I don’t know if it’s appropriate to have a favorite Beatitude—one of the wisdom blessings offered by Jesus at the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount—but if I had to pick one, it would be the sixth: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matt. 5:8).

I linger over this one, in part because “purity of heart” encompasses several aspects of the Christian life. There’s the pursuit of inner purity and righteousness as opposed to lust and deceit. There’s the purity of vision that interprets the world according to the scaffolding of goodness and love as opposed to a tainted and skewed vision of everything through the smudged lens of sinfulness. There’s the purity of intention expressed in single-minded devotion (Kierkegaard’s dictum—“Purity of heart is to will one thing”) as opposed to the double-mindedness warned about by the prophets and by James the brother of Jesus.

Promise for the Pure in Heart

The more I meditate on this saying of Jesus, the more I sense the distance between its radiance and the shadows of my heart. I give thanks for the only One with clean hands and a pure heart who ascended the mount of Golgotha to pay the price for all my impurity. Jesus’s love for me then galvanizes my affections with a renewed commitment to rely on his power to live into this identity he has pronounced over me, to bring my life more and more in line with this wondrous description.

Why? Because of the promise. The pure in heart will see God. Imagine that. We will see God. My heart leaps at the thought of all that’s entailed in the future that awaits God’s children. What happiness is promised here? What joy? What intensity? What does it mean to see God? The historic Christian answer has been called “the beatific vision”—the vision of God his people will enjoy forever.

Vision That Stirs Up and Satisfies Desire

Throughout church history, our forefathers and mothers in the faith have contemplated the meaning of this everlasting gift. In his homilies on 1 John, Augustine linked the present reality of not being able to see God (except in part) to the longing for holiness that should mark every Christian’s life.

In The Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa pondered the beatific vision in similar terms yet claimed our desire will be ever-satisfied and ever-renewed.

For all eternity, we’ll be simultaneously satiated by God and stirred up with desire for more of God. And because we’re finite and he’s infinite, we’ll never come to the end of tasting and craving his glory. One of my favorite prayers included in the 30 Days prayer series comes from Anselm and begins with the acknowledgment he hasn’t yet seen the Lord, then climaxes in this paradoxical expression of longing:

Pondering the Beatific Vision

Samuel Parkison’s new book To Gaze upon God: The Beatific Vision in Doctrine, Tradition, and Practice is one of those academic books that digs deep into theology with the intent to make the reader’s heart sing. Parkison comes at this doctrine from various angles, explaining its development through theologians of the Great Tradition and into the Reformation era and beyond. He also considers why the doctrine has fallen out of favor in recent decades and makes a persuasive case for reclaiming this promise as part of our heritage and hope.

As we behold the glory of the Lord by faith in this present life, we’re transformed. And as we grow in holiness, we’re given greater and greater glimpses of God in his glory, in anticipation of the promise of glorified sight that will make us like him as we see him as he is (“What we will be has not yet been revealed,” 1 John 3:2). Here are a few of the astounding truths Parkison expounds in this book:

• It’s a vision of love in a resurrected state. “The beatific vision is a vision of love, a participatory vision of God’s essence, in resurrected bodies, wherewith we will see this vision immediately and everywhere, particularly in the person of Christ, on account of our union with him.”
• We contemplate today the God we’ll see forever. “The object of our contemplation by faith now (i.e., God in Christ) will be the object of this beatific vision forever—him whom we delight to behold by faith now we will continually delight to behold in glorified vision hereafter.”
• We’ll see God through God. “United to Christ, his perfect vision of God will be our perfect vision of God, for he is the author and perfecter of our faith, our forerunner and perfect federal head and restorative source.”
• This vision totally fulfills and satisfies our every desire. “This vision is the full satiation of every creaturely desire and the absolute telos of the image-bearer. Every happiness that has partial fulfillment here will be realized in full in this vision, since this vision is the destination to which all natural desires lead.”
• Yet the nature of this fulfillment will be ever-growing thirst and satiation for all eternity. “The realization of this hope is one of perpetual growth and expansion—where the saint’s capacity for delight in the blessedness of God grows with his reception of that delight, and his thirst increases simultaneously with his satiation. Thus, the saint is full to the brim with satisfaction even as his capacity for satisfaction grows forevermore.”
• The vision is the consummation of our bond to God. “It is the consummate fellowship and communion with the believer’s bond to Christ—who is the Spirit. Thus, the beatific vision is a spiritual vision of divine love—where the believer is brought by the Spirit into the Trinity’s own beatitude, further up and further in, forever.”

Further up, and further in. This is our hope. The promised land. The new Jerusalem. God’s holy mountain. The Holy of Holies. Eden’s eternal Sabbath rest.

And we won’t be alone, Parkison says. “The individual saint’s delight of this vision is enhanced by the presence of other saints and angels, for there love will be perfectly expressed, and true love for neighbor will overwhelm the individual saint with delight—the joy of neighbor will increase the joy of oneself.”

No wonder Jesus includes the pure in heart in his list of Beatitudes. We will see God, together, forever rapt in wonder, love, and praise. What more could we ask for?

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Last week, Pew Research Center released their newest survey of the religious landscape in the United States, a detailed snapshot of the nation’s religious composition, beliefs, and practices.

I’ve spent time digging through the data to share a few key takeaways that I believe are particularly relevant for evangelicals trying to make sense of this cultural moment.

1. The decline of Christianity and the rise of the unaffiliated have stalled.

For years, we’ve heard about the rapid decline of Christianity and the meteoric rise of the “nones”—those who claim no religious affiliation. But here’s the surprising news: Both trends have plateaued.

According to Pew,

• 62 percent of U.S. adults describe themselves as Christians: 40 percent are Protestant, 19 percent are Catholic, and 3 percent fall into other Christian categories.
• 29 percent are religiously unaffiliated: 5 percent are atheist, 6 percent are agnostic, and 19 percent identify as “nothing in particular.”
• 7 percent belong to non-Christian religions: 2 percent are Jewish, and 1 percent each are Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu (all figures are rounded).

What does this mean? It’s like we’ve hit the pause button. For Christians concerned about the church’s future, this could be seen as a glimmer of hope—a moment where the bleeding has stopped. But just because the decline has stalled doesn’t mean the church is out of the woods.

There’s still a major challenge ahead. The survey shows younger adults are much less religious than older generations. Unless there’s a spiritual revival among younger Americans, the overall religious landscape will likely continue to shift as older generations pass away. And so far, no generation has shown signs of getting more religious as it ages. This means that, over time, religious affiliation could decline further.

2. Religious switching is rising, and the church is losing ground.

In America’s religious marketplace, people are switching beliefs and denominations more than ever. Religion is often viewed primarily as a personal choice, a tool for self-help, or a place to find community. As a result, people shop around for the faith that fits them best.

But here’s the tough news: The church is still losing more people than it’s gaining. Many young adults raised in religious households aren’t staying in the faith as they grow older. And for every American who converts to Christianity from another faith or no faith at all, six others are leaving Christianity behind, either becoming unaffiliated or joining a non-Christian religion.

Within Christianity, there’s also been a noticeable shift in denominational switching. Mainline Protestantism continues to decline, and that’s one of the reasons evangelicalism has held steady as a share of all Protestants (even if evangelicals are shrinking as a percentage of the overall population). A similar trend is happening now with Southern Baptists, whose decline corresponds to the rise in nondenominational Protestants. Nondenominational Christians now make up 7 percent of the adult population, and they’re the only group that grew as a share of the U.S. population since the last survey.

3. Church attendance and religious practices are holding steady.

Despite all the changes in religious identity, one thing hasn’t changed as much as you might expect: church attendance. About 33 percent of Americans say they attend religious services at least once a month, and 25 percent go at least once a week. These numbers have been pretty stable since 2020.

When I’ve looked at past surveys of church attendance for Americans, I see a surge of churchgoing in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by steady decline, to the point that today’s percentages appear to mirror the 1940s. I hesitate to compare these statistics, because the surveys aren’t the same, and it seems clear that weekly churchgoing is down across the board, but I do think there’s something to the point that the norm in American life has been that about a third of Americans attend church on a regular or semiregular basis.

Prayer habits are also worth noting: 44 percent of U.S. adults pray at least once a day. That’s a drop from 2007 but has been steady in recent years. Another 23 percent pray weekly or a few times a month, leaving only about a third who rarely or never pray. This suggests there’s still a strong cultural openness to prayer, even among those who don’t attend church often.

Church leaders should take note. These numbers indicate a solid base of people open to spiritual practices, even if they’re not showing up every Sunday.

4. The religiously remixed are everywhere.

Just because people are leaving organized religion doesn’t mean they’re becoming secular in the strictest sense. Many are crafting their own spiritualities, drawing from a mix of religious traditions, philosophies, and personal beliefs. As Tara Burton points out in Strange Rites, we’re witnessing a shift from institutional religion to what she calls “intuitional religion”—spirituality based on personal choice and self-expression.

According to Pew, most Americans don’t fit the secular stereotypes of Western Europe. The study found,

• 86 percent believe people have a soul or spirit beyond their physical body.
• 83 percent believe in God or a universal spirit.
• 79 percent believe in something spiritual beyond the natural world.
• 70 percent believe in heaven, hell, or both.

The nonreligious “nones” are quite religious or “spiritual,” after all. And that shouldn’t surprise us. Scripture makes clear that God created human beings as worshipers. We’re either worshipers of God in Christ, together with his Bride, the Church, or we’re worshipers of some other higher power with people who share similar views and practices.

At the same time, it’s important to point out that intuitional religion mixes with institutional adherence. You should expect to find people in churches who are mixing and matching different aspects of spirituality and religiosity as they cobble together an identity of their own that just so happens to coincide with church attendance.

World of Opportunity

There’s so much more to unpack in the Pew survey—from immigration trends affecting religious diversity to the narrowing gender gap in religious participation. But the big takeaway is this: Even though religious decline is a real challenge, there’s also an enormous opportunity for mission.

The stability in church attendance and prayer practices shows that a significant number of people still consider themselves spiritually active. And the rise of “religiously remixed” beliefs suggests people continue to search for meaning—a quest the church is uniquely positioned to address.

The challenge for Christians is to understand this cultural moment and engage with others in good faith, to not bypass the open doors for sharing the gospel in a culture that’s still hungry for meaning and purpose.

If you want to dive deeper into the data, you can check out the full survey on the Pew Research Center website. But in the meantime, let’s pray and work for renewal, knowing that God has worked in ways that upset the trend lines in the past, and through us, he might do it again.

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There’s a never-ending debate among readers about whether it’s preferable for a book to have footnotes or endnotes. Regardless of where you come down (footnotes for academic works and endnotes for popular-level titles, obviously!), the passion you feel about this issue indicates the importance of these author-asides in the reading experience.

Good notes help you trace ideas back to their sources, and they can often stimulate further reflection. A footnote in N. T. Wright’s massive volume Jesus and the Victory of God that recommended we consider the worldview question “What time is it?” planted a seed in my mind that, after 10 years of watering, sprouted into my PhD dissertation and my book Eschatological Discipleship.

When it comes to substantive endnotes, Tim Keller was king. His book Preaching contains 68 pages of notes, barely besting Making Sense of God’s (although the latter’s 67 may be a higher word count due to the smaller font). Keller’s notes are marvelous in offering deeper interactions with other writers and thinkers, but my favorites are the notes that explore a statement or theme as if we’re going on an invigorating walk on a trail just off the main path. They’re often as interesting and insightful as anything you’ll find in the main text.

So, as a tribute to the King of Endnotes, I’m counting down my top 10 favorites, in hopes that next time you crack open one of Keller’s books, you don’t skip his notes.

10. Keller lays out a preaching calendar.

In endnote 14 from chapter 1 of Preaching, Keller explains how he chooses his topics and themes for preaching over the course of a year.

After this, Keller goes on to discuss the appropriate length of a sermon series before offering actual examples of such series over the course of two years. All this in an endnote.

9. Keller safeguards the primary mission of the church gathered.

In endnote 17 from chapter 10 of Hope in Times of Fear, Keller makes an important clarification intended to keep the purpose of the church gathered narrow while still insisting on the broader ramifications of the gospel.

8. Keller speaks to guilt, shame, and individualism.

This endnote (2) on guilt and shame in chapter 8 of his last book, Forgive, could be the subject of a whole book.

7. Keller says your idols will enslave and curse you.

This insight from endnote 50 in chapter 3 of Counterfeit Gods could be expanded into an entire chapter.

6. Keller shows how a classic catechism provides counter-catechesis in a secular age.

One of Keller’s recommendations in his later years was for counter-catechesis—new tools that would use biblical doctrine to both deconstruct the beliefs of culture and answer questions of the human heart that culture’s narratives cannot. (Inspired by this vision, I’ve cowritten a counter-catechism along these lines.) In endnote 6 of chapter 7 of Making Sense of God, Keller shows how the Heidelberg Catechism directly counters a contemporary view of identity.

5. Keller criticizes medieval mystics, irenically.

In Prayer, Keller shows up at his most Protestant (and Reformed), yet in endnote 122 of chapter 4, he shows how his critique of Catholic mysticism does not in every case invalidate a true communion with God.

4. Keller compares Christian and Muslim views of conversion.

In endnote 4 of chapter 4 of The Reason for God, Keller appeals to the uniqueness of Christianity, with an assist from Don Carson!

3. Keller outlines a forthcoming book on idolatry.

In endnote 8 from chapter 10 of The Reason for God, Keller gives a lengthy, bulleted list, the seeds of which would grow into his later book Counterfeit Gods. And speaking of that latter work, if you check out endnote 119, you’ll find a list of idol categories (theological, sexual, magic/ritual, political/economic, racial/national, relational, etc.). More gold!

2. Keller offers insight into the early church’s culture of gospel generosity.

In endnote 59 from chapter 3 of Generous Justice, Keller’s meditation on Acts births an insight often overlooked when considering just how generous the culture of the early church was.

1. Keller contrasts Elsa from Frozen with Martin Luther.

My personal favorite endnote comes from chapter 5 of Preaching, where in laying out the contours of the late-modern mind, Keller draws on pop culture and church history.

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“It’s vital to connect.”

“We need churches to foster connection.”

“It’s all who you know. All about connections.”

We hear statements like these all the time. You understand what they’re getting at—the truth they intend to convey. But if you were talking with someone from a hundred years ago, they’d look at you funny and ask you to elaborate. Go back another hundred years, and they wouldn’t understand you at all. No one back then used the word “connect” in reference to individual personal relationships.

In 1760, connect meant “to join, to link, to unite, or to cohere.” That’s how Samuel Johnson defined it in his dictionary. An author might connect his reasons as he makes an argument. You could connect sentences, or objects in the physical world. Churches might connect by linking together as some kind of organization.

Then came the Industrial Revolution, and “connect” began its upward climb, mostly in scientific and construction contexts. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the word broke into the social sphere of personal relationships. And it was only in the 1990s that connecting with people became one of its dominant uses.

Words Create Worlds

Words fascinate me—maybe because I’m a writer but also because the words we turn to reveal the way we see the world. Words give us an interpretive lens on life. That’s why fluency in another language isn’t just about communicating your thoughts via strict translation; it’s the ability to inhabit a different world. It’s stepping into a different way of seeing. Words in different languages carry multiple shades of meaning.

It’s often said that “words create worlds.” Our imaginations get ignited by the words we use, and the connotations of a word or phrase open up new patterns of thinking, influencing us in ways we often don’t perceive.

We argue over words because words carry more than their dictionary definitions. When journalists abandoned the phrase “sex-change operation” for “gender-confirmation surgery,” they didn’t just tweak the terminology; they smuggled in an entire worldview about someone’s internal sense of gender and its correspondence to (or distance from) that person’s biological sex. The pronoun debate isn’t just about politeness or politics—it reveals a conflict of vision, opposing views of the world and the nature of humanity.

But beyond the headline-grabbing language battles, quieter shifts are happening all the time—subtle, unnoticed changes in how we describe reality. I’m more curious about the words and phrases we don’t fight over, the terms we’ve embraced quietly, the common sense we’ve never thought to question.

How Consumer Culture Shaped Our Speech

Consider how the American psyche is revealed in the way we apply consumerist language to areas far beyond transactions.

In Romania, for example (a culture not as dominated by Western free-market influences), no one says “I don’t buy that” when expressing skepticism toward another person’s argument. But in English, we think like consumers—so much so that we evaluate arguments in terms of “buying” what someone must be “selling.”

We talk about “the bottom line”—the important takeaway or fundamental analysis—outside financial contexts, or getting the most “bang for our buck” even when no transaction is involved in our effort or experience. These phrases slip in unnoticed, quietly shaping our vocabulary according to a vision of life as a marketplace. Consumer culture shapes how we speak, and then how we speak reinforces consumer habits of thinking.

But there’s another linguistic shift underway—one that might be even more significant. It’s the mechanistic way we describe ourselves in the digital era.

Rise of the Machine Metaphor

In A Web of Our Own Making, Antón Barba-Kay stacks example on top of example to show how we’ve absorbed digital and mechanical language into our self-descriptions. Read through his list below (with a few of my own added in), and you start to feel dizzy—like you’re seeing for the first time just how pervasive the phenomenon is. We talk about ourselves all the time as if we were machines.

• We say we “burn out” or “fire on all cylinders” like engines.
• After a busy season, we “crash” like an overheated computer.
• We talk about “pushing buttons” or describe our personalities as being “wired” a certain way.
• We’re “overloaded” like circuits, or kept “in the loop” like wires, or “plugged in” like a power cord.
• In relationships, we make “connections” or feel “connected” or “disconnected,” or try to stay “in sync” with someone else.
• We talk about “networking,” as if we’re computers and devices linked to each other.
• We “tune in” to others like a radio frequency, and after an intense experience, we need time to “process.”
• Sexual encounters are recast as “hooking up.”
• We need “validation,” just like software needs a key.
• Influencers promise ways to “upgrade” or “update” ourselves, or “level up” in life.
• We “store” and “retrieve” memories like hard drives.
• A creative person is praised for their “output” (“He’s a machine!” is supposedly a compliment).
• When overwhelmed, we say we don’t have any “bandwidth,” and when things go haywire, we need a “reboot.”

Barba-Kay writes, “This mechanization and digitalization of language expresses a changing practical self-understanding. It suggests, for one, that we are our brains (as opposed to our hearts or souls or selves) and that our brains are machines” (224).

Recovering a Fuller View of Ourselves

Words create worlds, and worlds influence words. The speed with which we’ve adopted machine language suggests that, in subtle ways, we now see ourselves in mechanistic terms. Whenever we adapt our language to the machine’s vocabulary, we can’t help but reimagine life in less-than-human categories.

But we aren’t computer-brains with bodies. We’re creatures—living, embodied, relational, and spiritual. The church’s calling in the years ahead will be to deliver prophetic words of warning and comfort—resisting reductionist views that strip us of our multidimensional humanity and calling people higher, to the full-orbed dignity of bearing God’s image.

We aren’t machines. We aren’t processing units. We aren’t minds in meat suits, waiting for the next software update. We’re image-bearers of the living God, created to know and enjoy him, destined for a glory and dignity that’s the envy of angels. If our future is royalty, our vocabulary shouldn’t sound like machinery.

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Disappointment is a hallmark of ministry, leadership, and influence. Most of the time, we focus on dealing with the disappointment we feel when others let us down. But it’s also important to learn how to handle the reality that we’ll disappoint people we respect. It’s inevitable.

I once heard of a pastor who told a younger man training for ministry, “Brother, there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t know of someone who’s disappointed in me.” He was acknowledging the reality. Serve God’s people long enough, and you’ll be both the one disappointed and the one who disappoints.

Burden of Letting Others Down

For nearly 20 years, I’ve been speaking and writing in public. Over time, I’ve disappointed my fair share of readers. Some have been dismayed by my stances and opinions—perhaps because I critiqued a book or author they admire, or because my condemnation of a writer or movement wasn’t as forceful as they thought the moment required. Other times, it wasn’t something I said or wrote but simply that I have friends or associations they think are compromised.

Church ministry brings similar challenges. Your take on a matter of political prudence may differ from some church members. Your response to a cultural controversy comes across as either too strident or too soft. You come down in different places on a question of denominational politics. You draw a sharp line on matters of orthodoxy, or you don’t draw the line sharply enough for a doctrine some think is a matter of orthodoxy. You quote or associate with someone from the “wrong” tribe. The list goes on.

When Encouragement Turns to Contempt

Sometimes, the pain runs deep—not just when others disappoint you but when you disappoint them. People who once encouraged me—who praised my books and sermons, sent emails of affirmation, shared meals in my home, or enjoyed a warm drink with me at a conference—have later trolled me on social media, blocked me, or written me off entirely.

One pattern I’ve noticed: Those who are over-the-top in praising you are often the most likely to be over-the-top in cutting you off when you disappoint them. It reminds me of Charles Spurgeon’s counsel: “Too much consideration of what is said by our people, whether it be in praise or in depreciation, is not good for us.”

Posture of Gratitude

In coming to terms with the inevitability of disappointing people, I’ve sought to respond with a spirit of gratitude. I can be grateful for whatever measure of help I was able to provide someone else, even if only for a season. It’s no small thing to gain someone’s ear—for my online scribblings to be a subject of reflection, or for my podcast to accompany someone on a drive or a run, or for one of my books to be given attention out of the millions available. If you’re a pastor, the fact that anyone sits through your sermons and yields to your leadership, even for a time, is an inestimable gift.

Along with taking a posture of gratitude, I’ve had to renounce the fear of disappointing others. I can’t let self-preservation stifle my instincts or keep me from serving as faithfully as I know how. I’ve had to resist the temptation to dwell on my missteps or to soften necessary words for fear of ruffling feathers. I’ve had to root out bitterness and resentment against those who’ve turned against me. I’ve tried instead to focus on the larger body of work I hope to contribute over a lifetime—a ministry I pray that, even with its many flaws, will glorify God and build up the church.

Word to My Readers

So, my readers, I must prepare you. If you follow my work long enough, you will eventually disagree with me. You will, at some point, be disappointed. Some of you may even stop reading or listening altogether. And that’s OK.

Even if that happens—even if disappointment leads to distance or to derision—I can still be grateful for the season where the Lord allowed me to serve you with my words. I choose this posture because it guards me from becoming defensive, from falling into people-pleasing, or from holding back when I feel compelled to speak the truth as I see it.

When You Disappoint Others

You, too, will disappoint people. If you serve in ministry, lead in any capacity, or engage publicly with ideas, it’s inevitable. The question isn’t whether you’ll let people down but how you’ll respond when it happens. “Bless your critics for their honesty,” Calvin Miller wrote. “They do not criticize you to be a blessing to you, but the end product may be the same.”

Don’t let your disappointment turn into self-doubt or defensiveness. Receive criticism with humility, discern what you can glean even from those whose manner is abrasive, and then move forward with confidence in God’s calling on your life.

We don’t measure faithfulness by universal approval. We measure faithfulness by adhering to the call of our Lord. Even when that means disappointing people along the way.

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Last week, Larry Sanger, the man who started Wikipedia in 2001, published a lengthy essay laying out his journey from skepticism to Christianity. For most of his adult life, Sanger was a committed skeptic, trained in analytic philosophy—a field dominated by atheists and agnostics. Though he spent 35 years as a nonbeliever, he never saw himself as hostile to faith, only unconvinced, and his testimony is geared toward those who share that rational, open-minded skepticism.

Reading through Sanger’s story, I was struck by a few features.

1. Failure to engage well with good-faith questions can be a catalyst for disbelief.

Sanger grew up in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, but by his mid-teens, his belief in God was dissipating, and his departure from the faith was clinched by the unfortunate response of a pastor to his questions:

This story should rekindle a passion in every minister’s heart to be familiar enough with the field of apologetics to know where to seek out and find answers to questions and objections people may have to Christianity. It should also encourage a spirit of compassion and pastoral care, not annoyance or contempt, toward people with questions.

2. The cumulative force of multiple arguments for God’s existence can be more persuasive than any single one.

Although Sanger found the Fine-Tuning Argument, a version of the Argument from Design, emotionally moving as the most compelling case for God’s existence, he found neither it nor the other traditional arguments fully convincing.

That partial headway had more influence the more he studied, as the cumulative effect of the arguments’ force became stronger than he realized at first.

Here was his conclusion:

(This is similar to Gavin Ortlund’s approach in Why God Makes Sense in a World That Doesn’t, where he offers a cumulative case for God’s existence, showing how multiple lines of evidence—philosophical reasoning, the beauty of the universe, and humanity’s deep existential longings—converge to make belief in God not just plausible but the most compelling explanation of reality.)

3. The character of Christians—especially online—can either draw people in or push them away.

Sanger points out the way Christians carried themselves both in person and also online, showing themselves and their views worthy of respect. He contrasted the Christian’s demeanor with the obnoxious manner of the New Atheists, with whom he shared at least some affinity in terms of skepticism. Because the Christians he observed online were serious and kind in their manner of engagement, their perspectives gained credence.

Perhaps we do well to reflect on the other side of this takeaway—the damage done to Christianity’s credibility when believers online act in obnoxious and trollish ways.

4. The Bible is the best resource for someone warming up to Christianity, and good tools make a difference.

Sanger’s growing warmth toward Christianity was fanned into flame by deeper study of the Bible. Curious and determined, he turned to every tool at his disposal—study plans, commentaries, Bible apps, and maps—approaching Scripture with the same meticulous analysis he once applied to philosophy.

Considering how many people are curious about the Bible these days, the increase in Bible sales, the interest in various philosophers and commentators providing their takes on the Scriptures, we should never look at the Scriptures as a source of embarrassment but as an endless trove of treasures. The Bible is the best thing we’ve got going for us. God has given us his Word!

Pray for Larry Sanger

Larry Sanger’s story is unfinished. He continues to read, write, and think. Right now, he’s examining the claims of different denominations. It’s clear he sees his need for a local church and the fellowship of other believers.

We can and should pray for him in the days ahead as he continues to grow in his newfound faith. And we can learn from his story how to better engage people considering Christ’s claims.

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I’ve just finished one of the most frightening books I’ve ever read. No, it’s not a tale of suspense or a novel in the horror genre. It’s not fiction, but it’s also not a true story, at least not yet.

Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War is terrifying because it isn’t pure speculation. Based on interviews with top-level officials and on declassified documents, it describes in gruesome detail what would happen to civilians and soldiers alike in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. But the horror isn’t merely in the death toll—it’s in the cascading consequences. Civilization as we know it would collapse, swiftly and irrevocably.

The sheer fragility of the world’s systems is staggering. We take for granted our daily lives—communication networks, financial markets, supply chains, the basic infrastructure of modern existence. Yet Jacobsen shows how quickly everything could be upended. A single detonation wouldn’t remain an isolated event. Because of the built-in logic of deterrence, the impulse toward self-protection, and the need for quick retaliation, nuclear war is unlikely to begin with just one catastrophic explosion. If the first missile launches, more will follow. Counterattacking missiles would already be in the air before the first detonation on U.S. soil occurred—a deadly sequence set in motion by paranoia, miscommunication, and distrust.

And if you think such a scenario is unthinkable, consider how World War I began. Read the accounts of what took place in the summer of 1914—the triggers, the diplomatic blunders, the domino effect that led world leaders to bumble into a war no one knew how to stop, gutting Europe of an entire generation of young men. It doesn’t take a madman with a death wish—just a moment of miscalculation from someone with their fingers on the nuclear button.

A World Destroyed in Hours

What stands out to me about Nuclear War is the speed of the catastrophe. The book takes 10 times longer to read than it would take for the entire scenario to unfold. In half the time it takes to watch a typical two-hour movie, the world would be forever changed.

This timeline is unlike anything humanity has ever experienced. Other wars stretched over years, even decades. This one would be measured in minutes. There would be no time for deliberation, no strategic planning, no last-minute efforts to de-escalate. Once the chain reaction begins, there’s no stopping it. Within an hour, major cities across multiple continents would be reduced to smoldering craters, with radiating fallout sweeping over the countrysides. Think Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii—but everywhere. Governments would fall. Communications would cease. The world as we know it would be over, just like that.

