When We Were Your Age, We Needed Jesus Too

Mike McGarry

Thirty Christian authors remember the struggles of their teenage years while sharing hard-won gospel wisdom with teens today.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Mosi Knife / Unsplash / Five / Getty

Youth ministry is real pastoral ministry. That ministry involves a hefty dose of pastoral care for students and their parents as they navigate a host of challenges: doubt, perfectionism, mental health struggles, eating disorders, questions about their sexual orientation or gender identity, suicidal ideation, and grief—to name just a few. It can be overwhelming to know how to offer pastoral support while applying the gospel without minimizing their crisis.

The Jesus I Wish I Knew in High School

Cameron Cole (Author), Charlotte Getz (Author)

New Growth Press

192 pages

For this reason, The Jesus I Wish I Knew in High School has quickly become one of my go-to books to give away. It offers a unique perspective that easily resonates with students, helps them realize they aren’t alone, and invites them to consider what difference the gospel makes in real life.

The Jesus I Wish I Knew in High School is edited by the leaders of the Rooted Ministry and features 30 chapters, each with a different author reflecting on their teen years and what they wish they understood about the gospel when they were younger. The editors describe the intention of the book this way: “We want you to be filled with hope, peace, joy, and freedom. We want you to have Christ at the very center of your life, because he is the only place where we find true, abundant life.”

Multifaceted message of grace

Each chapter follows the same general pattern: The author recounts a pivotal moment in their teen years that highlights their own need for Christ, and then they apply the gospel to their teenage self before closing with a final word to their teenage readers today. Each chapter also contains a keyword (gospel, justification, shame, grace, and so on) that is defined and then applied with a two- or three-sentence statement about “What this means for you.” Although there are 30 different authors, the book pulls the diversity of voices and stories together into one multifaceted message of grace.

It’s important to highlight the name of the book is The Jesus I Wish I Knew in High School—not The Jesus I Wish I Knew About in High School. Many of these authors grew up in church and knew the gospel. They had orthodox theology. But they didn’t yet know Jesus. This is a stark reminder to parents and youth workers that conversion is the work of the Holy Spirit. Apart from the work of the Spirit, students’ knowledge is only knowledge about God, not saving faith. Emily Heide captures this well by writing, “Whether your conversion looks like Paul’s (dramatic and sudden), or Thomas’s (slow to develop and full of questions), or maybe somewhere in between—rest assured that the Lord has the same merciful love for you and will use your story for his glory.”

This serves as a reminder about the role of struggle and crises in teenagers’ faith formation. It’s a natural impulse to protect our kids at all costs and to shelter them from suffering. But when parents and youth workers do that, they’re undermining a biblical view of suffering as something that produces perseverance, character, and hope (Rom. 5:3–5). This book is an implicit warning against becoming a helicopter parent (or pastor), as well as a wise guide for students learning to navigate crises in light of the gospel.

Sometimes that moment of crisis comes when the pressure to be perfect overwhelms you, or when you don’t get named captain or homecoming queen, or with the slow burn of feeling unsure about your salvation. For others, the wake-up call comes through God’s megaphone of suffering. Books written for teenagers can tend to highlight dramatic stories so much that students with “boring testimonies” feel even more boring than they felt before reading. But this is not the case here. Students will find their story—whether it reflects normal teenage life or something more dramatic—mirrored in these pages.

Scott Sauls confesses the insecurities that drove him to mistreat others: “I had been so desperate for attention, so desperate for approval, and so desperate not to be made fun of or bullied myself, that I had become the bully.” Rachel Kang reflects on her experience grappling with physical disability: “I should have been dreaming about possibilities of my future, not dreading the reality that my body was broken and in need of healing.” Michelle Ami Reyes describes being “the lone brown-skinned Indian girl in an all-white town. No one in my school, my church, or my neighborhood looked like me or lived life like me.” Scotty Smith opens his heart by writing, “The tragedy of my mom’s death exposed several things in my life: the absence of my relationship with Jesus, the absence of a relationship with my dad, and how much I relied on my mom. She was my world—my oxygen, light, and feast. My dad was essentially a stranger.” And Catherine Allen addresses body-image issues: “Sadly, deep down, I believed I wasn’t good enough. … As a chubby, outgoing, unathletic, mediocre student, I believed that if I was smarter, more attractive, and more soft-spoken, I would be desirable.”

These are the types of stories gracing the pages of The Jesus I Wish I Knew in High School, and they are told with a surprising degree of vulnerability but without ever glorifying sin or oversharing details. Teenagers will see themselves (and their friends) in these accounts of struggle, and they’ll see Jesus redeeming them with grace. Whether students read the entire book or only the chapters that seem to resonate with their felt needs, they will encounter familiar struggles, all while witnessing the life-giving and healing power of the gospel.

Healing generational divides

One of the strengths of the book is the genuine diversity among the authors. Whatever the makeup of your students, they will find themselves represented here. Even more surprising are the ways they will find themselves identifying with stories by those who are different. In this way, the book presents more than tokenism. By keeping the gospel front and center, it highlights what we have in common through Christian unity and fellowship, even while acknowledging the particularities of our different backgrounds and experiences. This book will resonate with Gen Z, a true melting-pot generation.

Speaking of generations, the honesty and vulnerability of these chapters make The Jesus I Wish I Knew in High School something more than a gospel-saturated resource for teenagers. In addition, the book offers a surprisingly insightful window into the authors’ own generation (most are in their thirties or forties). Amid our current generational divides between boomers, Gen X, and millennials, I’m convinced that non-youth leaders would benefit from reading about the teenage experiences of these godly men and women. Reading their honest accounts of racism, abuse, insecurity, fear, and anxiety carries significant potential to foster meaningful conversations with more than just the generation to whom this book is written.

If you want a book for teenagers that they’ll actually read, buy this one. It’s story-driven and gospel-saturated. And buy a copy for yourself to help you better understand those who are ministering to teenagers, too.

Mike McGarry is the youth pastor at South Shore Baptist Church in Hingham, Massachusetts. He is the author of A Biblical Theology of Youth Ministry and Lead Them to Jesus.

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Books

Excerpt

Books Open Windows into Holiness

Jessica Hooten Wilson

How models from literature guide us toward the good.

Martina Rigoli / Getty

We cannot concoct holiness on our own, decide what it looks like without examples, or try to become holy without other people. The goal is to be remade into God’s likeness, and we do so by imitating models of holiness.

When we read stories of holiness, we live vicariously through those stories, then we body them forth in our reality. The models become part of our imagination, our way of seeing how to live a holy life. For me, when I try to imagine how to be holy, I have a cloud of witnesses—from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima to Walker Percy’s Father Smith to Willa Cather’s Archbishop Latour to Toni Morrison’s Baby Suggs.

You’ll notice in the novels that I have chosen to explore that these characters are not perfect; they are not goody-goodies, and their stories are not hagiographies. Rather, these figures exhibit the reality of our common sinfulness as they chase after holiness with greater and lesser diligence.

Some characters encounter saints along their journey and share the experience with the reader, that we may long for such sanctity. Others attain holiness at the end of their long, wayward lives. But none of these figures are satisfied with their self as it is; all of them desire holiness. It is the story of a life lived in longing for the holy that I most want to emulate.

In Dostoevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov, his rebellious nihilist Ivan Karamazov sets forth a convicting argument against God, complete with a host of newspaper accounts of suffering children as evidence against a good, omnipotent Creator and a narrative poem that illustrates Christ’s impotency.

