain the truths propounded by Christianity. We may not be familiar with all the ancient treasures, yet still, we live in a castle, not a cabin.

Go Exploring

My daughter shared the gospel recently with a friend, and she responded well to some of the spiritual and existential questions that arose. I told her that if she gets asked a question she’s not sure how to answer, she should say she’ll look into that and reply later. I want her (and her friend) to assume there are plenty of good answers in the Christian tradition that can be found through a little study. We may need to explore an ancient corridor or rummage through one of the closets in the castle, but we’ve no reason to fall back and say something silly like “This doesn’t make any sense, but that’s what faith is for!”

Come to think of it, it’s not only in our evangelism where we need to remember we live in a castle. In a time of widespread doubt and deconstruction, we should expect young people growing up in our churches to face challenges to their faith.

What’s needed is an environment where pastors and church leaders wrestle with the big questions of life, so that when young people run up against an obstacle of some kind, they’ll say to themselves, I’m sure there are Christians in the past or in the present who have wondered the same thing, and I should seek out what they’ve said. We need a church that showcases Christianity as a castle, not a cabin, so we develop in the hearts of young believers the instinct to go exploring.

Confident Enthusiasm

To speak the truth with confidence doesn’t excuse arrogance. There’s no room here for pride. On the contrary, exploring the castle should give us a sense of awe at the riches we’ve inherited, a reverential gratitude at the glories of this treasure.

We want to be people of passion who persuade others to enter the castle, not a belligerent presence at the castle gate, shouting at our neighbors. So let’s engage the world not from a place of inferiority or embarrassment, not with dumbed-down doctrine or a compromised creed, but with confident enthusiasm and bottomless joy.

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The apostle Paul told the Colossians, “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (Col. 3:2), an evergreen command for all Christians in all generations. There’s an echo there of Jesus’s rebuke to Peter, when he told him he was setting his mind not on the things of God but on the things of man (Mark 8:33; Matt. 16:23).

Set your minds, Paul says. In other words, be intentional. Seek first Christ and his kingdom.

But why is it so hard to do this?

Looking over the landscape of the church, and looking into my own heart, I can point to three reasons we’re prone to set our minds on earthly things rather than look to God, with each reason adding a layer of complexity.

1. We’re drowning in digital distraction.

This is the easiest one to spot. Everyone is addicted to their phone, it seems. More addicted than we even realize. Myself included.

As a result, we’re drowning in distraction. These technological tools trivialize our lives and make it hard to keep our minds and hearts open to the transcendent, to what God is doing in the world. Digital diversions keep us perpetually restless.

This isn’t a new problem, of course. In the 17th century, Pascal wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”—and that was well before the constant clamor of a busy world of smartphones and their ceaseless notifications and incoming messages. If it was difficult then to avoid distraction and trivialities, how much harder is the task today.

Without serious intentionality and better habits, we’ll continue to use the phone in ways that make it harder to set our minds on anything substantive at all, much less on things above. The phone will remain a convenient mechanism that conceals and drowns out the quiet, insistent voice of God. We’ll drink from a never-ending stream of trivialities, scrolling from one item to the next, while slowly losing our capacity to feel the weightier matters of life and know the deep things of God.

Distraction, in part due to our phones—that’s the most obvious obstacle to setting our minds on things above right now. But let’s go a level deeper.

2. Our imaginations are captive to a lesser story.

Our minds are meant to be set on something, and one reason it’s hard to keep looking north is that our compass is broken. The magnets don’t work right, and instead of pointing true north, the compass is often pointing northwest or northeast—to some kind of story that isn’t the main story of our world.

We all live out of a story. We make choices informed by whatever narrative gives shape and significance to our lives. When our compass fails to point true north, we wander around, showing the world through our attitudes and actions that our attention is directed toward some other story, a narrative less important than the scriptural storyline.

For some, it’s the story of a successful career. For others, it’s the accumulation of wealth. Many live as if the most important story is political, as if we could pinpoint the center of world history in Washington, DC. More than a few live for leisure and entertainment. We want to seek first the kingdom, but it’s the American Dream that gets most of our attention. I feel the pull of all these lesser stories on a regular basis. They’re lesser because they fade in comparison to the central story of God’s redemptive plan for the world.

Whenever we live according to lesser stories, we’re likely to focus more on what’s happening nationally than globally or more on what’s happening individually than in our community. We interpret events and moments and movements from the standpoint of whatever lesser story has seized our imagination: politics, technology, personal comfort, or professional ambition. We’re less likely to view current events from the perspective of what’s happening to the church worldwide. We don’t see milestones in life from the perspective of our growth in holiness. We don’t look at cultural developments from the perspective of how they may aid or hinder Christians in our mission.

To seek what is above requires a change of attention and affection, whereby we share God’s heart for the nations and God’s love for the church. We love our neighbors best not when we live according to the lesser stories but when we stand out.

That’s why it’s essential to examine our hearts and assess the primacy of the stories that shape our lives. We should look at what dominates our thoughts when we wake up and when we go to bed, where our minds wander in moments of quiet, and how our daily actions align or don’t align with our professed beliefs.

There’s one more reason it’s hard to set our minds on things above, and this is the toughest one of all.

3. We focus our faith primarily on ‘what works.’

There’s a pragmatic impulse in society today that judges religion by the standard of “whatever works,” and no one is immune to this temptation—not even those of us who go to church. This may be the toughest obstacle we face. It’s certainly the hardest to discern.

In a society where most people assume religion exists to help you “be true to yourself” or “chase your dreams,” we can easily fall for a pseudoversion of seeking whatever is above but only insofar as the heavenly stuff helps us with the earthly. It may look like we’re seeking what’s above when we’re actually using our faith as a means to get what we want here below. Christianity becomes a means to some other end. We harness the heavens for earthly aims.

How can church leaders identify this pragmatic impulse and counter it? Some pastors believe the answer is “God-centered preaching.” That’s certainly part of the solution. But in too many cases, those who want to be God-centered don’t do enough to show how God’s Word connects with daily concerns and pressing issues.

It’s possible for our preaching to sound like it’s from another planet—a 40-minute stream of gibberish that fails to connect with questions from below in a way that might reset the compass and reorient our lives. It’s not a question of “God-centeredness” versus “practicality.” That’s a false dichotomy. What we need is the relentless pursuit of both: God-centered application to all of life.

If we’re to truly seek what’s above, we must bust through the immanent frame that holds us only to earthly horizons, and truly encounter God. To know the God of the Bible, to truly experience him, means having a relationship with Someone whose Word will impinge upon our daily thoughts and activities. We need God’s Word and God’s people to help us set our minds on things above. Our desire is not to use God for our personal agenda but to worship the God who sets us on the path of his kingdom purposes.

I’m sure there are other obstacles to setting our minds on things above. But at a minimum, it’ll require resisting digital distractions, examining ourselves to make sure we’re not held captive by lesser stories, and encountering the God whose power overcomes our pragmatism.

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When the COVID-19 lockdowns went into effect across the world in March 2020, pastors and church leaders pivoted quickly to live streaming and video as a way of keeping the lines of communication and connection open. Twenty-two percent of churches did a live stream before the pandemic; within weeks, the number had jumped to 66 percent, with 92 percent of Protestant pastors providing some kind of video sermon or worship service during the stay-at-home season.

On the other side of the pandemic, the number of churches live streaming their worship services has grown, and even though there have been some thoughtful calls to stop doing so, I suspect the practice is here to stay. (A new Pew Research survey offers an interesting look at churchgoer perspectives on live streaming.)

Larger churches have gotten especially good at presenting a cohesive and engaging broadcast of their services, rivaling the shiny Sunday morning television broadcasts from a generation ago. As any church with a television or radio ministry will tell you, a professionally packaged experience can extend the reach of a local congregation and the influence of Bible preachers and teachers.

The Supplement Is Not a Substitute

But there’s a downside to this boom in online worship services. We’re vulnerable to a cultural malady ailing Americans today: “substitutism.” That’s a term from Joshua Mitchell’s American Awakening. It’s a label that describes our perpetual quest for easy alternatives and shortcuts. It refers to our tendency to make a supplement a substitute.

In his book, Mitchell never discusses online church or live streaming worship services. He sees “substitutism” at work in other areas, such as social media and friendship. Take a look at his diagnosis of substitutism in these areas, and then I’ll apply these insights to worship.

At its best, social media enhances real-life relationships. Mitchell writes,

In other words, friendship is the real thing. Social media is a supplement. The only reason social media gives you the feeling of friendship is because you already know what real friendship is. (And that’s why we recognize something has gone awry when someone’s “friends” are online only.)

Vitamins can supplement our diet, Mitchell says, providing essential nutrients that go alongside regular meals. But people don’t live on vitamins alone. The supplements enhance the meal, but it’s the meal that matters most. The meal makes up the core; the vitamins assist.

Imagine the skilled warrior filled with courage. Give him some weapons, and they’ll enhance his fighting capacity and increase his passion for victory. But weapons don’t make the man a warrior. They don’t give him courage. Give the same weapons to someone untrained, or someone cowardly, and they won’t make a difference at all.

Shortcuts That Shrink Our Capabilities

This is the problem. Over time, the more we substitute supplements for the real thing, the more likely we are to lose the “competencies” that gave us something genuinely good in the first place. And so, Mitchell cautions us,

When the vitamin becomes a substitute for the meal, over time we lose our competency in cooking great food and spreading out a feast. When social media becomes a substitute for real-life friendships instead of merely a supplement, we eventually lose the ability to cultivate close friendships in person.

Ever wonder why the rates of loneliness have increased in the age of social media, in a time when people are “connected” to more “friends” on social media than ever? Because of substitutism. We’re so enthralled by the supplement that we’ve lost sight of the meal. As time goes on, we’re no longer able to cultivate rich and deep friendships based in virtue and love. We don’t even know what those look like anymore.

This is why we must never think an online worship service or watching a sermon on television is a genuine substitute for the physical gathering of believers in covenantal community. Yes, we can be grateful for the supplement of online worship—when we’re sick and can’t attend or if we’re out of town—but we draw benefit only because we know the real thing. Tuning in online gives us a taste of the genuine experience. It’s a supplement to the meal.

Allure of Shortcuts

The allure of shortcuts is an ever-present temptation, in matters of faith just as in other spheres of life. Friendship is hard. Church life is difficult. To cultivate a rich and meaningful life with God takes time and effort. We won’t grow in holiness and righteousness by racing to supplements designed to help us bypass the difficult labors of church life. It’s precisely in and through those labors that spiritual growth takes place.

So let me offer a hearty commendation to churches engaged in the good work of providing an excellent online experience for worshipers. But let’s remember this is a supplement. Only a supplement. If we fall for substitutism in church life, we’ll leave the next generation spiritually impoverished. And over time, no one will know how to “do church” anymore.

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“Our Image of God Must Go.”

That was the title of an essay in The Observer in March 1963, an excerpt from Honest to God by New Testament scholar John A. T. Robinson, the bishop of Woolwich in the Church of England. The book took the religious publishing world by storm, selling over a million copies, stimulating all sorts of conversations about the future of the church, and stirring up controversy and calls for Robinson’s resignation.

For a long time, I’ve heard about Honest to God. People point to the publication as an inflection point in the history of Christianity in Great Britain and in mainline Protestant circles in the United States, claiming it as either a bold step toward progress in bringing Christianity into conversation with the modern world or as a radical departure from historic Christianity that has ended in theological disaster.

In light of this influential work turning 60 this year, I found an old, discolored paperback edition, the cover barely clinging to the book, and marked up my way through the text. It’s a short proposal that casts a long shadow.

It’s Time for Something Radical

The book begins and ends with Robinson casting himself as a reluctant revolutionary. He assumes the role of a wise and reasonable church leader pressed upon by the current moment to do whatever it takes to save Christianity and stave off church decline.

What’s necessary is something far more radical than “a restating of traditional orthodoxy in modern terms” (7), he says, something that diverges from the path taken by Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and J. B. Phillips (15). The moment demands more than mere translation of traditional Christian teaching. If the church is to avoid shrinking into “a tiny religious remnant,” we need “a much more radical recasting” whereby “the most fundamental categories of our theology—of God, of the supernatural, and of religion itself—must go into the melting” (7).

Sights on the Supernatural

Throughout the book, Robinson appeals to the work of Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Rudolf Bultmann. They’re his conversation partners, the German philosopher theologians at the vanguard of a new kind of Christianity, whose proposals look most promising. The survival of Christianity is at stake, he says. “There is no time to lose” in seeking to “recapture ‘secular’ man.” The way forward is to adopt a new conception of God that, in the end, is more faithful to Christianity than the traditional formulas so often misunderstood in modern times (43).

Robinson takes issue with the God of popular imagination—the old man upstairs who intervenes in human affairs much like a doting grandfather or absent caretaker. Rather than correct these misconceptions of God with a deeper exploration of Scripture or by interrogating the therapeutic and deistic assumptions that lead to such a vision, or by challenging dualistic readings of the biblical text, Robinson sets his sights on “supernaturalism” and “the miraculous.” The church should heed the naturalist critique of supernaturalism because it exposes many of Christianity’s cherished beliefs as “an idol” we must no longer cling to. At the same time, he insists, the Christian faith has a word for thoroughgoing naturalists, lest God become little more than “a redundant name for nature or for humanity” (54).

Robinson embraces Tillich’s description of God as “the ground of our being,” claiming it to be a “great contribution” to the project of reinterpreting transcendence in a way that “preserves its reality while detaching it from the projection of supernaturalism” (56). He celebrates this move toward the abstract—away, it seems, from the covenantal faithfulness of Yahweh, seen in the gritty life of Israel. (Much more could be said about the flattening of Old and New Testament particularity here, but I digress.)

Christianity for a New Day

Robinson’s new image of God leads to a consistent redefining of traditional Christian doctrine, with both God and his works morphing into something less personal and less concrete (and if I’m honest, much less interesting).

Robinson dismisses arguments for the divinity of Christ that appeal to Jesus’s self-conception or speech, such as Lewis’s famous trilemma of Jesus being either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. Jesus never claimed to be God personally, he tells us, only the One who brings God completely (72). Traditional theologies of the atonement are set to the side. The kenotic theory of Christ’s incarnation is preferred. Gone are the New Testament’s frightening images of hellfire; eternal judgment gets recast for a modern age as “union-in-estrangement with the Ground of our being,” following Paul Althaus’s description of “inescapable godlessness in inescapable relationship to God” (80).

Christian morality gets altered also, with Joseph Fletcher’s “situational ethics” put forth as the only option for “a man come of age” (116–17). “Life in the Spirit” means living with “no absolutes but his love” (114), which “will find . . . its own particular way in every individual situation” (112). Actions once considered wrong or sinful (such as sex before marriage) are not necessarily so, once love becomes the standard that renders moral laws irrelevant.

Here’s the way Robinson’s proposal works. He adopts, almost without question, the assumptions of his sophisticated contemporaries but then pushes back gently at some of the more far-reaching implications of modern views. Christianity comes across less like an authority heralding the truths of divine revelation and more like a quiet conversation partner meekly lifting a hand every now and then from over in the corner, hoping to be heard. Enlightenment naturalistic views are assumed; traditional Christianity gets interrogated.

In the end, as the reluctant revolutionary, Robinson calls the church to overcome her obstinate opposition to radical change and embrace a “metamorphosis of Christian belief and practice”—a recasting that will “leave the fundamental truth of the Gospel unaffected” yet still require “everything to go into the melting—even our most cherished religious categories and moral absolutes” (124).

Successful Disaster

It’s been 60 years since this book appeared on the scene and rocked the church world. Looking over the landscape, you could interpret the results as either a stunning success or an unmitigated disaster. And there’s a sense in which both takes are true.

As far as success goes, Robinson was followed by bishops and leaders who pushed positions far more radical than his. Millions of secular and barely religious people today might shrug at Robinson’s proposal, so commonplace has his take on Christianity become. In some Protestant circles, the willingness to dispense with markers of historic Christianity is now so pervasive that controversy is stirred up not by heresy but by someone daring to insist on a moral absolute or hold to historic Christian teaching.

As far as the disaster goes, the sophisticated makeover Robinson sought to give the church has resulted in the emptying of churches at a historic rate. Ironically, the “tiny remnant” of faithful churchgoers in England today are more likely to be the Christians who still read Sayers, Lewis, and Phillips, the writers Robinson thought passé. Those who’ve followed the path of Honest to God don’t bother with church at all.

Now that postmodern waves have crashed upon modernity’s shore, many of the abstractions, assumptions, and sophistications of a 1960s English aristocracy come across as quaint. Robinson’s “recasting” looks like little more than an outdated attempt to curry favor with people who have “come of age” according to good old-fashioned Enlightenment arrogance.

Honestly out of Date

The project of liberal Christianity seems to make headway in every generation, usually through sounding an alarm about the survival of the faith or painting a dire picture that assumes only a tiny remnant will remain in church, yet always claiming the latest fad or fashion is the key to renewal. We’re told to take as our foundation the assumptions of our current cultural moment, and then remake Christianity—put it through the melting fires—into something more acceptable to the modern mind. Unfortunately, the “modern mind” is a moving target. That’s the problem with fads and fashions—they’re fleeting. They don’t last.

Honest to God isn’t just a faded paperback, its words barely clinging to some semblance of historic Christianity. The proposal in these pages is musty, while so many other books written before and around the same time still feel fresh, drawing sustenance from roots in an ancient faith.

Sixty years on, what the church needs most isn’t another proposal that interrogates Christianity from the vantage point of our contemporary sensibilities but leaders who interrogate our current moment from the vantage point of historic Christianity. And, honest to God, that’s what the world needs too.

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There’s a command in the New Testament we ought to lift up as the orienting aspiration for our lives.

It’s from the apostle Paul just before his execution, in the last of his letters. It’s given to Timothy, his son in the faith, alongside other instructions for Christian life and leadership. After encouraging Timothy to endure suffering as he runs the race, Paul—who’s suffering “to the point of being bound like a criminal”—tells his spiritual son,

In everything, no matter the circumstances or hardship, whatever cultural challenges or church problems arise, remember Jesus the King, Israel’s Messiah descended from David, the One raised from the dead.

Center of the Christian Life

This truth marks the center of the Christian life: Reigning over creation is the crucified Messiah of Israel and risen Lord of the world.

Paul’s admonition is another way of saying, Keep the gospel central, my son. Don’t lose sight of the center.

We’ll face all manner of distractions in the Christian life. In all our work and play, in all our streaming and scrolling, we can easily forget Jesus. The gospel can slip to the back of our minds. We lose sight of his lordship. We fail to grapple with the implications of his resurrection.

We’re prone to keep putting self back on the throne, imagining we’re at the center of the universe, with our family, our church, and everyone in society revolving around us like planets orbit the sun.

But the apostle Paul holds Jesus Christ before our eyes, as if to say, “Look here. Don’t stop looking. Remember. Do not forget.” This is what life is all about. This is the One who rules the cosmos. This is the One who knows you better than you know yourself, yet loves you anyway. King Jesus is the point of everything.

Center of Christian Fellowship

One of the best things we can do for our brothers and sisters in Christ in an anxious age, a time filled with angst and insecurity, a moment of deep division and disorientation, is to do what Paul did for Timothy. To point people back to Christ and his kingdom.

Stressed? Scared? Anxious? Distracted? Remember King Jesus. Take time to avert your eyes from everything else and look squarely at him. Look to his perfect life in your place. Look to his death on the cross for your sins. Look to his resurrection victory. Look to his exaltation as king. Look to his promise to come again.

In the church, we’re prone to shift the cross from the center and replace it with a cause (most likely a good one!). But if we as God’s people don’t remind each other that Jesus is the King of kings, who will? If the church herself forgets Jesus by pushing him to the periphery, who else will trumpet the good news? Unless we keep our focus on Jesus as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, we’ll drift until we become little more than a society of social workers or a political action committee. We’ll do work in the name of One we have forgotten. Or, worse, we’ll misuse his name for our agenda, not his.

Center of Our Service

But Trevin, you may say, there’s so much that deserves our focus right now. Shouldn’t we be concerned about the direction of our country? Aren’t you deflated by the decline of the church? How can I not be preoccupied with the challenges facing my family right now? Am I supposed to just grit my teeth and ignore a season of sadness and suffering?

Remembering King Jesus does not remove us from the world we’re called to serve. It gives us the proper perspective so our actions can be most spiritually effective.

Remembering King Jesus does not deflect our attention from challenges in the church. It reminds us why there’s a church in the first place and who is her Head.

Remembering King Jesus does not resolve all the problems that arise. It gives us an orienting center from which to face our griefs and pains.

Remembering King Jesus does not diminish our concern for justice and righteousness. It fuels our activity so our motivations don’t slip into ever-common grooves of self-righteousness and contempt.

I’ve always loved the old hymn “Turn Your Eyes upon Jesus,” but the line that says “the things of earth will grow strangely dim in light of his glory and grace” is only true for some aspects of earthly existence—those temporal concerns and worries that keep us preoccupied when we lose sight of the big picture.

Most of the time, when we turn our eyes upon Jesus, the things of earth grow clearer, not dimmer. We interpret the things of earth with more insight, with wisdom from above, with a sharpness of clarity that comes from the Spirit. We put things in perspective; the outlines and edges come into sharper focus because our lens is zoomed in on Jesus the King.

The best thing we can do in the year ahead is to remember King Jesus and to remind others of his centrality as well. Consciously. Daily. Devotedly. Shai Linne reminds us of this Jesus who is

the God-glorifier,
the universe-Creator,
the prophecy-fulfiller,
the perfect law-obeyer,
the Scripture-validator,
the Father-honorer,
the humility-modeler,
the cross-carrier,
the sin-bearer,
the death-conqueror,
the grave-defeater,
the salvation-achiever,
the prayer-answerer,
the proud-humbler,
the weak-strengthener,
the elect-preserver,
the triumphant returner,
the justice-executor,
the Satan-destroyer,
the eternal joy-giver . . .

Remember King Jesus.

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Jesus—he’s the central figure of the New Testament, and his life, death, resurrection, and exaltation is the heart of the gospel. His story is foretold by the Old Testament prophets, anticipated in the Psalms, and then explained by the apostles who witnessed his work. But nowhere do we see him more clearly than in the Gospels, the four biographies that reveal his ministry on earth.

As Christians, we approach the inspired scriptural testimony not primarily as historians excavating ancient accounts but as worshipers seeking an encounter with the living Savior. We want to see him in his glory—to be dazzled by the brightness of his revelation on the Mount of Transfiguration, to sit at his feet like Mary and drink deeply from the wisdom of his infallible words.

Journeying with Jesus

A few years ago, I adapted a centuries-old approach to reading through all 150 psalms in a month, relying on a morning, midday, and evening prayer schedule. The result was a little book called Psalms in 30 Days.

This week marks the launch of Life of Jesus in 30 Days, which follows the same structure of prayer as my Psalms volume but with selections from the Gospels. The goal is to embark on a 30-day prayer journey with Jesus through the major moments and teachings of his life, his death on the cross for our sins, and his resurrection and ascension.

There’s precedent in the Scriptures for praying three times a day, and there’s spiritual blessing in deliberately punctuating your day with moments of prayer and Bible reading. This three-times-a-day approach takes you back to the life of Jesus so you lift your eyes above your current circumstances and remember that the glory of our Savior is the blazing center of all things.

Prayers of Faithful Christians

Over the years, I’ve also found the written prayers of faithful Christians who have gone before me to be a help in my prayer life. Our praying the written prayers of saints from years gone by is a lot like children trying on the shoes of their parents. We wonder if our feet will ever fit into the spiritual shoes of the giants who have gone before us. We wonder if our devotion will match the intensity and clarity we find in their words. We want hearts that are oriented in such a way that we’d ask for and desire the right things.

Praying through these Gospel selections alongside other Scriptures and other faithful expressions of faith over the years is one way of forming our hearts and minds daily.

Life of Jesus in 30 Days

This book features Gospel stories and teachings of Jesus, as translated in the Christian Standard Bible, arranged in three-times-a-day readings for 30 days. I haven’t sought to include every single story, parable, miracle, or moment recorded in the Gospels, but I’ve intentionally pulled from all four Gospel writers so you’re acquainted with each of their voices. The journey is predominantly, but not precisely, chronological.

Every prayer time begins with a call to prayer, includes the Gloria and the Lord’s Prayer, and closes with a biblical blessing.

• The morning prayer guide includes a “confession of faith” taken from Scripture, the ancient creeds, or the “Reforming Catholic Confession,” which was released in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.
• The evening prayer guide includes a “confession of sin” and a biblical promise of absolution to all who repent.
• The morning and evening prayers also include psalms, prophecies, or songs from Scripture as well as written prayers from Christians through the ages—all of them aligning with the specific themes of the day’s Gospel readings.
• There’s also time set aside for you to intercede on behalf of others and bring your personal requests to the Lord.
• The midday prayer guide is abbreviated and focused on the reading from the Gospels, since this is the time of day when it may be more challenging to carve out 10 or 15 minutes for prayer.

Suggestions for Praying Through the Life of Jesus in 30 Days

Praying through these Gospel selections for 30 days is a spiritual workout, much like doing daily exercises. Don’t feel the pressure to make it through all the readings your first time through. If you miss a reading, you can catch up later, or you can skip it and come back to it the next month. If you get behind by a day or two, you can pick up on the day that corresponds to the day of the month, or you can proceed in order, even if it takes you more than 30 days to complete the readings.

Set the book on a desk, nightstand, or table close to your bed, where you’ll see it. Let it be a visual reminder whenever you enter the room that nudges you to spend time with the Lord. Pray the morning selection as soon as you wake up and the evening selection just before going to bed. The abbreviated midday routine is ideal for a brief pause during work, but if you miss a midday prayer time, simply add that Gospel selection to the evening prayer guide to catch up.

My prayer is that this guide will help you make this journey with Jesus a regular spiritual discipline that strengthens your love for God. “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 15:13).

Earlier this year, I read Eugene Vodolazkin’s widely acclaimed Laurus, a novel about a man in medieval Russia who is both a healer and a “holy fool” in the Russian Orthodox tradition. It’s a story filled with vivid descriptions and mystical encounters—a search for redemption that takes the reader through landscapes plagued by war and disease.

A recurring theme in Laurus is the parting of ways. In one scene, when several men take leave of each other, we’re told the moment was marked “with an especial cordiality” because there was no question “they were parting forever.” They assumed they’d never meet again on the earth. “In this lay a particularity of partings during that era,” Vodolazkin comments. “The Middle Ages rarely presented opportunities that brought people together twice during the course of an earthly life.”

Parting Ways

Parting forever.

