Luci Shaw Wants to Open the Windows

In Reversing Entropy, the 95-year-old poet looks lovingly at creation.

Kristin Karlsen / Unsplash

Editors’ note: Writer and teacher Luci Shaw died on December 1, 2025, at age 96. Shaw was prolific, publishing more than two dozen works of poetry, spiritual reflection, and anthology. Her final collection, An Incremental Life, was published in 2025.

Luci Shaw is a legend in Christian literary circles. Her many volumes of poetry—named for rivers and clay, the color green, the glint of seaglass—speak to the beauty of creation and the generosity of the Creator. She has written on faith and art, the Christian imagination, and prayer, including a few books co-authored with her friend, Madeleine L’Engle. Shaw is also a beloved teacher, serving as longtime writer-in-residence at Regent College.

Speaking with the poet about her latest collection Reversing Entropy (out this spring from Paraclete Press), I understood how she has served as an inspiration for generations of students and readers. She’s gentle, curious, and wise. Her way of seeing the world is wondrous—everything from lichens, to a shivering little lake, to “jewel dew” in the grass, is significant. All the world inspires praise.

Reversing Entropy doesn’t just look around; it looks ahead. Luci Shaw is 95 years old, and this collection is understandably full of endings. Leaves fall; ripe apricots drop from a tree; her brother passes away. There is “the inevitable decay / the leaving and the dying.”

But there’s also hope. From the collection’s final entry, a long, tumbling prose poem that Shaw says “poured out” of her “like a gift”:

Give praise, now, to our God, the Quickener, the One who stirs us into such new life that we, and all creation, may wake to the sound of a fresh music, and start to sing again the songs of love, and longing, and refreshment. …

Come Springtime, that most beneficent of seasons, all, everything, every thing, will be thawing, rising, joyful, laughing, tuning up for the evermore, and in every green plant, sap will begin again to up-rise, elated…

Entropy has been reversed. Decline denied entrance, or existence. Death has been utterly extinguished as we enter, and join, the Quickening.

—Excerpt from “The Quickening: To Be Sung in Procession to Heaven’s Gate”

My interview with Luci Shaw has been edited for clarity and length. Poems in italics were read by Shaw during our conversation.

Let’s start with the title of the collection: Reversing Entropy. I wonder how this phrase gets at what poetry (and living as a Christian) means to you.

Reversing entropy is important to me—pushing back against chaos and despair, replacing them with hopefulness, with joy, with creativity. The concept of entropy is that systems of an evolving creation are declining and losing energy. People of faith, people of Christian faith, are able, through the arts, to take and reclaim territory that has been lost.

This “reclaiming territory” can happen through our art—but also in daily living. One of your poems, “Clues for Perception,” begins: “To reverse entropy is to avert chaos, to restore order in a / system, to correct or forgive a wrong.”

And it ends: “I rejoice when the crumb on the floor falls victim to the broom!”

Oh, absolutely. You don’t wall off your poetry into a separate little room. You open up the whole house. You open up the windows and the doors!

I recently listened to an interview with Marilynne Robinson in which she said, “a mind at peace in any degree, and a mind that’s schooled toward good attention, sees beauty all the time.”

That line reminded me so much of your poetry. To take one example, in “Crossing the Cascades,” you are “noticing the small / miracles of green, / the stabs of survival / in the most / improbable places. / … We pay passing attention / and our observation / turns it real.”

That’s a wonderful word, you know, attend. It comes from a Latin root, ad tendere, to reach into or to reach toward something else. My life practice has always been to pay attention to beauty—in relationships, in nature, in politics, in our church life. I look for significance in whatever I see.

Isn’t it amazing that that creation can lead us to an understanding of the Creator? The fingerprints of God are on the solar system.

WHALE

“Monday. The Port of Bellingham posted a photo of a visitor along Bellingham Bay. Humpback whales are commonly the size of buses.”

—The Bellingham Herald , March 24, 2022

O mighty one, you whose bulky vehicle visits
our islanded western Sounds in early spring,
who, breaching, lift your mass in opulent suspension
above the waves, its grand re-entry flinging wide
a rainbow spray. You, whose magnitude now courses
along the continent’s channel way, swimming
north to new, nutritious waters. You, leviathan,
astound us, a grandeur that causes godly fear
at your creation, and wonder at the deep sounding
of your uncanny songs. Whose fine baleen strains
from the waters a nutritious soup of krill,
the most minor of sea creatures nourishing the major.

May our fragmentary whispers of gratitude bless You,
the One among us who listens and, unearthly, speaks.

God can speak through the size of the whale, but also through tiny fish, the krill, that nourish that huge creature.

How does prayer fit into this?

I value the Book of Common Prayer because it addresses every aspect of life. It gives us prayers, liturgies, the psalms. The psalmist had to deal with very similar struggles, I think, to the lives we live now. The context is different, but the human spirit is always the same.

The terminology for many of the Old Testament prophets was the “burden of vision.” How difficult it was, in the middle of an ordinary life, to be given a vision by God and to rise to the challenge of being a prophet.

Take Jeremiah. Even though he was speaking divine truth, he got punished for it. His listeners put him in a muddy pit.

I’m not a prophet in that sense. But I do hope to speak truth into life.

“The burden of vision.” So often we hope for a direct word from God. But are we really prepared for what that word would require of us?

God appeared to Moses on Mt. Sinai. But he had to shelter himself behind a rock because his unshielded presence was overwhelming.

Let’s talk about a few other poems. One of my favorites is “New Leaf Restaurant.”

I have a dear friend who lives on one of the islands off the coast, a writer and philosopher. Every time I go and visit him, I get fresh insights into the life of the creative person. Sometimes, he’s the only person to whom I can honestly admit that I have doubts about my faith.

I wonder about how to live the authentic Christian life. I wonder about mystery; the Greek word is mystērion. It means “that which is hidden.” As a poet, I like to open things up, even trivial things, and examine them. That’s what’s happening here.

NEW LEAF RESTAURANT

With the camera of my mind I try
to teach myself the view, anticipating
a destination before arrival, expecting
the benediction of weather, a warm sun
and a cool wind from the ocean, almost
believing my desire will bring it to pass.

Waiting has been always a discipline
alien to me.
Yet I try to teach myself what
I need to know, to respond with gratitude
to guidance, perhaps salutatory,
yet offered with great generosity.

Wanting, as I wait, the message in the air
to be true, that when I arrive I may receive
with gratitude a friend’s long-harvested
wisdom and discernment.

Impatience consumes me. Like a candle,
my dark wick of certainty burns down to
a lonely thumb of wax destined for snuffing,
its pale smoke drifting to the ceiling
like an angel’s scarf, before vanishing.

Though I’ve been lonely, shorn of trust
and certainty, feeling bald and plain,
a friend’s gracious green and gold
speech fills the untidy field of my belief
with new growth. Today all my living
spreads ahead of me, like a field in Fall
dank with wet, decorated with
wild flocks of white geese.

I love how, as I watch,
their congregation lifts and lowers
over the field, like a woman’s white
sheets on a backyard line
raising their wings
in praise of the wide air.

When I didn’t have a clothes dryer, I had to hang up clothes in the backyard with clothespins. That experience gave me that wonderful image of the wind blowing through a sheet and filling it up, lifting it like a sail of a ship.

In spring the flocks of white geese settle on our plowed fields, which they like because the worms are available to them. I love movement: when the whole flock rises together, and then settles again, around all the fields.

It’s helpful to hear the story behind the poem. You go to the islands with concerns, and they’re addressed in several, fresh ways. There’s your friend, who can listen and respond with “wisdom and discernment.” And then there are the geese: speaking without language, somehow, and providing another kind of insight.

We learn in different ways—from literature, but also from observing the unpracticed beauty of nature. The trees don’t take lessons in looking beautiful. They just are.

THE DANCE OF THE LICHENS

A damp day, and walking the woods, we discover them,
sprouting like miniature lettuces, spreading their
minor mantles, hoary and moist, curling at the edges—
lichens green and fine as human hair, decorating the rotten
stumps and rocks of the woodland, charming us by their
pale
frills and baroque contours. You can’t call them plants,
but they like to pretend. Claiming distant relationship
with fungi, macrolichens float into the air pale fibers
delicate as lace, a curious embroidery on the forests’ face.

Enchanted, we photograph a dozen examples, some
fine as hair, some frilled as flower petals, pale, green,
gray, orange, dotted with red micro-spores, ready to fly,
to catch any minor air for conveyance, for symbiosis,
for claiming some damp environs as habitation.

Summer, and some, surviving the season’s heat, creep
across bare rocks, enter granitic cracks, split
giant boulders by the persistent force of mere existence.

Today, on the path down to our creek, we saw them
swarming,
dancing along the wooden handrail, balancing like
gymnasts.

Variants of symbiosis, ambient, fanciful, buoyant, spotted,
flaunting, frilled, flirting, feeding on the rot of forest floors,
they decorate the underworld in gray-green, and gold.

We have only a tiny fraction of understanding and knowledge, because we’re so limited and restricted as individuals. But, also, we have this calling, to go beyond the surface of the ordinary and to see significance in those ordinary things. It’s never a dead end. There are always open windows for us to lean out of and to see the larger world.

- More from Interview by Kate Lucky

News

World Vision Brought Clean Water to More Than 1 Million Rwandans

Morgan Lee

How the world’s largest nongovernmental provider of the resource is delivering on its promise.

Photography by Jeez / Courtesy of World Vision

For years, whenever Regina Mukasimpunga sat in church, she found it hard to concentrate on anything other than the chore awaiting her when service let out: fetching water.

The never-ending task dominated the life of the rural Rwandan community, forcing residents to leave the house with jerry cans before the sun came up to take long walks in the darkness in the hilly terrain to reach a spring. There, they often competed with other families to fill jugs, everyone desperate to move on with their days as quickly as possible.

“We would wake up at 5 a.m. to get water, which often took two hours. When we finished, we were exhausted,” said Mukasimpunga, at her home in Gicumbi district, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) south of the capital, Kigali. “We couldn’t farm productively.”

