The Great Omission

Jen Wilkin

With busy schedules, chatty small groups, and personalized quiet times, we’ve neglected the rigor of learning the Bible.

Illustration by Valero Doval

If I asked, could you summarize the entire story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation in five minutes or less?

Could you tell me what God made on each of the six days of creation? List the Ten Commandments in order or the names of Jacob’s 12 sons? Pinpoint where Deborah falls among the 12 judges in the Book of Judges?

Who was king when the kingdom of Israel was divided? What were the promises in each of the covenants? Which one of Jesus’ miracles is recorded in all four gospels? Where can you find the Sermon on the Mount?

If these questions make you want to grab your phone and Google the answers, you are not alone. A Bible literacy crisis has flooded the halls of local churches and left many Christ- ians unable to recall basic information contained in Scripture. Some may not consider this important knowledge for Christians to learn, but Great Commission faithfulness demands our attention.

In over 25 years of teaching Bible literacy in the local church, I’ve often heard regular churchgoers and Bible study participants confess, “I’ve been in the church my whole life, and no one has taught me this.”

Our lack of biblical literacy compounds into theological illiteracy. When we don’t know our Bibles, it follows that we will also lose our theological moorings. Last year’s State of Theology report by Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research gave a stark assessment of local church discipleship. Surveying evangelicals on basic Christian belief, they found the following:

In response to the statement “God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam,” 47% of evangelicals agreed.
In response to the statement “Everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God,” 64% of evangelicals agreed.
In response to the statement “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God,” 28% of evangelicals agreed.

Something is wrong. Each of these statements can be easily challenged as faulty with relatively little Bible knowledge. How can our churches be filled with people who are active and involved but have so little biblical grounding to show for it? I believe it is because we have forgotten a few simple truths that previous generations of believers knew.

To start, we have forgotten that discipleship requires learning. We have reduced its definition to attendance, service, giving, relationship-building, and mostly peer-led, feelings-level discussions. But at its most fundamental level, discipleship is a process of learning—of renewing our minds to no longer conform to the world.

We tend to view the Great Commission as a call to make converts, when in fact it is a call to make disciples—learners. It explicitly requires teaching those converts to be learners who obey all that has been commanded. According to Jesus, we are to replicate by passing along the good deposit that was passed along to us.

Conversion happens in an instant. Discipleship, on the other hand, is the work of a lifetime. It involves the transmission of an ancient faith from one generation to the next. But by all measures, we have not transmitted it. Twenty-eight percent of us don’t even believe in the deity of Christ. How can we teach others what we ourselves have not learned?

Those of us in church leadership have too often followed a discipleship strategy of lowering the bar on learning environments, believing people are too busy to commit to anything requiring effort. We beg them apologetically to come to a six-week study, promising it won’t have homework.

Yet people want to do hard things. They understand intuitively that anything of lasting value takes effort. They preach the gospel of CrossFit and disciple others into Whole30. They learn foreign languages and musical instruments. They run marathons. Millions have done the 75 Hard challenge, a fitness program designed to build resilience and mental toughness that literally promises to be hard not in its fine print but in its name.

Discipline is not dead. It just follows the most compelling message. When was the last time you saw a discipleship program that promised to be hard? All of our bar-lowering and apologizing has failed to communicate a compelling call. Instead, it has communicated that learning the Bible should be easy.

Here’s another quick quiz: How many times have you studied or heard a sermon series about Ephesians? What about 1 and 2 Chronicles?

There is a reason for your answer: Ephesians is short. Short books of the Bible, especially New Testament ones, get preached or taught repeatedly, while other books lie untouched. And short studies rule because they sell—especially short, topical, application-driven studies.

When I was first asked to consider publishing one of my studies, I was told women wouldn’t do longer than six weeks. Could I take my 22-week study of 50 chapters of Genesis and cut it back to 6 weeks with 10-minute teachings? The answer was no.

I knew women would do longer studies because I was watching them every week in my church. But publishers are incented to publish what will sell, and sermon series are often chosen according to what will fit neatly on a preaching calendar.

Meanwhile, we have fallen prey to the malformation of “quiet-time culture.” Having a quiet time can be beneficial, but it often disciples people into a devotional style of reading the Bible. Devotionals are big sellers, and for good reason. They pair a snippet of Scripture with a bite-sized insight, leaving readers with a positive emotion to start their day: comfort, assurance, hope, inspiration. Christian living and devotional books comprise 41% of Christian book sales, while Bible studies a mere 8.5%. One of the best-selling Christian books of all time is a devotional that has sold over 45 million copies.

Devotional reading limits which portions of the Bible we spend time in. There is a reason no one has written a devotional on the Book of Leviticus. But all Scripture is profitable.

Quiet-time culture also delivers a short-term, instant-gratification reward. It elevates individual interaction with Scripture so that we view the most precious time in the Bible as personal, not communal. If you have been caught in a “what this verse means to me” spiral in a small group discussion, you have seen this dynamic at play.

But surely, gathering weekly for a sermon will build our literacy? When Lifeway asked pastors what approaches their churches used to disciple adults, a full 89% responded “the sermon”—20 points higher than the next response, “Sunday school.” Yet 95% also said that discipleship is completed not in a program but in a relationship, with 69% believing discipleship is best accomplished in a group of no more than five believers.

Let me be clear: I love the sermon. It is essential to spiritual formation. We are nourished by it. But if you felt unsure reading the opening questions in this article, it is likely the sermon is not enough to build Bible literacy.

Most congregants arrive at church on Sunday ready to sit and receive a sermon over a text they have spent no time studying themselves. They take their seats as the amateurs, looking to the expert in the pulpit to illuminate them. Rather than considering the preacher’s knowledge as something they could be trained into, they hold him to the expert role and remain passive recipients of his teaching. He’s the seminarian, not me. I could never do that.

This same expert-amateur divide can play out in Sunday school classes and Bible studies—anywhere that people do not actively participate in the learning process.

Finally, we have placed too heavy a burden on the community group. Home groups, life groups, grow groups—whatever your church may call them, they are excellent at building community but dismal at building literacy.

About 15 years ago, this group ministry model gained a foothold as a solution to busyness and lack of community in churches. But many churches embraced it as a utility tool of discipleship, eliminating learning environments like Sunday school or Bible study.

At best, a community group can manage a peer-led, application-driven discussion, and the quality control of this organic ministry model is notoriously spotty. Community matters, but not if it is gained at the expense of learning.

That’s a lot of grim news. But the solutions to these challenges are not difficult to discern. In an age of dabbling with discipleship strategies, churches must return to the basics of sound educational practice.

The church must remember that it is more than a place for evangelism, missions, worship, and service. The church is, and has always been, a house of learning, ensuring that “one generation shall commend [God’s] works to another, and shall declare [his] mighty acts” (Ps. 145:4, ESV). We cannot pass along a good deposit that we ourselves have not received.

Two thousand years of faithful instruction and transmission are the reason anyone reading this is a Christian today. Let’s not be content with converts who don’t grow to maturity. Let’s answer the call to make disciples, teach them well, and take our place in the story with diligence and care. We could ask for no more beautiful object of study or more useful subject matter. We could ask for no more joyful task. Let this generation be found faithful.

Here are five suggestions for leaders to reclaim learning in the local church:

1. Focus on Your Church

Recognize that the problem is in your congregation, not just someone else’s. Have your congregants take a simple Bible quiz to test their knowledge and discern the state of your church’s literacy. Don’t be like the person who avoids going to the doctor for fear of bad news. Get the scan. Share the results with your people. Then assure them that the universality of the problem means we can all move forward together. Dissonance is what motivates us to change. Leverage this dissonance to create a new discipleship ecosystem, one in which active learning is pursued.

2. Clarify Terms

Understand the difference between a devotional, a topical study, a book discussion, and a Bible study—and then communicate this clearly to participants. When we offer all these genres under the title of “Bible study,” attendees check a mental box of having attended one but may not have been growing in their own literacy skills and knowledge. Clarity is kindness. Help people self-diagnose by explaining the differences between these kinds of offerings, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and their learning outcomes.

3. Ask a Different Question

Instead of asking “What do our people want?” ask, “How are disciples formed?” What is important for them to know? In what order should they learn it? What are the tools necessary to teach it well? Imagine if you dropped your second grader off at school and were told the kids would be learning math, reading, and science in whatever order and to whatever depth they desired, with most of their learning time happening in peer-led small groups. You’d be alarmed, to say the least. Our discipleship pathways become more effective when they use a scope and sequence developed by someone with the big picture of learning in mind.

4. Bring Back Active Learning Environments

Create classroom opportunities where students are actively invested in the learning process through pre-work, thought-level group discussion, and dialogic teaching. Though these spaces will undoubtedly create community, let learning be their highest stated goal. Task teachers with diminishing the expert-amateur divide by training the “how” of Bible study—giving tools, not just information. Train them to do this well. Remind them that their enthusiasm for learning is contagious in their learners. Free up the sermon (and the pastor!) to not bear the full weight of teaching by training and calling upon the priesthood of all believers.

5. Raise the Bar

Reframe discipleship as difficult but valuable. Reclaim for congregants the life of the mind in the process of transformation. We cannot worship a God we do not know. We cannot obey a command we have not heard. We cannot teach what we have never been taught. Ask more of people, believe they are capable, and call them to a beautiful vision. That beautiful vision is nothing less than the Great Commission itself.

Help those in your church to understand their small but vital place in Great Commission faithfulness. Because someone before them was faithful to the joyful task of discipleship, they heard the gospel. In an age of deconstruction, disillusionment, and distraction, invite them into a historic, time-tested faith. It is their heritage to receive with joy, and it is their heritage to transmit with diligence.

Jen Wilkin is an author, Bible teacher, and cohost of the Knowing Faith podcast.

This article appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Go and Make Learners".

Ideas

Raids Are a Perilous Substitute for Reform

Andy Olsen

Anti-immigrant policies helped spark the American Revolution. Today, they are deforming our national conscience.

Illustration by Adrián Astorgano

Among the 56 men who gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 to sign the Declaration of Independence, 8 were transplants to the American colonies. Two were born in England, the rest in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Some came to North America as children. Others sailed there in adulthood.

None of these men required permission from Colonial governors to immigrate. They just did—in the pattern that was typical at the time and would remain so for the first century and a half of the United States’ existence.

The New World was hungry for warm bodies. To lure them across the sea, colonies granted immigrants limited local citizenship, enabling them to own and inherit land. Eventually, Parliament offered British naturalization to any Protestant alien who resided in the Colonies for at least seven years. (Catholics were excluded, but Jews could swear a modified oath that skirted professions of Christian faith.)

Then, in 1773, Parliament rescinded the offer—and forbade local governors from granting citizenship to foreigners, effectively banning naturalization in British North America. It was the culmination of a decade-long effort by England to curtail migration to the increasingly belligerent Colonies.

The turn against immigrants didn’t go over well. Migration was foundational to the Colonies’ land-of-opportunity identity and strategic for their economic ambitions. Britain’s antinaturalization measures landed at No. 7 on the list of grievances against King George III, as articulated by the authors of the Declaration of Independence:

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.

Given this history, it’s unsurprising that critics of President Donald Trump see tyranny lurking in his assault on immigrants or that they are repulsed at the sight of federal immigration agents roaming the streets. Deportation policy riled the original No Kings movement too.

