The Challenge of Orchestrating Global Worship This Side of Heaven

Gather25 reflects our desire to sing together but also the struggle to capture the diverse music of the church.

Gather25

Gather25 handout photo

As the livestream of Gather25 began, five children stood at the edge of an auditorium stage as a guitar picked a simple introduction to “This Little Light of Mine.” A spotlight focused on a boy who sang the first verse in English, then panned as each took a turn singing a few lines in their own languages.

A 25-hour-long event broadcast last weekend from seven locations around the world, Gather25 is the latest effort to bring together the global church for worship across tribes and tongues.

“I think people are hungry for this,” organizer Jennie Allen said in a Fox News interview. “I believe in the diversity of the church. Each stream of the church is causing good in different ways. At the end of the event, we’re going to be singing ‘How Great Thou Art,’ and our hope is that for one moment, the whole world would sing one song to God.”

Between the live locations, TBN broadcast, and livestream into 21,000 churches and homes, organizers estimate that 7 million people tuned in.

The vision in Revelation 7:9 of “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne,” has inspired worshipers for centuries and added an eternal dimension to international gatherings of believers.

But logistically and practically, leaders aiming to represent the diverse languages and styles of global worship almost always struggle to share platforms and microphones equitably.

Ethnodoxologists, who study global worship, examine the challenge for international gatherings to bring together Christians in song while resisting the pull toward the cultural and musical practices of the well-resourced and influential segments of the church.

The week prior to the live event, the collective of worship artists involved in Gather25 released an album, Hear the World That You So Love Sing Back to You. Executive producers Matt Redman and Jason Ingram assembled a team of Christian musicians and songwriters from ten countries.

“It all makes for such a unique project—and such a beautiful glimpse of the global Church—alive and well, and singing her heart out,” said Redman in promotion of the album.

Many of the artists featured on the release already had large platforms. Nigerian worship leader Sinach (who wrote “Way Maker”), Guatemalan group Miel San Marcos, and Brazilian worship leader Gabriela Rocha each have millions of followers on social media and produce music that generally falls in the same contemporary praise and worship style that is popular in the US.

The album also includes several songs that incorporate Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, and Swahili, but in terms of musical expression, there is a generally unified sound: Western pop-inflected praise and worship.

“I didn’t see a lot of diversity in the musical expression,” said ethnodoxologist Joy Kim, who works for Proskuneo Ministries. “That’s not necessarily a problem if there was deep collaboration involved. If artists from around the world were involved in the songwriting process and it all came out sounding like Western pop, that’s one thing. But all we can see is the outcome.”

Gather25 began at the US location, in Dallas, with children singing an American folk song popularized during the Civil Rights Movement, followed by a dance-team performance and an energetic worship session by award-winning gospel artist Tye Tribbett. Christine Caine, Francis Chan, Priscilla Shirer, and Rick Warren offered remarks and prayer.

As the hours went on, the broadcast locations moved around the world: Romania, Rwanda, India, Malaysia, the UK, Peru, and an undisclosed location featuring Christians in the persecuted church.

The live events themselves included more musical diversity than the album. At 2 a.m. Central Time on Friday night, Americans could tune in to hear worship leaders in India sing in regional vocal styles as they led congregational music. During the 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. time slot on Saturday, performers in Rwanda displayed traditional dance and drumming.

Gather25 handout photo

Over 7,000 attended the Gather25 event in Rwanda.

African Christians filled the arena in Kigali, Rwanda, and celebrated the chance for their ministries and leaders to be in the global spotlight: a children’s choir from Uganda, drummers from Burundi, a gospel singer from Nigeria. Rwandan pastor Hassan Kibirango called it “exhilarating” and one of the “landmark moments” in his life to speak at the event.

While the sessions were translated in real time—organizers say 87 languages were offered—Christians from the US and the West also heard musicians around the world sing familiar songs or English lyrics.

With the global growth of contemporary praise and worship music from the United States, the UK, and Australia, churches in Nigeria, South Korea, and the Philippines can sing some of the same songs used in American megachurches.

Historically, the church has moved between a unified musical repertoire and regional diversity.

But this isn’t the first time in church history that there has been interest or movement toward a unified musical repertory and practice.

The Roman Catholic Church prioritized a standardized liturgy and collection of chants, so before the Reformation, Christians mostly heard the same music and text in the same language (Latin) during services.

Baptist, Methodist, and Lutheran missionaries brought their own hymnody with them in the 18th century, seeking to unify the church across geography. In some cases, that meant elevating Western musical practices over local ones as the “true” music of the church.

“There was a shift in the mid-20th century toward encouraging Christians outside the Western European music tradition to embrace their own musical expression,” said Brian Hehn, the director of the Center for Congregational Song. “But the global church has only had a few decades to fight against the existing musical hierarchy. And they don’t have the resources to fight the music industry.”

Hehn said that the musical hierarchy of the church still powerfully shapes worship practices of Christians around the world and challenges the ongoing pursuit of a global practice or “global song.”

“People with resources and power have to stop and think, Are we setting up people across the world to worship in their own voices, through their own local expressions?” said Hehn.

Joy Kim, the ethnodoxologist, acknowledged that intercultural collaboration can be hard and expensive, especially when it comes to songwriting across language barriers.

Outside the US, most church musicians are bivocational and serve in contexts where they don’t have the time and resources to travel to songwriting meetups. Even in an age of videoconferencing, cowriting or recording doesn’t work as well when everyone can’t be in the same room.

“If I had the money, I would invite worship leaders from around the world, pay all of their expenses, and write music together,” Joy Kim said.

Jaewoo Kim, the author of Willingly Uncomfortable Worship and director of public relations and ministry development for Proskuneo Ministries (and Joy Kim’s husband), wrote about the value of looking beyond Western Christian music after last year’s Lausanne Congress. Like Gather25, Lausanne gathered Christians from over 200 countries and territories virtually and in person and aimed to represent the diversity of the global church.

“The songs chosen [for Lausanne] were also predominantly written by Western or English-speaking composers,” he wrote. “Every song is born out of a specific context. When we sing a song from another part of the world, we not only bring a particular culture’s language into our congregation but also welcome that country’s story and its lived theology in word and melody. This is an exercise in mutuality.”

Joy Kim said that the work of learning to make worship more “polycentric”—giving equal weight to multiple cultures rather than one dominant culture—leads to rich relationships and a more expansive view of the global church. And she said she is hopeful that events like Gather25 can be a step in a good direction.

“We all need to learn what it means to have worship that is polycentric, multicultural, and intercultural—worship that reflects the bride of Christ,” said Kim. “I rejoice in efforts like this event to bring non-Western worship leaders and multiple languages to the same platform. We have a long way to go, but I celebrate it.”

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Culture

‘Last Days’ Has No Motivation for Martyrdom

Trevor Babcock

The new movie from director Justin Lin portrays its missionary subject sympathetically. But it doesn’t understand #SoliDeoGloria.

Earlier this year, the film Last Days premiered at Sundance Film Festival, dramatizing the life of John Allen Chau. According to a journal he left behind, Chau, an American missionary and graduate of Oral Roberts University (ORU), felt called to evangelize the unreached people of North Sentinel Island, part of an Indian archipelago in the Bay of Bengal. He was killed there in 2018 at the age of 26.

Interest in mission work marks a departure for director Justin Lin, whose long list of film credits includes directing Fast and Furious entries and episodes of True Detective. He undertook this project with the stated goal of being as sympathetic as possible to its real-world subject, and his compassion for John Chau is evident. One film critic characterized Last Days as a “respectful dramatization” that “shin[es] a light on what motivations could make someone attempt to contact a remote tribe.”

From its opening frames, Last Days evinces Lin’s cinematic expertise. Its expert direction, explosive sound design, and electric performances—especially from lead Sky Yang, who plays John—will jar viewers accustomed to amateurish faith-based cinema.

But then Last Days isn’t exactly faith based. Rather, it’s an investigation by filmmakers outside the church into the heart of a young man who apparently died on a religious suicide mission.

It’s also not the first film to take on this story. In 2023, National Geographic put out the documentary The Mission, available on YouTube, which quotes from John Chau’s journal at length. It also includes interviews with John’s friends, the missionaries who trained him, and skeptics.

These interviews point to a major difference between the two portrayals. In Last Days, John receives his Christian education and attends something like a missionary bootcamp from a parachurch organization, but then he’s mostly on his own. The Mission clarifies that John enjoyed ongoing mentorship from a support team that never appeared in his social media posts. As one ORU alumnus says in the documentary, “In any endeavor, a lot more people are involved than anybody knows.”

At the Sundance premiere of Last Days, Justin Lin contrasted his film with The Mission’s documentary style. Preferring a based-on-a-true-story approach, he told his audience he was less concerned with getting the facts of John Chau’s life exactly correct and more concerned with creating “human connection.” That meant drawing inspiration not from The Mission but from another piece of work: a feature article in Outside magazine entitled “The Last Days of John Allen Chau,” from which the movie’s title is taken.

The journalist behind that article, Alex Perry, isn’t a Christian. But for a nonbeliever trying to suss out John Chau’s motivations, he seems a worthy guide. In the early 2000s, Perry tried but failed to meet the people of the Andamans, the archipelago that includes North Sentinel Island. Like Chau, he saw the islands as something “big and difficult and dangerous and extraordinary,” an opportunity for adventure.

“Where John and I differed was that while I had been a reporter pursuing a story, John wanted to be the story,” Perry writes. But a look into Chau’s journals reveals something different: He wanted to proclaim a story, the gospel.

The journalist does acknowledge an evangelical perspective. One of his quoted sources, a missionary who’d met Chau, said, “Whether you buy John’s reasoning comes down to whether you share his faith.” If God and his judgment are real and Christ died for the world, it’s rational to risk it all to take that message to every last people group. But if this is all just fantasy, it’s dangerous—a mix of “obsession, arrogance, self-deception … an almost inhuman absence of doubt,” as Perry puts it.

