War Drove Her Out. Now She’s Planting a Church.

Displaced from Ukraine, a young immigrant found safety—and mission—in small-town Minnesota.

The Gidenko Family / Getty / Edits by CT

The window in Yevheniia Poliakova’s apartment in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, almost shattered when military aircraft rocketed through the city. Debris was falling in nearby fields—shredded remnants of drones and missiles.

“You can hear the booms,” Poliakova—who goes by Zhenya—recalled of that winter in Ukraine. “I can’t really see. I can just hear. It was very loud at night. I just remember it was sometime in the morning when a girl who lived in a different room came in and said, ‘The war started.’”

For weeks prior, Zhenya had seen the bustle of Vinnytsia morph into mild panic at the threat of Russian invasion. People hustled luggage to bus stops and train stations until, on February 24, 2022, “everything stopped,” she said. “Every store closed. Everything was alive, but not this day.”

Before long, endless sirens pierced her apartment complex. “And you just saw on social media, in some chats,” she told me: “It’s not a game. It’s real. You don’t know if the Russian soldiers are coming to your city. Maybe the next day they will come.”

Just 23 years old at the time, Zhenya traversed the globe in search of safe harbor, carpooling with other women and children to Western Ukraine, then France and Spain. When she finally arrived in America after a legal pathway for people fleeing Ukraine was cleared that April, she carried only what could fit in her backpack: a water bottle, a few pairs of socks, and a Bible.

Born in Zhmerynka, Ukraine, Zhenya did not hail from a Christian family. Her mother was divorced three times and struggled with alcohol abuse. “I asked my mother, too, if she loves me,” Zhenya recalled, “and she would say, ‘Go somewhere else.’” Somehow still, “I always knew there is a God somewhere, and I had a trust that when I grow up, I will be happy—I will have a good marriage, a good husband, and everything will be good, so it’s okay to have a worse life right now.”

Zhenya found reason to believe while working for a coffee shop in Vinnytsia before the war. She didn’t realize it at first, but the shop doubled as a coworking space and covert church. Hooked on the shop’s uplifting—and noticeably alcohol-free—atmosphere, she was surprised when the owner, who was also the pastor, urged her to avoid calling the space a church. He did it, she said, “because we had a bad culture in Ukraine,” and some congregations outside the Orthodox church worried about being branded extremists.

Poliakova had dabbled in Buddhism, but she couldn’t stay away from the church after encountering its worship. “I never saw or heard singing about this very interesting love,” she recalled. “Like, someone loves you? And this really touched my heart. It was about God’s love. I realized God is really alive.” Zhenya became a Christian, was baptized, and dived deeper into the Word. She came to trust that God would provide her with a family of her own.

And a family showed up. They were missionaries, originally from Ukraine but more recently from Minnesota. They’d come to Vinnytsia to foster church growth, but after the war started, they shifted from cultivating Bible studies to helping Ukrainians escape bloodshed. Zhenya was among the Ukrainians they helped, and it was to their home in Minnesota—to work as a live-in nanny—that she went when she arrived in America with her backpack.

“There was only one family who cared about me when the war started,” she told me. “I didn’t know what I needed to do. I was in a panic. I called my mother to ask her, ‘Can I come home?’ And she just screamed at me. She was very angry. She wanted me to stay where I was. And she doesn’t remember this call, so I now understand that it was from God.”

Zhenya also credits God with the love story that followed. After her arrival in the States, Zhenya attended a program at Bible Mission International, a Minnesota school and ministry serving primarily Eastern European immigrants. She recruited volunteers to stuff Christmas envelopes at the ministry, and one of them happened to be Tim Gidenko, a young man who had previously spent two years working at Bible Mission.

“When he came into the room,” Zhenya recalled, “I heard a voice from God say, ‘He is your husband.’ And I don’t even look at him! I was like, ‘Why God? No, please, I don’t understand.’ But I was sure that’s from God. I was really close to God, because I was broken with a lot of stuff.”

Tim was finishing college to become an engineer, and he was no stranger to God working across borders. His parents had left Ukraine for America in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and raised him in a Slavic Baptist church in Erie, Pennsylvania, where his father, uncle, and grandfather all held the pulpit. It wasn’t long before he too came to see marriage to Zhenya as God’s will for them. After just two months of dating, they were engaged, then married a few months after that, in March of 2023.

The Gidenkos—who now have a son, Yonathan, and a daughter on the way—could have sought an established church for their first years as a family. Instead, they decided to plant a church in Red Wing, a Minnesota river town of roughly 16,000, south of the Twin Cities. They partnered with a pastor named Willie Grimm to build a community of demanding discipleship.

“Here in Red Wing, a woman from our core group met some people from her neighborhood and was talking about Jesus, and they said, ‘We never heard about Jesus,’” she continued. “How is it possible?”

The new church is called Harbor Point, and so far, it’s staying small. That’s not a bad thing, Zhenya said, because it forces intentionality, deep relationships, and immediate gospel-sharing rather than the work of navigating the established infrastructure of larger congregations.

This path is a natural extension of her own story, she said: “I want to share about Jesus. So yes, I have stories from my childhood—my alcoholic mother, bad relationships, immigration, a broken heart. But no matter what my experience, the only thing that matters is sharing the gospel. So what I want to talk about is Jesus, just like someone talked to me.”

This isn’t a glamorous push for more attention in an age of digitized influence. It’s a prioritization of neighborhood prayer walks, worship nights in quiet farmland chapels, opportunities to mow the unkempt lawn of a single mother on the “wrong side” of town.

“Our hope,” Tim said, “is not to bring people to us but to bring people back to God.”

Zhenya has moved across nations—or, rather, been moved, as she tells it—sometimes by blaring sirens, or the animosity of a distant mother, or the fear of oncoming soldiers, or the tugs of a missionary family. But above all, she’s been moved by a God who loves and pursues her.

“I think maybe, in the beginning, it was what I was chosen for,” she said of the church plant. “I remember I once wanted to go to some village in Ukraine where nobody had heard about God. Maybe it was something God put in my mind for this experience, for what I have right now.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story gave the incorrect date for the Gidenkos’ wedding.

- More from Cody Benjamin

Ideas

Low-Tech Parenting Must Be a Big Tent

Brad East

Contributor

If we want to parent wisely in a digital age, we must pair courage with grace—not judgmentalism.

Unsplash / Edits by CT

Last year, I was sitting at a conference with folks I had “known” for a while online but had just met for the first time in person. In a sense, we were already acquainted—I read their writing, they read mine—and that’s what got me into trouble.

All in our 30s or 40s, as parents of teens down to babies, we were talking about digital technology. Everyone knew where I stand on tech in general and kids in particular: Keep the former away from the latter at all costs. Wherever I go, I’m the flag-waving Luddite. I want screen-free churches and youth ministries without social media and parents without phones in their hands and children with books in their hands—preferably outdoors.

Here was my misstep. On the topic of kids and tech, I volunteered a middle way on which my wife and I had ventured. Since we were unwilling to let our middle schoolers have smartphones, we had agreed to buy them an iPad. Before I’d even explained my reasoning, my newfound friends’ jaws were on the floor.

Are you serious? they asked. Yes, I replied—but now uncertain of myself. They stared at me. I stared back. Suddenly I wondered whether I was in enemy territory.

Any parent is bound to feel inadequate from time to time, fearing judgment from peers. In this case, the judgment wasn’t hidden. These fellow believers had counted me an ally in the fight. Now they saw my true colors. I was a turncoat: I talk a big talk in my writing but, they learned, I fail to walk the walk. Scandal!

To be sure, once the dust settled from their shock, they heard me out and listened with kindness. I explained our circumstances and reasoning: Our kids go to public school. Most of their friends have smartphones, and they have homework assigned and submitted online. We figured a stripped-down tablet—with just a handful of apps and tons of restrictions, fitted for music, homework, and texting their friends—was a reasonable compromise.

In a perfect world, perhaps, they would attend a classical Christian academy without screens, worship at a church without screens, live in a neighborhood devoid of screens, and—well, you get the picture. That’s not their world, nor ours, so we drew some hard lines while meeting our teens in the middle. At their age I “texted” friends via AOL Instant Messenger on a desktop computer. That is more or less how it’s worked out in their case, and my wife and I have been pleasantly surprised by the results.