The Constitution assigns the federal government the job of granting citizenship. But wild as it sounds today, many of the founders believed that the authority to police immigrants rested solely with the states, indistinct from the ordinary work of policing citizens.

When the Fifth US Congress passed a law in 1798 allowing the president to deport foreigners deemed “dangerous,” Americans protested. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson objected, accurately, that the Constitution gave no such powers to the federal government.

Individual states did not hesitate to expel paupers, alien or otherwise, to other states. But the notion that immigrants enjoyed weaker protection from arrest than did citizens was anathema to many in the young country. Jefferson, who voiced plenty of concerns about the risks of recruiting immigrants to US shores, nonetheless insisted in 1781 that all people, “if they come of themselves,” are “entitled to all the rights of citizenship.”

We’ve fallen far from Jefferson’s ideal.

In two and a half centuries, Congress has revised US immigration policy countless times, dialing restrictions up and down in tandem with shifts in public sentiment toward the foreign born.

Changes often benefited the political party that made them, disenfranchising opposition groups or placating unions. Many changes were blatantly discriminatory: Preference for white immigrants, for instance, was written into the law until 1965.

America’s current immigration system is based largely on a 1965 law called the Immigration and Nationality Act, in which Congress scrapped limits on immigrants of certain races and from certain countries in favor of more skills-based migration and greater opportunities for immigrants to bring family members to the United States. Congress has since fine-tuned the statute in meaningful ways—significantly, in committing the United States to recognize valid asylum claims and in setting up a bureaucracy to process them.

But global economic and political changes long ago outstripped the US system’s ability to keep up. It is slow, cumbersome, and underpowered—a reality undisputed on either the political left or the political right.

Someone trying to “come the right way,” as we are fond of boasting that our forebears did or that our immigrant friend probably did, faces impossible backlogs. A married Mexican woman who applies today to join her citizen parents in the United States might wait in line 25 years for a visa.

And increasingly, many who were granted permission to wait in the US for their cases to resolve are being rounded up, detained, and deported.

Nothing qualifying as comprehensive immigration reform has succeeded in the 21st century. Washington has made modest attempts to reform our broken system over the past 30 years, all failing. Even a 2024 bipartisan border bill, which may have passed had then-candidate Trump not pressured Republicans to abandon it, was merely a tune-up of a machine in need of complete overhaul.

But there is no reason meaningful reform could not happen in 2026. This year, while Republicans still hold majorities in both houses of Congress, Trump has everything necessary to cement his reputation as the first president in a generation to secure immigration reform. He could simply command it, and his will would be done.

Or he could continue down the path of King George, steering the nation not toward more sensible immigration but toward what appears to be the kind of anti-immigrant plot America’s founders bled and died to overturn. We ignore reform at our own peril.

Last fall, I attended a pair of convenings in Nashville where leaders from faith communities, businesses, and law enforcement discussed the need for immigration reform. I was reminded repeatedly that immigration is baked into America’s founding documents and that President Trump is so excited about the 250th anniversary of independence that the White House website has a countdown clock. What better moment to take action?

The two groups organizing the meetings, the secular National Immigration Forum and the Evangelical Immigration Table, approach reform with mildly different sets of priorities. But both want a meaningful solution that addresses border security, provides pathways to legalization for longtime immigrants—including those who were brought here as children—and honors generations-old congressional commitments to welcome qualifying refugees.

Thus far in the second Trump administration, legislators and the White House have focused exclusively on immigration enforcement, funding an already-bloated deportation-and-detention apparatus to new levels that surely would have horrified our founding fathers. This, the consensus in the room held, is not immigration reform.

“There’s securing the border and then there’s closing the border, and I think what we’re seeing now is an attempt to really close the border,” said Tim Quinn, a former US Customs and Border Protection chief of staff and public liaison. “I don’t necessarily think that that respects the role that America plays in the world, in terms of being a place where people with asylum claims, legitimate asylum claims, can come and have those asylum claims adjudicated. We are not doing that.”

When I spoke with Myal Greene, the president and CEO of World Relief, he said the administration’s enforcement-only approach is not only impeding efforts at reform but also sabotaging immigration programs Congress already created and blessed, such as asylum and humanitarian parole.

“You look at people who’ve come on some of these statuses,” Greene said. “They were vetted before they entered the country. They came legally, and [now] they’ve had their status revoked. And what that is—it’s a desire not to have a functioning program.”

Of course, immigration policy must balance welcome with public safety. After a tragedy like the Thanksgiving-eve shooting of two National Guard members by an Afghan national who received asylum, it’s reasonable and achievable to audit the vetting process. But the administration’s knee-jerk response—temporarily shutting down the whole asylum system, barring immigrants from a swath of nations, threatening the residency or citizenship of entire ethnic groups Trump has called “garbage”—is clearly an overreaction and a victory for ethnocentrism.

When the executive branch acts alone on immigration, it tends to result in dysfunction. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans to be sent to concentration camps in 1942, subsequent administrations issued public apologies, and Congress eventually paid reparations to survivors. President Joe Biden’s attempt to control illegal crossings by forcing asylum applicants to use a government app was legally questionable, did little to quell the border chaos, and was leveraged against him by the Trump campaign.

And while immigration still polls as Trump’s most successful talking point, Americans have soured on his hard-line approach: His approval rating on the issue has slipped from early 2025.

Where presidents fall short, Congress must step in. The Constitution gives Congress the power to define the broad contours of immigration policy. Only Congress can design and safeguard a system that works for the 21st century and, to borrow language from the National Immigration Forum, that reflects the founders’ ideal of “a nation of laws and a nation of grace.”

There are respectable proposals languishing in legislative committee, just waiting to be put up for a vote. The Dignity Act is one—a bipartisan bill with significant support from both conservative and progressive evangelical groups. It would make meaningful changes to bring order to America’s asylum system, would provide a path to residency for “Dreamers,” and would allow longtime undocumented immigrants with clean records to pay steep fees to qualify for protected, noncitizen status.

Like any compromise bill, the measure is not ambitious enough to please either white nationalists or the “abolish ICE” crowd. But its tenets align well with what most evangelicals tell pollsters they want for immigrants to America.

Despite that, multiple leaders in Nashville told me they believe Congress will take no action on reform unless it is first championed by Trump. Greene said he had met to discuss the subject with staffers for a senior congressional leader. They told him, “We’re not going to move it until we get clearance from the White House.”

Influential Latino evangelicals have called on Christians to pray for passage of the Dignity Act. In Nashville, leaders expressed their frustration at churches’ general silence in response to immigrant cries for help.

Reid Ribble, a former Republican congressman from Wisconsin, said, “If the church is quiet on this—which they have a tendency to be—then members of Congress think that all the voices that matter are the ones that they’re hearing, which are clamoring for more deportations.”

The vibe at the Nashville gatherings was undeniably gloomy. It struck me how a year of unprecedented government crackdowns on immigrants and defunding of groups that help them had reshaped hearts in dark ways.

As I spoke with Latino pastors, I could almost see them glancing over their shoulders. Church and nonprofit leaders shared how they have moved communications to secure messaging apps like Signal, fearful of government eyes. Ministries teaching English have discussed whether someday soon they could be criminally liable for harboring illegal aliens.

The anecdotes at times felt like reports from underground churches in an authoritarian state, not from American evangelicals in the heart of the Bible Belt.

Then again, segments of the US church are in effect being driven underground: Some immigrant congregations report that Sunday attendance has dropped by a third, as worshipers fear venturing from their homes. A pastor in Los Angeles told me he’s lost 80 percent of his in-person worshipers.

If we accept dramatic enforcement as the sole solution to America’s immigration problems, we must also accept the ways it will deform the church and our national conscience. It will dull our sensibilities until we simply accept statements like the one from Rep. Jim Jordan, who, when asked in October about footage of masked federal agents arresting journalists and shooting a pastor with a pepper-spray ball, told a journalist, “ICE agents are doing the Lord’s work.”

Law enforcement, like almost all work, can of course be God-honoring and, per Romans 13, God-ordained. But to rest on such blanket statements is to refuse to see the moral mess of humanity that God sees. Alabama state troopers presumably arrested plenty of dangerous criminals in the weeks before they loosed their billy clubs on peaceful Black marchers in Selma. Was that all the Lord’s work?

The administration’s overt aim is to use federal agents as tools of terror in immigrant communities, multiplying that fear by sending masked videographers on ambushes and churning out Call of Duty–style video cuts for government social media. That might be a good recruitment strategy, but it’s hardly a Christian vocation. Why would Jordan—who only months earlier told Breitbart, “Grace is amazing; we all need it”—want to associate Jesus with imperious menace?

The greatest harm of an enforcement-only immigration policy, however, is how it is battering segments of society to which Scripture repeatedly commands Christians to give special deference: the poor, the foreigner among us, the “least of these.” When the legislature doesn’t articulate sensible immigration policies or insist on adherence to them, the poor have little defense against capricious enforcers.

Even immigrants who thought they were following the rules—entering the country lawfully under a special program, staying out of trouble, going to church, paying taxes—are being torn from their families and stuffed into detention centers.

All of this is driving what might be called “Beatitude communities”—the “blesseds” of Matthew 5—into deeper levels of isolation and mistrust. This is the antithesis of a Christian objective. Christ calls people into community and into the light, not into the shadows.

The response du jour in some Christian circles is to dismiss such concerns as worldly empathy corrupting the faithful. Even if that were true, it would not explain away the words of James in his epistle: “Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom?” (2:5, ESV). It’s an odd stance for voters and for professionals “doing the Lord’s work” to prioritize tormenting the people to whom Christ has willed his inheritance.

Mingling at tables in Nashville, I caught glimpses of how the administration’s crackdown, now entering its second year, might already be distorting some of those heirs of the kingdom in the long term.

I sat with two pastors of local Latino congregations. One of them told me about a child in his church who begged his mom not to go outside to feed the dog, because there might be ICE agents in the yard.

The other pastor was more grave. He told me he worries about the 10-year-old in his community who was born in the United States to immigrant parents. When that boy watches ICE arrest his father or his aunt, the pastor asked me, “What does that do to the child?” You can deport his parents, the man said, but you’re going to have that kid with you forever.

Then the pastor made his hands into a little pretend rifle and said, “He’s going to learn to hate.”

Andy Olsen is senior features writer at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Raids Are A Perilous Substitute for Reform".

- More from Andy Olsen

Testimony

I Ran from God and My Jewish Identity. Then I Read the New Testament.

Aaron Abramson

Aaron Abramson served in the Israeli Defense Forces before abandoning his faith and wandering the world in search of meaning.

Photography by Sophie Jouvenaar for Christianity Today

I grew up in an interfaith home in Seattle, a city cradled between mountains and water, where belief often felt like a patchwork quilt. Our house had a little Christmas, some Hanukkah, and a bit of everything else.

When I was a child, this didn’t feel strange. I did not question the mixture of traditions. In fact, it mirrors the lives of many Jewish families today, navigating multiple layers of identity and culture.

My father was raised Jewish, my mother Catholic, and both came to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. When I was about 12, our family began attending a Messianic congregation to deepen our Jewish roots.

About a year later, I had my bar mitzvah. My haftarah reading—a selection from the books of the Prophets—was Isaiah 1:18, which says, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”

At 13, I did not fully grasp the depth of this promise, which would later ignite and reshape my life.