The core problem is that it’s hard, maybe impossible, for a nonbeliever to understand what could motivate a person to risk martyrdom for Christ. Perry repeatedly quotes Chau’s motto, #SoliDeoGloria, though he lacks the framework to make sense of “the cryptic Latin hashtag.” And the movie inspired by his article doesn’t make sense of it either.

Without a sense of “to the glory of God alone,” Last Days remains unfinished and unsteady. Director Justin Lin’s choice to rely on Alex Perry’s interpretation is not just an inaccuracy but an artistic error; it fails to supply a satisfactory motivation for its main character’s martyrdom. The movie’s John Chau, though cast in the best possible light, is a man of incomprehensible, unmotivated faith.

Early in the film, John attends his final chapel before graduating from ORU. The speaker challenges each student to light a candle, symbolizing a commitment to light the whole world with the gospel of Christ. But John demurs. The film never investigates why he initially rejects the call.

Nor does it explain why he eventually accepts. We see John committing to a life of missions only after his father, a doctor, runs into legal trouble surrounding painkiller prescriptions. Last Days seems to imply, ambiguously, that John is actually running from his father wound, whereas The Mission reveals a young man genuinely motivated to strive for God’s glory.

It’s this question of motivation that caused the most confusion for the missionaries I spoke with after they watched the film in Park City, Utah.

One missionary expressed regret at a missed opportunity. “I was that way, and now I’m this way,” he said of his own conversion experience. “It’s impossible not to share.” He loves proclaiming the gospel. It’s that love that doesn’t translate in Last Days.

Another missionary asked a different question: “Who’s this for?” He didn’t think that John Chau comes off as feckless or insane, per the accusations of real-life social media haters; the film acknowledges and dismisses these critiques. But the movie also won’t inspire believers. Its middle ground will “pretty much alienate most evangelicals,” he said. “They’re not going to watch.”

He may be right. But the care with which the film treads that middle ground is still remarkable. When Hollywood wants to portray a believer, it often fills him with hesitancy; audiences resonate more with Doubting Thomas than with Simon the Zealot. You can find a recent example in award-winning Conclave (2024), as Ralph Fiennes’s uncertain Cardinal Thomas Lawrence gives non-Catholics a point of entry into Rome’s highest echelons.

By contrast, Justin Lin’s rendering of John Chau is refreshingly faithful. Unwavering, John sets his face toward North Sentinel Island like Christ toward Jerusalem. Uncertainty may shroud his motivation, but the objective at least remains clear.

Another missionary hopes evangelicals will watch the movie in spite of its shortcomings. “It felt very familiar,” she told me, “in terms of a young missionary’s experience.” With 35 years in ministry and 20 of those as a missionary to Africa, her first reaction was to emphasize how well Last Days honored John Chau: “It was a nonjudgmental approach.”

She also appreciated how the film exposed the pitfalls that confront young ideologues on the mission field. “Due to colonialism, which is so ingrained in us and is the other side of the coin of white supremacy, we just think we know better,” she said.

In Last Days, this cocksure Christianity is exemplified in Chandler (Toby Wallace), a fast-talking, risk-taking young man who shows John Chau the ropes of Christian thrill-seeking. Hours after meeting John, Chandler invites him for a ride in his prop plane, emblazoned with the slogan “Jesus is my copilot.” Chandler awes John with the scenery below before inviting the inexperienced young man to grab the control yoke and pilot for a bit.

In Last Days, what John needs is an Obi-Wan. What Chandler gives him is a Han Solo—a slightly older, more worldly, but less wise companion.

The lack of meaningful discipleship is a huge mistake for Last Days’ John Chau, maybe his fatal flaw. “You get a 20-something who thinks he or she knows better, and there’s no stopping it,” said one missionary. Another agreed that mulish independence is a real threat to mission work, even if the particular excesses of Chandler were “cartoonish.”

The missionaries I spoke with hope that the film’s depiction of their work will lead to conversations. But I regret that they may come at the cost of John Chau’s portrayal in Last Days. The film presents him as mostly autonomous—God’s own loose cannon—though The Mission testifies to his integration in a Christian community. This oversight, and the film’s failure to capture his heart for Jesus, is a failure to convey his soul. On screen, John Chau’s enthusiasm seems to come from nowhere. Without a lost-and-found character arc, he’s just lost.

John will forever be a man younger than me, as will his hero, Jim Elliot, who was also killed on the mission field. Yet they will also always be, for me, titans of the faith. Each possessed the courage to lay down his life for a gospel that had changed it. Their testimonies resonate like thunder in the great cloud of witnesses, a thunder powerful enough to rattle fellow believers.

“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose,” Jim Elliot once said. By this standard, the John Chau of Last Days, who sacrifices everything to gain nothing, is a desperate if well-intentioned fool. How different was the real-world John Chau, a young man who glorified God alone through his life and in his death, laying down his life for friends to whom he ministered so briefly.

Trevor Babcock is an assistant professor of English at Williams Baptist University, where he teaches film and other subjects. His chapter on David Lynch’s Christian and Hindu influences will appear in the forthcoming book Theology, Religion, and Twin Peaks as part of the Theology, Religion, and Pop Culture series.

- More from Trevor Babcock

Theology

The Moral Cost of Murdering Ukraine

Russell Moore

Columnist

What’s at stake is not just the survival of nations. It’s the consciences of those who align themselves with what is unquestionably wrong.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Over the past few weeks, the United States of America reversed course on the Russian invasion of Ukraine in multiple ways: siding with Russia in a United Nations resolution, freezing aid to Ukraine in its defense against Russian forces, and hosting a televised Oval Office repudiation of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

As many have noted, the geopolitical, military, and diplomatic costs of attacking allies and appeasing enemies are incalculable. As American Christians, though, we should also consider the moral cost of abandoning Ukraine.

In most situations of foreign policy, the moral questions are usually debatable, if not murky. Hawks and doves usually agree on the underlying ideals and values to be defended but disagree on the best prudential way to achieve them.

Sometimes, however, those ideals and values are definitively tested. In those moments, what’s at stake is not just the survival of nations or even of the world but the consciences of those who align themselves with what is unquestionably wrong.

Through most of the first half of the 20th century, the American left—or at least its most fervent sector—defended, if not communism itself, then certainly the Soviet Union and its promise of a revolutionary utopia of equality and justice. Often, this was done with a “I don’t agree with everything the Soviets do, but they’re not as bad as they’re portrayed” type of waving away of reports of atrocities committed by the Soviet state.

George Orwell famously defined the ideology at work here when he wrote, “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

Orwell was especially harsh on the communism of his fellow British. He noted that no real revolutionary feeling—an actual tearing down of the status quo—existed in the England of his time.

“It is only natural, therefore, that the English Communist movement should be controlled by people who are mentally subservient to Russia and have no real aim except to manipulate British foreign policy in the Russian interest,” he concluded. “The more vocal kind of Communist is in effect a Russian publicity agent posing as an international Socialist. It is a pose that is easily kept up at normal times, but becomes difficult in moments of crisis”—because the brutalities of the USSR have to be justified in ways that can make them seem morally consistent.

“Every time Stalin swaps partners, ‘Marxism’ has to be hammered into a new shape,” Orwell continued. “The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.”

The moral cognitive dissonance of all this was on display every time Stalin swapped partners. Those who were “heroes of the Revolution” were suddenly enemies in the show trials. Fascism was an evil—until the signing of the Hitler–Stalin Pact. It was then an evil once again when Hitler and the Soviets split.

In time, the facts many had always known became indisputable: about the Soviet starving of Ukrainians, for example, and the encampment and murder of dissidents. Those who were anti-anti-Communist had to find a way to either ignore these atrocities or to justify them, without repudiating previously stated ideals or admitting that they had been morally compromised by their own ideology.

In his analysis of the American religion of the first half of the 20th century, historian Martin E. Marty (who died last week) noted the anguish of Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes in preaching a sermon in 1940 titled “Why We Liberals Went Wrong on the Russian Revolution.” Holmes, who was widely known in his day, was a “man of the left” and had defended for years the Soviet Union and its promise of a just society.

But the Hitler–Stalin Pact left Holmes shaken. He came to describe his defense of the USSR as “the supreme disillusionment” of his life. “I have been deceived, deluded and disgraced,” he said, “sold out by those I trusted most; and I am as deeply afflicted as I am utterly disgusted by what has happened.”

“[Holmes] faulted himself and his fellows for not having properly read the signs of the times,” Marty wrote. “Liberals, in their concern to fight economic injustice, he said, had permitted evils to go on which ‘in our own hearts we knew to be wrong.’”

“Sometimes ‘we’ had fallen to doctrines which hold that the end justifies the means,” Marty wrote of Holmes’s confession. “It was the Hitler-Stalin Pact which, as Holmes saw it, stripped away the last veils of self-deception from the eyes of liberals, and set them ‘steadfastly against the cruel and bloody regime which they should have uncovered years before.’”

Now here we are again—with another defense of a bloodthirsty, empire-seeking Russia, led by murderers and oligarchs in their illegal invasion of a neighboring country, kidnapping children and killing Ukrainians, with a Russian Orthodox Church cheering it on as a “holy war” of Russian Christendom against the decadent Western world.

Previously pro-Ukrainian voices now have to find a way to shift with the ideology, convincing others that something has changed beyond the price of tribal admission. Zelensky, they might say, was rude for wearing battle fatigues instead of a suit to the Oval Office (while not objecting to Elon Musk wearing a T-shirt and ball cap in the same place).

