Dreaming Against the Machine

Sho Baraka

Technologies like AI privilege “growth” and “effectiveness” over imagination and inefficiency. God operates differently.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash, Getty

This piece was adapted from the Mosaic newsletter. Subscribe here.

Many years later, facing the machines, I remember that distant afternoon when I picked up the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. From the fantastic mind of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, it offers a cautionary tale for our time.

The enchanted city of Macondo, known for its alchemy, has created a candy that causes insomnia. At first, citizens are dismayed by their lack of rest. But eventually they realize that this pill allows them the capacity for endless work, and soon “no one worried any more about the useless habit of sleeping.”

Although the insomnia doesn’t produce tired bodies, it does produce tired minds, and the people have severe memory loss. They forget the names of household objects; they lose their ability to recognize faces and remember their pasts. In their quest for infinite achievement, the Macondians realize they’ve lost a major prerequisite for thriving—their ability to dream. (Without deep, dream-state sleep, according to some research studies, memories aren’t properly processed.)

The people also find sleeplessness strips them of their imaginations, essentially turning them into machines. Now their sole purpose is to work, producing more for the sake of more.

Here’s the cautionary tale: I think we’ve eaten the candy. We’ve stopped sleeping. We’ve lost our memory.

Today, as in the magical world of Márquez, our relentless focus on more abundance, more progress, and more efficiency at any cost leads us to a dehumanizing amnesia that forgets faces and ignores history.

Our conversion into machines might appear to be godly stewardship of our resources. But our devotion is really to another kingdom. Jesus proclaims in Matthew 6:24, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (KJV), an entity identified by scholars as money, wealth, or avarice. In his book The Life We’re Looking For, Christian thinker Andy Crouch describes Mammon as a force that wants to “separate power from relationship, abundance from dependence, and being from personhood.” We proclaim Mammon’s gospel of greed, admiring the naive influencers and billionaire feudal lords who offer it their loyalty.

These days, Mammon has a new guise in the form of artificial intelligence. Amazon, UPS, and Target are laying off tens of thousands of employees—at least in part because they’re seeking to automate more and more of their operations to make products and deliver packages faster. The billionaire Peter Thiel, a professing Christian, has toured the world warning people about a coming Antichrist who will arise to impede technological progress. In his thinking, growth alone is godly, and there’s no room for restraint.

Meanwhile, Christian organizations and preachers promote the use of AI-directed spiritual formation as a strategy for church growth. Some groups market AI that can help you read the Bible or pray. Recently an AI artist reached No. 1 on the Christian music charts. Is our worship an act that we can outsource for efficiency?

How we labor testifies to the type of God we believe in. In Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, villagers ask the prophet to teach them about the virtue of work. He responds, “Work is love made visible”—not simply a means of production, as “machinist” theory would have you believe, but a spiritual discipline that reflects the character of God.

Mechanization makes this “visible love” irrelevant. Love is for humans. Machines are for efficiency, profit, and progress. They are not relational. They are tools used as a means to achieve a calculated end. The human end is different—to know God and love others.

When we become machines, we lose the memory of a heavenly love that operates outside our cost-benefit analysis. Jesus became flesh, was born of a virgin, and died an agonizing death on the cross. This was hardly productive by our mechanistic reckoning.

Indeed, Jesus disrupts efficiency in many of his interactions. Casting demons into swine disrupted a business for a pig herder but liberated a neighbor. The wealthy young ruler is surprisingly told to forsake his “productive” life and give his riches to the poor. Despite Judas’s complaint that the anointing oil could have been sold to feed the poor, Jesus blesses the improvisation of his devoted follower. Philosopher Jacques Ellul would call these human acts of apparently wasteful benevolence “an introduction of the useless” into the world of efficiency. But machines have no positive vision other than utility. The language they speak is profit.

Woe to the church that loses its ability to dream of another kind of world, the church programmed to consider only growth and effectiveness. And blessed be the church that, unimpressed by Mammon’s magnetic force, corrects the greed of Acts 6 and practices the radical solidarity of Acts 4. In these churches, pastors and influencers might not conjure so much content or curriculum—but they will remember what it means to move at the speed of humanity, which allows for error and rest.

Some predict the AI revolution will lead to fewer work hours or a significant depletion of the workforce altogether. But in the 19th century, as industrialism boomed, not many would have expected that they would exchange their agrarian pace not for more leisure but for more dangerous, dehumanizing hours in factories. The ramifications of technology aren’t as predictable as the machines we make. We’ve already forgotten that too.

The theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote that dreaming is deep spiritual work, “rooted in energizing memories and summoned by radical hopes.” When we dream, our minds take the raw materials of experience or history and imagine something new.

Enslaved people dreamed as a revolutionary act against being made machines. So did abolitionists. They called on the stories of Scripture and what God had already done to ground an eschatological hope that defied their current circumstances. The dreaming of Martin Luther King Jr. energized a movement that Mammon had codified into discriminatory laws. In every case, imagination allowed for defiant joy. The marginalized could sleep in the peace of knowing a new tomorrow was possible.

In the Old Testament, once Joseph receives his dream, neither distractions nor detractors can keep him from the pursuit of the prophetic imagination God has deposited within him. Climbing in social status, he still has the discipline to deny himself what belongs to others. Imprisoned, he finds time to serve. Possessing great power, he doesn’t return evil for evil. Dreams are borrowed visions from God given to us to bless others.

Not all dreams are so noble. Outside the church, contemporary sorcerers strive toward a singularity where the useless habit of sleep no longer holds us back and in which suffering and death will be no more. We battle the principalities of a modern Docetism that attempts to liberate the mind (and soul) from the body. Thiel has funded multiple startups practicing eugenics in the form of gene manipulation. It seems that when billionaires aren’t attempting to liberate themselves from flesh and blood, they’re developing technology that strives to create a superior race.

But we’ve seen this before. Satan sold us the same goods in the garden. The plot unravels on humanity when we attempt to strip God of his authority. Creating a world of convenience in our own image, we actually produce suffering and exploitation.

I am mindful that machinery has created better conditions for much of humanity—transportation, medical services, the technology that allows me to type this very article. But moderation still matters. Abundance theories lead us to believe contentment is naive and regulation is archaic. It is the insatiable appetite of man that leads us to a greed where “desire outstrips need,” as pastor and historian Malcolm Foley candidly puts it. Rather than trusting God with the increase as we slumber, we stay up late with a scarcity mindset, telling ourselves that without more we will have nothing and will be nothing.

God’s grace and love are without limit, but our earthly resources and human capacity are not. “Rest is the glad contemplation of work well done,” said thinker Andy Crouch in a recent talk. And rest is not only for the cultivator but also for the land (Lev. 25). Isaiah 5:8 offers a warning to those who “add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.” The machine’s program is a colonizing spirit—when there is undeveloped land and vacant time, there is only opportunity for occupation.

Jesus, by contrast, lived an unpredictable life that allowed for improvisation, rest, and disruption. He had time for the outcast and the afflicted. He had time for intentional leisure with his disciples.

The command to rest is closely related to Jesus’ warning: We can’t serve two masters. We must reject the false gods and toss the ideological spoils lest we become like Achan, hiding trinkets that will lead to our destruction.

Dreaming in our age of machines will alleviate the insomnia mixed up by the crafty sorcerers of our day—the tech tycoons, AI evangelists, and work-worshiping Christians. They promise a paradise. They blaze a trail toward more and more and more. But ultimately, all we’ll have is the unsatisfying taste of production on our tongues, muted memories, and a trail of faceless humans in our wake.

Sho Baraka is editorial director of Big Tent for Christianity Today.

News

Church Provides Shelter, Aid During Bondi Beach Attack

Amy Lewis

Australian Christians are finding ways to support the Jewish community after an ISIS-motivated shooting killed 15.

A Hanukkah menorah is projected onto the sails of the Sydney Opera House in memory of the victims of the shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney on December 15, 2025.

David Gray / AFP / Getty

It was just after 6:30 p.m. on Sunday when pastor Martin Morgan and about 20 volunteers returned to Bondi Beach Church, a block away from Sydney’s famed Bondi Beach. They had been delivering boxes of food to families going through difficulties. Once they arrived inside, they gathered to pray before chatting about the visits and that evening’s sermon.

Suddenly, Morgan heard pops that sounded like firecrackers or fireworks. A few seconds later, they saw a woman in formalwear carrying her shoes as she ran past their door. She was the first of a wave of at least 50 people in a variety of beachwear running in the same direction, crying.