I’ve contemplated the significance of parting ways this year, having lost a friend and colleague in January in a sudden accident. After a week of working on various projects and attending meetings, we walked out to the parking lot together, talked about future plans, and then parted ways. Neither of us knew that within a few hours or so, he’d be with his Savior. Since that day, maybe as a result of the shock and grief we’ve felt, our team has parted ways with apprehension and sadness (and we often text each other when we get home!).

Whenever someone dies, you immediately think of your last encounter—perhaps a phone call or text message, or running into them at a conference or at church. A past parting of ways grows in significance when it becomes the last. There’s finality. An end to the chapter. Not that the end is forever. The official hymn of Southern Seminary includes a line that says, “We meet to part, but part to meet,” hinting at the significance of earthly partings and pointing ahead to the day we’ll meet again in glory.

Even when it’s not death but a change in circumstances, there’s a bittersweet aspect to parting ways with someone—watching them board the plane to go overseas, or load up the U-Haul to move across the country, or stay behind after being dropped off at college. Even when you expect to meet again—just in a different way, or not as often, or under new circumstances—the parting is still powerful.

Never Completely Parting

In a later scene in Laurus, the main character embraces another and says,

This is the profundity in parting. We’re different because we met. The encounter has changed us.

This is why someone no longer with you remains close to your heart. There’s still presence in the absence, something real in the empty room. As long as you remember the person you worked with, or lived next to, or served alongside, or roomed with, there may be a physical parting of ways, but the parting is never complete. Something of them in you remains. You’re different from who you might have been otherwise.

This is what it means to encounter another living person, an image-bearer of the one true God. “There are no ordinary people,” C. S. Lewis reminds us. “You have never talked to a mere mortal.”

When we meet with another human being, when we spend time with someone made in the image of God—sitting across the table, enjoying a hot beverage, working on a project, or falling into deep conversation—we are changed. And when we part ways, we acknowledge this with the hug or the handshake: It’s good that you exist. I’m glad that you are.

A beautiful parting of ways is steeped in the ethos of the kind farewell. And whenever we part ways—no matter our frailties and fears, anxieties and questions, hopes and dreams—we give thanks for the connection, and we savor the memory, nodding at the power of presence, even in absence. Knowing that nothing good will ever fully pass away.

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In his 1896 lecture “The Will to Believe,” philosopher William James described religious beliefs as either “live” or “dead” wires.

A live hypothesis is a real possibility for someone. For example, James wrote, if he were to ask you to believe in the Mahdi, you’d probably not even know what was being asked. There’s no “electric connection with your nature.” No spark of credibility at all. It’s a dead wire for you. But if he were to ask an Arab (even if not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the possibility would be alive. “Deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties,” James said, “but relations to the individual thinker.”

The possibility of a religious belief is like a live or dead wire. “A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones.” For many in James’s time, the choice between being a Muslim or a theosophist was basically a “dead option,” but the choice between being “an agnostic or a Christian” was alive. (And many of his contemporaries opted for agnosticism over traditional Christianity.)

In our time, we’re witnessing the rise of secularism and a corresponding decline in the percentage of people who belong to religious organizations or claim religious faith. And so we wonder this: In the future, will calling someone to follow Jesus make about as much sense as asking the average American in 1896 if they’ll follow the Mahdi? Does secularism make Christianity a less plausible option, a “dead wire” for most people? And if so, how do we respond?

Is Christianity Still Plausible in Secular Society?

In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes describes an interesting moment in the Birmingham City Art Gallery. In a glassed-in corner, there’s a small, intense painting by Petrus Christus of Christ displaying his wounds: “With outstretched forefinger and thumb he indicates where the spear went in—even invites us to measure the gash. His crown of thorns has sprouted into a gilt, spun-sugar halo of glory. Two saints, one with a lily and the other with a sword, attend him, drawing back the green velvet drapes of a strangely domestic proscenium.”

Barnes recalls a tracksuited father and his small son traveling through the gallery. As they turned the corner and the boy saw the painting, he asked, “Why’s that man holding his chest, Dad?” The father glanced back and replied, “Dunno.” The art held no significance because there was no shared understanding of Christianity or the meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection.

Despite his atheism, Barnes can’t help but feel a sense of loss at the fading cultural memory of Christianity. And yet he views such loss as inevitable, wondering, “What will it be like when Christianity joins the list of dead religions, and is taught in universities as part of the folklore syllabus; when blasphemy becomes not legal or illegal but simply impossible?” He imagines it will be a bit like a recent visit to Athens where he marveled at Cycladic marble figurines, much like the man in the tracksuit with his son. Whatever we may appreciate about the artistry of the Cycladic figurines, their purpose was to be buried with the dead. “And what exactly—or even roughly—did they believe, the people who produced such objects?” Barnes asks. “Dunno.”

Is Christianity Becoming a Dead Wire?

Returning to William James’s analogy of dead and live wires, we may wonder, Is Christianity—traditional Christianity and its creeds and confessions and congregations and cathedrals—a plausible option for radically secular, never-churched people? Is it a “live wire,” a possibility for most people? Or is it increasingly a “dead wire”?

Asking this question gets to the root of anxiety among believers today. The reason many Christians worry about the decline of Christendom and the loss of widespread Christian values is that it seems to make evangelism and discipleship more challenging. Don’t we need Christendom if we want following Jesus to remain a live option for those outside the faith?

Complicating the question is another cultural development. The “agnostic vs. Christian” hypothesis that William James saw as a “live wire” for educated people in 1896 has been replaced by what Charles Taylor describes as the “nova effect”—an explosion of different options for belief and meaning in a secular age. It’s not just this position or that, it’s this choice among that, and that, and that, and that—a myriad of beliefs and practices, many “remixed” in some way, as pointed out by cultural observer Tara Isabella Burton, who has also chronicled the shift from “institutional” religion to “intuitional” faiths. It’s no surprise, then, that pastors and church leaders today feel as if they must not only answer the question of “Why Christianity?” but also “Why not whatever?”

In this era of religious confusion and decline, we need to remember three truths.

1. Need for Missiological Awareness

If we’re to be good missionaries, we cannot ignore our changing cultural context. If we’ve relied on aspects of cultural Christianity or Christendom in the past to smooth the way for gospel presentation, we can do so no longer.

We shouldn’t assume biblical literacy. We shouldn’t assume a favorable atmosphere for the gospel. We shouldn’t assume the methods we’ve used in the past will continue to bear fruit the same way in the future. Missionaries must adapt to conditions on the ground, and so should we.

2. Plausibility Power of the Church

Don’t underestimate the power of relationships. The church is where Easter comes alive. A renewed fellowship of people who live in relationship and follow Jesus together is indispensable in the conversation about Christianity’s plausibility.

Charles Taylor points out the power of relationships in a world with so many religious options:

Unless something happens that suddenly makes another person’s faith option seem viable. And that happens usually through relationship. He goes on,

Rodney Stark made a similar point about early Christianity. Conversion is more likely when “people have or develop stronger attachments to members of the group than they have to nonmembers.” This is still true. Both personal evangelism and corporate fellowship are vital if we’re to show the world that following Christ is a real and viable option in a radically secular world.

3. Supernatural Intervention of the Spirit

We mustn’t be so faithless as to think the gospel needs cultural Christianity to remain the power of God unto salvation. The church before Christendom wasn’t propped up by cultural Christianity, and Christians in many parts of the world today walk with God just fine with no need for cultural crutches. Yes, Christendom may be an asset to Christianity in terms of plausibility structures, making it a “live wire” in a sociological sense, but theologically, we must never assume cultural Christianity is what supplies the electricity. It’s the Spirit who makes the gospel spread like wildfire, blowing when and where he pleases.

Conversion is always impossible without supernatural intervention. Cultural Christianity may be one of the tools that God uses to smooth the path so some will understand the basics of biblical truth before being confronted with the specific claims of Christ. But God isn’t dependent on Christendom, and we shouldn’t be either. Whether we labor in fields where Christianity seems as far-fetched a possibility as becoming Zoroastrian or whether we labor in areas that still bear the fragrance of commonly held Christian values, our call to evangelism and missions remains the same—even if certain methods must change based on cultural context.

No matter what approaches we suggest or methods we use, we must not forget that in the end, the primary reason anyone believes the implausible testimony that Jesus of Nazareth walked out of his grave isn’t because of live or dead wires but because of spiritual awakening.

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In a recent conversation about the world’s most beloved fairy tales, Jonathan Pageau commented on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the mystical object that captures the attention of the queen: a magic mirror. “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” says the queen, expecting always to hear she’s the fairest in the land, only one day to discover there’s someone who threatens her supremacy. Jealousy then drives her hunt for Snow White.

For thousands of years, humans have imagined the power of being drawn to an object that props up one’s pride. In the story of Snow White, the looking glass serves two purposes: (1) to flatter the queen by affirming her beauty and (2) to help her keep an eye on the activity of others, so she can maintain control over her kingdom. Flattery and surveillance.

The 1937 Disney classic shows the mirror mounted on a wall. But other versions of the story show the queen looking into a handheld mirror.

Today, imagination is reality. I have a magic mirror in my pocket. And so do you.

Tell Me I’m Beautiful

Your phone is designed every day, every hour, to tell you that you’re the center of the universe. If your phone is your world, and if the settings and apps are tailored to you and your interests, then with you at all times is a world that revolves around you. No wonder we find it hard to set the phone aside. Nothing else has the same effect of putting us at the center. Nothing else makes us feel more in control, more Godlike, more knowledgeable, more connected.

The phone is like the vanity mirror, a temptation to pride. Its power is like that of the pool that captured Narcissus, who pined after the reflection of his face until it led to his destruction.

“The deeper danger of our screens,” Andy Crouch says, “is flattery. Our screens, increasingly, pay a great deal of attention to us. They assure us that someone, or at least something, cares.”

The curse of this flattery is self-imprisonment, the locking up of one’s self in the smallest chamber of the mind. Like the queen, constantly looking in the mirror and hoping to see her beauty, we lose the ability to lose ourselves in pleasures that don’t require constant self-awareness. We never find ourselves because we can’t lose ourselves.

We can’t enjoy the beauty of nature except as a backdrop for a selfie. We can’t retreat into a thought-provoking book because the phone is always there, beckoning us with distraction and flattery. We can’t piece together thoughts and express our feelings in writing or conversation because our hearts have shriveled and our minds flit from one topic to another before being drawn back to the magic mirror, like a mosquito to a lamppost.

Show Me My World

The phone doesn’t only flatter us as we construct a sense of online identity; it also, like the magic mirror in Snow White, helps us maintain constant surveillance of our social circles, our little kingdoms in which we all seek to maintain supremacy. Whether it’s the number of likes and comments on Instagram, the virality of an entertaining video on TikTok, the fist-bump of “ratio-ing” someone on Twitter, or the amassing of followers and “engagement” on Facebook—we’re all participants in a massive social experiment that casts us all as the stars of our own shows, a veritable Truman Show except that we’re in on the gag and enjoy the attention.

When your sense of flattered identity gets too tied to this kind of vigilant surveillance of your social hierarchy, you cannot help but become discouraged or depressed when someone else vies for supremacy. The vanity of the queen in the story of Snow White doesn’t stop with self-absorption; it descends into jealousy and rage. Because, after all, the magic mirror does more than tell you how fair and lovely you are—it informs you of people fairer and lovelier still.

When you scroll through posts of friends and family who always seem to be living their best lives; when you see peers whose careers have taken off in ways yours hasn’t; when you notice how colleagues seem wealthier, stronger, livelier, happier; you become aware that you’re not the greatest. The magic mirror flatters you, then flattens you.

And, just like the queen, we’re primed for a soul-destroying jealousy, a seething sense of envy in response to our feelings of deflation and discouragement—sometimes dipping into depression, often erupting into vitriol. The queen cannot celebrate the beauty of another; she must take it down.

Perhaps this is why the online world of social media is a cauldron of vices masquerading as virtues, with inordinate energy spent tearing down others. We grow increasingly incapable of celebrating the good we see in others because beauty has been reduced to a tool of competition, a zero-sum game that leaves no room for generosity of spirit. Having spent so much time gazing into our magic mirrors—having grown accustomed to constant flattery and vigilant surveillance—the deadly sin of vanity impoverishes our spirits and shrivels our souls.

Look out the Window

A growing number of sociologists, psychologists, pastors, and theologians recognize the dangers of social media and the effects of the phone, particularly for adolescents. But we’d do well to expand our concerns beyond the mental health challenges of teenagers to see how almost everyone today, no matter their age, is too tightly connected to their magic mirror. We’re more chained than we realize.

The magic mirror tells us a false story and slowly transforms us into shells of the humans God has called us to be. We like to think we’re Snow White. It’s more likely we’re the evil queen.

What’s the solution? A world of windows, not mirrors. Habits of mind and heart that lead us to look through windows to the glories of something other than ourselves and to see through the temptations and tendencies of the mirrors all around us.

Spiritual vitality involves turning away from self and toward God, the daily exercise of remembering that we were made to know and love God, that we were made to be known and loved by God, and that God (not us) is at the center of all things. We look through the windows of God’s world and God’s Word until we see the beauty of his creation and redemption. Only there will we find lasting contentment. Only there will we see how our own story finds a place in the epic he’s crafting.

There’s more magic in the world than in your mirror. The world outside our window is enchanted, if only we have eyes to see.

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If you care about the health and witness of the church, you’re likely aware of the increased attention given recently to patterns of pastoral abuse of authority. Domineering behavior in the church is not new, of course. You can see it throughout church history. Sixteen hundred years ago, Jerome wrote about prideful bishops:

I echo the concerns of many today who believe we mustn’t minimize or wave away the bullying behaviors on display in some spiritual leaders. This moment calls for greater attention to spiritual abuse, not less.

As we seek a healthier church in the future, we must move deeper into the scriptural teaching that warns about shepherds who, for one reason or another, abuse their authority, lording their power and domineering the sheep. Jesus told us the pagan rulers lord their authority over others, using high positions to act as tyrants. “But it is not so among you,” he said. “On the contrary, whoever wants to become great among you will be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you will be a slave to all” (Mark 10:43–44).

Danger of Dilution

If, like me, you care about the people who’ve been hurt by pastors known for bullying behavior, manipulative words, and a haughty spirit, and if, like me, you want to see renewal in the area of leadership in the church today, then I appeal to you: watch out for a phenomenon taking place (largely online) that has the potential of derailing reforms in the church when it comes to matters of spiritual abuse, mistreatment, and harm.

I’m referring to the dilution of words like “toxic,” “abuse,” “hurt,” “trauma,” and “harm” in online discourse. Call it “concept creep” or “word dilution.” It’s the ever-expanding connotation of these words in ways that (ironically) diminish the stories and experiences of those who have truly been abused.

The result of concept creep is twofold: real experiences of evil are minimized and ordinary experiences of difficulty are magnified. In the end, this trend causes confusion that makes it much more difficult for real people in real churches to report real injustices.

Abuse and Ordinary Harm

To avoid this language dilution, we must distinguish between true spiritual abuse and what Myles Werntz calls “ordinary harm,” which is a “downstream effect of sin” that shows up in ongoing ways in both the church and world:

I might quibble with that definition, as I’m not sure all abuse is consciously intentional, but the point is well taken. Spiritual abuse shows up in patterns of bullying and manipulative behavior, the undermining of accountability, an unwillingness to submit to formal structures of authority, and the hardening of anger toward correction. This is one reason why Mike Kruger’s Bully Pulpit is an important book (and Kruger is careful to anticipate the problems of this dilution in language I’m noticing online).

I’m afraid today’s online discourse is making it harder, not easier, for real people facing real harm in real communities to speak up. When we apply serious words like “trauma” or “abuse” to situations of ordinary harm, we diminish the seriousness of hurt in more significant cases. We flatten the distinctions. No one is served well by such flattening.

This concept creep works against the time necessary to test a situation, leading us to rush to judgment (or to social media), and it can have a chilling effect on those who might speak up about significant harms because they see what the accusations of “abuser” and “toxic” do when leveled too quickly online. When accusations become so common that they engender a shrug, people facing significant injustice begin to think, No one will believe me and No one will take this seriously.

Word Dilution and Church Relationships

If we really care about spiritual abuse, then we must push back against the dilution of the meaning of serious words. Otherwise, we create unhelpful expectations for life together in the church and the world. Even in the church, we should expect to be hurt from time to time. After all, we’re sinners on the road of sanctification—our past sins in the process of being uprooted and our present vices being countered.

The apostle Paul’s admonition to bear with one another implies there are hurts to be borne, for love covers a multitude of sins. The need for healing within the body of Christ implies the presence of wounds. Even as we should be utterly intolerant of any form of abuse, we should expect ordinary hurts and harms to be part of our life together. In Christ, we turn from sin, and, among his people, our hurts can heal.

But what often happens online (through a well-intentioned effort to bring more attention to sins that require repentance) is the transformation of ordinary harm into “abuse,” leadership foibles into “toxicity,” the presence of discomfort into “trauma,” and verbal slights into “violence.” This approach serves as a grave injustice to real victims of real abuses, while also creating an unhealthy fragility among those who experience ordinary harm, providing a perverse incentive to find one’s identity and power and significance in victimhood. Not all harm in ministry is spiritual abuse.

Something similar takes place in the fight against racial prejudice. When words like “racism” or “white supremacy” become diluted by applying them too broadly in online discourse, often in laughable ways, the result is not a reduction of racism in real life but more shoulder shrugging among those who think the whole conversation is simply overblown. When everything and everyone is racist, no one is really racist. Throw up your hands and be done.

If you care about renewal in the area of spiritual abuse, you’ve got to be on guard against slippage in language—both in yourself and in those who turn to these words too flippantly. We’re less likely to see reforms take place if the label of “toxic” and “abuse” gets applied too broadly, because those who would be most likely allied to our cause will begin to think these concerns must be overblown. We mustn’t conflate ordinary sins and relationship trouble with true trauma and abuse, precisely because we care about ending real abuse.

Word Dilution and Injustice

In What’s Our Problem: A Self-Help Book for Societies, Tim Urban notes how the expansion of meaning given to words like “harm,” “trauma,” “racism,” and “abuse” not only increases the pool of victims but drives a corresponding hunt for villains. He writes,

He goes on: 

We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. In his acclaimed work on the pervasiveness of sin, Cornelius Plantinga Jr. remarks how even humanity’s best intentions at reform are often muddled: “Reforms need constant reforming. Rescuers need rescue. Amendments need amendment. . . . Evil contaminates every scalpel designed to remove it.” Plantinga points out how reform movements that address one aspect of injustice can unwittingly become the purveyors of a different kind of injustice. I hope this won’t be the case when it comes to abuse reform.

If we want the church of the future to be healthier than the church of today, then we must be open to more conversations about the exercise of proper authority and what constitutes spiritual abuse. These distinctions matter. That’s why we must push back on concept creep and not take part in the dilution of serious words about serious sins.

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What will it take for the church to be renewed and the world to experience a profound move of God?

At the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, Francis Schaeffer spoke on “Form and Freedom in the Church,” later included in a book of Lausanne papers. Ray Ortlund recently pointed me to this address, which nearly 50 years later remains a prescient and powerful call.

Schaeffer claimed we need two contents and two realities—four indispensable ingredients for seeing a move of God.

1. Sound Doctrine

Schaeffer began by pointing back to the essential elements of Christianity. Even while acknowledging the “borderline things” Christians will disagree upon, he insists that “Christianity is a specific body of truth” and “on the central issues there must be no compromise.” Orthodoxy is essential.

Schaeffer warns about both a conservative and a progressive path to abandoning orthodoxy. Liberal theologians begin to deny that the Bible offers any clear and hard lines at all, adopting a latitudinarian approach to all Christian belief. Evangelical theologians confuse middle-class, contextually specific standards with unchanging truth, making their own preferences or expressions of Christianity “equal to the absolutes of the Word of God.” Both result, over time, in the dissolution of orthodoxy and the destruction of the church’s witness.

Lest you think Schaeffer’s emphasis on doctrine implies a mere cognitive acceptance of Christian truth, he makes clear that “we must practice the content, practice the truth we say we believe,” demonstrating “to our own children and to the watching world that we take truth seriously.” Doctrines are something we walk in, teaching is something we abide in, and the gospel is something we obey. “Do you think for a moment we will have credibility if we say we believe the truth and yet do not practice the truth in religious matters?” Schaeffer asks.

2. Careful Contextualization

Schaeffer promotes “honest answers to honest questions,” which I’m describing as careful contextualization. It means thinking like a missionary. We’re called not only to believe the truths of Christianity but to proclaim them in such a way that they can be heard, understood, and received.

We believe sound doctrine—orthodoxy—is vital to the health of the church and that the truth must come into contact with the modern world. “If Christianity is truth as the Bible claims, it must touch every aspect of life,” Schaeffer writes, and “Christianity demands that we have enough compassion to learn the questions of our generation.” This requires listening, not just speaking. “Answering questions is hard work.”

A missionary encounter doesn’t take place when we assume faithfulness is simply reciting the creeds, reveling in our reception of sound doctrine. No, loving our neighbor requires compassion, the ability to listen carefully to the questions of a generation and then “pray and do the hard work” necessary for answering honest inquiries. Schaeffer himself, in his work at L’Abri, was a model of hospitality and generosity of spirit in the way he dialogued with those seeking truth.

3. True Spirituality

The first of Schaeffer’s two essential realities is true spirituality. “The end of the matter,” he writes, “is to be in relationship to God.” It isn’t enough for the church to believe and proclaim the right things unless our hearts are gripped by the beauty of the gospel and the power of a relationship with God.

Schaeffer is describing here a “true spirituality” summed up by “the moment by moment work of the whole Trinity in our lives.” This means our interior life is to be a deep well of wisdom, grace, and love.

No, we will not attain perfect righteousness or spirituality in this life. Schaeffer realizes that when we look back from the perspective of eternity, all our growth will appear paltry and poor. “And yet there must be some reality,” he writes. “There must be something real of the work of Christ in the moment by moment life, something real of the forgiveness of specific sin brought under the blood of Christ, something real in Christ bearing his fruit through me through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.”

I wonder if today, with the superficial trivialities of a digital age so prevalent in our world, this kind of spiritual depth—the force that comes from realities developed in unseen and hidden practices—will stand out all the more, simply for how rare it has become. Shallow people cannot showcase gospel depth. Without true spirituality, the sound doctrine we proclaim is worthless and even destructive to the cause of Christianity. “There is nothing more ugly in all the world, and which turns people aside, than a dead orthodoxy,” he writes.

4. Relational Beauty

Schaeffer’s second essential reality is the beauty of Christianity’s effect on human relationships. The beauty of the church must adorn the truth of the gospel.

First, we’re to relate well to unbelievers. We can argue all day long against the determinism of B. F. Skinner, he says, but what’s the point if we treat the people we meet every day as “less than” really made in the image of God?

Schaeffer considers the person he may encounter for just 10 seconds or so, sharing a revolving door. “We do not think consciously in every case that this man is made in the image of God, but, having ground into our bones and into our consciousness (as well as our doctrinal statement) that he is made in the image of God, we will treat him well in those ten seconds that we have.” Even when battling our theological or cultural opponents, “we try from our side to bring our discussion into the circle of truly human relationships.”

Second, we’re to showcase the beauty of human relationships in the church. If we’re called to love our unbelieving neighbor, how much more (“Ten thousand times more!”) should we showcase “beauty in the relationships between true Bible believing Christians, something so beautiful that the world would be brought up short.”

Love for one another is the mark of Christianity, even across denominational lines. Lovelessness destroys orthodoxy. “If we do not show beauty in the way we treat each other,” Schaeffer writes, “then in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of our own children, we are destroying the truth we proclaim.” And later, he urges evangelicals to ask God for forgiveness for “the ugliness with which we have often treated each other when we are in different camps.” Perhaps this call to repentance is needed more today than 50 years ago when he issued it.

Summing Up

Schaeffer calls the church to embrace “two orthodoxies,” one of doctrine and one of community. We must be clear on the essentials of the Christian faith and be compassionate as our Savior was, filled with such love that, like the early church, no one could imagine one person being hungry while another was rich.

Two contents and two realities, Schaeffer pleaded. If we have all four, perhaps then “we will begin to see something profound happen in our generation.” May it be so today.

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John Seel, who’s a good-faith critic of my work (as I am of his), took issue with my recent column on the paradoxical nature of the church today. I made the point that the church today is both stable and in crisis, and such has been the case throughout history, reaching all the way back to the New Testament. The church in every age faces challenges, and yet the promise of ultimate victory for the church remains ever secure.

Without a firm grip on that paradox, I warned, we’ll slide into either complacency or chaos. When we focus only on the trouble the church faces, we succumb to fruitless anxiety about a battle whose outcome is secure. When we focus only on Jesus’s ultimate victory, we fail to engage the world in ways that require vigilance in this present moment.

Sociologically Wrongheaded?

In an email response, John acknowledged this paradoxical truth, but he believes my emphasis on the church’s stability to be “sociologically wrongheaded” and “psychologically imprudent.” Yes, the church has always faced crises, he wrote, but when I appeal too quickly to church history, I end up flattening and normalizing the situation currently facing the church. We’re in a truly unprecedented moment, as evidenced in the landmark work of Philip Rieff. In My Life Among the Deathworks, he writes,

If Rieff is right (and I believe he is), the church in the West is facing immediate and historically unique challenges that set us apart from the crises faced by the early church or our Reformation heroes. We’ll need the Spirit’s guidance to develop new forms and approaches. Unprecedented times need an unprecedented response. John goes on:

That’s the sociological pushback to my emphasis on the church’s stability. This crisis is bigger than those that have come before. He’s not wrong about this, and my assessment of our contemporary challenges isn’t far from his. Here’s how I described these times in my guest lectures at Oxford last fall: “We live in a world infused with Christian sensibilities now turned against traditional Christian teaching.”

A recent spate of books seek to demonstrate how Western society is pervasively Christian in its most deep-rooted assumptions. Tom Holland’s Dominion claims Christianity’s influence is so pervasive and powerful that society unwittingly borrows and invokes Christian teaching when it condemns the church for its failures. Similarly, Glen Scrivener, a minister and evangelist in the U.K., points in The Air We Breathe to seven values central to the modern outlook that come to us from the influence of Christianity.

What happens when we seek to retain a civilization that enshrines these values but without reference to their sacred origin? Os Guinness describes the situation in the West as a “cut-flower civilization.” It’s the attempt to retain and enjoy the life of a flower bloom when its source of soil, nutrients, and water has been severed. Christian values, when severed from the Christian story, begin to cause as many problems as they solve. The virtues of Christianity, isolated and separated from one another and from the story that gives them meaning and significance, shoot off in all sorts of directions that lead to civilizational conflict and chaos.

And so, yes, “unprecedented” is the right word. As Tim Keller wrote,

But this shouldn’t make us overly alarmist or anxious. Keller also wrote, “Everything is unprecedented once.” It’s true “there has never been a fast-growing revival in a post-Christian, secular society. But every great new thing is unprecedented—until it happens.”