Mukasimpunga and her husband, Fulgence Ndemeye, enlisted their three children to help, but the job could last so long it made the children late for school, their tardiness earning them reprimands from their teachers and challenging their ability to keep up in school and study when at home.

Then, in 2021, World Vision opened a water station about 50 meters (164 feet) from their home. The life change was immediate: Now, everyone could start their day on time, take more showers, and wash their clothes more frequently. Mukasimpunga and Ndemeye could grow tomatoes year-round and not just during the rainy season. They could triple the livestock water ration, which meant their cow gave them more milk, which they could sell to their neighbors. The family’s economics improved so much, they were able to join a savings group.

Mukasimpunga and Ndemeye’s story is just one of many. The same story has happened over and over again in Rwanda, changing the daily lives of 1 million people in this country of 13.4 million, thanks to one of the final commitments made by former World Vision CEO Richard Stearns.

Stearns met with Rwandan prime minister Édouard Ngirente in 2018 and launched a five-year plan to make Rwanda the first developing nation with universal access to clean water, starting from the 39 subdistricts or sectors where World Vision was operating at the time. Since then, World Vision has partnered with the government and achieved universal basic water service coverage in the targeted areas.

In 2023, current CEO Edgar Sandoval celebrated when the program reached a major milestone: 1 million Rwandans now have clean water within 500 meters (0.3 miles) of their homes.

“Access to essentials like clean water levels the playing field, empowering kids for achievements like finishing their education and discovering their God-given gifts,” he wrote. “As we do this work together in Jesus’ name, we demonstrate the truest meaning of victory … that Christ came to usher in a new kingdom where hope wins.”

A 30-year partnership

World Vision’s now 30-year history in Rwanda—the ministry has been serving in the country since the genocide ended in 1994—has played a critical role in allowing them to build physical and social infrastructure at scale. World Vision Rwanda is the largest NGO in the country, with an average annual budget of $34 million, and only six of their 303 staff are of non-Rwandese nationality. They are also the country’s largest non-governmental partner in providing clean water.

After the universal basic water coverage initiative kicked off in 2018, World Vision met leaders of the districts where its 39 areas are based to set goals. They signed memos of understanding stating that World Vision would contribute 60 percent of the project’s costs and that the government would contribute the remaining 40 percent.

“If you just look at the journey from 1994 to now, infrastructure development, compared to other countries, has gone very fast,” said Pauline Okumu, the national director of World Vision Rwanda. “The message is: We have to build our country. There’s intentionality around goal setting.”

For engineers, their first step of creating clean water infrastructure is studying the topography of a region and determining if they need to build a pumping station or if they can supply water by gravity, says Murebwayire Marie Léonce, a technical program manager for World Vision’s WASH (Water Sanitation and Hygiene) program. Engineers must design the correct water pumps and install them, and a technical team services the water treatment system.

“Most of the areas where we serve are not reached by road. Service providers transport all materials by car till the nearest road, and the community supports by transporting materials manually from the road to the designated site,” said Léonce.

Not everything has been smooth. Existing infrastructure has been vulnerable to floods and landslides. Land needed for new infrastructure sometimes runs through people’s private property. Negotiating with farmers takes time and occasionally requires the government to step in.

But Okumu, who has worked in a number of countries around the continent, noted that in contrast to public officials she has observed in other places, the Rwandan government has frequently reached out to engage World Vision. Public officials are regularly evaluated on whether they accomplish their goals, and in turn, this accountability spurs them to reach out to their NGO partners to ensure they are doing their part.

Unlike other organizations based in Kigali who might make trips to other parts of the country, “World Vision is community-based,” said Alice Muhimpundu, WASH’s health behavioral change manager. “We are there.”

Further, World Vision’s own vision casting makes them an ideal partner, said Parfaite Uwera, the acting mayor of Gicumbi District, an area of nearly half a million, where CT visited a water pump, a water point station, and a clinic, church, and school.

Photography by Jeez / Courtesy of World Vision

A water station in Rwanda provided by World Vision.

World Vision’s own long-term planning aligns closely with the government’s own initiatives, making it easy for public officials to work “hand in hand” with them, she said. “World Vision really is special in the area of partnership. … They make sure that what they leave behind is safe and sustainable.”

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the government’s decision to allow World Vision to use its own procurement process to acquire the sanitation infrastructure materials, circumventing what would have been a far longer and more tedious process. They also allowed them to hire their own contractors and take care of tendering and operations.

“As a Christian organization, the government believed they would not have to worry about fraud,” said Muhimpundu. “That was simply amazing.”

The Rwandan government also gave World Vision special permission to advance with its project during the pandemic. Rwanda was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to issue a lockdown and had more stringent COVID-19 regulations than many neighboring nations, yet numerous water infrastructure projects carried on or began construction in 2020.

As these projects have wrapped up, World Vision has handed over control of the water to the government and local councils, which monitor water usage, report any damages or broken infrastructure, and maintain the sites.

Providing sanitation education

World Vision also works with churches from numerous denominations to teach sanitation curriculum, identifying priests and pastors as “key change agents” who can help students make connections between hygiene and Scripture. The most effective teacher, though, has been COVID-19. Anxiety about contracting the disease changed personal behavior and policy.

When churches closed during the lockdown, the government worked with religious leaders to determine its criteria for reopening houses of worship. One feature now necessary for churches: handwashing stations. When people met for the first time after lockdown at one ADEPR (Association of French Pentecostals in Rwanda) congregation in Gicumbi, greeters met them on the steps and directed them to handwashing stations, delivered to them by World Vision.

“Then they could hug and sit next to each other and not feel nervous,” said Sunday Emmanuel, one of the pastors. “Washing is now part of the culture.”

The church has a large outdoor baptismal font; previously, they used rainwater, but now they can take from their clean water supply.

Not all churches have had access to these types of hygienic facilities. For months, the ADEPR church has been hosting another congregation that has been unable to get its own building because of the sanitation requirements. Its leaders have submitted a proposal to World Vision to help them with the sanitation costs for their building.

Accessible clean water has also transformed numerous local institutions.

Photography by Jeez / Courtesy of World Vision

A water station from World Vision at a school in Rwanda.

At Groupe Scolaire Muhondo, a school that serves just over 2,000 students, more than half a dozen trophies sit behind the desk of principal Elie Habumuremyi. They finished second in the country last year in primary school girls handball. World Vision’s changes have made it easier for the school to organize sports teams by offering athletes clean drinking water, and the presence of extracurriculars helps incentivize students to stay in school longer. Meanwhile, girls miss school less because there’s more sanitation resources available to them when they’re on their periods.

Leaders at one local clinic that serves a community of 20,000 noted that prior to World Vision’s water installation, more than half of those who came in suffered from some hygiene-related issue. About 20 babies are delivered there a month, and many mothers were forced to return within weeks of giving birth because of a sanitation-related issue. Without access to running water, health care providers didn’t regularly wash their hands or bed sheets.

Some of these issues were mitigated when one of the staffers, Emmanuel Twagirumukiza, invented a water filtration system operated by foot pump. But the scale of World Vision’s new water system has dramatically reduced disease for kids under five, helped patients not contract other infectious diseases while getting help for unrelated issues at the clinic, and lowered the number of intestinal worm cases.

The ministry is not stopping at 1 million Rwandans with clean water, though. They’ve added wells to serve another 200,000 people and expanded into 30 more areas. They may also look at adding more wells to reduce the average distance to clean water from 500 to 200 meters (0.3 to 0.1 miles). (Donors can now support this cause through the organization’s new Believers for World Change subscription giving model.)

“Reaching this milestone has actually strengthened my personal faith as an individual, as a person,” said Innocent Mutabaruka, integrated programs director at World Vision Rwanda.“You can actually see things changing instantaneously. You see the impact that this has on people’s lives and you say, ‘This is God.’”

- More from Morgan Lee

Books

Review

Billy Graham Preached at His Crusades. His Singers Believed They Were Preaching Too.

Amber Thomas Reynolds

A late historian explores how crusade hymns told both the classic story of gospel salvation and the evolving story of evangelical worship music.

A choir at the Billy Graham evangelist crusade at London's Earls Court in 1966.

Fox Photos / Stringer / Getty

Crowds of over 50,000. Famous special guests. Hundreds of cities in the US and around the world. Beloved, catchy songs. For many, these might sound like readouts from the Taylor Swift Eras Tour hype machine. But exchange the glittery girl power for the gospel in baritone, and you have one of the most successful musical touring acts in the postwar world: the Billy Graham Crusades.

Songs I Love to Sing: The Billy Graham Crusades and the Shaping of Modern Worship

Edith L. Blumhofer (Author), Fernando Ortega (Foreword)

187 pages

$22.99

The first association that “Billy Graham Crusade” may evoke is not musical at all, but rather a close-up shot of the evangelist, with his penetrating, wide-eyed gaze and raised forearms, thundering, “The Bible says …” Admittedly, music was not the main focus.

Yet as the late historian Edith Blumhofer shows in her final book, Songs I Love to Sing: The Billy Graham Crusades and the Shaping of Modern Worship, neither Graham’s ministry nor the late-century rise of contemporary Christian music can be understood without it. As crusade song leader Cliff Barrows pursued his main goal—“sing to save”—he and his teammates bridged stylistic, cultural, and generational divides, transforming evangelicals’ music into the harmonic blend of old and new that is familiar today.

Mining rich resources

Before unpacking this highly original book, a few words about the author. Blumhofer is an American religious historian renowned for her empathetic biographies of hymnist Fanny J. Crosby and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, as well as broader studies of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. She concluded her career with this new study, sadly succumbing to a battle with cancer in the process.

To finish the project, her publisher, Eerdmans, tapped Jesus People expert Larry Eskridge, with whom she had for many years directed the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College. Having studied under and worked for Blumhofer and Eskridge as a master’s student—and witnessed their erudition, musicality, and mirth—I cannot think of two scholars better suited to telling this story.