Most of them passed the Anglican church’s front door on Wairoa Avenue, but some yelled, “Get inside! Get inside! There’s someone with a gun!” before ducking into the building. Morgan and his team welcomed people into their church, locked the door, and began to pray for people who may have been hurt. The gunshots continued.

Then they heard helicopters and the sirens of emergency vehicles. The people sheltered in his church described seeing people bleeding and others lying face-down on the asphalt.

A hundred yards away from the church, Naveed Akram, 24, and his father, Sajid, 50, stood on a pedestrian bridge and opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration taking place at Bondi Beach, organized by the synagogue Chabad of Bondi to commemorate the first day of the Jewish holiday. Their social media post advertised jelly-filled donuts, a petting zoo, live entertainment, and the lighting of the first candle of a giant menorah.

The event’s location near a playground made the festival easy for hundreds of people to find. It also made them an easy target for Akram and his father, who had a recreational firearms license and owned six rifles. The pair used pump- and bolt-action rifles to shoot into the crowds of people on the half-mile crescent of beach.

One bystander, Ahmed al-Ahmed, snuck up behind Sajid Akram, tackled him, and disarmed him. Al-Ahmed held Akram at bay before leaning the gun against a tree to show police he wasn’t one of the attackers. He was among the nearly 40 people wounded.

The Akrams killed 15 people, including 41-year-old Chabad rabbi Eli Schlanger; a 10-year-old girl named Matilda; an 82-year-old Slovak citizen named Marika Pogány who delivered more than 12,000 Meals on Wheels over the course of a decade; and 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman, who shielded his wife, Larisa, from the bullets.

Police shot and killed Sajid and wounded and detained Naveed. They found two rudimentary improvised explosive devices and two homemade Islamic State flags in the pair’s car at the scene. By 10 p.m., the prime minister declared the shooting an antisemitic terrorist attack. An Australian counterterrorism official believes the Akrams received training last month while visiting an island in the Philippines known for being a hotbed of extremism.

In the aftermath of Australia’s worst mass shooting since 1996, churches in the area are holding vigils and services while providing counseling and practical assistance to the Jewish community, bystanders, and neighbors. Christians are seeking to stand with the Jewish community as antisemitism rises in Australia.

Morgan, who mentioned his church also provided aid after a stabbing attack last year at the Bondi Junction Westfield mall, noted that caring for those affected by such an violent and traumatic event is a long-term commitment.

“In the end … the message of the gospel and the hope that Jesus offers is of great practical help,” Morgan said.

As those sheltering in Bondi Beach Church Sunday night scanned their social media feeds to stay updated on what was happening, Morgan and his church members also started praying for the dying and wounded. When they heard police had neutralized the shooters, they walked out to the street and began to direct traffic away from the beach and talk with neighbors.

Several of Morgan’s church members had joined the Hannukah celebration on the beach after the 5 p.m. church service. They were unharmed and comforted those who had been shot. The church building was open until midnight, serving coffee and tea and allowing people to gather, pray, cry, and process the attack. Morgan made sure the church remained open the next day as well.

On Monday evening, Morgan and assistant minister Matt Graham held their scheduled Nine Lessons and Carols service at St. Mary’s Anglican less than two miles away. They modified the service to include “a time of somber remembrance for the victims and prayers for those who’ve been affected, and that the Lord and the Prince of Peace would show how that peace works in the context of this sort of violence,” Morgan said. The service ended with a candlelit vigil.

For many in the Jewish community, the tragedy of the shooting is magnified by the fact that as antisemitism in Australia has grown since the Israel-Hamas War began, an attack felt inevitable. “Jewish friends of mine have been expecting something like this,” Morgan said. “They said, ‘It’s going to happen. It’s not a matter of if it happens, but when.’ They’ve been on tenterhooks.”

The day after the shootings, Ben Pakula, a Messianic Jew and assistant minister at Grace Anglican church in Sydney, told Dominic Steele on The Pastor’s Heart podcast, “To be honest, I find it difficult to know how to respond. There’s an element of shock when you hear something like this, but I’m not surprised, I’m very sad to say.”

The country’s 117,000 Jews are concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne. Synagogues and organizers of Jewish events in Sydney’s eastern suburbs have expanded security since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel as antisemitic acts in Australia increased fourfold.

On October 9, 2023, government officials lit the sails of the iconic Sydney Opera House blue and white to mourn the victims in Israel. But when they learned of an unauthorized pro-Palestinian protest on the theater’s steps, they told Jews to stay home. Since then, graffiti targeting Jews has been sprayed on businesses and homes. Arsonists have burned a Melbourne synagogue, a Jewish childcare center, the cars of Jewish people, and their businesses.

“Once again since the Hamas pogrom of October 7, 2023, the Jewish people throughout the world are under violent attack,” rabbi Yehiel E. Poupko, rabbinic scholar at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, told CT. “This time darkness has come to the House of Israel in Australia during the celebration of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights. When will it stop?”

In North Sydney on Sunday night, Jews for Jesus missionary Alexander Adelson had invited a few friends and families to his home to celebrate the beginning of Hanukkah. Adelson, who had moved to Australia from Israel, said his phone often buzzed with news notifications about attacks in the cities where his Israeli friends and family lived. Since moving to Australia, Adelson has turned off most of these, so that night it was one of his visitors who saw news of the Bondi Beach attack and told him.

“You think immediately of the people you should call to check on them, pray for them,” Adelson said, noting the similarity of his response to when he hears of bombing in Israel. Because the Jewish community is relatively small in Sydney, when a name comes up in the media, he thinks, Hey, I know that guy. What happened to him? What happened to his wife?

He admits that he sometimes feels helpless: “Because I cannot do much, it is much more powerful to pray for those people who potentially could be there and immediately to contact them.”

Morgan and Bondi Beach Church are looking for ways, no matter how small, they can help in the aftermath of the tragedy. The congregation is delivering boxes of food and toys to neighbors, many affected by their proximity to the attack.

One man who sheltered at the church was unable to reach his car as it was stuck in the crime scene, so a congregant drove him home to the other side of Sydney. Other church members also provided rides to bystanders. Meanwhile, Anglicare Australia, which is associated with the Anglican denomination, set up a counseling hotline.

“When a violent thing like this happens, which is so in-your-face violence and evil, that tension is going to take time and very special care,” Morgan said. “So we’re praying that God gives us wisdom to respond.”

This week, Morgan and leaders from different churches and denominations met to discuss the needs of the community in the aftermath of the Bondi Beach attack.

“The churches of the eastern suburbs are uniting rather than working in our own little separate silos,” Morgan said. “So we pray that we have the wisdom to take the next step in a way which actually increases that connectedness within the Christian community but also with the synagogues in the area.”

Adelson recommends Australian Christians reach out to the local Jewish community in tangible ways.

“Use your voice,” he said. “Bring them a flower. Bring them a postcard. Say something, that you are standing with them, because this is what makes the change in people’s mind and people’s understanding that we are not alone.”

Adelson has been inundated with phone calls and emails from people in Israel, the US, and Australia saying they are praying for the Jewish community.

“But it’s not only a small group of Jews for Jesus or a hundred Messianic Jews,” he said. “It’s thousands and dozens of thousands of believers around the globe who stand with them and are saying, ‘Never again. It shouldn’t happen, and we are here to support you.’”

Ultimately, Adelson says, there’s an opportunity to share the hope of Jesus at the right time. “We never forget about the comfort that we are hoping to share with them, and this comfort can come only through one source—through Yeshua, from him, from God.”

- More from Amy Lewis

News

How Rhode Island Churches Responded to the Brown Shooting

Harvest Prude and Kara Bettis Carvalho in Providence, Rhode Island

God “draws near to us in our suffering,” local pastor Scott Axtmann preached after Saturday’s deadly attack. Area ministries were active too.

Photo by Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Brown graduate student Maddy Wachsmuth’s first notice of an active shooter on campus came from a GroupMe chat with other Christians. Even before students received official alerts, texts streamed in: “Urgent. Take cover. This is not a joke,” she described.

“It was scary getting messages the whole time,” she told CT. Some updates came from a student barricaded in a classroom. Wachsmuth prayed as she monitored the chat of nearly 300 Christian students and alumni. Later, students gathered at campus ministry leaders’ homes to pray, cry, and eventually eat takeout.

Three days after the shooting, the campus is much emptier between canceled finals, winter break, and a gunman still at large. But faith leaders, pastors, and Brown spiritual faculty are showing up, providing care for those who’ve remained after the attack that claimed the lives of two students and injured nine others.

On Monday, near the shooting’s site, a sign attracted passing students: “Do you need a hug? Prayer? Coffee, a snack? To talk to a trauma pastor or therapist? Place to stay? A ride to the airport? Or anything else? Let us know!”

