Become a Shadow of Your Future Self

Manifesting isn’t the answer. Consenting to holiness is.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash / Pexels

Recently, a psychologist at New York University wondered if young adults were not saving money for the future because they felt like they were putting it away for a stranger. So Hal Ersner-Hershfield conducted an experiment, giving some college students a real mirror and others virtual reality goggles where, with the help of special effects like those used in movies, they could see a future version of themselves at age 68 or 70.

Now I Become Myself: How Deep Grace Heals Our Shame and Restores Our True Self

Ken Shigematsu (Author)

HarperCollins Children's Books

208 pages

Those who saw the older version of themselves in the virtual “mirror” were willing to put more than twice as much money into their retirement accounts as the students who spent time looking at their younger selves in a real mirror. What’s more, those who glimpsed their future selves were more likely to complete their studies on time, whereas those who didn’t were more likely to blow off their studies. Those who saw their future selves were also more likely to act ethically in business scenarios.

Recognizing and investing in our future selves is certainly a fruitful practice. But it remains inadequate for those who believe in Christ.

When our identity is rooted in the knowledge that we are creatures who were made by God in dazzling glory and created with an original core of goodness and beauty, we can live inspired to become the masterpieces God intended. When we catch a vision for who we might become in the future, we can begin to live as that person now.

When we can imagine ourselves in both our temporal future and our eternal future, we can be inspired toward holiness in our day-to-day lives. In his classic sermon “The Weight of Glory,” C. S. Lewis observes, “There are no ordinary people.” He continues, “Remember that the dullest, most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations.”

As the theologian N. T. Wright observes, when we think of an older, physically diminished person, we might say, “They are just a shadow of their former self,” but when someone belongs to Christ, we should say, “They are just a shadow of their future self.” If you can envision your future, glorious self, you can move toward becoming that person right now, bearing the beautiful image of God in your daily life.

Consenting to holiness

As we grow into the glorious masterpieces of God’s imagining, we aren’t manifesting our desired reality through positive thinking or embarking on a pull-ourselves-up-by-our-bootstraps self-improvement project. Rather, we are opening ourselves to be shaped by God’s creative, loving hands, inviting him to use whatever tools are necessary to slough away our dross. For it is only after we pass through purifying fire, after God chisels, sands, and burnishes us that we will begin to shimmer with an inner radiance that will cast warmth and light upon everyone around us. Though this creative process is something that God does as an artist—as Jesus said, “apart from [him] [we] can do nothing” (John 15:5)—we also play a role (Phil. 2:13).

Our role is to consent to the cleansing work of the Holy Spirit.

When I was a teenager, I kept a pornographic magazine hidden behind one of the logs stacked in our garage. When I first met Christ, I knew nothing about the Bible, and I hadn’t yet heard about the Holy Spirit. But as soon as the Spirit made a home within me, my first instinct was to grab the pornographic magazine I’d hidden behind the log, toss it into the fireplace of our living room, and burn it. I had an inward sense, born of the Spirit, that pornography would compromise my new relationship with God.

In due course, I also felt an inner urge to make things right with certain kids whom I had bullied in our neighborhood and at my high school. As humbling as it was, I felt that I needed to go to them and ask them to forgive me for the way I had treated them. Though imperfectly, I was saying yes to the work of the Holy Spirit in me.

Decades later, with God’s help, I still seek to respond to the Holy Spirit within me, whether by making a choice to stop objectifying an attractive woman, to initiate repair and reconciliation in a fractured relationship, or to respond to a conviction of sin in some other area of my life. We do not need to fear these inner urgings because the Holy Spirit never condemns us, but gently convicts us.

Condemnation drives us from God, but conviction draws us toward God.

For many of us, the temptation to sin might not come most often in obvious areas, such as sexual lust or the desire to dominate or bully someone, but in more subtle inclinations. For example, like many people, I am inclined to place too much security in my bank balance and what I have accumulated rather than trusting in God’s provision. By nature, I also have a tendency to base my self-worth on how I perform at work and in other spheres of life. Or I can become overly attached to someone and then start trying a little too hard to impress them.

In certain situations, I also feel an anxious desire to influence or control the outcome. Although I play a role in my transformation, I am ultimately powerless to change these tendencies in myself. On our own, we cannot experience freedom from our attachments and addictions to security, affection, esteem, power, and control. Our primal desires for these things are wired into our central nervous system, deeply rooted in our bodies. As Thomas Keating says, “our issues are in our tissues.” Experiencing real change is not just a matter of willpower or intellectual insight—we need God to do a cleansing and transformative work within us.

This is why I pray this simple welcoming prayer I have adapted from Mary Mrozowski, who was a lay leader from an interdenominational contemplative community. I pray this prayer each morning as part of a time of meditation. I may also pray it at various points in the day as I feel unhealthy frustration and desire for security, validation, or control:

I consent to the work of the Holy Spirit. I let go of my desire for security and pleasure. I let go of my desire for affection and esteem. I let go of my desire for power and control.

I invite you to consider regularly praying this welcoming prayer if you want to become a person who does not make your money, your work, pleasure, food, what others think of you, or your influence and power your functional god.

Decluttering our souls

Becoming God’s masterpiece is primarily God’s work in us, and so our role is to consent to the work of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes we respond and agree to the Holy Spirit’s work of removing sin from our lives; at other times we allow the Spirit to declutter us.

When my wife Sakiko and I clean our home, we toss out all our garbage (used Kleenex, socks with too many holes, blueberries turning white with mold, and so on). Each summer, we do a deeper cleaning, going through our closets and identifying clothing that we haven’t worn for a year to give it to the Salvation Army Thrift Store. We also browse our bookshelves, culling any we won’t read again, and donate them to a nearby library or used bookstore.

Recently, while we were cleaning out our garage, Sakiko found some wedding gifts in storage containers that we hadn’t used in nearly two decades—so we gave them to the Salvation Army. When we throw away our garbage and give away things we’re not using anymore, we get rid of the clutter in our house, and this opens more space for the things we need and value.

If we want to experience the deep transformation of the master artist, we need to make space in our minds and hearts to attend to God’s loving presence. This will include opening ourselves to the purifying work of the Holy Spirit in relation to possible sin in our lives and inviting Jesus to cleanse our bodies and spirits of any garbage or clutter that might distract us from his presence.

- More from Ken Shigematsu

News

Canadian Christians Launch Collective for Climate Action

Adam MacInnis

Tearfund and A Rocha see the impact in humanitarian crises now and want to organize churches to help.

NASA scientist monitors arctic sea ice loss, one of the measures of climate change.

Mario Tama/Getty Images

When Matthew Schroeder thinks about the drought in Ethiopia—the worst in 50 years—he thinks of the starving animals and malnourished people.

When he thinks about the solution, he thinks of the need to address climate change.

“It’s not a one-off thing. It’s not a glitch,” the director of Tearfund Canada told CT.

The Christian relief organization has provided assistance through food programs established to help herdsmen who have been forced to migrate to cities as their livelihoods dissolve. But Schroeder feels compelled to do something more than help those suffering now. He wants to mitigate future droughts by addressing the problem of climate change.

The substantial increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases caused by burning fossil fuels doesn’t have an outsized impact on the lives of Canadians where Schroeder lives in Toronto. But 7,500 miles away, in Eastern and Northern Africa, the human cost of climate change is very visible.

“We see the effects firsthand,” Schroeder said. “For us, if things get too hot, we’ll just crank up the air conditioning a bit more. But for our beneficiaries in Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and South Sudan, it really is a matter of life and death.”

That’s why Tearfund has taken steps recently to partner with another Christian organization, A Rocha Canada, to better educate people in Canada about the effects of climate change and what they can do to help.

To kick off this partnership, they conducted a survey of 742 Canadian Christians between the ages of 18 and 40 to learn more about what they currently think concerning climate change and how the church is already doing at addressing the issue.

“We know that young people obviously care about these issues just in general more than the older generation,” Schroeder said. “We really wanted to dig deeper and to figure out what they thought and what they believed in.”

What they discovered was a high degree of concern. More than 90 percent of those surveyed reported being worried about climate change and nature loss, with 60 percent stating that they are “quite” to “seriously worried.”

Only a quarter, however, indicated they were actually taking action to address the issue. There was a presiding sense of hopelessness.

As one survey respondent wrote, “It appears like the clock is ticking, and there may not be a future world for my children or my grandchildren. And that, to me, is the single biggest concern. Will they have food? Will they be able to survive?”

Schroeder believes that is a great place for Christians to enter the conversation.

“When you look out into the world and see people, especially young people, being depressed and sad and anxious, I think the church has a wonderful message—one of hope, one of renewal,” he said. “We have a creator God who loves us.”

Tearfund and A Rocha Canada launched The Creation Collective on April 20 at Tyndale University to be a network of like-minded Canadian churches and organizations who want to take action to care for creation. Their website will serve as a place for churches, organizations, and individuals to find ways to combat the hopelessness, take real action, and serve their suffering brothers and sisters in Ethiopia.

“No matter where you are on the journey, you can start taking action and learning more in easy and practical ways,” Schroeder said.

The Creation Collective is offering both theological resources, with courses, videos, and books on creation care, and practical ideas to reduce the use of carbon and make personal changes to better care for the earth.

Luke Wilson, CEO of A Rocha Canada, said there’s a shared ethos and value system between his organization and Tearfund. He thinks a lot of evangelicals in Canada agree with those ideas too but don’t know how to take the next step.

“We really believe that organizations and the church need to collaborate to move forward on this important topic,” Wilson said.

The Creation Collective’s survey confirmed the need for a more intentional and organized response to climate change. It’s an especially important topic for young Christians. The survey found 91 percent of young Christians believe it is important to act now to do something about climate change.

“I knew that eco-anxiety is a growing trend,” Wilson said, “but to see it affirmed with high percentages in the 80s or 90s was fairly significant.”

Christians in Canada may not be experts on the science of climate change and may not have special insight into the best policy proposals for reducing carbon emissions. But a large part of the problem that needs to be addressed, Wilson said, is in human hearts. And churches are called to speak to that.

