The Big Tent Initiative

The Big Tent Initiative is building bridges across the American Church.

The Church today stands at a crossroads. Political polarization, racial tension, and denominational divides have fractured our witness and weakened our unity. Many believers long for a faith community that reflects the beautiful diversity of God’s kingdom—where people can disagree without division and pursue truth together in love. The Big Tent Initiative exists to meet this need.

The “Big Tent” is a place that brings together diverse groups of people who are united around the same core biblical beliefs. Through thoughtful conversations, creative media, and fresh theological resources, this initiative convenes Christian leaders and storytellers from many backgrounds to model a better way—one marked by grace, humility, and understanding.

By platforming underrepresented voices, learning from believers from different backgrounds, and creating spaces for honest, hopeful, and winsome dialogue, The Big Tent Initiative is helping the Church rediscover what unites us in Christ.

Your gift to the One Kingdom Campaign supports and extends this vital work. Learn more about The Big Tent Initiative and how you can make an impact here.

Theology

Christian Devotion Does Not Undermine Christian Charity

Brett Vanderzee

When Christians neglect the poor and oppressed, it’s not because we love Jesus too much but because we love him too little.

Anointing of Jesus by Alexandre Bida

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

It was a “social experiment” playing out on TikTok: A young Kentucky woman called churches asking if they’d buy formula to feed her (fictional) hungry baby. Only a handful agreed on the spot, and the stunt went viral, “proof” that Christians and other religious people are stingy hypocrites who can’t be bothered with the needy.

In reality, it proved nothing of the sort. A pastor who jumped at the chance to help was rightly honored. And while some responses were admittedly obtuse, there are also good reasons a church secretary wouldn’t instantly comply with a stranger on the phone. Baby formula—because it’s shelf-stable, relatively expensive, urgently needed, and subject to intermittent shortages—has long been a popular item for black market trading and schemes to defraud SNAP, the food stamps program.

And beyond baby formula, the generosity of Christians and other religious Americans is well-established. While not free of hypocrisy, we’ve consistently set the curve on giving. “The evidence leaves no room for doubt: Religious people are far more charitable than nonreligious people,” writes Arthur Brooks in Who Really Cares, a painstaking study of American charitable action. “In years of research, I have never found a measurable way in which secularists are more charitable than religious people.”

This generosity doesn’t just extend to houses of worship. Religious folks outperform secularists “in every measurable way,” Brooks documents—including giving to secular charities, volunteering, and donating blood. This has been true of Christians for centuries. Basil of Caesarea is credited with paving the way for the modern hospital, and the early church was renowned for its courageous care of the sick. Our culture’s deep assumption of the value of the young, weak, and vulnerable undeniably rests on the ethical foundation laid by the carpenter from Nazareth.

Still the perception remains: this idea that Christians are all words and no deeds, too busy doing empty religious rituals to see Christ in beggarly form. Even Christians sometimes fall into this line of thinking, wondering if there’s a tension between the church’s worship and the Lord’s work. Do love and adoration for Christ feed our impulse to feed the hungry? Or is churchly devotion to Jesus a mere distraction from tending to a broken world filled with dire needs?

Certainly, we should welcome prods to action: The Christian disposition to care for the least of these cannot remain a mere disposition. “The goodness of caring for the poor,” Joseph Bottum warns in An Anxious Age, can become “much less about actually caring for the poor … and much more about feeling that the poor should be cared for.”

Yet it’s a mistake to pit worship and service against each other—a mistake that will diminish our worship and service alike. Hearing, praying, learning, and singing the stories of Jesus’ mercy each week confronts us with the fact that Christianity is not a historical curiosity. It demands to be lived.

Christian devotion does not undermine charity but underwrites it. And going to church does not distract us from service but teaches us to serve. Far from competing with practical charity, devotion to Christ is what keeps his teachings in our lives.

The church’s call to worship is a call to action. It is a call to awaken from sloth—from what theologian Ross McCullough describes as “the vice of failing to love [goodness] enough.” The virtue that Christians have traditionally prescribed to combat sloth is diligence, the Latin root of which is diligere, or “to love.” Love is an indispensable ingredient to the Christian life, as the apostle Paul says in one of his most-quoted chapters: “If I give all I possess to the poor … but do not have love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor. 13:3).

When Christians neglect the poor, oppressed, and marginalized, it is not because we love Jesus too much but because we love him too little. Weekly fellowship with a church intent on doing justly (Mic. 6:8) is a practice and a source of diligence. The worship of Christ and the works of Christ are designed to go together, and any attempt to separate the two will ultimately fail.

This is the truth underneath the seemingly dismissive remark Jesus once made about the needy: “The poor you will always have with you” (Matt. 26:11). The line, a reference to Deuteronomy, comes in the story of Jesus’ anointing at Bethany. A woman breaks open an alabaster jar of expensive perfume and pours it on his head—much to the disciples’ dismay.

“Why this waste?” they ask. “This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor” (Matt. 26:6–9). But Jesus calls the woman’s action “beautiful.” She was anointing him for burial, he says, adding that the disciples will always have the poor (vv. 10–12).

What are we to make of this strange episode? Does it confirm the caricature of callous religiosity? Is Jesus justifying Christian selfishness?

The passage Jesus quoted points us to the answer. By invoking a fragment of Deuteronomy, Jesus was invoking the whole passage (a practice known as “metalepsis”), in which God addresses the ubiquity of poverty in order to command its redress: “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land’” (Deut. 15:11, NRSVue). Students of the Galilean rabbi would have known the citation’s implications.

The context in Matthew matters too. In the prior chapter, Matthew 25, Jesus points to treatment of the downtrodden as the criterion for eternal salvation and damnation, listing out feeding the hungry, giving a drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting the imprisoned. “Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these,” Jesus says, “you did not do for me” (v. 45). From the Sermon on the Mount to the end of Matthew’s gospel, no one walks away with a license to ignore the lowly.

But what of the expensive ointment at Bethany? Does extravagant worship lavished on Jesus undercut care for the poor?

Actually, the opposite. Matthew 25 says that whatever we do for the poor we have ultimately done for Jesus. And in Matthew 26, the principle is reversed: When the woman does a beautiful thing to Jesus, she also does it to the poor.

That is, she doesn’t just anoint his body for death; she anoints his very way of life. She anoints his fellowship with the least, his touch of the untouchable. She anoints his sermon that starts by saying the poor in spirit are blessed (Matt. 5:3). Her worship is directed at the one who “became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9)—not materially rich but “rich in good deeds” (1 Tim. 6:18).

When I was in college, a friend of mine had an idea to start a movement called Sunday Morning Worship. The idea was to convince students to stop attending their local churches and instead spend Sunday mornings downtown serving the homeless. The heart behind the idea was good, echoing the call of Isaiah 1:12–17 to stop privileging solemn assemblies over seeking justice for the oppressed and needy.

But the “living sacrifice” of Christian service (Rom. 12:1–2) is never in competition with Christian worship. On the contrary, Sunday morning is precisely where we learn of Jesus’ heart for the destitute. And as it happened, our congregation on campus already had vibrant ministries to the poor. The work was being done; we needed only to join in.

That isn’t always the case. Too many churches have been unfaithful to the ministry agenda of Jesus. We have not always mirrored his tender mercy. But fervent worship of Jesus is not the problem here. It is the beginning of the solution.

