Author Philip Yancey Confesses Affair, Withdraws from Ministry

The writer said he will retire from speaking and writing and grieves “the devastation I have caused.”

Author Philip Yancey

Courtesy of Philip Yancey

Christian author Philip Yancey said in an emailed statement to CT that he had engaged in an affair with a married woman for eight years and would retire from writing and speaking.

Yancey started his writing career in 1971 at Campus Life magazine, which became a part of CT a few years later. He wrote for CT for decades, reporting and later becoming a regular columnist and editor at large. His books, including What’s So Amazing About Grace?, have sold more than 15 million copies. He often wrote about faith in the face of pain and suffering.

Yancey, 76, has been married to his wife, Janet Yancey, for 55 years. He said he was sending the news “due to my longstanding relationship with CT” and continued:

To my great shame, I confess that for eight years I willfully engaged in a sinful affair with a married woman.

My conduct defied everything that I believe about marriage. It was also totally inconsistent with my faith and my writings and caused deep pain for her husband and both of our families. I will not share further details out of respect for the other family.

I have confessed my sin before God and my wife, and have committed myself to a professional counseling and accountability program. I have failed morally and spiritually, and I grieve over the devastation I have caused. I realize that my actions will disillusion readers who have previously trusted in my writing. Worst of all, my sin has brought dishonor to God. I am filled with remorse and repentance, and I have nothing to stand on except God’s mercy and grace.

I am now focused on rebuilding trust and restoring my marriage of 55 years. Having disqualified myself from Christian ministry, I am therefore retiring from writing, speaking, and social media. Instead, I need to spend my remaining years living up to the words I have already written. I pray for God’s grace and forgiveness—as well as yours—and for healing in the lives of those I’ve wounded.

Yancey also provided a statement from his wife:

I, Janet Yancey, am speaking from a place of trauma and devastation that only people who have lived through betrayal can understand. Yet I made a sacred and binding marriage vow 55½ years ago, and I will not break that promise. I accept and understand that God through Jesus has paid for and forgiven the sins of the world, including Philip’s. God grant me the grace to forgive also, despite my unfathomable trauma. Please pray for us.

In 2023, Yancey was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He wrote for CT about how the disease had been slowly disabling him and how his wife had been preparing for the journey of caretaking.

But he still had public speaking engagements this year. Yancey had been scheduled to speak at Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena, California, on Wednesday at a service marking the one-year anniversary of the devastating Eaton fire, but now the church does not list him as the featured speaker in its announcement. Yancey’s social media pages appear to have been deleted.

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News

After Maduro’s Capture, Venezuelan Pastors Pray for Peace

Hernán Restrepo

Meanwhile, the diaspora celebrates the strongman’s ouster.

Nicolas Maduro in handcuffs as he is escorted to a federal courthouse in Manhattan on January 5, 2026.

XNY / Star Max / Contributor / Getty / Edits by CT

In the early hours of January 3, airstrikes on Fuerte Tiuna, Venezuela’s largest military complex, woke up Ender Urribarrí and his family. From their Caracas apartment, they saw explosions as US forces sought the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

“We managed to get out as soon as the first detonations occurred and before they closed off access to and from the city,” said Urribarrí, who leads Iglesia Evangélica Encuentro con Dios in Colonia Tovar. He quickly sent a prayer request to his church’s 24-hour WhatsApp prayer group and immediately received responses from several parishioners offering to pray for them.

“Right now, everything is a blur,” he said.

By Saturday afternoon, Maduro and Flores were en route to New York, where they face US federal charges of drug trafficking and terrorism. Maduro, who had governed Venezuela since Hugo Chávez’s death in 2013, was serving his third term as president after declaring himself winner of a disputed election in May 2024. Under his rule, 8 million people left the country due to hyperinflation, political repression, gang violence, and a shortage of food and medicine.

Exiled Venezuelans cheered Maduro’s ouster, gathering on the streets of the US and some Latin American countries to celebrate the news. Yet questions remain about the country’s future, and global leaders question the Trump administration’s handling of the strikes.

Meanwhile locals had a more muted response due to fear of reprisals from police forces and pro-Chávez groups. Several Venezuelan pastors with whom CT spoke declined to comment on Maduro’s capture, including Urribarrí, who stated that discretion is best until the storm subsides.

Since Saturday, a tense calm has prevailed in Venezuela. In many cities, the streets were deserted, as public transportation stopped over the weekend. Meanwhile, long lines formed outside stores as locals stocked up on food and gas.

“The country is at a standstill,” said pastor Georges Doumat of Apostolic and Prophetic Ministry of the Most High God on Venezuela’s Margarita Island. “Some people have gone out in search of food, in search of fuel, but we as a church are doing what we are supposed to do.”

Many churches in Venezuela decided not to hold in-person services on Sunday due to fears of further attacks. Doumat’s congregation, however, was able to meet because they gather inside a shopping mall. He added that many parishioners were unable to attend due to the lack of public transportation.

Doumat preached on Psalm 65, providing “a word of hope in the Lord about a new year that is beginning with all the … difficulties we are facing,” he said. “But we have the firm hope and faith that this year will be the year in which God will give peace and freedom to Venezuela.”

The US attack followed months of increased tensions between the two countries, including strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug-smuggling boats as well as a CIA-led drone strike on a docking area in Venezuela believed to be used by drug cartels.

Saturday’s operation involved more than 150 aircraft to dismantle Venezuelan air defenses so military helicopters could deliver troops, according to Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He added that during the mission, no US military forces were killed. Meanwhile, a senior Venezuelan official told The New York Times that at least 80 Venezuelan military and civilians were killed.

Trump initially stated Saturday that the US would run Venezuela during the transition of power, yet Secretary of State Marco Rubio walked back the statement, adding that the US would continue to enforce an oil quarantine on Venezuela. The South American country has the largest crude oil reserve in the world.

Venezuelan vice president Delcy Rodríguez, who was sworn in as interim president Monday, criticized the US’s “illegitimate military aggression” and maintains that Maduro is still the president of Venezuela.

On Monday, Maduro appeared before a New York judge and declared his innocence. “I’m not guilty. I am a decent man,” he said. “I am still president of my country.”

Hours after Maduro’s arrest, the Evangelical Council of Venezuela issued a cautious message, avoiding celebration and calling for peace. “We encourage everyone to limit their exposure to social media and the constant flow of information,” said the statement, signed by executive director pastor José G. Piñero. “We suggest setting aside time each day to seek informed opinions and dedicating the rest of the time to prayer, fraternal communion, service, and other activities that build the well-being of our families and advance the kingdom of God.”

In contrast, many in the Venezuelan diaspora expressed excitement at the news. Around 25 percent of the Venezuelan population has left the country, with many migrating to Colombia, which shares a complex 1,370-mile border with Venezuela.

“The world was asking for [Maduro] to be removed because he continued to harm not only Venezuela but an entire continent,” said pastor Aristóteles López, the founder of March for Jesus in Venezuela, who now lives in West Palm Beach, Florida. “We are witnessing very relevant and historic changes for Venezuela and Latin America.”

López said that while he and his family haven’t joined the celebratory rallies in the streets, he is glad justice is finally coming for “one of the leaders of the dictatorship.” He added, “I think that beyond celebrating, we need to be careful about what’s coming for our country. I don’t think these are easy days.”

On X, Argentine-Venezuelan Christian singer Ricardo Montaner, who lives in Miami, posted a prayer for God to “watch over and bless the Venezuelan people, take away the wicked, and let peace reign, and let your love and mercy guide the future of all who love you.”

Christian leaders of other Latin American countries also expressed hope for change in Venezuela. “Days of restoration, of justice, of returning home, of hugs that heal, and of hope that becomes a song are coming,” said Colombian Christian singer Alex Campos in a video posted on Instagram. Mexican Christian influencer Daniel Habif posted a video of himself smiling with tears of joy in his eyes: “We’re not dreaming. It’s happening. It just happened!”

