The Christian Peacemaker Who Left a Trail of Trauma

Daniel Silliman

Judy Dabler built a career helping reconcile conflict within ministries including RZIM and Mars Hill. But a new investigation says she abused her authority to protect those with power.

Screengrab Missouri Baptist Convention 2017 Annual Meeting

A leading Christian conciliator who was involved in handling abuse allegations and training at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), Mars Hill Church, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), and dozens of other churches and ministries over the past 15 years, has been found unfit for counseling, coaching, or conciliation.

Judy Dabler founded two popular organizations for Christians needing a third party to help navigate conflict and broken relationships: Live at Peace Ministries (LAPM) and Creative Conciliation. She also taught more than 10,000 people how to do conciliation, which she described in presentations as the only biblical option for dealing with conflict.

In her conciliation work, though, Dabler consistently favored the person paying the bills, siding with the leader or big-name institution. Again and again, interviews and documents obtained by CT show, it was the less powerful party—the victim of sexual harassment, the beleaguered employee, the hurt congregant—who was pressured to make confessions they weren’t comfortable with and settle for agreements they thought were unfair.

Former clients and colleagues say Dabler protected and perpetuated power imbalances through mediation, all while appealing to Scripture and her authority as an experienced conciliator who had seen behind the curtain of the worst dysfunction in contemporary Christian ministry.

The renowned peacemaker also perpetuated abuses herself, according to interviews and documents. She bullied, belittled, and shamed her staff, and she sexually abused two seminarians she taught, supervised, and employed from 2007 to 2011.

“What you have to understand is that Judy is very gifted,” said Paul Vazquez, who worked with Dabler as a conciliator in the early 2000s. “She is very gifted, but like everybody else, she is very broken. There is always a fine line between a biblical use of your gift and a destructive use, depending on how you walk it out, whether it’s for good or for evil, and what the ultimate manifestation is.”

An independent investigation by an ad hoc panel of three Christian conciliators—originally requested by Dabler in response to allegations of misconduct—concluded in July that she is disqualified for all further conciliation work. The panel found she was unethical, and her approach traumatized the very people she was supposed to help.

She should not mediate or train others “until she has completed an independently supervised process of therapy and conciliation that leads to a clear demonstration of authentic repentance,” the panel said.

LAPM—the conciliation ministry that Dabler founded in 2007 and ran until she left in 2014 to start Creative Conciliations—issued a public apology on Tuesday, acknowledging its role in Dabler’s abuse.

“We failed to hold Judy Dabler accountable, minimizing the victims’ concerns, and neglecting to pursue justice vigorously,” the statement says. “The current LAPM leadership is grieved by the harm that has been caused by our sins of commission and omission, enabling an abusive pattern and silencing victims’ voices.”

Dabler declined CT’s request for comment but said she will make an official statement at CreativeConciliation.org, a site that is currently private. She has told several fellow conciliators that the investigation is illegitimate, former friends are turning on her, and she is the victim of a plot to discredit her.

The investigation was led by Ken Sande, the founder of Peacemaker Ministries and head of Relational Wisdom 360. Sande has no formal authority over Dabler but is widely respected in the field of Christian conciliation. He has been asked to conduct more than a dozen independent investigations over the past 40 years.

Dabler requested Sande do the investigation after evangelical political commentator David French reported in February 2021 on her involvement with RZIM. Dabler had been hired by RZIM president Michael Ramsden and CEO Sarah Davis to maintain order in the apologetics ministry as it responded to allegations of sexual abuse against founder Ravi Zacharias. Former RZIM staff told CT that Dabler was known inside the ministry as “the Enforcer.”

Dabler stopped cooperating with Sande’s investigation when the panel decided to accept the testimony of multiple staff members at RZIM, other people who had gone through conciliation with Dabler, and other people who had worked for her, dating back to the late 1990s.

Emails obtained by CT show that Dabler considered participating in the investigative panel’s restoration plan, but only if she could adjust the terms and if the process was supervised by someone who works for her. The offer was rejected.

The panel’s recommendations are not binding and have not been made public. Sande declined to provide any documentation on its conclusions on Dabler. CT has, however, obtained multiple copies of the 18-page investigative report from others involved in the process, plus 36 pages of additional material produced by the panel, and more than 100 internal documents the panel considered as evidence.

CT has also interviewed seven people who have been harmed by Dabler’s conciliation work and six who worked closely with her starting in the late 1990s.

The documents and the interviews reveal a decades-long trail of emotional wreckage and trauma and raise questions about the way that Christian conciliation has been used to protect power and abuse in evangelical churches.

‘A nice bow to wrap up the problem’

Dabler is based in St. Louis, Missouri, and has been working in conciliation since the late 1990s. According to her official biography, she “grew up in a battle-filled blended family that permanently shattered” with divorce. After a conversion experience in her 20s, she went to Covenant Theological Seminary and earned a master’s in theological studies and a master’s in counseling. She is licensed by the state of Missouri and the Institute for Christian Conciliation, where she has for a number of years also worked as a conciliation trainer.