A nuclear exchange wouldn’t merely be another war—it would be an extinction event. The 1970s preparation plans telling American schoolchildren to hide under their desks are laughable. Millions of civilians—families, children, entire populations—would be incinerated in an instant. And those who survived? They’d be the unlucky ones, either dying over the next days and weeks in excruciating pain or inheriting a world unrecognizable, a wasteland of radiation and ruin, something resembling the bleak post-apocalyptic horror of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Love in Light of Loss

I said this book is frightening, and it is. But despite the underlying stress from encountering such a scarily plausible scenario, another emotion emerges: gratitude. Contemplating how quickly the world could be lost makes me love it all the more. Chesterton once wrote, “The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.”

We’ve all felt this in smaller ways. The gut punch of hearing about a tragic accident involving someone else’s child—followed by the instinct to hold our own children a little tighter. The realization that life is fragile makes it more precious, not less.

In Saint Francis of Assisi, Chesterton describes the saint’s vision of his beloved town upside down. “Whereas to the normal eye the large masonry of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and more in peril.”

A strange paradox. Seeing the world on the edge of disaster, with all the systems and structures we depend on for protection now transformed into massive vulnerabilities—seeing the whole world hanging by a thread doesn’t lead to despair. It leads to love. It leads to joy. It leads to service.

A World Hanging by a Thread

This sense of love is tied to something even deeper: dependence.

Chesterton explains how St. Francis, after seeing the world from this new perspective, loved it more, not less.

This is what Nuclear War made me feel—not just fear but a renewed awareness of how much the world depends on the mercy of God. How much my very life depends on the will of God. The threat of mass extinction is a magnification of our individual vulnerability. Any one of us is an accident or a stroke away from death . . . all the time. One minute you’re alive, the next you’re dead. All our lives hang by a thread, and God is the One who pulls on it.

And God is the One who extends mercy. It’s true that history is full of horrors. Human evil and suffering have sometimes run their course unchecked—the decades-long wars in centuries past, the horrors of Auschwitz, the fallout of Chernobyl. But history is also full of unknown deliverances—wars that didn’t happen, disasters that didn’t strike, atrocities narrowly averted. These moments are there, too, unseen by us but woven into the fabric of providence.

We don’t know what the future holds. We don’t know how close we may be to the next catastrophe. But we do know this: God upholds all things. He restrains evil more than we can fathom. He continues to give us breaths, each one undeserved. And he has promised that, even in the darkest moments, he will bring good out of evil.

Who knows? Perhaps Jacobsen’s book will serve as a warning, a deterrent—one more tool that in God’s providence will prevent leaders from tumbling down the tunnel into darkness.

Regardless, a book like this helps us see the world’s fragility for what it is, increasing our sense of dependence on God, helping us see in a scenario of world destruction the vision of the world’s glory. As Chesterton said,

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My annual reading of Augustine’s Confessions always surfaces something new, and this year was no exception. Perhaps because I’d just finished Kevin Vanhoozer’s acclaimed Mere Christian Hermeneutics, I was struck by a section in Book 12 of Confessions about theological debate over biblical interpretation—where Augustine takes a posture we should adopt in current disputes over the text’s meaning.

Augustine is pondering the truths expounded by Moses in Genesis and the difficulty of wading through multiple seemingly legitimate interpretations. Anthony Esolen’s new translation expresses Augustine’s thought process:

Notice two elements here. Augustine expresses total confidence in the truth and authority of God’s Word. That’s not in dispute. His confidence is in God. But he expresses less confidence that he has rightly understood the author’s original intent. He thinks he understands what the text means, but his level of certainty regarding his interpretation isn’t as high as his confidence that God speaks truth.

Danger of Pride in Theological Pursuits

But Augustine discovered not everyone holds to their interpretation with this level of humility.

Augustine will make a case for his viewpoint, and he’ll happily consider other perspectives, so long as they lie within the bounds of orthodoxy. He loves the back-and-forth of theological debate, but he gets frustrated when a conversation partner doesn’t share the same openness to different perspectives, and so he asks for patience from the Lord.

“They do love their own [opinion], not because it is true, but because it is theirs.” That’s key for Augustine here. He peels back the layers of doctrinal debate until he sees the motivation behind controversy. In our day, just as in Augustine’s, there are those who hold to their opinions with an improper level of certainty, as if they could see directly into the author’s mind. This is pride. It leads to rashness in theological debate.

Communal Nature of Bible Interpretation

Note the communal focus of biblical interpretation here. No one has a corner on the truth, he says. The truth comes wholly from God and belongs to the whole people of God. We need each other if we’re to interpret the Bible well. Humility requires openness to what our brothers and sisters glean from the text, something we may have missed.

How should we deal with believers who obstinately insist on a particular opinion and condemn all other reasonable interpretations consistent with orthodoxy? Augustine points to the Truth above all involved.

Seeking Truth with Love and Humility

As Augustine says elsewhere, the whole point of biblical interpretation is to increase our love for God and neighbor. We short-circuit this road to holiness when, in arrogance, we fail to show love and forbearance to our opponents. Even if we’re right—without love and humility, we’re wrong.

Augustine imagines a flowing stream of Truth. More than one truth can be drawn from that gushing water. We can draw from the river whatever truths are on offer, as long as they accord with the rule of faith.

I realize this view of textual interpretation may challenge us today because his premodern take does not confine the meaning of the text to whatever is most evident. He writes,

Opening up oneself to multiple insights and various perspectives on a text raises the question of what interpretations should be given more weight. Augustine would point us to whatever is consistent with orthodoxy and in line with the greater aim of Scripture—to build up love for God and neighbor.

From Augustine, we learn to remain open to uncertainty in our interpretations because we’re fallible interpreters of God’s infallible Word, and because the purpose of theological debate should be growth in love and holiness. Here we find a posture of openness and humility—we take care to affirm basic matters of orthodoxy, but we remain circumspect in issuing “once-for-all” judgments in more contested areas. “Let there be no obstinate wrangling,” he writes, “but rather diligent seeking, humble asking, persistent knocking.”

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It’s clear you’re dealing with a cultural phenomenon when comedians start making jokes and online parodies begin appearing. That’s now the case with a perspective on raising kids called “gentle parenting.”

Gentle parenting is a philosophy of child-rearing centered on mutual respect, emotional empathy, and positive (rather than negative) discipline, so that the parent-child relationship is marked by understanding and guidance—never scolding, punishment, or obligation.

You may have seen these techniques in action—a child acts out, and a young mom responds with a cloying tone, “What kind of choice do we want to make, Noah?” Or “Emma, I see you’re upset. Can you tell me what you’re feeling right now in a way that helps me understand?” Or “Jackson, what else can you do to show you’re frustrated without making Ella feel unsafe?”

The goal is to increase a child’s emotional intelligence by responding in calm and positive ways when behavior crosses a line, redirecting the child’s self-expression toward something healthier or more socially acceptable. A tantrum is merely the result of frustration. Bad behavior arises from unmet needs.

Children Are Inherently Good?

At the heart of this philosophy is the belief that children are, at their core, good—compassionate, loving, and generous. Affirming a child’s internal goodness is meant to free parents to be curious about why their child might act out. Parents are trained to look beyond behavior to the deeper reasons behind their child’s actions.

In UnHerd, Marilyn Simon describes the philosophy this way:

Why has this approach caught on? In The Dispatch, Megan Dent explains part of the appeal: It implies that simply meeting all a child’s needs will improve their behavior. Affirming emotions, making children feel “seen,” or removing sources of stress is the key to raising compassionate and respectful adults.

Flattening Your Kids

The problem with gentle parenting is its reductive view of human nature. Simon goes so far as to call the approach “cruel.” The philosophy patronizes children and “flattens the human experience into a series of choice options, none of which reflect any natural goodness or badness in the child, but which instead represent optimal or less optimal outcomes.”

Furthermore, it denies a child his or her full humanity as a moral agent because it refuses to acknowledge that sometimes our instinctive feelings aren’t just impolite or inappropriate but wrong. A child’s actions are often not the result of “frustration” but of selfishness. Our wills need to be restrained because our desires are corrupted. Simon writes,

Pervasiveness of Sin

As Christians, we realize the sin and selfishness of child and parent alike will always foil the best intentions of the gentle parenting approach. Human nature isn’t inherently good but bad. We’re born sinners. Our wills are bent. Our instincts are corrupted. Wrongdoing isn’t merely the result of ignorance, injustice, or frustration at not being fully understood—it originates in the evil of the human heart.

Self-help gurus may balk at such an assessment, but acknowledging the sinful propensity of the human heart goes back thousands of years. Dent points to a famous moment early in Augustine’s Confessions where he reflects on the selfishness evident in infancy, even before a child has the awareness to judge right from wrong:

Parenting, then, isn’t merely about teaching our kids how to live in society; it’s about showing them the moral weight of their actions—that sin is real, punishment is necessary (though not doled out in anger or caprice), and forgiveness is available.

Diagnosing sin in our kids’ hearts doesn’t strip them of dignity. On the contrary, it dignifies and deepens them. We treat children as moral agents, respect them enough to discipline them in love, and then forgive and restore them.

Gentle and Holy God

The God of the Bible is a tender Father, yes. Jesus described himself as gentle and lowly. But his gentleness isn’t patronizing, nor does he evade the true source of our wrongdoing. In God, we see a fiery holiness that names sin for what it is. He upholds our dignity by holding us morally accountable, and he offers himself in self-giving love to bring back the wayward heart that turns from sin and trusts his grace. As Dent observes,

Our Opportunity

The church will have a major opportunity in the years ahead, as young people come of age having been raised under the philosophy of gentle parenting—with its emphasis on safeness, social niceties, and emotional self-expression, and its erasing of sin, evil, judgment, and redemption.

We do ourselves no favors by downplaying, denying, or diminishing sin, no matter how unpopular it may seem. A patient riddled with the cancer of selfishness will one day tire of the vitamins and tonics doled out by feel-good doctors and yearn for surgery on the soul. When that day comes, we’ll have the opportunity to speak the unsafe truth that every person, deep down, already knows to be true: I have sinned.

As one woman recently testified, “I love the church because she told me I was sinning when no one else would.” Yes. A stark diagnosis, before a magnificent cure.

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I’ve been slowly rereading Antón Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making, one of the most profound books in recent years on how the digital era is reshaping civilization. One of its key insights is how human interconnectedness makes the digital revolution’s effects inescapable. Even those who resist or withdraw from online life do so against the backdrop of a world fundamentally shaped by it.

Another takeaway exposes the temptation to remake and reconfigure the physical environment (even our bodies and relationships) in ways that conform to the digital. The future isn’t a world where everyone spends an inordinate amount of time in an AI-inhabited metaverse of virtual reality but a world where it’s acceptable, even expected, for physical bodies and places to be molded and shaped by the digital images we hope to capture. The online world now sets the standard for all of life.

You might hear this and think, That doesn’t apply to me. I can always opt out. I don’t have to engage with social media or virtual reality. I can just log off. Unfortunately, human culture doesn’t work that way. Television reshaped public discourse even for those who didn’t own a set. Social media has reduced political debate to clips and soundbites. Even if you never watch your church’s livestream, the presence of a camera broadcasting the service alters the experience for everyone—whether it’s the pastor who acknowledges an unseen audience, the worship leader who adjusts to the basics of broadcasting, or the people gathered who realize a moment of devotion might be captured by the camera.

No One Is an Island

When a new technology becomes widespread, no one remains untouched. Brad Littlejohn, in his article “Narcissus in Public,” offers a striking example. Over Christmas break, he took his family to the ice rink at the National Gallery’s Sculpture Garden. They noticed a group of young women using the rink as a mere backdrop for Instagram glamour shots. Other skaters had to swerve to avoid them, avert their eyes from their immodesty, or adjust their own experience around these self-curated performances. He writes,

What seems like an individual choice—taking selfies or curating an image—changes the experience for everyone else. We think our phone habits are personal, but when millions of people prioritize their screens over the world around them, the consequences ripple outward. When you divide your attention between your phone and the real world multiple times a day, you reshape not only your expectations but also the social fabric around you.

Your phone habits don’t affect just you. Littlejohn continues,

Permission Structure Has Changed

You’ve likely seen this phenomenon elsewhere. If you’re on a hike with friends, enjoying conversation and the beauty around you, the moment someone pulls out a phone to capture the moment for social media, the dynamic shifts. The scenery is no longer just scenery—everything is potential for content or a possible background for a selfie. The hike is no longer only about you and your friends—it’s something to be broadcast, something open for evaluation and discussion online.

If you’re in a business meeting, once one or two people pull out their phones or open their laptops, the permission structure of the room changes. The expectation of everyone being fully present—really there and engaged—diminishes. Distraction is now unavoidable. Even the person determined to leave the phone in the bag and stay attentive will be affected by the shift.

And what about church? If you glance down the aisle and see someone scrolling Instagram mid-sermon, the atmosphere changes. Full attention to God’s Word is no longer the assumed posture. You’re gathered with people for worship who aren’t fully there. Openness to half-hearted listening and distracted engagement becomes permissible for all.

Littlejohn notes the compounding effect:

Reclaim Presence

Our actions are more connected than we realize. When I’m helping my son with his homework, or talking with my daughter, and I let my attention drift to my phone, I’m sending a message: This moment doesn’t require my full presence. Or worse: You’re not interesting enough to me. If we’re watching a movie with my kids, but I’m multitasking and checking my email, their experience of the film is altered, not just mine.

A principle in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians holds here—“everything is permissible,” but not everything is beneficial; “everything is permissible,” but not everything builds up (1 Cor. 10:23–24). “No one is to seek his own good, but the good of the other person,” he says. As Christians, we’re obligated to consider how our personal choices affect those around us.

You’re not an island. Your phone habits are never just about you. Our digital choices reflect our priorities. Our online actions have downstream effects. Unless we take a good, long look at ourselves in the mirror and unless we carve out spaces and times that we—with others—agree should be free from the distraction of our devices, we’ll ride along with the currents of imperceptible but significant cultural devolution.

The choice before us isn’t just whether we use our phones more or less than others. It’s whether we’ll be fully present and fully aware of the collective effects of our individual decisions.

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For two seasons of my podcast Reconstructing Faith, we’ve explored the credibility crisis facing the church today and examined the challenges that stand in the way of restoring the church’s witness. We’ve sought wisdom from Scripture, church history, and the global church. We’ve discussed rolling up our sleeves and taking our place on the wall, ready to do the hard work of renewal.

But a question still confronts us: What if we can’t rebuild?

What if, despite all our good intentions and efforts, we’re not ready?

What if we’re not up to the task of restoration?

What if we aren’t healthy enough ourselves to lead the way toward a healthier church?

Necessity of Spiritual Formation

We don’t expect a novice runner to succeed in a marathon, or someone who hasn’t practiced piano scales to suddenly perform a Mozart sonata. Why, then, do we assume we can help restore the church’s witness without first attending to our spiritual formation?

We admire stories of martyrs and heroes, but their courage in the moment of testing doesn’t materialize out of nowhere. Yes, the Holy Spirit may provide extraordinary grace in the moment of crisis, but that assistance is often delivered through years of formation—choices and practices that flow from and reinforce virtuous character. Faithfulness in crisis depends on faithfulness in ordinary life.

Reconstruction doesn’t take place spontaneously. Real transformation requires preparation. And an essential aspect of that preparation is the practice of abiding in Christ and depending on his Spirit. Apart from Christ, our aspirations for renewal are doomed to falter.

Introducing Season 3

The third season of Reconstructing Faith is devoted to exploring spiritual formation—those practices and habits God uses to shape our hearts and lives. The work of reconstruction begins with acknowledging our limitations and throwing ourselves on God’s grace. Only the Spirit can transform us into the sturdy trees of Psalm 1, planted by streams of living water, ready to bear fruit in a dry and weary land.

The call to rebuild the church’s witness isn’t a call to self-reliance. It’s an invitation to deeper dependence on Christ. As we lean into the Spirit’s work, we’ll discover that renewal flows not from our strength but from the One who strengthens our hands.

The first season focused on the credibility crisis facing the church. Season 2 examined the big obstacles we encounter as we work toward renewal.

Season 3 offers a closer look at questions of spiritual formation and personal discipleship. We’ll explore the disciplines and virtues essential for becoming pillars of faithfulness in a world of chaos.

This season, we’ll look in more detail at the following:

• the necessity of spiritual practices and the growing movement of spiritual formation
• the three waves that have influenced evangelical churches in the past half-century
• what it means to become people of prayer who truly depend on the Spirit
• becoming Bible readers in a world where nobody reads
• preaching God’s Word faithfully (and becoming better listeners)
• how the digital era is reshaping how we view ourselves and the church
• therapy culture and the question of resilience in church leadership.

At the end of the season, we’ll look at seven big challenges facing the church worldwide, and we’ll spend some time in the Sermon on the Mount as we consider the characteristics of God’s kingdom people. Guests this season include Mark Sayers, Andrew Wilson, Christine Rosen, Brad East, Liliana Llambés, Michael Sacasas, and more. The first two episodes are available today wherever you listen to podcasts, and the rest will follow once a week.

My hope for this new season of Reconstructing Faith is to take a closer look at how we lean into the Spirit’s formation of our hearts and lives so that we grow in awareness of our need for God’s grace. So that we grow in wisdom about how best to meet today’s challenges. So that we grow more solid in a world of shadows. So that we run the race to win the prize.

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Over the holidays, I watched the new film Conclave, a suspenseful look at the secretive world of Vatican traditions and the political maneuvering of cardinals as they gather to elect a new pope. The film is based on a novel I read last year, by Robert Harris.

This isn’t the place to delve into the cinematography, performances, or score (all good), nor to unpack the story’s over-the-top plot twist. Set aside the palace intrigue; what stood out to me was the thread running through the narrative—an ongoing battle between “progressives” and “traditionalists” in the Catholic Church.

Certainty vs. Doubt: The Central Debate

The story sets up factions of cardinals, some more aligned with a liberalizing vision for the Church and others who believe the faithful need something solid. Cardinal Tedesco represents the traditionalist vision, at one point offering a speech that echoes both Pope Benedict XVI’s “dictatorship of relativism” and G. K. Chesterton’s quote about the Church moving the world.

Tedesco stands as the foil to Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the overseer of the conclave, played by Ralph Fiennes. Lawrence, representing the progressive vision, delivers a pivotal speech, nearly word-for-word from Harris’s novel:

Notice the assumptions here. Certainty isn’t only a sin but one of the most fearful. Unity is good, tolerance is indispensable, and certainty threatens both. We’re most like Christ when we’re uncertain, as he seemed to be on the cross, and our faith is made more real the more we doubt, because certainty is a dead thing that resolves all mystery and makes faith unnecessary. In the life of faith, certainty is a vice, and doubt is a virtue.

To this, a simple response is in order: Hogwash!

Power of Doubt?

Look first at the Gospels. Jesus nowhere commends doubt. Instead, we see him chastising his disciples for their lack of faith, or asking in frustration, “Why did you doubt?” When he praises people, it’s for their faith—faith that amazes him, no matter the person’s background. “Don’t be afraid,” he says. “Just believe.”

Look also at church history. It’s not doubt that brings unity to the church but confidence. It’s certainty in the truth of God’s Word. It’s confidence in the great creeds of the faith. Unity flows from confession of truth, not from a posture of perpetual uncertainty.

What’s more, we see throughout history inspiring examples of faith—especially those who endured the dark night of the soul or the relentless whispers of the Evil One. It isn’t doubt that inspires the world but faith overcoming doubt. We don’t remember Perpetua and Felicity for cowering before the wild beasts in the amphitheater but for their courage and conviction. We read works today not from men and women in the past whose muddled ponderings betrayed their uncertainties but from those who strenuously sought the truth and made clear affirmations, no matter the cost.

Of course, the life of faith isn’t easy. Thomas doubted the reality of the resurrection. A number of disciples doubted the truth even after they’d seen the risen Lord. Struggle is to be expected. That’s why Jude tells us to “have mercy on those who doubt.” Honesty about our doubt is a virtue, but it’s the honesty that’s commendable, not the doubt itself.

You’d be hard-pressed to find anything before the past century that would cast certainty and confidence as a sin; something opposed to unity; or to tolerance; or, heaven forbid, to faith. The great Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck titled one of his books The Certainty of Faith. “Certainty” in itself isn’t responsible for the persecution of enemies. It all depends on what we’re certain about. Someone certain of the truth of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount will be more inclined to withstand persecution than to spread it.

Doubt and Confidence

To be clear, we’re not talking about Enlightenment-style certainty that presumes exhaustive knowledge of God’s mysteries. What we need is a deep and abiding confidence in God’s love and grace—a knowing in our bones that God is real, that Jesus is alive, that we’re loved, that all will be well in the end. “I know whom I have believed . . .” we sing. Lesslie Newbigin put it this way: “[It isn’t] the confidence of one who claims possession of demonstrable and indubitable knowledge. It is the confidence of one who had heard and answered the call that comes from the God through whom and for whom all things were made: ‘Follow Me.’”

I realize one reason some want to recast doubt as virtue and make certainty a vice—it’s in response to churches that squelch hard questions, that act in craven and self-focused ways, or that suppress any expression of doubt or uncertainty, thereby forcing tender consciences into hiding. In these communities, shame accompanies struggle. No wonder some might react negatively to a certain faith that leaves no room for doubt.

But the problem in these faith communities is dishonesty, not certainty. The problem is hypocrisy, not a settled faith.

Doubt is a normal part of the Christian life. As Philip Ryken says,

That’s the right posture. We swing between faith and doubt at times, but the goal isn’t to celebrate doubt—it’s for our faith to shine brighter. If doubts are winning and our faith is dim, we want to alter that situation, not remain in it. “Help my unbelief!” we cry.

The Christian life will sometimes involve dark nights of the soul, seasons of spiritual dryness, unexpected bouts of sickness and suffering, and intellectual hang-ups with some of Christianity’s most audacious truth claims. Struggle doesn’t mean you’re a bad Christian, just a normal one. Still, we’re never told to celebrate our doubts but to press through them toward a fortified faith on the other side.

Brad East makes this point in Letters to a Future Saint:

Amen! So, enough with the valorization of doubt! There’s nothing compelling about a person who says, “Come to Jesus, so you can be as unsettled as I am!” It’s perseverance that draws, confidence that convicts, and faith that moves mountains.

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A number of readers have thanked me for recommending Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden—my favorite read last year. Many have commented on the novel’s beautiful characterizations, its vivid descriptions, and the compelling nature of its central figure. I’m delighted others are encountering this remarkable story and grappling with the implicit challenge of a saintly old man whose life radiates love and attention.

In pondering the many lessons from Levi’s novel, I’ve been thinking more carefully about how compelling and attractive holiness can be in a world that has forgotten the sacred dignity of humanity and the high calling God has for us. And here, I come upon a puzzle I’ve wrestled with for some time.

Threat and Beauty of Holiness

On the one hand, holiness can feel threatening. “Moses, take off your sandals!” Encountering someone whose spiritual devotion far surpasses your own—or recognizing what seems to be genuine saintliness in someone else—can provoke feelings of inadequacy, even resentment. At times, a vehement reaction can escalate to violence, as history and Scripture attest.

On the other hand, truly holy people—the ones who radiate the joy and love of Jesus—possess a magnetic quality. They don’t highlight our shortcomings; they draw us in, make us feel more alive. Their presence opens us up to the possibility of growth and transformation.

Righteousness vs. Self-Righteousness

Why does holiness provoke such disparate reactions? One explanation might reduce the difference to righteousness versus self-righteousness. And that’s a good place to start.

The distance between righteousness and self-righteousness is a chasm, but crossing it takes just a step. A person can be steeped in spiritual disciplines—Bible reading, prayer, fasting, church activity—and still exude a self-righteousness that alienates those around them. It’s the difference between being holy and being “holier than thou.” In this case, the disciplines give off a self-righteous stink and provoke feelings of frustration and guilt in others.

By contrast, genuine righteousness—true holiness—bears the fragrance of humility. It’s inviting, not intimidating. Love infuses a saintly person’s discipline and devotion, so that when you encounter them you don’t feel inadequate but inspired. There’s no smugness or sense of superiority that stirs up guilt. Rather than feeling burdened by the sins that still weigh you down, you feel lighter, as if you’ve been given proof that sin can be cast aside, that closeness to God is a real possibility.

Churches marked by real holiness reflect the warmth and radiance of Jesus, the friend of sinners. The radical call to pursue righteousness is still there, of course, but as a response to God’s gift—divine grace that flows without condition to unworthy people.

Holiness That Enlarges the World

The explanation that real righteousness draws us closer while self-righteousness is a turnoff makes sense. But we must say more.

Why? Because true holiness doesn’t always draw people in. Holiness often provokes persecution. “All who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted,” the apostle Paul told Timothy (2 Tim. 3:12). Real devotion will engender real opposition. Ironically, it’s often not the “worst of sinners” who resist the presence of holiness but pious people whose religiosity is threatened by genuine devotion.

Likewise, self-righteousness isn’t always a turnoff. Churches steeped in self-righteousness become places of comparison, striving, and judgment. But they too can attract people—anyone looking for a spiritual workout regimen more than a house of grace.

It’s not so simple, then, to say that real righteousness always draws and self-righteousness always repels. Different people, with different inclinations, may be drawn to the righteous or the self-righteous, for different reasons.

So where does that leave us? I can only speak from experience. When I’ve spent time with those who’ve walked closely with Jesus for many years, I don’t feel like a failure; I feel revived. I don’t feel weaker; I feel strengthened. I don’t feel condemned; I feel challenged. Their presence is an invitation—it calls to something deep inside my heart, a trip wire activated by God’s Spirit that leads to a yearning to become the person Jesus wants me to be.

It’s the mark of a righteous person that others feel more alive in their presence. Not chastised and unworthy but roused from complacency, imbued with a fresh desire to radiate the love of Jesus. It’s the combination of sweetness and seriousness that stands out to me—a firmness and kindness that invites me to a deeper repentance, that unfolds a different kind of path before me. True holiness expands the soul. It enlarges the world.

Light That Points to Christ

The more I reflect on these encounters, the more I realize how far I am from exhibiting this quality, especially for the family and friends closest to me. They’re all too aware of my self-righteousness and pride, or the moments when I’m stubborn or obtuse, lacking self-awareness and Spirit-awareness in my attentiveness to others. But however far I am from real righteousness today, this is my higher aim—to grow into someone whose life is a fountain of joy, someone whose presence reflects not the dust cloud of Pigpen in Peanuts but the spinning up of joy and sanctity wherever I go.

True holiness shines a spotlight, but it never points to the self. Instead, it directs our gaze to Jesus. The light that emanates from someone righteous helps us see Jesus more clearly, and it transforms how we see the world also. In the presence of someone truly holy, God seems bigger. The world seems larger. We’re drawn out of ourselves and lifted by love, toward Love.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Spiritual love proves itself in that everything it says and does commends Christ.” That, I believe, is the secret of life-giving holiness: the reflection of Christ in the lives of his people.

When we encounter sanctity, we’re drawn not to the saint but to the Savior. The commending of Christ is what compels us. It’s the touch of his nail-scarred hands, delivered through the compassion and challenge on display in his most devoted worshipers, that stirs something deep in us. Holiness compels because it whispers of Jesus, refracted through his people, lighting up life with his love.

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Every pastor has a face-palm, “I can’t believe I preached that” moment. Mine goes back to when I was a 19-year-old student in Romania, before I’d had a class on scriptural interpretive principles. I was invited to speak in a village church and picked a passage a friend had recently sent me for inspiration. I titled the sermon “Seeking God” and preached from Job 11:13–19:

What a beautiful passage about redirecting your heart to the Lord to receive his blessing, right? In my enthusiasm, I did a brief exposition and took the church line by line through the text.

The problem, of course, was that my sermon was an exposition of Zophar’s speech—one of Job’s three friends who receives God’s condemnation at the end of the book. This is the bad friend talking, offering bad counsel to the innocent man who had faced so much suffering. Oblivious to what was really going on in this text from Job, I preached the message as if I were Zophar, offering a straightforward formula for turning from sin and embracing the Lord’s comfort and safety.

My worst sermon ever. Nothing else comes close.

When ‘Scripture of the Day’ Gets It Wrong

I thought of that face-palm moment not long ago when a reader emailed me about the “Scripture of the day” he’d been receiving on his phone. Occasionally, the app featured verses plucked from the speeches of Job’s friends—those who not only spoke incorrectly about God but also compounded Job’s pain. Here’s one example:

That’s Job 22:28, spoken by Eliphaz. The overall message of Job counteracts what that verse says. Selecting it as a Scripture of the day transforms the text into little more than a message of positive thinking that could fit into a fortune cookie.