“It’s a matter of where do we place our value and what do we care about and what do we love,” he said. “Our resources and energy follow that.”

Wilson has been encouraged, so far, to see that Canadian Christians share his conviction that climate change is a gospel issue. The survey found 94 percent of young Canadian Christians say that their faith taught them to care about injustice and the most vulnerable. They are concerned about the environment because of—not despite—their faith.

“It was encouraging to see statistics to back up our stories on the ground of people really living out a new kind of way of their faith,” Wilson said. “I think that’s the opportunity in this gap between where the next generation is and where they believe the church could be and should be.”

Andrea Leung, a 28-year-old law school student in Ottawa and a current board member of Tearfund, said that for her the impact of climate change on the global south drove home the urgency of the issue.

“It’s something I feel we can’t just turn a blind eye to, especially if our way of living and our actions are causing or contributing to the severity of climate change and nature loss,” she said. “I feel like that’s something that requires us as Christians to get involved.”

At the same time, she relates to many of her peers who struggle with knowing what to do.

“People just don’t know how to turn those thoughts into action,” she said. “Personally, I often struggle with [thinking] I should be doing different things, but I don’t really know what that should look like and more practical steps to take.”

That’s where she believes The Creation Collective will come in. Already it has many resources available for people to look at and starting points for individuals and organizations that want to do something. For instance, an initiative underway now encourages Christians to make time on May 27 to take part in Canada’s National Litter Pick-Up Day.

While each group may ultimately choose a unique way to make a difference in their own community, she believes there is value in having a place to find resources or to share and discuss ideas with others.

Her prayer is that through this initiative, God will give people a heart for change and remove the paralysis of fear and helplessness.

“Starting small makes it so it’s not such an overwhelming task,” she said.

- More from Adam MacInnis

Books

Review

With Drug Overdoses on the Rise, Churches Need an All-Hands-on-Deck Attitude

Brett McCarty

Conservative and progressive Christians favor different approaches, and both have their place.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Getty

What would the parable of the Good Samaritan look like today?

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis

Beth Macy (Author)

LITTLE, BROWN

400 pages

In the United States, the man lying beside the road may well be dying from an overdose of fentanyl.

Over the course of the pandemic, social isolation combined with a flood of super-potent synthetic fentanyl pushed overdose deaths in the US to unimaginable levels, from 70,000 in 2019 to 107,000 in 2021. Will we, like the Levite and priest in Luke 10:25–37, keep our distance?

Journalist Beth Macy’s book Dopesick chronicled the current opioid crisis, inspiring a widely viewed Hulu miniseries. More recently, in Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis, Macy searches out possibilities of hope amid mounting deaths of despair.

The title of Macy’s book comes from her conversations with Rev. Michelle Mathis, who cofounded Olive Branch Ministry, a faith-based organization in Hickory, North Carolina, devoted to reducing harm and death associated with drug and opioid use. Mathis offers a compelling account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead that focuses on an overlooked element in the story:

Nobody was a miracle worker except for Jesus … but even in the end after the miracle had been performed, nobody could see it because Lazarus was still bound, so Jesus told people to go forth and unbind him—those folks had a role to play. Those that were willing to unbind Lazarus were able to look the miracle in the eye and be face to face with this new creation that God had brought forth.

As Macy describes Mathis’s telling, “Jesus had already performed the miracle; now, it was up to the community to do the stinky, messy work of pulling the burial shroud off Lazarus.”

This “stinky, messy work” is always done locally. Throughout the book, Macy joins on-the-ground organizers in overlooked places like Batesville, Indiana, and Charleston, West Virginia, as they cultivate connections between suffering people and support in their communities. Macy finds no top-down formula for local responses to substance-use issues. Instead, healing in each location seems to require close and attentive care sustained over time, which means patiently and persistently meeting people right where they are.

All hands on deck

Over the past several years, I have studied religious responses to the opioid crisis in southern Appalachia and across North Carolina through projects funded by the Greenwall Foundation and The Duke Endowment. Using mixed methods—interviews, listening sessions, and a statewide survey—our research teams have listened carefully to faith leaders responding to the opioid crisis. We discovered the work of remarkable people, including Mathis, and we built the Churches Promoting Recovery project to share practical resources inspired by their wisdom and witness. Much as Macy describes them, these modern-day Good Samaritans spend their days on our own roads to Jericho, bandaging wounds and connecting people with networks of care.

For the most part, they are not culture warriors. They do not have large media platforms. They may or may not fit into typical political or religious boxes. They are not wealthy. They often have personal stories of hard-lived experience, grace encounters, and hard-won healing. They see the men and women on the road and do not pass by on the other side.

Opioid and drug overdose is not a red-state or a blue-state problem. It is not a problem that affects only one racial or ethnic group. It is rather an all-hands-on-deck problem that affects every community—but responses must be tailored to the needs of each particular community.

As we learned in a study of faith leaders in North Carolina, pastors’ needs and interests vary, differing by whether their congregations are predominantly Black, Hispanic, or white and also by cultural expectations and theological commitments. What works for one conservative Baptist congregation may not work for the progressive Presbyterian church down the road. Mathis gets this, and against the grain of many progressive activists, she makes a point of meeting conservative Christians and their communities where they are.

Recognizing the importance of differences among clergy and churches, the Churches Promoting Recovery project highlights stories of faithful and creative witnesses from diverse Christian leaders and communities. Mathis and Olive Branch Ministry are one such story. When we spoke with her, she conveyed the urgency of the contemporary crisis for Christians: “If the church does not engage people who use drugs where they are,” she said, “we’re going to lose those lives one way or the other—whether it’s a physical loss or a spiritual loss. Can we really afford that as people of faith?”

One size never fits all

When Christians get involved in responding to the opioid crisis, they encounter a fault line. On one side are those who emphasize opioid-use problems as medical issues, for which medication-assisted treatment (MAT) with drugs like buprenorphine is the fitting strategy. On the other side are those who emphasize opioid-use problems as spiritual issues, for which abstinence programs like Narcotics Anonymous offer the only pathway to genuine healing.

Advocates for these alternative approaches often view each other with skepticism and distrust. Both have witnessed their approach transform lives; both can point to deaths that they believe were caused by the inadequacies of the other side. Fierce competition for local, state, and federal funding further hinders collaboration. It also spills out into fights along politically polarized lines, with conservatives advocating abstinence-only responses and progressives pushing for MAT and other harm-reduction strategies like syringe-exchange programs.

How might Christians find a way through this impasse? Macy offers two helpful recommendations. First, she counsels giving up “the rigid notion that a single fix exists” and acknowledging “that one size never fits all when it comes to addiction.” She describes buprenorphine (“bupe” for short) as only “a critical first step.” “What bupe does best,” she continues, “is to create a window of reprieve from the daily hustle of avoiding dopesickness, thereby allowing people the chance to engage in all the equally difficult next steps of trying to build back their lives without drugs.” In the end, conservatives and progressives alike have to discern what is best for particular people through the slow, patient work of walking alongside them.

Macy’s second recommendation flows from observing that communities are transformed when their members hold personal change and social change together. The stories she tells display how changing hearts and minds goes hand in hand with reforming structures, and vice versa. As with treatment strategies, there is no formula for this kind of work; it must be discovered locally through the on-the-ground efforts of caring and committed people. Macy observes, “Change happened by way of one forward-thinking sheriff, one frazzled peer, one grieving mother at a time. It came by way of a purple-haired minister [Rev. Mathis] obsessed with doing s— rather than talking about it.”

A lesson in neighbor love

The progressive evangelical leader Tony Campolo often remarked that his evangelical audiences were bothered more by his use of profanity to describe the deaths of children from malnutrition than they were by the deaths themselves, and Macy’s Raising Lazarus includes quite a bit of profanity. Evangelicals may be put off, as well, by characters like the purple-haired Rev. Mathis (who cofounded Olive Branch Ministries with her partner Karen Lowe). Many see syringe-exchange programs and other harm-reduction strategies as enabling substance abuse.

Our studies in North Carolina found that pastors of evangelical churches were much more likely to say that their congregations oppose syringe-exchange programs than pastors in mainline Protestant churches. More were open to distributing naloxone, the life-saving medication that reverses opioid overdoses, but still fewer than among mainline Protestants.

Perhaps Mathis, however, has something to teach her evangelical sisters and brothers. Like the Samaritans of Jesus’ time, she and her colleagues at Olive Branch Ministry would be dismissed by some evangelicals for what they see as problematic politics and theology. And yet there she is, walking along the Jericho road, looking for people struck down by substance-use issues, meeting them where they lie, and doing what she can to keep them alive, form relationships with them, and hope for their healing and transformation.

Perhaps Mathis’s ministry is less a scandal than a lesson in neighbor love, inviting us to “go and do likewise,” to discover God’s resurrection power in “the stinky, messy work of pulling the burial shroud off Lazarus.”

Brett McCarty is associate director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke University, where he holds faculty appointments in the Divinity School and the School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health Sciences.

- More from Brett McCarty

Church Life

Worship Music Is Emotionally Manipulative. Do You Trust the Leader Plucking the Strings?

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

The Spirit is at work, but so are the mechanisms around high-production sets.

Linda Xu / Unsplash

“Bigger!” said the voice in my in-ear monitor.

I was on stage in a dark room, nearly blinded by spotlights. It was my first time leading worship at a big regional conference for college students, and one of the production managers in the sound booth prompted me to raise my hands higher, move more, clap more, jump, be more physically demonstrative.

I had always known conference worship sets were orchestrated, but this was the first time I could see the minutiae. At one point, I was told to imagine my arms attached to foam pool noodles, to keep them straight and raise them high. Each song was ranked by “energy level” from 1 to 5, and certain sessions could have songs only above a 3.

I remember wondering, Am I manipulating the people watching, singing, and listening? Am I using music to generate an emotional response in the crowd?

The short answer is yes. Worship music can move and manipulate emotions, even shape belief. Corporate worship is neurological and physiological. Martin Luther insisted that music’s ability to move and manipulate made it a singular, divine gift. “Next to the Word of God,” Luther wrote, “only music deserves being extolled as the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart. … Even the Holy Spirit honors music as a tool of his work.”