Two years later, everything changed. My family made aliyah, the process by which Jews immigrate to Israel, and we moved to an Orthodox community about an hour northwest of Jerusalem. My father felt a deep conviction that Jewish people belonged in the Land of Promise.

The move was a leap into a life entirely different from the one I had known. Suddenly, my Jewish identity was no longer a theoretical or cultural idea. It was tangible, lived, and steeped in ritual. We celebrated every holiday, national and biblical, and observed customs that were foreign to my American upbringing.

The move brought unexpected challenges. Living in Israel during the First Intifada (the Palestinian uprising against Israel) meant facing uncertainty and fear daily. As a 15-year-old suddenly confronted with my mortality and my inability to shield my family from harm, I began to wrestle deeply with questions about my faith, my identity, and even God.

By 17, I decided to leave home, seeking to understand my Jewish background. My journey took me to an Orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem, where young men trained for rabbinical life.

I walked in expecting answers but walked out with more questions than ever. What does it really mean to be Jewish? Why did God give us the Torah? Does he even exist? My questions were treated as distractions, a detour from the talmudic study that defined daily life there. The more I studied, the more the walls around me seemed to close in.

While at yeshiva, I formed a friendship with Joshua, an Orthodox Jew from Montreal. Our bond grew over music and basketball, simple joys that briefly distracted us from the intensity of our surroundings. Yet while I felt my Jewish identity fraying under pressure, Joshua’s commitment to Israel and his faith only seemed to deepen.

In 1992, we both enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), he out of duty and I out of obligation as a citizen. The military years were some of the darkest of my life as my search for identity collided with the realities of war.

One day, while stationed with my paratrooper unit in the desert near the Dead Sea, I saw Joshua’s name on the front page of an Israeli newspaper with the word ne’dar. Missing.

Panic and disbelief surged through me as I raced back to Jerusalem to join the search. The outcome was devastating. Joshua had been kidnapped, tortured, and killed by Hamas terrorists simply because he was Jewish.

His death shattered me. I slipped further into nihilism and disillusionment. One morning, as I hitchhiked to my new base, an Israeli man gave me a ride and shared his thoughts on religion, echoing my own growing disbelief. “Religion is for the weak,” he said, “a crutch for people who cannot face life on their own.” His words resonated with me. I began to see belief as an illusion, and the God I had once trusted seemed like a distant memory.

My time in the IDF only grew in difficulty. I wrestled with depression and a deep sense that the world was broken. By the time I completed my service, I was tired of conflict, tired of God, and tired of living in Israel. My Messianic roots had withered, and my Jewish identity felt like a fragile thread I had no desire to repair.

I stayed in Israel only long enough to save some money and then embarked on a journey of wandering and self-discovery. Like a character out of a Jack Kerouac novel, I traveled around America, Canada, and Mexico with an Israeli friend, moving from city to city, seeking anonymity and escape. If I heard Hebrew, I would turn the other way. I wanted to fade into the background and be free from the weight of my past.

Even in my self-imposed exile, I could not escape the stirrings of a spiritual reality. I encountered loving people who saw my brokenness and told me about Jesus. At first their words and kindness were curious, but later they became unsettling. Their insistence that God was real and that Jesus was relevant to me as a Jewish person began to press on my disbelief. Questions I had long ignored about morality, meaning, and the purpose of life began to demand answers once again.

Finally, someone challenged me to read the New Testament. Pride made me hesitant. I did not want to admit I had never read it. But curiosity and a sense of desperation overcame my resistance. I opened the text for the first time, and the words resounded deep inside. Everything I had questioned since my yeshiva days, like the nature of God, the purpose of God’s laws, and our role in God’s creation, began to make sense. I discovered Jesus in those pages, not as a distant figure but as a fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures.

The prophecies of the Messiah, the teachings of the Torah, and the writings of the Prophets all pointed to him.

The parables of Jesus pierced through my hardened heart. The story of the Prodigal Son mirrored my own. The lost sheep reflected my sense of isolation. The climax of Jesus’ ministry, his sacrificial death on the cross, shocked me with its depth of love. An innocent Jewish man, tortured and killed, praying for the forgiveness of his executioners, showed me what divine mercy truly looked like.

For the first time in years, hope began to grow. I called upon the God of my ancestors, asking him to forgive me, cleanse me, and be Lord of my life. A joy I had never known filled me, accompanied by a deep, abiding peace.

During this time, I returned home and stayed with my family in Israel. One Sunday morning, I wandered through the graffiti-marked streets of the Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem to attend my first church service as a believer.

To my surprise, the service was in Arabic, and the congregation was filled with former Muslims. My suspicion rose immediately. I felt like an intruder. But Pastor Issam, an Arab man with a warm smile, welcomed me with open arms. His words and the fellowship of Jews and Arabs worshiping together powerfully demonstrated God’s heart to forgive. My anger over Joshua’s death began to dissolve.

That moment reshaped my understanding of reconciliation. Since then, I have met many Jewish and Arab brothers and sisters in Christ. Although we don’t all share the same experiences or agree on everything, the gospel has provided a solid foundation that has changed hearts and brought reconciliation where none existed.

Even today, with tensions running high between Israel and Hamas, it is easy for Arabs and Israelis to think of one another only as enemies. But I have seen with my own eyes that the only lasting hope for peace comes not through politics or power but through the saving grace of Yeshua. Only the gospel can break down ancient walls of hostility and animosity, turning enemies into family.

Over time, my passion for sharing the peace I had found grew stronger. I wanted everyone to experience the love, compassion, and forgiveness I had discovered in Yeshua. I began volunteering with Jews for Jesus in Israel, speaking with people on the streets, hosting Bible studies, and sharing the gospel.

Each encounter reminded me of how far I had come and how God had guided and sustained me. In a short time, I realized that helping others to meet Jesus, especially among my own Jewish people, was what I was meant to do with my life. I went through training and eventually became a full-time missionary.

My work is about not just outreach but also breaking down barriers that stand in the way of people understanding the gospel as well as equipping others to share the hope of the Messiah with courage, compassion, and clarity.

When I wandered far from God, Jesus met me on the road and welcomed me home. That is the same invitation he extends to every Jewish person, to every Arab, and to every nation: Come home to the Father through the Messiah.

Aaron Abramson is the CEO and executive director of Jews for Jesus and is the author of Mission Design: Leading Your Ministry Through Organizational and Cultural Change.

This article appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Testimony".

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Church Life

Why the Church Matters More Than Ever

Brad Edwards

CT’s 2025 Book of the Year winner on why we need each other—minds, bodies, and souls—as AI proselytizers promise an enchanting new world.

Illustration by Chris Neville

New Atheists like Richard Dawkins spent the better part of two decades preaching that science, not religion, was our key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Disenchantment was supposed to free humanity from believing in “fairy tales” like Christianity.

But this worldview has proven unlivable. People are still searching for spiritual meaning. The rise of artificial intelligence has ushered in an era of reenchantment, with AI proselytizers using unscientific, mystical, and even religious language to describe the technology’s transformative potential for humanity. They have likened their role as midwives birthing a nonhuman supersentience or as prophets summoning gods.

This reenchantment is not value-neutral. AI is not being developed in an ideological vacuum. Rather, its design is indelibly shaped by quasi-religious beliefs rooted in digital gnosticism—a dualistic worldview that seeks transcendence over the material world by leveraging digital technology.

Ancient Greek Gnosticism viewed the material world as a cosmic mistake, a prison from which to escape and ascend to a more true spiritual existence by divining “secret knowledge.” For digital gnostics, the limitations of embodied life are existentially vexing. Every inefficiency, from the ordinary frictions of community to the inevitability of death, must be overcome through technology. And the downstream implications—for both the church and religious belief in America—are legion.

More than 80 years ago, C. S. Lewis issued this warning in The Abolition of Man:

There is something which unites magic and applied science [technology] while separating them from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

AI is the digital gnostic’s messiah. It offers every user the gift of knowledge and power, untethered from wisdom and virtue. So much so that artificial general intelligence (AGI) has been called humanity’s “last invention,” after which it will supposedly be able to do all future inventing for us. If so, our “technological Rapture” is just around the corner.

Digital gnosticism then, is the “good news” that we will be saved by merging with the machine, allowing AI to optimize us for eternal life (as in Bryan Johnson’s “Don’t Die” movement) or using AI to project our consciousness across the universe.

I wish I could say this was science fiction, but these are genuine beliefs flooding a culture now lacking the gravitational pull of Christianity at its center.

This is why the church is needed more than ever. As I wrote in The Reason for Church, “the church is not merely the sum of individuals who believe the same thing and live in the same geographic area. Every church is a living, breathing embodiment of the gospel story” (emphasis added).

As such, weekly worship is a “strange, thin place between a fallen world and the God who helps us make sense of it all.” It’s no wonder that widespread dechurching has only made people more desperate for meaning and less discerning in where to search for it.

Recently, a Google employee at our church who works with AI asked the students in our youth ministry, “Where do you go when you have questions you don’t think your parents will be able to answer?” About a quarter of them said ChatGPT. We already trust online influencers more than institutions, and 42 percent of adults use AI for emotional support. Digital divination—trusting a chatbot to tell us the truth about reality—doesn’t require a leap of faith.

But what if our divining isn’t a digital facsimile? What if there are ghosts in the machine? Scripture reminds us that the spiritual world is just as real as the material one. God exists, miracles happen, and angels and demons are at work. Because we wrestle “against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:15), we can’t categorically dismiss reports that, as Rod Dreher put it, “evil discarnate intelligences use [AI] to communicate with people.” If the cardboard and plastic of a Ouija board can be a gateway to dark spiritual forces, why not digital ones and zeros?

Whether AI is merely reflecting our superstitious hopes and fears back at us or there is a ghost in the machine, Deuteronomy 18 wouldn’t list using mediums, divination, and necromancy as “abominations to the Lord” if there were no spiritual risks.

Digital gnosticism will ultimately prove just as futile as secular materialism. We are creatures made of dirt and breath. We will never transcend our need for the fullness of existence. And in Christ, we have it.

Because American individualism has always been more than a little gnostic, we often see our union with Christ as a merely spiritual reality. We treat church as optional, but it never would have occurred to Paul that one could be spiritually in Christ without fully and physically abiding in Christ’s body. It is only in the church, Paul says, that “the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10).

If we want to be reenchanted by the gospel and inoculated to digital gnosticism, we will need a rechurching even greater than our dechurching. We can start by devoting ourselves to a local church and participating in the ordinary means of grace—Word, sacrament, and prayer. In our gathered worship and witness, we rehearse the drama of redemption. In serving our neighbors and loving our enemies, we resist artificial intelligence with otherworldly love.

AI may offer “a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col. 2:17, ESV). God loves us too much to let us go on existing without him. That’s why I believe reenchantment will include a greater openness to the gospel. It is therefore the church’s task—nay, privilege—to welcome digital gnostics into a true and better enchantment.

Brad Edwards is the lead pastor at The Table Church in Lafayette, Colorado. He is the author of CT’s Book of the Year, The Reason for Church, and cohost of the podcast PostEverything.

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Church Life

What If a Good Pastor Is a Bad Preacher?

Karen Swallow Prior, Kevin Antlitz, and Kiara John-Charles

CT advice columnists also weigh in on anguished estrangement and a suspicious devotional.

