A Christian’s First Calling Is Never a Career

Karen Swallow Prior’s new book reframes our understanding of work and vocation.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

I have three adult children. In the last two months, all of them have talked to me about whether they like their jobs enough. Conversations often begin with questions, either explicit or implied, like “Am I passionate about my work?” “Am I paid enough?” “Is my boss helping me grow?” “Is this work meaningful?” and occasionally, “Am I bringing meaning into the world?”

For over a decade, I have professionally taught courses on integrating faith and work. And I discuss the topic frequently at the dinner table. Despite this, my children rarely ask God-centered questions about their work, such as “What might God want me to see about my job?” or “How might God be forming me in the role that I have?” or “How do I bring his goodness into this role?”

Perhaps this reveals some shortcoming in my parenting. But it doubtless reflects a dominant Western narrative of work, especially among the highly educated, where identity and meaning are often closely connected with career performance and satisfaction. (Of course, another equally real narrative exists, which revolves around questions like “Why can’t I get work that pays me enough to live?” or “Why must I be exploited?”)

Of course, young adults aren’t the only ones facing challenging questions about the nature and purpose of work. Each week, headlines about artificial intelligence, automation, and other novel trends in the job environment spark waves of curiosity, fear, and reimagining. Both my husband and I recently felt something of this turbulence as we transitioned out of jobs we thought would take us to the end of our working lives.

So despite my three decades working in the corporate sector, education, and nonprofit leadership—and now as a consultant committed to helping individuals and organizations integrate their faith into their work—I found myself deeply grateful for Karen Swallow Prior’s new book, You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good, and Beautiful. Packaged beautifully in a compact 5-by-7-inch format (almost like a stack of study index cards), this little volume delivers an impressive density of insight. Page by page, I discovered rich theological and practical truths, all deeply relevant.

You Have a Calling is clearly written for Christians trying to make sense of their vocation in a world of ever-changing options and mounting burnout. This is not a “career-discernment” manual in the conventional sense. Instead, it aims to reorient the very meaning of vocation through a sacred framework.

Prior covers many angles of vocation and calling in this short book, which could be devoured in one or two sittings but is better savored slowly with a journal in hand. Her decades as a literature professor, along with a lifelong appetite for reading, are evident in her elegant, layered style. She weaves together voices from across the centuries—sacred and secular—pulling from poetry, literature, memoir, philosophy, business psychology, and Scripture. The result is a work that feels both timeless and timely.

In her early chapters, Prior explains why the conversation about calling is both ancient and urgent. Rather than offering groundbreaking ideas, she recovers and simplifies truths as old as dust. She clarifies the differences between paid work and unpaid work, between career and vocation, illustrating the nuanced interplay among all of them. Occasionally, this interweaving of the vocabulary gets confusing, but in the end, readers will come away with a clear understanding of each concept.

For me, the book’s most meaningful theme is confronting modern cultural narratives about work—especially in the West—and offering a Christ-centered alternative. Prior broadens our existing definitions of calling and work, bringing in theological insights that challenge prevailing notions of how and why we labor. She covers the history of how work has been understood across time.

Perhaps most importantly, Prior reminds us that our vocations are fundamentally about who we are, not which tasks we perform. Early in the book, she powerfully affirms that “the first calling of every human being” is “to bear witness to the God who created the world.” Elsewhere she writes, “Most of our first vocations, in fact, aren’t related to work or career at all.” Our identities as parents, children, siblings, and image-bearers of God all take precedence over any titles and roles in the workplace.

Prior critiques our reigning cultural emphasis on work that inspires passion, brings success, and makes a measurable impact. As she argues, these ideals are distortions of a Christian understanding of vocation. Drawing on the work of author and productivity researcher Cal Newport, she challenges the popular belief that passion precedes purpose. Instead, she posits that meaningful work often grows out of excellence, commitment, and faithfulness.

She also critiques our obsession with finding the “perfect job,” framing it as something of a torment. As such, she elevates quiet and ordinary work, defending its value despite its lack of visibility and glamor. All told, the book seems to suggest that working the right way is more important than finding the right work.

The book culminates with Prior presenting a virtue-based vision of vocation that prioritizes truth, goodness, and beauty—no matter the job or its prestige. While careful to insist that only God embodies these transcendental qualities in full, she helps us appreciate how we participate in his nature whenever we do good work (and do it well). As she writes, “To pursue all three [transcendentals] is to embrace the reality of what it means to be human—and the virtue or excellence of being human. To reject any of these is to diminish our humanity, the essence of which is the very image of God.”

Although I haven’t personally met Prior, I’ve heard her speak—and the style of the book seems to mirror her public presence. The writing is intellectual yet accessible, philosophical yet grounded, and at times whimsical while making serious theological claims. The tone is reflective, pastoral, and wise—never preachy or condescending.

Even so, You Have a Calling may not resonate equally with all audiences. If you’re looking for a practical road map to find your next job, this book probably won’t deliver the punch you seek—even if it does liberate you from the pressure of having to figure it all out. If you are working without much agency in your job choice, and possibly in exploitative conditions for wages that fail to cover basic needs, the book might feel tone-deaf to your reality—even if its theological foundations are solid.

Additionally, those who prefer a straightforward, bullet-point, business style of writing might find the book’s synthesis of sources and stories frustrating. And yet, while Prior’s book is not as deeply formative as some earlier titles in this vein, like Os Guiness’s The Call or Steven Garber’s Visions of Vocation, it is far more approachable in both length and complexity of language.

All that said, my favorite parts of You Have a Calling were the personal anecdotes Prior sprinkles throughout her narrative. She includes accounts of her own vocational shifts, some of which arose from painful choices to remain true to her convictions. These stories demonstrate that she is not merely theorizing and prescribing but also embodying the message she offers. And they reveal that it often requires costly courage to work in ways that are good, true, and beautiful.

Prior’s book has helped me re-envision how I might approach conversations with my adult children about work. I can better imagine encouraging my eldest daughter to see the beauty her brand-vision strategizing brings into the world. I feel renewed excitement about telling my son that his career in finance involves using numbers to define truth, thus bringing transparency into business. And I can emphasize the inherent goodness of kidney dialysis treatment whenever my youngest daughter feels lost in the sea of clinical data.

Appeals to beauty, truth, and goodness remind my children—and me as well—that our first call is always to our Caller and to the way he shapes each of us through our work. Kudos to Prior for the integrity of her work and for her deftness in articulating what every Christian needs to hear about calling.

Missy Wallace is the founder of 90Seventeen Consulting and the former managing director of the Global Faith and Work Initiative at Redeemer City to City. She is a coauthor of Faith & Work: Galvanizing Your Church for Everyday Impact.

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Theology

Man Does Not Live by Additive-Free Bread Alone

Abigail Brougher

MAHA gets some food concerns right. But Scripture shows us how our eating is meant for much more.

The Israelites in the Desert by Jacopo Bassano

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

When Donald Trump ran for president in 2024, the predominant social media chatter among Christians in my demographic was around the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. The movement’s critiques of America’s food and drug systems brought recognition to a key issue my friends had been wrestling with for some time: concerns around what they’re putting in their bodies and the bodies of their kids.

The movement, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., formally articulates itself as an effort to improve childhood chronic disease rates, which often presents as a skepticism toward traditional medicine and an interest in addressing the root causes of chronic illnesses. MAHA has had its fair share of concerned critics. Yet parts of its platform can resonate with all of us: We all care about our health and the health of the ones we love.

MAHA is not the first movement to capture our collective cultural imagination when it comes to food and eating. Climate change activists have promoted vegetarianism or veganism for some time because of environmental concerns. The pharmaceutical industry is pushing new drugs like GLP-1s, originally for treating diabetes, to help people who haven’t been able to lose weight. And Instagram is full of influencers promoting niche supplements and diets (ever heard of Liver King?) to achieve a certain sort of lifestyle and physique.

Each of these movements can come with its own dark sides. Our conversations about diets and meals can too often swerve into the territory of fear. In contrast, a biblically faithful perspective on food is always driven by love—love for God, for creation, and for community.

When I studied food and faith for my master’s thesis, I discovered that the two are inextricably connected in Scripture and most of Christian history. In the Old Testament and the early Jewish tradition, feasting, fasting, and obeying food regulations played an essential part in one’s relationship with God. The Catholic church throughout the medieval era and now (though to a lesser degree) integrates food into its faith practices, like fasting during Lent.

Following the Reformation, however, Protestant groups sensitive to any sort of ritualism have largely shied away from food guidance. In the absence of clear directives from the church, evangelicals today are turning elsewhere.

Not all of MAHA’s claims are wrong. Some specific concerns are rooted in real research, like how ultra-processed foods have been shown to have negative effects on our health. But for Christians, focusing only on these concerns puts us in danger of missing the bigger picture.

Before humans ever cared about how and what we ate, God cared. He pays attention to these things because food is one of the ways through which he shows us his grace and deepens our relationships with himself, with each other, and with the world.

Scripture’s story about food begins in the Garden of Eden, when the very first gift that God gives to humans is sustenance (Gen. 1:28–30), providing them an opportunity to delight in him through even their most basic needs. In Exodus, God uses food as one of the primary means of revealing his identity to the Israelites after he delivers them from their enslavement in Egypt: “Tell [the Israelites], ‘At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God’” (Ex. 16:12, emphasis mine). The miraculous provision of food—and the establishment of feasts and festivals in Leviticus 23—is the means through which the infant nation learns that God is its God and grows in worshiping and trusting him.