Songwriters and worship leaders use tempo and dynamic changes, modulation, and varied instrumentation to make contemporary worship music engaging, immersive, and, yes, emotionally moving.

As worshipers, we can feel it. Songs with lengthy interludes slowly build anticipation toward a familiar hook. Or the band drops out so voices sing out when the chorus hits. Plus the lyrics themselves can cue our behavior (“I’ll stand with arms high and heart abandoned”).

There are valid and interesting questions about the particularities that give contemporary worship music its resonance—borrowed conventions of secular love songs and pop ballads or associations with the aesthetics of high-energy arena rock concerts by artists like U2 and Coldplay, for example. But current concerns about the manipulative power of worship music seem to have less to do with musical style and taste than with the people and institutions involved in the making and performance of it.

So perhaps the question I should have been asking myself on stage is not whether the music was manipulative but whether those of us responsible for the worship set were trustworthy stewards and shepherds of the experience.

Corporate worship invites us to open ourselves to spiritual and emotional guidance. That openness feels, and is, vulnerable. And as worship becomes a bigger production in churches and ministry events, a rising chorus has challenged whether our emotions are in safe hands.

“That’s the tricky thing about emotions. [In musical worship] something happens inside you that is both voluntary and involuntary,” said ethnomusicologist Monique Ingalls, who directs graduate and research programs in church music at Baylor University.

Worshipers have agency; they decide how much they open themselves to emotional direction. Even extreme examples of musical propaganda require receptivity on the part of the listener. Musical propaganda is most effective when the music is used to increase devotion—to build on our faith—not change or alter beliefs. But once there is trust and buy-in, a dangerous, exploitative emotional manipulation is possible.

“Emotional manipulation in a worship service is like a shepherd leading people to certain pastures without knowing why,” wrote Zac Hicks, author of The Worship Pastor, on the subject of “manipulation vs. shepherding.”

“Manipulation, at its best is ‘purposeless shepherding,’ or ‘partial shepherding,’” Hicks wrote. “A sheep-person waking up from the fog of manipulation will often first exclaim, ‘Wait, why am I here?’”

Rather than a worship leader seeing the crowd’s emotional response—raised hands, closed eyes, or tears—as a sign of a successful set, Hicks argued that a thoughtful shepherd will use what he calls the “emotional contours of the gospel” (“the glory of God,” “the gravity of sin,” and “the greatness of grace”) to shape musical worship and avoid manipulation.

But when worshipers suspect that attention to the gospel’s contours has been superseded by other influences, trust begins to erode. Does it seem like the worship leader on stage is concerned more with cultivating a particular image than with serving in a pastoral role? Do heavy emotional moments seem to become overtures to fundraising? Worshipers fear manipulation when they have a reason to doubt the intentions of a leader or institution.

“It’s easy to mistake emotional manipulation for a movement of God, right?” journalist and author Kelsey McKinney said in the 2022 documentary Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed. “Are you crying because the Lord is staging some kind of intervention in your life, or are you crying because the chord structure is built to make you cry?”

The suspicion that a chord structure might be “built to make you cry” oversimplifies the relationship between music and emotion. Music does not simply act upon the listener; there is a dialectic between an individual and music in which each influences and responds to the other.

But the fear of being tricked into perceiving carefully crafted music as a spiritual encounter is understandable when it seems like powerful people at the helm of megachurches are using powerful music to cultivate loyalty and devotion—not only to God but also to their brand.

Scandals like the ones that have plagued Hillsong in recent years, as well as indications that contemporary worship music is increasingly shaped by financial interests, are feeding skepticism. A growing share of the worship music used in churches comes from a small but powerful group of songwriters and performers that most of us will never see in person.

When it comes to emotional shepherding, Ingalls sees trust and authenticity as paramount—two things that are difficult to maintain in a celebrity-fan relationship.

“I think the fear of manipulation, the question ‘Can I trust this person?’ is absolutely wrapped up in the authenticity debate,” Ingalls said.

But concerns around emotional manipulation far predate Hillsong and the worship mega-artists of the past 20 years. A 1977 Christianity Today cover package titled “Should Music Manipulate Our Worship?” called out new expressions marked by “a strong beat and a high emotional pitch,” from uptempo “gospel rock” bands.

The musical styles have changed, but the direction offered remains relevant for today:

If the evangelical church is to respond maturely to the swiftly changing patterns of musical expression, we need trained, concerned ministers of music who can guide us past the pitfalls of both aestheticism (worship of beauty) and hedonism (worship of pleasure).

We need musicians who are first ministers. They must understand the spiritual, emotional, and aesthetic needs of ordinary people and help lead a church in its quest for the true Word and for a creative, authentic, and complete expression of its faith. This kind of a ministry is more concerned with training participants than with entertaining spectators.

Imperfect medium, imperfect shepherds

C. S. Lewis, though not a musician, professed the belief that music could be “a preparation for or even a medium for meeting God,” with the caveat that it could easily become a distraction or an idol.

Musicologist John MacInnis has observed that Lewis’s exposure to the music of Beethoven and Richard Wagner was a spiritual gateway. Lewis considered transcendent musical moments in his life as signposts and would look back after his conversion to Christianity and see them as encounters that moved his heart and mind toward God.

But Lewis recognized the imperfection of music as a mode of worship or devotional meditation. “The emotional effect of music may be not only a distraction (to some people at some times) but a delusion: i.e. feeling certain emotions in church they mistake them for religious emotions when they may be wholly natural.”

Lewis did not understand his response to Wagner’s Ring cycle as worship, but he felt it brought him to some form of transcendence, to an overwhelming sublime encounter.

Listeners overwhelmed by the visual and sonic spectacle of a Taylor Swift concert might feel euphoria that does indeed surpass the usual scope of their emotions. Music and its contexts can bring us to the height of our emotional capacities. We can be overwhelmed by its beauty or power, by the visual media it accompanies, by a memory it alone can activate with precision and potency.

Like Lewis, perhaps we all can benefit from allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by music outside the sanctuary every now and then. It may be that understanding our capacity to be moved by music will help us navigate our emotional openness in worship.

The exact workings of music on the emotions are inscrutable, even with new neurological research that further explores music’s effects on the brain. Beneath our fear of being emotionally manipulated, for most of us, lies a fear that we are being coerced into doing or believing. We fear that our emotions are responding only to the music and not to the Holy Spirit, that what we perceive as a spiritual encounter is counterfeit, manufactured by skillful musicians, a production team, and a well-written musical hook.

Transparency may be one antidote. It may help for musicians and worship leaders to simply be more open about the ways they program music or what the purpose of a particular musical selection might be. A leader might preface a meditative song with intimate lyrics by encouraging the congregation to consider a passage of Scripture. Just acknowledging the emotional weight of the moment indicates self-awareness and care on the part of the leader.

Ingalls suggests evaluating emotional musical worship experiences in a particular church or ministry by looking at the fruit of that worship outside the sanctuary. “When we're evaluating emotions in worship, we can ask, ‘What are the worshipers that have these intense emotional experiences going out and doing?’”

If we accept that our moving, sometimes tearful, moments in a singing congregation are almost always brought about by some cooperation between God in us and the music around us, we can keep an eye on the work of our shepherds by looking around at the pastures where we find ourselves on the other side.

“What is being done on the ground?” Ingalls suggests asking.“To bring God’s shalom into the world? To heal broken relationships between God, between people, between people and the earth?”

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is CT’s worship music correspondent. She is a musicologist, educator, and writer who researches music in Christian communities.

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Church Life

A Tale of Two New York City Pastors

Kara Bettis Carvalho

One formed me. The other entertained me.

Carl Lentz (Left) Tim Keller (Right)

Edits by Christianity Today / Source Images: AP Images / Portrait of Keller Courtesy of Redeemer City to City

On a sunny March afternoon in 2014, I found myself jumping on the L train from Manhattan to Williamsburg to interview a young, urban pastor named Carl Lentz in his luxury waterfront apartment. A trendy evangelical magazine wanted me to profile him. With its nightclub venues and award-winning worship music, his Hillsong church was attracting thousands of diverse young people from around New York City.

Lentz is now featured in an FX documentary, The Secrets of Hillsong, which examines his string of affairs and the embattled church he left behind. The four-episode exposé features a solemn and emotional Lentz sharing that he was sexually abused as a child, admitting to moral failings (from sexual indiscretions to drug abuse), and describing the conflict among Hillsong leadership and staff.

The documentary dropped the same day that another New York City pastor made headlines: Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s founder, Tim Keller, died of cancer on May 19.

In the mid-2000s, both Redeemer and Hillsong drew flocks of spiritually curious New Yorkers, and both brought in around 5,000 attendees weekly across several services. For two years during college, I attended both churches simultaneously. After growing up as a homeschooled pastor’s kid in New England, I moved to New York City for undergrad. But it wasn’t just the star-studded Manhattan sidewalks that grabbed my attention; it was also the churches led by rapidly rising evangelical stars, including Keller and Lentz.

Since then, the evangelical church has been waking up to the pitfalls of platforming and creating celebrity pastors. We’ve watched many of them fall hard into sin after they were groomed for leadership at a young age and given too much power too fast. By contrast, “celebrity” pastors like Tim Keller, who finish their race faithfully if imperfectly, seem anomalous.

But a decade ago, many, like me, didn’t know better. I didn’t understand that my unreflective consumerism and curiosity contributed in part to the creation of celebrity pastors. I hardly understood the theological distinctives between a strongly Presbyterian church and a loosely Pentecostal one. I also didn’t get how leadership structures and accountability systems can make or break a church and its leader.

Despite my naivete, it was hard to miss the stark differences between both churches and their leaders: One formed me. The other entertained me.

Redeemer Presbyterian’s services were marked by hymns, thoughtful and lengthy sermons often delivered by campus pastors rather than Keller (who rotated between campuses), and after-service coffee hour. One campus hosted a jazz-themed worship service on Sunday evenings. I was drawn to the family-friendly environment and the feeling of being biblically and morally challenged each week.