How is Dostoevsky to defeat such a robust intellectual attack against God? He does so by recounting the life of a saint, his fictional Father Zosima, whose life was as full of sin and suffering as Ivan’s, yet who chooses love over winning the argument. His story bears fruit in the soul of his novice Alyosha, who has patiently listened to his brother’s account but finds his elder’s life more convicting.

So many questions cannot be answered in life, yet Dostoevsky’s story asks, Which life do you want to live? Do you want to imitate Ivan, whose world becomes smaller, narrower, more confused, and despairing as the novel continues? Or do you want to imitate Zosima, whose life freed others to cry out in gratitude at the beauty of the stars, to embrace and kiss the earth, and to shout “Hurrah!” at the hope of resurrection?

Worldviews, debates, and apologetics have their place in Christian faith. No one wants a church without the legacy of Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth. But stories convert our desire for well-versed explanations. After we read Dostoevsky’s novel, we first hope to be like Zosima. Then we can think about why. When we read Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, we love Aslan before we ever analyze what the lion reveals about God.

In Dante’s Paradiso, the pilgrim witnesses a dance of two circling groups of saints in the realm of wisdom, the sphere of the sun. The rings are made up of 12 saints each, intensely bright, crossing one another in a circling dance.

One group represents those who reasoned through doctrines of the Trinity, the relationship between body and soul, and so on, epitomized by St. Dominic, a great doctor of church thought. The other group, whose prime example is St. Francis, loved through how they lived, with dramatized nativity scenes, stories of hermetic asceticism, and even the stigmata. In Dante’s description, these rings of saints flash

each other’s radiance like glass
each turning but in opposite career,
circling together as they cross and pass.

Not only do they reflect one another’s light, but each group tells the story of the other: Aquinas (who is Dominican) uplifts not his Dominican father but instead Francis, while Bonaventure (who is Franciscan) praises Dominic.

Their dance shows the reciprocal relationship between imagination and intellect, how these parts move with one another, not separately. Dante commands his reader three times at the start of canto 13 to “imagine” what he himself feigns to witness.

As a student of both Dominican and Franciscan education, Dante could portray both in his poem. Dante could not have penned this work of imagination without having studied both the disputations of Aquinas and the life of St. Francis. Because of Dante’s poem, I understand this relationship between intellect and imagination better than I might have through reason alone. When I consider the roles of these spheres, I imagine those bright dancing saints from Paradiso.

As we try to imagine a life of holiness, we need more than a definition, philosophical argument, or to-do list. We need an image. We need the stories that will compel us to follow the saints, that we might become saints ourselves.

When Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, was once seeking inspiration, she picked up two hagiographies and “closed them both with horror.” She records in her diary the sickening and false descriptions of the saints that she found and declares, “No wonder no one wants to be a saint. But we are called to be saints—we are the sons of God!”

Great fiction will not sugarcoat the internal work within the saint’s soul, her struggles, the grit and grime of everyday reality. When we are allowed to see through these saints’ eyes, we experience their desires and thus practice holiness alongside them.

Reading these literary accounts of sanctity provides an antidote to our preoccupation with our autonomous selves. We live through another’s eyes and experience their struggles and victories in following Jesus Christ.

We fill our hearts with stories of holy exemplars with whom we relate, love, and make friends: Flannery O’Connor’s crazy prophets, Eugene Vodolazkin’s holy fool in Laurus, Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, and Georges Bernanos’s faithful country priest. These stories of holiness may not be real in the empirical sense of the word, but they are more true than some of our knowledge of history or science. Their holiness attracts us and trains our imagination.

In the Eastern Orthodox liturgy, the priest prays for sinners but also for the publican and for the prodigal son from Jesus’s parables. These characters from Jesus’ stories have become invested with an unexplainable reality in the prayers of the church. So, too, have the saints whom I have met in novels. I pray I can learn from their faithfulness and live out such holiness in my own life, that my story of becoming a saint might be true.

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Theology

Porn Is Plotless

Russell Moore

Faithful love requires a storyline, not just a series of sensations.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

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

The young man looked down as he talked to me about his ongoing struggles with what he felt to be a compulsion toward pornography.

After this many years in ministry, I’ve had that conversation so many times I can almost script it in advance. But this Christian was able to summarize his situation better than most. “I guess I would say that my problem started with lust,” he said. “And then it was guilt and shame. It’s still all that, but it’s something else too. It’s boredom.”

The same afternoon I talked to a middle-aged Christian, really successful in his career, who said, “I’ve achieved everything I set out to do; and now it just all feels so empty and without meaning. It’s like I’m bored.” I’ve had that conversation too, countless times.

That day, though, I started wondering if, in some way, these conversations were really about the same problem.

I was prompted to ponder this question after reading a jeremiad against “today’s turn towards the pornographic”—not from a likeminded conservative evangelical viewpoint, but from a decidedly secular anticapitalist philosopher.

In his book Capitalism and the Death Drive, Byung-Chul Han clarifies that this “pornographic turn” does not just show up in explicit sexual depictions on the internet, but an even deeper aspect of spiritual malaise.

Han argues that pornography attempts to sever signs from meaning, sensations from communion, the bodily organs from the person. This results in a fragmentation that comes from a kind of hypervisibility and hyperavailability.

Pornography makes use of sexuality, but ultimately it fragments and undermines the tension necessary for the erotic. For him, the point is that pornography has no plotline.

By this, he doesn’t mean that pornography can’t be embedded in a story. What he means is that genuine feeling can’t be manufactured, bought, and sold. The genuinely erotic, he contends, requires patient unfolding and long-lasting connectedness.

A pornographic mindset confuses this because people think of love as a random arrangement of consumable feelings—not as part of an ongoing drama. This distortion leads people to the compulsion to constantly change partners (whether “in real life” or in their minds) to maintain those fresh and novel sensations.

I doubt whether Han would ever frame this as “sin” or “immorality,” but he certainly sees it as self-defeating and self-destructive. And the result is a society that seems burned out—burned out on attention, burned out on meaning, burned out on love.

Unlike pornography, Han argues, love has a plot. Love isn’t a random set of sensations, but something that must be set in a larger context. And fidelity, Han argues, is not just an emotion but also an act. As a matter of fact, fidelity is a series of acts that requires a storyline.

Han gives the example of a French man’s letter to his wife, in which he anticipates their life together in the future as though it were present tense: “You’re 85 years old and have shrunk five centimeters. You only weigh 40 kilos now, yet you’re still desirable.” This kind of love requires a vow and a life.

As I read this, I thought about the advice that’s usually given to parents when it comes to pornography.

Those without concepts of sin, grace, and God seem to increasingly assure parents that porn shouldn’t be thought of as “immoral.” But they usually follow that up by saying that porn is not a good source of sex education.

Kids who learn only from porn, these people will say, won’t understand that real people’s bodies don’t respond so formulaically. Porn alters expectations of what sex, consent, and mutuality should look like, they say.

If that’s the primary problem with porn, however, the implication seems to be that it could be addressed with “more realistic” pornography that might help prepare these young people for genuine intimacy.

But intimacy is with a person, not just with a set of genitalia. Therefore, it can only be approached with the mystery that makes up a whole person—and this cannot be “consumed.”

This is how the Bible depicts human beings and sexual intimacy. The love story of Ruth and Boaz resonates with us because, like every true love story, it doesn’t transport us immediately to a sensation and leave. The story unfolds with tension and indeed keeps unfolding.

What seems to be the unlikely and accidental introduction of these two people—with a background of deep tragedy—turns out to result in a house of David. And we know how that story takes us to back to Bethlehem and beyond.