Meanwhile, the leftist leaders of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Spain, and Uruguay jointly denounced the US action, describing it as a contradiction of the United Nations Charter and a violation of Venezuela’s national sovereignty, a violation that sets a “dangerous precedent for peace and regional security.”

“We defend relations between states based on respect for sovereignty, dialogue, and collaboration, never on imposition or the use of force,” said Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum. “Cooperation, yes; subordination, no.”

About 30 percent of the Venezuelan population are evangelicals. In recent years, Maduro intensified his strategy to favor evangelical leaders by giving them cash, sound equipment, and chairs for their churches as a political strategy to win votes in presidential elections. Yet the Evangelical Council of Venezuela rejected the political influence on the church, stating, “The evangelical soul is not for sale. It has already been bought with an infinite price.”

Over in Margarita Island, Doumat noted that even as many churches remained closed over the weekend, Christians still gathered online for worship. “Our trenches are everywhere; we don’t need to be in a building to cry out to the Lord and for the Lord to answer us,” he said. “It’s a tense time, a difficult time for us as a country.”

Theology

Church Scandals Don’t Negate God’s Faithfulness

Myles Werntz

Contributor

That fallen pastor or troubled tradition was never responsible for the truthfulness of the gospel. That is God’s work, and God never fails us.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

Imagine a well-known denomination is enjoying a season of prosperity. Attendance is high. Ministry is faithful. Prayers are answered. God feels near. The good times last for years.

But then, cracks appear. Long-held doctrine comes under doubt. Prominent ministry figures are exposed in corruption or abuse. Questions arise first about the leaders, then about the theology undergirding their ministries. Finally, questions are raised about the tradition itself. Was there ever anything good there? Or was it always rotten?

Sound familiar? If you guessed that I’m thinking of third-century North African Christianity, you’re correct—and that history is far from the pristine vision of unity and holiness we might imagine. Church history may not repeat itself, exactly, but it sure does rhyme.

Around the year 250, a crisis arose after Christian bishops fled the city of Carthage in the midst of persecution. After two and half centuries of off-and-on persecution, martyrdoms, and Christian survival amid a hostile Roman empire, the fleeing bishops were a grave scandal. Their escape caused a crisis of faith in both their pastoral leadership and the theology they’d proclaimed.

At the heart of the controversy was a popular priest named Cyprian. He’d been named as a deacon and then a priest not long before this persecution began. Already a figure of some controversy, Cyprian fled even as other Christian leaders—including Pope Fabian—were put to death. In Cyprian’s absence, many other Christians either abandoned the faith or wrote letters falsely claiming they had renounced the faith in order to survive.

After the most intense persecution ended, the church in North Africa underwent a new crisis: How should Christians who had remained faithful treat those, like Cyprian, who had fled or even lapsed in their faith and then returned once it was safe? More broadly, what do we do with a church that fails to live up to its ideals?

For the North African church, the question only became acute five years later, in 255, when a collection of ministers fell into heretical teaching about the Holy Spirit. Cyprian, who by then had been reinstated to ministry, took a hard-line position: Heretics could not be faithful ministers of the gospel, he said, and not only were these pastors themselves spiritually bankrupt, but also every baptism they’d performed was invalid.

“How can he who baptizes give to another remission of sins who himself, being outside the Church, cannot put away his own sins?” Cyprian argued. “For when we say, ‘Do you believe in eternal life and remission of sins through the holy Church?’ we mean that remission of sins is not granted except in the Church, and that among heretics, where there is no Church, sins cannot be put away.”

Baptism by heretics is not at issue in the American church today. But we too are forced to ask what to do with a broken tradition and ministerial failure. If a denomination is corrupted, a local church split by scandal, or a pastor exposed in sin, what should we do? Is all their work bankrupt? Are all their teachings, baptisms, works of mercy, and gifts of the Spirit simply to be discarded?

Cyprian’s opinion on this was not the final word for early Christians. Two centuries later, the church father Augustine articulated a very different position, one that would become the norm for most Christians since. A bad minister, he reasoned, does not negate the work of the Spirit. God can even work in and through heretics, as well as ministers whose failure is unknown to us, Augustine argued.

This is so because the fallen pastor or troubled tradition was never responsible for securing the truthfulness of the gospel. That is God’s work, and God never fails us.

Augustine’s wisdom has been needed many times since. When starting this article, perhaps your mind went to 1940s Germany, 18th-century France, 15th-century Italy, or 21st-century America—for I think every generation has its own experience of a Christian tradition that has come up short, whether through outright failure or ambient disappointment. This is one of the oldest stories of Christianity.

In fact, we see it in Galatians 2, where Paul recounts the incident of Peter and his companions refusing to eat with the Gentile believers. As Paul tells it, this was not just Peter’s error but that of a whole “circumcision group” (v. 12), and the error was spreading, including to Barnabas.

It is easy for us, reading Galatians, to see Paul’s argument as a wholesale rejection of any place for tradition within God’s work. But that is not what Paul is saying. He follows the story of conflict with Peter by explaining the centrality of the Holy Spirit in creating God’s people.

It is the Holy Spirit who enlivens us to carry the work of Jesus forward. It is the Holy Spirit who illuminates not only how the law is fulfilled but also how we are set free to be God’s people (5:2–6). Paul is not negating the law or rejecting tradition, for he calls his audience to continue things which the law also commends (vv. 19–21). He is showing that it is God who brings life to traditions, meant for our blessing, that cannot be lived apart from God’s Spirit (3:19–22).

This story of Peter and Paul provides a pattern for us still. Tradition and God’s presence belong together. These bones live because—and only because—God makes them alive.

To live inside any Christian tradition, then, is to live inside a tradition that has disappointed us and that will undoubtedly disappoint us in the future. Long before there were pastors sexually abusing their congregants, there were racist Christians. Before there were Nazis, there were Christians killing each other over baptism and Communion. Before there were three popes all claiming to be legitimate at once, there were Christians accumulating exorbitant wealth at the expense of fellow believers.

Yet for all that history of heresy and sin, in every era over the past two millennia, God’s Spirit brought forth salvation, increased our understanding of Christ’s work, and expanded the gospel’s reach into new peoples and lands. In every era, the traditions of Christianity have proliferated through faithfulness and failure.

We can’t forget these failures, but neither should we focus on failure alone. In a social media age, failures both ordinary and extraordinary are always on display, serialized in podcasts, pouring into our minds a continual stream of bad news. The omnipresent cares of today make it easy for us to forget that things have always been broken—and that God’s Spirit has always worked through our broken traditions anyway.

This is as true of evangelicalism as it is of every other Christian tradition. The evangelical movement has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, and some of these changes strike at the very heart of what has made evangelicalism good. Many institutions that once fortified American evangelicalism—colleges, publishing houses, ministry networks, and more—have spread groundless conspiracy theories (or worse) alongside the gospel. There is no way to sugarcoat it: Evangelicalism does disappoint us.

Some Christians have left evangelicalism because of these disappointments, departing either to some other tradition or to nothing at all. We’ve seen a surge of interest in traditions, both ancient and novel, that might offer some immunity to changes of this type.

I understand the impulse but don’t think that’s the solution. The bad news in a fallen world is that it’s not a matter of whether a tradition will be broken but how. The good news—the gospel—is that God brings broken people and broken traditions back to life. For now, as always, the point is not that a tradition is perfect but that God works through it, truly and faithfully, for it has always been God’s work to save.

Myles Werntz is the author of Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century. He writes at Taking Off and Landing and teaches at Abilene Christian University.