Illustration by Studio Pong

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

Q: What do you do about pastors whose preaching isn’t good? I don’t mean bad theology but more mundane problems. Messy organization. Poor delivery. Too many ideas at once. I don’t come to church for a performance, and I appreciate the wisdom and intent. These are faithful shepherds. But they could be more skilled, and I wonder if it’s ever appropriate to say so. —Tough Crowd in Tennessee

Karen Swallow Prior: Some people’s jobs have regular evaluations built in. Preachers and pastors, perhaps because of assumptions about the nature of their callings, are often in roles for which such assessments are not the norm.

It’s seldom wise to give advice or feedback that is neither requested nor expected. But your question raises others that might be more important: What part does the sermon play in the church’s worship service and in the overall life of the church? (This differs across denominations.) Is the church governed in a way that supports that congregational emphasis? Do other church leaders (like elders or bishops) “pastor the pastor” to facilitate the reflection, rest, and growth needed to develop preaching skills?

After all, among the biblical qualifications for an elder is the ability to teach (1 Tim. 3:2). This includes the ability to communicate, and church leadership should be holding preachers to this standard along with the expectation of maturity that would support such accountability.

These underlying reasons for a pastor’s lack of skill in preaching are the more important matter here. If your church is a place where character, care, feedback, and growth are encouraged, then the preaching problem should diminish over time. If it is not such a place, then poor preaching is not your most significant worry.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Karen Swallow Prior lives in rural Virginia with her husband, two dogs, and several chickens. Following a decades-long vocation as an English professor, Karen now speaks and writes full-time

Illustration by Studio Pong

Q: For years, my younger sister has experienced severe, undiagnosed mental health issues. Though she’s an adult, her rage and deception have harmed my parents, and I’m not alone in worrying about their welfare. My parents’ motto is to forgive like Jesus, but it hurts to watch how my sister treats them. I’ve cut ties with her, to my parents’ dismay, and I need advice. I know God calls us to forgive, but is estrangement a sin? —Isolated in Illinois

Kevin Antlitz: These questions are among the most confounding and painful we can face. To begin, it may be helpful to differentiate forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration. In my experience, much harm comes from conflating these three related yet distinct things. Christians are commanded to forgive whether or not someone apologizes (Matt. 6:14–15; Col. 3:13). Forgiveness is hard, but by the grace of God, it is within our control.

Reconciliation, however, requires both sides to take responsibility for wrongs, to repent of harmful behaviors, and to repair the damage when possible. We ought always to seek reconciliation (Rom. 12:18), but this is not within our control. It is a two-way street.

And though reconciliation brings peace, it doesn’t automatically restore the relationship to what it was. Such restoration isn’t always wise, let alone possible.

Now, to your situation. Your instinct is right: God is indeed calling you to forgive, and he will give you the grace to do it over and over again. But forgiveness and boundaries aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, forgiveness often requires strong boundaries. If your sister refuses to take responsibility and repent, reconciliation and restoration aren’t possible. Your options, then, are enabling her bad behavior or estrangement. As sad as it is, you’ve chosen the path of wisdom. As long as you remain open to reconciliation, estrangement is not sinful in your case.

Jack Richardson

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

Q: I’ve never known my dad to be a writer, so I was surprised when a sibling showed me Amazon pages for three books—all Christian devotionals—listing him as the author and self-published within a single week. Since then, my father has promoted these books online. He’s tech-savvy, and I strongly suspect he “wrote” them using ChatGPT. The situation has been gnawing at me. I’m angry, disappointed, and stressed. What should I do? —Taken Aback in Texas

Kiara John-Charles: As we enter adulthood, navigating parent-child relationships can stir up complex emotions, especially if you suspect your parent is involved in deceit or some other sin.

This situation requires balancing honor for your father with a call to integrity. Scripture provides a few examples of adult children confronting their parents. Think of Jonathan defending David against his father, Saul (1 Sam. 19:4–5; 20:32), or Jesus correcting Mary at the wedding in Cana (John 2:3–4).

These stories show the delicacy of such moments and the necessity of wisdom. Allow the Holy Spirit to guide and convict you and your dad alike (John 16:7–8, 13).

While the desire to see your father live a life of integrity is natural, confronting him in anger and disappointment is unlikely to result in the admission of guilt you seek. Your approach to him and what he seems to have done must come from love.

Begin with prayer to align yourself to God’s heart, and allow the Holy Spirit to steer your steps. If God does lead you to talk to your father about his writing, speak to him with love, respect, and curiosity. Start with questions rather than accusations, remembering that you haven’t yet confirmed your suspicions. Encourage honesty if he has been deceitful, but engage him in honor and charity, trusting the Spirit to move.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

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

This article appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Qualms & Proverbs".

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

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Ideas

Don’t Forsake the Assembly

Bonnie Kristian

Staff Editor

A durable, dogged, in-person, on-paper, public commitment to a local church is a necessary part of the Christian life.

Illustration by Klaus Kremmerz

Certain Bible verses demand to be quoted in the King James Version, and Hebrews 10:25 is one of them. Following calls to “hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering” (v. 23) and provoke one another “unto love and to good works” (v. 24) is an exhortation even more direct: Christians should not be “forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is.”

This is indeed the manner of some—today in ways the epistle’s unknown writer could not have anticipated. Human foibles are the same as ever, but 21st-century Christians have excuses for forsaking the assembly that first-century Christians could not muster: You can always just listen to a sermon podcast. You can pick up that extra shift or sleep a little longer or take your kid to the travel soccer tournament and make it up to God when the next episode drops. Well, you can do these things in the sense that this technology is available and no one will keep you from using it. But you can’t replace Sunday morning with a recording and presume that you’ve been to church.

Digital “attendance” is a misnomer. Even the best sermon podcast or live-stream is not church, and a durable, dogged, in-person, on-paper, in-public commitment to a local church is a necessary part of the Christian life. Church is “not an optional add-on,” as theologian Brad East has written at CT. “It is how we learn to be human as God intended. Indeed, it makes possible truly human life before God.”

Sometimes, of course, we find ourselves in extenuating circumstances. Some Christians must contend with sickness or disability that makes church attendance physically impossible, perhaps for a long time. Their local congregations have a duty to bring church to them, insofar as that is feasible. Some Christians live under persecution or in places where there literally are no local congregations or have some other hardship that renders the exhortation in Hebrews a word of future hope rather than a near-term reality.

I am speaking not about these circumstances but about those typical of Christians in the modern West. I’m particularly speaking of Christians in America, which enjoys world-historic freedom, security, and comfort and which—even decades into record-level dechurching and church closures—is bustling with local churches. Here, for most of us, most of the time, professing to follow Jesus must mean going and committing to church.

And I do mean going. The church is the people, not the building, true enough, and there are contexts where that’s a needful reminder. My strong suspicion, though, is that America in 2026 is not one of them. We could stand to think a bit more often about church as a location to which we must bodily take ourselves. We must go, week in and week out, even when we’ve slept poorly or it’s storming or we do not feel like getting the kids out the door for the seventh day in a row.

It is somewhere we must go even when there is somewhere else we’d prefer to be. I understand how many Christians find themselves in a post–blue laws world struggling to avoid Sunday work shifts. Those of us with 9-to-5 jobs should be grateful that our work doesn’t interfere with Sunday worship and should do what we can to accommodate siblings in Christ who have more taxing and volatile schedules—perhaps including helping them find other work.

I have no similar sympathy for discretionary, time-intensive leisure activities that habitually take the hours that ought to be reserved for assembling. I’m thinking especially about travel sports, which in the past few decades have emerged as a major competitor to Sunday service attendance. If I may follow Hebrews in its bluntness, any kids’ sports league that convenes on Sunday mornings should either change its schedule under parental pressure or find that the only Christians on its rolls are Saturday Sabbatarians.

(Do I need to add a Screwtape Letters bit here? “My dear Wormwood, inspire in the patient a mad fanaticism for travel sports’ assurances of the well-rounded college application, the opportunity to learn real leadership, and the excellence that will translate into lifelong success. Never let him consider that this season’s soccer schedule will have him away from the sanctuary 11 Sundays of the next 13 or that he’ll be too exhausted on the other 2 to even contemplate arranging himself on a wooden pew at 9 o’clock in the morning.”)

The goods of church that we miss when we forsake assembling together are hard to overstate. In East’s phrase, the church, for all its flaws and failings, is a God-founded institution “finely tuned to the complex needs of the human experience—to help us with everything from early socialization to midlife crisis to dying well.” Even the best soccer season can’t compare; and neither can the sermon podcasts we may be tempted to substitute suffice.

On the podcast front, I speak from experience, because I embraced sermon downloads sooner than most. In my 20s, I moved to a small town in Virginia and began attending a nondenominational church within walking distance of my apartment. I met the pastors, joined the young adults group, and volunteered in the Awana kids’ program. I was married in the historic sanctuary where I’d learned to be an active member of the local body of Christ.

But early in my time there, it became apparent that the theological resources at my new church only went so far. I was in a season that today might be called deconstruction, though I didn’t experience it as the crisis the label now connotes. I was a 22-year-old exploring big theological topics myself for the first time, and I realized that the pastors at my church—though faithful, sensible, and kind—were working in a different register. I had questions beyond what they could realistically answer.

So I turned to books, to begin with. Then blogs. (It was 2010, after all.) Then, after Googling the name of an author I’d found helpful, I made a discovery: the sermon podcast.

Podcasts as we know them were only half a decade old at the time, and I still thought of sermon recordings as things that lived on cassette tapes in church vestibules. Soon I learned I could fill my screenless iPod with four archival sermons each week and spend my long runs under the tutelage of venerable pastors and expert theologians. And it was all free! I was surprised. I was impressed. I was hooked.

Over the next few years, those sermon podcasts shaped my faith and career alike. I no longer listen to any, except to make up the odd week that I’m out sick on Sunday. But it’s no exaggeration to say that without them, my life might look very different today. By no means do I recommend against them.

Yet for all their goods, digital media are not church, and church is not to be forsaken in their favor. Like a book or an essay, a podcast or video may offer guidance, instruction, and encouragement. These are elements of church, but they are not the whole. For that, we must assemble. It is in the assembly that we “hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering” and provoke one another “unto love and to good works.” It is by going to church that we learn to be the church.

The necessity of that lesson is why simply intending to go is not enough. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” we all know from too much experience (Matt. 26:41).

That truth is why, last spring, I knelt before the bishop of the Pittsburgh diocese one Sunday morning and was confirmed into the Anglican Church in North America. Confirmation wasn’t something I’d expected to pursue. I wasn’t raised in churches that practice it, but it’s offered by the church I’ve now embraced.

So I sought it, most simply because I could. Because it’s there. Because it’s another way to bind myself to this congregation, to say, “I’m in,” and I want other people to help me remember that when I’m inclined to forget.

I expect we are all so inclined at some point or another. Perhaps the inclination is particularly tempting in this time and place, in a society as noncommittal as they come. But the confirmation liturgy, developed from the 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer, suggests to me that human weakness and inconstancy can flourish with or without the atomization and irresponsibility of our time.

“Will you obediently keep God’s holy will and commandments, and walk in them all the days of your life?” the bishop asks.

“I will,” the confirmands respond, “the Lord being my helper.” (Many other denominations do something like this in the membership vows or church covenant.)

It’s a realistic and humble reply—yet one that the next exchange suggests is not quite humble enough. After receiving that answer, the bishop immediately pivots to ask the whole congregation, “Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?”