But Hillsong’s vibe was exhilarating. Doors would open minutes before service, catching the attention of passers-by with lines around the block on a Sunday morning. Many described their visit as “an experience.” And it was—the dark room, neon stage lights, thumping worship music, and hyped-up message felt like a concert. Sometimes a small moshpit formed near the stage. During announcements or a meet-and-greet, ushers passed out cups of candy and water. Hillsong successfully drew many people who might not step in the doors of a traditional church: they claimed tens of thousands of converts since its inception.

Even if I knew I wasn’t being theologically fed in the same way as Redeemer, I couldn’t stay away.

Like their churches, the two pastors couldn’t have been more different. Keller started in humble beginnings. He cut his teeth at a small, rural church in Virginia and initially resisted the call to New York. He loved the intellectual side of the faith, acquiring multiple theological degrees, writing dozens of books, and even quitting his first pastorate to become a seminary professor.

Keller had many famous friends but didn’t flaunt those relationships. “Many features of his ministry made him the anti-celebrity pastor , even while he had significant influence and reach,” wrote Katelyn Beaty in the wake of his death. “Keller valued substance over style.”

As several people pointed out after his death, Keller waited until he was in his late 50s to publish his first book. Lentz published a memoir at 39. Keller’s church only ballooned to its current size in the wake of 9/11. Lentz, on the other hand, was poised to be an influential Hillsong leader in his early 20s, as a close friend of the founding family, Brian and Bobbie Houston.

Though he didn’t excel at or love school before Bible college, most of Lentz’s formation came from Hillsong College. And once he became a pastor, Lentz claims, Brian Houston pushed him at a pace he didn’t feel he could handle, at times preaching seven times on a Sunday.

“We can barely handle what we have right now,” Lentz recalls in the documentary. “We don’t have enough leaders; our structure is not strong enough … Before you know it, you’re so far in over your head that it’s a matter of time.”

“The idea of writing about a celebrity pastor having an affair, to be honest, felt pretty pedestrian to me,” Vanity Fair writer Alex French says in the documentary. “There was something else larger that was happening at this church.”

These deeper, foundational issues are only briefly touched on in the film: the platforming of celebrity pastors, the consumer mindset of many attendees, and the emaciated ecclesiology and discipleship of such churches.

The nefarious truth is that we, too, are often responsible for creating celebrity pastors. In college, was I hungry for Scripture and gospel-centered community? Yes. Was I also willing to be emotionally titillated, spiritually distracted and even entertained, and looking for a place to belong? Also, yes.

Regardless of their similarities or differences, I was not looking to become a family member of either church or a caring Christian sister of either pastor, joining in the work of the saints and the partnership in the gospel (Eph. 4:12, Phil. 1:5). I was consuming them, looking to check a box on Sunday mornings at the most entertaining or attractive one-hour experience I could find. Ultimately, I ended my time in New York at a small church plant where I served as a member of that community.

Jesus “triumphed over sin not by taking up power but by serving sacrificially. He ‘won’ through losing everything. This is a complete reversal of the world’s way of thinking, which values power, recognition, wealth, and status,” wrote Keller in his book Center Church. “The gospel, then, creates a new kind of servant community, with people who live out an entirely alternate way of being human.”

Today, Lentz has found a home at Michael Todd’s Transformation Church, a predominately Black nondenominational megachurch in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Back in 2014, Lentz told me that he thought Christians should avoid things that made them vulnerable to sin, and that his priority was to the Great Commission.

“Balance is a funny word,” he said in the interview, “My calling is not to Hillsong New York City, my calling is to serve Jesus and be a good husband and father. If I do that right, the church ends up being fine.”

Kara Bettis Carvalho is an associate editor at Christianity Today.

- More from Kara Bettis Carvalho

Christians Are Asking ChatGPT About God. Is This Different From Googling?

Compiled by Morgan Lee

Experts from around the world explain the consequences of the AI revolution for believers on and off the internet.

Illustration by Abigail Erickson / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

Hundreds of millions of people have used ChatGPT since its arrival last November to plan vacation itineraries, help them code better, create pop-culture sonnet mashups, and learn the finer details of their beliefs.

For years, Christians have Googled their theological questions to find articles written by humans answering questions about God and God's Word. Now, people can take these questions to AI chatbots. How will natural language-processing tools like ChatGPT change how we interpret the Bible?

Eight AI experts from around the world— and Chat GPT itself— weighed in.

Pablo A. Ruz Salmones, CEO, X eleva Group, Mexico City, Mexico

As John 17:17 says, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (ESV). Thus, interpreting the Bible is, to a great extent, the search for Truth. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT don’t have, by definition, a source of truth; it’s simply not in the model—hence why sometimes they make things up and extrapolate. They are incapable of finding truth, so that even when they do stumble across it, they are unable to recognize it as such.

Thus, when reading an output of an LLM regarding the Bible, we must understand that said output does not come from its search for truth within His Word but rather from a mixed “regurgitation” and extrapolation—a.k.a. algorithms—of what others have said. As a result, ChatGPT cannot offer a new interpretation of the Bible by itself; rather, a person querying ChatGPT may find in the chatbot’s answer a new way to interpret the Bible, just as they may find it in an answer offered by a parrot. Because it copies others, the parrot ends up speaking truth, even if it has no idea it has done so.

Suman Kumar Polepaka, founder of BibleMate, now based in Munich, Germany

Generative text AI models, like ChatGPT, are transforming how we seek answers to theological queries. Gone are the days of Googling and scrolling through endless articles. Instead, AI chatbots offer instant, clear, and authoritative responses, compiled from a vast array of texts, books, and articles. Their convenience, speed, and interactive nature make them a go-to resource.

They can even enhance personal Bible study by providing instant, diverse interpretations and context for any passage. But here's the catch: ChatGPT, being a general-purpose model, may lack theological or biblical accuracy. Its goal isn't to foster personal relationships with God or nurture spiritual growth.

This led me to create BibleMate.org, a ChatGPT-based alternative. BibleMate's mission is to provide biblically accurate answers and guide users on their faith journey. It's about ensuring AI doesn't just offer information but contributes meaningfully to spiritual growth. This project is still in its early stages, and I'm excited to see how it evolves.

Ang Wie Hay, IT practitioner and preacher, Singapore

ChatGPT’s speed in collecting and filtering information, integrating and sorting data, and providing summaries in numerous languages gives it an intelligence not possessed by any normal human.

This technology means that Christians looking for biblical advice may ask ChatGPT to apply Scripture passages to various contexts. ChatGPT’s various language capabilities may make it easier for us to perform exegetical studies of Bible verses from the original language of the Bible to various local languages.

ChatGPT is not a human who is able to distinguish the will of God or determine the truth of the Bible. So a person’s own biblical insight is paramount in deciding whether the answer from ChatGPT is in accordance with his or her faith.

As a preacher, I’m grateful that ChatGPT will greatly help to speed up the preparation of sermon manuscripts. And at the same time, the pastor still needs an intimate relationship with God, so that the preacher is sensitive in capturing the wisdom and guidance from God. My hope is that with ChatGPT's speed in responding to our requests, the pastor can spend more time cultivating an intimate relationship with God.

Sharath Chandra Kogila, product line manager working on AI initiatives at Dell Technologies, Bangalore, India

We need to address information overload immediately. Due to the amount of information that we are exposed to, our cognition gets impaired and our ability to summarize, understand, and extract value out of information is challenged. From this generation forward, we will rely on AI systems like ChatGPT, which are based on large language models, to interpret and summarize information for us. The problem I see here is that models can be trained to reflect a specific worldview or ideology when reading information (including the Bible). This would especially affect someone new to the faith looking for resources and information.

Any type of content, including voice, may be produced and made to look real using GPT systems. That's a serious risk, since we can't tell the difference between truth and counterfeiting or engineered from original content. Furthermore, with such systems, information cannot be traced back to a source—unlike accessing information via the web, where information must be linked to a website and its authenticity can be more easily verified. In such instances, either all information must be trusted or none at all. When such methodologies are used, the AI systems either have a neutral point of view or a politically prejudiced point of view, both of which are undesirable when interpreting situations from a biblical perspective.

Batseba Kassahun, HR consultant who has previously supported digital health, e-learning, and telecommunication companies, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Too often the global church values Western culture, regardless of whether this culture has any historic Christian connection. While we currently don't have ChatGPT available in Ethiopia, I fear it will just become another tool that leads Christians to further glorify Western culture. I also worry that its answers and application to us Ethiopians would be limited, as ChatGPT is designed to work for a very different context.

Christians who do have access to ChatGPT have to wrestle with the fact that this AI generates well-developed sermons and teaching. If it can do this, how much more can it imitate our personal Bible study? Our personal transformation happens through our own digging and studying the Bible. What will happen if we are only fed summaries and conclusions?

An IT professional and AI thought leader, whose public sector job has not authorized him to make public comments due to the nature of job assignment, India

When interacting with a user, natural language processing tools like ChatGPT use a process known as word embeddings. Each word embedding has its own internal mathematical rules for associating different words together to construct a sentence in order to reply to a query.

Each word in a next-possible word list to construct a sentence is assigned a probability, and a final word is chosen based on maximum probability or the result of preference (bias) introduced through reinforcement learning with human feedback.

As a result, any query that ChatGPT answers depends upon the training data used in pretraining and human feedback provided when fine-tuning the model. The internet training data used by ChatGPT has both pro-Christian [writing collections] as well as critical or anti-Christian [collections].

Further, chatbots like ChatGPT can be deliberately poisoned by fake or synthetic data and can hallucinate answers (i.e., create convincing but fake answers). Hence, any response from ChatGPT would need critical evaluation for its theological validity and historical accuracy.

Even with these serious limitations, ChatGPT is great tool for studying the Word of God, as it readily provides concise and free reference to a vast amount of premium Bible teachings through countless blogs, discussions, discourses, commentaries, maps, charts, handbooks, systematic theology books, general Christian books and study Bibles.