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Books

Review

The Insufficient Secular Case Against Porn

Kate Lucky

A new book from Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel makes a compelling and rightfully angry case against pornography but fails to articulate a better sexual ethic.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Polity Books

If you’re a Christian reading Pornocracy, the slim new polemic from British advocates Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel, I bet you’ll find yourself nodding along.

Here’s the thesis: Pornography is bad. So far, so agreed. Yet Bartosch and Jessel make explicit that they aren’t writing from a traditional Christian sexual ethic. Their justified anger is decidedly not about the degradation of God’s good creation. It arises less from a moral framework about what sex should be and more from an understanding of what it most certainly shouldn’t be: violent, exploitative, and harmful to women and children.

That negative framework is good so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.

The evidence the two writers provide for what they do claim is familiar. But seeing so many facts thus marshaled in one place is disturbing to say the least. Highly addictive and extremely accessible, pornography websites push their gradually desensitized users toward ever-more-extreme material, recommending scenes of rape, incest, and “pseudo-child abuse” (in which young-looking adults wear braces and lick lollipops).

What users watch online seeps off the screen. In 2023, a French agency “reviewed millions of videos on the biggest international pornography websites, and found that 90% featured verbal, physical and sexual violence towards women,” Pornocracy notes. In turn, studies have documented an actual increase in choking and slapping among young people during sex. Another analysis revealed the popularity of keywords like “barely legal” or “teen.” Some men convicted of possessing child sexual assault material, Pornocracy points out, “had no sexual interest in children before using porn.” The “pursuit of variety”—a search for “schoolgirl”—eventually led them somewhere criminal.

Most porn users are men, and Bartosch and Jessel are sympathetic to their plight. “Generations raised with smartphones have now seen scenes of rape, choking, and incest before experiencing their first (real-life) kiss,” they lament. Too many young men have lost their “ability to enjoy fulfilling, respectful relationships,” instead programmed to “react to what they see on screen rather than to value and find mutual pleasure with their partners.” Porn teaches boys that “to be a man is to be impervious to intimacy and empathy.”

But the most pronounced victims of the porn industry, Bartosch and Jessel make clear, are women—exploited for “cash, clicks, and subscriber counts” online, subjected to increasingly rough sex in the bedroom, and humiliated by deepfakes. For those who argue that access to pornography is a “human right” and protest that opposition is “prudish,” the writers have nothing but white-hot scorn.

As “zombie feminists have continued to censoriously carp about microaggressions and trivialities,” they cry, middle school girls are exploited by classmates who strip them naked with AI applications. Grown women walk around with bruises on their necks.

Pornocracy is a wrathful book. Bartosch and Jessel occasionally rage at the right; they’re dismissive, for instance, of a populist conservative movement that would strip women of the right to vote as a reaction against “divisive identity politics.” But mostly, they’re mad at the left. Unapologetic members of the trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) movement, they draw throughlines between queer theory, contemporary sexual education in schools, the rise of gender-nonbinary identifications, and violence against women.

However warranted, disdain as a modus operandi doesn’t always serve this book well. The authors’ decision to choose the most provocative examples to make their points (like a dance troupe of drag performers with Down syndrome) or being cute with language about serious subjects (like a chapter on gender nonconformity promising to “[follow] in the high-heeled footsteps of men who claim to be women”) sometimes makes their arguments feel more like viral tweets designed to provoke than the powerful, often common-sense claims that they are.

At their best, Bartosch and Jessel evince empathy for the young people whose sexual orientation and gender identity has been deformed by pornography, saving scorn for the platforms and institutions playing on these “malleable minds.” That includes major organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), whose “sex positive” guidelines Bartosch and Jessel castigate for providing “legitimacy and a framework” to create “highly sexualized and inappropriate lessons for children.”

On these matters, perhaps too aggressive is better than too tame. Scripture is crystal clear about how Christians are to respond to wickedness: “The fear of the Lord is to hate evil,” proclaims one proverb (Prov. 8:13). “Hate what is evil; cling to what is good,” echoes Paul (Rom. 12:9).

Evangelical readers can say amen to the fierce assertion that “pornography is shameful, and by ignoring or downplaying its dangers, our society’s leaders become bystanders whose silence allows evil to proliferate.” But we can’t help but notice the absence of the rest of the biblical sexual ethic—Christianity’s positive vision of sex within faithful, monogamous marriage between a man and a woman.

Some of the book’s reform proposals are correspondingly practical and predictable, including stricter age verification for online porn consumption, vetting the private pornography use of high-ranking legal officials and politicians before they’re promoted, changing sex education curricula in schools, and making prostitution illegal.

Other takeaways are more abstract. In a closing note, Bartosch cites the work of lesbian feminist Julia Long, a separatist who believes “women should simply ditch men.” Bartosch is sympathetic. “It makes better sense for women to swear off men than to put up with a partner that uses pornography,” she writes, though she does not believe “women will ever leave men en masse” and isn’t “sure that would be a desirable model of society.”

I take her point—women shouldn’t put up with their husbands’ pornography use out of fear of being typecast as puritan moralists. But even holding up separatism as an understandable impulse strikes me as a step in the wrong direction when it comes to mending the relationship between the sexes. It also ignores the many women who watch pornography. What are we to do with them?

Jessel offers a more gender-agnostic recommendation: Shame. Not, he clarifies, “the shame imposed by hierarchs and moralists” who “until quite recently, damned people for being same-sex attracted, and women for having any sexuality at all.” He doubles down: “My objections to pornography have little or nothing to do with faith-based morality. They are strictly Darwinian: shame tells us when we’re doing something that will harm ourselves, or the tribe.” It’s shameful, he insists, to “masturbate to scenes of coercion,” to “get off on incest and misogyny and much more besides.”

Amen again! Those activities are shameful indeed. But here, the Christian must offer something more. The same Scripture that tells us to hate evil and ruthlessly root it out of our hearts is also relentless in its assertion that we’ll always fall short; that repentance and corresponding mercy, not diffuse guilt and moral bootstrapping, must proceed from changed hearts and lives.

In their acknowledgments, the writers thank “religious conservatives” for being allies in the good fight. To the force of what these two secular thinkers have presented, may we add not only our hatred of evil but our proclamation of what’s good and the extension of a vision of grace to even the chief of sinners.

Kate Lucky is a senior features editor at Christianity Today.

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Books

Excerpt

Fighting Addiction Starts with Forgiveness

Ericka Andersen

An excerpt from Freely Sober: Rethinking Alcohol Through the Lens of Faith on God’s grace in setting the captives free.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, IVP

I’d gone through the entire day feeling good, energized, and productive without wanting to drink. I assumed the feeling would continue as the day progressed. But my cravings returned as reliably as the rising sun.

As usual, I dreaded making dinner, so when I saw my neighbors outside with their kids in the afternoon, I avoided cooking. I brought my own children over to play and pushed responsibility out of my mind. As was so often the case, the wine at their house was flowing freely. I often went there, quietly hoping they’d offer me a glass, as they almost always did.

Accepting the glass really didn’t feel like a deliberate choice.

Wine with friends on a beautiful Tuesday afternoon—that’s a very normal thing to do. Normie drinkers do that, and I was definitely normal—at least I tried to be.

I drained the glass within ten minutes. My friend graciously offered a refill. Who was I to refuse? I could get a little buzz, which would help with the dinner dread, and my husband wouldn’t even know I’d been drinking. Or I could tell him it had just been a little.

Once home, I was brooding with self-hate for decisions I knew had brought this on. I chugged a glass of water, made a pile of cheese quesadillas, and ate until I felt sick. I hoped without hope that the food would soak up the alcohol. That’s it, I told myself. I’m quitting drinking tomorrow.

Fifteen years after these awful tendencies had begun in my life, they were still running rampant and worse than ever. I knew there was a better way, but everything seemed pointless compared to a buzz. Yoga, meditation, prayer, exercise—sure, I thought those might help a little, but they were so tame compared to the chemical high of alcohol.

