The Church Is Fragile—And Unshakable

Columnist

We can be grieved about the state of the church, but we can still love and fight for it.

Illustration by James Walton

The burial plot of Jesus is a mess. More accurately, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem—marking what is thought to be the tomb Jesus occupied for three days—is a mess.

“The warring Christian monks make responsible maintenance of the sacred structure impossible,” wrote author and former Catholic priest James Carroll. “As a result, the roof beams rot, the walls crumble, the leaking gutters channel rainwater into the sanctuary instead of away.”

Carroll notes that turning the holy site into a fancy building, originally by order of Emperor Constantine and modeled after the imperial palace, was part of degrading the site, not preserving it. And, in Carroll’s thought, the old structure’s decay is still inevitable even if it really is the spot where Jesus was raised from the dead.

“That the Incarnation of Jesus Christ means He made His home in this particular thicket of turpitude,” Carroll continues, “does not mean that eventually the ancient basilica will be spared from final collapse.”

He’s right, up to a point. Jesus’ promise to build his church upon a rock such that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18, ESV throughout) is not a promise that any particular congregation—much less any particular structure—will itself survive. In fact, the point is reinforced by the passage itself, which has divided the church over whether the “rock” is referring to Peter’s ongoing apostolic office.

Part of what Jesus communicates in his Patmos revelations to John is that churches are more fragile than we think. A church can lose its lampstand. A church can die. A church can hear the knocking on the door but refuse to have ears to hear. We need to be aware of this, Jesus said, if we are to “strengthen what remains and is about to die” (Rev. 3:2). But that’s not all Jesus told us.

A good number of us—seeing all the decadence and decline, infighting and carnality in whatever the evangelical church might now be—are all too aware of the fragility of the institutions and movements we love. In the face of that, maybe we need to be reminded that the church is also stronger than we think. And that leads me back to Revelation.

Many Christians—especially evangelicals who grew up with bizarrely speculative prophecy charts and end times theories—tend to love the first and last few chapters of Revelation but find the chapters in between confusing and disorienting.

For instance, John in his vision is told, “Measure the temple of God and the altar and those who worship there, but do not measure the court outside the temple; leave that out, for it is given over to the nations, and they will trample the holy city for forty-two months” (11:1–2).

Foggy passages like this, or those referencing “a time, and times, and half a time” (12:14), can come across as coded words meant for somebody else, perhaps the long-dead Christians who lived during the reign of a hostile emperor or future Christians at the precipice of final judgment. But Revelation specifically says it was written for the reader—for each of us—regardless of where we might be in time and space (1:3).

Remember that Jesus told us the temple was his body. It would be torn down, and he would raise it up again in three days (John 2:19). The temple is also where the dwelling place of God is, and the New Testament identifies that as the church, the living stones that make up God’s house, built on the cornerstone that is Christ himself (Eph. 2:20; 1 Pet. 2:5).

Why, then, is John told not to measure the outer court pictured before him in the vision? That outer edge, Jesus tells John, will indeed be beleaguered and besieged. But it is only the perimeter. What can be seen as destroyed and wrecked does not affect the Holy of Holies within, the altar at which sins are forgiven, through which peace is found with God.

The disaster in the outer court is for three and a half years—the perfect number of seven divided in half. In other words, the tumult is real, but it’s not unexpected and it will not last forever. The outer walls we can see before us are not, in fact, conquered. God has given them over to the nations, but just for a little while.

The church will sometimes make us grieve, but not as those who are without hope. Forty-two months seems like an eternity, but it’s not.That’s why we can still love the church.

We can work to keep it from being overtaken by marketers or politicians or scoundrels—to allow such would be to join the trampling nations in the outer court. And we can do that work of love without despair because the altar remains. The temple abides. The church is worth loving and fighting for.

When J. R. R. Tolkien’s son Michael was on the verge of losing his faith due to the nonsense and villainy he had seen in the church, Tolkien wrote in a letter to his son that, for him too, “the Church which once felt like a refuge, now often feels like a trap.” But Tolkien wondered if “this desperate feeling, the last state of loyalty hanging on,” was itself a blessing.

This, Tolkien wrote, gives us the moment “to exercise the virtue of loyalty, which indeed only becomes a virtue when one is under pressure to desert it.” The father thus advised his son to go to church—with people who annoy you, with an organization that may exasperate you.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is not what we would hope—from the structural disrepair to the tacky souvenirs that can be bought outside its doors. In time, the building will collapse. Maybe one day, it will be forgotten altogether.

What difference does this make? It’s not wise to speculate about what our experience might look like after the resolution of all things under the lordship of Christ. But maybe, just maybe, in the kingdom to come, one of us might wish to visit the former tomb of our Lord. We might ask, “Where on this transfigured map is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre?”

And perhaps Jesus will say to us, “Why seek the living among the dead? I’m right here, and I’ve been here all along.”

Structures are fragile. The resurrected Christ—and his church—is not.

Russell Moore is editor in chief at CT.

Onward: A column by Russell Moore

Testimony

I Was Sold into Slavery. Jesus Set Me Free.

Rakthai Sophia Loibl with Isabel Ong

In the Thai Muslim community where I lived, enslavement was all I knew. Then God spoke into the darkness.

Photography by Lauren Decicca for Christianity Today

My earliest memory is of crying inside a locked supply room. My mother had sold me as a temporary child laborer, as she often did. When she returned to pick me up after a few days, she dropped me off at another shop, then another. I was only 3 years old.

When I was around 4, we traveled to a home in Bangkok, where a man was waiting for us. He gave my mother 2,000 Thai baht (about $58), and she laughed.

I wondered if I would stay there for a few days—but my mother never came back.

I became a slave laborer to the man, the imam of the neighborhood’s Muslim community. He had four wives, and he lived with his fourth wife and their ten children. The imam allowed me some homeschooling, but I mostly learned how to cook, clean, serve, and be a devout Muslim.

At night, I slept in a tiny room that could only be unlocked from the outside, like a cage. Sometimes, when I felt too tired, I would only pretend to pray and work. When the imam found out, he would hit me and lock me in my room for three days without food or water.

As I grew older, I felt my heart calcifying; I became cold and reserved, completing my tasks mechanically. It was too painful to dream of any alternative. I had not seen the outside of the home all this time.

When I was 18, I became pregnant by the imam. Every night after a hard day of work, I came back to my room, belly swelling, and looked out my small window, wondering, Why am I here?

I delivered my baby girl at home, and the imam took her away immediately. I didn’t see her again for years—I had no idea what her name was or where she had gone.

At 25, I was pregnant again. Life felt unbearable. That’s when I began hearing a gentle whisper in my ear: It’s okay. Just stay alive.

Photography by Lauren Decicca for Christianity Today

I didn’t know who or what this voice was, but it comforted me; it was powerful yet gentle. As the time came to deliver my second baby, the voice kept reassuring me: It’s going to be okay. This baby was also a girl, and she was also taken away from me immediately.

One night not long after the birth, I awoke at three in the morning to the voice telling me to escape through the window. I was confused, but the voice said, It’s time.

As I was contemplating whether to jump—my room was on the second floor—the imam’s sister knocked on my door. She entered and brought in a young girl, around 6 or 7. I took one look at the child’s face, so much like my own, and knew she was my first daughter. They could only stay a moment, and after they left, I felt at peace, for I had bargained with the voice just before they had come in, saying, “If I jump, you have to promise I’ll get back everything I have lost.”

Finally seeing my daughter made me trust that voice a little more. So I jumped and escaped on my own.

A woman in the community took pity on me and sent me to seek refuge with her brother in another town. There, I hid behind my burqa as I worked at a store. Physically, I was free, but mentally, I felt trapped.

During this time, a US Army officer working at the American embassy began pursuing me romantically.

“Do you want to see America?” he asked one day.

This was the first time another person had ever invited me to do something of my own will. I felt he could help me get away from Bangkok, so I followed him to Chicago.

It was not the fresh start I had hoped for. During the next six and a half years, the man abused me. I tested positive for HIV, developed tuberculosis, and landed in the hospital, wrecked with despair. All the money I had earned while working in Chicago at a flower shop, at a grocery store, and as a cleaner went toward my medical bills.

Soon I had nothing left, and the officer sent me back to Bangkok. I never saw him again.

For three months, I languished alone in a hospital bed. My legs became paralyzed, and though I could hear what went on around me, I could not move or see, and I could not remember my name or who I was.

During this season of torment, I silently called upon every god I knew—yet nothing happened. An American friend visited and talked about Jesus with me, asking, “Why don’t you ask Jesus to be your savior?” Unable to say anything or acknowledge that I had heard, I cried out to Jesus in my heart: If you are with me, come save me.

But my condition only worsened. The doctors asked my relatives to prepare for a funeral. By then, my mother had passed away, so my brother and aunt came to pick me up, even though none of us had ever met.

Afraid that my illnesses were contagious, they placed me in a small house far from their homes in the village as they waited for me to die.

I went for six weeks without food or medicine, only water, which my aunt came in to give me from time to time. Yet strangely, I never felt like I was alone, because the voice that had spoken to me all those years ago spoke again: Live.

In that little house, I understood that it had been Jesus’ voice all along, and in his presence, I slowly came back to life. My wounds healed and my spirits lifted. Then one day, it seemed as if Jesus was telling me, Come out.

I stumbled out of the wooden house like Lazarus. My family, the villagers, and the doctors who had tried to heal me were all shocked. They wondered if I was a completely different person, maybe an identical twin.

A pastor in Bangkok had visited me while I was on my deathbed in the hospital. After my miraculous healing, he brought me to a ministry called The Well to help me recuperate. I told him I wanted to learn more about the voice that had brought me back to life, and that’s when I gave my life to Jesus.

The pastor helped me enroll at a Baptist seminary in Bangkok, where I received my biblical studies certificate. I wondered where this new life in Christ would take me.

It took me to the one place I didn’t want to go. Not long after I graduated, I felt God calling me to return to the the Muslim community I had escaped. Go back, God said. Learn to forgive and love them.

The community still had both my daughters, and they didn’t want to return them to me because I had become a Christian. But I slowly reestablished connections. I brought food and had meals with people. I accompanied elderly women to the hospital and shared how Jesus had befriended and saved me.

About eight years after I returned to the community, the imam who had enslaved me called on the phone. He said he was dying of cancer and wanted to see me.

I sat next to him as he lay bedridden, and he asked me to forgive him. And then he said, “Can you give me bread and coffee?”

I was stunned. He had locked me up for years. Why should I forgive and serve him? What was I even doing, sitting there next to him?

Then I remembered Jesus and his command to forgive and love my enemies. I took the bread and gave it to the imam—and the chains in my heart broke. I felt true freedom at last, from this man and all those terrible years.

Later, right before he died, the imam asked if I wanted to have my daughters back. He didn’t need to ask twice. Today, my two daughters, now 25 and 32, live with me.

When I jumped out of that window, I asked God to give me everything back. He kept his promise: He kept my daughters safe and returned them to me. When I was locked away, he was my friend and savior. When I was dying, he brought me back to life.

What’s more, he has transformed my suffering into an open door to minister to other people in dire situations living in Thailand, including prostitutes, abandoned children, and those who have been trafficked or are without homes.

I am living proof that God is working in the darkness. And all the ways he has loved me are glimpses of the everlasting life I now treasure in him.

Rakthai Sophia Loibl is the founder of the Bangkok-based ministry Walk with Love.

Isabel Ong is East Asia editor at Christianity Today.

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

- More from Isabel Ong

Ideas

Keller’s Threefold Hope for Renewal

Collin Hansen

Tim Keller didn’t see national revival during his ministry. But he prayed that we would.

Illustration by Adam Parata

I first met Tim Keller nearly 20 years ago at the inaugural conference of The Gospel Coalition while covering the event for Christianity Today. I had recently written the 2006 CT cover story “Young, Restless, Reformed,” about the New Calvinist resurgence then popularized by figures like John Piper, Albert Mohler, and C. J. Mahaney. Keller became one of the most important leaders in that movement, especially by inspiring church plants in the world’s most influential cities.

But in 2007, Keller was not yet a household name. He hadn’t published his 2008 bestsellers The Prodigal God and The Reason for God. Even then, however, Keller had begun to help Christians navigate the social and academic pressures driving down church attendance, especially in urban areas and universities. Keller was early to recognize this secularizing trend. In the past 25 to 30 years, some 40 million Americans have left the church—the largest and fastest religious transformation in American history.

When Keller died in 2023, he was still working toward a unified Christian response to this shift occurring across nations and institutions, training urban church planters and devising evangelistic strategies. Together, he and I founded The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. In annual retreats and online cohorts, we continue to build on what so many learned from Keller, applying an unchanging gospel to an ever-changing culture.

Not everyone agreed with how Keller counseled Christians to engage with this “great dechurching,” though. And the roots of that division go back to the origins of the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement.

At CT 20 years ago, we weren’t just trying to be clever when we described this nascent movement as “restless.” Keller represented a more academic and urban wing of the movement, comfortable in the neo-evangelical institutions where he studied, taught, and published.

But in the 2000s, a more populist wing of this Reformed movement adapted the methods of shock jocks and standup comedians to bring disaffected young men into the church. Other populists criticized denominational leaders as corrupt, out of touch, and lacking in zeal to confront cultural elites, largely through partisan political activism.

This populist-institutional divide has widened, especially as the United States continues to move away from Christianity. And the not-so young and Reformed remain restless, often directing their ire toward each other.

Keller lamented these divisions. He didn’t dwell on them, however, even as they intensified near the end of his life. He remained focused on the same evangelistic projects that had occupied him since moving to New York City and planting Redeemer Presbyterian Church in 1989.