When I say the church is in crisis yet also stable, I’m thinking of the church worldwide, not merely the church in the West. If we’re attuned only to the particular form of crisis the church in the West is facing, we may miss the bigger picture of all that’s happening around the world.

With many Asian and European countries about to experience massive demographic free fall (which has already begun in some places and may be irreversible in others), we’re likely to see a surge of worldwide religiosity and a decline (globally) of secularism in the coming decades. It remains to be seen how effective values like Americanization, materialism, and prosperity will be in the secularizing of the Global South . . . and if their birth rates and their engagement with late modernity will follow the pattern of those in the West or if religious revival will change the direction here.

Psychologically Imprudent?

John’s second critique is that by focusing on the eternal stability of the church, I’m failing to take seriously “the level of denial that is woven into the institutional fabric of the church.” Pastors and ministry leaders need to hit rock bottom, like an alcoholic, before recovery can become effective. Unfortunately, most pastors and ministry leaders haven’t made this shift. My friend likens their mindset to the hubris of the Titanic’s captain heading into iceberg-strewn waters.

Saying “the church is stable” and “the gates of hell will not prevail”—while theologically true—serves only to distract from the severity of today’s crisis. When we blame “secular culture” for the decline of the church, we miss the ways the church has failed to be salt and light or has contributed to its own decline. Repentance and honesty are required. What we see instead is overconfidence—a sign of American exceptionalism—which becomes a theologically excused form of sociological blindness. John writes,

His takeaway? We need to focus more on the crisis of the church than on the promise of stability. This isn’t the time for theological “balance.” We need to emphasize the crisis if we’re to break through “the religious inertia and self-serving theological triumphalism” that keep God’s people in psychological blindness. “We are at a pivot point for the gospel in America at this historical moment. We need to begin to act accordingly.”

Keep Your Head

I always appreciate insights and careful pushback when readers come across something of mine that seems wrongheaded. In this case, I agree with John’s caution—we could easily hear the “crisis” and “stability” language in such a way as to mask indifference or self-deception to the seriousness of the situation we face. Far be it from me to reinforce a sense of apathy or complacency.

I agree the church in the West needs repentance and reform, not triumphalism or a sense that “all is well.” This was the main reason behind my podcast on Reconstructing Faith: we should remove the rot and fortify the foundations at the same time. The dechurching we’re seeing in the West is occurring at a level we haven’t seen before.

That said, many of the most championed proposals for church renewal and reform in progressive evangelical churches would require the abandonment of orthodoxy, whether theological or moral, which hasn’t stemmed the tide of dechurching in the mainline but has seemed to only speed it up. It would be a disaster for the church—in the very moment when the world is waking up to the anthropological confusion and disillusionment left in the wake of the sexual revolution—to jump on a bandwagon already heading over a cliff.

Hopeful Reform

If the church can hold to core convictions, while finding new ways of answering the longings of people in late-modern societies, while being clear and convictional about society’s biggest lies, we’ll have the best chance at renewing the future. Looking for “new ways” is key here, and, yes, carefully thinking through ways we must repent and reform is part of what’s required of us in this moment.

Still, it’s important to stress the “stability” of the church alongside the “crisis,” not in an attempt to baptize the status quo but to help Christians keep their heads—to think wisely and missiologically. Thus we’ll be kept from falling for the common temptation of using the crisis to justify wholesale changes or departures from the faith that would horrify our forebears and cheat our descendants. New ways will be important but only alongside the ordinary means of grace—God’s people doing what we’ve always done, applying the truth of God’s Word in ever-changing situations, following Christ’s commands, and trusting in his promises.

We shouldn’t appeal to the eternal promises of God as a way of excusing temporal apathy or complacency. But neither should we appeal to a temporal crisis as a way of justifying revisionism in the name of reform. Recognizing the long-term, worldwide stability of the church is one of the ways we can keep our heads in a time when the crisis requires our most careful, biblical thinking.

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In the final session of my recent online cohort for The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, we discussed political and societal polarization and its evidence in the online rancor of social media. Too often, our speech isn’t seasoned with salt because of our fear of man, or our fear of insignificance, or our fear of cultural trends.

As an alternative to blaming the algorithm for our sinful responses online, I put forward a solution of better understanding our justification by faith, for only then will believers have the inner security to engage without reflexive selfishness. A deep and abiding understanding of God’s grace to us in the person and work of Christ in our place is the best source of inner rest and assurance.

Knowing we’re accepted by God (because of Christ’s performance, not ours), we don’t interpret online disagreement—even harsh words—as an attack on our identity. When we speak the truth, defend the faith, or correct someone who’s in error, we don’t do so as a way of “proving” our loyalty to one tribe or another but out of sincere concern for someone else, seeking to persuade from a place of humble conviction. Apart from a heartfelt understanding of justification by faith, I said, we’re bound to follow the world’s tribal instincts, assuming the worst of brothers and sisters in Christ, catastrophizing every controversy, proving our bona fides to whatever camp we care about most.

Justification Isn’t All

A few weeks later, I sat across the table from one of the participants in that cohort, a recent convert to Christianity, who pushed back on the idea that justification alone is where we should turn if we’re to be more Christlike online.

He agreed with everything I said about deepening our understanding of who we are in Christ and finding our rest and security in him. But justification isn’t the whole of the Christian life. Spirit-driven sanctification that flows from our union with Christ must play a role in how we call people to better online behavior. And glorification, the promise of our future selves marked by Christlike virtue eternally, also matters.

I think he’s right. If we’re to be holy (“set apart”) in how we engage online in an era of worldly polarization, we must start with justification, yes, since this goes to the heart of the heart—the transformation wrought by our regeneration. The inner security and assurance that flow from justification provide a good basis for online engagement. But simply resting in Christ, or finding our identity in him, isn’t the only source of life change in this area. We can and should call people back to the deep reality of justification, and we can and should call people forward on the journey of sanctification headed toward future glory.

In other words, as well as resting assured of God’s approval of us in Christ (thereby removing the fear of death, the fear of judgment, and the fear of losing the approval of others), we also work out our salvation in fear and trembling. We work out what God has worked in.

Justification isn’t the sole aspect of our self-understanding when we seek to engage others faithfully online. Christ tells us to follow him, to love our enemies, to pray for our opponents, to exude indescribable joy in the face of slander and insult, to return blessing for cursing and good for evil. If we’re to stand out in how we engage others online, it’ll be due to both the assurance of our status before God (we’re declared righteous because of the imputed righteousness of Christ) and the affirmation of God’s promise to renew us (we’re becoming righteous as the Spirit works in and through us).

Without a firm grasp of our justification, all our talk of sanctification sounds like little more than moralistic striving and behavior modification. But if we lose sight of sanctification, all our talk about justification sounds like little more than a past event, a new birth that casts no vision for the natural, healthy growth of an infant toward maturity.

Call to Online Christlikeness

When it comes to online discourse in a world of political and social polarization, we’ll need the self-understanding that comes from justification and sanctification working together. We should stand out not only because we rest in Christ ultimately for our righteousness and approval but also because we strive in the Spirit’s power to demonstrate true righteousness in our interactions.

We can be quick to repent when our selfish impulses get the best of us, slow to grow angry when words test our patience, and consistent in seeing the image of God in both ourselves and our opponents, while recognizing we’re in the process of being made whole—fully unique and yet more like Christ through the Spirit’s power every day.

To truly stand out in how we interact online, we don’t simply point back to our justification. We seek to demonstrate in the present the fruit of the Spirit, with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and (especially) self-control becoming the hallmarks of our attitude and actions. And we look ahead to the day we’ll be perfectly whole, forever full of Jesus—glory-given in glory-giving.

Because of our justification, we rest assured in Christ. Because of our sanctification, we strive in the Spirit. Because of our glorification, we press forward in faith. And the point of it all is to show Jesus as great.

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Last year I was invited to write an essay for the Spring 2023 edition of the Southwestern Journal of Theology, which features a number of noteworthy contributions regarding the relationship of evangelicals and Southern Baptists. This article is longer than my usual, so if you’re not a Southern Baptist but are interested primarily in the future and place of denominations, I recommend you jump forward to the third point and begin reading from there.

“What hath Wheaton to do with Nashville?”

The sentiment behind Tertullian’s famous quotation regarding Athens and Jerusalem might well have been expressed by a number of Southern Baptists in the late 1970s and early 1980s—a time of controversy in the Convention when certain evangelical leaders (whose primary geographical center was in Chicagoland) participated in a strange dance with certain Baptist leaders (whose center was in Nashville), at times aligned in partnership, at other times keeping distance, often more than arm’s length.

The controversy between Baptist and evangelical identity came into its most clear and concise form in a debate between James Leo Garrett and E. Glenn Hinson in 1982 (later published in book form),¹ a time when the SBC was embroiled in bitter controversy over the nature of the Bible. Luminaries in the evangelical movement—men like Francis Schaeffer, Harold Lindsell, and Carl Henry—offered crucial support to conservatives in the SBC who insisted on the importance of believing in the Bible’s inerrancy. Concerned about doctrinal drift in the Convention, many Southern Baptists looked outside the SBC, particularly to leaders in the north, for energy and support in their “battle for the Bible.”

It may come as a surprise to younger Baptists to hear that it was Glenn Hinson, the moderate Baptist scholar, who argued against linking Southern Baptists with the evangelical movement. Hinson saw evangelicalism as a northern phenomenon with aspects that resembled fundamentalism. Garrett saw Southern Baptists as fitting comfortably within the history of evangelicalism as a renewal movement, although he believed the Southern Baptist denominational identity was crucial and not to be underestimated.

Forty years later, critics of the evangelical movement are more likely to come from the right, not the left. Pastors and leaders concerned about the doctrinal and ethical drift of many evangelical leaders and institutions argue against linking Southern Baptist identity with the evangelical movement, sometimes for good reason. In certain cases, the church growth movement has led to a focus on pragmatism that often downplays the seriousness of Christian doctrine. In other cases, doctrinal drift has marked the once-burgeoning Emerging Church movement, or recent discussions around a post-evangelical identity or deconstruction of the faith. Some theological proposals today get labeled “progressive,” when there is little to distinguish the views from mainline Protestant liberalism.

As governmental and cultural pressures on traditional Christianity multiply, and as threats to religious liberty become more common in the future, theologically conservative evangelicals who belong to smaller denominations or are part of the rise of non-denominational churches may feel the need to hoist a flag with likeminded Christians in order to bolster the strength of their defense. New coalitions are forming. Church planting movements are multiplying. Well-established evangelical publishers and institutions are reconsidering their roles in the fast-changing landscape of evangelicalism.

The question forty years ago was this: would evangelicals be part of the renewal of the Southern Baptist Convention? The question today is: Will Southern Baptists be part of the renewal of evangelicalism?

In considering this question, we must widen the lens and take a broader look at the definition of evangelicalism, how it relates to the Southern Baptist Convention, and then consider the current context of churchgoing, identification, and the future of denominations, which I liken to houses in a neighborhood.

I. Defining Evangelical

The question of defining evangelicalism—the core features that mark this movement, as well as its boundaries—is ever-present, and the different ways of asking and answering the question lead to wildly divergent viewpoints. From a global perspective, Mark Noll can claim evangelical Christianity as “the second largest grouping of Christian believers in the world,” behind Roman Catholics, and—aside from Muslims and Hindus—bigger than all other world religions.² John Wolffe believes evangelicals make up a tenth of the world’s population, and although he acknowledges “the fluidity and individualism” of evangelicals can make it difficult to assess the strength and size of the movement today, he points back to a prehistory that extends to the early church and a more recent origin in the eighteenth century.³

British scholar David Bebbington is known best for his description of four major traits of evangelicalism (biblicism, conversionism, crucicentrism, and activism). This definition played a major role in a book released a decade ago, in which four scholars (“fundamentalist,” “confessional,” “generic,” and “post-conservative”) debated the meaning of the term and the spectrum of Christians encompassed by it.⁴ A more recent proposal comes from historian Thomas Kidd: “Evangelicals are born-again Protestants who cherish the Bible as the Word of God and who emphasize a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. This definition hinges upon three aspects of what it means to be an evangelical: being born again, the primacy of the Bible, and the divine presence of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.”⁵

The situation is complicated in the United States, where it is often humorously said “An evangelical is someone who likes Billy Graham and likes to debate the definition of ‘evangelical!’” The sociological definition, based either on self-identification or on denominations associated with the evangelical movement, is often contested by those who prefer a more theologically or historically informed definition.⁶ Meanwhile, some researchers have attempted to define evangelicalism by doctrinal and ecclesial commitments, discovering that many who adhere to common evangelical beliefs do not claim the label for themselves, while many who do not adhere to common evangelical beliefs wear the badge proudly, usually while going into the voting booth.

It’s the close association of evangelicals with the Religious Right that has caused confusion in recent years. The term has evolved from its American manifestation as a renewal project in the middle years of the 20th century. At first, American evangelicals provided a counterpoint both to the isolationist tendencies of fundamentalists, on the one hand, and to the modernists who held unorthodox views of Scripture on the other. It was the movement’s political mobilization in the 1980s that altered the landscape, leading to a present-day scenario in which a tiny percentage of Muslims and Hindus now claim the label “evangelical,” most likely because they see it as a label meaning “religiously devout and politically conservative.”⁷

Anyone addressing this question in the United States must consider whether to define evangelical by those who identify as such, or the way political pundits do, or by core doctrinal commitments. I advocate for a variation of the doctrinal definition, but I do so with eyes wide open to the fact many more claim the label, while many who fit the doctrinal description don’t want the label at all. I don’t think we can dismiss self-identifying evangelicals who hold to theological or political positions we find problematic (whether on the political right or theological left). Neither can we dismiss brothers and sisters who hold tightly to evangelical distinctives and yet want nothing to do with the label.

All of this leads me to something like a two-track understanding of evangelicalism, a way of holding together an aspirational definition and a cultural one. There is evangelicalism as a renewal movement based on common beliefs and distinctives, and evangelicalism as a sociological and political phenomenon. The first is more aspirational and more closely aligned to the movement’s roots (as well as its global connections), while the second is a sociological manifestation of varying traits of evangelical culture (even if the core beliefs and distinctives are no longer present).

Some wonder if we should give up the term “evangelical” because it has become hopelessly compromised in the American context. I would rather reclaim the historic meaning of the term. Just as there are Baptist churches far from where I believe true Baptists should be doctrinally (on one side Westboro Baptist and on the other First Baptist Church of America), it must be possible to hold both the historic definition and acknowledge the contemporary de-formation at the same time. And, as we consider the situation globally, we must remember that evangelicalism is not solely an American reality. The word has different connotations in different contexts. It has a rich history that spans generations (even preceding the American neo-evangelical movement). It is a narrow and American-centered view of the world to allow American controversies to define the movement.

Debates over the definition of evangelicalism will likely persist into the next generation, but the good news is, we don’t have to choose between preserving the best of our evangelical heritage and reforming whatever needs to change. At its core, evangelicalism is about renewal. That’s the best thing evangelicals have to offer, and right now, it is something the church needs, in many denominational settings.

II. Evangelicals and Southern Baptists Together

The debate over evangelicalism as a renewal movement and its connection to the Southern Baptist Convention has taken twists and turns in recent decades. By the time Hinson and Garrett debated the relationship, the sticking point was the close identification of northern evangelicals with their fundamentalist roots, particularly on how best to articulate the nature of biblical inspiration and authority, as well as the fast-growing political mobilization of conservative evangelical churches for the Republican Party.

The framing of James Tull’s introduction and Glenn Hinson’s contribution warn that a restrictive reversion to fundamentalism now defines evangelicalism, which leads to the compromise of Baptist distinctives, most notably the doctrine of soul competency and anti-creedalism. Hinson shows the connection between these two beliefs, claiming the historical pedigree of E. Y. Mullins:

The lordship of Christ and the competency of the person signify that no priest, church, or earthly government has a right to interpose itself between God and the human soul. This twin affirmation involves the authority of the Scriptures, for no ecclesiastical institution has the right to interject a creed or a prescribed practice which infringes upon the right of private interpretation. It involves the belief in the “New Testament as our only rule of faith and practice.”⁸

Hinson goes further to explain why the tradition of Baptists is to reject all manmade traditions, that “the Baptist tradition” refers not to common beliefs but “the essence or spirit of a movement,” so that the tradition is to follow our ancestors in “kicking and screaming” against “efforts to impose uniformity either in worship or in faith and practice.”⁹ Such a move would compromise the conviction that faith must be free and voluntary.

The implications of this view of Baptist identity quickly become clear, in stark form, beyond the question of biblical inerrancy. If one’s own status before God, apart from any mediator or outside authority, is a key component of Baptist identity, then who are we to claim that someone cannot be truly Baptist, even if he or she believes that Christ, “without the resuscitation of his dead body, now lives at the right hand of God, in the lives of his disciples, and works for the redemption of the world”?¹⁰

Hinson called for “a sharpening of the distinction between Baptists and other Christians,” so as to avoid the “grave danger of letting our association with Evangelicals and Evangelicalism of a particular type obscure and even obliterate voluntarist perceptions which stand most at the center of our life together as Baptists.” When it comes to biblical authority, Hinson warned, evangelicals assign priority to the Scriptures and to creeds as the objective Word of God, when Baptists prioritize the response of believers as a subjective Word.¹¹

Ten years later, in 1993, Hinson clarified that he did not argue “Baptists are not evangelicals” but wanted to say that Baptists are other than evangelicals.¹² This aligned with his earlier contention, that it would be better for Baptists to preserve a sense of identity over against Evangelicalism.

In his counterpoint, James Leo Garrett claimed it is accurate to situate the SBC within the evangelical movement, with the label “denominational evangelicals.” Garrett traced the development of Neo-evangelicalism from the Fundamentalist / Modernist controversies of the early twentieth century. He defended his view by pointing to the obvious overlap between Southern Baptists and evangelicals (including a missionary impulse, a focus on forgiveness of sins through Christ’s redemptive work, and a high view of God’s revelation through Scripture).¹³ Even if Southern Baptists must be described as “unmistakably and intentionally denominationalists,” there’s no denying the areas of doctrinal agreement on justification by grace through faith or regeneration by the Holy Spirit, the supreme authority of the Scriptures, and the deity of Jesus Christ.¹⁴

Furthermore, Garrett believed Hinson “underemphasized the common roots which both Evangelicals and Baptists have in Puritanism,” and had thus set up an antithesis unwarranted by Baptist history itself, the Baptist understanding of the authority of the Bible, the role of confessions of faith, and the Baptist commitment to religious freedom.¹⁵

Forty years later after this important debate, the context has changed. In the past few decades, we’ve seen an explosion of non-denominational churches across the country. Many of these are, in terms of doctrine and practice, Baptistic, which has prompted the Christian comedian Tim Hawkins to joke about non-denominational Christians: “You’re not fooling anyone; you’re just a Baptist church with a cool website!” These churches are often marked by a connection to the Charismatic Movement as well. One of the biggest shifts in American church culture in the past forty years has been the rise of non-denominational churches along with new networks that act as quasi-denominations.¹⁶

These new networks have often led to pressures on older denominations and institutions, as it can be difficult for established groups to match the nimble nature of the newer forms and networked abilities. In addition to the rise of new networks, society’s embrace of expressive individualism has fueled the rise of something cultural observer Tara Isabella Burton calls intuitional religion, as opposed to its traditional, institutional forms. She describes it as follows:

a new, eclectic, chaotic, and thoroughly, quintessentially American religion. A religion of emotive intuition, of aestheticized and commodified experience, of self-creation and self-improvement, and yes, selfies. A religion for a new generation of Americans raised to think of themselves both as capitalist consumers and as content creators. A religion decoupled from institutions, from creeds, from metaphysical truth-claims about God or the universe of the Way Things Are, but that still seeks—in various and varying ways—to provide us with the pillars of what religion always has: meaning, purpose, community, ritual.¹⁷

This is not only a description of the religiously unaffiliated, but also of many people in more established religious communities. We see a spiritual fluidity where many church-going Christians believe things that are fundamentally incompatible with orthodox Christian doctrine.

Several developments strain the evangelical consensus: the explosion of non-denominational churches and new networks, the benefits and drawbacks of the church when tightly connected to political parties, the rise of intuitional spirituality in place of institutional authority, and the cultural pressures evident in sexual revolution ideology and identity politics. Not surprisingly, some leaders, churches, and denominations historically associated with evangelicalism have drifted from biblical authority, leading others to wonder if an ever-enlarging evangelical tent is sustainable. Today, the Southern Baptists most likely to fret about the evangelical ethos making headway in the Convention are those on the right, who believe evangelicalism as a movement has strayed from sound doctrine. For reasons opposite of Glenn Hinson forty years ago, some Southern Baptists believe we need to reestablish our Baptist convictions over and against a wider evangelical movement that has gone astray.

III. The Place of Denominations in Evangelical Renewal

If the situation forty years ago was one where Southern Baptists needed help from evangelicals, today we wonder the reverse: are ailing evangelicals in need of help from Southern Baptists?

The only way this question makes sense is if Southern Baptists are doctrinally sound and spiritually healthy enough to provide support and ballast to a drifting evangelical movement, and if denominations will be part of evangelical renewal in the first place. Considering the rise of new networks and non-denominational churches, why would we consider a role for denominations in the future?

We could begin with the objection to denominations, or at least the concern that these visible divisions are in direct disobedience to Christ or contrary to His expressed will. “Christendom has often achieved success by ignoring the precepts of its founder,” wrote H. Richard Niebuhr nearly a hundred years ago.¹⁸“Denominationalism in the Christian church is… an unacknowledged hypocrisy. It is a compromise, made far too lightly, between Christianity and the world,” he wrote. He continues, “The division of the churches closely follows the division of men into the castes of national, racial, and economic groups.”¹⁹

For Niebuhr, it is too simplistic to think that denominations can be explained merely by creedal differences. On the contrary, many churches and groups are divided by color and class. The creedal differences, while important, are often a respectable gloss on a more scandalous reason for contemporary divisions.²⁰

Since the Reformation, church history offers many sad examples that buttress Niebuhr’s thesis. Perhaps the most notable example is in the birth of the Black Church tradition, when Richard Allen, a former slave who learned to preach under Methodist leader Francis Asbury, walked out of St. George’s Methodist Church in 1787 with his associate Absalom Jones and several other black people who were accosted after kneeling in new pews that had been reserved for whites. That walkout was the beginning of Bethel Church, known as “Mother Bethel,” and the seeds were planted that would blossom into the African Methodist Episcopal Church.²¹ This is a clear example of a denominational identity that began, not due to doctrinal differences, but to racial and class differences due to the assumptions of white supremacy at the time.

Niebuhr’s point is well taken: As denominations and groups develop over time, the doctrinal distinctives that may have had a supporting role in one era begin to take on a greater contrast in another. The same can happen in reverse, with doctrinal differences fading to the background and other aspects of culture and class coming to the forefront. Still, we must grapple with the distinctive groups as they are today, not as we might want them to be. What is the best way to look at different denominations within evangelicalism?

1. The House and the Neighborhood. A healthy way of looking at the presence of different denominations today would be to think of inhabiting a house in a friendly neighborhood.

First, consider the house itself. A house must have walls and structures. Some of those walls and structures are loadbearing. You remove them at your peril and may damage the integrity of the house or lead to its collapse. A beautiful home contains furniture. Some of the furniture may give the house a sense of character and personality.

Great houses are often big, with many rooms, and larger denominations often have subgroups that live comfortably in the home, in one wing of the house or another. More than a decade ago, David Dockery categorized Southern Baptists in this way: fundamentalists, revivalists, traditionalists, orthodox evangelicals, Calvinists, contemporary church practitioners, and culture warriors.²² We might tweak the description of those groups a little today, based upon new debates and challenges, but even now, these disparate groups with various emphases can inhabit different rooms and live comfortably within the same structure.

A house with history also comes with stories and narratives. I recently had the opportunity to spend some time in the home of one of my literary heroes, G. K. Chesterton. Not only is the house interesting from an architectural standpoint, with its own integrity and protection as a notable house with government restrictions on the owners, but it also shines with stories—the notable people who passed through to visit, the plays that went on in the built-in studio theater, the study where Chesterton would write his great works and then steal out into the garden to cut heads off flowers, and the morbid yet comical picture of a group of men, shortly after Chesterton’s death, trying to get his massive coffin down a tight spiral staircase.

Great houses come with stories of heroes and narratives of key moments, and the same is true of denominations. The story of past successes and failures, conviction and compromise, heroes and role models—all of these are vital for a house to feel like a home.

Consider also the presence of a neighborhood. Why is it important for those of us who live in the Baptist house to recognize the other homes nearby? Because we are not alone. And our roots go deeper than the current home in which we reside.

First, we share common ground. Creation is the stage upon which redemption plays out. In this shared realm—in which we all benefit from the sky and sun, wind and rain—we recognize this solid earth beneath our feet connects us to the rest of the world, and to other churches, and it is here we exercise Luther’s four callings: family, church, workplace, and community.

Secondly, we share a common creed, in that we adhere to the Nicene Faith. We recognize the specific contributions of our own home, but as part of a larger tradition that goes back to the apostles. As the Center for Baptist Renewal has put it: “We affirm the distinctive contributions of the Baptist tradition as a renewal movement within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. These contributions include emphasis on the necessity of personal conversion, a regenerate church, believers’ baptism, congregational governance, and religious liberty.” At the same time, “We encourage a critical but charitable engagement with the whole church of the Lord Jesus Christ, both past and present. We believe Baptists have much to contribute as well as much to receive in the great collection of traditions that constitute the holy catholic church.”²³

Third, we can make common cause with believers who reside in other homes. Because we believe the gospel is public truth, not a private revelation, we recognize that all believers offer the world some sort of public witness, whether they realize it or not. We can partner with and benefit from believers in other denominational homes who provide a faithful witness to Christ in areas of art, science, education, politics, sports and entertainment, business and entrepreneurship, etc. Making common cause reminds us of the importance of considering not only the reputation of our house, but the entire Christian neighborhood.

2. The Necessity of Institutions. Of course, some question the need for houses altogether. Are they not cumbersome? Do not old houses need constant work of renovation and repair? Wouldn’t we be better off to throw together mini-houses, or live in RVs, or find a place in one hotel or another? Perhaps some Christians might choose to live this way, eschewing denominations in favor of independent congregations, and yes, choosing to be “renters” rather than “owners” does allow for a level of mobility you might otherwise miss.