Because Eskridge maintains in the preface that the text is essentially Blumhofer’s, I will refer to it as such. Fellow historians will be disappointed by the lack of footnotes—unfortunately, these are impossible to recover. But a “selected bibliography,” along with her earlier essay in Billy Graham: American Pilgrim, show her indebtedness to hymnologies, histories of postwar evangelicalism, press coverage of the crusades, and archival material from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (formerly held at Wheaton College).

In its final form, Songs I Love to Sing gathers what Blumhofer calls “biographies” of the hymns and people that anchored Graham’s evangelistic campaigns. As she argues, the lyrics of hymns “told the crusade story of biblical truth, rendering the narrative of sin and redemption in ways that mattered in all times and places.”

And the hymns’ rich backgrounds—their authorship, inspiration, source material, and historical evolution—told the larger story of modern evangelicalism and gospel music as it cohered in the stanzas of “How Great Thou Art,” “Just as I Am,” and other crusade mainstays. Blumhofer’s richly detailed histories cross continents, languages, cultures, and classes, revealing contributions from remarkable yet obscure men and women of faith.

In determining program selections and style, Barrows followed past revival song leader Charles Alexander’s advice: “‘Sing to save,’ and ‘sing as if you were preaching, not singing.’” He mined the rich resources of gospel musicians from his era and before—including Dwight L. Moody’s song leader Ira Sankey—and adapted both specific hymns and general principles of worship leading to the crusades’ unique audiences.

Soloist George Beverly Shea, a star of religious radio who joined the team in 1947, sang in the resonant, emotionally laden style that first landed him a contract with the mainstream Decca label in the 1930s. (For context, fellow Decca artist Bing Crosby had popularized a similar “crooning” sound during the Great Depression’s nadir.) Although evangelistic intentionality marked every component of Graham’s program, including music, Shea was allowed to follow the Holy Spirit’s impromptu leading in choosing his solos—those songs “he loved to sing.”

Regarding the team’s relationships, any reader looking for a Behind the Music–style exposé of egos will not find it here. Instead, Blumhofer illuminates the warm-hearted partnership between the “chord of three—Graham, Barrows, and Shea,” maintaining that it was, indeed, rarely broken by personal conflict.

Humorous anecdotes are sprinkled throughout. As one example, the story of Graham’s introduction to Barrows in June 1945 feels particularly of its era. While guest preaching in North Carolina, Graham was struggling to find musicians for the evening. Then he heard about a honeymooning couple in attendance, who nervously agreed to assist. While the new Mrs. Barrows took her seat at the piano, her husband dutifully ran to his car to retrieve his trombone (as one does).

Over the ensuing decades, Barrows chided the rather tone-deaf Graham that evangelists would be unemployed in heaven, while he and Shea would keep on singing. While on earth, however, both men submitted to Graham’s leadership, fulfilling “what each had vowed before God to do in the 1940s,” as Blumhofer notes.

Graham’s musical responsibilities included leading the team’s winsome, albeit pointed, response to external criticism—and criticism they did receive, especially during their 1966 evangelistic campaign in London. In a land marked by liturgical tradition, anti-American skepticism, and emerging secularism, the British press claimed that playing “Just as I Am” during the closing invitation elicited purely emotional “decisions for Christ.”

After reading such carping, Graham told his team to play no music at all. The press sheepishly watched as hundreds still made their way to the front, night after night, before later protesting that the silence itself was manipulative.

As Blumhofer’s study shows, succeeding under such pressures necessitated more than Graham’s evangelistic acumen; indeed, Shea and Barrows had to become music industry insiders. In formulating the campaigns’ sound, they went beyond the styles of earlier evangelical revivals and contemporaneous Youth for Christ rallies, drawing upon their “broad experiences in radio” and “on new material that reflected the continuously evolving musical tastes of a changing evangelical culture.” Prolific hymnist Homer Rodeheaver—a millionaire by the 1940s—provided a model not only for song leading but for handling the business of music publishing, especially copyright disputes.

In Blumhofer’s account, the crusade team worked diligently for legality and fairness to all songwriters whose hymns they used. Nevertheless, the behind-the-scenes wrangling over the international copyrights for “How Great Thou Art” got ugly and litigious after Shea debuted it during the 1957 Madison Square Garden campaign. It is understandable why the hymn’s English translator, the British missionary Stuart Hine, was upset by Shea’s revision of “works thy hands hath made” to “worlds”—supposedly a nod to the space age—as Shea’s version became increasingly “standard” around the world.

A related theme, and one worthy of more critical analysis, is the somewhat discordant blend of Christian sincerity and American celebrity that fueled the crusades’ success. Blumhofer zeroes in on the most significant recurring guest musicians on the platform, from cowboy singers Stuart Hamblen and Roy Rogers in the 1950s to jazz-age legend Ethel Waters and outlaw-country star Johnny Cash later on. These stars of the screen and stage had much in common besides lengthy résumés—multiple marriages, personal demons, and vivid testimonies emphasizing their “surrender” to Jesus.

From the crusade team’s perspective, the presence of such guests showcased the power of redemption and brought in starstruck audiences eager to hear familiar entertainers sing a new song. Considering the stars’ motivations, Blumhofer highlights Graham’s efforts to vet their faith before offering them spots. But we should remember that the context was postwar America: Rather than shrink their audiences by hitching their wagons to Graham, the country singers (Hamblen, Rogers, Cash) may well have widened them. For troubled 60-year-old Ethel Waters, the evangelistic campaigns provided a career lifeline.

Waters’s story is particularly interesting, as it reflects not only on the quandary of Christian celebrity but on the crusade team’s efforts to bridge racial and cultural divides. After Graham integrated his crusades in the mid-1950s, he invited civil rights advocates such as Chicago-based gospel singer Mahalia Jackson for guest appearances at the platform and featured Southerner Myrtle Hall in numerous crusades. But Waters became the best-known Black female soloist after she attended the 1957 New York rally, rededicated her life to Jesus, and then sang for “her baby Billy” until the 1970s.

Her signature song was the 1905 hymn “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” which she had famously recorded in the early 1950s. Although Blumhfoer does not say this, it is worth observing that Waters’s persona in her later acting roles, in her memoirs, and on the crusade platform reflected a well-entrenched stereotype for American audiences: the folksy, Southern Black nanny. And yet, Blumhofer insists, “The issue of cultural appropriation never surfaced—and may well never have even occurred to anyone at the time—even in the wide press coverage.” This was true across the team’s incorporation of ethnically diverse singers, African American spirituals, and international audiences’ musical tastes.

The crusades and CCM

If the music of the Graham crusades adapted rather well to different cultural contexts, it became increasingly out of step with younger audiences, despite the aging team’s continued inclusion of “contemporary” worship songs and singers (Amy Grant in 1979, for example).

However, reaching postmodern youth necessitated a special “translation,” the name of the book’s final substantive chapter and the hinge point for Blumhofer’s argument that the Graham crusades helped fuel the rise of contemporary Christian music (CCM) and modern worship music.

Compared to Leah Payne’s new history of CCM, God Gave Rock and Roll to You, in which Graham and company hesitantly supported such musical innovation from the sidelines, Blumhofer’s narrative centers the crusades at the intersection of modern hymnody, praise and worship, Southern Gospel music, and Christian pop-rock.

By 1969, Graham had launched a series of youth nights during his crusades, which attracted baby boomers with a laidback coffeehouse vibe, folk singers, and Pepsi. While the Jesus People and early CCM acts began to popularize Christian rock over the next decade, both Barrows and Shea, according to Blumhofer, remained opposed to sacrificing the traditional crusade format for something more akin to a concert. Graham, taking the lead, admitted that CCM wasn’t his preference but conceded its evangelistic usefulness.

Thus, starting in 1994, huge acts such as DC Talk and Michael W. Smith headlined a series of revamped crusade youth nights. Teenagers could belt out Smith’s “Place in This World” and headbang to DC Talk’s “Jesus Freak” before hearing a “grandfatherly” Graham deliver a short gospel sermon. The book quotes Graham’s reaction after the first such concert, held in Cleveland: “Personally, I didn’t understand a word of those songs [as they were being sung]. But I had all the lyrics written down, and they were straight Bible, great lyrics.”

Blumhofer does not contend that CCM required Graham’s blessing to win over youth; the opposite is more likely true. However, she makes the case that Graham’s platform helped expand CCM’s audience, lend it legitimacy in the eyes of parents and local churches, and attract mainstream journalists’ attention.

The Gospel Music Association even inducted Shea, Barrows, and Graham into its Hall of Fame for their contributions, giving the intergenerational “blended worship” model some powerful validation. By 2005, when the chord of three led the final singing of “Just as I Am” during Graham’s farewell crusade, it had become standard in many churches.

In an era when historical writing about evangelicalism can be overwhelmingly critical and cynical, Songs I Love to Sing leaves quite a different impression but without swinging to the opposite extreme. To riff on the title, this seems like a book that the author loved to write.

Certainly, its topic and anticipated audience—not limited to scholars—help explain the tonal difference. Yet worship music styles have divided church members for decades, and uneasy questions about Graham’s accommodation of American popular culture persist. The book’s core difference lies in its emphasis on the hymn lyrics themselves. As Blumhofer maintains, the texts ultimately sang “one song” with their appeals to God’s greatness, redemption, and eternal salvation for those who can say, “Oh Lamb of God, I come, I come.”

This framing device, I am inclined to think, testifies in part to this Christian historian’s faith amid bleak circumstances. Writing what she eventually knew would be her last work, Blumhofer has shown that serious evangelical history might also emanate sincere joy .

Amber Thomas Reynolds is adjunct assistant professor of history at Wheaton College.

- More from Amber Thomas Reynolds

Books

Review

Care for the Environment Is Biblical. It’s Also a Witness to Environmentalists.

Dennis Greeson

Do activists often invest their work with religious significance? All the more reason for Christians to be discerning co-laborers.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash / WikiMedia Commons

I love nature documentaries, especially those narrated by David Attenborough. Whether watching with my children or on my own, I love seeing the majesty of the snowy Alps or kelp forests.