That was how my mind operated back then—almost feral when it came to a fix. If you look closely at both people and animals, there’s a natural, almost primal instinct to fix what feels off—as fast as possible.

Animals and humans cope with pain differently, but it’s for the same primary reason: When a core need goes unmet, we reach for something to fill the gap. When social, emotional, and spiritual deficiencies overshadow our sense of security, belonging, and purpose, our brains search for anything that will ease our pain. Drinking is simply one method of temporarily meeting our unmet needs.

This is the theology of addiction I wish I had heard in the beginning of my recovery journey. It echoes the truth I mentioned earlier: You can’t self-discipline your way out of addiction. You can’t pray hard enough or be “spiritual” enough to beat alcohol dependence on your own. That’s not because you’re weak—it’s because life is challenging and substance reliance is powerful. By grace, Christians are uniquely empowered—not merely by mental or emotional tools but by a spirit made alive through the Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:16).

As Christians, we carry something our secular counterparts don’t: a spirit made alive by the Holy Spirit. Recovery isn’t just behavior modification—it’s soul-level renewal, dealing first with any spiritual roots that may be feeding our addiction, empowered by the Spirit of God within us.

Thankfully, we can implement self-forgiveness, which can help us overcome the Enemy’s greatest tool: shame. We can do this by applying Scripture and evidence to understand God’s perspective, instead of continually relying on our own faulty beliefs.

This theology reminds us that addiction is far deeper than a sinful choice. It’s more like being in bondage. Maybe that sounds dramatic to you. But even if you wouldn’t describe yourself as a captive, isn’t alcohol dependence exhausting? Praise God, Jesus came to set the captives free (Luke 4:18). And we don’t have to earn that freedom by perfect behavior or religious effort; instead, we receive it through acceptance, surrender, and grace.

Remember the beautiful words God gave to Paul: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9, ESV throughout). You might feel weak, as if you’ve failed. But the gospel assures us that we need not be strong. God’s grace is not for some future, better version of you—it’s for right now, in your raw, real efforts to make better choices. God sees your desire for change and meets you there in whatever wilderness surrounds you.

Psalm 34:18 reminds us, “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” Being crushed in spirit resonates with me bigtime. How many times did I disappoint myself? How many times did I end up back at square one? This Bible verse was often my only solace. You and I don’t need to prove ourselves to God. He already knows us, loves us, and is committed to our restoration.

Today, I’m able to look at my experience through the lens of mental health and addiction theology. I can better understand Scripture and God’s perspective on these matters in my heart, and I can see each step of my journey to today with grace and truth.

“For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate,” wrote Paul (Rom. 7:15). For me, that may be the most relatable verse in the entire Bible.

Sound familiar?

The verses after that one can be a comfort for us, though: “As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out” (vv. 17–18, NIV).

We are all born with a sinful nature, unable to overcome it without the grace of Christ. He atoned for every part of our nature, including those elements that feel out of our control. We relieve performance pressure by accepting this fallible nature and believing that any good in us comes from God alone. It’s not possible to “do what is good” without God. And while giving everything to God may seem difficult, there’s hope in day-to-day, even moment-to-moment, surrender.

In the case of addiction, the “sinful nature” of seeking alcohol has compulsively taken root in the brain. The addicted or dependent brain turns off certain natural functions that must be intentionally retooled to work correctly again. In the grip of addiction or dependence, our brains naturally gloss over painful memories or consequences. Often, our minds deceive us, downplaying the anxiety, hangovers, headaches, and regret, convincing us that the situation isn’t that bad or that we don’t have a “real” problem. But we need to see through these biased memories and misunderstood myths.

In the video “How an Addicted Brain Works,” a Yale Medicine team explains that “addictive substances trigger an outsized response when they reach the brain,” which ultimately causes “dopamine to flood the reward pathway, ten times more than a natural reward.” I want to emphasize again what researchers explain about alcohol and the reward system: “Achieving that pleasurable sensation becomes increasingly important, but at the same time, you build tolerance and need more and more of that substance to generate the level of high you crave.”

Once we’re aware of scientific realities, we can begin to view our own situation from a more rational perspective. So, please, forgive yourself for what you didn’t know. Forgive yourself for taking all the blame and being lied to by the world about the harms of alcohol.

Once you take all the pressure off yourself, you can healthily take up a mantle of responsibility—which is graciously lightened by our Lord: “‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Cor. 12:9). Thank God he didn’t make us dependent solely on our own strength. Today’s world tells women to save themselves, love themselves, and find themselves. That’s the wrong answer. We have a role to play, but we are not the remedy. He’s the solution.

In a sermon, the pastor Alistair Begg once said, “Don’t ask me what I feel about myself. Ask me what I know about God.” I want to tattoo that on my forehead. Our feelings are fleeting and unreliable. But what’s true about God? God’s truth is immovable, unchangeable, covenanted. Don’t just say you believe it. Actually believe it.

Our triggers have power only when we deliver their demands. They’ll soon shut down when they realize we refuse to do so anymore. We know that God is sovereign and that only he holds the swirling of the universe in his hands. By the power of the Holy Spirit, God has given you the ability to say no. And he’s promised to help you do it.

Pain is inevitable, but we have control over how we cope with it. You’ve been using unhealthy tools to cope with uncomfortable parts of life, but now you know there are alternatives for that.

When we think of “spiritual” tools, we might think of prayer, Scripture, and worship. We can rely on these, but God has provided us even more to help us overcome—friendships, family relationships, mentors, marriages, church family, biblically grounded books, podcasts, support groups. And we have healthy coping mechanisms like breath work, exercise, laughter, and music. We can put God first in our journey and also deploy the many modes of recovery that prove helpful.

When we “work it”—as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, the tools and healthy ideas we’re learning now—we are free to make better choices in the future. Forgive yourself for choices you made long ago without fully understanding their consequences. In hindsight, you might have chosen differently.

- More from Ericka Andersen

Church Life

Death of a Eulogy

Matthew D. Love

Christian funerals are increasingly secular. But how can Christians go quiet on the gospel at these of all moments?

A Funeral by Anna Ancher

WikiMedia Commons

I’m troubled by a trend I’ve seen with funerals.

For the last decade, I’ve been the preaching minister at a rural congregation in the Bible Belt South. My outpost is nowhere near Nineveh. In fact, if anywhere enjoys protection by the ghosts of Christendom past, it’s here. A lot of conservatism lives in my backyard—conservatism of every kind, but especially theological conservatism. The impulse is strong to protect the deposit of faith from our forebears and guard against worldly powers that would undermine our beliefs. If the Christian funeral is going right anywhere, it ought to be going right here.

But I’m not confident it is. For instance, a few months ago I preached at the funeral of a great Christian man from our church, one who had lived a long and prosperous life as Psalm 91:16 envisions: “With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation.”

The problem when someone lives so long, however, is that the funeral is not usually well-attended. He had outlived most of his congregational contemporaries, so it was a small gathering primarily comprising extended family members I did not know. Still, these were Christian folks. After the service began and it was my turn to speak, I started, as I like to do, with some remarks of sympathy for the family and a few anecdotes about the deceased, qualities I’d admired, that sort of thing.

Then, somewhere in the middle of the eulogy, I made the turn to the gospel, the only hope we Christians have and the sole hope of this man now slumbering in the Lord. But a strange feeling came over me, and as I spoke I was alarmed by the body language of my listeners (always distressing for public speakers). It seemed I had mostly lost them.

Some were fidgeting again with their programs. (Now what was the next item on the agenda? Oh, right, the closing prayer.) Some were checking the time. Their lack of interest after ten minutes seemed to interrogate me: What are you talking about? And are you almost finished? We just wanted a nice service, not a sermon.