Keller was the first to insist that his ideas weren’t novel. The Bible and historical Reformed confessions directed his teaching, from his start as a small-town pastor to his legacy as one of the most globally well-known evangelical preachers. When looking to the future, Keller looked backward for guidance.

When he cofounded The Gospel Coalition in 2005, he lamented how evangelicalism had declined since the previous generation of leaders like Francis Schaeffer and John Stott. Reaching back even further for a model of maintaining orthodoxy amid modernity, Keller turned to one of the most influential pastors in American evangelical history, the 18th-century New England revivalist Jonathan Edwards.

Alamy

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), American theologian and revivalist.

Keller lauded Edwards as theologically orthodox, pious, and culturally engaged. The problem, as Keller saw it, was that when Edwards died, evangelicals couldn’t hold together these three traits. While they flowed separately in different ministries, Keller bemoaned that they didn’t always join together in one mighty spiritual river. He believed that if Christians could unite these three streams once more, we would see an end to the spiritual drought of the post-Christendom West.

He never quite saw that happen. Indeed, the populist-elite division stems the spiritual tide. But two years after his death, we find that Keller has left us enough clues that could, if the Lord wills, guide the church into faithful and effective mission for the 21st century.

J. T. Reeves was a senior at Wheaton College in 2023 when he and his friends drove down to Wilmore, Kentucky, to join the Asbury Awakening, along with an estimated 50,000 people who flooded the university campus over 16 days of prayer and worship.

Asbury’s events resonated with Keller’s description of the central role of prayer in past awakenings. As he wrote in his paper “The Decline and Renewal of the American Church” (first published in its entirety in 2022):

There is always corporate prayer—extraordinary, kingdom-centered, prevailing prayer. Prayer not merely for our individual needs but for the power and gospel of God to be manifest (Acts 4:24–31). This is prayer beyond the normal daily devotions and worship services and, as much as possible, should be united prayer, bringing together people who do not usually pray together.

The Asbury outpouring was a model collaboration between institutional leaders who resisted outside influences and students who followed the unpredictable leading of the Holy Spirit. Reeves wrote how the revival jolted him into a deeper prayer life and how God awakened him from a spiritual haze accelerated by “the current of our screaming algorithms.” Corporate prayer seems less plausible when we’re scrolling ourselves to death.

Compared to older generations, you’re less likely to hear younger adults today describe their “quiet time” and more likely to learn about their “rule of life” or “daily liturgy.” Edwards would understand—as a teenager, he adopted 70 resolutions for his life. To follow suit today, we need habits that keep us from reaching for the smartphone every spare moment. Hearing from God often requires taking out the earbuds.

“Spiritual renewal brings an extraordinary sense of God’s presence, of increased communion with God (1 John 1:3), of ‘joy unspeakable and full of glory’ (1 Peter 1:8),” Keller wrote in 2022. Only God knows if we’ll see unspeakable joy wash over the country in our lifetimes. If we do, it probably means younger adults are practicing the “liturgy of the ordinary,” as Tish Harrison Warren put it, seeking and sensing God’s presence in all of life.

Keller modeled this life of prayer, this evangelical thirst to taste and feel the love and presence of God. In the tumultuous days of the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd protests, criticism of Keller increased, especially from populist corners of the Reformed community. Institutions creaked and cracked under pressure. Many leaders lost their bearings and moorings. Longtime friendships fractured under the pressure of social media spats.

As he fought for his life after his 2020 diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, Keller grew more patient, joyful, hopeful, and forgiving, even though he was blamed for much that had little or nothing to do with him. The power of his prayer life was evident.

When he died, tributes poured in from across the Christian community. Cardinal Timothy Dolan offered St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York for the memorial service. Few Christian leaders could boast a better ministry résumé than Keller’s. But in eulogies published across mainstream publications, I didn’t see much discussion of his accomplishments. Instead, I saw repeated homages to his pious character, in private as in public.

Whether populist or elite, skeptical or institutional, younger Christian leaders should aspire to his example as he followed Christ in prayer. Spiritual outpourings such as the Asbury Awakening come neither from central planning nor from social media condemnations but by patient and persistent prayer from God’s people.

Even though Keller counted friends among institutional elites, he shared many populist critiques of Western cultural decay. As Christianity declined, he observed that the Enlightenment had failed to deliver cultural solidarity and meaning. Families, neighborhoods, and institutions—such as the academy—have faltered without a unifying vision provided by Christianity. This resulted in “greater isolation, loneliness, anomie, anxiety, and depression,” Keller wrote in 2022. He continued,

As the percentage of the population going to church declined, and as the radical individualism of the West became more pervasive, the original Enlightenment vision of a society based on secular human reason alone came largely to pass. But it has not led to unity at all. Western society in general and U.S. society in particular are polarized, fragmented, and ungovernable as everyone adopts their own meaning in life and moral values.

One example of renewal comes from the life of Molly Worthen (who wrote a tribute after Keller’s death for The Atlantic). Worthen had reached the pinnacle of her academic field with a PhD from Yale University and articles in The New York Times. She taught history at the highly ranked University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She looked forward to a long career as a respected public intellectual.

But she wasn’t fulfilled. She entered the academy looking for truth, yet it seemed that the purpose of the academy had evolved into something less certain and clear—more political posturing than searching for knowledge. In an interview with Southern Baptist pastor J. D. Greear, she mentioned how she sometimes wanted to believe as evangelicals do. Greear could hardly ask for a better prompt. Knowing her academic inclination, he put her in touch with Keller.

At Keller’s recommendation, Worthen read N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, which challenged her with overwhelming evidence for the bodily resurrection of Jesus. C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy opened her imagination. Combined with Greear’s urgent appeals, these resources eventually led Worthen to confess faith in Christ, wading into the waters of baptism at Greear’s Southern Baptist megachurch wearing a “Jesus in my place” T-shirt.

Worthen is hardly alone in turning to Christianity amid dissatisfaction with modern life, which feels increasingly unlivable to many. Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, another professional historian, tells the story of her adult conversion in Priests of History. When Keller published The Reason for God, New Atheists such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali were riding a wave of cultural skepticism toward organized religion, from evangelical Christianity to radical Islam. Yet by 2023, Hirsi Ali had become a Christian too.

“The only credible answer [to the decline of the West] . . . lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” she wrote of her conversion. At first, some wondered whether Hirsi Ali had only fallen in love with the Western culture that delivered her from abusive expressions of Islam. Subsequent interviews indicated deeper spiritual transformation that caught the attention of Richard Dawkins, who has taken to calling himself a “cultural Christian.”

High-profile conversions reveal one path toward influencing and ultimately changing culture-shaping institutions. Revival could come again from the top down, as it did under Jonathan Edwards’s grandson Timothy Dwight, who was the president of Yale University during the Second Great Awakening. But Hirsi Ali’s conversion suggests a possible revival from the bottom up as populist dissatisfaction spreads across the West, especially with elite institutions enforcing divisive identity politics around sexuality.

Though Keller was more identified with the elite strategy than the populist alternative, he personally experienced revival on the margins. Keller and his InterVarsity Christian Fellowship friends at Bucknell University could hardly count on support from the administration or professors as their chapter grew overnight during the Jesus Movement of the 1970s. And no one I know was predicting revival on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s after nearly a century of steady church decline.

Toward the end of his life, Keller anticipated widespread dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment and its aftermath. Like the populists, he saw an opening for the gospel as the sexual revolution turned bitter.

At least since the 1960s, a historical, orthodox sexual ethic has hampered the appeal of Christianity in the West. Between 2012 and 2016 in particular, popular perception of Christian views on sexuality shifted from embarrassment to harassment, especially among cultural elites. Once dismissed as prudes, Christians became ostracized as bigots in the culmination of a long-building shift in how individual identity develops across the West.

“The triumph of the modern self and of the sexual revolution for the loss of Christianity’s credibility can’t be over-estimated,” Keller wrote in 2022.

The Christian sex ethic is seen now as unrealistic and perverse. This is massively discrediting and makes biblical faith implausible to hundreds of millions both inside and outside the church. . . . The idea that you simply discover and express yourself is an illusion. Nevertheless, this view has swept society and is seen as common sense.

But when I talked to Keller just a month before he died, he could see the outlines of a shift in popular circles. Witness secular feminist Louise Perry with her 2022 Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Or Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex from the same year. J. K. Rowling’s relentless feminist critique of transgender ideology combines the elite influence of an enormously wealthy author with populist disregard for institutional pressures. And President Donald Trump’s successful 2024 campaign channeled populist anger toward institutions—media, schools, entertainment, and hospitals—that have foisted unpopular transgender policies on the public.

The sexual revolution has led to a sexual recession, Nancy Pearcey observes in her 2023 book The Toxic War on Masculinity. By pushing the sexes away from each other and then turning them against each other, the sexual revolution has failed to deliver on its promises of progress.

Far from needing to update our theology, we can hold to orthodoxy to keep from being swept into the dustbin of history with cultural fads. It may not always be in season with popular culture, but God’s law is always good. If you want to write tomorrow’s headlines, stick with the old, old story—the gospel wins out in the end.

As much as any other Christian of his generation, Keller engaged with the hardest arguments against Christianity. He defended the gospel and proclaimed Christ in some of the most hostile settings of the elite West.

Keller approached these exchanges with the biblical assumption that his opponents were made in the image of God. Before he identified where Christians and non-Christians disagreed, he tried to affirm something good and right in a religious skeptic’s outlook on the world.

He approached people with curiosity, not speaking contemptuously or dismissively. He acknowledged some critiques of the church as valid. And he didn’t pretend that Christians have everything figured out. His apologetics assumed that, in a secular age, Christians have many of the same questions or doubts as non-Christians.

Yet anyone who has listened to his sermons knows Keller didn’t coddle his left-leaning Manhattan neighbors. He challenged them—directly, forcefully. He exposed them as believers—in something or someone that would inevitably fail them. And he invited them, with passion and pleading, to trust in Christ alone for the forgiveness of their sins and the life everlasting.

It may surprise some to learn what Keller prioritized for the church in an increasingly secular society. “Christian education, in general, needs to be massively redone,” he stated in “The Decline and Renewal of the American Church.”

We must not merely explain Christian doctrine to children, youth, and adults, but use Christian doctrine to subvert the baseline cultural narratives to which believers are exposed in powerful ways every day. We should distribute this material widely to all, flooding society, as it were, with it.

Like many populists, Keller saw the need to prioritize Christian education for spiritual formation. He saw the temptation for those inside the church to lose their way, especially when they’ve been inundated with the values of elite institutions.

The thing about exposing secular cultural narratives around identity and progress—to take just two examples—is that Christians aren’t immune to them. It’s not as if only non-Christians think that happiness can be found in accumulating goods and experiences, or that a political party can help them feel secure in the world. And the pursuit of institutional power drives populists as much as elites. Regardless of our religious or political beliefs, we’re all shaped by similar goals and desires. The real questions are: For what? For whom? And how?

To use institutional and cultural power for good, Keller believed, Christians need counter-catechesis. For instance, the world says power should be wielded to enact vengeance. In contrast, how can Christians exercise power in ways that don’t turn victims into victimizers or compound injustice with injustice? How can we love our enemies in obedience to Jesus?

Keller didn’t exactly recommend removing ourselves from the secular world. But he did believe that Christians need “moral ecologies”—especially churches—to help us live what we profess.

To this end, he labored through Redeemer City to City to help start more than 2,000 churches since 2001. He commended vocational groups that shape Christians working in specific professions and valued the role of singles in churches. Like many evangelicals before him, Keller saw deep power in small groups united in prayer, confession, Bible study, and practical support.

These moral ecologies have become more important in the past two decades, when the internet has made it far easier to live according to the cultural narratives of the world than according to the Scriptures. Social media can create moral ecologies too—but often negative ones that form around what a group opposes. Such communities fail to produce the fruit of the Spirit. They don’t help disciples of Jesus pursue the good, including love for the outgroup.

It’s hard to imagine widespread spiritual revival that doesn’t bear the fruit of the Spirit. What would the world find compelling in a church that mirrors society’s own sins?

Instead, non-Christians will find refreshment in a church that puts down the smartphones to pray together. Choking on the dust of loneliness kicked up by the sexual revolution, they’ll discover true belonging among Christians who have counted the cost and followed Jesus. Betrayed by the Enlightenment, they’ll follow the river of life to the light that will never be extinguished (Rev. 22:1, 5).

With history as our guide, revival in the 21st century will be a spiritual torrent fed by three streams—personal piety, biblical orthodoxy, and cultural engagement. These streams will bring spiritual refreshment to lands parched by the failed modern pursuit of individual identity apart from Christianity.

The time is right for evangelical elites and populists to collaborate once more. We agree on many of the problems. We agree on many of the solutions. And we can unite as Christians around an apologetic method grounded in biblical theology and adorned with spiritual fruit.

Christians, whether elite or populist, shouldn’t feel comfortable in this world. We should feel restless for our forever home with God in the new heavens and the new earth. Maybe revival won’t come in our lifetimes. But every revival starts with Christians desperate to catch a glimpse of that future on this side of eternity.

Tim Keller didn’t see that national revival during his ministry. But he prayed that we would.

Collin Hansen is vice president for content and editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition, executive director of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, host of the Gospelbound podcast, and the author of Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation.

This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Keller’s Hope for Renewal".

- More from Collin Hansen

Culture

NYC Pastor Rich Villodas on Subversive Anger and True Forgiveness

Russell Moore and Rich Villodas

A conversation with Russell Moore on living out the challenges of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

On a recent episode of The Russell Moore Show, pastor and author Rich Villodas discussed anger, forgiveness, and faithful family members who make it possible to rise to the challenge of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Illustrations by Ronan Lynam

Russell Moore: Can you tell us about the influence your grandfather had on your life?