But there is something to be said for denominations, just as there’s something to be said for houses. Those who decide to stay unaffiliated—to rent rather than put down roots—often find it necessary to draw from the benefits of stronger ecclesial connections. Even fiercely independent congregations naturally gravitate toward some kind of communion or network with other likeminded churches. It’s true that denominations all have limitations—certain strengths and weaknesses—but there are many possibilities for collaboration and mutual strengthening.

We live in an age that is (often rightly) suspicious of institutions, and there is narrative drama in being “anti-institutional” in some way, the startup versus the established. But institutions are inevitable at some level. As Ray Ortlund has pointed out:

An institution is a social mechanism where life-giving human activities can be nurtured and protected and sustained. Some aspects of life should be unscheduled, spontaneous, random. But not all of life should be. What an institution does is structure a desirable experience, so that it becomes repeatable on a regular basis. Institutions are not a problem. But institutionalization is. An institution is meant to enrich life. But institutionalization takes that good thing and turns it into death. How? The institutional structure, the mechanism, takes on its own inherent purpose.²⁴

A healthy denomination, much like a healthy house, does not exist for its own sake. It is open for the benefit of others, and it serves a purpose for those who live there, to be a place of refreshment and empowerment for the larger mission of God. It is when the people who live in a house become overly focused on the structure itself, rather than its purpose, that institutionalization squeezes the life out of the movement that led to its construction in the first place. As Ed Stetzer said a decade ago in reference to the SBC: “Being consumed with the machine of the denomination distracts us from the mission of the church. The goal is joining God on His mission, and denominations are merely a tool to that end. But we often turn tools into rules, and our focus becomes the machine instead of the mission. A denomination should exist to help us live sent rather than maintain a structure.”²⁵

The problem we face today is an institutional crisis. We have hollowed out the ability for our institutions to deliver the weight of the expectations we put upon them, as Yuval Levin has pointed out.²⁶ In an individualistic world, we tend to think of freedom as the escape of institutional constraints, rather than the need to be formed and molded by those who have gone before us, or the community in which we are present. The renewal of evangelicalism will not take place apart from institutional forms, whatever those forms might take. Denominations will be a critical part of that future.

3. The Importance of Cooperation. If we look at denominations as houses, the question might arise: why not live alone? Why is the house necessary?

In the past, most denominations have answered this question by pointing to the mission and the essential nature of cooperation in fulfilling that mission. The point of being a homeowner is not merely to renew the house and take on various renovation projects, but to establish a home base from which to venture out into the world. And so, a good neighbor may agree to help better and beautify other homes in the neighborhood, just as leaders and pastors in one denomination may benefit from or contribute to the growth of leaders and pastors in another.

When J. B. Gambrell in 1901 answered the question of why Baptist churches unite in the form of a Convention, he said, the purpose was “to promote cooperation in matters of common concern.”²⁷ As Southern Baptists are fond of saying today, “We can do more together than we can apart.”

But the decision to live together—the agreement to take up rooms in the house and to come together for common mission—requires us to focus on the purpose, not the process. As Gambrell wrote:

Boards are channels, not fountains. They are means, not forces. The churches use them to convey their contributions as men turn a thousand streams into one channel to carry their united volume of water to arid plains that they may be watered and become fruitful fields. To elicit, combine and direct the energies of willing workers for the carrying out of the will of Christ is the function of a convention, and this it does, not by authority, but by persuasion and the influence of intelligent piety.²⁸

Cooperation matters when it comes to churches within the same denomination (just as people inhabiting different rooms in a mansion will come together for common cause), but cooperation also matters when it comes to churches from different denominations. The neighborhood is stronger when the various strengths on display in different homes are mutually available. We can trust that the Spirit is at work in other churches, and we believe He is active in nourishing, empowering, restraining, and enabling other believers. The Spirit is the common bond and unity for all believers, no matter which denomination, much like all the homes in a neighborhood are connected to a common water supply and electrical grid.

The Baptist Faith and Message (Article 14) encourages this kind of cross-denominational cooperation. A good homeowner extends the hand of fellowship to like-minded neighbors, which is why we should seek to strengthen the growing number of coalitions, encourage gospel-proclaiming denominations, and cheer on various church-planting movements. Conservative evangelicals need strength and support in their efforts to reclaim the center of evangelical identity.

Cooperation always comes with a risk. Cooperation can lead to the watering down of conviction or doctrinal distinctives. It is not wrong for some Southern Baptists to feel threatened by what this sort of evangelical networking might mean for the future of the Convention. There are some who feel that the purity of Southern Baptist identity will be polluted if we join coalitions or encourage other networks. This was the view of Glenn Hinson from the moderate side forty years ago, and it is often the view today from some on the right in Southern Baptist life.

But the cooperative spirit, when buttressed by security in what we believe and why, should cause us to bring others into the house who agree with our basic beliefs rather than causing us to pull up the drawbridge, hunker down on our hill, and refuse temporary shelter for the evangelical homeless. David Dockery is right:

Denominations that thrive will remain connected by conviction to Scripture, the gospel, and their tradition, while working and exploring ways to partner with affinity groups and networks moving out of their insularity and seeking to understand better the changing global context around us. Learning to work afresh in cooperative ways will be important, with denominations no longer seeing themselves as rivals with either the networks or other denominations, looking instead for commonalities while working together with other special-interest groups.²⁹

4. The Need for Clear Boundaries, but Not Impenetrable Walls. A healthy house has clear and visible structures. Imagine a neighborhood with distinct homes perhaps even with a fence, but the gate is unlocked, so as to provide easy access to people from other homes, and to allow people who live there to freely visit others. A vibrant neighborhood is a place where people feel a sense of camaraderie, where it is not a threat to spend time outdoors, to enjoy the occasional block party, to get together to watch fireworks, or to share a common pool.

In the same way, a well-established house and yard need not become a prison for the people inside, or a compound designed to keep people out. Paradoxically, one of the best ways to ensure that people in one home can visit another is by making clear the distinctions between homes. Vibrant denominations have clear lines of distinction.

In one of the first books published by the Baptist Sunday School Board, in 1900, J. M. Frost edited a series of contributions under the title Baptist Why and Why Not.³⁰ Many of the chapters explained why one would be Baptist and not Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, Campbellite, etc. Later chapters explained the “why” behind key doctrinal distinctives, such as why “close communion and not open communion,” and why the insistence on “a converted church membership.”

A strong foundation, walls, and rooftops are essential to a healthy house. But even here, with these clear lines of distinction, with a fence erected around the yard, there remains a sense of openness, a welcome to visitors who may occupy other houses in the neighborhood, as long as they share the same bedrock conviction of submitting to Scripture and living under its authority, while adhering to the essentials of the Christian faith as articulated in the great Christian creeds and as witnessed by the global Christian church through the ages.

Denominations that compromise their convictions often try to enlarge the house so much that it eventually loses its integrity in trying to accommodate everyone and everything. We ought instead to be okay with blessing someone out of our fellowship and waving at them as they move to a different house, if their beliefs have shifted into better alignment elsewhere. This is best for denominational integrity.

I recall a small Baptist church a few years ago that wrestled with admitting a Presbyterian family into membership without undergoing baptism by immersion after a confession of faith. When I counseled the church, I told them that—should their church go in this direction—they would, in effect, cease to belong to the denomination of which they were part. They would be more akin to the Evangelical Free Church of America, which receives as valid infant baptism (though believer’s baptism remains the norm). The church decided against this move, choosing to happily stay in the home they had started in. My point was not to decry or diminish the wonderful churches that belong to the EFCA. It was simply to say that this is a question of identity, and if you make a decision in this way, you are effectively moving from one house to another.

One cannot endlessly move the boundaries of the house without eventually harming the structure. A house with no walls is not a home. It is not unloving or uncharitable to insist on denominational integrity, just as it is not unloving or uncharitable to recognize the structure of its home and surrounding yard.

5. Appreciation for Denominational Gifts. Perhaps the opposite danger of broadening and extending the house is feeling threatened by the existence of neighbors. The denomination that becomes insecure in its convictions and biblical interpretation often compensates by throwing up additional walls and fences, turning the house into something more like a compound, as if everyone in the house needs to be protected from the neighbors. This is often the danger most associated with a Neo-fundamentalist mindset—the need is for additional walls, not gates or bridges.

As mentioned above, it is right and proper to insist on denominational integrity. But this can be done in a way that is not hostile toward other homes in the neighborhood. One of the ways we remain good neighbors is by recognizing that we have gifts that others in the neighborhood might benefit from, and that other homes may have strengths that would strengthen us.

Healthy homes can also give courage and protection to other homes in the neighborhood. Throughout history, we can trace among various denominational traditions a pattern of God using believers from one tradition to warn others about dangers from inside and outside the church. Perhaps this would be the “neighborhood watch” element of a healthy community. Yes, we look to ensure the wellbeing of our own home, but we also notify neighbors when dangers threaten another house.

Relating to people in the denominational neighborhood allows us to work together on certain projects, shave the rough edges off each other, and learn from one another’s strengths and weaknesses. It is myopic to assume that the Holy Spirit is exclusively or primarily at work in only one of the homes in a neighborhood. It would be better to extend the application of the Apostle Paul’s reference to the church as the body of Christ and to recognize distinctive gifts in different communities. Thus, Presbyterians may have something to learn from Baptists in the field of outreach and personal evangelism, and Baptists may have something to learn from Anglican stalwarts of theology, like John Stott and J. I. Packer. The charismatics may be strengthened by another home’s insistence on being tethered to the Word, while denominations that emphasize preaching and Bible study may learn something from the intercessory prayer of those in the Assemblies of God.

My point is not to relativize these homes, to claim they are all equally valid or scripturally the same. It is merely to recognize that each group has a specialty. God is at work in different groups in different ways, and if you visit other homes in the neighborhood, it is very likely that you will enrich your own home because of your experience and common commitment to Christ. As Nathan Finn has written: “Southern Baptists should humbly confess that we are only part of the visible body of Christ and that our own interpretations of numerous doctrines have been influenced by the catholic confessional consensus. We should acknowledge that we have much to learn from other Christian traditions, even as we earnestly and often times prophetically contend for our unique Baptist distinctives.”³¹

IV. Evangelical Renewal

If the neighborhood of evangelicalism is in disrepair, with some nearby homes showing cracks in the foundation, the best way Southern Baptists can serve our brothers and sisters is by ensuring that our home is as healthy and robust as it can be. This health will come from both a recognition of our convictions and spiritual gifts, and a willingness to glean from the Spirit’s gifts on display in other fellowships.

By renewing our own home, we make the house a place for others to find refreshment and empowerment in engaging in God’s mission. We also free ourselves up to strengthen the homes of others, to encourage the faithful to remain tied to sound doctrine, engaged in outreach and evangelism, and committed to the full authority of the Scriptures. I do not see an avenue of evangelical renewal that does not also include the renewal of particular denominational homes. The health of the neighborhood depends in large part on the health and charity of the individual homes. To that end, we ought to see ourselves not as Southern Baptists over against other evangelicals, but as Baptists among and for other evangelicals, rooting for our neighbors, conscious of God’s work and hopeful in His promise to his church in the future.

Notes

1. James Leo Garrett Jr. and E. Glenn Hinson, Are Southern Baptists “Evangelicals”?, ed. James E. Tull (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1982).

2. Mark Noll, “What is an Evangelical?,” in The Oxford Handbook of Evangelical Theology, ed. Gerald R. McDermott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 19.

3. John Wolffe, “Who Are Evangelicals? A History,” in Evangelicals Around the World: A Global Handbook for the 21^st Century, ed. Brian C. Stiller, Todd M. Johnson, Karen Stiller, and Mark Hutchinson (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2015), 32.

4. Kevin T. Bauder, R. Albert Mohler Jr., John G. Stackhouse Jr., and Roger Olson, Four Views on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism, ed. Andrew David Naselli and Collin Hansen (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011).

5. Thomas S. Kidd, Who Is An Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 4.

6. For the former, see Ryan P. Burge, 20 Myths about Religion and Politics in America (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022), 11-20. For the latter, see Ryan P. Burge and Andrew T. Walker, “Is ‘Evangelical’ a Historical, Theological, or Political Identity?” Good Faith Debates, Gospel Coalition video, 1:02:10, June 1, 2022.

7. Ryan P. Burge, “What’s Up with Born-Again Muslims? And What Does That Tell Us About American Religion?”, posted March 2, 2021.

8. Garrett and Hinson, Are Southern Baptists “Evangelicals”?, 30.

9. Garrett and Hinson, Are Southern Baptists “Evangelicals”?, 14.

10. Garrett and Hinson, Are Southern Baptists “Evangelicals”?, 28-29.

11. Garrett and Hinson, Are Southern Baptists “Evangelicals”?, 165, 169, 174.

12. E. Glenn Hinson, “One Baptist’s Dream,” in Southern Baptists and American Evangelicals: The Conversation Continues, ed. David S. Dockery (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1993), 202.

13. Garrett and Hinson, Are Southern Baptists “Evangelicals”?, 118.

14. Garrett and Hinson, Are Southern Baptists “Evangelicals”?, 126.

15. Garrett and Hinson, Are Southern Baptists “Evangelicals”?, 122.

16. Frank Newport, “More U. S. Protestants Have No Specific Denominational Identity,” Gallup, posted July 18, 2017.

17. Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020), 2-3.

18. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Meridian Books, 1929), 3.

19. Niebuhr, Social Sources, 6.

20. Niebuhr, Social Sources, 12-14.

21. Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

22. David S. Dockery, Southern Baptist Consensus and Renewal: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Proposal (Nashville: B&H, 2008), 11.

23. Matthew Y. Emerson, Christopher W. Morgan, and Lucas E. Stamps, Baptists and the Christian Tradition: Toward an Evangelical Baptist Catholicity (Nashville: B&H, 2020), 353.

24. Ray Ortlund, Jr. “Is Your Church an Institution?” Gospel Coalition, posted May 23, 2017.

25. Ed Stetzer, “Denominationalism: Is There a Future?” in Southern Baptists, Evangelicals, and the Future of Denominationalism, ed. David S. Dockery (Nashville: B&H, 2011), 40.

26. Yuval Levin, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (New York: Basic Books, 2020).

27. J. B. Gambrell, “Why Conventions of Baptist Churches” in Baptist Why And Why Not, ed. J. M Frost (Nashville: The Baptist Sunday School Board, 1901), 286.

28. Gambrell, “Why Conventions,” 288.

29. David Dockery, “So Many Denominations: The Rise, Decline, and Future of Denominationalism,” in Southern Baptists, Evangelicals, and the Future of Denominationalism (Nashville: B&H, 2011), 25.

30. Gambrell, “Why Conventions,” 288.

31. Nathan Finn, “Priorities for a Post-Resurgence Convention” in Southern Baptist Identity: An Evangelical Denomination Faces the Future, ed. David Dockery (Wheaton: Crossway, 2009), 262.

Jesus cares about church unity because it’s a testimony to the world.

That’s the simple way of explaining what Jesus prayed the night before he was crucified. But reading through John 17 again recently, I was struck by the deeper logic of the passage and the desire that his followers be one. There’s something more powerful at work here than “church unity is a witness to the world.”

Getting Along in God

Jesus wants us to get along, yes, but the deeper truth is that we get along in God. Eternal life is knowing the only true God and the Son he sent to save us (John 17:3). The interplay between the Father and the Son (everything Christ has is the Father’s, and everything the Father has is the Son’s) provides the context for Jesus’s prayer that his followers “be one as [they] are one” (vv. 10–11). The unity of the church is to be tightly connected to the unity of the persons of the Trinity.

This means, in all our distinctiveness as members of Christ’s body, we reflect something of the nature of God when we’re one and when we display this oneness to the world. The divine unity of Father, Son, and Spirit, enjoyed from before the foundation of the world—the joy and happiness that overflows that union of eternal love—is what Jesus wants for his followers. He wants our joy to be completed (v. 13) and for us to be one just as he and the Father are one. We’ve been adopted into the family, united to Christ, and therefore united to God.

It’s more than just “getting along.” It’s getting along in God and as a mirror of his glory.

Participating in God’s Oneness

But there’s more. Jesus wants his followers to be one as a way of participating in the oneness of the triune God.

Listen to how he later prays: “May they all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I am in you” (v. 21). The unity of the church is bound up in the divine life of God. We’re invited into the triune life of love. “May they also be in us” may be one of the most profound and surprising things Jesus ever prays. His desire is that, together, we be in God.

Participation in the divine love of the Father and Son is the prerequisite for the world believing that Jesus has been sent by the Father (v. 21). In case it’s unclear, Jesus gets more explicit: “I have given them the glory you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one” (v. 22). And if the participation element isn’t clear enough: “I am in them and you and you are in me, so that they may be made completely one” (v. 23). Lesslie Newbigin comments,

So, yes, Christian unity matters so the world will know we’re Christ’s followers, but there’s a deeper sense in which Christian unity shows the world what God is like. And an even deeper sense follows: Christian unity participates in the divine life of God as Three-in-One. Here’s how Cyril of Alexandria summed up the prayer:

In our different ministries, in our variety of gifts, in our works of service and love, we’re manifesting the same Spirit (1 Cor. 12:4–11). United to Christ, we’re filled by the Spirit as we serve one another. Our unity is one of divine love.

Enduring the World’s Hostility

Why does all this matter? Because the world is going to hate us: “The world hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I am not praying that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world” (John 17:14–16).

Jesus prays for his followers to stand firm, to be sanctified by the truth because God’s Word is truth (vv. 17–19). He prays for the unity of the church not merely so our “getting along” will be a testimony of God’s power but because our participation in the life of God himself will be necessary if we’re to endure the hatred and hostility of the world. Unless we participate in the divine love, unless we hold together in love, unless we’re overcome by the love of God for us expressed in our love for one another, we’ll fail the test when we experience the world’s hatred. Apart from the love of God, we’ll fall prey to the fear of man.

In the end, the goal isn’t papering over differences and finding surface-level agreement. Church unity matters because (1) our unity is connected to the unity of God himself (and thus our disunity is a scandalous affront to the gospel), (2) the world sees a reflection of God’s inner life in our fellowship when we participate in his divine love, and (3) it’s the means by which we withstand the pressures of the world that rage against God’s truth.

And so, with some of the earliest Christians, we pray,

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One of the most striking elements of watching the sun set, whether you’re looking over a mountain range, the vast expanse of the ocean, or flat fields and farmlands, is the slowness and the speed. The descent of the fiery ball on the horizon goes slow at first, casting all sorts of colors and shadows across the sky and the land, but once the orb reaches the earth’s edge, it’s striking how fast it descends and disappears. Slow, then fast. Light remains, but there’s a chill in the air.

On Wednesday evening, upon hearing the news that Tim would soon be going home—both physically, to Roosevelt Island, and spiritually, to his eternal reward, I spent a few moments in prayer in my home office, and as I looked up, the light of the sun caught the Keller selection of my bookshelf just right, spreading a warm glow over the words of a pastor who has left an indelible imprint on my heart and mind.

This morning Tim Keller died after a three-year battle with pancreatic cancer. It feels a bit like a great light has slipped beyond the horizon. It’s a sunset that has long been coming, and yet it still feels strangely sudden.

No doubt Tim would raise an eyebrow and cast a bemused smirk at any suggestion he be compared in any way to the sun. (He’s the only person I’ve known who could roll his eyes via smile.) If there’s anything you’d take from his work and writing, it’s that there’s a main character in history and none of us are it: God is at the center of all things, and Jesus is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. Tim wasn’t about himself; he was about the Savior he adored, and he cared about reaching a lost world in need of salvation. He reflected well the Jesus he loved, but that’s one of the reasons his loss does feel like a light has flickered out.

Over the years, Tim’s influence on me has been profound, first through his writing and then later through occasional correspondence, in-person meetings, and reading suggestions. In the past seven years, Keller has guided much of my reading. (I still have Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death in my book stack, one of the few titles I’ve not yet gotten to.) Tim offered counsel, pointed me in certain directions, cautioned me against dead-ends, and took an interest in some of the projects I was working on.

Keller’s writing and ministry became an anchor for me. He exuded a sense of calm no matter what was taking place. He didn’t get caught up in drama. He was the epitome of a “non-anxious presence,” and he had a deep-rooted security in his faith that allowed him to interact with people of various beliefs with respect and kindness. He also cared deeply about the future of the church and the spread of the gospel globally. (In a podcast interview I did with him earlier this year, he ribbed me about outliving him and seeing the renewal he hoped for.)

When Tim received his cancer diagnosis, I confessed to a few friends that the idea of an evangelicalism without Tim Keller frightened me. Every generation needs heroes, people who serve well, who—despite their failures and flaws—model faithfulness to Christ and his people. Tim has been one of mine. Today, I’m grateful for how he finished his race. A sun has set, but Tim is now in the presence of the ultimate One—the bright morning star (Rev. 22:16).

“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil,” said Gandalf as Frodo prepared to depart for the Grey Havens. I’ve shed a few of the good kind of tears today.

For us, like Sam watching his friend disappear, “the evening deepened to darkness as . . . he saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West, . . . hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores.” But perhaps Tim, like Frodo, has “smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. . . . The grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.”

From us to Tim, Farewell. From the Lord and his angels, Welcome.

Several weeks ago, I voiced a question I’ve long been pondering—something that seems to go unnoticed by many church leaders: How does the dissolution of traditional family structures affect the church’s self-perception?

To get more specific, How does the widespread loss of the experience of being or having a sibling affect the way we see ourselves as brothers and sisters in Christ?

If we believe the church is the “family of God,” our self-understanding as a family will be connected, at least in some measure, to our experiences within family life. The absence of particular family relationships can’t help but affect our view of church as family.

Question of Justice

An astute reader, Andrew, responded with a slightly different perspective. He recommended we approach the issue of family breakdown in the church by beginning with scriptural teaching on justice. We cannot simply ask how broken families will affect the church’s self-perception; instead, we must incorporate ministry to broken families into how we see ourselves as Christ’s Bride.

Andrew pointed to the Hebrew understanding of mishpat: “Rectifying justice or putting things right for those prone to be exploited.” Throughout Scripture, God calls his people to do justice (mishpat) for widows, orphans, immigrants, and those in poverty. Andrew writes,

He quotes from Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke on the responsibilities of the righteous and how our actions set us apart from the world:

Learning Love in the Family?

Andrew acknowledges the point I made in my article about family breakdown affecting the church’s self-understanding. It’s true that “the righteous love that the church seeks to emulate is other-oriented and it is easiest to learn this kind of love in families,” he says. And yet,

I appreciate Andrew’s pushback because of its historical perspective. He’s right: there has never been a golden age of family life in history or around the world. Our life together as sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, children and grandchildren—it’s always been complicated. Take a closer look at the family dynamics in many of the Old Testament’s most beloved stories and you’ll see how riddled they are with bad marriages, failing fathers, envious brothers, scheming mothers, and adulterous husbands. Sin warps the family in severe and lasting ways.

Yet even with all the examples of bad dads, God speaks of himself as our Father. Even with the examples of unfaithfulness in marriage, God describes himself as a spouse to Israel. What’s more, he sometimes uses the sinfulness of family breakdown (in adultery, for example) as an analogy of Israel’s waywardness.

I stand by my original point: We ought to give more thought, not less, to the ways our understanding of the church as a family is adversely affected by the loss of stable, faithful, familial relationships. It’s likely a lack of experience with thick, enduring, and faithful families will lead to a corresponding “thinness” in church relationships as well. If families are easily entered and exited, why not churches also?

Church’s Responsibility

That said, Andrew is right to point us back to the church’s responsibility in this world of family breakdown. Surely part of what it means to be the family of God is to provide something of substance for those who, without blame or fault, have never known family life as God intended.

Christians who grew up in somewhat stable homes and experienced strong family relationships should consider Andrew’s question. What’s our responsibility as the family of God to our siblings who suffer the consequences of family breakdown? And there’s a deeper question here than the one I posed in my previous article—not just how family breakdown might affect the church’s self-understanding but how the response to family breakdown factors into how the church sees herself.

Andrew is onto something important here. Can we come to better understand the church as a family in the ways we do justice and show mercy, creating a sense of ecclesial belonging for those who live with the effects of family breakdown? Can those with strong family relationships be a source of healing for those who only know brokenness? I’m grateful for readers who help us ponder deeper questions as we seek to be faithful in the world in which God has placed us.

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It wasn’t supposed to be his last project. At least that’s not what he or anyone around him expected. For more than a year, my friend and colleague Clint Clifton had been working on a short ebook designed to help pastors and church leaders start residency programs to train future leaders for the church.

This wasn’t just a book for Clint. It was a way of life. His Wednesday morning meetings in person with his residency group were sacrosanct. When our team would discuss the best times to meet during the week, Clint always alerted me to his scheduled time with residents. We adjusted our meetings around it. I wanted nothing more than for Clint to continue that rhythm of life because it had been so fruitful.

Clint believed anyone could start a residency. His big question wasn’t “Why a residency?” It was “Why not?” In the ebook, he made his position clear:

Clint made the idea of doing a residency accessible. And the residency itself made the idea of ministry accessible for future leaders. It was a way of calling people to walk alongside and join in the work of ministry, training and guiding them weekly.

What struck me about Clint’s approach was the informality of it all. Yes, there was a plan, but it wasn’t really a program. It was friendship, mentoring, and discipleship. It involved encouragement, occasional rebuke, and the confirmation of God’s gifts and call in a person’s life. Think of Paul with a handful of Timothys and Tituses but always looking for ways to involve the newcomers in church ministry and outreach.

Clint was “wildly optimistic” about the potential of the undeveloped leaders in a church. So optimistic that it surprised and changed the lives of people. At his funeral, several people told me Clint saw potential in them they’d never seen in themselves. He called out that potential when he invited them into ministry. He saw, he affirmed, and he challenged. And the fruit of his work is still evident today.

Clint wasn’t good at everything we threw at him, and he would’ve been the first to admit that. But where he was good, he was great. Truly great. He was great at raising up leaders through a residency.

On the day before he died, I was passing through the cafe area at the North American Mission Board headquarters and saw Clint in one of the off-rooms on a Zoom call. He motioned for me to come in. It was Wednesday morning, so (of course!) he was meeting with his residency group. We did some Q and A, and I enjoyed seeing this online version of his usual in-person meeting. Most exciting was seeing his oldest son, Noah, on the call, who’s helping plant a church this summer.

Just a couple of days before the plane crash that took his life, Clint was able to see the final proofs for the residency ebook he’d labored over. He had helped design the cover, which featured an airplane, and he was pleased with the final product. After his death, I assumed that if we did anything with the book, we’d change the cover and maybe alter some of the analogies he used. But in conversation with Clint’s family, it became clear: they wanted this last word from Clint to be the way he designed it, plane and all. And so we left it—a tribute to and the legacy of a man whose work continues to bear fruit.

That book is now available. I challenge every pastor and church leader to read and heed it. There’s nothing stopping you from starting a residency and pouring into the lives of future leaders. And you’ll find no finer example of how to do it than that of Clint Clifton.