For Indian Christians who want to use ChatGPT, for better or worse, this vast amount of knowledge is available mostly in English, and there is not much in local Indian languages like Hindi or 21 other official languages.

Marcelo Cabral, editorial and education manager at ABC2 or Associação Brasileira de Cristãos na Ciência (Brazilian Association of Christians in Science), São Paulo Brazil

On the one hand, ChatGPT can provide a framework, suggestions of interpreters, and accessible summaries of theological traditions that may greatly improve Christians (both lay and ordained) in their practices of reading and designing Bible studies.

On the other hand, ChatGPT will become one more obstacle (along with social media) in Christians pursuing deep reflection of biblical texts. It discourages Christians from reading the biblical text for themselves and allowing the biblical text to “read” the reader in return. This intellectual and spiritual work may be super-automatized, thus atrophying minds and hearts in the formative process of thinking and creating.

Benjamin Bimanywaruhanga, AI practitioner, Uganda

Ugandans are spiritual and would like to learn what teachings there are in the Bible that relate to their real-life situations. Many would use ChatGPT if it was built with them in mind.

However, whereas the developed world has benefited from the internet as a source of knowledge, it has eluded the majority of the population in developing countries. Most people do not speak the international languages offered by the internet, so only the elite have previously utilized it as a source of information.

With increasing internet penetration and a growing number of chat-based internet applications that use [specialized communication] pathways, there’s an opportunity for many in the developed world to turn to these places for knowledge. However, this depends on tools like ChatGPT operating in local languages. When that occurs, we will see an adoption of ChatGPT-like applications that supersede the number of users in the West, similar to this part of the world leapfrogging the developed world in the mobile money revolution.

ChatGPT

Natural language-processing tools like ChatGPT will change how we interpret the Bible by increasing accessibility to biblical interpretations and explanations, providing diverse perspectives, enabling contextual understanding, and offering personalized guidance.

They allow immediate access to theological information, making it more inclusive. ChatGPT can process a wide range of sources, promoting a nuanced understanding of the Bible. It can analyze context, historical background, and cultural references, aiding in accurate interpretations. The tool engages in conversational interactions, helping users navigate complex concepts and apply teachings to personal circumstances.

However, AI chatbots are tools, not substitutes for human interpretation. The Bible's complexity requires expertise, discernment, and theological understanding. While AI chatbots provide valuable insights, engaging with trained theologians and scholars remains essential for comprehensive Bible interpretation.

- More from Compiled by Morgan Lee

Books

Sola Scripturas: Can Evangelicals Befriend the ‘Protestant Reformers of Islam’?

Jayson Casper

Interview with scholar of American Salafism finds commonalities—and potential for engagement—between the austere Islamic interpretive movement and the Christian community most wary of them.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash

If one pictures “radical Islam,” chances are the image resembles Osama bin Laden, Boko Haram in Nigeria, or the ISIS fighters of Iraq and Syria. And the connotation is that they are out to kill—or at least to turn the world into an Islamic caliphate.

Scripture People: Salafi Muslims in Evangelical Christians' America

Matthew D. Taylor (Author), Amir Hussain (Foreword)

Cambridge University Press

358 pages

They are known as Salafis: Muslims who bypass accrued tradition to imitate meticulously the example of Muhammad, his companions, and the first generation to follow them. After the death of the prophet in 632 A.D., the nascent faith’s collective zeal established a sharia-based global empire that did not end until the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Muslims who look like these jihadist images are found in every major American community.

Matthew Taylor counterintuitively argues that, at least in the United States, Salafis actually compare better with evangelicals—the religious group with the most unfavorable perception of Muslims in general.

Author of the forthcoming Scripture People: Salafi Muslims in Evangelical Christians’ America, Taylor argues that the Salafi impulse to return to the origins of Islam parallels the evangelical desire to imitate the early church. And both communities, as the title implies, center their approach on sacred text.

The question is: Do the two scriptures take them in radically different directions?

CT asked the Fuller Seminary graduate, now a mainline Protestant scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, to address the common concern about Salafi extremism and to advise evangelicals on how to pursue a path of possible friendship:

What makes a Muslim a Salafi?

Salafism has very deep roots in the Muslim tradition, and the term Salaf refers to the first generations of Muslims. The idea is to get back to the original authentic practices and theology of Islam, before the tradition became corrupted or diluted.

The Salafi approach involves a direct approach to texts, a deep interest in the Hadith—a secondary scripture in Islam that includes the sayings and actions of Muhammad and the early Muslim community—and a downplaying of the traditional schools of jurisprudence. This is why many Salafis will analogize and call themselves “the Protestant Reformers of Islam.” They see their project as similar to what Martin Luther and John Calvin did in the 16th century.

Can you tell a Salafi simply by their appearance?

It is easier in non-US contexts. A beard is a strong signal that a man is an observant Muslim. And you’ll find Salafi discourse—based on specific hadiths—as very focused around the length of the beard as more than can be grasped in the hand. Traditionally, they adopt distinctive modes of clothing such as the thobe, a long, flowing robe with pants that come up just above the ankles.

Salafi women almost always wear the hijab and others the niqab, which covers the face. But after 9-11, the American security state had an intense focus on Salafis which prompted a process in which many integrated into the American Muslim mainstream, downplaying distinctive Salafi attire and even avoiding always expressly calling themselves Salafis.

How do they justify downplaying their distinctives?

Salafis have a sophisticated understanding of the difference between original theology and original culture. They mimic the normative practices and beliefs of the early Islamic community, while recognizing that the early tradition was occurring in a particular context.

The Prophet Muhammad and his community inhabited a situation of predominant polytheism, among multiple monotheisms. This required great flexibility to operate as a new minority religious community.

Salafism is incredibly diverse—just as evangelicalism is incredibly diverse—and it adapts to fit the environment in which it operates. In the United States, in fact, they have become very open to interreligious dialogue and religious pluralism, all of which might sound contradictory if you associate Salafism with rigidity or fundamentalism.

But it reflects the flexibility built into Salafism, rather than being a violation.

How does this apply to the practice of jihad?

It would be a mistake to singularly characterize Salafis by this term. Islam emerged in a context of inter-tribal conflict, often very brutal and violent. The early Islamic tradition reflects substantially on questions of legitimate warfare, when it is acceptable, how it should be conducted ethically—just war theory, so to speak.

As a result, there is a diversity of perspectives within Salafism. Salafi-jihadis such as ISIS and al-Qaeda endorse jihad against their enemies. Political Salafis, who often are in conversation with groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, are invested in politically taking over Muslim-majority societies—sometimes through democracy, sometimes not.

And then there are the purist Salafis, who are not interested in jihad, nor interested in shaping the politics of the Muslim-majority world. They simply want to live piously and scripturally wherever they find themselves, bearing witness to their tradition. This is called da’wa, is similar to evangelism, and is very important to them.

The vast majority of Salafis in the US are in this third, purist strand.

But for the most part, their proselytism efforts are directed towards their fellow Muslims and showing how pure and correct their version of Islam is. That doesn’t mean that they don’t want to see people convert to Islam. They do. But the goal is not the takeover of society.

For most Salafis in the world, jihad is at best a tertiary concept.

In America, most would say that jihadism is bad Salafism. It misunderstands the situation that Muslims are in. It is not that jihad is never permissible, just as most Christians would not say that war is never permissible. In Europe and many parts of the Muslim world, Salafis feel like they are in a battle—either to try to take over society or to keep their distance from the general culture. But they look at America and say: We have freedom here.

Some Salafi teachers I profile in the book would even say that in the US, you can be more Salafi than anywhere else in the world, because you have freedom of religion.

But a key Salafi teaching is that Muslims not living under Islamic law should emigrate to where they can.

This is the concept of hijra, when Muhammad left a situation of persecution in Mecca to begin a Muslim-led community in Medina—the starting date for the Islamic calendar.

Theologically, conventional Salafis say this is the moment when the prophet gained his civic role, resulting in protection and the shaping of a Muslim society. It is a precedent that Muslims should imitate today—often interpreted as living in a Muslim land, or at least their own insular communities. And in the 1990s, this was a big topic of conversation in the Salafi community in the US.

But today, many American Salafis point out that Muhammad was not antagonistic to the pagan or Christian Meccans, and as long as he and his community existed in peace, they felt comfortable being there. And this becomes the model instead.

It is a direct refutation of this imperative of hijra, though living conservatively still requires community, attending mosque, and training in scripture. But there is no hostility to the broader culture.

But hostility is also a deep part of the tradition, that Muslims should not be friends with non-Muslims.

This is the concept of wala’ wa bara’—loyalty to your friends, and enmity to the enemies of God. Yes, that’s a Salafi idea or principle, but how do you apply it? Traditionally it means there must be no alliance or partnership that relies upon those who neglect or oppose the principles of Islam.

But most American Salafis say that since the culture is neutral towards us, only people who are overtly Islamophobic—who want to get rid of Muslims—are our enemies. Since most Americans are not that way, since most Christians are not that way, we don’t need to choose a default hostility. We just need to be thoughtful about cultivating friendships, as any evangelical would do.

How does their hermeneutic allow for such changes?

Generally speaking, it is through a commonsense appeal directly to the text of the Quran and Hadith. But just as with evangelicals, the methodological articulation of that hermeneutic can be rather thin.

They certainly do not rely upon centuries of legal reasoning, as would most traditional Muslims. The argument that contemporary American Salafi scholars are making is that they have been trained in hermeneutics and they live in this culture, so why should they look to other cultures, such as Saudi Arabia, for cues on how to live here?

I would argue their reasoning, while going back to scripture, is less about parsing the fine points between the experience of early Muslims in Mecca or Medina and more of a pragmatic presentation that argues this different, American way of being Salafi is also authentic.

How does this compare with traditional Islam?

The relationship between traditional and Salafi Islam is mirrored in the mainline Protestant and evangelical divide. I contrast the educational institutions that Salafis have built in America, like AlMaghrib Institute, with more traditional Islamic educational institutions like Zaytuna College.