In his comments on the story from Matthew 26, theologian Stanley Hauerwas reminds Christians of the work and worship incumbent upon every congregation:

The wealth of the church is the wealth of the poor. The beauty of a cathedral is a beauty that does not exclude but in fact draws and includes the poor. The beauty of the church’s liturgy, its music and its hymns, is a beauty of and for the poor. … “The poor you always have with you” is not a description to legitimate a lack of concern for the poor, but rather a description of a faithful church. This woman, this unnamed woman, has done for Jesus what the church must always be for the world—precious ointment poured lavishly on the poor.

When Christians bend the knee to Jesus, we adopt his posture to the impoverished: humble service, devotion, and sacrifice. To mirror the posture of Jesus is to prepare to carry a cross.

Brett Vanderzee is preaching and music minister at The Springs Church of Christ in Edmond, Oklahoma, singer-songwriter, and cohost of the podcast Bible & Friends.

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Ideas

This Winter, Be Bored

Hannah Miller King

Contributor

This slow and quiet season is an opportunity to hear anew from God.

EyeEm Mobile GmbH / Getty

Parenting literature these days is full of encouragement to let kids be bored. In an over-scheduled world, kids need downtime. Their brains benefit from white space, which ultimately results in greater creativity and motivation.

As a mom of three young children, I can attest to the benefits of boredom (although I can also attest to the messiness of its ensuing blanket forts and slime recipes). My own best memories of childhood are from a season when my siblings and I learned to entertain each other without a home television.

Adults aren’t given the same permission to be bored. Instead, we are encouraged to be productive. We evaluate our worth and usefulness in terms of busyness and efficiency. In our achievement-driven society, any kind of lull is perceived as evidence of poor planning or low ambition. The quiet rage I feel when I am held up in the grocery checkout line—without any more emails to respond to on my smartphone—exposes my pathological aversion to white space.

For me, and for many I’ve pastored, this “efficiency addiction” can often be subdued only by some kind of mind-numbing entertainment. In a discussion about Sabbath-keeping, some friends admitted to me that the only way they know how to disentangle from work is by bingeing Netflix shows. It seems that our consumer-capitalist framework has taught us to know only two modes: productive or entertained.

Many of us are currently riding that pendulum as we leave the constant stimulation of the end-of-year holidays for the fresh to-do lists of New Year’s resolutions. Our fluctuation between overwork and inertia demonstrates that we have forgotten how to exist apart from what we produce or consume.

Of course, productivity is part of our calling as God’s image bearers. Work predates the Fall and will likely last into eternity (Isa. 65:17–25). But we are more than what we do.

God declared creation to be “very good” before human beings did anything to develop it (Gen. 1:31). When my children embrace the natural lulls in activity on a given day, they are usually reconnecting with this good creation. They inspect icicles outside or play in a bubble bath. Sometimes they fall asleep. Their ability to receive the present moment, with all the limitations and pleasures of embodiment, convicts me. It exposes my disinterest with the world beyond my computer screen or to-do list. It exposes my fear of what might be deemed inefficient or insignificant.

I am challenging myself to welcome my own encounters with boredom as a spiritual discipline of sorts. In the spare moments of the day when I would typically turn to my phone for either a quick task or mindless clickbait—waiting in line at the store, sitting at a red light, even walking from the bedroom to the kitchen—I am seeking instead to be present.

This has made my life less productive and at times less interesting. But it is also reorienting me to a way of being in the world that is more expansive than my to-do list. When we resist the urge to fill every moment with a task or bit of amusement, we practice a subtle form of cultural resistance. We remind ourselves and others that life is more than a series of accomplishments and that enjoyment is not synonymous with entertainment.

Getting there, of course, is not easy. Our commitment to preoccupation often stems from deeper anxieties than the day’s deadlines. Busyness can mask low self-esteem, unprocessed grief, fears about the future, and much more. But even these need to be given space to emerge so that we can address them honestly.

I have a friend who is a spiritual director. She encourages people not to overstuff their prayer lives with activity—because even good things like prayer lists can inadvertently feed our preoccupation. Our souls need white space, time to unfurl in God’s presence and be healed. We can’t hustle our way to holiness, Alex Sosler wrote for CT, because “formation is less about productivity and more about stillness.”

This is how boredom can lead to breakthrough in our lives: not as an end in itself but—as its etymology suggests—as a boring through, like a hole that is bored or drilled into a solid object to make space for something else. If we can prayerfully receive it, boredom can create the conditions within us for deeper attunement and presence.

When we embrace white space, moments or even hours of inefficient, uninteresting time, we begin to reconnect with the basic truths of our existence in the world. We discover parts of ourselves that predate our productivity and will outlast the next episode on Netflix. When we practice the skill of presence, we retrain our senses to see the goodness of creation as it is right now and we increase our capacity to enjoy it.

Ultimately, strengthening our attunement to creation can serve another end: wonder. As I’ve practiced slowing down and paying attention to the present moment, I’ve realized that just because I’ve seen that icicle or the sunset for 36 years doesn’t mean I’ve exhausted their beauty or meaning.

Sometimes, after we’ve inoculated ourselves to the world’s gifts, we need to force ourselves to look again until we remember how to see. This too is a kind of attunement to God, who is always affirming creation by holding it together (Col. 1:17). When we learn to value presence over productivity, we grow into his image and rediscover the wonder for which we were made.

In Orthodoxy, theologian G. K. Chesterton put it this way:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

The inevitable winter lull, with its long stretches of routine and inclement weather, can lead to more frustration and determination to get things done. But if we let it, these months’ slower pace can reorient us to the gift of being, apart from questions of usefulness and productivity. We can choose to embrace these unavoidable inefficiencies—and the boredom they may evoke—as a kind of spiritual discipline that reconnects us to our true selves and to God.

As we become attuned to the people and things in front of us, we live counter-culturally, reflecting the image of the God who said in the beginning, “Let there be,” and it was good.

Hannah Miller King is the associate rector at The Vine Anglican Church in Western North Carolina and the author of Feasting on Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness.

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Ideas

Nicki Minaj Is Right on Persecution—But Neglects Suffering Closer to Home

Chris Butler

Contributor

The rapper’s political advocacy seems sincere, but she has fallen into political tribalism.

Nicki Minaj being interviewed by Erika Kirk at Turning Point USA's annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona on December 21, 2025.

Caylo Seals / Stringer / Getty

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

Nicki Minaj has gone MAGA.

The rapper’s political evolution seems to have begun last fall when she expressed rightful concern over the safety of believers in Nigeria. Minaj, who identifies as a Christian, has since started talking more about God and has expanded her commentary to other hot-button topics.

The modern right welcomed her with open arms: She exchanged compliments with Vice President JD Vance, spoke at a Donald Trump–friendly political event, and threw dehumanizing punches at media personality Don Lemon for his presence at an ill-mannered anti-ICE demonstration in a church. This week, Minaj also appeared with Trump at another event and called herself his “number one fan.” She said she is not concerned about the criticism she’s facing due to her alignment with the president. “It actually motivates me to support him more,” she added.

The problem with all this isn’t Minaj’s embrace of politically conservative principles. The Trinidadian-born rapper once had an expletive-filled one-liner in a song about voting for Mitt Romney. (She later said it was sarcasm.)