The point isn’t that this was the “right” decision. I’m not defensive about it (though I admit to some defensiveness when I was put on the spot!), nor do I consider it some abstract ideal for others to follow. I consider it instead the best decision we could come up with in our situation—an attempt at wisdom in the face of particular details unique to us. An attempt, in other words, at prudence: bringing principles to bear on concrete circumstances that require practical judgment. Others may differ; in fact, they do.

This experience taught me a lesson. In the face of the extraordinary challenges presented to parents and Christians by digital technology, it seems to me that we need two things above all.

First, we need courage and boldness in confronting these challenges head on, especially on the part of institutions and leaders from the top down.

Second, and just as important, we need grace. Grace for others, grace for our children, grace for ourselves. We need heaps of grace, grace upon grace, because we live in unprecedented times and most of us, most of the time, are sincerely trying to do what we think is best—or, failing that, what we feel capable of at any given moment.

To be clear, I don’t have in mind the weak tolerance of “live and let live.” We should be willing and eager to have hard conversations about these things. A policy of silence is no help to anyone.

In a recent essay, the Catholic journalist Matthew Walther has written with eloquence and compassion about what he calls “technological poverty.” He means families, single parents, and young children whose every waking moment is utterly dominated by the reign of the screen and who in that sense have been robbed of reality: sunshine and birdsong, gardens and tree-climbing, scuffed knees, unmonitored walks, neighborhood bike rides, tinkering in a garage, getting lost in a novel.

Those of us who have succeeded, at least to some extent, in resisting or escaping this poverty are often at a loss as to how to help others. But it’s arguably the greatest need of our time.

So no, let’s not merely live and let live. Instead, let’s extend generosity to friends, family, and neighbors who come to different decisions than we do. Let’s be tech fallibilists, allowing for the possibility that our own approach might be wrong or, at a minimum, not the universal answer for all people without exception. And even if we have good reason to believe that our policy is best—or better than another’s—that doesn’t release us from the obligation to continue seeing, treating, and speaking of others with charity, warmth, mercy, and grace.

Parental decisions about technology today are reminiscent of other thorny intra-Christian debates. Consider schooling. “Real” Christians, “serious” Christians, Christians who care about their children’s formation, avoid public school by opting for private school. Not to be outdone, other parents come to see that even private school is a half measure. It’s homeschool or bust.

The same kind of dynamic happens with entertainment. What do you let your children watch or listen to? At what age? Why? It turns out there’s always someone more restrictive than you and someone less restrictive than you. You cannot believe the one is so conservative, even as you cannot imagine being so liberal as the other. Thankfully, like Goldilocks, your position is just right.

My purpose in poking fun at these perspectives is not to expose the one final and correct answer. That would undermine everything I’m trying to say. On the contrary, I want us to see that there is no such thing. There are better and worse answers, there are wise and unwise answers, there are situation-specific answers—but there is no one-size-fits-all answer. And even if there were, the temptation to hypocrisy and self-righteousness is so pronounced that we would need a remedy for our inflated egos and parental insecurities irrespective of our objective rightness.

The same goes for technology. Call it “tech grace”—a refusal to sit on our digital high horse and look down our nose at anyone who differs from us. It doesn’t matter if the temptation is to sit in judgment on those who are less restrictive (“We let our middle schooler have a phone, but they let theirs download Instagram”) or more restrictive (“We don’t have video games, but can you believe the Joneses don’t even have a television in their house?”).

The thing to avoid is judgmentalism, the kind of self-appointed judgement that presumes to sit in the Lord’s place and condemn with authority. To do this without sin is impossible, because it is both hypocritical and self-righteous. In the end, it’s little more than moralizing gossip. As Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get” (Matt. 7:1–2, RSV).

There are other kinds of judgment, though. When we exercise a considered judgment, we reach conclusions or form convictions carefully, based on reasons, arguments, and discernment. We may not and must not leave behind this kind of judgment, and I am nothing if not full of tech judgments in this sense: Social media is bad for teens. Smartphones are bad for literacy. Screens are bad for attention.

I take these judgments not only to be true but to be demonstrably true. I regularly make them in print, and I am always happy to share them with people who are open to hearing about them. I’m an evangelist of sorts, and I’m not ashamed to make the case in public.

The trick, then, is to exercise considered judgment without judgmentalism. Happily, this is part and parcel of the Christian life more broadly. I believe, as all Christians do, that the gospel is true and urgent news for all people, whether or not they know it and whether or not they share my convictions. But I don’t believe this because of some merit or goodness in me. I believe it because I have come to see that I am a sinner in need. I therefore want all my fellow sinners to receive this same gift—to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8).

Individually, then, we can and should strike a balance with digital technology. The real burden falls on institutions and those in positions of authority and influence to exercise costly leadership. Their decisions end up defining shared norms and practices within our communities. More than ordinary individuals, leaders can and must take bold actions, defend strong stances, and set firm policies without hypocrisy or condemnation. Far from burdening the weak, this boldness is a gift that facilitates wise habits and offers freedom from compulsions that otherwise might feel undeniable.

Andy Crouch calls his approach to digital devices “tech-wise.” Jay Kim calls it “analog.” Clare Morell calls it “the tech exit.” Whatever we label it, the coalition has to be a big tent. It can’t just be the elite few, the tech-light elect. It has to include as many as will fit—which is to say as many as are seeking to live wisely in a digital age and are willing to sacrifice to do it.

If we’re going to have any success, if we’re going to expand rather than shrink, we’re going to have to live with one another. And the only way to do that is with grace.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.

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Ideas

Friction-Maxxing Higher Ed

Kristin VanEyk and Elisabeth E. Lefebvre

Christian colleges can offer complexity and real challenges instead of pat answers and easy degrees.

Bethel University in Minnesota.

WikiMedia Commons

Shortly after joining the faculty at Hope College, I (Kristin) received an email from a student’s parents requesting a meeting. Instead of meeting with the parents, I met with the student. The student shared that her application for an academic program had been rejected. She wanted her parents and me, her adviser, to appeal the decision on her behalf. I told her to contact the program director directly, but she believed that would cause her too much anxiety—she did not want to face the professor who had written the rejection. The student was 20 years old.

As professors at Christian institutions, both of us regularly encounter students’ habits of fear, anxiety, and lack of risk-taking. These moments illustrate a larger trend documented across college campuses and more generally among young people: increasing social unease accompanied by diminishing levels of resilience. Mental health continues to decline among adolescents, and young people report greater anxiety and depression. According to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind, young people also tend to avoid difficult and frictional experiences that could help them work through this fear and anxiety.

We believe Christian colleges and universities are uniquely equipped to help students reduce anxiety and increase resilience as faculty and staff guide students through frictional experiences.

The term friction-maxxing gained popularity in early 2026. Rather than succumbing to the “life-annihilating suction of technologies of escape,” Kathryn Jezer-Morton wrote, friction-maxxing describes an alternative “orientation toward friction” and emphasizes frictional opportunities for growth. As author and founder of LEADx Kevin Kruse wrote in a recent article for Forbes, “Friction maxxing is the practice of intentionally choosing small, safe inconveniences that build your tolerance for discomfort and bring you joy.”

Applied to college life, friction-maxxing might include going to a professor’s office hours for the first time or taking an interesting class outside of your major that’s scheduled for 8 a.m. It could be sitting at a different table with new people in the dining hall or signing up for a study abroad experience. To be effective, friction-maxxing requires carefully designed curricular and communal experiences that build in so-called inconveniences and disruptions, thus encouraging students to embrace commitment and perseverance, even when encountering hard things.

Applied to a Christian college context, friction-maxxing must also include opportunities for students to negotiate faith and intellectual pursuits within a community accountable to the way of Jesus. For example, at Hope College, students can participate in the Emmaus Scholars program, which requires weekly prayer and spiritual learning over shared meals. Students also meet with professors to complete projects that apply a faith-based lens to class content. At Bethel University, students can take three-week, faculty-led study abroad courses during the month of January, pushing them to encounter the world in new ways. From travel writing in Belize to immersion in British primary and secondary schools, students learn in borderless classrooms and then apply that learning to their faith and academic studies. These experiences—and others that intentionally lean into friction—push students to engage deeply and in new ways, persisting despite friction.

The Coddling of the American Mind argues that students today were raised on three “great untruths”: They are fragile, emotions should guide reasoning, and life is a battle between two groups (us versus them). Lukianoff and Haidt explain that rather than prepare young adults for bumps in the road, parents and communities have instead prepared the road, reducing childhood frictions until young people learned to be anxious when encountering the new or unexpected or difficult. By doing so, we have unintentionally communicated to college students that they are fragile and in danger, a habit of the mind that becomes self-fulfilling.