In ancient civilizations like Israel, agricultural challenges and their human consequences were obvious to the community, solidifying the idea that all creatures’ well-being connects to and relies upon God. For example, in Scripture, famine regularly ravages communities and even drives narrative action (Gen. 12:10; 26:1; 41–42; Ruth 1:1).

In the Levitical laws, God uses food to teach his people how to interact with each other, with their animals, and with the land. God commands those who work the land to not reap to the very edge of their fields, so that the poor and the foreigner can collect what’s left for themselves, inviting people into dependence on one another (23:22). There are strict regulations around animal eating, a way for the Israelites to recognize their place of power over their livestock and hunted creatures and to ensure that life (represented by blood) is taken seriously (chapter 17). Likewise, God also requires the Israelites to let the land “rest” every seventh year—the number associated with the Sabbath (25:1–7).

Through its careful attention to food and the land, Leviticus establishes the idea that the well-being of the land and animals depends on the Israelites and that the Israelites’ interactions with the nonhuman creation affects their standing with God. Most seriously, the Israelites could be considered clean or unclean before God simply by what they ate (11:24).

According to biblical scholar Ellen Davis, this incessant attention to food in Leviticus teaches us that God sees our own well-being and the well-being of animals and the land as interconnected, and all life as fully dependent on God.

Food was also central to Jesus’ ministry on earth. He provided wine and bread to people in their moments of need (John 2:1–11; Matt. 14:13–21). The Lord’s Prayer’s “Give us today our daily bread” (Matt. 6:11) calls us to rely on God to provide what’s needed from day to day. Later, food is Jesus’ preferred way for the church to remember his redemptive sacrifice (26:26–28) through the Eucharist and to anticipate his second coming.

As Scripture demonstrates, food is one important way we experience the grace of God and anticipate our eternal life with him. But man does not live on bread alone, and simply cleaning up the ingredients in our store-bought loaves will not bring us closer to godliness. Applying a biblical food theology to our modern era requires paying attention to the broader community around us.

In my family’s household, we make it a point to drive to a farm about 30 minutes from our house each month to pick up our meat share, a surprise variety of beef and pork from animals raised on that very farm. With these regular visits, my city kids have come to learn that the chicken in their soup doesn’t come from a package but from the live birds they’re chasing. It’s not the sort of the relationship with animals we’re used to, but it places us right in the web of interconnectedness that Leviticus imagines: chatting with the farmer who raises our animals, walking on the land on which the cows graze, and asking face-to-face questions about how the livestock are treated.

God’s delight in our codependence on one another, himself, and his nonhuman creation is clear from the beginning of Scripture (Gen. 2:18). Purchasing our food from coolers in a climate-controlled supermarket is an isolating task, but my visits to the farm do more than open my eyes to where my food comes from—they put me in relationship with people I otherwise might never meet and let me peek at the good lives of the animals I’d otherwise only know as food.

A food theology based in Scripture also requires me to look beyond my own refrigerator to consider what’s happening around me and to recognize injustices related to food. For example, food deserts are areas with limited access to affordable and nutritious food, usually located in lower-income communities. While I may have access to healthy food (and the freedom to drive an hour once a month to get meat), a compassionate food theology compels me to be sure my neighbors can have access to good food and care for their families and themselves.

A faithful food theology will look different for different people. It may look like regularly inviting friends, strangers, and even enemies to the table, creating new relationships over food to mirror the fellowship of the early church. For others, food will become an opportunity to intentionally and prayerfully engage with God, who faithfully provides them with every bite, even when food feels scarce.

Some people may choose to forgo eating meat out of ethical concerns for the treatment of animals or the climate impact of meat eating. Within immigrant communities, food may be an opportunity to stay connected to family traditions and one’s cultural history, helping people to remember God’s faithfulness across seas and borders. A healthy food theology includes taking the Eucharist regularly and cultivating a conscious, eager anticipation of the messianic banquet, when we will celebrate Jesus’ final victory over sin and death (Rev. 3:20; 19:7–9; 21:2).

Living into a proper food theology also requires going beyond the individual to engage with church communities.

Jennifer Ayres in Good Food encourages churches to consider how US policy has affected small-scale farmers and to look for opportunities to alleviate economic burdens on modern agricultural communities, applying a hyperlocal and systemic perspective to Scripture’s idea of the “least of these.” My church, for example, has put significant effort into developing a food pantry for our neighborhood, making sure everyone in our area has the opportunity to share in communal meals and delight in God’s gift of food.

The beauty and challenge of food theology is that it cannot provide a prescription for perfect eating. But however we live it out, we as the church must recapture how we see food as a spiritual matter. Just as the MAHA movement’s popularity demonstrates, it’s ingrained in us to care about what we eat, and not just because it’s a biological necessity. We desire to find meaning within our food and food systems; this desire both comes from and is met in God. Rather than serving as a political barometer, food is meant to draw us closer to our Creator and to our communities.

MAHA is not the first movement to take ideas infused with truth and motivate them with fear, and it won’t be the last. On this side of the messianic banquet, Christians can and should engage with some of the ideas offered by these ideologies.

But in doing so, we can’t forget that Scripture offers us something far better: a redemptive love that drives out fear (1 John 4:18), strengthens our bonds with one another, and deepens our relationship with the one who created it all.

Abigail Brougher writes about creation, food, and faith. She has an MTS from Calvin Theological Seminary and lives with her husband and young children in West Michigan. More of her work can be found on her Substack, Milk & Honey.

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Culture

Maverick City Is Not Diluting Gospel Music

Stephen Newby

From Thomas A. Dorsey to Andraé Crouch and Kirk Franklin, the worship genre has always integrated new sounds.

From left to right: Brandon Lake, Naomi Raine, and Chandler Moore of Maverick City Music perform onstage in Los Angeles, California.

Aaron J. Thornton / Stringer / Getty

When I was a teenager and heard “It Ain’t No New Thing” by Andraé Crouch and The Disciples, I instantly fell in love with the sound. The song, which stood out at the time in the world of gospel music, had a Dixieland feel: pennywhistles blowing, slide trombones moaning, and banjo-pickin’ joy, all fused with lyrics testifying to the movement of God throughout the ages.

In African American gospel music, new sounds and idioms have always emerged, and sometimes they were integrated amid resistance. Lately, this issue has cropped up with Maverick City Music, whose genre-blending approach (gospel plus contemporary Christian music, or CCM) has sparked debates about whether it’s diluting a beloved art form.

Criticisms against the group increased more recently after its cofounder—Norman Gyamfi—said on a podcast that the state of traditional gospel music was “stale,” gospel singers were singing “too hard,” and the entire genre was not evolving with the times. Gyamfi then brought race into the conversation, saying Maverick City Music had been composed of Black people with white writers and producers who were “training them not to over-sing.” His remarks were disrespectful to many in the industry and rightfully deserve criticism. But I also think Maverick City Music haters—who have long argued the musical group is watering down gospel—are wrong too.

From shape-note hymnody to Thomas Dorsey’s blues gospel, Mahalia Jackson’s clarion cry to Kirk Franklin’s hip-hop declarations, gospel music has always been an evolving stream—echoing mercy, resisting oppression, and calling us into human flourishing. Fans often think of the genre in fixed categories: the Negro spirituals, then the songs of Jackson, Crouch, and Franklin. But it has always changed and adapted. And Maverick City—with its swirl of gospel harmonies, hip-hop cadences, jazz voicings, and Pentecostal praise anthems—is just one more extension of that.

The essence of gospel music, as curated by the Black church, has always been the liberating evangelistic message of the good news of Jesus Christ. The late historian Horace Clarence Boyer more particularly defined the genre as music that reflects the personal religious experience of the African American community and uses the musical devices of the church—such as call-and-response, syncopation, improvisation, hand clapping, and foot stomping—to convey the message of the gospel. But composers have continued to expand on these practices.

When World War II was wrapping up in 1945, gospel quartets emerged in Black churches. Two decades later, Andraé Crouch blended Motown polish with Pentecostal fire. Then in 1978, Walter and Tramaine Hawkins expanded gospel’s sonic vocabulary with synthesized string orchestrations and emotional vulnerability. By the ’80s, the genre bore traces of rock, Latin percussion, and mass-choir power. The ’90s gave us the gospel choir God’s Property; Kirk Franklin, who brought holy disruption with hip-hop sensibilities and choir-led chants; and The Gospel According to Jazz, where modal harmonies became a new form of prayer. The 2000s led to the rise of Lecrae and gospel-influenced, theology-rich rap. Now, Maverick City invites us into a new form of worship—decentralized, diverse, and deeply Spirit led. It’s not diluted or worse. Just different.

Kevin Bond, a ten-time Grammy Award–winning producer who worked with Franklin and artist Edwin Hawkins, told me during a recent interview that back in the day, both men were seen “as ahead of their time, often misunderstood and even criticized for challenging gospel music norms.”

“But what we need to realize is that each generation builds on the shoulders of those before it, growing a little taller in the musical spectrum and reaching different audiences,” Bond told me. “The key is never to tear down the previous generation, because doing so weakens our position and drags us lower than we would be if we stood firmly on their shoulders.”

Despite its evolution, the heart of gospel music has never changed. It is a servant of sound doctrine, reaching across generations, genres, and geographies to reconcile all creation to the wise Creator God. And the Holy Spirit, ever faithful and free, breathes across changing tempos.