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In 2008, tragedy struck the family of Christian singer-songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman when one of his teenage sons arrived home, turned the corner of the driveway, and didn’t see his 5-year-old sister Maria Sue, who had darted directly into the path of his SUV.

Chapman saw the accident take place from the front porch, but he doesn’t remember much about the immediate aftermath. “I do remember running around to the back of the house and finding my wife, of course, just in hysterics,” he said. “It was a lot of blood.”

Chapman also doesn’t remember something that others witnessed in that horrible moment. As he was leaving the scene to go to the hospital (where little Maria would be pronounced dead on arrival), he looked over and saw his son crumpled up in a ball on the ground, his older brother on top of him, holding him and praying for him. At that moment, Steven told the driver to stop. He rolled down the window and called out, “Will Franklin, your father loves you.”

That scene chokes me up every time I imagine it. To think of a father, in the throes of shock and grief, in that terrible fog of horror and chaos, instinctively assuring his son of unconditional love instead of casting blame or bowing to bitterness—the moment says something about the character of a man. Out of the overflow of a heart smitten by hardship comes a word of consolation.

Storeroom of the Heart

In Luke’s version of Jesus’s Sermon on the Plain, we’re told that “a good person produces good out of the good stored up in his heart,” while “an evil person produces evil out of the evil stored up in his heart.” In both cases, what comes out of the mouth is “from the overflow of the heart” (Luke 6:45, CSB).

I’ve always read that verse and applied Jesus’s saying to the question of speech. How should we talk? What do our words say about us? How can we control the tongue? After all, Scripture has much to say about taming the tongue and blessing others with our words (including James 3 and multiple proverbs).

But the real application of Jesus’s saying lies further back. To take his words to heart, our focus should be not so much on what we should say as what we should store. To apply Jesus’s insight, if we want to be the kind of person who speaks words of wisdom and grace, then we have to begin by storing up wisdom and grace. The question isn’t “What should we say?” as much as it’s “What should we store up? What should go in the storeroom?”

J. C. Ryle claimed the test of a person’s religious character is his “conduct and conversation.” The test reveals the character. But even there, if you want to pass, you don’t focus on the moment of the exam. You focus your attention on the weeks or months before the test. It’s about preparation, what you put in the storeroom of your mind and heart.

Guard Your Heart, Not Just Your Lips

Too many times, we try to control what we say at the surface level. We try to avoid saying things we shouldn’t, and we try to say the things we should. Well and good, as a start. But Jesus’s words push us deeper. Further back.

Why? Well, I may try my hardest to speak words of life, only to be appalled at my own occasional missteps, the overspill of polluted waters that have remained deep in my heart. I surprise myself at times when the muzzle on my mouth malfunctions and something I wish wasn’t in my heart suddenly becomes visible.

Paul Tripp in War of Words says we’re prone to blame others or blame the situation whenever we say something wrong. Instead, we should recognize that “word problems reveal heart problems.” It’s not the people around you or your current circumstances that make you speak a certain way. Even when you’re around people who drive you crazy or when you’re facing difficult challenges, your heart—if good—will reveal itself in words of truth and grace.

No wonder, then, that Proverbs says, “Guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life” (Prov. 4:23, CSB). We spend so much time guarding our lips that we forget the importance of the storeroom. The preparation takes place there. “A holy practice must of necessity flow from holy principles and heavenly affections,” wrote Charles Simeon.

What Are You Storing Up?

Store up gunpowder and you’ll blow up when something lights the fuse. Store up bitterness and your words will ooze with resentment when someone crosses you. Store up pride and your speech will drip with mockery and condescension. Store up envy and you’ll find yourself giving voice to biting remarks that chip away at another’s character or credibility. Store up judgment and another’s failures will trigger harsh and overly critical words.

But store up grace and you’ll return good for evil. Store up compassion and you’ll pray when persecuted. Store up conviction and you’ll speak with courage when everyone else compromises. Store up humility and you’ll acknowledge when you’re weak and fess up when you fail. Store up gratitude and you’ll bless those who grumble. Store up faith and you’ll draw closer to God when the trial arrives. Store up love and you’ll speak with wisdom and grace when everyone else falls prey to anger.

None of us knows when we might face a tragedy as severe as the one faced by the Chapmans. Whether we’re days or weeks away from a trial, know this: what you fill the storeroom with is what will come out. So, what are you storing up?

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One of the wearying aspects of church life these days is the constant weaponizing of disagreement. I’m referring to the tendency to take an honest disagreement we have with someone (perhaps over secondary points of theology, or matters of political prudence, or parenting methods) as a sign he or she must be “unsound”—and so we wield that disagreement as a weapon, as a way of smearing the person’s entire outlook or ministry.

The shallowness we see on display today stems at least in part from what Nicholas Carr described as the new mental patterns that develop in a world of online scrolling and commenting. In this new world, Christians seem increasingly unable to critique without canceling. We don’t see in our disagreements an opportunity to pursue truth together—to argue by appealing to Scripture, logic, reason, and tradition. Instead, disagreements devolve into quarreling. All heat, no light.

Easy Labels

Easy labels play a big role in weaponization. Words like “based” or “woke,” “progressive” or “right-wing,” “problematic” or “troubling” often get deployed not because of theological disagreement exactly but because we may think others unwise, inconsistent, or just wrong in how they apply theological convictions to the choices we face in today’s world.

• She voted for Trump, so she’s a right-wing fanatic whose approach to everything else must be suspect (and she’s probably a closet racist!).
• He expressed doubt about vaccines or the wisdom of school lockdowns, so he must be a gullible conspiracy theorist who doesn’t love his neighbor or who harbors authoritarian desires!

On the other side . . .

• This church was closed for more than a few weeks and the pastor encouraged vaccination, so they’re obviously in line with compromised “woke” evangelicals who are “progressive.”
• This author believes there may be human causes to climate change, so he’s obviously “liberal” or at least duped by global elites!

Faded from view are the detailed and historic confessions of faith that once marked out faith traditions and communities. Slogans, labels, and epithets remain. From a theological perspective, you can’t label “liberal” anyone who gives full-throated affirmation to the Westminster Confession of Faith or the Baptist Faith and Message. And you can’t fairly label complementarians “abusive” or “misogynist” just for aligning with the traditional and ecumenical consensus of the church on the matter.

Unfortunately, political debates loom so large in the consciousness and imagination of the evangelical mind that we’re increasingly unable to separate out the issues, to welcome good-faith disagreements on matters of prudence without casting opponents in the worst possible light or castigating them for (gasp) disagreeing with us.

Signals over Substance

In the past eight or nine years, I’ve noticed a shift toward signaling over substance online. Not only do we expect others to agree, but we think we should all agree in the same way and by sending the same signals.

If you’re not commenting on every major case of racial injustice, if you’re not announcing every time another church leader is exposed for sex abuse, if you’re not weighing in on the latest crazy tweet from someone claiming the mantle of Christian Nationalism—well, you’re part of the problem. You’re complicit. Compromised. Suspect. “Silence is violence!”

The same goes for the other side. If you’re not signaling your outrage about the latest harms of doctors given over to gender ideology, if you’re not expressing regular and vociferous disagreement with proposals from the president, if you’re not broadcasting your alignment with the “fill in the blank” news story of the day, you’re not really sound. You’re uncommitted. Asleep. Weak.

Late last year, a colleague of mine was accused of being a “progressive” agent working undercover to undermine the theological foundations of his denomination. The evidence? He had a few friends whose disagreement had already been weaponized (Aha! Fraternizing with the enemy!) and he hadn’t issued on Twitter any comment or celebration about the overturning of Roe v. Wade last summer. Gotcha! Never mind the fact this colleague was hit-or-miss on social media, rarely engaged in saying much of anything online, and was so devoted to the pro-life cause (in reality, not just on social media) that he and his wife had taken in multiple foster kids.

See what happens here? It’s not even disagreement that divides but not agreeing in the same way. You’re not loud enough in your agreement! You’re not adopting the same posture or proposal! The result is more fracturing, even among people on the same page, simply because they don’t signal their allegiance the same way. (I’m reminded of the thunderous applause everyone was expected to give when Nicolae Ceaușescu was dictator of Romania. Don’t be the first to stop clapping! Don’t be the first to sit down! Your “loyalty” will be suspect.)

Different Members of One Body

When differences of perspective and opinion get melted down into bullets that become ammunition for the Great War we see ourselves as engaged in, our targets become brothers and sisters in the barracks instead of the powers and principalities where the true, spiritual battle rages. Christ’s Bride is the casualty, and the Evil One laughs.

If the body of Christ seems out of shape these days, perhaps it’s because we’re getting body parts all out of proportion, insisting everyone be an eye, or an ear, or a mouth. Rather than recognizing and appreciating different gifts and competencies (not to mention different callings), we adopt a totalizing view of online engagement.

The body is complex. If we’re to heal an ailing and divided church, it might come through multiple medicines and treatments. But we’ll never return to health if we assume anyone with a different mixture of medicine is trying to poison the church instead of heal it.

Way Forward?

What’s the solution to this wearisome warfare? We can’t just paper over disagreements and cheer “unity” over and over again, as if this will solve all our issues. Denominations don’t heal that way, just like churches and families don’t heal by shoving disagreements under the rug. We should aspire to unity, yes, and we must stop weaponizing disagreement in ways that mischaracterize, reduce, oversimplify, or attack brothers and sisters acting in good faith. But talking about unity won’t resolve the disagreements.

John Stott found ways for creative collaboration and partnership by doing his best to listen carefully to critics who were concerned about this or that—whose disagreement was sincere and well-meaning—and he often found the truths they wanted to safeguard were ones he considered precious as well. Creative solutions could come about once that common ground was established enough for productive conversations. But I sometimes wonder if any of that is even possible online.

Which pushes me to look deeper into the reasons why we’ve arrived at this place.

Why is it so hard to critique without canceling people?

What has happened to us online that makes it so easy to write others off?

How can we speak truthfully when doctrinal drift poses a danger to a leader’s soul and the souls of others, without contributing to the culture of easy labels and rapid canceling?

What habits would help us cultivate charitable critique, to follow the counsel of James to be “quick to listen” and “slow to speak” and especially “slow to become angry”?

What have we become? Who are we becoming?

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I know the church would be better served by more Christians insisting on face-to-face interaction, resisting the impulse to constantly signal online that we belong to this or that tribe, and choosing to avoid the constant carping and criticizing on issues where we’re unlikely to persuade others. Maybe we need more cold takes than hot ones. And maybe it starts with reevaluating our habits and, at the very least, committing to no longer weaponizing good-faith disagreement.

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In traveling around the country, in multiple conversations with pastors, I perceive a sense of weariness mixed with dread: We’re about to go through it again. They’re referring to the upcoming election year, which looms large after previous polarizing election cycles saw churchgoing Christians divided over matters of political principle and prudence.

Good pastors care deeply about the unity of the flock they shepherd. They take seriously the admonition of the apostles to preserve the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace (Eph. 4:3), and they share the heart of Jesus expressed the night before he died, when he prayed that his people might be one (John 17). In a world where the political seeps into all spheres of life, new threats to church unity arise, often from multiple directions.

2 Tendencies for Concerned Pastors

What should faithful pastors do? What does it look like to steer the ship through stormy waters? I see two tendencies in well-meaning pastors these days.

1. Go quiet.

The first is to hunker down, play it cool, and avoid anything that seems “political.” The way to preserve the unity of the church and to avoid coming under fire from the most politically active and vocal members of the congregation is to refrain from anything that could be seen as partisan or offensive. If you just ignore all the drama and keep your political opinions quiet, maybe you set an example for relationships in your church and you can keep people from getting too worked up over temporal matters.

The problem here is the divorcing of discipleship from the political sphere, which only creates a bigger void for other voices to fill. How can you possibly steer clear of anything “political” or “controversial” when nearly everything these days is contested? Significant questions about identity, the beginning and end of life, the obligation to “remember the poor” (Gal. 2:10), our care for the immigrants in our midst, how best to oppose racial discrimination, and how to address declining family stability, not to mention the definition of the family itself and the meaning of sex and gender—these are all matters now considered “political.”

We may bemoan the encroachment of politics into every area of life, but this development is no excuse for silence. It’s a reason for speech—divine speech, as we seek to bring the Word of God to bear on the issues we face in our day. To avoid any topic that touches on the political is to forfeit the fields where discipleship happens. Loving our neighbors means willing their good. It includes caring about the neighborhood. We fool ourselves if we think Christians can be a “faithful presence” in society apart from “truthful witness.”

2. Become a pundit.

But there’s a second tendency that deserves our attention. It’s the temptation to sacrifice the power of a prophet for the pablum of a pundit. The pastor might feel compelled to weigh in on the multiple events (and pseudo-events) happening every day, whether on social media or from the pulpit on Sunday. And of course, there’s always something to comment on, always a news item begging for commentary. So much news that the primary message—the good news we’re called to proclaim—can get lost in a sea of trifles. And just like that, we replace the feast of divine proclamation with another serving of political porridge.

The main calling of the pastor isn’t to the country but to the church. Paradoxically, the best way for the church to bless the nation is by leaning into her kingdom identity, by God’s people serving as a radical outpost of his reign.

I make this point in The Thrill of Orthodoxy, urging pastors and church leaders to take the long view, to realize that all week long, content comes at people from a cacophony of voices. World leaders, political pundits, novelists, sportscasters and journalists, infotainment sites and shows, celebrities and social media stars—everyone has something to say. But on the first day of the week, the day we celebrate the resurrection, someone stands up with an ancient book to deliver a message designed to cut through a noisy world of constant chatter. You’ve heard what everyone else says. Now listen to what God says.

What follows should be an otherworldly message with God at the center. Anyone can be a broadcaster today; anyone can be a pundit. The church will not be healthy if pastors spend more time scrolling on social than searching the Scriptures. What the world needs most is the whole counsel of God—truth expressed with grace; truth that, yes, touches on social and ethical dilemmas but is never subsumed into the vortex of American politics. What is temporal matters, yes, but never at the expense of the eternal.

Better Way

In place of the two temptations above, I encourage pastors bracing themselves for another election year to lean toward other tendencies that will lead to a better way.

1. Get close.

If, in the noisiness of an election year, we’re to resist the tendency to go silent or to slip into worldly anxiety, we must remember this: Pastors do their best work in person. Proximity matters. Physical proximity. You don’t pastor the world from your Twitter or Facebook account. You oversee sheep for whom you will give account. Lean into the tendency to love the people you see every week and focus on their spiritual benefit.

Don’t underestimate the power of face-to-face time with church members. Too much of today’s drama arises from the refracted prism of social media, distorted by those who often get the label of being “Very Online.” The wise pastor will prioritize the needs of the “Very In-Person” rather than cater to the preferences and desires of the Very Online.

2. Remember your calling.

Go back to the heart of your ministry and your calling, especially as you buckle up for the wild ride of another election year.

Consider the long-term effects of your words and actions. Think of the long-term influence of your ministry on your congregation and your congregation’s service to your community. Don’t be swept up into the breathless, overhyped, and overheated anxieties of one cultural moment. In The Ways of Judgment, Oliver O’Donovan writes,

The church needs heralds of King Jesus. And the world needs churches that speak the truth in ways that transcend the current moment yet still intersect with it, churches whose presence proves unsettling and disturbing to the powers that be, as we ensure our earthly battles never dwarf our eternal hope.

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The church is in crisis, as is always the case. We could say this of the church in the early centuries, during the Middle Ages, in the tumultuous time of the Reformation, and in our modern era. From the days when Christians were getting drunk at the table in Corinth to the brutal extermination of Christians today at the hands of Islamic terrorists in some parts of the world, crises have been constant. Heresies strike from inside, persecutions from outside. The church is in crisis.

But we must also acknowledge the church is stable. “Upon this rock, I will build my church,” Jesus said. Like the parable he tells of the wise man, Jesus builds his house on the rock, and the gates of hell will not prevail against his people.

Yes, there will be and have been fallings away, false messiahs, heresies that ravage Jesus’s teaching, moral aberrations that harm our witness, and persecutions that sweep over the landscape. But the paradoxical truth still stands. The true church is always in crisis and is always stable. We’re in a spiritual battle whose outcome is secure.

If we focus only on the crises facing the church, we’ll retreat with a fortress mentality that makes preserving what we have the goal. We’ll make church maintenance the mission. Just hold on to what we have! If we focus only on the stability and assured outcome for the church’s future, we’ll be asleep at the wheel, unaware of specific threats that appear on the church’s horizon and unprepared to respond in appropriate ways.

Challenges and Opportunities When Christianity Is in Decline

C. S. Lewis’s sharp intellect and devotional dedication helped him put challenges to Christianity in perspective. He didn’t shy away from the challenges facing the church, but—with an evangelistic heart—he spoke to the issues of his day, confident in the enduring appeal of truth, no matter how dim things may have looked at the time.

We sometimes adopt a romanticized view of the world of our forefathers and mothers in the faith, failing to fully appreciate some of the challenges they faced head-on or the trials they experienced. Lewis wrote many of his best-loved works during the Second World War, and then he experienced along with the rest of England several years of austerity after the cataclysmic events of that war had passed. He was committed to caring for an increasingly cantankerous and ailing elderly woman. He carried heavy burdens during tumultuous times and yet remained able to see both challenges and opportunities for the church in his day.

Here’s an example: Lewis noted the decline of religion in England back in 1946. He didn’t see this religious decline as a good thing, noting that the absence of religious devotion might endanger the principles and purity expected in public life and the mutual respect and kindness that political opponents would otherwise show one another. (In other words, without Christian morals and values as norms in society, things would get more vicious.) But Lewis wasn’t a pessimist, seeing only the downside to a loss of religious affiliation. He looked deep into the darkness of that challenge until he saw a glimpse of light, an opportunity.

In other words, Lewis saw that the loss of cultural Christianity didn’t necessarily mean the loss of true Christians. Instead, the decline of religion in the West serves to bring into sharper focus the nature of conversion. One cannot simply skate along as a “Christian” in name only when the culture is fast shedding its culturally Christian trappings. The question of conversion remains. Its significance is heightened. One no longer simply “assumes” a Christian identity; one must wrestle with the implications of what it means to be a Christian. And this is a good thing.

This is just one example of Lewis recognizing with eyes wide open a problem for the church in his era while carefully looking for the opportunity that might accompany the challenge. We’d do well to follow this pattern.

Look for Opportunities in the Challenges

Wisdom requires us to recognize both that the gospel will always be opposed and that the gospel will overcome opposition. “In the world we will have trouble,” Jesus told us, but take heart, because he has overcome the world. Focus only on the trouble, and you’ll succumb to fruitless anxiety about a battle whose outcome is secure. Focus only on Jesus’s ultimate victory, and you’ll fail to engage the world in ways that require vigilance in this present moment.

Times of turbulence and shifting cultural trends give us an opportunity to recommit our lives to expanding God’s kingdom. We aim to see disciples multiplied and churches planted, as we pursue a missionary encounter with the world we’re called to reach.

That’s why we need to see the opportunities accompanying every challenge and the challenges accompanying every opportunity. What challenges make it difficult for us to follow Jesus in the 21st-century West? What opportunities accompany these challenges as we seek to spread the gospel and fortify the church of Jesus Christ? These are the questions we must always be asking, and the answers will require discernment and wisdom, grounded in hopeful realism.

______________________________

Editors’ Note: Trevin Wax will lead a microevent on “The Hope of Gospel Expansion in a Hard-to-Reach Culture” at TGC’s 2023 Conference, September 25–27, in Indianapolis. You can browse the complete list of topics and speakers. Register soon; prices increase May 11!

Brad East’s essay “Once More, Church and Culture,” published by Mere Orthodoxy, is one of the year’s most insightful. It begins with a reflection on the rise and fall of Christendom (“the name we give to Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority”) and then revisits H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic Christ and Culture, first published in 1951.

Christ and Culture

Niebuhr provided Protestants with a template for how to think about Christians relating to the surrounding culture:

• Christ Against Culture
• Christ of Culture
• Christ Above Culture
• Christ and Culture in Paradox
• Christ Transforming Culture

(For an overview of Niebuhr’s taxonomy, see my summary and critique.)

East believes this mode of evangelical Protestant thinking about the church falls short because of its presumption of the American context as normative. His critique here aligns at points with Don Carson’s revisiting of Niebuhr’s work, where Carson argued against a “one size fits all” mentality and acknowledged the Scriptures may advocate some elements in one situation and other elements in another. (What would it mean, for example, to tell beleaguered and oppressed believers in North Korea that their posture should be one of “transforming the culture?”)

Faithful Presence?

East goes on to sample other typologies of the church’s relation to culture, including James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World. There, Hunter described three unacceptable approaches—(1) Defensive Against, (2) Relevance To, and (3) Purity From—before offering a way forward: (4) Faithful Presence Within. Hunter recommends faithful presence as part of Great Commission obedience, including both affirmation and antithesis—celebrating whatever is good, true, and beautiful in the culture and subverting whatever is idolatrous.

East appreciates Hunter’s work, but he finds four major faults. Here’s my summary:

1. Not global enough—it’s too tightly tied to the American context.

2. Not historical enough—it assumes today’s secular settlement is the norm rather than the exception in church history.

3. Not broad enough—it focuses nearly exclusively on professions associated with the upper-middle class, thereby sidestepping application for the whole Christian community.

4. Not alert enough—it fails to help Christians understand where to draw lines about what institutions or professions are off limits to the Christian, thus missing subtler spheres of life where sharp contradiction is required.

Better Way Forward

East believes we can build on and extend the work of Niebuhr and Hunter and others, but only if we give up the idea of finding one “correct” type, posture, or model. Instead, he writes,

The upside of East’s work is its breadth—we can apply each mode in every possible historical and political context: premodern and postmodern, established and disestablished, privileged and persecuted. He sums up the four modes with four Rs:

1. Resistance

2. Repentance

3. Reception

4. Reform

East’s proposal takes all the strengths of the Niebuhr and Hunter taxonomies without collapsing them into a single model. He urges us to consider the appropriate ways we might implement them all, no matter the cultural conditions or historical circumstances. I especially appreciate East’s concern in finding a way forward that applies today to the church all over the world and makes sense of the choices of the church throughout history.

The whole essay is worth your time. I hope my summary of East’s analysis and argument is enough to whet your appetite.

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I recently finished Paul Kenyon’s Children of the Night: The Strange and Epic Story of Modern Romania, a gripping historical overview of the tumultuous century experienced by the country my wife hails from, the place where I once made my home.

Consider this: within the span of one century—from 1900 to 2000—Romania went from celebrating a monarchy, to sliding into a nationalist dictatorship, to fighting in WWII on the side of Germany before switching to fight on the side of the Allies, to deposing the monarch and installing a Communist regime, ending in a revolution that brought the birth pangs of freedom. From monarchy to fascism to Axis to Allies to Communism to free markets. All in one century.

My wife’s grandfather was drafted into WWII as a soldier who fought on the side of Hitler, but once the country switched allegiance, so did he, spending the last part of the war fighting on the side of the Allies—all the while despising both the remains of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the designs of the nascent Soviet Union that would darken the country by closing the drapes of the Iron Curtain. Whenever the war would come up in conversation, my wife tells me, her grandfather’s gentle, elderly exterior would fade away and he’d begin to curse, bitter at the circumstances that led to his country’s humiliation.

Paul Kenyon’s historical look at Romania begins in a familiar place, with Vlad Țepeș, the medieval leader whose legal rigidity and terrible punishments led to peace in the land, but at the cost of human decency. “Vlad the Impaler” became the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Gothic character Count Dracula, and Vlad’s residence (Bran Castle) the setting for Transylvanian horror.

From there, Kenyon’s narrative jumps forward to the 20th century, where he traces the arc of Romania’s history while featuring the personal stories and testimonies of ordinary people. In this way, the book never becomes a dry historical recitation of facts but instead helps the reader feel the promise and peril of the moment.

If there’s anyone who stands out as someone decent, whose leadership gave Romania its best opportunity at stability, it’s Queen Marie, the British-born granddaughter of Victoria, whose husband, Ferdinand, was the German-born King of Romania during WWI. Thanks to Marie’s tireless efforts in serving her people and advocating on their behalf, the territorial expansion known as Greater Romania came into existence.

Once Ferdinand is dead and Marie is only the Mother Queen, the country lurches toward the chaos of competing factions. No one is good. The evil of Corneliu Codreanu and his nationalistic zeal is cloaked in the spirituality of the Romanian Orthodox Church, until the drive for national pride and spiritual unity of the historic church are merged into a frightening picture of an evil “saint” whose cross joins with the swastika. At one point, the literal heart of the deceased Queen Marie is carried from one part of the country to another, in the same realm where Vlad Țepeș is said to be buried, as a way of tapping into the nation’s lifeblood.

By the time the Second World War arrives, Romania’s hatred of foreigners has snowballed into a vicious anti-Semitism that leads to complicity in the Holocaust. As Timothy Snyder points out in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, European public opinion made it difficult to criticize the Soviet regime without seeming to endorse fascism, and vice versa. Hitler called all his enemies “Marxists,” and Stalin called all his  “fascists.”

Kenyon is wise to keep going back to ordinary people, victims of events beyond their control, so that you get a sense of what it would have been like to live through these times. As you read about the people with power, there’s nobody to root for. Never a good option.

You may long for a stronger monarchy to bring stability and courage to the country, but the embarrassment of King Carol II and his exploits at home and abroad put to rest the notion that a king could save the nation. You might admire the nationalistic zeal of Codreanu or Ion Antonescu, but then you’re confronted with the brutality, anti-Semitism, and string of high-profile assassinations. You may think the answer to fascism will be found in the oppressed, marginal movement of their archenemies—the young Communists—only to discover that, once in power, they were every bit as bad, if not worse, than the tyrants they displaced.

The biggest monster is saved for the latter part of the book—the rise of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his horrible wife, Elena, who managed to hoodwink the Americans and the British (or at least neutralize their human rights concerns) in exchange for seeking a measure of independence from the Soviets. Their dictatorship, which grew progressively worse as the years went by, turned the bad dream of Communist rule into a nightmare of the Securitate’s authoritarian tyranny.

Throughout Kenyon’s narrative, I couldn’t help but be reminded how fragile a gift is freedom. I pondered the ethical dilemmas faced by the common people at the time—the difficulty in distinguishing truth from propaganda, having to choose between fascists or Communists (or having to simply keep your head down once the “choice” was made for you), the swings from one form of evil to another, the rapidity with which the church can be co-opted by movements that express genuine concerns as a front for accomplishing evil aims, and the dissolution of character and statesmanship among the country’s leaders. I prayed God would preserve the United States in the future from this level of turmoil.