Or, they might argue, Zelensky is a dictator because Ukrainian law pauses elections during wartime (when one could just as fallaciously argue that the US is a dictatorship because there are no presidential elections in the four years between when the Constitution specifies they should take place).

Some Christians even suggest that Ukraine is opposed to religious liberty—when virtually every religious minority testifies that the reverse is the case, that Russia, in fact, is the persecutor of evangelical Protestants and even of Russian Orthodox clergy who will not toe the Putinist line.

Perhaps most dangerous of all, in terms of what it does to the consciences of those arguing this way, is the suggestion that Ukraine is fated to lose. They have no cards left to play, the claim goes, so the free world should side with the eventual winners—or at least do nothing to stand in their way.

Those who are now castigating Ukraine don’t even pretend that doing so is moral. Instead, they seem to argue for a worldview in which everyone is equally corrupt and murderous, so the US should simply divide the world up into spheres of influence, regardless of who is being plundered or murdered in the process.

Political scientist Mark Lilla recently explained the psychological state of this moral worldview in terms completely separate from the Russia-Ukraine war, through—ironically enough—one of Russia’s greatest intellectual and literary giants, novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.

“In so many of his novels we meet seemingly wicked characters who are really only in despair, their original goodness having been robbed by someone or by circumstances beyond their control,” Lilla writes. “And to cope with the trauma, they convince themselves that there is no such thing as goodness, becoming prostitutes or rakes or drunkards or revolutionaries, reveling in their baseness. But then they are undone when they meet genuinely good people and grow to hate them.”

Dostoevsky was not the first to see this psychological dynamic. Millennia earlier, the Book of Genesis gave us the account of Cain and Abel. Cain, enraged that God had accepted Abel’s offering while rejecting his, murdered his brother. When interrogated by God, Cain believed his violence was hidden safely in the past. But God says, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground” (Gen. 4:10, ESV throughout).

The apostle John, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, explained to the early Christian church what was happening in this ancient account by saying, “We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous” (1 John 3:12).

Legally, Ukraine belongs to Ukraine. Morally, a people have a right to defend themselves from the extinction of their people and the taking of their land. The Bible tells us of another murdered man—Naboth the Jezreelite—who lost his land unjustly.

King Ahab demanded that Naboth sell his vineyard to him, but Naboth replied, “The Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers” (1 Kings 21:3). The king went home “vexed and sullen,” until his wife, Jezebel, worked to frame and execute Naboth on made-up charges so she could take his land.

It’s odd to me that some of the same people who will use the epithet Jezebel for women who wear yoga pants or teach Sunday school take no notice at all when they themselves defend the same sorts of real crimes that Jezebel actually committed.

Decisions about war and peace are often morally complex. But in this case, the defense of the indefensible is happening through a social Darwinist argument that is already hollowing out much of American life. Such a view says that the power to do something is itself a moral justification—or even worse, that moral considerations are themselves a sign of “virtue signaling” and weakness. We have seen before where this leads.

For Christians, it demands some questions: Who would you rather be, Naboth or Ahab? Abel or Cain? The answer to these questions might not solve the war in Europe, but it will reveal something about you.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Hope for Tainted Creeks and Troubled Families

Kate Lucky

Responders to our November/December issue told stories of estrangement and healing.

Photography by Abigail Erickson for Christianity Today

Sara Kyoungah White’s meditation on a polluted creek in our November/December issue struck our readers as “mournful” but also “deeply moving” and “hopeful.”

“I live near Plaster Creek and used to ride my bike on the path described by the author until erosion caused it to crumble,” wrote one woman on Instagram. She expressed her gratitude for the work of Calvin University, whose community has helped coordinate cleanup efforts. “They installed our rain garden and so many others in our neighborhood.”

Other readers shared their own creation-care efforts. On his family farm in northern Ohio, Jim, a retired clergyman, is planting trees along the Little Scioto River and removing invasive plants. “I wish I could write like you to tell the story of my land,” he said. “I see it as part of the watershed, and what I do affects everything else.”

The problems of river pollution aren’t unique to the Midwest. “We have many dairies in our larger Columbia Basin that are so rich in manure and are a threat to our water,” wrote Grace from Washington State. “Here in Kennewick, we have the Hanford Nuclear reservation, which is also a big threat. But there are some grassroots things we can do. Just knowing there are many others who care about our water and world being clean and healthy, for us and the wild, is a happy thing. And yes, it matters to God too.”

Kate Lucky, Senior Editor, engagement & culture

Recovery Ministries Try to Help Portland Get Clean

Measure 110, which decriminalized hard drugs, was a disaster and reflected secular society’s refusal to recognize evil. Fortunately, progress was made with the recriminalization of drugs last April. I am thankful for Christian organizations such as Union Gospel Mission, Blanchet House, CityTeam, and Portland Rescue Mission, which provide successful rehabilitation programs.

Charles Felton, Hillsboro, OR

I’m Estranged from My Parents. I Still Love Them.

I wish Carrie McKean well as she pursues recovery from her abusive childhood, yet there are many vulnerable young people and their families (and I know some) who need to be alerted to the dangers of indiscriminate estrangement, distancing, or severing.

Christine A. Jones, Carlsbad, CA

I have been an orphan since I was 11 years old because of the civil war in Liberia. One of the people accused of killing my mother was a close family member that I pursued for 34 years and finally got in contact with last year. It was worth it. Forgiveness was my goal, though reconciliation has proven elusive. A few years ago, I started an organization called WeRECONCILE. Our mission is to help fathers and mothers reconcile with their estranged adult children. We are in the pilot phase of the program with a few families this year, and it’s going well.

Marcus Doe, Tucson, AZ

Very beautiful article. I estranged myself for a time from my father once and, though necessary, it was deeply wrenching. An ongoing grief.

Dianne Tucker (Facebook)

For those of us who survived years of abuse or neglect, causing us to question for some time whether God was real or with us—and those of us who found healthy family and healing in the church and the gospel but still, in the same church, found many people who could not comprehend what we had gone through—this piece toes the lines of our hearts tenderly, and I am glad it was published.

@alexeamcmahan (Instagram)

Never read an article until now that captures so well the complexities of estrangement in a Christian family. Echoes so much of what I’ve wrestled with over the years, being estranged from my parents after trying so many ways to “walk on eggshells,” set boundaries, and otherwise make it work.

@nate-meyers.bsky.social (Bluesky)

What to Salvage from Fundamentalism

I appreciated Reynolds’s tactful and respectful observations about changes in theological viewpoints. I grew up accepting the Scofield dispensational views and am aware that the present generation has largely rejected them. I wonder why. Perhaps Richard Mouw’s book gave reasons, but I have no access to that work and would welcome a simple explanation behind the prevailing view. Is the rejection based upon more conformity to modern society or upon later biblical exegesis? A dispensational view does not automatically result in extreme separatism—or does it?

Wendell Kent, Colorado Springs, CO

Twenty-five years ago, he may have had a point. These days, fundamentalists have just rebranded themselves evangelicals; there is not enough of a distinction.

Lisa Cawyer (Facebook)

Winning the Pro-Life Battles, Losing the Persuasion War

Don’t forget that Brown v. Board of Education was an unpopular Supreme Court ruling when it was handed down.

Martin Backus (Facebook)

Behind the Scenes

Toward the end of the editing process for my essay “I’m Estranged from My Parents. I Still Love Them.”, my paternal grandmother died. As I separated myself from my parents, she was my fiercest defender, despite aching for her son. For years, I’d worried what I would do when she died—attend the funeral and risk a highly charged encounter with my parents or skip it to keep the peace? I thought I’d settled it: I would honor my grandmother without being physically present.

The week of her funeral, I was in an intense round of edits. The timing felt unbearable. My editor kept the process moving by asking gently probing questions that took me deeper into my own emotional journey.

I knew my grandma would want me to tell my story, so I persisted. As I did, I experienced fresh healing. As I recalled fraught relational moments, God’s faithfulness at every turn stood out. He never abandoned me to my grief and loss; why should I expect any less now? Not going to Grandma’s funeral would only indulge my fear and desire for control.

I called my brother, and we bought plane tickets within the hour. The next day, I turned in my final draft. Then we traveled to Washington and spent four restorative days with extended family. My parents didn’t attend the funeral for reasons of their own, which left me sadder than expected. But I did see God’s faithfulness, which I might have missed but for a writing deadline.

Carrie McKean, freelance writer

This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Open Dialogue".

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News

Justin Brierley Goes from Unbelievable to Re-Enchanting

Madeleine Davies in London

After hundreds of conversations, the pioneering apologetics podcaster is celebrating the “surprising rebirth” of faith in the UK.

Photography by Alun Callender for Christianity Today

Walk around central London, and you’ll quickly spot the capital’s famous red buses, their sides adorned with advertisements for upcoming films, fashion lines, or beauty products. But in January 2009, they confronted the city with a more provocative message: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Created by the comedy writer Ariane Sherine and backed by the British Humanist Association and renowned atheist Richard Dawkins, the “no God” campaign took place during the heady days of New Atheism. Dawkins’s The God Delusion had been selling in copious numbers—just one contribution to a public discourse striking in its contempt for religious faith. Delusion was one of the kinder epithets applied; it was not unusual to hear religion condemned as indoctrination, even abuse.

In a small studio on Chapter Street, not far from Westminster Abbey, however, one 29-year-old was attempting to inject some civility into the conversation. Justin Brierley started his Unbelievable? show on Premier—a Christian radio station in Britain—in 2005, offering believers the opportunity to sit down with an atheist and talk through their respective positions. It was, according to Brierley, not a universally popular addition to the schedule.

“A lot of listeners at the time said, ‘This is a terrible idea because you are bringing these atheists on to argue for atheism,’” he recalled. People expressed fears that Christians would be “shaken in their faith.” Objectors had a point, he conceded: “The format was quite full-on, and it didn’t pull its punches.”