Gospel music is anchored in the sound of freedom (Gal. 5:1), not only from sin but also from social hierarchies, racial caste systems, and a rigid status quo. It is concerned about not only the freedom from those things but also the freedom to worship, create, and belong. Fans know gospel music has always preached perseverance to weary souls and uplifts without ignoring sorrow, embodying both struggle and hope. Even when artists rise to fame, the best of the genre resists ego and points us back to Christ and a horizontal embrace of humanity.

In many ways, Maverick City Music continues in this legacy. It’s inclusive, featuring racially diverse, some formerly incarcerated singers, and bilingual worship. The musical group has lifted the sounds of jubilee through a collection of songs dedicated to Negro spirituals. Its performances and covers reflect traditional devices used in gospel, including call-and-response, syncopation, and routine improvisations by lead singer Naomi Raine. But its songs are also fused with pop and rock elements that challenge the traditional gospel barriers, which members—who say they want to break down the “unspoken rules” in the world of Christian music—have openly acknowledged. “You can’t put it in a box,” artist Chandler Moore said of the group’s music in 2020. “It is what it is.”

Despite our proclivities, the gospel of Jesus Christ has always borrowed from our human way of communicating. When gospel music blends languages, collaborates across traditions, and displaces the central mic in favor of the collective voice, it is doing the work of reconciliation at a time when so much divisiveness vies for our attention. It is not fusion for fusion’s sake but the expression of a reconciled humanity.

Too often, this type of musical evolution gets mistaken for theological drift. But the core of gospel music—its fidelity to biblical orthodoxy—remains the same. We should also remember that the songs we love don’t just belong in a genre, but are Sprit-led music. And the Holy Spirit, who led creators of spirituals to embed hidden maps toward freedom, leads today’s singers to put theology within four-part harmonies, Auto-Tune, and free-verse lyrics. So whether it comes in the form of a spiritual, a choir anthem, a symphony, or a Maverick City song, gospel music’s mission has always remained the same: to reconcile, liberate, and profess the good news of Jesus Christ. Let us welcome this new iteration with an open heart.

Stephen Newby is a professor of music at Baylor University, where he also serves as the Lev H. Prichard III Endowed Chair in the Study of Black Worship. Newby is the coauthor of Soon and Very Soon: The Transformative Music and Ministry of Andraé Crouch and the author of Worship Outside the Music Box: Theology of Music & Worship and Multi-Ethnic Worship.

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Ideas

Chatbot Cheating in Ethics Class

Myles Werntz

Contributor

After discovering some students using AI chatbots to write their midterms, I switched to an oral exam—and an explanation of virtue.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

I am old enough to remember life—and learning—before the internet. It was an era of studying flash cards, memorizing by rote, outlining questions by hand, and scouring libraries for answers. These practices seem downright archaic to students in my college classroom today. For them, entire worlds have always been available on their phones.

For decades, search engines have accelerated learning, but now even that kind of research is becoming outdated: In 2022, ChatGPT entered the world. A project of a company called OpenAI, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence assistant working off a large language model (LLM). It’s a chatbot, digesting and summarizing vast quantities of information to answer queries in human-like sentences. But this program (and others like it: Claude, Google Gemini, and Grok, to name a few) doesn’t think so much as guess what a plausible answer to your question might be. ChatGPT is already one of the most-visited websites on the planet. You may not be using it, but your kids sure are.

The allure of these AI programs is simple, especially for students. In just seconds they can generate entire research papers. Responding to feedback, they can edit and tweak, building on past interactions to produce better results every time. The ethical and practical problems are legion: copyright disputes, ecological effects, a possible economic bubble, and plain deceit. Still, for an undergraduate on a deadline, the appeal is obvious.

Last semester, my undergraduate Christian Ethics class was awash with ChatGPT use. The irony of using an LLM to game a Christian ethics course aside, I get it: My class was a general-education, optional course, and almost none of my students had a deep understanding of the discipline of Christian ethics prior to the class.

It was only after running their midterm essays through the embedded AI detector in our learning management system that I realized how deep the problem went: The detector flagged 7 papers out of 30 that were more than 50 percent constructed using AI tools.

I had already included a provision in my syllabus prohibiting this kind of thing, but at the time I had no idea what was coming. And in talking with the students who had heavily relied on AI for their midterm papers, I was also surprised to find them fairly candid about using LLMs for schoolwork—and not just in my class but in many others. ChatGPT had, for many, become what memorization was for my college experience: a foundational part of the process, so basic as to be unquestioned.

They understood they had broken a rule by creating midterm papers this way. But they didn’t understand (and I hadn’t realized I needed to explain) why AI use was banned.

For an ethicist like me, artificial intelligence—and specifically LLMs like ChatGPT—generates lots of fascinating questions. I’d love to know whether AI assistants “dream” or whether a system like ChatGPT can be fed enough Shakespeare that it spits out a new sonnet of real worth. More personally, I wonder how long it will be before ChatGPT runs all us teachers and essayists out of business.

But perhaps most important to explore is whether and how AI use comports with a Christian vision of what it means to be human. Scripture gives no direct commands governing the use of such tools, of course, and humans are notoriously good at finding ways to make efficiency the unspoken metric of our moral deliberations. We will too easily be swayed by AI’s sheer convenience if we do not doggedly orient this conversation around what it means to be good creatures of God.

What is at stake here, in other words, is a question of virtue: Does this tool lead us away from or toward being God’s good creatures? This is what I’d failed to communicate in the syllabus.

Virtue is not where we’re used to beginning conversations about tools. We’re much more used to asking whether a tool does the job. But not every tool is a good tool. Some make us lazy, and some foster in us a love of not just completing a job but doing it well.

To tell the difference, we must ask questions about virtue, about character, about what kind of people we are meant to be and how the things we do lead us toward that end. As Paul and the earliest Christians would have understood the word, virtue has to do with how one’s character resonates with the grain of God’s universe, with what one is meant to be as God’s creature.

Virtue is entwined with sanctification in Christ, with the transformation of our hearts and souls by God’s grace. It is living in faith, hope, and love by habit. This is God’s gift, but it doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen without us cooperating.

We can speak of virtue as a whole way of being, but in ancient Greek philosophy and much of the Christian tradition, four cardinal virtues—fortitude, prudence, temperance, and justice—have long been used to organize ideas around specific virtues. We can think of them, roughly, like this:

Prudence: knowing how and when to do a thing, neither too early nor too late
Temperance: knowing how much of an action is needed, neither too much nor too little
Fortitude: continuing to do good things in the face of difficulty
Justice: helping good things flourish among people

There are many other virtues too, like gentleness, patience, and generosity, but these four shape how they work and relate to one another. Taken together, they amount to wisdom. This may seem complicated, but if virtue is about reflecting God’s design, then we should not expect it to be simple, easy, or judged according to our personal inclinations or desired results.

Virtue helps us make sense of biblical commands, for God’s commands cohere to what it means for us to be God’s creatures. Virtue helps us understand and obey those commands not only because they are commanded but also because God’s commands suit the kind of people God has created us to be.

With that in mind, let’s return to the chatbots. Does using an LLM lead us away from or toward being God’s good creatures? Or put another way, does ChatGPT help us become virtuous? I confess I’m skeptical.

Let’s start with prudence. Because ChatGPT excels at finding patterns and organizing large essays, it undermines my students’ ability to make judgments about the research materials involved. If I write an essay from scratch, I have to weigh evidence and draw conclusions about whether and how to use different possible sources.

If I let ChatGPT do this work for me, I won’t develop the same intuitive sense of how truth and fact claims fit together or what information is relevant and how. This is a loss of prudence, which includes a sense of nuance we need to rightly navigate the world. (What makes this worse is that LLMs routinely “hallucinate” false information, providing the answer the user is expected to want even if it’s fake. But if I as the user have no familiarity with the material, I’d never know.)

What about temperance? By making writing and summarizing easy, LLMs speed students to the end of some assignments. But what might have use in limited situations—generating citations or correcting grammar—poses a huge temptation as well. For if it works well enough in those small ways, why not use it in more and more circumstances? Already, AI use by professional academics is spiking, and by one study’s measure, one-third of all students are using it on written assignments—all within three years of ChatGPT’s launch.

Temperance reminds us that too much of a good thing can cease to be good: Think oversalted soup or overmonitored children. Some things which make life easy can help us in moderation, but against the increasing demands of school life, LLMs are already proving to be one of those things which, once we adopt them, we tend to use without moderation.

The same ease poses problems for fortitude. The difficulty of learning new skills is part of what makes skills stick and part of how we learn perseverance. Learning—and the moral life in general—should involve struggle. It is in and through struggle that we unlearn bad habits, undo ignorance, and internalize hard-earned insights.

Thus far, ChatGPT seems to have failed on three of the four basic virtues. But perhaps justice requires us to invite everyone to use such an equalizing tool?

Again, I think the answer must be no. There’s a rudimentary fairness to letting all students use LLMs—but also a deeper injustice. Training students to use and even rely on AI does not give them what they need to flourish intellectually or morally as God’s creatures. This is a severe injustice. As I put it to my students, the problem is less their violation of academic integrity than the fact that they robbed themselves of what was rightfully theirs in the educational process.

After that midterm paper, I decided to scrap the written final in favor of an oral exam. I gave students ten possible questions to study in advance, and then we spent 20 minutes talking about one of them, chosen at random.