The problem is also not that she champions her faith or criticizes politicians over gender ideology—even though it is hypocritical to simultaneously promote her own debauchery-filled music. The real problem is her online taunts, middle-fingered Chucky memes, and the culture-war mentality that seems to fuel much of what she does. Her behavior is yet another sign that reveals what happens when genuine concern about social issues is formed by outrage.

I should say here that it’s possible everything she’s doing is part of a grift, as some have suggested. But as of right now, I’m not convinced by that theory.

Minaj, whose real name is Onika Tanya Maraj-Petty, grew up in a Christian home. It’s unclear if or where she goes to church, but she has previously pointed out she does have a pastor who leads a nondenominational ministry in Brooklyn, New York. Minaj speaks openly about prayer, baptism, and her desire to please God. She seems like she has sincere concerns about issues that resonate deeply with many believers—not just the persecution of Christians abroad and gender confusion but also the right to worship without intimidation.

These are not fringe concerns. They are real, morally serious questions, especially for Black Christians navigating a political landscape with two white-dominated parties that often treat faith as either a liability or a prop. But concern alone is not enough. Without discipleship, concern often curdles into grievance.

During an appearance last month at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, Minaj did not offer a comprehensive political platform or a detailed endorsement of the Trump administration’s policy agenda. The rapper had previously criticized the first Trump administration’s family-separation policy and revealed that she “came to this country as an illegal immigrant.” At the conference however, she didn’t bring up any of that.

Instead, she focused on areas of alignment with the administration—religious freedom, resistance to cultural coercion, and a shared sense of being bullied or silenced—complimented both Trump and Vance, and ignored the rest.

Omissions like this reflect the way our political culture increasingly trains participants, especially public figures, to emphasize alignment and bracket complexity. Internal critique is often framed as weakness, and complexity often seems like a liability rather than a virtue.

As a result, people amplify some of their concerns and become quieter on others, not because they abandoned those concerns but because they no longer feel speakable. Suppressing tension, however, doesn’t clarify our public witness; it only distorts it. Over time, many, including Christians, learn to say only what their tribe (or one they’re trying to belong to) will affirm.

This explains why figures like Minaj can speak passionately about Christian persecution abroad while remaining silent on policies that harm vulnerable families at home, why outrage over cultural coercion can coexist with indifference to state coercion, and why people can pair Christian language with rhetoric that dehumanizes perceived enemies.

But removing inconvenient tensions is not a problem unique to MAGA. I have similar concerns with the left, which treats dissent—especially on sexuality, race, and identity—as worthy of social exile. This very trait has been on full display with former fans of Minaj, who are circulating petitions calling for her deportation to Trinidad.

For Black Christians, the act of losing nuance can be especially dangerous. Historically, the Black church has held together moral commitments that do not fit neatly into America’s partisan binaries: a high view of human dignity alongside a strong sense of right and wrong, a demand for justice coupled with personal responsibility, and resistance to oppression in tandem with a search for reconciliation.

That tradition has always required discernment, not slogans. But discernment must be taught. And too often, it has not been.

Many churches, wary of political entanglement or exhausted by partisan conflict, have retreated from shaping consciences on public issues altogether. Others have functionally outsourced their political theology to one party or another, trading prophetic distance for access and affirmation.

But when churches fail to form believers politically—not by telling them who to vote for but by teaching them how to think Christianly about power, justice, and responsibility—the media, partisan movements, and social media often become places of discipleship and affirmation.

Minaj’s story illustrates this vividly. She does not arrive at Turning Point—or the recent event with Trump—as a policy technician or ideological theorist. She arrives as someone who feels pushed, mocked, silenced, and spiritually disrespected. And she is met not with patient theological conversations but with applause. Her anger is validated. Her “courage” is celebrated. Her complexity, however, is quietly narrowed.

The tragedy is that a community of Christians should be where someone like Minaj can bring all her convictions, examine them honestly, and refine them through Scripture and community. It should be among us that she can ask hard questions about immigration, religious liberty, gender, violence, and state power without hearing that only some of those concerns are welcome.

Unfortunately, both for Minaj and for the rest of us, these types of communities have become few and far between.

Chris Butler is a pastor in Chicago and the director of Christian civic formation at the Center for Christianity & Public Life. He is also the co-author of Compassion & Conviction: The And Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement.

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Theology

What Happens When You Look Away from the Minneapolis Shootings

Russell Moore

Columnist

Ask not what will happen to your country—although that’s of grave importance. Ask what will happen to you.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

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

In 1981, novelist Walker Percy wrote a column he titled “A View of Abortion with Something to Offend Everybody.” As a Christian, he took on the seared consciences of pro-life people disregarding the poor women who don’t get abortions but can’t feed their babies. As a medical doctor, he took on the seared consciences of pro-choice people who see the unborn child as just a blob of detachable organic matter.

His final word was for the ones he assumed would be the winners of the political moment. To supporters of abortion, he wrote, “According to the opinion polls, it looks as if you may get your way. But you’re not going to have it both ways. You’re going to be told what you’re doing.”

What Percy identified here is much bigger than just one issue. It is rather the temptation, present in all places, to make invisible whatever actions trouble one’s own conscience, to make disposable whatever people one’s own tribe deems unworthy. He knew the fellow pro-lifers he was criticizing would not argue that children of poor women deserved their suffering. They would just say, What poor women in my community? And he knew the abortion rights supporters he was criticizing would speak loudly about choice without ever describing what actually happens in such a choice—and to whom.

This month, masked federal government agents in Minneapolis shot and killed two American citizens. With the first shooting, that of Renee Good, those arguing that we should ignore ICE’s culpability said Good was attempting to drive into the officers. Slowed-down video footage convinced many people who saw it that this was not the case, but surely the people waving away this killing thought the officer was justified in his response. The second and more recent killing, that of Alex Pretti, seemed much less ambiguous: A man legally carrying a concealed weapon was thrown to the ground, disarmed, and then shot ten times.

Over the past several days, the president’s language has been much more restrained than that of his vice president and his Homeland Security secretary, and homeland security adviser, who in some cases implied and in other cases stated that these two protesters were domestic terrorists.

If this were a mere question of governance and policy, it would still be of great importance. After all, we can see what happens in other places when armed authorities kill with impunity those who protest. And as I wrote two weeks ago on the meaning of Romans 13, the responsibility for holding such power accountable in America’s system of government is ultimately with all of us. But let’s step back from the civic space for a moment.

Some Christians, wherever they are politically, have said what should be obvious and noncontroversial: The killing of people under the circumstances we saw filmed is evil. But others who profess the name of Christ have said Good and Pretti deserved what they received. And still others throat-cleared their way out of making judgments only after the Pretti video became ubiquitous. Even if these were murders, the argument goes, these people shouldn’t have been where they were when they were. The immoral taking of human life, in other words, should be safe, legal, and rare.

People made the same arguments after the murders of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney in Mississippi in 1964: Nobody is for killing anybody, but if they had stayed home, they would be alive today. People made the same arguments about John Lewis in Selma when police beat him or about Martin Luther King Jr. when he was assassinated. What has changed are not the arguments themselves; the only thing that has changed is the time.

Jesus warned about this when he said to the religious leaders around him, “For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets’” (Matt. 23:29–30, ESV throughout).