Current college students also grew up in politically polarized environments, experiencing at least three contentious presidential elections in 2016, 2020, and 2024, and nearly continuous protests across the US around policing, racism, sexism, and xenophobia. These students were also children or early adolescents when the COVID-19 pandemic began, disrupting social and behavioral learning for both them and adult role models (who were generally more afraid and anxious during the pandemic). These experiences have increased a sense of precarity and either-or thinking.

We have experienced students’ resulting binary thinking at the colleges where we teach. In her office hours, Elisabeth (an education professor) had a student tell her that homeschooling is the only safe or Christian educational choice for children (though she prepares teachers to work in all types of schools and her own children attend their neighborhood public school). One of Kristin’s colleagues expressed concern about “triggering” a negative student response by bringing a controversial speaker to campus. In a recent seminar course, one of Kristin’s students wrote in a journal that he hoped the class could talk about “real issues” but he was wary that others would “be open to new ideas.” We see these experiences as illustrating a need for a new kind of frictional engagement, one steeped in faith.

New Testament letters to the early church recognize that faith grows only through intention and persistence—what Paul might have termed friction-maxxing if he were writing today. The author of Hebrews reminds his readers to “throw off everything that hinders” and to “run with perseverance” (12:1). In Galatians 6, Paul calls Christians to persevere in fulfilling the law of Christ, writing that the church must “not become weary in doing good” and that “we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (v. 9). These verses, and others throughout the Bible, call attention to both the practice of faith—long obedience in the same direction, as Eugene Peterson described it—and the value of faith practiced in community.

These passages suggest something that Christian colleges should be uniquely prepared to teach: Faith doesn’t shy away from hard things but instead leans into friction, seeking growth through a long obedience in community. Now, as high school seniors choose which college to attend, we encourage them to consider Christian colleges as uniquely able to model thoughtful and engaged growth.

Christian college faculty are frequently trained in secular environments yet continue to affirm their commitment to historic Christian faith. Faculty have wrestled with the seeming discontinuities between their secular disciplines and their faith and have persevered in their commitment to faith as the primary way of understanding the world.

Faculty believe Christians must pursue lives modeled after Jesus, marked by orthopraxy—service and sacrifice. Carefully designed curricular experiences, such as the one Elisabeth teaches at Bethel University—a general education course focused on educational equity— integrates community-engaged learning with the pursuit of justice as a core expression of Christian faith.

At their best, Christian college communities commit to asking hard questions within theological parameters, collaboratively, and across disciplines. A student majoring in biology at Hope College said her professors regularly talked about frictions between science and faith. While her professors expressed that tension differently, for her their varying responses were the point. Faculty modeled and encouraged generous and robust conversation, even amid disagreements.

Ultimately, eliminating friction is antithetical to the point of education or to Christianity. Instead, as Lukianoff and Haidt write, college should be the “ultimate mental gymnasium, full of advanced equipment, skilled trainers, and therapists.” In the academy, intellectual struggle is how knowledge is forged. There are no new answers without hard questions. There is no progress without failure and persistence. There is no depth without challenge. Faculty at Christian institutions also model this frictional approach to faith: There is no vibrant faith without rigorous refinement, but a faith forged in the fire is a faith worth trusting.

Kristin VanEyk is assistant professor of English education at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, where she teaches writing and education courses. Elisabeth E. Lefebvre is associate professor of education at Bethel University in Minnesota. She writes about education, justice, and community for outlets such as Mockingbird and Reformed Journal. They are also coeditors of the book Purpose and Joy: Pursuing a Meaningful Career in Christian Higher Education (ACU Press, June 2026).

- More from Kristin VanEyk and Elisabeth E. Lefebvre

Books

Review

We Aren’t Just Disenchanted. We Are Desecrated.

Danielle Treweek

Carl Trueman’s latest work tackles Western society’s theological ailments—but could offer a stronger Christian remedy.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Sentinel

It was late 2020 when, suddenly, the confused world I found myself living in began to make a little more sense to me. The reason it all fell into place was Carl Trueman’s masterful cultural analysis, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

In that book and the popular-level version, Strange New World, Trueman explains how contemporary Western culture has come to define personal identity and demand social conformity through the psychologized and sexualized self—that is, through “expressive individualism.” Put simply, he explains why the modern Western world is the way it is—and why Christians do, and indeed should, feel increasingly out of step with it.

So when I heard about Trueman’s forthcoming book, The Desecration of Man, I was eager to see how he would further develop his anthropological argument. Yet I will also admit to some trepidation. After all, what was left for him to say about the current predicament of mankind that could be articulated nearly as well as what he had already said?

Thankfully, it doesn’t take long for Trueman to reveal the book’s distinctive argument:

I will make the case that desecration is key to understanding the dynamic of modern culture and the anthropological confusion that it embodies. I will argue that the modern notion of man—free and autonomous as demonstrated by his ability to transgress boundaries once considered sacred—has paradoxically reduced him to nothing. In desecrating God, man has ironically desecrated himself.

Where his earlier analysis traced the historical and social forces that led the modern West to idolize the self, this new work invites the reader to gaze upon that same landscape, this time with theological binoculars: Our rejection of God has degraded our own humanity.

As the title suggests, the concept of desecration is central to the book’s argument. According to the author, the stripping away of mystery—disenchantment—fails to explain the anthropological mess we find ourselves in today. The real issue, Trueman asserts, is our compulsion toward desecration, the “intentional abuse or destruction of something holy, something of more than ordinary significance.” Specifically, humankind has desecrated itself.

Chapters 1 and 2 explain how this tragic reality has come about. The human person is an exceptional creature, made alone in God’s image (Gen. 1:27) and tasked with ruling this world under him (Ps. 8). This is our teleology—a term Trueman frequently employs to describe humanity’s ultimate purpose. Yet exceptional though we are, creatures we remain nonetheless, meaning our purpose is given rather than self-determined. Put another way, “human beings are created by God with a given set of dependencies and obligations, limits, and ends” that accord with and facilitate their teleology.

Trueman argues that even as the murder of the Creator was committed during the Enlightenment, we are only now reckoning with the full effects of his death certificate. In killing God, we have each enthroned ourselves as our own gods, and where there is no creator, we are all self-creations. It therefore follows that if modern Western individuals—subjugated to expressive individualism and drunk on the divinity of technology—are to live with any sense of existential integrity, they must transgress any sacred limit and profane any reigning expectation. Their compulsion is to desecrate.

Chapter 3 reveals how humanity turns the horrible into horrific through our overt delight in such a compulsion. The exhilaration of constantly breaking every rule is addictive. It turns the transgressor into the hero, the perpetual self-creator into the almighty. According to Trueman, this is especially powerful within the “cultural officer class”: the educators, the politicians, and the artists (or overpaid Hollywood celebrities) who dictate cultural meaning.

Of course, the tragic irony is that the ideology of desecration is an endless cycle of degradation: “It is not that the old beliefs, values, and practices are overthrown and something new and stable is put in their place. It is that the practice of overthrowing what is—whatever it may be—is itself the project.”

This is evidenced in certain breakdowns between segments of the lesbian, gay, and bisexual population (those who are attracted to their own biological sex) and their queer, transgender, and sexually nontraditional counterparts (those who insist sex is a matter of self-identification rather than biology). Desecration is always ravenous to uproot any norm, even those that were established a mere generation ago.

This has also resulted in the alliance of strange intersectional bedfellows. As Trueman aptly observes, it is not a shared vision of what life should look like that brings Black Lives Matter activists, the queer lobby, and pro-Hamas protesters to march together in New York, London, and Sydney. No, what they share is a commitment to “overthrow what is and demolish what previous generations considered authoritative.”

Of course, as Trueman is quick to show, too many on the political right are equally dedicated to the task of humanity’s desecration: “It is one thing to believe that illegal immigrants should be deported; it is quite another … to rejoice and celebrate the pain and distress of children involved.”

Chapters 4–6 lay out how this project of desecration has played out in the realms of sex, reproductive technology, and death. The sexual revolution promised freedom from bodily and relational limits but has instead turned us into little more than objects for one another’s gratification.