The results were fantastic. The students who did well had developed the capacity for nuanced thought, deeply engaged and understood the material, and made connections between topics. Those who had not put in the work did not do well, and they couldn’t rely on AI tools for help.

I was particularly pleased with my conversation with a student who had used an LLM to generate 75 percent of her midterm. She did exceptionally well in the final, and it proved to be a truly pastoral moment. The experience taught her that she didn’t need the LLM to do her argumentation and writing for her. And she came to see that the road of learning—the road of virtue—is slower but ultimately more rewarding. She saw the value in struggle.

In just a few weeks, she’d grown in her ability to make arguments, develop judgments, and work without a tool that had deprived her of the goods of education. This is not yet virtue, for I am not sure that she liked the hard work. But virtue is like Psalm 136, which invites us to praise the Lord’s goodness repeatedly whether we feel like it or not. You repeat a good thing until you get it. And you go through a hard process until, one day, you begin to love not only the result but also the journey.

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

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Books

Review

Christ Renews Our Minds, not Our Brains

Sharon Dirckx

A new book argues that some proponents of “neurotheology” misstate the relationship between our bodies and our souls.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

What exactly am I? And what are you? The nature and essence of human beings is one of the most widely discussed and hotly debated topics not just of our time but arguably of all time.

Are we just advanced apes? Are we just machines one day to be artificially upgraded? Are we souls that will one day break free of our physical confines and float off to some higher state of being? Human beings have asked these questions since antiquity. In recent decades, they have been thrust back into the limelight through the advance of neuroscience and through the claims of scientists like Francis Crick, who suggests that humans are “nothing but a pack of neurons.”

The approach many scientists take, often unquestioningly, presumes that matter (atoms, molecules, and the forces of nature) explains everything—or will do so eventually, given enough time. And this approach carries over to larger questions about human nature. Many neuroscientific authorities argue that all aspects of our being are reducible to the workings of our brains.

Christian apologists often respond to this materialist outlook by showing its insufficiency. We don’t just have a brain, they argue, but also a mind, a self. There is a conscious you and a me that cannot be captured simply by measuring the activity of nonconscious neurons.

Stan W. Wallace is responding to a different kind of argument in his excellent book Have We Lost Our Minds? Neuroscience, Neurotheology, the Soul, and Human Flourishing. He contends that the “you are your brain” view has leaked into Christian thinking, albeit cloaked in spiritual language.

Wallace, president of an academic ministry called Global Scholars, focuses attention on two thinkers in particular: Christian psychiatrist Curt Thompson, author of Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections Between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships; and spiritual-formation expert Jim Wilder, author of Renovated: God, Dallas Willard, and the Church That Transforms.

For Thompson and Wilder, neuroscience is more than a means to understand the workings of the brain during our spiritual, intellectual, and emotional experiences. In fact, they describe it as the new route to spiritual maturity.

On this view, growing in Christlikeness involves engaging and understanding the workings of our cerebral cortex more than being transformed by the renewing of our minds. As deeply relational beings, we find the key to growth in forming love attachments with God and others. According to Thompson and Wilder, this happens primarily through the brain. Wallace sums up their perspective like this: “In effect, the prefrontal cortex is me, and therefore it must be fully functioning for me to be known and know others in secure and healthy relationships.”

Wallace describes this endeavor as “neurotheology,” which he defines as integrating “the findings of neuroscience” with “the theology of spiritual formation.” He is keen to show that this trendy and seemingly innocuous project is potentially seismic at its core, and he speculates about two potential causes. Either it originates from a lack of philosophical training to understand the distinction between the brain and the mind or soul, or it stems from a belief that humans are not in fact an amalgam of body and soul, brain and mind, or physical and spiritual elements. They are just a body. Just a brain. Just a physical machine. Have We Lost Our Minds? is a response to Christian materialism.

What can we say in return? Brains don’t think. People think using their brains. Brains don’t form love attachments. People choose to love. As Wallace sat down to write his book, it was him doing the writing. Yes, his brain was engaged in the process, and a well-designed imaging study would have captured myriad neural networks at work. But even the most sophisticated measurements could not have captured what he had in mind to write.

People—not brains—write books. This is an important but often misunderstood point. The self, or soul, and the brain are very closely connected. But this doesn’t mean they are identical or conceptually interchangeable. Mind and brain are, in fact, two very distinct entities.

Wallace is well placed to write this book, having completed doctoral studies in philosophy alongside a ministry degree. He deftly navigates both the technical arguments and their application in daily life. He makes clear at the beginning that his aim is not to cast doubt on neuroscience itself. We all benefit from the valuable insights into brain function and human behavior this discipline affords us. In fact, some neuroscientists, such as Andrew Newberg, define neurotheology much more neutrally as “an interdisciplinary field that combines neuroscience and theology” and “explores the relationship between the brain and religious experiences.”

Have We Lost Our Minds? does not critique that kind of neurotheology. Instead, the book responds to a bolder variant that sees neuroscience as the new road to spiritual maturity and human flourishing. This kind of thinking sees biblical references to mind and soul as referring to the brain, even to the point of applying them to Christ himself. For instance, in Anatomy of the Soul, Thompson suggests that “Jesus’ mind … reflects the most integrated prefrontal cortex of any human of any time.” Taken to its logical conclusions, Wallace argues, this thinking is not only false but also potentially capable of leading Christians astray.

In contrast, Wallace argues that a proper understanding of human nature, spiritual formation, and human flourishing ought to come from the combined insights of theology and philosophy, as well as from neuroscience. If humans are made in the image of an immaterial God, then there must be an immaterial dimension to our human makeup, which Wallace—in alignment with J. P. Moreland, Dallas Willard, and others—describes as a soul.

In Willard’s words, a soul is “that in us which combines all the dimensions of the person to form one life.” The Bible regularly refers to an unseen dimension of the self with words like heart, soul, mind, spirit, and inner being. Scripture tells us we are outwardly wasting away but are inwardly being renewed each day (2 Cor. 4:16).

Biblically speaking, then, there are certainly dualities to our human makeup. Wallace’s book revolves around defending what he calls holistic dualism—the belief that body and soul are distinct substances, both of them able to bring about causal change in the world, yet in a deeply integrated way.

As Wallace puts it, “The Scriptures teach that we are a functional unity of soul and body but also an ontological duality, with the soul being the more fundamental aspect of what we are.” He goes on to suggest that this view makes best sense of neuroscientific discovery. Wallace takes time to address misunderstandings about dualism, arguing that the holistic version differs from various predecessors, such as Cartesian dualism (named after René Descartes, known for the iconic phrase “I think, therefore I am”), which infers a much more token interaction between soul and body.

Another key goal for Wallace is in correcting misinterpretations of the late Dallas Willard’s view of humanity. According to Wallace, Wilder and Thompson argue that Willard embraced neurotheology (in the less neutral sense) toward the end of his life. Accordingly, they reframe his view on the soul in physical terms. Wallace cites a remark from Wilder’s book Renovated: “The brain happens to contain a structure whose function is the integration of all internal states and external connections with others.” Thus, when Willard “describes our experience of the soul, … he could hardly have described the cingulate [cortex] in clearer terms.”

Does this reframing do justice to Willard’s position? Apparently not, according to those who knew him well, such as philosopher J. P. Moreland. Wallace gives evidence that Wilder and Thompson misinterpreted Willard’s support of understanding brain function as a wholehearted support of their neurotheology. Wallace notes that Willard never used soul and brain interchangeably. He consistently referred to people as embodied souls.

Have We Lost Our Minds? is well pitched to a nonspecialist audience with short, digestible chapters and helpful summaries. Yet there are also detailed footnotes and a glossary for anyone wanting to go deeper. The first few chapters unpack the relationship between the mind and the brain, showing how and why they are distinct, albeit closely connected. The middle of the book examines the nature of the soul, tracing the influence of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to the present day.

The final part of the book focuses on application. What we believe about human nature is so important because it shapes how we love God and others. Wallace portrays materialism (which denies the soul) and Cartesian dualism (which diminishes the body) as two opposing extremes. Holistic dualism, however, offers a “responsible middle way” toward human flourishing.

We are best placed to love God and grow into the likeness of Christ when both body and soul are engaged. Worship, in this view, extends beyond spiritual activities like prayer to encompass embodied practices like fasting and service. On the other hand, spiritual formation is not something we can passively allow our brains to do on our behalf. Brains don’t form love attachments. People do this, which is why the thinking that takes it out of our hands is potentially harmful. The soul and will must choose to engage with God and with the spiritual disciplines that provide the vehicle for transformation.

What does this all mean for loving others? Wallace argues that holistic dualism provides a strong motivation for evangelizing and doing mission work, caring for the vulnerable, pursuing justice, and loving others in the workplace. It truly matters that we adopt a biblical view of the soul and body, because this overflows into who we are and what we do every day.

Have We Lost Our Minds? is a helpful addition to ongoing conversations on human nature. Anyone wanting to think Christianly about neuroscience—what it can and cannot tell us about human nature and spiritual formation—will definitely find it worthwhile.

Sharon Dirckx holds a PhD in neuroimaging from the University of Cambridge. She is a speaker, broadcaster, and author of books, including Am I Just My Brain?

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Inkwell

Wisdom on Loving Your Craft

Interview by Christopher Kuo

New Yorker executive editor Michael Luo gives advice for young Christian journalists.