Commit to faithfulness, yes, the question implies, but let’s think about contingency plans.

For me, I am glad someone is doing that thinking. It’s necessary and prudent. By divine design, the Christian life comes with support; the congregation answers yes.

It’s no knock on the Holy Spirit to recognize that we also need other people—that sometimes “the Lord being my helper” looks like an exhortation from your pastor or a book recommended by your small group or a casserole from the family in the next row. Sometimes we are too weak to hear God’s still, small voice (1 Kings 19:12, also in the KJV), but we can take in a text from a friend.

Naturally, this kind of give-and-take commitment goes for spiritual support and institutional maintenance alike. At our church, confirmation is a step beyond membership, one required to serve in select lay leadership roles. It provides an extra layer of theological instruction and scrutiny from our clergy, a layer that in some other traditions looks similar, in others is different, and in some may not exist at all.

Having seen firsthand what can happen in a local church without deliberate care in steering the congregation, I’m all for it. Our era is not (if any era ever was) a time of stasis, a time of ecclesial plenty, a time in which congregations can coast on the good work and established traditions of generations past.

Christian institutions, including local churches and denominational hierarchies, are inevitably human endeavors, subject to entropy like anything else in a fallen world. If we simply assume we’ll still have faithful, functional congregations 10 or 20 or 30 years hence, we won’t. They must be actively maintained, a task requiring steadiness and diligence, perseverance and forbearance.

I pursued confirmation to reiterate my aim to participate in that work. It is a way to solidify—to put down in writing and speak aloud in the sanctuary—the duty I already know to be real. Confirmation isn’t the only way to do that, of course. Many Christian traditions don’t confirm people, and confirmation is never explicitly mentioned in the Bible. Neither is formal membership, though that too strikes me as a good idea.

There are plenty of perfectly good ways to commit oneself to a local church, and (as a thoroughgoing Protestant) I don’t imagine God gets unduly worked up over the ceremonial details. Yet some kind of deliberate, public, in-print commitment is vital. “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together” is an active task.

The point is not about one exact arrangement or another. The point is to be in and to say so and to invite others to say it back to you when you’ve fallen silent. The point is the commitment, the orientation of your heart toward God, and the body of people whom you will serve and who will serve you in turn—people with whom you will assemble to worship, study, and imitate Christ.

Bonnie Kristian is deputy editor at Christianity Today.

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Church Life

Miroslav Volf: ‘Disagreeing With You Feels Like Disagreeing With Myself’

Andrew Hendrixson

The deep friendship between the theologian and poet Christian Wiman is built around mutual respect and a willingness to tackle life’s hardest questions.

Illustration by Denise Nestor

“My office or a big room?” Miroslav Volf asked. His Blundstone boots carried his tall frame to a sputtering coffee machine. Before Volf got the last words out, his friend Christian Wiman said, “Big room.” Wiman was running a few minutes late because a half-marathon in New Haven, Connecticut, had led to road closures. His “Montana” baseball cap was slightly askew. He looked pleased that coffee was underway.

It was a gray Labor Day at Yale University when I met with Volf and Wiman, my former professors. The mild temperatures heralded the end of summer, and campus was mostly quiet aside from some rustlings in the hallway, where students sat around open laptops and sifted through books that bloomed with colorful tabs. We met in an empty seminar room in the building where Volf directs the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.

Volf and Wiman loom large in their respective fields for good reason. They have spent their lives exploring the human experience and articulating something of the complexities of faith—Volf as a theologian and Wiman as a poet.

The former has spent his life asking questions about the furthest reaches of forgiveness and the ways we can live together across great differences. The latter has long wrestled words of faith and doubt across pages. Poetry helped him return to church after a 20-year absence and a diagnosis of incurable blood cancer.

Along the way, these two men have built a friendship by looking squarely at life’s big questions and tackling faith and doubt, suffering and joy, together.

Their writing seems incapable of lingering on the superfluous. No question is too big or unwieldy for Volf and Wiman, no confession of doubt too destabilizing. Rather than lead them toward cynicism or unbelief, their willingness to ask hard questions has drawn them closer to one another and to God.

Recently, the two friends decided to give readers an intimate view of their relationship in their book Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian. They expanded on those letters as they sat at a long table in the classroom last September. The conversation centered on each man’s faith, including Wiman’s ongoing battle to keep despair at bay and Volf’s admission that he longs to possess a hunger for God that seems to elude him.

For years, Volf and Wiman have taken walks together, beginning at Yale Divinity School and trekking a regular route along the sidewalks of New Haven. The walks began early in their friendship, and these first conversations tended to focus on what each was reading. Neither had read the other’s works. Their friendship came about when Volf’s wife, Jessica Dwelle, took a class with Wiman. When the two couples got together for dinner a short time later, Volf and Wiman found themselves compelled by the mind of the other. “At some point,” Volf said, “we started talking about prayer and about a desire for God.”

Occasionally, one of them would be out of town or unduly weighed down by a teaching load, or Wiman was sick, and they’d continue their conversations by writing emails to one another.

The emails began in earnest during the fall of 2022. Wiman said these letters “came at a period of great urgency.” He had been diagnosed at age 39 with a rare and incurable form of cancer called Waldenström macroglobulinemia. Twenty years later, as he began his correspondence with Volf, he “really was dying.” He went on to say, “It was a literal godsend to me the way that this exchange happened.”

Cancer’s effects on Wiman’s body come in waves, quieting for a stretch of years then becoming acutely virulent. “I started getting sick in 2022 and had a hard time finishing that semester, but in 2023 it was really bad,” he said. He completed a book called Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair but wasn’t sure he would live to see it published.

He was wrestling at the time with “what it means to love God.” He said, “It seems to me such an abstract question. And in a way I feel like
I know what it means, in the way that I feel like I know when a poem is beginning. It’s about the same sort of feeling. But there’s something very elusive and frustrating about it when you are in a period of suffering.”

“I found it immensely helpful to think about these issues with somebody concrete before me,” Volf said of their email correspondence. Rather than working through an issue alone and “speaking to myself or to a potential reader,” he said, “I had specifically Chris in view, and that just catalyzed something for me.” Their walks on campus and around New Haven laid the foundation on which they later built as they emailed one another. “It was really helpful that I knew [Wiman] well,” Volf said. He spoke of “a certain honoring and appreciation of what’s coming from the other side. And that to me was really wonderful.”

“I don’t know what faith means anymore,” Wiman wrote to Volf in an email that would later appear on the first page of Glimmerings. “I’m
fifty-six years old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone marrow transplant ahead of me and I don’t know what faith means.”

That kind of raw honesty marks their published correspondence, from the first entry on February 28, 2023, to the last one written on June 16, 2024. As Wiman struggled with a sense of God’s absence, Volf confessed that he doesn’t reach for God so much as he recognizes God is holding him.

“My sense is that even when Chris and Miroslav experience God differently,” Wiman’s wife, poet Danielle Chapman told me, “they approach theological questions with the same urgency.” She said the friendship with Volf has been “a great gift to Chris, to have a friend who sees but is not put off by his intensities, whose own faith and understanding is sharp enough to engage real suffering and despair without attempting to dispel or dismiss it. This has been all the more true when the questions they’ve asked together have literally been questions of life and death.”

In the midst of his correspondence with Volf, Wiman underwent an experimental treatment in Boston called CAR T-cell therapy, which
saved his life. When we met, he looked well, like the Wiman I remembered from class.

Both Volf and Wiman come from families riddled with tragedy and grief. Each bears the marks of the place from which he came.

Born in Croatia and educated in Germany, Volf came of age in the 1960s, a tumultuous time in former Yugoslavia. His father was a Protestant minister in a predominantly Catholic region who spent time in a labor camp and whose conversion came during a death march he narrowly survived. Volf’s mother lost four children.

“What my mother did early on,” Volf said, “was to talk to us about her experiences of her four children dying, of the grief that she had. She didn’t shield us from that.” He said her openness wasn’t disorienting for him. Rather, “my love for my mother, and for her struggle, and for what has come to be of her just grew. Suffering was in the middle between us.”

Wiman responded, “She sounds like a strong person who could convey her pain without it being completely destructive. I didn’t have that. There wasn’t strength to convey suffering; there was just this blast of suffering.”

Wiman came of age in a trailer in a hard-beaten stretch of West Texas. His family was prone to reoccurring avalanches of addiction and self-destruction. His essays about his early years are threaded with violence and chaos and what he calls his “badly plugged well of unfocused rage.” I asked him once, during a coat-and-tie dinner at which our conversation about drug-addicted and incarcerated family members stood in ragged contrast to the crisp linens on the table, how he’d gotten from there to here. “Sheer desperation,” he told me.

Navigating desperation and despair is a far cry from the sort of acclaim these men have earned in their professions. In addition to founding and directing the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, Volf is a longtime professor of theology at Yale Divinity School. Wiman is an author, editor, translator, and professor of communication arts at Yale Divinity and the university’s Institute of Sacred Music. Volf sat on the hiring committee for Wiman, a detail Wiman hadn’t heard before our talk last year.

Although Volf can be found teaching graduate seminars or giving the Gifford Lectures, he can just as readily hold a conversation onstage with Rainn Wilson at the Aspen Ideas Festival or chat with Maria Shriver on the Today show. His books are among the seminal theological texts of our time.

Edgardo Colón-Emeric, dean of Duke Divinity School, recounts using Volf’s The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World in a seminar on the theology of reconciliation. “One of my students was a Burundian pastor who had been recently tapped by his government to work on a post-genocide national reconciliation project,” Colón-Emeric said. “I was so moved by his story that I gave him my marked-up copy of Volf’s book. He thanked me profusely and told me, ‘This book will save lives.’”

Wiman’s writings have left their own imprint. He received the distinguished Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and then spent years at the helm of Poetry magazine. His work can be found in the pages of The New Yorker and in his own books of prose and poetry. He recounts stories of strolls down Chicago sidewalks with the late poet Mary Oliver and the dead bird in her pocket or time spent with his friend and poet laureate the late Donald Hall.Wiman also speaks around the country, discussing the works of French philosopher Simone Weil or 18th-century theologian Jonathan Edwards and offering sermons at Yale’s Marquand Chapel.

His own suffering marks others’ art. Singer-songwriter Sandra McCracken told me, “Chris Wiman’s work haunts me with truth as he wrestles so earnestly with suffering and certainty.” She said reading Wiman’s writing is “disruptive—and all the more effective because it’s so elegant. I am quite sure that Wiman’s poetry has left some of its shimmering residue on my songs for many years now.”

For all of their accolades, what comes through most when Wiman and Volf are in the same room is a deep friendship, one that can handle a bit of intellectual roughhousing. That’s something the two men engage in, though their tussles are not with one another so much as with themselves. There’s a lightness: In Glimmerings, readers can sense their friendship acutely during these disagreements. Volf writes, “I love how disagreeing with you feels like disagreeing with myself, free of any envy and malice.”

During our talk, Volf spoke of the correspondence with Wiman as one “with no upmanship” and said, “It is a kind of release where my own winning was not at stake.” Wiman replied that their communication, even when friction was present, “was a genuine search. We did disagree, but it was a genuine search.”

Wiman has no formal theological training and never spent a day in graduate school, but there is still a piercing clarity of theological insight in his writing. He writes about feeling God’s absence, needing to summon God by focusing his attention on him. Wiman is very much after something. His hunger for God is heard in his voice and seen in his tendency to rub his palm over his closely shorn scalp as he stews on a question.

