Be Honest About Your Motives for Mission Trips

Contributor

Short-term missions are complicated and often done poorly. But with wisdom and transparency, a medical missionary explains, they can be hugely helpful.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

As a missionary, I am often asked about short-term mission trips: Are they harmful? Can they be better? Were we wrong when we were trying to help?

This kind of question is fairly new. Not so long ago, it was routine for American churches to send a bunch of teenagers to a poorer country to paint a church and play soccer with some local kids. But now many Christians are examining the power differentials in missions and asking—quite appropriately—whether short-term trips make theological, ethical, or practical sense.

Some even argue for doing away with short-term trips altogether, and they have a good point: If you were contacted by a wealthy Korean church that wanted to send a short-term mission trip to your church, what would you tell them? How would you feel if a dozen rich teenagers were to descend on your community and take pictures with the kids in your nursery? What kind of work would you assign to help them feel “useful”?

I’m not quite willing to say all short-term missions must go. Yet here at the end of another summer mission-trip season, I do want to offer a missionary’s perspective on different kinds of short-term missions and how to make yours—if you do them—as functional and faithful as possible.

We’ll start with the ugliest kind of mission trips: the ones that seem for all the world to be designed for Instagram. These trips are mutually exploitative. A church or ministry in the developing world wants wealthy foreigners to visit as a means of attracting local attention and secure overseas donations, and it does this by creating an experience that makes the visitors feel good about themselves.

This can include (but is hardly limited to) setting up opportunities to take pictures with cute kids living in poverty, creating some kind of make-work project for Western teenagers, or recruiting a bunch of people to claim they’ve given their lives to Christ so that visiting preachers can tally up a big score of “souls saved.” These kinds of trips are becoming rarer as people on both sides of the arrangement become wiser to the damage they do, but they still happen.

To avoid a trip like this, consider questions like these: How much work will your visit be for the people receiving you? Will the visitors do anything truly useful, something locals couldn’t do for themselves with sufficient funding? What will the long-term relationship be between visitors and the receiving ministry? How does the visitors’ work connect to the broader vision of that ministry? Can that work be continued on an ongoing basis, or will it only make things harder for local people in the long run?

For example, consider medical missions, which is my field. It’s relatively simple to do a few life-changing surgeries that don’t require any follow-up and could not happen without out-of-town expertise; these trips are usually worthwhile. But trips in which visiting health professionals simply hand out medicine will generally have little long-term effect and may even discourage people from investing in their local health infrastructure.

Looking at long-term effects is particularly vital when we’re thinking about dependency: Will a short-term trip make the host ministry more or less sustainable? This is a tricky question because different ministries have different needs. For example, most of us expect the pastors of our local churches to be dependent on tithes and offerings for their salaries, even if they take other work to supplement their income. On the other hand, campus ministers who go through Reformed University Fellowship, Cru, or InterVarsity will never be able to feed their families on the donations they collect from the college students to whom they minister. So some ministries can be financially self-sustaining, but many require ongoing funding from people other than those they serve.

Sometimes dependence is appropriate and even permanent, but sometimes it can become malignant. Think of nations that become so used to handouts from wealthier countries that they never build up their own economies. In the same way, something has gone awry if a hosting church learns to rely on foreign donations instead of asking its own congregants to feed local orphans—or if it drops all evangelism projects because the American teenagers will arrive to do them soon enough.

Speaking of orphans, perhaps the single most problematic aspect of short-term missions is how they tend to engage with orphanages. Christian and secular voices alike have called for an end to orphanages because they are worse for children than family care or foster care—this is why we no longer have orphanages in developed countries. Children in orphanages are often vulnerable to abuse, and many have one or more living parents who only relinquish their children to improve their chances at a decent education.

Orphanages are popular destinations for short-term trips because the emotional connection visitors form with orphans over a single, intense week often translates into ongoing financial support from afar. Churches should avoid these trips and instead help existing ministries transition to a different model.

So those are the bad trips. What are the good ones? Well, the best short-term mission will task visitors with doing something the receiving ministry can’t do for itself while building that ministry’s capacity to do more on its own in the future. A good mission trip like this should take place in the context of a long-term relationship between visitors and receivers. These trips are still a lot of work for the recipients to organize (especially when language barriers require hiring translators). But done right, the blessings last well after the visitors go home.

In my context of medical missions, this often looks like having doctors come to our hospital to see patients while teaching local health care professionals and bringing in specialized equipment. These visitors both meet immediate needs and pass their skills along to others to make a lasting impact.

Other ministries use a “training of trainers” model that equips local recipients with skills in church planting, discipleship, or evangelism. They’re then encouraged to train others in turn, making further visits unnecessary.

Good trips can also be opportunities for the receiving teams to take a break from their usual workload, as visitors can shoulder or at least lighten their hospital or church responsibilities for a few weeks. Visitors could offer childcare or other services to allow clergy and other ministry workers to have rest or travel or conference time that wouldn’t otherwise be feasible. Let the local pastor take a much-needed vacation.

Visitors can also multiply extant efforts. For instance, a church may already host trainings for local pastors, but a visiting team of teachers could allow them to work with a larger cohort. In the mission hospital where I work, we teach resuscitation skills to our trainees every year, and we’re extremely blessed by the visitors who come during that time to help us teach and take over rounds at the hospital so we’re free to focus on the courses.

We also appreciate thoughtful donations, from surgical equipment to comfort foods we can’t get on the mission field. Some visitors do it all: After bringing us big bags of dried cranberries and chocolate chips, a husband operated at the hospital with our residents while his wife assisted with homeschooling the missionary kids and the visiting teens did a little soccer camp.

They will be less Instagram friendly, but good short-term trips can still serve the very understandable motives that drive the bad trips. They can still bring in funding for ministries in poor countries, still give visiting Christians—especially young people—a cross-cultural experience that may reshape their faith for a lifetime, still spark long-term missionary careers with a vision for lifelong service.

What differentiates the good from the bad is honesty and transparency about your self-interest in the trip and the context of a long-term relationship between visitors and hosts.

So if you’re going to another country to see firsthand the work of the ministry your church supports, don’t feel as if you need to accomplish something. Just go and build that relationship. See the impact of your giving.

Or if you want your teenagers to see what poverty is really like and how Christians around the world worship God despite intense adversity, just admit that you want them to have that experience. It can be enormously valuable—though you might not call it a mission trip.

Or if you’re a student or intern who wants to shadow a professional to build your resume or explore what life is like on the mission field, be straightforward about that aim.

And if you’re part of a receiving ministry, be upfront about how you want people to come so they can pray for you and give to your ministry after they leave. And if your ministry gets locals in the door because they want to gawk at foreigners, be honest with your visitors about how they help your ministry by serving as free advertising.

Short-term mission trips can be good—if you’re well prepared and wisely consider who benefits from the arrangement and how. And beyond this guidance, as you look toward next year’s schedule at your church, know that there are many useful resources for best practices in short-term mission trips, especially for medical missions.

Even though my family already lives as missionaries overseas, when my kids are teenagers, I want to ensure they go on a trip. I want them to see some place more remote and difficult than where we live so they too can experience what Christian ministry looks like in a context different from ours. As the body of Christ in a time of rapid communication and transportation, we have more opportunities than ever to encourage and support one another across borders. And we have no excuse not to get it right.

Matthew Loftus lives with his family in Kenya, where he teaches and practices family medicine at a mission hospital. His book Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond is forthcoming from InterVarsity Press.

- More from Matthew Loftus

Church Life

Christian Groups Helped Millions After Katrina

Marvin Olasky

When federal aid was slow or nonexistent, volunteers sacrificed to serve.

People line up for free meals provided by the Salvation Army on September 2, 2005 in Gulfport, Mississippi.

Daniel J. Barry / Contributor / Getty

Twenty years after Katrina’s landfall on August 29, 2005, the hurricane remains one of the biggest disasters in American history: 1,392 deaths, and damage of about $200 billion (in 2025 dollars).

This will be a week of remembrance in New Orleans. We’ll probably hear a lot about the scope of the loss and the failures in response, including how journalistic credibility suffered damage.

While the Los Angeles Times cited “snipers and armed mobs” terrorizing “seething crowds of refugees” and CNN anchor Paula Zahn spoke of “bands of rapists, going block to block,” none of that was true.