Dabler got her start directing a counseling ministry at Kirk of the Hills, a Presbyterian Church in America congregation where her husband was an elder, until conflict with coworkers and leadership led her to leave and start her own ministry. Dabler founded and ran Live at Peace Ministries from 2007 to 2014 and then left that to start Creative Conciliation, where she still offers conciliation and training today.

Dabler is consistently described by former colleagues as incredibly gifted. She made those around her feel special and like they knew the truth about the way things worked. Those who were close to her also say she was very manipulative, driven by fear and deep issues of distrust, and bullied people to get her way.

According to former colleagues, Dabler surrounded herself with people she had counseled about their histories of abuse and struggles with sexual sin, former colleagues say, as well as young men she flattered about their exceptional talent.

While there is no complete record available of all the conciliation work Dabler did, she held herself out as the go-to person for major conflict inside evangelical churches.

“There’s a market for what she provides, and she’s supplying what the market wants,” said Kyle Hackmann, a pastor in Canada who was training to be a conciliator and worked with Dabler doing conciliation.

“Conflict is really messy. We want it fixed,” Hackmann said. “I wanted a nice bow to wrap up the problem and make it go away. And that’s what Judy did.”

Many churches and faith-based nonprofits require all employees to agree to conciliation or mediation, according to Wade Mullen, director of the master of divinity program at Lancaster Bible College and an expert in the ways religious organizations respond to abuse allegations or other image-threatening events.

“This kind of thing is embedded in the policies—it’s in the bylaws and it’s in the membership contracts—and often people are fully informed of this, but they don’t know what it is,” he said.

Conciliation is sometimes described as the “Matthew 18 model” for dealing with conflict. Dabler, in a presentation she gave to the Missouri Baptist Convention in 2017, described the process of peacemaking as the “heart of the gospel.”

According to Mullen, however, the conciliation model is too simplistic to apply to all conflicts. It assumes, for example, that both parties bear some responsibility for the problem and are roughly equal. It does not account for the fact that one person may have the power to decide if the conciliator gets future business while the other will lose their job if they don’t participate.

Conciliations also almost always involve confidentiality agreements or non-disclosure clauses that prohibit anyone from seeking appeal. Defenders say this is necessary to allow people to be vulnerable and honest. In some cases, however, individuals are not even allowed to tell other pastors or their pastor’s spiritual authority if the process did not go well.

Dabler herself does not have a standard practice for accepting feedback from people in conciliations, according to the investigative report.

People may technically be allowed to file a formal complaint with the Institute for Christian Conciliation (ICC), but the licensing body does not maintain a public record of who is or isn’t licensed to practice Christian conciliation, and there are no grievance forms available on its website. If a conciliation does not go well, it appears the only recourse is to request further conciliation.

Many times, of course, conciliation does go well. There is abundant testimony of marriages saved, relationships restored, and pastoral teams put right by conciliation. It is often seen as the only alternative to a bruising legal process that leaves everyone diminished. As it was conceived by the Christian Legal Society in 1981, conciliation offers the possibility of repentance and healing, where civil courts at best offer victory over an adversary.

“People can misuse and abuse the conciliation process,” Sande said to CT. “If people are not trained to understand power imbalance and the dynamics of abuse, well-meaning Christian conciliators can make serious mistakes and, in that process, can abuse a victim all over again.”

Dabler held herself out as an expert on abuse, former clients and colleagues say. She said she understood the dynamics of abuse and was accepted as an expert by the field—she even taught on the subject at the Peacemaker Ministries annual conference in 2011. Nevertheless, the panel investigating her found “patterns of personal and professional behavior that violated established ministry and professional standards and caused such significant trauma that many of [those she hurt] were compelled to seek or are still pursuing professional therapy.”

Starting with specks and logs

According to those who spoke to CT, Dabler’s perpetuation of unfair power dynamics often began with the intake process. Dabler assigned people homework that asked them to identify “specks and logs,” in reference to Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 7:1–5, which says to “first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

She did not make it a priority to establish an objective account of the facts. This was true, people who worked closely with Dabler told CT, even when the conciliation was prompted by allegations of abuse. Advocates for conciliation say the mutual confession of sin is not an appropriate starting point in response to an injustice.

At Mars Hill Church in 2012, Dabler was brought in to conciliate because a woman in the church said her small group leader was sexually harassing her. According to a colleague who was there, the process began with an individual accounting of “specks and logs,” and the woman was asked to account for the things in her life that might be leading to her “crazy weird behavior.”

At an Evangelical Free church in 2013, a woman in an abusive marriage was told that she needed to acknowledge and repent her “sinful fear” as a precondition to working on her marriage, even before her husband, who was talking about buying a gun, dealt with his anger. The fear and anger were treated as roughly equal weight, “speck and log” or “log and speck.”

At a conciliation with a Chicago-area pastor and his wife in the Converge church-planting network, the wife was asked what sins in her life were keeping her from restoring her relationship with her husband after his affair with someone in the church. The affair was not treated as sexual abuse, despite the pastor’s spiritual authority over the person he had sex with, and no one attempted to establish the facts of what had happened.