Volf, confessing that he does not reach for God as much as he recognizes that he’s being held by God, said, “I’m not proud of that.” He continued, “I want to have what Chris has. I want to have the longing.”

Wiman seemed surprised to hear this. “Really?” he asked.

“Yeah, absolutely I do.”

“I want to have what you have,” Wiman replied. They turned toward one another as smiles slowly appeared. “You seem secure in your faith,” Wiman said. “You don’t seem milquetoast or lukewarm. You seem secure. I would like to have that security. I just think of it as a calm—some deeper calm that enables people.”

Perhaps that sense of calm stands out in contrast to Wiman’s own—as he puts it—“impulse to self-destruction, which has been a war throughout my life.” He has found some refuge from the war in poetry, through which he came to Christ—taken by the throat, he has said—in his 40s after falling in love and receiving his cancer diagnosis.

He said concepts like grace, faith, sin, and love can feel impenetrably abstract. “I can only understand these abstractions when they’re rooted in poetry or metaphor that opens them up in some way,” he said. Poetry “locates abstraction,” and then, as he writes in Glimmerings, “all of my instincts tell me I must follow God. I simply know that he is.”

Volf spoke of what he called a “feature of modernity,” particularly pronounced in the United States, in which there is an “expectation that life should be directly within your control, and if it isn’t, then there’s something wrong with the world, or something’s wrong with you.”

“I was raised in the setting in which this expectation could not be had,” Volf said. “The relationship to faith was not a matter of asking how faith can help me be fully in control of my circumstances.” Nor was it a matter of “how faith would actually help shift and change” his circumstances. In the churches of his youth, he said, “we prayed for healing, but the assumption was that the world is such that you are not and will not be in control. And God comes.”

Indeed, God comes, even in suffering. The topic of suffering was peppered throughout the course of our conversation, as it was in Volf and Wiman’s correspondence. In one letter, Volf relayed a provocative question that came out of a class he taught with a colleague. The question was “whether we could imagine letting Jesus raise our kids.” Volf said he initially “balked at the idea viscerally, as if some unspecified but great damage would befall them if committed to [Jesus’] care.”

Volf has three children, and Wiman two. They discussed how, as Wiman put it, Jesus seems to claim people through suffering. Both explored the thought experiment of whether they ultimately could allow their children to suffer and watch it happen if it was the means by which God claimed them. Volf wrote of his young daughter, “Somewhere deep down, I do desire to take Mira’s hand and together with her follow the radical, uncomfortable Christ.”

Many of us carry questions that could fold us under their weight. They can incite a despair that renders us anemic and our places and lives and futures only arid. Or they can incite a despair, like Wiman’s response to me at our fancy dinner, that has the capacity to buoy us and spark newness.

In spite of the suffering that both men have walked through, Volf and Wiman maintain a fierce and visceral hope. Both have a ready laugh that sounds sincere, albeit hard-won.

The glimmerings in the book title is taken from a line by poet Seamus Heaney: “Glimmerings are what the soul’s composed of.” It was Wiman who first proposed that their correspondence become a book. “It was a very strange thing for me to do,” he said. “I’m not looking for more work. It was a weird, sudden thing.” Wiman sent an email to Volf, who responded immediately that he had been “musing on the same idea.” Volf told me, “I felt that there was something really significant going on that could be of broader significance than just for us.”

Many of the book’s early readers seem to agree. Krista Tippett, who has interviewed both Volf and Wiman for her show On Being, told me, “The learning behind these letters is matched by the fierce courage of their words to each other.”

In any of the differences between these friends, the necessity of facing soberly and honestly not just their own suffering but the suffering of Christ is a place of earnest agreement. “He did make those in need terminal points of his love,” Volf wrote in one of his letters. “He fed the hungry, healed the sick, raised the dead.” Volf later continued, “Christ consoles because his experiences with God are so close to our anguish.”

Despite Wiman’s assertion that he doesn’t know what faith means anymore, his life tells another story. Knowing him, reading his writing, and listening to the recent conversation all say something quite different. Wiman may always need to pile sandbags against encroaching despair and self-destructive impulses. Volf may always, at the edges of even the best days, feel moments of what he calls “cosmic motherlessness.” They may be chronic, these symptoms of human finitude and frailty.

But Volf and Wiman seem simultaneously to believe so deeply that Christ is present and hears them that each will take to God the loneliness, absence, and doubt he feels about that very God.

We are less inclined to cry out—for years and decades—to an ether we believe is empty. Part of faith is believing that we will be heard. Volf and Wiman seem to know that, ultimately, they will be.

As our conversation drew to an end, I asked Wiman to read aloud one of my favorite poems of his before we parted. It is titled “I Don’t Want to Be a Spice Store” and is a litany of what he wants and does not want to be. He doesn’t want to carry “handcrafted Marseille soap” or other luxuries.

Half the shops here don’t open till noon
and even the bookstore’s brined in charm.
I want to be the one store that’s open all night
and has nothing but necessities.
Something to get a fire going
and something to put one out.

It is one of my favorite poems because of the final three lines, two dozen words that startle me because of the openness to which they aspire and the possibility of communion for which they leave room—expect, even.

I want to hum just a little with my own emptiness
at 4 a.m. To have little bells above my door.
To have a door.

Neither Wiman nor Volf is a spice store. Their lives and their work have never dealt in trivialities. The necessities they have offered are sometimes comforting, like finding God amid a ravaging illness, and sometimes challenging, like finding ways to forgive those who have injured us and our families most deeply.

They share a sense of urgency in that each has spent his life asking the most pressing questions humans can ask. As they have asked how to repair ruptures—whether across warring ethnic groups, in a family, or within themselves—both have done so with a sense that God sees and holds them, even when they’ve had to strain to believe it.

Like the biblical psalmists of old, Volf and Wiman have taken refuge in the belief that no frantic, middle-of-the-night question, no flash of desperate honesty, is unheard by God. They have also taken refuge in the friendship of one another. Each carries the essentials. Each has a door.

Andrew Hendrixson is an artist and writer who is pursuing a doctoral degree in theology from Duke Divinity School.

This article appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "No Question Too Big".

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News

Nursing Home Revival

Amy Lewis

Churches invest heavily on children and youth. But what about those in the twilight of their lives?

Illustration by Matija Medved

Jennifer Bute, the executive partner at a large general practice in Southampton, UK, was driving to her office in 2004 when she got lost. Suddenly, the 59-year-old doctor couldn’t remember how to get to the medical center she had worked at for the past 25 years.

When she finally showed up and told the staff why she was late, no one believed her. Bute realized something was wrong.

Over the next four years, more troubling things happened. She began forgetting her passwords. Her sister came over for a visit and on her way out the door remembered she’d left her phone back at Bute’s apartment. Bute offered to go get it. When she returned with the phone, she didn’t recognize her sister.

“Are you going to give me that phone?” her sister asked.

“No,” Bute told her, “I’m going to give it to my sister.” Only when her sister looked puzzled and moved her head in a certain way did Bute recognize her mannerism and realize who she was.

The last straw came when she arrived at a case conference she was leading and asked all the attendees to introduce themselves. They were confused. “Don’t be so stupid, Jenny,” said one colleague. “We’ve worked together for 20 years!” She didn’t recognize any of the 22 people in the room, but they all knew her.

That same year, Bute diagnosed herself with dementia and visited a neurologist she knew professionally. Bute said he refused to examine her, insisting he could tell just by looking at her that nothing was wrong. It took five years before she got an official diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s at age 64. She resigned her job and stopped working as a doctor. In 2011, she and her husband moved into an assisted-living village in Somerset, England. Her husband died a few months later.

Today she lives at Richmond Villages Cheltenham Care Home, an advanced-dementia care facility, as she needs more daily help, including reminders to eat and drink. The day we spoke, the 80-year-old had looked in every cupboard for the mug she uses for her morning tea. She eventually found it in the microwave—full of yesterday’s tea.

Yet one thing she hasn’t forgotten is her call to go out and make disciples of all the nations—including the residents at her care facility and others in the UK who are losing their memories.

When Bute first moved into Richmond Villages in 2022, she invited a few of her fellow dementia-unit residents to attend her church, C3 Church Cheltenham. But after only a few visits, her friends stopped coming. When her pastor, Christian Walsh, asked her why, she responded that the service was too long. “But people are interested,” she added.

So Walsh started running a Friday-afternoon course at Bute’s facility called Life’s Difficult Questions that mirrored an Alpha course. Some attendees were Christians; some were not. When the course ended, they kept meeting. Bute said she is seeing people in her building accept Jesus. “I wouldn’t call it a trend, but they are coming—slowly,” she said.

Pastors and leaders who minister to the elderly around the world are also seeing people return to their faith in Christ or believe in him for the first time. They note the extraordinary opportunity and challenges in reaching this demographic. On the one hand, they have more time to consider Christianity and are often more open to discussing matters of life and death as their lives near the end. On the other hand, some struggle with their memory, like Bute, while still others have lost their sense of purpose, especially as many of their friends and loved ones have died. Their time is limited, making evangelism more urgent.

As the world’s population ages and birthrates drop, ministry to the elderly is becoming increasingly important, since those over the age of 65 represent a larger population and mission field. In the US, the senior-citizen population is expected to nearly double in the next few decades, with more than 94 million Americans 65 and older by 2060, according to US Census Bureau projections.

Some church leaders are encouraging Christians to get involved and not to neglect the older adults in their communities. CT spoke with ministry leaders in the UK, the US, Australia, and Uganda about how they are seeking to love and reach this population.

“God is so not finished with these people,” said Elisa Bosley, a chaplain in Colorado. “Unfortunately, the rest of our society thinks they’re finished. But the harvest is there. And we can pray for God to send workers into the harvest to see the beauty of this work and to jump into it with commitment.”

In Australia, believers Are mourning the national decline of Christianity. For the first time in the country’s colonial history, less than 50 percent of residents claim to be Christian, according to its 2021 census.

When demographer and social analyst Mark McCrindle looked closely at the longitudinal data, he discovered a surprising trend: Despite the general decline in self-identified Christians, nearly 195,000 Australians over the age of 55 moved from no religion to Christianity in the last five years, making up 25 percent of the country’s Christian converts. In the last decade, the proportion of Christian converts over 55 increased by 11 percentage points. His team interviewed 3,000 Australians to find out why.

They found that many people who converted to Christianity had grown up attending church or were familiar with the religion but had rejected it. As they age, McCrindle said, the veneer of secularism wears off. “They realize that secularism and materialism can’t answer loss and grief and frailty,” he said.

According to his team’s interviews, the older generation sees younger generations growing up in uncertain geopolitical and technological times. Those cultural changes motivate them to look at the faith that held the society they used to know together.

For instance, Christina Hill of Geelong, Victoria, didn’t become a Christian until she was 75. Although she attended a local Methodist church on her own as a child, she stopped going when the church sent her home with a packet of tithing envelopes to fill.

Years later, she was baptized into a New Age spiritualist church and visited fortunetellers, looking for answers about the future of her youngest son as he struggled with mental health issues. In 2022, he went missing, and Hill remembers desperately praying to God to bring him home safely. Hours later, she found him at the beach near their home, and he told her that he had found the Lord.

Hill began reading books about Christianity and bought a King James Bible. She stopped going to yoga and tai chi classes. She was baptized at a nearby Pentecostal church and started attending a Christian Reformed church.