Romania is a different country today. In the years since I lived there, it has joined the European Union and there are signs of the nation recapturing the shimmer of its glorious past. Still, the wild history of this place once called “the breadbasket of Europe” surely stands as a striking example of a people caught between competing factions, where soundness of character is in short supply, and where the true church faces the ultimate price for remaining faithful.

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We don’t get to pick our times; God does that.

We also don’t get to pick the challenges that confront the church in any given era. The culture determines the issues that require the church’s truthful witness.

We don’t have the luxury of choosing a narrow sliver of cultural space for faithful thinking and action. Jesus is Lord of all. Discipleship is never timeless. We’re to train up believers in understanding and living according to the unchanging truths of the faith, yes, but always in a way that equips them to resist the most prevalent falsehoods spreading over the world right now. Faithful Christian formation requires us to expose and counter the distortions and deceptions of our time.

A pastor friend of mine in the U.K. recently expressed astonishment at how many pastors in America never (or rarely) speak publicly about sex, gender, and identity. How can we expect the next generation to be biblically grounded if we don’t explain and expound Christian conviction about the goodness and givenness of our bodies, if we fail to offer clear and coherent answers from Scripture about the nature of humanity and our gendered selves?

What will this kind of engagement look like? How can leaders be faithful in addressing these issues?

In a recent segment about transgender controversies in Christianity Today’s podcast The Bulletin, Mike Cosper talked with Nicole Martin (chief impact officer at CT) and Madeleine Kearns, a staff writer at National Review who hails from the U.K. Their conversation juxtaposed two approaches to questions of gender and identity in the church today.

Convictional and Candid

Kearns comes at the issue directly, delineating between those who think the transgender movement is a wonderful idea that should be fully embraced and those who think we’ve turned a corner toward cultural insanity. Kearns makes clear her position: “I think this stuff is pretty insane and difficult to justify,” she says, and she mentions the various angles of debate including free speech, the purpose of medicine and treatment, the welfare of children, the safety of women-only spaces, and the legitimacy of gender-specific sports.

For Kearns, what matters most is conviction expressed candidly. Convictions about the nature and reality of biological sex will lead us to oppose certain cultural trends. In pushing for equality and against gender stereotypes, Kearns notes, some feminists in the late 20th century began to erase the reality of male/female differences (physically and socially), setting the stage for today’s debates. A decade ago, a libertarian posture toward adult transitions (“Be whatever you want to be”) seemed most prominent nationwide. Even conservatives thought it courteous and generous to adopt someone’s preferred pronouns.

But as transgender activism has become ever more demanding and aggressive, it’s now clear the bending of language serves an ideological purpose. “Compassion isn’t compassion unless it’s truthful,” Kearns says. And we mustn’t surrender plainspoken language that serves our argument about biological reality. Compassionate conversations matter, but apart from clearly stated convictions, there can be no conversation (which seems to be the goal of some transgender ideologues—to shut down any debate and shout down any dissent).

Conversational and Compassionate

In contrast, Nicole Martin says the goal right now shouldn’t be persuasion (at least not initially) but to make space for the conversation itself. Issues of identity are thorny. Martin sees the complexity in relating to a person who may “wrestle with a God-given identity, a selected identity, an identity that they feel very protective of.”

Like Kearns, Martin recognizes God’s gift of distinction and the need to honor our differences. Yet she thinks the church’s energy would be better directed elsewhere. The realization that some of the Christians involved in transgender debates weren’t at the forefront of rallying for women’s rights in the past makes her uneasy. She prefers to move from the transgender issue back to the women’s rights question more generally. And rather than taking a confrontational approach, she begins with our failures in Christian witness over the years, how “the church has silenced the voices of women” in ways that require reconciliation and healing.

Regarding sexuality and gender, Martin believes the church in the past has been better at expressing conviction than showing compassion. She realizes it’s impossible for Christians to try “sit in the middle on all issues” but notes how especially “sticky” it is to figure out how to address someone or continue a relationship with someone on the other side. In the end, she doesn’t answer Cosper’s question of what faithful witness looks like, claiming instead that “the question itself is exactly where we need to be.”

This Is Our Time

There’s plenty of overlap between Kearns and Martin here, but I’m struck by the differences in their outlooks and temperaments. Kearns focuses on convictions first and how to be direct and candid about them in conversation. Martin focuses on conversations first and the importance of showing compassion in expressing one’s convictions. Church leaders who align with Martin will have different priorities and make different choices than the ones who align with Kearns.

When it comes to this subject, I’m with Kearns. I don’t think Martin’s approach will be tenable in five (or even two) years. As is often said, you will be made to care. We may wish to change the subject, but what’s the point in discussing the failures of the church to women in the past if we’re unable to even define what a woman is in the present? And as much as we might yearn for constructive dialogue about these matters, it should be clear by now that gender activists aren’t looking for conversation. Their goal is conquest, a world in which the basic realities of human nature and existence are denied and all dissenters are viewed like the “savages” of Brave New World.

But even if the cultural opposition weren’t so fierce, I still think Kearns is right. We have a positive case to make on this issue. “The gospel should meet people at the point of their deepest confusion and at the height of their loftiest ideals,” writes Chris Brooks. What better place for the rescue of amazing grace than a world drowning in confusion, a society unmoored from embodied reality? The church offers an alternative society to this cultural dystopia because we see creation as a gift to be received, not a constraint to be cast off. That’s why, nearly a century ago, G. K. Chesterton wrote,

The Questions Are Coming

The new gender ideology has reached into all kinds of spaces and raised all sorts of questions. Just ask pastors what they’re facing. Here’s a smattering of situations I’ve heard from church leaders in just the last month.

• What’s the appropriate response of an elementary school kid in your church when the class throws a party celebrating another student’s newfound gender identity?
• How does your church support the distraught parents of a highly online teenage girl who is threatening suicide if not allowed to medically block her physical development?
• What’s your decision regarding a minor who identifies as trans and who wants to attend church camp?
• How do you instruct young people on the Bible’s teaching of sex and gender while simultaneously warning them against the dehumanizing and hateful rhetoric often deployed toward those who identify as transgender?
• How do you counsel the realtor whose livelihood is threatened because she defied a corporate order to post the transgender flag on her Facebook page? Or the church member whose job is in jeopardy because he won’t sign a statement affirming all of his company’s diversity, equality, and inclusion policies?

If we’re to truly make space for a conversation on these matters, the starting place must be our convictions about reality. All our choices must flow from those convictions. Strong convictions are the prerequisite for true conversations. And convictions and compassion aren’t in opposition. When the world is falling en masse for a bold and terrible lie, the most important and compassionate thing the church can do is uphold the courageous and irrepressible truth.

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For decades, Christians have worried about the weakening, shrinking, and decline of families. We’re in uncharted territory when large numbers of children no longer have siblings (and have fewer aunts, uncles, and cousins) or no longer live with both biological parents. Nearly 30 percent of households today consist of only one person.

In response to these trends, most pastors and church leaders devote their efforts to dealing with the fallout, looking for ways the church can strengthen families in crisis or mitigate the aftermath of family dissolution or better involve singles in ministry. The pastoral impulse to find avenues for the church to serve people in distress is vital.

But a bigger question often goes unasked: How does the decline of the family alter the way we understand the church? It’s not enough to ask how the church can address the breakdown of family relationships; we must also consider how these new challenges affect church relationships. Consider a few examples:

• How do we understand what it means to have “brothers and sisters” in Christ in a world where more and more children are born and raised without siblings? (That’s a question I’ve asked in relation to China, where the economic and demographic fallout from the disastrous one-child policy has led to a world where siblings are the exception, not the norm.)
• How do we continue to see the church as the family of God in a world where more and more people live in a household of one, especially in cities where in some congregations singles outnumber couples?
• What’s the long-term effect of homes broken by divorce on how we view God as Father?
• How does the perpetual unsettledness of mom’s or dad’s serial relationships affect a child’s understanding of God’s permanent covenant love?

No Easy Answers

These are challenging questions, in part because the situations and circumstances differ from person to person, family to family, and culture to culture. I don’t claim to have all the answers here, and I realize even asking these questions implies some family structures (husband and wife with marriage intact and the children born of their love) are closer to a universal standard. We run the risk of idealizing a particular arrangement as the norm in all places and times, when instead, for example, traditional societies often differ from the Western-style “nuclear family” by placing a higher value on the involvement of and expectations for the “extended” family.

Still, there’s no getting around these issues, because the Scriptures (1) regularly speak of the body of Christ in familial terms and (2) are shot through with marital and familial imagery. We’re right to consider how our understanding of the church is affected when long-standing family relationships (father and mother, child to parent, brother to brother) become less common.

Why Families Matter

When exceptions become the norm in family life—as family sizes get smaller and fewer children have brothers and sisters, as single-parenting becomes commonplace and divorce and remarriage expected—it becomes harder, not easier, for us to undergo the process of learning to live well in other spheres of life. Gregg Ten Elshof writes,

Unfortunately, expressive individualism often leads us to consider a person in the abstract—isolated and separated from others. The individual is the fundamental unit of society, separated from our familial and relational context. But there’s no way to strip away relationships without stripping an important aspect of humanity away at the same time. No living tree is without roots. No living person is without ancestors. We are, in the end, relational beings.

G. K. Chesterton pointed out that the power of family life lies precisely in the fact we don’t choose our companions. We must learn to deal with people who are unlike us. To revolt against the family because it’s uncongenial is to revolt against mankind.

Chesterton describes being born as “the supreme adventure,” walking into “a splendid and startling trap,” with father and mother lying in wait, an uncle there to surprise us, an aunt as a bolt out of the blue:

The family is an adventure, full of promise and peril. Adventures can go well, leading to heroic displays of virtue, and adventures can go wrong, leading to deep pain and trauma. Family life is rarely easy, and that’s precisely why the family matters for understanding our place in the world and our future.

Family Life and the Church

The adventure of family life prepares us for the adventure of living well in other spheres. By learning to relate well to parents and siblings, aunts and uncles and cousins, grandparents and great-grandparents, we develop the skills necessary for making friends, loving our neighbors, respecting those in authority over us, and, most of all, being the family of God—the church. It’s harder to discover what loving the church looks like—“a fellowship of differents” as Scot McKnight describes God’s people—until we learn to love those in our immediate and extended family.

It’s possible, of course, to make too much of the family’s importance, perhaps by freezing a particular form of the nuclear family (father, mother, 2.5 kids) as essential to human flourishing. The New Testament strikes against both individualistic excess and kinship idolization. We mustn’t forget how Jesus relativized the priority of blood relations in some shocking ways. And the apostle Paul’s high view of singleness should keep us from dismissing or diminishing people whose situations and callings are different.

Still, we cannot understate the family’s formative power. When a society’s view and experience of the family shift, we should expect the church’s self-understanding to be affected too. Ten Elshof asks,

Ten Elshof’s point is that if we’re to see church as a family, even a surrogate family, we need the majority of people to have some sort of knowledge and experience in what it means to relate to family members. “You cannot extend what you’ve not yet acquired,” he writes. Apart from learning (from your own experience or from imitating those around you) what it means to be a brother or a sister, a son or a daughter, or a father or a mother, it’ll be more challenging to be the church and to relate well to our family members in Christ.

Family Life and Secularism

We need more pastors and church leaders wrestling with the question not only of how the church can serve people today but of how family situations today affect our view of the church. We should expect our understanding of the church to be altered in a culture where fewer and fewer people grow up with siblings, or with extended relatives around, or in stable homes. This matters for the church and for society.

I don’t have all the answers here, but I think part of the answer is at least asking the question, How does the widespread dissolution of traditional family expectations, due in large part to the prevailing assumptions of individualism, affect our ability to see the church as a family and to act accordingly?

Another question follows: How does the gospel renew and restore the people of God so those who’ve never experienced healthy family life are able to take their place among new brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, children and grandchildren in Christ?

Ten years ago, Mary Eberstadt proposed a new theory of secularization. Most assume marriage and childbearing decline in Western societies after they begin to secularize, but Eberstadt claimed the decline of marriage and childbearing speeds up and causes secularization. Religion and family are in a “double helix”—two threads circling endlessly around one another, rising and falling together, joined in the middle by important connections. Family formation influences religious belief. “Family illiteracy breeds religious illiteracy,” she writes.

Perhaps at least part of the reason there’s been so much focus on the family among Christians in recent decades is the instinct that the strength of the church and the strength of the family often rise and fall together. On this point, we’ve not been wrong.

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“Keep Louisville Weird” was a bumper sticker I saw frequently the year my wife and I lived in Kentucky with our oldest son. The slogan pointed to something odd and eccentric about the city and its inhabitants; it reveled in the area’s strangeness and nonconformist impulse. Even if the campaign felt at times like it was trying too hard—as if it wanted to capture and brand the weirdness, to make it more consumable—I always liked the pride people took in the city’s personality.

Keeping a Strange Faith

The impulse to stand out, to stay strange, would serve the church well today. Too often, church leaders think the way to reach people or gain a hearing for Christianity today is to demonstrate our normalcy, to show that what we believe and how we live doesn’t fall too far afield from the mainstream. We can adapt the faith wherever necessary, especially in the area of ethics, where there seems to be a widening chasm between Christian and secular views of morality.

But Christianity’s strangeness is a feature, not a bug. Mystery is what draws us in. In a world that sees religion as just “being a good person” or a bit of spiritual inspiration for living your best life, we claim a crucified man from the first century got up out of his grave and is now King of the world, to whom everyone on earth owes allegiance.

Consider for a moment how foolish that must sound to the uninitiated. Foolish, but oddly compelling. Columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein says, “What I, as an outsider to Christianity, have always found most beautiful about it is how strange it is.”

Imagine visiting a church for the first time, with no background knowledge of anything the Bible teaches. You’d think it strange how much Christians sing about sacrifice, talk about God’s glory, or take comfort in the idea of being washed in the blood of a slaughtered animal. You’d find incredible the miracles described in the Bible. You’d raise one if not both eyebrows when you hear what Jesus teaches about money and possessions, sexuality and power. You’d marvel at the joy Christians feel at the thought of an execution stake where the worst torture takes place. Make no mistake: Christianity is strange.

I often chuckle at the following quote from classics translator, Sarah Ruden:

For 2,000 years, people have been hearing this strange and exciting “good news”—the gospel—and have found their lives transformed as a result. And the desire for everyone in the world to experience God’s forgiveness and love motivates our obedience.

Peculiar People

Many people think the whole point of religion is to find a God who affirms the general direction of our lives and doesn’t say or do anything too unexpected, a God who doesn’t ask too much of us, a God who is easygoing and empty of all mystery. And there are many who believe the way for the church to grow is to show everyone just how “in step” we are with the culture around us. If we can just show everyone that we’re not so different, that we’re not so out of step with the times, then we’ll gather more people. We just need to show people how culturally relevant God is, how common, normal, and reasonable the gospel is, and people will join us.

There’s a place for offering rational reasons to believe in Christianity, of course. God wouldn’t have us check our minds at the door of the church. But let’s not forget it’s the strangeness of God that draws us to him. It’s not because God is just like us that we want to draw near but because he’s so different, so holy, so separate, so weird. And yet this God, in all his majesty, took on flesh. What could be more astounding than what J. I. Packer described as “the babyhood of God”?

It’s not what’s normal that attracts attention but what’s abnormal, what’s strange and fresh. If we give up essential truths of the Christian faith in order to be culturally relevant, we make ourselves eternally irrelevant. We make the church boring. The world needs a church that does more than offer an echo of our own times.

Are You Strange Enough?

I realize it’s possible to seek strangeness for its own sake, to revel in the peculiarities of the faith as if they’re just a fashion statement to help us stand out from our peers. This kind of weirdness becomes just another consumeristic brand that leaves the allegiance of our hearts untouched.

In contrast, the early church writings (like the Epistle of Diognetus) describe Christians in ways that stress their strangeness and their ordinary, commonplace goodness as citizens. What’s necessary is a mix of the commonplace and the strange; only then does Christianity both stand out and remain comprehensible to the modern world.

Still, I think the bigger challenge today is that we don’t stand out enough. And so we must ask some questions.

Is there enough strangeness in your life?

Is there enough in your life that would make you compelling to the people around you who don’t follow Jesus?

Is there anything different about your life that would attract attention? How you spend your money? How you spend your time? How you live morally? How you engage the world? How you forgive?

Standing out draws attention, not fitting in. Let’s keep Christianity weird.

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I’ve seen it happen enough now that I can read the signs of the sky. “Red sky at morning,” or something like that.

I’m referring to the development of a full-blown social media hurricane, with an organization or a person lying directly in the middle of the storm’s path. Helen Andrews reflects on the phenomenon as a “shame storm,” an apt metaphor. When a typhoon is heading your way, there’s virtually nothing you can do to prevent it, stop it, or blunt its force. The most you can do is cling to whatever piece of plywood you can and brace for impact, hoping something will be left standing when the maelstrom is over.

Storms pop up on more than one platform, but the warm tropical air of Twitter seems most conducive to their formation. My friend Chris Martin says someone is the main character every day on Twitter; the point of the game is to not be it. Unfortunately, for organizations and people with influence who do the increasingly dangerous work of thinking out loud and in public, everyone is vulnerable to criticism that cascades into canceling. Within hours or days, scattered showers can become a hurricane. Here’s how it happens.

Storm Starters

It starts with scattered showers and thunderstorms.

Any reputable organization is going to get rain. Doing something of substance will attract a fair share of criticism. My former boss Eric Geiger used to say, “You can’t have buzz without noise.” Others talk about how big ships leave a big wake. Leadership books tell us, “Criticism is the cost of influence.” This goes with the territory. Say something, expect disagreement. If you’re doing something of value, expect to have arrows shot in your direction; just be strategic about which arrows you want to take, and try to avoid unforced errors.

Showers and thunderstorms can be a good thing, helping people and organizations clarify their thinking. No one gets it right all the time. Good-faith critics perform a valuable service. But Tim Urban distinguishes between criticism culture (going after an idea) and cancel culture (going after the person). In criticism culture, the point is to subject bad ideas to rigorous debate as we all seek truth together. In cancel culture, the point is to punish and excommunicate the person who holds the bad ideas so the unclean presence is expelled.

“Storm starters” are convinced a particular person or organization is so wrong or harmful as to deserve online condemnation. They’ve moved beyond critique to cancellation. The best way to chip away at the credibility of the target is to start or intensify online thunderstorms, hoping the tempest will spill out of the teapot.

Tropical Depression Phase

Over time, if enough scattered critiques converge into a narrative (promoted by the storm starters), a tropical depression will develop—a bigger storm encompassing smaller storms. Stormy weather indicates trouble, to the point some outside observers begin to wonder, If there’s smoke, there must be fire.

Most organizations and influential people face tropical depressions on a regular basis. This is when the scattered criticisms (some true, some false) are numerous enough to form a coherent narrative that diminishes the organization or person’s credibility. Even good-faith critics begin to ask questions, wondering if some of the storm starters have a point. The chorus of concern grows louder and more frequent.

Wise leaders will surround themselves with trusted friends who act as “storm spotters” to give them perspective on controversies and help them discern whether an organization is facing a squall or if the storm’s intensity is bigger, thus requiring a different response. Without such perspective, it’s easy to respond in ways out of proportion to the size of the storm. In the tropical depression phase, sometimes the organization or person in question will act differently, perhaps by adjusting decisions to alleviate the concerns of good-faith critics or by pushing back publicly against the false narratives propounded by bad-faith critics.

Institutions and individuals are vulnerable to the beatdown of rain in a tropical depression. Australian church leader Mark Sayers points to the work of Edwin Friedman, who noticed how institutions play an important social role by absorbing anxiety. In a world with healthy, well-functioning institutions, there’s a built-in respect for individuals and institutions committed to passing on wisdom, conquering challenges, and centralizing important knowledge. But in our world today, many institutions are unhealthy, many more have been devalued, and some have disappeared. Widespread cultural anxiety is the result, and the flood of anxiety sweeps everyone into tribes.

These are the atmospheric conditions for the slow-moving tropical depression that plagues institutions and individuals. The tribal impulse then leads to the next phase of the storm.

Tropical Storm Phase

Usually, something triggers the jump to a tropical storm. It may be a particular video, article, statement, controversial association, or a past position—whatever it is, the revelation seems to legitimize the concerns of critics in the tropical depression phase. The event becomes a topic of conversation, pressuring people who have ties to the person or the organization but haven’t felt any of the earlier depression’s effects to choose sides or to make clear their position.

The tropical storm’s growth is commensurate to its ability to draw other circles of influencers into its orbit. If you can tap into the energy that comes from a different online tribe or ecosystem, and if you can draw that energy into the storm, then the pressure on the organization or person gets ramped up considerably. Peer pressure begins to do its work.

The online tribe or the people in an adjacent ecosystem feel a moral obligation to join in the criticism (and may begin calling for cancellation) as a way of echoing the concerns of previous critics. The more tribes triggered, the bigger the storm becomes, to the point even good-faith actors, who may not be able to distinguish genuine problems from online manipulation or the dynamics of social media, are swept into the vortex.

Hurricane Phase

Once several storms become a megastorm, the tempest is no longer contained to the teapot of one or two social media platforms. The hurricane itself becomes the story, and the pressure increases exponentially for the organization or person in the direct line of the hurricane’s landfall.

By this time, people or organizations close to the direct hit begin to feel massive pressure. Friends flee the path of the hurricane by distancing themselves from the people or organizations in the eye of the storm. Or worse, they think the only way to survive is to become part of the storm, to add energy to the tempest to escape being a target of the hurricane’s fury.

This is when storm chasers show up. Just like bad weather is a ratings bonanza for cable news networks, an online hurricane provides an opportunity for people to weigh in with hot takes, podcast conversations, TikTok rants, and YouTube shows—breathlessly covering the controversy and raising their own profiles in the process. Social media platforms benefit from the buzz, with algorithms pointing more people to the pseudo-event. Storm chasers piggyback on the trending storm to build their brands. Others find the whole thing strangely compelling, watching the disaster unfold from the comfort of their smartphones before scrolling to some other spectacle.

During the hurricane, the storm’s intensity will include vitriolic personal attacks and the dehumanization of the storm’s target. It’s not that the person or entity in question is merely mistaken; they’re monstrous, irredeemably immoral, even disgusting. The viciousness of the hurricane undermines good-faith criticism and can sabotage any efforts at making reforms.

Hurricane intensity is assessed by wind speeds, and at least initially, it’s the wind that does the most damage. Online, most hurricanes make landfall and lose steam rather quickly. It’s the pressure from the wind, or the storm surge, that leaves people or organizations weaker than they were before, especially when the gales cause everyone in the path to bend to keep from breaking.

Human Nature and Online Storms

Social media dynamics are new in human history, but human nature is old. There’s much to learn from thinkers who watch and account for human behavior, from philosophers like René Girard and observers like Jonathan Haidt. Growing in our understanding of how these storm dynamics work is one way of approaching our use of social media with wisdom. It’s good to be aware of how the atmospheric dynamics of social media (we could call it “online climate change”!) lead to unusual behaviors—to canceling instead of critiquing, for example—because everyone acts differently when the barometric pressure changes and the storm is upon us.

Awareness, however, will not stop or prevent the hurricane. Over the years, I’ve been inside multiple organizations or close to people who have experienced online storms. I’ve never been in the direct path of a hurricane (probably only a tropical depression), but I assume if I continue to write and think out loud, my day is coming, whether it be next week or next year.

Prepare for the Next Storm

No matter when or where the next hurricane barrels through, I’m sure of this: we can decrease the intensity of these storms if (1) we resist being drawn into an online vortex full of perverse incentives and distorted dynamics, (2) we recognize “storm chasing” when it happens, and (3) people and organizations in the eye simply let the storm do its worst and then look to glean lessons and wisdom in the aftermath.

To the first point, I go back to Mark Sayers’s description of leadership as “a non-anxious presence.” Relying on Friedman, he writes,

To the second point, we should get better at seeing through opportunists who chase storms as a way of building their own brands and platforms. Keep your eyes open for the pattern, and you’ll see it (on all points of the spectrum) whenever there’s a storm.

To the third point, self-critique is good. But it’s rarely helpful to try it in the middle of the storm. The needed self-reflection should be part of the cleanup; that’s when we’re most likely to take away the appropriate lessons. It’s only after the storm—once the sun has returned and there’s a pleasant breeze instead of gale-force winds—that the weather is better suited for back-and-forth critique and good-faith disagreement, where we vigorously debate ideas instead of cancel people.

Storms require the presence of certain atmospheric conditions before they can expand from one level to the next. We can’t change the course or trajectory of storms on our own, but we can weaken their intensity and destruction if we grow in online wisdom regarding their development, if we choose instead to embody a non-anxious presence in a world of swirling anger and anxiety.

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My favorite moment in How the Grinch Stole Christmas is when the heart of the Grinch, once described as “three sizes too small,” suddenly begins to grow. The Grinch discovers the capacity to give and receive love, and as a result, joy swells along with his heart.

These days, the reverse seems to be happening in the United States. Our hearts are shrinking and shriveling, drying up before our eyes.

‘Wall Street Journal’ Survey of Values

Just look at a recent Wall Street Journal poll. The core values that once stood out among Americans as being important—morals worthy of pursuit and emulation—have receded. Over the last quarter century, the importance we attach to patriotism, religious faith, having children, and caring about the community has plummeted.

In 1998, 70 percent of respondents said patriotism was very important and 62 percent said the same about religion. Today, it’s only 38 percent and 39 percent. Having children? A drop from 59 percent to 30 percent. What about community involvement? From 62 percent to 27 percent. (One outlier: the importance we assign to money has climbed to 43 percent from 31 percent.) The biggest declines in these values appear to have occurred in the last five years.

“These differences are so dramatic, it paints a new and surprising portrait of a changing America,” says Bill McInturff, a pollster who worked on a previous survey. Indeed.

Several people sent me this article shortly after it began making the rounds online—no one surprised, everyone troubled. Now, it’s possible the methodological differences (shift from phone to online) as well as the small sample size (1,000) has affected the results here. A similar survey from Gallup likely gives a fuller picture, at least on patriotism. Still, it’s a slide into “record lows” no matter the exact percentages.

Sin and the Inward Curve

Sociologists and political theorists will point to various causes for these declines. We could blame the economic downturn, the pandemic, church scandals, political polarization, institutional distrust, or the rise of social media. And surely any and all of these factors affect the American outlook.

But from a theological perspective, what we’re witnessing is both an expression and an effect of sin.

The Christian tradition going back to Augustine describes sin as a “curving in on oneself.” Sin shrivels the soul. When, in our pride and decadence, we turn from God to self, we alienate ourselves not only from our Maker but also from those made in his image. Martin Luther noted how the deceit and corruption of the human heart (Jer. 17:9) leads us to be “so curved in upon ourselves” that our self-interest causes us to turn even spiritual goods into a way of fulfilling selfish purposes.