Is a Verse a Day Harmful or Helpful?

This got me thinking about “verse of the day” emails or “Scripture of the day” selections on Bible apps. Up until now, my posture has been largely positive. Better to read and focus on one Scripture a day than none at all, right? Isn’t it better to encourage someone who treats the Bible like a vitamin to build from there toward more substantive habits than for them not to encounter a daily Bible verse at all?

I’m not so sure anymore. I’ve grown more cautious about the overall effectiveness of this approach, because even when the verse is true as it stands (not something egregious from Job’s friends), the untrained reader could still be led astray.

When the verse is drawn from a clear statement like John 1:1—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”—it can be a wonderful prompt. Readers familiar with John’s Gospel will likely reflect on this statement within its context, meditating on the Son of God’s eternal glory, or perhaps being drawn toward the incarnation, as described later in the chapter—the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us.

Similarly, a verse like Matthew 5:3—“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs”—will bring to mind Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and maybe a few more of the Beatitudes, the characteristics of God’s kingdom people.

But for someone just beginning their faith journey, a “verse of the day” practice may do more harm than good. Without aids for interpretation, the verses get consumed in ways that resemble a horoscope or a fortune cookie. A statement in Ecclesiastes may be drenched in irony the casual reader misses, or the reader may mistake the genre and claim a verse from Proverbs as a specific promise true for every situation, rather than recognize it as a general observation of how the world works.

More Bible, More Food

I worry that out-of-context inspirational verses may tilt the untrained reader’s expectations of the Christian life toward the prosperity gospel. This sets up new believers for failure.

When suffering crashes into their life, the person whose Bible reading consists of bite-size verses will be more prone to disillusionment. It’s likely theirs will be a fragile faith, built more on emotional well-being and positive vibes from “everyday verses” than on the rock-solid foundation of God’s sovereignty and goodness as revealed throughout Scripture, or the richness of biblical teaching about the relationship between sin and sorrow.

That’s why I’m more ambivalent these days about consuming a “verse of the day”—at least when the reader is someone new to the faith or young in the Scriptures. I’m more inclined to encourage people away from this practice if it’s their primary encounter with God’s Word. I recommend other resources and habits that will deliver more nutritious spiritual sustenance. God’s Word is a feast, not a vitamin supplement or fortune cookie.

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Paul Kingsnorth’s 2024 Erasmus Lecture, “Against Christian Civilization,” is the best kind of audacious. Delivering his ideas under the banner of First Things—a publication devoted to religion in public life and with a history of defending the Christian faith’s cultural contributions—Kingsnorth takes a contrarian stance, critiquing the concept of “Christian civilization.” As a recent convert to Christianity (he was baptized in the Romanian Orthodox Church in 2021), Kingsnorth in this lecture bears all the passion and provocation of a new believer who wants the world and the church to bear faithful witness to the treasure of the gospel.

I found much to appreciate in Kingsnorth’s lecture—plenty of insight, the mark of an original thinker who has, in recent years, delivered prophetic words against the Machine (his memorable image of humanity’s efforts to bring everything under our dominion so it’s controllable and at our service). But here, his sweeping arguments against Christian civilization are hindered by significant gaps. His warnings are often on point, but his reductive take on the nature of culture and civilization blunts their force.

What Kingsnorth Gets Right

First, there’s a refreshing boldness to Kingsnorth’s critique, something Kierkegaardian in his take—a shot of strong drink intended to wake the bleary-eyed Westerner. It takes courage to question the idea of “Christian civilization” in a setting that has often championed it. Kingsnorth invites us to reconsider what it means to follow Jesus in a way that transcends not only the political but also the civilizational aspirations of people in our day.

Second, Kingsnorth’s warning against instrumentalizing Christianity is timely. He is right to critique the tendency of a growing number of intellectuals on the right who see the Christian faith as primarily useful in the culture wars—a helpful tool in preserving what’s best in our society or a bulwark against dehumanizing ideologies—regardless of its truth.

As examples, he points to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s essay explaining why she jettisoned atheism for Christianity and to Jordan Peterson’s message to Christian churches, the latter of which is notable for the total absence of any reference to Jesus. Kingsnorth will not abide any attempt to skate around the fundamental fact of Christ crucified and raised, as if one could harness Christianity’s symbolic power for an earthly agenda. When the cross gets pushed out of the center of Christianity and replaced by a cause—even a righteous one!—the gospel is robbed of its distinctiveness and power. On the danger of subordinating Christianity as a tool, Kingsnorth summons C. S. Lewis, who wrote,

That brings us to the third strength of this essay—Kingsnorth’s call to personal holiness. In an age where social activism overshadows spiritual formation, his focus on intimacy with God and a sanctified life calls us back to what should remain central for all Christians everywhere. Likewise, in recalling the radical nature of Jesus’s teachings, Kingsnorth pushes back against the tendency of every generation to water down Christ’s demands or bury his startling sayings under layers of commentary and tradition, as if never-ending dialogue and debate over Christ’s words can shield us from the call to obedience.

Where Kingsnorth Misses the Mark

As much as I enjoyed the provocations of Kingsnorth’s lecture, several weaknesses stand out.

First, his biblical framework is incomplete. Kingsnorth rightly draws attention to the garden imagery in Genesis, but he fails to trace Scripture’s trajectory from the garden to the city. He describes a world where every civilization is pervasively and inescapably idolatrous—through and through. But the Bible doesn’t condemn all civilizational efforts; it points to a future where human cultures are redeemed and glorified.

For example, the multiplicity of languages may be a result of God’s judgment at Babel, yet the distinctive beauty of various languages and accents will not disappear on the last day. Civilization is part of God’s plan, and one day, even the sin-stained elements will be redeemed for his glory. The vision of the new Jerusalem in Revelation isn’t a return to a primitive state but the culmination of God’s redemptive work—a city where kings bring to the Lord the cultural tribute of their peoples.

Along these lines, Kingsnorth’s critique of civilization is exclusively negative. He portrays the Western world as irredeemably corrupt, rooted in and driven by the seven deadly sins. And while, yes, we can observe with Kingsnorth the pernicious effects of these vices all around us, can we not also see the leavening effects in our civilization of Christianity’s virtues? Must we ignore the existence of hospitals, the building of schools, the expectation that we’d care for the vulnerable, and a call for justice that continues to reverberate throughout the world?

By looking only at the idolatrous aspects of civilization without the countervailing influence of Christianity, it’s as if Kingsnorth has one eye closed, which affects his depth perception. He notices civilization’s sinfulness but misses many of the ways God’s people have been salt and light in the world.

Likewise, Kingsnorth’s suspicion of power structures is one-sided. While authority can be and often is abused, Scripture also teaches that governing authorities can be instruments of God’s common grace. History is replete with examples of leaders who wielded power, albeit imperfectly, to promote justice and human flourishing. Kingsnorth’s approach to authority is almost Anabaptist at this point—as if any collaboration with or involvement in societal power is inherently and inevitably corrupting—which is odd, considering he’s not Mennonite but Orthodox; he belongs to a tradition where, throughout history, church and nation have gotten entangled in multiple ways to the detriment of the faith.

If civilization is inescapably evil, then to truly embrace Christianity will require us to renounce any attempt at creating a Christian society. Radical obedience will require a radical withdrawal. It’s not surprising, then, that Kingsnorth puts forth a semi-monastic vision for believers, lifting up the contributions of monks and mystics as the truest Christians over the centuries. In making this move, however, Kingsnorth misses all the ways monasticism contributed to and served broader civilization-building efforts. Many monks not only prayed but also supported Christian rulers and warriors. There’s an unspoken dichotomy in Kingsnorth’s lecture between mystics and builders—one that can’t be historically sustained.

One last thing: Kingsnorth is a brilliant writer whose description of his conversion to Christianity has inspired me. That’s why it’s disappointing to see him pick apart the initial reasons Hirsi Ali gave for her conversion. Even though his critique has merit, it comes across as someone who’s entered a castle through one door and is chastising someone else entering the same castle through another.

There’s also a lack of self-awareness in a new convert suggesting the witness of most Christians in public life over the past two millennia has been wrongheaded. Or that Christian pastors and theologians have yet to truly wrestle with Jesus’s radical sayings. Kingsnorth is right to call us to repentance; to a love directed first and foremost to God; to engage in battles from and for love, not out of disdain or hatred of the enemy. But he’s wrong to presume an absence of God-and-neighbor love in the imperfect efforts of Christians who have influenced civilization over the centuries or of those Christians who continue to work for the betterment of the world today.

Better Vision

“Against Christian Civilization” is laudable in many ways, well worth your time and consideration. It’s beneficial to feel the full force of Kingsnorth’s prophetic broadside. And yet we mustn’t respond to modern attempts to instrumentalize Christianity by reducing the faith to a mystical, otherworldly retreat that would rob our neighbors of the goodness of the gospel’s public, transformative implications.

It’s because we love our neighbors that we care about the neighborhood. And that’s what civilization is—a neighborhood of neighborhoods, structured and directed (yes, because of the fall, too often in deformed and distorted ways) toward aims that can be influenced by Christianity, shifted toward a telos intrinsically ennobling, in contrast to the secular humanist, ethnonationalist, expressive individualist, technocratic empire (“the Machine”) Kingsnorth rightly recoils from.

An overly negative view of civilization will not help us resist treating Christianity as a tool for an agenda subordinate to Christ’s Great Commission. What we need is to remember our calling—not to retreat from the world or romanticize a return to the garden but, instead, to make disciples in hope, anticipating the coming of the new Jerusalem. Christianity’s leavening effect on civilization isn’t an idol; it’s a fruit of the gospel’s transformative power.

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Is there a massive movement of young men to Eastern Orthodoxy? The New York Post seems to think so. A viral article by Rikki Schlott last fall painted a dramatic picture of young men converting to Orthodox Christianity “in droves.”

As someone curious about denominational trends and with missionary experience in a culture dominated by Orthodoxy, I read the report with interest. But I found it heavy on stories and light on stats.

Appeal of Orthodoxy

The young men interviewed in Schlott’s article shared why they find Orthodoxy attractive. They desire something unchanging in a world of flux. They’re disillusioned by the perceived superficiality of what they’ve experienced in many Protestant contexts: short worship services, TED Talk–like sermons, and a version of Christianity that demands little in terms of daily habits and disciplines. In contrast, Orthodoxy offers structure and continuity—rigid, unbending traditions that require frequent confession, prescribed prayers, fasting, and long worship services.

Father Josiah Trenham, a priest in California, says his church is part of a “massive uptick” in conversions. A catechist in his church highlights the “call to adventure” Orthodoxy provides, describing its traditional practices as “masculine,” something exciting for young men on “a journey of self-improvement.” (This trend aligns with the broader cultural turn toward neo-Stoicism and figures like Jordan Peterson who inspire young men to seek rootedness and structure in a chaotic world.)

Numbers Behind the Stories

The article does include one stat—a 78 percent increase in converts to Orthodoxy in 2022 compared to prepandemic levels. That’s a striking number, but it needs context.

Ryan Burge’s forthcoming book from Oxford University Press, The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends, and the Future, provides a bigger picture. From 2010 to 2020, the number of Orthodox adherents in the United States declined from 817,000 to 676,000, with regular attendees dropping from 212,000 to 183,000. A different survey, however, shows a modest increase in adherents from 0.4 percent to 0.7 percent of the population.

Why point to the numbers? Because Orthodoxy is a tiny tradition in the States, smaller even than the liberal United Church of Christ. For perspective, there are more than four times as many Baptist churches in my home state of Tennessee alone as there are Orthodox churches in the entire country. Eight of the 10 U.S. counties with the largest Orthodox populations are in Alaska, a fact that reflects Orthodoxy’s historical ties to Russia.

Speaking of Russia, immigration plays a significant role in Orthodoxy’s American story. Burge points out that only a quarter of Orthodox adherents have been in the States for three or more generations. Twenty-seven percent are immigrants, and another 27 percent are children of immigrants. Having lived in Romania, I’ve seen how Orthodoxy intertwines with national identity and how that cultural identity then shifts and stabilizes when people are on the move. New converts drawn to the strangeness or otherworldliness of Orthodox worship are also encountering, in Orthodox communities, the “foreignness” of other peoples transplanted into the American context.

The internet plays a role here, as Schlott’s report shows. If I hadn’t married a Romanian, it’s possible my great-grandmother and my grandparents would’ve gone their entire lives without ever encountering an Orthodox Christian. But YouTube has made all kinds of Christian traditions “accessible.” Wings of the church that young men never knew existed now come into view, with the internet giving voice to traditions, large and small, across the spectrum. The irony is, it’s a technologically connected, consumerist-influenced culture that makes some of these conversion stories to an “unchanging” tradition possible.

Put Growth in Perspective

Orthodoxy shows signs of vitality. The average age of attendees is 42, with 62 percent between 18 and 45. That’s significantly younger than other major traditions. Attendance has also increased slightly, bucking broader secularization trends.

Still, we ought to proceed with caution in how we interpret recent shifts. Percentage increases can seem dramatic when the baseline is small. A church growing from 40 to 80 members can breathlessly announce their 100 percent growth year over year, but it’s the same numerical increase as a church growing just 10 percent (from 400 to 440 members). A small parish of 20 people can triple its numbers but still only have 60 attendees.

It’s also worth noting that more Orthodox adherents convert to evangelical churches than vice versa, following broader immigration trends where Catholics (often from Mexico or South America) are more likely to become nondenominational charismatics than American Protestants are to become Catholic. Much of Orthodoxy’s recent growth appears to stem not from secular or irreligious individuals converting to Christianity but from disillusioned Protestants discovering the rich history of Orthodox theology and worship via the internet.

Lessons for Evangelicals

All that said, evangelical Christians can learn from recent trends. Here are a few takeaways.

1. Nominal Christianity Is a Turn-Off

Young people are hungry for vibrant, immersive faith, not a watered-down version of Christianity that makes few demands. This phenomenon isn’t unique to the United States. In Orthodox-majority countries, where faith is often cultural and superficial, young people also seek a real encounter with Jesus, which is why many become Baptists or Pentecostals. We’ve got to look beyond the expression of a particular faith tradition to the underlying reality of regeneration and the call of Jesus to faithful obedience. Pastors and church leaders must model and hand down a faith where following Jesus is central, not a peripheral “hobby” for someone who wants to engage their “spiritual side.”

2. Stability Is Compelling

In a chaotic world, young men crave rootedness and structure. Orthodoxy’s unchanging traditions appeal to this desire. As evangelicals, we can also rise to this challenge by tracing the line from current practices to the church’s ancient roots. There are ways of connecting what we do on a given Sunday to the church’s ancient traditions, of reminding our people we aren’t the first to discover and hear the sacred Scriptures and to better familiarize ourselves with our tradition. We should remind people our faith is grounded in the gospel and apostolic witness, not in chasing innovation. The goal is a fresh expression of what’s ancient, not a faddish embrace of the aesthetics of antiquity.

3. Rigor and Discipline Are Attractive

Many young men seek structure, discipline, and rigor in their faith. Gen Z wants a serious faith. Evangelicals have a rich tradition of spiritual practices that can meet this need without slipping into a gospel-less legalism or a “journey of self-improvement” you can find on offer scrolling through Instagram reels. We need to recapture the spiritual practices and postures that bring about true life-change—where the Spirit does his work in and through us. Without the gospel’s transforming power, discipline becomes just another man-centered approach to religion.

4. Worship Must Be God-Centered

Over the past few decades, as Gavin Ortlund points out in his video responding to the Schlott article, evangelical worship has sometimes slipped into something entertainment-driven and has lost a sense of God’s transcendence. Critics of Protestantism often highlight our weakest practices, presenting them as representative of the whole. But within our tradition, we have worship practices intended to lift us beyond ourselves, to anchor us in history, and to challenge us with the gospel afresh.

One young convert in the Post article expressed it well: “Orthodoxy isn’t about us, it’s about God.” That ought to apply to all of us, no matter what tradition we belong to. All Christian worship should center on God, not us. If there’s one takeaway from this report, it’s the need for renewed God-centeredness in our worship.

Call to Intentionality

The appeal of Orthodoxy to young men highlights a hunger for depth, structure, and transcendence in the Christian life. I feel the need to put these statistics in a broader context so we don’t overstate the trends indicated by the headlines, but I do hope evangelicals will heed these stories as a challenge to recover and embody the richness of our own tradition.

Let’s model a faith that’s vibrant, rooted, disciplined, and, above all, centered on God.

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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 2024.

#1. THEO OF GOLDEN
by Allen Levi

This book wrecked me. The mystery of the storyline captured my imagination, but it was the characters who pushed their way into my heart. I was drawn as if by fire to the central character, whose sanctity gently exposed my innate selfishness and inability to see—really see—people God puts in my path. I wept at the end, stirred with compassion for others, longing for growth in love and holiness. I knew when I closed the book I was unlikely to find another this year that would top it. Nothing else came close. O to be a saint! 

#2. THE LORD OF PSALM 23
Jesus Our Shepherd, Companion, and Host
by David Gibson

David Gibson’s careful, contemplative treatment of one of the best-known psalms provides a rich devotional experience that left me longing to simply linger with the Lord in times of prayer and Bible reading. This little book is filled with insight into the goodness and greatness of Jesus as our Shepherd and deserves a place on the shelf as an example of the best devotional literature of the first quarter of this century.

#3. ELISABETH ELLIOT
A Life
by Lucy S. R. Austen

Lucy Austen’s biography of Elisabeth Elliot paints an honest and multifaceted portrait of a remarkable woman, highlighting her courage, theological growth, and humanity. While many recognize Elisabeth as the widow of missionary martyr Jim Elliot, Austen focuses on her life after the tragedy—her resilience, ministry, and struggles with doubt and disillusionment. This biography doesn’t gloss over challenges or romanticize Elisabeth’s life; instead, it shows her as a thinker who grew spiritually through life’s mysteries and contradictions. I closed the book with gratitude for a valiant woman who knew both her sins and her Savior. Read my full review.

#4. THE ANXIOUS GENERATION
How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
by Jonathan Haidt

This year’s best work of sociology and cultural analysis. Haidt’s book paints a grim picture of the generational challenges inherent in the smartphone era, but his perspective provides hope because he shows we can, collectively, make decisions to shift the window of acceptability in educational outcomes, family life, and the restoration of play. This may become one of the year’s most influential books, as it has prompted conversations among lawmakers and leaders in education across the country. Not to be missed.

#5. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Michael R. Katz

This translation of Dostoevsky’s classic is 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. I’m looking forward to reading (again) The Brothers Karamazov in the coming year, but this time in Katz’s translation. He has set a new standard.

#6. KING
A Life
by Jonathan Eig

This biography of Martin Luther King Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize, deservedly so. It’s difficult to pull together exhaustive research and simultaneously tell a story that feels like an adventure. Eig leans into King’s background and education, and his spiritual and theological influences. The biography shines light on King’s personal sense of destiny that was never disconnected from his feelings of inadequacy and guilt-ridden conscience over his sins. King’s relationships are also examined in ways that provide broader context for his ministry and activism. I’ve long recommended Taylor Branch’s trilogy on the civil rights era for the best portrait of King, but now Eig has surpassed Branch by giving us a one-volume biography focused only on King. 

#7. THE ATONEMENT
An Introduction
by Jeremy Treat

Jeremy Treat excels at delivering books marked by theological rigor and a pastoral heart. This accessible introduction to the atonement does more than give the scholarly lay of the land. Jeremy shies away from false dichotomies, choosing instead to magnify the greatness of God’s atoning work on our behalf in all its many facets. Along the way, he incorporates memorable illustrations and analogies, always writing with a doxological bent that engenders gratitude and worship. This book succeeds at several levels.

#8. THE DEMON OF UNREST
A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War 
by Erik Larson

No one recounts history like Erik Larson. He’s a master storyteller, and his latest offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Abraham Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter—a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, enflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. At the heart of this narrative are Major Robert Anderson, Sumter’s commander sympathetic to the South but loyal to the Union; Edmund Ruffin, a radical who stirs secessionist ardor at every opportunity; and Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a prominent planter.

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#9. THE MYTHMAKERS
The Remarkable Fellowship of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien
by John Hendrix

John Hendrix has the honor of delivering the first-ever graphic novel to appear on my Favorite Reads list. This genre isn’t one I’m familiar with, but when I saw this book on a bookstore shelf, I knew immediately it deserved attention. The art is beautiful, the storyline compelling, and the frequent asides educational. As someone who has enjoyed multiple biographies of both Tolkien and Lewis, I was struck by how many anecdotes and facts were new and fresh to me. This retelling of the Lewis and Tolkien friendship was delightful in so many ways.

#10. FRANKENSTEIN
by Mary Shelley

It seems like every year one of my Favorite Reads is an older work suggested by one of my kids. Shelley’s classic came recommended by both my oldest son and my daughter, and Karen Prior’s beautifully crafted edition includes an introduction and some guided reading. I had in my mind a caricature of this book’s storyline and main characters, perhaps due to its cultural influence through movies, parodies, etc. The story provokes a number of ethical questions related to humanity, technology, compassion, and justice. There’s a reason we still talk about this novel.

HONORABLE MENTION

LETTERS ALONG THE WAY
From a Senior Saint to a Junior Saint
by D. A. Carson and John Woodbridge

This new edition of an older work from two evangelical scholars is filled with wisdom and insight. The imaginative elements didn’t really work for me (the construct of an older scholar writing for a younger), but those are overcome by the biblical conviction, pastoral heart, and needed reminders that fill these pages. Anyone who wants to step into a role as pastor-theologian should consult this book. 

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Why step onto the battlefield where the culture wars rage if you can experience the thrill of a fight by shouting at your fellow soldiers in the barracks?

Because I care about the health and vibrancy of the church, and because I want to see a more just and righteous society, I can’t help but be discouraged when I see believers expending more and more energy in opposing and battling the people with whom they share closest alignment than they do making real and enduring strides toward cultural change.

I call it “fighting phantoms.” We yield to this temptation when minor differences begin to loom large, like ghosts haunting every interaction, until they threaten your group’s effectiveness. Whether it’s disagreements over strategy or infighting over issues on the periphery of your primary mission or purpose, the small shadows of difference lengthen into scary specters. Soon you’re swinging your sword at phantoms—wounding the people closest to you while making little to no progress in the cause that once brought you together.

We see phantom-fighting when someone gets elected to office and then spends most of their time chastising their fellow party members rather than working with them to advance legislation. We see it when advocates for a righteous cause focus primarily on calling out their allies over differences in method or strategy. We see it when people who come to the same theological conclusions start opposing each other because of the particular path they took in arriving at those conclusions, or when people in the same theological camp don’t agree exactly on how their vision should inform their church’s practice.

In these cases, the fight has moved from the battlefield to the barracks.

Why Do We Fight Phantoms?

What motivates this strange phenomenon? Is it psychology? Sigmund Freud pointed to “the narcissism of minor differences”—when a group of like-minded individuals, committed to a cause, begin to downplay their similarities and emphasize their divergences to create a new sense of self and superiority. Drawing lines of differentiation is an easy way to stand out, and continual categorization can fast-track a new coalition or identity. Rather than gathering as many people as possible into a coalition to support a cause, the group engages in a purification ritual—saving their strongest fire for those on the periphery of their own side.

Is it technology? Perhaps we should look at the perverse incentives of an increasingly digitalized existence marked by unhealthy habits on social media. Performative individualism has become a marker of online interaction, pressuring us to try on new identities in the back-and-forth of online debate. We settle for signals over substance. Vibes matter more than vision. Outrage trumps outcomes.

Is it institutional weakness? Yuval Levin has pointed to one reason for stagnation in our politics: more and more politicians get rewarded when they use the institution as a platform for popularity instead of submitting to the institution’s norms in a way that would mold and shape their character, a crucial component in forging a lasting movement. The way to get accolades today is through performing online, not finding consensus or seeking to persuade.

I’m sure there’s something to all these explanations, but in the end, there’s a more obvious reason we like fighting phantoms. It’s fun. Exaggerating the differences of the people to your immediate right or left, with whom you agree on 80 to 90 percent of everything, is exciting. It’s not only fun. It’s easy. Once you draw new lines and train your sights on those with whom you once made common cause, you get a sense of satisfaction in creating and belonging to a new in-group. Phantom-fighting provides the false thrill of thinking you’re making a real difference in the battle.

Fighting Phantoms Online Is a Game

Fighting phantoms doesn’t make sense in terms of military strategy. It’s irrational. But it can be fun. Which is why on Twitter (I still refuse to call it X), many of the loudest voices from different sides of the spectrum—those committed to fighting phantoms—often gush about how many people are now following them, or how many views their posts get, or how one of their sick burns “ratioed” some online opponent.

All this talk reveals something important about the online version of fighting phantoms: it’s a game. And games are fun, especially when social media constantly rewards you with the dopamine rush that makes you think you’re winning. The way to “level up” is to reject the boring approach of always railing against those on the other side of the political aisle and to focus instead on the flaws of the people who are largely with you, just divergent in some way. Draw new lines. Narrow the circle, and your voice gets louder.

But only for a time. Eventually, the circles get too narrow, and your online voice diminishes. When the game is over, there’s often little to show for the effort.

Pick Your Battles Wisely

Following Jesus doesn’t resemble the game of phantom-fighting.

A life of virtue is marked by patience, not popping off. A life of wisdom is marked by slowness, not speed. A life of holiness is marked by self-control, not impulsiveness. A life of love is marked by self-giving, not slander.

Yes, disagreements with brothers and sisters will arise. Debate and dialogue will always have a place. People often fit uncomfortably in the same coalition. There’s a place for meaningful discussion over aims and methods, for warnings about unintended consequences, for disagreeing forcefully at times over certain decisions, and, yes, even for parting ways when divergences grow too big. But the fracturing of coalitions should be met with tears, not glee.

What’s more, long-lasting improvements in culture and society are most likely when people press through these challenges and keep their focus on the main battlefield, where the stakes are highest. We must be on guard against the constant temptation to abandon the battlefield in favor of skirmishing in the barracks.

Fighting phantoms is great for attracting attention, but the future belongs to those who know how to make music, not just noise. It’s those who resist the impulse to tear down and learn instead to build who make progress. It’s those who broaden and solidify coalitions, not those who seek short-term profit from every crack and fracture, who experience forward momentum.

A fractured church is a much smaller threat to the Evil One’s schemes than a unified (not uniform) battalion of believers who don’t take their eyes off their primary objective, who lock arms with as many like-minded soldiers as possible, and who devote their lives to Christ’s law of love. “Let us pursue what promotes peace,” Paul tells us, “and what builds up one another” (Rom. 14:19). ‬‬

It’s not fun we’re after but joy. Not the narcissism of small differences but the selflessness of intense devotion. Dressed in truth and righteousness for the gospel of peace, we mustn’t retreat from the spiritual battlefield into the comfort and fun of fighting phantoms.

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In theological circles that stress the pervasiveness of sin, we’re often told we’re more sinful than we realize. We can’t comprehend the extent of sin’s effects: its parasitic attachment to whatever good we do, its potential to taint even the purest of motives, the way it fractures shalom in the tiniest of ways, the resistance of sin’s rebellious heart toward God, or the sly and insidious actions motivated by a quiet fear of people. “Out damned spot!” cried Lady Macbeth after all her futile efforts to get rid of the bloodstains from her complicity with murder.

Even after we’re rescued by Christ—trusting him not only to save us but also to make us more like himself—our sense of our sinfulness grows. The closer we get to Jesus, the more we see and feel our lack of holiness, our stubborn sinful patterns, our spiritual inadequacies. As the extensiveness of their sin dawned on people around pastor Jack Miller, he’d do the opposite of the world that constantly chants “You are enough” and “You are good” by saying instead, “Cheer up! You’re a much bigger sinner than you think!”

Yes, we’re far more sinful than we can comprehend, and we’re guilty even of sins we’re unaware of, the sins the psalmist asks forgiveness for, our “hidden faults” (Ps. 19:12–13) that require purification.