Author Michael Lewis, a longtime New Orleans resident who did what reporters are supposed to do, said he “covered much of the city, along with every inch of the high ground” and checked out specific stories to correct the fictions.

While journalists became hysterical when the category-5 storm hit, many Christian volunteers kept their heads and exercised their hearts.

The work of church groups, rarely on the press call list, often ended up overlooked. Only later did stories emerge like that of Travis Maynard, 66, a Southern Baptist who had survived a massive heart attack and chemotherapy and radiation to treat cancer.

In the hurricane aftermath, he headed up a 24-person crew that served 10,000 or so meals a day, saying, “I’m here to serve. This is my calling.”

Maynard and his helpers were not alone. Thousands of volunteers aided the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Katrina who needed housing, goods, and other help. Ethel Wicker, a 57-year-old evacuee from New Orleans, summarized her experience at one site. ‘‘You just walk in. They have clothing …. And they treat you very well.’’ She compared that with waiting for hours to get food stamps and no help from FEMA.

Hundreds of churches had stories like this one from Gautier Presbyterian Church in Gautier, Mississippi, which helped a disabled veteran after Veterans Affairs did not replace his dentures, eyeglasses, and hearing aid swept away by Katrina. Church volunteers raised money to cover the dentures and pre-paid a Wal-Mart optician’s bill.

When church volunteers spotted an elderly lady living in a tent beside her ruined home, they immediately brought her food, blankets, a generator, a lamp, and an electric heater and then pressed for a long-term solution.

Groups often worked together. In Long Beach, Mississippi, Southern Baptist disaster relief volunteers from Ohio, Iowa, Tennessee, and Kentucky joined the Salvation Army for a mass feeding operation in the parking lot of a tattered Piggly Wiggly. The volunteers in yellow hats worked in mid-90s heat distributing meals in the parking lot or loading Salvation Army canteen trucks. The trucks carried meals to Gulfport and other decimated towns, often sharing gas with the local sheriff’s department.

Thousands of evacuees ended up in Jackson, Mississippi, where First Baptist Church became a shelter for people with special medical needs. Dozens of cots and a handful of hospital beds soon lined the church’s gym, with some among the elderly filling a makeshift clinic run by volunteer nurses and doctors.

One 83-year-old, Thomas Smith, had missed two critical dialysis treatments in New Orleans before he was airlifted to the church, where he said volunteers treated him better than doctors back home.

In Biloxi, Mississippi, Samaritan’s Purse set up at a United Methodist conference center that escaped destruction. One of the volunteers, San Diego firefighter Rusty Thill, sold everything in his apartment when he heard the Katrina news and drove his Chevy truck to the Gulf Coast.

At the home of Linda Ogden and her elderly mother, Thill and other volunteers lay sturdy tarps on their leaking roof, an effort that left Ogden in wonder. “I can’t believe they would help people for free like this,” she said. “I’m so thankful.”

In Gulfport, nearly 10 percent of the congregation of Pass Road Baptist Church lost everything, but the church staged a relief effort that included volunteers from North Carolina preparing and serving meals, and those from Pensacola, Florida, set up a mobile medical clinic.

In Texas, Great Hills Baptist Church and the Southern Baptist Convention coordinated mercy flights by pilots who donated their time and planes to ship provisions to flooded areas. “Load it up, fly it over, and stay long enough to pick up some fuel,” said pilot Derrich Pollock from Austin.

One month after Katrina’s landfall, church efforts gained unusual praise in the New York Times: “A New Meaning for ‘Organized Religion’: It Helps the Needy Quickly.” The September 29 story described how “from sprawling megachurches to tiny congregations, churches across the country have mobilized in response to Hurricane Katrina, offering shelter, conducting clothing drives and serving hot meals to evacuees, many of whom have had difficulty getting help from inundated government agencies.”

Times reporters Michael Luo and Campbell Robertson wrote:

The main hallway of the Florida Boulevard Baptist Church is lined with garbage bags full of clothing. The gymnasium has become a soup kitchen. And a kitchen set up outside churns out several thousand hot meals a day. At River of Praise Church in Tomball, Tex., 150 evacuees from the New Orleans area are camped out on cots in the family activity room, two youth rooms and a conference room.

Big organizations put up big number. The Salvation Army rotated into the disaster area 12,000 employees and 28,000 volunteers on two-week shifts. They distributed 158,000 cleaning kits (broom, bucket, mop, and detergent) and 130,000 boxes of groceries, assisting about 1 million people in all.

Individual church members were also active. Beliefnet told of a person who felt helpless watching Hurricane Katrina coverage on television. “I said a prayer, ‘Lord, I am giving money, but I want to do something personally. Send me someone to help.’ About 15 minutes later my phone rang. My neighbor said, ‘We are helping 75 evacuees who are moving into a camp near Pell City, Alabama. Do you want to help?’”

The result: “My husband and I moved into high gear. We gathered up linens, pillows, blankets, comforters, hair dryers, hot rollers, toiletries, make-up, soap, tools, clothing, 15 pairs of shoes, etc. I am giving Wal-Mart gift certificates to hand out as well. It was such a joy for us to be able to share what God had blessed us with to help someone who had nothing.”

During the week after Katrina, thousands of individuals posted online listings offering help: “I am a licensed bus driver willing to go south to haul those folks out …. I am a house painter …. I am fully licensed, have a truck with all equipment and chemicals, and am willing to go down and help out with any pest control problems …. I’m a building and roofing contractor from upstate New York who will donate my expertise and labor …. I am background-screened and fingerprinted for childcare, willing to take in a few kids or a small family …. I speak fluent Spanish and will contact anyone for anybody.”

Some never carried through on their initial impulse, but many did, including some from among the medical personnel who wrote of their willingness to serve: “I’m a board- certified orthopedic surgeon who is willing to help in a medical capacity …. I am a nurse from Cleveland …. I am a fully licensed general surgery chief resident willing to help immediately …. I am a CPR-certified health care provider.”

Some specialists were willing to be generalists: “Hi—I’m a registered nurse, my boyfriend is a union electrician. Even if you couldn’t use us in our professions, we would be willing to provide any assistance necessary.”

Many people offered housing, and some had their offers accepted: “Can’t get out there myself, but we have a dry, clean living room with space for a small family and their pets …. We only have our hearts and our home to offer, but our home is comfortable and dry! … I am a single mother with a small baby at home. I have an extra room and can house a single parent and/or children. It’s not a lot of space but I can help with meals, clothing, employment, and schooling …. We are licensed, loving foster parents who would be honored to take in a baby/toddler/young child—short or long term.”

Many without special training or available space just offered themselves: “I was down at Ground Zero after 9/11 and can help with any manual labor, rebuilding, medical help, search and rescue, and anything else under the sun …. I cannot offer my apartment for shelter at this time because I have no power/water, and I cannot offer money because I have very little, but I am very able to help out physically …. I have two husky chainsaws, transportation, and complete camping and cooking gear. No PAY required, just a destination and a person who truly needs help.”

Some skeptical journalists did not hide what they had seen. Bill Berkowitz of the Inter-Press Service compared “FEMA’s failure to provide timely assistance to the victims [with how] the faith-based community mobilized quickly. Thousands of vigorous and enthusiastic volunteers who were affiliated with a broad assortment of religious groups stepped up to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and serve the needy in countless ways.”

An atheist writing in Britain’s British Guardian Weekly commented two weeks after Katrina that he had seen how Christians “are the people most likely to take the risks and make the sacrifices involved in helping others…. men and women who, like me, cannot accept the mysteries and the miracles, do not go out with the Salvation Army at night.”

Marvin Olasky is Christianity Today’s executive editor for news and global and the author of The Politics of Disaster: Katrina, Big Government, And a New Strategy for Future Crises.

- More from Marvin Olasky

Books

Review

The Bible Is About Jesus—but Not Jesus Without His Bride

Brad East

Jonathan Linebaugh’s pastoral, accessible invitation to Scripture is rightly focused on Christ but uncertain in its audience and too quiet about the church.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash

If the Bible is the most-published book in world history, books about the Bible sometimes feel like a close second. That’s not a bad thing. I’ve written a couple of them myself and may have more in me. Books about the Bible are vital because they point us back to the sacred text, showing us how to read it, what it’s about, or (perhaps) how we’ve gone wrong in understanding it. For this reason, ever more Bible books are far from redundant; I’d go so far as to say they’re necessary.