Artificial reproductive technology claimed to conquer infertility but has ultimately divorced procreation and parenthood from biology, redefined what a child is, created a marketplace for babies to be bought and sold, and revived the specter of eugenics. And our refusal to accept death as the final human limit has produced an exploitative antiaging industry and a political system that now determines which lives are worth continuing at what cost and which may be ended upon the submission of the correct application form to the state.

The Desecration of Man is yet another Trueman tour de force. He has again proven himself capable of peering into the heart of society and diagnosing the deadly plague within. This time, however, he also wields a theological scalpel, opening the arteries of our cultural moment and laying bare the deeper pathology that the death of God has wrought upon us all. For that reason alone, this book deserves wide and careful reading. Trueman’s analysis cuts cleanly, and his diagnosis rings true.

Yet diagnosis is only half the story. What prognosis does Trueman offer? More to the point, what treatment does he prescribe? He is straightforward:

The answer is consecration. … Only by true consecration of man can his desecration be overcome. And that requires a return not simply to the alleged cultural benefits of Christian belief and practice but to actual Christian belief and practice.

Trueman argues that humanity’s desecration cannot be undone by a mere rehabilitation of “cultural Christianity.” Attempting to do so would be like closing open-heart surgery with a Band-Aid. What is needed, he insists, is a return to the actual truth of Christianity itself. The clarity of this proposed remedy, laid out right at the beginning of the book, raised my expectations for what would follow. Yet as I continued reading The Desecration of Man, I found myself increasingly unsatisfied.

It is not that Trueman says nothing about Christianity’s truth claims. He offers brief summaries of Christian doctrine, cites Scripture and emphasises the place of creed, cult and code in the life of the church. And to be fair to him, he clearly states that “I do not argue in this book for the truth of Christianity. This is not a book of Christian apologetics.” Fair enough: One book can only do so much.

But there is a difference between declining to persuade readers of Christianity’s truth claims and declining to explain the content and significance of those truth claims themselves—especially when you have identified them as necessary for consecration.

Trueman grounds his argument in the imago Dei—humanity made in the image of God. This is the right place to begin. Yet it is not where Christianity’s distinctive claims about human nature and teleology culminate. If humanity’s desecration can only be overcome by the consecration Christianity proclaims, then the person of Jesus Christ—the perfect human—must stand at the center of that claim.

The Incarnation and Resurrection do not merely reaffirm the imago Dei; they fulfill and restore it, revealing both what humanity truly is and what it is destined to become. Yet at this crucial point, Trueman’s argument remains largely implicit. This leaves the careful Christian reader wanting a clearer account of how the gospel itself accomplishes the consecration the author identifies as necessary, and the non-Christian reader without a clear sense of why the gospel alone can provide that remedy.

Indeed, by confining his anthropological argument largely to the imago Dei—without explicitly and extensively bringing the Incarnation and Resurrection to bear upon it—Trueman creates an unintended ambiguity. If the problem is humanity’s failure to live according to the image and design of the Creator, then other monotheistic traditions might seem capable of offering similar solutions.

The reader is therefore left wondering why, as Trueman concludes, “the church is the place where humanity as made in the image of God can be truly realized,” rather than also the synagogue or even the mosque—especially since Trueman himself occasionally enlists all three monotheisms as allied counterpoints to contemporary culture.

Early in the book, Trueman warns that modern culture often confuses “taste for truth.” Because he never fully explains how the gospel uniquely and decisively consecrates a desecrated humanity, some readers may feel that warning rebound upon him. His solution can itself appear to be a matter of personal taste rather than established truth.

Such a reading would blunt the impact of an otherwise excellent book and would be a misrepresentation of what I am confident is Trueman’s conviction that Jesus is the only way, the truth, and the life. But more importantly, it leaves Christian and non-Christian readers alike without an understanding of how the gospel of Jesus Christ alone is able to rescue us from our desecration and consecrate us to eternal life.

In the end, The Desecration of Man is a masterful piece of analysis and social diagnosis well worth reading, even if the theological treatment it prescribes is found wanting.

Danielle Treweek is the author of several books, including Single Ever After: A Biblical Vision for the Significance of Singleness, and the research officer for the Anglican Diocese of Sydney.

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Culture

‘No Guardrails’ for Some Christian Wellness Influencers

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

Correspondent

Supplements and other wellness products do big business on social media, and even Scripture can be turned into marketing language.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

“Fuel the grind and honor the soul” is one of the slogans on the website of the yet-to-be-released energy drink Praise Energy. Bryce Crawford, a Christian influencer with 4.1 million followers on TikTok and more than 3 million on Instagram, shared a video in January announcing he had been “secretly” working on a Christian energy drink. According to Crawford, his Christian canned beverage will have 100 milligrams of caffeine, “natural flavoring,” no artificial colors, and no sugar.

“I just got convicted. I’m a big energy drink connoisseur and was like, ‘I’m tired of drinking stuff that’s got like 50 ingredients and is gonna, like, give me heart issues in five years,’” Crawford said. “I want to actually honor God with what I consume.”

Energy drinks are an $80 billion dollar business. Praise Energy is an example of the “wellness washing” of energy drinks. It’s also an example of the newest Christian diet-and-health wave and the ways the “Christian” label is being used to sell supplements, skin care, and other wellness-adjacent products, largely through influencers online. Faith washing has become its own form of wellness marketing, and savvy influencers and supplement companies are finding that it’s an effective way to reach Christian consumers.

American Christians are accustomed to having a menu of ways to live out their faith by spending money on consumer goods. We raise the public profile of Christianity by supporting faith-based films, attending Christian concerts, and adding Christian athleisure to our rotation of gym clothes. For people who are very online, supporting Christian influencers like Crawford can feel like supporting evangelistic ministries.

The influencer sphere is full of enthusiastic creators who blend the language of faith with the hustle jargon of wellness grifting. The combination of Christianese (familiar uses of words like stewardship and temple) and the promise of a product that both improves physical health and puts the consumer in alignment with God’s created order (sometimes just nature) is a potent marketing strategy.

The global wellness industry, a broad term for goods and services related to nutrition, fitness, appearance, sleep, mindfulness, and general physical health, is valued at over $6 trillion dollars and projected to hit $7 trillion this year. Its growth since the mid-2000s has been driven by trends like the “food movement” sparked by Michael Pollan’s 2006 book An Omnivore’s Dilemma and the subsequent intensification of moralizing marketing that mobilized words like natural, organic, and clean to sell food and beauty products. Over the years since, many consumers have come to see formerly low-stakes decisions about breakfast cereals and household cleaners as choices that could have life-or-death impacts for themselves and their families.

In recent years, books like Rina Raphael’s The Gospel of Wellness and Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites have examined the religiosity of wellness culture—citing the ways brands like SoulCycle create exercise classes that seem to emulate megachurch services, and the ways the prosperity gospel echoes in the marketing of products and advice. “Healthism,” which Christy Harrison defines in The Wellness Trap as “the belief … that physical health is the be-all and end-all of well-being, a goal that’s attained primarily, if not entirely, through individual lifestyle choices,” can become a religion of its own.

These days, wellness influencers and entrepreneurs aren’t just borrowing the trappings of religious devotion. They are also mobilizing well-known Bible verses (1 Cor. 6:19, for example) and (often generalized) tenets of the Christian faith. There is still plenty of run-of-the-mill inspirational language, but it has become easier to find influencers marketing perfume, raw honey, and diets as explicitly biblical. Their content is gaining traction, and companies are taking notice.

It’s surprisingly frictionless for a supplement company to partner with an influencer to sell a product. To form a partnership, a business can reach out to a content creator and offer to pay a commission each time the influencer posts about the product or talks about it on an Instagram story for a certain amount of time. Former wellness influencer Andrea Ellis told me in an interview that the process has become so seamless that influencers usually don’t have to do anything more than post; the company does all the packaging and shipping.

Ellis also said influencers can reach out to supplement companies and ask for “white-label” supplements to sell as their own branded products. Companies can then create new brand names and designs for those influencers while selling the exact same substance as a different supplement under another name.

“There are no guardrails,” said Ellis. “A lot of influencers will say that mainstream medical providers are shills for the pharmaceutical industry, but the supplement world actually works exactly the way they say Big Pharma works.”

In the current political environment, where public trust in established medical institutions is declining, the supplement industry and alternative health-and-wellness influencers are trying to win trust from health care skeptics. We are in the era of personality-driven health care.