Hill said Jesus has changed her. She said she’s a gentler, softer person now. “I keep asking the Holy Spirit to make me more like Jesus,” she said. “I want to be changed—heart, mind, and soul.”

And she’s sharing the gospel with others, including her former neighbor who is in his 80s. She gave him a Bible, and a few weeks later he asked her how he could “speak to the Lord and give him [my] heart.” Right there, Hill helped her neighbor pray the sinner’s prayer.

“I wasn’t evangelizing him,” she said. “I just asked him about the Bible and talked with him about the things of life.”

In Boise, Idaho, Stephanie Smith has also seen an openness to the gospel among older generations. As the leader of Calvary Chapel Boise’s Twilight Hope, a ministry to the elderly, Smith visits eight different elder care facilities with her team to hold services or Bible studies.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, the group visited Grace Memory Care, a home for patients with dementia. Residents gathered in the common room with a large-screen TV playing a 1980s sitcom. Smith handed out stapled songbooks with classic hymns like “The Old Rugged Cross” and “I’ll Fly Away” printed in a large font. The room swelled with cracking yet joyful voices. In a lull between two songs, one woman from a back couch called out, “I love them all!”

Smith followed the worship time with an exposition of Psalm 3 and exhorted the residents to cry out to God even in their confusion.

She recalled the impact the Bible had on a Korean War commander in his late 80s at Avista Senior Living several miles away in Garden City, Idaho. Living there forced him to finally sit and be still, but he had trouble sleeping, and his thoughts tormented him. He listened as Smith taught through the Book of John. After one gathering, the Word of God pierced the veteran’s conscience, and he asked Smith, “Who told you that about me?”

At first Smith didn’t understand what he was talking about. Then she responded, “I think that’s the Holy Spirit. It’s God pursuing your heart.” He became a Christian after that meeting.

In the ensuing months, he shared with Smith his guilt over being the only survivor of his battalion after an attack in the war. Smith prayed with him.

Before his death, he told Smith, “When I’m praying, I don’t feel that stress anymore. It just goes away, and I just feel joy and calm.”

Smith helped found Twilight Hope in 2000, and the group now has a rotating team of about 19 people. Because of their visits, she’s seen the residents—who can’t leave the facilities to attend worship services—learn more about the love of Jesus. Her volunteers have grown in their faith and love for God through their interactions with residents, she said. And the Christians living in the facilities have encouraged Smith as they model what it looks like to finish the race well.

Still, finding enough volunteers for the ministry is a challenge. Many people will help with Christmas caroling events at the retirement homes or attend special classic-movie nights that Twilight Hope puts on at facilities. But only a few volunteers come out consistently.

Some people find long-term care facilities intimidating. “I think it’s because there’s weird smells, there’s scary noises, sometimes there’s bells going off,” Smith said. “Some of the facilities feel like hospitals, and that freaks people out.”

Yet she believes those feelings fade quickly. “Once you get in there, and once you get over that, and once you start to get to know the people, you’re gonna fall in love with them,” she said. “They’re so wise. They have whole histories behind them, a life to share.”

She noted that residents especially enjoy when children visit. One volunteer, Jake Alger, has been serving and bringing his children with him for the past 18 years. His youngest is 6 and is a favorite among the residents.

“Jesus tells us to love our neighbor, and the reality is a lot more of our neighbors are going to be older,” Smith said. “There’s a real sense
of urgency.”

A 2024 Barna Group report found that about half of pastors say ministry to older adults is a high priority for their church. But 60 percent say they don’t have anyone at the church specifically dedicated to ministering to older adults. Meanwhile, when McCrindle surveyed Australian pastors, he found that churches spend a large portion of their budget on children’s and youth ministry.

Bosley, the chaplain at a long-term care facility in Boulder, Colorado, noted that churches often don’t invest in the elderly “because there’s no return on investment—they will not grow your church rolls or grow your budget.”

She noted that American society prizes youthfulness, vitality, and cognition. “We avoid working with elderly people because we’re afraid of death ourselves, so we don’t want to stare at it in the face all the time.”

In the early 2000s, Bosley’s father-in-law developed Alzheimer’s, and she spent the next decade caring for him. After his death, she became a licensed chaplain for dementia patients, but she couldn’t find resources that fit the needs of many of her residents.

So she founded Spiritual Eldercare, creating specialized Bible discussion guides, large-print hymnals with fewer verses of the age-old favorites set in lower keys, YouTube versions of the songs, and suggestions for full-length worship services.

She noted that by serving people struggling with dementia, she is obeying God’s command to care for widows, orphans, and aliens. Bosley sees dementia patients as all three—many have lost their spouses and their parents. They also feel like aliens. “They’re really living in a different land than we are,” Bosley said. “They’re in a different reality. It’s our job to go to them and to speak their language.”

When Bosley is at Balfour Cherrywood, a dedicated memory-care residence facility, she invites everyone she meets to the church services she leads. Some decline, saying they aren’t Christian, but she tells them to come anyway—no conversion required. “I don’t want them to feel like I’m only there for our little clique,” Bosley said.

And often they show up. “God is at work. They’re lonely. They’re bored. They’re curious.”

Bosley crouches or kneels in front of a resident she’s speaking to so she can look the person directly in the eyes. She finds that they pause to process her questions, but if she waits a few seconds, she usually gets a response. “Like anyone else, they respond to being seen, listened to, treated with dignity, and not talked to as if they were children or, worse, absent altogether,” she said.

Oftentimes, the residents in long-term care don’t remember the church services that she prepared. They don’t remember that she prayed for them. They don’t remember singing the same song every week. But Bosley said that is beside the point.

“It’s still worth it because they are affected and reached in that moment,” Bosley said. They often weep when they sing the old hymns or when she prays with them. “God is so active in reaching his people. I get to see these miracles all the time. I used to write them all down … but there were just so many.”

Source: Jennifer Bute, Kenneth Mugayehwenkyi, Stephanie Smith. Images used with permission.

Left to Right: Jennifer Bute, a former doctor ministering to her fellow dementia patients in Cheltenham, UK; Kenneth Mugayehwenkyi, founder of Reach One Touch One Ministries in Uganda; and Stephanie Smith, leader of Twilight Hope in Boise, Idaho.

Mark Wormell, 67, acting rector of St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Cremorne, Australia, began researching in 2016 how older adults, especially those with dementia, come to Christ. When he visited care facilities and spoke with chaplains, every person had stories of conversions.

He began to study the theology behind conversions within that demographic: What does faith look like for someone with dementia? What does repentance mean for those who can’t remember what they’ve done and are not that sure what is right or wrong?

He realized that repentance comes by the sovereign help of the Holy Spirit and doesn’t need to be articulate or detailed.

“It’s knowing that there is a God … that God loves you, and knowing that that God will care for you and that you are dependent upon him,” he said.

His professors encouraged him to publish his resulting paper, “Coming to Christ in Dementia,” as a book, but his classmates, 30 years his junior, wondered why he would even bother trying to lead people with dementia to Christ.

“It made me sick, as if they didn’t matter to God,” he said.

Today, Wormell continues to visit dementia wards at care facilities and run Communion services. Some of the people in the care home are blind. Some are deaf. But for those who have taken Communion all their lives, “they know what to do, even if their mind isn’t totally switched on,” he said.

When he approaches residents with a piece of bread or cup, they just reach out their hands. “They know they’re receiving something good from God.”

During one visit, Wormell explained to the residents that Communion was a meal for anyone who trusted in Jesus. As he brought the bread and cup around, one man named Peter said he had never taken Communion before. He considered himself a Christian but had never been a regular member of a church. He felt like an outsider there, so he had never gone forward. “It’s the first time that anyone had asked him to take Communion—at the age of 95—and he just sat there in tears,” Wormell said.

Kenneth Mugayehwenkyi of Mukono, Uganda, said working with seniors also helps other generations, as many grandparents care for orphaned grandchildren. In 2002, two orphaned girls approached Mugayehwenkyi’s wife, who worked for Compassion International in Seeta, Uganda, for help. Yet her current program was full. So Mugayehwenkyi, who was working as a social worker in the US at the time, started sending part of his income home to help them.

Later that year, he returned to Uganda to help rebuild the shack where the orphans lived with their 70-year-old widowed grandmother, Elizabeth. The girls’ parents had died of AIDS, and Elizabeth had no way to support herself or her granddaughters.

Then he met Elizabeth’s friends and found them in similar circumstances—raising the kids of their own dead children in their old age. Mugayehwenkyi changed his plans, and instead of seeking to move his family to the US, he moved back to Uganda. He began meeting weekly with these destitute grandparents to study the Bible and pray about their circumstances.

He noted that many nonprofits, government organizations, and ministries in Uganda invest money to reach children not only because they are vulnerable but also because of their potential. For Christian groups, children ages 4–14 are statistically more likely to embrace Christianity than other age groups are. Sometimes ministries use these children as success stories they can show to wealthy donors overseas.

Mugayehwenkyi believes that focusing only on children treats people like commodities, especially as the elderly also have great needs. Many widows and widowers are raising their orphaned grandchildren with few resources.

What started as a few grandparents meeting weekly quickly grew to dozens. He founded Reach One Touch One Ministries (ROTOM) in 2003 and started to provide food for hungry grandparents at the meetings, but they would save it to take home to their grandchildren. So his group began making extra food and providing containers so the grandparents could both eat and take leftovers home. His ministry began alternating home visits with group meetings, where the grandparents could share their stories and difficulties, study the Bible, and pray.

One member of his group died due to difficulty accessing a hospital to treat his malaria, so Mugayehwenkyi decided to open two clinics specifically for geriatric care. Mugayehwenkyi said the average age of the grandparents in his group has increased from 72 to 80 years old in a country where the life expectancy is 68.

When the program began in 2003, about 80 percent of the grandparents claimed they were Christians. But as Mugayehwenkyi got to know them, he found that only half truly believed in Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

Now, after 22 years of ministry, Mugayehwenkyi says at least 87 percent of the attendees have a relationship with Jesus and about 70 percent of them share their faith with other people in their lives. In these two decades, ROTOM has ministered to more than 2,000 older people—along with 600 orphans.

He noted that because many already consider themselves Christ-ians, they don’t think they need salvation. They take “a different path,” Mugayehwenkyi said. “It takes a relationship, sometimes over many years of trust.”

Back in Cheltenham, England, Bute or a member of her church leads a group of about a dozen people between the ages of 70 and 90 every Friday afternoon. Some of the attendees used to travel or knit. They remember their pets fondly. “But they’re more likely to mention life’s experiences that have been hard and how God fits into that than spend time talking about their interests,” Bute said.

Among dementia patients, familiar songs are important, since music memory is one of the last things to fade. So they sing either “It Is Well with My Soul” or “In Christ Alone” each week, as Bute believes those songs tell the story of the gospel. For many, the songs were initially unfamiliar, so Bute spent time telling them the backstory of the former and explaining the latter line by line. Now the songs have become firm favorites even for those with more advanced dementia.

After singing, the group discusses a topic that relates to their everyday lives. One recent topic was grace—the words we say at the table before we eat, the way we’re graceful in movement, and ultimately God’s grace to us in Christ. Not all participants are Christians—one woman comes just because she attends every activity at the care facility. Some of the staff members have Buddhist tendencies, but they have shown an increased interest as the weeks go by. “ ‘By all means, save some’—isn’t that what the Good Book says?” Bute asked (1 Cor. 9:22).