For hours, therapists, pastors, and other Christians prayed with students and handed out hot drinks. Over the weekend, nearby Sanctuary Church put together 100 care packages for social workers and frontline responders. “Christians [shouldn’t] run from a crisis. They run into it,” said Andrew Mook, pastor of Sanctuary. “[We’re] trying to embody that as much as we can.”

When Mook heard about the active-shooter situation unfolding, his thoughts flew to the dozens of Sanctuary members who might be in harm’s way. Over the next 15 hours, he and other church members reached out to as many of the students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty, and staff they knew. They set up a virtual prayer room and conversed there all night.

Mook learned later that the shooting left one of Sanctuary’s student attendees in critical condition. Another had a close escape from the lecture hall targeted by the gunman. Students spent the night in lockdown in dormitories or barricaded in university buildings. On Sunday, Sanctuary held a service after consulting with the mayor’s office. After the message, one Brown student shared her harrowing experience with the congregation.

Other local ministries have also been busy responding. “Just about everyone knows someone directly connected to those who were in the classroom when the shooter arrived,” said Jarrod Lynn, a chaplain at Brown with Athletes in Action, a campus ministry focused on student athletes. “The sadness [and] weight of it all is slowly starting to settle in,” he said.

Christian Union, a campus ministry that serves Ivy League schools, routinely hosts events and makes its ministry center a place students can grab a nap, a snack, and a listening ear. Both murdered students had visited, and one, sophomore Ella Cook, was also a member of Christian Union.

Cook “exuded Christ,” said Kimani Smith, a multisite ministry director with Christian Union. “She was someone who was a sincere believer, and her walk showed it.” The pastor of Cook’s home church, an Episcopal congregation in Birmingham, described her as “incredibly grounded and generous and faithful” and “a bright light.”

Recently, Cook had also started volunteering at a nearby crisis pregnancy center, according to Jared Cowgur, the lead pastor at BridgePointe Church, which partners with the center. “The tragedy hits close to home,” he said. “The staff at that ministry are understandably shaken.”

The other student killed was freshman Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a scholarship recipient and naturalized citizen from Uzbekistan. Umurzokov was Muslim, Smith told CT, but “he was open to hearing about Christ.” Their encounters, preserved in snapshots in Smith’s camera roll, now strike him as a “divine moment of God allowing us to be a witness.”

Pastor Jacob Van Sickle of Sacred City Church learned about the shooting through a text from a Brown student while at his church’s annual Christmas party in downtown Providence. The party turned into a prayer vigil.

Around 10 to 20 percent of local churches’ populations are college students, most from Brown, Van Sickle estimated, and Cook had visited his church several times. That heartbreaking recognition “brought it closer to home,” he said. “Our students will be mourning in a different way.”

Lead pastor Scott Axtmann at Renaissance Church in the Riverside neighborhood is still hearing from members who had to shelter in place, were in the building just minutes prior to the shooting, or personally knew the victims. On Sunday, he went ahead with his prepared message, which focused on how Christ suffers alongside humanity.

“He understands. He sympathizes. He suffers with us in our pain,” Axtmann preached. “It’s easy to feel alone in our pain, but the truth is that we are not alone. God is with us. … He draws near to us in our suffering.”

Though the shooter was still at large and she was running on little sleep, Brown student Wachsmuth felt compelled to go to Sanctuary as usual on Sunday. “It’s weird that we’re in this season of Advent,” she said, “longing for the New Jerusalem and longing for every tear to be wiped away. We’re feeling that even more.”

Books

Review

Union With Christ Means A Responsible Life

Christa McKirland

Theologian Kelly Kapic’s new book Christian Life is a corrective to anxious faith.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Zondervan Academic

At a time when the word Christian has become a political football thrown about to gain favor and garner power, theologian Kelly Kapic provides a winsome corrective that I believe all Christians, especially American evangelicals, need to hear. In his new book Christian Life, he says the Christian life is “a response to the love of God.” Sounds simple, right? Yet simple is not simplistic.

God’s love is cosmic. It is also richly triune. Kapic writes, “We experience the life-giving power of the Spirit who unites us to the crucified and risen Savior as we learn to rest in the deep love of the Father.” Since the triune God is eternally self-giving, the human response to this love will likewise be the same. Union with the triune God requires a response of self-giving love for others. This is Christian life.

Kapic echoes what recent biblical scholars, such as John Barclay and Teresa McCaskill, and theologians, such as Tom McCall and Willie Jennings, have argued: God’s grace is unconditioned (you cannot earn it), but it is not unconditional (God still expects a response—he wants a relationship). In Kapic’s words, “While God does not need our obedience in order to love us, we who are made alive in Christ are called to participate actively in the Spirit’s work in and through the body of Christ.”

While many American evangelicals reductively equate Christian belief with assent to a set of doctrines in order to “not go to hell,” this is a far cry from the fullness of Christian life. As Kapic argues, truths about the Father, Son, and Spirit are meant to shape the Christian life, a life growing out of union to Christ, a life that fosters gratitude and responsive love.

If Christian faith is more than doctrinal assent but proceeds from union with Christ and reveals itself through self-sacrificing love, this has implications for how we view discomfort, inconvenience, and suffering.

For instance, in Hannah Nation’s research, believers within the Chinese house church understand unity with Christ to necessitate suffering with Christ. The logic goes like this: Since the servant is not above the master (John 15:20) and because the master suffered, those united to the master will suffer. In a 2025 paper Nation presented at the Evangelical Theological Society, she called such a union “the backbone of public witness” for these Chinese believers. This lived theology does not glorify suffering, but it expects that a broken world will reject a crucified king and those unified with him. The Christian life, then, does not equate material abundance, health, and safety with God’s blessing.

Kapic’s book, like Nation’s work, provides the theological legs on which the Christian life stands. If we are united with Christ’s life by the power of the Holy Spirit, we will embody love—love of neighbor, love of enemy, love of creation, and even love of self. Such self-love, when mediated through this union, means we love ourselves through the Son’s love. Kapic explains, “When we turn from Christ to the ego [self], if we are speaking of Christian life, we are not, in fact, turning from Christ at all.”

Instead, we are relationally constituted; I am now in Christ. Therefore, I am able to more fully love myself since this self-love comes from Christ’s love of me. We can love fully because we have been fully loved. The Christian life is secure because its identity and value come from Christ, so we can run toward others rather than away from them.

Kapic reminds the church that our love proceeds from God’s love. But what is equally important is the way he offers this corrective. He models a winsome charity without falling for extremes. For instance, he neither elevates subjective, personal experience over God’s character nor elevates the objective reality of God in a way that becomes impersonal.

Many evangelical Christians either view personal experience suspiciously or see it as the sole determinant of a Christian life. Kapic presents a mediating position, valuing personal experience while not making it the sole determiner of a person’s faith. He writes that the more we can understand who God is and what he has done for us, the more we will be compelled to live with radical love toward God and others.

Richly experiencing a loving God draws us to worship. The more I read and reflected on the triune God’s immense love and goodness (an objective reality), the more my awe and love for God increased (subjective feelings). I found Christian Life shaping me more into the image of the Son. We are drawn into the life of love of the triune God. The incarnate Son is a human who has fully received the love of the Father and is also God our Savior, expressing the perfect love of the Father on our behalf. By the Spirit of Christ, we can receive the love of the Father and then love others.

Kapic’s book concludes by focusing on the body of Christ, the church, as one of the primary contexts in which Christians learn to love others. While, for many, the reputation of the church has fallen, it is nevertheless vital. We are united to Christ, so we are also united to one another. Our union with Christ matures in the context of the church. When we gather, we participate in Christ’s own threefold ministry: “He as our great Priest, King, and Prophet not only receives our worship but is also the leader of our prayers, laments, and corporate worship.”

As Kapic emphasizes, Jesus is not only the one we worship but also, mysteriously, the leader of our worship. Our union to Christ therefore connects us vertically to the triune God and horizontally to our spiritual siblings. Thus, just as a life of responsive gratitude is nonnegotiable for Christian life, so is participation in the corporate body of Christ.

This understanding of the church as the context of our joint formation pushes against individualism. It recognizes the unifying work of the Spirit, who gives gifts to each member (1 Cor. 12:11) and keeps Jesus central. Kapic emphasizes how the church, especially through local, corporate worship, is meant to shape our Christian lives.

Sunday liturgies ought to foster our communion with God and each other and have a demonstrable effect in our lives. Kapic notes, “If you want to know what people really believe or trust, observe their lives, actions, instincts, and intuitions; pay special attention to their checkbooks and day planners.”