This is perhaps why Christian wellness content and products are gaining ground in the marketplace. If more people are making health care decisions based on trust in individuals on the internet, a shared worldview goes a long way toward establishing that trust. Christians wading through the glut of online wellness content might see a cross emoji or Bible verse in a creator’s bio and trust that, at the very least, this person shares their faith. The influencer might not be a doctor but may ascribe to the Apostles’ Creed.

For an influencer, Christianese can be shorthand for “You can trust me.” Supplement makers have figured this out and are already experimenting with ways to cut out the middlemen (influencers) and go right to the consumer with the message, delivered by a trustworthy-seeming messenger generated by artificial intelligence.

For example, this video of a one-sided conversation on a nameless podcast may at first appear to be just another wellness content clip. The speaker says, “If you’re a good mother, you’re living highly in accordance with God.” He’s addressing Christian mothers, affirming their importance and power in the lives of their children. There’s something slightly off about the language he uses, but he hits predictable notes (e.g., “You’re practicing the highest form of stewardship”).

A few tells might indicate the person onscreen isn’t actually a real human being: The way his mouth moves isn’t quite right, and he’s wearing a lanyard that appears to have the word speaker on it, but the tag at the end of it has indecipherable words. Scroll down on the Instagram page for the account, and you’ll find a clip that begins the same way, featuring the same person in the same outfit, but on the opposite side of the room.

The text overlays for these two AI-generated videos are “God didn’t make you a mother by accident” and “The TRUE connection between motherhood and God.” In both videos, the speaker awkwardly transitions from a series of truisms and inspiro-speak about motherhood to a pitch for a supplement. A link in the caption directs viewers to buy it on Amazon.

“We only value true nourishment,” a seemingly AI-generated Amish influencer tells 348,000 Instagram followers. The account page features an array of videos about how she feeds her (fictional) Amish family of 12. Videos appear to be taken outside or inside a barn or sometimes at a supermarket (which has become a wellness-grifter video trope).

I was curious to know whether the college students in my media literacy class would be able to recognize that the Amish woman on the screen was likely AI-generated; they knew it immediately. The red flag, they said—other than an Amish person spending a bunch of time posting to an Instagram account—was the cadence of her voice. The voice, while expressive, has the uncanny lilt of other AI-generated speech apps and videos.

Other tells are the slight variations in her appearance from video to video, the slightly inhuman mouth movements, and the distorted text on the nutrition labels of foods she appears to hold up for the camera. In one video, she holds her hands over a pot of boiling water, close enough to be burned by the steam.

Why use the persona of an Amish woman to sell supplements? The persona is shorthand for a value system many Christians can get on board with—she looks like a person of Christian faith who rejects many of the developments of modernity and speaks the language of created order and natural living. Wellness-minded Christians can easily fall for the naturalistic fallacy: the belief that something is good simply because it is found in nature.

“For many people, ‘natural’ feels godly,” said Ellis, who stopped selling supplements and wellness products a few years ago and now researches and writes about misinformation. “‘Natural’ feels closer to God and God’s created order.”

Ironically, Ellis points out, the substances sold as supplements by vendors on Amazon are unregulated, are rarely tested by reputable labs, and in some cases are counterfeits of other popular products. Since the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act passed in 1994, supplements don’t have to obtain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration before going to consumers. Testing and accountability, if there is any, come after the sale of these products, usually if a customer experiences negative side effects or suspects he or she is taking snake oil.

This is why trust is a key component of the supplement niche of the wellness industry—you have to trust the seller enough to buy an unregulated substance and put it in your body. Supplement manufacturers rely on parasocial relationships with wellness influencers, an extension of the multilevel marketing model of older supplements like Herbalife. Manufacturers rely on the networks of intrepid representatives (usually women, from what I’ve seen) for distribution.

Now, Christian wellness influencers offer a network that is bound by parasocial relationships and shared worldview. And companies may try to cut out the real people if they can—to isolate the messages that make them trustworthy and repackage them with AI-generated personas that don’t need to be paid and certainly won’t have any questions about the quality of the products they are selling.

The AI tells in the videos circulating right now are likely going to disappear soon. It’s only going to get harder to tell whether an unfamiliar content creator is a real person or AI persona. Oddly, I find myself cautiously optimistic about the decline of trust in influencers. I don’t want to live in the era of “trust me” health care. More specifically, I don’t want to live in an era of “trust me” health care where everyone is competing for credibility by faith washing everything from creatine to caffeine. If AI breaks that, I’ll be glad.

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the worship correspondent for Christianity Today. She is a coauthor The Myth of Good Christian Parenting and writes broadly on Christian music and the intersection of American Christianity and popular culture.

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News

Died: Chuck Norris, Icon of American Machismo Who Returned to Faith

Cody Benjamin

The action star personified the ideal of a clear-cut fight between good guys and bad guys.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

Even Chuck Norris’s granddaughter bought into the memes that described her Papa as indestructible. He was, as she wrote recently, the man who “counted to infinity twice, the man who got bit by a cobra and the cobra died.” Chuck Norris didn’t do pushups, she added; he “would push the earth down.”

Norris, the famed martial artist and old-school action hero, died Thursday, March 19, at the age of 86. His family confirmed the “sudden passing” a day later, amid reports of a brief hospitalization in Hawaii.

Yet Norris seemed destined to live on as a sort of mythical figure—a one-time underdog who’d conquered several lives: Air Force veteran, martial arts expert, big-screen lawman, accidental internet hero and, in more recent years, advocate for conservative values and his Christian faith.

Chuck Norris doesn’t worry about high gas prices; his vehicles run on fear.

Born Carlos Ray Norris on March 10, 1940, in Oklahoma, the bearded actor was originally named after Carlos Berry, a local minister who’d impacted Norris’s father, according to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “Chuck” became Norris’s lasting moniker just as he reached adulthood, around the time he was stationed in South Korea as an air policeman.

The oldest of three brothers, Norris later described his upbringing as challenging: His mother was a devout Christian credited for her frequent prayers, but his father battled alcoholism. His parents divorced when he was 16, and his younger brother, Wieland, was killed in Vietnam in 1970. So Norris found more purpose overseas, training in Tang Soo Do, a martial art often dubbed “Korean Karate.”

Norris’s fast growth as a fighter led him to international tournaments, where he eventually crossed paths with Hong Kong’s Bruce Lee, one of the most influential martial artists of all time. Soon the two costarred in The Way of the Dragon, a box office smash for its blend of combat and comedy, and Norris began headlining a string of his own action movies throughout the ’70s and ’80s.

As his beard thickened, so did his influence. It perhaps culminated when he parlayed a cult-classic part in Lone Wolf McQuade (1983), a modern Western featuring Norris as a no-nonsense ex-Marine, into an eight-year run as the face of Walker, Texas Ranger, a hit CBS show that showcased Norris’s titular cowboy downing countless crooks and criminals with hand strikes and roundhouse kicks.

The force of Norris’s blows—and the worshipfully slow-motion presentation that accompanied them—made Chuck an addictively watchable make-believe fighter for a seemingly forgotten moral code. It wasn’t a coincidence that he acquired several roles originally written for Clint Eastwood.

“I think Walker stands for what generally people would want him to stand for,” Norris once said of his signature character in an interview with ScreenSlam. “He’s very strong in his beliefs as a law enforcement officer, but yet at the same time there’s a soft side to him for people who are in need. If you’re a very vulnerable person, Walker’s a very compassionate person. But if you’re a bad guy, God forbid.”

When Chuck Norris goes swimming, sharks get out of the ocean.

Norris began his onscreen career as a villain, but his best roles allowed him to play a protector figure. Unbeknownst to many of his fans, while in the thick of his lucrative filmography, Chuck Norris—a symbol of American machismo—needed rescuing himself.

“My career started building,” he revealed in 2008 as the commencement speaker for Liberty University, “and unfortunately I got sucked into the entertainment world of Hollywood, and I wound up drifting from my faith. I had been in films and I had fame and fortune, but I was very unhappy and I couldn’t figure out why.”

For years, Norris forged his way into the homes and hearts of audiences seeking a certain kind of hero, using sheer brawn and ambition to make martial arts “American” and reinstate the simplicity of good versus evil. But “the harder I worked,” he explained, “the more famous I got, the bigger the hole in my heart became.”

All the while, his aging mother, Wilma, was busy praying for not only his success but also his salvation, as he wrote in 2021—including “for me to find a woman to change my life.”