Remember that when the apostle Paul explains the mystery at the heart of the one-flesh union in Ephesians 5, he did so to a congregation gathered in a city known for the temple of Artemis. This was a culture in which temple prostitution—the use of sexual orgasm for the alleged purpose of connecting the divine—was a cultural norm.

Paul writes that the joining of man and woman points to the communion of Christ and his church, not just by using abstract principles but by showing us how this all fits into a larger cosmic story of redemption. Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, washing her with water.

This cannot be mimicked by a momentary firing of nerve endings. It can be modeled and embodied by nothing less than the giving of an entire life. That requires a commitment to share the same story—in sickness and in health, until death do us part.

Such a story requires a people who can learn what it means to be in communion with one another, and with the one in whom every good story holds together. Because whether we are sexually active or not, we are all members of one another in the body of Christ.

Russell Moore leads the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today.

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News

Died: Duane King, Pastor Who Saw the Need for a Sign Language Bible

Daniel Silliman

He didn’t know anything about deafness. But he believed the gospel is for everyone.

Courtesy of the King family / edits by Rick Szuecs

Duane King, a hearing minister who founded a Deaf ministry and started work on the first sign language Bible translated from the original Greek and Hebrew, has died at 84.

King had no special skills or training to work with the Deaf. He had no personal experience with Deaf family members motivating him to see and care about this often-overlooked community.

But he believed the gospel was for everyone. He believed a good shepherd would leave the 99 to go after the one. And when he met some people who didn’t have access to church or Scripture, he couldn’t let it go. He dedicated the rest of his ministry to reaching those people.

“He was a giant,” said Chad Entinger, a Deaf Christian who succeeded King as director of Deaf Missions in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “Through Duane and his faithfulness to God, millions of Deaf people and their families and friends in more than 100 countries around the world have been impacted with the Gospel of Jesus!”

King was born outside of Skidmore, Missouri, on November 9, 1937. His parents, Elza Cledith and Myrtle Lois Brown King, had four boys, and Duane was the youngest. He was raised in the Independent Christian Church and attended Nebraska Christian College with the intention of becoming a pastor.

King was initially drawn to music ministry. He joined a college quartet, first called the Lordsmen and then later the Watchmen, and traveled the Midwest singing the bass parts of gospel songs. The Watchmen were popular at summer revivals, and King also learned to preach.

When he met a young women named Peggy Carr who also belonged to the Independent Christian Church, also attended Nebraska Christian College, and was also an accomplished vocalist, his future and his ministry seemed clear. The two got married in 1961.

King took a job at the First Christian Church Norfolk and began pastoring the congregation there, while still occasionally traveling with the Watchmen.

A couple who couldn’t attend church

Five years later, he invited a new couple to come to church around Christmastime. It changed his direction forever.

“I pushed what I thought was a doorbell but later learned was a light,” King said in one recounting of the pivotal encounter.

A woman came to the door, and King started talking, but she just turned up the palms of her hands. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t hear his words.

The woman, Louise Booth, found a pencil and pad of paper and invited King into the kitchen. There, the 29-year-old minister wrote out his question to her and her husband, Emery Booth: “Why don’t you come to church?”

Louise wrote back: “We can’t get anything out of church.”

The realization was like a light that went on instead of a doorbell. Of course they can’t! King thought. And there must be other people like that.

The pastor made the Deaf couple an offer. “If you’ll come to church,” he wrote on the notepad, “I’ll learn sign language.”

Duane and Peggy King both learned it, and the new skill opened up a ministry. A few years later, King took a position with the First Christian Church of Council Bluffs, Iowa, near the Iowa School for the Deaf. The church supported him as he launched Deaf Missions and planted Christ’s Church for the Deaf in 1970.

The congregation was small—by 1972, there were around 30 regular members—but King preached the gospel, served Communion, baptized new believers, visited the sick, and buried the dead, all in sign.

Once, a wedding at the church attracted national attention when the Associated Press reported on how the ceremony was silent. King asked a Deaf man in sign language if he took a Deaf women to be his wife for better, for worse, for richer, and for poorer.

King still traveled occasionally with the Watchmen, using the opportunity to ask Independent Christian Churches across the Midwest to financially support Deaf Missions.

He and the staff at Deaf Missions also started to develop materials for Deaf Christians. In 1979, the ministry produced its first issue of Daily Devotions for the Deaf. The devotion was published on videotape, using the Japanese technology that was just becoming available in the United States.

The mission has published a devotional for every day over the past four decades, updating the format as video technology advanced. Today Deaf Devo is available as a smartphone app.

Vision for a sign language Bible

In 1981, Deaf Missions took on a more ambitious project: translating the Bible into American Sign Language. King recruited Harold Noe, a Christian Church minister with a doctorate in theology from Drew University and a local access TV show for Deaf children in West Virginia. Noe helped with the Greek and Hebrew. King also recruited Lou Fant, a Baylor College graduate who became a pioneering educator and cofounder of the National Theater of the Deaf, as well as an actor who played a signing preacher on General Hospital and Little House on the Prairie. Fant helped with the ASL.

For a few years, the mission used the video equipment of a local media company and then an Omaha TV station. When new owners bought KMTV in 1987, however, Deaf Mission was forced to buy its own equipment and build a studio to keep filming.

King found the money. And they kept going. For him, it was just another “probortunity,” a word that he told Chad Entinger he invented to describe how God worked.

“God takes problems,” King said, “and turns them into opportunities.”

Entinger compiled a list of King’s sayings, “Kingisms,” that set out his philosophy of ministry:

“If you cut too many corners, you’ll start going in circles.”
“Jesus’ return is nearer today than it was yesterday.”
“An important part of praying is a willingness to become part of the answer.”

The New Testament was translated into American Sign Language in 23 years. When it was finally finished, King was speechless.

“I’m thrilled,” he said, “beyond ways to express it.”

King retired in 2007, leaving the completion of the full American Sign Language Version to his successor. Entinger, with support from a network of Bible societies and Bible translation ministries, saw the translation through to completion in 2020.

King attended a celebration of the completion of the Bible at Deaf Missions, but he demurred when he felt anyone gave him too much credit for the project that involved 53 Deaf translators working over a period of 39 years.

“If we are successful in anyway,” he told an Iowa TV station, sitting at his kitchen table with his family, “it was God working through us.”

King died on January 25. He is survived by his wife, Peggy King; daughter, Christine Clausen Cannon; and son, J. D. King. At his request, they served ice cream at his funeral.

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News

Wire Story

Pentecostal Nurse Who Refused to Wear Scrub Pants Wins $75K Settlement

Kathryn Post - Religion News Service

After being sued for religious discrimination, the health care provider who rescinded her job offer agreed to provide back pay and damages.

The Good Brigade / Getty Images

A Tennessee-based health care provider will pay $75,000 to settle a religious discrimination lawsuit involving an Apostolic Pentecostal nurse who wanted to wear a “scrub skirt” to work. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said the company denied the nurse’s right to religious accommodation.

Wellpath LLC hired Christian nurse Malinda Babineaux in 2019 to provide health services at Central Texas Correctional Facility in San Antonio. After accepting the Texas job offer, Babineaux informed the company’s human resources team that her religious beliefs required her to wear a scrub skirt, rather than traditional scrub pants, to work in accordance with modesty codes.

The company declined to accommodate her request and rescinded her job offer. According to the lawsuit, Babineaux had previously worn scrub skirts in other nursing positions.

Scrub skirts, while rarely seen in American hospitals, are preferred by some religious women, typically for modesty reasons. In a 2010 post on the nursing forum website Allnurses.com, a woman introduced herself as “a Pentecostal woman, who wears skirts instead of pants for religious reasons,” and asked, “Is it okay for me to wear scrub skirts in a clinical setting?”