Ultimately, Christian Life is about God’s agency and our response. Kapic draws the life-giving water of Christ from a deep well of theological tradition. Pay heed as he unpacks dense language and concepts. Theology isn’t just for experts. It is crucial to our daily lives, for understanding our identity and place in the world. To know who we are and how to live, we need deep theology, and Kapic draws up the bucket and hands readers a cup.

May Kapic’s Christian Life make readers long for more of Christ’s life-giving water, and may that change us to live out the self-giving life in grateful response to our union with the triune God.

Christa McKirland is dean of faculty and lecturer in systematic theology at Carey Baptist College in New Zealand. Her books include A Theology of Authority: Rethinking Leadership in the Church and God’s Provision, Humanity’s Need: The Gift of our Dependence.

- More from Christa McKirland

Theology

In Bethlehem, God Chose What Is Weak to Shame the Strong

Brad East

What is true of Good Friday applies to Christmas too.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

At Christmas, incarnation and revelation go hand in hand. God becomes flesh, and God grants us knowledge of himself. In Bethlehem, the immortal Creator of all is manifest in a mortal creature. The Lord shows himself forth in all his works, but in the incarnation, we see the nature and perfection of the one true God with maximal clarity and beauty (Heb. 1:1–4).

To be sure, the Incarnation isn’t limited to Christmas. It begins in the womb of Mary, continues throughout the whole earthly life of Jesus, and reaches its climax at the cross and empty tomb. Even now the risen and ascended Jesus remains incarnate, since he did not slough off his humanity when the Father raised him up to heaven to sit at his right hand. In point of fact, the Lord Jesus will remain human into all eternity. In this lies our hope, for “when Christ appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). He is the one truly human being who ever lived. Jesus is our brother forever.

Yet for all this, Christmas is the proper moment to dwell on the Incarnation, because the birth of Jesus is God’s own entrance into the world—his transition from hiddenness to openness, from invisibility to visibility, from silence to speech. When the baby cries, God’s Word is with us, a voluble Immanuel in the form of a speechless newborn.

What sign is this? What does it mean that God became an infant? The claim is so preposterous—yet so marvelous—that even with the best of intentions our attempts to understand it go astray.

One danger is to reverse the terms of God’s humanization by anthropomorphizing God. He’s just like us, we muse. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth coined the phrase “the humanity of God,” and although he did not mean it this way, it can suggest a version of the Christmas gospel that brings heaven to earth in exactly the wrong manner: projecting onto God whatever we think is best about us humans.

If incarnation is about revelation, though, we have to let God tell us about himself, not the other way around. We don’t know God before he introduces himself; we can’t speak on his behalf. And his speech, always and everywhere, is Jesus (John 1:1–18). When we turn the page to Bethlehem, the Lord speaks loud enough for the whole world to hear.

This is why it is fitting to include the Magi in our celebration of the Nativity, even though they were there not on the night of the birth but later, when Jesus was a toddler (Matt. 2:16). The Magi represent Gentiles. They anticipate the coming of all nations to the Lord of Israel, bending the knee and paying homage to the one God and Creator of all (Zech. 8:20–23). “Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God” (Rom. 3:29–30).

Another wrong turn comes when we sentimentalize Christmas. I’ll admit that this is next to inevitable, given the mother and baby at its center, but we can at least be aware of the temptation. And it’s worth avoiding for a simple reason: Jesus Christ was born to die. In this he is unlike the rest of us, however brief or painful our lives may be. The Lord was always bound for the Cross, for the anguish of the Passion and the blood-mingled tears of Gethsemane. He was always going to be abandoned, denied, and betrayed by his friends. Whatever else we say of him—hymning him in his peaceful sleep, imagining him nursing at Mary’s breast, admiring the family crèche—we must not forget this.

Finally, while we are right to see humility at Christmas, the question is: What does it mean to call God humble? To be humble is to be lowly, and God is not lowly in himself. Rather, he becomes lowly for our sake. Nor is God weak, though he assumes our weakness to grant us his strength. Nor still is the humility of Bethlehem imposed upon God, as if it manifested an incapacity or lack.

No, the humility revealed at Christmas is the willingness of God, in his infinite love for sinners, to stoop down to our level, regardless of worldly appearances, regardless of the consequences for himself. In this sense we might apply the beloved line from Hebrews 12:2—that Jesus scorned the shame of the cross—to the manger as well. To be found a weakling in a bed of straw is, from the vantage of the powerful, nothing if not shameful. But the Lord scorns the infamy of the high and mighty to join himself to the low and weakly.

As Paul writes, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor. 1:27–29, ESV). Paul is speaking about the “foolishness” of the Cross (vv. 18–25), but what is true of Good Friday applies to Christmas too.

For this reason, it’s worth stepping back from Joseph and Mary and the shepherds to ask what else the manger reveals of God, especially those things that might not seem obvious from first glance at a baby boy placed among farm animals. I’m thinking in particular of what theologians call the attributes of God: omnipotence, omniscience, and so on. These are what it means for God to be God, characteristics that define God as Creator in distinction from us creatures. They’re true of him in a way that could not be true of anyone or anything else.

Christmas sets God’s attributes in relief in beautiful and unexpected ways. For instance, think again of humility. There is nothing surprising in the weakness of a baby. All newborns are utterly dependent on their mothers for life and sustenance. What is surprising, then, is what the gospel adds to this: namely, the child in Mary’s arms is one and the same as the God who created her and even now sustains her in existence. The nursing babe is none other than he in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:17) and apart from whom nothing has been made (John 1:3).

Only a God with whom all things are possible (Matt. 19:26) can become incarnate in the form of an infant. The old hymn is therefore right to say, “Jesus, Lord, at thy birth!” For God’s “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). When we peer into the manger and glimpse the Christ child, we need double vision. We are seeing weakness, yes, but also the matchless might that made the universe.

Then there’s God’s transcendence. Children sometimes imagine a physical deity who lives in the sky but leaves for a while to come to earth—the way a president might leave the capitol to go abroad for a time—then returns to the heavens, resuming a throne left temporarily empty.

Transcendence describes God’s utter difference from created existence and thus his remove from any and all limitations we take for granted. God shows himself transcendent at Christmas by remaining God even as he takes on our nature. As the church fathers liked to put it, in becoming human, the Lord assumed what he was not while remaining what he was. Jesus isn’t either divine or human. He isn’t a hybrid or a half god, like Hercules, or a “semi-demi-mini-god,” like Disney’s Maui. He’s fully divine and fully human, all that it means to be God and all that it means to be human—and yet a single person, undivided.

He is this, he can do this, because he transcends us. Being absolutely transcendent, he can be absolutely immanent, or near, to us. The one entails the other. In the words of Saint Augustine, God is “more inward than my most inward part and higher than the highest element within me.” If he were otherwise, he would be limited in some way and thus unable to be both our Savior and our brother, both our Lord and our friend, both our judge and our pardon.

In short, Christmas reveals God to be wholly unlike the gods of the nations, beyond myths and legends and idols of every kind. Only the God besides whom there is no other (Isa. 45:5) can become one of us without ceasing to be himself—without leaving heaven vacant. The Lord who sits on the throne also sleeps in Bethlehem. This is the mystery of the Incarnation.

The final attribute I want to lift up is wisdom. Wisdom is another word for God’s knowledge, or omniscience. God possesses complete understanding of everything. He teaches but is not taught. His knowledge, like his power, is limited by nothing and lacks nothing.

That knowledge is not like a computer—or perhaps an AI chatbot, minus the errors and hallucinations. God is not ChatGPT scaled up to have every answer to everything. His knowledge is his wisdom, and his wisdom comprehends far more than a flawless record on trivia night.

Spoken of God, wisdom means something like the skill of an artist applied not only to the mind but also to actions, plans, and purposes. It means that God always does the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, for the right reason. His actions, in other words, are virtuous; he acts with righteousness without exception.

But he also acts beautifully. God’s wisdom is the movement in the symphony that makes it a masterpiece, the turn in the plot that makes you catch your breath, the unexpected move that in retrospect couldn’t have happened any other way. It’s so apt to the moment, so fitting to the need, that it’s obvious after the fact but couldn’t have been guessed in advance. It’s the father running to embrace the prodigal (Luke 15:20), the Samaritan stopping to help the man by the side of the road (10:33–34), the assumption of Mary that the risen Lord was a gardener (John 20:15).

And God’s wisdom is Christ himself, born in Bethlehem to a virgin from Nazareth. It’s Mary, the last in a line of Israel’s miraculous mothers, from Sarah and Rachel to Ruth and Hannah. It’s Joseph, who like his namesake brings his family down to Egypt for protection. It’s Herod, another Pharaoh intent on preserving his tyranny from the threat of Hebrew boys. It’s angels and animals, fellow creatures from Genesis’ opening chapter who greet the birth of their Creator in a stable. It’s shepherds, who marvel at the pronouncement that Israel’s royal shepherd has finally come.