Hope for God's Creation: Stewardship in an Age of Futility

Andrew J. Spencer (Author)

240 pages

$16.10

But I’ve noticed that in recent years, nearly every somber vignette of a species struggling on the edge of survival ends with a call to action. Viewers are beckoned to take responsibility for causing a poor animal’s plight and to consider how they can fix things before the species is gone forever.

I understand the impulse to believe that animals’ struggles should move humans to action. However, it is the ethics informing the narrator’s pleas that seem a bit muddled.

By many documentarians’ admission, the species we marvel at on screen have emerged out of eons of struggles to survive and adapt to their surroundings. Sometimes, the narrators even remind us that this process has resulted in countless prior species disappearing into extinction.

Whether you believe in a young or an old earth, in God’s hand or in meaningless physical forces guiding history, we can all agree that change, death, and selection favoring adaptability are features of life on earth. Witnessing it in real time makes for compelling television drama, but the moral indictment that you and I contribute to grave evil when one of these species goes extinct does not seem to square with the documentarians’ worldview.

What compels us to see polar bears possibly going extinct in terms of moral right and wrong? If we take human action out of the equation, isn’t history littered with the bones of countless species that have gone extinct? Are not humans and their actions part of nature?

A robust theology of creation care

If we listen closely, many environmentalists seem to hold ambiguous views when it comes to discerning between good and bad, in both utilitarian and aesthetic senses, and what is objectively right or wrong. If everything is just part of natural processes and there is no God who says thou shalt not regarding his creation, can we say anything more than that the disappearance of species is harmful to how ecosystems currently function? Can we say that it is not just sad to see these animals gone forever, but that it is actually wrong?

The basis for this seems pretty flimsy if change, struggle, and extinction are just part of nature and there’s nothing transcendent to inform what we should do. Accordingly, I’ve often thought that calls to action in nature documentaries add up to little more than sentimentality—that is, unless we undergird them with a Christian belief in a Creator to whom we are accountable as we live in his creation. Perhaps, then, Christians may have more to say about care for God’s creation than many Christians and their skeptics might realize.

This is exactly the angle Andrew J. Spencer takes in Hope for God’s Creation: Stewardship in an Age of Futility. In considering how God cares for his creation and gives it value—and in considering the task of humanity to image God well by stewarding his creation in line with his ways—Spencer provides a robust theology of creation care. His book is accessible for the average reader but also well-researched and argued for the specialist.

Spencer seems to be just the right type of author to embark on such a project. An evangelical Christian ethicist who has spent much of his career working in the nuclear power industry, he understands the scientific and public policy discourse around these issues, and puts them in conversation with orthodox Christian theological commitments.

Readers will appreciate his summary of historic and contemporary allegations that Christianity is ideologically harmful to the cause of environmentalism. Moreover, they will learn much from how he engages with particularly tricky issues like sustainable energy sources and climate change—his key argument being that Christians should embrace a “Pascal’s wager” approach that treats energy conservation and work toward sustainability as net goods, even if theories of climate change don’t play out as projected.

Additionally, Spencer’s warning against ideologically driven approaches to environmentalism that flatten complexities and justify emergency powers to remake the social order—what he calls a “big idea” approach to environmental concerns—helps contemporary Christians discern many ulterior motives that have been smuggled into the discussion.

But the book’s most significant contribution is giving Christians good reasons to care for creation in holistic and prudent ways for the sake of mission. How Spencer does this, though, needs some teasing out. It is not the case that he sees creation care as part of the church’s mission per se. Rather, he sees care for the creation as an essential way to contextualize the faith to the cultural and moral sensibilities of our time.

A new moral currency

While Spencer doesn’t unpack this idea directly, it is important to see how his argument fits with recent efforts to understand the phenomenon of the West becoming increasingly more spiritual, even as it grows less Christian.

Author Tara Isabella Burton has pointed out that in the current twilight of Christendom, we are witnessing an explosion of alternative spiritualities. These spiritualities help impart a sense of belonging and purpose in the absence of belief in God. In an age that has cut itself off from transcendent sources of truth, people still long to be caught up in something bigger than themselves. Even more, they desire to be equipped with moral categories of good and bad to help ensure that they are on the right side of history.

This is not to say that caring for the environment is just a fad that lacks any justification. Spencer presents good reasons Christians need to care for the environment as a matter of stewardship. As he notes, Scripture affirms that Christ is the one through and for whom creation was made, and by whom it all holds together (Col. 1:16–17).

But it’s worth highlighting that, for many in our society, concern for the environment functions in the same way that public religion used to in the Christian West. Caring for the environment imparts meaning and purpose (humans must not harm nature in its natural processes), delineates clear heroes and villains (activists and enlightened scientists versus big oil and consumer culture), and provides objective means to atone for one’s sins (carbon credits, tree planting, and recycling). In this way, care for the environment can stir the heart and provide a common basis for social order.

We might be tempted to write off such elevation of the environment over human needs as a form of Neopaganism, making a god out of nature. As Spencer points out, that is certainly a trend in environmentalism. But the insight that environmental activism is now a major moral currency in our culture means that Christians need to be discerning and active participants in the work of caring for the environment, for missiological reasons and for the sake of public witness.

This is precisely why Spencer’s work is such a timely resource. Like it or not, skeptics or those “deconstructing” their faith likely are not repelled because they find Christian truth claims unbelievable. Rather, the greater probability is that they find our faith and our vision of life in the world uninhabitable. They don’t see the way of life it fosters as actually good or desirable.

Certainly, there is no fault in the actual goodness of God’s ways or what he has revealed about himself. But Christians need to be sensitive to the shifting sentiments of post-Christian social imaginaries—those systems of belief we inherit from our society that shape what we find believable or desirable.

Sober-minded hope

A friend of mine, who is a pastor in Amsterdam, shares often about how climate change is an urgent and existentially significant issue for most people in his context. If Christians remain silent on the issue or only point fingers in calling out the idolatry of the environmental movement’s ideological excesses, they needlessly isolate themselves and the gospel from public life. Spencer’s work provides a careful way for Christians to see that they can both care deeply about the environment and have important things to contribute to the conversation.

To name just a few contributions mentioned by Spencer, convictions about human dignity and care for the poor can help temper an alternative energy absolutism—which seeks to restrict developing nations from using cheap fossil fuels to improve quality of life. Commitments to freedom of conscience can help direct climate change solutions to be found in the freedom of the market rather than in radically reengineering society through totalitarian control. Most of all, Christianity can offer sober-minded hope in an age of environmental angst, even as it forms individuals in wise habits of consumption and conservation that point to God as the giver and sustainer of life.

Readers may disagree with where Spencer lands on particular scientific questions or wonder whether there actually are conspiratorial forces at work in climate change policies. Or they may fault him for not going far enough in his proposals. Regardless, all readers will benefit from his insistence that, for the sake of mission, Christianity does not need to be part of our environmental problems. It offers much more to say on these things than our society thinks.

Dennis Greeson is dean of the BibleMesh Institute and program coordinator and research associate at Union Theological College, Belfast. He is the coauthor of a forthcoming book, The Way of Christ in Culture: A Vision for All of Life.

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India Says It Has a Border Crisis. Christians Say the Solution Will Divide Them.

Surinder Kaur and Angela Lu Fulton

The government plans to close its porous border with Myanmar to boost security, separating ethnic groups that straddle the boundary.

An Indian police officer and an Indian man walk on a bridge across Tiau river along the India-Myanmar border in Mizoram.

Anupam Nath / AP Images

Ngamreichan Tuithung runs a Christian boarding school that sits right at the border of India’s Manipur state and Myanmar. Amazing Grace Mission School is based in Wanglee Market, a small Indian town, and serves around 150 students from Myanmar and 6 from India.

Since Myanmar’s 2021 coup, the school has become a safe haven for parents wanting to send their children away from the violence of the war raging on in Myanmar. To Tuithung, it’s an opportunity to share with students and parents “about God’s love and how God is taking care of us.”

For decades, some parents in Myanmar (also known as Burma) have been able to easily send their kids to school in India, thanks to a government policy that allows citizens of either country living within 10 miles of the border to freely enter the other country without a visa. Many tribal communities share ethnic ties, familial bonds, and a way of life transcending territorial boundaries. Tuithung, who is from the Naga ethnic group, grew up in India but has many relatives in Myanmar. Because of their close ties, he can speak Burmese and visits them often.

However, all this will change as the Indian government proceeds with its decision to close the international border between India and Myanmar, which shares boundaries with four Indian states: Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram. India’s home minister Amit Shah says the action is needed to “ensure the internal security” and “to maintain the demographic structure” of northeastern India as the war in Myanmar continues. Plans include constructing a fence and implementing a surveillance system.

Tuithung believes that even with tightened borders, the government will provide a way for his students from Myanmar to continue attending his school, but he fears it would become more difficult for him to meet with his relatives or to buy goods from Myanmar.

“Religiously, linguistically, and ethnically, India and Burma share a good relationship,” Tuithung said. “The same ethnic groups, like the Naga, stay in both Myanmar and India. … If this border fencing is coming, both of us will suffer, as [we are] the same family.”

The move has sparked widespread outrage and exposed fissures within India's northeastern region, pitting the border states against each other and drawing intense opposition from tribal groups, political leaders, and civil society organizations who fear the consequences of severing their connections with kindred communities across the border.

While two state governments—Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh—welcome the decision that cites concerns of cross-border insurgency and illegal immigration, the Christian-majority states of Mizoram and Nagaland vehemently oppose the move.

Members of the tribal communities worry that the closure would separate families, hurt the local economy, and cut off a lifeline for people from Myanmar escaping war and violence. Christian workers along India’s border also believe it will impact their ministry, as many believers in Myanmar come to India for theological education and Indian missionaries enter Myanmar to teach. Of the 10 Christian leaders CT spoke with from the Mizo, Chin, Naga, and Kuki ethnic groups, nine opposed the border closure while one remained neutral.

“The border closure is like a Berlin wall erected between us,” said Chinkhengoupau Buansing, a pastor of the Evangelical Baptist Convention in Teikhang, a village in Mizoram near the border.