Rich Villodas: I became a follower of Jesus at 19. At that time, about 15 family members came to faith in Christ in one night in a small church in Brooklyn. After that remarkable encounter, I had lots of questions.

Thankfully, my grandparents were down the block from where I lived. My grandfather Marcus, at that time in 1999, was quite ill.

I walked down the street and said, “Grandpa, I have lots of questions about what happened on that Sunday.” He said, “Why don’t you sit next to me?” I sat next to him on his bed, shoulder to shoulder, and three hours later, we had had our first conversation about the Bible and Jesus and prayer.

And then he said, “Why don’t you come back tomorrow? Let’s do it again.” So I came back the next day, and we did it again. And that was my rhythm for eight months—four to five days a week, two to three hours each time. I sat shoulder to shoulder with my grandfather as he taught me about the Scriptures, theology, prayer, humility.

He gave me two assignments throughout those eight months. One was to memorize entire psalms, and the other was to live the words of Jesus, specifically the Sermon on the Mount. That was how I started following Jesus.

I wish everyone had what I received in those eight months with my grandfather, patient and unhurried. After those eight months with him, he passed away. But what a deposit in my life.

RM: I’m assuming that as you were writing your book [The Narrow Path: How the Subversive Way of Jesus Satisfies Our Souls], you were teaching through the Sermon on the Mount at your church.

It seems to me that when it comes to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, you have to either make strange the familiar or familiarize the strange.

Would most people in your congregation be those for whom this was new, where you had to make it familiar? Or do you think most people were overly familiar—that they were used to the words and you had to get around that familiarity and numbness to show them the strangeness?

RV: The challenge with a question like that, at least in my context in Queens, is that our church is so diverse. There are 80 nations represented in the neighborhood and 123 languages spoken. Our church is generationally diverse, theologically diverse, and politically diverse, which makes this congregation one of the most dangerous and stressful places on the planet to preach.

But I think more people would be unfamiliar with the Sermon on the Mount. And many who are familiar with it are used to hearing it in a particular light. For example, those who are familiar with it often hear, “This sermon is not meant for me to live but to show how inadequate I am to live it and then to lead me to throw myself at the grace of God.”

That’s opposed to a different mindset: “Let me throw myself at the grace of God first and ask God to help me to live it.” The emphasis Jesus puts on the Sermon on the Mount is on living it.

I find myself having to toggle back and forth. Some folks need to be made familiar with the language, and others need to see it from a different vantage point.

RM: There are people who look at the Sermon on the Mount and say, “This is really hard, and it seems impossible to do. And that means I’m inadequate and not the kind of person that Jesus is calling.”

And then there are people who say, “Well, this is obviously impossible to do. Jesus just wants us to reflect on God.” Both of those views can lead a person away from what Jesus is doing.

RV: To look at Jesus’ words directly, toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount, he says things like “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice” is like a person who builds their life on the sand (Matt. 7:26). As Jesus comes to the culmination of this amazing sermon, the greatest sermon ever taught, his emphasis is on practicing it.

This emphasis is true even in Matthew 7—one of the most terrifying passages in the Bible, where Jesus basically says, “You’ve prophesied in my name, you’ve cast out demons in my name, and on that day, I’ll say, ‘I never knew you’ ” (vv. 22–23).

I used to think that Jesus was exclusively talking about someone’s personal relationship to him. They were doing the right stuff but had never really made a commitment to receiving Christ as Savior.

That might be part of it, but I think when Jesus said, “I never knew you,” he was also talking about the path we’ve chosen to take.

It’s more like he’s saying, “You’ve never submitted yourself to my teachings. You’ve never submitted yourself to my way of life.” It’s not about a personal faith thing; it’s about your outward life.

I think we let ourselves off the hook very easily by saying that Jesus doesn’t expect us to submit to a certain way of life—that all he wants is a relationship with us, and how we live and follow him is secondary. We say, “If we can get there, great. But if we can’t, don’t worry—we have the grace of God.”

We do need to be reminded of the scandalous grace of God that forgives and pours out love and mercy. And that same God is also calling us into a relationship, to follow Jesus in a particular way right here, right now. We need to not just have faith but live faithfully in the way of Jesus.

RM: Let’s talk about some of these specific issues people are struggling with. One of those issues is anger. A lot of people, when they hear what Jesus says about anger, think immediately of people who are quarrelsome, who have screaming fits.

How do you help people see where they fit into these warnings about anger when it can look so different for different people?

RV: Some people grew up in households where they didn’t have permission to be angry. That was an emotion that, as a Christian or maybe as part of a particular culture, was frowned upon.

Frederick Dale Bruner, the New Testament scholar, really helped me to understand anger. The word that Jesus uses there is not about momentary anger when something happens. Jesus is talking about an anger that is subterranean. Bruner says it’s a kind of anger that gets expressed through resentments, and it ultimately results in contempt.

Jesus says, in short, “You’ve heard it said, don’t murder, but I tell you, if you’re angry at your brother or sister, you’ve already committed murder in your heart” (Matt. 5:21–22).

And then he talks about this word raca in that same context. Raca is basically a word to describe cultural harshness with a level of contempt in our souls. When you look at our world right now, the world is raca everywhere. We have allowed this low-grade sense of resentment to stockpile in our hearts to such a degree that it’s weighing us down.

When we think about anger, we think about the Inside Out film, where Anger is this red, fiery guy who’s explosive. That’s the only kind of image we have of anger. But anger is also something that seethes down low. It’s resentment. It’s a way of diminishing others that we’re carrying deep in our souls, which leads to contempt.

This is why I think that lying happens more inside the church than outside the church. We know as good cultural Christians how to hide our anger through being nice and warm and hospitable.

Jesus is talking about this subterranean resentment that ultimately leads to contempt.

There’s lots of anger in the church—in the evangelical church, in the Pentecostal church, culturally, politically. So much of that has been bubbling up over the years. And now we’re at a place of significant anger, contempt, that raca that Jesus talks about.

RM: What about somebody who says, “I think I’m resentful about some things that have happened to me”—perhaps a broken marriage or relationship—and has a lot of anger. What can they do with that?

RV: I think about it in two ways: interpersonally and individually. Interpersonally, having spaces where we can wrestle faithfully with what’s happening in our interior lives helps us to move beyond that moment.

My wife, Rosie, and I have been married 19 years. In the first few years, I found myself having a hard time when she was sad or angry. I did not know what to do. I would personalize it. I would minimize it. I’d say, “You know what, I’m going to go grocery shopping. I’ll be back in two hours.”

We found ourselves stuck when it came to this part of our marriage. I remember going to a therapist and saying, “When my wife gets angry, I just don’t know what to do. I make matters worse.” And he said, “Rich, the next time she’s angry, I want you to do one thing: I want you be angry along with her.”

There was something incarnational about that. When someone is angry, sometimes we need to step into that space with them.

If we have spaces—friendships and communities—where people can be angry along with us, we can create a space where there is enough patience and exploration to then ask ourselves, “Is there something beneath the surface that this anger is pointing to?”

Individually, I think the language of lament is important in naming our anger, because what lament does is open us up to lifting our minds and hearts to God. We allow God to have access to a significant part of our tender hearts in that moment, to give us a different social imagination about what’s going on.

Lament—naming what’s beneath the anger and lifting that to God—can be a significant pathway to getting to the core of what our anger is revealing. Anger is usually secondary and symptomatic of something deeper. And God can handle it.

When we find ourselves stuck in those moments, the best thing to do is to behold Jesus. This is why I believe the Sermon on the Mount is the most important set of teachings in the entire Bible. If you want to know exactly what path to take, the words of Jesus are where to go.

RM: In abusive families, churches, and systems, I’ve noticed that people will often use the language Jesus gives about forgiveness and nonretaliation to tell people, “Don’t seek accountability. If you’re seeking justice in this case, that means that you’re not Christlike, because Jesus would tell you to let this go.”

How do you help somebody in that situation who thinks, I’m not forgiving in this radical way that Jesus has instructed? Especially when there are people in this person’s life saying, “If you keep bringing this up, you’re disobeying Jesus.”

RV: To read Scripture is to look at the ultimate goal, the telos, the hope of what Jesus is teaching us. But we often don’t see the time it takes or the pathway to get there. Jesus says to forgive someone “seventy times seven” times.

I wonder what it would look like for us to forgive in a way that is transformative and not performative. Sometimes I’m trying to strictly obey the Bible, but there’s nothing happening on the inside. In those spaces, there must be room for discernment and nuance.

One of my favorite books about forgiveness is called Don’t Forgive Too Soon. A lot of Christians will hear that and go, “Whoa, we’re being really unbiblical.” But it’s easy to forgive someone in word while our hearts are not there.

Does Jesus want us to say, “I forgive you,” when our hearts are far from him? We’re talking about a God who wants to transform us from the inside out. He wants not just external obedience but internal obedience and alignment to his ways.

Rich Villodas is an author and the lead pastor of New Life Fellowship in Queens, New York.

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

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

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News

Church Kitchens Are Getting Chopped

Daniel Silliman

More congregations are trading casseroles for coffee shops.

Illustration by Mike Haddad

Church kitchens are disappearing. They are disappearing from rural, suburban, and urban churches. From liberal and conservative churches, contemporary and liturgical, megachurches and the medium-sized.

One by one, across America, as buildings are remodeled and new construction replaces old, kitchens are getting scrapped.

No one tracks exact numbers—there’s no census of fellowship halls—but architects who specialize in sacred spaces told Christianity Today that the trend is hard to miss.

“I can’t remember the last time I was asked to design a big kitchen,” said Jacob Slagill, who teaches architecture at California Baptist University and designs church buildings for evangelicals. “A small kitchen, maybe.”

Newly built or remodeled churches typically have a space with a sink and a coffee pot, Slagill said. Possibly a microwave. But no expanse of countertop suitable for chopping carrots, potatoes, and onions to go into a big pot of soup. No oversized refrigerators for Jell-O salads. No industrial ovens large enough to cook three or four casseroles at once. Churches these days don’t have a lot of cupboards with drawers labeled “forks and knives,” “spoons,” and “serving utensils.”

That kind of space is gone. Or at least it’s going away.

A recent exhibit of religious architecture in the 21st century curated by architect Amanda Iglesias included more than 40 churches from around the world. Only five had dedicated spaces for gathering around food.

“Culture has changed,” said Katie Eberth, an architect with Aspen Group, a leading firm in the field of church design. “It’s not part of the culture now, the church culture, where you have 20 women who come together and make a meal. Today we order Panera or Jimmy John’s.”

When new clients sit down with Aspen architects, Eberth said, they don’t often ask for kitchens. They are most likely to start the conversation with their needs for more space, more parking, or more rooms for Sunday school and youth groups.

The architects ask them to set the specifics aside, for a moment, and have a larger conversation. One of the first questions Eberth likes to ask is “How do you define your community?” Then they start to talk about the vision for the church, their aspirations, and their congregation’s values.

Hospitality comes up a lot, according to Eberth. But when people talk about what that should look like in the physical construction of a building, they don’t talk about fellowship halls with long folding tables where everyone can sit together. They talk about a café serving coffee and pastries in the foyer.

“The lobby is becoming more important, because it extends people’s time at church, before and after a service,” Eberth said. “That’s where people—especially younger people and new people—are going to connect.”

If Aspen clients do talk about the possibility of a church kitchen at some point in the process, they are generally dissuaded by the cost, the additional permitting required by city and county governments, and the lack of volunteers. Who is going to work in the church kitchen?

Historian Gretchen Buggeln, author of Temples of Grace and The Suburban Church, said this part of congregational life has changed dramatically over the last 50 years, driven by larger cultural and economic transformation in America. In 1970, about a third of married women with children under 18 had jobs outside the home. By 1980, that had increased to 51 percent. By the 2010s, more than 70 percent of mothers were part of the US labor force.

“Churches don’t have people to run a kitchen,” Buggeln told CT. “You have to have at least half a dozen people who can show up and cook.”

In her research on church buildings, Buggeln found there were always some people who questioned the cost of kitchens. Women in the 1950s and ’60s frequently fought with building and finance committees, justifying kitchens’ expense and arguing for better equipment. Those women saw the kitchen as their domain. Decades later, when they talked to Buggeln about the physical building, they were more likely to talk about the kitchen than any other part of the church.

“They remembered working together,” Buggeln said. “What was important to them was the actual people working together in the kitchen to prepare food, getting to know each other through shared work. That’s going away now.”

The change is significant to us now, but most churches, for most of church history, have not had kitchens. The oldest known buildings dedicated to the purpose of Christian worship—in the ancient Middle East cities of Dura-Europos, Aqaba, and Megiddo—didn’t have kitchens, and neither did the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe, such as Notre Dame, Chartres, and Westminster Abbey. American Christians in the 1800s really liked picnics, packing food to eat after revivals, outdoor baptisms, and Sunday school socials. But they didn’t have kitchens.

The age of church kitchens didn’t really get going until rapid urbanization started in the 1880s.

“The city offered saloons, amusement parks, and pool halls, places designed to attract and corrupt young minds with fun,” historian Daniel Sack writes in Whitebread Protestants. “Churches were just one competitor in the free market of entertainment. . . . The church had to use every tool at hand, including food.”

Potlucks, youth group socials, and charity fundraisers became so important in congregational life that by the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon for critics to say the social activities overshadowed anything sacred. Religion scholar Martin E. Marty, for example, said that for a lot of Christians in America, church life and “the machinery of church life, smoothly oiled, takes the place of the deity.”