What I felt in that moment I intuit elsewhere and in other ways. More folks are opting for whichever form of funeral can call the least amount of attention to death. Even the word itself—funeral—is out of style, and I hear ever more of memorials, celebrations of life, private gatherings. We would not like a preacher, people say. Someone from the family will say a few words instead.

When I am asked to speak, I sometimes hear similar messages in the tone and subtext of the family’s desires for the service: Don’t go too long. Accentuate the positive. Our loved one wouldn’t want us to be morose.

It leaves me wondering if that’s really what the deceased wanted. How can Christians come to the end of their lives and, on death’s doorstep, abandon the gospel? A funeral strikes me as exactly the wrong time to drop this theme.

Of course, I understand it when nonbelievers want to avoid talk of death. These choices make sense from unchurched families. But I’m talking about the funerals of women and men who, from every indication of their lives, were on the right side of this story. These were churchgoing, Bible-reading, Christian-radio-listening folks, people who heard 70 or 80 Easter sermons about Christ as the resurrection and the life, the victor over death itself (1 Cor. 15:20–32).

How can such Christians come to the end of their lives—lives of taking up crosses, following the Crucified One, dying daily, knowing that Christ alone conquered death—only to ask for a low-key funeral with no clear presentation of the gospel? And how can Christian families be content with a service more likely to share hobbies than the truth itself? What does this say about the faith of those in our pews or the direction things are heading for American Christianity?

I’ve come to think that parishioners’ desires for basically secular funeral services with a Christian veneer reveal that our theology is not sufficiently robust. Their attitude calls into question whether I am proclaiming the gospel often enough, clearly enough, or winsomely enough. Parishioners’ desires for tepid preaching at Christian funerals portends the failing of our hope.

To be sure, funerals accomplish many things. They are mostly for the family, for the living, I hear often. I wonder if this is true. Either way, celebrating or remembering life is a good work. Still, Christians are supposed to be all in on the Resurrection.

Few moments in life warrant as clear and confident an articulation of the gospel than a funeral. That doesn’t mean overdone, opportunistic sermons that capitalize on a captive and grieving audience to win souls. In my experience, funerals that seek to convert the living most often only irritate them. What I am prescribing is a eulogy that simply and clearly articulates, clings to, and celebrates the Christian hope.

Congregants may have little appetite for a witness that takes death seriously while proclaiming escape in Christ’s empty tomb. Such loss of appetite for the gospel (especially in the wake of death) is troubling, but it is also a firm reminder of the important work ministers do. We are not the first to say the words “Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel” (1 Cor 15:1, ESV). In every age, this will be our fundamental task, for our people (saved and sanctified though they are) are prone to forget it.

Matthew D. Love teaches preaching and ministry at Harding School of Theology.

- More from Matthew D. Love

Ideas

Christianity Today: A Declaration of Principles

Marvin Olasky

Editor in Chief

Where we stand at seven decades—and how readers can help.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

The evangelical world includes a vast variety of perspectives, ethnicities, and geographies. It’s blue-collar and advanced degrees, covenantal and dispensational, Reformed and charismatic, and none of the above, all under the same tent.

Christianity Today lives in that big tent. In common with our fellow evangelicals, we believe in the authority and sufficiency of the Bible and the centrality of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We desire to live out our faith in service to others and to see more people in more places embrace the life-transforming Good News.

CT is committed to orthodox Christian doctrines on the Trinity, Scripture, Adam and Eve, the Fall, Christ’s redemptive work on the cross, resurrection, and biblical inerrancy. We affirm the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed as well as CT’s own statement of faith. These commitments shape our journalism and all content production at every stage.

We apply these understandings when thinking through much-debated current issues. CT is pro-life. That includes more than opposing abortion—we also oppose euthanasia and eugenics—but certainly not less. CT hosts disagreement on tactical questions about the best ways to end the evil of abortion but not on the ethic of life. All of us, born and unborn, regardless of ability or disability, are created in God’s image.

We believe that God designed sexual activity to be in the context of a marriage between a man and a woman and that all Christians are called to chastity—abstaining from sex before marriage and practicing fidelity within marriage. We believe the sexed bodies given by God determine whether we are men or women. To be blunt, CT is not theologically affirming on LGBTQ issues and does not publish affirming perspectives.

As a US-based media ministry, we endorse and uphold the US Constitution with its checks and balances, rule of law, and Bill of Rights. We are not opposed to progress but biased toward due process and time-tested wisdom. We oppose extremists on the right and the left who put power above persuasion.

We believe Christians are called to show compassion to the poor, the homeless, and immigrants. We see that many governmental aid programs have failed, so we look for ways to further charity. We oppose racism, antisemitism, and ethnic hatred.

We try to approach every issue through the lens of Scripture, and therefore we oppose any attempt to put humanity’s purported wisdom above God’s. We remember that all have sinned (including ourselves) and fallen short of the glory of God, so we are skeptical of ideological pronouncements (including our own).

We own our mistakes with humility and make corrections. We value street-level reporting over suite-level orating and do what it takes to speak the truth. We are critical at times but steadfast in our desire to uplift the church as the bride of Christ. We do not lobby for or against legislation or endorse or oppose candidates for office, though certainly we praise and critique policies and politicians. And though many of our journalists do vote, per our editorial code of ethics we are not permitted to donate to campaigns or political action committees.

We aim to be transparent. Journalism as an industry has seen rapid change over the past four decades, much of it mystifying to the reading public. CT has begun to publish our internal editorial policies, including our corrections policy, our fact-checking policy, and a statement on how we investigate abuse allegations.

Within our commitment to evangelical orthodoxy, we welcome readers and writers from an array of denominations and theological traditions. You’ll find in our pages differing opinions on baptism, predestination, and roles of women in the church and home. On these and other weighty matters of faith and practice on which evangelicals disagree, we work to represent a variety of views in our pages—and to represent them fairly.

Now that I’m 75, I feel all the more strongly about affirming the basics while learning from others in areas of disagreement. I hope for more time with my wife of 50 years and within my journalism profession of 55 years. But I also look forward to life on a new earth where we will see Jesus face to face and I’ll be able to sit in a Library of Congress reading room where every volume is filled not just with imaginings but with truth.

In the meantime, I want to learn more from not only CT staff and freelancers who work within our commitments but also readers. What is your response to this declaration? Please let us know by sending an email to editor@christianitytoday.com. We’ll publish a diversity of letters in an upcoming issue.

Update (March 19, 2026): This statement was lightly updated in the course of preparation for print publication.

Marvin Olasky is editor in chief of Christianity Today.

- More from Marvin Olasky

Culture

The Vanishing Gifts of Boredom

The Bulletin with Christine Rosen

How technology steals uncomfortable yet formative human experiences.

Mark Aliiev / Unsplash

While any time is good for “out with the old, in with the new,” the New Year offers a fresh calendar page on which to plot out changes we hope to enact in our lives. Though research reports that most Americans make New Year’s resolutions for embodied life changes—better eating, more exercise, less shopping, and more socializing—ever-present digital technologies are obstacles to our success from day one.

The Bulletin’s Mike Cosper sat down with historian and author Christine Rosen to talk about this tension between the life we need and the life to which technology lures us. They discuss the disciplines of slowing down, practicing patience, and choosing embodied relationships over virtual ones. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation in episode 138.

What do you as a historian think is going extinct in our culture, and how is it dying out?

When my sons were working on handwriting in elementary school, I noticed how little time was spent teaching them cursive writing. I always struggled with handwriting as a left-handed person, and I wondered, Is this valuable for my kids?

My generation used to take for granted certain experiences, such as face-to-face interaction, waiting patiently without being entertained, the ability to do things with our hands. There weren’t many alternatives to these. Today, a vast range of digital experiences are supplanting the old ways of doing things.