Concerns over the border closure

The controversy began in February when the Indian government announced its decision to scrap the decades-old Free Movement Regime (FMR), which allowed easy access for people living on either side of the India-Myanmar border. The FMR, introduced in the 1970s and last revised in 2016, facilitated social, economic, and cultural exchange between the communities, enabling them to maintain their deep-rooted ties despite the international boundary.

The Chin people in Myanmar, the Mizo of Mizoram, and the Kuki in Manipur share the same ancestors and inhabited the hill country in the borderland of India and Myanmar before the British divided the area into different countries in the 1890s.

“We come from the same tribe, we have the same surname, we are cousins from the same family line, we speak the same dialect, look the same, have the same food habits, practice the same culture, and worship the same God,” Buansing said.

Concerns of the border closures were raised this week after a gate guarded by Indian security forces at the Mizoram-Myanmar border stayed closed even after voting ended on April 21 for the Mizoram parliamentary seat.. Typically border gates are closed during elections to prevent any interference and then reopened afterwards. But this time, Indian border guards have kept it shut, citing an order from higher authorities. Residents in Mizoram fear that the government has already begun to revoke the FMR.

Border guards told locals that the gate would remain open until the end of the month only for medical emergencies, essential food, and medicine. Starting May 1, they intend to seal the border to prevent unauthorized cross-border activity.

Hemlaljudson Sonboy Lhungdim, a Christian leader from the town of Moreh in Manipur, said he did not support the closure because “people have relatives on both the sides, and many have mixed marriages where one of the spouses is from Myanmar,” he noted. “They would not be able to go back even during Christmas to celebrate with their families and then come back.”

Myanmar’s war spilling into India

India’s government officials say they are concerned that war in Myanmar could incite ethnic unrest in neighboring states. As Myanmar’s junta is busy fighting ethnic armed groups and civilian militias, the illegal drug trade and other criminal activities have skyrocketed in the country.

Home minister Shah noted at a recent election rally in Manipur that FMR has been misused to bring drugs into the country. He also claimed that “intruders are coming in and conspiring to change the demography of the State,” expressing fears that the porous border is contributing to the violence in Manipur that started last year between the predominantly Hindu Meiteis and the Christian Kuki.

Since last September, Manipur chief minister Nongthombam Biren Singh has demanded barbed wire fencing along the border with Myanmar to stop Myanmar nationals from entering his state illegally. He had appealed to the central government to scrap the FMR agreement, claiming that extremists had been exploiting it to stoke ethnic violence in Manipur.

“Many of the illegal arms used in the Manipur violence were smuggled from Myanmar and caused much harm to the people of Manipur,” according to a source in Manipur who asked not to be named for security reasons.

Yet critics argue that this position is aimed to draw attention away from the government's internal security failures. The state government has been accused of fanning tensions to consolidate its Meitei support base—a charge that it has denied.

However, the move to close the border has faced fierce opposition in Nagaland and Mizoram. In Nagaland, tribal organizations, Naga political factions, and civil society groups oppose the border closing. For chief angh Tonyei Konyak of Longwa Village, which lies directly on the border, it would divide not only his village, but even his own house into two separate countries. The Naga Students’ Federation, a majority Christian students’ group, has asked the UN secretary general to urge the Indian government to stop the program.

K. Vanlalvena, Mizoram’s sole representative in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament, wrote a letter to Shah opposing the proposed removal of the FMR and called it a “shocking” and “unfair” development for the people living along the border in his state.

Cutting off a lifeline

The border closure’s impact would be felt most heavily by the Chin people in Myanmar, many of whom see India, especially the border towns, as a lifeline. While Chin people have long fought Myanmar’s military junta for greater autonomy, fighting has intensified in the past three years as the Chin were one of the first to resist the military after the coup. The military has bombed villages, destroyed churches, displaced nearly 50,000 people in Chin State, and placed seven of the nine townships under martial law..

Although India’s central government initially called for Mizoram to stop refugees from coming into the country, the Mizoram government and its people pushed back, providing shelter and aid to those crossing the border.

“We call [the Chin] our brothers and sisters,” said Mizo activist and theologian Lalrinawmi Ralte, who aids Chin refugees through the Zo Reunification Organization. “Once they cross over the international boundary, they are safe here. They don’t die of starvation.”

Today about 32,000 Chin refugees live in Mizoram, along with 1,100 Kuki-Chin fleeing ethnic persecution in Bangladesh and 9,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Manipur, according to the Mizoram’s Home Department. Ralte noted that the government of Mizoram, local nonprofits, and residents have provided food, medicine, and other necessities to the refugees. Yet as the war in Myanmar dragged on—now in its third year—the Mizo, many of whom are struggling financially themselves, have little left to give. Jobs for refugees are also few and far between, as many live in small villages.

With no help from the central government and political policies making it difficult for foreign groups to provide aid, Ralte said the work sometimes felt helpless. Now it will become even more difficult to help Chin across the border. Despite letters to the prime minister and protests in the streets against the border closing, nothing has changed.

“Our people are not a wanted people,” she said. “[The government] only wants our land. It’s very pathetic at this junction to be a minority in India; minorities are not safe.”

Vanlalchhana, the head of Myanmar Refugees Relief Committee Mizoram and a Chin refugee who has lived in Mizoram for the past 25 years, is concerned that India will no longer be a safe haven for people fleeing the violence, as crossing the border would be illegal.

The closure would also block off communication between Chin refugees and their family members back in Chin State, he says. Because some regions of Chin State are completely controlled by Chin resistance fighters, refugees could sometimes go back to Myanmar to visit family. Refugees told Vanlalchhana (who goes by only one name) that they are worried that once the border is sealed, they will no longer be able to do that.

“I think everything will be affected if they totally seal the border, because every day, morning and evening, people go back and forth across the border,” he said. “It’ll be very difficult.”

Christianity Today

The India-Myanmar border

Peter Ngaidam, a Chin church leader now living in Norway and an activist in the Global Chin Christian Federation, noted that the border closure would severely impact Chin refugees in Mizoram’s ability to send aid, like rice and medicine, to IDPs who remain in Chin State. Many of 50,000 people living in IDP camps rely on supplies from churches across the border.

“We are very sad about India’s central government approving to close the border; personally I do not agree with them,” Ngaidam said. “We have concerns for IDPs and families and churches in Chin State because we have only that way to support our families and coworkers who are suffering.”

Still, leaders of the church told Ngaidam that even with the new policy, they will continue to provide for their families in Chin State even if it means crossing the border illegally.

Economic concerns

Many residents in the border states are concerned about the economic implications of the closure. India is Myanmar's fifth-largest trade partner, with bilateral trade reaching $1.03 billion in 2021. The border closure could disrupt this economic relationship, as communities rely on the cross-border trade of products ranging from chemical compounds, machinery, and textiles from India to vegetables, wood products, and metals from Myanmar.

Lhungdim noted that in Moreh, the vegetables and rice on his dinner table are grown in Myanmar. “In Moreh, we have no cultivation,” he noted. “All our groceries come from Myanmar. If the same came from [Manipur’s cities of] Imphal or Churachandpur, the prices of the same commodities will be tremendously high—because of the road tax and all the transportation cost and other taxes that would be included.”

Because Myanmar’s currency is valued lower than India’s, those on the Indian side can get a good deal, and the sellers in Myanmar also get a fair price. Amid the war, many women, children, or older people from Myanmar rely on selling goods in India to support their families, said Onkho Haokip of Kuki Baptist Convention, who lives in Churachandpur, Manipur’s second largest city.

“If they are prohibited from crossing the border, where will they sell their stuff and sustain themselves? They will perish in poverty,” Haokip said. “My heart goes out for the community in Myanmar, for they are the major sufferers.”

Effects on missions

Khinlakbou Ringkangmai, the founder of Doulos Institute of Theology and Missions, feels conflicted about the recent border announcement. A resident of Imphal, the capital of Manipur state, he says he can understand the government’s reasoning that closing the border would provide greater security. “Not all the people coming from Myanmar are good,” Ringkanmai said. “Some people are coming to India with bad intention; they came to Manipur and they join in insurgency and try to create problems.”

Yet from a missions perspective, he added, the border’s closure “badly affects the spreading of Christianity in Manipur and Myanmar, as many Burmese students have gone to India … to get theological training.” Once the borders close, they’ll lose out on that opportunity. Many of the students don’t have the money to get passports or visas and have been able to enter India through the FMR.

Currently Doulos has only 12 students, a drop from 30 last year, due to the violence in Manipur. Some of his students transferred to schools outside the state or returned to Myanmar.

“Once the border is closed, I won’t have any Burmese students for theological training,” he said. “Many Bible schools will have a decreasing number of students.”

Mission groups operating along the border are also bracing for potential disruptions to their activities. Kuki Baptist Convention’s Haokip stressed the importance of Indian missionaries going into Myanmar to meet with believers and “help them in different capacities,” which will not be possible once the borders are sealed.

“The border is the gateway for our mission strategy,” Haokip said. If the border is closed, “our mission work is crippled. We were free to cross the border without visa, [to] go and share the gospel … stay there, and come back.”

- More from Surinder Kaur and Angela Lu Fulton

Theology

From Antisemitic Campus Mobs to Australian Murders

Russell Moore with Marvin Olasky

Hatred around the world rises again.

Pro-Palestine demonstrators gathered in protest both inside and outside the locked gates of the Columbia University campus in New York City.

Melissa Bender / AP Images

Seventeen hours after gunmen murdered at least 15 people at a Jewish holiday celebration in Australia, the congregation of Christ the King in Houston sang words originally penned in the 8^th century and, through many revisions, translated into English now familiar:

O come, O come, Emmanuel
and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.

Yesterday, millions of other Christians around the world also sang those words, in many languages. They are relevant to every member of spiritual Israel: We are all captive to sin and in desperate need of ransom. But with haters around the world assaulting physical descendants of Abraham, those words seem especially poignant. Today, Christians and Jews are mourning together. We are one family.

It is a time to lament. Rabbi Yehiel E. Poupko, Rabbinic Scholar at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, told CT, “Once again since the Hamas pogrom of October 7, 2023, the Jewish people throughout the world are under violent attack. 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?”