In another thread on the same website, another poster criticized scrubs skirts, saying that they “limit your range of motion when providing patient care” and that “nurses have not routinely worn skirts since they’ve earned some respect as a profession.”

Last month, a future medical student who is Muslim asked other Reddit users whether it was common to see scrub skirts, saying, “dressing modestly is important to me and don’t want to give it up when there are skirt scrubs available.” Another user replied, “I’ve seen orthodox Jewish nurses wearing them, nobody bats an eye.”

The EEOC filed a lawsuit in September 2020 on behalf of Babineaux, citing a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits religious discrimination. The settlement requires Wellpath LLC to provide the nurse with $75,000 for back pay and compensatory damages. Wellpath also agreed to inform employees of their rights and to provide anti-discrimination training that includes matters related to religious dress and grooming.

“Under federal law, when a workplace rule conflicts with an employee’s sincerely held religious practice, an employer must attempt to find a workable solution,” said Philip Moss, trial attorney for the EEOC’s San Antonio field office, in a press release. “This settlement should underscore the importance of employers taking affirmative steps to comply with their obligations under anti-discrimination laws.”

- More from Kathryn Post - Religion News Service

Church Life

Nigeria’s Newest Bible Translation Started with Missionary Lepers

Rebecca Hopkins

After the gospel came to a small community in northeast Nigeria, two men on two different continents spent five decades translating Scripture into the Kamwe language.

Mark Zira Dlyavaghi and Roger Mohrlang

Courtesy of Mark Zira Dlyavaghi

About 70 years ago, a handful of people with leprosy and a blind man shared the gospel with the Kamwe people in northeastern Nigeria, and many in the community accepted Jesus. Today, up to 95 percent of the Kamwe profess to be Christians. This year, 30,000 copies of the entire Bible are being printed for the first time in their native language.

Christianity Today interviewed Bible translators Roger Mohrlang, an American who spent 38 years as a theology professor at Whitworth University and oversaw the translation work, and Mark Zira Dlyavaghi, a Nigerian who was the primary translator and team coordinator for the project. They shared why they got involved, how they persevered, and how their translation efforts might shape the rest of Nigeria.

Why and how did you decide to get into this work originally?

Roger: It all began with my conversion to Christ during my college years. I was a physics student at what is now Carnegie Mellon University. I had an engineering professor who asked me one day, “Are you a Christian?” He was the one who encouraged me to use my college years to get into Scripture. I spent endless hours reading, studying, memorizing Scripture, and that, more than anything else, changed my whole life.

I realized my life was not going to be centered on physics. What can I do that would be significant in the work of Christ? I didn’t see myself as a pastor or an evangelist, but I was drawn to Bible translation, in large part because of the effect that reading Scripture had had on my own life.

Mark Zira: I went to a missionary school that was close to my village. One of the lepers was in my village, teaching God’s Word. He opened the primary school there. He started it as a ‘Christian Religious Instruction’ class. I became a follower of Christ in 1975.

Because of God’s call, I went to Bible school in 1988 and graduated with a divinity degree in 1992. When I came home, the Kamwe Bible Translation Committee invited me to join the committee as the first graduate.

Courtesy of Jean-Paul Becker

Family reading the Kamwe New Testament.

Can you share a brief timeline of the translation project since it first began?

Roger: I arrived in that village, Michika, in northeastern Nigeria in 1968. My job as a missionary linguist was to learn the language, analyze the language, form an alphabet, and produce some basic literacy materials, and especially to work with the Christians on the translation of the New Testament. I left in 1974. The New Testament was dedicated in January 1, 1976, with a huge celebration.

For years, I didn’t hear anything at all from them. I was away doing graduate study and continuing teaching. Then in the late 1980s, I got this letter saying, “All 5,000 copies are sold out. We want another 10,000.” And I was euphoric. A colleague reminded me it’s time to get it onto the computer. All of that up to that time was by pencil and typewriter. So, volunteers in England spent 1,000 hours keyboarding the whole thing, and then I proofread it. I realized we could do better, and that led to a revision project that I coordinated while I was teaching at Whitworth. The revised New Testament was dedicated in 1997.

Ten years later, I heard that they were beginning work on the Old Testament, that they wanted the whole Bible in their language. The last 30 years of work has been done together with the Kamwe Bible Translation Committee. They have done the whole first draft of the Old Testament. I served as a consultant checker. It’s really been their project. A second New Testament revision and the translation of the Old Testament were completed in 2021, and the Kamwe Bible is being printed in Korea.

How do you feel having finished such a lifelong project? And how has this project changed you personally or spiritually?

Roger: I feel relief, joy, and gratitude. One of the things I’m doing right now is writing about stories in my life and God’s hand in it. It’s just been wonderful to see all the good gifts of God and the way that made all of this possible. Part of the gratitude is the fact that my eyes have held out right to the end. I have macular degeneration. That has slowly decreased my vision.

How has it changed me? It’s given me a more comprehensive grasp of the Bible as a whole and of its complexity. My hope and my belief is that spending so much time in all of these words is that these words will be written more deeply in my heart, that I would become more and more the person that God wants me to be.

Mark Zira: I’m overjoyed now because the work is now over. We’re relieved after years of sitting, working, traveling.

I read the Bible over and over and over again, particularly the Old Testament. That has given me a lot in my life and my perspective. I will continue to invest in God’s work until I die.

Have you had moments where you wanted to quit? And if so, what refreshed your spiritual joy to press on despite obstacles and difficulties?

Roger: I don’t think I ever had any desire to quit. What sustained me were two things. One was a sense of commitment to the Kamwe. I thought of it like a marriage commitment. You don’t break that vow, you honor it. Along with that, there’s a sense of calling. I realized I am the one person that knows these languages, the culture, the world of Bible translation. So in some ways, I would be the obvious person to assist with all of this.

Mark Zira: It’s God’s work, so there are enemies attacking from here and there, even within. Sometimes when I remembered those who were attacking me, I remembered others who were supporting me, encouraging and praying for me, and that gave me courage.

Courtesy of Jean-Paul Becker

Kamwe village in Nigeria.

I understand the Kamwe people experienced a community conversion. What do you think were the primary catalysts for this?

Roger: The New Testament in their own language was inevitably one key factor. It meant that when they have church services, they can read the New Testament in their own language. It gives them a sense of identity too.

But the movement toward community conversion was there—the beginnings of it—even before the Bible translation. From a human point of view, that is due to the fact that the earliest evangelists were all Kamwe themselves. This handful of lepers, this blind person, came back from the leprosy clinic, as believers, and as evangelists. It was not an outsider-driven project. There was quite a warm welcome to it. As a result of that, the Christian songs that evolved were all in their local language. Customs were indigenous customs.

The mission in the larger area was the mission of the Church of the Brethren. The fact that the mission brought in medicine, small clinics, and helped to establish schools in the area, was viewed positively.

The dominant factor is the grace of God, God doing a wonderful work, orchestrating all of it. It’s the work of the Lord that changes hearts. The fact that three quarters of a million people, up to 95 percent of whom now confess to be Christian, calling themselves a Christian community, right within miles of this jihadist movement to the north, the Boko Haram, is a phenomenal thing.

What was their belief system was before converting to Christianity? And what else can you tell me about the lepers who first brought the gospel there?

Roger: It’s traditional sub-Saharan African animism, belief in the spirit world. They believed in a high God.