Zaytuna follows more of a madrasa form of Muslim education, translating it into the American liberal arts model. They teach the various traditions of jurisprudence, concerned about raising up the next generation of formal religious leaders. It is a vanguard model of education: training scholars and leaders in the tradition who can then interpret the tradition for everyone else.

The Salafi ethos resembles evangelicals in the spirit of empowering ordinary people not only to study scripture but to equip them with tools to teach others. AlMaghrib Institute has taken more of a parachurch—or paramosque—approach to education.

It reminds me of when I was a student leader with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. I’m studying the Bible, and I’m teaching the Bible, but I’m not at all accredited by an institution. Evangelicalism and Salafism both have the egalitarian sensibility that scripture is not sectioned off as the realm of the elite.

What’s fascinating to me is that America has always been a laboratory of religious pluralism, where you have, originally, all these different forms of Protestantism—and then Judaism and Catholicism and other religions—that are learning to work without state establishment.

So it is not shocking to me that Salafism would not only flourish in this space, but evolve in ways that make it very distinct not only from traditional Islam but from the traditional forms of Salafism worldwide.

What are three tips for evangelicals to make friends with Salafis?

First, focus on your love for scripture. And then allow them to talk about theirs. Muslims across the board love talking about the impact of the Quran on their lives, and Salafis do so to the nth degree. Both communities treasure the text.

Second, look for surprising places of agreement. Similar to evangelicals, Salafis have anxieties about liberal or progressive tendencies in culture—while looking for spaces of collaboration. They practice their faith by serving the poor, and friendships can be cultivated around social justice and concern for society.

Third, don’t forget the simple dialogue of life. Everyone deals with the same stuff: bills to pay, food on the table, grocery shopping, and after-school activities. Many times, we think we have to center dialogue on the religious questions and make everything a conversation about faith. But that’s not how friendship works; friendship is life, together. The more we engage in small talk, the more trust can be built for more complicated religious conversations.

What do you recommend for sharing the gospel?

The best dialogue, the best conversations, even the best evangelism, begins in an authentic witness to what you love about the religious identity that you hold. And more than with any other community within Islam, evangelicals and Salafis can come together and say: We really love the text. Let’s study the text together.

You can even say you want them to follow Jesus. Just be ready for them to reply that they would like you to become a Muslim.

- More from Jayson Casper

News

US Slavic Churches Booming with Ukrainian War Refugees

Emily Belz

One generation of Soviet refugees is welcoming another.

Ukrainians meet for a Bible study in Chicago.

Courtesy Sergei Karpenko / Edited by CT

Sergei Karpenko’s Chicago church is now almost entirely made up of refugees from the Russian war against Ukraine.

Many of them aren’t from a church background, so the pastor of Bible Church of Ukraine–Chicago spends his mornings eating breakfast with the new arrivals and evenings hosting Bible studies in his apartment.

“It happens by the providence of God that I am here, and God sent new people from Ukraine,” Karpenko, who is Ukrainian himself, told CT. “I never prepared myself for such a ministry. We’re making mistakes and learning. Pray for us.”

Refugees come to his church by word of mouth or through refugee resettlement agencies like World Relief. Some Telegram channels for new Ukrainian arrivals advise them to find a local church for support. Karpenko’s church—which worships in Ukrainian, Russian, and English—tells freshly arrived Ukrainians that they can contact them if they need help, conversation, or friendship.

The US has welcomed about 300,000 Ukrainians since Russia invaded Ukraine. Millions more are refugees in Europe.

Slavic churches are key to helping the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals to the US. Many of these refugees are coming in through a special program (Uniting for Ukraine) that doesn’t go through the traditional refugee resettlement agencies, instead assigning arrivals to individual sponsors.

But in some cases, sponsors disappeared when Ukrainians arrived. Churches are trying to provide a steadier foundation for the new arrivals. For Ukrainian Christians already living in the US, it’s a helpful way to process the war.

“You can’t cry all the time and sit and watch the news 24/7,” said Chicago pastor Russ Drumi, whose church also has many war refugees. “Kids are growing. There are things to do.”

Ukrainian Christians in the US sponsoring new arrivals have helped with essentials, lent cars, hosted families for a couple of months, cosigned on apartments, helped find jobs, or shared information on various government services. A Ukrainian Assemblies of God church in New York City recently hosted a dinner of borscht and Ukrainian potato pancakes so new arrivals could gather to talk about their experiences in the country.

More than 4 in 10 Ukrainians have family separated by the war, so churches are often helping mothers with young children or other fragmented families.

Evangelicals from the former Soviet Union came to the US in droves after the passage of the Lautenberg Amendment in 1989, which gave asylum to those fleeing religious persecution. Those evangelicals—including current World Relief resettlement staffers—are now the welcome wagon for war refugees.

Churches reported to CT stories of refugees who are becoming new church leaders, and of new congregants who have never been to church or who only celebrated Orthodox Easter and Christmas before arriving in the US.

As a result of all of this, Slavic churches say that war refugees are dramatically growing their congregations. Cornerstone First Ukrainian Assembly of God in Manhattan’s East Village has seen about 30 percent growth from refugees, and one of the new arrivals is now a minister.

As churches expand, they are also wrestling with their cultural identity. While many Ukrainians speak Russian as a first language, some churches have now started Ukrainian language services to preserve the language and culture. Churches with Russian language services are also now seeing Russians arrive seeking asylum in the US and are working through sometimes painful tensions.

Chicago is the No. 2 resettlement area for Ukrainian refugees after New York City, which has the largest population of Ukrainians in the country, according to World Relief. Another resettlement hub is in Sacramento, California.

Tatyana Sigidina, World Relief’s liaison for Ukrainian refugees and Slavic churches in the Chicago area, arrived in the US in 1999 under the Lautenberg Amendment. She still has family in Ukraine, and in Ukrainian territory now occupied by Russia.

Sigidina has noticed many more Russians seeking asylum through the Mexican border, coinciding with a new conscription law requiring Russians to serve in the military. (The law took effect in April.)

Since the beginning of this year, about half of the asylum seekers Sigidina works with have been Russian, half Ukrainian. There isn’t a parole program for Russians like there is for Ukrainians, so pastors say the Russians arrive with less access to public resources.

Slavic churches largely are serving both populations.

“It doesn’t matter from which country, we are Christian, this is No. 1,” said Sigidina. “Of course, it’s hard to say that. If Russia had destroyed your motherland, of course you might not have enough love in your heart.”

Some churches have had problems between Russians and Ukrainians, but not “big problems,” she said. Russians seeking asylum in the US are generally not supportive of the war, she said.

Karpenko, the Ukrainian pastor in Chicago, said that the support for the war from many Russian evangelical churches—or even just their silence—makes relations difficult.

“If some people come from Russia we will accept them as well,” he said. “But there is some emotional problem. I don’t want to paint a pretty picture. Russia attacked Ukraine and killed Ukrainian people. People must emigrate because Russia attacked.”

Hope Seventh-day Adventist Church in Chicago, a 14-year-old congregation, was called Hope Russian Church before the war. Drumi told CT that people in the church didn’t support the war and felt uncomfortable with the name, so the church changed it simply to “Hope.”

But the congregation still has many Russian-speaking members, including Drumi, and both Ukrainian and Russian refugees.

The church’s size doubled with arriving refugees after the war broke out, and a few months ago congregants decided to plant a church. One church now conducts services in the Ukrainian language, and another, which Drumi leads, worships in Russian. Many Ukrainians who speak Russian go to that service, with Russians. The pastor of the Ukrainian congregation is a refugee.

Drumi says the plant wasn’t because of war-torn relationships between Russians and Ukrainians, but to accommodate growth and language needs.

“Sometimes on the personal level it could get tense,” between Russians and Ukrainians, he said. “It’s painful, it’s hard, but still we are Christians. Our homeland is heaven, the kingdom of God.”

The Ukrainian and Russian congregations have done joint worship services together when worship space for two services wasn’t available, and they do fellowship meals. There’s a service at night for young people that includes congregants from the Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking churches. Slavic churches are working through an “identity evolution,” Drumi said.

At Cornerstone Church in New York City, the English-speaking pastor for youth, Paul Oliferchik, stepped aside to have a refugee who was fluent in Ukrainian step in—“a capable, gifted, and godly leader,” he said. The refugee population had grown so much in the church that the church needed a Ukrainian speaking minister, he said.

Most of the refugees at the church are Ukrainian, Oliferchik said, but there are some Russians too who took the risky route through the southern border. One is a family with a toddler.

For those new Ukrainian church leaders arriving, like the pastor at his church, Oliferchik dreams that the scattering of Ukrainian Christians could possibly “re-evangelize the West.”

Karpenko in Chicago also serves a church and seminary in Ukraine; he teaches and preaches over Zoom now. He thinks about his Chicago church made up entirely of refugees like Israel in exile in Babylon.

“God gave them a command to go live and praise the Lord. Certain things we cannot change. What can we do? We just pray,” he said. “Our hope is in Jesus Christ. He knows his sovereign will. He knows why, and what he wants to achieve.”

- More from Emily Belz

Theology

Russell Moore: I Already Miss Tim Keller’s Wise Voice

Russell Moore

The late pastor theologian gave strong counsel to me and so many others in ministry.

Tim Keller

Courtesy of Redeemer City to City / Photo by Rachel Martin / Edits by Christianity Today

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

“Gandalf isn’t supposed to die.”

That text appeared on my phone yesterday from a New York City pastor who worked closely with Tim Keller. It made me smile and cry at the same time. So many of us called Tim “Gandalf,” in part as a tribute to his frequent J. R. R. Tolkien references, but also because he fit the image of the sage wizard guiding us hapless hobbits out of harm’s way.

In the opening chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien writes that Gandalf’s “fame in the Shire was due mainly to his skill with fires, smokes, and lights. His real business was far more difficult and dangerous, but the Shire-folk knew nothing about it.”

By any measure, Tim was an impressive figure—the most significant American evangelical apologist and evangelist since Billy Graham. Most people think immediately of his skill in the areas of preaching, cultural analysis, church-planting strategy, and apologetics. All of that is true. But Tim’s real business went beyond his skills and gifts. He was smart, yes, but what made him unique wasn’t intellect but wisdom.