Illustration by Inkwell

In college, many people decorate their dorm rooms with posters of their favorite musicians or sports stars. I put up a grid of 12 New Yorker magazine covers, sliced from the weekly print editions I received in the mail.

I was a budding writer, a student of the craft, and The New Yorker had quickly become one of my favorite publications. I was drawn in by the breadth of its subject matter and the ability of its writers to impart any topic with intrigue and narrative. Perhaps staring at the arrangement of magazine covers on my wall would grant me some ability to do the same.

As I devoured these magazines over the years, there was one writer who often stood out. Like me, he was Chinese American and a Christian who seemed to enjoy writing about religion and the state of the American evangelical church.

That writer was Michael Luo, the executive editor of The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The New York Times. I remember coming across Luo’s work when I read his 2021 story titled “The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind,” about the anti-intellectualism and conspiratorial thinking that had begun to creep into some corners of evangelical Christianity. Since then, Luo has written numerous stories about Christianity, including a history of Christian fundamentalism and a reflection on the legacy of Tim Keller (Luo attended Keller’s church in Manhattan).

In a 2013 interview with Christianity Today, Luo described the animating spirit behind his journalism: “For me, an influential verse has been, ‘What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’ Journalism was a career in which I could pursue justice and mercy. Some people are drawn to journalism because of the words. I was more attracted to what the words could do.”

Buoyed by my surprising success in landing an interview with Elizabeth Bruenig, I decided I’d try something similar with Luo. A while ago, someone told me that New Yorker email addresses typically follow a set pattern. So I typed Luo’s first and last name into the template and fired off an email. To my delight, he responded.

In a Zoom call with Inkwell, Luo explained what it takes to reach The New Yorker, his advice for young journalists, and his typical media diet. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What does your craft look like in your day-to-day?

The big thing for writing for The New Yorker is that it’s a completely different thing than writing for newspapers. The way you write is just very different. And maybe the worst thing you could say to an editor or writer at The New Yorker is “too newspapery.”

The thing that’s interesting about The New Yorker is that if you study the way our stories are put together and constructed, it’s basically just fact after fact. It’s the accretion of facts and how you titrate those facts and arrange them and build momentum through them that leads to a New Yorker story. That’s actually one of the things that’s hardest for people to grasp.

I think my ability to move from The Times to The New Yorker relates to a love for the craft, a love for a kind of literary sensibility. The New Yorker exists at the intersection of journalism and art, so a lot of times when I’m interviewing people, I ask what they read. You have to have a literary sensibility to be successful at The New Yorker. You’re looking for people who demonstrate that confluence.

So if I want to work for The New Yorker one day, do you think the best route is to go through newspapers? Or is it better to freelance for magazines?

The best way to become a better writer is to write a lot. I think it’s a mistake for young writers to graduate from college and set out to write 10,000-word feature stories. You’re just not going to know what you’re doing.

Actually, the best way is to write whatever form it takes, to write a lot and write frequently and to learn the fundamentals of the craft. That includes reporting.

I think a lot about my own evolution as a writer and how all these different steps I’ve taken along the way have been really important to the position I’m in now. Maybe that’s not just about writing, that’s also about editing.

Right now, I oversee our news and politics coverage. A big advantage is the fact that I’ve done all kinds of reporting. I’ve done presidential campaigns, I’ve covered beats on a metro desk, I’ve been overseas, and I’ve covered Congress. When you’re deploying writers and editors for coverage, it’s helpful that you’ve had those experiences. It makes you a better editor.

What’s your sense of the culture of mainstream newsrooms when it comes to faith and Christianity?

It can be a big asset. Newsrooms are serious about covering the breadth of the country and the world through a diverse newsroom. When I first got to The Times, it was soon after the scandal involving a reporter named Jayson Blair, who had been making up stories. There was a credibility committee that was formed afterward to look at ways to improve The New York Times.

One of the things they talked about in this report was the need to have people in the newsroom from all different walks of life, and not just focused on race and ethnicity—people from the military, people from different religious backgrounds. You bring every part of yourself to the job, and that could be your own ethnic background, it could be your geographic background, it could be your faith background.

I’ve covered religion at The Times, but even when I wasn’t covering religion explicitly, I brought it to bear. I wrote a piece when I was in Iraq in 2006 about Iraqi Christians after visiting these churches under threat and talking to people of the Christian faith there. I was drawn to that story because of my background, and that was one of the reasons I was able to report well—because of my ability to speak that same language.

Now at The New Yorker, I’m an editor but I write occasionally. I’ve wound up writing a fair bit about the American church and what’s happened to it. I can say that David Remnick, my boss, loves that, appreciates that, and values that. When I was at The Times, my faith was also something that was valued by the newsroom leadership.

What do you read, both in your news diet and more generally?

It’s really important for young writers and journalists to read a lot. I subscribe to too much. I still get the print New York Times. I find that when reading the print newspaper, sometimes there’s a level of discovery that’s missing from online—you read more and understand more. Every day, I’m reading The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico.

I subscribe to too many magazines: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The London Review of Books, Harper’s, New York Magazine, Wired, Vanity Fair, Foreign Policy. Recently, I felt like there was a dearth of coverage of China, so I started reading The Wire China. I read a lot of Substacks. I listen to Ezra Klein a lot, but I also listen to history podcasts like The Rest Is History. The most recent book I read is Demon Copperhead, and I also finished reading the new Ocean Vuong novel, The Emperor of Gladness.

You recently published Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. What was the process like for writing your book?

I didn’t take any leave. So I worked on it for four years—from 5:30 to 7:30 in the morning, and then got my kids ready to go to school. And then I worked on it on weekends.

Sometimes they talk about writing a thousand words a day when you’re writing a book. I couldn’t write a thousand words a day, but I could write 200 words a day. That’s like a paragraph. Or you could be preparing for the thousand words that you would write that weekend. So that’s like 4,000–5,000 words a month, or 60,000 words a year. That’s how you write a book.

When you read the book, each of the chapters is its own kind of self-contained magazine story. So basically, each chapter is a 5,000- to 10,000-word magazine story, and there are 25 chapters.

There are a lot of people in your audience who are thinking about writing books when they’re young. I think there are some arguments for writing a book when you’re younger, since you don’t have the obligations, you can go off on some book-writing project, and you don’t have a mortgage or kids.

On the other hand, I don’t think I could have written this book if I had written it earlier in my career. I have thought about the next book I will write maybe being about the American church and what has become of it.

Christopher Kuo is a writer based in New York City. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Duke Magazine, and elsewhere.

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Pastors

The Weight of Trust

Thomas Anderson

In a cynical age, pastors must carry their calling with tenderness and grit.

Chris McLoughlin / Getty Images

In the film Gladiator, there’s a scene where the Roman senator Gracchus visits the protagonist Maximus, a once-revered general who has been betrayed and enslaved. Rome is crumbling, and corruption rots the empire from within. The old senator, desperate for hope and someone to trust amid the chaos, looks this broken gladiator in the eye and says, “Marcus Aurelius trusted you. His daughter trusts you. I will trust you.” It’s a moment of clarity. He doesn’t pledge allegiance to an institution but to a person whose character has endured.

I think about that moment when I consider what you’re facing right now. Trust has become as rare as gold in the marketplace of American faith. And you—whether you asked for it or not—have inherited the wreckage.

The numbers don’t lie. For the fourth straight year, trust in the clergy has dropped to 32 percent. For the first time in Gallup’s history, fewer than a third of Americans believe pastors operate with high ethical standards. What a pastor from previous generations could assume (that his word carried moral weight simply because of his clerical collar), you must now earn in every conversation.

This isn’t a glitch in communications that can be fixed with better branding. It is a spiritual crisis that strikes at the heart of shepherding souls. In recent years, the percentage of pastors who feel excellent respect from their communities has plummeted from 22% to 7%. Something is breaking: the trust that allows broken people to place their deepest wounds in your hands.

When trust becomes sacred currency

Henry Cloud once observed, “Leadership is not taken, it is given. People give leadership to those that they trust.” Your ordination certificate doesn’t grant you spiritual authority. Your seminary degree doesn’t automatically open hearts. Trust is the real currency that decides whether people will open their hearts to you.

But here’s where it gets complicated. Your congregants have watched too many pastors turn their pain into sermon illustrations or confessions into social capital. They’ve learned to be suspicious of pastoral motives—and honestly, can you blame them?

The very authority you need to shepherd effectively can become the barrier to authentic relationships. Influence must be wielded in ways that liberate rather than bind, that create safety rather than fear. It’s like a scalpel—meant for healing, but in the wrong hands, it can cut deep and leave lasting damage.

The Jesus blueprint for trust

When you study Jesus through the lens of building trust, patterns emerge that may well reframe how you think about ministry. Consider the woman caught in adultery (Jn 8:3–11), dragged before Jesus by religious leaders who weaponized her shame for their political theater.

Jesus did something that shocked everyone present: He protected her dignity while addressing her sin. He demonstrated, in ways visible to the crowd, “I mean you no harm” and “I seek your greatest good.” No exploitation. No manipulation. No using her brokenness to enhance his reputation.

Again and again, Jesus created safety for the vulnerable. When children approached and his disciples tried to turn them away, Jesus welcomed them (Mark 10:13–16). When sinners and outcasts sought him out, he never exploited their desperation or commodified their stories. Seeking Jesus never resulted in shame, manipulation, or betrayal.