As the closing verse of John’s gospel says, “There are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (21:25, RSV throughout). In a sense, books about the Bible are just these books that burst the world’s limits: Christians will keep on writing and reading them until the Lord’s return. Why? Because books about the Bible are always interpretations of the Bible. And in the words of Protestant theologian Gerhard Ebeling, “Church history is the history of the exposition of Scripture.”

Into the church’s ever-expanding library of Bible books, Jonathan Linebaugh has contributed another: The Well That Washes What It Shows: An Invitation to Holy Scripture. Linebaugh is a professor at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, and his scholarship has focused both on the New Testament, especially Paul’s letters, and on Reformation approaches to law, grace, and Scripture.

But this book is not a scholarly monograph. It’s a slim, accessible volume written for laypeople as well as pastors. As Linebaugh explains, it’s “an introduction to Holy Scripture that hopes to be an invitation to Holy Scripture.” The book simultaneously explains what the Bible is and narrates the story the Bible tells.

The tone isn’t dispassionate or professorial. Linebaugh is a preacher, and his model is Martin Luther: “Whatever page or portion of Scripture Luther is preaching from, he is preaching and pointing to Jesus Christ.” That’s because “all of Holy Scripture … both speaks about Jesus and is Jesus speaking.”

Here’s how that works: When Jesus speaks, he gives himself. So when we hear the voice of Jesus in the human words of the Bible, we are right to confess that what we have heard is the Word of God. For Jesus is both God and God’s Word: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Prophets and apostles are a vehicle for this one eternal Word.

But even if we acknowledge God’s speech in Scripture, Linebaugh wants us to realize that when we encounter the Bible’s words about Jesus, we are encountering Jesus himself. The Word of the gospel, which Scripture proclaims and to which it testifies, is one and the same Word that brings the living presence of the risen Lord into our midst—into our lives—into our very hearts and minds and bodies. Like Jacob in his wrestling match at the Jabbok river (Gen 32:22–32), we will never walk away from this encounter unchanged.

Besides Luther, Linebaugh’s other inspiration is George Herbert, whose 1633 poem “The Holy Scriptures I” provides the title and driving metaphor of the book. The Bible, Herbert says, is a well that washes what it shows. This two-step operation is sometimes called the two “words” or “works” of God. Through Scripture, God first diagnoses, then heals; first indicts, then pardons; first convicts, then forgives; first binds, then sets free. We cannot be helped if we don’t know our own need—but knowing our need isn’t good enough. We need help beyond ourselves to relieve our pitiful condition.

This is just what the Word of God does. It shows us what we are: miserable sinners bound for death, hopeless and godless and assaulted on every side by dangers visible and invisible. We are anxious, lonely, guilty, and hurting. We are unwell. To say otherwise would be dishonest. This is Scripture’s honesty, a term Linebaugh treasures as a description of God’s work in his Word. It tells us the truth about ourselves, and the truth isn’t pretty.

And yet the Bible goes on to wash what it shows. It washes us sinners clean. In Paul’s words, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph. 5:25–27). Or as Luther puts the point, “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it.” God’s love finds us through his Word, and the result is total transformation—from tip to toe.

Such is the flavor of Linebaugh’s writing about Scripture. It is earnest, endearing, unpretentious, and attractive. I can think of more than a few college students in my life who need a taste of it, not least to rinse out the dry and bitter flavor of so much other writing about the Bible.

The book as a whole is simply organized. Following a concise theological introduction (a highlight in itself), Linebaugh introduces the Old Testament in three chapters (Law, Prophets, Psalms) and the New Testament in three as well (Gospels, Paul, Hebrews to Revelation). He then uses Romans as a case study before concluding with a chapter on the ministry of the Word as a comfort to the lost and despairing.

These chapters are a pleasure to read, although seasoned pastors and biblical scholars are unlikely to learn new information from them. The book’s ideal setting and audience is the classroom, I think, whether high school, college, Sunday school, or adult small group.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its foursquare refusal to dabble in hot-button issues, whether moral, political, or theological. This is not a book about our petty squabbles or partisan divisions. It’s about the book of the gospel, the Holy Scriptures that give us Christ. Our disagreements are important, but they are not the main thing. The main thing is the Lord. Too often our conflicts point us away from the empty tomb in order to clinch a debate. If we have forgotten the Good News, then even when we win, we lose.

Before I raise a critical question or two about Linebaugh’s work, I want to comment on his style. At times his exposition of Scripture is so close to the text’s surface as to be invisible. I trust that this is on purpose. Linebaugh does not avoid repetition but positively revels in it. He never paraphrases or summarizes when he can quote verbatim instead. He rarely turns to illustrations from the world or his own life; his words are, for the most part, tissue thin to the point of transparency. He wants the Word to resound in his words; he wants his words to point, like the finger of John the Baptist, not to himself but to Christ alone.

Given Linebaugh’s readership, this is a wise if delicate decision. It seems he is seeking to train his readers to become readers of Scripture. And the way he does this is by suffusing his own text as much as possible with the text of Scripture. Once you turn the final page, you’ve been conditioned to turn next to the genuine article: Scripture itself.

I call this decision a delicate one because the danger is that readers who do not know Scripture, much less how to read it, will find writing like Linebaugh’s difficult to navigate precisely because so much of it is scriptural quotation. I don’t mean to call the decision into question, only to flag it as a challenge facing us all: How do we write for a postliterate audience largely ignorant of Scripture’s sound and feel on the page? Should we ease them into it or throw them in the deep end? Either way demands a light touch. Linebaugh has one, and I’m confident many beginners will be grateful for it.

Having said that, there was one matter of style that stumped me. In the preface to his 1988 book Disappointment with God, Philip Yancey explains why he chose not to put biblical references “in footnotes or parentheses within the text”—namely, because doing so “creates an awkwardness in reading not unlike listening to someone with a stutter.”

I wish Linebaugh had followed Yancey’s method. There are long sentences and entire paragraphs so filled with parentheses, abbreviations, numbers, colons, and semicolons that my eyes struggled to follow the thread. And this is my day job! I read books like this for a living. I can’t imagine the unnecessary strain for a typical reader, especially one who is new to Scripture. I grant that Linebaugh is following guild standards, but that’s only to shift the problem one level up. All Christian writers for a nonscholarly audience—including publishers and editors, including this very article—need to hash out new standards that think first about readers’ needs and less about precision in citation.

This comment returns us to the implied audience, which is a confusion I faced throughout Linebaugh’s book. On every page it is clear that the book’s audience is laypeople of all ages. Yet the final chapter (nearly 20 pages) is about ministry and appears to be addressed to pastors. This is an odd decision in more than one respect.

First, very little in this book will be news to any pastor I know. Not that pastors couldn’t benefit from it—sometimes the most informed need to be reminded of the basics—but so much of what Linebaugh is doing is milk for beginners, not meat for the mature. So the turn to pastors in the end was befuddling, even jarring.

Second, in Linebaugh’s treatment of Scripture the church is nowhere to be found. For that matter, equally absent are tradition, liturgy, the sacraments, and the Holy Spirit. The result, if I may put it this way, is an account of the Bible and its message that is maximally and perhaps stereotypically Protestant. By this I don’t mean the book is “not Catholic.” I mean that it is so intensely focused on the “solas”—Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone—that it leaves by the wayside other essential features of the gospel.

For example, in a book about the Bible we get no more than a couple pages on Acts, and even these consist mostly of references to Paul’s ministry and the geographic spread of God’s Word. I was astonished to see Linebaugh summarize both the event of Pentecost and the second chapter of Ephesians without mention of the church, either directly or indirectly. The power of the Word in Linebaugh’s presentation is so Christ-centered that an unsuspecting reader wouldn’t guess the Spirit is crucial to hearing and being changed by it.