From childhood all the way to adulthood, we form habits. Some of those are individual, but many of them are cultural and social. The questions that drive me are “How does taking away tactile, embodied experience change how we understand the world around us?” “How has technology changed the way we develop our habits of mind?” “How has it changed the way we solve problems and the questions we ask?” And in light of these questions, what’s worth preserving? What things might we be embracing too rapidly without asking important questions about the opportunity costs involved?

We carry devices with us everywhere we go. They are intimately part of our daily lives in a way that previous technologies never were. We have to ask tougher questions and have tougher boundaries because everything about technology is meant to infiltrate your daily life.

Because we’re human and we like to trust these objects and all the information on them, we start to seek wisdom from them rather than just information. We look to them to make judgments for us rather than just provide options or convenience. These are questions of value and virtue. That’s not what technology is supposed to do for us or to us, but it is something I think we have too often allowed it to do. And it’s not good for us.

What is the appeal of the mediation of a device for us?

There’s both the convenience and ease of the technology and a conceit that all the world’s information is available at your fingertips. These technologies have risen at the same time that society has become more mistrustful, lonely, and secular. Our mistrust of institutions has us looking around for easy answers, but the challenges are really about human nature.

Today, whether we’re surrounded by strangers on the bus or sitting in a meeting at work or with our loved ones around a table, when we begin to feel uncomfortable, we can remove ourselves mentally and emotionally. That has consequences.

When we didn’t have that option, we had to learn those human skills of “how to deal,” as the kids used to say. We couldn’t escape. Now that we can escape, we find ourselves doing it all the time. We are all prone to this.

Because of the design of the internet and search being driven by ad revenue, it is clear: We are the product. The devices are designed by people who know how the human mind works and what keeps us coming back for more. Monetizing our attention is the goal. It doesn’t matter if that attention is positive, negative, hateful, or happy. Because we are flawed creatures, we tend toward impatience, anger, fear, anxiety—the things that really fuel unsavory behavioral responses online. Is that true of the entire internet? Of course not. But over time, through passivity, we have relinquished ourselves to much of it.

Silicon Valley theorists and technologists are already trying to implement a tech utopia that overlays a virtual world on the real world. Their argument is that virtual reality is great because the real world’s too difficult for many people. A virtual world gives them more control.

However, trying to escape our physical reality cultivates certain anti-virtues. Control is a conceit: It’s created by the people who create the platforms. That vision of the future is deeply unhealthy and inhumane and also proto-totalitarian because it gives so much power to a few who create a world that many must live in with little control.

A lot of theorists are arguing that we can rebuild in different ways that allow for connection without so many of these negative side effects. I’m optimistic that we can move into a new era where architecture and design questions can come to the forefront and address human needs and human experiences.

We still live in physical bodies, and one day, those bodies will become weak or sick. Bodies of those we love will become weak or sick. Then, what do we owe to the other person? We cannot live by whim. We have to live by obligation and trust. We owe each other things if we’re healthy communities.

How might we think differently about the role of waiting in our everyday lives?

Some years ago, I realized that whenever I had a moment, waiting for the bus or waiting in line—or just interstitial time—I would pick up my phone and look at it. I would go online and waste time. Those minutes accumulate over a day, a week, and a lifetime.

Interstitial time is actually quite valuable. It allows your brain to rest from stimulation. It allows your mind to wander and maybe come across a new idea. It also teaches some form of patience.

When you scale up hundreds of millions of people who fill every single moment of downtime or boredom with entertainment, you are cultivating a population that has vast cultural impatience—and not just for each other but for solving difficult issues in politics or in communal life. You can see how it scales up.

Do I want people to sit around and be bored all the time? No, but boredom does teach some things. It teaches a kind of mental discipline. It teaches an acceptance that you can’t always control your environment, and it lets your mind have the fallow time that it needs in a world where you’re constantly bombarded with stimulation and information.

The availability of technology also creates a mindset where we’re expected to be productive at times in our life where maybe we shouldn’t. Our leisure time has now become something we measure and manage and want to feel productive doing. The self-tracking movement started a lot of this for people. It can be helpful for people who are trying to achieve certain physical goals or fitness goals or whatnot.

This idea that we should become more machinelike in our behavior—I’ve got 15 minutes. I’ve got to make my widget; I’ve got to answer all my emails—we feel efficient because we can do what we should. In some countries, however, workers rebelled against their employers, saying you cannot send an email after 6:00 p.m., because they were completely overwhelmed and burned-out and didn’t have a clear separation between their work world and their private world.

We do need boundaries. We need that backstage time where we can let down our hair

and be with our people and not have to worry about being productive. That impulse to productivity is also something that doesn’t allow for contemplation and rest. And these are things that humans need. We need time for those things.

Where are you encouraged by people’s recognition of embodied needs?

The most encouraging thing is that people are simply willing to be more skeptical and ask more questions before they adopt new technologies. I mean it sincerely: We have to actively defend human things.

For example, a smartphone wants to introduce an embedded sensor on your phone that’ll monitor your heart rate and your galvanic skin response on an app that tells you when you’re anxious. If you’re talking to someone who makes you anxious, you could possibly eliminate that person from your life because of this feedback.

But what if you look up and see your good friend? They’re just annoying because sometimes friends can be annoying. Do we need to outsource and externalize our own intuitions, our own emotional experiences, to machines, to algorithms, to the phone? This is where we should pause and evaluate.

The same thing is true with people at the most vulnerable stages of life, children and the elderly, where there’s a real push to outsource their care and feeding to technology. Do older people need monitoring, not by fellow human beings but by robots or constant surveillance cameras and sensors they can wear, so absent caregivers are alerted in the event of a person’s fall? No, that’s our job as humans. We owe that to each other.

My wonderful libertarian friends scold me for being pessimistic about where some of these technological horizons are taking us. They say, You’re just being a curmudgeon. You’re being too reactionary.

To them, I always say, Look at what Silicon Valley theorists think about humans. Humans are often described as obstacles to their bigger project. They talk about humanity, but they rarely talk about people. I care about people. I think we should care about people. Our gold standard should be human interaction, the thing that most people actually crave and need.

- More from The Bulletin

History

When the Times Were ‘A-Changin’’

Daniel Silliman

CT reported on 1967 “message music,” the radicalism on American college campuses, and how the Six-Day War fit into biblical prophecy.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

CT readers learned that singers—including Bob Dylan, Sonny Bono, Bobby Goldsboro, and Paul Simon (mistakenly called “Pete Simon”)—were putting out music with a message.

Message music is not a style of music, like rhythm and blues or swing. It is a song in any style that speaks directly or indirectly to a basic problem of mankind. Not all rock ’n’ roll songs are message songs. Most of them are about the traditional topics of popular songwriters: love desired, love fought for, love gained, and love lost. But there are songs that are far more serious. They speak of fear, anxiety, war, loneliness, hope, and the difficulties and contradictions of life in the twentieth century. …

They lay bare hypocrisy, hidden fears, the doubts and inadequacies of our generation; they reveal the difficulties of living when the “times they are a-changin’.”

Some of the messages were alarming. On college campuses, a growing number of students embraced radicalism and calls for revolution. CT published FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s 3,500-word analysis of the “New Left” and its dangerous “gospel of nihilism.”

To dismiss the New Left, as some do, as a collection of simpletons, eccentrics, and jocular fools is to commit a grave mistake. Its adherents should not, as so often happens, be judged strictly by their Beatnik dress and ways (repugnant as they may be to most Americans). …

Basic to the New Left’s mood is the idea that contemporary American society (contemptuously called the “Establishment”) is corrupt, evil, and malignant—and must be destroyed. To reform it, to change it for the better, is impossible. It must—along with its Judaic-Christian values—be liquidated. “Let’s face it. It is, to use the crudest psychological terminology, a sick, sick, sick society in which we live. It is, finally, a society which approaches collective insanity—a system of authority-dependency relationships which destroys life and health and strength and creates debility, dependency, and deathliness.”