She noted that Mike, a 90-year-old attendee of the study, was virulently anti-God and “anti-everything.” Later they learned that he had been abused at his Catholic school.

Mike came to the Friday meetings for years but was “on the fence” about following Jesus. A few weeks ago, Walsh asked Mike if he was still on the fence. “I don’t think so,” Mike told him. Bute gave him an orange book with the Gospel of Luke interspersed with questions.

When I first scheduled an interview with Bute, she forgot our appointment. When we finally connected, she was apologetic but realistic about her forgetfulness. “I laugh over it,” she said. “I can’t help it, and there’s no point getting upset.” She added, “But with faith, I’m just grateful. I think I’ve learned more about God. I’m very grateful to God.”

Bute noted that since her diagnosis she has trusted God more. People ask her if she’s worried about her son who lives in Ukraine. “No,” she said. “All our days are numbered, and if he dies, then I shall be very upset, of course. But I know where he’s going, so I don’t need to worry about it. What good is worrying going to do? God’s important to me, and I trust him.”

Her faith in God amid hard circumstances has been a witness to those she lives with at the care facility: “We need to live close to God if we want to help other people find God,” she said.

Amy Lewis is a writer located in Geelong, Australia.

This article appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "The Silver Harvest".

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Ideas

Witnessing Is The Church’s Work

Ashley Hales

Staff Editor

A note from CT’s editorial director in our January/February issue.

Illustration by Studio Pong

Every quarter, my church’s book club meets to discuss a novel. We’ve read (among others) Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Homer’s Odyssey, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, Percival Everett’s James, and Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse.

Most times we meet, I guide the discussion around a few central questions: What does this book say about what it means to be human? How does this character help us wrestle with identity? Does religion in the novel (or its lack) give us a window into how others perceive Christian faith? By the end of the evening, people who disliked a particular novel often find something to reframe their original judgment (or at least they find a few people who loved the book).

While the pleasures of reading are often solitary, reading in community expands our imaginative horizons. We see things we were blind to. We find something to enjoy that we might not have had an appetite for previously. We become curious together. The best stories demand to be shared. Their resonance grows in community.

Christians, too, have a shared story. We come together each week to participate in the lived-out drama of a redeemed people. We rehearse and remember Scripture. We share our testimonies—the application of the gospel to our personal histories.

This issue you hold in your hands celebrates these testimonies—stories we tell about ourselves, the world, and God. As people of the Book, we share stories that are not just our own: We must give ourselves to formative communities and formative habits. Jen Wilkin shows us that discipleship requires learners who are biblically literate. Bonnie Kristian reminds us to not forsake the assembled people of God. Amy Lewis reports on growing global conversions among the elderly, and Haleluya Hadero reports on the allure of African spirituality, which can pull some Black people—even Christians—into false religious practices.

Our testimonies are not without complication and doubt. Andrew Hendrixson profiles the friendship of theologian Miroslav Volf and poet Christian Wiman, noting how each has created space for a desire for God alongside theological wrestling. In the narrative arc of redemption, we trust that our wrestling moments find a home in the household of faith.

These moments also testify to the outside world that each specific gathered community of believers is a living witness to the truth of the gospel. David Zahl believes part of this witness has to do with play (and pickleball). His essay argues that play is part of the relief of the gospel and that Christians should be the most adept at delight.

We also are thrilled to feature CT’s Book Awards—the best books of the year in evangelical publishing that we believe will influence faith and practice. Be sure to read original essays from our Book of the Year award winner, Brad Edwards, and our Award of Merit winner, Robert S. Smith. We hope both of their books, along with our other category award winners, influence your own story of faith.

Whether you host a book club or enjoy a Book Awards selection on your own, may you find that the stories we read, the stories we tell, and the stories we live testify to the one true and beautiful story: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Ashley Hales is editorial director for features at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Editor's Note".

- More from Ashley Hales

Church Life

Disciplines Don’t Save. Christ Does.

Michael Horton

Michael Horton exhorts Christians to not confuse discipleship with the gospel.

Illustration by Studio Pong

A disciple was someone who followed a rabbi around not only to learn doctrine but also to see its application in life. Jesus was one such rabbi, as we see in the familiar story reported in Luke 10:38–42 (ESV throughout):

Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”

Martha offers hospitality, preparing meals and hosting Jesus and his disciples. As we see in Jesus’ ministry, this too was part of discipleship. Yet Jesus, the Word incarnate, found nothing greater than hearing and delivering his Father’s words, the “one thing … necessary.”

The chief mark of discipleship is receiving Jesus in his Word, as Mary does. There is a time for a disciple to do “many things,” but attentiveness to Christ is first. Jesus is delivering himself to Mary as her Savior. The instruction Mary is receiving “will not be taken away from her.” She will cherish these hours, for these words of life will fuel her many works.

A disciple is first and foremost a recipient of good news. Following the example of Jesus is an important part of discipleship in the Gospels, but it is not the gospel.

Yet many today are equating discipleship with the gospel. John Mark Comer focuses his recent book, Practicing the Way, on discipleship. Comer reports that many people told him they had never heard about discipleship before in their evangelical churches.

This is surprising to me. I grew up in an evangelical world in which Dallas Willard—the preeminent name on spiritual formation—made a significant impact. Everyone was talking about discipleship. A translation of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ (circa 1418–1427) was a well-marked-up volume in my mother’s library. In His Steps, an 1896 classic by Charles Sheldon, was on the shelf too. In that book, Sheldon, a Congregationalist pioneer of the social gospel movement, asked the question “What would Jesus do?”

For 19th-century evangelist Charles G. Finney and other revivalists, in fact, following Christ’s example edged out Christ’s saving work in their preaching. Evangelicalism is an activistic version of Christianity, which has its pros and cons, as Jesus’ words to Martha and Mary suggest.

One evangelical theologian who focuses on Christian activism is Scot McKnight. I appreciate his emphasis on Jesus himself being the gospel. But I think McKnight’s reactions against a genuine problem of evangelical reductionism (found in such resources as the “plan of salvation” tracts) lead him to another oversimplification.

Comer, too, emphasizes the active nature of Christian practice, but he lacks McKnight’s nuance. Comer acts as if no one had thought about discipleship and the kingdom of God until he came along.

As I see it, the problem with Comer’s emphasis is equating discipleship with the gospel. In Practicing the Way, Comer says, “And through apprenticeship to Jesus, we can enter into this kingdom and into the inner life of God himself.” But even if we were to adopt this approach—doing all the things Jesus said—that is not salvific. Jesus taught that a person enters the kingdom through the new birth, which is an entirely supernatural gift of grace (John 3:1–8).

But there is nothing really about grace in Comer’s Practicing the Way. In fact, there is a lot about Jesus as example, but the main point is “What would Jesus do?” Part of what is done seems to be a “rule of life.” Comer’s emphasis on a rule of life may echo the Benedictine Rule, but it is a decidedly modern monasticism, both in its view of salvation and in its individualism. His “nine core practices” can be done without any particular accountability to a local church. Like many who emphasize Christ’s example over his achievement, Comer seems to think that God’s work is something he accomplishes merely through us rather than for us.

But Jesus is not just a preeminent rabbi. He is also the Father’s incarnate Son, who descended in flesh to redeem us from condemnation and death. Jesus is the gospel.

So while the message of Christian formation according to Jesus’ example is entirely appropriate for Christian growth, it is instead made into the gospel itself. It isn’t.

Jesus himself summarized loving God and neighbor as the fulfillment of the whole law (Matt. 22:37–40; Gal. 5:14). Jesus exemplifies the perfect human, not only in his birth but also in his obedient life and sacrifice.

The “What would Jesus do?” (or WWJD) gospel is not a gospel at all. It is the law—the good law. We have it not only prescribed in the Ten Commandments but also fulfilled in Christ. The Good News is not “Give your life to Jesus” or “Surrender all”—actions we take—but the truth that the incarnate Son gave his life and surrendered all for you. Apart from this Good News, the example of Jesus leads us either to despair or to self-righteousness.

This truth is abundant not only in Paul’s writings but also in the Gospels, even in the episode with the rich young ruler (Matt. 19:16–22). The Pharisee in one of Jesus’ parables goes so far as to thank God for his moral superiority, but Jesus says the tax collector “went down to his house justified, rather than the other” (Luke 18:14). How could this happen unless, as Paul teaches, Christ’s fulfillment of the law is imputed to us just as our transgressions are imputed to him?

It’s not a question of whether we hold in principle to such doctrines but rather whether they function as key drivers of gospel discipleship or are transformed into the gospel itself.

I have learned much from conversations with Professor McKnight. But I know more about what he believes about “King Jesus” than “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

Apart from the latter, it is terrifying news that Jesus is King. Look at me. My best efforts at discipleship are stained by pride and sloth. I’m hardly a person Jesus could trust to help him usher in the everlasting kingdom of righteousness and peace. I want to be, but even my wanting is too often halfhearted and fleeting.

Is there a gospel for people like me? Maybe I don’t have a great testimony of descending into a horrible life of rebellion and then surrendering all. But Jesus surrendered all for me. King Jesus on a cross: That’s the story from Genesis 3:15 to the end of the Bible.

Maybe we can’t point to radical moments of transformation in our lives and in the world through us. Perhaps we are those who go to church, confess our sins, hear and believe the gospel, receive Christ’s body and blood, and go out again into the world to love and serve our neighbors in meaningful but quiet and failing ways.

I need the body of Christ because I’m not a good disciple on my own. There are no rules or core practices that will save me from this. Only the story I’m baptized into can do that. Let me hear it again, from different episodes, until I feel myself becoming rescripted into it. Let me pray with other struggling Christians who sometimes just don’t feel like praying.

Above all, let me be a recipient of grace. Instead of coming together to get our marching orders for consummating the kingdom, let us come together to confess our sin and our faith in Christ, who is greater than all our sin. And let us go out to offer a sacrifice not of atonement but of thanksgiving for the atonement Christ accomplished once and for all.

Jesus reigns. The good news in this is not that he gives you an agenda and example (which he does!) but that he is your “righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30).

Discipleship is not the gospel. It is the fruit of the gospel. Just as fruit varies from tree to tree, so do our roles in God’s kingdom. There is no promise that you will become a world transformer. You might just be somebody who washes dishes, changes diapers, or drives a truck. That’s good. Jesus was a builder.

Perhaps there will be decisive moments where your discipleship enjoys a significant impact, but for most of us, it is a slog. We try not to be “anxious and troubled about many things,” but we are. We try not to envy, but we do. We try not to surrender to sloth when there is so much to accomplish, but we are halfhearted.

Martha thought Mary was wasting her own time and Jesus’ by asking theological questions. But maybe that’s what a disciple does more than anything. Mary and Martha were both disciples, but the work of discipleship starts with and remains grounded by the gospel that falls from Jesus’ lips.

Disciples do serve, work, and extend hospitality. But they do this because they have sat at the feet of Jesus to learn who he is and what he has come to do.

More than providing comfort or anything else, the news that King Jesus is the Lamb of God is the fuel for following the example of the one who “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28). Martha indeed found the one thing necessary, which Jesus pointed out to her: “Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”

Michael Horton is J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California. His most recent book is Shaman and Sage.

This article appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Are You Really a Disciple?".

- More from Michael Horton

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