This stands in sharp contrast to what’s driving our current crisis. When people experience spiritual authority as a cover for abuse, financial exploitation, or political manipulation, trusting any pastor becomes psychologically dangerous. This is a damaged landscape every pastor today inherits—wariness that previous generations never faced. You’re paying for sins you didn’t commit, but if we are to have hope in discipling the next generation, rebuilding and maintaining trust must become a priority.

Learning from Joseph

Joseph’s story offers a master class in earning trust under impossible circumstances. Elevated to second-in-command of Egypt (a foreign land with unfamiliar customs, representing a God the people don’t worship), he faced the ultimate leadership challenge.

Joseph proved himself competent. But competence alone would not have sustained him. He consistently proved that his power served the welfare of others, not his own advancement. When famine struck, he used the crisis to preserve life, not consolidate control.

The ultimate test came when his brothers (the very ones who had betrayed him) stood before him in need. Joseph had every justification for revenge. Instead, he chose restoration: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives” (Genesis 50:20).

Joseph understood something crucial: Trust isn’t built when everything runs smoothly. It is forged in those moments when you have the power to harm and deliberately choose to heal instead.

Build safety that restores trust

The mechanics of building trust are surprisingly mundane. You establish office hours and honor them. You end counseling sessions when you promised, not when the conversation becomes compelling. You return calls within the time frame you committed to, not when it’s convenient.

These aren’t restrictions on ministry. They’re the infrastructure that makes sustainable ministry possible. They signal to people that you’re trustworthy with small things, which gives them confidence to trust you with larger ones.

When problems arise—and they will—you address them quickly and directly. Financial irregularities. Staff tensions. Behavioral issues that harm the community. The cover-up invariably causes more damage than the original problem. Your congregation is watching how you handle difficult conversations, and these moments become small deposits in the trust account.

There’s a particular kind of vulnerability that strengthens authority rather than erodes it. This isn’t turning the pulpit into your therapy session. It’s letting people see that the gospel you preach is actively transforming you too. You share how a particular text challenged your pride. You acknowledge when a sermon felt inadequate. You openly own it when you’ve had to seek forgiveness from your spouse.

The goal isn’t perfection. Perfection actually works against trust. The goal is authenticity within appropriate boundaries. In a cultural climate where examples of broken trust abound, people need evidence that you’re human enough to fail and mature enough to take responsibility.

Remember that you’re starting from a deficit. Skepticism is the default. Every action will be scrutinized. Every failure, magnified. In this context, how you respond to mistakes becomes crucial. When you get it wrong—and you will—your response becomes an illustrative sermon. It’s your chance to demonstrate the very grace you preach. Can you receive correction without defensiveness? Can you apologize without qualifying? Can you change course without losing face?

What Hangs in the Balance

This is far more than a question of reputation or your church’s institutional health. When trust in spiritual leadership erodes, people lose access to the kind of wisdom, comfort, and moral guidance that has sustained communities through crisis for generations.

More than half of churches saw fewer than 10 people become Christians last year. Multiple factors contribute to this decline, but the trust crisis plays a significant role. When people can’t trust the messenger, they struggle to receive the message, regardless of its truth.

When authenticity conquers cynicism

In Gladiator’s final moments, Maximus lies dying in the arena, having defeated the tyrant who destroyed his family and corrupted the empire. Then something remarkable happens. The crowd, the senators, even the Praetorian Guard stand in recognition: They’ve witnessed something rare—a person who used power not for personal gain but for others’ welfare, even at the cost of his own life

That’s the picture to hold onto now: a leader whose character is so evident, whose care for others is so consistent, whose use of spiritual authority serves flourishing rather than control. And that even skeptics may recognize authenticity when they see it.

You have the opportunity now to create something beautiful: communities where people can bring their full selves—their doubts, fears, failures, hopes—and find grace rather than judgment, genuine care rather than manipulation, protection rather than exploitation.

Trust in pastoral leadership won’t rebuild through better marketing or well-polished sermons. It happens through the slow and patient work of proving, one relationship at a time, that there are still shepherds who care more about the welfare of the sheep than their own reputation.

The question isn’t whether the crisis is real. It is. The question is whether you’ll be the kind of leader future generations point to as an example of what shepherding should look like. Your answer will be written, not in words, but in the countless small decisions that show whether power serves love—or love serves power.

In that choice lies the future of pastoral ministry and the hope of a watching world. The weight of trust may feel unbearable some days. But you’re not carrying it alone.

Every time you choose integrity over ease, transparency over spin, and service over self you’re walking in the footsteps of shepherds who refused to let cynicism write the ending. You’re walking in the way of Jesus.

The world is watching. They’re aching for something true.

By the grace of God—give it to them.

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

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News

A Christian Chess Detective Faces a Mathematical Stalemate

Emily Belz in New York

Complexity theory remains one of the great unsolved mathematical puzzles. Kenneth Regan is trying to figure it out.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Kenneth Regan, Pexels

Kenneth Regan paused at lunch in New York to glance at incoming texts from top international chess officials. A world-renowned “chess detective,” he’s on call to review games with his specialized algorithm that detects cheating.

Chess players cheat by using computers to find the best moves; an algorithm can detect the probability that a move came from a computer rather than a person.

But Regan, who loves chess but also theoretical mathematics and singing in his church choir, put the phone away. He would analyze the chess games later.

Instead, he resumed explaining one of the greatest unsolved conundrums in mathematics: the P versus NP problem, which could explain how complex the universe is. Regan, 65, has made this question his life’s work, in a field of computer science known as complexity theory.

The P versus NP problem asks, Are all problems feasibly solvable by a computer algorithm, or are there some problems so complex they can never be solved? Are solvable P problems the same as seemingly unsolvable NP problems?

The theory has major implications for artificial intelligence, quantum computing, evolution, and questions about the beginnings of the universe. As artificial intelligence models stand to offer the most powerful computing in human history, P versus NP is one way to consider how far computing can go.

In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute designated the P versus NP problem as one of seven “Millennium Prize Problems,” with a $1 million reward for the scientist who solved it. To date, no one has, and no one seems close to an answer either.

If P does not equal NP, then some problems are too complex to solve. If a problem is unsolvable by an algorithm, then that means it is not solvable in all the time in the universe. (Quanta Magazine has a helpful explainer video.) If P equals NP, then the solution to any computational problem is solvable within finite time.

Regan thinks that P does not equal NP and some problems are unsolvable by an algorithm. But he can’t prove it yet.

If P does not equal NP, as Regan believes, then scientists might not be able to ensure the large language models behind generative AI tools are giving consistently correct solutions to problems. If P does not equal NP, that could hamper “efforts to avoid hallucinations” from AI, he said. But mathematicians just don’t know.

The P versus NP question can also apply to other scientific questions, like evolution: “If we see a way to do something, we can postulate it and prove it,” he said. That’s a P problem. He continued: “But it’s very difficult for us to be able to make negative conclusions, for instance, that something could not have evolved naturally. The P versus NP impasse is standing over that.”

A chess prodigy as a child in New Jersey, Regan has the kind of preternatural memory that top chess players must have.

Math and chess are a friendly combination, requiring calculating but also theoretical thinking. Notable mathematician Emanuel Lasker, for example, was the dominant world chess champion at the turn of the 20th century. One modern-day list has Regan, an international chess master, as one of the highest-rated chess players among professional mathematicians.

Over his career, Regan developed the algorithm that FIDE, the International Chess Federation, uses for cheating detection, analyzing hundreds of thousands of historic chess games. In 2022, he found himself at the center of evaluating a major chess scandal where the world champion Magnus Carlsen accused an opponent of cheating.

Regan’s algorithm was the subject of discussion on Reddit threads and podcasts. At the time, one of his fellow church choir members peppered him with questions about the case.

He sees his chess work as more than a hobby for a game. The algorithm he worked on there might apply in other fields; the chess work is also math work.

Regan earned his mathematics PhD as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University, where he was involved with Christian Union.

Regan remembered sharing a train as a grad student in the 1980s with another complexity theory mathematician, Michael Sipser, who was confident that scientists would solve the P versus NP problem. But now, Regan said, “it seems more remote than ever.”

“It’s considered too formidable to take direct aim at,” he said.

For much of his career, Regan has researched and taught computer science at the University of Buffalo. He has a professor’s warmth to talking through any question—and no self-consciousness about going deep into theoretical mathematics in a diner in Manhattan. But he’ll talk about baseball or skiing too, finding crossovers between math and anything else in life.

Regan argues that his love for God, his love for the humanities, and even his love for chess help make him a good mathematician by allowing him to see the world differently. And a theoretical mathematician must find new ways of thinking to take swipes at a problem like P versus NP.

Almost 30 years ago, a dean of the complexity theory field, Donald Knuth, estimated that only 5–10 percent of his computer science colleagues believed in God. Knuth is a Lutheran like Regan.

Regan believes the number of people of faith in the world of science has grown. He knows other Christians in his department. No one has complained about the sermon links on his professor page or his personal notes on N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope.

Regan said he sees his faith as holistically connected to his scientific work but not as a tool to prove the existence of God. His Christianity helps him to see his neighbors through the lens of “people first, not scientific advancement first.”

“Making room for God in science, that I very much want to see,” he said. “We need a scientific community with people accustomed to all ways of thinking.”

Regan grew up Catholic but became Lutheran to join his wife’s denomination. He loves Reformer Martin Luther’s theology of the Cross as a way to look at the world, saying that the “theology of glory needs to be continuous with the theology of the Cross.”