It is clear, of course, that those who want to cover up conversation about these killings expect that most of us will look away and that those who don’t will quickly move on. In Machiavellian terms, these leaders have good reason to assume our willful forgetfulness. They’ve seen it before, over and over again. Maybe you fit into that category: You don’t want to justify what sure seems to be murder, but you don’t want to get out of touch with your tribe either, so you choose not to think about it at all.

Ask not what will happen to your country—although that’s of great and grave importance. Ask what will happen to you.

What happens to you? If, when Charlie Kirk was murdered, your thought was Well, he shouldn’t have said the Second Amendment was worth the lives that were lost in school shootings or if now your thought is Well, they should have stayed home, and they’d be alive today, do you hear yourself? If that’s your response, you don’t object to murder but to murder of people on your side. It would be disastrous for us as a country if we collectively started to think like that. But a soul is even more permanent than a state.

The searing of a conscience—especially by evaluating in terms of tribal belonging what lives are worth living—leads to easier and easier searing in the future. The power to discern good from evil demands “constant practice” (Heb. 5:14). The next-to-end result is chilling: “They kill the widow and the sojourner, and murder the fatherless; and they say, ‘The Lord does not see; the God of Jacob does not perceive’” (Ps. 94:6–7).

Armed agents doing wrong things can perhaps count on masks to shield them from accountability—or on presidential pardons or legal immunities or even the short attention spans of the American people. But what happens to you when you make moral decisions about the life or death of those made in the image of God? That cannot be hidden, at least not permanently, not to the God who judges the living and the dead.

If the universe is meaningless and good and evil are just categories of power or distinctions between friend and enemy, that’s one thing. But if there is an all-seeing God and Jesus is alive, then the judgment seat is quite different from public opinion. You cannot hide a hardened heart behind the fact that you weren’t the one pulling the trigger. God is not a political hack of any party or movement, and he doesn’t observe the Fifth Avenue rule.

The country is in a dangerous time. You might conclude that defeating your enemies is worth ignoring some lives lost—murders you would have denounced if the “other side” had done the killing. You might conclude that a culture war is worth your conscience. If so, you might win. After all, the United States is only 250 years old, and underestimating human virtue and responsibility is often a safe bet in a fallen world.

But you can’t have it both ways. You will be told what you’re doing.

Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Church Life

How to Witness Well in Post-Christian America

Darrell Bock

We must engage the truth of the gospel with relationship and respect.

Mitchell Luo / Unsplash

Times have changed significantly in my 50 years as a believer. Here in the United States, the perception and position of the Christian faith has flipped from seemingly being the home team to being the visitors instead, even perhaps the rivals met with booing. Some survey data suggests the decline in U.S. Christianity may be leveling off, but that’s after a significant drop. In 2007, 78 percent of American adults identified as Christians. In 2024? Only 63 percent.

We live in a post-Christian context, even, at times, a “negative world” in which being a believer is not just neutral but socially detrimental. This shift changes everything about how we present Christ. Our world is not new; it’s much like the world of the first-century church. Now, though, we must reckon with stereotypes about Christians and peoples’ past experiences of church.

The church taught for decades that what is in the Bible is true because it is in the Bible, full stop. But what do you do when the Bible is not automatically assumed to be a source of truth or, at the very least, an innocuous good book? “Because the Bible says so” can’t be the end of our conversations with the roughly 30 percent of Americans who identify as religious nones.

These days, how we engage with non-Christians is as important as what we present as truth. Christians have always valued humility and sacrificial love as core virtues, reflective of Christ on the cross. Through the centuries, we’ve seen how those virtues can change hate and hostility into love and respect for all made in God’s image.

But the temptation is always to use force instead. This is not only a theologically and ethically troubling solution to the problem of unbelief but also an ineffective strategy. The gospel is about an internal change of heart, not an external change of law.

Before we even begin to discuss specific contentious issues such as immigration, sexuality, gun control, vaccinations, abortion, the Middle East, race, diversity initiatives, or a host of other specific issues, we must consider how we enter the public square, a place where Buddhists and Presbyterians, Muslims and Baptists, Jews and agnostics must figure out how to live together.

I want to argue that the Christian’s best initial strategy is to listen, and to listen seriously. Engagement means persuading, not badgering. We must take the time to understand the underlying why behind another person’s position, even when we ardently disagree. Leaping into argument and conflict often closes doors. If we sincerely hear out someone else’s rationale instead, we often discover not only an open door but also a bridge that can take us toward the gospel.

I have found looking for common ground often changes not just a conversation’s direction but its tone, allowing me to present how Christ makes a difference and offers an alternative way of seeing life’s choices. For example, when I have acknowledged our failure to live well together in a diverse culture, all of a sudden my conversations about race go from confrontation to collaboration.

But for many Christians over the last four decades, the default in public spaces has been to fight. As a result, we have made nonbelievers the enemy, driving them away from the gospel. Peter challenges us to give a defense of our hope with meekness and respect (1 Pet. 3:15–16). In his letters, Paul insists that Christians do good to all people and alwaysuse gracious speech (Gal. 6:10; Col. 4:5–6). Ephesians 6:12, a passage drawing imagery from warfare, declares that our battle is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual forces. The people we seek to convince are not our combatants; the real battle is spiritual, not merely intellectual or emotional. This deeper spiritual battle means living out our faith consistently, with peaceable patience, even as we advocate courageously for our beliefs.

Christians may wrestle with what their orientation should be toward people who need what Jesus offers but have not yet received his free gift of grace. Do I fundamentally value those people on the basis of their being made in God’s image? Or do I focus first on the decisions they make or ideas they hold that run counter to God’s word? Do I see people who do not know God as my adversaries? Or do I see them as the ones for whom Christ died, to whom we make an appeal to know God precisely because of his exceptional, sacrificial love (2 Cor. 5:19–20)? The latter perspective is inseparable from our ability to share our faith in a pluralistic context.

The gospel is a challenge and an invitation. Without the invitation, I do not have the gospel. But I often see believers focused on the fight at the cost of the welcome. The result is a missed opportunity for attracting our neighbors.

The Bible is revelation from God, defined by The Oxford English Dictionary as “the divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something relating to human existence or the world.” Think about that definition. What’s revealed in Scripture is not separate from what’s revealed in the natural world. The Bible’s claims are constituent of human existence. A teaching is true not just “because it’s in the Bible.” Teaching appears in Scripture as a disclosure of what already is and has been—what was already true. In the beginning, there was the Word (John 1:1).

When we discuss the Bible’s teachings with someone who has no regard for or familiarity with the text, then we need to present the ideas of Scripture on their own terms. We need to make the case for the biblical worldview by appealing to its wisdom and truth.

But in addition to using these apologetic strategies, we must also remember that the fruit of the Spirit is fundamentally relational. The Great Commandment is relational. Christ’s way is distinctive in how he calls us to treat those who oppose us: We are to love our enemies, not just our allies. That treatment is the standard by which we measure Christian love.

Tone matters one heaven of a lot. The best way to witness in our world is to reflect the approach of our Savior. Only in relationship and respect will we be able to not only stall the decline of Christian faith in the United States but also actually advance the gospel anew.

Darrell Bock is the senior research professor New Testament Studies and executive director of cultural engagement for Dallas Theological Seminary. He is the author or editor of over 45 books.