Effects of Sin

Close-knit communities can protect themselves from any number of outside threats. But the internal distress that comes from the soul-shriveling, inward turn of sin—that’s much harder to fix.

What the WSJ poll reveals is a curved-in expression of sin and selfishness in several areas.

• The loss of patriotism includes a loss of loyalty to anything beyond the self, a lack of gratitude for the good gifts that accompany one’s earthly citizenships, and a diminished love for one’s neighbors.
• The loss of religion implies the disappearance of transcendence or significance beyond this present moment, of something that reaches beyond our earthly horizons.
• The loss of community means we value the “freedom” that comes from being alone more than the mutual obligations that accompany deep and sustaining friendships.
• The loss of children means we no longer look to the future, no longer able or willing to endure the distractions and burdens of raising and training the next generation.

The effect of sin is loneliness, which often compounds the problem, leading to a further shriveling of the soul into the cocoon of self-focus. Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out how sin’s power grows:

We weren’t made to find and express ourselves, to think freedom comes from cutting ourselves off from others, as if our meaning and significance can be excavated from the deepest caverns of our hearts. We were made not to look in first but to look up to God and then around to others.

Church’s Chance

A misdirected, curved-in-upon-itself love leads to isolation, alienation, and loneliness. It stunts our humanity. It’s only when we’re drawn out of ourselves, giving away our lives in self-giving love, that we find joy in God and in others.

The WSJ survey reveals the challenges of our time. But the church can find in these dismal results an opportunity. A chance. A way to stand out and offer the world something better.

• The church can cultivate loyalty that goes even beyond the goodness of patriotism (love for one’s fellow citizens and gratitude for earthly blessings) by helping us identify with all who pledge allegiance to Jesus Christ the Lord.
• The church can cultivate a genuine concern for the community by helping us find satisfaction not in seeking to have all our needs met but in pouring ourselves out to meet the needs of others, in imitation of our Servant King.
• The church can remind us of the goodness of creation and the glory of redemption, bursting through the immanent frame that would limit our vision only to temporal realities.
• The church can foster in us a love for families and children, a desire to see the next generation carry forward the fire of God’s love and grace, adding to the number of those who confess the name of his Son.

The gospel of grace does more than simply enlarge a shriveled soul. The Spirit replaces a heart of stone with a heart of flesh. And as the Spirit works in us, we see our souls expand, our selfishness healed, our curved-in hearts turned inside out through the fullness and wholeness of loving God and neighbor.

The WSJ poll is depressing, but Christians can take heart. We have the solution in the power of the gospel and the witness of the church.

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I enjoy personality tests. Some are more helpful than others, but at their best, surveys tell you something about yourself and the people you live or work with. (I’ve discovered I’m an extrovert in a family of introverts, although the jury’s still out on our youngest!) I’m partial to the Myers-Briggs, but I’ve engaged in multiple tests over the years, at work and for fun.

The problem with personality tests, though, is we can sometimes dismiss or diminish clear biblical standards that don’t align with our self-perception.

A Christian’s Talk

Take, for instance, what James 1:19–20 says about a Christian’s talk and temperament:

In our cultural context, it’s never been easier to speak and to be heard. The internet, social media . . . all these new technologies have made it possible for us to say more things publicly than in any other time in human history, to the point some cultural observers wonder out loud, Is this even good for us? Should we be taking in this much information or putting out so many words? Were humans ever intended to speak so much?

Everything in our world makes it easy to speak quickly. There’s nothing out there designed to help you learn to listen well. The way stuff is set up online, the way people climb the ladder socially or professionally, the way people debate—everything is set up for speech. Say something! But Proverbs 17:27–28 says,

In other words, if you’re wise, you won’t talk as much. You’ll restrain your words. You won’t vent all your frustrations. You won’t say everything you feel.

Some will say, “Hey, I’m a talker! I’m just being real! That’s just my personality. I blurt things out. I just say stuff without thinking. It’s my Myers-Briggs. That’s my Enneagram number. Have you seen my StrengthsFinders? I’m just keeping it real.”

Sorry, but if you’re a Christian, that’s not what “keeping it real” means. James doesn’t say to be quick to listen and slow to speak unless you’re extroverted. Unless you’re talkative. Unless you have a big following on TikTok or Instagram. No, what he says goes for all of us.

A Christian’s Temperament

It’s not just our talk James mentions but also our temperament: “Slow to become angry.” The proverbs put talk and temperament together too: “The one who has knowledge restrains his words.” That’s talk. “One who keeps a cool head is a person of understanding.” That’s temperament.

Some of us may be prone to angry outbursts. Some of us may be prone to anger that shows up in seething, quiet resentment. Some of us may not find anger to be as big a challenge. We’re all different, yes. But make no mistake: a personality test doesn’t give you a pass on the fruit of the Spirit.

Right now, a lot of people think that if we just let loose, if we say what we feel all the time, if we tell people off, that’s going to fix it. Let me lash out on Twitter. Let me add a sick burn on a Facebook comment thread. The way we make a difference is by “shutting someone down” or “owning the libs” or whatever.

Of course, there is such a thing as righteous anger. James says slow to become angry, not never to become angry. But the temptation in our day is to baptize our anger as righteous, to justify sin in the name of justice. Samuel James writes, “Righteous people can become angry. Angry people have a very hard time being righteous.”

That’s why more than once in James 1, we’re warned about self-deception. It’s easy to think if we can just be mad enough, or if we can get people riled up, then that’s going to bring about righteousness in our lives or in society. According to James, that’s a trap. Human anger—sinful anger—doesn’t resolve our problems. It doesn’t bring about the righteousness of God.

Gregory the Great said, “Because a diseased mind has no control over its own judgment, it thinks that whatever anger suggests must be right.”

If we think our anger is usually or always righteous, we’re probably self-deceived. A diseased mind always finds an excuse for anger, assuming that anger is righteous when really we sound just like the world. We’re to be known for a different kind of talk and a different kind of temperament.

Defined by God

A personality test doesn’t define you. God does. And what’s beautiful about the biblical instruction regarding our talk and temperament is that this is one of the ways we reflect our Maker. Slow to become angry? That’s how God describes himself to Moses in Exodus 34:

Becoming more like Christ doesn’t mean becoming less ourselves. We become our truest selves when we reflect him through our personalities. This is the paradox C. S Lewis pointed out: “It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.”

We should be less focused on the personality stereotype of a test or survey and more concerned that we showcase the glory and grace of God, no matter what our inclinations may be. These tests can help us see the unique ways we can bring glory to Christ, but in the end, finding myself isn’t the goal. Following Christ is what counts. That’s why we should seek to bring our personalities in line with the Spirit—so his fruit ripens in our lives in beautiful ways that exalt the Savior.

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A friend recently remarked that nearly every time I pray with my team or with others in partnership, I ask for wisdom. I hadn’t noticed the habit until he mentioned it. But he’s right. I’m constantly asking God for wisdom—for myself and for others.

Which got me thinking, Why do I pray this way? What exactly am I asking God for?

The Bible-minded run right to Solomon, which makes sense, since the king of Israel was affirmed by the Lord for desiring discernment. The Lord not only blessed Solomon with wisdom but also granted him the wealth and power he hadn’t requested.

The proverbs of Solomon link wisdom to the fear of the Lord, and in the New Testament, the brother of Jesus reminds us heavenly wisdom leads to good conduct and works done in gentleness (James 3:13). It is “pure, . . . peace-loving, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without pretense” (v. 17, CSB).

Why We Need Wisdom Today

It’s not hard to see why we need wisdom these days. In his forthcoming book Digital Liturgies, Samuel James defines the essence of wisdom as “living in light of reality” and then shows how the online world can undermine wisdom by cutting us off from the world as it truly is:

We’re experiencing an epistemological crisis, wondering what’s true and how we know it to be so. Everything in our world pushes us away from cultivating habits that lead to wisdom and reflection. No wonder, then, we must pray for God to be generous with wisdom from above. We sense our need because we recognize not all the choices we make will be clear-cut or black-and-white or easily discernible decisions of faithfulness.

Patterns of Wisdom

In Uncommon Unity, Richard Lints says wisdom starts with realizing “God has made the world with certain patterns and that our flourishing rests in embracing those patterns and resisting the lure of running contrary to those patterns.” We must see things as they are. The wise don’t chafe against limitation or try to remake the world in humanity’s image. We’re to joyfully submit to the God-given patterns in creation and then seek faithfulness within finite constraints.

Of course, the acknowledgment of creational goodness must be held together with an understanding of the fall—the world isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. Biblical wisdom is “able to distinguish between the goodness of the created order and the brokenness of the created order, neither naively accepting the brokenness nor becoming cynical about the loss of goodness in the world.”

We don’t simply accept the world as it is, shrugging off injustice or succumbing to fate. To be wise is to differentiate what’s good from what’s fallen, sometimes even in the same person or pattern—rarely relegating something to one category or another completely but recognizing the complexity of a broken world in need of redemption.

The wise are usually wise everywhere, no matter the differences on the surface. They’re able to distinguish between superficial cultural elements and deep-rooted differences. They can spot underlying unity when it exists, and they also identify foundational fault lines.

Prayer and Practice

Wisdom comes through prayer and practice. “It is a learned habit,” Lints writes, “but there is no mechanical means to acquire it. . . . It is confidently humble and able to glean insights from a variety of diverse sources.”

Unfortunately, too much that passes under the banner of “discernment” these days is a narrow focus on discerning what might be bad in something. A broader and fuller understanding of discernment enables us also to discern what’s good, without adopting an openness to everything in a person or position.

The irony of casting everyone into categories of “good” or “bad” is that you no longer need to practice discernment. You wave away anyone in the “bad” category or adopt uncritically whatever comes from the “good” category. True wisdom requires us to look for truth wherever it may be found, to sift everything through the Scriptures, and to celebrate God’s goodness when we see it refracted, even through broken or shattered image-bearers.

Perhaps the greatest area of need today is wisdom combined with patience. The wise don’t rush to judgment but recognize “when a fuller story is needed to fill out the account.” We need more cold takes instead of hot ones. The wise acknowledge the need to know how the past influences the present, and they seek to interpret someone’s words or actions in the context of their circumstances, trying to understand the narrative within which someone makes sense of the world.

Need of the Hour

In the end, we pray for wisdom because we have no hope of gaining wisdom on our own. Lints writes,

Wisdom points us to the Lord, the One who gives generously and helps us better interpret our present circumstances and guide the people whom God has placed in our path.

So . . . with Solomon, and following the instruction of James, let’s keep praying for wisdom. Lord knows we need it today.

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C. S. Lewis got a lot of things right. He also got a few things wrong. And when Lewis was wrong, he was really wrong.

One of the places he was off was in how he viewed the imprecatory or “cursing” psalms, defined by Trevor Laurence as containing “a speech act that calls for, demands, requests, or expresses a wish for divine judgment and vengeance to befall an enemy, whether an individual or corporate entity.”

If you love the Psalter, and if you try the ancient Christian practice of praying through all 150 psalms every month (I have a Psalms in 30 Days prayer journey just for you!), you won’t get far before you run into prayers for God to enact justice, petitions for God to exact vengeance on the enemies of his people. Some of the psalms are primarily imprecatory in their nature, but a large number incorporate imprecatory elements—even the beloved Psalm 139 (“You have searched me and known me”), which, by the end, expresses hatred for God’s enemies. And then there’s the infamous ending to Psalm 137, which asks the Lord to dash the heads of enemy infants against the rocks.

Lewis thought these psalms “devilish,” naive, “diabolical,” given to “pettiness” and “vulgarity.” He believed their “vindictive hatred” to be contemptible—full of “festering, gloating, undisguised” passions that can in no way be “condoned or approved.” Lewis still managed to secure a pedagogical place for these ancient songs, but he ruled out of bounds for the Christian any imprecatory sentiments against human enemies.

No New Testament Shame

Christians with a high view of Scripture, who believe these psalms make up God’s inspired and inerrant Word to us, may still wonder what, if any, place these cursing psalms can have in corporate worship or personal devotion. Are they obsolete in some way? Superseded by New Testament grace? Should we still pray these psalms? If so, how?

Over the years, I’ve considered different ways of reframing or reinterpreting the imprecatory psalms, feeling the pinch of these petitions myself. But the biggest problem I run into is that I don’t see a smidge of embarrassment on behalf of Jesus or the apostles regarding these songs from Israel’s prayer book. What’s more, Jesus quotes from imprecatory psalms. It seems strange to claim that because of the coming of Christ, we should no longer sing or pray the very songs Christ had no trouble singing or praying. What’s more, the Bible ends with a book that includes petitions for God to destroy the wicked.

If I find my sentiments and sensibilities seem out of step with those of Jesus and the apostles, then I’m the one who must do the work of getting back into the world of imagination in which praying songs like this would make sense. And that’s where Trevor Laurence’s book Cursing with God is so helpful. It’s not an exaggeration to say this should become the evangelical’s go-to resource for understanding the imprecatory psalms and how to pray them. Laurence doesn’t just defend their use; he insists upon it:

What’s happening in these psalms? The petitioners are begging God to interrupt the assaults of the wicked, to vindicate the suffering righteous, and to keep his promise to enact judgment on all that would threaten the sacredness of God’s temple-kingdom.

World of the Psalms

To understand the what of the psalms, we must take our place in the same story. God created a good world as a cosmic temple for his presence. Humans were commissioned to exercise royal dominion and subdue the earth as a holy house for God. We were intended to be kings and priests who serve and guard this good world. Human beings failed at this task by disobeying God’s commandment, and yet God promised that one of Eve’s offspring would crush the head of the serpent.

The rest of the Old Testament tells the story of Israel as God’s son, a royal priesthood tasked with following God’s commands and purging evil from their midst, in anticipation of the day when “all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the LORD” (Num. 14:21). King David, as a representative of the people, was to prepare the people of God for the construction of the temple. Those who pray alongside David share the same concerns: for the glory of God’s name, the justice of God’s righteous rule, and the preservation of purity on behalf of the innocent.

Fast forward to the time of the church, and we now pray the psalms alongside Jesus, the Son of David, who alone is perfectly righteous. In him, his prayers become our prayers, and our prayers remain in line with the covenant promises of God.

Within the world of the psalms, imprecatory prayer is a means by which we, today, sing songs against the Evil One. Laurence describes it as a way of guarding the people of God and leaning forward to the day when the entire earth will be filled with his presence (and purged of evil). The cursing songs are a peaceful, petitionary participation in God’s promise to strike the seed of the serpent and restore the peace of the garden.

Praying While Waiting

Instead of seeing the imprecatory psalms as a problematic or outdated mode of praying, Laurence believes these are “the prayer-pangs of those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” (256). We pray against “violently unjust predators who prowl after and pounce upon the innocent” and “the unwarranted assaults of the wicked” that “terrorize the godly.”

The New Testament does shape our mode of praying these psalms, of course, as we no longer live in ancient Israel. And we can see how Jesus becomes the fulfillment of these prayers—both in assuming his role as the perfectly innocent king who receives vindication and in becoming the One cursed for our transgressions, bearing the weight of the world’s sin.

• In and alongside Christ, we pray for God to enact justice, rather than take vengeance into our own hands.
• We pray God would thwart the schemes of the wicked, with hopes he might exercise mercy and judgment by rescuing the evildoer from sin through repentance or by stopping the schemes that lead to injustice.
• We pray against Satan and the spiritual forces that war against us, that seek to desecrate our earthly temples by leading us to unfaithfulness.
• We even direct these prayers to our own sins, asking God to be ruthless in purging our hearts of all evil and temptation.

We pray the cursing prayers. They’re in the Psalter for a reason.

Praying for the Kingdom

Laurence claims we find an implicit commendation for imprecatory psalms in the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer. Every time we say, “Your kingdom come,” we’re pleading for the manifestation of God’s kingdom on earth. We want to see believers reflect the character of the kingdom, sinners converted to join the kingdom, and violent enemies interrupted from opposing the kingdom, as we await the day of Christ’s return.

C. S. Lewis was wrong on the imprecatory psalms, and yet every time he uttered the Lord’s Prayer, he was incorporating all the hopes and petitions of these wrathful songs, begging God to enact justice, keep his covenant, and bring about the fullness of Christ’s reign as King. And so, with the martyrs who even now cry out for vindication, we too say, “Come, Lord Jesus. Make new the world.”

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In person, he was kind, respectful, and upstanding. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the physique of this man approaching middle age. Unassuming. A friendly smile. A steady presence.

On Twitter, he was different. Under various aliases, he seethed and raged, lashing out at opponents real and imagined, uttering vile sentiments that crossed all sorts of lines. He enjoyed the rush of transgressing society’s few remaining taboos (namely, racism and misogyny), saying what no one else would say, and trolling the insufficiently “based” while calling out the cowards.

Perhaps you think I’m describing a scandal that erupted last fall, in which the headmaster of a classical Christian school was exposed as someone with a number of anonymous Twitter accounts full of sinful statements. In that case, the darkness of a troubled man who described himself as a “despairing man angry at the world” was exposed.

But this story might fit any number of men who frequent evangelical churches or are involved in evangelical institutions. In the past decade, anonymous accounts on Twitter have proliferated, often trafficking in outrageously racist or misogynistic statements under the cover of anonymity.

More than Trolls

It’s common for Twitter users to roll their eyes and say, “Don’t feed the trolls.” But the phenomenon I’m describing goes beyond trolling.

Many, if not most, trolls choose not to remain anonymous. Under their real names, they hound a few people with their contrarian takes, expressing themselves in unhealthy ways with no intention for civil dialogue or persuasive back and forth. They get a rise out of tweaking the people for whom they feel contempt. As an observer and participant on social media, I’ve encountered trollish behavior for years, from both the left and the right. (And make no mistake, trolls on the left can be just as annoying and ridiculous as those on the right.)

The kind of Anonymous Twitter I’m talking about goes beyond the typical troll. It doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone who may choose, perhaps for prudential reasons, to try out opinions under a pseudonym. The Anonymous Twitter accounts I have in mind mercilessly mock and bully anyone belonging to a despised tribe and then deploy over-the-top rhetoric that would be either personally embarrassing or professionally costly if their identities were known.

No wonder the account remains anonymous. Behind the veil, the user adopts a different persona and says the unsayable, transgressing the boundaries of genuine conversation while enjoying the thrill of nonconformity.

I’ve witnessed this long enough to wonder, What’s going on here, in the heart of someone who engages in this behavior? Why the appeal? What’s the goal?

Even more, how can the church respond? Surely the mission field includes the young men who find a measure of satisfaction in creating and sustaining these accounts. So where do we start, as missionaries with the heart of Christ, in understanding and responding to this phenomenon?

Younger Millennials and Anonymous Twitter

To dig deeper, we must consider younger millennials and Gen Zers growing up in a social-media-infused world. I say “younger millennials” because there seems to be a qualitative difference in the online mentality between older millennials like myself and those who were born 5 to 15 years after me.

I’m not a digital native. I was 19 before I opened my own email account, and I was in college overseas before I had a simple cellphone. The situation was different for many born after 1986 or 1990. Exploring the internet anonymously during the late 1990s involved conversing through message boards and forums. Expectations changed in the early 2000s, and once Facebook took off and Twitter arrived, the ability to craft online personas became easier and the practice more widespread.

Younger millennials have never known a world without the possibility of fashioning and crafting an “online identity.” It’s a crucial piece of how they imagine “being online.” Even when not anonymous, many a young man’s crucial years of “owning” his faith or political views for himself happened not in conversation or learning environments that required physical proximity but through online postings and comments. Social media gives young people a canvas on which to imagine and paint a picture of themselves. No doubt this marks a shift in how we perceive our “identities”—both online and in the real world.

Crafting Online Personas

Chris Bail’s important work on the distorting effects of social media shows we don’t just broadcast our opinions; we put on different costumes. We try out different identities. We make statements, gauge the reaction, recalibrate our next statements, watch how others respond, and eventually tailor our online presence as we consider ourselves in relation to our online community, according to the values we perceive among the people we most appreciate. Sentiments that receive affirmation from the people we care about or outrage the people we despise create a feedback loop that leads to greater polarization, as behavior that would be generally frowned upon in the real world gets applauded as “courageous” and “bold” online.

In a world with fewer and fewer boundaries, young people figuring out their identities find meaning and significance in policing tribal lines, often directing their most vicious statements toward people who are “closest” to their tribe—adjacent in some way and yet not fully in line. The most common target is the traitor, the betrayer, or the compromiser—the one who interacts with an opposing tribe, considers other perspectives, or entertains the possibility of a good point made by someone in the “despised” category.

Why does this take place? Because when your sense of identity is tied to your online portrait (and increasingly divorced from place, family, work, and church), you feel the urge to create and police boundaries so you can stabilize your own self-understanding. Anonymous Twitter accounts satisfy this urge, which is why so many fire missiles not at the opposing side but at the tribe-adjacent people no longer deemed “sound.”

True Aggression?

If Bail’s research is right, it helps explain why some men find the rush of transgressive postings irresistible. And note I say men, not women, because in my experience much of the aggression expressed in anonymous accounts comes from men.

But is it true aggression? Granted, that’s how the postings of an Anonymous Twitter account sound, but I’m not sure the rage is really heartfelt. Sometimes I wonder if the shocking statements come from a deadened, desensitized heart, as if the aggressive, vitriolic response is just a way of feeling something, anything—of trying to get the blood pumping again.

I’m not convinced the vile sentiments expressed in Anonymous Twitter are a true reflection of the person’s central identity. In a fractured and fragmented world online, nearly everyone’s identities can be seen as “in flux” in some way or another. And, because it’s never been easier to create an online persona that differs widely from who you are “in person” or who you are “in public” or at your job or church, it’s become more common for people to try on multiple identities and enjoy the feeling. It’s the split personality—digital version.

Is the author of the Anonymous Twitter account that spews racist and misogynist filth a covert racist and misogynist? Possibly. Probably. But always? Could it be this is someone who thrills at the transgression of boundaries without any perceived cost, much like a churchgoing young man harboring a secret porn addiction? Is the Anonymous Twitter user really filled with hatred toward ethnic minorities? Or is he playing “dress-up” — pretending to exhibit a bravado and twisted courage lacking in his real life?

Some of the anonymous accounts are so over the top in their campy racism and misogyny that it feels like the mirror image of the drag queen—the irreality of a person playing a part for a twisted culture of perversion. It’s a show. A performance. But the performer gets a kick out of it more than the audience.

Why Men?

I wouldn’t want anyone to assume my questions intend to excuse the behavior of Anonymous Twitter. These accounts are often abominable. But I do think it’s important to understand the phenomenon and why men, in particular, are tempted toward this behavior. Where does the appeal come from?

At some level, we must consider the flailing and fledgling missteps of manhood in our day. If you’re a minister of the gospel and you’re not asking why some men are gravitating toward books and podcasts promoting Stoicism, or the frank talk of Jordan Peterson, or the numerous “body-builder-training-types” on Instagram, or Andrew Tate (especially among teenage boys), you’re missing a major piece of a cultural puzzle right now. Men all around us are looking for a challenge, and they won’t take seriously a church that doesn’t call them to something.

If you look past what’s obviously non-Christian or appalling in many in these examples—if you can look past the lies to the deeper longings being addressed—you’ll see that much of what appears to be “calling out” for weakness is being received as a “calling up” to strength. Even if the supposed virtues are worldly and unbiblical or lack Christlike character, surely you can see that in a world that no longer regularly celebrates the contribution of men or manhood, the thirst for self-improvement and self-discipline is real and enduring.

Men need ways to channel healthy ambition, to channel the impulses to build and repair with heroic self-sacrifice and courage. And yet, too often we divvy up certain virtues (and even the fruit of the Spirit) into characteristically “masculine” or “feminine” categories, thus leaving us all impoverished and deformed in character. Or we go the other way and flatten out into “sameness” men and women’s expression of virtues and fruit of the Spirit, so we no longer recognize the distinctive ways in which women exhibit strength and valor or the distinctive ways men express kindness and gentleness.

All across the spectrum, you find commentators chattering away about the crisis of manhood in the wake of gender confusion, the denigration and disparagement of men traditionally involved in “men’s work,” and the quest for significance and identity among men who seem to be lost and demoralized in our strange new world. No wonder some young people prefer the “manhood pretenders” of Andrew Tate or the manners-defying conduct of being brash and abrasive. It’s about the fight!

This spasm of outrage we so often see online is connected to a lack of significance among young men and a lack of male meaning. Life hasn’t turned out as expected. The future looks bleak. And when some men feel something is wrong, they dull the pain through self-satisfaction, try to break out of the destructive cycle through excessive self-discipline, or are seduced by the promise of Anonymous Twitter, where they deploy guerrilla warfare tactics as foot soldiers for the “heroic” generals who wage war in public.

Some may defend their use of anonymity as protection against being “canceled” or as a fight for free speech. But the notion that all of us all of the time need a global platform on which to broadcast whatever opinion we have (and without consequences) only makes sense in a world with sentiments and sensibilities deeply formed by online culture. It’s far more likely that a man who engages in this behavior will succumb to social media’s perverse incentives and harm his soul than that his witty retorts will have an effect on society.

What’s more, the battle becomes a substitute for community, a way of compensating for offline relationships where in the past all sorts of far-flung thoughts were shared, discussed, refined, and corrected. Without face-to-face friendships, self-broadcasting steps into the void.

Online, you can adopt a “manly” and “macho” persona that drips with bravado and “courage” (never mind the question of how it’s possible to be courageous while remaining anonymous!). You can say things that shock and provoke. And even if no one reacts, you receive the thrill of transgressing the cultural boundary. You get the initial satisfaction of saying the awful thing, calling names, and belittling and bullying others, all as a mask for your own insecurity and inadequacy. You can appear strong, even as you struggle with your weight. Magnetic, even as you struggle in your marriage. Free, even as you feel trapped by a job that doesn’t give you the chance to build anything.

There’s also the adrenalin rush of treating Twitter like a video game—of seeing what content will fit the algorithm and win clout. You may not feel like you’re winning at life, but you can win at Twitter.

Reaching the Lost Boys

The church isn’t to blame for the sinful actions of men on social media. But the church cannot be blind to some of the reasons these sins are so seductive.

These aren’t real men but boys—lost boys who have returned to the middle-school locker room to brag about their exploits and assert their dominance, all from a desire to make a mark on the world in a way that hides their sense of inner powerlessness. It’s the tantrum of a little boy who despairs at a world that will not bend to his desires and who has given up the desire to master his urges and exhibit self-control.