At a Toronto church in 2020, documents show that a couple who were in conflict with the pastor protested that the homework was “one-size-fits-all” and told her their conflict was not the result of a difference of perspective, as the homework seemed to imply. They felt an actual injustice had been done. They were told to “do the process.” Afterward, when they objected the process had not gotten to the core issues, they were told that complaints are different than conflict, and they shouldn’t have entered into a conciliation process if they wanted a formal disciplinary finding.

“I did not know,” Dabler wrote in an email obtained by CT, “that you were seeking or expecting a resolution other than reconciliation.”

Once a conciliation process began, Dabler also frequently identified one person in the conflict as the problem. Colleagues reported that Dabler joked about how quickly she could judge the dynamics and personalities of a situation, based on her years of experience. Sometimes, taking a call from a church she had never worked with before, she would answer the phone, “What did the worship pastor do this time?”

Noted for peremptory judgments

But the quick judgment wasn’t always a joke. Those who worked with her say she would regularly decide who was responsible for a conflict without seeming to need any information.

“Judy was noted for her peremptory judgments,” a colleague told the ad hoc investigative panel. “You couldn’t win disagreeing with her; if people didn’t accept her analysis, she would berate them and pressure them.”

In conciliation, Dabler would develop language labeling a person as the problem, which the larger organization would then repeat to dismiss any lingering concerns. In one church she labeled a person “dramatic,” according to someone involved, and after the conciliation failed to resolve the conflict, leaders in that church repeated that the one staff member was “dramatic.” In another ministry, one person was called “unstable.” That surprised his colleagues who were not involved in the conciliation, but it also made them second-guess every concern he raised in the future.

At RZIM, public relations manager Ruth Malhotra was identified as a problem person. She was part of the emergency task force responding to allegations that the ministry’s founder and namesake had manipulated a woman into sending him nude photos then threatened to kill himself if exposed. When the public controversy died down in 2018, the team got together for a three-day conciliation. Malhotra thought they were going to focus on team dynamics, some unanswered questions about the scandal, and develop a plan to move forward.

Instead, the issue on the agenda turned out to be her.

“It was staged to be like it’s going to be this group moment where we all come together,” Malhotra told CT. “We all come together. We’re not in the war room. We’re not hammering out a statement. We’re taking the time to hear each other’s stories and unpack some stuff. But that wasn’t the goal. That wasn’t possible.”

Why Malhotra and senior leaders disagreed, Dabler didn’t mediate. She took the senior leaders’ side and used her authority to discipline Malhotra, in one case ordering her to write out a Scripture verse by hand.

“I love the Bible,” Malhotra said. “I’ve always been trained the Scripture is our gold standard. The Bible says it, I believe it … and that was used against me to force me to say that I’m not just a difficult employee but a bad Christian.”

On the second day of the conciliation, a senior vice president said he was tired of “beating around the bush,” according to Malhotra’s written account of the meeting, which was confirmed by another staff member. The VP wanted to address the real issue: “Let’s admit that we don’t trust Ruth.”

When Malhotra began to cry, Dabler said that she was on the brink of a breakdown, “one step away from complete and total insanity.” The phrase was subsequently repeated by senior leadership in other settings at least three times, explaining why Malhotra’s concerns or issues need not be taken seriously.

In 2019, when the team met again for another conciliation, Dabler told Malhotra explicitly that she was the purpose of the gathering.

“Everyone had a problem with you,” she said, according to Malhotra’s notes. “That’s why they spent $10,000 on you [for the conciliation session]. You should be grateful.”

Six other RZIM staff members told the ad hoc investigative panel of similarly traumatic experiences, where Dabler made them feel unsafe, pushed them to emotional breakdown, and used her authority to pressure them to question their core commitments as Christians.

“She pushed me so much in the conciliation meeting I had a panic attack,” one staffer wrote, noting they weren’t allowed to leave the room. “It wasn’t until recently that I realized it wasn’t all in my head.”

Two others RZIM staffers say they sought psychological treatment for symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder after their meetings with Dabler.

“She uses ‘Christian conciliation’ as a tool to bring ‘errant troublemakers’ in line with the people paying the bill,” one of them told the investigative panel, and “she protects and flatters the people paying her very large bills.”

Her involvement with organizations, even if confined to certain cases, often went on to shape how those ministries approached abuse and conflict going forward. At RZIM, the senior leadership started revising human resource policies based on Dabler’s teachings.

‘I couldn’t refuse this’

The panel found that money was one source of conflict of interest, as Dabler consistently sided with the senior authorities at RZIM and others navigating responses to abuse allegations. But it wasn’t the only one. Dabler herself had been accused in 2011 of “inappropriate physical contact” with two seminary students who worked for her.

According to documents produced by the two former students, she touched them frequently, held their hands, rubbed their arms, took off their shirts to rub their backs, lowered their waistbands to rub their upper buttocks, hugged them for long periods of time, lay on top of them in her home and in hotel rooms while traveling, and sat on their laps for late-night discussions.

“I vividly remember late that night, she moved from her couch to my tiny chair and crawled up into my lap,” one of the men wrote. “All I could think of was being powerless to change this. … I couldn’t refuse this without damaging my mentor, counselor, boss, and friend that just opened up about how she has never had any one care for her.”