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Church Life

Young Christians Can Stay in the Black Church

Michael Lyles II

A legalistic congregation and my own spiritual immaturity made me sour on church. But God and another congregation drew me back.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash, Pexels

If you go to a Sunday service at many Black churches, you won’t find a lot of young people there. Pew Research Center confirmed this generational gap, which has also attracted media attention. Congregations that once served as the political, social, and economic nerve centers of their neighborhoods face uncertain futures as millennial and Gen Z Christians opt for online services, seek membership in multiethnic churches, or ditch church altogether.

There are many reasons young people are stepping out of the pews. Some just don’t want to go to church or to be affiliated with one religion. Others think the Black church is not involved enough in contemporary political and cultural issues. And a subset of young Black Christians distrust spiritual leaders, feel that they don’t fit in at church, or have had upsetting experiences they often call church hurt.

Some of these sentiments echo in my own journey of walking away and coming back to the Black church about ten years ago, at 30. My relationship with the church changed when I understood the deeply personal reasons behind why I left, studied Scripture for myself, and transformed my understanding of the role God intended church to play in my life. I realized what we all eventually discover: There’s no perfect church or perfect Christians, just a perfect Savior worth following.

Whenever I meet anyone new, I do not enjoy answering the question “Where are you from?,” because the predominately white suburb where my parents chose to raise me is not what I would have picked for myself. My parents grew up in tight-knit segregated Black neighborhoods in the 1960s. When they had the opportunity to choose where to live in the mid-1980s, they moved to a northern Atlanta suburb that had a population of roughly 50,000 people.

The makeup of the town meant I was isolated from the Black history and institutions that were important touchpoints with my own culture and with the city of Atlanta—the only exception being a local Black church my family attended. When I was five, my mother reminds me, I asked her why the people at my school were white when the people at church were brown. I remember some kids asking me if they could touch my fade or if I was black all over my body. Others were overly eager to make “a Black friend,” which made me acutely aware that I was not like them.

Since my extended family lived elsewhere, our church became my version of the proud Black neighborhoods where my parents grew up. Church was the place I could see people who looked like me, and it was the center of my family’s social life. My father taught the high school Sunday school class for decades while my mother poured her heart into the children’s program and youth ministry.

My parents, particularly my dad, cast large shadows. It seemed every active member knew him and by extension knew I was his son. Growing up, I often felt as if fellow church members treated me like a carbon copy of my father, even though both of us were (and still are) very different from each other. We don’t share the same ministry gifts. But the constant comparison made me wonder if God wanted me to be a replica of him. Those feelings planted seeds of anger, hurt, insecurity, and spiritual doubt, all of which were then watered by legalistic attitudes within the congregation.

This was the beginning of a complicated relationship with my church. On the one hand, it was the place where I met my childhood best friend, and I felt the Holy Spirit moving as our youth choir sang a rendition of Psalm 23. I loved and respected many of the members. On the other hand, it was also the place where, like many Christians in predominately white evangelical churches, I saw the excesses of the ’90s purity culture.

As a teen, I involuntarily joined a junior-high vow-of-purity program in which my peers and I were told we could risk going to hell for having premarital sex. A sin? Yes, but surely not one uniquely beyond the reach of God’s mercy. The well-intentioned but ultimately poor theology didn’t stop there: our teachers also told us we would face the eternally fiery furnace if we listened to secular music, especially if we did so on a Sunday.

Then there’s what didn’t happen. We didn’t have nuanced conversations about honoring God with our sexuality. My biggest takeaway from our church was that Christians shouldn’t talk, joke about, or even acknowledge our sexual desires. There was also little to no conversation about how to stay true to the biblical sexual ethic in a nation where many who oppose our views on sex align with us on racial-justice issues—and where those hesitant to address injustice call themselves Christians too.

Then there was the case of traditional marriage, which our church rightly promoted as a worthy aspiration. But at times, it felt as if we were championing the American dream (the spouse, the house, the kids) instead of preaching the whole counsel of God, which says not everyone is called to marriage or parenthood (1 Cor. 7:1–8). Moreover, even when Christians are called to this path, their journeys may not follow the formulaic fairy tale we were sold.

Over time, I struggled with how a church that seemed to paint every issue in black and white could be a relevant part of my life when the situations I encountered Monday to Saturday had many hues of gray. So I left.

When I went to college, I was still a Christian. But church was no longer where I rooted my social or spiritual life. I eventually found a group of friends (made up of fellow jaded Christians, agnostics, and “spiritual” people) who embraced candor and occasional irreverence and were not preoccupied with whether everything I said, did, or thought was a sin. I wanted a community that could handle my doubts about legalistic biblical interpretation and did not shy away from the fact that life is sometimes messy—even for the most dutiful Christians. My friends provided that, but my spiritual life petered out.

Years after I ran away from church, however, God used another Black congregation in Harlem, New York, to shake me out of my spiritual slumber. He also pushed me to confront a hard truth: The root cause of my attitude toward the church was my own spiritual immaturity.

I visited the Harlem church with my then-girlfriend, now wife, after our yuppie peers suggested it was a fun place to go before brunch on Sundays. There, the doubt and criticism of church behaviors I encountered as a kid were welcomed, not rejected. The church pushed us to read the Bible cover-to-cover so we would know what was in it and what was not. At that point, I couldn’t have told you the general narrative of the Bible from Abraham to Jesus. I knew hymns but not the context of the Bible passages that inspired them.

The other church members and I did not always agree with each other—or our pastor—on theological interpretation. But we learned how to disagree with a Bible-centered perspective.

The accounts of Israel’s monarchs in the Old Testament showed me God doesn’t relate to every generation of a family the same way, so I did not have to feel guilty or insecure about having different gifts than my dad. I didn’t feel pressure to never miss a church service, which felt like an expectation growing up. The Harlem church’s training gave me a spiritual defensive mechanism against the subtle forms of legalism that bothered me as a kid and that, I believe, have led a chunk of young people to walk away.

But the fault isn’t with Black churches alone. Many young people, including me, left because we had a distorted view of our local congregations. We didn’t see Black churches as what God intended: a joint spiritual savings account that requires investment from every member. Instead, we saw them as tools we could use to withdraw support, prayers, love, and a weekly sermon about rules we had to follow.

Maturity in the faith requires taking ownership of our relationships with Christ and looking for opportunities to help others lean into that same fellowship, not expecting everyone (including churches) to cater to our every need. That doesn’t mean we won’t face pain. Other believers might continue to hurt us, and life will have messy seasons. But when our faith and hope are rooted in Christ—not in people or circumstances—we can better weather those storms.

Today, my wife and I are raising our kids in a racially diverse community in Atlanta. We go to a Black church, but we don’t rely on it to be the only place where our kids encounter people who look like them. My dad and I respect each other’s differences and allow each other the space to worship and serve in our own ways. Our churches are not perfect, and neither are we.

Black churches, like all other congregations, are made up of people, not walls. They are imperfect, but they are also one of the instruments God is using to renew the world. Millennials and Gen Zers should avoid squandering their proud legacy and choose to invest in them instead.

Michael Lyles II is an executive recruiter in Atlanta and a member of Elizabeth Baptist Church, where he teaches a children’s church class with his wife, Kristina. He has written for Our Daily Bread Publishing and is part of the volunteer answer team at GotQuestions.org.

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News

An ‘Underground Railroad’ to Rescue Abducted Ukrainian Kids

Jill Nelson

Russia has taken tens of thousands of children, who end up in reeducation facilities, military schools, or illegal adoptions.