All these and more fill the divine artist’s canvas, revealing the master storyteller in his incomparable wisdom. Every detail is in its place. Everything in the narrative was preparing for this. And now that we see it, we cannot help but step back in awe and wonder at our God. The Lord is great and greatly to be praised (Ps. 145:3). He has drawn near to his people in their need. With the “multitude of the heavenly host” (Luke 2:13, ESV), the only thing left to do is worship.

- More from Brad East

News

Religion on Egyptian Citizens’ ID Cards Enables Christian Persecution

Jill Nelson in Egypt

The requirement makes it difficult for religious minorities to get jobs, justice, and opportunities. Advocates are pushing for change.

Coptic Christians in Egypt tattoo crosses on their right wrists as a symbol of their faith.

Roger Anis / Stringer / Getty

On a September afternoon in an Egyptian city, cars and donkey carts navigate around pedestrians crossing the streets. Locals purchase cuts of meat from a carcass hanging by the road as a dog jumps on top of a parked car for a better view.

A quiet apartment on an adjacent side street provides a reprieve from the daily commotion. It also offers sanctuary for local Christians facing religious-based threats and violence. The apartment is among 20 safe houses Help for the Persecuted operates across the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Inside, Amira Butros shares over a glass of soda why she fled her home. Christianity Today agreed not to use the real names or locations of Butros and three other Egyptian Christians due to ongoing safety concerns.

Butros previously lived in a spacious two-floor apartment where members of the growing Sudanese refugee community gathered. She hosted a house church, provided English classes, and distributed blankets and other supplies. In early September, her Muslim neighbor broke into her home and physically assaulted her, her mother, and several of the visiting Sudanese, Butros said. Then the man alerted other neighbors and accused Butros of converting Muslims to Christianity.

Local authorities refused to file her complaint because she was a Christian, Butros said. She no longer felt safe in her apartment and contacted Help for the Persecuted to secure temporary lodging. She put her ministry work on hold.

Although Egypt’s Constitution protects religious freedom and criminalizes discrimination, the government seldom investigates acts of violence against Christians. Additional laws strictly limit freedom for religious minorities, creating a system of contradictions.

Religious freedom advocates around the world are urging Cairo to do better. Groups want the Egyptian government to remove individuals’ religions from their ID cards to prevent discrimination.

“We need to create a social movement that will bring greater freedom and religious liberty to the region,” said Shirin Taber, executive director of the US-based Empower Women Media (EWM), which mobilizes religious freedom advocates in the Middle East and Pakistan. “We feel that addressing things like the identity card—but also supporting businesses, artists, athletes, creatives, and content creators—will help advance the movement in the region.”

Egypt’s Christians number more than 10 million—at least 10 percent of the country’s 111 million people—making it the largest Christian community in the Middle East and North Africa. Over 90 percent of the Christian population is Coptic Orthodox, but the government also targets Protestants.

In October, a large Muslim mob attacked a Coptic Christian community in the Upper Egyptian town of Minya. Rumors of an 18-year-old Christian man dating a Muslim woman sparked the violence and led to the expulsion of the Christian family from the village.

Only weeks earlier, US representatives French Hill and Thomas Suozzi introduced a resolution asking the Egyptian government to grant Coptic Christians equal rights and prosecute those who commit crimes against Christians. “As the largest Christian community in the Middle East, the Copts have long endured systemic injustice,” Suozzi noted in a press release.

An Egyptian Christian ministry leader said converts to Christianity face some of the most significant challenges, and local authorities at times enable or encourage the persecution.

For instance, in 2021, Egyptian authorities jailed Abdulbaqi Saeed Abdo, originally from Yemen, for sharing his testimony on a Christian TV channel and participating in a social media group for Muslim-background believers. Authorities released him earlier this year after an international campaign. Now he and his family live in Canada.

When police discover that a member of a Muslim family is attending church, they ask the family and neighbors to pressure the new convert, the ministry leader said. The convert is often forced into hiding.

He added that church leaders can openly preach the gospel inside the church, but it’s illegal to proselytize or hold Christian events outside church grounds. It’s also illegal to change someone’s designated religion on a national ID card from Muslim to any other faith. Converts to Islam face no challenges making a change.

An Egyptian Christian businessman said authorities sometimes check ID cards at Christian conferences and prevent Muslim-background believers from entering due to their stated religion. “If we remove this from ID cards, it will give better opportunities for businesspeople, better opportunities for people to choose their faith, better opportunities for people to live their lives,” he said.

EWM recently launched a campaign to equip Egyptian leaders to advocate for changes to the country’s ID-card legislation. The organization released a report and video explaining the need for the initiative.

Every Egyptian over the age of 16 is required to have a national ID with one of the three recognized religions on it: Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. The card is necessary for many aspects of life, including enrolling in university, getting a job, traveling, and opening a bank account. In 2008, the government granted members of the Baha’i faith permission to leave the religion field empty on their ID cards.

Taber believes Christians and other religious minorities would experience greater freedom if the government lifted the ID-card requirement. “You’ll have a better chance of getting that job, getting enrolled in university, and your child being able to play on the soccer team,” she noted. “Women, youth, and minorities are discriminated against the most.”

Another Egyptian Christian expressed skepticism about the initiative. He doesn’t believe it will bring much benefit because “Egyptian society is highly interconnected” and names often reveal religious affiliation. Christians typically choose biblical names while Muslims draw names from Islamic tradition. Some names overlap.

Other Egyptians, including Sherif Azer, the director of programs at the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, are more optimistic about the initiative’s potential impact. In a September policy brief addressing religious persecution, the Egyptian human rights activist listed ID-card reform among five recommendations for improving religious freedom.

In 2018, Azer criticized Cairo’s failure to pass a parliamentary bill that sought to remove the religion field from identification cards. “Whenever there’s a situation that requires showing your ID … you would be categorized right away,” Azer told Morning Star News.

Yet Taber said she sees “the winds of change blowing” across the region, especially among the business community and educated women. She cited Arab countries normalizing relations with Israel as an example of change “we only dreamed about in the past.” In May, EWM hosted a training in Cairo that educated 90 women about their religious liberties.

Taber’s Egyptian contacts tell her that President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who led the 2013 military coup against Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, is open to reform and has opened new churches and attended Christian services.

Yet Islamists and clerics at Al-Azhar, one of the world’s most influential Islamic institutions, frequently block attempts to change the legislation, Taber added.

Taber, an Iranian American Christian and author of Muslims Next Door, will explore these challenges at an EWM-sponsored summit in Malta in March with several senior-level Egyptians officials in attendance. She also plans to bring in members of the Coptic community to foster greater collaboration with Protestants and a more unified response to religious persecution.

Back at the Cairo safe house, Butros looks for a new place to resume her ministry work with Sudanese refugees, many of whom faced worse persecution in Sudan than in Egypt. “We create support for those who have experienced persecution,” Butros said through a translator. “It’s very important I continue my service with these people.”

Taber underscored the importance of addressing persecution while simultaneously doing evangelism, discipleship, and church planting. “If not, you’re just doing it all backwards,” Taber said. “Christ compels us, and he is the Prince of Peace and has given us everything we need to do the work.”

- More from Jill Nelson

Books

Review

Personal Preference Is No Way to Judge Faithful Worship

Kevin Antlitz

Steven Félix-Jäger’s new volume on biblical, aesthetic, theological, and pastoral considerations in worship will serve many churches.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Zondervan Academic

“Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or to rebel against it.” This famous line from Chaim Potok’s novel My Name Is Asher Lev captures the fluency required to speak meaningfully into or against a tradition. A tradition must be known, experienced, and even loved before it can be properly judged. Without that depth of understanding, critiques and contributions tend to ring hollow or even false.

While few of us can hope to truly master even one Christian tradition, Steven Félix-Jäger’s How to Worship for All Its Worth helps readers grow in both understanding and appreciation for the ways different traditions worship God.

Worship is a vast and sprawling subject, and Félix-Jäger wisely narrows his focus to congregational worship and music. Yet within that frame, he offers a rich, accessible guide for encountering the breadth of worship practices across the church.

As an artist, scholar, minister, and educator, Félix-Jäger is fluent in the fields (biblical studies, philosophy, practical theology, music theory, and more) required to seriously and generously engage with the wide range of authentic Christian worship that exists today. Whether assessing the theological merits of the chorus of a contemporary song or explaining Immanuel Kant’s perspective on aesthetics, Félix-Jäger proves himself a faithful guide. He’s the kind of scholar-practitioner who is uniquely qualified to train the reader in how to make good judgments about congregational worship.