“Well, wait, let’s think about this for a minute, Russell.”

Those words from Tim kept me from more dumb decisions than I can recount. They prefaced the counsel from Tim that kept me in my position as president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention. In the wake of my refusal to support Donald Trump as president, I was facing significant backlash.

“Let’s list all the people trying to drive me out that are under the age of forty,” I said. “None. I can’t think of one. As a matter of fact, I’m having trouble thinking of more than four or five that are under the age of seventy.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Tim said. “Don’t do something stupid.”

Four years later, after consulting scores of friends and counselors about whether to leave the ERLC for a new field of ministry, Tim was the one who convinced me to go. I told him the decision was really hard to make, and he said, “You’ve already made the decision. You know what to do. Your mind is just fighting what your soul already knows.”

When I protested that I didn’t want to make a rash decision I might later regret, Tim said, “Honestly, Russell, of all of the possible responses from anywhere in the world, do you really think even one of them will be ‘Why so soon?’”

I laughed—and the decision was made. With just the right joke, Gandalf helped my mind and soul align.

Untold numbers of people have similar stories. Tim would call to encourage us, even while he was undergoing chemotherapy treatments. He sent his last text to me from a hospital room while he was nearing death. He wanted to check on a prayer request I had given to our Wednesday night book club the week before.

Tim was able to care for so many of us in times of trial because he didn’t tell us what we wanted to hear, and we knew that he knew what he was talking about. His wisdom came from decades spent in the presence of Christ. He cultivated closeness with the Spirit through the Word, and as a result, he, like Jesus, so often “did not need any testimony about mankind, for he knew what was in each person” (John 2:25).

Over the past several years, Tim and I were often in conversation with unbelievers—some curious and irenic about faith, others dismissive and hostile. I remember stifling laughter when an atheist whom Tim loved and respected told a group of us that the need for transcendence could now be met with psychedelic mushrooms. I watched Tim’s eyebrow go up. I felt like White House chief of staff Leo McGarry on The West Wing when he saw President Jed Bartlet at a press conference put his hand in his pocket, smile, and look away.

Watch this, I said to myself.

In every one of those interactions, I never once saw Tim humiliate someone with arguments, even though he could easily have done so.

“Well, let’s think about this for a minute,” he said to the atheist arguing that morality could be explained by evolutionary process alone. Tim explored this man’s objections to human slavery, imagining them in the context of a cosmos without any transcendent moral order. In so doing, he affirmed the rightness of the man’s moral intuitions while simultaneously showing how his theory couldn’t bear the weight of those same intuitions. Once again, he showed where the mind and the soul (or the mind and the conscience) were at odds and pointed to a better way.

At the end of the conversation, there was no question that Tim understood the argument and had responded with devastating clarity. But we also knew that his talk wouldn’t end up as a YouTube video titled “Watch Tim Keller Own the Atheist.” He really loved the man and engaged him without passive retreat or intellectual intimidation.

When I invited Tim to guest-speak in the Institute of Politics class I taught at the University of Chicago, most of the students were disconnected from people of faith and didn’t know who he was. David Axelrod, the director of the program at the time, said, “These kids have highly tuned B.S. detectors, and it’s almost like you could hear the shields coming down three minutes after he started talking.”

Many of them realized, Wait, this pastor is as smart as or even smarter than we are, and he’s not the least bit embarrassed about Christian orthodoxy and biblical authority.

That wisdom freed him from personal ego too. Sometimes he would call and say something along the lines of “Well, I just wanted to check in on the other inerrantist, complementarian, Marxist social justice warrior I’m seeing on YouTube.” Then he would reference a video from the “TheoBros for Confederate Blood and Rage” or whatever.

“I wouldn’t in a thousand years even know about that video,” I said. “Why on earth do you?” He was aware of it because he had compassion on his critics—and not just the rational, good-faith ones. With astounding accuracy, he could see the pain they were experiencing.

“A lot of people are hurting and don’t feel significant,” he said. “They try to find significance by attacking people they think others will find significant.” When he saw those critics and others coming after him, he didn’t feel attacked. He saw it as a prayer request and prayed accordingly.

“I wish I were that magnanimous,” I said in response to the TheoBros video. “But I don’t look at those things because I would want to call down fire from heaven.”

He responded with a smile, “Well, I guess we all have a little theobro side to us, don’t we?” Ouch.

Tim’s wisdom wasn’t just about treating people well. He would almost assign the task of tracking people who needed support, even before they knew they needed it. For example, when Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren started writing a weekly column for the New York Times, he said, “She’s going to be great; she’s such a good writer. In that venue, though, no matter what she writes, she’ll probably get a lot of criticism. She can handle it, but it’s never fun. We need to encourage her when that happens.”

In those and other similar moments, he showed more than intellect. He exhibited wisdom through compassion, maturity, grounding, solidarity, and good intuition.

The pastor who texted me “Gandalf is not supposed to die” knew Tim wouldn’t live forever. By that he meant he has trouble imagining a world without Tim’s voice of calm, steady, joyous counsel.

Gandalf once said to Frodo, “Good-bye now! Take care of yourself! Look out for me, especially at unlikely times!”

The next time we see Tim Keller will be at the consummation of all things in Christ. On that day, Tim won’t have to talk any of us out of stupid decisions. He won’t have to give any of us a reason for God. But I like to think he’ll say to C. S. Lewis or Herman Bavinck or one of the countless skeptics he led to Christ, “Well, wait. Let’s think about this for a minute.”

And like many times this side of the Shire, we’ll see that Gandalf can indeed die for a little while, but the gospel he carried stands forever.

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

Theology

Tim Keller Changed Church Planting, from City to City

Compiled by Isabel Ong

From Beirut to Barcelona, pastors reflect on his influence.

Tim Keller

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash / Photo of Keller by Nathan Troester / Courtesy of Redeemer City to City

“Christians are called to be an alternate city within every earthly city,” Tim Keller wrote for CT in 2006. “We must live in the city to serve all the peoples in it, not just our own tribe. We must lose our power to find our (true) power.”

Keller, who died on Friday, May 19, at age 72, launched nonprofit organization Redeemer City to City to train and develop leaders for gospel-led movements in urban settings. His decades-long experience in this field stemmed from establishing Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, a so-called “spiritual desert” in New York City. When the church was founded in 1989, there were only a handful of evangelical churches in the area. Twenty years later, the number of evangelical churches there had swelled to 197.

Among Keller’s many teachings on urban church planting is the notion of a “whole city tipping point,” which occurs when 10 to 20 percent of the population become Jesus-followers and start making visible, tangible impact on the city’s culture. Such a “city-wide gospel movement” is organic, energetic, and Spirit-led, he emphasized.

“Tim Keller taught us that to be a church that is in, for, and with the city, we need to be a present church, a church that serves its neighbors and neighborhood, and a church that’s willing to dialogue with the city and be attentive to its faults, illnesses, needs, and demands. Only then can we be Light for the city,” said Brazilian pastor Digo Karagulian, whose church ministers daily to people living in the Pilar favela (Portuguese for “slum”) next door.

CT interviewed church planters in Barcelona, Beirut, Chennai, Hanoi, Melbourne, Quezon City, Recife, Shanghai, and Vienna about their respective city’s distinctive charms and challenges and how they are contextualizing the gospel there, all with this question in mind: To what extent has Keller’s approach to church planting influenced their ministry?

MIDDLE EAST

Marwan Aboul-Zelof in Beirut, Lebanon

Pastor of City Bible Church
The Reformed-Baptist church has a 70-strong congregation and holds services in English.
Sixty percent are locals and the rest of the congregation includes people from every continent.

Beirut is a beautiful and cosmopolitan city with an incredibly rich history. It’s much smaller than New York City, but has twice the population density. Tim Keller never visited the Middle East, although we had hoped that he would come. But he had a great impact on us through his writings, sermons, and social media posts.

Beirut, and our church, has gone through significant challenges in the past few years: revolution; the pandemic; economic and government collapse; and the 2020 explosion. Yet, the Lord remains faithful and gracious to us.

I remember being on a call with Tim, who talked about historical moves of God and how there was often a major crisis that served as a catalyst for those moments. He told me that Lebanon’s multiple major crises may develop greater openness to the gospel, acknowledged the difficulties I face as a church planter here, and encouraged me to remain faithful.

SOUTH AMERICA

Digo Karagulian in Recife, Brazil

Pastor of A Ponte (The Bridge) Church, established in 2014
The Reformed Christian church is in two neighborhoods: Recife Antigo (an artsy, historical area where Carnival is held) and Boa Viagem (one of the richest, densest regions in the city).

Recife is one of the most populous cities in Brazil with around 1.6 million inhabitants. It’s a city that’s rich in music, dance, literature, and craftsmanship.

Keller’s concept of embellishing culture refers to using the wealth of art, music, and expressive brands in a city to spread God's love in a more accessible and strategic way. Seeing culture in a positive way is being salt in culture: We prevent it from putrefying and transform it into a tool that generates life rather than death.

Recife’s main cultural power is the Carnival, which has a lot of artistic richness but also carries certain distortions with it. The city’s cultural idols are drunkenness, debauchery, lust, and a fascination with aesthetics and self-image. During Carnival, we hold an annual event, “A Praça” (The Square), featuring lectures on art and spirituality, dialogues with local artists, exhibitions, musical performances, and other experiences as a way of bringing people from the neighborhood into our church and have a genuine encounter with Jesus.

A common mistake in many churches in my city and country is wanting to replicate what North Americans do. This “replica” can introduce a cool aesthetic, liturgy, and music, but it does not impact or dialogue with the city and becomes a “strange body” within the city. Keller’s writings inspired us to be a church that the city must have, a church that steps on the city’s ground and seeks to connect with it.

ASIA

Christopher P. David in Chennai, India

Pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church, part of the conservative Presbyterian Church in India
The church plant is less than a year old and has an average Sunday attendance of 35 people.