People from the nonprofit organization, AVAAZ, light candles in Belgium beside teddy bears for Ukrainian children who have been kidnapped.

Thierry Monasse / Getty

Sashko Radchuk hasn’t seen his mother for nearly four years.

One month into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a shell fragment struck the then-12-year-old’s left eye. His family lived in Mariupol—only 35 miles from the Russian border—and was unable to flee as Moscow’s troops advanced.

Radchuk ran inside his home, screaming in pain. His mother sought help from Ukrainian soldiers, who took them to a military hospital set up inside a metal factory. Doctors removed the shell fragment as Russian troops closed in, forcing them to remain at the makeshift medical clinic.

Two weeks later, Russian soldiers seized the factory and took Radchuk and his mother to a hangar in Bezymenne, a village in the Donetsk region, then to a camp for “filtration”—a brutal interrogation process Russia uses to determine who might pose a threat to Moscow’s war aims. Some Ukrainians undergo torture and forced deportation in these centers.

Radchuk remained in a tent while Russian officials interrogated his mother in a separate location for 90 minutes. Immediately after she returned, the Kremlin’s so-called child service s arrived.

“They told me that they were taking me away from my mom, and they didn’t let me say goodbye to her or say anything,” Radchuk told Christianity Today through a translator. “They put me in the car and drove me away.”

Russian officials transferred Radchuk to two different hospitals to monitor his recovery and told him he would eventually be sent to a school or adopted into a Russian family.

Courtesy of Bring Kids Back UA

Sashko Radchuk

The Ukrainian government estimates Russia has taken nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children since the war began. The Kremlin places the number much higher—close to 700,000. Moscow insists these aren’t abductions, but humanitarian evacuations from war zones.

Mounting evidence, however, points to a coordinated effort to strip kids of their Ukrainian identity and move them to different cities, making them difficult to locate. Recent reports suggest some kids could be as far away as North Korea.

“By abducting children and forcing them to abandon their language, faith, and identity, the Kremlin is attempting to erase an entire people,” said Mykola Kuleba, an evangelical and founder of Save Ukraine, a Kyiv-based organization that has rescued 1,124 children.

Most children are placed in Russian reeducation facilities, while others are illegally adopted or sent to military schools. Some Ukrainian children are even sent to the battlefield to fight against their own country, according to the Institute for the Study of War. Kuleba believes the Kremlin’s ultimate goal is to “turn them into future soldiers.” If Russia’s crime goes unanswered, it risks normalizing the weaponization of children, he added.

Ukrainians are urgently advocating for the return of all abducted children, and Christians are deeply engaged at every stage, Kuleba said. “Faith-based networks help identify missing children, support rescue missions, and provide trusted contacts that make this work possible.”

Save Ukraine’s “underground railroad” is a tedious and expensive process, requiring months to secure original birth certificates and plan travel logistics. It’s often more difficult to extract kids from occupied Ukrainian territory than from Russia, said Daria Kasianova, chair of the Ukrainian Child Rights Network. Her Kyiv-based organization consolidates efforts to return and reintegrate Ukrainian children. Some missions require a trip through multiple countries and across western Russia to reach Ukrainian territory under the Kremlin’s occupation.

Kuleba said his organization has documented multiple consistent testimonies from rescued children who reported seeing Russian-controlled Telegram channels promoting the transfer of Ukrainian children to North Korea. Locals—including kids—are expected to follow the channels for information about schools and other community news, but they are also used to normalize and encourage participation in transfers to camps.

While the North Korea claims are difficult to independently verify, Kuleba said the consistency of the accounts suggests they are not simply rumors.

He is also aware of confirmed cases in which Ukrainian children have been sent to isolated regions in Russia, including the Kuril Islands—more than 5,000 miles east of Ukraine. Some abducted children believed they were going to summer camp but never returned home.

The longer the children remain in Russian hands, the more challenging rescue operations become, Kasianova said. Russian authorities sometimes change children’s names and dates of birth, making them hard to track, she added. The longer they are exposed to Russian indoctrination, the more difficult it becomes to convince them to return home.

“Children are really afraid to leave the territory because they heard terrible information about Ukraine,” Kasianova said. Her team employs psychologists to reassure them it is safe to return home. Some children who haven’t embraced Russian propaganda contact her organization directly on social media to ask for help.

Her organization has so far rescued 309 kids. In one case, a Russian soldier raped a 13-year-old girl during the invasion of Kherson. Her father, a Ukrainian soldier, had died weeks earlier and her mother wasn’t involved in her life. Russian social services sought to place the girl and her sister in a Russian institution or foster family, but Kasianova’s team was able to intervene just hours before the girls were to be sent away. They now live with their grandmother.

Save Ukraine also operates 20 education and empowerment centers based in local churches across 11 regions in Ukraine. The centers support rescued children and their families as well as others suffering from trauma and displacement.

These church-based spaces are often “where trust is rebuilt first and where families feel safe, welcomed, and not judged,” Kuleba said. “This is where the church is seen at its best: active, present, and deeply caring for children and families in crisis.”

Many of the rescued kids suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder that requires extensive therapy and reintegration programs.

In December, Kuleba testified before a US Senate hearing on Russia’s mass abduction of Ukrainian children. He was encouraged by the bipartisan concern over the plight of the abducted kids and hopes the US government will support the rescue, rehabilitation, and reintegration of Ukrainian children.

“Their willingness to stand with Ukraine’s stolen children reflects America’s moral leadership and our shared conviction that every child is made in the image of God,” he said.

When Russian authorities took Radchuk to a hospital in Donetsk, he hoped his mother would soon follow. She never came. He couldn’t remember his grandmother’s phone number, and the hospital staff didn’t know how to help the desperate boy. One of the staff members posted his picture on social media, and Radchuk’s grandmother eventually encountered the post.

With the help of the Ukrainian Child Rights Network, his grandmother made a trip through Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia to reach Radchuk in occupied eastern Ukraine—two months after he was separated from his mom.

“It was a joy, but also I felt very proud for my grandma, because she traveled so many kilometers just to rescue me,” said Radchuk, now 15.

His mother is still missing—one of thousands of Ukrainians who have been victims of Russia’s enforced disappearances—so he currently lives with his grandmother.

He hopes ongoing peace negotiations will bring an end to the war and secure the return of missing Ukrainian children and adults. “I haven’t seen my mom in four years at this point, and it’s very difficult for me,” Radchuk said. “And there are many more children who haven’t seen their parents in a long time because of the war.”

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Church Life

I Trained to Monitor ICE but Found Myself Feeding the Hungry

Elizabeth Berget

Here in Minneapolis, our immigrant neighbors are scared. Local churches like mine are working to meet their needs.

Federal agents stand in tear gas and face protesters on Nicollet Avenue in south Minneapolis on January 24, 2026.

Star Tribune via Getty Images / Contributor / Edits by CT

I sit at a friend’s kitchen table at her home in our South Minneapolis neighborhood. A vinyl tablecloth wrinkles under my notebook as we work together to make a grocery list for her family so I can shop for her.

She snuggles her young daughter and begins to cry as we talk in the dimly lit room. The shades have been pulled down for weeks; she hasn’t gone anywhere besides work; and her children have not stepped foot outside since December. She is a US citizen of Mexican descent, as are her two children, and her husband is undocumented. She is afraid that her family will be separated.