But 900 episodes later, the host stands by his reasoning.

“In the long run, if your faith can’t stand up to some difficult questions, then you have got to ask whether it’s a faith worth having,” Brierley said. “There’s a kind of growth that requires a certain amount of uncomfortable questioning, but rather like the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, it can be difficult and painful but ultimately it makes you stronger.”

Brierley took his first job at Premier Christian Radio 22 years ago. In that time, he has grown a large and largely online audience with an appetite for in-depth, unashamedly intellectual debate about Christianity’s claims to truth.

In doing so, he has forged a career as a prominent Christian apologist. It’s a role that he has arrived at by an unusual route—as mediator rather than preacher. His tool is the well-timed question offered in service of the listener rather than the monologue delivered to the camera.

His story also tells us something about the evolution of apologetics in 21st-century Britain, where the internet, rather than the institutional church, has played host to debates about the big questions of life, the universe, and everything.

From humble beginnings—his first show featured an Anglican friend and his atheist neighbor—Brierley went on to host guests including Philip Pullman, Tim Keller, and William Lane Craig. His “Big Conversations” series featured Jordan Peterson on the psychology of belief and Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins debating belief and biology.

With the advent of podcasting—Brierley was an earlier adopter—the show gathered an enormous online following, with nonbelievers prominent among them.

Scroll through thousands of comments beneath the YouTube videos of these debates, and a common theme is praise for Brierley’s hosting.

“This guy is the best moderator on earth,” wrote one enthusiastic contributor watching the debate between Christian theologian Keith Ward and atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett. “I was very impressed by the host,” wrote another. “He was even-handed, totally free of aggression, and he always kept the conversation within the audience’s understanding and interest. Even though I’m an atheist and fully convinced of Dennett’s position, I felt completely welcome as a listener, and I’ll definitely come back to this channel!”

N. T. Wright, who is featured on many of Brierley’s shows (including an “Ask N. T. Wright Anything” series), describes him as a “natural” moderator. “He knows when to prompt a speaker, how to draw out something that was implicit but not quite clear yet, and when to add a fresh point that can turn the conversation in new directions,” the British theologian said. Wright cites as a favorite his own conversation with the historian Tom Holland. “We both learned a lot,” he said, “not just from one another but from what Justin was able to draw out from us.”

Writer and broadcaster Elizabeth Oldfield, whose podcast The Sacred has gained a large audience for its sensitive, probing interviews, describes Brierley as “just intensely personable. He seems like someone who is engaging in the world of ideas and has spoken to a lot of intellectual giants with a remarkably low level of ego.”

“He has more of a hosting posture,” Oldfield added. “He’s not been saying, ‘This is my startling new apologetics argument,’ or ‘This is how I have the answers to how Christians should be doing this.’ It’s been a much more hospitable holding of space for conversations.”

Brierley remembers to “greet people with warmth,” she observed, a vital missional skill. “Acknowledge the presence of people who don’t agree with you, name that they are welcome, seek to see things from their point of view, and ask the questions that they might have. It’s that actual empathy for—and liking of—people with different views that shouldn’t be rare, but it does feel quite rare.”

For those weary of ill-tempered exchanges, Unbelievable?, which Brierley left in 2023, stood out for its civility. But while part of the appeal was the show’s exploration of philosophical, existential questions and in-depth engagement with science, there was also a danger that listeners could get lost in theory.

Watch a debate in action, though, and you’ll notice Brierley politely seek clarification from a speaker or attempt to summarize a particularly dense argument. You’ll also see Brierley’s genuine interest in atheistic arguments. “I’ve always said I’d much rather [hear from] a really dogmatic atheist than ‘I really don’t care’ apathetic agnosticism,” he said.

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While the show is primarily known for its atheist-versus-Christian format, Unbelievable? soon broadened to include conversations between those of various faiths and between Christians with different theological convictions. Shortly after the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, Brierley hosted a radical Islamist, Anjem Choudary, in a discussion about whether the former Al Qaeda leader represented “the true face of Islam.”

Debates could get heated, Brierley recalled, particularly those between Christians and Muslims. In some instances, guests who had honed their craft at Speakers’ Corner, a section of London’s Hyde Park that has hosted public debates since the mid-1800s (and where arrests occasionally take place), brought a more combative approach to the studio.

But for the most part, the conversations illustrated the value of being face to face. Guests joined Brierley at Premier’s recording space in London, leaning over microphones around a white table, with Brierley as moderator in the middle.

By the time the pandemic pushed conversations onto Zoom, familiarity and rapport were already built up: In 2022, Dawkins challenged fellow scientist Collins on miracles with bafflement rather than contempt.

Brierley’s range of guests is notable given current debates about “no-platforming,” or “canceling,” public figures, with British higher ed regulators tracking speaker rejections by universities amid growing concerns about the protection of free speech.

Unbelievable? hosted Jordan Peterson, who in 2019 had his offer of a visiting fellowship at Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity rescinded, as well as writer Douglas Murray, who has argued that European civilization is dying by suicide as a result of immigration.

Brierley believes that some of his invitations were in error “because their views were probably either so extreme or a minority position that it wouldn’t have made sense to give them a platform.” But he’s still “not a fan of cancel culture.”

He maintains that the format of the show—matching each guest with someone who had an opposing “substantive point of view”—served an important function. For example, some listeners criticized his decision to feature a young-earth creationist. “But the fact is there are a lot—especially in the US—of young-earth creationists,” Brierley said, “so is it fair to just ignore their perspective?”

Brierley grew up in the Jesus Army, a British incarnation of the Jesus Movement, followed by time in independent charismatic churches. He remembers having a “strong peer group” and a “vibrant faith” in those years. It wasn’t until his arrival at Balliol College, Oxford University—where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics from 1998 to 2001—that he first encountered Christians of other traditions or even “proper hard-boiled skepticism about Christianity.”

Having grown up with a “very experiential” introduction to Christianity, he began to research the intellectual underpinnings of his faith, reading apologists that included a fellow Oxford alum, C. S. Lewis.

He was also part of the Christian Arts and Drama Society, a student group that staged evangelistic skits in the town’s streets. One tradition involved a performance in the square outside the Radcliffe Camera, a famous 18th-century library, on mornings when students would return, slightly worse for wear, from all-night parties.

“I’m sure some of these sketches had a bit of a cringe factor to them,” he said. “But they were also our honest, heartfelt attempts to communicate faith in a different way to the student body; there were interesting conversations that happened off the back of them.”

It proved useful training for his work at Premier Christian Radio. He began working there shortly after graduation, learning the ropes as a presenter, including time as a sidekick on the station’s weekday Inspirational Breakfast show hosted by radio veteran John Pantry. Three years in, he pitched Unbelievable?, which quickly became a flagship show.

Its success occurred in parallel with a broader shift in public debate to online platforms through YouTube, podcasting, and social media. Anybody, technically, could build a following. Among Brierley’s regular interlocutors on the show was Alex O’Connor, who founded his Cosmic Skeptic YouTube channel while still a student at Oxford.

This development has “broken down the control that many churches or church denominations once had,” Brierley said. Congregants now have access to a wealth of information, including attempts to debunk religious tenets, at the click of a button.

There have been “casualties from that, who found it difficult to remain a Christian,” Brierley noted, “partly because they had been perhaps exposed to a very one-dimensional form of Christianity, and suddenly it was difficult to transpose that into a wider category.”

But the internet is now “part of our everyday life,” he added, and churches are left learning to adapt. There are some things that it cannot replace, such as the face-to-face community found in local churches, although the transition from online exploration to life in a local church can be uncomfortable.

“Church in person is not delivered via an algorithm, and that’s the problem,” he said. “We are used to having our very specific interests met in this online world now…. Then, when you turn up at your local church and it turns out it’s not Tim Keller preaching, or it’s not Jordan Peterson delivering a message, there’s a sense of disappointment.”

Those on this journey need to learn that Christianity is “not interesting intellectuals giving you hourlong philosophical treatises,” Brierley said.

“The whole point of Christianity is seeing God’s grace in the everyday and normal…. It’s all very well to go on these intellectual flights of learning and deep thoughts, but if it can’t be translated into the way you live your life next to someone who you just find completely irritating, it is kind of pointless.”

Brierley’s 2023 book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, suggests that churches in the UK may see more new people, including those who have begun to explore Christianity online, walk through their doors. The book’s thesis is that that the “Sea of Faith” described as being in “melancholy” retreat by the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold could in fact be coming back in.

He writes about the radical change in the tone and substance of public conversation around faith—a shift from the “bombastic debates” he hoped to diffuse on Unbelievable? to something much more considered and curious. In addition to giving a eulogy for the New Atheism of the early 2000s, the book explores the trajectory of high-profile public figures “surprised by the continuing resonance of the Christian faith.”

It’s a story that sits in stark contrast to statistical measures of belief in Britain, where a growing proportion of the public (more than half) identify as “no religion” and church attendance continues its precipitous decline.

Last October, the interim results of a three-year study titled “Exploring Atheism” were presented at London’s Conway Hall. The authors suggested that Britain had entered its first “atheist age,” with more atheists than theists. Brierley is careful to qualify that his book is not describing a revival, but possibly “the beginning conditions of a revival.”

“You would hardly recognize the way people are now talking about faith in the public square,” he said. “The big question is, are these people just using it as a sociopolitical tool, a useful fiction? And arguably some of them are. But I also see a number of these individuals who seem to be attracted on an aesthetic, personal level to Christianity.”

He cites the example of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, once hailed as the fifth “horsewoman” of the New Atheists, who has spoken publicly and candidly about her conversion to Christianity.

Oldfield, another close observer of the climate, describes a shift in the center of gravity from the hostility of New Atheism to an acknowledgement of the inheritance of Christian traditions and institutions “with a sort of wistful envy.”