The two men were part of a small cohort of Dabler’s students at TEDS when Dabler taught counseling and conciliation as an adjunct professor starting in 2008. The group met outside of class for hours-long counseling sessions—especially focused on past sexual and emotional abuse.

Dabler then added individual counseling sessions, until the two men were each spending 13 to 16 hours with her per week, frequently late at night in her apartment. Sessions alone in the dark until 3 a.m. were not uncommon, the two men said.

As the counseling led to breakthroughs and personal realizations of their brokenness, the men increasingly trusted Dabler and depended on her to tell them who they really were and what they needed.

She told them they should become counselors and conciliators and hired them to work with her at her organization, Live at Peace Ministries. The two men recalled that she said she was investing in them and “grooming” them for future conciliation ministry.

She also told them they couldn’t trust their own bodies and their own emotional responses to physical touch. They should, instead, trust her. They did. And it became normal for her to touch them frequently.

At the same time, Dabler started having the two men counsel her, sharing her own past trauma and abuse, her sexual sins, and her sexual desires—including details about how she masturbated while thinking about students.

“She used her power over me to make me feel that I owed her this,” one of the men wrote in a formal complaint to TEDS. “During these sessions a great deal of physical touch was also included . She would ask me for back, head, hand, or foot massages, telling me that my physical touch was better than anyone’s for her and it reset her for days to be productive.”

The relationships escalated and intensified until each man tried to put up a boundary and assert some emotional space. Dabler accused each, respectively, of betrayal and cut them off. In 2011, the two men together contacted LAPM and TEDS to report they had been sexually abused by their boss and teacher.

No accountability

The allegations were dealt with quickly and quietly. TEDS ended Dabler’s teaching responsibilities in 2011, and her classes were reassigned. A TEDS spokesperson told CT the school “is committed to investigate and respond to every student complaint and potential Title IX violation.” The official complaint against Dabler was “investigated in detail, and Ms. Dabler has not taught at Trinity since spring 2011.” According to documents obtained by CT, several of her students say they were not contacted during any subsequent investigation.

The board of LAPM started an internal investigation in 2011 but stopped when Dabler admitted to the substance of the allegations. She was put on paid sabbatical, went to Australia, and worked on a book about church discipline.

“LAPM leadership failed to love Judy well, but more importantly, we did not love the victims well,” wrote Daniel Teater, the current president at LAPM. “We have sought their forgiveness privately and now publicly, and have committed to do justice by bringing this to light.”

Dabler returned to conciliation after three months, documents show. The next year, she was asked to help at Mars Hill Church in Seattle and went on to speak at ReTrain, the church’s leadership development program.

In the next 10 years, when she was asked to mediate in dozens of conflicts involving sexual abuse, and more involving the abuse of power, Dabler never disclosed that she herself had been credibly accused. She never mentioned that she had not been held accountable.

Instead, according to interviews and documents obtained by CT, she held herself up as an expert for churches dealing with abuse allegations. She required people to sign agreements saying she was, in effect, their final court of appeal. She joked about how quickly she could determine who the problem person was. And she went to work to make evangelical churches and ministries safe for powerful people.

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

The Pastors Aren’t All Right: 38% Consider Leaving Ministry

Kate Shellnutt

As the pandemic has gone on, burnout continues to take its toll on church leaders.

pemaphoto / Lightstock

Sitting around campfire beside Lake Tawakoni in Northeast Texas, pastor Nic Burleson has heard pastor after pastor confess their greatest challenges: depression, church conflict, marital strife, and, increasingly, doubt over whether they should continue in their role.

“We have multiple pastors at every retreat that are contemplating leaving ministry,” said Burleson, who organizes the three-day getaways, sponsored by his congregation, Timber Ridge Church in Stephenville, and Vista Church in Heartland. “In a lot of ways, they feel stuck, which just adds on to the pressure and the burnout.”

Pastoral burnout has worsened during the pandemic. A Barna Group survey released today found that 38 percent of pastors are seriously considering leaving full-time ministry, up from 29 percent in January.

“The change that has been accelerating in the last 18 months has left a lot of pastors with their heads spinning and their hearts spinning as well,” said Joe Jensen, Barna’s vice president of church engagement.

“All the chaos, all the pressure, the magnifying glass of social media, the pandemic, the politics, the hyperdigital context, it makes sense that you have a lot of pastors saying, ‘Is this really what I signed up for? Is this what I was called into?’”

The greater number of pastors rethinking their profession correlates with rising stress and worse mental health in general. Back in 2016, 85 percent of pastors rated their mental wellbeing as good or excellent, according to a previous Barna poll. In the October 2021 poll, it was down to 60 percent.

Pastors who said they have seriously considered leaving the pulpit were half as likely to say they were doing well relationally and a third as likely to say they were doing well emotionally, Barna found.

With so many ministry leaders on the brink, pastors are more eager for outlets like Burleson’s getaways, where they can develop friendships, speak openly about their struggles, get advice, and find mental health support.