This turned out to be Gena O’Kelley, his surviving second wife, who according to Norris rekindled old flames of faith by reading the Bible aloud to him: “It was like the Holy Spirit hit me,” he told Liberty grads. “He said, ‘Chuck, it’s time to come home.’ … I was hot for the Lord and I still am to this day.”

Norris’s faith informed his politics, leading him to make outspoken endorsements of Republican presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. While in the 2000s and 2010s he loomed largest in relentless internet memes about his unmatched toughness, Norris’s quiet Christian walk led him to encounters with fellow believers both famous and ordinary.

Part of his testimony, according to Franklin Graham, was that he’d “dedicated his life to Christ as a young adult at one of my father Billy Graham’s crusades.” Greg Laurie, senior pastor of Harvest Christian Fellowship, recalled after meeting Norris that “the man behind the legend was always quick to point beyond himself. He never let the fame become the point.”

Jack Graham (no relation to Billy), senior pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Texas, said he was Norris’s pastor during the actor’s time in Dallas shooting Walker, Texas Ranger. “Chuck was obviously a man’s man,” Graham wrote, “but he was also God’s man. … He was truly an icon in so many areas, and he leaves behind a lasting legacy as a faithful believer and an indelible mark as a cultural legend.”

When Chuck Norris makes a mistake, the mistake apologizes.

Besides a treasure trove of films, TV shows, and black belts, Norris also produced nine books and established Kickstart Kids, a martial arts nonprofit for youth. In addition to his wife, Gena, he is survived by five children, including a daughter he fathered with another woman whom he adopted after meeting her when she was 26 years old; and 13 grandchildren. He was previously married to Dianne Holechek.

Days before his passing, while celebrating his 86th birthday, Norris shared a video of himself—grayer but still swinging while doing kickboxing training. His caption was confident: “I don’t age. I level up.”

Cody Benjamin is senior news writer at Christianity Today.

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Ideas

The New Party Politics of Abortion

Daniel K. Williams

Contributor

Some Republicans remain consistently pro-life. But under Trump’s lead, the GOP has become an anti-Roe yet pro-choice coalition.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Image: Getty

This month, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced a bill to ban the abortion drug mifepristone and revoke the FDA’s approval of it.

In the recent past, few would have been surprised that a socially conservative Republican member of Congress would introduce a bill to restrict abortion pills. Ever since the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this use of mifepristone in 2000, during the Clinton administration, many pro-life Republicans have wanted to reverse it—especially since mifepristone is now used in more than 60 percent of all abortions in the United States.

But this time, Hawley’s target is not a Democratic administration FDA, but a Republican one. Under President Donald Trump, the FDA has expanded access to abortion pills by approving a second form of mifepristone last October.

During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump assured voters that he did not support a national abortion ban, and he removed a promise of a human life amendment from the Republican Party platform. Yet at the same time, he frequently took credit for the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

While some saw Trump’s mixed signals on abortion as political posturing, the reality may have been more straightforward: Trump and many of his allies have repositioned the Republican Party as a party that is mostly pro-choice—but anti-Roe.

This is difficult for some pro-lifers to grasp, because many are used to equating support for abortion legalization with support for Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that declared abortion a constitutional right.

Indeed, for the Democratic Party, support for abortion rights was for decades inseparable from its support for Roe. After a conservative Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, Democrats immediately made restoring Roe (by which they meant restoring federal protection for abortion rights) a top priority. “With a Democratic Congress, we will pass national legislation to make Roe the law of the land again,” the 2024 Democratic Party platform promised.

This promise has united almost all Democratic elected officials. Today there is only one Democratic member of Congress who opposes abortion legalization: Rep. Henry Cuellar (Texas). And for many Democrats, support for Roe is inseparable from a larger feminist vision and a constitutional interpretation framed around an expansion of women’s rights.

Republicans in recent decades have not subscribed to this rights-based feminist vision, and they have not had much regard for Roe. From 1976 to 2016, the Republican Party platform included a promise to overturn Roe through a constitutional amendment.

Leading pro-life organizations, such as the National Right to Life Committee, have therefore found much stronger support for their cause among Republicans than among Democrats—especially when overturning Roe v. Wade was a central goal for the pro-life movement, as it was for decades.

But now that Roe has been overturned, it has become clear that the GOP is more anti-Roe than anti-abortion. In the last four years, the Republican states of Montana, Missouri, Arizona, and Ohio have passed ballot measures protecting abortion rights. Similarly, in the Republican states of Kansas and Kentucky, voters rejected referendums to restrict abortion.

Democrats hoped that these voters would leave the Republican Party over abortion, but they didn’t. Instead, they evinced little interest in the Democrats’ project of reinstating Roe through national legislation even as they voted to keep abortion legal in their own states.

While 63 percent of Republican voters say they want to make abortion mostly or entirely illegal, those Republicans are disproportionately concentrated in the most socially conservative states of the Bible belt and parts of the Midwest. In states where church attendance is lower—including in strongly conservative states that Republicans know they need to win—Republican voters are much less supportive of abortion bans.

Trump, it seems, has discovered a politically successful formula for much of middle America: keeping abortion legal and widely available in most of the United States, even while dismantling the federal protections for abortion rights that were grounded in a 20th-century liberal vision that most conservative Republicans dislike.

As a result, pro-lifers have gained no traction in their efforts to restrict abortion at the national level, even though Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House. Hawley’s bill is unlikely to make it out of the Senate.

Pro-life success in restricting abortion pills will instead likely be confined to a handful of socially conservative states where Republican voting is also paired with high rates of church attendance. In South Dakota and Mississippi, bans on abortion pills have already passed the state legislature and are awaiting a governor’s signature.

But in most of the rest of the country, pro-lifers have to face the reality that just because the Republican Party is anti-Roe does not mean that it will restrict the availability of legal abortion.

After all, even Hawley’s own heavily Republican home state—Missouri—allows abortion up to the point of viability. If his proposed ban on abortion pills fails in the Senate, it won’t be solely the fault of Democrats; it will also be an indication that even in conservative states, opposition to Roe may be a lot stronger than concern for the unborn.

Daniel K. Williams is an associate professor of history at Ashland University and the author of Abortion and America’s Churches.

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News

Elevation Church’s New College Reflects a Shift in Christian Higher Ed

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

The influential megachurch’s new partnership with Southeastern University is an onsite training program for Christian college students.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, WikiMedia Commons

Elevation Church—a multisite megachurch founded by Steven Furtick and based in Matthews, North Carolina—announced the launch of Elevation College in November 2025. The new hybrid institution is for “traditional college-aged students who feel called to ministry and want to earn an accredited degree” while receiving onsite training and experience at the church. Elevation College plans to welcome its first class of students in fall of 2026.

Students who attend Elevation College can live in on-campus housing and participate in practicum courses at Elevation Church, but the degrees will be granted by Southeastern University (SEU), an Assemblies of God–affiliated institution based in Lakeland, Florida. The college will offer both two and four-year degrees, including an associate’s degree in ministerial leadership, a bachelor of science in worship ministries, a bachelor of science in biblical studies, and a bachelor of science in production ministry. According to the Elevation College website, the yearly cost of attendance (including tuition, a site fee, and housing) will be a little over $19,000.

Steve Saccone, vice president of the SEU Ministry Network, told CT that the launch of Elevation College follows years of collaboration between the two organizations.

“We believe that there’s nothing like hands-on experience. If you want to be a leader, you have to lead something,” Saccone said. “We feel like we’re restoring that vision, of embedding academics in the local church.”

SEU has been offering distance coursework for Elevation staff for several years, and Elevation’s production team recently helped the university build a new digital production class for SEU students. According to Saccone, Elevation approached SEU about developing an accredited degree program to supplement its existing apprenticeships and internships.

Elevation currently has 19 campuses and had an average 17,373 weekly in-person attendees in 2024. Until 2023, Elevation was a member of the Southern Baptist Convention. It left just after two other congregations were expelled over female pastoral leadership, but it did not publicly state the reasons for its departure.

Its partnership with an Assemblies of God university demonstrates the softening of some long-standing divisions between Pentecostal-charismatic churches or networks and conservative Reformed or Baptist organizations. Both SEU and Elevation are influential institutions in the worship music industry, and their partnership is an example of the ways contemporary worship music and the subculture around it has become an ecumenical space where new alliances are taking shape and gaining power.