Among those who have raised concerns about the trend is Luke Bretherton, regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford, who warned of the tendency to treat Christianity as “an endangered species to be protected on special reservations or weaponized to defend Western culture from internal collapse and
external attack.”

Things are also changing within apologetics. Oldfield recently sat alongside Brierley on a panel exploring the idea of a “rebirth” of Christianity, and, in a clip that became widely shared on social media, spoke of the “falling away of the myth that we make decisions based on arguments.”

Ultimately, she said, people come to conclusions based on relationships—people and “the stories that make sense to us.” For too long, she argued, Christians have tried to meet demands for “neat and tidy and palatable” responses to a “very thin, narrow definition of reason.”

It’s a perspective in tune with Apologetics without Apology. In this book, British theologian Elaine Graham suggests that apologetics has “narrowed its focus into a model of rational propositional argument.” She favors a new model, an “invitation to inhabit an imaginative world, in which religious faith ‘makes sense’ of experience.” Most of the proponents she cites for this propositional form of apologetics are male, and many of Brierley’s interlocutors, at least in the early years of the show, were men too.

Today, Brierley shares Oldfield’s sense that people are “often more guided than they are willing to admit by their gut and by their emotion.” The same applies to Christians, he said. “I still think [Christianity] makes intellectual sense, but I wouldn’t be a Christian if I didn’t feel that I encountered something genuinely transcendent, that stirs my emotions.”

It’s significant that Jordan Peterson often becomes emotional during talks—a vulnerability that is critical to his appeal. “We’ve heard people talking endlessly about science and reason and it’s all been good, but people want to connect again with a real sense of being human and that involves a lot of emotion,” Brierley said. “I think it’s come back again. and I am glad that people are no longer dismissing that as just delusional.”

Oldfield adds that she has “softened towards some of those more intellectual forms of apologetics.” Some people, often young men, need to engage in such debates “to allow themselves to drop down to the emotional, existential level, to give themselves permission that it’s worth paying attention to these metaphysical yearnings.”

Brierley left Premier, where he had served as theology and apologetics editor, in 2023. In addition to running the Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God podcast, he now hosts the Re-Enchanting podcast for Seen & Unseen. It’s a venture by the Centre for Cultural Witness, launched by Anglican bishop Graham Tomlin to “inspire a renewal in the public understanding of Christian faith.”

Brierley’s next release, due in April, is an update of an earlier book: Why I’m Still a Christian After Two Decades of Conversations with Sceptics and Atheists. The book is a testament to the conclusion he reached as a student at Oxford: that believing in God is not a delusion but rather, as he puts it in one video, “a perfectly reasonable conclusion when we look at the fingerprints on our universe.”

Among those convinced by his argument is a viewer who, having watched one of his short YouTube films (“How a Dice can show that God exists”), commented about having a die tattooed on their wrist.

Meanwhile, on Sundays Brierley can be found at the suburban United Reformed Church (URC) congregation led for almost 20 years by his wife, Lucy, who was already exploring a call to ordination when they met at Oxford.

Justin was playing Harry the Horse in a production of Guys and Dolls “with a brilliant New York accent,” Lucy recalls.

“I was helping backstage and had been applying his makeup all week,” she said. “When he approached me at the cast party, it became apparent that he thought we were meeting for the first time.”

They were engaged within six months and married 18 months later. She remembers “intense but exhilarating theological discussions” in their early years that widened their perspectives on Christian faith.

His career path did not surprise her, given his intellect, communication skills, faith, and “beautifully calm—actually I would say unflappable—demeanor.”

Their church today has bucked the trend of mainline decline in Britain, and their four children have found their own faith over the years.

Brierley speaks with great affection about his wife’s ministry and the crucial role it has played in keeping his own perspective in place.

“It keeps you grounded as to what real issues are facing ordinary people,” he said. At its best, the church is “where you really see God in action in the lives of people and in the everyday, mundane ways in which we end up serving each other, hurting each other, forgiving each other.”

Lucy sees their jobs as complementary. While she disciples Christians in times of joy and crisis, journeying beside them in regular life, her husband taps thinkers and teachers in conversation about God.

“We’re both dealing with similar issues and spheres but from different angles,” she said. “What we’ve learned is that there is a place for both in the Christian world …. Faith is a matter of the head and the heart, and our respective roles have certainly shown us that.”

While it’s useful to have a “first-rate apologist” on hand at church, she said, Brierley also plays in the music group, volunteers with the youth group, and leads a home group—all roles he brings up on his shows.

Christian faith includes intellectual debate, but it’s important, he said, “to remind listeners who are used to hearing all these weighty intellectual arguments that …what you are hearing is one niche bit that appeals to you.

“Real Christianity is what my wife does: sitting next to the bed of someone who is dying or being involved in helping someone who hasn’t got enough to pay the bills,” he said.

“That to me is the heart of Christianity … I would not want anyone to mistake these intellectual debates and conversations for the real thing.”

Madeleine Davies is a reporter in London, where she covers the Church of England for Church Times.

This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Justin Brierley Does the Unbelievable".

- More from Madeleine Davies

Church Life

Who Gets Our Church After a Dating Breakup?

Beth Moore, Kevin Antlitz, and Kiara John-Charles

CT advice columnists also weigh in on outreach to a family leaving a church and a lost sense of ministry calling.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: A family from our small group seems to be drifting away from church. They said they were going to leave our group to focus on family time, but we aren’t seeing them on Sundays either, so we’re worried. Most of our group’s attempts to reach out as friends have been ignored. But the friendship was pretty new before all this, and we aren’t sure how long to keep pursuing them. —Anxious in Arkansas

Beth Moore: I enjoyed hearing from Arkansas, the beautiful land of my upbringing! I “heard” your letter in my accent.

What a wonderful small group you must have. Your concern for a family drifting away and your mention of outreach tells me volumes. People can feel invisible in their churches, and it’s good that you haven’t let that happen here.

I’m guessing most of what you’ve tried so far has been digital (texts, emails) and indirect (checking in, offering to get together). Think about mailing them a physical card directly expressing how missed they are. Ask the Lord to help you reach out in a way that is genuinely personal but not pressuring.

Be specific and think about the whole family, including any kids. A handwritten note expressing remembrance means even more to me when my family members are referenced by name. I know then that the sender truly had us on their mind.

If they respond, you may learn that the absence is temporary and for no other reason than the one offered. Then again, additional family concerns could be in the mix. It’s possible they’re not meaning to ignore you, just feeling overwhelmed or dealing with grief or other sorrow.

Prayer for any family is never wasted, so pray for God’s gracious hand over their lives whether or not you see them again at church. Bless y’all!

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Beth Moore and her husband, Keith, reside outside Houston. She has two daughters and an armful of grandchildren. Beth leads Living Proof Ministries, helping women know and love Jesus through Scripture.

Q: I’ve been attending my church for over a year. When I first started, I felt a call to vocational ministry, and I was close to the pastors and other teachers who helped me consider that calling. But recently, I don’t feel that call anymore, and it seems as though the pastors who once walked with me have distanced themselves because of that shift. Am I reading too much into this? —Melancholy in Mississippi

Kevin Antlitz: Most pastors get really excited about raising up aspiring ministers. One of the joys of pastoring is entrusting what we have learned to faithful disciples who will teach others also (2 Tim. 2:2).

It’s also true that pastors sometimes overlook their call to help disciples integrate their faith in all areas of life. Most disciples spend most of their waking time at work—whether as a stay-at-home mom or a plumber, as a student or a CEO—and a pastor’s job is to equip the saints for whatever work God has given them to do.

Sadly, pastors often “spend the majority of their time equipping Christians for the minority of their lives,” as I recently heard from Tom Nelson, a pastor and the founder of a ministry focused on vocation.

Still, while all of that is generally true, I don’t and can’t know if that’s why it seems like your pastors have distanced themselves. Rather than wonder about it, I encourage you to reach out. Start with the one with whom you’re closest, the one you trust has your best interest at heart. Send a gracious, nonaccusatory email sharing a bit about how you’re feeling and why you’d like to talk.

Hopefully this will be the start of a good conversation. Perhaps it will lead to your community expanding what they mean by “vocational ministry,” since all Christians are called to serve God and their neighbors.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Kevin Antlitz is an Anglican priest at a Pittsburgh church positively overflowing with kids. He and his wife have three young children who they pray will never know a day apart from Jesus.

Q: Is it silly to leave a church because of a breakup? One time, I broke up with someone in my Bible study, and he dated another girl in the group. Another time, I was seriously dating a guy—we had discussed getting engaged—but we had a bad split. My mom asked, “Who gets the church in your ‘divorce’?” She was just joking, but it’s a serious question for me. —Confused in California

Kiara John-Charles: Breakups are a common and painful reality, including in the church. But a failed relationship doesn’t mean you need to lose your church community. So first I encourage you to process this decision with God in prayer, as his peace will guard your heart (Phil. 4:6–7).

What is your main reason for thinking about leaving your church? Breakups can stir up heightened emotions like shame and awkwardness, but they’re simply part of the dating process.

True, there are situations where leaving is necessary to prioritize your mental health. If seeing an ex is causing significant distress, it may be wise—after prayerful discernment with faithful friends—to take a break from that church or find a new community to provide a safe space for healing.

But most of the time, in an ordinary breakup, it’s better not to bolt. There are healthier ways to navigate that awkwardness and remain in your congregation.

Establishing boundaries will be key, and you and your ex may need to discuss how to be cordial but distant. That could mean joining a different small group, attending an alternate service, or sitting in a different section. Over time, the sting of the breakup may lessen, allowing you to share the same spaces more comfortably.