I’ve spent the last couple days investing in pastors & church planters. Deeply grateful for the generous people of @timberridge & @VistaChurch who make these retreats possible. If you’re a pastor or planter & interested in joining us in 2022, DM me. #churchplanting pic.twitter.com/ULOoklZvr2
— Nic Burleson (@nicburleson) November 4, 2021

“Prior to COVID-19, burnout was a silent epidemic in ministry leaders. The stats testify to this, but now I might say burnout is endemic,” said Dan White, who launched the Kineo Center in 2020. The center hosts retreats for ministry leaders in Puerto Rico and is a starting weekly coaching program in 2021.

In his work with pastors, White has seen the crisis intensify. More leaders are experiencing burnout, even people with regular Sabbath rhythms and vacation times. Their burnout has gotten more severe, with discouragement and exhaustion running “bone deep.”

“Burnout begins to show up in different ways according to differences in our personalities,” said White, a longtime church planter, pastor, and coach with a counseling degree. “For some it looks like anger and irritation behind closed doors with family. For me it looked like relational hiding and trying to disappear. For others it looks like excessive indulgence in social media, alcohol, binge-watching TV in order to escape. Our mind, souls, and bodies will try to compensate for the overwhelm we feel.”

Evan Marbury, a pastor and counselor in Durham, North Carolina, uses Paul’s line in 2 Corinthians 1:8 as a guide for identifying burnout: “We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself.”

“They don’t feel God’s nearness, they don’t feel other people that love them, they don’t feel the ways they are made in God’s image and how their existence is actually delightful. When you get to that place, that’s really concerning,” he said. “Many pastors are ashamed or afraid of that place, even though Paul said it. If Paul said it, we should be able to say it.”

Pastors across the board are feeling more overburdened and lonely as the pandemic goes on, and the crisis is particularly acute among mainline Protestant churches. In October 2021, half of mainline pastors said they are seriously considering quitting, compared to a third of evangelical, non-mainline pastors, Barna found.

Amid all the shakeups and crises that have come in 2020 and 2021, this has become a moment for pastors to rethink their approach to their role and their mental health.

“A lot of pastors are struggling to feel hope,” said Marbury, a pastor at Christ Central Church. “They believe it theologically, but things just seem to keep spiraling. Budgets are being hit and attendees are hit, and then someone sits with you and says, ‘I’m leaving…’ That can reinforce doubt, shame, feelings of inadequacy.”

When churches called off in-person gatherings during the pandemic, pastors lost out on the boost of assurance that could come from worshipping together in a full sanctuary, hugging members after the service, and talking through issues with them in person. So in some cases, they were left navigating intense church conflict, politicized departures, and pandemic trauma without some of the most life-giving parts of their ministry.

“It’s forcing pastors to find their identity in Christ and not in the perfection of their ministry, and I think that’s a good thing,” said Burleson. At Timber Ridge Church, he’s had to address his own fears of not growing and remind himself that God’s call in Matthew 25:21 was focused on faithfulness, not success.

He has planned 20 more lakeside retreats for 2022, a record for the program, which will expand to include weekends for married couples who copastor. Participants continue to keep in touch as friends, and for those who need professional counseling or support, organizers are able to refer them to trusted resources.

Because so many pastors enter full-time ministry assuming it will be a life-long calling, they often endure a lot—including chronic health issues, as well as anxiety and depression—before thinking of moving on. But counselors and coaches say their experience aligns with Barna’s findings: More pastors on the brink are wondering how long they can last.

“The number one factor influencing a pastor’s assessment of a vocational transition is money—‘What will I do for income?’” said White. “There’s a panic there. In many cases, we have to help them re-imagine themselves and their pastoral role in the world.”

Jensen at Barna urged pastors who find now themselves questioning their place in ministry to lean into the process rather than seeing themselves as a less of a pastor for reconsidering their calling.

“Figures like king David, Moses, other biblical figures—they had questions, they had doubts about their calling,” he said. “Now’s a great opportunity to lean into the tension, to go deeper into their relationship with Jesus, and to come out more resilient, more sure of who they actually are, whether that’s being a vocational minister or not.”

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Church Life

Premarital Sex Is More Taboo for Today’s Devout Christians

Lyman Stone

Research suggests the current generation of religious young adults might value abstinence more than those in past decades.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Klaus Vedfelt / MirageC / Getty Images

Religious worldviews and attitudes may be a key motivation for abstaining from pornography, viewing premarital sex as wrong, and refraining from sex until marriage.

So does religious behavior correlate with sexual abstinence? The answer is yes.

While there has perhaps been a modest increase in sexual abstinence among religious nonattenders or occasional attenders, the lion’s share of the increase in sexlessness has been among the relatively religiously devout. Since 2008, among never-married individuals under age 35 who attend religious services more than monthly, the rate of sexlessness has risen from about 20% to nearly 60% in 2021. Among their less-religious peers, sexlessness has risen from around 10% in 2008 to 20% in 2021.

Since at the very least, most religious communities in America view premarital sex as a less preferred sexual arrangement than marriage, the increase in sexual abstinence among religious young adults could speak to an important change among religious communities.

It could be that Americans who deviate from religious sexual norms are finding it harder to stay attached to religious communities, as the cultural differences between religious and nonreligious worlds become larger. In this scenario, as nonreligious American culture becomes more sex-positive, the tension with religious norms becomes more intense, and people who deviate from those religious norms leave the church. This would imply that for many people, a key motivating factor in their religious behavior is sex.