Above all, one walks away without any sense that the book of Scripture—which is absolutely the book of Christ, the Word of the gospel, the inspired medium of the Lord’s living address—is also the church’s book, or that this book’s home and habitat is the church’s public worship. Linebaugh has an enviably light touch with historical details, like the exile from Babylon or the cities Paul visited, but he does not mention the history of the texts themselves: authored by leaders and servants of God’s people, edited by them, collected by them, copied by them, preserved by them, translated by them, canonized by them, and much more besides.

These aren’t mere matters of history; they’re theologically significant. The same Spirit who inspired and speaks through these texts superintended every moment in the entire canonical process, from their initial transcription, down through the centuries, all the way to hearing Joshua or Jeremiah from the pulpit last Sunday in one’s mother tongue. And the hands the Spirit used were the hands of the people of God.

In short: no Scripture, no church. But also: no church, no Scripture.

This dynamic is not incidental to the story Scripture tells. That story is indeed universal in scope and minute in impact—cosmic in extent while reaching down to me. But it also has a particular protagonist: the family of Abraham, the elect people of God, whom Christ has opened to the nations. Linebaugh doesn’t avoid talk of Israel. But reading him, you wouldn’t know that the church is Christ’s “body, the fulness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23) or, in the words of the Shepherd of Hermas, that “for her sake the world was framed.”

The resulting impression is that Scripture’s primary business is to facilitate a one-on-one relationship between individual readers and Jesus. Not for a second do I think Linebaugh believes this or intended to communicate it. But that is what comes across. This unintended effect is part of what makes the final chapter so odd. In place of a chapter on ministry, the book needed a chapter on the church: its traditions of reading (not only Augustine and Luther but also all the fathers and medievals between them, not one of whom Linebaugh cites or references), its sacramental worship, and most of all its life with the Holy Spirit.

Linebaugh is right to say that, through Scripture, “God unveils our need for Jesus; God gives us Jesus.” But this giving is not generic or random; the “us” who receive it are a body, not just individuals. We are not only children of the Father but also together the bride of the Son. In the words of Dei Verbum, through Scripture “God, who spoke of old, uninterruptedly converses with the bride of His beloved Son; and the Holy Spirit, through whom the living voice of the Gospel resounds in the Church, and through her, in the world, leads unto all truth those who believe and makes the word of Christ dwell abundantly in them.”

The Bible is about Jesus—but not Jesus without his bride. Such a story would feature the lover without the beloved, the Lord without his people, the head without the body.

Jonathan Edwards wrote that God created the world in order “to provide a spouse for his Son Jesus Christ, [who] might enjoy him and on whom he might pour forth his love.” We must therefore always center our telling of the gospel on Christ, and Linebaugh does this beautifully. Having zoomed in on the face of the Lord, however, he has cropped the Lord’s body out of the picture. The Bible doesn’t do that, and neither should books about the Bible.

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.

- More from Brad East

Ideas

Gen Z Doesn’t Need a Soft Gospel

Kenna Hartian

Christian leaders can meet our desire for authenticity and stability with a message of Christ’s holiness and grace.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

It was fall semester 2024, and I’d managed to claim a table in the normally crowded student center at Taylor University. As I sat studying, a girl slid into the seat across from me and asked if she could join. We lived in the same building, but I didn’t really know her. Still, I said yes. She noticed the sticker on the back of my laptop. It read, “Biblical femininity, not feminism.”

“What is your definition of feminism?” she asked, launching us into a discussion about what the Bible said about gender, the role of women in the church, and the effects of different cultural movements.

Our impromptu conversation wasn’t the only time I’ve had conversations about controversial subjects with my peers. We’ve discussed abortion, immigration, marriage, racism, environmentalism, and more. I’ve discussed eschatology while standing in line for rides at Six Flags.

Generation Z prizes authenticity. We want stability. We’re searching for community. And we’re willing to engage with difficult topics to find them. Most of all, we want a gospel that tells us the whole truth. Gen Z does not need a soft gospel.

Born between 1997 and 2012, zoomers are younger than the internet. Our oldest members barely remember life before smartphones, and the youngest members don’t know a life without social media.

We’re a generation coming of age in a world that does not feel stable. Our public square is online, and we’re used to receiving filtered, edited, and one-sided information. We turn to social media, especially TikTok, to stay up-to-date on the news. We tend to distrust established institutions. Misleading news coverage on politics and social media’s platforming of alternative viewpoints and false information has made Gen Z skeptical. Everything seems fake, and zoomers don’t like it.

Gen Z came of age in a divisive political environment seemingly headed toward violent implosion. We watched as Western culture discarded traditional and natural boundaries around gender and marriage while calling any pushback bigoted. Many of my generation are still scarred by the forced lockdowns of COVID-19 and the anxiety surrounding both the disease and the response to it. And as we look to the future, many of us zoomers are worried we won’t be able to afford the cost of living, especially housing.

And then Gen Z is just lonely. More connected than ever through screens, many 20-somethings don’t have in-person communities they can rely on. For members of a generation whose mental health struggles are well documented, this means they’re suffering alone.

The need for authenticity, stability, and community might be why some members of Gen Z are shifting back toward traditional ideals. They’re aware of the competing thoughts surrounding marriage, gender, and life. Many are disillusioned by mainstream progressive solutions.

Children’s rights advocate Katy Faust summarized it this way: “One reason for Gen Z’s rightward lurch is they’ve tasted and seen how family breakdown has destroyed their lives. They have watched their friends try on every sexual label and still be depressed, anxious, and lonely. They have experienced firsthand the crisis of meaninglessness. They want an alternative.”

Unfortunately, Gen Z has reacted by seesawing back toward secular traditionalism. For example, many young men are increasingly drawn to a type of hypermasculinity popularized by influencers like Andrew Tate. This version of manhood teaches that masculinity is synonymous with physical strength, glorifies the lusts of the flesh, and encourages men to beat down the weak. Young men seem to be drawn to Tate types because they’re an antidote to the culture’s antagonism toward men.

Many young women, too, are drawn to the tradwife trend, which reduces God’s call to an aesthetic caricature, creates unrealistic expectations, and can twist the biblical doctrine of headship into dictatorship. Young women seemingly are drawn to this trend because it counters Western society’s idea that they must “do it all.”

But neither of these things satisfies, because they miss the real source of instability, fakeness, and loneliness. They try to fix the rift in humanity’s relationship with God through our own power.

Gen Z needs an alternative, and the story of the gospel provides it.

When people sugarcoat the gospel in an effort to make it seem nicer, they minimize it. It starts to look like the rest of the hedonistic, postmodern philosophies causing destruction in our culture. For a generation used to wading through edited information, filtering the gospel to make it appear softer makes it sound like another unstable ideology leading to broken loneliness.

Preaching “you’re accepted just the way you are” feels good, but it isn’t fully true. Yes, he will save us just the way we are, but he will not leave us just the way we are (Rom. 5:6–11). When we avoid preaching the seriousness of sin and the consequences of our broken relationship with God, we cheapen Christ’s sacrifice.

It’s good to speak about God’s love—he is love. But his love is different from the world’s definition of love. It’s actionable (Ps. 136). It doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing—even popular wrongdoing—but rejoices in the truth (1 Cor. 13:6). It’s sacrificial (John 15:13).

Avoiding the parts of Scripture that are more difficult to preach will only provide people with an incomplete view of God and salvation. It makes it seem as if the gospel doesn’t have real-world impact.

The Bible does indeed address injustice, violence, financial security, and loneliness. Gen Z needs an answer only Scripture can give—but we need to share the whole of Scripture.

For a generation that craves authenticity, the Bible is honest about humanity’s sinful nature (Ps. 51; Rom. 3:23). Old and New Testament authors alike don’t shy away from discussing the often harsh realities of this fallen world. God’s Word is honest about the sole path to salvation (John 14:6; Rom. 10:9–10). Scripture proclaims truth without posturing or editing it first (2 Tim. 3:16–17; Heb. 6:18). It’s authentic.

Zoomers wants stability? God is a God of order (1 Cor. 14:33). He holds the world in his hands (Ps. 24:1; Matt. 5:45), established right and wrong (Mic. 6:8), punishes evil (Isa. 13:11; Rom. 1:18), and provides for those who seek first his kingdom (Matt. 6:33). He is the cornerstone and the firm foundation (1 Pet. 2:6). He provides stability, and he is stable (Luke 6:46–49).