Most congregations, however, saw social activities as outreach. Kitchens brought people into church, where they could be fed, body and soul.

Some Christians say that despite broad cultural changes over the last 140 years, church kitchens still do this. When architect Rick Archer sat down with a committee to talk about some renovations at his own church, Grace Northridge Anglican in San Antonio, the first thing he said was “Let’s do the kitchen.” The committee agreed.

Food serves an important function in the life of the congregation, Archer told CT, and the kitchen is also an emblem of the invitation to the altar.

“It’s so much at the heart of who we are as a people,” he said. “When we gather around a table for a meal, it’s an extension of the gospel.”

A bigger kitchen can be a means for Christians to love their neighbors. An Evangelical Free church in Blackduck, Minnesota, for example, developed a funeral ministry because it had a large kitchen.

“This is a rural community, way north,” said pastor Dwight Warden, who retired in 2023. “Funerals were a big thing, and people would come to town for funerals and need a place to come together. These were not necessarily members, or even churchgoers, but our church would serve them. The bigger kitchen made it possible.”

Blackduck Evangelical Free remodeled its kitchen in 2011, expanding a tiny older space and installing a large refrigerator, a dishwasher, three ovens, and lots of cabinets. It was a serious financial investment. But it created new opportunities for outreach.

The church started a monthly Monday night meal that connected the congregation with members of other churches and community groups, including a women’s bowling league. The space was used for birthdays and graduation parties. And in the spring, when everyone desperately needed to get out after a long winter, the church would host a Wild Game Feed, serving venison, buffalo, duck, grouse, or some other meat harvested by local hunters.

“A kitchen isn’t just for coffee and donuts, though we always had coffee and donuts after church,” Warden said. “The Wild Game Feed, we had 250 to 300 people come to that every year, and some of these are people who would never darken the door of a church.”

Other congregations have decided a big kitchen requires too much work, doesn’t serve their needs, or won’t help them serve their communities.

“A big fellowship hall . . . if it’s not in use, it just leaves the church feeling kind of empty,” Iglesias said. “A big kitchen can be limiting. Churches are living organisms, and the architecture needs to be living too. Churches adapt.”

Architects who specialize in sacred spaces told CT that adaptation might lead to more child care co-ops or coworking spaces in American churches. There could be renewed interest in designs that elicit feelings of awe, with extra emphasis on art and natural light.

In the past, church needs were met in the kitchen. But now, people seem hungry for something else.

Daniel Silliman is senior news editor at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Church Kitchens Get Chopped".

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Ideas

Borrowing Faith When Doubt Creeps In

Stefani McDade

Contributor

The certainty of another believer can guide us back to the truth.

Illustration by Xiao Hua Yang

As a teenager, I co-led my first small group with a friend, guided by an older woman from our church. During a discussion on faith, I decided to be vulnerable and share my own doubts about God to encourage others to open up.

After the meeting was over, the woman pulled me aside to caution me about setting a good example for the group. Her message was kind, but clear: Doubt was unbefitting a rising leader.

Over the years, my doubts have shifted. While I no longer question God’s existence or identity, I still wrestle with his sovereignty and goodness, wondering why his actions—or inactions—sometimes seem at odds with my understanding of who he is.

I’m not alone. A 2023 Lifeway Research survey found that only half of Americans have no doubt that God exists—and half of those with a Christian background say they have gone through a “prolonged” period of doubt at some point in their lives.

Of course, doubt is not a modern problem. Humans have struggled to trust God since the Garden. The Bible portrays doubt as a common feature of our fallen human condition—even for the holiest among us. From Abraham and Sarah to “Doubting Thomas,” uncertainty has marked the lives of God’s people for millennia. Countless saints throughout church history have wrestled with disbelief, many of whom endured a “dark night of the soul,” as John of the Cross described it.

But the recent and widespread rise of doubt in the West is reflected in part by the steady decline of Christianity. In the United States, this has been termed “the Great Dechurching,” with approximately 40 million former churchgoers no longer attending.

Along with “human suffering” and “conflict in the world,” two of the highest sources of doubt in America, according to Barna, are “past experiences with a religious institution” and “the hypocrisy of religious people.” The abuse crisis in the church reminds us that religious certainty can too easily be weaponized, and many Christian leaders and institutions have wielded it for evil.

As I’ve experienced myself, the church can be an inhospitable place for the doubting—a reputation many have earnestly sought to remedy over the years. Instead of being “merciful to those who doubt” (Jude 1:22), we’ve too often condemned them.

And while far more can be done to accommodate faith struggles in the pews, it is equally worth cautioning against the other extreme. That is, in our attempts to encourage doubters and avoid weaponizing certainty, we must not lose sight of our call to be people of faith.

We live in an incredulous generation—an age of unbelief and religious deconstruction, in which suspicion permeates the very air we breathe. On both sides of the ideological aisle, people who place their wholehearted trust in any one set of beliefs have been dismissed as naïve “sheeple” who lack critical thinking skills or fail to “do their own research.”

If we’re not careful, the church may follow the cues of our culture and join in its effort to nurture skepticism and enshrine cynicism. Some Christians say it’s natural, even healthy, to live in the perpetual push-and-pull between faith and doubt. A few have gone as far as saying faith somehow needs doubt to function properly—painting doubt as a virtue to nurture rather than a tension to continually resolve by faith.

At first, such rhetoric can seem reassuring, especially to those who occasionally struggle to keep the faith. But for those, like me, who have found themselves deep in the dismal abyss of chronic doubt—more akin to despair—this is a depressing prognosis. In such times, I clung to a shred of hope that my season of doubt was temporary, and that I would someday regain a modicum of the unwavering faith some Christians seem to possess in abundance.

The Bible tells us that faith is essential. “Without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb. 11:6).

Scripture repeatedly praises simple, childlike, dependent trust in God and encourages us to be like obedient sheep rather than rebellious goats (John 10:27, Matt. 25:32–22). And while we may have different natural capacities for it, we are all called to live “in accordance with the faith God has distributed” to each of us (Rom. 12:3).

Take my husband. He has the spiritual gift of faith (as listed in 1 Corinthians 12:9). A frequent pattern in our marriage is him calmly responding to a crisis with “Everything is going to work out.” To which I ask, “But how do you know?” and he says, “I just do.”

Rather than always finding this encouraging, for someone like me—cursed with an anxiety diagnosis and a theology degree—his unwavering faith can sometimes be irritating.

It’s not as if he’s never experienced situations that threatened his faith. Our first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, and the birth of our daughter was marked by a traumatic moment in which my husband had to run down the hospital corridors at midnight, yelling for help.

Yet he constantly challenges me by living out the Bible’s most concise definition of faith: “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see” (Heb. 11:1).

As author A.J. Swoboda put it, “Faith thrives in the tension of mystery, where we trust even when we don’t fully understand.” Faith isn’t about having all the answers, but about trusting the one who does—sometimes blindly.

When Thomas touched his resurrected Lord and finally believed, Jesus said, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29). He also told his disciples, “You will receive whatever you ask in prayer,” but only “if you have faith and do not doubt” (Matt. 21:21–22). The one who doubts, Scripture says, “is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. . . . Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do” (James 1:6, 8).

I have been that wave-tossed person in past seasons of spiritual wrestling, and I can say this verse aptly describes the emotional reality of doubt.

The psychological theory of cognitive dissonance tells us our brains are hardwired to desire resolution and that uncertainty is an uncomfortable, untenable place to stay long-term. As theologian Brad East wrote for CT, “Doubt is a ladder, not a home.”

Perhaps this is why we are already seeing the cultural tides begin to shift from chronic doubt back to belief. Recent survey data suggest that the deconstruction movement—the swell of people leaving faith or rethinking their beliefs—may be slowing. And the precipitous rise of “nones” (those claiming no religious affiliation) and “dones” (those leaving the church) has plateaued.

At the same time, stories of unexpected conversions are popping up everywhere. From celebrities and influencers to cultural elites and academics, high-profile figures are finding their way to Jesus, or at least cultural Christianity, in the most unlikely ways. Time and again, faith has proven it can rise from the ashes of doubt.

“There is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe,” wrote Flannery O’Connor in a letter to a friend in spiritual crisis. “But I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened.”

I think now more than ever, discontented doubters will be looking for bold believers. They will be seeking out Christians with a resilient faith—not one that’s glib and unrelatable but one that has been tried, tested, and has triumphed, one that has peered into the abyss of a life without God and stepped back from the edge.

One such well of encouragement can be found in the spiritual lives of past saints—those who persevered in faith despite their struggles with doubt.

Theologian Søren Kierkegaard, like me, wrestled with his mental health, calling depression his “most faithful mistress.” In his pseudonymous work, he wrote that “doubt is thought’s despair” and that despair is a “sickness unto death.”

Kierkegaard acknowledged both the constructive and destructive aspects of doubt. He wrote, “I think I have the courage to doubt everything,” but he also wrote, “One of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity” is that “the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.”

While our doubts can sometimes be illuminating, Jesus calls his followers to act from a posture of faith, not out of doubt. As the apostle Paul said, “Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23, ESV). Doubt is natural, yes, but faith is supernatural. As Kierkegaard observed, faith is a “leap”—and “without risk, there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.”

We also have saints alive today whose faith serves as a gift to the church for the doubting. But beyond praying for those who are struggling spiritually (which is the best place to start!), how might these people help?

The answer isn’t brow-beating disapproval and condemnation; nor is it a Pollyannaish optimism that dismisses spiritual struggles with a tone-deaf platitude and a smile.

Surely steadfast believers, especially those of us with scars from healed spiritual wounds, have more to offer than a sympathetic ear, a generic word of encouragement, and a polite prayer.

Yes: We have our testimonies—our public witness to the ways God has revealed himself to us. And we shouldn’t feel discouraged from sharing them with doubters (perhaps out of fear that it might alienate or shame them), because our testimonies aren’t acts of self-congratulation; they’re lifelines.

Our testimonies are like “totems” from the film Inception: personal markers of God’s past faithfulness that remind us of what’s real when life feels like a dream—or a nightmare. Such stories are akin to the stones of remembrance God commanded the Israelites to set up as monuments to his fulfilled promises (Josh. 4:4–9). We need such tangible markers outside of ourselves to tether us to truth.

I’m so grateful Jesus didn’t leave us to walk this journey of faith alone but instead sent the Spirit to continue his work in and through the church as his ongoing bodily presence on earth. Scripture makes it clear that every task of the Christian life, including rebuilding the scaffolding of our faith, was divinely designed for community.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, God has willed that we should seek and find his living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man. Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself.

Doubt thrives in isolation. In fact, Satan does his best work when there are no advocates around to speak a better word to us or for us.

Scripture tells us that those who lack the shield of faith are unable to withstand the enemy’s attacks (Eph. 6:16), which leaves them susceptible to the same cunning work the Devil’s been up to since the Garden—to make us doubt God’s goodness, faithfulness, and sovereignty.

Yet in one of the most powerful scenes in Scripture, the apostle John sees Satan (whose name means “adversary” or “accuser”) being defeated by Jesus and the saints: For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony. (Rev. 12:10–11)

Ultimately, our doubts are not dispelled through argument or experience. Only Jesus’ blood and the testimony it produces in our lives has the power to combat the Devil’s schemes—his endless prowling, devouring, and accusing (1 Pet. 5:8).

Whenever we lend or leverage our faith for weaker brothers and sisters—until they’re strong enough to carry it themselves—we wage war against the powers of darkness.

In the end, our salvation is founded not on our faith but on Jesus. Jesus is the ultimate stone of remembrance. He is our cornerstone. So we fix our eyes on him as the “pioneer and perfecter” of our faith (Heb. 12:2). Faith doesn’t mean we never doubt. It simply means we trust Jesus enough to bring our uncertainty to him, knowing he will never pull away from us in our moments of disbelief, anger, or questioning but that he will draw near and invite us to do the same (James 4:8).

Such trust is straightforward, but that doesn’t make it easy. “It is much harder to believe than not to believe,” O’Connor wrote to her doubting friend. But to anyone struggling, I echo her advice: “If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.”

Even if all you can do right now is whisper a prayer, let this be your tiny mustard seed of faith: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24, NKJV). By God’s grace, it is enough.

Stefani McDade is theology editor at Christianity Today.

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

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News

Americans Think Church Should Look Churchy

Daniel Silliman

Survey shows most don’t like trendy, modern buildings.

Illustration by Mike Haddad

Outreach-minded evangelicals have often argued that church buildings need to be less “churchy” to draw in would-be seekers. But that might not actually be true, according to recent research from Barna Group and Aspen Group asking a representative sample of 2,000 Americans questions about the architecture of sacred spaces.

When Americans close their eyes, they can picture a church. Even if they rarely or never attend one, they have an idea of what a church should look and feel like—and a preference. That preference is quite traditional.

Nearly 90 percent of Americans say a church should be “easily identifiable,” and 8 of 10 say they want the building to “reflect the beauty of God.” There are some, to be sure, who prefer that churches feel modern (38%) and trendy (28%), but most Americans want religious spaces that feel more timeless and transcendent.

This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "The Ideal Church ... Building".

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News

Canadian Pastors Struggle to Address Assisted Death

Daniel Silliman

And other news from Christians around the world.

Illustration by Blake Cale

Most Canadian evangelicals have not heard their pastor speak about medical assistance in dying (MAID), even as the legal bar for euthanasia has been lowered and the number of deaths has rapidly risen to nearly 5 percent of all deaths annually. “The silence has been deafening,” Heidi Janz, a disabilities ethicist who has tried to rally churches against the law, told Christianity Today. “We’re just collectively shrugging our shoulders.” The rapid acceptance of MAID and the sharp increase in the number of deaths from about 1,000 in 2016 to more than 13,000 a year caught many clergy by surprise, according to Paul Charbonneau, an evangelical Anglican chaplain in Ontario. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle once this thing is let out,” he said.