Mark Zira: I knew most of the lepers. One was my teacher in the primary school. They had leprosy, so they heard of missionaries who came from America. The Brethren established a clinic 100 kilometers from our village. The lepers went there, were healed of their leprosy, and heard of the gospel. So, when they came home, they went to villages, teaching them about Christ. That’s how most of them received Christ.

Roger: One leper named Daniel became quite a highly respected pastor in the whole area. And I got to know one of the lepers who was a Christian leader in his own village. His name was David. When he was away at the leprosy clinic, he learned how to read and came back with a Hausa Bible. And at the end of the day, when they’d all come in from their farming, he would tell them stories from the Bible and pray for them. He was known as a singer, and he composed Kamwe Christian songs.

How did the Boko Haram attack of Michika in 2014 affect the Kamwe community? And what’s the current and potential future political situation like there?

Mark Zira: The Kamwe community was badly affected. I was part of the tragedy. We were in church on Sunday, the seventh of September, when they were approaching our village. All of a sudden, we heard gunshots everywhere. We were sent out by force into villages, into bushes, and most of us went to other places. It was very, very terrible.

At that time, I had a wife and five children of my own with foster children also. All of us were chased out. We had a car that we took to a certain village, and later they burned it down. They even burned some of my property.

Roger: There are three terrorist threats in northern Nigeria. One is Boko Haram and its rival faction, ISWAP (Islamic State—West Africa Province), both of which are fighting to establish an Islamic caliphate in northeastern Nigeria. In the last 20 years, Boko Haram, with its hideout only 35 to 40 miles north of the Kamwe, has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced an estimated 2.3 million people.

Second is the threat of the Fulani cattle herders who are killing Christians and taking over their land in central Nigeria. In the last few years, they’ve killed thousands of Christians and displaced hundreds of thousands.

Third is the growing number of gangs who are kidnapping people, including more than 1,000 students last year, for ransom in central and northwestern Nigeria.

Courtesy of Jean-Paul Becker

Reading the Kamwe New Testament.

What do you see as the further impact of having the Old Testament completed?

Roger: It would be a wonderful boost for them to be able to read those stories in their own language, preach them from their own language. It will greatly enrich their services.

My hunch is it’s going to increase the songs. The women have been very good at teaching the Christian message by singing. They get a group of women together and one of them is a leader. The leader gets a line. Then everybody responds. That’s the way that they have passed along the Christian message and Christian teaching.

In doing Bible translation work, there’s often no immediate payback. You’re working for 20 years, 40 years, 60 years down the future. It’ll be interesting 60 years from now to see what effects it’ll have.

Mark Zira: When we have a Bible, it is keeping the language going. Many young people do not use the language much. That will encourage them to study God’s Word in their own language and know what God expects of them. When we read it in the church and our homes, that will really encourage us. Everybody is expecting it. The pastors are really eager, asking when the Old Testament will come.

It takes many people from outside helping us, so we are encouraged. We also pray for them that God will bless them so that they will encourage other people like us. I also want to thank Roger who came here as a youth and spent all of his life helping us.

What’s your hope and prayer for the future of the Kamwe Christian community?

Roger: My hope is that the Bible in their language could strengthen every believer, strengthen the church as a whole, and strengthen their witness to the outside world.

Mark Zira: I am praying that the Kamwe are more united, that they will also keep the faith and use God’s Word day in and day out, so that they can be stronger to resist whatever enemies they are experiencing and be able to face whatever trial and temptation is to come.

- More from Rebecca Hopkins

Books

Excerpt

Miracles Don’t Violate the Laws of Nature

Craig Keener

The ideas of a Scottish skeptic explain why some Westerners struggle to embrace signs and wonders.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Zbynek Burival / Unsplash

Why do many people embrace a worldview that won’t even consider evidence for miracles? Sometimes they assume that science opposes miracles, but that assumption goes back not to scientific inquiry itself but to an 18th-century philosopher. Knowingly or unknowingly, many people have followed the thesis of Scottish skeptic David Hume (1711–1776).

Hume was probably the most prominent philosopher of his generation, and surely the most influential from his time on subsequent generations. He wrote on a wide variety of topics, sometimes very insightfully but sometimes (as with his ethnocentric approach to history) in ways that would not be accepted today.

Hume’s intellectual stature, earned from other works, eventually lent credibility to his 1748 essay on miracles. In this essay, Hume dismisses the credibility of miracle claims, appealing to “natural law” and uniform human experience. Although an appeal to natural law might sound scientific, Hume was not a scientist; in fact, some of his views on causation would make scientific inquiry impossible. Hume’s essay on miracles also contradicts his own approach to discovering knowledge.

Moreover, Hume’s essay has generated serious intellectual counterarguments since the time it was first published. One of these counterarguments was history’s first public use of Bayes’ theorem, today an essential staple in statistics.

Mathematician and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes originated the theorem but died before publishing it. His close friend Richard Price, also a mathematician and minister, published it and then used Bayes’ theorem to refute a probability claim Hume had made in his essay about miracle witnesses.

Hume himself acknowledged the force of that argument, though he did not adequately revise his essay in light of it. Mathematician Charles Babbage, designer of the first mechanical computer, also issued a refutation of Hume’s probability argument against miracles.

Most early English scientists believed in biblical miracles. Such scientists included Isaac Newton and early Newtonians. Modern science originally developed in contexts that affirmed that a superintelligent God created the universe and that it therefore should make sense. Newton popularized the idea of natural law—and saw it as a design argument for God’s existence.

Likewise, Robert Boyle, the father of chemistry, used his discoveries about nature to argue for an intelligent designer. Boyle, Newton, and Newtonians believed in biblical miracles: They affirmed that the God who set up the universe to normally work in an orderly way was not subject to that order. Some modern scientific thinkers concur, such as John Polkinghorne.

Most early modern scientists worked from a Christian worldview. Examples include Blaise Pascal, the mathematician who developed the precursor of the modern computer; Andreas Vesalius, the founder of the modern study of human anatomy; Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the founder of microbiology; William Harvey, who described the circulatory system; Gregor Mendel, a monk and early leader in genetics; Francis Bacon; Nicolaus Copernicus; Galileo Galilei (despite conflicts arising from contemporary academic and ecclesiastical politics); Johannes Kepler. More recently, we have Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and George Washington Carver—the list could go on. The myth of a historic war between science and religion stems especially from two late 19th-century books that historians have subsequently debunked as antireligious propaganda.

It was not, then, scientists who came up with the idea that miracles violate natural law. It was other thinkers such as Hume. Hume liked Newton’s mechanistic universe; he used it, however, in a way quite different from Newton. Hume adopted much of his argument from a movement of his day called deism. Deists believed that God designed the universe, but they often denied that he acted in the world much after that. Hume developed much of his argument precisely to oppose the sort of evidentialist apologists who had led England’s scientific revolution.

Hume’s argument was twofold: First, miracles are violations of natural law. Second, uniform human experience warns against trusting miracle reports.

Although some earlier writers had viewed miracles as beyond laws of nature, Hume treated them as “violations” of laws of nature. Once he adopted this definition, he insisted that miracles are miracles only if they violate natural law. Then he argued that natural law cannot be violated, so therefore miracles do not happen.

Although this clever play with words does not fit Hume’s own normal way of arguing, he conveniently defines miracles this way in hopes of defining them out of existence. This approach spares him the trouble of having to argue against them one by one.

As Hume’s critics have always pointed out, this language loads the deck of the argument. No one who believes in a God who created laws of nature believes that God is subject to such laws—as if God illegally “violates” them by doing a miracle.