Gen Z wants community? God promises to never leave nor forsake us (Deut. 31:8; Heb. 13:5). He sends the Helper to be with his followers (John 15:26–17). He loves unconditionally (Rom. 5:8) and won’t let us stay in our messes (1 Thess. 4:3). Christians have a built-in community of believers to do life with (Eph. 2:19). And Christ himself provides community.

We Christians need to share that Christ died for our sin (Isa. 53:5). He experienced the full wrath of a just God against evil (Rom. 3:23–26). God will save anyone, no matter how degenerate a sinner, but he does not leave people the way they are. Freedom in Christ is not a license to keep on sinning (Gal. 5:13). His kindness is meant to lead to repentance (Rom. 2:4). Belief in him is the only way to salvation. Living in sin will result in slavery to sin (Rom. 6). Knowing that Christ is the only way to salvation strips away the mask that obscures the results of prominent cultural ideologies (10:9–10).

There’s a church near me that does a wonderful job preaching Christ’s death and resurrection. But because it only ever preaches those elementary doctrines of Christ (Heb. 6:1), many young adults have left. They want churches that will speak to what is happening in the world around them and that will show them God has a plan for their specific pains. They need to see that these core doctrines—the gospel—connect to their life. A watered-down gospel won’t do that.

Generation Z is open to Jesus but wary of religion. Religion seems fake and disconnected; Jesus seems real.

One of my younger sisters came home from her freshman year at Cedarville excited about Jesus because she realized that her faith is a relationship. Jesus is someone she can spend time with and know better. He isn’t disconnected from what’s happening in the world.

Now is a perfect time to speak to Generation Z about the whole gospel, even though it’s offensive to the world (1 Pet. 2). My generation needs to know we’re not crazy for wondering why the LGBTQ culture feels wrong. We need to know why living for ourselves makes us feel anxious or depressed.

There’s an understanding among zoomers that the status quo isn’t right, but many are looking for answers in the wrong places. Secular conservatism is just as dangerous as secular liberalism. Without the stability, authenticity, and community Christ brings, nothing will change. Honest discussions with Gen Z, where all of Scripture is embraced—including the parts this world hates—will draw my hungry generation to Christ.

Kenna Hartian is the Habecker fellow at Christianity Today.

- More from Kenna Hartian

News

Died: Chuck Girard, Who Shaped the Sound of the Jesus People

Daniel Silliman

The pioneer of Contemporary Christian Music wrote songs of salvation and worship for a generation of evangelicals.

Chuck Girard / edits by Christianity Today

Chuck Girard wrote and sang and played from the time he was a kid—rhythm and blues, blue-eyed soul, doo-wop, pop, and even a top-ten radio hit about Honda motorcycles. When he experienced the love of Jesus at age 26, that didn’t change the way he felt about music.

“I want you to know I still love rock-and-roll music,” Girard wrote in a subsequent song, “but now I have something to say.”

Girard and his band Love Song started to perform what they called “Jesus music” in Southern California in the early 1970s. They became one of the regular groups at pastor Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, where thousands of young people flocked to hear about God’s love and peace, get baptized in the ocean, and join the “Jesus People movement.” Love Song’s earnest folk rock—with tunes like “Welcome Back,” “Changes,” “Little Country Church,” and “Since I Opened the Door”—became the soundtrack of salvation for a generation.

Girard went on to further shape the sound of American evangelicalism with his work producing the first Maranatha! Music compilation album and solo hits like “Sometimes Alleluia” before turning to worship music in the 1980s.

Contemporary Christian music (CCM) legends Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith both described his music as life-changing.

Andrew Erwin, one of the producers of the film Jesus Revolution, said Girard deserved “a standing ovation” for his originality and extensive influence.

“He was one of the true trailblazers of Christian music with Love Song,” Erwin told CCM Magazine. “They were the first of their kind, paving the way for artists like Larry Norman, Keith Green, and so many others who followed. Chuck stood at the very forefront.”

Girard, for his part, said the earthly accolades were nice, but he was looking forward to something greater.

“The real treasure is in Heaven,” he said in 2012, when he was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame. “I pray that we will all be in Heaven’s Hall of Fame someday and hear the most amazing words we will probably ever hear: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your lord.’”

Girard died at home in Franklin, Tennessee, on August 11 at age 81.

He was born in California on August 27, 1943, one of Clarance Girard and Dorthea Tomany Girard’s four kids and their only son.

Girard wrote in his autobiography, Rock & Roll Preacher, that his father was an abusive alcoholic. His first memory as a child was trying to get his father to stop hurting his mother. He also had vague recollections of his father taking him to bars and giving him alcohol when he was a toddler.

Girard’s mother was a Catholic who also believed in New Age mysticism and told people’s fortunes. She told Girard that she had had a vision of him as an adult playing piano on a big stage. She enrolled him in lessons when he was 10.

Girard had no interest in music at first. But then he heard the chord progression of “Heart and Soul,” also known as the “doo-wop progression,” and became obsessed.

“I had no other goal in life than to make music,” he said.

In high school in Santa Rosa, California, he and some friends formed a pop group they called The Castells. Girard’s mother gave him $100 to make a demo tape, and The Castells went to Hollywood and landed a record deal. They signed with Era, agreeing to 3.5 cents per record, split between the four boys.

The Castells had a hit in the summer of 1961. The song “Sacred” was the 20th-most-played song on the radio. The following spring, “So This Is Love” rose to 21.

Girard soon found himself sharing stages with some of the biggest acts of the time—Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bobby Vee, Brenda Lee, The Righteous Brothers—and spending the rest of his time at house parties, drinking without stopping for days.

“I felt like I was floating,” Girard wrote, recalling one binge. “From the day I first got drunk, I attempted to stay in the state of some degree of inebriation as much as I could.”

The Castells floundered and fell apart, but Girard stayed in Los Angeles. He started working with producer Gary Usher, who was close with the Beach Boys and hoped to replicate their success with another band that captured a youth culture fantasy he could package and sell: surfing or hot rods or something.

In 1964, with Girard along for the ride, Usher threw together “The New Sounds of the Silly Surfers” by the Silly Surfers, “The New Sounds of the Weird-Ohs” by the Weird-Ohs, “Hot Rod Hootenanny” by Mr. Gasser and the Weird-Ohs, “Surf Route 101” by the Super Stocks, and “Little Honda” by the Hondells.

They got lucky with the Hondells, when the group’s paean to Japanese motorbikes, “Little Honda,” charted at No. 9.

Girard was also along for a generational ride. With the rest of the hippies, he discovered marijuana and psychedelic drugs and came to understood his life as a spiritual quest.

“I believed that I had discovered the key to the secrets of the universe,” Girard wrote in his autobiography. “A dimension of consciousness opened up. … I had no realization of the implications regarding God and the devil.”

He experimented with Eastern philosophies, astrology, the occult, and radical vegetarian diets. At one point, Girard ate only avocados, asparagus, and bananas.

Rock musician Denny Correll, part of a band called Fifth Cavalry, convinced him that Jesus was at least part of the spiritual answer he was looking for. Backstage at a concert, Correll pressured Girard to declare Jesus his Savior.

“I halfway meant it, but mostly it was to get him off my back,” Girard later wrote. “His fervor was infectious, and he could easily make you believe that what he preached was true.”

The two men and a group of hippie musicians started a commune. They shared everything they owned, did drugs, played music, and talked endlessly about the Bible. One man emerged as the leader and started having revelations that they were supposed to move to Hawaii, where they could live off the land until Jesus returned to establish his millennial kingdom, with New Jerusalem located on the islands.

It didn’t work out. Girard ended up, as he would tell the story later, wet in a cave by himself with a guitar. He returned to the mainland to try to relaunch his career in music.

He continued to pursue enlightenment through drugs until he had a horrible experience with LSD in Utah.

“I had no sense of any other living thing in the universe. … There was complete silence,” Girard later wrote. “It frightened me to the core of my being.”

At about the same time, Girard’s new band, Love Song, kept getting invited to Calvary Chapel. Girard, Tommy Coomes, Jay Truax, and Fred Field would pick up hippie hitchhikers. Again and again, the hitchhikers asked them if they’d heard about Calvary Chapel.