It is a time to pray. As the hymn goes,

O come, Thou Dayspring from on high,
and cheer us by Thy drawing nigh.
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
and death’s dark shadows put to flight.

The urgent plea—Disperse!—isn’t just for Down Under. This spring alone, antisemites attacked Jews in Colorado, murdered Jews in Washington, D.C., committed arson at the residence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and spewed on popular podcasts. As winter comes, they are getting louder.

Particularly given the long and tragic history of antisemitism within the church, Christians today and Christianity Today need to remember and keep reporting this latest wave of hatred. We plan a fuller story about the Australian murders tomorrow. Today, we republish what Russell Moore wrote last year: “What Antisemitic Campus Chants Tell Us About This Angry Era.” Other CT articles right after the October 2023 Hamas atrocity discussed antisemitic violence and speech.

Apparently, those chants about eliminating sons and daughters of Israel “from the river to the sea” now mean not only the Mediterranean Sea but the Tasman Sea of the Pacific Ocean. That makes it all the more pressing to sing the last verse in many traditional versions:

O come, Desire of nations, bind
in one the hearts of all mankind.
Bid Thou our sad divisions cease,
And be Thyself our King of peace.

And the familiar refrain: “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel/ Shall come to thee, O Israel.”

Marvin Olasky is editor in chief of Christianity Today.

The following piece, which was originally published on April 26, 2024, was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter.

As Columbia University and other elite campuses erupt into protests against the United States’ diplomatic and military support of Israel’s war against Hamas, US Sen. John Fetterman denounced the antisemitic speech of some of these protesters, remarking on the social platform X, “Add some tiki torches and it’s Charlottesville for these Jewish students.”

Whatever one thinks of Fetterman’s analogy or of the Israel-Hamas war, we would do well to listen to the common ring of the Charlottesville chant, “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” with the one recorded this week on the Columbia campus: “We have Zionists who have entered the camp!”

An observer might have asked in Charlottesville, “What Jews are trying to replace you?” The white nationalists there would no doubt have told such a person that a shadowy cabal was seeking to import immigrants, to commit “white genocide.” Just so, another observer might ask at Columbia, “What Zionists have entered your camp?” Israeli military forces? No. The “Zionists” in question are Jewish students—one wearing a Star of David—attempting to walk on campus.

At one level, the video of the students chanting seems almost farcical, like a parody out of an old episode of Portlandia. The leader yells out a sentence; the followers repeat it back—even to the point of repeating back, in unison, “Repeat after me.” Does that part really have to be repeated? Well, kind of; that’s part of what happens in a chant. The message is not reasoned discourse. The rote nature of the repetition is the point. It’s also the danger. In a mob, the individual is submerged into a collective—a collective usually reverberating with anger.

Campus protests are an essential part of a society that prizes free speech. Students have every right to make known their opinions that they disapprove of Israeli political or military policies in Gaza. Citizens of good will can, and should, simultaneously hold moral condemnation of Hamas’s terrorism, systemic rapes, and hostage-taking alongside moral concern that the lives of innocents in Gaza are protected from Israeli bombs, starvation, and Hamas itself.

Even speech that I would find morally repugnant—the “whataboutism” that waves away the atrocities of Hamas and Iran and their terrorist collaborators—is, in a liberal democracy, free to be expressed. And, when others are threatened or harmed, a university has a responsibility to protect them.

Christians, though, ought to be especially attentive to what’s happening to a society that increasingly seems, on the horseshoe extremes of the populist right and the activist left, to be driven toward the pull of the channeled rage of the mob.

That’s why we must listen to the chants. By this, I don’t just mean that we should listen to the content of the chants, as important as that is. White nationalist mobs and Orbánist intellectuals—on social media or in real life—parroting back talking points straight from Mein Kampf ought to alarm us.

So should masked leftist students shouting the same slogans—“From the river to the sea!”—used to justify not just opposition to Israeli policies but to the very existence of the Jewish state itself. The chants of an angry mob almost always seek a scapegoat—and those scapegoats are almost always religious minorities.

Consider, for instance, the vitriolic rage with which some professing Christians—at city councils and town zoning boards all over the country—treat Muslim Americans.

The talking points are usually taken right from the Know-Nothing rhetoric of a century before: Muslims can’t “assimilate” into American culture; Islam is not a religion but a ruse to dominate and impose sharia law. Many such mobs—online and in real life—wove and disseminated bizarre conspiracy theories that the then-president of the United States, the first Black commander in chief in our history, was not a “real” American but was a Muslim, as though the two would be contradictory even if true.

Who was hurt in all of this? A lot of Muslim men and women and children—including people so patriotic that they fought proudly for this country, and families so patriotic that they received American flags from the graves of their sons and daughters who died fighting to protect their country from terrorism.

As unspeakable as the damage to our Muslim neighbors was, they were not the only ones harmed. Everyone was—perhaps none more than those shouting the rage themselves.

My fellow Mississippi Baptist, the late comedian Jerry Clower, would often say that what convinced him of the moral bankruptcy of the Jim Crow segregationist regime he had always known was not the arguments of Martin Luther King Jr. or Fannie Lou Hamer or other civil rights leaders. Instead, what convinced him was watching a crowd of other white Mississippians in the streets of Jackson screaming about the presence of Black children in their schools.

Watching the red-faced rage of a man screaming racist epithets, Clower saw the kind of self-consuming wrath about which his Bible had warned him. The spell was broken. Just for a moment, he saw the crowds not as a mass of white Mississippians but as individual persons, as human beings, and he did not want to become what he saw.

Chants are powerful; that’s why they’re used by human beings seeking to merge together as one. Like everything else, the power is precisely because they were created for good. Listen to a recording of Gregorian chants, for instance, to hear the beauty of a gathering of people whose voices blend together, no longer distinguishable as individuals but as something merged together as a whole.

When I lived in Louisville, Kentucky, I would sneak away to a Cistercian monastery an hour’s drive away to listen to the monks chant the Psalms together. I would calm down, reminded of what it was, as a child, to recite in unison, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” I must have been the only visitor to Thomas Merton’s monastery there to relive Southern Baptist Vacation Bible School.

Chants—of whatever kind—resonate deeply with human nature because they are meant to join us together, to create a kind of hive mind in which we lose, for a moment, our sense of individuality, to become part of something together. The resonance of that kind of chanting is meant to take us to those emotions that are best expressed in that sort of “hive”: awe, wonder, worship. They are meant to break us from the preoccupation of the self.

If history has shown us anything, though, it is how dangerous it can be when a collective meant to channel awe becomes instead a channel of a much more uncontrollable emotion—that of anger. In those chants, the individual is lost not in a mass but a mob. The energy that lights up such a gathering is not shared smallness in the face of something or Someone greater but what the Bible calls the “works of the flesh,” the drive to idolize the tribe by delighting in the darkest, most violent aspects of our fallen human nature.

The biblical picture of a human being stands in contrast with both individualism and collectivism. We are created to be persons in communion. The apostle Paul used the metaphor of a collective body, with individual members who are distinguishable and unique but who belong to each other (1 Cor. 12:12–27). And the apostle Peter used the metaphor of a building made up of individual, living stones (1 Pet. 2:4–5).

The mob is so dangerous because it taps into an artificial feeling of communion. But unlike the body of Christ, where the energizing principle is the mind of Christ, the mob is fueled by the frenzy of the limbic system. A mob is a place to hide from one’s own moral accountability: I was just swept away. I was just following orders. The Christian moral vision, though, tells us that the consciences we try to quiet are right: We can sin together—sometimes in a number that no man can number—but we stand at the judgment seat not tribe by tribe or mob by mob but one by one (Rom. 2:9–16).

The fallenness of mobs ought to remind us of what these mobs have fallen from. We are, indeed, created to join our voices in a chant: “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9). That song is to the Jew who, thanks be to God, re-placed us. And the narrow path to where that song is sung is a different one from this era’s broad road of isolated persons and energized crowds.

To sing, we must say no to the slogans. To find love, we must say no to hate. To find community, we must say no to the mob.

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

News

Wire Story

After Schism, United Methodists Vote to Restructure Denomination

Yonat Shimron – Religion News Service

The plan would organize UMC churches in four global regions, with each given more leeway around same-sex marriage and other theological issues.

At the 2024 United Methodist General Conference, the Rev. Ande Emmanuel of the Southern Nigeria Conference speaks about his decision to vote in favor of regionalization.

Mike DuBose / UM News

The top legislative body of the United Methodist Church passed a series of measures Thursday to restructure the worldwide denomination to give each region greater equity in tailoring church life to its own customs and traditions.

The primary measure, voted on as the UMC General Conference met at the Charlotte Convention Center in North Carolina, was an amendment to the church’s constitution to divide the denomination into four equal regions—Africa, Europe, the Philippines, and the United States.

According to the plan, each region would be able to customize part of the denomination’s rulebook, the Book of Discipline, to fit local needs. While church regions in Africa, the Philippines, and Europe have already enjoyed some leeway in customizing church life, the United States has not.

The vote on the constitutional amendment passed 586–164, or by 78 percent, which means it surpassed the two-thirds majority needed for constitutional amendments. It must now go before each smaller church region, called an annual conference, for ratification by the end of 2025.

If ratified by two-thirds of delegates to the annual conferences, the restructuring would allow the four regions to set their own qualifications for ordaining clergy and lay leaders; publish their own hymnal and rituals, including rites for marriage; and establish its own judicial courts. A new Book of Discipline would have one section that could be revised and tailored for each of the four regional conferences.

The two-week worldwide meeting is the first meeting of the General Conference in five years, due mostly to delays associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. It follows a painful schism that has split some 7,600 US-based churches from the denomination—a loss accounting for 25 percent of all US congregations.

Regionalization was the first order of business and it came unexpectedly early in the meeting. The General Conference typically does not take up major proposals until its second week.

This is not the first time Methodists have tried to regionalize their operations. The last attempt, in 2008, passed in the General Conference but failed to receive two-thirds ratification among individual conferences around the world.