This means that Christianity, he thinks, can see some level of continuity between good, beautiful things in the world and ugly, despised things—“not flip sides on a sheet of paper, but like a Möbius strip,” he said, using another math reference.

On his academic page, Regan links to a sermon from Lutheran pastor Mark Bartels about the theology of the Cross, which states,

Through what appeared to be foolishness, in His great wisdom, He saved the world! And, yes, may He work through the weakness in my life, to make me strong! And, ultimately one day He will take us to glory. He will take us to glory! And let us always remember that, in this world, we live under the cross, the cross of Christ!

Regan approaches complexity theory as a mathematician with an affection for the humanities. He peppers his conversation with references to Jacques Derrida and Willy Wonka. He reads widely: Earlier this year, he was going through the notes in Willis Barnstone’s Restored New Testament and Tim Palmer’s Primacy of Doubt, about how uncertainty in mathematics is scientifically valuable.

“A lot of what we call the big questions—‘Is there life after death?’—they have scientific parallels, and I’m interested in the scientific parallels because you can inquire after them,” Regan said.

He loves church music, insects, languages, flowers, and biking with his wife.

“My best work has been cross-pollinating two areas, such as error-correcting codes to improve the running time of a construction in complexity theory or linking between resource bounds of measure theory,” he said.

Conversation with Regan includes terms like polynomial ideal theory and algebraic geometric invariant theory.

At his father’s funeral, Regan began his eulogy talking about parallel universes and string theory—tossing out the question of whether there are resurrected versions of our bodies in parallel universes.

He enjoys asking any question that interests him, like what God’s chess rating would be. The point of that question is that no one knows what a perfect chess rating is, because machines haven’t solved chess.

Being at the center of big chess and science questions, he sees the importance of “scientific communication,” he said.

“Coming out of the COVID pandemic … we have one side that says, ‘Follow the science,’ but is unclear about explaining what that means—and the other side that excoriates that, or says, ‘Do your own research. Don’t trust,’” Regan said.

“People feel that scientists should be able to give crisp, definite answers,” he said. “And that’s just not the case. Science itself is good. The best science is aware of and infused with doubt.”

As a result, the stalemate on the P versus NP problem doesn’t discourage Regan.

“The impasses in the field ought to be the source of a lot of intellectual humility,” he said. “Humility is a requisite of what I call doing science faithfully.”

Further resources on understanding the P versus NP problem

The Golden Ticket: P, NP and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow

- More from Emily Belz

Church Life

China’s Quiet Revival, One Handwritten Bible Verse at a Time

Andrea Lee

A church sought 1,200 participants when it launched a Scripture-copying initiative. Millions of believers across the country responded.

Handwritten Bible verses from John 1 and John 10:11 in Chinese.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wang Wenfeng, Andrea Lee, WikiMedia Commons

Chinese calligrapher Lü Xiaokui spent decades transcribing Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist texts into elegant xiaokai script. When he came across a friend’s message about an initiative to copy the Bible by hand on the Chinese messaging app WeChat in 2019, he reached out to the organizer, Wang Wenfeng, to express his interest in participating.

“At first, we were pretty surprised, because he wasn’t a believer,” Wang said. “We weren’t sure if—or why—he’d actually go through with it.”

Several months later, Lü sent Wang, who now pastors SanQi church in Beijing, a beautifully penned copy of the Gospel of John. When they saw Lü’s submission, Wang and his fellow church members were stunned by Lü’s careful, detailed brushwork.

As Lü handwrote the Book of John, he encountered stories about Jesus. The more he read the Bible, the more he longed to become a child of God.

That December, Wang baptized Lü in Shenzhen in front of Lü’s family and friends, publicly declaring a transformation that had begun with ink and paper.

In a time when religious expression is often curtailed and many Chinese churches operate in isolation, copying the Bible on paper has become a shared language, a spiritual discipline, and a form of quiet resilience among believers in the country.

Since the initiative launched six years ago to mark the centennial of the Chinese Union Version (CUV) translation, Wang estimates that tens of thousands of churches and millions of individuals in China have taken part in the Bible hand-copying initiative.

Initially, Wang and his church members set a modest goal of getting 1,189 participants—corresponding with the total number of chapters in Scripture—who would each write out a chapter for a commemorative manuscript of the CUV.

Within days of sharing this idea online, however, thousands of responses from believers at underground house churches and officially recognized Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) churches flooded Wang’s WeChat. “They wanted to draw closer to God, find stillness in a noisy world, and reconnect with family and church,” Wang said.

To meet the overwhelming demand, Wang and his team designed printable Bible-copying templates and circulated them through WeChat. Soon, people were uploading photos charting their daily progress in writing Scripture to WeChat, exchanging testimonies, and forming Bible-copying circles.

Wang heard stories from Christians around the country of lives changed. One Christian family who was dispersed in various parts of China had not sat together for years, as some members attended registered TSPM churches while others worshiped at unregistered house churches.

But when each family member signed up to copy a portion of Scripture, they began exchanging Bible verses, asking about each other’s chapters, and praying together. “For the first time, we remembered that we are not just family members by blood—we are all God’s children,” one family member wrote in a WeChat message to Wang. “The ink reminded us.”

Chen Huai, a Sunday school teacher in Zhejiang, a province in eastern China, felt concerned that her Christian colleagues were spending too much time playing online games. She invited them to hand-copy the Bible with her. In three years, Chen and her colleagues copied the entire CUV translation, draining 170 pens along the way.

A 70-year-old grandmother from the same province also decided to participate. Despite being illiterate, she enlisted her grandchildren to help her recognize characters and correct mistakes in her writing. Slowly, stroke by stroke, she drew her way through the New Testament.

A former drug addict, whose right hand became paralyzed due to past substance abuse, began copying Scripture with his untrained left hand. A teenager with autism spent years illustrating entire chapters. A toddler, still in diapers, insisted on clutching a sheet of paper and filling it with scribbles as her mother wrote Bible verses out.

Still, the project faced some challenges. When several churches first launched the project, everyone picked short or compelling chapters to copy. No one volunteered for Numbers or Chronicles. Eventually, people had to draw lots, picking strips of paper from a cup with chapter numbers on them.

As scores of handwritten Bible copies poured into his mailbox from individuals, families, and entire churches, Wang was moved by the reverence and zeal he witnessed in these believers. He felt awed by the sheer volume of copies and wrestled with how to preserve them all. Many documents were elaborately bound, painstakingly illustrated, or accompanied by personal testimonies.

To honor and safeguard these works, Wang transformed a five-story house in Wenzhou, which was entrusted to him by his parents, into a Bible museum in 2023. For several years, visitors could enter and admire the various hand-copied works displayed there.

But this March, after activities at the museum drew local authorities’ attention—not because of its religious content but because the influx of visitors had reportedly disrupted the city’s transportation—Wang decided to close the museum to the public. Today, the space functions as a private repository of handwritten Bibles.

As Wang shepherded the Bible hand-copying movement, he experienced long seasons of physical and mental exhaustion. To convert the house into a museum, he had to sell his property in Beijing to fund its renovation, which created financial strain. All this also took place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when rumors and fears of Christian gatherings getting reported to the authorities began swirling.

“There were moments when I wondered if I would be taken away [by the authorities],” he said. “I had already prepared my heart for it.”

Yet, no officials came to question Wang about the initiative and no official orders arrived to stop it, even as the Chinese government was shuttering churches, closing Christian bookstores, and increasing its scrutiny of religious activities across the country.

“It was like God covered it with his hand,” Wang said. “That’s the only explanation.”

Instead of a government crackdown, Wang believes he witnessed a revival—one not loud and obvious but rather quiet and embodied. “When you write the Bible by hand, it enters not only your mind, but your muscles,” Wang said. “Your heart begins to slow down to match the rhythm of the Word.”

One believer in Beijing told Wang that he used to speed-read devotions and forget what they said immediately after. “But now, the verses stay with me,” he said. “They’re not just in my Bible—they’re in me.”

Wang never intended to create a campaign to convince people to read physical Bibles over screens. Instead, the Bible-copying initiative was an organic, spontaneous, and deeply spiritual movement that demonstrated the power of God’s Word to draw people toward him, he said.

The biggest takeaways from this initiative should not be numbers, strategy, or who the organizers are, Wang added. “The real protagonists are the Bible copiers—millions of believers who didn’t need a stage or a microphone, just a pen and a Bible,” he said.

Six years on, the Bible hand-copying initiative has not slowed down. Participation keeps growing across China. Lü, the calligrapher, is now copying the entire CUV translation.

“It’s not just about writing,” Lü said. “It’s how I draw near to God, one character at a time.”

A previous version of this piece was published on ChinaSource.

- More from Andrea Lee

Culture

Learning to Forgive the Country That Oppressed Mine

Ahrum Yoo

On Korea’s 80th Liberation Day, I exhort fellow evangelicals to view Korea and Japan’s relationship through one of Jesus’ parables.

On the right: a street in Sinujiu in Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

As a child growing up in Seoul, I read the story of Yu Gwan-sun, a teenage girl who was imprisoned, tortured, and killed by the Japanese colonial police for participating in Korea’s March 1st Movement to overthrow Japanese rule in 1919.

In elementary school, I watched a TV drama about Korean “comfort women” forced into sexual slavery during Japan’s military expansion. In history class, I learned that the Japanese colonial government did many things to erase our Korean identity, like banning our language, replacing our names with Japanese names, and making us bow down to the Japanese emperor.