This kind of judgment, he makes abundantly clear, is not a bad thing. To judge in this sense is to critically assess something to determine its value or significance.

Learning how to make good judgments about worship is ultimately what this book is for. It’s a kind of training manual to help Christians, worship leaders, and pastors critically assess different aspects of worship for different worshiping communities so they can help God’s people worship.

The book is divided into two parts. The first outlines four principles for how to faithfully design and evaluate worship. The second applies these principles in five case studies, each focusing on a representative church from the Reformed, Pentecostal, Black gospel, evangelical, and charismatic Catholic traditions, respectively.

The first principle is about how to use biblical judgment to assess fidelity to the Scriptures in worship. Here, Félix-Jäger highlights the communal dimension of biblical interpretation. “While every [church] tradition reads the whole Bible, each tradition comes at the text from a different vantage point,” he notes. “Traditions implicitly apply the insights of certain texts over others and receive biblical texts differently depending on their context.”

These differing approaches to the Scripture make for differing worship practices too. For instance, the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America relies on the “regulative principle,” which holds that worship must be based on explicit commands or examples in Scripture. That’s why these churches they only sing psalms without musical accompaniment. This principle also explains the prominence of the biblical theme of liberation in the Black gospel tradition.

The worship in these traditions may not be your cup of tea—and fair enough. But not preferring or perhaps even feeling out of place with the style and substance of a worship service isn’t enough to call it unbiblical.

To fairly judge a congregation’s worship in terms of scriptural faithfulness, then, we can’t use our own church as the standard. Some differences in worship are wrong, bad, or heretical—but many are not. If we can understand each tradition’s worship habits in light of its relationship to Scripture, we’ll often be able to honor and appreciate styles of worship we do not prefer. This is a key insight Félix-Jäger develops in all four principles.

The second principle is about using aesthetic judgment to assess the form and fit of worship. Here Félix-Jäger surveys some of the philosophical foundations of art and touches on the formal elements of music, including rhythm, pitch, and timbre. With this, he gives the reader language to talk about the style and substance of worship practices and whether they fit a particular context.

Just as it doesn’t make sense to critique punk because it’s not jazz, it doesn’t make sense to critique a Hillsong anthem because it’s not a traditional hymn. Aesthetic judgment is about assessing forms of worship on their own terms and in the contexts where they’re used.

Next is theological judgment. Here, Félix-Jäger develops Gavin Ortlund’s idea of “theological triage,” which orders theological beliefs according to their significance for the Christian faith. Pinning down what is primary, secondary, and tertiary is often messy in practice, but these are helpful categories for determining which truths should be centered in worship (such as God’s Trinitarian nature) and which are tertiary and should be avoided (like particular views on eschatology).

The last principle is about pastoral judgment for congregational worship. Félix-Jäger discusses the pastoral work of the worship leader and the formative power of worship music to shape individuals and communities—and it’s here that he gets to the heart of this project.

Why does biblical fidelity matter? Why is aesthetic fit important? Why does theological emphasis deserve careful planning? Because worship plays a profoundly pastoral function in shaping a congregation’s understanding of and relationship with God.

In the latter half of How to Worship, Félix-Jäger puts his theory to work, offering ethnographical studies of representative churches from a range of traditions.

Each evaluation follows the same pattern. Drawing on historical research, interviews with church leaders and members, and participation in the worship services, Félix-Jäger describes the history and distinctives of the congregation in question as well as its denomination or tradition. He also outlines the church’s geographic and cultural context along with its architecture, then evaluates all its elements of worship, from the type of instruments played and song selection to the style of the sermon and the overall vibe of the service.

As he does this, he renders biblical, theological, aesthetic, and pastoral judgments about each congregation’s worship, ending with commendations and recommendations. Together, the five case studies give a sense of how to judge worship in a structured and charitable way. Combined with a careful and thoughtful writing style, this practical demonstration helps make the book successful in its aims.

Still, let me close with three judgments of my own. The first is a small and mostly stylistic quibble. Throughout the book, certain words and phrases are bolded and defined. Definitions are helpful for a book like this, but I found myself distracted by the editorial decision to define certain terms and not others. Why “Southern Baptist Convention” but not “Roman Catholic Church”? Why “TULIP” but not “Charismatic Renewal Movement”? Why “Bapticostal” but not “born again”? The execution of this feature didn’t quite make sense in a book so defined by its engagement with a wide range of Christian traditions.

Second, Félix-Jäger has little attention for congregations with a more high-church mode of worshiping—all the smells and bells, so to speak. He does go beyond the Protestant world but chooses to focus on a narrow stream of charismatic Roman Catholicism, which has a good deal of overlap with Pentecostals and Evangelicals. Why not go all-in and evaluate a traditional Catholic parish?

I understand that Félix-Jäger couldn’t be comprehensive in his scope, and I’m biased as a priest at an Anglican church. But many Christians—including many Protestants and even many evangelicals—worship in more liturgical and sacramental churches. More attention to this type of worship would’ve presented a clearer picture of the global church and a more challenging text case for many readers seeking to evaluate worship according to Scripture, aesthetics, theology, and pastoral concerns rather than mere preference.

Finally, though he acknowledges that his descriptions are not comprehensive and are shaped by “cultural insiders,” I was often puzzled by the distinctions Félix-Jäger drew. More than once when he identified a supposed difference, I found myself wondering what tradition would not consider it important.

For instance, he writes that an emphasis on the “now and not yet” reality of the kingdom is a distinguishing feature of Pentecostals. While that theme is certainly central in Pentecostal worship, this kind of inaugurated eschatology is also a major emphasis in many other traditions. In fact, the modern articulation of the “already/not yet” framework is rooted in the work of Reformed and evangelical theologians such as Geerhardus Vos and George E. Ladd. Pentecostals may express this theme in characteristic ways, but it hardly makes them distinct.

Despite these weaknesses, How to Worship for All Its Worth has much to offer as a toolbox for worship practitioners. Its most important tool is a shared vocabulary for talking about worship in ways that rise above personal preference or inherited prejudice. This common language can foster unity and mutual appreciation within the body of Christ.

I found especially helpful Félix-Jäger’s treatment of flow, defined as “the progression of a worship service, where each element of worship naturally leads to the next.” This is a simple but useful idea that draws attention to how the elements of worship join a narrative and emotional arc that facilitates engagement, encounter, and ultimately transformation—or fails to do so. Churches rooted in more liturgical or sacramental traditions, like mine, may need to supplement this approach to service design with resources tailored to their own dynamics, but the core framework is widely applicable and quite helpful.

The book also equips us pastors and worship leaders who plan or lead services to bolster our own traditions and build up our local churches. It would be especially valuable at the beginning of a new pastor’s tenure or during a season when a church is seeking to become more hospitable to newcomers. But in any season, this is a worthwhile guide to shepherding God’s people into his presence more faithfully. Is there any task more central to the church’s life than this?

Kevin Antlitz is a writer and an Anglican priest in Pittsburgh. He previously pastored in Washington, DC, and did campus ministry at Princeton University.

- More from Kevin Antlitz

News

Killed: Acclaimed Gospel Vocalist Jubilant Sykes

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

The Grammy-nominated singer jumped from gospel to opera to spirituals to jazz; he considered it all sacred.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

In 1981, an industry newcomer named Jubilant Sykes released his debut album, Number of the Lord, with Light Records, the same label as gospel legend Andraé Crouch. At the time, gospel music scholar Robert Darden was working as a music journalist in New York, and he remembers the day he listened to that album.

“This album was different. It was gospel, it was funk,” Darden said. But it wasn’t the style or instrumentation that stood out to him most—it was Sykes’ voice.

“At that moment, Sykes had the best voice in gospel.”

Sykes drew acclaim as a rising gospel star—praised for his rich baritone sound, virtuosity, and control—but he didn’t remain in the niche for long. His trajectory from gospel to opera to popular sacred music was a path through the music industry as singular as his voice.

“I’ve been singing since I was a kid. I wanted to be like Michael Jackson of the Jackson 5,” Sykes said in an interview in 2004. “But these doors are the doors that just happened to open. It’s nothing that I really planned.”

Over the course of his five-decade career, Sykes lent his versatile baritone voice to contemporary sacred music, gospel, funk, African American spirituals, and contemporary gospel. He received a Grammy nomination in 2009 for his performance as Celebrant in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass and collaborated with a roster of high-profile artists including Julie Andrews, John Williams, Carlos Santana, Josh Groban, and Brian Wilson. He also worked with the music ministry at John MacArthur’s Grace Community Church in southern California and performed on several occasions with contemporary worship artists Keith and Kristyn Getty.