Girard finally decided to check it out for himself. He sat in the back and was overwhelmed by the feeling of Christ’s love. The pastor preached about sin and redemption and how Jesus died for us because we could not get right with God on our own. Girard started crying—deep, heaving sobs.

“Snot was all over my beard, and tears were all over my face. But, I felt clean!!!” he later wrote. “I had asked, and it had been given to me. I had sought with all my heart and I had found. I had knocked incessantly, and the door had been opened to me.”

Unexpectedly, the other members of Love Song also had born-again experiences at Calvary Chapel. They added another member, John Mueller, and started writing and singing songs about Jesus in 1970. Their music style didn’t change, but now they had “something to say.”

Love Song become one of the house bands at Calvary Chapel, developing the folk-rock sound of the Jesus People movement.

As a professional musician with the most recording experience, Girard was also brought in to produce the first Maranatha! Music compilation in 1971, which was called “The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert.” He was not credited but made key decisions about keeping the music simple and evangelistic.

As Girard told Rolling Stone magazine at the time, the music was meant to glorify God, not the musicians. And he didn’t want the songs to get tripped up in artistic ambiguity. Every song, he said, should present its message in “plain simple language with no deep intellectual vibes. What we’re saying is Jesus, one way. If you want the answer, follow it.”

The Maranatha! Music album was sold to Christian bookstores out of the trunk of a car but sold 160,000 copies and launched a series of compilation albums that defined early CCM.

Love Song released its own self-titled debut album in 1972 and headlined at Explo ’72, the Christian music festival and evangelistic rally that was promoted as a rejoinder to the hippie movement and its big music festivals, especially Woodstock.

Girard was not the biggest star of the Jesus music scene, but he was very influential. As Songwriter Magazine reported, he “always possessed a rare combination of musicality, heartfelt simplicity, and spiritual conviction,” and “his talent helped bridge secular musicianship with evangelical faith at a pivotal moment in American culture, lending authenticity to what would become a major genre.”

Love Song produced a second album, “Final Touch,” in 1974, and Girard went solo in ’75. The final song on his first album, “Sometimes Alleluia,” became one of his biggest hits. Girard would call it his “first worship song.”

In the midst of all his success, however, Girard continued to struggle with alcohol addiction. He got to the point where he couldn’t make it a day without consuming alcohol and was drinking vodka in the morning, hoping he could hide the smell.

His wife, Karen, confronted him in 1979 with the help of pastors Chuck Smith and Kenn Gulliksen, whose church would later grow into the Vineyard movement. They sent him to rehab.

Girard recalled it was a crushing moment when he first sat in a circle of addicts, opened his mouth, and said, “I’m Chuck Girard. I am a backslidden Christian singer, and I’m an alcoholic”—but it was also the beginning of healing.

After rehab, Girard went to a Vineyard Bible school and studied what Scripture said about music. He grew convicted that he should serve the church and focus his talents on worship more than performance.

“Music is almost always about worship in the Bible,” he later wrote. “Sometimes it’s warfare, sometimes celebration, all of it brings praise to God.”

He shifted his focus to worship ministry in the 1980s and, according to the obituary written by his family, embraced a “church-centered calling that remained his passion for the rest of his life.”

Girard released his final album in 2024. It is an eclectic collection of songs about pain, uncertainty, and, of course, Jesus. He released it at the same time he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer.

“Here’s what I know,” Girard said. “I was blind but now I see; Jesus is the only answer to life’s problems; the Bible is the truth and can be trusted; surrender yourself to doing it God’s way; build your life on believing the truth and forgiving and being forgiven.”

Girard is survived by his wife, Karen, and their four daughters, Kristin, Alisa, Cherie, and Nikki. Memorial services are planned for The Gate Church in Franklin, Tennessee, on August 26 and at Calvary Chapel Golden Springs in Diamond Bar, California, on September 20.

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

Wire Story

AME Clergy Recoup $60 Million of Mishandled Retirement Funds

Adelle M. Banks - Religion News Service

After the denomination’s embezzlement scandal, a partial settlement returns some lost funds to thousands of ministers and staff.

The closing worship service of the African Methodist Episcopal Church quadrennial General Conference in Columbus, Ohio, in 2024.

Video screen grab / RNS

A district court judge granted final approval last week to a partial settlement for clergy and staffers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church after a substantial percentage of funds from their retirement plan were discovered to be missing.

The historically Black denomination has been accused of mishandling the retirement funds, leaving many plan participants with about 30 percent of what they had hoped to use for retirement. The denomination accused its former retirement department head of embezzlement after discovering in 2021 that he provided “deceptive, false and grossly inflated financial statements” about the retirement plan.

On August 19, Judge S. Thomas Anderson of the US District Court for the Western District of Tennessee approved the partial settlements for the plaintiffs—totaling some 4,500 people whose single case was previously consolidated from six—with the denomination and Newport Group Inc., a third-party administrator involved with the church’s retirement services. He said if the case was not settled, the plan participants could “face the risk of rulings adverse to their cause.”

Under the approved settlement, the AME Church has put $20 million into a settlement fund and Newport provided $40 million, totaling $60 million plus any interest.

Lawyers for plan participants and the church confirmed Tuesday that, not including interest, legal fees currently total $20 million plus $1.3 million reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses—more than a third of the settlement.

Both lawyers for the church and for the case’s plaintiffs said they were pleased with the development but acknowledged there is more work ahead of a trial set for 2026. The trial would involve defendants who continue with the litigation and are not part of the settlements.

“It’s been a long and difficult battle, and we’re not done, but this settlement is a major milestone in our efforts to collect every penny that these pastors lost,” Matt Lee, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs, told Religion News Service via email. “It’s hard to overstate what the restoration of these funds will mean for thousands of retired AME Church ministers. While we’re proud of the work our team has done so far, we will not relent until every stone is turned and every responsible party is held accountable.”

Douglass Selby, general counsel for the AME Church, said the denomination was “thrilled” by the legal juncture.

“It marks an important point to the litigation,” he told Religion News Service in an interview. “Obviously, we still have a ways to go to get our plan participants who suffered this wrong fully restored to their financial position, but this is an important series of first steps.”

Selby added that the church continues to seek “full recovery” from “the other parties that were participants in this scheme to defraud the church.”

Early in the litigation, the plaintiffs said some $88.4 million was lost from the retirement funds. The AME Church said the situation was the result of embezzlement by the Rev. Jerome V. Harris, who retired in 2021 after 21 years as head of the denomination’s Department of Retirement Services. He died in May 2024, of a heart attack.

Symetra Life Insurance Co. and his estate are among additional defendants in the case.

On Tuesday, Selby said, “We are going after the estate of Dr. Harris with full force, and our expectation is that if there are any funds there that we would secure them.” Retirement plan participants could then recoup more of the lost funds if the court decides in their favor.

The judge, who has presided over the case for three years, wrote a 30-page order about its complexity. He said it has produced more than 1.5 million documents and numerous claims, counterclaims, cross-claims and third-party claims.

“Perhaps, most important, the money obtained from the settlements will allow the plan participants to begin receiving increased retirement benefits sooner rather than later,” he said.

Anderson noted that the court received just two objections and no opt-out requests to the settlement. He acknowledged the concerns of two Florida ministers, including the Charles Larkin Scott Sr. of Royal Palm Beach, who objected to the amount in legal fees for attorneys, but determined they lacked merit.

“The Plan participants relied on the promise of full pension benefits when they retired as outlined in The Book of Discipline and have been confronted with a broken promise just when they most need those benefits,” Anderson wrote, referring to the rule book of the AME Church. “The Court agrees with Reverend Scott’s statement that the Plan participants have done nothing wrong and has made its decision based on considerations of how best to help those who have been injured.”

Lawyers for the church and the plan participants said if those two ministers do not appeal within 30 days of Anderson’s order, a settlement administrator will transfer funds to a trust from which eligible plan members or their beneficiaries can receive financial distributions.

In a Wednesday statement, Bishop Silvester S. Beaman, president of the AME Church’s Council of Bishops, said the church “crossed a major threshold in the settlement with the Newport Group” and that he was confident the funds would be available for plan participants by mid-September.