Hume’s god that cannot violate natural law is not the God of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Nor do “violations” of nature correspond with most of the biblical miracles that Hume wished to undermine. Hume was thus refuting a straw man—a caricature of what people actually believed.

In the Bible, God often acts through other agents. When Judges 20:35 says that God struck the tribe of Benjamin, the context makes it clear that God executed this judgment through human warriors.

Likewise, when God gave the Israelites Canaan, the Bible claims that he accomplished this gift through their military victories (Deut. 3:18; 4:1). When God sent swarms of locusts into Egypt by a strong east wind (Ex. 10:13), he was not breaking any natural law. This was not the only time locusts struck Egypt; it was simply the most severe and timely—the one that came right after Moses predicted it. And we already discussed the parting of the sea.

Human beings regularly act within nature; they do not, for example, “violate” the law of gravity by catching a falling pencil or lifting an eraser. Nor does a surgeon violate natural law when she restores someone’s sight. Why should a putative creator be any less able to act within nature than those he created? One must essentially assume deism or atheism from the start for Hume’s argument to work at all.

Another problem with Hume’s argument today is how he viewed natural laws. Today philosophers of science tend to define laws of nature in primarily descriptive ways. That is, these “laws” describe what happens rather than causing it. If scientists find some things that do not fit the pattern, they may rethink the law, but they do not ordinarily say that something violated the law.

Moreover, laws of nature describe nature at particular levels and under particular conditions; they function differently in settings such as superconductivity or black holes. Why should special divine action not create a different set of conditions than those to which we are accustomed?

- More from Craig Keener

Theology

I’ve Reached My Breaking Point as a Pastor

Peter Chin

But that doesn’t have to mean broken relationships with others.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Mission Media / Lightstock / Max Brouwers / Getty / WikiMedia Commons

A new Barna study discovered that 38 percent of pastors have given real, serious consideration to quitting the ministry in the past year.

I am one of that 38 percent.

Even in the best of times, pastoral ministry has always felt like a broad and heavy calling. But the events of the past few years have made it a crushing one. The presidential election. Unrest around racial injustice. A global pandemic that has taken the lives of over 800,000 Americans.

Never before had I considered health protocols in the context of the church. But today, being too strict with health guidelines might damage the well-being of the church, while being too lax might take the life of a congregant. Pastors like me have to deal with the never-ending conversation about in-person versus online services—and how to serve churchgoers without leaving behind the immunocompromised or disabled.

All of this has injected a paralyzing degree of complexity and controversy into every single situation I face, every decision I make. And to make things worse, it feels as if everyone is on a hair trigger, ready to walk away at the merest hint that the church does not line up with their political or personal perspectives.

Normally, pastors might rely on their personal relationships to navigate such fraught dynamics. But COVID-19 has taken that away as well, forcing us to rely on phone calls and video screens—which are no substitutes for physical presence.

The situations are complex, the consequences weighty, the criticism unrelenting, and the path forward unclear. All of this has driven many pastors, including myself, to the breaking point.

As I ponder walking away from ministry after 20 years, I have found little comfort or counsel from the world. Some people say we should refrain from making rash decisions during such a tumultuous time—which might be wise advice for those who can manage such emotional detachment.

Others suggest the exact opposite, saying we should draw attention to our exit from ministry—using it as an opportunity to publicly air any grievances we have suffered as a form of protest, no matter what kind of relational fallout we may leave behind.

The advice that I have received is much like the season we find ourselves in: fragmented, chaotic, and unclear.

But I have found some peace in this word found in Scripture: chesed.

Chesed is a Hebrew word used throughout the Old Testament, like in Psalm 13:5, which reads, “But I trust in your unfailing love (chesed).” Chesed has no direct analogue in English, but it is frequently translated as “lovingkindness” or “loyal love.” It is how God loves his people—with an enduring and faithful love that transcends circumstances and seasons.

But intrinsic to the idea of chesed is the practice of remembrance. After all, one cannot trust in the unfailing love of God without thinking back to times in the past that God’s love did not fail.

As I consider leaving ministry, I have paused to think about God’s faithful love in my life. I could not count the number of times and situations in which I felt desperate and hopeless, but God demonstrated that he saw me and cared for me, as well as for those whom I loved.

Through my wife’s cancer diagnosis, the first and the second time. Through frequent unemployment. Through break-ins, heartache, and failure.

As I remembered these many moments, I gained a precious gift: perspective. I recognized that as crushingly hard as this season has been, I have encountered other difficult situations before, and God’s love persisted through them all.

This does not necessarily mean that I should not walk away from ministry, only that I should not let this one season define my entire life. That is, I may or may not be a pastor in the future—but one thing is certain: God’s love will endure through it all.

Christians have a deep fondness for studying the words for love used in Scripture: agape, chesed, and others. But our understanding of these words is often incomplete, as it focuses on how God loves us; agape is a Greek word that describes God’s unconditional love for us, chesed is God’s lovingkindness to us.

While true, chesed has another equally important application that we often overlook.

For example, in the book of Ruth—where God is never directly mentioned—we see frequent uses of the word chesed. It describes the care Naomi receives from her daughters-in-law and also the generosity of Boaz. It is how Boaz describes Ruth when she shares her affection with him. So this loyal, unfailing love is not only something that we receive from God; chesed is also how we are called to love others.

The first aspect of chesed granted me deeper peace; the second provided me clearer direction. Yes, God’s loving care for me will endure no matter what happens. But I too am to love others in the same way—with an enduring, loyal love.

This can be painfully difficult to do at our breaking points. So often these are the moments when our relationships can fall apart as we walk away from others, physically and emotionally. And out of all the painful consequences of such transitions, these broken relationships can haunt us the longest, and we often mourn them the most.

But it does not have to be that way. Our breaking-point moments do not have to result in broken relationships. We can choose chesed, to doggedly persist in loving one another in the same way God loves us. Again, this does not necessarily dictate our choices—whether I choose to leave ministry or not. That decision still lies before me.

No matter which path I feel led to take, however, I will stay committed to chesed—to loving those around me and thus fulfilling the command of Jesus to love others in the same way that God loves me.

In this season of deep doubt and uncertainty, this word has rescued me. It has liberated me from being trapped and defined by this one season of my life while charting a clear path forward that allows me to maintain clean hands and a pure heart.

It has rescued me from both fear and bitterness, reminding me that no matter what happens, God will always love me—and that no matter what happens, I am always to love others.

To be honest, I am no clearer on what the future holds for me, or for the church. Perhaps I will walk away from ministry, now or someday to come. But I know now that I can do so with hope for a future that remains connected to my past and a heart that stays ready to love.

Peter Chin is a pastor at Rainier Avenue Church and the author of Blindsided By God. He and his wife and their five children live in the Seattle area.

- More from Peter Chin

Church Life

The Witness of the Black Church Rings Through NBA History

Paul Putz

Over 75 years of the professional league—and for decades before—Black Christians brought a social conscience to basketball.

Pictured: John Howard Johnson (left) and St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Harlem (second to left)

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Joshua Hoehne / Kylie O'Sullivan / Unsplash

In 1949, 42 bronze bells were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean from the Netherlands and installed in the bell tower at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Harlem.

The bells have a remarkable history in their own right. As the first carillon in the world to be played by a Black musician, they have been described by scholars as a “cultural treasure” and “an irreplaceable historical instrument.”

But St. Martin’s didn’t just make history for its tolling church tower. When the bells were installed over 70 years ago, no congregation in the country better represented the melding of basketball and Black culture.