And this is part of our mission field. The causes that lead some men to this kind of behavior are part of the environment in which we’re called to be faithful. The response to Anonymous Twitter is a church where men can know and be known, where an exhilarating vision—the mountaintop summit of Christlikeness—and a desire not for moral mediocrity but moral majesty through the power of the Spirit is God’s call on our lives. We inhabit a spiritual battlefield with epic stakes. Unless we grasp and promote a vision of men of substance, we’ll see more seduced by Neverland, where the lost boys never grow up but become the shadows of Anonymous Twitter.

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You probably don’t have a photographic memory, able to quickly recall the precise words on a particular page of something you’ve read only once. Few are the readers with such a gift.

You may feel like you don’t even have a good nonphotographic memory. You can’t remember the names of main characters or the major plot points in the book of fiction you plowed through last summer on vacation. You can’t remember most, if any, of the principles in a Christian living book you read over the holidays, except for the main point (which you could pretty much glean from the title!). You can’t remember anything but the general topic of a book of accessible theology you studied with a church group in the fall.

If you can’t remember most of what you read, why even bother? Aren’t there better ways to use your time?

Power of the 1 Percent

In 1981, a young John Piper sought to encourage Sunday school teachers in his congregation who felt a sense of “quantitative hopelessness” when considering the one measly hour they get with children who watch countless hours of TV every week. Piper urged them not to overlook the value of a holy encounter, “the immeasurable moment” and the “lasting, transforming power of an insight.”

Piper used reading as an example: “I do not remember 99 percent of what I read,” he told them. “I don’t remember books whole.” He then went on to say,

Remembering everything you read isn’t the point. The power of a well-crafted sentence that wows the reader with insight is the blessing that, Piper says, makes the other 99 percent of reading worth suffering through. But I think we ought to also consider the effects of the other 99 percent of reading, even if you don’t come across a new insight that changes your life.

Power of the Other 99 Percent

Sometimes pastors feel discouraged when most of their congregation can’t remember the main points of Sunday’s sermon. But is remembering the outline the goal? Even if just one insight or statement or story stood out to a church member, doesn’t that make the sermon memorable?

Furthermore, should we think the parts of the sermon a church member doesn’t remember have no formative effect on the congregation? Surely the “forgettable” parts still matter. How the pastor treats the text—carefully explaining its meaning, adorning it with good illustrations, seeing it in light of the wider world of Christian teaching, driving toward an encounter with God—all these practices shape the listener in imperceptible ways.

The same is true for books you don’t remember. Austin Carty says “uploading information to our brains is not the main reason for reading,” and he turns to a brilliant analogy to make the point: the filters on your phone’s photo app. Older phones had only the image and nothing more, no other lens to see it through. But the variety of filters now available allow you to see the image in ways that draw out its richness. Carty writes,

C. S. Lewis made a similar point about reading and how it expands our vision and understanding:

This Is Why You Read

Remembering everything you read isn’t the point.

Yes, you can read with the hope of encountering one sentence that strikes you with insight and changes your life. But encountering all the other paragraphs and chapters that don’t stand out still shapes and forms your outlook, in ways you don’t see or fully comprehend.

The effects of reading go far beyond the details you remember or the sentences you highlight. Reading enhances your filter, giving you knowledge and insight that will reverberate in your mind in ways you can’t perceive, offering a measure of wisdom and breadth you wouldn’t otherwise have.

That’s why you read. And why even the books you can’t remember still matter.

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In debates over sexual ethics today, whenever longstanding positions are challenged, some say, “The creeds don’t speak to this.” Or “This issue is separate from our confession of faith.” Or “Theological affirmations are one thing, but ethical pronouncements are another.”

In The Thrill of Orthodoxy, I point out the ahistorical nature of this minimalist approach to the creeds, arguing instead for a robust look at the implications of what we confess, including ethics. The church fathers would find it strange to hear people pointing to the “silence” of the creeds as a license to implement massive revisions in morality. It’s impossible to completely sever orthodoxy from ethics.

Obeying Your Confession

But there’s additional biblical support for tying orthodoxy to ethics. The New Testament sometimes speaks of the gospel as something we “obey” (2 Thess. 1:8; 1 Pet. 4:17). And in 2 Corinthians 9:13, Paul praises the early believers for their generosity, describing their good deeds as “obedience to [their] confession in the gospel of Christ” (NET). The phrase can also be translated as “the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ” (NIV) or “your submission that comes from your confession” (ESV) or just “obedient confession of the gospel of Christ” (CSB).

Regardless of your translation choice, it’s clear that obedience and confession are linked. Generosity evidences the seriousness with which we take our confession of faith.

Now, we’d be overstating it to say “confession” in this passage refers to a “confession of faith”—something specific, similar to a later creed or doctrinal statement developed after years of debate and clarification. But the point still stands: confessing the truth of the gospel implies obedience. When we confess the truth about Jesus—claiming he is Messiah and Lord—we are, by implication, submitting our lives to his rule. If the confession is true, allegiance follows.

People of the Way

This is why recurring debates over whether or not we can trust Jesus as Savior without bowing to him as Lord are misguided. True faith is demonstrated not in mere assent to certain truths about Jesus but in personal trust that results in practical obedience.

We confess Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6). Don’t miss the implication. The truth of Christ is tied to a way of Christlike life. No wonder the early Christians were known as The Way (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22) and Peter described Christianity as “the way of truth” (2 Pet. 2:2). One of the earliest Christian catechisms was called “The Two Ways,” made up primarily of ethical instruction. Confessing the gospel prompts obedience and directs us to a certain kind of life. Doctrine and practice reinforce each other.

When we confess our faith in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, we acknowledge the handiwork of the Creator in rightly ordering his creation. When we confess our faith in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, we commit ourselves to his way. When we confess our faith in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, we rely on his illumination as we seek to bring our lives in line with holiness.

To confess Jesus Christ as Lord leads to action, a generous heart that extends into practice. Pure religion, James tells us, is to keep oneself unstained by the world and visit the fatherless and widows in their distress (James 1:27). Confession implies conduct. Charles Simeon urged “universal support” for good works that “adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.”

On a similar note, Carl Henry wrote,

Ethics of Generosity

The most heated controversies today revolve around sexual ethics. Can we claim to follow Christ and disregard or revise New Testament teaching on sexuality? Those who stand with the unchanging witness of the church say “Never.”

But the passages we just looked at should challenge us in other areas. We cannot consider orthodoxy as something separate from neighbor-love or the radical generosity required of believers. We shrink the ethical sphere if we try to exclude sexuality (as some revisionists do), but we also shrink the ethical sphere if we think of faithfulness almost exclusively in terms of sexuality when Paul linked confession to charity and James described pure and undefiled religion in a way that includes radical generosity.

So what does it mean to confess Jesus as Lord? Much more than merely stacking divine titles or uttering the right words about his identity. It implies our bending the knee to the majesty of the Name we confess and bringing our life in line with his truth.

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If you’re like me, when you pray spontaneously, you push past the preliminaries and get right to your needs. “Lord, I need you for this. . . . Lord, can you help me with that?”

There’s nothing wrong with going right to your need. The urgent petition acknowledges your dependence on God. You’re not thinking of God correctly if you see him as a distant king with arms crossed because you’ve not yet bowed or curtsied your way into his presence. He may be king, but he’s also your father. And he delights in hearing and answering his children, whether or not you’ve followed the “proper protocol” in addressing his majesty.

That said, we shouldn’t overlook the power of praise in our prayers. There are good reasons why it’s best to begin our prayer times by magnifying and extolling the glory of God. Jesus himself gave us this pattern when he told us to pray first for the name of our Father to be hallowed (Matt. 6:9). Likewise, the psalms combine petition and praise, as the writer often bounces back and forth from singing praise and then asking for assistance.

Praise That Declares and Distances

J. I. Packer and Carolyn Nystrom’s book Praying points out how praise is an important aspect of our prayer life, not simply because God delights in our praise as a fragrant offering but also because of what the act of praising God does for us. They say praise both “declares” and “distances.”

First, when we praise God, we declare who he is and the relationship we have with him. We don’t praise ourselves. We praise our Maker. So every time we praise God, we’re saying, through prayer and song, “You are God, and we are not.” Or, as the psalmist says it, “The LORD is God. He made us, and we are his” (Ps. 100:3).

Second, when we praise God, we distance ourselves from him even as (paradoxically) we enter his presence. Yes, there are times we’ll rush into the throne room to plead for assistance from our Father, but the regular act of bowing—of recognizing God’s majesty—drives home the reality that we stand in the presence of a King. Even when he’s close, we stand at a distance. By praising his majesty, we remind ourselves of how far he is above us.

Packer and Nystrom claim Psalm 95 as a classic example of this function of praise. The psalm celebrates the work of God in creation and then invites us to draw near to this God in humility.

Joy of Praise

We don’t praise God because he needs our affirmation. We praise God because he commands it for our own joy. C. S. Lewis made this point famously when he showed how praising something we enjoy not only expresses but completes the enjoyment. God’s desire for praise is not an act of selfish pride but of self-giving love.

We praise God because he’s worthy and because we receive the joy of basking in his greatness. When the King gives us an audience, we receive the benefit of his presence. It’s not in minimizing the distance of God’s glory and greatness that helps us feel his closeness but in feeling the awe and wonder of his presence with us even as he is so great a God. We’re thunderstruck not when we lower God to our level but when God condescends—comes near—while retaining all of his glorious Other-ness. Packer and Nystrom put it this way:

I like how the hymn “Come, Thou Fount” asks God to “tune my heart to sing Thy grace.” It’s the “streams of mercy never ceasing” that “call for songs of loudest praise.” We ask God to tune our hearts and, in prayer, praising his majesty is one of the primary ways our heartstrings get retuned. We declare his God-ness and goodness, and we’re reminded of the distance between us and the God who draws near.

Don’t let your heart song get out of tune by rushing to petition. Make room in your prayers for resounding praise.

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Maybe I’m just a legal nerd, but I enjoy listening on occasion to oral arguments before the Supreme Court.

The habit began with listening to Supreme Court cases in summary form on the Legal Docket segment every Monday on the podcast The World and Everything in It. (If you listen every Monday, you’ll get Mary Reichard’s coverage of every case heard by the Court each year. Start here!) Whenever a case piques my interest, I check out summaries from different perspectives on the SCOTUS blog, sometimes listen to commentary on the Advisory Opinions podcast, and every now and then download the oral arguments so I can listen in.

You might think only the cases that deal with abortion or religious liberty would interest me, but I find that’s not the case. I even enjoy the more obscure debates. Why the appeal?

Good Arguing

Even though I’m not a law student, nor do I have any legal experience, I’m intrigued by the discussion. The Supreme Court is one of the last places in society where you can find strong, civil debate on thorny questions. Where else do you find powerful points and counterpoints presented in civility by people at the top of their game? Where else do you hear arguments from people who know their cases inside and out and seek to persuade the justices so their position might prevail?

No case arrives at the Court unless there’s a split in the circuit courts. Only the most perplexing issues get debated, often with far-reaching implications for society. Listening to the arguments can help you develop a deeper understanding of the legal principles at play and the reasoning behind each side’s position.

Tough Calls and the Art of Persuasion

Many of the high-profile cases fall along philosophical lines (with the conservative-leaning justices on one side and the liberal-leaning justices on the other), but plenty of cases split in interesting ways. Not all outcomes follow the same pattern, especially when the issues involved aren’t at the center of culture-war politics.

Not long ago, I listened to the arguments over “fair use” laws, with Andy Warhol and Prince at the center of controversy. Both sides made a compelling case about what constitutes fair use, how to protect commentary on artistic works, and how we should define the transformation of art. The points and counterpoints were so strong I couldn’t help but be glad I’m not having to make the call!

I enjoy the back-and-forth of oral arguments because of the intellectual stimulation of hearing people make strong cases for their point of view, yet always doing so civilly and respectfully. It’s a masterclass in the art of persuasion. Listen long enough and you’ll start to notice the various strategies lawyers use to influence the Court: appealing to precedent, highlighting the broader implications of a ruling, and presenting compelling facts and evidence.

A World of Bad Debate

Unfortunately, it seems there are fewer and fewer places where one gets this kind of robust and respectful debate.

Jonathan Haidt has shown we rarely make judgments based solely on reason; usually, we make snap judgments and then look for rational justification for why we feel the way we feel.

Alasdair MacIntyre has described our society as enthralled by emotivism, defined as “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.” No wonder it’s so rare to find good argumentation on Twitter or civil back-and-forth on Facebook—these are forums that confuse emoting with arguing and that devolve into endless quarrels.

Listening to Supreme Court oral arguments, especially cases I’ve only recently become aware of (or ones where I don’t have strong feelings about the outcome), can be a beneficial exercise because I feel the force of both a point and counterpoint. Listening to the justices and the questions they ask, the way they push and probe and press on the arguments, testing the weak points and providing pushback—it’s a terrific way of sharpening your mind, testing your assumptions and biases, and learning strong and weak ways of reasoning.

Points and Counterpoints

I love a good debate. It’s why I enjoy the point-counterpoint books put out by evangelical publishers. A recent example is Zondervan’s Christ in the Old Testament, which includes five views of how we should read the Old Testament as Christian Scripture in light of Christ. Reading that volume didn’t resolve all my questions and concerns about various interpretive approaches, but it did help me see some of the pitfalls and dangers in the debate. Even if my position lines up closest to just one of the contributors, my respect for the other positions went up because I can see what they’re trying to safeguard or protect, even if I may not think their approach is best.

We need more forums where robust debate can take place. That’s why I recommend occasionally listening to oral arguments—not because you need a crash course in legal disputes or a civics lesson in how our government works (although these are benefits), but because it’s a place where you encounter experts in the field making the strongest case they can and then responding as well as possible to the counterpoints that might arise. Look up some of the key legal terms you hear. Enjoy the satisfaction of legal jousting. Sharpen your mind and widen your perspective. It’s a mental workout you won’t regret.

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There are two tendencies right now in our society when it comes to highly regarded theologians from the past.

The first is hagiography—to crown heroes with halos and look at forefathers and mothers in the faith through a fuzzy lens that airbrushes their mistakes, sins, and evils, leaving the impression their insights and achievements outweigh any nitpicky “flaws” today’s historian might point out.

The second is the cancel-culture impulse to write off anyone from the past whose views or actions are now deemed “problematic” and wave away any appeal to what could be helpful or beneficial in their work because their sins discredit or cancel out any goodness or virtue.

Neither of these tendencies serves the church well. Neither reckons sufficiently with what the Bible teaches about the nature of humanity or the parasitical nature of sin’s intertwinement with goodness or the unevenness of sanctification. Both tendencies need a larger dose of complexity. The problem is, in a world that swings from simplistic hagiography to the quick rush to cancel heroes, we wind up treating theologians the same—either writing them off immediately and minimizing their contributions or embracing their contributions uncritically and minimizing their sin. We can do better.

We can either look down on past theologians for their sins or we can look deeper. Looking deeper requires us to consider different kinds of sin, how those sins might affect the outlook of the theologian, and what treasures we may still receive, with wisdom and discernment, from flawed forebears.

The Karl Barth Dilemma

It was a jarring experience for me a couple years ago to encounter Christiane Tietz’s extraordinary biography of Karl Barth at the same time as I was reading books on how most of the church fathers approached the task of theology.

Barth is perhaps the most influential Christian theologian of the last century, rivaled only by Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). And yet as hidden aspects of Barth’s life have come into the light, we now know he lived in an adulterous relationship with his assistant, Charlotte von Kirschbaum, and even arranged his living conditions around this sin, to the detriment of his wife, Nelly. What’s worse, he made twisted and bizarre theological justifications for persisting in unfaithfulness.

Samuel Parkison recently tackled this dilemma head-on, asking how it even makes sense to say something like “It’s a shame he was an adulterous and unfaithful husband, but he sure was a great theologian and a gift to the church.” Parkison has read and agrees with the church fathers on the role of virtue in the life of a theologian, that “high-handed and habitual unfaithfulness” cannot help but negatively influence one’s theology. Gregory of Nazianzus claimed personal piety was essential to the task of theology; only the pure in heart can take in the brilliant brightness of God. Theology isn’t an abstract, purely academic exercise. Even Barth acknowledged this reality in a letter in which he wondered how his and Kirschbaum’s sinful “experience” might affect his theological ruminations.

Theologians and Purity of Heart

Should we require moral uprightness from scholars in the past? Is there anything we can learn from theologians whose lives frequently fell abominably short of biblical fidelity?

If instead of looking down on the past we look deeper, we can agree with the church fathers and uphold a high standard of an “ever-increasing purity of heart” among those who seek to plumb the depths of God’s mysteries. At the same time, we can consider how biography shapes theology and how theologizing is always in some way affected by sin.

The answer isn’t to cordon off issues of personal holiness as if we do theology as an Enlightenment systematician or scientist. Our character makes a difference in how we theologize, interpret Scripture, or make applications. The church fathers were right: we’re wise to pay attention to how the presence of persistent sin affects the way we think of God.

Right now, many believers shy away from considering how one’s theology is affected by sin, because this raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions regarding theologians from the past (especially those implicated in various forms of white supremacy). In reaction to a cancel-culture mentality that’s often too quick to dismiss our forebears in uncritical “all or nothing” terms, we might find it easier to slip into the Enlightenment mode of keeping academic study and personal piety separate than to heed the premodern church fathers on this matter.

This is the wrong move. No, I’m not advocating cancel culture for important theologians, not even Barth. Instead, we ought to think more carefully and critically about how the sins of influential theologians may have negatively affected their theological reasoning and conclusions. As historian David Steinmetz said, “The study of history gives the church freedom vis-à-vis its past: freedom to appropriate past wisdom, when it can, and overcome its faithlessness and sin, when it must.”

3 Types of Sinful Theologians

To this end, we should delineate between different types of sinfulness. Some Christians resist this idea, preferring to think of all sins as the same since any sin—large or small—separates us from God.

But the Christian tradition has always held some sins are “more heinous in the sight of God than others,” as the Westminster Larger Catechism says (Question 151).

Sins can be aggravated in circumstances when the sinful person is older and seen as an example, or when the sins are more directly blasphemous toward God, or when the sin breaks out of its conception in the heart and becomes a series of scandalous words and actions without repentance. The Catechism also mentions sins against nature, going against conscience, and the deliberate and presumptuous breaking of vows.

In light of this discussion, we see different variations of sin among past theologians.

1. Willful Rebellion

We start with Barth, who belongs to the category of theologians who persisted in willful sin knowing it to be sin. Paul Tillich would be in this category as well—a man whose extramarital exploits were renowned even in his day. These are the most egregious examples of sin, when a theologian engages in illicit activity in a habitual way and doesn’t appear interested in repentance or restoration.

2. Culpable Blindness

A second category would include pastors and theologians who in varying degrees were complicit in sins, evils, and injustices of their times. Their sin was the result of culpable blindness. Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic views and writings would fit here, as well as Jonathan Edwards’s defense of and involvement with slavery (even as he condemned the slave trade!). Ironically, in these cases, both Edwards and Luther would urge us not to remove or reduce their moral accountability. They would insist that even if they didn’t see their sin as such (and were, in this sense, spiritually blind), they were still culpable for that state of blindness because often there are truths the heart doesn’t want to see.

3. Sinful Struggle

A third category would include theologians whose lives were marked by sinful struggle, and yet they were known to be striving against sin, confessing their sin within the context of the church, and seeking to turn from sin even as they sometimes fell backward. We shouldn’t minimize sin in any form, as it always negatively affects our lives and the lives of those around us. But in this case, the desire of the theologian is to reject sin and be free from it. Read the confessions of some of the Puritan writers or, further back, Anselm or Augustine, and you see a striving for holiness amid the muck of this fallen world. Yes, sin remains. But the theologian seeks to grow in Christlikeness.

Complicating the Categories

I admit the categories I’ve supplied have several limitations. First, we tend to “freeze” a person at a particular point in time, when there can be movement away from or toward sin over time. Willful rebellion in one season can turn into sinful struggle in another, with sprouts of repentance breaking through the barren ground. On the other hand, culpable blindness can harden into willful rebellion, especially when there were those who called out a theologian for complicity in injustice.

Second, even if we agree willful rebellion is perhaps the most serious and egregious category, the effects of theologians in the culpable blindness category can be just as devastating and sometimes worse (think of the Nazi appeals to Luther in the years leading up to the Second World War, or later American theologians who continued the evil of slavery in the wake of Edwards). The third category, however, probably describes the majority of theologians—those who fall short of purity of heart and yet struggle against sin, in agreement with God and his Word.

Third, the sins we believe “instantly disqualifying” often depend not on the Scriptures but on how we read the Scriptures, as conditioned by our culture and times. (Consider why some African Christians believe getting a tattoo to be a more serious offense than adultery!) Many biblical characters—Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Jonah—provide windows into both egregious sin and glorious salvation.

On occasion, some pastors and theologians, while not perfect, live in ways that beautifully match their theology. The ancient church often called them “saints,” and even in traditions without official “sainthood,” we recognize when the beauty and glory of a person’s life corresponds to their confession of faith and theological study. As a general rule, we have good reason to see as more trustworthy the theological musings of someone whose life is marked by godliness, both in the personal and public spheres.

Ask Deeper Questions

Treating theologians as “all or nothing” isn’t the way to go. It’s not wise to tar and feather past theologians or uncritically embrace them. Sinful forebears still have something to teach us.

The impulse on social media is to put everyone in quick and easy boxes so we know instantly who the “heroes” and “villains” are, but real life is gloriously complicated. Some of those we might call “villainous” had heroic traits of virtue, while those we might call “heroes” had villainous streaks of sin.

Instead, looking deeper requires us to carefully reckon with sin’s distorting effects in the theological outlook of past theologians. Onsi Kamel recommends we “look at the specific loci of thought and the particular sin, and then investigate in particular how the thought was noticeably impacted by the sin. And then discount or warn about or treat carefully those dimensions of thought.”

We should wonder . . .

How did Luther’s vicious anti-Semitism affect his approach to the Old Testament? Did his view of the Jews shape his sharp distinctions between law and gospel or his two-kingdoms approach to society?

How did Edwards’s slaveholding affect his understanding of mercy and justice? How did it alter the way he understood the Bible or his view of God? How did it shape his view of how society is to be ordered or his doctrine of humanity? Does the fact Edwards’s son became an ardent abolitionist complicate these questions?

How might Barth’s adultery have influenced his views on sin and grace? Did his willful rebellion and theological gymnastics diminish his understanding of God’s judgment? Did they play a part in some of his semi-universalistic musings?

Sanctification is often uneven, and I understand if this article complicates the issue and stirs up more questions than answers. That’s why we need more debate about past theologians, not less. More complexity, not simplistic answers. Truth isn’t served by hagiography or exalted biographical sketches that minimize the sins of theologians from the past. Neither is truth served by the impulse to see only the sins and not the signs of sanctification in the lives of influential thinkers.

We’re better off acknowledging the complexity of the human condition, recognizing where even the most respected theologians may have harbored sins or blindness that affected their theological vision, and then recommitting ourselves to seek the holiness without which we cannot see the God we long to study and adore.

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Something momentous happened this week.

The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) announced they no longer recognize the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury as “first among equals.” What’s more, they say that in adopting “innovation in the liturgies of the Church and her pastoral practice” in order to bless same-sex sexual relationships, the Church of England has “departed from the historic faith passed down from the Apostles” and has thus “disqualified herself” from leading the Anglican Communion.

In choosing to move closer to the wishes of politicians and revisionist church leaders in the United Kingdom, the Church of England has signaled that her desire to stay as a “wife” to the state is greater than her desire to remain a “mother” to the worldwide Anglican Communion. Perhaps the fear of disestablishment and divorce from the state is greater than the fear of losing “the kids.”

But here’s what’s strange. If you read the headlines or peruse the news articles or listen to Church of England leaders who have promoted revisionist teaching, you get the impression it’s those pesky, stubborn African bishops who have chosen schism rather than “unity.” Everyone else just wants peace, to walk together in love. It’s the Global South that refuses to just “agree to disagree” and “maintain the bond of the unity.” It’s unfortunate, sad really—this schismatic impulse of those who pull away.

But this take is backward.

First of all, the Church of England and the other churches associated with the Anglican Communion that have adopted revisionist theologies in line with the sexual revolution make up a tiny proportion of the Anglicans who worship every Sunday around the world. The vast majority of today’s Anglicans are represented by the Global South and by theologically orthodox provinces. It’s not Africa that represents a small segment of the worldwide church breaking away; it’s the revisionists who are splintering off from the whole.

Second, bishops and priests in the Anglican Communion take vows to defend and promote official church teaching as expressed in the Thiry-nine Articles, the Book of Common Prayer, the Ordinal and the Book of Homilies, and more recently, the Lambeth Resolution 1.10 in the 1998 Lambeth Conference, which preserves the traditional teaching of Scripture and the church related to marriage and sexuality.

What does it mean, then, for bishops to deliberately defy these teachings upheld by the worldwide Communion or to advocate for positions that go against what they vowed to teach? Who is schismatic? The bishops and priests who remain faithful to their vows to promote biblical teaching or those who change the practice and then expect everyone else to ignore, downplay, or be OK with such doctrinal deviations? Certainly it’s not the Global South but the bishops and priests who, against their vows, introduce errors and heterodoxy and then expect everyone else to accept it and remain in full communion.

Third, when a group of people is walking together down a path and several depart from the group and begin to take a different path, how does it make sense for those walking in a new direction to chastise the main group for their “divisiveness”? And yet that’s exactly what we see today. All the language about “walking together” obscures the reality that some have walked off. It’s as if those who walk away now wag the finger at the bigger group, saying, “Why don’t you want to walk together anymore?”

Once again, who is the schismatic? Who has changed here? Who has walked off? Not the vast majority of Anglicans across the world but the shrinking subset of predominantly white churches who have adapted their policies in line with the state’s institutionalization of the sexual revolution’s revision of marriage. It makes no sense to label as “schismatic” the bishops and churches that remain in line with every Christian in history until just decades ago.

Coverage of these disputes often seems to lay blame for schism at the feet of those who uphold Christianity’s historic sexual ethic instead of those who advocate for a sexual revisionism that would have been unfathomable to the generations of the Christians who came before us and, even today, shocks the consciences of the vast majority of Christians outside the West. Only in Western cultures do we call churches “affirming.” Outside the West, the term is “apostate.”

Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg’s analysis in the late 1990s was prescient:

This is schism brought about by those whose “cheap grace” is employed as justification for sexual immorality—the sort of situation the brother of Jesus warned against (Jude 4), which means that defending the faith (Jude 3) in this context is about the church’s moral witness to the sexual ethic handed down by Jesus and the apostles.

This isn’t about fundamentalist division. It’s about faithfulness in doctrine and fidelity to Christ. Don’t blame faithful Christians who cannot “walk together” with those who walk away from the faith “once for all delivered to the saints.”

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