Though wanting to leave is understandable, staying connected is paramount during difficult times. At my church, we say, “We suffer in isolation, but we heal in community.” After a breakup, community is even more important than usual.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Kiara John-Charles is an LA native with Caribbean roots and a love for travel and food. She works as a pediatric occupational therapist and serves at her local church in Long Beach, California.

This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Qualms & Proverbs".

Qualms & Proverbs: Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Theology

One Lord, One Faith, Many Metaphors

Andrew Wilson

Scripture uses a wealth of images for the church. Shall one say to the other, “I have no need of you?”

Illustration by Mark Conlan

As much as we exert control over our words, our words can exert a kind of control over us. This is especially true of common metaphors. We use particular figures of speech to discuss certain subjects, often without thinking. In turn, those figures of speech influence how we think about the subjects themselves—probably more than we realize. They constrain our thinking, for better or worse. They can calm tensions or inflame them; they can foster unity or diminish it.

In debate, for instance, most of us use architectural imagery. An idea is foundational; she demolished his case by destabilizing his assumptions; you should build or construct your argument and support or reinforce it with further examples; her view has structural weaknesses that make her position shaky, rather than robust, and at risk of collapse.

But some metaphors work in more insidious ways. Over the past few decades, political discourse has seen a marked increase in military language: culture wars, battles for the soul of the nation, fights for justice that involve occupying frontlines and gaining ground. We think of public policy in terms of allies and enemies, battlefields, skirmishes, and threats. We declare war not just on nations but on terror, poverty, drugs, obesity, waste, and a host of other abstractions.

Unsurprisingly, this terminology makes our thinking far more combative and binary than a range of possible alternatives. Consider, in contrast, the same situation described with clothing metaphors: The fabric of society is unraveling and frayed, full of moral tangles and knotty problems and in need of stitching back together through weaving close-knit communities, repairing past injustices, patching up disagreements, and threading the needle between extreme positions.

Metaphors are hugely influential in understanding the nature and purpose of the church. Scripture gives us plenty of images for thinking about the people of God. Jesus calls us the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a city on a hill. Peter says we are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation. We are a field and a garden; we are branches in a vine, members of a body, sheep in a fold, crops in a harvest, warriors in a spiritual conflict; we are citizens of heaven, children of God, the bride of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Each metaphor highlights different aspects of what it means to be God’s people as well as the privileges and responsibilities we carry as a result. We need them all. If any of them is missing, we will quickly become imbalanced in ways that threaten to damage or divide.

If, for example, we see ourselves as soldiers armed with shields and swords without remembering that we are also a bride beautifully dressed for her husband, we could end up with an excessively militant picture of the church. The reverse is true too. If our imagery is bridal without also being martial, we might assume the church is a lover and not a fighter, when the New Testament presents us as both (Eph. 5:22–6:20; Rev. 19:11–21:14). This could easily pave the way for compromise on issues that require courage.

Scripture has good reason, then, for supplying a wealth of metaphors for the church. Not only do these metaphors offer useful portraits of God’s people and the callings he places upon them, they also point back to the gospel itself, challenging and refining a variety of cultural assumptions that can distort our reading of God’s Word.

To illustrate the importance of keeping the full range of church metaphors in mind, consider two images favored by the apostle Paul: the church as body and the church as household.

On the one hand, the church is an interdependent body (Rom. 12:4–5; 1 Cor. 12:12–31). Its members have nonidentical but equally important parts to play, which precludes anyone thinking themselves independent of, or beneath, anyone else. On the other hand, the church is a household (Gal. 6:10; Eph. 2:19; 1 Tim. 3:15). That means order and structure remain important, and some members carry more responsibility than others.

We need to hold both images in mind. If we think carefully about the different ways each works, we might be able to better navigate contested areas of church life today, including spiritual gifts, church government, and the ministry of men and women.

Consider spiritual gifts. When Paul addresses the use of charismatic gifts in the church—prophecy, languages, healing, interpretation, and the like—he usually employs the body metaphor. “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function,” he writes, “so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us,” including prophecy, service, teaching, encouragement, giving, leading, and showing mercy (Rom. 12:4–8).

The body is the perfect metaphor for charismatic life within the church. God has given us many different gifts; no individual is sufficiently gifted or godly to get by without the contributions of others. Consequently, nobody should think their gift is sufficient for life in God, and nobody should think they have nothing to bring, but each should use their gifts for building up the church.

Charismatic Christians (like me) revel in passages like this. But notice the potential hazards. If everyone’s gift is equally valuable, how do you recognize different levels of gifting, maturity, or wisdom? If we need all the gifts to flourish, how do we stop meetings from descending into chaos? How do you prevent the “eye” from going on endlessly about all the heavenly mysteries it claims to have seen, while the “liver” and the “kidneys” suffer in silence? If, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14:26, “each of you has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation,” how can these things “be done so that the church may be built up”?

The answer: by remembering that the church is also “God’s household” and thus “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). All of its members are equally valuable. But households (rightly) differentiate between fathers and mothers, parents and children, family members and guests, staff and visitors.

As a household, the church is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets” (Eph. 2:20). It has order, a structure, and different levels of maturity and authority. It includes overseers, deacons, and experienced saints who know the Scriptures inside out, alongside quarrelsome men, gossiping women, new converts, heretics, and outsiders (1 Tim. 3:1–5).

You may have seen what happens when one of these two metaphors drives out the other. Some congregations are so eager to let every part of the body contribute that there is no quality control, no liturgical shape, no church order, and no doctrinal clarity. The result is a household of God lacking walls, doors, and pillars. Other congregations are crystal clear on the offices, roles, and qualifications of everyone in the household, so much so that only one or two members are doing most of the load-bearing.

The interplay of body and household imagery can even help reframe debates over men’s and women’s roles in the church. On this topic, many believers find it hard to square the two distinct strains of Paul’s teaching. In 1 Corinthians, it appears that women pray and prophesy publicly, and everyone can bring hymns, teachings, and interpretations of Scripture (14:26). In 1 Timothy, however, women seem to be restricted from doing this (2:11–12), and Paul lists exacting qualifications for the church’s elders (3:1–7).

Some interpreters use one teaching as a lens through which to read (or minimize) the other. Some argue that the two letters must have been written by different people. I have made the case myself that Paul uses the verb teach somewhat differently in his letters to churches and his letters to individuals.

In many ways, however, the difference in Paul’s emphases reflects a difference of metaphor. Because the church is a household, it needs to maintain distinctions in a way that reflects good order; because the church is a body, it needs to value the contribution of every member. Because we are a body, we are interdependent; because we are a household, we are not interchangeable.

If either of these pictures is missing, our ecclesiology gets smaller, often in self-reinforcing ways. I cannot prove this, but I suspect that when churches stress either the body or the household metaphor over the other, they will find this hampers their practice of spiritual gifts and church government, while diminishing the service of men and women alike.

For a mature view of the church, we need all the images included in God’s Word. In Ephesians alone, we learn that the church is a body (1:23), a new humanity (2:15), a citizenry (v. 19), a household (vv. 20–22), a temple (2:21), a family (3:15), a light (5:8), a wife (vv. 22–23), and a soldier dressed for battle (6:10–18).

All these metaphors give essential guidance to God’s people in the here and now. Ultimately, though, they testify to the full scope of what God has already accomplished in knitting together a people for his own possession. Whatever its visible faults, the church of Christ will fulfill all the callings God has given it, to his everlasting glory.

Andrew Wilson is teaching pastor at King’s Church London and the author of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West.

This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Mixed Metaphors".

- More from Andrew Wilson

Books

Review

Faith Torn Down to the Studs

Jen Pollock Michel

A deconstruction survivor seeks ways to repair faltering houses of belief.

Illustration by Sam Chivers

There are two conversations I recall with clarity. The first happens on a hot August day, with my oldest son and me sitting together in the car, in the driveway. The engine cools, but we linger. The second takes place the following month, in the evening. This same son, who has just entered his senior year of high school, leans against the doorframe of our bedroom. He talks, and his father and I, dressed for bed, put down our books to listen.

In both conversations, our son explains that doubt has found him. His childhood faith is shaken. He may no longer be a Christian, given the intellectual ferocity of his questions about human suffering, the Bible’s reliability, and God’s hiddenness. Having gone searching online, months earlier, for answers to his atheist and agnostic classmates’ questions, our son encountered debates where the case against faith seemed stronger than the case for it. According to some cosmic irony, searching for truth had led him to doubt.

In this story, as in many others about deconstructing faith, before is a mythical land of certainty, where belief is easy and God is very, very real. It’s the kind of land you assume you’ll live in forever—until you don’t.

The crisis of interrogating one’s faith, as author Ian Harber has capably argued in Walking Through Deconstruction: How to Be a Companion in a Crisis of Faith, is a stress test for all involved. Harber hopes his survivor story, written “to the church and for the church,” might provide some handholds in the land of after. Harber is now on the other side of deconstruction, and though many of his questions have never been fully answered, he’s arrived at a “settled trust in the Lord.”

While the term deconstruction describes a more recent evangelical trend, its origins lie in academic philosophy. It suggests that a house of belief has been built on a shaky foundation. In the dismantling mode of Christian deconstruction, once-standard commitments and convictions are taken down to the studs.

This happened with Harber’s friend Jenny. As he recalls in the book, “She was asking questions about the authority and trustworthiness of the Bible. She was asking questions about the church’s treatment of women and their role in ministry. She was questioning whether God even exists or if this whole thing we call Christianity is just a sham.” Although one imagines the typical deconstructor to be young, Harber cites research from a recent book, The Great Dechurching, indicating she is, generally, a white Gen X woman, disconnected from and disillusioned with the church.