Many of us are familiar with basketball’s Christian origins. The sport, after all, was created at a Christian college (the YMCA’s International Training School) by an ordained Presbyterian minister (James Naismith) for the purpose of cultivating Christian values and spreading the gospel (“winning men to the master through the gym”).

Naismith and the YMCA, however, tell only part of the story. The sport would not have become what we know it to be today had it not been for Black Christian leaders and institutions.

This season, the NBA marks its 75th anniversary. By the time the league was formed, basketball had developed far beyond its Christians roots. And yet, when modern NBA players like Steph Curry splash a three-pointer, or when they champion the cause of racial justice, they bear witness to the past—to the lasting influence of a Christianity nurtured by churches like St. Martin’s that promoted excellence on the court and a social conscience off of it.

Culture making and Black churches

“Here in Harlem the bells are in the center of things, right in the market place of community life.” – John Howard Johnson

For Black residents in New York City, organized basketball started around 1905. The game had been invented 14 years earlier, but the YMCAs that spread the sport were segregated. While white branches had buildings and facilities to support basketball, few allowed Black athletes to participate. And only a handful of Black YMCA groups had their own building, much less the equipment and space for basketball.

Enter Black churches.

As new athletic organizations like the Alpha Physical Cultural Club created basketball teams for the Black community—ushering in the “Black Fives” era—churches often provided the gym space. And some also began to sponsor their own teams.

Most notable among these were several Episcopalian churches that served Black communities: St. Philip’s Episcopal Church (sponsor of the St. Christopher Club), St. Augustine’s (associated with the Smart Set Athletic Club), and St. Cyprian Episcopal Church (whose team was called the “Speed Boys”).

As these Black basketball teams began to train and compete against each other, the sport developed a rapt following among New York City’s Black community. It was entertainment, yes, but something more.

“From the beginning,” scholar Onaje X. O. Woodbine writes, “black churches and clubs fused a religious ethos of ultimate worth and community uplift into the game.”

St. Martin’s in Harlem was part of the network of predominantly Black Episcopal congregations that sponsored sports teams. The church was founded in 1928 by John Howard Johnson, a minister’s son who came of age competing for his father’s St. Cyprian church team. A rangy and athletic sharp-shooting forward, he starred for the Speed Boys in the 1910s before enrolling at Columbia University, where he became the first Black man to take the court for the Lions.

Even though Johnson traded in his jersey for a cleric’s robe after college, his time as an athlete shaped his ministry, with a holistic vision that included care for the body and the soul, the afterlife and the here and now.

“The gospel of the resurrection is not only an announcement that Jesus has conquered death, that we and our loved ones shall live again,” Johnson preached, “but also it is an announcement about the power of God to renew the life of the world.”

Following the path of his father’s church, Johnson established sports and recreation programs at St. Martin’s, seeing them as practical and positive ways to engage the community.

St. Martin’s was linked to New York City’s Black basketball culture in another important way: It was the church home of Bob Douglas, the father of Black professional basketball.

An immigrant from the West Indies, Douglas arrived in New York City around 1900 and five years later witnessed his first basketball game. He was smitten immediately. “Basketball became his life,” Johnson wrote about his congregant.

Douglas cut his teeth in the city’s amateur Black basketball leagues before deciding, in 1923, to carve out a new path and launch the first fully professional Black basketball team, the New York Renaissance Big Five (or the “Harlem Rens”). Over the next few decades, the Rens became one of the truly great teams of professional basketball’s pre-NBA barnstorming era. They played against and defeated the best teams of all races and in 1939 won the first World Championship of Professional Basketball tournament.

When the NBA began operations, however, it ignored this part of the basketball world. From 1946 until 1950, Black players were not allowed the join the league. And into the 1960s, an informal quota system remained in place to limit the number of Black players.

The bells at St. Martin’s, then, testify to the ways that Black institutions cultivated the game when the color line was drawn. For a league in which nearly three-fourths of the players today are Black, the bells remind us that the roots of professional basketball extend far deeper than the NBA.

The sounds of public witness

“May the bells ring out a message of brotherhood and peace and unite us in one Holy Fellowship, those who are near, and those who are far away.” – John Howard Johnson

Church bells can call people together to worship. Yet, once gathered, believers are sent out into the world. More than the sounds of church bells, it’s the lives of churchgoers that make the faith intelligible to the broader world.

Johnson understood this well. “Christianity is essentially a gospel—the announcement of something God has done,” he preached. “The proclamation of His resurrection was the good news His follows made known abroad.”

And that proclamation had implications for everyday life. “From the gospel,” Johnson said, “there flows the system of Christian ethics with its demands upon us for certain kinds of conduct.”

The dilemma is that different Christian communities might prioritize different moral and ethical demands. What seems central to Christian witness for some is not a central concern for others. And in the NBA, the question of race and racial justice has loomed especially large, reflecting broader fault lines within American Christianity.

For Johnson, Christian witness necessarily included work for racial justice. In 1934, he helped lead a campaign aimed at getting white-owned businesses in Harlem to hire Black employees, launching the efforts with a sermon delivered at St. Martin’s, titled “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work.”

Yet what Johnson and other Black church leaders emphasized was not a moral priority for many white believers—not in the 1930s, nor in the ensuing decades as the NBA was created and the civil rights movement gained momentum.

In the 1960s, Boston Celtics great Bill Russell took notice. Russell grew up in Louisiana, spending every Sunday at church. But as he got involved with civil rights activism, Russell grew disenchanted with Christianity. While he supported Martin Luther King Jr.—“my old church days came back strong” when King preached, he said—he also found Malcolm X’s message compelling. And he saw too much hypocrisy among white Christians, too must resistance to the civil rights movement.

Hall of Fame center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar followed a similar trajectory. Raised as a Catholic in New York, Lew Alcindor (as he was known then) went to college at UCLA, where he vocally supported civil rights activism while also interrogated the contradictions of American Christianity. For a faith that claimed to unify and speak to the needs of people of all races, why was the experience of Black Christians so different?

“We don’t catch hell because we’re Christians,” he told a reporter in 1967. “We catch hell because we’re Black.” The next year, while still at UCLA, Alcindor converted to Islam.

It was not just Black NBA players who grew disenchanted with the public witness of the church. As a high schooler, future New York Knicks forward Bill Bradley attended a Fellowship of Christian Athletes event and committed his life to Christ. When Bradley moved on to college at Princeton, he became a national sensation and basketball star, profiled in John McPhee’s acclaimed book A Sense Of Where You Are (1964).

Through it all, Bradley served as a poster boy for Christian athletes. But by the time he joined the Knicks in 1967—cast as a “great white hope” in a league increasingly led by Black players—he had grown uncomfortable with the attention. His evangelical faith was challenged, too, by his growing social awareness. He was surprised to find that many of his fellow evangelicals did not share his support for the civil rights movement, and soon after joining the Knicks, Bradley left his evangelical commitments behind.

For Russell, Abdul-Jabbar, and Bradley, the sounds of the church bells repelled them rather than drew them in, in part because the moral priorities of church members did not seem to include concern for racial justice.

Returning home

“The bells will speak of God and call men and women to church, not necessarily to this church, but to some church … seeking individual souls, lonely souls, tired souls, to give them courage.” – John Howard Johnson

Other NBA players continued to find solace and comfort in the Christian faith. The first pick of the 1968 draft, Elvin Hayes was supposed to be the league’s next big star. But the pressure of high expectations and the grind of NBA life exhausted him. He grew distant from his wife, Erna, and dependent on sleeping pills.