Jubilant Sykes died on December 8, 2025, in Santa Monica at the age of 71. Sykes died after being fatally stabbed in his Santa Monica home. His 31-year-old son, Micah, has been arrested and investigating authorities say he will be charged with homicide.

When Sykes’ soprano voice dropped at the beginning of puberty, he started to lose interest in singing. He credits his voice teacher with preserving his love for making music and helping him see the beauty in his deepening voice. In 2002, Sykes told NPR that his teacher, Linda Anderson, “turned him on to classical music” and instilled in him a love for Bach and confidence in his changing vocal chords.

As a college student at Cal State Fullerton, Sykes continued singing but didn’t seriously consider a career as a professional singer. Even so, he decided to continue his studies as a graduate student at the University of Southern California, which cast him in a production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess that ended up touring Europe.

At every turn, Sykes’ stunning baritone voice attracted the attention of teachers and directors, earning him opportunities to collaborate and audition to appear on the biggest stages in the classical music world. In 1990, he performed with the New York Metropolitan Opera as the character of James in Porgy and Bess and went on to appear in venues like the Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall.

What made Sykes unusual in the classical music world was his openness to stepping outside the confines of the highbrow. For a period in the late 1990s, he was performing in jazz clubs one night and turning around to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony the following day. His 1981 album blended funk and traditional gospel elements, and he recorded and performed jazz and gospel music even after achieving success in opera.

Following his time with the Met, Sykes toiled away as a working singer, often holding multiple jobs or working on two or three projects at a time. That versatility made it possible to have a sustainable but demanding full-time singing career. He told interviewers that it wasn’t ideal, but “it’s just the way the chips fell.”

Robert Darden, now a professor emeritus of journalism and founder of Baylor University’s Black Gospel Restoration Project said that, outside his impact in the opera world, Sykes carried on the tradition of black vocalists like Paul Robeson, who helped preserve and elevate African American spirituals.

After the Civil War, African American spirituals were at risk of being lost. A vernacular musical tradition, spirituals evolved in slave communities and migrated between them, evolving as they moved.

“Spirituals were never sung the same way twice, from church to church and plantation to plantation,” Darden said. “After the war, there was a real fear that these traditional spirituals would disappear.”

To preserve the songs while simultaneously elevating the form, composer Harry T. Burleigh (1866–1949) arranged spirituals as art songs, drawing on European conventions. While these arrangements and subsequent recordings of them by figures like Robeson (1898–1976) made significant changes and additions to traditional spirituals, they preserved lyrics and melodies and helped ensure that the genre would be documented and appreciated as a legitimate form of American art music.

“Sykes is one of the most recent figures of this tradition,” Darden said. “He, like many African American opera stars, came from the church and heard these spirituals, then recorded them with incredible sensitivity. These versions will move you to tears. They resonate.”

Sykes’ 1994 album Jubilant Sykes Sings Copland and Spirituals features stirring renditions of music by influential American composer Aaron Copland alongside arrangements of spirituals like “Go Down, Moses” and “City Called Heaven.” With cinematic accompaniment by the London Symphony Orchestra, Sykes’ solo voice carries the words of each spiritual with sensitivity and pathos.

Sykes said that singing spirituals like “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” gives voice both to the horror of the slave experience in America, “the loneliness, the madness and the darkness of it all”—and to enduring hope “that I am never really alone.”

In 2009, Sykes’ performance as Celebrant in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, a demanding musical theater work based on the Tridentine Mass, received a Grammy nomination. Throughout his career, Sykes was open about his Christian faith and about his belief that his performances—whether explicitly sacred or not—were all a form of worship.

“It’s not that one is secular and one is sacred. It all is to the glory of God. Bach said that all music should be in the honor and glory of God,” Sykes said in a 1998 interview. “And I think that’s true.”

Sykes was involved in the music ministry at Grace Community Church since 1978, according to a statement from the church. At Grace, he met his longtime collaborator, classical guitarist Christopher Parkening. The two toured together on and off for over a decade and recorded an album, Jubilation, together in 2007.

Sykes also collaborated with modern hymn writers and worship leaders Keith and Kristyn Getty—most recently at a concert at the Grand Ole Opry in celebration of the publication of the Gettys’ Sing! Hymnal.

In a post on Facebook, the Gettys wrote about Sykes’ “ability to find the wonder and extraordinary in the ordinary” and his “unique Christian voice.”

Sykes carried a deep appreciation for classical music, but he rejected the tendency of the music industry to silo performers. At times, he seemed to suggest that his career might have been easier if he’d picked a lane and stayed there. His eclectic discography and performance career reflect an artist who loved music too much to pick a niche.

“I have a passion for music, and I probably want to do too many things at one time,” Sykes said. “I’ve got to take myself seriously enough to work, but not so seriously that I become more neurotic. At this stage of the game, you take [engagements] as they come … and they come by God’s grace.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Books

My Top 5 Books on Christianity in South Asia

Compiled by Nathanael Somanathan

Wisdom on staying faithful in ministry and navigating multireligious realities in India, Sri Lanka, and beyond.

Illustration by Christianity Today

The following books were selected by Nathanael Somanathan, deputy principal at Colombo Theological Seminary in Sri Lanka.

South Asia’s missional memory reaches as far back as the first century, when the apostle Thomas is believed to have traveled to India and possibly even farther, establishing a church in the northern part of Sri Lanka. However, the verifiable history of missions in South Asia began in the 16th century alongside colonization, when Franciscan and Dominican missionaries first arrived in India, followed by the Jesuits. It was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that the Protestant missions movement emerged, particularly with Dutch colonization in places like Sri Lanka.

Today, the subcontinent is home to paradoxes, syncretisms, and layers of diversity. Religion and culture within countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka are so deeply intertwined that Christian mission in the region has been both challenging and creative.

Yet Christianity has managed to thrive in its own ways, producing a church that has persevered through persecution and enriched itself through the theological and philosophical wealth of its own resources. Here are some books that showcase this.

South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim by Chandra Mallampalli

A ubiquitous narrative in world Christianity studies today is that the faith is rapidly expanding in the Global South and that the center of gravity in the Christian faith has consequently shifted from North America and Europe to regions such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, studies often overlook a large sector of this new demographic: South Asia.

In this recent monograph, historian Chandra Mallampalli, a second-generation American born to immigrant Indian parents, sheds light on why this is the case. The preoccupation with numerical growth within world Christianity studies has obscured “vital lessons about interreligious encounters and the experiences of marginal people” within South Asia, he argues.

Mallampalli’s historiography focuses particularly on Indian believers whose stories are profoundly shaped by the Hindu and Muslim environments they live in. He weaves a compelling narrative of Indian Christian identities that often exist as religious minorities on the fringes of society. The book covers an impressive range of Christian groups across nearly two millennia, leaving the reader inspired by a Christianity that may not have triumphed in numbers but certainly has in spirit and witness.

The Call to Joy and Pain: Embracing Suffering in Your Ministry by Ajith Fernando

Prominent Sri Lankan theologian Ajith Fernando responds to a common misconception that Christians must not suffer, especially in ministry. Drawing from his experiences as Youth for Christ’s former national director for more than three decades and how he navigated several ministry crises, Fernando relates the themes of suffering and pain to lament, gospel witness, and discipleship. He encourages readers to embrace hardship without losing the joy of serving God.

This book is an encouragement for people on the verge of burnout as they struggle with ministry life, marked by euphoric mountaintop experiences and dark, difficult valleys. Fernando’s thesis can be summarized in this quote: “Something is seriously wrong not when Christians suffer but when they do not have the joy of the Lord.”

The Recovery of Mission: Beyond the Pluralist Paradigm by Vinoth Ramachandra

This 1996 book remains a seminal contribution to mission studies. Ramachandra wrote it as a response to a widespread debate in the field at the time on whether all religious traditions offer a path to salvation and whether interfaith dialogue and cooperation in social work could replace a traditional understanding of mission as evangelization.

The effectiveness of Ramachandra’s critique of pluralism, represented by three of its most influential proponents—Stanley Samartha, Raimundo Panikkar, and Aloysius Pieris—lies in the fact that Ramachandra is an Asian theologian who lives in Sri Lanka and offers insights shaped by this local missional context.

Ramachandra draws on Lesslie Newbigin’s paradigm of mission—namely, the gospel as public truth in a pluralist society—and focuses on the “scandal” of the person and work of Jesus. Throughout, he emphasizes the incarnational implications for mission as an alternative to the pluralist paradigm. The book ultimately points to his conviction that the Good News produces a new humanity—the church—which is integral to gospel proclamation.