This past year, many in my community began to prepare for the reality that our city might become the site of an immigration crackdown. Minneapolis has for decades been a haven for refugees and immigrants, and that plus the political dynamics—the administration considers Minnesota a sanctuary state and promised to “come after” such jurisdictions last summer—made this foreseeable.

Years working as an ESL teacher have deeply embedded me in relationships with families from every corner of the globe. So last June, I attended training sessions run by immigration advocacy groups to learn how I could help protect these neighbors. Even so, I was not prepared for the jarring intensity of what we’ve experienced in recent weeks.

While the rest of the country sees scenes of violence on their screens, we see it in front of our homes, our libraries, our children’s schools, and our churches—all set to a soundtrack of helicopters hovering overhead. I understand why some think of Operation Metro Surge as law enforcement. But from the inside, it feels like an invasion. Masked militia, carrying weapons, have arrived in droves and roam through residential neighborhoods.

Long-standing members of our community are vanishing as federal immigration agents round up far more than the “worst of the worst.” A November analysis of leaked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data from the Cato Institute found three in four of those the agency detained had no criminal record, and only 5 percent had a record of violent crime.

Numbers the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) provided to our local Fox station suggest that pattern holds here. A “little more than 10% of ICE arrests fall into [the] category of being the ‘worst of the worst,’” people who have been convicted of crimes other than immigration offenses, Fox 9 reported earlier this month. Of that 10 percent, about half (5 percent of the total, as in the Cato report) were convicted of violent crimes.

Overwhelmingly, then, the people being detained and in many cases deported from Minnesota have not been convicted of nonimmigration offenses. Some have legal immigration status in America. Some are even refugees.

Julie Oostra, a nearby neighbor and friend from church, shares a story that has become all too familiar in the past weeks. “In my work as a notary, helping vulnerable families obtain and certify important contingency documents if they were to be deported, I was asked to help a mother whose 6-year-old son had been detained with his father earlier that day,” she told me:

When I arrived at her house, she was distraught. She basically fell into my arms even though we were strangers, and I held her as she told me she could not locate her son as no known database of minors exists. She wept and clutched her son’s stuffed Spiderman toy, detailing how despite rounds and rounds of phone calls made by her and supporting neighbors, no one could tell her if her son was being held with his father, separately, or if he was even in the state.

This has all been so surreal and chaotic that many of us who are not activists or protestors—including people who support immigration reform and oppose open borders—have felt a civic duty to defend the rule of law, due process, and civil and human rights. Christians around the city have found ourselves grappling with what is ours to do in this crisis.

As federal agents began pouring into Minneapolis weeks ago, I remembered the pull of the Spirit that drew my family to this city. My husband and I had been teaching English in South Korea, and we both felt called toward mission work. But factors in our personal lives seemed to be pointing to Minneapolis, and God reminded me that he had brought the nations to this city. In recent weeks, I felt a strong compulsion to do something to ease the suffering of my city, to care for the foreigners among us.

For days, I struggled with unshakeable stomach pain and anxiety as I watched the unrest and wondered what to do. At first, I helped patrol local schools as a legal observer at drop-off and dismissal, whistle and phone at the ready to alert immigrant families if immigration agents appeared.

But after legally observing several times, I found myself questioning whether I was called to this type of work. I knew it was vitally important. The accountability it provided could help save lives. But I was always nervous, and I kept experiencing doubt: What if I was impeding an arrest of someone who’d committed a horrible crime? How do I follow the biblical call to respect governing authorities while convinced that they are violating a higher moral law? What is the call of Jesus for me in this moment?

Then a close friend asked if I’d accompany her to drop off groceries to a vulnerable family. At the food pantry, a hum of volunteers busy sorting donations filled the air. One helped us gather the groceries the family needed, and we drove to their home with trepidation, warily scanning the streets for immigration agents.

But once we’d safely handed over our boxes and returned to the car, I experienced a profound peace. I knew in that moment that whatever he required of others, the call of Jesus to me in this pivotal time was simple. This is how I can love my neighbor as myself.

In the following days, I discovered a safety net that Christians around the city had woven. I joined a neighborhood care group co-run by John Hildebrand, a member and elder of Calvary Baptist Church here in Minneapolis, which has been fielding needs from vulnerable families in their neighborhoods. Vetted members of the group respond to needs as they arise, offering to give rides, do laundry, bring groceries, or shovel front walks for people—even strangers—afraid to leave their homes.

As I became more involved in this and other care networks, my phone pinging all day with new needs, it occurred to me that this is what it may have been like if the church of Acts 2 had used a group text:

Ride needed, 9:30 a.m., to pick up food at food pantry

Grocery shop needed: family of 5 + a baby

Volunteers needed to bring supplies and give rides to released detainees

Looking for rental assistance for a family

In search of midwife or doula for homebirth – mom is too afraid of the hospital

One by one, needs are met.

When I asked Hildebrand what had initially compelled him to be involved in running the care group, he didn’t hesitate. “It’s the story of the good Samaritan,” he told me. “The point of the story is that to be neighborly means to be the one who stops to help. And for me, that’s the call of discipleship. That’s what it means to follow Jesus. It’s to be aligned with and protective of the vulnerable.”

At my own church, which my pastor asked me to keep anonymous because the building has been surveilled by ICE agents, many members assembled into smaller care groups, each “adopting” a family in need.

We soon found that, beyond food, many families were in dire need of basic home and hygiene products. One group leader suggested we establish a hygiene bank, as these products are often hard to come by at food pantries, and within days, the bank went from concept to reality. From the generosity of strangers, the church received towers of supplies. Volunteers worked overtime to sort and stack them. Hygiene products are already going out to families in need, and our church is donating extras to other churches and organizations in the area.

I firmly believe that advocating for good policy is a crucial part of change. Yet I also know Jesus did not spend his years on earth debating Roman law or fighting the empire’s soldiers, as some of his followers hoped he would. He announced his ministry as an anointment of the Spirit “to proclaim good news to the poor … to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–19). And he called his followers do the same: to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit those in prison (Matt. 25:31–46).

As my city has been rocked by turmoil, I have been honored to witness Christians obeying this command. I’ve seen individual Christians giving their time, goods, and money. I’ve seen churches meet the moment, sharing resources and space. And people outside our faith are noticing too.

Hildebrand’s church is just over a block away from where Alex Pretti was killed. You can see the church’s steeple in much of the footage from that day. Within hours of the tragedy, church members were on site, passing out coffee and hand warmers outside and inviting people into the sanctuary to escape lingering tear gas and chaos.

Calvary Baptist offered this respite throughout this past weekend and has since received many notes of gratitude. One couple emailed to say that though they’d only gone into the church to use the restroom, Hildebrand told me, “when they went in, they looked around a bit and said a prayer, and they felt God’s presence in that space as strong as they have ever felt it in 71 years.”

I met another community member while working on establishing the hygiene bank. Katie (who only wished to share her first name) still considers herself a Christian but admits that she and her family have not attended church in a long time. They’ve struggled to find a congregation that actually practices what they preach, she said.

“I have been so encouraged by how generous everyone at the church has been in responding to needs without condition or criteria,” she told me. “I feel like while I know people in this congregation have different political viewpoints, everyone is looking at the same north star in this moment, trying to follow the teachings of Jesus versus dogma. I’m rethinking church in all of this and wondering if this is a body I could be a part of.”