Chennai is a melting pot of Western postmodern and traditional Indian culture. It’s home to nearly 12 million people and is very different from New York as it is more conservative and Hinduism pervades its culture. However, like New York, people are highly aspirational and often find their value and identity in education, career, and wealth.

The biggest challenges for church planting here have been the popularity of the prosperity gospel, the growing influence of secularism, and the entrenched Hindu norms found in traditional Indian culture.

Keller’s emphasis on community is important in Chennai, where many come from dysfunctional families and struggle to navigate the shame-honor paradigm. To these people, the message of God’s full acceptance and authentic love in the gospel is revolutionary.

A key lesson I learned from Keller is the importance of recruiting a launch team of servant leaders rooted in the gospel and investing in them. An involved laity is essential for a healthy church, and the men and women on this team meet weekly to pray and plan.

Keller's brand of contextualization, which seeks a high degree of cultural relevance, is functional in a Western secular world that still incorporates many of its former Christian elements. However, such contextualization is difficult in a thoroughly pagan culture such as India, where the Christian faith stands utterly alienated and is antithetical at nearly every point. Thus, to speak of a “third way” becomes nearly impossible. While Keller has certainly influenced our church planting approach, much of our ministry philosophy is old-school Reformed practice focused on the preached Word and Sacraments.

John Hu in Shanghai, China (for security reasons, he uses a pseudonym)

Pastor of a Reformed church planted in the midst of the pandemic
In less than four years, the church has opened three sites.
Around 260 congregants, mostly made up of young, middle-class professionals, attend weekly services.

Shanghai has a similar density to New York City, although we have a larger population, a smaller percentage of Christians, and a more hostile environment to the faith.

I do ministry in the city not because it is effective, but because it is biblical. After the two-month COVID-19 lockdown last year, we encouraged church members to reflect on their relationship with Shanghai: Were they looking for ways out of a city that’s increasingly unfriendly and struggling economically? Or could they be a blessing to the city by staying and living as people who reflect the incarnate Christ and walk in his ways?

Understanding Keller’s concept of theological vision (DNA) prevented me from copying successful church planting models. Keller also encouraged me to seek the peace and prosperity of the city (Jer. 29:7) and helped me reconcile the huge tension I faced between my businessman background and my experience in a fundamentalist church.

Employing reason and debating is usually how we communicate in the business world. But in the fundamentalist church, we often hear: “This is what the Bible teaches, and we should follow it.” Reason for God opened my eyes as to how we can reason with, debate, and communicate the gospel to non-Christians and seeker friends.

Joseph Bonifacio in Quezon City, the Philippines

Pastor of No Other Name, a non-denominational church plant
Its focus is on reaching young people online and offline with the aim to develop future leaders on campuses.

Quezon City is one of the most densely populated cities in the Philippines. It is a cultural, business, and educational center for our country. It’s easy to see the crowds, traffic jams, pollution, and the effects of sin. But it’s also home to 12 million people who need to hear the gospel.

Here, one feels the intersection of different streams of thought from around the world. The religious and conservative mindsets clash with the rise of a generation bent on questioning and challenging institutions.

Tim Keller’s ministry and writing showed me a way to thread a “gospel path” between these two perspectives. It helped me equip young ministers in a way that was both faithful and engaging, less ideological, and more Christlike. Keller’s description of the gospel as a third way didn’t just show that unrestrained giving in to sin was wrong—so too were religious attempts to curb sin through coercion.

The Prodigal God also helped me minister to many lost younger sons and older sons who stayed away from faith and church because they thought they knew what it had to say. Hearing about a Father who just wanted them back and the Son who made the way was refreshing and compelling to them. But it was most helpful with reaching older sons: high-performing, readily compliant, and burned-out people who are active and serving in church but far from the Father. Through the book, I was equipped to recognize “older son lostness” and minister to them with gentleness.

Jacob Bloemberg in Hanoi, Vietnam

Lead pastor of Hanoi International Fellowship, a non-denominational church founded in 1995
Six-hundred believers—comprising locals and expats from countries like the Philippines, South Korea, and Nigeria—attend services in two locations.

As the “rising dragon” of Asia, Vietnam’s 1,000-year-old capital city, Hanoi, has transformed itself from a quaint historic relic to a bustling mega-city in just three decades.

Keller was right in saying, “It takes a movement to reach a city.” Protestant evangelical Christians here comprise 0.1 percent of the population. Despite the church’s growth since my arrival in 1997, it has only kept on par with the city’s population growth, which is estimated at 10 million citizens today.

For effective church planting in Vietnam’s urban context, the proclamation and demonstration of God’s love must go hand-in-hand, as Keller asserted. My church initiated the Love Hanoi movement in 2012; local churches led community service projects with over 3,600 participants. We co-organized a festival in 2017 that attracted more than 30,000 people from all over North Vietnam. Over 4,500 responded to the gospel message.

Western approaches to urban ministry, however, need to be contextualized for Vietnam’s urban context. My book, Love [Your City]: 5 Steps to Citywide Movements, talks about the importance of posture. Having an open, warm, and welcoming posture to the police and government has been the game-changer for our church. The positive relations we’ve established with them has allowed us to be part of major activities and events in Hanoi.

OCEANIA

Stephen Tan in Melbourne, Australia

Pastor of Regeneration Church, which is part of the Baptist Union of Victoria
Located next to Monash, Australia’s largest university
Its two congregations, of around 100 people each, are predominantly highly educated young adults from culturally diverse backgrounds.

Melbourne is the coffee and cultural capital of Australia, projected to overtake Sydney as Australia’s most populous city by 2031. The city is home to multitudes of international students and migrant workers, largely from Asia. It’s also the most progressive and secular city in Australia. From climate change to same-sex marriage, refugees, and racial justice, Melbournian views are more left-leaning than the rest of Australia. It’s not the easiest place to plant a church.

Part of me wondered why any Australians would listen to a Malaysian pastor. Keller’s Center Church and City to City’s “Incubator” training gave me confidence that I could be a pastor, preacher, and church planter to both secular Aussies and conservative Asian migrants.

Keller’s focus on idolatry seems to make emotional and cultural sense to many people today. As he put it: “An idol is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living.”

One way I’ve contextualized the gospel to both groups of people in the same sermon is to compare and contrast their idolatries. International students idolize academic success and the approval of their parents, but this leaves them feeling like they are never good enough. The gospel says that God approves of them not because of their success but because of Christ’s success on their behalf. Secular Aussies idolize the freedom to pursue their dreams, but this leaves them enslaved as they find that the dream is unattainable and they are not as free as they imagined. The gospel says that true freedom is found in the right constraints.

EUROPE

Christian Hofreiter in Vienna, Austria

Pastor of CityKirche, a German-speaking Anglican church plant, with an average Sunday attendance of 70 to 100 adults and over a dozen children
Congregants are mostly professionals or students between 20 and 55 years old
They focus on reaching people who have existential and intellectual reservations about the Christian faith.

Vienna is old Europe at its most glorious and regularly tops global “most livable city” surveys. It has a population of roughly two million (a quarter of Austria’s population), world-class art, splendid architecture, and plentiful green spaces.

Compared to New York, Vienna is much smaller and less multicultural. Life here moves at a slower pace, housing is more affordable, and the state provides more services. The city is largely post-Christian, which in Vienna mostly means post-Catholic. Christianity is viewed as irrelevant and is increasingly seen as stifling personal development and cultural diversity.

Without Keller’s example of winsome, culturally intelligent, and biblically orthodox ministry, I would not have planted CityKirche at all. His intentional, balanced, and biblical approach to contextualization has been an immensely helpful and fruitful framework. His readiness to listen carefully to questions and objections from those on the fringes or outside the church, to observe and analyze culture, and to do so with obvious respect for those with whom he disagrees, is inspiring.

On the first Sunday of each month, we forgo liturgy, prayers, and Bible readings. Instead, we hold Big Questions Sunday, in which we explore topics from a Christian point of view, such as: What does it mean to be human in an age of cyborgs and AI? What is the connection between religion and violence?

Half of the service is given to audience Q and A and interspersed musical performances. This dialogical format has proven to be very attractive to people on the fringes or outside the church. Members of the audience can raise any question or objection they wish, and we seek to give an honest, respectful answer.

Xavier Memba in Barcelona, Spain

Co-founder of Ciutat Nova church, a non-denominational church established in 2011
Services are held in Catalan.
The congregation has 60 people from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Barcelona is similar in density to Manhattan, with a rich history, stunning architecture, exquisite cuisine, bustling nightlife, and high-level sports. Ciutat Nova is a church that mirrors Barcelona's diversity, cosmopolitanism, modernity, and cultural and historical legacy.

Training with Tim Keller as part of the Redeemer Church Planting Fellows Program in 2007 offered me a new perspective on the church in the modern world and how it must adapt to its cultural and urban context without forgetting the gospel message. This transformed my vision of the church as a dynamic entity that constantly interacts with its surroundings, inspiring the creation of Ciutat Nova. I came to understand more deeply that the church not only serves its members but also plays a crucial role in social transformation and community well-being.

Rather than imposing a specific method, Keller emphasized the gospel's essential importance in the believer's life, the church's structure, and in any ministry or movement that the church might promote in a particular context.

However, the European context—and Southern Europe particularly—requires the church planting process to be constantly reviewed as these efforts tend to be quicker in the United States or Anglo-Saxon countries. Many Europe-based church planters can't neglect administrative or logistical tasks to focus solely on strategic aspects like mission, vision, community, and proclamation.

Additional reporting by Jayson Casper and Surinder Kaur

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MIDDLE EAST

Marwan Aboul-Zelof in Beirut, Lebanon

SOUTH AMERICA

Digo Karagulian in Recife, Brazil

ASIA

Christopher P. David in Chennai, India

John Hu in Shanghai, China (for security reasons, he uses a pseudonym)

Joseph Bonifacio in Quezon City, the Philippines

Jacob Bloemberg in Hanoi, Vietnam

OCEANIA

Stephen Tan in Melbourne, Australia

EUROPE

Christian Hofreiter in Vienna, Austria

Xavier Memba in Barcelona, Spain

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