For that reason, members of the New Left take great delight in desecrating the American flag, mocking American heroes, and disparaging American history. They contemptuously hiss and boo officials of our government and show scornful disdain for opinions with which they disagree (the New Left at heart is extremely totalitarian, intolerant, and opinionated in nature). They urge resistance to the draft (even on occasions try to interfere physically with the legitimate activities of armed-services personnel on college campuses present for the purpose of recruiting), burn or mutilate draft cards, endeavor to dictate to university administrative officials how these institutions should be run.

One evangelical group sought to engage students directly with the Christian account of what made society “sick, sick, sick” and tell them about the cure that could be found in Jesus. Seven hundred Campus Crusade for Christ staff members spent a week evangelizing students at the University of California, Berkeley.

CCC activists buttonholed students with straightforward, person-to-person gospel appeals. They staged noon rallies before thousands and conducted evening meetings in scores of residence halls. They infiltrated “The Forum,” a popular Telegraph Avenue coffeehouse frequented by hippies and budding political radicals, and scored many conversions there. Nightly they put on high-quality programs at a 3,000-seat theater. They saturated surrounding neighborhoods with a visitation campaign, and in the campus Plaza area they manned Christian literature tables next to tables run by such groups as the Campus Sexual Rights Forum, the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, and the Maoist-oriented Progressive Labor Party.

By the end of the week almost 1,000 decision slips were tabulated. … Widespread criticism resulted. The Daily Californian editorialized … “there are limits to these activities which should not be overstepped, and this group of zealots has managed to transgress those boundaries with gay abandon.” It complained that students had been roused from bed by early-morning telephone calls—a charge [Campus Crusade for Christ leadership] denied.

CT reported efforts to loosen legal restrictions on abortion and ongoing public debates about the ethics of abortion.

Prestigious leaders representing religion and ethics, law, medicine, and the social sciences disputed, debated, and defended the world’s abortion practices during a three-day International Conference on Abortion held this month in Washington, D. C. …

Dr. Herbert Richardson of the Harvard Divinity School, one of the conference conveners, summarized the ethicists’ closed-session discussions: Human life begins at conception, or at least no later than eight days after conception. Abortion should be performed—if at all—only in exceptional cases. Both theists and non-theists saw human life as qualitatively different from all other earthly life, and therefore worthy of special respect. And theists agreed among themselves that religious affirmations are relevant: God is creator of man and the author of life; man is created in the image of God; man is the steward of the gift of life and not its complete master.

Beyond this, opinion diverged. Some moralists deemed it morally possible to take the life of an unborn child under certain conditions as a “human response to God’s love and his neighbor.” Others held that the fetus has inviolable rights; no individual or society has the right to say which shall live and which shall die.

CT also looked at new developments in birth control and asked, “Which Methods Are Moral?”

The pill—which is relatively expensive and must be taken daily—is popular among affluent, sophisticated people, while the IUD is the most feasible means of mass birth control for developing nations. Though only about 95 per cent effective, the IUD is inexpensive and, once the small loop or ring is inserted in a five-minute operation, requires little attention. An estimated 1.3 million women now use the IUD in India, and South Korea credits 400,000 IUD insertions with a significant drop in its birth rate. …

The U. S. Food and Drug Administration is studying the safety and effectiveness of IUDs and should report by mid-year. Although ethical discussions on birth control tend to be divorced from biology, scientific evidence leads such Christians as William F. Campbell, a missionary doctor in Morocco, to fear that use of the IUD is “a kind of abortion.”

The biological question is at what point the IUD stops human life—before or after the male sperm fertilizes the female egg. The ethical question is whether a fertilized egg is a human being—whether the IUD may be the mechanism for microscopic murder.

Internationally, CT reported a revival in Indonesia.

“It’s too early to put all the pieces together,” says Dr. Clyde W. Taylor, executive secretary of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, “but there can be no doubt that revival has broken out.”

Taylor says the best estimates show at least 200,000 conversions from Islam to Christianity within the last eighteen months. Mission boards are assigning top priority to getting help to the workers in Indonesia, now the world’s fifth-largest country. Nowhere before has there ever been a comparable response from Muslims—missionary experts often regard them as among the hardest people in the world to reach.

The success of Wycliffe Bible Translators was also encouraging. CT reported that in 1967, Wycliffe had become “the world’s largest Protestant missionary organization.”

Evangelical breakthroughs almost invariably occur under strong leaders. Bob Pierce has been the Billy Graham of the evangelically rooted World Vision movement and through plaintive pleas and skillful promotion raises millions of dollars annually for orphan care and general relief work in the Far East. Dapper Bill Bright has led Campus Crusade for Christ, with its simple but intensive evangelistic zeal, into hundreds of colleges in the United States and abroad. In the case of Wycliffe, the genius has been that of soft-spoken W. Cameron Townsend, now 71, whose diplomacy has won him entrée to scores of traditionally anti-Protestant government residences in Latin America.

Fifty years ago this month, Townsend, product of a California farm family, arrived in Guatemala as a $25-a-month salesman for the Bible House of Los Angeles. The real challenge came with his discovery that the Scriptures were of no use to the Indians because they could not read Spanish. Prodded by their complaint that “God doesn’t know our language,” Townsend set out to translate the New Testament into the then-unwritten Cakchiquel dialect. Although it took twelve years, Townsend not only achieved that goal but also inspired similar projects across Latin America and subsequently in other parts of the world.

Out of these projects grew Wycliffe, which was incorporated in 1942 and today operates on a budget of about $5,000,000.

Several Communist countries seemed to grow more accommodating and tolerant toward Christians. As CT editors surveyed the global situation, they grew concerned that the temporary ideological compromises of dictators would deceive naive Christians.

Never has the religious situation in Communist countries been more confused and ambiguous than it is today.

Except for Mao’s China, where the fury of the barbaric “cultural revolution” strikes hard against Buddhists and Muslims as well as Protestants and Catholics, a relative calm and a sort of “peaceful coexistence” now seems to prevail between governments and various religious groups. Church delegations from Communist countries visit the United States and other Western nations almost routinely. Various churches of the Soviet Union and other Communist nations have been permitted to join the World Council of Churches and international denominational bodies.

The greatest breakthrough in church-state relations in the Soviet Union was the first visit of the head of the Soviet Union to the Vatican in January of this year, the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Church dignitaries are now more often invited to official state receptions in Communist capitals though they are not yet asked to say grace at banquets given by Communist leaders. …

A superficial observer might be easily tempted to misinterpret such phenomena. He might conclude, hastily and optimistically, that … a promising new era of a dialogue between Christians and Marxists is at hand. American churchmen, knowing neither the language nor the extent of complex problems in these areas, often make inaccurate and misleading appraisals of the religious situation. Their opinions tend to reflect wishful thinking rather than historical realities.

Evangelicals were struggling in Cuba, eight years after the takeover of Communist Fidel Castro.

The harassment continues more subtly than in 1965, when fifty-three Baptists were arrested simultaneously. Thirty-four of them were brought to trial and sentenced for a variety of offenses, from espionage to “twisting biblical texts for the purpose of ideological diversionism.” To go about with Bible in hand is still an offense. Informers have infiltrated the churches—a fact not only admitted but boasted about by Dr. Falipe Carneado, director of the government’s department of religious matters. Churches cannot build. Theological students are whisked away to military service or to work camps. Unbelievers have been known to attend a church service, stand up at a given moment and sing the national anthem, then accuse those who do not join in of disrespect.