The Rev. Dee Stickley-Miner, executive director of missional engagement for the General Board of Global Ministries who has worked on the plans alongside non-US-based church leaders, said this time around, the measures are more clearly stated and have been shaped and vetted by Methodists in the various regions.

Regionalization has been framed as an undertaking of decolonization. Born of an 18th-century movement begun in England by John and Charles Wesley, the Methodist movement through its various schisms and realignments has always been centered in the United States. This new regionalization, if it is approved, will decentralize the church.

“We’ve really come to understand how worldwide the United Methodist Church is and how that requires some changes in how we structure ourselves, so that the United States is seen alongside the other regions in order that Jesus can remain at the center and not in one region,” Stickley-Miner said.

But the regionalization plan is also an acknowledgment that cultural and theological differences are driving Methodists apart, especially regarding sexuality. Many church leaders believe the only way Methodists around the world can live under one umbrella is if they have leeway to differ on matters of same-sex marriage and ordination of LGBTQ people.

Several coalitions of Methodists in the US and abroad opposed the measure, including the Wesleyan Covenant Association and Good News Magazine.

On Thursday, delegates passed five of the eight measures in the regionalization package; the remaining three, which pertain to the US only, will be voted on later and are considered procedural.

- More from Yonat Shimron – Religion News Service

Ideas

Let the Cultural Christians Come unto Jesus

O. Alan Noble

Contributor

The world is realizing anew that our faith has tangible benefits. This is an opportunity for the gospel.

Priscilla du Preez / Unsplash

As Christianity continues to decline in the West, the broader world has begun to notice something’s missing. There seems to be a growing awareness that—for all the scandals and failings of the church—the loss of a Christian culture leaves us all worse off, and that there are benefits to being a Christian and to living in a Christian society.

For example, Derek Thompson recently wrote in The Atlantic about the loss of community that comes with declining church attendance. “Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall,” he concluded, “hold[ing] back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.”

Likewise, Harvard scholar Tyler J. VanderWeele has extensively researched the benefits of participation in religious services, finding that it leads to improved mental and physical health, happiness, and sense of meaning. Statistically, going to church regularly will help you flourish as a human being. As Brad Wilcox, a professor at the University of Virginia, has shown, regular church attendance even correlates with a more satisfying sex life!

And then you have those like former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali who explain their conversion to Christianity at least partly as a response to the decay of the contemporary world, a world threatened by “woke ideology,” “global Islam,” and authoritarianism. “The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” Hirsi Ali said in an essay announcing her new faith. Famous atheist Richard Dawkins objected to Hirsi Ali’s conversion yet seems to resonate with her reasoning, as he recently described himself as a “cultural Christian” in response to the growing influence of Islam in the UK.

What these arguments have in common is the recognition that Christianity is tangibly good for the human person and society. It improves our sex lives, mental health, and social networks, and it gives us a stability, order, and foundation for liberty and justice that the contemporary secular world can’t replicate. These are powerful reasons to become a Christian and encourage the spread of at least a superficially Christian culture—one that assumes the ethos of Christianity even if it doesn’t accept the orthodoxy of Christianity. After all, the data seems clear: A more Christian culture would produce more human flourishing.

But is this awareness of Christianity’s measurable benefits a threat to authentic faith or an opportunity for the gospel?

On the one hand, as Christians who do accept the orthodox doctrines of the faith, it is unsurprising to us that living according to God’s law will produce blessings. Living against the grain of the universe is bound to cause harm to individuals and society alike. And since we are called to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile” (Jer. 29:7), we ought to advocate for policies, practices, and social norms that align with our Christian faith. If we believe that God’s will for our lives is to live according to his design of the universe, and if we love our neighbor, we should encourage our neighbor to live according to that design. In this light, even Dawkins’s faithless “cultural Christianity” is perhaps a small step in the right direction.

But God’s will for our lives is not just that we live according to his law. His will is that we know him through his Son, Jesus Christ. And this introduces a challenge for Christians as more people are becoming aware of the personal and social benefits of our faith: How do we proclaim the goodness of Christianity without turning it into just another tool for achieving well-being? In other words, we must ask ourselves whether a culture that adopts the virtues of our faith for its material benefits might perpetually neglect or even become inoculated against its spiritual benefits.

In a recent article about Dawkins’s comment, CT editor in chief Russell Moore expressed just this concern. “Christianity is not about national anthems and village chapels and candlelight carol sings,” he wrote. It isn’t simply not-Islam (as Dawkins would like) or not-wokeness (as Hirsi Ali wants). And if “the gospel isn’t real, the gospel doesn’t work. Genuine paganism will win out over pretend Christianity every time.” Christianity without orthodoxy—Christianity that is not a living faith in response to a living God—becomes nothing more than a social identity.

And the world is filled with social identities. If one can receive the material benefits of Christianity without actually believing the gospel, then why bother dying to self and living in radical obedience to Christ? As I argued in Disruptive Witness, the modern tendency is to view Christianity as a lifestyle option, not as a revealed truth from a transcendent God who entered into history in the form of Christ. If people come to Christianity only because they see it as a superior way to self-optimize, then when the demands of Christianity become too great, they will abandon it for some easier fad.

In that context, it’s easy to imagine an alternative Christianity evolving that truly makes a mockery of the faith by denaturing it, removing the Christ from Christianity. Even worse, Christ could come to be understood as a mere symbol, a meme for a largely political movement which is utterly unconcerned with the truth of Scripture.

It’s easy to imagine this because it’s already happened for a long time in some segments of American Christianity. The social gospel of progressives who have abandoned core doctrines like the Resurrection is a perfect example. And on the political right, Christianity can become a form of civic religion, as in former president Donald Trump’s recent promotion of an America-themed Bible. Christianity is always at risk of being co-opted by those who want the material benefits of the faith without the spiritual reality of the gospel.

But is it necessarily the case that those attracted by the material benefits will fail to adopt a deep, personal, orthodox faith? Is it possible that people concerned about a world gone insane could come to faith via this mundane path—first drawn to the God-designed order that is inherent in Christianity, and then drawn to God himself? Is it possible that people who are lonely and depressed could come to faith by first being drawn to the God-designed community inherent in the church?

I see the real risks of cultural Christianity. But I believe unbelievers who are first attracted by the benefits, not the gospel, may yet stumble into the faith. They may seek God “and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us” (Acts 17:27).

There is danger here, and we must be wary of encouraging a superficial, denatured Christian culture. But we find ourselves with a remarkable opening to proclaim the gospel. Whether people come to church to socialize or out of obedience to God, they need to hear the gospel. Whether people show interest in Christianity because of their fears about progressive culture or because they are convinced about the historicity of the Resurrection, they need to hear the gospel.

The challenge is to invite those who see the benefits of our faith to see that these are perfect gifts from the Father, not merely positive outcomes from an optimized lifestyle. The gospel is that invitation. Proclaiming it is how we can explain to our neighbors that Christian culture is good because it comes from a loving God who “richly blesses all who call on him” (Rom. 10:12), a God who desires them to repent and turn to him.

O. Alan Noble is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University and author of three books: On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, and Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age.

- More from Alan Noble

Culture

If This Ain’t Country, Expand Your Canon

Khristi Adams

Beyoncé’s right. Whether listening to Cowboy Carter or reading theology, diversity is a good thing.

Beyoncé at the iHeartRadio Music Awards.

Chris Pizzello / AP Images

I wasn’t planning to listen to Cowboy Carter, the eighth studio album from American singer and songwriter Beyoncé. I’ve always had a love for her music—but country has never been my thing.

Plans changed when I started to read what people were writing about the record, from comments on social media to reviews in major publications. Their reactions were bitter, even cruel. “Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ isn’t a country album. It’s worse,” proclaimed one review in The Washington Post. “Beyoncé has chosen to do Dolly Parton karaoke,” writes the reviewer. “She sounds like she’s doing Wild West bedroom cosplay in outer space.”

“The lefties in the entertainment industry just won’t leave any area alone, right?” asked an interviewer on a One America News program. “They’ve got to make their mark, just like a dog in a dog walk park,” responded the interviewee.

It’s not that Cowboy Carter is exempt from criticism. Its genre-blending experimentation won’t be to everyone’s taste. Some listeners may have reservations about Beyoncé’s departure from her earlier pop and R & B records. That’s fine. Music, like all art forms, is subjective. Thoughtful critique can serve as a means for musicians to grow as artists, and to engage audiences in meaningful ways.

But that’s different from implying that Beyoncé can’t and shouldn’t sing country music simply because of who she is: not a white man from a rural small town, but a Black woman raised in Houston. A “stay in your place” undercurrent cuts through how critics have spoken about her new album, and it rubs me the wrong way.

Who owns country music? By releasing Cowboy Carter, writes Tressie McMillan Cottom in The New York Times, Beyoncé is claiming that she does. By “reinscrib[ing] a genre’s latent politics,” Beyoncé makes listeners “reckon with [their] complicity in that genre’s policing of who is and is not legitimately American.”

In my forthcoming book Womanish Theology: Discovering God Through the Lens of Black Girlhood, I reflect on another question of possession: Who owns theology?

In the first months of my seminary education, I read texts from some of the white male theologians who had historically framed the discipline: Karl Barth, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Paul Tillich. For me, those texts were theology.

It was only when elective classes introduced me to Black, liberation, mujerista, womanist, and feminist theologies, writings from thinkers like James Cone, Gustavo Gutierrez, Katie Cannon, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, that I came to understand how marginalized voices could enliven my understanding of Jesus’ ministry. Excluding those voices as a significant source of theological knowledge would be a mistake.

Reading different kinds of theology, whether from thinkers of different cultural backgrounds or thinkers with whom we have profound disagreements, doesn’t have to undermine our own understanding of fundamental doctrine. We might disagree with some (or many) aspects of a person’s work. But that disagreement can be clarifying, helping us to develop our own arguments for what we believe. And diverse theology can provide new perspectives on belief and practice, fresh interpretive lenses for Scripture, and deeper understandings of God’s consistent character.