Unseen Holiness of Christ in Us

But there’s a flip side to this lack of awareness of how deep our sins go. Sometimes, the believers most likely to harp on how sinful we are miss the other side of sanctification, an element of the good news that’s every bit as powerful and life-changing. It’s this: You don’t realize the pervasiveness of Christ’s holiness in you. A Christian living by the Spirit does far more good than he or she even realizes.

Isn’t that what we see when Jesus separates the sheep and the goats and then begins to list off the good things his followers have done? “Lord, when did we do these things?” comes the question (Matt. 25:31–46). They’re gobsmacked. They can’t even recall all the good things they did, whether large or small. The closer you get to Jesus, the more you spot your lingering sins, yes, and the less you feel your progress in holiness. But that progress is there nonetheless.

In his recent book of reflections on Christ’s second coming, Come, Lord Jesus, John Piper reflects on the astounding promise of Ephesians 6:7–8: “Serve with a good attitude, as to the Lord and not to people, knowing that whatever good each one does, slave or free, he will receive this back from the Lord.”

Whatever good each one does will be rewarded. Whatever good. Every good thing. Not just the big and noticeable good things but also the smallest acts of kindness, forbearance, patience, and love that, over time, come like second nature to you—all will be rewarded at the day of Christ. Even the seeming insignificance of giving “a cup of cold water” to one of Christ’s followers (Matt. 10:42) is counted in the economy of God’s kingdom. Piper urges us to consider the ramifications of this truth:

Every Good Deed Counted

Not long ago, I reflected on the biblical truth that the Lord is El-Roi, the One who sees us. He’s the Lord who sees all our sins and hidden faults, yes. But he’s also the Lord who sees all the goodness he’s working in and through us, the character traits and fruit of which we remain unaware. Piper reminds us that not only does the Lord see our good deeds, but he also promises to reward them. All of them. Piper continues,

But, you say, I have so many shortcomings! I have so many flaws! I’m hobbled by so many faults! Yes. The Lord knows. And he’ll burn away all that dross to show the gold he has formed inside. We aim to persevere, to remember that even if our good deeds pass by without notice in this life, we trust in Jesus’s promise to repay his people at the resurrection.

Our future will be like that of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, where by grace we’re made aware of every single ripple effect of every single good thing we ever did through the power of Christ’s Spirit. That’s the wonderful promise from our wonderful Savior who multiples his life into a million wonderful lives. Bank on it.

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Not since the 1300s, when the world’s population imploded due to the bubonic plague, have we faced a demographic downsizing of the magnitude projected for the century ahead. Many observers predict the global population will peak in the coming decades, with estimates ranging from 2053 to the late 2070s or 2080s, before entering a period of decline.

Wait a minute! you may be thinking. Wasn’t it just 50 years ago that experts warned about overpopulation? And don’t we hear constant talk of the world’s population boom? Yes, but as Peter Zeihan explains in The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, today’s population swell is partly due to increasing life spans.

The Age of Depopulation

Nicholas Eberstadt’s recent essay for Foreign Affairs, “The Age of Depopulation,” chronicles the startling collapse in global fertility rates, which have fallen to half what they were in the 1960s. “More and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation,” he writes. East Asia, for instance, “tipped into depopulation in 2021,” while Latin America and parts of the Middle East now face subreplacement fertility rates also. Even countries once thought immune due to cultural or religious traditions, such as Iran and Turkey, are on a similar trajectory. Unless you live in sub-Saharan Africa, you likely reside in a country with subreplacement fertility—a trend accelerating in recent years.

What’s behind this decline in childbearing? Eberstadt points to a “revolution in family formation.” Across the globe, we see “the ‘flight from marriage,’ with people getting married at later ages or not at all; the spread of nonmarital cohabitation . . . and the increase in homes in which one person lives independently—in other words, alone.” This seismic cultural shift means fewer children and smaller, more fragile families.

As families wither, the desire for autonomy, self-actualization, and convenience rises. In this atmosphere, children are “quintessentially inconvenient” and big families become cultural outliers. It’s true that religious belief can stem the tide by encouraging marriage and celebrating children, but only up to a point, because family formation and religious participation are intertwined in counterintuitive ways. (See Mary Eberstadt’s How the West Really Lost God for the provocative thesis that secularism is a result of family breakdown, not always its cause.)

The Age of the Aged

The world’s depopulation will unleash a cascade of social consequences. The collapse of fertility means, according to Nicholas Eberstadt, “fewer workers, savers, taxpayers, renters, home buyers, entrepreneurs, innovators, inventors . . . and voters.” What’s more, by 2050, there will be more people over the age of 80 than children in some countries. He writes,

We’re entering an era of profound social and economic challenges, a wildly different context marked by the thinning out of younger generations and the swelling ranks of older people with increasing life spans.

Depopulation and the Church

What will these developments mean for the global church and our mission?

1. We’ll have to reckon with an aging society in the days ahead.

The recent State of the Great Commission Report released before the Fourth Lausanne Congress highlights the extensive needs of an aging population and lays out opportunities for the church to step into the gap. We’ll need to shift our attention from seeing older believers as merely the recipients of care and attention to engaging them as colaborers in their extended years of good health and ministry. From supporting multigenerational families to pushing back against trends of isolation and loneliness to offering spiritual formation and ministry opportunities for the elderly, we’ll need to find ways to minister to and alongside older believers.

2. The depopulation crisis calls for a renewed commitment to strengthening marriages, supporting families, and celebrating children.

In a world that prizes autonomy and convenience, the church can model a different way—a way of sacrificial love, covenantal commitment, and the beauty of generational faithfulness.

It’s true the “nones” are on the rise in the West, but globally, Pew Research Forum predicts “secular” people in 2060 will make up a smaller percentage of the world’s population than they do today, mainly because of demographic trends. Eric Kaufmann’s book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? claims the future will belong not to secular elites but to grassroots communities marked by deep faith.

Ross Douthat, longtime observer of demographic trends, thinks countries that keep or boost their birthrates close to replacement level will have an edge over countries whose rates continue to plunge. And even within countries where fertility is collapsing, regions that buck the trend will become outliers with outsize cultural influence: “To predict the most dynamic American states and cities, the most influential religious traditions and ideologies,” he writes, “look for places and groups that are friendliest not just to the young but to young people having kids themselves.”

3. The depopulation crisis will require more ministry to and alongside singles.

In a world with more single-person households and fewer people with extended family ties, the church will need to step in as the family of God by providing friendship in a world of isolation, and new support systems for people strained by economic or social pressures. Ministry in this world will not overlook but assume the presence of singles (and not as second-class citizens in God’s kingdom).

You might feel tension between points 2 and 3, and understandably so. Figuring out how to gently encourage marriage and childbearing among Christian young people while also supporting and cherishing those called to singleness (whether temporarily or for a lifetime)—knowing where and when to put which emphasis—will not be easy or obvious. Some will resolve the tension by falling down on one side of that line or the other, and that’s what we see in most churches today, an either-or that doesn’t incorporate the whole body of Christ.

If we make it seem as if marriage and family represent the only faithful way of life, we’ll leave out large swaths of the unfolding mission field made up of aging single seniors. And if we downplay marriage and family life, even though it has been the norm for most people throughout history, we may wind up contributing to the demographic trends on the horizon instead of resisting them. We mustn’t hobble ourselves during a time when we need all Christians with different passions, gifts, and callings mobilized to address the needs before us.

Looking Forward

The demographic challenges ahead are immense. The solution isn’t to merely decry the reasons for the demographic decline, as if we’re chastisers of the culture we’re called to serve. No, we walk forward in faith, knowing that the church has faced significant changes in the past.

Our hope isn’t in birth rates or demographic trends but in the Lord of the harvest. Fulfilling the Great Commission is the only way to ensure the continued presence of vibrant, resilient Christian communities that disciple and send out believers to live as salt and light in a depopulating world.

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A consistent struggle of mine is listening. I mean really listening. My mind always seems to run a hundred miles an hour, jumping from one thought to the next. I’ll focus on someone talking to me for a bit and even take in what they’re saying—but soon enough, I’m also thinking about what tasks I have ahead, what’s next on my schedule, an idea for a new column, a family member or friend, a podcast segment, or my next meal! So, truth be told, I’m often only half-listening.

My friends might not say I’m a bad listener, but my colleagues can tell when my mind has wandered. And my family? They’d probably say my listening skills need work (mine are abysmal compared to my wife’s!). Maybe I’ve improved a little over the years, but slowing my mind down enough to give full attention is still something I have to work at.

Art of Slowing Down

In her recent book The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, Christine Rosen explores how challenging it has become in our digital age to give ourselves over to the beauty of poetry, music, and art. Distraction reigns, and we rarely slow down to fully engage with what’s in front of us. She shares a well-known quote: “Most works of art yield their secrets slowly.”

If that’s true of art, how much more so of Scripture? The Bible isn’t an easy book. Saying it’s not easy doesn’t mean we can’t grasp its main message—Scripture clearly reveals salvation. But the Bible makes demands of us. It calls for thought, patience, and devotion. The path to truly internalizing and digesting Scripture is rugged, intentionally so, for this is how the Spirit does his work in our lives.

A Call to Listen Beyond the Noise

Why is it so hard for us to really hear God’s Word in our time? I could point to our phones and devices, our busy schedules, or the endless stream of information—the overload, the barrage, the constant influx of news and opinions competing for our attention. But what if some of our distraction comes from a different source? What if part of the difficulty comes from religious routines that relegate God’s Word to background chatter, like a radio playing in a dentist’s office?

What if our religious activity, even our church involvement, sometimes keeps us from truly hearing? To the point that when God does speak to us through his Word, we don’t even know how to respond? So we jump to planning, preparing, even talking over him. Do we use our busyness in ministry to evade that Voice?

Consider Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration. There he was, beholding Jesus in radiant glory, flanked by Elijah and Moses. And what was his first reaction? Talking. Planning. Suggesting. Strategizing. Rushing to do something—until the Father’s voice interrupted: “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him!”

The command isn’t to start doing anything, much less to say anything. Not in that moment, no. It’s to listen. When you encounter God’s transcendent glory in the face of Jesus Christ, religiosity is stripped away. Good intentions melt. Spiritual disciplines shrink. Our task is to listen.

Listen Until It Hurts

John Webster wrote,

Real listening. Intense listening. Listening that hurts. Burrowing deep into the Scriptures, with patience and determination, trusting the Spirit to unveil riches and depths we couldn’t see before.

We live in a world where many voices seek attention, where influencers everywhere hawk their wares. In a world teeming with voices and influencers, how tragic if the church becomes just another place of constant noise, with God’s Word relegated to background chatter. How tragic if we develop the capacity to attune to everything but our Creator’s Word.

Perhaps the most radical, countercultural practice we could cultivate today is an intensity in listening to the Scriptures—a steadfast attention that refuses to allow anything to wrest our focus from the Bible. To listen until it hurts, as Jacob wrestled with God, refusing to let go until he was blessed.

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“Read your Bible, pray every day, and you’ll grow, grow, grow.” This song was omnipresent in my earliest years of church life, chosen by Sunday-school teachers because of its simple message (and its corresponding motions for fidgety kids). The song presents a general truth: spiritual growth is linked to spiritual sustenance. We receive nourishment from the Scriptures and abide in Christ through prayer. Naturally then, Bible reading and prayer are crucial for spiritual growth.

But these practices don’t guarantee results. No foolproof formula exists. Many believers striving to overcome persistent sins often feel their Bible reading or prayer doesn’t bring victory. They seek spiritual nourishment but still feel stuck in their struggles. Likewise, history shows that daily Bible readers and those committed to prayer can sometimes become self-righteous, more like the Pharisee than the tax collector in Jesus’s parable. Reading the Bible won’t necessarily make you holier; it could make you holier-than-thou.

Search for the Perfect Technique

When the Christian life doesn’t follow the simple, formulaic approach we learned as children, we often seek new methods. We hunt for the perfect technique or tool to maximize our Bible reading or make us more consistent in prayer. What practices will transform my life? What rhythms, formulas, or liturgies might help me gain the most from spiritual disciplines?

We live in an era flooded with life hacks—new exercise regimens, cooking recipes, productivity shortcuts, and self-optimization strategies. The message is clear: Find the right technique and everything will change. We’re bombarded with marketing, which influences how we think, even in spiritual matters. This hyperfocus on techniques and disciplines often drives our conversations about spiritual formation. We’re drawn to it because of our consumer society and our hearts’ inclination toward self-justification. The desire for self-optimization warps into the belief we’re responsible for our spiritual growth.

Slow Road to Holiness

The result for spiritual formation? Almost all our attention goes to the habits of formation, and little to none to the Spirit’s part in spiritual growth. This misplaced emphasis has consequences. When we trust in techniques, we sideline the Spirit. Our focus shifts from God’s grace in sanctification to external outcomes. We grow frustrated with the slow pace of our spiritual journey, expecting faster progress toward holiness.

But life hacks don’t remove our sins. Habits aren’t a shortcut to holiness. Techniques can turn into steroid shots for muscles: impressive in their initial results while doing long-term damage.

Abiding in Christ over Technique

To be clear, different methods and techniques for Bible reading, prayer, and fasting can be helpful. I’ve personally encouraged a “daily office” of prayer through significant portions of Scripture. I hope these tools are beneficial and that, as the song says, if you use them daily, you’ll “grow, grow, grow.”

But spiritual growth isn’t a checklist. In our world of tracking heart rates, steps, calorie intake, and exercise routines, it’s easy to add Bible reading to the list of tasks we accomplish each day. But keeping a daily Bible reading streak on our app doesn’t mean we’re becoming more like Christ. We may start to wonder why we still struggle with certain sins or why these practices don’t seem to deliver the promised transformation. Over time, we might abandon these practices, believing they don’t work.

The truth is, spiritual growth takes time. Life is full of constraints, and many of the distractions and frustrations and even the people we may think are getting in the way of our disciplined routines are themselves the slow but necessary pathway to holiness.

When I speak with older believers who radiate the joy of Jesus, they often talk about their lingering sins and how their progress is far from where they’d like it to be. They remind me of Paul, who called himself the chief of sinners, but one who was running toward the prize.

The center of spiritual formation isn’t about what you do or the practices you adopt—it’s about the Spirit forming you into Christ’s image. The spiritual life is more about learning to abide in Christ than about following a pattern or liturgy, however helpful your practices may be. The point isn’t just to do your duty but to trust the Spirit to transpose your desires and transform you into a different kind of person over time.

Mystery of Spiritual Growth

Spiritual growth requires attention. And attention is our most precious resource. Prayer is hard, often boring, and sometimes excruciating. Sitting in silence before God while our thoughts flit about can be a painfully revealing process of where our hearts are drawn. Kyle Strobel warns that we might turn to tools and techniques as a way to avoid a genuine encounter with God. Blaise Pascal noted that humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly alone in a room. If that was true in his day, how much more so in our age of endless distractions?

Life hacks prioritize speed and efficiency, and they promise quick results. Yet those who walk with grace over decades often seem unhurried. They don’t obsess over tools or methods. They embrace each moment as a gift, focus on the person before them, and don’t view prayer as a productivity tool but as a way to commune with God. Setbacks and distractions aren’t obstacles to spiritual growth but part of the process of renewal.

I’m grateful for the tools and techniques that aid in spiritual growth. But I’m even more thankful we cannot life-hack our way to holiness. The Spirit is essential, not peripheral. His work is mysterious, not manageable. Miraculous, not marketable. And for sinners in need of his sanctifying work, that’s really good news.

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I recently finished an almost year-long stint as interim pastor for a vibrant church just a half hour from my home. It’s always a blessing to open God’s Word for God’s people week after week and to pray for and give guidance to a staff and congregation during a time of transition.

Not long ago, I took one of the church members to lunch, a guy in his 30s who grew up as part of the congregation and had recently found his way back. Over a basket of chicken tenders and fries, he raved about the woman who teaches the third-grade Sunday school class his son attends. It’s the same woman who taught him Sunday school at that age. Thirty years later, she’s still in the role.

“She doesn’t play around,” he said. “She knows the Word she’s going to teach those kids, she comes prepared, she stays on point, and she does her job with excellence. What she did for me she’s now doing for my son. That’s special.”

Celebrate Consistency

Sometimes we wonder how frequent or how rare it is to find examples of people that consistent and faithful over so many years to the same ministry. In my experience, the cases are more frequent than we think, but it’s rare that we hear about or celebrate these people.

The persevering Sunday school teacher is the unsung hero of the church. Everyone can see the preacher on Sunday. The same goes for the worship team or the instrumentalists. Or the short-term mission teams that go out and do service in the name of the Lord and then come back and give testimony. But few take notice of the faithful Sunday school teacher—the man or woman in the background laboring over a Bible lesson, incorporating new ways to engage children with the truth of God’s Word, and following up with prayer and support as the kids grow up.

Committed Sunday school teachers are a big part of what makes discipleship effective. Yet how often do we let weeks and years go by without lifting up their example or celebrating their faithfulness? These leaders are like the part of the engine that only the mechanic can see yet that’s still critical to the car’s well-being and functionality.

Influence of Group Leaders

And let’s not just brag on Sunday school teachers devoted to kids. A faithful man or woman who prepares a Bible study for an adult class every week for a period of five years will perform this task 250 times. If your Sunday school teacher has been serving for 10 years, they’ve probably done 500 Bible studies. The 20-year veterans have taught 1,000 hours (and that doesn’t count the time spent in preparation).

What’s funny, most group leaders tell me that when they started, they had no idea how long their service would be. Often they begin as a coteacher, or a fill-in for someone else, or they agree to one year . . . and that ministry gets extended again and again, like renewing a contract they never signed. Over time, they develop the knack for leading others into an encounter with God’s Word. They learn to enjoy the regular routine of preparing a lesson and how it reinvigorates their personal Bible study. They deepen relationships with the people they’ve shared life with, men and women who’ve passed in and out of their group.

These are unsung heroes. The church is full of them. So is the Bible.

In Colossians 4, the apostle Paul highlights 10 lesser-known figures from the early church. In Tychicus, we have an example of encouraging one another through God’s Word, while Onesimus illustrates how the gospel transforms lives, turning the “useless” into the “useful.” Aristarchus exemplifies the importance of sharing in both joys and sufferings, and Mark teaches us the value of resilience as he overcame past failures and became the writer of one of the four Gospels. Justus models a primary identity grounded in Christ, and Epaphras shows us how to contend for others in prayer. Luke the doctor demonstrates how our professions can serve God’s glory, while Demas serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of worldliness. Nympha shows that even small contributions can have significant effects, and Archippus challenges us to remain faithful to our callings.

And let’s not forget the profound influence of Lois and Eunice on Timothy, as noted in 2 Timothy 1:5. These two women instilled in Timothy a faith that would shape his ministry and influence the early church. The most significant contributions to the kingdom often come from those who never stand in the spotlight.

Look around your church and find the unsung heroes. They don’t want you to sing their praises. They’ll be perfectly content if you direct that praise to the God who called and equipped them for ministry. So let’s make sure we do so. Let’s offer gratitude for the plodding, persevering work of God’s people who devote countless unseen hours to serving the next generation. Church wouldn’t be church without them.

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I admit there’s hyperbole in that headline. It’s hard to imagine any modern-day hymn matching the influence of Stuart Townend and Keith Getty’s “In Christ Alone,” which in the past 25 years has inspired translations and countless covers, uniting believers worldwide in a song that tells the gospel story. Keith has often joked about that early collaboration being their greatest, with self-deprecating comments like “It’s all downhill from here!”

But recently, there’s been a big bump on that “downhill” journey, and it’s called “Christus Victor (Amen).” This song, introduced in September at the 2024 Sing! Conference, strikes a powerful chord. I first encountered it in South Korea, when the Gettys led worship at the Fourth Lausanne Congress, introducing it to a gathering of 5,000 representatives from over 220 nations.

I was impressed by the song’s power and the seemingly magical way the Gettys in just moments had everyone united in worship—most of whom didn’t speak English as their first language, singing at the top of their lungs with passion and confidence. (Interestingly, the Third Lausanne Congress in Cape Town in 2010 closed with “In Christ Alone,” and the intent was to have the Fourth Congress finish the same way. But once the conference organizers saw how participants responded to “Christus Victor (Amen),” they opted for the newer song to be the benediction.)

The singability of the Gettys’ catalog sets their work apart. I’ve long been thankful for their goal in fulfilling what should be the desire of every worship leader—to enable and enhance the congregation’s singing, not to show off one’s own talents or vocal ability. “Christus Victor (Amen)” shares this quality. I can see this song becoming one of the most influential of their later career. Now that the Sing! Conference version has been released, my assessment stands: This song is among the greatest the church has received in recent years.

The verses are the result of years of collaboration between the Gettys, Matt Papa, Bryan Fowler, and Matt Boswell. Keith shared that the chorus melody came suddenly during a drive in Nashville while chatting with Kristyn. The “Amen” bridge recalls the classic tradition of harmonizing together as a local congregation.

What makes “Christus Victor (Amen)” remarkable is its unique blend of melody and biblically rich lyrics, focused on Jesus’s triumph (the “Christus Victor” theme), while emphasizing his substitutionary atonement as the means of that triumph. It reminds me of Jeremy Treat’s excellent work, in both The Crucified King and The Atonement, which holds together what too many theologians would rather separate.

Take a look at the song’s first verse:

O Most High, King of the ages
Great I AM, God of wonders
By the blood You have redeemed us
Led us through mighty waters
Our strength, our song, our sure salvation

Here, we’re in Exodus. We sing to the Lord as “the Great I AM,” the “God of wonders” whose power was demonstrated in the plagues that came on Egypt. “By the blood” refers to the sacrifice of the Passover lamb, and being led “through mighty waters” imagines us walking through the Red Sea and straight into Miriam’s song of deliverance and the later Song of Moses, praising the Lord “our strength, our song, our sure salvation.”

The chorus then lifts our gaze from one of the first songs of the Bible and carries us to one of the last, in Revelation—one of the throne-room songs.

Now to the Lamb upon the throne
Be blessing, honor, glory, power
For the battle You have won
Hallelujah! Amen

We’re back in the biblical storyline for verse 2, picking up with the Gospels.

O Most High, dwelling among us
Son of man sent for sinners
By Your blood You have redeemed us
Spotless Lamb, mighty Savior
Who lived, who died, who rose victorious

Here, the focus is on the incarnation and ministry of Jesus in bringing about the new exodus. The most high God of verse 1 is now “dwelling among us.” We see the “Son of man sent for sinners.” There’s a subtle shift from gratitude for the blood of the Passover Lamb as a prototype to the deeply personal, from the to Your—Christ’s blood, shed for us, as the “spotless Lamb” and “mighty Savior” whose life, death, and victorious resurrection accomplishes our salvation.

For the second chorus, we flash forward again to Revelation’s throne room, but this time with additional lines that widen the frame so we see people from “every tribe and every tongue” as well as the angels, all celebrating “the triumph of the Son.”

Now to the Lamb upon the throne
Be blessing, honor, glory, power
For the battle You have won
Hallеlujah! Amen
With every tribе and every tongue
We join the anthem of the angels
In the triumph of the Son
Hallelujah! Amen

The final verse looks forward, placing us in the throne room once more but with a view of the future.

O Most High, King of the nations
Robed in praise, crowned with splendor
On that day who will not tremble?
When You stand Christ the Victor
Who was, and is, and is forever

Now we’re looking ahead to the day when Christ will make all things new. The “King of the nations,” acknowledged by people from every tribe, is “robed in praise” and “crowned with splendor.” A line from the Apostles’ Creed, “He will return to judge the living and the dead,” is in view here, as the hymn calls us to ponder “that day,” asking “who will not tremble” when the Lamb upon the throne stands as “Christ the Victor”—the same Jesus “who was, and is and is forever” (evoking verse 1’s description of the Great I AM).

If you’re a worship leader or a pastor, I encourage you to listen to “Christus Victor (Amen)” and consider adding it to your worship services. (Here are some suggestions.) The combination of singability, biblical depth, and theological richness will ground your congregation in gospel truths while uniting them with the church around the world. (If the congregational harmonizing on the “Amen” portion seems too complicated, the song works fine without it!) This hymn has the potential to join the ranks of “In Christ Alone” as an anthem that inspires us for generations. Christ is Victor!

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I’ve noticed something common in the culture of student ministry, something that was true when I was a teenager and still presents a challenge today for spiritual growth and maturity. It’s the assumption that Christian devotion can be measured by feelings of passion. The strongest Christians are those who feel or demonstrate the most “on fire” intensity for Jesus.

This assumption leads us to think the purpose of a youth group—and by extension, the church—is to rev up believers and to rekindle the campfire feeling of closeness to God by providing “mountaintop experiences,” whether through summer camp, weekends of worship and teaching, or midweek rallies. The right combination of meaningful worship, powerful preaching, and committed relationships will result in softened hearts, elicit tearful confessions, and fuel the desire for holiness and whatever recommitments are necessary to keep the fire alive.

It’s no wonder one of the largest and most influential gatherings of young people in the United States bears the name “Passion.” Being “on fire” for Jesus is what the Christian life is all about, right? If you don’t feel passionate, you’re failing, backsliding, losing sight of your first love.

A Fire That Lasts

I don’t want for a second to question the intentions or motives of selfless leaders in the thick of student ministry. Nor do I want to throw cold water on any attempt at regaining a passion and excitement for God and his Word. Who isn’t inspired by the passion of the apostle Paul? Or convicted by the words of Jesus to the church in Ephesus that, despite all the believers’ activity, they’d “lost the love they had at first” (Rev. 2:4)? My heart soars at the call of John Wesley for just “one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God” who will “shake the gates of hell” and extend God’s kingdom. I want the church to rediscover the adventure of Christian faith, “the thrill of orthodoxy.” The Passion conference’s worship music regularly shows up on my playlists, for good reason.

But I fear that when we bounce young people from experience to experience, where flames arise and then quickly dissipate, we create the expectation that the faithful Christian life depends on “the next big thing” to reengage the heart. Shouldn’t we long for a generation to be on fire for God for a lifetime, not a roller coaster of ups and downs or swinging between hot and cold?

Fire Needs More than Kindling

Fire needs more than kindling. You need structure and support, a scaffolding that helps the fire to grow, and you also need the right amount of consumable material at just the right time to keep feeding the flames.

If you’ve ever watched the nail-biting “fire challenges” that come near the end of Survivor, you know how crucial it is for the contestant to not only ignite the sparks but also set up the structure that enables the flames to expand. Pile too much on top, and the fire gets snuffed out. Don’t pile enough, and the fire leaps high before disappearing. Blow just enough air and the flames will spread, but blow too much and you’ll put the fire out. The best contestants at making fire know not only how to get it going but also how to feed and maintain its growth.

Student ministry culture often tilts toward sparking. The big experiences are sparks intended to get the fire going, and then we pray God’s Spirit will fan those sparks into a flame. At their best, these events put us in the right posture for God to light a fire in our hearts.

But too often, we think flint is all we need for fire. Just scrape that flint until God gives you a spark and then pray the fire will spread!

Fire and Form

The student ministers who do the most good long-term adopt a different mindset. They’ve seen what happens when fire leaps up and then quickly disappears, with no forms or structures to support it. And so they give just as much attention to a typical Sunday morning group time as they do to a midweek rally. They focus just as much on materials that will stoke and grow the fire as they do the initial matches that get it going. They keep working on the structures at the base of the fire: teaching the “how-to” of personal spiritual disciplines, drawing young people into deeper community, regular exposure to the Scriptures, and other practices. They know how both fire and form are essential parts of the Spirit’s work.

Mark Sayers makes this point, likening healthy biblical renewal to a bird with two wings—form and fire:

If you pursue fire without form, you wind up chasing spiritual experiences that slip into nothing more than human enthusiasm, and you get disillusioned and disappointed when the flames dissipate and God’s will doesn’t work out as you planned. If you pursue forms without fire, you begin to lean on yourself, your habits, and your routines until you settle for a complacent Christianity marked by drudgery, not delight.

Don’t Forget the Forms

When I hear from student ministers, even the ones who fall more on the “form” side than the “fire” side, they tell me it’s tough to keep giving attention to the regular rhythms of spiritual growth and discipleship, simply because (in larger churches especially) the expectations around big events and experiences demand so much attention. The tyranny of the urgent takes over, as every few weeks you’ve got another event that needs planning and preparation. Student ministry culture is built around fire-hopping in the hopes of creating passion again and again.