United States: Evangelical philanthropist sentenced

Wall Street investor and evangelical philanthropist Bill Hwang was sentenced to 18 years in prison for fraud. Hwang’s investment firm collapsed in 2021 after it was discovered he had been misleading lenders to manipulate stock prices. About $100 billion in market value disappeared overnight, and banks lending the firm money lost $10 billion. The federal court judge said the amount was unprecedented and that Hwang’s request to avoid prison was “ridiculous.” Hwang’s previous investment fund also admitted to fraud in 2012. He gave to hundreds of religious nonprofits, including Fuller Theological Seminary, the Museum of the Bible, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, Bowery Mission, and Redeemer Presbyterian Church.

Mexico: Baptists can’t go home

Local leaders in the villages of Coamila and Rancho Nuevo refused to allow 150 Baptists to return to their homes. Members of the Great Commission Fundamental Baptist Church, part of an Indigenous group of Nahuatl speakers, have been denied health care since 2015 and repeatedly told they must participate in Catholic festivals and give money to the Roman Catholic Church. They fled their homes after electricity was cut and access to the Baptist church was limited by armed men in April 2024. Hidalgo state officials worked out an agreement with local leaders that would allow the Baptists to return, but the officials didn’t intervene when the terms were not upheld. The Mexican constitution protects religious freedom and the rights of Indigenous communities. But Christian Solidarity Worldwide’s advocacy co-director Anna Lee Stangl noted, “This means little in the absence of enforcement and accountability measures for village leaders who continue to openly break Mexican law.”

Brazil: Crucifixes okay in courtrooms

The Supreme Court ruled 11–0 that religious symbols may be displayed in public buildings as long as they reflect the country’s Catholic heritage. Evangelicals have long opposed the privileges given to Catholics in Brazil. In 1891, an evangelical sermon against religious symbols in public buildings inspired a man to break into a courtroom and destroy a crucifix. A judge said Brazil is still secular, despite crucifixes in courtrooms, because “the legal foundation . . . does not rest on divine elements.”

France: Seminary enrollment grows

The Faculté Jean Calvin, a theological school for Reformed and evangelical ministers, had a record enrollment of 48 new students in the fall of 2024. The school in Aix-en-Provence near Marseille was called the “last chance for France’s languishing Calvinism” when it was founded in 1974. Fifty years later, new growth has come through online enrollment and international students from former French colonies.

Netherlands: Ark replica headed to Israel

A floating recreation of Noah’s ark is being renovated in preparation for relocation from Dordrecht to Israel. The ark was built by Dutch carpenter Johan Huibers and has been visited by more than 100,000 tourists since 2008. But it costs about 300,000 euros ($308,000) per year to maintain. Investors agreed to finance the museum—but they want it in Tel Aviv. The plan is to sail the ark to Dover, Antwerp, Dunkirk, Bordeaux, Lisbon, and several other cities before arriving in Israel sometime in 2026.

Italy: Art asks about animals and God

The granddaughter of Hollywood legend Audrey Hepburn is painting pictures of sacrificial sheep and goats in Tuscany. “Why do people do this thing in the name of God?” Emma Ferrer asked. “Where is God for that animal? Does the animal perceive God in those final moments?” She will have her first art show, The Scapegoat, in New York City in 2025.

Sudan: Evangelicals face dire need

Sudan Evangelical Alliance leader Rafat Samir said evangelicals are facing critical shortages of food as the conflict between military factions continues into a third year. Evangelicals are not aligned with either side and are often suspected of being Western spies, Samir said. The UN has dispatched 17,500 tons of food, which will only feed about 6 percent of the people in dire need.

Rwanda: Church tax considered

The government agency tasked with regulating religious groups has drafted a bill to tax churches after President Paul Kagame criticized pastors for getting rich while they “squeeze even the last penny from poor Rwandans.” The country has seen the rapid growth of Pentecostal congregations that preach the prosperity gospel. But critics accuse Kagame of attempting to squelch potential dissent. “You know once you say something,” political commentator Ivan Mugisha said, “your church is going to be in trouble.”

Malaysia: Call for Bible in schools

A member of parliament called for the Bible to be taught in public schools in the states of Sarawak and Sabah, arguing, “Knowledge of Scripture is a unifying force and an essential component in educating young people in pluralism.” The country’s official religion is Islam, but Christians make up a slight majority in the two states. John Ilus, a politician from Sarawak, said the schools in the region were founded by missionaries and that their Bible-focused curriculum “fostered a tradition of tolerance.”

Nepal: Churches are finally legal

Fifteen Christian denominations have finally registered with the government, achieving legal status 17 years after the former Hindu kingdom officially became secular. Applications were ignored for years, but a Christian lawyer named Prakash Karki pushed successfully for change in 2020. The number of Christians in Nepal has increased more than 500 percent in the last 20 years.

South Korea: Meeting planning sparks controversy

Evangelical leaders are upset that key national organizations were not involved in plans for the next World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) General Assembly, set to be held in Seoul in 2025. The WEA worked directly with the pastors of two large churches—Presbyterian Junghyun John Oh and Pentecostal Younghoon Lee—but not with the Christian Council of Korea or the Communion of Churches in Korea. The WEA is made up of regional and national alliances, and the General Assembly is usually planned in cooperation with member organizations. Some evangelicals have also raised questions about WEA engagement with Catholics, the World Council of Churches, and Muslim groups, which they say indicates an ecumenical liberalism.

This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Death Count Goes Up, but Most Pastors Stay Silent".

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

Growth Is Good. Survival Is, Too.

Sophia Lee in Japan

Japan’s Christians still pray for revival. But endurance is its own reward.

Left: Akasaka Izumi in a classroom at Japan Bible Seminary. Middle: Mizuno Akiko's church in Ina. Right: Pastor's vestment hanging in Japan Bible Seminary.

Photography by Ben Weller for Christianity Today

Akasaka Izumi sitting in his office at Japan Bible Seminary

Akasaka Izumi’s office is only slightly larger than a bachelor’s closet. The principal of Japan Bible Seminary has just enough room for a desk, some bookshelves jammed with theology volumes, and a coffee table.

We sipped from dainty cups of dark coffee while Akasaka eyed the clock. We were scheduled to talk with a pastor on Zoom at 2:30 p.m. At 2:31, when the pastor had not appeared, Akasaka began fidgeting.

“Something’s wrong,” he muttered, picking up his cellphone. “I better call.”

“It’s only been one minute,” I pointed out. But he dialed the pastor anyway. “Yes, but you know, we’re Japanese.”

It’s not so much that the Japanese people hate tardiness, I learned, as they hate being inconsiderate. Such civility so impressed the Spanish Jesuit priest Francis Xavier, who led the first Christian mission to Japan in the 16th century, that he urged only the highest quality missionaries be sent to the country. His successor, Cosme de Torres, was equally enamored with Japanese culture. He wrote in a report to Rome, “If I should strive to write all the good qualities and virtues which are found in [the Japanese], I should run out of paper and ink.”

Five hundred years later, the West is still fascinated with all things Japanese. But the country’s culture is a stumbling block when it comes to evangelism, one missionary told me: “Japanese culture is beautiful. It’s near perfect.”

How do you show near-perfect people that they too desperately need the gospel?

Within missions circles, Japan is known as a “missionary graveyard,” a place where the best efforts bear little fruit. The country has one of the world’s largest unreached people groups. The more than 125 million people there have fewer than 10,000 churches, including Catholic and Orthodox ones. Christians account for less than 1 percent of Japan’s population.

According to 2016 data from the Japan Congress on Evangelism, 81 percent of Protestant churches in Japan have fewer than 50 attendees. About a third have fewer than 15. Nearly three-fourths of pastors were more than 60 years old then, which means many still serving are now in their 70s.

Many pastors feel unable to retire because there are few trained younger pastors to fill their spots. A 2018 Tokyo Christian University survey found that 6 percent of churches don’t have a pastor. A similar number of congregations share a pastor with another church.

These dire statistics are what brought me to Japan to meet Akasaka at Japan Bible Seminary in Hamura, a semi-rural municipality about a two-hour subway ride from central Tokyo. I spent about two weeks in Tokyo and Sapporo, meeting Christian leaders and missionaries from various backgrounds, to get a sense of the future of Japan’s church.

Akasaka Izumi leads a lecture at the Japan Bible Seminary

Japanese Christians are brutally frank about their situation. Akasaka speaks at more than 40 churches across the country. He sees a trend: white-haired pastors preaching in buildings occupied only by a handful of white-haired congregants. Akasaka, at age 64, is often the youngest among them. “It’s discouraging,” he said, sighing. “It’s discouraging for the older generation to not be able to see younger energy. They don’t know how to attract younger people, and they’re not even successful in passing their faith to their own children and grandchildren.”

Tales of demise abound. I heard of a Mennonite group in Hokkaido that planted 10 churches. Today, only two are still operating while the other eight sit empty, the children and grandchildren of worshipers long gone occasionally opening windows to air out the stale sanctuaries.

Or consider an American missionary who, in the 1960s, envisioned planting 100 churches across Japan. As the story goes, he planted about 40, of which only about a dozen have surviving buildings. Of those, two still hold services; some of the others house widowed pastor’s wives.

When Akasaka was a student in Michigan in the late ’80s, people would ask him, “When do you think a revival will happen in Japan?” He would reply, “When Japan’s economy hits the ceiling and plummets, maybe then people will turn away from Mammon and turn to God.”

In the ’90s, the economy tanked and never fully recovered. Last year, the Japanese yen sank to its lowest point in 34 years. “I’m still waiting for that revival,” Akasaka told me.

There have been almost, maybe, not-quite revivals. After World War II, hundreds of missionaries, mainly from the United States, arrived in Japan with food, clothing, and Bibles to fill the “spiritual vacuum,” as General Douglas MacArthur called it. “If you do not fill it with Christianity,” MacArthur warned, “it will be filled with communism.” He called for 1,000 American missionaries to go to Japan, and more than 1,500 responded within five years.

After losing the war, Japan was spiritually and physically defeated. People were scraping by on meager potato rations. They were shocked by the devastation of two atomic bombs and the revelation that Japan’s emperor wasn’t an all-powerful god. Most missionaries were earnest in their desire to heal Japanese souls and bodies. With the help of wealthy Western donors, they built churches, schools, and hospitals and won thousands of converts.

“But I’m hesitant to call it a revival,” Akasaka said. “The missionaries came with power and prosperity—and the gospel.” Churches were packed and an evangelism tent could draw hundreds. People were hungry for something—but was it the gospel or the power and wealth represented by the white benefactors whose country had chastened theirs? “When the missionaries left,” Akasaka said, “people lost interest in Christianity.”

But then, starting around the late ’70s, another church planting movement budded, this time mostly through the efforts of local Christians. Those were exhilarating, optimistic years, a period of rapid economic growth during which Japan surpassed the United Kingdom in purchasing power parity per capita. Many were called to ministry; most of the pastors I met, including Akasaka, attended seminary during that period.

In 2003, when Japan Bible Seminary hired Akasaka as one of its few full-time faculty, they were expecting the student body to grow. At the time, the school enrolled around 60 students.

By 2010, it was clear to Akasaka—and to the 30-something evangelical seminaries in Japan—that enrollment was declining instead. This year, Japan Bible Seminary had just five new enrollees. And that’s a relatively large number—many Japanese seminaries can count their students on one hand. Some years, there are none.

In Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence, a Portuguese Jesuit priest commits apostasy after years of seemingly successful missionary efforts in Japan. When another priest confronts him, he declares,

This country is a swamp. In time you will come to see that for yourself. This country is a more terrible swamp than you can imagine. Whenever you plant a sapling in this swamp the roots begin to rot; the leaves grow yellow and wither. And we have planted the sapling of Christianity in this swamp.

Endō’s work is fiction, but I saw similar discouragement among many Japanese Christians. While churches in neighboring countries such as China, South Korea, and the Philippines are booming and multiplying, Japanese churches are withering and dying. Are there not enough planters? Or is there actually something wrong with the soil? And if so, why would anyone want to plant in Japan?

Lam Wai Chan certainly did not want to. Everything he heard about Japan scared him: One of the hardest fields in the world. Lovely for tourists, terrible for missionaries.

Lam was raised in a Chinese Buddhist home in Singapore. The first Christian in his family, he worked for five years as a correspondent for Japanese media, then entered seminary in 2009. For some reason, Japan kept popping up in his mind like a poltergeist, unsettling him. “I couldn’t get rid of it,” Lam told me. “I tried to forget it. I tried not to think about it, but it was always there.”

Photography by Ben Weller for Christianity Today

Lam Wai Chan, pastor at Nerima Church of God, Tokyo.

He didn’t want to be rich. He didn’t want to be famous. “I just wanted a peaceful, easy life.” It is one thing to suffer  for God’s mission. Who wants to suffer for a mission that’s bound to fail?

His first year in seminary, a local Church of God pastor asked Lam to consider succeeding him. Lam, then a staunch Methodist, politely declined, using the excuse that he felt called to Japan. The pastor’s eyes lit up. “Oh! We have Churches of God in Japan!” he said. “I’ll introduce you to one.”

Eventually, the pastor connected Lam with Kanemoto Satoru, pastor of Nerima Church of God in Tokyo. Reluctantly, Lam found himself on a 10-day visit to Japan. It didn’t win him over. Japanese churches were so tight-knit, so closed-off, so… Japanese. He felt awkward and alien, like ketchup on a bridal dress. He felt he could never belong.