Take liberation theology, which emphasizes God's preferential option for the poor and oppressed. It reminds us that God is actively involved in the struggle for justice and liberation. In mujerista theology, God is portrayed as immanent and relational, engaged in the everyday struggles and triumphs of Latina women. In womanist theology, we pay particular attention to moments in the gospels when poor women encountered Jesus and his apostles.

In the same way that theologians from different backgrounds can offer different perspectives on the nature of the divine, country music as sung by Beyoncé provides its own unique perspective on the genre. Beyoncé adds context, just as other Black country artists like Linda Martell, Charley Pride, Tanner Adell, and Mickey Guyton have done.

How does a genre fixated on land and family and faith sound when Black artists take on those themes and reflect them through their experiences in towns and homes and churches? Beyoncé’s rendition of “Blackbiird” puts the struggle for Black civil rights alongside Levi’s jeans and long roads and banjo licks. That old struggle is part of our “country” too; as “American Requiem” puts it, “Nothin’ really ends / For things to stay the same, they have to change again.”

“Oh, Louisiana, I stayed away from you too long / Oh, Louisiana, How can a true love go so wrong?” goes one interlude, a sped-up Chuck Berry sample. Plenty of country songs are wistful about their roots. But Beyoncé’s reasons for staying away might be different.

An important caveat: Cowboy Carter doesn’t just offer something new because its singer is Black. It offers something new because its singer is Beyoncé—a global superstar, an icon. “This ain’t a Country album,” she wrote in her introductory Instagram post. “This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.” That means listening for what Cowboy Carter has to say about fame and wealth, celebrity and pride—and using those declarations to understand a musical tradition, and an American culture writ large, more fully. Her cover of “Jolene,” for instance, gives us another view on the pain of betrayal from Queen Bey’s lofty vantage point.

“Used to say I spoke, ‘too country’ / And the rejection came, said I wasn’t ‘country ’nough,’” Beyoncé sings in “American Requiem.” “Said I wouldn’t saddle up, but / If that ain’t country, tell me, what is?”

I celebrate Cowboy Carter for its boldness, creativity, and depth. And I celebrate Beyoncé for fearlessly declaring that she belongs here too.

Khristi Lauren Adams is dean of spiritual life and equity and an instructor of religious studies at the Hill School. She is the author of several books including Parable of the Brown Girl and Unbossed: How Black Girls Are Leading the Way.

- More from Khristi Adams

Church Life

Your Church Drummer Has More and Less to Do These Days

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

How the keeper of the beat is adapting to shifts in worship music.

Rafael Oliveira / Unsplash / Edits by CT

It was a church drummer’s worst nightmare. In the middle of a service, David Wagner was playing “Heaven Invade” with his worship band when his in-ear monitors stopped working.

Wagner posted a clip on Instagram of what happened. It includes the audio that should have been coming through in his monitors: a mix of the sound from the band, some added reverb, and of course, the click track—a repetitive tapping sound that keeps time, usually sounding for each beat. Halfway through the video, one of the vocalists—his wife—passes him a new pair of headphones.

The role of the worship drummer has changed a lot over the past 20 years. In addition to the evolving sound of worship music, drummers have adjusted to new production setups, becoming the person on stage who makes sure that musicians and tech are fully in sync.

Since the rise of contemporary worship bands during the late 1990s, many churches have adopted technologies that were once reserved for live concerts in stadiums and large auditoriums, where musicians needed in-ear monitors and click tracks due to crowd noise and echoes.

For veteran church drummers, these changes are pushing them to develop new skills and to adapt their approach to the music. Some say these shifts are making drumming more boring, lower stakes, and monotonous. Others are finding that new tools allow them to be creative, to explore using their instruments in different ways, and to experience new freedom as worshipers on stage—even if they are behind a Plexiglas cage.

Wagner, who has been a drummer for 12 years, moved to a church in Murray, Kentucky, that uses in-ear monitors (IEMs) about 3 years ago. At a smaller church before that, his tech setup had drums and guitars, but no click. The music was different too, more Chris Tomlin acoustic guitar sounds than the synth-heavy songs from Bethel or Elevation.

It took time to adjust to the relentless click track in his ears, but Wagner says it’s a tool that makes his job a lot easier.

“At first, it was kind of intimidating,” said Wagner. “But playing with a click actually felt easier.”

Most church musicians who use IEMs and click tracks aren’t just hearing a metronome; in many cases there are voice cues for the intro, verse, and chorus. Some churches also employ a music director that uses a microphone to speak directly to the musicians on stage to call out changes or to let everyone know if something is going wrong.

At first, taking in all that input while playing an instrument or singing can be overwhelming. But the precise orchestration these tools afford is necessary to recreate the sounds of today’s popular worship songs.

Drew Allen went from drumming for an Assemblies of God church in Mississippi to playing for a large North Point affiliate church in Gainesville, Florida.

Accustomed to a musical worship style marked by flexibility and spontaneity, the exacting structure imposed by a click and pre-programmed tracks at his new church felt very different. But ultimately, the predictability and clarity made it easier to engage in the music without the pressure of timekeeping and remembering whether a chorus or bridge was coming next.

“I used to think, I have to learn this exact arrangement? It’s going to be so hard to worship like that. But I’ve actually found that it’s the opposite,” said Allen. “When you have the arrangement on lock, it’s actually really freeing.”

Musicologist Joshua Kalin Busman points out that, over the last decade, the sound of worship music—think of the big names like Hillsong, Bethel, and Elevation—has shifted to reflect the profile of electronic dance music (EDM) more than rock.

That shift seems to have led to less tempo variation, an emphasis on a unified musical “set,” and rhythmic repetitiveness and simplicity.

“We jokingly call a contemporary worship service the ‘andante hour,’” said Busman (andante is a musical term for a moderately slow speed). “Everything now seems to sit in this tempo sweet spot at around 76 beats per minute.”

In EDM, rhythmic stability and key continuity (keeping songs in the same musical key signature) help create seemingly endless sets of songs that audiences can move to and participate in. One song can be easily folded into another, and transitions can be seamless. Increasingly, this way of participating in music is shaping worship services.

“That kind of tempo and pitch matching has always been part of EDM,” Busman said. “There’s more of a holistic musical trajectory. In worship music, we’ve shifted from a focus on the song as a delivery system to the set, a 30- or 45-minute experience.”

Paradoxically, the influence of EDM—a genre that’s all about the beat—hasn’t meant that drummers have more to do. The click track actually allows a band to rely less on a drummer and more on synth effects and vocalists, because everyone on stage has the same beat in their ears. There’s no danger of someone losing track of the tempo.

“For many worship tunes now, there is so much less groove in the arrangement of the song,” said Allen. “There are no drums from the top of the song, maybe a light cymbal swell into the second verse and a kick and floor tom. In a six-minute song, I might be playing a full beat for maybe 30 seconds of it.”

Hillsong’s “So Will I (100 Billion X)” is a good example of this. For most of the song, the lead vocalist and a riff in the electric guitar provide the sense of tempo. Drums punctuate the verses as the song slowly builds. But it’s a very slow escalation, and the drums don’t add a driving pulse until the bridge.

Church musicians who have been leading for a few decades know that there have always been slow songs and upbeat songs. Slow songs might have a few cymbal rolls and a full chorus, with very little for the drummer to do during the verses. But until recently, the high-energy songs have tended to pull from a rock sound that involved a lot more constant activity from the drummer.

Tim Whitaker, who spent his youth group years drumming in church and playing metal, recalled that mid-2000s music from groups like Sonicflood and David Crowder Band required drumming that reflected the sound of rock and punk.

“Modern worship music is all about intentionality and pocket,” said Whitaker, pointing out that when drummers aren’t driving the tempo, they have to develop sensitivity and subtlety. “You have to reframe these changes as a new challenge. Playing this music well actually takes a lot of maturity and musicianship.”

Wagner has found that the safety of the click allows him to experiment with different grooves and plug in musical ideas borrowed from other songs or arrangements.

“I used to play almost exactly what’s on the recording. I like to honor the parts that the drummers on the recordings have put together,” he said, “but I’ve gotten to the point where I can take some creative liberties.”

For drummers who developed their skills in bands where they were the indispensable timekeepers and rhythmic drivers, the changes in musical style and the role of technology can seem disempowering.

“It takes a lot of self-control and restraint to play this new music,” said Allen. He also pointed out that it takes spiritual maturity to be willing to serve and worship, whether you’re playing or not.

The automation of some parts of a drummer’s job has also opened up opportunities for new musicians to step in and play without the pressure of holding everything together. Drummers can be hard to find.

“The simplification of drums may have to do with the sort of talent pool that exists,” said Busman, the musicologist. “There’s a smaller pool of drummers.”

A drum kit is expensive and takes up a lot of space. For a kid to begin learning to play, parents have to make room, find money for the set and lessons, and resign themselves to a noisier home. And many school band programs require students to learn to play piano before being allowed to play percussion.

IEMs and a click mean that a new or out-of-practice drummer can step in and know that even if they get lost or make a mistake, the rest of the band will be able to keep in time and finish out the song, even if the drums drop out altogether.

Will Shine, a drummer and PhD student at the University of Georgia, pointed out that the tech tools that make it easier for a beginner to join in also make it easier for churches to recreate popular worship songs in weekly services.

“You have to play to your lowest common denominator, skill-wise,” said Shine. “At the same time, for a song to become popular, it has to be replicable.”

Today’s popular atmospheric anthems would not be as easy to recreate without the increased use of tech. But the new technology also makes it possible to automate the music, to the point that musicians start to wonder if they even need to be there. It also makes it harder for a worship set to have any spontaneity.

“There’s a strange disconnect,” said Allen. “It seems like a lot of musicians and leaders want the crowd to experience this vibey, unplanned worship experience but to still have the ability to manage its production down to the second.”

Finding balance between programming and spontaneity is a challenge for church musicians and leaders implementing new technology. And while congregants seem to value and even seek out opportunities to participate in worship that has the potential to lead to unexpected outpourings, the popular music many churches are using requires a high degree of technical orchestration.

It can also leave musicians like Wagner scrambling when there’s a glitch.

“I spent a little more money on my new in-ears,” he said, “so hopefully it won’t happen again.”

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

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