But Kyle Strobel is right:

The healthiest student ministries don’t dampen enthusiasm around big events but are built on the forms and structures necessary for fire to endure—the habits and patterns of abiding in Christ in the ordinary seasons of life, the regular rhythms of feeding the fire, and, above all, relying on the Spirit to do the work of formation only he can accomplish.

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Belonging comes before believing.

For nearly two decades, I’ve heard this statement bandied about in Christian circles, prompted by a desire for seekers to feel like they’re part of the church before they embrace Christ. During one session at the Fourth Lausanne Congress, the saying came up in a presentation on strategies for reaching Gen Z. “They’ve got to feel they belong before they will believe!”

Noble Sentiment

There’s something clearly right about this sentiment when it comes to the Christian call to radical hospitality and the authentic atmosphere of welcome that should characterize God’s people.

Consider our ministry to children who grow up in church. Regardless of its position on infant baptism, every congregation incorporates children into the rituals and rhythms of church life, making them feel a part through Sunday school classes, or vacation Bible school, or special moments in the worship service. I once served at a church that assigned senior adults as “guardian angels” to neighborhood children in attendance, and I watched with delight as those elderly saints saved seats for the kids during the service, helped them feel welcome, gently instructed them on how to behave, and became a source of spiritual wisdom and guidance. In terms of chronology, children often feel they “belong” before they “believe.”

Or consider the church’s role in becoming a living, worshiping witness to the truth of the gospel, so that unbelievers who see and experience God’s family in all its glory begin to find the gospel more plausible than before. The church is, in Lesslie Newbigin’s memorable phrase, “the hermeneutic of the gospel”—our life together displays the gospel’s credibility.

It’s one thing to share the gospel with a stranger on the street; it’s another to share the gospel with someone after they’ve encountered the scandalous grace of God on display in the Christian community and have tasted of Jesus’s radical hospitality in dining with tax collectors and sinners. The latter is generally more effective than the former because it’s the entire church, not just a Christian, who commends the gospel, providing an alternative to unbelief. It’s possible, then, for an unbeliever to be drawn to the promise of belonging to God’s family before they put their faith in Christ.

What’s Missing

But there are some problems with the “belonging before believing” mindset.

In discussing the concept with my tablemates at the Lausanne Congress (from India, Kenya, Korea, and Hong Kong), the difference of context came up. In restrictive countries where following Jesus will result in family rejection or government persecution, the experience of “belonging” to the church (in the sense of developing close relationships) before making a public profession of belief is vital. Baptism cuts someone off from their past, leading to a very real “trading of families.” It’s important for someone in a restrictive country who professes faith to already have personal experience of the proven dedication of God’s people. When the wrath of family members comes, or the shunning from friends, or the potential for government persecution, the new believer will rely on the belonging they’ve already tasted within the family of God.

In other contexts, however, the mentality of belonging before believing downplays the distinctiveness between the church and the world, making the line between unbelief and faith fuzzy. The emphasis can fall so strongly on making people feel they belong that it’s not clear why belief would be necessary at all. In the end, the church turns into a sociologically religious community marked by friendly feelings rather than a confessional people marked by what the members believe.

Not Fully Belonging

Throughout history, the church has found ways of bringing unbelievers into the community so they experience an appetizer of Christian fellowship, even while recognizing the whole meal is only possible for those who belong through belief. Today, belonging before believing too often settles for appetizers as the end-all of Christianity. If an unbeliever feels they belong to the church just as much as a believer does, then what’s the point of believing? And what does belonging even mean anymore?

A friend of mine expressed the paradox this way: “When I invite an unbeliever, I want to pull them into the church so deeply they feel they don’t fit.” The desire should be to show such genuine welcome and hospitality that the unbeliever is taken aback, compelled by the welcome and sense of belonging they feel and by their uneasiness at recognizing they cannot truly belong to this community until they believe.

In the early centuries after the New Testament, the church made the lines clear in ways that sound awkward today. Unbelievers would be welcome in the homes of Christians and were present in worship services, but only up to a point. When the service would shift to the taking of the Lord’s Supper or instruction only for church members, the unbelievers would be dismissed. In this way, there was still a sense of belonging and welcome but also a clearly defined line marked out by belief and baptism.

Belonging Through Belief

In the end, I hope our churches will be places where people feel welcomed and loved. But if we’re to follow the New Testament pattern, where belonging to a church really means something beyond being the recipient of hospitality, we cannot in the fullest sense belong before we believe. That’s impossible. We belong through believing.

It’s our belief that unites us to brothers and sisters in Christ, our common confession of Jesus our King. We belong to God through our belief in his Son. Remember the opening to the Heidelberg Catechism: our only comfort in life and death is that we are not our own but belong—body and soul—to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ. We belong to Jesus by faith, and we belong to one another in the church by faith also.

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Not long ago, I sat with some brothers over lunch and grieved the way our political debates in the United States affect the church—heightening tensions, compounding fractures, and unleashing words and actions that can only be described as ugly.

Slander sells. Sowing division is popular. Bad actors profit personally or professionally from the ever-changing landscape of newly deemed “heroes” or “villains.” Clouds of self-righteousness and hypocrisy cover the sun and reinforce our tribal impulses.

Danger of Ressentiment

Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote about one of the great dangers facing Christians in North America—the spreading of the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment. That’s the deep-seated envy and hostility that arises in individuals or groups who perceive themselves as powerless, leading them to recast their weaknesses as virtues and project their frustrations onto those they envy or blame for their situation.

Ressentiment, combined with contempt, the silent killer, gives off fumes that suffocate the faith, hope, and love we should be known for. We lack faith when we assume the worst of others, casting opposing viewpoints as belonging to enemy oppressors and taking umbrage at every perceived slight. We lack hope when we assume all is lost unless every injustice is corrected right now, when we can’t see past the urgency of the moment to take a broader view of God’s work in the world. We lack love when all we can do is keep a record of wrongs. We lack grace when our ire grows from the roots of entitlement.

How do we breathe when we inhabit this atmosphere marked by the fog of ressentiment? How do we rightly take a stand for truth without becoming like the world we’re called to counter? In our battles against Mordor, how do we keep from becoming more like orcs than hobbits? How can we resist the suspicion and cynicism that would lead us, like Nikabrik in Prince Caspian, to sacrifice principle on the altar of pragmatism? Especially when everywhere you look, ugliness seems to be winning.

Return to Jesus

After lamenting the state of the church today, my brothers and I stumbled on a solution often derided for its simplistic Sunday-school associations: Jesus. What else do we have but Jesus? What else can we offer a world that needs him? What else can we offer a church that too often forgets or co-opts him? He is the answer. We’ve got to come back, again and again, to Jesus.

When tempted to put our trust in princes, politicians, and parties that are passing, or to excuse respectable sins that further our cause, or to nurse our wounds of bitterness and lash out in fear, or to confuse the fruit of the Spirit with weakness, we look to Jesus just like the disciples after others walked away, and we say, “Lord, to whom will we go?” (John 6:68). Who else do we have? “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart, my portion forever” (Ps. 73:26).

It’s Jesus who approached Golgotha with a prayer on his lips that God would unite his people with such a powerful love that the world would know the truth of the gospel (John 17). It’s Jesus who brought into his closest company both a zealot and a tax collector. It’s Jesus who showed us how to live, how to speak, and how to love. It’s Jesus who said the meek will inherit the earth. It’s Jesus who called us onto the narrow road of beauty, truth, and goodness in a fallen world of sin. It’s Jesus who told us the last will be first and the first last, who defined true greatness in terms of suffering, service, and sacrifice instead of the pomposity of earthly power. It’s Jesus who promised to be with us to the end of the age.

The rough and tumble of earthly politics may depend on anger, wrath, malice, slander, and filthy language, but these are the ugly practices of idolatry we’re called to put away (Col. 3:8). Our new self is being renewed in Christ’s image, and so we’re to put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, and above all, putting on love, which is the perfect bond of unity (vv. 12–14).

These characteristics are the glorious brushstrokes that God is painting into his portrait of us as his people. The church father Gregory of Nyssa likened the Beatitudes to a picture of purity. “God is the true light,” he said, “the fount of all goodness, the one thing lovable which is always the same,” and so, for Gregory, the Beatitudes become an invitation into a new life of rejoicing without end in infinite happiness. Sin has disfigured us, but Jesus has come to wash us clean of our sins, to restore the painting. He’s working on your portrait, brushing up your soul until, more and more, you look like him, the most blessed one.

In the End, Beauty Wins

If you’re a Christian, you have to believe that Beauty will win. Life will triumph over death. Beauty will overcome the ugliness of the world just as Jesus’s blood has removed the stains of sin in your heart.

Ugliness can only destroy, not create. Slander can only tear down, not build. Selfishness can only fracture, not unite.

The only way we soldier on through seasons of darkness is by maintaining hope and faith that the beauty of Jesus will shine. Jesus is the treasure.

And so we don’t respond to works of darkness as pearl-clutching moralists but as pearl-finding missionaries. We’ve sold all for God’s kingdom, the pearl of great price, because we know deep down the truth expressed by Dostoevsky—the world may think we’re idiots, but beauty will save the world. And Beauty is a person.

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No one disputes we’re living through an era of institutional decline and distrust. Multiple surveys show Americans acknowledging their loss of trust in virtually every segment of society. This decline in institutional credibility is, in part, a result of poor leadership and the exposing of corruption, with organizations covering up past failures or widening the breach of trust through their defensive posture or apathy.

It’s no surprise churches feel the headwinds in this environment. This is why so many church leaders are pondering how best to repair and rebuild trust in an age of widespread cynicism and suspicion. We should ask several questions:

• What ingredients are essential for our church to be considered “trustworthy?”
• How do we preserve the trust and goodwill our church has right now, if things are going well?
• How can we regain trust and goodwill after something goes wrong?
• If or when we fail as a church, how can we respond in ways that repair rather than widen the breach of trust?

These questions matter because trust is at the core of Christianity. We’re people of belief, trust, faith, and faithfulness:

• Christians are marked out by specific beliefs: We confess Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead.
• We’re marked out by a life built on trust: We rely on Christ alone for salvation.
• We’re marked out by a life of walking by faith, not by sight. Faithfulness to God and to his people becomes a defining element of our lives.

A crucial aspect of living a faithful Christian life is our growth toward ever-greater trust in God and a corresponding growth in becoming more trustworthy ourselves. As people of belief, trust, faith, and faithfulness, we’re uniquely equipped to contribute to the repairing and rebuilding of institutional credibility. This is one way we fulfill our role as salt and light.

What Is Trust?

Earlier this year, an insightful report on trust, developed by Martin Seeley, David Ford, Veronica Hope Hailey, and Gordon Jump, was released within the Church of England. The authors lean on a definition of trust from a 1998 journal article:

This definition covers a wide range of institutional life and helps us understand why breaking trust is so damaging. To trust someone else requires us to accept vulnerability. It’s possible we’re wrong about the person we trust. We might get hurt. And yet this vulnerability is indispensable to a properly functioning society.

In Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell says our initial response when something seems amiss is to “default to truth.” We’re inherently trusting of people, technology, and institutions. Sometimes this impulse goes wrong and leads to tragic outcomes, when we refuse to see (or are unable to see) the corruption or injustice taking place right before our eyes. But defaulting to distrust would be even worse. Our world would grind to a halt and life would be impossible if all trust were absent.

We can’t not trust people and institutions, at least at some level, which is why it matters that people and institutions work hard to build and retain trust. Especially when, as the old Dutch proverb goes, “Trust comes on foot but leaves on horseback.”

4 Ingredients of Trustworthiness

The report on trust lays out four essential elements for healthy and trustworthy leaders in an organization:

1. Ability: Have they got the right competencies and abilities to do their job?

2. Benevolence: Are they bothered about others or entirely self-interested?

3. Integrity: Are they guided in their decisions and actions by a moral code?

4. Predictability: Can people see a consistency in their approach?

In my experience, all four of these ingredients are crucial, but they’re not equally important.

Leaders can be forgiven occasional lapses in the first category, “ability,” because no one expects everyone to be fully competent at all times in all ways. In fact, a leader’s response—if he or she acknowledges mistakes, corrects problems, and shows growth in competency—can serve to increase trustworthiness over time. Likewise, the fourth category, “predictability,” is important, but erratic behavior can be overcome if the other three elements are in place and the leader demonstrates the desire for consistency.

The second and third categories are most critical: benevolence and integrity. The moment an institution acts in cravenly self-focused ways, or a leader makes decisions that betray selfish ambition instead of a servant’s heart, or people cross clear moral lines to preserve and protect reputation or power, trust dissipates. An organization can survive challenges and failures in categories 1 and 4, but it’s much more difficult to recover and rebuild trust when malevolence and dishonesty become obvious.

When Trust Is Lost

Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build focuses on the formational and aspirational aspects of categories 2 and 3:

Levin’s definition is true broadly, but especially when applied to the church. When we no longer submit to the formative power of the church but instead seek to harness the institution for our own ends, we present to the world a deformed body of Christ. The church that should exist for the glory of God and the good of the world turns inward—all its resources self-directed now for the glory of the leaders and the good of those with most at stake.

Even worse, breaches of trust in categories 2 and 3 in some churches make it all the more difficult for other churches to overcome even minor lapses in categories 1 and 4. People are more likely to attribute deficiencies in competency and predictability to the more egregious breaches of trust in areas of benevolence and integrity. In this atmosphere, common mistakes can suddenly have outsize effects. The cloud of suspicion hangs over all churches everywhere, even those doing a good job of maintaining consistently high standards of accountability and trust.

Getting the Response Right

One of the takeaways from the report is the importance of correctly assessing the level of concern. We won’t be able to contribute to the repairing of trust and rebuilding of institutional credibility if we treat every breach of trust the same way.

If we cannot differentiate between systemic issues of corruption and occasional lapses of judgment, we’ll get the prescription wrong because our diagnosis is off. We won’t treat deep-rooted failures with the level of intensity and commitment needed to rebuild trust, like prescribing vitamin pills for a cancer patient. Or we’ll overreact to ordinary harms, blasting the institution with a level of chemo and radiation that indicates the whole organization is riddled with cancer, instead of a more focused approach on problem areas. Getting the prescription wrong, either by overlooking serious disease or overtreating minor problems, can kill the institution.

We’ve got our work cut out for us. In these times of distrust, we’ll need to focus on rebuilding credibility by giving attention to these four ingredients: ability, benevolence, integrity, and predictability. And we’ll need to pray for and work toward the day when the church is once again a beacon of faith, worthy of trust.

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I enjoy conversations with college and seminary students developing an intellectual life in service to the church, who envision a future in which the life of the mind is a central preoccupation. They look forward to years of voracious reading, following the trails of their curiosity, and engaging knowledgeably in discussions and debates over important ideas and practices.

Often, these students ask, Where do I start? They look to those of us who’ve been reading, writing, teaching, and preaching for a while now, and they ask, How do I get from here to there? Where do I begin?

I see in these questions a desire to offer something of value to the church. The students recognize the necessity of intellectual growth, and naturally, they wonder how to figure out what to study and where to begin. But these questions assume there’s a particular order of steps applicable for everyone, a well-worn path to follow if they could just find the entrance. And while there’s no denying the importance of reading foundational texts in the history of philosophy and theology if aspiring to the life of the mind, my counsel doesn’t start with the “classics” or the “essentials.”

My advice? Just jump in. Start in the middle. Because the middle is your beginning.

Enter the Ongoing Conversation

Starting down the road of intellectual inquiry and theological reflection is like entering a conversation that has been going on for a long time. As you listen to people well-versed in the terms and concepts of a theological discussion, you get the lay of the land. Over time, you discern the contours of the conversation more broadly, and you may even find a few places to dig deeper in your studies so you too can contribute.

But there’s no specific “beginning,” unless we’re talking more generally about the fear of the Lord. Just jump in. Tune in to the broadcast already “in progress.” Join a conversation already taking place and focus first on careful listening, with humility and curiosity.

Follow Trails

When I was a student at a Christian university in Eastern Europe, I had access to a terrific library of theological resources. Because of their value, most of the books were unavailable for checkout, so I spent hours in that library working through books that piqued my interest.

One of my earliest intellectual pursuits involved Jesus’s parables and they how functioned in their original context. I was fascinated by carefully comparing the different versions of the parables in the Synoptic Gospels, and I spent significant time with Kenneth Bailey’s Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes. Craig Blomberg’s Interpreting the Parables showed me the landscape of parabolic interpretation through the centuries. Following more trails, I was introduced to the important work of C. H. Dodd and the contribution of Joachim Jeremias. I followed a few trails into the dead-end skeptical takes of the Jesus Seminar and the landmark work of John Dominic Crossan’s In Parables.

Tracing my way back, I noticed how those trails led me into an even bigger conversation—“the quest for the historical Jesus.” Ben Witherington’s work gave me a lay of the land, and eventually, I arrived at N. T. Wright’s massive volume Jesus and the Victory of God, which I spent more than a month with, reading it cover to cover, absorbed by the brushstrokes of Wright’s historical portrait. Soon, I was following footnotes to other conversation partners, reading predecessors and successors in historical Jesus studies, reviewing older works of history and then engaging present-day scholars still responding to Wright’s work.

No, I never became a historical Jesus scholar (although I try to keep up with the latest scholarship on the Gospels). But I’ve wandered onto a bunch of other trails, driven by passion and curiosity and sometimes ministry necessity, all culminating in a PhD focused on North American missiology, with an emphasis more in systematic theology than biblical and theological studies.

My point is that I’ve had the pleasure of joining lots of conversations along the way—all of them in progress. I’ve engaged in ongoing discussions about the church’s posture toward the culture, the breadth of the church’s mission in the world, the relationship between eschatology and discipleship, and the philosophical and technological developments that have left our cultural landscape marked by expressive individualism, Enlightenment rationalism, and the scars of the sexual revolution.

I’m more of a generalist than a specialist. I’m wired that way. Other scholars have taken a different approach, following one trail deeper and deeper into the forest until they become experts who can make a strong contribution to a specialized field. There’s no right or wrong here. My point is this: When you’re at the outset of a theological journey, just jump in. Don’t expect to find the perfect spot to start from. Follow your curiosity until it leads you into the conversations that make your heart race and your brain hurt.

Guidance, Friendship, and the Point of Theology

Guidance matters. Find mentors who’ve spent significant time in the conversations that interest you, because they can help you read well and widely. They can keep you from the dead-ends and cul-de-sacs as they guide you into the field. They can help you avoid chronological snobbery or youthful enthusiasm that arrives at conclusions too quickly.

Friendship matters too. Find peers who share your curiosity. Cultivate a life with people whose work overlaps with yours but isn’t perfectly aligned, because they’ll broaden your perspective by refining your thinking. They’ll push back when you fail to reckon with the best critiques issued against your favorite authors. They’ll celebrate when you unearth something original you can contribute to the conversation.

Most importantly, remember that talk about God is just talk. The real goal of theological study is to grow in knowledge and love of God and then serve his people more faithfully. The intellectual life should never be separated from one’s devotional practices. A mind without devotion can turn brilliance into blindness.

So follow the trails and enjoy the campsites where fellow students gather around the fire and affirm and argue, discuss and debate, in pursuit of truth. Just remember to keep climbing, with your intellect bent toward your Maker and your world of thought infused by wonder, because the best trails lead up toward the summit, the mountaintop of praise and worship of the triune God.

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In recent weeks, there’s been considerable conversation about the reasons why people drop out of church or walk away from their Christian convictions.

Let’s consider three theories often thrown around.

Three Grand Theories

Some say deconstruction comes down to the desire to engage in illicit sexual activity. The people who walk away really just want to commit adultery, or entertain a divorce, or engage in same-sex relationships, or have premarital sex, or no longer feel bad about pornography. Holding to a Christian sexual ethic in a world where identity is defined by your desires and your pursuit of personal pleasure seems not only outdated but repressive. Revisionist views of sexuality and marriage ease that pressure. But soon, the rest of Christianity begins to collapse, like a house when a load-bearing wall is removed, until there’s a rejection of orthodox Christian teaching all across the board. People say they have a problem with the church, but what’s really behind their questioning is lust!

Others say deconstruction is a result of so many abuse scandals in the church and the way they’ve been handled or mishandled in recent decades. The church’s minimization of grave evil has led people to question the church’s moral authority and to reexamine other important doctrines. Perhaps the church is toxic through and through. Consider the church’s treatment of women throughout history, or the church’s complicity with large-scale injustice over the centuries, or the authoritarianism that surely must be inherent in pastors and leaders occupying a hierarchical structure. You can’t blame anyone for leaving the church because of the terrible injustice they or others have received at the hands of bad leaders!

Still others assume deconstruction is directly tied to white evangelicalism’s embrace of right-wing politics. The church is too married to the Republican Party, we’re told, and this conflation of political platforms with the faith once for all delivered to the saints has led to confusion, and in some cases, outright political advocacy in Jesus’s name. We must disentangle Christianity from politics, we’re told, or we’ll lose more and more people because of hypocrisy and compromise. The real reason so many are leaving is because of all the right-wingers who want to use the church as a tool for political power!

Complicating the Grand Theories

When I see variations of these themes circulating, I find the people who voice them share one quality: confidence. They think the reason they offer for church decline and faith deconstruction is so obvious that you’d have to be stupid, compromised, or complicit not to see it.

But I don’t think any of these explanations works as a grand theory for why people leave the church or walk away from the faith. There may be a measure of truth in all these accounts, but people are way more complicated—gloriously so.

For example, when someone no longer abides by Christianity’s sexual ethic, it’s often the case that their decision came after a season of broader disillusionment or disappointment with Christian teaching; it wasn’t the cause. Sexual sin followed the loss of faith; it wasn’t the driver.

Or take the “deconstruction because of abuse scandals” grand theory. Last year, I angered some readers online when I suggested, according to research on dechurching, that mishandling of abuse isn’t the most prominent factor and that it’s possible some who’ve drifted from the church for unrelated reasons may be more inclined to use abuse scandals as a way of justifying their deconstruction. My point wasn’t to minimize the real harms done by church leaders but to call out people who’ve not experienced those harms for the way they trumpet them as the cause of their own choices.

Or look at the surveys on political activism. Studies from Lifeway Research on students who left the church in their college years showed the church’s political views were lower on the list than one might expect, with more prosaic reasons near the top (not connecting well, moving to another place, etc.). Pointing to this research doesn’t mean I think we should conflate Christianity with right-wing politics. Neither does it preclude situations where political shifts can lead to questioning key Christian doctrines. I just want to complicate the grand theory a bit, especially when the political explanation often ignores the decline of churches associated with left-wing or progressive causes, which have been proven to be even more politically oriented than their right-wing counterparts.

Don’t Flatten Your Neighbor

I don’t deny anecdotal evidence that aligns with each of the reasons I’ve listed above. You can find a measure of truth in these theories. You can find stories that align well with your preferred narrative.

But I want to make sure we don’t flatten our neighbors who’ve deconstructed or who’ve left the church. Ian Harber’s forthcoming book prefers to speak of catalysts rather than causes, and he rightly emphasizes the emotional and experiential side of deconstruction rather than relying on intellectual questions. A monocausal explanation or grand theory will hinder our ability to attend carefully to the person God puts in our path. A grand theory will cause you to retrofit their story and shove their experience into a predesigned category. Even worse, you won’t have ears to hear the heartache of people whose experience doesn’t fit any of the above.

Let me tell you about a middle-aged woman who grew up in church, faithfully read her Bible, and devoted years of earnest prayer for a wayward child. There’s no happy ending after all that prayer. She loses her teenage son to suicide. The next year, her husband is diagnosed with terminal cancer and dies within months. Six months later, her church splits over leadership failures related to a volunteer with a history of sex abuse, and due to a vocal minority who want the church to be more outspoken on political matters.

Within a three-year span, this woman’s world has been rocked to the point she questions everything she’s believed. She no longer trusts the power of prayer. She doesn’t see the point in going to church when all her congregation could offer were platitudes. Her pastor’s moral authority has taken a beating. She feels as if God has not heard her, only hurt her. Online, she seeks a salve for her sadness by amplifying stories of church abuse, and as she connects with similarly wounded people, her political views shift. A couple years later, she begins a relationship with an unbeliever, and she moves in with him. She’s not sure she identifies as a Christian anymore.

Depending on your perspective or your commitment to one of the three grand theories I offered above, you could reduce this woman’s story to the real reason she walked away. She’s living with her boyfriend, so she clearly wanted to be freed from Christian restrictions about sex! Or She’s been burned by the church’s complicity in injustice! Or Her church was beholden to right-wing politics!

Jumping to these conclusions would flatten this woman. None of them takes into account the real and powerful persistence of grief and suffering as a result of significant loss or her feeling of being abandoned by God after earnestly seeking to live according to his ways.

What’s worse, rushing to the grand theory leaves her in a state worse than she was in before. The main word she needs to hear right now is REPENT! Because we all know she’s walked away because she just wants to sin. Or Good for her on leaving the church when the church has been so rotten! Or Finally, she’s able to see the political views of her church were all wrongheaded; aren’t those right-wingers awful?! None of these reactions gets to the root of her pain, the source of her struggle, the gospel’s comfort and challenge in response to her ongoing suffering and sin. All leave her bereft of any lasting help.

Beware the Grand Theory

We won’t prescribe the right medicine or adequately deal with real sin and real suffering if in conversations about dechurching and deconstruction, we fall back on grand theories that flatten out the real experiences of real people. Monocausal explanations don’t open our ears; they harden our hearts. They speak more to our need for reassurance of our moral righteousness, or our righteous cause, or our righteous stance than they do to the struggling person’s need for a listening ear during seasons of doubt and disillusionment, sin and suffering.

Everyone wants you to buy into their simplistic grand theory these days. Don’t.

Love your neighbor and listen.

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When I finished Lucy Austen’s biography of Elisabeth Elliot a few weeks ago, the book went first to my desk, not my shelf, because I knew I’d have to write something about this remarkable woman’s story. Elisabeth rose to prominence as the widow whose husband Jim died in 1956 with four of his fellow missionaries at the hands of Waorani men in the jungles of Ecuador. Her life was long, her ministry vibrant. Austen’s portrait reveals a woman of courage and conviction who developed spiritually and theologically over time.

In this telling, there’s no halo over Elisabeth’s head, no smoothing out all the rough spots. Austen’s admiration for her subject comes through, but the way she shows respect for Elisabeth is by refusing to sugarcoat the challenges that arose or ignore the doubts that hovered over her hardest years.

Strange and Compelling Love Story

Readers unfamiliar with the story of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot may be surprised at its roller-coaster highs and lows, and just how long it took before they agreed to marry. From the outset, the reader senses they were both right for each other and tortured in the way they sought God’s will for their relationship.

The twentysomething Jim could sometimes be callous, often immature, clearly in the throes of a throbbing passion for God yet confused because he was confident God had called him to a life of celibacy. Torn between his devotion to God and his interest in Elisabeth, opinionated to a fault yet with a charisma and grace that charmed and influenced those around him, Jim was both honest and obstinate. Often unaware of how his vacillating affected Elisabeth, his words and actions carved channels of both love and sorrow. They were called first to the mission field and only then to each other, and once married, the couple’s life was marked by intensity: a fierce devotion to God and to each other, and to the people they hoped to reach with the gospel.

Life After Tragedy

If you’re familiar with the story, you may think the most interesting part of Elisabeth’s life is wrapped up in the mission she shared with Jim, their commitment to a dangerous and remote place in the jungle while still in their 20s, and the circumstances surrounding his death. But Austen’s biography devotes more attention to Elisabeth’s life after the tragedy on the beach.

First, we see the grieving widow with a young daughter honor the story of her husband and his fellow missionaries by giving the world an account of their dedication. Then we see her return to the area, labor for many years in language development and Bible translation, and eventually live with and observe closely the tribe responsible for Jim’s death. Along the way, she wrestles with doubt and disillusionment, ponders the miracle of conversion, and bemoans the monotony of a missionary’s life. She struggles relationally with Rachel Saint (the sister of one of the missionary men killed), always wondering how to rebuild and restore what was broken. Once she becomes a writer and speaker in the United States, Elisabeth bucks the expectations set for a missionary widow, refusing to give American audiences the gauzy and inspiring stories they most want to hear, choosing instead to be honest about her experiences and observations.