These volunteer efforts are at once small and significant. Person by person, church by church, we are caring for our neighbors. Keeping this focus can be difficult in these divisive times that tempt us to choose sides or to be more interested in policies than the people God has put in front of us.

But as a follower of Christ, I have learned and relearned this month that we must be “rooted and grounded in love” (Eph. 3:17, ESV). Our highest call is to love God with the whole of our being and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Matt. 22:37–40). Love can hold boundaries and be firm. Love does not mean lawlessness. But love is kind. It does not dishonor others, is not easily angered, does not delight in evil, and always protects (1 Cor. 13:4–7).

I don’t know what’s coming next for my city or so many people I care about. But my prayer is that God will continue to use me, my church, and Christians throughout Minneapolis to love and serve our neighbors as Jesus did.

Elizabeth Berget is a Minneapolis author whose first book, Love Like a Mother, releases May 2026 with Brazos Press. She writes on Substack at Back of the Flock, and her work has been widely published.

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Books

Review

Love Thy Dead-for-200-Years Neighbor

Daniel K. Williams

God and Country argues Christians studying the past must be charitable to its flawed inhabitants.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, B&H Academic

In one of his dark epistles, the devil Screwtape tells his nephew Wormwood that Satan has managed to deceive humanity by convincing scholars to adopt the “Historical Point of View.”

“The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true,” C. S. Lewis’s character explains.

And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to Our Father [Satan] and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that “history is bunk.”

As I think back on my graduate education in history, I realize that my own attitudes toward the past were for a while perhaps uncomfortably close to this devilish perspective. Like the scholars Screwtape describes, I learned the art of researching the past using primary source documents. I enjoyed immersing myself in the texts—but I didn’t necessarily look to them for wisdom.

John D. Wilsey’s God and Country encourages Christians to adopt a more spiritually mature attitude toward the past. Like Lewis, Wilsey knows that if we’re not “nourished by the past,” we will be more vulnerable to the Devil’s lies. And like Lewis, he wants Christians to avoid the errors of uncritical nostalgia on the one hand and unreflective dismissal on the other.

Both dangers are certainly with us. Wilsey writes in the wake of a movement on the left to tear down statues of past heroes because their actions were out of step with our contemporary moral code. He also writes at a time when an uncritical, reactionary celebration of the Confederacy is alive and well in some circles on the right.

And he writes at a time when numerous other Christians question why they should study the past at all. As a church historian teaching at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wilsey notes that many of the aspiring pastors in his classes wonder why they need to take time away from their biblical and theological studies to study Christian history.

God and Country explains both why Christians should study the past and how they should do it.

Thinking about the past is part of being human, Wilsey asserts: “Humans are the only creatures that have an awareness in time.” We make memorials and tell stories about days gone by. We were “fashioned by [our] Creator” to “think historically,” he writes.

Though remembering the past is a universal phenomenon, Christians have another reason to study history. Without an awareness of what’s already happened, we won’t be able to understand God as the author of history. Christianity is not a set of moral teachings, parables, or wise principles that can be divorced from a historical context. It is instead the story of God’s redemption accomplished through a divine intervention in time and space. “Our faith and confidence in God are rooted in what He has said and done in the past,” Wilsey says. “Thus, the option of considering history as irrelevant is not open to the Christian.”

After making the case for history’s necessity, Wilsey instructs his readers in its study. His first two chapters on the subject present material that will probably be familiar to most professional historians. Students of history, he writes, must consider the “five Cs”: change over time, context, causality, contingency, and complexity. In other words, studying the past is not simply describing what happened but instead examining why particular events occurred and how they relate to other developments.

On that point, few historians would disagree, whether they’re atheists or believers. But Wilsey then pivots to suggest something I never encountered in my historiography classes at secular institutions. To study the past, he argues, we need to cultivate virtue, since “without virtue in the study of history, there is no fear of God; thus, there can be no understanding.”

Specifically, Wilsey argues that we need to develop love for the people whose lives we examine—not a mandate to like them personally, let alone excuse their flaws—but to treat them with charity in accordance with 1 Corinthians 13. Because “Paul wrote that love is patient,” we must bear with our historical subjects “in their manifold expressions of their fallenness,” Wilsey says. “We must be fair to them and their times,” he encourages. “Our place in relation to them is as their student rather than their judge.”

“Ever since the Enlightenment, it has been common to regard the people of the past as boorish, childish, superstitious, brutal, and prejudiced,” he continues. But “love excludes arrogance toward others in the present and the past.” If we cultivate Christian virtue, we won’t be “chronological snobs.”

And if we learn to love the people of the past, with all their flaws, we will find it easier to love people in the present who also are deeply flawed.

One of those present loves Wilsey says we need to cultivate is love for country. He devotes the last chapter of his book to a rightly ordered Christian patriotism, grounded in an understanding of the country’s history. An unreflective celebration of America might be jingoistic idolatry. But a Christian student of history can love America for the good it has done while lamenting its failures. Just as we can learn to love people in the past even with all their faults, so we can learn to love our country even when it has not lived up to its ideals.

It is this last chapter that is likely to raise the greatest controversy among some Christians. At least on a surface level, it’s hard to disagree with most of what Wilsey says in this book. What Christian historian, after all, would say we shouldn’t treat our historical subjects fairly and charitably? What Christian historian would say we shouldn’t consider context when studying the past?

But some Christian historians may resist Wilsey’s conclusion, at least in part. I have attended enough conferences to know that many believe historical study should be a quest for truth and justice, in the sense that we should seek to expose the wrongs of the past in order to right them in the present.

Some of these Christian historians, I imagine, would not necessarily agree with Wilsey’s assessment that “the United States is a story of the advancement of freedom, not only within our borders but around the world.” He proclaims, “No other country has done more for the advancement of human freedom than the United States.”

For those who believe that the United States is a flawed—but still mostly admirable—country, with an unparalleled record of advancing human freedom, it makes sense to love the nation despite its missteps.

On the other hand, for those who believe, as Nikole Hannah-Jones argues in the New York Times’s 1619 Project, that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” it may be harder to take such a sanguine view.

Wilsey is honest about America’s history of racism and slavery. But at the same time, there’s a distinct difference between his view of America as a bastion of freedom despite its racist sins and Hannah-Jones’s view of America as a society founded on racism despite its promise of liberty and equality. I’m not sure the theological work Wilsey does in this book can fully address that gap, because the gap is not simply a matter of theology but rather a matter of historical interpretation.

Even so, I hope even those who are most critical of Wilsey’s traditional conservatism and love for the United States will learn from his theological opposition to what Lewis called “chronological snobbery.”

If we find ourselves quick to denounce earlier generations who defended slavery or engaged in other morally objectionable actions, perhaps we should ask ourselves if we are treating our historical subjects with love and understanding. If we look to the past only to champion the oppressed and further our own agendas in the present, perhaps we should ask whether we’re cutting ourselves off from needed sources of wisdom.

In other words, perhaps we should ask if we’ve fallen for Screwtape’s devilish agenda.

With Wilsey’s book as a guide, readers will be less likely to succumb to this error. And maybe in the process, we’ll also become better practitioners of the Christian virtues, capable of extending grace to others—both those who lived in the past and those who are with us now.

Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity.

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