Elevation Worship, Elevation’s influential worship artist collective, became a dominant force in the worship music industry in the early 2010s. The group’s 2021 collaborative album with Maverick City Music, Old Church Basement, won a Grammy. Its most recent album, So Be It, features prominent worship artists Brandon Lake, Chandler Moore, and Leeland Mooring. In 2024, Elevation Worship’s music had more than 2.3 billion streams across platforms and 161,243 people attended its “Worship Nights” tour.

SEU has its own popular worship music collective in SEU Worship. The group includes SEU students, alumni, and staff and is signed to Essential Worship (a Sony label). It has over 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify and was part of the 2025 Winter Jam tour. SEU alum Tiffany Hudson is now one of Elevation Worship’s lead vocalists.

For both Elevation and SEU, the worship music production affiliated with the institutions helps attract attendance and raise public profile. The millions of livestream viewers of Elevation Church’s services have access to professionally produced musical worship and high-energy performances. Students interested in a college where they might get to participate in the production of new worship hits may consider SEU because of the success of its worship collective.

Service production, trendy worship music, and the popularity of lead pastor Steven Furtick have made Elevation an attractive church home for young Christians who are looking for cultural relevance and emotional intensity. Nearly 8,000 volunteers serve across its campuses on a weekly basis—a large pool of potential students who might be interested in earning a degree or taking a class as they contribute to weekly operations.

SEU has helped other churches turn their existing volunteer arrangements, apprenticeships, and internships into degree programs. In 2022, it established a degree-granting site at The Belonging Co in Nashville (another megachurch with a worship team turned artist collective that produces its own worship music). It also helped establish degree programs and distance learning partnerships at Vous Church in Miami, Impact Church in Phoenix, and Bayside Church in Sacramento.

According to Saccone, these church partnerships take shape organically, relying on relationships rather than denominational affiliations. The biggest share of SEU’s church partners are affiliated with the Assemblies of God, but they also work with Baptist, nondenominational, and (Association of Related Churches) ARC congregations.

“We want to partner with the local church,” Saccone said. “We’re not going around policing theology.”

One selling point of the programs SEU establishes in local churches is that the degrees cost less than traditional bachelor’s degrees from residential private schools. Another is that they allow students to pursue ministry training in the context of the church they want to attend and maybe work for in the future. This kind of context-specific training has value and limitations, say some educators.

“Church is a great place to get discipleship and leadership training, but it’s not always a great place to improve musicianship,” said Casey Corum, a producer, songwriter, and instructor at Biola University. Corum works with undergraduate students pursuing degrees in music and has worked closely with Vineyard Worship. He says there are tradeoffs students should consider when looking into degree programs that are so closely tied to a particular church.

“When it comes to music ministry training, I see a lot of value in going to a college or university where you’ll be in classes with the best musicians from all over. You get a different breadth of peer relationships and exposure to different traditions,” Corum said. “I would hope that a worship training experience would provide some depth of training across genres and styles of music.”

But Corum also noted that students interested in a music degree have good reason to consider less-expensive options like Elevation College. For a church musician who doesn’t have aspirations to play with the New York Philharmonic, in-house training can be a good fit and provides specific instruction and spiritual support that one wouldn’t receive in a traditional (and far more expensive) conservatory-style music program.

He also pointed out that, for young people attracted to contemporary worship music and the churches and collectives that have become its standard bearers, Elevation College may be the ideal place to study ministry, especially in areas like music and production.

“The model Elevation is teaching toward is transferable, to an extent,” Corum said. Because Elevation’s music has been so widely used in American churches for over 15 years now, its ministry model and musical style both reflects and shapes worship practices outside its 19 campuses.

Worship Leader Research (WLR), a collaborative of scholars and practitioners studying trends and influential producers in the worship music industry, refers to Bethel, Hillsong, Passion, and Elevation as “The Big Four” but argues that only Elevation has managed to build momentum and grow in musical influence during the first half of the 2020s, while it appears the reach of the other three is waning.

According to Saccone, Elevation College received hundreds of inquiries from interested students in the months after the church announced its program launch. The number of students admitted for fall 2026 hasn’t been made public yet. Students entering the program this fall will be taking online classes paired with practicum work. Elevation College has not yet received approval from the state of North Carolina to allow SEU to hire adjunct faculty to teach in-person classes onsite.

The past five years have seen a wave of closures of small Christian colleges across the country, but SEU is bringing its degree programs to students in a format that is more experiential than exclusively online programs and more reputable than dubious unaccredited programs such as the now-defunct IHOP University. SEU’s church partnerships are an experiment in lower-cost, hybrid ministry training and theological education. It may be that megachurches are the future of Christian higher ed.

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Books

Review

What Kids Think About God Matters

Andrew Wilson

Three theology books to read this month.

Illustration by Christianity Today

This piece was adapted from CT’s books newsletter. Subscribe here.

Sam Luce and Hunter Williams, How to Teach Kids Theology: Deep Truths for Growing Faith (New Growth, 2025)

A. W. Tozer once said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” If that is even close to being true, then children need to be taught theology as much as anybody does. This book aims to equip people to do that: to “provide leaders with the principles and practices needed to teach biblical passages and stories to kids with theological conviction and competency.”

The result is commendable in several ways. The writers don’t suggest dumbing down the content; the writers treat children as people who need to know the deep things of God, not just life advice or instructions on good behavior. The writers use questions and (mis)understandings of real, specific children as springboards for talking about particular doctrines. There is a good balance between the conceptual and the practical. The authors highlight the importance of God’s big story in our communication of theology and do not shy away from difficult ideas or passages. They distinguish between central, debatable, and peripheral doctrines and reflect on how to differentiate between them and teach children accordingly. The children’s author in me appreciated these emphases and would love to see them accepted more widely.

At times I found myself puzzled. There is a whole chapter on the difference between “simplifying” the truth (which the authors see as a problem) and “distilling” it (which is their solution), involving distinctions which I found oversubtle and—ironically—a bit complicated. I am not sure why the authors insist that the primary point of the Good Samaritan is not that we should love our enemies, which seems to me to be Jesus’s punch line in Luke 10:37, but that “our enemy loved us.” I also thought the book would include more examples of how we can use visual illustrations, objects, life stories, and humor in our communication, and more reflection on the way Jesus himself used these tools. Nevertheless, there is plenty of wisdom to learn here.

Christopher Ash, The Psalms: A Christ-Centered Commentary (Crossway, 2024)

Christopher Ash has written a masterpiece: a four-volume commentary on the Psalter that is devotional, scholarly, searching, and delightful. Some commentaries aim at academics, some at pastors, and some at ordinary believers. Many of the best combine elements of all three. But Ash has done something remarkable by writing in a way that is well-versed in the scholarly literature and history of interpretation—much of which he discusses directly in the ground-clearing first volume—yet filled with devotional warmth, theological insight, pastoral application, and evident delight in Jesus Christ. My wife and I have been using it for our daily readings over the last year, sharing (and occasionally squabbling over custody of) each volume.

The secret sauce is the books’ Christ-centered approach to interpretation. For Ash, it is not just that the Psalms reveal Christ in a general, typological way. Nor is it that some Psalms are messianic (22, 31, 45, and so forth) and some are not. The key to the Psalter is that Christ is the primary speaker, singer, and prayer of every Psalm, including the laments, imprecations, confessions, and songs of praise. He prays Psalm 51 as the representative head of the church, confessing our sins as they are laid upon him and asking for mercy. He sings Psalm 95 as our corporate worship leader, summoning God’s people across time to join him in celebration and obedience. He prays Psalm 119 as a fellow meditator on the beauty, wisdom, and sufficiency of God’s Word. So when we read the Psalms, we read them not only as our words or those of the original author but also as those of Jesus.

The result is a doxological tour de force. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (1520)

At the end of his life, Martin Luther said all his books could be burned except for two: The Bondage of the Will and The Small Catechism. I think he was wrong about that. For me, his most powerful and compelling work is The Freedom of a Christian, which was written in the maelstrom of 1520 as the Reformation was exploding across Germany, and which set out several of his key ideas in pamphlet form.