“This is a positive step forward in our quest to restore the funds that were lost,” Beaman said.

AARP Foundation, which has been part of the team of attorneys working on the litigation, also welcomed the judge’s approval.

“This settlement is a hard-won victory and will bring much-needed financial relief to thousands who dedicated their lives to serving their communities,” said William Alvarado Rivera, senior vice president of litigation at AARP Foundation. “This agreement helps restore critical retirement funds, without further delay and expense.”

Retired ministers described having to return to work or depending on their children for financial security, which was not how they envisioned spending retirement, as a result of the lost funds. Beneficiaries of ministers who died are also awaiting payment.

The Rev. J. Edgar Boyd, a leader of the AMEs for Justice and Accountability group, said he has heard from retired clergy whose economic situations have been “imperiled tremendously” in the wake of the retirement fund losses.

In an interview Tuesday, he said the funds available through the settlement amount to about $39 million, not including interest. That’s because the $60 million total is reduced by the attorneys’ fees and an additional $200,000, as each of the 10 named plaintiffs will receive $20,000 as a service award.

The parties involved in the settlement, which include AME Church defendants such as its Council of Bishops, Department of Retirement Services and General Board, as well as Newport, have not admitted liability. However, the AME Church has long declared it desired to make “participants whole.”

Anderson said that day is still in the future.

“However, to be clear, the present settlements will not make the retirees whole,” he wrote after stating in his order that the settlement calls for retirees to “recover proportionally what he or she invested.”

“The litigation continues with that goal in mind and with the assurance of Plaintiffs’ counsel that claims against all other defendants in this matter are being actively pursued,” he wrote.

- More from Adelle M. Banks - Religion News Service

Ideas

Christian Education Can Survive ChatGPT

Griffin Gooch

As an early-career educator, I was growing discouraged in the classroom. Then a small Christian college showed me a new way to teach.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

If you’d asked me a year ago why so many American college students are struggling, I’d have told you a familiar story: Rising tuition rates fund bloated administrations and build bougier freshman dorms. Broken teaching styles don’t give students the knowledge or skills they need. And then there are the students themselves, widely reputed to be lazy, “functionally illiterate,” ChatGPT-addicted phone zombies.

There is truth to these charges, and growing up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, primed me to believe the accusations against students in particular. When Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves wanted to show just how much the modern male is struggling, he used my hometown as a case study. “Thanks to an anonymous benefactor, students educated in the city’s K–12 school system get all their tuition paid at almost any college in the state,” he wrote. But though the “program put rocket boosters on female college completion rates,” the “men’s rates didn’t budge.” Literally no change.

After a few years of teaching in Kalamazoo high school and college settings, I wasn’t surprised by those findings. It’s not uncommon for new educators to be crestfallen when their expectations meet the reality of classrooms in an age of smartphones and artificial intelligence. But as a Christian educator who connects education to knowing and imitating Christ, I was slowly growing a unique sense of discouragement. Many students are more interested in doing as little work as possible to get as high a grade as possible than in anything to do with Jesus.

But then I showed up to teach at Northpoint College, a Christian school nearby. I expected more of the same: doomscrolling during lectures and using chatbots with excessive force. Instead, by a few weeks in, I was texting every professor I know to enthuse that I’d never seen a group of students so devoted to education.

AI-use detection was zero on all assignments. The average paper looked better than my own submissions to academic journals. By the end of the semester, the biggest complaint I got in course evaluations was that I wasn’t challenging the students enough.

All my students were impressive, but having read Reeves’s work, I was especially struck by the men. Of the ten guys in my class, six were planning to get PhDs, and the rest had lined up impressive careers or made concrete plans to work at local churches after graduation. In between classes, I started interrogating other professors to see if their experiences lined up with mine. They did, unanimously.

I had to understand what was going on, so I reached out to Trent Roberts, Northpoint’s president. His account of his school’s success was in many ways what you’d expect from the leader of an Assemblies of God-affiliated college. The Holy Spirit figured prominently. But Roberts also highlighted Northpoint’s unusual pairing of very high expectations with abundant validation and resources for students.

Northpoint offers bachelor’s degrees but mostly uses master’s-level textbooks, and anything below a C is a failing grade. But the college introduces these expectations by explaining to students that high standards match high hopes.

In practice, this is a system built around relationships. When the academic dean reviewed my syllabus, his most notable change was adding my personal phone number and email. And where in previous roles I could count on one hand the number of times students reached out for help, at Northpoint my inbox is avalanched by student emails every week. That’s the kind of culture the school has cultivated, asking a lot from students but never leaving them to flounder.

Roberts’s account of the college’s approach reminded me of the work of psychologist David Yeager, who’s known for his research on motivating young people. In one of his studies, scholars had a teacher correct one group of students’ essays while leaving no additional comments. For another group, the teacher corrected just as rigorously but also left a “wise feedback” comment that said, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.” The wise-feedback group made twice as many revisions to their essays as the group with no encouragement.

Yeager argues that young people want and need this kind of affirmation. That’s not because they’re vain, selfish, or obsessed with status, he says, but because recognition and respect are to young people what food and sleep are to infants: “core needs that, when satisfied, can unlock better motivation and behavior.” As Roberts and I talked, his philosophy of education at Northpoint struck me as a Spirit-driven version of this idea. “Our job is to make students feel capable,” he told me, “and to provide them whatever they need to reach our standards.”

In an increasingly postliterate age, faculty may be tempted to lower their standards, boosting students’ immediate performance but undermining long-term growth. But Northpoint is flourishing by raising expectations, asking students to grapple with “desirable difficulties” that build character alongside knowledge—while providing students with the relational and academic support to grapple well.

And generally, young people take that opportunity when offered. “It drives me nuts when older generations complain about Gen Z like they’re incompetent,” Roberts said. “It makes the next generation more likely to live out those critiques like a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Stories of generational decline don’t have to come true.

Nor does the golden age of the university have to be in the past, and Christian colleges like Northpoint are perfectly positioned to train the next generation well. As Oklahoma Baptist University professor Alan Noble has noted, many problems present in secular universities aren’t occurring in Christian higher education to the same degree. With Noble, I’d argue this is because Christian institutions are grounded in a moral and theological understanding of education that their counterparts lack.

Christian schools should consciously train students to see the prestige, wealth, or opportunities their educations provide as secondary goals. “The end then of learning,” as John Milton put it in Of Education, “is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him.”

Our calling as Christian educators is not only to share knowledge but also to challenge our students to live into their status as “heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:12–17)—the utmost honor imaginable. It’s easy to blame the downfall of higher ed on 18-year-olds, but if we want students who don’t cheat with ChatGPT, then we need to teach students that getting a good grade is less important than imitating Christ.

Griffin Gooch is a writer, speaker, and professor currently working on his doctorate at University of Aberdeen. He writes most frequently on Substack.

- More from Griffin Gooch

Theology

What Christians Should Know About Shinto

Interview by Kazusa Okaya

Evangelical scholar Yoichi Yamaguchi on the indigenous religion’s key teachings, its historical development, and ways to evangelize effectively in Japan.

People holding lanterns at an Obon festival.

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

Every August, Japan celebrates Obon, one of the country’s biggest Shinto-Buddhist festivals. Vibrant dances set to the beat of taiko drums take place in temples or parks as a form of welcoming the spirits. Families visit their ancestors’ graves to pay their respects and light paper lanterns to guide the spirits back to the afterlife when the festival ends.

The Shinto belief that pervades this festival is the notion that the spirits of dead ancestors have become deities who watch over their living relatives. During Obon, it is customary to welcome these ancestral spirits into peoples’ homes.

Shinto, or Shintoism as it is known in the West, has profoundly shaped the history, culture, and worldview of the Japanese people. Yet literature in the English-speaking world—particularly addressing the relationship between Shinto and Christianity—remains limited.

To explore the nature of Shinto, its development in the country, its interactions with Christianity, and its implications for evangelism in Japan, Christianity Today interviewed Yoichi Yamaguchi, director of the International Mission Center at Tokyo Christian University.

“At Shinto’s foundation lies a mythological worldview: that Japan was established by the sun god Amaterasu, a chief deity,” Yamaguchi said. “The emperor is regarded as Amaterasu’s descendant.”