But another explanation is that the behavior of religious people themselves is changing. Perhaps religious young adults are simply complying with the norms of their communities more determinedly than previous generations. In this scenario, we aren’t seeing religious young people change their metaphysics to validate sexual liaisons, but rather, we’re seeing religious young adults adopt more intense behavioral norms than prior generations.

In reality, both stories are probably true. Doubtless, changes in American culture writ large have made religious norms harder to square with day-to-day life for young people spending more and more years without a spouse, and some young adults have decided that the cost of compliance with religious sexual norms isn’t worth paying, as declines in church attendance may indicate.

Among adults under 35 who have never been married, the share who are frequent religious attenders fell from over 30% in the early 1990s to under 20% today. But while significant, these changes in religious attendance have been far too gradual to explain the whole trend observed in sexlessness.

In particular, there has been essentially zero change in religiosity among unmarried young adults in the GSS sample since 2008. So while compositional changes may matter, the behavior of religious people has changed too. This would seem to indicate that the current generation of religious young adults is more scrupulous about avoiding premarital sex than the last generation or two.

Increasingly delayed marriage has a large and well-understood effect on sexual frequency among American adults. But the rise in sexlessness among unmarried adults is not as well understood. If the data from the General Social Survey is to be believed, a key part of this story of changing sexual behavior in America is a change among religious people, or others, who believe premarital sex is wrong.

Increasingly, religious young adults are “practicing what they preach,” adopting a distinctive set of sexual behaviors. As a result, the growing diversity and polarization that typifies so much of American life is reaching even further—even into bedrooms.

Lyman Stone is a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, chief information officer of the population research firm Demographic Intelligence, and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

This research was excerpted with permission from a recent article published at the Institute for Family Studies blog.

- More from Lyman Stone

Ideas

Prayers for ‘Where the Church Suffers the Most’ in Europe

Thomas Bucher

Six reasons the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, controlled by pro-Russian rebels, needs Christians to pray for peace and religious freedom.

An icon of Christ damaged by shelling at St. Ignatius (Bryanchaninov) Church in Donetsk, Ukraine, seen in April 2017.

Mikhail Sokolov / TASS / Getty Images

To mark the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church [this month], the European Evangelical Alliance (EEA) calls upon evangelicals to unite in praying for the area of Europe where the church suffers the most: the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

In 2014, Russian-supporting rebels took over the Donbas region and created the so-called People’s Republics of Donetsk (DNR) and Luhansk (LNR). Since then, thousands of civilians have died, nearly 2 million people have fled, and those who remain have suffered the effects of ongoing conflict, extreme poverty, and terrible government.

On top of all these hardships, restrictions on freedom of religion or belief make life even bleaker for all who follow a faith other than Orthodox believers linked to the Moscow Patriarchate:

Many churches are illegal and cannot meet, especially evangelical and Ukrainian Orthodox ones. Whole denominations are classed as extremist with no justification.
Much Christian literature is banned, including the Russian Synodal translation of the Bible.
Church buildings have been seized by force; the Christian University of Donetsk is occupied by soldiers.
The registration system for faith communities is totally unfair. Churches have found their applications rejected or have been liquidated later for supposedly being extremist. No evangelical church in Luhansk is registered.
Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox clergy have not been allowed back into the [region].
Defying a ban and meeting as [a] church anyway results in fines and harassment.

The [DNR and LNR] are not recognised by the international community because of the illegal and violent way they were created. This means that international human rights law does not apply. The only international actors who have any influence are the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the International Red Cross.

The situation in Donbas is bleak. Fear abounds.

And that is why we invite Christians to join us in praying for change:

Let’s pray for miracles.
Let’s pray for our brothers and sisters there: for miraculous hope and peace, wisdom and protection, freedom and joy, and for the Good News of Jesus to be seen and heard.
Let’s pray for those who work to strengthen peace and reconciliation and bring practical hope. May God multiply the impact of local Christian efforts to love and care for neighbors.
Let’s pray for those working in the OSCE: those in the mission in Donbas and those seeking to exercise influence from abroad. Let’s pray for protection, wisdom, and courage, and for a prioritizing of freedom of religion.
Let’s pray for a change of heart in those that control the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine so that freedom of religion, peaceful assembly, expression, and travel are fully respected.
And let’s pray for a dramatic turnaround so that shalom can return.

Thomas Bucher is general secretary of the European Evangelical Alliance. This op-ed was first published on the EEA website.

Speaking Out is Christianity Today’s guest opinion column and (unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion of the publication.

- More from Thomas Bucher

News

Ahead of the Holidays, Christian Charities Plan Around Supply Chain Holdups

Ericka Andersen

Homeless ministries are preparing for higher costs and greater demand, while publishers and distributors relying on overseas shipping are also affected.

Scott Olson / Getty Images

Wheeler Mission in Indianapolis usually produces tens of thousands of Thanksgiving meals for the hungry. Their motto: “Fill plates with food and lives with the hope of Christ.” This year, they may run out of the former before everyone is served.