It opens with the magnificent paradox at the heart of Luther’s theology (and, he would argue, Paul’s): “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” The doctrine of justification by faith means Christians are the freest of kings and priests forever, with no human power over us and no need of any work to save us. That argument occupies the first half of the pamphlet. But that same gospel also makes us servants of all humanity, as Luther shows in the second half: “If we recognize the great and precious things which are given us, as Paul says, our hearts will be filled by the Holy Spirit with the love which makes us free, joyful, almighty workers and conquerors over all tribulations, servants of our neighbors, and yet lords of all.”

The Freedom of a Christian is a short, punchy, and readable statement of many of Luther’s most influential teachings, including the relationship between faith and works, the priesthood of all believers, the marriage analogy for union with Christ, and the oft-quoted idea that although God does not need our works, our neighbor does. If you haven’t read it yet, do yourself a favor.

Andrew Wilson is teaching pastor at King’s Church London and author of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Follow him on Twitter @AJWTheology.

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Theology

Urgency Is Not Faithfulness

Thomas Anderson

A church that quickly reacts to every controversy is echoing the culture, not God’s Word.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

A statement dropped on a Tuesday. I do not remember which Tuesday. There have been many Tuesdays like it. Something breaks into the news: A shooting. A Supreme Court ruling. A pastor’s fall. Within hours, the internet is fully awake.

Soon, we see statements appear. Positions are declared. Silences are cataloged. Lines are drawn. By Wednesday morning, the sorting has already happened, with the righteous on one side, the complicit on the other. By the following week, the algorithm has moved on to something new, leaving behind the usual debris: strained friendships, flattened nuance, and the aftertaste of having just performed something that looked but did not feel like faithfulness.

Most of us have probably seen this happen a million times. As a pastor, I have seen it up close and personal. I have sat in rooms where church staff wrestled over whether we needed to post a statement within 48 hours of national controversies or tragedies. We didn’t lack conviction, but we knew whatever we said would be examined for what it did not say.

One then begins to realize the clock is not really measuring time; it is measuring suspicion. I have watched thoughtful, Bible-reading, Spirit-seeking Christians reduce the work of discernment to the speed of a news cycle. I have done it myself. I have mistaken urgency for obedience, letting the clock tell me when to speak and the crowd tell me what to say. But one day, I opened my Bible to Exodus 34 and met a God whose behavior, by his own description, is slow.

Imagine the scene for a moment. Moses has already seen plagues swallow an empire. He has watched the sea divide and close again. He has climbed a mountain wrapped in cloud and thunder. And still he asks for more: “Show me your glory” (33:18, ESV throughout). It is one of the most audacious prayers in Scripture. And what happens next is not what we might expect. There was no storm. No earthquake. No cosmic display meant to overwhelm the senses. God answered with a description. He passed before Moses and declared his name: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (34:6).

If you read the Bible long enough, you notice something. Israel returns to this moment again and again. The line echoes through the Psalms, through Jonah and Joel and Nahum and Nehemiah. Whenever the people need to remember who God is, they return here. And one of the first things God says about himself is that he is slow to anger. The Hebrew phrase is erekh appayim, which literally means “long of nostrils.” The image is earthy and human. The God of Abraham introduces himself as someone who draws a long breath before responding and inhales slowly when others would flare with anger.

Scholar Paul R. House wrote that this description of God can serve as an interpretive lens for the entire Old Testament story. Once you see it, it’s easier to notice the pattern everywhere. The centuries between the promise of the Messiah and the coming of Christ are not empty space. They are the long patience of a God who was forming a people and building a lineage that would produce his anointed one instead of merely putting out a fire. Caught between this promise and its fulfillment, Habakkuk cried out, “How long, O Lord?” (1:2, NLT), and God answered with something that almost sounds like a contradiction: “If it seems slow, wait for it. It will surely come; it will not delay” (2:3).

In The Justification of God, John Piper noted that God’s patience is not weakness but power. The one who could end the story at any moment chooses not to, and that choice reveals something about who God is. The Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama spent years sitting with that same realization and arrived at a conclusion I find disarming. “Love has its speed,” he wrote. “It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. … It goes on … at three miles an hour.”

Three miles an hour is the pace of a human being walking down a road. Nazareth to Capernaum is roughly 26 miles. At that pace, it takes a bit more than a full workday to make the trek. Jesus has walked that path. But he was rarely in a hurry in all his journeys. He stopped for interruptions. People reached out and touched his cloak. A stranger called his name from the roadside, and he healed. Koyama called this the three-mile-an-hour God.

The phrasing was meant as a critique of a world drunk on technological speed. But it lands just as sharply on the church. As I’ve noted, we have built an ecclesiastical culture that assumes faster is more faithful and the first to speak wins. Yet the God who spoke the universe into being chose to arrive as a baby in an occupied village and spent 30 years in obscurity before speaking a single public word.

There is a word for this kind of slowness buried in the middle of Galatians 5. When Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit, the word he uses for patience is makrothumia. It is a compound word that means something like “long-tempered,” the capacity to take a long time before a flame appears. Paul could have chosen a different word. Greek had hupomonē, which means endurance under hardship. But he chose the word that describes patience with people.

Patience is a discipline. It should not be mistaken for passivity, cowardice, or the absence of conviction. It is simply the refusal to let the person who provokes determine the speed of the response. Said another way, it is the decision to burn at the right moment, in the right way, for the right reason. The hot take rewards immediacy and treats reaction as courage. But makrothumia waits.

In Galatians, Paul does not describe this type of slowness as a personality trait. It is a fruit, which means it grows slowly and quietly over time. The Holy Spirit produces patience the way roots spread through soil. And it is supposed to flow through us toward a society that desperately needs it.

The need, however, isn’t new. Most of us know about the story of the woman who was caught in adultery and dragged before Jesus (John 8:1–11). The crowd had gathered. The religious leaders wanted a verdict from Jesus, and they wanted it quickly.

The urgency was manufactured, designed to force a quick answer under pressure. Condemn the woman and appear righteous, or show mercy and appear soft on sin. But Jesus just bent down and wrote in the dirt. The Gospel writer never tells us what he wrote. Commentators have wondered for centuries. But the silence may be the point. When Jesus finally spoke, the words were simple: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone” (v. 7).

Then, the accusers left—first the oldest, followed by the rest. The woman remained standing with the one person who had the authority to condemn her. And he did not.

Patience here looks like the most powerful presence in the room refusing to let the crowd set the terms. Centuries later, family therapist Edwin Friedman would give language to dynamics like this. After studying families, congregations, and organizations, Friedman observed that anxiety spreads through environments quickly, and once it does, the group orients around the most reactive voices.

Friedman’s prescription for this problem was not withdrawal but what he called a “non-anxious, and sometimes challenging presence.” Essentially, what the group needed was someone who was connected to them but refused to be governed by the volatility around them.

When we approach the Gospels with that language in mind, certain scenes begin to look different: Jesus asleep in the boat while the disciples panicked. Jesus silent before Pilate while the crowd shouted. And of course, Jesus writing in the dirt while the Pharisees demanded a verdict. In each moment he was fully present but not controlled by the anxiety around him. Isaiah named the posture underneath it all: “In quietness and trust is your strength” (Isa. 30:15, NIV).

But our lives are not only personal. They are also cultural. In his book The Prophetic Imagination, theologian Walter Brueggemann warned that our consumer culture depreciates memory and ridicules hope, “which means everything must be held in the now,” either urgently or eternally, seeing the present world as our sole reality.

When the church adopts that pace, it looks like the culture around it. What appears to be courage becomes compliance with the algorithm’s demand for speed and with the crowd’s demand for a verdict. But a church that reacts at the speed of the culture is not prophesying to it. It is echoing it.

The French philosopher Simone Weil once wrote that “the rarest and purest form of generosity is attention.” To pay attention is to allow a question to remain open long enough for truth to arrive. Discipleship works the same way. Christians who are patient and can hold tension without collapsing into tribal reflex are not made overnight. They are formed slowly, in communities where disagreement does not immediately fracture relationships.

Scripture has always known this. We can see it not only in God’s silences, but in the watchman waiting for the morning and the farmer waiting for the harvest. Fruit does not grow on the timeline of the anxious. It grows in the darkness, patiently, at the speed of roots.

Thomas Anderson is the pastor of disciple making at Grace Community Church in Fulton, Maryland.

- More from Thomas Anderson

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Sam Luce and Hunter Williams, How to Teach Kids Theology: Deep Truths for Growing Faith (New Growth, 2025)

Christopher Ash, The Psalms: A Christ-Centered Commentary (Crossway, 2024)

Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (1520)

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