Austen’s biography contains more than a few surprises: the severe strain of her relational challenges with Rachel Saint; her marriage to Addison Leitch so quickly after his first wife’s death from cancer, after a clearly unwise yet budding friendship; the paradox of a highly independent woman accustomed to preaching and teaching who became a well-known opponent of egalitarianism; and her willingness to entertain questions on the edges of evangelical consensus—about the fate of the unevangelized, the nature of conversion, and the draw of Catholicism.

Story of Development

Austen never lets us see Elisabeth as “frozen in time,” as if we could reduce her to one event or viewpoint. Who Elisabeth was in her 20s is both consistent with and different from the woman she was in her 50s. This woman was a thinker. She applied the same curiosity she had about the world to her spiritual life, choosing to read widely even when her openness drew criticism.

The clearest change is in Elisabeth’s view of God’s will. She and Jim were influenced by the Keswick Holiness tradition, which stressed the importance of giving one’s whole heart to God to align with his will. She was given over to excessive self-examination, driven by a desire to ensure every moment of every day was devoted to obedience. Her letters betray an obsession with heeding God’s guidance, deathly afraid she might step outside of his will in some way. It’s almost as if she thought God had placed her blindfolded in a field, only then to whisper to her faintly about where she should go. This left her desperate to hear her Father’s voice, ever worried she’d miss his direction and invite his disapproval.

Over time, her view of God and his will changes. As she encounters more and more of the unknown, as she runs up against the mysterious side of suffering and the inscrutability of God’s purposes, she becomes less assured of all her decisions yet freed from a paralyzing fear of wandering off. She comes to realize the relationship between God and his people doesn’t lead to direction as obvious as she’d expected, and yet she finds solace in this not knowing because she trusts his character and believes in his presence no matter the circumstances.

No One-Dimensional Saints

Austen’s biography has been criticized by some who believe the description of Elisabeth’s third husband, Lars Gren, is unfair. Based on letters and testimony, Austen portrays Lars as controlling and manipulative; thus the marriage, though Elisabeth’s longest, was the least happy of the three, with her and Lars occupying separate interior worlds. But Lars is no villain here, because Austen also shows us how well and how long he loved and served Elisabeth in her later years of mental and physical decline. Lars, like Elisabeth, like Rachel Saint, like Jim Elliot, is complicated. No one is one-dimensional.

It’s hard to improve on Austen’s summary of Elisabeth at the end of the book:

Yes. And this complexity marks all of us saints and sinners. Elisabeth Elliot knew this. What she wrote in her biography of R. Kenneth Strachan applies to herself as well:

I, for one, am deeply encouraged by holy men and women whose stories are full of “ironies, contradictions, inconsistencies, imponderables.” They help us see the earthy side of holiness, what it means to have a heart for God that’s also a jumble of competing desires, what it looks like when we examine a saintlike life and find so many sins still on sad display. Elisabeth Elliot’s story reminds me of the importance of grappling with mystery and certainty, the realization that the more we know, the more we see there’s more to know. Here is a portrait of a valiant woman who knew her sins but, better yet, knew her Savior.

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What does it mean to be worldly? I still find David Wells’s definition unbeatable: “Worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal and righteousness look strange.”

Wells emphasizes the perniciousness and pervasiveness of worldliness. We get so accustomed to sin we don’t see it. And that means we should always ask, What sins appear normal today? What sins are so common we hardly shrug at them?

The more I contemplate this question in a digital age, the more I’m convinced we’ve entered an era marked by the normalization of slander.

What Is Slander?

Slander is spreading untruth about someone else so their reputation is damaged. These untruths are sometimes flat-out lies designed to inflict maximum harm, but often slander takes the form of deceptive inferences, assuming the worst of others instead of the best, or deliberately crafting a preferred narrative out of conveniently edited facts.

God hates slander (Prov. 6:16, 19) because he is the Truth. Satan loves slander because he’s the father of lies. Jon Bloom remarks on “its poisonous power” as “one of the adversary’s chief strategies to divide relationships and deter and derail the mission of the church. . . . He knows that slander deadens and splits churches, poisons friendships, and fractures families. He knows slander quenches the Holy Spirit, kills love, short-circuits spiritual renewal, undermines trust, and sucks the courage out of the saints.”

The antidote to slander is found in the Westminster Larger Catechism’s description of keeping the ninth commandment against bearing false witness. Faithful Christians will be inclined toward these actions: “the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbor, as well as our own, . . . a charitable esteem of our neighbors; loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their good name; sorrowing for and covering of their infirmities; freely acknowledging of their gifts and graces, defending their innocency; a ready receiving of a good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, concerning them.”

Instead, we often demonstrate a propensity for slander. The Puritan writer Thomas Manton believed the source of slander is self-love and the desire for human praise. Slanderers feel contempt toward someone with a sterling reputation. “They blast their gifts with censure, aggravate their failings, and load them with prejudice, that upon the ruins of their good name, they might erect a fabric of praise to themselves,” he says. Slander and censure go together, ever blasting outward, never looking inward. “Self-lovers are always bitter censurers; they are so indulgent to their own faults, that they must spend their zeal abroad.”

Slander’s Poisonous Effects

Matthew Lee Anderson describes the soul-sucking nature of slander by pointing to the New Testament’s framing of this sin in terms of consumption. Galatians 5:15 warns against the tendency to “bite and devour one another,” which echoes the psalmist who speaks of people with teeth like “spears and arrows” and tongues like “sharp swords” (Ps. 57:4). Anderson also quotes a medieval text that describes a woman “slandered, eaten away at, gnawed at, by the people, for the grace that God performed in her of contrition, of devotion, and of compassion.” He writes,

Social media platforms grease the tracks for an easy slide into slander or its amplification. Through an emphasis on speed and quick reactions, social media often cultivates accidental slander. While some people intend to slander, others simply want to appear knowledgeable and will participate in slander unwittingly.

Slander spreads because slander works. Social media algorithms favor slanderers, raising their profile, attracting more and more attention to the accusers and the people who receive the blows. In an era of institutional decline, social media has shifted the incentives away from looking for common ground or trying to get along. Now the aim is to tear down (so others can get ahead).

If church leaders from just 20 or 30 years ago were dropped into today’s world to witness the many interactions that take place on social media, they’d be shocked at the prevalence of slander—the acceptability of this sin and the ease with which people engage in it. What’s most frightening about slanderous activity is how invisible it is to us.

Slander and Friendship with the World

One of the strange ironies of our time is the pervasiveness of slander among Christians who take a firm stand for truth, who oppose values that don’t align with scriptural teaching, and who shun any appearance of trying to be on good terms with the world (whether through “niceness” or “winsomeness” or “accommodation”). “Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God?” they say, quoting James. “So whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God” (4:4). The way you show yourself to be on God’s side is by demonstrating your hostility to the world—confronting the ideologies that have harmed the family, the church, and the wider society; or railing against the moral quagmire of sexual immorality and pornography and the shallow allure of pop culture.

This impulse, motivated by a good and godly desire for holiness that provides a stark contrast to the world, can easily become a cover that excuses or minimizes sinful speech toward other Christians. It misses the subtler form of worldliness that’s truer to James’s context. James isn’t describing “friendship with the world” as a soft or overly accommodating posture toward anti-Christian people and positions. For James, the signs of “friendship with the world” and “hostility toward God” are the “wars and fights among you” and the “passions” and “wrong motives” that drive this descent into conflict.

What’s more, James’s warning about worldliness comes just after his admonishment to tame the tongue, whose power can set forests ablaze (James 3). And right after James’s warning comes this command: “Don’t criticize one another, brothers and sisters. Anyone who defames or judges a fellow believer defames and judges the law” (4:11). In context, then, friendship with the world results in “bitter envy and selfish ambition,” leading to “disorder” (3:14, 16).

Friendship with God is demonstrated in heavenly wisdom marked by “good conduct” and works done in “gentleness” (v. 13). Righteousness isn’t just taking the right stand against the darkness but taking the right stand the right way: as a holy people “pure” and “peace-loving, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without pretense. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who cultivate peace” (vv. 17–18).

Resist the Spread of Slander

Our social media habits have made slander so prevalent, so normal, that we’re willing to overlook its pernicious effects as long as it helps our cause or confirms our narrative. We no longer see this sin as disqualifying. We no longer even see it as sin. I fear we’ve normalized this form of worldliness to the point that the righteousness described by James (“peace-loving, gentle, . . . full of mercy”) now gets reframed as soft, or squishy, or compromised.

These dynamics should scare us. Social media makes slander seem normal and righteousness strange. Few of us can maintain the discipline necessary to stop the spread, or refrain from furthering our own cause on the backs of others’ broken reputations, or keep our hurt at being slandered from turning to gall. All the incentives pull us toward the vortex of these works of darkness.

I don’t have simple solutions here, apart from repentance (it’s hard to find anyone with clean hands on this front) and desperate pleading with the Lord to open our eyes to this form of worldliness. Perhaps the first step would be to slow down, to make sure we never spread any statement or accusation if the veracity may be in question. Above all, we must learn to sow peace, as James says. To be marked not by tongues that set forests ablaze but by the tongues of fire that rest on all those filled by the Spirit. May God help us resist the impulse to be so blinded by the rightness of our cause that we do the work of the Accuser.

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Can we talk about LOST?

I know I run the risk of losing half of you right now. Out of all the television shows released in the first quarter of this century, LOST is the one that will instantly polarize a table conversation. One side thinks LOST was a well-crafted spectacle but with plot lines that derailed and crashed into a disappointing finale, proving the whole show was a colossal waste of time. The other side believes the show’s success at developing memorable characters and delivering plot twists alongside philosophical meanderings resulted in a truly one-of-a-kind series that, though not without its flaws, still holds up remarkably well.

Put me in the latter camp.

LOST is turning 20 this year (yes, 20—cue the “I’m old” memes!). I’ve seen the series three times—first when it was airing weekly on broadcast TV, then with my son when he hit his teenage years, and a third time when my son and I introduced the show to his sister the summer week we all got COVID and realized the first season of LOST would be the perfect way to spend our quarantine. (Funny story: Later in the fall, just after my daughter and I finished the show, I was in Manhattan teaching a seminary course. During a quick walk to CVS, I recognized Terry O’Quinn, who played John Locke, on the street and talked with him briefly.)

Having watched the show three times now, I’m convinced there’s no series quite like it. Nothing as ambitious. Nothing as audacious. Nothing that succeeds so well on so many levels at leaving you spellbound.

LOST Between Broadcast TV and Streaming

LOST marks the end of an era. It represents broadcast TV at its finest. Its quality is cinematic and epic, with a beautiful score from Michael Giacchino, yet it aired in the liminal period when streaming was just stirring. It was also the last real “appointment TV” show, with watch parties in the evening and water-cooler conversations the next morning.

LOST was at the forefront of finding new ways to engage viewers, enticing us with exclusive scenes made available only to people who purchased episodes on Apple, for example. Yet it began like any other drama that required roughly two dozen episodes a year—a staggering number compared to today’s standards. The two-hour pilot is masterful from start to finish and the first season is terrific, slowly unfolding the storyline and developing the characters through the use of flashbacks, all while introducing cryptic elements, giving answers to questions that lead to more questions. The solution to one mystery starts another.

Because LOST was still bound by traditional programming constraints, its writers and producers were working out the series in real time. Back then, there was no “dropping” of a full season all at once on a streamer, and so the creators could take into account fan theories and opinions proliferating in dozens of internet forums and chat rooms. Rabid LOST fans were stunned to see their viewpoints being folded into the show’s development. (Best example: when fans made clear their contempt for a couple of new characters, the writers shifted plans and booted them later in the same season, deliciously fulfilling the fans’ wishes.)

LOST was produced at a volatile time in the entertainment industry, straddling two eras. It combined movie-worthy production and casting with a locked-in weekly television schedule that created an inordinate demand for new episodes, while its developers were unusually responsive to the show’s fans who made their views known online.

LOST as Smart TV

LOST also stood out for how it placed demands on viewers. The scriptwriters didn’t talk down to us. They expected us to catch the show’s philosophical bent and wanted us to look up the famous thinkers some of the characters were named after—John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Hume, Rousseau, and Faraday (and they even give a nod to C.S. Lewis—Charlotte Staples Lewis).

The show was infused with religious imagery, ancient myths, and a mix of scientific and political theories. It brought together elements of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley, showing us where reason, faith, and technology converge, in storylines both inspiring and tragic. It created a microcosm of human society, a group of individuals united by tragedy yet divided in their opinions on battling the elements, resisting evil impulses, and discovering life’s purpose. It foreshadowed the cultural turn toward conspiracy theories, creating scenarios where any rational person would start wondering, What’s really going on?

Where LOST Got Lost

The later seasons of LOST struggled to match the character development of the show’s beginning. But even here, standards remained high. (The finale to one of the middle seasons—I won’t say which—ends with a twist so unexpected it’ll take your breath away as you suddenly realize the pivot point will affect the rest of the series.)

If it felt like the writers of LOST got lost in some of the loose ends, it was in part because of the television constructs at the time. It became harder and harder to sustain interest over 16 weeks every spring when the multiplicity of characters and strange mythology made it difficult for regular viewers to follow along. Even when there were brilliant moments in the latter seasons (“The Constant” is one of TV drama’s greatest episodes), it became nearly impossible to sustain the early success.

But that’s in part because LOST was ahead of its time. In the second half of the series, the writers and producers knew the future was streaming, with episodes available one right after the next, without a week’s wait in between. And they began writing that way. Slowness in plot development that initially felt interminable or the confusing twists and turns and new characters that made it hard to keep up when watching week after week—these challenges were rectified in the “bingeable” era. And now that LOST is streaming on Netflix again (hurrah!), some of the annoying features of watching the show on a broadcast schedule disappear.

What’s more, the initially frustrating finale isn’t as bad as people remember it, especially if you acknowledge that LOST at its best was all about great characters. The reason we loved the show in the first place wasn’t just the science fiction elements, the nod to important philosophers, the wrestling with deeper questions of life, or the mysterious aspects of the island’s deeper mythology; we loved LOST for the characters.

No, the writers weren’t able to bring the show to a compelling close that would satisfy everyone, but that’s in part because of how grand and ambitious the show was from the beginning. I’m glad they shot for the moon, even if they fumbled the descent and landing. Friends who were disappointed in the finale but have rewatched LOST now tell me those later seasons mostly absolve themselves of the initial criticism.

Will LOST Endure?

It remains to be seen whether LOST will have lasting cultural influence. In the streaming era, hardly anything counts as “must-see” beyond the niche of tailor-made audiences. It’s startling these days how even critically acclaimed shows after a year or two don’t get talked about anymore. The streaming era has given us some great entertainment, but everything seems more ephemeral. The shows are there for a season, then gone.

We’ve also lost the cultural phenomenon of “watch parties” or “event TV” because people now stream shows in isolation, on their own terms, rather than thinking of TV as a community-making experience that invites fans everywhere to share in a show’s wonders and mysteries.

I don’t know if LOST will continue to gain new fans in a new era, if its enthusiasts will push the show forward into the next generation and beyond. It might fade into little more than a cultural touchpoint that marked the transition between the era of broadcast TV and streaming. I hope not.

LOST drew us in with characters who wrestled with sin and redemption, wondering if there might be a divine plan and purpose in life. Their stories reflect society’s attempts to find meaning and love in a world caught between science and faith. The show tapped into the mysteries of the world around us and pointed, albeit imperfectly, toward the grand finale we all long for—a time when all wrongs will be righted, all injustices will cease, and we’ll finally understand purpose and pain.

I hope LOST finds a new audience. It’s TV at its best.

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Attending the Fourth Lausanne Congress in South Korea has been one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I’ll be contemplating its significance for weeks and months to come. How can I capture the beauty of gathering with more than 5,000 believers—representatives from more than 200 nations—in a single room to worship the true and living God together? Nothing I say here could do the experience justice. Still, I’d like to offer a few reflections on the Congress, along with thoughts on the Seoul Statement and the future of evangelical mission work around the world.

Over the past 50 years, the Lausanne Movement has been the catalyst for key shifts in global evangelical mission strategy. The first Lausanne Congress in 1974 laid the foundation for pursuing unreached people groups with the gospel and drafted a Covenant that has proven highly influential among evangelical churches and organizations. The gathering in Manila in 1989 emphasized cross-cultural ministry and contextualization in church planting, while directing attention to the 10/40 window. At Cape Town in 2010, the Congress reinforced the integration of evangelism (gospel proclamation) and social action (gospel demonstration), a perspective that has become foundational to many evangelical efforts today.

Polycentric Mission

One of the most evident takeaways from this year’s Congress is polycentric mission—mission activity is now a truly global endeavor, with people being sent from everywhere to everywhere. This concept, foreseen by missiologists at Cape Town in 2010, has now become reality. The era of missions being led predominantly by North America and Europe has passed; the global church has taken up the mantle, sending and supporting mission work across every continent. A few examples: One of my table mates from Kenya shared about his support for mission work in other areas of Africa. I got the chance to meet René Breuel, a missionary from Brazil now serving in Italy (whose book on the paradox of happiness is terrific). And, of course, the Korean church stands as a testament to the shifting paradigm, being one of the largest senders of missionaries outside North America.

This shift has profound implications for the church’s approach to mission. No longer should we see ourselves as primarily sending from the West to the rest. The reality now is that churches everywhere—whether in Nairobi or New York, São Paulo or Seoul—increasingly understand their role in advancing the gospel. Missions isn’t a Western export; it’s a shared calling of the whole church to bring the whole gospel to the whole world.

Along these lines, Sarah Breuel’s message to delegates was a highlight for me. She described the ways God is at work across the globe, and she urged each continent to engage wholeheartedly in the mission to proclaim and embody God’s grace. To North America, she warned about losing our boldness in missions, in part due to the notion that the missionary movement was just the product of colonialism. To a discouraged Europe, she called for a shift in perspective, reframing today’s challenges not merely as “post-Christian” but as “pre-revival.” I remember Tim Keller acknowledging we have yet to see a revival in a post-Christian context, while emphasizing the word yet, since every revival is unprecedented . . . until it happens. With God, the impossible is possible.

Conversations Across Contexts

The Congress was marked by rich and enlightening conversations with colleagues from around the world. As a table group leader, I had the privilege of meeting with my group multiple times a day. Our table included participants from Hong Kong, Kenya, Korea, and India. The latter was a converted Sikh who introduced himself by saying, “A greater Seeker found me.” When I asked him when he was “found,” he replied, “Before the foundation of the world!” Such encounters deepened my connection and appreciation for those who worship the same Lord as I do.

As expected in any large gathering covering so many complex issues, some presentations resonated well with participants while others provoked consternation. There were the expected calls to reach the next generation, challenges toward a stronger focus on discipleship, integrity in leadership, and the connection of the gospel to its implications. A couple presentations on justice-related issues would have been stronger if they’d been more not less holistic, going beyond causes that (in Western contexts at least) code “left” instead of “right.” If it’s true that Christianity blows up manmade categories—holding tightly to principles that political coalitions apply only selectively—then it’s a miss when a speaker who devotes attention to a litany of unjust atrocities in the world doesn’t see the scourge of abortion as a significant injustice that must be named.

One of the highlights of the week was participating in a collaboration session with dozens of believers from around the world on the topic of gender and sexuality, specifically how this issue presents a “gap” that impacts our efforts in evangelism and discipleship. My table included participants from England, Canada, the Netherlands, Ghana, Malawi, and Greece. An interesting debate broke out on the second day, because, while the majority immediately saw “gender and sexuality” and assumed we’d be focusing on LGBT-related challenges, a handful of people, primarily from Africa and Asia, chose the topic because they wanted to explore the relationships between men and women and broader issues related to marriage and family. We debated whether to realign into different groups based on those broader issues, but in the end decided to keep everyone where they were. This diversity pushed the conversation beyond cultural flashpoints, prompting a deeper examination of Christianity’s theology of the body—what it means to be made in God’s image as male and female. Such dialogue underscores the need for a more profound, biblically rooted framework that can speak to these challenges in every context.

Seoul Statement and a Theology of the Body

It’s no surprise the Seoul Statement generated considerable discussion, including praise for its presentation of the gospel story and guidance in biblical interpretation. (See my highlights.) Its emphasis on human anthropology and a biblical view of sexuality also struck a chord, highlighting the urgent need for a robust theology of the body amid ongoing debates over gender and sexuality. While some criticized the statement for overemphasizing this issue, I believe the drafters were wise to direct their attention here. The questions What does it mean to be human? and What is the meaning of our bodies? are essential. The statement’s focus on these themes isn’t merely a response to Western cultural controversies. From my conversations with believers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, it’s clear these issues are being debated worldwide.

Yet the rollout of the Seoul Statement wasn’t without its challenges. Within a short span of time, a paragraph on the church’s failures toward believers who experience same-sex attraction underwent revision, with the removal of the notion that church failures could be attributed to “ignorance” (which likely received pushback from African churches) or mere “discrimination” (a term critiqued, rightly in my view, by Korean church leaders who recognize its shift from a discipleship-focused perspective to legal connotations). The incorporation of edits raised the question of further amendments and the process of revision. I recommended the addition of a single sentence that would reiterate Lausanne’s historic commitment to evangelism as a “chief concern” (Manila 1989), especially when in parts of the world most marked primarily by relativism and pluralism, Christian presence and practice is welcomed, while proclamation is not.

Many will continue to offer feedback, but frankly, I hope the Statement doesn’t change much more from this point on. I sympathize with the leaders of the Theology Working Group, Ivor Poobalan and Victor Nakah, in grappling with so many perspectives. Having been part of committees responsible for resolutions or charged with wordsmithing certain documents, I know the headaches associated with trying to make sure you’re comprehensive and concise, not to mention clear-headed amid critique.

Despite the concerns expressed over its rollout, I’m grateful for the Seoul Statement and pray it will become a vital resource for the church. It grounds its anthropology in the biblical story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration, reminding us the Christian vision isn’t reactionary but a positive proclamation of God’s good design for humanity.

Holding Together Evangelism and Social Action

One of the ongoing challenges for Lausanne—and indeed for global evangelicalism—is maintaining a proper emphasis on both evangelism and social action. The history of the modern missions movement shows a trajectory of downplaying evangelism and conversion in favor of social action. Unless you beat the drum of evangelism and discipleship, you lose that drum over time.

John Stott and Billy Graham themselves weren’t on the same page as to what the focus of Lausanne would be. Looking at Lausanne today, it’s clear Stott won that debate. But perhaps Lausanne would benefit from more of Graham’s reticence to extend the organization’s focus to everything good the church might be involved in. Even though on the question of holistic mission I’m more of a Stott-guy myself, I felt the burden of Graham at this Congress. Lausanne would do well in the future to tighten up its areas of focus to the issues most closely related to world mission, discipleship, and the evangelization of unreached people groups so that this central aspect doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of so many competing priorities.

One way for Lausanne to stay on track would be to reiterate the apostolic teaching on Christ’s return to judge the living and the dead—the notion of eternal stakes in accepting or rejecting Christ—as one of the central motivations for urgency in evangelism. Though the Cape Town Commitment is right to ground our evangelistic fervor in love, not in the threat of eternal judgment, the latter aspect mustn’t go missing from our proclamation, lest we no longer sound like Jesus, whose teaching struck this note of warning much more often than this Lausanne Congress did.

Vision for the Future

Despite the challenges, what stood out most from the Fourth Lausanne Congress was the glorious messiness of people all around the world coming together. Discussion and debate is one of the great lessons of Lausanne over the years. Collaboration doesn’t happen without some measure of conflict. Doug Birdsall’s telling of Lausanne’s history shows how the whole movement began with and has endured conflict from the start. What’s important is to avoid controversies that fail to speak to the substantive issues under the surface.

The global church is a multifaceted multicultural phenomenon. I wept during many of the worship services (led primarily by a well-known Korean band called Isaiah 6tyOne, and the Gettys), standing side by side with so many believers from so many parts of the world, our hands raised high in worship of our Triune God. I don’t know that I’ll ever recite the Apostles’ Creed line about “the communion of saints” the same way. Walking through the halls, especially on the day when many wore the traditional dress of their native countries, I was deeply moved by the rich variety of cultures on display, something that made me homesick for a home I’ve yet to encounter—the new heavens and new earth, where every tribe and nation will bring their cultural tributes to the feet of King Jesus.

Another highlight was meeting with readers from Ethiopia, Kenya, India, and Korea who shared how my work has affected their lives and ministries. These conversations gave me a fresh perspective on my writing and filled me with resolve to look beyond the North American horizon to the needs of the global church.

The Fourth Lausanne Congress reminded me that no matter how crazy the world seems right now, the church is going to be fine. God’s people are alive, thriving, and pressing forward—everywhere to everywhere—with the good news of Jesus Christ. Even amid the disagreements and controversies, the Spirit of God is at work, drawing people to himself and uniting his people for the task ahead.

Let the church declare and display Christ together!

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Just before the opening ceremony of the Fourth Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization—a gathering of more than 5,000 church leaders from around the world—the Seoul Statement was released. Each time the Lausanne Congress has met, a document has been published: the Lausanne Covenant in 1974, the Manila Manifesto in 1989, and the Cape Town Commitment in 2010.

The Seoul Statement builds on the good work of those previous documents while addressing several challenges facing the church today. The preface reiterates the need for urgency in evangelism and calls for the church to “nurture the faith and discipleship” of believers by responding biblically to “trending social values and to distortions of the gospel, which have threatened to erode the sincere faith of Christians and to destroy the unity and fellowship of the church of the Lord Jesus.”

The 13,000+ word document seeks to give voice to the call of this Congress: Let the church declare and display Christ together! The Statement is worth reading as a whole, but here are some highlights.

1. Recommitment to the Gospel

The Seoul Statement begins with a retelling of the gospel in story form, beginning with creation and God’s blessing for humanity made in his image. “Blessing received was to become blessing shared between peoples, and blessing returned as worship.” Next we see humanity’s fall into sin, described here in terms of seeking independence from God and rebellion against his rule, with death as the consequence, leaving all human beings in bondage to self-will.

Tracing the Bible’s storyline, we see the covenant with Abraham and God’s promise of a new people, so as to “restore the blessing of his life-giving presence to one people within whom he would again unite all peoples in a relationship of mutual blessing.” Then we follow the long and tumultuous story of Israel’s kings and prophets until we arrive at Jesus’s birth: “Through the Spirit of God, the Son of God, who is the eternal Word, became a human being in the womb of a virgin, Mary, as the beginning of God’s new creation.”

In the ministry of Jesus, whose obedience is counted in the place of Israel, we see God’s power in defeating the Evil One. “The blessing Jesus pronounced was not wealth or health but God’s own life as the transforming power of new creation.” On the cross, Jesus “died as our representative substitute, the God-sent Adam of the new creation. In Christ, God was taking the punishment for our sin onto himself. The one who has life in himself gave his life for the life of the world. He was condemned, while his ransomed people were freed—freed from slavery to sin to love and serve the Lord.”

The Statement continues with an affirmation of Christ’s resurrection, his exaltation, and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on God’s people, who live in anticipation of Christ’s return to establish a new creation. The church now lives by faith, and “through our presence, our practice, and our proclamation we tell the story of the gospel to the ends of the earth.”

2. Interpretation of Scripture

The next section of the Seoul Statement reaffirms the Bible as God’s Word written—inspired, unerring, authoritative, and sufficient, the supreme norm for church’s life—a Book with the gospel at its center and the edifying of the church as its aim. But the main focus here is on interpretation and the need for Bible reading that is “attentive to historical, literary, and canonical contexts, illuminated by the Holy Spirit, and guided by the interpretive tradition of the church.”

The Seoul Statement holds up the Protestant principle of Scripture as the supreme authority alongside the “necessary and positive role of tradition which passes on a continuity of faithful reading from past generations who were led by the same Spirit and believed in the same gospel of Jesus Christ through the same Scriptures.”

In interpreting the Bible, the Statement reminds us that no one reads the Scriptures in a cultural vacuum. Christians in different parts of the world benefit from and challenge one another’s cultural perspectives in interpretation: “Each local church both represents the whole church in reading Scripture faithfully in and for its own context, and contributes from its local culture distinct insights that benefit the whole church.” This section concludes with a call to more Bible reading.