Sam Brown, head chef at the Christian social services and homeless ministry, said he’s worried about having enough turkeys. From California to Chicago, there are nationwide reports of turkey shortages and massive price increases, both of which will affect nonprofit organizations feeding folks this season.

Shipping orders are blowing past delivery deadlines due to difficulty finding truck drivers. The ministry is short-staffed and is still trying to hire a dishwasher.

Hundreds of charities across the country are feeling the crunch of the global supply chain crisis, which is coming to national attention ahead of the holiday season. New research shows that nearly half of churches and faith organizations are involved in feeding the hungry, and this year they’re forced to shift processes based on longer wait times, product shortages, and unstable market expectations.

In some cases, ministries have been able to move forward with plans as normal. In other cases, depending on demand and access to resources, they’ve seen how the supply chain issues have gone on to impact those they’re trying to serve—from feeding the hungry in their own neighborhoods to sending Christian resources around the world.

The current struggles aren’t due to a lack of community generosity. Despite last year’s economic downturn, Americans actually donated more money in 2020 than they did in 2019. Though numbers for 2021 are not yet released, the Chronicle of Philanthropy predicts they will rise.

Demand for housing and food was up about 25 percent last year at Wheeler Mission, and they’re expecting the same levels this year, only with less access to the materials they need, said Perry Hines, chief development officer.

Wheeler is trying to anticipate needs for food, shelter, and other items well in advance, unsure which items may end up delayed in the supply chain. “Time will tell,” he said.

Feeding America and other charities have spoken about how the supply chain issues have also resulted in higher food prices for needy families and food banks themselves. Some plan to distribute chicken instead of turkey as a cost-saving measure this year.

Our Calling, a homeless ministry in Dallas that serves over 10,000 people a year, has already had to pivot to rely on donations to obtain supplies for the growing homeless population there. “We need simple things like outreach vehicles, food supplies, shoes, and hygiene items,” said Wayne Walker, CEO of Our Calling. “Unfortunately, many of these are on backorder.”

The Network of Community Ministries in Dallas started a local donation drive for hygiene items like deodorant, toothpaste, and soap. Prisons have also struggled to stock basic personal items regularly purchased by inmates.

Fortunately, some have not been impacted yet and expect to be able to plan ahead for a normal holiday season.

Convoy of Hope, which provides food, community outreach, and disaster response year-round, has its own fleet of trucks and has been able to navigate some of the material shortages across the US. The Springfield, Missouri-based charity does not anticipate needing to cancel or shrink any of its holiday programs thanks to a warehouse already stocked with food, water, and supplies.

“Our logistics team is spending a lot more time planning out our deliveries, and monitoring them through delivery, to make sure the relief supplies we're sending end up where they need to be,” said Ethan Forhetz, national spokesperson for Convoy of Hope. “Navigating this crisis hasn't been easy, but the Lord continues to make a way.”

Christians are also examining how the supply chain holdups could affect crucial holiday sales for publishers and booksellers. So far, the book industry has already been disrupted by a paper shortage, labor scarcity, and shipping delays.

“It’s everything from not being able to get books to press in time to issues with books and Bibles printed overseas being slowed by shipping issues,” said Bill Craig, senior vice president of publishing and ministry experiences at Lifeway Christian Resources.

Lifeway, which closed all of its brick-and-mortar locations in 2019, has had to be savvy in the past, but the twin struggles of a paper shortage and continued pandemic uncertainty are rough, especially as the holidays approach.

It’s not just new titles that aren’t making it. Getting book reprints and securing enough of Lifeway’s Sunday school curriculum has been particularly challenging, both due to the supply chain issues and to more than a year of church disruptions during the pandemic. Both of these parts of Lifeway have been “significantly impacted,” said Craig, who also noted a simultaneous uptick in digital sales.

One issue has been a lack of shipping containers to transport materials printed in China. Justin Paul Lawrence, senior director of sales and marketing at InterVarsity Press, said his company has dodged major issues thus far for new releases, partially because they do the vast majority of their printing domestically. Even so, they have had to change ordering and planning tactics to account for delays.

“We used to have to talk about printing delays every six months or so,” he said. “Now it's up to bi-weekly or weekly.”

Most industries are experiencing something similar—and some of them unknowingly contributed to the problem. When publishers and other companies started noticing the first shortages, they began stocking up on items, creating even more demand for an already over-strained, understaffed system.

The backups have also affected ministries that send shipments of Bibles and other materials abroad.

“Containers are about 30 to 50 percent more than what we were paying for them before,” said Jason Woolford with Mission Cry, which sent 1.2 million free Bibles via 24 shipping containers last year. “Normally I would have been able to order a container and have it here within the same week. As of right now, we’re out a month.”

Mission Network News reported that the ministry is trying to send four containers of Bibles and seminary books to Kenya, Ghana, and Pakistan before the end of 2021.

The strain has been less dire for those printing and shipping domestically. She Reads Truth, which releases yearly Advent Bible studies, prints its materials in Nashville, where it’s headquartered.

Cofounder Raechel Myers and her team have not run into delays or shortages with their 2021 Advent release, which is themed around Jesus as “The Everlasting Light.”