The current wave of deconstruction—an offspring of the emergent movement of the early 2000s, according to Harber—involves “the questioning of core doctrines” and an “untangling of cultural ideologies.” Harber’s definition suggests both what is old and what is (possibly) new about this phenomenon. In some ways, it might be as ancient as Augustine’s flight from Africa and from the primitive Punic faith of his mother. In others, it might be as novel as celebrity deconstructors like Michael Gungor, Joshua Harris, and Audrey Assad.

One critical difference between Augustine’s world and our own is the digital media environment, which affords access to varying faith perspectives. “Deconstruction is in the digital air,” Harber writes, noting that podcasters, not pastors, have the mic today. What’s more, the church’s failures have never been more public than in our internet age. In the wake of church scandals and glaring political hypocrisies and idolatries, the typical exvangelical is no longer convinced of the truth, goodness, and beauty of the Christian story. As one friend recently told me, when many of her Liberty University classmates faced the choice between association with religious “nones” and the Trump-Falwell bromance, they didn’t have to think hard.

Doubters throughout the centuries have questioned their faith for any number of reasons. Likewise, no contemporary deconstruction experience is exactly the same, even if stories typically center on church trauma, changing views on human sexuality, and disillusionment about evangelicalism’s political commitments.

Harber rightly counsels against ascribing morally suspect motives to anyone fleeing thou shalts and thou shalt nots. This is a characteristic misstep among companions who long to see a deconstructor’s faith restored (as well as larger institutions seeking to understand the trend). “By and large,” Harber writes, “when someone begins deconstructing, they aren’t looking for a way to leave the faith; they are looking for a way to stay.”

We must not condemn genuine doubt as sin, Harber says, as this is something Jesus never did. Come and see, Jesus said. Touch and believe, Jesus invited. Perhaps in God’s radical identification with human beings, he sympathizes with how difficult it can be to trust in the invisible and eternal more.

Nevertheless, when the thud of the mallet is strongest, tearing at load-bearing walls of core Christian doctrines, companions of the doubting can struggle to decipher goodness in a process that furthers estrangement from believing communities and from God himself. We want to solve and to fix, to make sure God loses none of his sheep.

But our anxieties can obscure the real grief of those deconstructing. As Harber reminds us, these people are losing not simply their faith but also their framework for reality, their communities of belonging, and their convictions about meaning and purpose. Yes, they’re tearing down the house, but for many, the collapse is suffocating and terrifying.

Although I might wish for more artfully told stories in his book, Harber helpfully gathers much collective wisdom about the deconstruction experience. Readers get a clear picture of how deconstructors remix, replace, and rebuild their faith. Walking Through Deconstruction is a valuable read for companions like me, if simply to gain sympathy, compassion, and patience for the journey of the wanderer.

At first, my husband and I imagined easy solutions to our son’s doubts: diligent prayer with and for him, a chat with a church leader, a couple of apologetic books, and expertly chosen and explicated Bible passages. I can remember the night I waited for Nathan to return from coffee with Dan, our whip-smart pastor who had converted to Christianity in law school. If Nathan’s questions were locks with perfectly fitted keys, then Dan would know which key to try. Doors would fly open, faith would flood in again, and when it did, I would yet believe in the goodness of God.

There was no key, of course. There rarely is.

After four years of wilderness wandering, our son returned home, if not exactly to the golden plains of unqualified belief. There would be no objective proving of God’s existence, much less of God’s loving self-revelation through Jesus Christ. Faith, recovered in the after, did not mean ironclad intellectual certainty, though it did mean returning to the old, old story of God’s persistent, self-sacrificing love for his children.

Nathan experienced this Good News in a fresh, emotionally resonant way when he began attending a church in a different tradition with a college friend. He became convinced that agnosticism was at least an invitation to consider that God was real and that a real relationship with him was possible. He began to pray again, to read the Bible again, to offer a kind of conditional worship: If God existed, then he deserved praise for the beauty of creation. As he described it to me at the time, he was finally ready to “surrender to the mystery.”

Deconstruction is scary for all involved. Still, says Harber, by the power of the Spirit, faithful companions can exercise a patient, nonanxious hospitality toward the doubting. As Nathan reminded me recently when we talked about his deconstruction experience, the honest search for truth is virtue, not vice.

Harber’s own reconstruction process took the better part of a decade. Ultimately, his faith was rehabilitated at church, where “questions were accepted, the Bible was opened, the riches of church history were taught, and genuine discipleship was modeled.” His experience of church had taken down his house of belief—and by God’s grace, a better experience of church raised it up again.

I can’t help but think of the radical hospitality to doubt practiced in our church community in Toronto, where we raised our children. It was a rare environment, one Nathan credits for his courage to pursue truth wherever it led. At the end of every sermon, time was made—in a large sanctuary, crowded with hundreds of people—for an open question-and-answer period.

Well-intentioned people sought clarity. Rabble-rousers occasionally shouted. Though today’s Q and A is moderated more carefully than it used to be (questions come by text, allowing for more judicious selection), no seeker is ultimately turned away. The pastors always answer the questions, if only privately.

Such a moment, carved into the church’s weekly liturgy, suggests that the Word of God, preached as good and wise and eternally reliable, can bear the load of human scrutiny. The answers given can never fully satisfy on their own, of course. God’s ways are not our ways, and his wisdom is not our wisdom. Anyone who thinks the Christian faith will conform to their list of personal preferences has not heard Jesus speak his many hard truths.

Still, real faith is demonstrated on that stage week after week. In fact, sometimes that faith says, “I don’t know” or “This is difficult to understand” or even “I might wish it weren’t so.”

Though everyone reconstructs after their deconstruction experience, according to Harber, doubt isn’t always replaced with faith. This is the aching reality of those left to grieve the leaving.

We can’t force people to stay—but we can endeavor to lead holy lives and seek to faithfully communicate the gospel so that less deconstruction work will be required. This might explain why I bristled recently at a formulation of the Christian faith I heard preached to a crowd of high schoolers. As the well-meaning speaker called them to trust the Word of God, he reassured them, in practical terms, that faith “works.”

I wondered if that’s the kind of sloppy phrasing that can inadvertently push people, like Harber, toward deconstruction. In Harber’s story—which included grief, loss, and abuse—faith clearly didn’t work in ways he might have preferred. Tragically, when he raised genuine questions and doubts, members of his church responded with hostility and betrayal. Imagine if, instead, someone had led him to the Book of Job and showed him how it teaches what Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis calls not a theology of suffering but “the theology of a sufferer.”

If faith only works when we, the people of God, are immune to the cruelties of the world, then the house of belief will crumble and fall. If “faith works” teaches that Christians and their leaders will consistently resist the temptations of idolatry and power, lust and greed, deconstruction is at hand. A working faith never denies these groaning realities.

In my view and Harber’s, a faith that holds firm amid tides of deconstruction may be less triumphal. But realism is no affront to hope. Maybe it’s one requirement for it.

Jen Pollock Michel is a writer and speaker. Her books include In Good Time: 8 Habits for Reimagining Productivity, Resisting Hurry, and Practicing Peace.

This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "A House Deconstructed".

- More from Jen Pollock Michel

Church Life

Satisfaction Comes for Doubters

Timothy Dalrymple

President & CEO

A note from CT’s president in our March/April issue.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash

There was a time when I struggled to articulate why I was a Christian.

In my college years, far from the faithful influences of home, I reviewed inherited convictions and determined which ones to keep. This was no mere intellectual sorting—the way one might sort out important letters from junk mail. It was a response to suffering. Having broken my neck in a gymnastics accident, I saw my life (and lack of paralysis) as a miracle, but the experience plunged me into questions.

The internal and bodily journey of healing was long, complex, and never comfortable. Several lifelines stood out: Finding a community of Christians who named the difficult questions—and addressed them thoughtfully and authentically—gave me hope. The testimonies of faithful men and women also illustrated God’s power to save and to keep. But it was my personal Bible reading that proved most vital. Through the words of Scripture, and particularly the life and teachings of Jesus, I found something haunting and beautiful and undeniably true. My faith became my own.

We seem to need more than the miraculous. The sixth chapter of the Gospel of John is best known for the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus walking on water, and Jesus’ famous statement “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (v. 35). You hear a ringing declaration, the triumphant conclusion to an irresistible argument for Jesus’ divine authority. After all, the crowds witnessed miracles. But still the people grumbled.

Jesus could have watered down his teaching to retain his large following. But he would rather have a faithful few who pursue him for the right reasons. So Jesus continued with offensive language about his body and blood, presenting himself as the true manna, the bread that comes down from heaven. Nearly everyone abandoned him.

When he turned to the apostles and asked whether they wished to leave as well, Peter replied, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (v. 68).

When I wrestled with my faith, sometimes all I had were these feeble and faithful words of Peter. Miracles are well and good, but only Jesus himself truly satisfies. Whatever else I might doubt, I could not deny that I had tasted the bread from heaven and it had filled my soul.

Like the church community and faithful followers in my life, we need witnesses to the Word, especially when our faith falters. Christianity Today is not the Word, but it is a witness to the Word. It represents a people who seek to saturate life with Scripture. A people who use the Word to make sense of the world, because the world does not make sense without it.

We invite you to seek Christ and his kingdom with us. Let’s eat together—especially in this Easter season—of the bread that was broken for us, the bread that comes down from heaven and satisfies our souls.

Timothy Dalrymple is president and CEO of Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "The Bread from Heaven".

- More from Timothy Dalrymple

Books

Review

What Must We Do to Agree on Salvation?

Rhyne Putman

Protestants and Catholics proclaim the same good news but expect different responses.

Illustration by Ryan Johnson

As a Baptist preacher’s kid, I never gave any serious thought to the question of whether Roman Catholics could be saved until I was 19 years old.

I was sitting with my parents at a diner booth in Santa Cruz, California, where we were vacationing. A few tables away, I overheard a man talking—no, preaching—about the Holy Spirit. I couldn’t help eavesdropping on what sounded like a deep theological conversation. This man spoke with evangelical fervor about the fruit of the Holy Spirit’s transformative work in his life: a renewed passion for Scripture, an unrelenting love for Christ, and a zeal for leading others through the Bible.