A common device is the street plan. Both ends of a street where a church is located are roped off. …

All in all, the picture is dark. One Cuban expressed it this way: “Our experiences are very sour. We breathe an atmosphere of insolence, tyranny, blasphemy, hypocrisy, lies, betrayal, and indignity. Our palm trees are so sad that they seem to be weeping, and our rivers are dry one moment and flooding at the other. This island is a huge prison with international jailers. We have returned to the time of the Vandals. The only thing we can do is raise our eyes to our blue skies, to the shining sun, to the twinkling stars, and to our God.”

The Castro regime also imprisoned Christian missionaries. CT reported on the experience of two American evangelicals who went to Cuba to plead for their son.

The Rev. and Mrs. Clifton Fite returned to Waynesboro, Georgia, believing the Cuban government will “deal kindly” with requests to release their missionary son David from prison. …

The Fites had tried to see their son since he was imprisoned two years ago on charges of currency-exchange violations. They finally succeeded, through the Cuban ambassador in Mexico. Officials “listened with reverence and responded with courtesy” during the fifty-one-day stay in Cuba, Fite reported.

In June, Israel went to war with Egypt and a coalition of Arab nations. CT published firsthand accounts from evangelicals in Jerusalem and Beirut and analyzed the political, military, and eschatological context of the Six-Day War.

Israel, hedged on three sides by Arab foes and outnumbered twenty to one, began fighting to ensure its survival as a nation. After mounting swift air strikes against Egyptian forces, Israeli troops in three short days circled and captured the old city of Jerusalem, controlled the Gaza strip, reopened the Gulf of Aqaba and reached the Suez Canal. …

The Christian can best understand the imbroglio in the Middle East through his knowledge of the prophetic Scriptures. Although the Bible does not describe future developments in detail, it offers much in the way of broad prophetic outline. … The believer will not be bewildered by the tides that sweep the world, nor will he despair over the headlines. …

The prophetic clock of God is ticking while history moves inexorably toward the final climax. And as that clock ticks, the Christian believer lifts his head high, for he knows that a glorious redemption draws near.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Ideas

From Panic Attacks to Physical Discipline

Justin Whitmel Earley

How one new year turned my life around spiritually and physically.

Andrik Langfield / Unsplash

Ten years ago, I was at the unhealthiest moment of my life.

I was a former missionary who had become a corporate lawyer. I had a head filled with great theology, but my job in mergers and acquisitions at an international law firm—combined with parenting two young sons—had driven my body into the ground. I suffered from constant panic attacks and insomnia, the kind that left me with suicidal thoughts and no sleep unless I took sleeping pills or had a few drinks.

I am no longer that person. I now run a law firm; I have four young boys; I write books. My life is certainly not less complicated, but panic attacks are a distant memory and I’m arguably in the best shape of my life.

Lest that sound boastful, let me be clear—God saved me. When I was spiraling out of control, I didn’t know what to do. But God used the grace of spiritual and physical disciplines to change everything about my life.

It started with a new year’s conversation I still remember to this day. I sat down with two of my best friends and asked them to keep me accountable to a few daily and weekly rhythms in the new year.

A decade later, I’m still wrestling with why habits are so spiritual—including health-related ones. Here are four things that I’ve learned.

First, you are mostly your habits. From Aristotle to James Clear, most of humanity has been clear on what makes up a life: our habits. According to one study, about two-thirds of daily actions are not choices we consciously make; they are the product of habit.

This is particularly important when it comes to our bad habits. Take mine at that time: scrolling emails constantly at home, eating things that make me feel horrible, snapping at my kids. All of us know better.

But the part of our brain that knows better is not the part that is churning along in habit. So we become the way I was: a good head with bad routines.

The problem is, when your head goes one way and your habit goes another, your heart tends to follow the habit. Habits start to get really spiritual really quick.

Second, habits are worship drivers. We are living in a resurgence of liturgy. Liturgies are the things in a worship service we put on repeat because we want to be formed in the image of the God we worship. But notice the similarity of habits and liturgy: Both things we do over and over, both things form us.

The big difference is that liturgy admits that it’s about worship. In our day-to-day lives, our patterns often obscure what we worship. But that doesn’t mean we’re not worshiping. The only question is what we are worshiping.

Third, your body is spiritual. It’s impossible to talk about habit without talking about embodiment, because we’re talking about a lower brain function. The impact of habit is very different from the impact of head knowledge. One does not automatically transfer to the other. You have to take knowledge and put it into practice. And that’s when whole-life transformation begins to happen. Jesus illustrated this very colorfully for us (Matt. 7:24–27).

Modern Christians tend to get nervous here, because we think that when we talk about the body, we are leaving the realm of spirituality. But this is not how the Bible sees the world. God made our bodies. He called them good. He saved us by the body of his Son. He is going to raise our bodies to new life. As C. S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, it’s no use trying to be more spiritual than God.

This is precisely why the spiritual disciplines are so physical, and why physical disciplines are so spiritual. It’s we who divide up the world into sacred and secular. Well, us and the Enemy. But it is not God. He’s very clear on this: Our bodies are sacred—and our habits are too.

Fourth, physical disciplines are spiritual disciplines. This means that the ways we eat and exercise are as spiritual as the ways we fast and pray. I am a living testimony to this. I will attest that spiritual disciplines like morning kneeling prayer and putting Scripture before phone absolutely changed my life ten years ago. But I am a lawyer, and I would not be telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth if I did not say that respecting sleep, embracing a healthy diet, and practicing regular exercise changed my mental health as much as the spiritual disciplines.

This is because anxiety is never just a head problem; it’s always a habit problem too. (The reverse is true as well, by the way.)

But I used to worry this fact somehow meant I was admitting that “the world’s” solutions to my mental health were better than God’s solutions. I don’t know when I forgot that all truth is God’s truth. I don’t know where I missed that everything biological is also theological. I don’t know why I didn’t take “honor God with your bodies” (1 Cor. 6:20) as seriously as “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19).

But I didn’t. I was a product of our modern, gnostic moment like we all are, and I had limited Christianity to a head project. But even people who love the head like Abraham Kuyper said that Christ calls out “Mine!” over every square inch of the universe. That means bodies too.

When you put all of the above together, you realize that your embodied habits have an enormous spiritual impact on what the Bible calls “the heart.” The way I like to put this is that the body teaches the soul. By that, I mean that God doesn’t just use our knowledge of him to shape our habits; he also uses our habits to shape our knowledge of him.

For example, moderate exercise is not only good for our health but also trains our heart to respect discipline of all kinds. For the sake of loving our families better and for the sake of self-control, Christians should see some form of exercise, however limited, as holy and useful to the Christian life.

Likewise, eating simply and healthily is not only good for our physical and mental health. It’s central to interrupting everyday idolatries such as gluttony and vanity. Christians should see a healthy diet as central to stewarding their body to love neighbor, and as central to rejecting loving anything more than God.

And a sleep rhythm is as spiritually formative as a sabbath rhythm is physically formative. Christians cannot be people who preach a gospel of peace while living in the unrest of incessant work. Calling it a night or taking a day off to sabbath are central ways we proclaim the truth of the gospel—and central ways we enjoy the truth of the gospel. On the cross, Jesus said “It is finished” partly so that you can calm down and take a nap.

If I could go back ten years and meet myself in the midst of my anxiety crisis, I would want to encourage that version of myself: “Embrace the new year health habits! God made your body. Caring for it does not have to be vanity. Stewarding your mental health is necessary to loving God and neighbor. So do it for love.”

This new year, I want to encourage you to do the same. Our bodies bear the image of God, and God is love! We shouldn’t idolize our bodies, but we shouldn’t ignore them either. We should image God through them by stewarding them for the sake of loving God and loving others.

Habits won’t change God’s love for you. But God’s love for you should change your habits.

Justin Whitmel Earley is a lawyer, speaker, and author from Richmond, Virginia. He is the CEO of Avodah Legal and the author of numerous bestselling books, including Habits of the Household and, most recently, The Body Teaches the Soul.

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