Then one Sunday in the summer of 1973, he decided to join Erna at her Pentecostal church. Hayes felt God speak to him during the service, and he gave his life to Christ. “I had accumulated all the things I thought important,” Hayes later explained. “But there was a void I couldn't fill. Only God could.”

For Hayes, God’s presence in his life eased the glare of the NBA spotlight and also brought “total harmony” to his home. Those two themes—peace in the midst of pressure and marriages strengthened by faith—would be echoed in subsequent years by numerous Christian players.

Still, it was not easy for NBA players to nourish their spiritual lives. In a league defined by constant travel and uneven weekly rhythms, players had a hard time remaining rooted in a local church community. At the end of the 1970s, however, a solution was developed: Church could come to the locker room. Building off of models developed in baseball and football, NBA teams began offering their own voluntary pregame chapel services.

The NBA’s chapel system was organized by predominantly white evangelical sports ministries, but they worked to serve an interracial constituency. In Chicago, this included collaborating with Henry Soles, an African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) pastor, who launched chapel services for the Chicago Bulls in 1979 and served as the team’s senior chaplain for the next two decades.

Even if evangelical sports ministries served NBA players of all races, into the 1990s their public witness was largely shaped by the concerns of the predominantly white Christian Right.

This meant that when Los Angeles Lakers forward A. C. Green and other Black athletes spoke up about conservative family values issues like sexual abstinence—issues that could overlap with racial uplift themes historically present within Black churches—their voices were amplified.

But discussions about racism that went beyond individual heart change were rarely promoted as matters of Christian concern. The voices of Black Christians like Soles, who criticized the Moral Majority for being “weak” in its “application of biblical principles” to the needs of Black Americans, remained in the background.

Soles’ assistant chaplain with the Bulls, Scott Bradley, experienced this too. Bradley was a minister with the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), a historically Black Pentecostal denomination. In 1991, right after the Michael Jordan–led Bulls won their first NBA championship, millions watched on television as Bradley lead the victors in the Lord’s Prayer.

Far fewer people noticed two years later when Bradley addressed the persistence of racism in American society. "If the Black man has been lied to,” Bradley declared, “the Black minister must address it."

Bradley took aim at the hypocrisy of the “war on drugs” and the way it disproportionally incarcerated Black men. He wrote about the exploitation of Black athletes—how they were expected to put their bodies on the line as players but denied opportunities as coaches or executives. And he pointed out that any time Black athletes criticized racism, they were told they should shut up and be grateful.

"The Black athlete is not to speak out on certain issues,” Bradley wrote, “or else he is discredited and tabbed by the media as ‘outspoken.’”

In evangelical sports ministry spaces at the time, Bradley’s insights barely caused a ripple. Yet, they demonstrate the ongoing, behind-the-scenes presence within the NBA of Black Christian understandings of race and justice that sometimes differed from the evangelical mainstream.

In recent years, as a new era of racial reckoning has enveloped American culture, the ideas articulated by Bradley decades ago have gained a wider hearing. Rather than remaining in the background or confined to Black Christian spaces, a growing number of Christian athletes have publicly emphasized racial justice and systemic reform as matters of Christian concern.

Sacramento Kings forward Harrison Barnes, whose goal is to play basketball for God’s glory, has supported efforts to provide Black people “a more equitable stake in society.”

Steph Curry, the most prominent Christian athlete in the game today, has lent his support to several racial justice initiatives, including the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice, led by Clarence Jones, a lawyer and advisor for Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s.

Malcolm Brogdon of the Indiana Pacers has also participated in marches and demonstrations, carrying on a family legacy: His grandfather, John Hurst Adams, was an AME bishop and “hell-raiser on behalf of civil rights” in the 1960s and beyond.

This recent activism can raise important questions about the consistency of Christian witness. What does faithful public engagement look like when you’re part of a multibillion-dollar global brand? What if Christian athletes have opinions on other ethical and social issues—like gender and sexuality or China’s human rights record—that differ from NBA leadership? How public do they need to be about their convictions?

Sometimes these questions are asked in good faith, but sometimes they are driven more by a desire to discredit NBA players as irredeemably “woke,” simply riding the recent social justice trend.

The bells at St. Martin’s, however, tell us something else. They remind us that racial justice activism in sports is not new. In an important sense, it is rooted in something that predates the NBA itself: the history of blending basketball, concern for racial justice, and Christian witness represented by John Howard Johnson’s Harlem congregation.

As the NBA celebrates 75 years, that history is worth remembering. Not only did Black churches help to develop the on-court game that millions of fans across the globe celebrate; they also helped to nurture the social conscience and concern for racial justice that many NBA players champion today.

Paul Emory Putz is a historian studying sports and Christianity and serves as the assistant director of the sports ministry program at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary.

- More from Paul Putz

News

Wire Story

Interim EC Pres Becomes First African American to Lead a Southern Baptist Entity

Adelle M. Banks - Religion News Service

Willie McLaurin, former Executive Committee VP, steps in four months after Ronnie Floyd’s resignation.

Courtesy of Baptist Press

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee has appointed Willie McLaurin to serve as interim president and CEO, marking the first time that any entity of the predominantly white denomination has been headed by a Black person.

McLaurin was named just over two years ago as the committee’s vice president for Great Commission relations and mobilization, a new role meant to focus on spreading the gospel and fostering relations with various demographic groups of Southern Baptists.

Prior to his work for the Executive Committee, McLaurin worked at the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board for 15 years and previously held pastoral roles in churches in that state.

The Executive Committee, headquartered in Nashville, has recently faced turmoil over racism, allegations of mishandling sexual abuse claims, and debates about how much access investigators hired to report on those claims will have to past conversations and other denominational communications.

Ronnie Floyd, the committee’s former president and CEO, resigned in October, citing the committee’s decision to waive attorney-client privilege in the investigation as a reason for his departure. The denomination’s longtime general counsel cut ties with the SBC and at least 10 committee members also resigned, citing similar reasons.

“We hope that he will help us to reset the tone by which the EC serves Southern Baptists,” said California pastor Rolland Slade, the Executive Committee chairman, in a statement about McLaurin in Baptist Press, the SBC’s news service. “Immediately before us is the challenge to regain the sense of trust of Southern Baptists.”

https://twitter.com/pastordmack/status/1488539512515014665

Slade, elected in June, is the first Black chairman of the Executive Committee’s advisory board. McLaurin is the first African American executive to lead the staff of the committee. McLaurin, 48, added in a statement that he hopes to build trust as an interim leader of the committee that acts on behalf the denomination outside its annual two-day meeting.

“My prayer is that this season will bring healing and unity to our Convention,” McLaurin said in Tuesday’s announcement. “When we love each other the way Jesus loves people then we create the atmosphere for cooperation.”

In an additional statement, McLaurin said he plans to guide the Executive Committee staff in its day-to-day operations, which include cooperating with the sexual abuse investigation task force and preparing for the annual SBC meeting scheduled for June in Anaheim, California.

“All of us here on this earth are interims, and I am humbled and honored to be selected and wholly dependent on the Lord to carry out His will in this time of transition,” he said.

McLaurin’s appointment cheered Southern Baptist leaders who have long called for greater diversity at the top ranks of the denomination, which dates to 1845.

“To God be the glory,” tweeted Pastor Dwight McKissic of Arlington, Texas, who has urged the SBC to place minorities in top executive positions.

“Now, if the SBC can take the next step & name this highly qualified brother as President, No longer can the Great Commission Council (SBC entity heads) gather to meet, & only one racial demographic is in the room.”

SBC President Ed Litton also hailed McLaurin’s appointment, saying in a tweet that he was an “exemplary choice” and a “faithful and distinguished leader.”

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