3. The Church’s Witness

It’s the church that must declare and display Christ to the nations, so naturally, the Seoul Statement turns from the Word of God to the people of the Word. This section’s context is the “confusion” brought about by “aberrant forms of church that distort the values of Christ and his gospel,” leading to “disillusionment among baptised believers” and the tendency for some to “distance themselves from the formal or institutional church.”

This section reiterates the importance of understanding the church as the communion of God’s people: one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The pilgrim church faces challenges from without and threats within.

The church grows as it gathers for worship, the community of faith’s “foundational practice. Worship is the ultimate end to which all our mission endeavors are directed. The work of mission will end when Jesus returns but worship will continue forever.”

Even in an anti-institutional age, all Christians are to “submit to the authority of a local church. Just as individuals grow because local churches grow in health and maturity, so too local churches grow because individuals grow in knowledge, intimacy, and accountability.”

4. The Human Person: Image of God Created and Restored

Now the Statement turns to the main challenges facing the church today, beginning with the question of what it means to be human.

The Statement starts with the meaning of humanity as made in the image of God, and our creation as “an integrated physical and spiritual unity.” Over against recent ideologies of gender, the Statement says,

The Statement does acknowledge the existence of intersex individuals and the significant psychological and social challenges they face, calling the church to compassion in these cases.

Next, the Statement expounds on the Christian understanding of marriage.

With this understanding of marriage and sexuality established, the Statement then rules out of bounds other examples of departing from the biblical witness.

We see here a reinforcement of an outward-focused, procreative direction for marriage, followed by a lament for how our society devalues children and marriage in the pursuit of sexual freedom. Abortion is mentioned here as one of the tragic results of human sinfulness.

Alongside the attention devoted to marriage and family, the Statement also acknowledges the importance of singleness.

After giving an overview of biblical teaching on same-sex sexual relations, the Statement concludes,

This section ends with the recognition of people within the church who experience same-sex attraction and calls for Christian leaders and local churches to support faithful believers by “developing healthy communities of love and friendship.”

5. Discipleship: Our Calling to Holiness and Mission

One of the biggest challenges facing the church today is the integrity of our witness when it comes to Christian leadership. The Statement acknowledges the “steady stream of reports of financial mismanagement, of sexual misconduct and abuse, of abuse of power among leaders, of efforts to cover-up these failures while ignoring the pain of those who have suffered because of them, and of spiritual anaemia and immaturity in evangelical churches around the world.”

A disciple is a follower of Jesus, formed by the gospel for a life of loving God and loving others. Mission is properly aimed toward the formation of disciples whose love for God and love for others are united in an undivided heart. “Our Lord Jesus commands us to be disciples and commissions us to make disciples.”

For this reason, “the pursuit of righteousness in our personal lives, our homes, our churches, and in the societies in which we live can no more be separated from the announcement of the gospel than being a disciple can be separated from making disciples.” The Statement calls on ministry leaders and missionaries to “remain in vital fellowship with and accountability to local churches.”

6. On War and Peace

The next section reaffirms God’s purpose in Christ to reconcile all peoples through the gospel in a world full of conflict and celebrates the presence of churches, Christian organizations, and individual Christians in championing the cause of peace. It lays out a vision of Christian witness in war-torn places.

The Statement also calls out those who would confuse church and state.

The Statement asserts “no modern state is able to claim or will ever be able to claim to be the special agent of God’s saving rule,” and so the church must “commit to pray and serve peoples in conflict in the world so that the gospel of Jesus Christ might bring true peace to all peoples.”

7. Stewarding Technology

Finally, the Statement turns to the question of technology and accelerating innovation, raising issues that range from areas such as genetic engineering, cloning, biotechnology, mind-uploading, digital media, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. Without getting into specific application, the Statement recognizes the danger of Christians being “discipled]” by social and digital media, yet also calls for “faithful presence in digital spaces, faithful contextualization through connected devices, faithful teaching of digital literacy, and faithful practice of hospitality for forming healthy usage habits.”

Christians must discern technologies that are motivated by the idea that neither nature nor human nature should be allowed to limit human freedom. At the same time, Christians are called to faithfully steward technology.

There’s so much more that could be excerpted from this Statement, but I think I’ve given enough highlights for you to have a taste of what this is all about. I recommend you spend some time with the whole document.

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In the summer of 2023, the Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA), in response to controversies threatening the unity of their association of churches from multiple directions, issued a set of affirmations and denials meant to clarify a path forward. “Just as Paul needed to explain and defend himself and his ministry (2 Cor 10–13),” they said, “we, too, sense a need to explain the ministry the Lord has entrusted to us.”

The statement was approved by the board of directors and the board of ministerial standing, the two boards elected by and accountable to the EFCA. When the president delivered it at the conclusion of his report, delegates responded with resounding affirmation. In that moment, the EFCA made it clear their future would be neither “Progressive Evangelical” nor “Neo-Fundamentalist.” They reclaimed the traditional and historic center of the best of their evangelical heritage. They clarified not only their beliefs but also their ethos.

This series of denials and affirmations is a terrific example of what I call “multi-directional leadership”—not an attempt to find “balance” or “a middle path” but a fierce commitment to walking in light of the gospel while avoiding dangers that encroach on the flock from different sides of the field. Here’s a quick overview of what they declared.

On Social Justice

The first three statements focus on issues associated more with the left, related to “social justice” and ideology often described as “woke.” The document pushes back against the “secular ‘Social Justice’ movement as held in progressive circles,” while upholding that “biblical justice has social implications.” It denies “a progressive ideology grounded in critical theory,” while affirming “the global and indeed cosmic impacts of sin, including racial injustice.” It rejects the reductionism of critical race theory and its contradiction of the Scriptures, while acknowledging that “the questions and challenges it raises” might “stir us to recall critical biblical truths that we may have neglected.”

On Christian Nationalism and God’s Kingdom

The next two statements focus on issues associated more with the right, related to “Christian Nationalism” and political activism. The document rejects a view of Christian Nationalism that would have “the federal government declare the United States a Christian nation” or label Americans as “God’s chosen people,” while simultaneously approving “a patriotic love of one’s nation” and the duties of Christians as good citizens to “freely advocate for God-honoring public policies.” It rejects a focus on political action as a means for establishing the kingdom of God, while recognizing the God-appointed role of “governing authorities to do good” and the reign of King Jesus as transcendent over “all other citizens and partisan ideologies.”

On Sex and Gender

Two more statements focus on current controversies over sex and gender. The document rejects attempts to alter the body when a person’s biological sex doesn’t conform to a person’s self-perception, while urging toward those who experience this “distressing struggle” a compassion grounded in biblical conviction that points “toward the wholeness of a biologically-sexed identity grounded in God’s ‘very good’ design in creation as male and female.” It also rejects an egalitarian perspective on the roles and functions of men and women in the church, while lifting up “the gifts and ministries of women” as “essential to the health and fruitfulness of churches” and saying these ministries should be “sought out and multiplied.”

On Eternal Suffering

The last statement rejects the annihilationist position regarding unbelievers who die apart from Christ and reaffirms the traditional Christian understanding of hell, while making clear that “among the kinds of suffering we ought to seek to alleviate, this is the most grievous,” thus steering clear of the tendency for social ministry to supplant evangelism.

Holding the Center

The document ends with several statements that hold together what many in our day would separate, which I summarize below:

• The gospel of Jesus is the ultimate solution to the world’s problems, yet love for God and neighbor requires us to seek the welfare and common good of others.
• The church is the new community, whose primary mission is to proclaim the gospel and make disciples, and yet Christians live as salt and light in anticipation of Jesus’s return.
• Biblical truth and the gospel must reign supreme over any contemporary social ideology, even if various social movements may contain biblical truth to which we must attend.

These summaries avoid both the quietist temptation that leads Christians to reduce our concerns to whatever is merely “spiritual” and the activist temptation that could lead to decentering the cross of Christ in favor of social work or political action. They uphold the supremacy and sufficiency of Scripture, while not dismissing truth and wisdom that flow from common grace.

Learning to Say Yes and No

The EFCA affirmations and denials are a good example of what faithful, discerning Christians must do in a time of controversy: to affirm the truth of the Scriptures and the truthfulness of biblical doctrine with an unqualified “yes,” and then respond, when the truth of the Scriptures and biblical doctrine are being denied, with an unqualified “no.”

True discernment isn’t the attempt of Christians to try to hold together opposing worldviews or meld differing beliefs together as if the distinctions don’t matter. But true discernment is also absent when Christians adopt an “all or nothing” approach, “either naively and uncritically accepting everything, or critically and condemningly rejecting everything.”

What the EFCA approved is a better way to preserve church unity and engage the world with discernment. With a posture of humility, we “avoid an attitude of hyper-criticism” that would hinder us from receiving insights from every contemporary claim. At the same time, we mustn’t be “naive in our acceptance of the truth claims of others” and thus be “misled by others’ false notions because are convinced that their motives are pure.”

The report concludes,

Take a look at the whole document and the corresponding biblical and theological commentary. Whether you line up with everything in these affirmations and denials or you find some wording you might quibble with here and there, I believe you’ll admire the desire to reclaim the center of evangelical identity in a season when both progressive ideologies and a return to neo-fundamentalism are on the rise.

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In September 2024, at Keith Getty’s request, I delivered a workshop talk on Taylor Swift for the Sing! Conference. I was reluctant to speak on this topic because, aside from familiarity with a few of her most popular songs, I haven’t deeply engaged with her music. I’m a Beatles fan, about the farthest thing from a “Swiftie” you can find, so I felt like an odd choice for the workshop. My kids aren’t into Taylor Swift either. My oldest son and I share an affinity for Ed Sheeran. My daughter is more into K-pop. I would’ve preferred to do a workshop on “The Songs of Ed Sheeran” or “The Beatles and the Bible.”

That said, it made sense for there to be a workshop on this topic, and so I accepted the challenge when I heard from Christian parents looking for guidance as they seek to raise girls in this era of Taylor Swift fandom or, in some cases, obsession. Some Christians have grown up with Swift’s music and now wonder how they should think about her latest material. Others want to know how to shepherd their teenagers well. Should all Swift’s music be off-limits? Or should we just overlook the areas where her music presents ideas or messages opposed to Christianity?

My goal in this column isn’t to answer every question about Taylor Swift’s music but to do a L’Abri style of cultural analysis that tries to understand the music from within its own frame, put the songs into perspective, bring a Christian viewpoint to bear on the art, and then provide practical suggestions as to the best approach to engaging this music in your family.

Phenomenon of Taylor Swift

If you start talking about Taylor Swift’s musical career, you quickly realize “career” isn’t big enough to describe her influence. She’s a phenomenon. Her most recent album, The Tortured Poets Department, is her 14th number one on Billboard, an achievement surpassed only by the Beatles. It’s the seventh of her albums to sell more than a million copies in a single week. She leads all female artists for the most top 5, top 10, top 20, and top 40 hits, as well as for overall chart appearances. Plus, she’s the only artist in history to claim all the Billboard top 10 spots at the same time.

Taylor Swift’s economic influence is so massive it birthed a new term: “Swiftonomics.” Her Eras tour contributed more than $5 billion to the U.S. economy—that’s more revenue than the gross domestic product of 35 smaller countries combined. There’s no question Taylor Swift is a savvy businesswoman. She knows how to keep her fans engaged and coming back for more (releasing extended editions of albums, four different vinyl pressings in different colors, and so on).

Why Is Taylor Swift So Popular?

One of the best questions we can ask when something is popular in society, or when a song or a musician’s influence spreads throughout the culture, is why. Before we react, before we jump to affirm or deny, to support or oppose her, we ought to ask the deeper questions: Why is Taylor Swift so popular? Why do people think her music is true and good and beautiful? Why do people want her outlook on life to be true?

Since I haven’t closely followed Swift’s music over the years, I asked some friends to give me the lay of the land, to point me in the direction of certain albums and songs, so I can better understand her artistry. After doing a deep dive into her music, I see some reasons for her popularity.

1. Songwriting Talent

First: sheer talent in songwriting. I have to admit, I was wowed. Taylor’s skill in writing, singing, and then performing—really selling her songs as an authentic expression of herself in a particular moment in time—is stunning. She not only can craft a memorable lyric but also has a good ear for a catchy melody. She’s one of the greats. When she was just 20, she released the entire Speak Now album as a solo songwriter, a way of proving to the world (and to herself) that on her own she could create a hit album.

The magic is in her storytelling. Her songs are personal and descriptive (often very detailed) and yet they still feel relatable. As she recounts her experiences, she throws in details that invite intrigue, facts that would seem to make the words only applicable to her, but because her bond with the listener is so strong, you see yourself in the lyrics. You imagine yourself into her world; you feel her emotions; you echo her pain.

In preaching class, professors tell you the best sermon application points should be specific and concrete. You might think the best way to relate to the whole congregation is to stay general, to say something like “The apostle Paul tells us to encourage one another” and let the hearers figure out how best to apply it. The reverse is true. The more specific and concrete you are with examples of encouragement, the better you’ll spark the congregation’s imagination. They’ll start thinking of creative ways of their own to apply what the Bible is saying.

Taylor’s music, with all its specificity, aligns with that principle. Her lyrics draw you in with a personalized yet relatable way of singing about life and love and pain. Think of tearjerkers like “Ronan,” about a kid who died of cancer. Or “Bigger Than the Whole Sky,” which might be about her experiencing a miscarriage, but no one is sure, and the mystery is part of the appeal. Or “All Too Well,” a song rereleased as a 10-minute version (!), with the line about how she “left her scarf there at [his] sister’s house,” or the way the song adapts and changes the meaning of “all too well” as it progresses, giving us other memorable lines like these:

Another note on songwriting: a test of a good song is how many ways it can be interpreted. Same song, radically different treatment, and it works. A mark of a good song is how it can be reimagined and reworked. Swift’s album 1989, named for the year she was born, is considered by many critics as one of the greatest pop albums of all time. Another artist, Ryan Adams, reinterpreted every song on that album and did his own indie-rock version of 1989. It’s an impressive achievement—a testament not only to Adams’s talent but also to Swift’s songwriting ability, that her music could be reimagined and still hold up.

2. Expression of Universal Emotions

Another reason for Taylor Swift’s popularity is the fact her music connects with near-universal emotions. Here are several.

Coming of Age

In nearly every album, you find “coming of age” themes. These are most prominent in her self-titled debut, but the albums Fearless and Speak Now also connect with how teenage girls feel and the situations they encounter. Everyone can relate to one of the eras. And now, because Swift has been in the music business so long, young moms introduce their daughters to her music.

Many women feel like she’s telling their life stories, not just her own, as if she has the magical ability to narrate their lives. The music itself embodies a rite of passage, the development from youth and innocence into relational complexity and uncertainty. The song “22,” which came out in 2012, captures something of the young adult struggling to find happiness and independence in this chaotic, isolated world:

That line reminded me of Robert Bellah’s observation in the late 1990s that “American cultural traditions define personality, achievement, and the purpose of human life in ways that leave the individual suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation.” It’s a way of life both exhilarating and exhausting. Or as Taylor says, “miserable and magical.” Happy and free? Yes. Confused and lonely? Yes. What an accurate depiction of twentysomethings today.

At the opening of her Eras tour, Taylor says,

That’s a brilliant way of recasting her milestones in music as more than just a discography but as a soundtrack for her fans’ lives—capped, of course, by their presence at her tour. Don’t miss the pilgrimage aspect of these events, where it appears that worship is taking place. Or at least some kind of adoration. And this devotion takes form with songs so meaningful to people that they memorize every line. Consider the videos of people singing along to every word. Sometimes you can’t hear Taylor because of how loud the crowd is! People even gather outside the stadiums just to participate in the experience and sing along.

Yearning for Lasting Love, Marriage, and Babies

Another common theme is a yearning for permanence, the desire for a love that lasts, for a man to commit to her for all her life so they can enjoy the children that come from that union. It may seem strange to see Swift (no friend to Christianity’s sexual ethic, as we’ll see shortly) yearning so openly for marriage and family, but this theme is present throughout her work. One of her first songs, “Mary’s Song” from 2006, is a love story, where two kids meet, grow up, then marry and return to the same place they started their relationship.

Then there’s “Love Story,” two years later. You can’t get more on the nose than a song that says, “You’ll be the prince and I’ll be the princess,” with references to Romeo and Juliet, and her crying out, “Romeo, save me, I’ve been feeling so alone.” The song (and video) ends with a ring and marriage and Taylor in the white dress.

Another song from 2008, “You Belong with Me,” is similar, a fairy-tale love song where she’s waiting for the prince to wake up and realize she’s right in front of him and has been all along. The end is heartwarming, because in the music video, the guy chooses the right girl (a good Taylor) over the wrong girl (a bad Taylor). Interestingly, it’s a double of Taylor, which foreshadows the other sides of her we see in her later music.

In The Tortured Poets Department, an album marked by lyrics highly sexualized with lots of expletives (we’ll get to those problems soon), the theme of marriage and having babies remains, yet it’s now tinged with regret, overshadowed by the passing years without the right person. In “So Long, London,” she sings,

You know the line kids use: “So-and-so and So-and-so, Sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage.” Taylor gives that rhyme a twist in “How Did It End?,” only she spells out a different word:

And how can you miss the heartache in “Midnight Rain,” about her checking in on a former boyfriend now happily in love, with the family she’s always dreamed of, and her raw admission that perhaps she made individual choices that will forever keep her from such a life?

Longing for Acceptance and Approval

Another universal theme is Taylor’s desire for acceptance and approval. It’s the restlessness of the human heart, looking for that rest not in God but in all the wrong places. It’s the desire to be good enough, or to be seen as good enough. Taylor is open about how this drives her music and her decisions:

This desire for acceptance has led to struggles in the past with an eating disorder and to her recognition that “there’s always some standard of beauty that you’re not meeting.” She feels insecure, even with all her success. In 2018, when she wasn’t nominated for a Grammy, her first response to the snub was that she’d just go make a better record. In talking about her song “Mirrorball,” she says,

Who can’t relate to that? And even though Taylor Swift’s life looks vastly different than the lives of her fans, even though she faces career pressures that make her think she is, in her words, “constantly having to reinvent, constantly having to find new facets of [herself] that people find to be shiny,” many listeners can still relate. Because in an era of expressive individualism where we’re responsible for finding and expressing ourselves, this pressure she feels on a large scale, millennials and Gen Zers feel on a smaller scale.

The need to constantly reinvent yourself, to figure out who you are and express it to the world, to discover new things about your identity and then put them on display, or to try on different identities until you figure out who you are—these themes in Swift’s songs represent the cry of a generation trying to find and be true to themselves while also pleading for the approval and affirmation of others. Without God, all you have is yourself or others.

Swift’s music resonates because she knows the self she wants to express is flawed. Watch the progression, for example, from a celebratory song like “Me!” from 2019, with its anthem-like assertion “I promise that you’ll never find another like me” to “Anti-Hero” in 2022.

“I’m a monster on the hill,” she sings. In “The Archer,” she says, “I cut off my nose just to spite my face, then I hate my reflection for years and years.” To be clear, in neither of these recent songs do we find her feeling sorry about her character flaws or the nature of being the monster on the hill. No, once her self-esteem crashes and she realizes she’s the problem, she doubles down on this flawed persona—and this leads to another theme.

Heartbreak and Anger at Being Mistreated

Swift’s music often expresses heartbreak and then anger at being mistreated, and a desire for vindication. Sometimes it’s her response to critics, for example in 2010’s “Mean,” when the haters came after her for all her failed relationships. She was being criticized for dating and breaking up with guys just to write songs about them. Her response is defiance:

That’s the primary motivation behind the one song I’m sure everyone reading this has heard before: “Shake It Off.”

Still, it’s not just defiance of one’s critics. Her songs expose a tenderness that acknowledges real pain underneath the facade. The song “Hoax” has a memorable line: “You know it still hurts underneath my scars, from when they pulled me apart.” About this, she says,

Part of that heartbreak stems from her inability to find fulfillment and happiness in relationships she thought would deliver. In ‘Tolerate It,” she sings,

No man is supposed to be a woman’s temple, mural, and sky. She’s heartbroken when she gets cut out from the story of her lover’s life. 

What Cautions and Concerns Should Christians Have About Taylor Swift’s Music?

We’ve looked at the reasons her music resonates with so many people today. Let’s look now from a Christian perspective and evaluate some of the aspects of her music that lead to caution and concern.

1. Language

Let’s start with the obvious: swearing, cussing, unwholesome talk. The first four albums were fairly innocent when it comes to the language. This changed with the release of the Taylor’s Versions of Speak Now and Red. Here’s a graph that shows a stunning rise in swear words and bad language in Taylor Swift’s albums (and this doesn’t even include examples of taking God’s name in vain).

We start here because this is the easiest place to acknowledge a simple truth for believers—you don’t want unwholesome talk seared into your brain. I know some will say that Christians are inconsistent here, because, after all, nearly every movie or television show these days has bad language in it. That’s true, but I do think there’s a difference in hearing bad language in song. Music is way more intimate; the path is shorter from head to heart and from heart to mouth. To be clear, I’m not defending TV shows and movies with explicit language. I’m simply saying we should be even more careful with what we sing. We’ll come back to this later . . .

2. Unbiblical Themes

It’s no surprise that, like most other music artists today, Taylor Swift has an outlook on the world that doesn’t line up with Scripture. Let me point out a few prominent themes that diverge from what Christianity teaches.

Rebellious Independence

In some songs, as we’ve seen, Taylor is heartbroken because she’s not found happiness in romantic relationships. In other songs, especially on the 2017 Reputation album, she puts forth a persona of fierce independence. I am all I need. Her music in that era represents a purge of nearly all her relationships. She’s fighting back after having been bruised and burned. She sings, “Gone was any trace of you. I think I am finally clean.” This is the lie that salvation is found inside. She doesn’t need anyone else.

In the Eras tour, when the Reputation era begins, all the imagery turns serpentine, and even her costume is covered in snakes. She took the Kanye West debacle that led to his fans calling her snake and repurposed it as a symbol of “the new Taylor.” In the end, this is the rebellious independence we see in the garden, when the serpent is telling Eve, You don’t need God. You don’t need Adam. You have everything you need right here.

Vengeance over Forgiveness

Another theme is vengeance over forgiveness, especially in songs like “Bad Blood” or “Look What You Made Me Do.” I love this line from “End Game”: “I bury hatchets but I keep maps of where I put ’em.” That’s a line that deserves a place in a sermon on forgiveness, because don’t we all struggle with that? Taylor may move on from relationships, or from broken friendships, or from the fallout when people in the music industry have wronged her, but she doesn’t sing about restoration or reconciliation.

Swift falls into a trap common in our day where relationships are instrumentalized. We judge the nature of a relationship based on how well we think it’s helping us to self-actualize, to find and discover and be true to ourselves. Once the relationship starts getting in the way of our self-expression or monkeys with our sense of identity, or if it impinges on our freedom, we assume it must be bad. In this environment, relationships can’t help but go haywire because they lack the self-sacrifice necessary for true companionship and friendship, where the relationship is not only about us but about both of us together, growing toward God. When things turn sour, there’s only moving on, not moving up.

Wiccan Spirituality

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the elements of Wiccan spirituality that show up in some of Swift’s music, especially the song “Willow”—the music video shows her in a forest, hooded, with a coven of witches. This spirituality isn’t dominant in most of Swift’s music, and it may be more of an aesthetic choice here than a sign of true devotion. But it’s clear that when she does lean into spirituality, it’s usually the pseudo-spiritualities and pseudo-religions we’re seeing grow in popularity today. She also sings about “karma” in this way, claiming it’s her boyfriend, even a god.

Anti-Church Mentality

Some of Taylor’s songs paint the church as full of hypocritical jerks. In “But Daddy I Love Him,” she calls people “judgmental creeps” who show concern about “what’s best for [her],” and she rejects their prayers and goes off with the “wild boy and all of this wild joy.”

Another song, “Guilty as Sin,” not only criticizes the church but also uses Christian iconography in ways that make the criticism even more pointed. Of course, this kind of slap toward the church isn’t new. You can trace it back to Madonna and others. But that leads me to one other overarching concern.

3. Sexual Revolution Ideology

Taylor Swift shares the common assumptions of the sexual revolution. Although it’s clear she yearns for fidelity, marriage, and children, she celebrates all kinds of sexual practices and behaviors. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Since the 1960s, almost all pop and rock music, including country, deviates from a Christian understanding of sex.

Swift’s early music isn’t as marked by this ideology. But when you get to 1989, you start to get references to LGBT+ issues (“Welcome to New York”) and much more sexualization (“Wildest Dreams” and “Blank Space”). By the time you get to Reputation and Lover, there’s more overt sexuality. And take note: the sexual suggestiveness isn’t always in the lyrics; sometimes, it’s more about the music video or the live performance. One of her recent songs becomes basically a burlesque show for the Eras tour.

The best example of Swift using her music to push the sexual revolution’s ideology is, of course, the 2019 song “You Need to Calm Down,” with its LGBT+ advocacy and a music video that contrasts a colorful world of rainbows to a mob of backwoods, country-looking people holding signs that can’t even spell homosexuality correctly. The play on words here with GLAAD refers to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation:

That line about being “in the dark ages” represents a major tenet of sexual revolution ideology: we progress morally as we adopt and embrace more and more sexual freedom and variety. In a documentary, she says clearly, “I need to be on the right side of history,” and she registers her disgust at people who would take us back to “a horrendous 1950s world.” If you believe sex is reserved for marriage between a man and a woman, Taylor puts you in the category of the bigoted, backwoods haters on the wrong side of history. No matter how philosophically or sociologically or biblically rooted your view is, based on her statements, she has no respect for you or your views.

Similarly, some of Swift’s heroes are examples of late-modern decadence and the empty promises of the sexual revolution. “The Last Great American Dynasty” is about Rebekah Harkness, a wealthy socialite in the latter part of the last century whose life was a mess. She gained notoriety through her shamelessness—a life of decadence, with relationship after relationship destroyed, to the point she barely made it back to speaking terms with her kids before she died. Taylor admires Harkness because of her boldness, her willingness to endure the gossip of others.

Before we move on from this topic, it’d be unfair if I didn’t note that even when celebrating perversity and decadence, Taylor knows that happiness isn’t guaranteed. “All of my heroes die all alone,” she sings in “The Archer.” And in “Illicit Affairs,” she acknowledges how the idol of sexual satisfaction is one that inevitably lets you down.

Some of these songs about sexual promiscuity have a dark side—a reference to isolation, or degradation, or the lies and empty promises. So, ironically, even though I condemn her sexual ethic, I commend her honesty in portraying the disillusionment left in the wake of her choices. 

Should We Listen to Taylor Swift?

Now, you’re probably wondering, Tell me, Trevin, if I should delete all of Taylor Swift’s albums from my phone. Or if I should ban her music from my teenager, or if we should only allow the “clean” versions that take out the expletives, and so on.

You’re going to be disappointed if you expect me to offer a one-size-fits-all rule. I’m not the Holy Spirit. I’m not your conscience. What I will tell you is, after having sampled a lot of this music, what I’d do if my daughter were into Taylor Swift. I’ll tell you how I’d handle it, based on similar conversations I’ve had with my kids about other artists they’ve been into. Here we go.

First, don’t overlook the impressionability of young minds. If I were to start playing the biggest hits of the year you graduated high school, I bet you’d know every word. You remember the songs you grow up with. Whatever your kids are listening to in the years from 5 to about 20 are going to stick with them the rest of their lives. So you should ask, What songs am I good with being the soundtrack of my kids’ lives? There’s a well-traveled path between the head and the heart.

Second, get into whatever music your kids like. If they invite you into their world of music, never turn down that chance. A few years ago, my son was into NF. Guess what? I listened to more Christian rap than ever before in my life. In the past couple years, I’ve listened to more K-pop than I ever expected to, not because I’m a fan of K-pop but because I’m a fan of my daughter, and I want to enjoy what she likes. If your daughter is into Taylor Swift already, or wants to be, then I suggest you get really familiar with her music, not because you care so much about Taylor but because you care about your daughter.