Then during lunch, Kanemoto and an elderly deacon pushed a piece of paper toward him, asking if he would return as a missionary.

Lam was 37 at the time. Cowed under the gaze of two elders nearly twice his age, he signed the agreement.

He returned to Singapore in a panic. What had he done? He tried to back out, but alternative career paths closed before him. Unexpectedly, his wife Janet received a job offer from a bank in Japan. “Why are you still fighting this?” she asked her husband. “It’s so clear God wants you to go to Japan.”

So by April 2013, when they arrived in Tokyo with their dog, Lam had decided that if God wanted him to serve in Japan, he would bring his A-game.

“I didn’t think I was going to save the world,” Lam recalled. “But I did think I was better than them. That I’m a plus.” He had grown a youth ministry in Singapore and led plenty of Bible studies. He figured he could bring his expertise and revitalize the comatose youth and the wasting church. “I was thinking, maybe they’re short-handed. Maybe they don’t know how to do it, maybe they’ve been stuck in Japanese churches for so long they don’t know the latest trends in ministry.”

That first year, Lam sat in the backseat of a car on his way to a conference. Kanemoto was driving and talking to another pastor in the front seat, discussing all the problems of churches and seminaries in Japan. By then Lam had heard it countless times. There is just no solution to this, he thought. And it struck him: “If it were me, I would have thrown in the towel.” Yet here were these two men still agonizing over it, still serving.

They are the beautiful remnants, Lam realized. “We like to talk about Japan’s less than 1 percent Christians as something horrible. But that 1 percent is a story of God’s divine provision—that no matter how bad the oppression is, you still have that 1 percent.”

Photography by Ben Weller for Christianity Today

Lam said he heard God tell him, They have faithfulness. What about you? There’s a lot to learn from the Japanese church. Be humble and learn, and you’ll see how it is me who sustains and preserves my church.

In 2019, Kanemoto abruptly retired at age 71. Fewer than 20 members remained in the church. They asked Lam, by then an assistant pastor, to take over as senior pastor. Lam accepted. But inside, he was trembling. “I felt like I was taking over a sinking ship.” He wept on his knees, begging God for guidance. “What do you want me to do? I can’t do a thing. I’m a Singaporean, for goodness’ sake.”

Lam felt God say, Offer the church back to me.

“Okay,” Lam remembers responding. “You preserve your church then. You save your church.” And then he let go.

As the new senior pastor, Lam intentionally avoided making big changes. The worship is the same as it’s been for decades, with traditional hymnals and a piano. His main initiative has been focusing on prayer at the church’s weekly after-service meeting. There, they pray for specific needs and people, for family members and friends and newcomers who don’t know the Lord.

So when their church slowly doubled in size, they knew whom to thank.

Lam Wai Chan, pastor at Nerima Church of God, Tokyo

I visited Nerima Church of God the year it celebrated its 99th anniversary. It’s a cream-colored three-story building tucked between homes in suburban Tokyo. The 9 a.m. service, the first of two, is designed for children: Church members pushed the wooden pews with emerald-green velvet cushions to the side so that the children—about 10 of them, ages 2 to 8—could worship in the middle of the high-ceilinged sanctuary.

That Sunday, I watched the children dance, sway, and stomp to contemporary worship music. Lam squatted on a cajon, slapping away on the hand drum, while one deacon strummed a guitar and another shook a tambourine. For the sermon, copastor Ando Rieko used hand-drawn doodles to tell the parable of the sower while the children sat cross-legged before her. After they recited Matthew 13:23 from memory—perfectly—Lam raised his palms to pantomime an applause. He chuckled, looking delighted and proud.

Five years ago, Nerima Church of God had eight Sunday school teachers and one little girl. Now they have a full service for a dozen children.

At the 10:30 a.m. service, a family of three visited for the first time. They weren’t believers, but the teenage daughter attended a private Christian K-12 school where Rieko is headmaster and she wanted to check out the church. That’s typical of how the congregation has grown: Unchurched people just walk in, even though Lam does no special programs, marketing, or evangelistic events.

God told Lam he would preserve this church, the pastor said. “And he has never failed me once in these five years.”

Lam hears what outsiders say about the Japanese church; he used to say the same things. “I hear, ‘Oh, we need to give money, we need to support them, poor thing.’ No, it’s not ‘Poor thing’! Try surviving in such a harsh environment.”

He says the story of the Japanese church is the story of how God himself moves the church forward: “There’s a powerful testimony here.”

Photography by Ben Weller for Christianity Today

Boie Alinsod, President of the Japan Council of Philippine Churches, in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

Japanese Christians may offer a powerful testimony, but at less than 1 percent of Japan’s population, they don’t have room to shrink much further.

Yoshinaga Kouki, a 44-year-old pastor in Sapporo, told me he worries about the future of Japan: “Even I, as a Japanese person, am not sure how to most effectively share the gospel in a culturally relevant way to bring more people to know Jesus.”

That stark reality has some church leaders wondering: What about turning to people who aren’t Japanese?

Japan’s population decline—driven by aging and an abysmal birth rate—is one of the world’s great demographic crises. But the number of foreign nationals has reached a record high of about 3 million, up 50 percent from a decade ago. And their churches—Filipino, Vietnamese, Nepalese, Chinese—are thriving.

Takashi Fukuda, the Asia-Pacific director at Wycliffe International, estimates that about 20 percent of those foreign nationals are Christian. If he’s right, that would amount to roughly 600,000 believers who are not accounted for in the Japanese government’s tally of 1.9 million Christians.

As a former missionary in the Philippines, Fukuda has built connections with multiple Filipino churches in Japan. Their members have Japanese spouses, neighbors, and colleagues. They have half-Japanese children and grandchildren who speak flawless Japanese and not a lick of Tagalog or English. And they’re eager to partner with Japanese churches.

Fukuda sees them as an untapped mission force. “There is a big need for collaboration between the Japanese church and ethnic churches,” Fukuda said. He is among those who have pushed for more visibility of Japan’s ethnic minority Christians within the leadership circles of  Japanese evangelicalism.

At the 2023 Japan Congress on Evangelism, a gathering of around 1,000 denominational leaders, pastors, and missionaries to the country, attendees participated in the first ever “Global Night” to highlight Japan’s growing ethnic churches. It was the type of event that became standard fare at similar gatherings in Europe and North America decades ago. Fukuda called it a “major breakthrough.”

Others have joined this cause. When Iwagami Takahito first became general secretary of the Japan Evangelical Association (JEA), one of his priorities was to facilitate and strengthen the cooperation of evangelical churches across ethnicities and cultures.

“It’s the key for future missions in Japan,” he said. “We’re getting old. We don’t have enough evangelical power. But these ethnic groups are very active, very eager to witness Jesus Christ. If we work together, I think they will encourage us, empower us.”

The idea of turning to diaspora groups to revitalize the church is not new. In Europe, evangelical immigrants have become the main drivers of church growth. But Japanese Christians are only now warming to the idea.

One of the main speakers at the congress’s Global Night was Boie Alinsod, president of the Japan Council of Philippine Churches. Alinsod immigrated from Manila to Tokyo with his wife and 11-year-old twin daughters to start a ministry for Filipino immigrants. They partnered with a Japanese church, Shinjuku Shalom Church, which had been instrumental in helping Alinsod launch his own church in Manila two decades earlier.

Alinsod remembers feeling burdened for Japan after visiting in the early ’90s and being shocked by what he saw. At one Sunday worship service, only four people showed up: the church’s pastor, his wife, and their two children.

“It’s the exact opposite of what’s happening in the Philippines,” Alinsod recalled thinking. “In the Philippines, there’s an explosion of the gospel.” At the time, his own church was expanding quickly and preparing to plant another. But in Japan, the gospel seemed stuck. “I thought maybe, maybe, the Lord can use us Filipinos in some ways to help, to give something to the Japanese church.”

Alinsod returned to Manila and called his church to pray for Japan. Seven years later, in 1998, Shinjuku Shalom invited Alinsod to help build a ministry for Filipinos in Japan. The Filipino congregation fasted and prayed for 40 days, and then the Alinsods moved to Tokyo.

Twenty-six years later, the church Alinsod founded in Tokyo, Shalom Christian Fellowship, has multiplied to five church sites and 24 small groups, with more church plants on the way. “We’re reaching people,” Alinsod said. “People are getting saved, being discipled, and our disciples are turning into leaders serving the church.”

They are almost all Filipinos.

Alinsod’s vision to partner with Japanese churches to reach the Japanese has not quite materialized. Some Japanese pastors have felt they are already stretched too thin to manage a new partnership. Some have felt that what works for Filipinos won’t work for the Japanese.

But Alinsod has been praying for a breakthrough. In March 2014, the Japan Council of Philippine Churches began gathering pastors annually to pray for Japan. Since then, other organizations have joined in, including the JEA.

“There’s hope in the nation,” Alinsod said. “As long as there are people like us who will stand to represent Jesus in the nation, even our short prayers will really matter. Maybe not now; maybe we cannot see that. But God is faithful. We will one day know the effect of our contribution to this nation.”

As with Lam, a Singaporean who found himself inexplicably bound to a Japanese congregation, other pastors are stumbling into cross-cultural ministry.

Fukui Makoto is a 64-year-old pastor in Futako- Tamagawa, Tokyo, once a rural neighborhood that now gleams with department stores, trendy coffee shops, and the Rakuten global headquarters (about half its employees are from India). Fukui planted Tamagawa Christian Church and pastored it for 33 years. It was a typical Japanese congregation—until an American family showed up one Sunday morning in 2022. Then an Indian family came, followed by Korean Americans and Sri Lankans. None of them spoke more than a few basic Japanese phrases.

Fukui panicked. What was he to do? He began preaching in both Japanese and—by his estimation—“broken English.” With the help of a translation service, he prints sermon notes in English and provides copies for English speakers.

He still doesn’t fully understand why they decided to attend his church when there are other English-speaking international churches in Tokyo. And he still doesn’t know how to integrate all the worshipers into one church body. But his vision for the church has changed. For whatever reason, God saw fit to create some version of the multicultural scene from Revelation 7:9 at his church.

There’s no good alternative, said Masanori Kurasawa, a 72-year-old pastor in Chiba. “We need to take our eyes outside Japan. We need to see where God is moving now.” Masanori was the first Japanese pastor to tell me he feels “very optimistic” about the future of the church in Japan—mainly because of Japan’s growing diversity. When he retires, a young Korean pastor will succeed him. What will the Japanese church look like decades from now? He gave me a wistful smile. “I very much wish to see it, if the Lord allows me.”

In Silence, Endō likened Japan to a swamp. But Fukui prefers a different analogy. Japan is like cherry blossoms, he said. It’s not easy to accurately predict when they’ll bloom, and different trees bloom at different times.

As a new pastor more than 30 years ago, Fukui prayed for his church to grow. “Now, I understand people grow at different paces,” he said. “Some bloom early, some late. Pastoring a church is like raising children. You just have to continue to love. So God told me to love and wait.”

Photography by Ben Weller for Christianity Today

Mizuno Akiko, pastor at Ina Gospel Church, Ina City, Nagano Prefecture

Back at Japan Bible Seminary, in Akasaka Izumi’s office, pastor Mizuno Akiko’s smiling face appeared on Zoom at 2:33 p.m. She was three minutes late. She had some technological problems, she said, apologizing profusely.

It had been another busy day for Mizuno. Every morning, the 73-year-old rises at 5:30 a.m. and reads her Bible. She records a daily devotional explaining one chapter of it. She does some light exercise then breakfasts on yogurt, bread, a banana, and coffee. And then the church doorbell starts ringing as people drop by for meetings, Bible studies, counseling, or help.

By the time she retires to bed around midnight, her eyelids are heavy.

Her life is not what she had envisioned nearly half a century ago as a 26-year-old fresh from seminary. Youthful and full of zeal, she took over as pastor of a new church plant in Ina, a city surrounded by rice paddies, pear trees, and cows in the mountainous Nagano prefecture.

Ina sits in a river valley between the Minami (Southern) Alps and Chuo (Central) Alps mountain ranges.

Ina Gospel Church, Ina City, Nagano Prefecture, December 18, 2024.

The church started with about 10 members, mainly from two families. They met at a house. When Mizuno arrived, a deacon told her, “We won’t be able to provide a lot for you, but I promise you, you won’t starve.”

That was in 1977. At first, her work seemed to take off. On the opening day of her new children’s ministry, about 100 neighborhood children showed up. They threw their shoes off in a heap and squeezed into her tiny home where the church met, steaming the windows. The community—even non-Christians—was extremely welcoming, bringing her food and helping care for her elderly father when he fell severely ill. Everyone in the neighborhood knew about the church.

The congregation increased to about 40 members and became self-supporting in five years. It outgrew the little house and moved into a new church building (which also served as Mizuno’s home).

Mizuno got ambitious. It was the 1980s, when American televangelist Robert Schuller was pioneering church growth strategies that transformed the imaginations of evangelicals in the United States—and hers as well. Schuller’s model, epitomized by his polished, wide-reaching broadcasts and his shining Crystal Cathedral, dazzled Mizuno. She brainstormed evangelism tactics for her own church to draw crowds and win souls. “I was very energetic,” she said. “With my ideas and energy, I would drive the church to do programs.”

Event followed event, and 10 years later, “my church got physically tired and spiritually thirsty,” Mizuno said. “And I didn’t notice their thirst. I had lost sight of loving my members because I was focused on programs and church growth.” By the time Mizuno realized her error, the church had shrunk by half. Many had flocked to a seeker-friendly church that did not require much commitment. The remaining half was withering, spiritually dry.