Between 2022 and 2025, Yamaguchi published a series of articles introducing key texts associated with Japanese Christianity (nihon-teki-kirisuto-kyo), a movement popular before and during World War II that attempted to wed Shinto and nationalism with Christian faith.

After the war ended, Japanese churches recognized the militant nationalism they had held on to and moved toward adopting a critical stance against syncretistic Christianity. They repented of practices like emperor worship, vowing to serve only God as their master.

More recently, however, Yamaguchi has sensed a growing openness among Japanese evangelicals to positively reengage Shinto because of the rise of contextual missiology and the diminishing of negative sentiments toward syncretistic Christianity 80 years after the war. Some Japanese Christians are also working to counter unfavorable portrayals of Shinto because they think it hinders evangelism, Yamaguchi added.

While Yamaguchi is encouraged by this openness to engage with Shinto and Japanese culture, he believes Christians should also be aware of “the ways in which the Japanese church has historically been compromised by them.”

“Respect and critique must walk together,” he said. “Only then can real understanding begin.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Read each section below:

- More from Kazusa Okaya

Theology

Shinto’s Key Teachings

Interview by Kazusa Okaya

Evangelical scholar Yoichi Yamaguchi explains why Japan’s indigenous religion lacks a transcendent notion of God.

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

Christianity Today speaks with Yoichi Yamaguchi, director of the International Mission Center at Tokyo Christian University, on what Shinto beliefs look like and how the indigenous religion flourished in Japan.

What is Shinto?

As the earliest religion in Japan, Shinto could have been practiced as far back as the Jomon period (10,500 to 300 BC). It developed over time by absorbing influences from other traditions and religions, such as Buddhism and Confucianism.

Shinto is the indigenous religion of Japan, which emphasizes the nature and worship of various deities (kami). The deities reside in various natural phenomena and objects, and Japanese people believe that all things possess a divine spirit.

Shinto emphasizes ancestral veneration and ritual purity, but there are no unified doctrines or rituals. Hence, Shinto is a very ambiguous phenomenon, and Japanese scholars of religion continue to debate whether it should be classified as a religion.

This flexibility is one of the most important characteristics of Shinto. “First, Shinto arose in tandem with Japanese ethnic culture and has never once been practiced outside of Japanese society,” Shinto scholar Minoru Sonoda writes in Encyclopedia of Japanese Religions. “Second, by modern standards, it is too vague to be classified as a religion, and most Japanese people who have encountered Shinto in some forms do not consciously recognize it as religious.”

What are Shinto’s key teachings?

Strictly speaking, Shinto does not possess formal doctrines. If anything, it is founded upon an intuitive reverence for the Japanese land, deities, and ancestors.

One defining characteristic of Shinto is its emphasis on ritual purity and harmony with nature. But this notion of purification differs considerably from the Christian concept of holiness before God.

Rather than seeking holiness in relation to a transcendent being, Shinto emphasizes subjective inner purity. For instance, walking quietly on gravel paths in a serene shrine forest is itself an act of spiritual cultivation in Shinto. Such practices foster emotional tranquility, but they do not arise from doctrinal imperatives.

Shinto’s focus is not on divine-human communion but on an individual’s harmonious integration with nature. This marks a fundamental contrast with Christian spirituality.

From a Western perspective, this is similar to the postmodern trend of religionless spirituality. But Japan has never fully undergone the modernization that preceded the postmodern turn in Europe. Japan has long inhabited a framework in which the transcendence is not external (extra nos) but internal (intra nos). Shinto lacks a transcendent notion of God, which is characteristic of Christianity.

How did Shinto grow and flourish in Japan?

Although Shinto was central to Japanese identity, Confucian and Buddhist values also coexisted with it. Historically, many Japanese people held the popular view, known as honji-suijaku, that Shinto deities were manifestations of various Buddhas. This perspective was influential in the development of Buddhist-Shinto syncretism in the country.

In the latter Edo period (1603–1868), the nativist (Kokugaku) movement emerged to clarify and purify Japan’s native traditions. Kokugaku scholars such as Motoori Norinaga and Hirata Atsutane sought to strip away “impure” elements, such as Buddhism and Confucianism, and rediscover “authentic” Japanese values like Shinto.

This intellectual movement provided the philosophical impetus for the Meiji Restoration, a political revolution in 1868 that led to the Meiji government’s institutionalization of an emperor-centered worldview, a concept we call kokutai.

Learn more about what Shinto’s historical and contemporary influences are in Japan, how Christianity and Shinto interacted in the country, and what evangelism looks like in a Shinto-influenced culture.

Correction: An earlier version of the story misstated what the honji-suijaku view entailed.

- More from Kazusa Okaya

Theology

Shinto’s Historical and Contemporary Influences on Japanese Society

Interview by Kazusa Okaya

Evangelical scholar Yoichi Yamaguchi shares how Shinto influenced the development of emperor worship and the ways Christians responded.

A portrait of Emperor Meiji.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

Christianity Today interviews Yoichi Yamaguchi, director of the International Mission Center at Tokyo Christian University, about Shinto’s long-lasting significance in Japan and how early believers responded to the imposition of emperor worship.

Can Shinto be considered Japan’s national religion?

While the Japanese imperial household conducts official Shinto rituals using the state budget today, Shinto was never officially declared the national religion in the country.

During the Meiji era (1868–1912), Japanese officials wrestled with whether Shinto could be declared a religion. Progressive bureaucrats who sought globalization firmly opposed using the term state religion, unlike conservative court officials seeking to preserve Japanese traditions.

During the drafting of Article 28—the clause on religious freedom—in the Meiji Constitution established in 1889, Japanese conservatives proposed to qualify religious liberty with the condition that it would not contravene the national religion. Their proposals were ultimately rejected, and the final constitution did not contain the term national religion at all.

Nevertheless, Shinto operated as a de facto national religion to strengthen national unity.

What about State Shinto? How and why was that established in Japan? How did Christians at the time respond to it?

While the Meiji government upheld a façade of religious neutrality, it established a system in which State Shinto, where people revered the emperor as a supreme being in Japan, occupied a central role in civic life.

The emperor was perceived as a semidivine figure who was a descendant of the sun god Amaterasu, and people believed he could be a mediator between deities (kami) and humans.

The Imperial Rescript on Education, a key ideological document of the Meiji state published in 1890, reflected how influential and pervasive Shinto was in society. Written by government officials and issued by the emperor, the rescript embodied the values of an emperor-centered state cult as a guiding principle for all spheres of education. Japanese people at the time treated the rescript as a sacred text because they thought the emperor, as a supreme being, had absolute authority.

In 1891, one notable conflict between Christianity and state ideology emerged in what is known as the “disrespect incident.” Kanzo Uchimura, a prominent Christian leader and public school teacher, was censured for refusing to bow to the document containing the rescript.

Over time, however, both state and church leaders came to insist that Christianity and State Shinto were not in conflict and could coexist. From 1930, the Japanese government began asserting that Shinto and imperial worship were only expressions of Japanese culture and identity rather than religious acts that conflicted with Christian beliefs.

This view slowly gained traction among the majority of Christian leaders, who thought it would make evangelism easier.

What elements of Shinto exist in contemporary Japan?

Until recently, Japan’s national broadcasting station, NHK, aired a Saturday-morning radio program called Good Luck Shrine Walks (Ayakari Jinja Sanpo), which featured shrines that are reputed to bestow good fortune.

In many Japanese companies, employees are often expected to visit a shrine together on New Year’s Day to pray for the organization’s prosperity. Companies also often maintain a household shrine (kamidana) in their offices for good luck. These practices are considered not religious but merely cultural by most Japanese.

Traditional Japanese festivals such as children’s fairs (omatsuri) are also held in shrines, although these practices have been decreasing in recent years.

Learn more about Shinto’s key teachings, the ways Christianity and Shinto interacted in Japan, and missions and evangelism in a Shinto-influenced culture.

- More from Kazusa Okaya

Give Today

Share

related

related

related

related

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

related

related

related

related

related

related

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Share

Share

Related

Share

related

related

Share

Related

Share

In this series

related

Share

Related

Share

In this series

Share

Related

Share

In this series

Share

Related