The Problem of the Self in Buddhism and Christianity by Lynn A. de Silva

Second only to Hinduism, Buddhism dominates the religious landscape of South Asia, particularly in countries such as Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan. In this context, Buddhist-Christian dialogue is paramount for fostering mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence. A notable example in this regard is the Sri Lankan Methodist minister Lynn de Silva, who pioneered many conversations between adherents of the faiths.

In this book, De Silva addresses the challenging question of what the “self” is. He identifies how Christianity tends toward eternalism and Buddhism toward nihilism and coins the concept of anattā–pneuma (non-egocentric mutuality) as a meeting place between the two faith traditions. This concept enriches the Buddhist-Christian understanding of personhood and helps to facilitate a “communal selflessness” in his view. I recommend this book to those interested in the academic study of cross-cultural missions and interreligious dialogue with Buddhism.

An Honorable Heritage: The Pandita Ramabai Story in Her Own Words by Pandita Ramabai

Pandita Ramabai is frequently overlooked for the pioneering role she played in Indian Christianity. She led the 1905 Mukti revivals, where thousands of young girls experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and inspired the subsequent Pentecostal movement that emerged in South Asia.

Here, Ramabai recounts her Brahmin upbringing, her training as a Sanskrit scholar, and how she ended up as a Christian evangelist and social reformer dedicated to women’s emancipation in India. After her parents and sister died of starvation during a famine, young Ramabai was thrown into despair. Later, she encountered several Christians and was baptized, but she only fully encountered Christ when she stumbled upon the book From Death Into Life by 19th-century Anglican revivalist William Haslam while in England. She came to realize that she needed Jesus Christ the person, not just Christianity the religion.

Ramabai’s autobiography is a must-read for believers of all ages. Her life exemplifies revival, transformation, and hope—dimensions that are inseparable from the Christian gospel and the work of the Spirit.

- More from Compiled by Nathanael Somanathan

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Top Women’s Cricket Player Trolled for Her Christian Faith

Vikram Mukka

Christian public figures in India face online attacks and offline consequences for speaking about Jesus.

Jemimah Rodrigues celebrating victory in the ICC Women's Cricket World Cup 2025 Semi-Final match.

Alex Davidson / ICC / Contributor / Getty

Emotions ran high at the DY Patil Sports Academy in Navi Mumbai, India, on October 30, when the India women’s cricket team faced Australia in a nerve-racking World Cup semifinal.

As the crowd roared, cameras zoomed in on Jemimah Rodrigues as she delivered a match-winning knock, leading her team into the finals for the first time since 2017. Tears streamed down Rodrigues’s face as she dropped to her knees in relief.

“Towards the end, I was just quoting a Scripture from the Bible—to just stand still and that God will fight for me,” she said in a postmatch interview, referring to Exodus 14:14. “I have almost cried every day through this tour. Not doing well mentally, going through anxiety. I knew I had to show up, and God took care of everything.”

Despite Rodrigues’s match-winning hit—and India winning the Women’s Cricket World Cup three days later—online commenters hounded her for speaking publicly about Christianity. “Once a rice bag always a rice bag,” wrote one person on X in response to a cricket post. (Rice bag is a derogatory term in India used to describe someone who converted to Christianity for material benefits.) Others used slurs such as “missionary dog.”

Many dragged her family, accusing them of participating in forced conversions. “She continued her conversion racket even in post-match,” posted another X account. “If her father and she continue to do that, Hate is only what you expect.”

The harshest comments targeted her father, Ivan Rodrigues, a junior cricket coach and PE teacher. “Her father was a soul ripper so deserved flak,” a commenter wrote. “Every converter is a soul terrorist. Their kids’ good deeds don’t cancel it.”

This wasn’t the first time the Rodrigueses came under attack for being Christians. In October 2024, Khar Gymkhana—one of Mumbai’s oldest clubs—revoked Jemimah Rodrigues’s honorary membership, following allegations that her father used the club premises for conversion activities.

Dismissing the accusations, he said prayer meetings there were conducted in accordance with club rules and with the club’s full knowledge. Khar Gymkhana’s president called the allegations “politically motivated,” noting that the club committee members’ comments came before elections and they lacked evidence.

Since then, videos of Jemimah Rodrigues leading worship or participating in healing services have circulated online, with netizens mocking her faith and shaming her family.

Although reports about persecution against Indian Christians focus on churches vandalized, pastors beaten, or prayer meetings disrupted, Christian public figures and content creators often face vicious online attacks when they speak out about their faith. That spills into their offline lives when they lose jobs and struggle with depression over the constant barrage of hate.

Beyond terms like rice bag, trolls also call Indian Christians “foreign agents,” claiming their loyalties lie with the West, where Christianity is the predominant religion. Lately, terms such as gorre (“lamb”) and gorre biddalu (“children of the lamb”) in the Telugu language have been used as dog whistles, recasting the Christian imagery of Jesus as a sacrificial lamb into ridicule.

To many Indians, the word converted carries a presumption of force and fraud. Christians are seen as converted, never as believers who chose freely.

In the Hindu nationalist worldview, this is particularly true in the case of Dalits and Adivasis (Indigenous groups), whom they believe are especially vulnerable to Christianity because of their socioeconomic status. Hindu nationalists believe they must protect those groups from Christianity to maintain a Hindu demographic majority.

Those who wear their Christian faith on their sleeve often bear the brunt of this language. Content creator Angelcy Benjamin, who posts humorous reels about her faith journey on Instagram, says slurs are all too common.

“People ask how many bags of rice my family received to convert,” she said. “I no longer get offended. I am a proud rice bag. My faith only deepens in the face of hate, and my resolve to share the gospel only rises.”

Others’ experience online is not so easy. When content creator Joy Mattu posted a call for prayer and peace after India and Pakistan exchanged missile fire last May, the comments turned vicious.

“I was called Pakistani, foreigner, British agent,” he recalled. Anonymous accounts sent him threats: “Tell me where you live. Even if you don’t, we will track you.”

He stopped posting on Instagram for a month. “My mother and sister were abused in comments,” he recounted. “It was psychologically draining,”

Some face consequences in their workplace. Smriti—a Christian influencer who speaks about her conversion from a devout Hindu background—lost two jobs within three months. One employer pressured her to resign, while another terminated her.

Meanwhile, podcaster and author John Giftah said he lost two jobs because of his online content. His podcast, Fuel for the Soul with John Giftah, is India’s No. 1 Christian podcast.

“My boss openly said, ‘Give him more work so he cannot make his YouTube videos to brainwash and convert people,’” he said. “In meetings, they mocked my faith.”

The job losses and constant humiliation depressed him to the point of feeling suicidal. He started going to therapy while also finding solace in the Scriptures, especially 1 Corinthians 7:17—“Nevertheless, each person should live as a believer in whatever situation the Lord has assigned to them, just as God has called them.”

Human rights activist and author John Dayal stresses that the language of contempt and digital hate connects to the physical persecution inflicted on Christians.

“It is part of the same continuum,” Dayal said. “Social media is a force multiplier for hate-mongers. They borrow the same vocabulary that has targeted Christians for decades. It is time Christians stand up to the weaponization of hate.”

He believes believers can fight the online narrative by sharing their own narratives.

Research attests to Dayal’s view. As part of a larger Hindu nationalist strategy, the constant anti-Christian rhetoric produces a “wider cultural common sense” and language, rendering violence against Christians a “moral obligation” to save Hindu India. Once it becomes part of everyday digital spaces, it is constantly circulated and recirculated until the stigmatization of Christians is normalized.

Out of the 1,165 instances of hate speech documented by the India Hate Lab 2024 report, 115 of them targeted Christians directly or alongside Muslims. The peaks came during Christian seasons such as Advent and Christmas.

Every time Jemimah Rodrigues and her family became the target of online abuse, she said that they chose to forgive.

“God is our witness,” she told the Hindustan Times. “So, we decided to stay silent, not to prove anything or fight back. We chose to forgive those who hurt us, because that’s what Jesus taught us: to forgive even those who wrong us.”

- More from Vikram Mukka

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South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim by Chandra Mallampalli

The Call to Joy and Pain: Embracing Suffering in Your Ministry by Ajith Fernando

The Recovery of Mission: Beyond the Pluralist Paradigm by Vinoth Ramachandra

The Problem of the Self in Buddhism and Christianity by Lynn A. de Silva

An Honorable Heritage: The Pandita Ramabai Story in Her Own Words by Pandita Ramabai

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