Third, talk about music regularly. Once you start listening to music together, when a song comes up on the playlist, or when you’re in the car together, or when she wants to show you a music video, talk about it. Give your honest impressions. Don’t hold back. Talk about what you like, what you don’t like, what parts you think are good or what parts are bad. Talk about what’s being said, the message being communicated, the view of life on display, or the view of romance or relationships. Let music prompt some good conversations about artistry, the Bible, where society lines up with and departs from Christianity, and so on.

(Listen, discernment is required for Christian music too! Don’t assume that “safe for the whole family” Christian radio means biblical, God-honoring lyrics. Part of the way this works in practice isn’t just by learning how to recognize what’s true or false, beautiful or profane in secular art but by exposing yourself to good, beautiful, and true art. There are deeply gifted songwriters making great music that seeks to glorify God, and it’s important to feed on that as well.)

Music can be a powerful point of connection. It’s like a different language. Become fluent, or at least conversational, in your kids’ musical tastes.

Fourth, set some guidelines. For my kids, explicit lyrics are off-limits. We aren’t putting curse words into our minds, because we don’t want those words coming out of our mouths. The simplest way to avoid explicit lyrics is to use the built-in controls for your phone or your music subscription to make explicit language stuff unavailable. That said, kids can listen to music in all sorts of ways, so if they’re listening via YouTube or Spotify, or other streaming services, it may be harder to implement this strategy. You’ll have to get their buy-in. In our family, we’ve agreed, “We aren’t OK with explicit lyrics in our songs because our minds are impressionable, and because we want to honor Jesus with our lips. Listening to music with swearing would make that goal harder, not easier.”

Of course, certain songs that are overtly sexual will need to be off-limits also. I’m a Beatles fan, but you’re not going to find me bopping along with my kids to “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?,” that awful song off The White Album. We’re just not going to sing that (not to mention it’s a terrible song from purely an artistic standpoint!). Just say no to the clear agenda-driven songs, like “Same Love” by Macklemore, which makes a case for gay marriage, or “Born This Way” by Lady Gaga, or “You Need to Calm Down” by Taylor Swift (heads up—that Swift song is so catchy I couldn’t help but hear it for days in my head after only listening twice).

Fifth, don’t make the fruit more forbidden than it is. You don’t want to give explicit songs or sexual songs a mystique, or push your kids into hiding so they just listen on their own. It’d be much better to explain why you’re not good with certain songs. Maybe you curate for yourself or your family a playlist with the Taylor Swift songs you think are appropriate and exclude all the ones that aren’t. You could say something like “Here are the songs I’m OK with you listening to. If there’s another one you want to hear, one that’s off-limits, we can sit down and listen to it together and discuss it. And then I’ll explain why I don’t want that song in your headspace.”

If you’ve not been terribly involved in your kids’ choices of music, you may feel like you’ve failed as a parent or that you don’t know where to start. I get it. Don’t beat yourself up. You may face some resistance, but I think deep down most kids appreciate boundaries, and they’ll relish the attention you’re giving to what they love.

Even if you’re starting this conversation at a later stage, after your daughter is a big fan, be real and honest. And remember, the goal is to reframe the discussion so you’re not talking about “banning” certain songs but expressing your desire to protect your daughter’s headspace and heart. Don’t make the off-limits songs “forbidden” in a way that increases the attraction. Better to show your kids why those songs are either not artistically or emotionally satisfying, or are way too outside the bounds of what we believe as Christians.

Last, I’d encourage you to do three things with the music of Taylor Swift. It’s the longings-lies-light construct from my book This Is Our Time. Look at the deep longings and yearnings in her songs. Those are planted by God. They’re part of the God-shaped hole, the restless search for rest that marks all humanity. Like everyone, she wants happiness. She wants goodness. She wants beauty.

Next, look at the lies she falls for in her pursuit of those longings, the lie that a man could ever fully satisfy her heart, the lie that sexual freedom is better than sexual fidelity within marriage, the lie that a biblical view of sex is repressive instead of life-giving, the lie that vengeance is going to satisfy her more than forgiveness, the lie that she could ever find approval and acceptance in her fame and fortune. Look at those longings, and then look at those lies.

Then bring the light of the gospel to bear on Taylor Swift’s words. Bring her words into contact with the Living Word. The gospel fulfills the deepest longings and exposes the deepest lies. Show how the gospel stands over and against Taylor Swift in some areas, but then show how the gospel also fulfills her deep longings, how the gospel offers Living Water instead of the polluted wells where she’s trying to quench her thirst. All her desire for lasting love, all her yearning for approval and acceptance, all her longing for happiness and fulfillment, all her hopes that one day her scars will heal and her pain subside—it’s all there in Jesus’s cross and resurrection, in the forgiveness that comes through his blood, and in the acceptance that comes from belonging to God’s family by grace through faith.

‘Oh God, What Now?’

In her most recent album, Taylor sings about performing on stage: “You know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart.” The phenomenon of Taylor Swift won’t make sense unless you can see beyond the music to the heartbreak of a younger generation that she so successfully captures and expresses.

There’s a moment in one of the documentaries when Taylor, after winning a second Grammy, says to herself, “Oh my God, that was all you wanted. You get to the mountaintop, and you look around and you think, Oh God, what now?” From an earthly standpoint, there’s no question Swift has reached the mountaintop. And at that summit, she has an unintended prayer on her lips: “Oh God, what now?”

Can we not pray for a new era for Taylor Swift? Remember, the Lord’s arm isn’t too small to save. So let’s ask God to move in the life of Taylor Swift, and let’s pray for guidance, wisdom, and discernment as we seek to raise kids who can shine like stars (we might say “bejeweled!”), who shimmer in a world of sin.

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It’s common to assume the big problem driving political and cultural polarization is that we feel too deeply—our passions run too hot, and we’ve become too intense about too many things. What we need is to lower the temperature and learn to chill out, to simmer down the passionate feelings that lead to so much unrest.

I wonder, though, if the deeper problem for many in our society is the reverse. We don’t feel enough. Our emotions are shallow and superficial, our mouth stifling a permanent yawn. Our outlook is shaded by cynicism, the apathy of memes, the replacement of substance with vibes.

Is it possible that in all our therapeutic attempts to anesthetize ourselves from feeling pain, we’ve also numbed ourselves to the experience of joy? Maybe we’re so distracted by entertainment and driven by our devices that polarization becomes attractive and anger enjoyable because at least then we feel something. Resentment, contempt, disdain, and rage may be negative emotions, but at least they make you feel alive again.

If I’m right, the Christian call to peacemaking in this cultural moment will not be accomplished by wagging the finger at those passionate about a cause or angered by injustice, just telling them to “temper down.” Spreading shalom won’t happen by prescribing more sedatives. Especially if, when we try to lower the temperature or tame the passions, a younger generation imagines we’re telling them to go back to a way of life they’re longing to escape: the lonely, isolated world of screens, text threads, and online forums, drugged by endless scrolling and swiping, with the phone as a pacifier.

Life Without Resistance

One of the most important books this year, Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, shows the lengths to which parents and teachers go to shelter and coddle kids and students from the unavoidable pains and sufferings in this life. We think happiness will be achieved not by building resilience through overcoming resistance but by not feeling resistance at all.

All these plans backfire, of course, because the good life is an adventure. Love is risky. Love opens your heart to hurt, deep hurt. Close relationships always come with challenges. Stepping up in leadership requires us to overcome the fear of failure or to develop thick skin whenever we’re criticized. Some ambitions do get crushed. Sometimes the righteous cause fails.

Ronald Dworkin warns about the new promises of “a de-problematized existence.” It’s the idea that discomfort, resistance, and challenge are indications of failure, something to be resolved through technology rather than endured and overcome through religious faith and persistence. If I encounter friction or pushback, something must have gone wrong! In the past, he writes, “people had to resist overbearing families, overbearing neighbors, and overbearing communities in order to preserve their individuality. Today, many Americans are so alone that they have no one who needs to be resisted.”

Life of the Dropout

It’s never been easier to orient your life around avoiding risks and preserving a semblance of inner peace. Retreat into yourself and voila!—you don’t have to deal with pesky people. Burrow into your cave of video games, the magic mirror of social media scrolling, the next recommendation on Netflix, or (in more extreme cases) a reliance on prescription drugs or weed or alcohol or the choice of porn over real-life relationships, and you won’t feel as much pain or suffering.

The problem is, this way of life keeps you from feeling much of anything. These are anesthetics, designed to keep us pacified. They isolate us from others. They numb us to real human connection.

It’s been two decades since Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone warned about this trajectory. Ryan Burge now surveys “the dropouts”—those who look at all the institutions that once consumed a huge part of American social life and conclude, “I don’t need any of this.” We’ve not arrived at the extremes we see in other countries (the severely reclusive hikikomori in Japan, for example) but what might slow or stop this trend?

Local associations and council meetings are increasingly overshadowed by national politics we observe on TV. In-person interactions at church are less common when people choose instead to just tune in online. Educational opportunities seek to eliminate all resistance and challenge, to simplify and make the process as easy as possible. To what end? So we have more time to hole up in our rooms like ghosts, waiting for whatever the algorithm serves up next?

Why the Dropout Phenomenon Matters

The scariest part of the anesthetized life is its self-perpetuating tendency. Dworkin writes,

The idea that a painless, frictionless, resistance-less life is what will make us happy is wrong. The best things in life require time and effort. The most rewarding relationships are forged through seasons of suffering and challenge. The best conversations are often full of disagreement and debate—tensions and passions that must be tamped down for the friendship to endure. There’s no such thing as a happy life of love that doesn’t impinge on our personal freedom.

But, some will say, is this not just setting ourselves up for sadness, for betrayal, for additional hurt? Yes, of course! That vulnerability is a vital part of what makes relationships work. We cannot experience rich relationships without some level of risk.

Necessity of Resistance

Here’s where the church must propose a counterintuitive though desperately needed alternative. Performative polarization as a solution to the anesthetized life will never satisfy. Neither will the avoidance of all discomfort and pain in relationships. Resistance is good. And necessary. There’s no such thing as limitless freedom, happiness without boundaries, or the good life without friction and pushback.

“We are afflicted in every way but not crushed,” writes the apostle Paul. “We are perplexed but not in despair; we are persecuted but not abandoned; we are struck down but not destroyed” (2 Cor. 4:8–9). And all his apostolic exertion is for the benefit of God’s people, so that thanksgiving increases to the glory of God (v. 15). There’s no “weight of glory” without “momentary light affliction” (v. 17).

The gospel may sometimes feel like a splash of cold water on the face, but that’s part of its purpose: to awaken us to greater glories and to give meaning and purpose to our struggle—the promise of joy in the resistance we encounter as we press on toward the prize. Don’t settle for the anesthetized life, brothers and sisters. Don’t settle.

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Last year, I wrote about a generational shift in expectations related to rhythms of running and rest in the Christian life. The overachieving, never-ending ambitiousness of Gen X and older millennials has led in many cases to burnout and prompted a course correction toward more sustainable rhythms of rest, practicing Sabbath, prioritizing health and well-being, and eliminating hurry and anxiousness. But for many younger millennials and Gen Z, the course correction has become the default setting, and over time, this emphasis on self-care can devolve into inordinate self-focus and sometimes laziness.

I discussed this issue recently with a church-planting friend in Germany, Jason Lim. He offered a helpful construct centered around essential rhythms of running and rest. Without the proper focus, rest can slip into resignation, marked by apathy, laziness, personal comfort, indifference, and self-indulgence. Meanwhile, running can become another form of restlessness, marked by busyness, anxiety, worry, pride, and the never-ending hustle and bustle of spiritual activity.

Running and rest are to be kept in healthy tension, Lim says, so we’re sacrificially ambitious in our kingdom service and securely anchored in Jesus and his love for us. Right rhythms are the key to ensuring running doesn’t become just a mask for restlessness, and rest doesn’t turn into a spiritualized form of resignation.

Running and Rest Aren’t Opposites

I find a lot to commend in Lim’s construct and in his heart to ensure the next generation adopts rhythms for a healthy Christian life. Yes, we run the race to win the prize, keeping our eyes on Jesus, striving with all our might in the Spirit’s power. And yes, we rest in Jesus, seeking to abide in his love, acknowledging we’re saved by grace through faith, with our identity as God’s children secure in him.

But I’d like to build on Lim’s thinking by offering an insight that may help us work toward this healthier vision: running and rest aren’t opposites. Running and rest aren’t merely two aspects of the Christian life we must hold in tension or try to balance. Rightly understood, rest is present when we’re running, and we’re still running even when we’re resting.

Running a Marathon

Say you’ve trained to run a marathon. For this event, runners incorporate periods of walking and the occasional stop for water. So even when you plan to run a marathon, you’re factoring in slowdown periods and hydration breaks. Yet in those moments when you’ve slowed to a walk or stopped completely, you still say, “I’m running a marathon.” Why? Because rest is factored into the running.

Let’s go deeper, to the level of identity. If you’ve trained and succeeded at running marathons regularly, you can honestly say, “I run marathons,” even though nearly all runners take significant time off in the days following an event. A period of recovery isn’t only normal but necessary for the runner.

If we broaden the analogy for the Christian life, we can say we too are running a marathon. We’re in the race of faith. Even when we’ve ceased activity—even when we’re on vacation or celebrating the Sabbath—there’s a sense in which we’re still running. Our stillness is part of running the race.

The same is true when we look at it from the angle of rest. We’re saved by grace through faith, not by our works, and yet we know we’re called to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, trusting the Spirit who wills and works through us. Rest is foundational to the Christian life. Resting in Christ doesn’t only take place when we’ve ceased activity or when we’re taking a break. Even when we’re sweating and striving, running the race as best and fast as we can, there’s a sense in which we’re still resting. There should be a deep sense of security in Christ, even when we’re active.

Why does this matter? Because our running will become a mask for restlessness or our rest will become an excuse for resignation not just when our life rhythms get out of balance but when at the foundational level we don’t understand the overlapping relationship between running and rest.

Restless Running

Why does running turn into restlessness? Most often, we’re trying to prove ourselves or we’re compensating for something we feel we lack, instead of running from a place of security and restfulness in Christ, with our confidence rooted in him. We may look like we’re killing it out there on the track when instead we’re focused less on Jesus and more on standing out from other runners. We may look like we’re seeking first the kingdom when instead we’re seeking first a projection of ourselves seeking the kingdom. We’re scraping out good deeds from the void in our souls rather than overflowing in love from the fountain of God’s grace.

What’s so terrible about restless running is how easy it is to spiritualize our activity by making it seem as if our striving is the perfect picture of the Christian life. We run ourselves ragged for Jesus to prove to him and the world how devoted we are, because we’re unaware of the extent of our self-deception. We learn to equate the faithful Christian life with restlessness, grounding our value in how useful we are to the Lord rather than in the reality that he wants us and loves us.

Running Resignation

Why does rest slip into resignation? Most often, while facing periods of disappointment and disillusionment, when we wonder why we don’t see more spiritual progress, we begin to underestimate the effects of our choices. We lose sight of the good tired that comes after a season of exertion in the way of Jesus. We begin to equate resting in God with ceasing all work, as if strenuous activity or striving that creates personal discomfort is less spiritual somehow than a baptized version of apathy.

It’s easy to give laziness a spiritual justification. “I’m learning to rest in God,” we say. Or, “I’m learning to set boundaries and take care of myself first.” Or, “I’ve just got to let go and let God . . .” Once we begin to equate spiritual maturity with our lack of action, our lack of service, or our lack of care and concern for others, the spiritual race gets radically transformed. Spiritual growth becomes little more than self-care. Self-absorption becomes not only justifiable but a necessary sign of our spiritual attentiveness.

Easy Yoke and Light Burden

The only way we can avoid these pitfalls and find the best way to incorporate healthy rhythms of activity versus stillness is by realizing running and rest are always interlocking and overlapping. We’re at rest when we’re running. And we’re running when we rest.

“Come to me for rest,” Jesus says. His yoke is easy and his burden is light. Make no mistake, there’s still a yoke. The Christian life doesn’t eliminate burdens.

But the key is Jesus. We’re to abide in him. We find rest . . . in him. We run . . . in him. Because of Jesus, we can run the race even when the road is long and the journey is tough. He grants us the stamina to move forward, to continue that long obedience in the same direction. Because of Jesus, our times of stillness help us acknowledge our limitations and recharge as we prepare for more exertion. He refills our souls for what lies ahead so we can offer ourselves up to God and our neighbors.

Running and rest. Don’t see them as opposites. Put them together.

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Here we are, enjoying the “glistening autumnal side of summer,” as described by Thoreau. The return of a breeze and the subsiding of the heat is a welcome change for middle Tennessee, yet I can’t help but feel wistful at the diminishing hours of sunlight and the resumption of all the activities that mark the fall.

Over the years, I’ve learned to lean into the rhythms of summer—family trips, fewer meetings, and more time for reading and writing. I love pushing projects forward. As this summer comes to an end, I thought I’d offer a quick update on some of the work that has occupied my time.

Completing a Prayer Trilogy

First is the release of Letters of Paul in 30 Days, the next installment in a series of prayer guides. This volume follows Psalms in 30 Days and Life of Jesus in 30 Days, forming a trilogy of resources to aid in spiritual formation. If you’re unfamiliar with the practice of the “daily office,” a structured prayer routine grounded in Scripture, I hope these guides serve as a gentle introduction.

My friends at Holman have truly outdone themselves with these editions—elegant, inviting, almost begging to be opened and explored. And for those who’ve found value in this approach, a beautifully slip-cased bundle with all three volumes will soon be available, just in time for the season of giving. I’m grateful whenever I hear from readers who have found their prayer life enriched by this collection.

Finishing Up a Counter-Catechism

Next, I turn to a project two years in the making, a labor shared with my friend Thomas West. Together, we’ve been crafting a counter-catechism. Regarding the renewal of the church in the West, Tim Keller talked often about the need for “counter-catechesis”—methods for presenting Christianity’s foundational truths that speak directly to, and against, the dominant myths of contemporary society.

Thomas, who cut his theological teeth on the work of one of my heroes, the missionary theologian Lesslie Newbigin, planted a church in London and now serves as pastor of First Baptist in Nashville. During my first extended visit to Oxford, when I lived for a couple weeks at The Kilns, the two of us spent a day in the common room there, jotting down notes, debating what doctrines to cover, discussing how these truths cut against the grain of today’s cultural narratives, and drinking lots of hot tea and coffee.

Throughout 2023, we engaged in the slow, methodical work of drafting, revising, and refining the 50 questions and answers, each with commentary. The feedback we received from pastors and apologists was invaluable, steering us toward a final product we believe could be a sharpening tool in the hands of new Christians and long-time believers alike. After good conversations with multiple publishers, we chose to go with Harvest House, due in part to their team’s vision of a future iteration for children.

A friend of mine in the publishing industry, after hearing about this counter-catechism, described it as the capstone of a broader edifice I’d not realized I was constructing: (1) making a foundational case for creeds and confessions (The Thrill of Orthodoxy), (2) providing resources for personal prayer and devotion (the In 30 Days series of prayer guides), and (3) a catechetical tool designed to help Christians stand “against the world for the good of the world” (to borrow from Augustine). I’d not thought about how each of these resources complements and upholds the others, but I think he’s on to something, and I pray these efforts will fortify the faith of believers in our generation.

Preparing for a Third Podcast Season

Finally, a word about my podcast with the North American Mission Board, Reconstructing Faith. For those wondering if a third season is forthcoming, the answer is yes, though it’s been delayed. The narrative, documentary style of the show demands a great deal more time and effort than a standard conversational podcast, and the format makes it both challenging and rewarding to produce. The reception to the first two seasons has been encouraging—pastors using episodes as discussion starters, seminary students engaging with the material in class, laypeople finding it a source of constructive reflection.

I’m excited to announce that the third season will focus on a topic I find increasingly pressing: personal spiritual growth and development. As I look at the landscape of the church today, I can’t shake one question: What if all our hopes and desires for a healthier church are bound to be dashed because we aren’t healthy and we lack the necessary strength to contribute to the rebuilding of the church’s witness? It’s a haunting thought, one that has driven much of my work this summer.

The new season is slated for release in January 2025, since this fall my schedule is packed with speaking engagements, including a trip to Seoul for the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. I pray the podcast will offer a meaningful contribution to the ongoing conversation about the church’s renewal and our need for the Spirit to build us up and develop our character so we offer the fragrance of faithfulness to the world.

Back to Writing Regularly

Now that September is here, I plan to return to my twice-a-week columns at The Gospel Coalition. If you subscribe to my newsletter, you’ll get these columns in your inbox, along with reading recommendations from my book stack, my Trevin’s Seven list (seven article links worth checking out each week), something from my archives, a weekly podcast recommendation, and a classic TV clip for all the old school Nick at Nite fans out there.

It’s an honor to write, and I appreciate the support and encouragement from those who read my work.

New Mexico is one of only seven majority-minority states and the only state where a slight majority (51 percent) identify as Hispanic or Latino. Its makeup isn’t only due to recent immigration trends. New Mexico was once part of Mexico, and before that, its story was one of Spanish settlement alongside indigenous peoples.

Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America calls the region of New Mexico and much of its surrounding area “El Norte”—the oldest European subculture in the United States, founded by Catholic Spanish settlers in the 1500s. The Spanish-speaking population in New Mexico today is made up of both recent Mexican migrants and the descendants of Spanish colonists. These residents are often associated culturally with Norteños (Northerners) in Mexico.

The borders have shifted many times. For centuries, the New Mexico area was part of New Spain’s viceroyalty. There was a time when the northeastern edge belonged to France. The Republic of Texas once claimed portions of the state. In 1821, most of present-day New Mexico became an autonomous region of the Mexican empire. Then in 1848, it was annexed by the United States as part of the larger New Mexico territory. It became the 47th state in 1912. To put it in context, the period during which New Mexico was governed by Spain or Mexico is more than double the length of time it has been a state!

The descendants of Spanish settlers remain in New Mexico. Over the centuries, the borders have shifted over their heads, putting them under the rule of New Spain, or France, or Mexico, or Texas, or the United States. While the boundary markers changed, the settlers continued with their unique cultural attributes, their Spanish dialect, their old buildings and landmarks, their traditions and artifacts.

There’s a lesson here for the church in unsettled times. Boundaries may shift, but we remain settled because of enduring truths.

Remain Settled in an Unsteady World

In politics these days, it’s common for Christians to feel disoriented by the quickly changing landscape. Positions considered left-leaning and liberal in the ’90s are now considered right-wing or centrist. Isolationist tendencies once associated with the left are now markers of a resurgent right. Principles once celebrated by conservatives (free trade, minimal government interference in business, etc.) are now decried by populists (who push for tariffs, unions, economic regulation, and more governmental oversight). Ever-changing norms make social media swarms more common, creating an atmosphere fraught with peril.

Pastors and church leaders feel the boundaries moving. Take a sermon from 15 years ago and preach it again word for word—on the subject of racial reconciliation, or advocacy for the unborn, or the indispensable elements of character for politicians seeking public office, or the Christian requirement to love our neighbors, or the meaning of marriage—and that sermon today, depending on the topic, could get labeled woke, or right-wing, or liberal, or Christian Nationalist, or progressive, or theocratic.

What happened? The borders shifted. What was once a cherished principle of being “conservative” may now be considered “liberal,” and what was once considered a “liberal” position may now be considered “pragmatic” and “necessary” for the right’s political ends. The feverish excitement of an election year, where signals are more important than substance and vibes matter more than principles, only adds to the anxiety and disorientation.

Stand

What do we do in a world where the borders are whizzing back and forth overhead?

First, we stand. We stand firm on biblical principles grounded in general revelation (observable in creation, bolstered by natural law) and special revelation (God’s inerrant Word). Don’t compromise your convictions. Don’t defy your conscience. Go back to the basics of the created order—the enduring narrative of God’s good world, marred by human sin and fallenness, now groaning for redemption. And then go back to the basics of Christian truth—the Nicene faith that has stood the test of time.

There’s no need to dig in. Just stand. Stay settled. Keep the main thing the main thing. Be a gospel person willing to hear and heed the whole counsel of God, no matter what borders change, no matter what new boundary markers appear, no matter what shibboleths those in power say you must utter if you’re to be accepted or to maintain influence. When it comes to political parties, whether we’re welcomed in or thrown out, we’re never to be of.

Outstretched Arm

Second, we maintain an outstretched arm toward brothers and sisters who may disagree on the best way forward. Don’t allow others to bind your conscience or burden you with the only correct way to think through choices that require wisdom and prudence. As long as you stand firmly on what God has revealed in creation and in redemption, feel free to debate everything else.

While the borders and boundaries whiz back and forth, set yourself free from the confining frame of 21st-century American politics. Those categories aren’t real. They’ll change in 10 years’ time, or maybe sooner. The borders will shift again. The best response when the boundaries are moving is to stay settled. Better to be principled people in search of a party than party people in search of principles.

Kingdom People First

Whatever happens, don’t forget we’re kingdom people first, no matter what passport we carry.

Keep the witness of the church throughout history ever on your mind. The saints of old matter more than the rising and falling stars in our national theater.

Keep your eyes on Jesus’s beautiful multicolored Bride. Believers in other parts of the world, even those who don’t always share your political sensibilities, are bound to you by Jesus’s blood more closely than a political ally who shares your strategy but not your Savior.

Pastors, don’t compromise your convictions for short-term political expediency. Don’t trade the mantle of a prophet for the pittance of a pundit. Don’t let the intensity of social media wars distract you from the flesh-and-blood people you’re called to lead. When tempted to let national concerns dwarf your passion for the Great Commission, seek first the kingdom and God’s righteousness.

Settled

The borders may be moving, but our calling doesn’t change.

When the dust settles, may it be said of us that we cultivated a church culture able to withstand the fallout from political rivalries. A culture marked by convictional civility in a world of reviling. A culture marked by the Beatitudes, with people who display the fruit of the Spirit, who refuse to fight worldliness with worldliness, who become an oasis of grace in a parched land. A people who belong to the kingdom and who look more and more like their King.

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The apostle Paul: more letters in the New Testament come from his hand than from anyone else. He’s the leader whose dramatic conversion God used to rock the early church and whose tireless efforts helped spread the gospel to the Gentiles. Historian and author Tom Holland describes Paul’s letters as “a collection of acorns, from which mighty oaks have grown. They are the most influential pieces of writing to have survived from antiquity, and their influence on Christian history, and the present-day character and assumptions of the West, are incalculable.”

Paul’s letters, inspired by the Holy Spirit, continue to radiate joy and deliver wisdom, even today. “The most important thing of all to him,” the ancient preacher John Chrysostom said, “was that he knew himself to be loved by Christ.” That’s why we love Paul. He never got over the fact of his own salvation. He encountered the living Savior and wanted everyone else to know the same joy.

Journeying with Paul

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. I followed that up with a similar structure of praying through selections from the Gospels, called Life of Jesus in 30 Days.

In my new volume, I follow the same structure of prayer but with the letters of Paul. The goal is to embark on a 30-day prayer journey through the letters, gleaning wisdom and insight from this first-century man called and commissioned by King Jesus to take the gospel to the nations.

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. The three-times-a-day approach takes you back to the letters of Paul so that you lift your eyes above your current circumstances and remember that God’s glory 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 their parents’ shoes. 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 oriented in such a way that we’d ask for and desire the right things.

Praying through Paul’s letters alongside other Scriptures and other faithful expressions of faith over the years is one way of forming our hearts and minds daily.

Letters of Paul in 30 Days

This book features all the letters of Paul, arranged in three-times-a-day readings for 30 days. I’ve taken a generally chronological approach (although it’s debated as to whether Galatians precedes the Thessalonian letters) so that throughout the month you can trace the development of Paul’s thinking and writing.

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 Reformation’s 500th anniversary.
• 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 aligning with the specific themes of the day’s readings from Paul’s letters.
• 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 one of Paul’s letters, 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 Paul’s Letters in 30 Days

Praying through all the letters of Paul in 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, nudging 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 it, simply add the midday reading to the evening prayer guide to catch up.

If you only wish to pray through Paul’s letters and not the other selected prayers, jump to that portion of the prayer guide and read the Paul selection three times daily.

My prayer is that this guide will help you make this journey through Paul’s letters a regular spiritual discipline that strengthens your love for God and neighbor. My heart for you echoes the words Paul himself expressed: “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).

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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