Mizuno almost gave up. “I was so down emotionally, spiritually, and mentally that I didn’t have the confidence to continue serving or even to continue living as a human being,” she recalled. “I was so engrossed with doing something that I forgot to be a person who loves God and people.” She prayed: “Lord, help me be that person.”

Mizuno downsized and reset. Instead of focusing on growth, she focused on helping each person in the church meet God. She did start one new project: She encouraged everyone to read a chapter of the Bible with her every day. Most did. It changed their conversations, she said. People talked about what they read. Together, she and the church have read the entire Bible 10 times over two decades, and they’re still going. The congregation has grown to about 120 members.

Mizuno Akiko, pastor at Ina Gospel Church, Ina City, Nagano Prefecture, December 18, 2024.

Slippers belonging to congregants at Ina Gospel Church, Ina City, Nagano Prefecture, December 18, 2024.

As a young pastor, Mizuno had prayed about marrying a fellow pastor and building a church together. Today she is still single and is unlikely to retire until she’s 80. But she’s content. She might not be rich, she said. But she never starved, just as promised, and she has stayed faithful to her calling. At the end of her life, she plans to tell God, “I’ve made some mistakes, but I was fully committed to loving you and loving your people. That’s what I wanted to do, and that’s what I was able to do.”

In Akasaka’s office, we bowed our goodbyes to Mizuno and left the Zoom meeting. I could tell that Akasaka was moved. He had known and respected Mizuno for years but had never heard about her struggles.

As the principal of a seminary with falling enrollment, it’s easy for Akasaka to feel disheartened. His board of directors decided against offering online classes—a common growth strategy—because they value in-person fellowship among the students and professors. They also voted against running a marketing campaign for the school, because they believe full-time ministry should be a calling.

Akasaka agreed with the board’s decisions, but he sometimes wonders if they were the right choices. “I don’t know. We are just trusting in God, waiting to see what he will do.”

Is Japan a swamp?

“Certainly the situation looks like that. There are no other words to describe it.”

Years ago, when he was still pastoring a church, Akasaka lamented the rise of wedding chapels in Japan. Christian-style weddings in churches, complete with choirs and altars, are extremely popular among the Japanese. It made him sad and frustrated that “fake” wedding chapels were grander and more popular than genuine churches.

One day, a woman in her 50s with an earnest, eager face told Akasaka, “This means God is preparing Japan for a revival. If a revival takes place now, we’ll need more pews, and I’m praying that God will one day fill the pews in those fake churches with real Christians!”

The woman’s childlike faith convicted Akasaka. “Her prayer became my prayer. I realized I cannot give up on Japan.”

Photography by Ben Weller for Christianity Today

Ina sits in a river valley between the Minami (Southern) Alps and Chuo (Central) Alps mountain ranges.

Before leaving Japan and flying back to my comfortable home in megachurch-packed Southern California, I grabbed tea with one of the students at Japan Bible Seminary.

Nakamura Mizuki is 30. He felt pulled to enter full-time ministry when he read John 21, where Jesus tells Peter, “Feed my sheep (v. 17).” It took him eight years to enter seminary because he was afraid. He was afraid he wasn’t worthy; he was afraid of poverty; but he was mostly afraid of failure. He had heard pastors sighing, year after year, “This year, still no baptism.”

He’s still afraid. Can he really do this? But he remembered Moses asked the same thing when God called him from the burning bush. God replied, “I will be with you” (Ex. 3:12).

“If this is God’s will, then I trust him,” Nakamura said. And so he is also excited. “I hope to share God’s heart with the church. I hope to share the gospel to many,  many Japanese.”

That’s another reason Akasaka said he has not given up on Japan. “God has called people to serve Japan,” he said—people like Mizuki and Mizuno, like Alinsod and Lam. “God has not yet given up on Japan.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story gave the wrong name for the seminary Nakamura Mizuki addends. He attends Japan Bible Seminary. The earlier version also gave an unclear figure for Japan Bible Seminary’s enrollment in 2003. The school enrolled around 60 students at the time.

Sophia Lee is a writer based in Los Angeles.

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

- More from Sophia Lee

Growth Is Good. Survival Is, Too.

Akasaka Izumi at his office in Japan Bible Seminary

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Akasaka Izumi sitting in his office at Japan Bible Seminary

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Lam Wai Chan preaching at Nerima Church of God, Tokyo

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Lam Wai Chan, pastor at Nerima Church of God, Tokyo.

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Boie Alinsod, President of the Japan Council of Philippine Churches, stands at a busy street in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

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Boie Alinsod, President of the Japan Council of Philippine Churches, in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

Mizuno Akiko, pastor at Ina Gospel Church, sits in a church pew in Ina City, Nagano Prefecture

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Mizuno Akiko, pastor at Ina Gospel Church, Ina City, Nagano Prefecture

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Like many rural areas of Japan, Ina has experienced consistent population decline over the past few decades.

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Slippers belonging to congregants at Ina Gospel Church, Ina City, Nagano Prefecture, December 18, 2024.

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Ina sits in a river valley between the Minami (Southern) Alps and Chuo (Central) Alps mountain ranges.

Ideas

Invasion Theology

Andy Olsen

Thorns and thistles may be the Bible’s classic metaphors for evil. But did the biblical writers ever meet kudzu?

Illustrations by Tim McDonagh

In late spring across the Eastern United States, the shrub Lonicera maackii enters into its glory. It enrobes itself in cream-and-white blossoms that smell of citrusy syrup and drift to the ground as the days warm. By early autumn, its branches pop with shiny, pulpy berries that can linger into winter, a Christmas backdrop as lovely as mistletoe or holly.

October is the best month to kill this plant. But if you’re busy then, really anytime will do.

East Coasters and Midwesterners once loved Lonicera maackii, better known as Amur honeysuckle. It was introduced into the US in 1898 by Niels E. Hansen, a Lutheran horticulture professor dispatched by the Department of Agriculture to scour the world for exotic plants that Americans might want to take for a spin. He told his students that he felt, as a botanist, he was “doing the Lord’s work.”

Hansen journeyed from Europe to China—by wagon, by train, and, for 700 miles, in a sleigh. He bagged carloads of specimens, shipping them back across the Atlantic. Among the first few hundred seeds was Amur honeysuckle.

The Department of Agriculture liked what it saw in this fast-growing, fruity shrub. It imported more from Britain and from Manchuria, the honeysuckle’s homeland. From the 1930s to the ’80s, the government’s Soil Conservation Service distributed the plant to farmers and landowners across the United States to curb erosion and restore wildlife habitats.

We all make mistakes.

By the 1960s, folks from Chicago to Cincinnati were cursing the bush as a weed. Amur honeysuckle, also called bush honeysuckle, spreads like gossip and is nettlesome to eradicate. It leafs earlier than other trees and clings to its leaves longer, robbing native wildflowers and saplings of sunlight. It excretes chemicals into the soil that stunt nearby plants. It boosts tick populations.

In short, Lonicera maackii is the worst. It’s banned from being sold in several states, and at least ten others blacklist it as an invasive species or as a “noxious weed.” Where I live in Kentucky, a region that supplies much of the nation’s valuable hardwood timber, forest managers watch helplessly as Amur honeysuckle floods the understory and smothers future generations of trees.

Bush honeysuckle simply wears people out. Billy Thomas, a forester at the University of Kentucky, calls it “a booger” and “our old nemesis.” He says for anyone with ears to hear, “If you’ve got one or two plants on your property, now’s the time to get them out of there.”

I’ve obliged. Over the years, I’ve sawn, hacked, and poisoned the plant away from the edges of my property. I’ve trucked away more than 30 cubic yards of brush. I nearly lost a finger to a chainsaw while chewing into a 20-foot-tall thicket. More than once, I’ve slipped and fallen on the berry mash that accumulates underfoot when wrangling the felled limbs.

Maybe it’s a kind of spiritual discipline. Gardeners tout weeding as the surest way to grasp all the Bible’s talk of thorns and thistles; we don’t fully contend with the curse of the ground until we sink actual shovel into hard dirt. “We could stand side by side, Adam and I, he in his skin shirt and I in my grubby jeans, hoeing, stopping to tear out an upstart cocklebur,” the writer Virginia Stem Owens mused in Christianity Today in 1976. “We inhabit the same spiritual space.”

I can’t disagree. Spend a day rescuing a strawberry patch from a tide of Bermuda grass—disentangling the tentacular runners of one plant from another—and you’ll relate to Christ’s parable of the wheat and the tares in ways you wished you didn’t.

Likely thousands of sermons have contemplated weeds. Some are weirdly laudatory.

Augustine, in his fight to prove the material world was not evil, argued that thorns and thistles, as part of God’s creation, were, in fact, good. He envisioned weeds as a sort of biological Babel, a divine gift to restrain our worst impulses. “Even such herbs have their measure and form and order, which whoever considers soberly will find praiseworthy,” he wrote.

In a similar vein, Charles Spurgeon preached a real downer of a message in the late 1800s. While Londoners likely were readying their spring gardens, the Baptist pastor delivered 5,200 words about thorns and thistles, as if to brace his congregants for the toil that lay ahead. He said—Chin up!—that weeds are a sign of God’s mercy: The Fall could have been worse. Instead, the resulting curse does not strike Adam directly but “glances obliquely and falls upon the ground whereon he stands.” (Did Spurgeon ever wake up blistered from poison ivy the day after clearing a fence line?)

Figurative weeds have infested every sphere of existence, Spurgeon assured his congregants at Metropolitan Tabernacle—from the natural world, where ships are tossed at sea, to the social order, where hucksters swindle and families disintegrate, to the “little world of your own self.” Weeds will grow unbidden for everyone, for the righteous and the unrighteous. “All the prudence and care, ay, and all the prayer and faith that you can summon to your help, will not keep you clear of these thorns and thistles,” Spurgeon said.

As sermon fodder, Scripture’s weed metaphors are a capacious bunch, coming in a surprising variety much like weeds themselves. The Old Testament writers described evildoers as briers (Mic. 7:4) and rebellious people as thorns (Ezek. 2:6). Jesus, for his part, likened false prophets to thistles (Matt. 7:15–16). He told his disciples, in his story about the sower, that thorns represent “the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth” (13:22). He bore a crown of thorns at his crucifixion.

Illustrations by Tim McDonagh

All those weeds descend from their root metaphor in Genesis, where thorns and thistles first poke through the dirt as consequences of sin, standing in for dysfunction and toil (3:18). A common characteristic unites the nuisance plants of the Bible: We brought them upon ourselves through the door of our disordered desires.

But Moses, bless him, didn’t know about Amur honeysuckle when he penned Genesis. He probably didn’t foresee a globalized world where weeds would jump continents, or a world where our speech and politics betray a subtly revised understanding of evil—not as a product of our own hearts but as a foreign incursion.

The first recorded instance of the term invasive species may have been in a British colonial journal in 1891, around the time Spurgeon preached his weed sermon. But plants and animals have been hitchhiking the world in earnest from the dawn of colonization.

We Americans have imported exotics since Christopher Columbus first dropped anchor. He’s thought to have brought lettuce, actually an Egyptian innovation, to North America. Also he brought the cow. Seafarers carted tomatoes and potatoes from the New World, where they originated, to the Old World and back again. Other favorite non-natives include honeybees and, though their belovedness is debatable, cats.

Some species, however, multiplied without our blessing. In Argentina in the 1830s, Charles Darwin stumbled upon impenetrable fields of European artichokes and thistles stretching for miles where “nothing else can now live.” (He also called it “an invasion.”) In 1898, the same year Hansen pocketed his first honeysuckle seeds, H. G. Wells published his novel The War of the Worlds, styling his Martian “red weed” after Elodea canadensis, an aggressive North American stowaway sea plant that now excels at clogging European waterways.

Today, there are more than 11,000 non-native species in the United States (the official count includes viruses, bacteria, and fungi). The result is that, according to US Geological Survey data, if you live in Hawaii or Napa Valley or Miami or Monroe, Louisiana, immigrant flora and fauna now define your landscape.

Not all exotics are weeds, and not all weeds are invasives. A weed, generally speaking, is any plant in our personal environments that gets on our nerves. When Spurgeon spoke of weeds as a metaphor for sin and evil, invasives weren’t yet a thing. He almost certainly had native plants in mind.

When exotic species turn on us, however, biologists slide them to the naughty list. Non-natives get labeled as “invasive” when they leap ecological fences and begin destroying wildlife or harming people. Some invasives—particularly in the animal kingdom—inspire our terrified fascination: mussels clogging municipal water systems, pythons strangling the Everglades, giant spiders parachuting into New York. But some plants among the invasive ranks may surprise you. Burning bush? Its foliage is striking, but it spreads like, well, wildfire. Bamboo? You’ll never be rid of it. English ivy? Something called tree of heaven? And wait, daylilies?

It turns out there are people who study runaway plants and animals. The field of invasion biology sprouted in the early 1980s, a few decades after English zoologist Charles Elton published The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, which popularized the idea that invader species could overwhelm and harm indigenous wildlife. Today, hundreds of invasion scientists publish in their own scholarly journals. They produce tomes of research, striving to understand when a non-native turns bad and when it is just fine.

A field with such loaded vocabulary—colonization, alien species, biological pollution—has sometimes, unsurprisingly, run afoul of cultural censors. Food and plant writer Michael Pollan, for example, is no fan of “nativist” gardening. Plants will inevitably spread on boats, by planes, and in bird droppings, so even many biologists don’t draw a line in the sand between all natives as “good” and non-natives as “wicked.”

Yet as it happens, the reexamination of weeds has coincided with a shift in the ways Americans talk about moral evil.