Encouraged—and a little nosy—I found a flimsy excuse to pass by his table and ask what church he attended. I expected him to mention a Baptist church like mine, or perhaps one of those big nondenominational churches in Northern California.

“I’m Roman Catholic,” he said, somewhat confused by my question.

I was stunned. I had never thought about the possibility that some Roman Catholics might believe the gospel and have a meaningful relationship with Jesus. To this point, everything I had absorbed about Roman Catholicism could have come from a fundamentalist tract. As it turned out, I had a lot to unlearn.

Over the years, I have thought and written a lot, in books like When Doctrine Divides the People of God, about unity in the body of Christ. But the issue of evangelical unity with Roman Catholics has always bothered me. We hold significant differences regarding Scripture, tradition, ecclesial authority, and salvation.

The phrase “salvation wars” captures the intense nature of these disagreements. During the Reformation, disagreements over salvation didn’t stay in the pulpit; they spilled onto battlefields, leaving thousands dead and Europe in turmoil. Thankfully, today’s salvation wars are fought with words, not weapons. But the doctrinal differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics remain a significant source of division.

In a provocative new book, Beyond the Salvation Wars: Why Both Protestants and Catholics Must Reimagine How We Are Saved, Matthew W. Bates takes up the ambitious task of reconciling Protestant and Catholic Christians by helping them rethink their own respective doctrines of salvation. As a Protestant New Testament scholar who spent years teaching at a Catholic university, Bates brings a fresh perspective to the differences between these broader traditions.

Roman Catholics connect salvation to participation in church sacraments such as baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist. Protestant evangelicals, by contrast, emphasize personal faith in Jesus, teaching that we are justified—or made right with God—through belief in the gospel.

Bates argues that both approaches distort biblical teaching on salvation. In the book, he invites readers to explore a different framework: what he calls a “gospel-allegiance model.” The language reflects his own Arminian perspective (challenging Reformed accounts of predestination by emphasizing a believer’s obligation to willingly receive the gift of grace).

As evangelicals, we often associate the concept of sharing the gospel with telling people what they must believe for salvation. But as Bates rightly points out, the New Testament never really uses the term gospel in that way. The word’s original, secular meaning (taken from the Greek word euangelion) was more political than theological. It referred to the “good news” delivered to loyal subjects of a king, such as Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, proclaiming their ruler’s victory over enemies or their conquest of new lands. Only against this backdrop, argues Bates, can we fully appreciate the New Testament gospel as “first and above all the claim that Jesus is now the Messiah or King.”

Furthermore, the core gospel message is descriptive rather than prescriptive in nature. In making this case, Bates points to passages like Mark 1:14–15, Luke 4:18–19, Romans 1:2–4, and 1 Corinthians 15:3–5. For the most part, these biblical expressions of the gospel don’t tell readers or hearers what actions they need to take. Instead, they proclaim who Jesus is as the eternal Son of God and what God has done to save us through the work of King Jesus.

Drawing from these passages, Bates summarizes the “raw content” of the gospel in ten statements:

Jesus has always been God’s Son.
He was sent by the Father, as promised.
He took on human flesh in fulfillment of God’s promises to David.
He died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.
He was buried.
He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.
He appeared to many witnesses.
He is enthroned at the right hand of God as the ruling Christ.
He has sent the Holy Spirit to his people to effect his rule.
He will come again to judge the world and rule eternally.

Bates observes that Protestants and Catholics generally agree on the content of this gospel outline. However, there are crucial disagreements about how we should express the gospel and how it relates to our salvation. Even as we share the same good news about Jesus, we demand different responses and expect different benefits.

Bates accuses Protestants of reducing the gospel to instructions for salvation, to the degree of conflating it with the doctrine of justification by faith. But he faults Roman Catholics for burying the gospel under the weight of a sacramental system and making minimal efforts to define it within the church’s formal catechism.

What alternative does Bates offer to traditional Protestant and Catholic models? It revolves around a redefinition of the Greek term pistis, traditionally translated as faith. Bates contends that pistis is better understood as fidelity, loyalty, or allegiance. He explains that New Testament writers sought more than mere intellectual agreement with gospel proclamations, though such agreement was essential. They also wanted followers of Jesus to pledge loyalty through their confession and demonstrate faithfulness through obedient living. In this, they echoed Jesus’ own example, as set forth in the Sermon on the Mount.

Evangelicals who stress the lordship of Christ will find common ground with much of this model. They might question, however, the extent to which Bates is really proposing an understanding of the gospel that differs from their own.

When the Bible proclaims the good news about King Jesus, it consistently invites a response of both belief and repentance in exchange for the forgiveness of sins (Mark 1:15; Acts 2:37–38; Rom. 10:9–10). Even though the gospel has broader implications for faith communities and even entire nations, the Philippian jailer’s pointed question recorded in Acts 16:30–31 —“What must I do to be saved?”—indicates that individuals still need to hear the gospel, believe it, and experience forgiveness.

The idea of allegiance to Christ has ramifications for other topics related to the doctrine of salvation. Bates observes that if Roman Catholics take his proposal seriously, they will need to reconsider their views on baptism. Specifically, they may need to rethink the belief that baptism saves “from the work worked” (ex opere operato), which suggests that baptismal waters can have saving effects apart from faith.

As Bates observes, in the first two centuries of Christianity, baptism was a personal and voluntary act stemming from obedience to Jesus’ command. Neither the water nor the faith of the baptizer were thought to hold saving power. As he sees it, genuine repentance initiates salvation. Baptism is the ordinary oath of allegiance one makes to Christ, but it has no saving power in and of itself. To illustrate the Catholic error in connecting baptism and salvation, Bates points to Simon the magician in Acts 8, who underwent baptism without genuine repentance or transformation.

But the book balances its critiques of Catholicism with others aimed at tenets of Reformed theology like the doctrines of election, regeneration, eternal security, and justification by faith. Many of these arguments echo Bates’s earlier works, including Salvation by Allegiance Alone and Gospel Allegiance. He views biblical election as God choosing a corporate group in Christ to share his purposes and mission rather than predestining specific individuals for salvation.

Reformed Christians often speak of the “perseverance of the saints,” which affirms that true believers cannot lose their salvation. Bates rejects this doctrine, arguing that the warning passages in Hebrews are not hypothetical. Here, he chiefly targets “easy-believism,” the idea that embracing Jesus at one moment guarantees salvation regardless of one’s life thereafter.

However, this characterization oversimplifies the Reformers’ doctrine of perseverance, which affirms that those united to Christ by grace will remain steadfast in their loyalty to him. Accordingly, those who are not loyal to Christ until the end were never truly born again or justified.

In Beyond the Salvation Wars, Bates presents a compelling vision of postdenominational Christianity, in which Catholics and Protestants are unified through a deeper understanding of the gospel and salvation. He is commendably invested in seeing the fulfillment of Jesus’ prayer for all believers to “be one” (John 17:21). Instead of sacrificing truth, Bates calls for gospel-centered “truth-based unity.” On this point, no follower of Jesus should raise any objection.

That said, many readers will likely take issue with Bates’s vision of achieving unity. Essentially, he argues that both Protestants and Roman Catholics understand the content of the gospel while failing to apply it correctly. And he asks both sides to adopt his gospel-allegiance model. However, I suspect that both Protestant and Catholic interpreters might respond with a similar solution. Like Bates, they presumably believe we could all achieve unity by simply adopting their original preferred perspective.

Unfortunately, efforts at interpreting Scripture often involve confirmation bias—affirming positions because they align with the theological tradition we call home. Too often, we approach the Bible looking to confirm what we already believe rather than to evaluate whether our beliefs align with Scripture.

This is why Bates’s call for fresh exegetical assessments is so valuable. Even if we disagree with his conclusions (as I do in many areas), we can still appreciate his challenge to return to Scripture and let it govern our efforts at reform. For Protestants especially, Scripture is the ultimate and unrivaled authority, the standard of all theological truth. When our traditions conflict with Scripture, we should allow it to correct our course.

Another challenge in navigating the kind of theological disagreements raised by Bates is that we reason differently about Scripture’s meaning. The Bible wasn’t written as a systematic theology textbook. Instead, its authors wrote in a range of genres, including occasional theology, to address the needs of God’s people in specific times and places. While authors like Paul used terms like election or predestination, they left no theological dictionary to define them. Bible interpreters often need to make educated guesses.

We build frameworks of understanding from the Bible and test them against the text to see if they match. This process is somewhat like assembling a puzzle without the picture on the box. It requires creativity, some guesswork, and a willingness to hold some of our conclusions more tentatively than others. Books like Beyond the Salvation Wars are valuable because they challenge us to rethink our theological assumptions. Even if we don’t fully adopt the new models they recommend, we gain new insight into the strengths and weaknesses of our own perspectives.

Does Bates achieve his goal of fostering unity? His distinction between gospel content and application is a helpful step. Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox Christians generally agree on the gospel’s core content and affirm shared truths in the church’s historic creeds.

But other foundational differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics lie outside the realm of gospel expression. There are questions about Scripture and tradition, the nature of the church, and the relationship between nature and grace (wherein Catholics locate the metaphysical grounds for their sacramental theology).

We hope and pray that many of these differences can be resolved over time. Purposeful conversations with our Catholic friends and neighbors remain essential. While books like Beyond the Salvation Wars may not offer a one-size-fits-all solution, they provide valuable insights to guide the way forward.

Rhyne Putman is professor of theology and culture at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of Conceived by the Holy Spirit: The Virgin Birth in Scripture and Theology.

- More from Rhyne Putman

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