At church, pastors and teachers often drew parallels between the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Exodus narrative in the Bible. “Japan was like Egypt,” they would say. “We were like the Israelites, oppressed but freed later.”

These widespread portrayals of Japan as Korea’s brutal oppressor created in me a deep discomfort and fear toward the Japanese people, even though I had never met any at the time. Because I was a descendant of people who had suffered such evil treatment, it seemed only appropriate that I should also take up my ancestors’ hostility toward our nation’s enemy.

Unfavorable sentiments toward Japan and its people often surge in the lead-up to August 15, when South Korea commemorates its Liberation Day from 35 years of Japanese rule between 1910 and 1945. Such attitudes are especially heightened this year, which marks South Korea’s 80th year of freedom. Many commemorative events have taken place around the country, including exhibits and writing contests evoking memories of historic oppression.

But as I’ve developed friendships with Japanese people and visited Japan multiple times, my understanding of Japan and South Korea’s complex history has changed. I no longer consider Japan as Egypt and South Korea as Israel. Rather, I view the two countries’ relationship through the lens of another biblical account: the parable of the lost son in Luke 15.

In this passage, the younger son who has squandered his inheritance returns home in desperation. Although he expects rejection, “his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him” (v. 20).

This parable highlights a father’s boundless grace toward his wayward son. Instead of rejecting him or treating him as a mere servant, the father welcomes his child with open arms. I yearn to see more Korean evangelicals view Japan in the same way: with kindness, compassion, and forgiveness, as Paul urges us to do in Ephesians 4:32.

The seeds of my journey toward a transformed perception of Japan and its people were sown through a story my grandmother told. She was born in Korea in 1924 but spent most of her early years in Manchuria (present-day northeast China), where the Japanese government had relocated many Koreans alongside the Japanese to populate and cultivate the region as a strategic territory.

At ten years old, I asked my grandmother about her time in Manchuria and her interactions with Japanese people. I expected to hear stories about hostility and mistreatment. Instead, she told me about a kind Japanese neighbor in her town.

“I did not speak Japanese very well like my brother,” my grandmother said. “My parents did not send me to the primary school, because I was a girl. But whenever this lady saw me, she always bowed politely and spoke very slowly and gently so I could understand her Japanese.”

My grandmother’s story—the only story she shared with me about her encounters with the Japanese people—shocked me. Japanese people were kind and gentle? All I had read and heard about them focused on their violent, cruel deeds. This story seemed implausible to my young ears.

Five years later, my family relocated to Indonesia. On the day of an English qualification exam for entry into an international school, I met a Japanese girl who was my age. “Hi, nice to meet you. My name is Kayo,” she said in slow, careful English. “Can we become friends?”

At first, I felt a bit uncomfortable. How could we be friends when I was Korean and she was Japanese? But we became firm friends from that day on. We swapped our favorite Japanese and Korean tunes and visited each other’s homes in Indonesia and, later, in South Korea and Japan. And whenever I was in Japan, Kayo’s family embraced me as their own.

Through my grandma’s story and my friendship with Kayo, I overcame the discomfort and fear I had inherited from my people’s collective memory. I learned that a genuine friendship based on kindness and compassion could break down prejudices and unforgiveness.

Sometimes, though, we as Korean evangelicals may think and act like the resentful older brother in the parable. When the older brother sees his father welcoming the younger son with a lavish feast, he becomes angry and refuses to celebrate with the family (Luke 15:28).

Like the older brother, who felt bitterness and animosity toward his sibling, we may also feel similarly toward Japan, criticizing the country for not seeking forgiveness from Korea for past atrocities.

Prominent Japanese leaders like Emperor Hirohito and several prime ministers have publicly expressed regret and remorse for the war. But their words often lack direct acknowledgment of wrongdoing in the past, which many Koreans consider the most important element to include in Japan’s apology. Other Japanese government leaders’ actions also overshadow these gestures as they continue to visit Yasukuni Shrine, where Japanese people venerate “Class-A war criminals”—individuals charged with planning and waging war—as gods.

While visiting Japan in my 20s as a language student, I discovered that some history textbooks there had downplayed or entirely omitted Japan’s colonial past. Because of this, many Japanese people are unaware of the suffering that Korea and other Asian nations experienced during the Japanese occupation.

My Japanese evangelical friend at seminary, Sho Ishizaka, felt deeply troubled when he learned as a teenager about the horrible things that Japan had done. When I asked Sho if he would be willing to apologize to the Koreans for his ancestors’ sins, he responded without hesitation: “I will apologize. We Christians will apologize—over and over again.”

Other Japanese evangelicals have also made sincere efforts to express their repentance.

In 1997, the Nippon Revival Association, representing 500 Japanese churches, issued a formal apology: “We … make clear our responsibility in World War II … and wholeheartedly apologize for it, declaring August 15 and December 8 [to commemorate the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor] as ‘Days of Fasting and Repentance.’”

Japanese pastor Reiji Oyama visited South Korea multiple times from the 1960s until he died in 2023 to apologize to Korean Christians and surviving comfort women. In 2019, he visited the memorial site of a church massacre in Jeamni, South Korea, with 16 other Japanese church leaders to offer an apology. Japanese colonial police had burned the church down in the aftermath of the March 1st Movement in 1919, killing 29 Koreans as a result.

Like my friend Sho, Oyama said he would apologize until the Koreans told the Japanese people, “Now that’s enough.” It appears that Korean evangelicals have not said this yet.

Forgiveness appears inconceivable if we continue to view the two countries through the Exodus narrative. But Japan is not biblical Egypt, and it is no longer Korea’s oppressor. Instead, perhaps we can conceive of Japan as a lost brother whom our Father longs to welcome home.

I am not saying history is unimportant. We as Korean evangelicals must remember our history of oppression and suffering, but we can also liberate ourselves from our long-standing grudges. Even though we may never receive the perfect apology we desire from Japan, we can walk in the spirit of forgiveness today. Forgiveness—graciously given and received—can transform our relationship with Japan and its people.

For Japan, August 15 was not liberation day. It was a day of devastation, when the two American bombs which fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki revealed that their emperor, whom they believed to be an invincible god, was merely human.

Emperor worship was a central tenet of state-sponsored Shinto in Japan. It featured prominently in the country’s wartime propaganda, fueling the military’s efforts and calling citizens to sacrifice their time, resources, and even lives. Japan’s military leaders promised their soldiers that dying in battle, especially through kamikaze or suicide missions for the emperor’s sake, would grant them a place of honor in the Yasukuni Shrine.

When Japan lost the war, its people felt disappointed in their military and government, as they had deceived the people about the emperor’s divinity. “The defeat proved that the Japanese were not god’s people after all,” Sho told me.

This sense of spiritual disillusionment may have led to all traditional religions, including Shinto, dwindling after the country lost World War II in 1945. Although the Japanese church grew briefly through Western missionary efforts, this growth has plateaued since the 1970s. Today, Japan remains the second-largest unreached people group in the world. Less than 1 percent of the Japanese population identifies as evangelical.

In contrast, South Korea experienced remarkable spiritual growth and eventually became the second-largest missionary-sending nation in the world. One in 5 Koreans are Protestant. But Korean evangelicals must humbly remember that our country was once a lost people too, saved only by the grace of God who sent missionaries to our nation.

Japanese believers contributed to the growth of Christianity in Korea from the late 19th century to the end of World War II by training Korean pastors in Japanese seminaries and sending missionaries to Korea. The recently released documentary film Mumyeong (Nameless) follows two such missionaries: Masayasu Norimatsu, founder of Dongshin Church in Suwon, and Naraji Oda, who opposed Japan’s enforcement of emperor worship in Korea. Both devoted their lives to serving the Korean people, even as fellow Japanese citizens perceived their sympathy for the Korean people as treacherous at times.

As cultural appreciation and exchanges rise between the two countries, whether through the influence of Korean pop, Korean dramas, or Japanese anime, Korean believers can capitalize on this growing openness to reach the lost in Japan.

About 1,200 Koreans are currently in Japan as long-term missionaries, a Korean mission survey conducted in 2023 revealed. This reflects a shift in missionary deployment, because Japan has long been shunned for being a “graveyard for missions.”

Even as Korean missionaries are more willing to reach Japan, evangelicals in South Korea can create opportunities to talk about Christ with Japanese residents and visitors in their midst. Korean churches might extend hospitality through homestay programs, similar to the temple stays that Buddhist temples offer to tourists. Or believers can invite people to gospel and K-pop concerts, as Korea-based Onnuri Church has done through its Love Sonata programs in Japan.

As Korean evangelicals who have forgiven and have been forgiven, we must not pass resentment and unforgiveness to the next generation. This year, I am teaching my kids Japanese in anticipation of our reunion with Kayo and her family in South Korea and Japan next summer.

Kayo is teaching herself Korean. “I am learning Korean because you have been so kind to me by learning Japanese for me,” she said.

It is Christ alone who can dismantle the “dividing wall of hostility” between the two peoples once and for all (Eph. 2:14). As Korean believers, we can also chip away at this wall through breaking down stereotypes, reframing the narratives we tell ourselves, and fully giving and receiving forgiveness from a country that once oppressed us. As we do so, we can come to see each other as we truly are: brothers and sisters who were once lost but are now made one in Christ.

Ahrum Yoo is a PhD student in Old Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary.

- More from Ahrum Yoo

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