Just as invasion science was taking off, presidential candidate Pat Buchanan turned the language of “culture wars”—a term popularized in 1991 by sociologist James Davison Hunter—into a battle cry. At the 1992 Republican National Convention, Buchanan railed against the sinister agenda liberals wanted to “impose” on America.

Dubbing the struggle a religious and cultural “war,” Buchanan struck a tone in many ways similar to that of a conservationist warning about environmental threats. He painted the nation as an unspoiled tract of land, calling Democratic ideas “not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.” He spoke of the need to shield “small towns and communities” from the “raw sewage of pornography that pollutes our popular culture”—as if provincial places were unacquainted with sexual temptation before it encroached like some kind of escaped bacteria.

The invading-horde rhetoric has only grown more intense since. Consistent references to immigrants and refugees as a disease-carrying “invasion” are a relatively recent political phenomenon. President Donald Trump has branded his opponents as hazardous pests by labeling them “vermin.” In a video debuted at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in 2024, then-candidate Trump was draped in messianic garden metaphors in an AI-modified play on Paul Harvey’s iconic “So God Made a Farmer” speech: God wanted someone to “fight the Marxists” and other looming threats. “God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.”

Even the administration’s repeated invoking of “the enemy within” is invader talk masked in introspection. Neither Trump nor Vice President JD Vance has deployed the phrase in service of self-reflection. In a February speech in Germany, Vance used it explicitly to reference those he sees as opposing nativist agendas; after the speech, he met with the leader of a growing political party that embraces racial ideals from Germany’s Nazi past.

Of course, no one is shocked anymore by othering language in politics. And Republicans don’t practice it alone: Remember when Democrats, led by Minnesota governor Tim Walz, tried branding conservatives as “weird”? The impulse is understandable. Christians know they have an enemy out in the world seeking harm. I, too, am wary of the Devil’s schemes.

But then, there’s the Bible. From the opening pages, it invests a lot of ink imploring us to examine ourselves, often with tricky turns of phrase. God alerted Cain, Scripture’s second soil-worker, that “sin is crouching at your door” (Gen. 4:7). Like an invader! Except God was not cautioning about some outgroup; he was calling out the sin already at work inside Cain’s angry heart.

Exoticizing shrubs has its uses. But exoticizing evil—or other people—endangers the soul. Jesus chided the Pharisees that their fixation on foreign evils had blinded them to the weediness of their own sin: “For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come” (Mark 7:21–22).

Spurgeon put it more practically for his audience in London. Anyone who looks will “find great crops of thistles springing up in their hearts,” he said, “and they have to keep the sickle of sacred mortification going to cut them down.”

Our most loathsome invasive plants weren’t foisted upon us. Almost without exception, we loosed them upon ourselves.

Kudzu is the quintessential American case study. Gardeners fell in love with this fuzzy vine, a cousin to peas, when it was introduced in the Japanese pavilion at the 1876 Philadelphia world fair. Its three- to four-inch leaves resemble mittens. It grows wicked fast, capable of covering the length of a subway car in a single season. Plant it as an ornamental, and in no time its shady foliage could cover a front porch or an unsightly bare patch like some tropical gift wrap.

A Quaker couple, Charles and Lillie Pleas, were the first farmers to grow kudzu commercially. In the early 1900s, they sold mail-order root crowns and seedlings from their North Florida nursery. (The post office briefly investigated them for mail fraud, skeptical that any plant could be as prolific as they advertised.)

Then in the late ’30s, kudzu took off. Relentless cotton cultivation had ravaged Southern soil. Researchers found that kudzu swaddled the dirt so tightly it all but eliminated erosion. Also, cows had a taste for the plant. So states stuck it on road banks. Farmers blanketed fields with it. The feds grew a hundred million seedlings and paid farmers to plant them.

No one cheered kudzu more loudly than a Baptist pastor’s kid named Channing Cope. A newspaper editor and self-taught conservationist, Cope tried kudzu for himself on his Yellow River Farm near Atlanta. By the 1930s, he was convinced the exotic plant could deliver Southern farmers from struggle.

Illustrations by Tim McDonagh

Cope boosted kudzu on his daily radio show for Atlanta’s WCON, recorded from a rocking chair on his front porch, and in his newspaper column with the Atlanta Constitution. He showed government agents and foreign officials around his kudzu fields. He founded the Kudzu Club of America, which at one point encompassed more than 20,000 members; held an annual convention with “kudzu queen” pageants; and aimed to plant 8 million acres of kudzu across the South.

Cope spoke about the vine in revivalistic tones. “A strange ecstasy lifts Southern growers’ hearts and exalts their language when they get together to praise kudzu,” Cope said during an interview in Reader’s Digest in 1945. In his Constitution column, he called the plant “the Lord’s indulgent gift to Georgians” and said hundreds of thousands of acres awaited “the healing touch of the Miracle vine.” In The Farm Quarterly in 1949, Cope wrote, “The South believes the Almighty had its cottoned-out gullies and hillsides in mind when he designed the wonder crops, kudzu.”

Cope died in 1961, a modest celebrity in the South. You’ve probably heard the rest. Things got out of hand, and we fell out of love with kudzu. Old cars disappeared in ropy clouds of green. Barns were crumpled and trees uprooted beneath kudzu mats weighing hundreds or thousands of pounds. Monikers piled up: “the vine that ate the South,” “cuss-you,” “strangling vine,” “foot-a-night vine,” “mile-a-minute vine.”

Today, kudzu is an adversary of the Department of Agriculture and the governments of more than 30 states. It has trekked as far as Oregon. Researchers calculate it has cost the forestry industry alone hundreds of millions of dollars. If the vine has sunk its meaty tubers into your land, thoughts and prayers to you.

Kudzu’s tale is one of unintended consequences. Cope, like Hansen with his honeysuckle, clearly meant well. He knew of the vine’s penchant to transgress; in his 1949 book Front Porch Farmer, Cope said cultivating the vine was fighting “fire with fire.” He just believed we could contain the fire.

We couldn’t. The flames were fanned by what theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called “collective egoism”—the concept that sin not only infects us as individuals but also knocks the whole of society out of alignment. So even our best contributions to the world carry the potential, for reasons we don’t understand, to miss their mark and muck things up.

No obvious sin lurks behind the tragic story arc of many invasive species. Cogongrass, a razor-sharp grass in the Deep South that destroys every plant in its path and intensifies wildfires, debuted in Alabama in 1911 as packing material from Japan. What exactly is the lesson there?

Matthew Henry, the great English Presbyterian minister, saw a kind of Pandora’s box in non-native plants. Preaching at the outset of the 18th century, when gardening with alien plants was largely an aristocratic hobby, Henry seemed suspicious of the growing affection for exotics. He heard a warning in the prophet Isaiah’s singling out of Israel’s “imported vines” (17:10). “This was an instance of their pride and vanity,” Henry wrote in his influential Bible commentary. Their “ruining error” was “their affection to be like the nations,” he said. Not content with what they have, “they must have flowers and greens with strange names imported from other nations.”

As far as I know, the Bible doesn’t pooh-pooh botanical variety. Martin Luther famously wrote to a friend, in a letter now housed at a museum in Wittenberg, “Just get me even more seeds for my garden, if ever possible many different varieties.” But Henry’s concern was that coveting fruits beyond those God has already given us can reveal weediness in our own hearts. What might he have said to Cope?

The Kudzu King, as Cope was known, battled his own inner invasives. Records show his mother divorced his minister father when Cope was 13, alleging “cruel treatment.” At age 14, Cope was arrested for breaking into a safe at a Louisville library and stealing $125. (Yet only a year later, Cope, as a young Navy seaman, dove from a boat in Rhode Island to save a drowning man.)

Cope held onto scraps of his Baptist upbringing throughout his life; he wrote a Christmas column in 1947 declaring to Constitution readers that Jesus was the only leader in history who offered durable hope. Even so, in a 1949 Time magazine profile, Cope comes across as a glutton with a bourbon problem.

Some biographers have portrayed Cope as a vainglorious fool. Maybe he was. Or maybe we see what we want to see when we flatten people as if they were plants. Perhaps, more charitably, Cope simply over-relied on kudzu to cover the scars of his own struggles.

Cope’s tangled legacy highlights an insidious tendency of framing evils as invasive: We mythologize them. The internet buzzes with apocryphal claims about kudzu—that it covers millions of acres throughout the United States, that it’s devouring an additional 150,000 a year, that at night it carries away children sleeping beneath open windows. But the US Forest Service’s own data vary wildly. The vine covers 2 million acres, it says. Or maybe 7 million. It only spreads by 2,500 a year. Actually, it might be in retreat.

Bill Finch, an Alabama horticulturalist with newspaper columns and radio programs of his own, contends that “the vine that ate the South” in fact didn’t. He calls kudzu “the most silly plant hoax of the past century.” He took his case against the lore all the way to the pages of Smithsonian magazine. Finch even says kudzu is not that hard to kill. Just mow it regularly. Or buy a few goats.

Christians know better than to overlook evil, of course. Where there are weeds, they must be pulled. But dealing with sin does not require mythologizing it—the way Pat Buchanan characterized small towns as spotless and vice as a toxin sent by city folk. In fact, in the weed wars, sensationalizing often obscures the real problems.

Consider salt cedar, a feathery invasive bush from Eurasia that plagues the American West. It has been accused of guzzling water and draining desert water tables. Now, some invasion biologists challenge that claim as urban legend, saying it distracts from the true culprit: human overconsumption of water.

In the South in particular, kudzu is a favorite sermon illustration for sin. (You can Google it.) And in many ways, it’s apt: Sin is only countered with vigilance. Libertine ideas come to the church from “the world,” not from biblical exegesis. But the image has limits. Sin, like most invasives, is tracked in on the boots of churchgoers.

Invade is a personifying word. In its earliest Latin use, it implied hostility with agency. Invasion rankles when we apply it to, say, desperate immigrants—a mother cradling an ailing child certainly does not feel hostile. And invasion should grate when we apply it to sin, because sin has no agency of its own. For nearly two millennia, the church has taught that everything God made is good and that evil is not a force in itself but a corruption of the good.

We challenge the goodness of God’s creation—and perhaps deceive ourselves—when we begin to think of evil as if it were a foreign creature we can vanquish. We step into something like a zero-sum game: It’s us or the invaders.

That’s a game we cannot win. Armed with all the herbicides in the world—or all the prayer and resources and state power we can amass—we still won’t beat the briers. Spurgeon taught that the weeds will always be with us: “The world will always go on bringing forth thorns and thistles” until Christ comes. The tares growing up among the wheat, Jesus said in his parable, are ultimately for him to sort through and uproot at the end of the age (Matt. 13:40–41). It’s a remarkably liberating little story, when you ponder it: The only task given to the wheat, or “the people of the kingdom,” is to be wheat (v. 38).

Why bother fighting weeds then? Does Adam’s mandate to tend the earth still apply if humans aren’t really capable of putting it all to rights?

I put the question to Jim Varick, a retired botanist who lives on 60 wooded acres outside Cincinnati.

“I don’t pretend to know the answer to all of those things,” he told me. Jim and his wife, Julie, have been schlepping bags of invasive garlic mustard (courtesy Europe, 1868) and Japanese stilt grass (courtesy China, 1919) out of the forest for 20 years. “I need to do what he’s called me to do today. And I feel like he’s called me to restore his creation.”

They finished off their bush honeysuckle long ago. As if by magic, a carpet of wildflowers unfurled on the forest floor. “It’s a great feeling, conquering the woods,” Julie Varick said.

The Varicks harbor no illusions about saving the Midwest from invasives. They’re content to steward the small places God has given them, to create glimpses of what life may someday be without weeds. What if a child could sit on the ground and read Jesus’ words about the flowers of the field, then look up and see not woods choked by honeysuckle monoculture but actual flowers—and know that her Father cares for her?

The couple also helps lead a restoration effort on the 70-acre former golf course where their church put up a new building a while back. The congregation, Horizon Community Church, is eradicating invasive plants and rewilding what was once a sea of lifeless turf. They are partnering with Cincinnati Nature Center and organizing workdays and planting truckloads of native trees, shrubs, and grasses.

Jim said he imagines creation as a work of art brushed by the hand of God—balanced, with just the right colors and proportions of negative and positive space. But over the centuries, we spliced in exotic invasives that bled across that canvas like a wound.

“We’re going in there with this beautiful, moody Dutch master painting, and we’re saying, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be better if it had some bright cheery flowers over here and some happy trees over here?’ And now when we look at it, we’re not getting the message that God intended for that painting.” No one is trying to vandalize anything, Jim said, but “I feel like that has to grieve his heart, when he’s given us this beautiful thing and we, in our infinite wisdom, have decided, ‘That’s really a great start there. But we can do it much better.’ ”

There’s room for disagreement. Go ahead and plant that saw palmetto in your front yard in Massachusetts, if you’d like, even though it most definitely doesn’t belong there. It won’t spread.

Just exercise caution. After all, thinking we could do better than God is what got us booted from the Garden in the first place.

It’s also what led my neighbor to plant invasive English ivy beside her driveway. This summer, I’ll spend a few sweaty hours yanking strands that have crept into my yard—a liturgy, if you will, that calls me ever inward to manage the native sin of my own heart. Pro tip: Pull ivy when the soil is damp for a satisfying snap of the roots. Next year, they’ll be back.

Correction: An earlier version of this story gave the incorrect year that Charles Spurgeon preached a sermon on thorns and thistles. The sermon was published in 1893; the year he preached it is unknown.

Andy Olsen is senior features writer at Christianity Today.

- More from Andy Olsen

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