“With supply chain issues on our radar,” Myers told Christianity Today, “we’re just working really closely with our printer to ensure we have what we need in plenty of time.”

Many seasonal studies are also available digitally, as ebooks or downloadable PDFs.

- More from Ericka Andersen

Books

She Walks in Beauty Like a Prayer

Interview by Karen Swallow Prior

Christopher Stokes on how the Romantic poets propelled a new view of personal devotion.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiArt / WikiMedia Commons

The language of prayer and the language of poetry share strong similarities. Prayer, like poetry, allows for, and even invites, the interplay between truth and beauty. A new book explores this connection between rational thought and aesthetic expression. Romantic Prayer: Reinventing the Poetics of Devotion, 1773–1832 (Oxford University Press, 2021), by Christopher Stokes, senior lecturer in Romantic literature with the University of Exeter, is a scholarly examination of several key poets of the British Romantic period, from pre-Romantic William Cowper to second-generation Romantics Percy Shelley and Lord Byron and a range of poets in between.

The poets examined in this book reflect shifts in forms of religious devotion. Stokes argues that the theology of prayer reflected in this age and its poets parallels the growing importance of individual practices in religious life, when devotion became as much about doing as believing. Poetry, likewise, was increasingly becoming a personal practice, not merely an objective art.

Living in a time of ongoing and culminating secularization, these poets illustrate the ways Christianity helped birth secularity, as debates about the modes of Christianity evolved into debates about Christianity itself. Even so, as Stokes shows, poetry can be a way to preserve and practice religious faith amid growing skepticism.

You call prayer “an organ of faith” because of the way it “imprints” an understanding of God in the one who prays. Poetry, too, is a language that forms or imprints itself on us. The foundation of your analysis is that the language of prayer and the language of poetry are deeply connected. How are they connected?

There’s certainly a deep historical connection between poetry and prayer. As I note in the book, the very earliest surviving poem in English, Caedmon’s “Hymn,” is a kind of prayer. And across the centuries, poetry has been energized by its relationship with private prayers, with hymnody, with liturgies, and with great scriptural texts like the Psalms or the Song of Songs. There are certain eras—I’m thinking of the 17th century and the Victorian period, for instance—when devotional poetry really is as good as anything else being written in English literature, and you see poetry drawing this tremendous beauty and complexity from the great religious and theological shifts of its times.

So, it’s impossible to think about the development of English verse—and literature never sheds its histories—without thinking about prayer as well. The evangelical tradition often slighted set or memorized prayers and saw prayer as a much more visceral cry from the heart. Poetry also took inspiration from that notion.

More abstractly, there is also something interlinking the experience of prayer and the experience of lyric poetry (poetry spoken by an “I”), which has always captured the imagination of writers. Perhaps it has to do with the intimacy of voice, or the overtones of confession, or the idea of speaking in this strikingly unusual way (that prayer and poetry share) whereby there isn’t necessarily an addressee present in the conventional way but there is still a fundamental sense that this language will be heard. I’ve always been fascinated by those links.

The Romantic poets were, in many ways, reacting to seismic shifts in the 18th century, shifts brought about by the Enlightenment, by the factions within and outside the established church, and by the increased subjectivity that both enacted and reflected these changes. You call this “a time in which prayer was a language under pressure.” What do you mean by this?

Maybe prayer is always a language under pressure! The Enlightenment gets mischaracterized, I think, as a relentless critique of religion. Actually, the radical atheist or anti-Christian polemic we associate with, say, French thinkers, was a pretty extreme wing of a much broader sensibility across Europe, and most parts of it had no real desire to exit Christianity at all.

However, it is true that many Christian thinkers in the era were obsessed about the reasonableness of religion as a belief system—and prayer fit quite awkwardly into that rationalizing project. For example, the idea that God would intervene supernaturally in the carefully constructed natural universe he had elegantly and intelligently created just because someone prays—well, that just didn’t sit well.

As the century went on, I would summarize two opposite reactions to this “reasonableness.” On the one hand, some Christians wanted to rationalize further, and their versions of prayer became closer to contemplation or meditation. On the other, the Methodists and the evangelicals offered something much more unapologetically spiritual and otherworldly, addressing a devotional need but provoking a lot of suspicion and even mockery from the mainstream. So, it’s a fascinating time when multiple ideas of prayer are circulating.

You describe the “secular” as “a space opened up between theism and atheism.” Can you elaborate on this idea?

It’s a way of looking at history in a more complex way. It seems broadly clear that over a few hundred years in the West, we moved from a state of affairs where Christianity was this universally shared backdrop to a present moment where this isn’t the case. Traditionally, the secularization hypothesis has described this change as a one-way street whereby religion inexorably gives more and more ground to reason, humanism, science, or whatever. It’s a narrative of inevitable binary conflict between religion and modernity. The problem is that we generally find that black-and-white ways of looking at history nearly always fail the fine detail. Things such as science weren’t always the opposites of religion, and religion continued to generate profound ways of inhabiting the world across the 18th and 19th centuries and beyond.

I’m trying to note that what the secular involves is not atheism triumphing over theism and hence bringing in “the modern world” as an atheist world, but rather a range of theists, a range of skeptics, and a range of agnostics all developing their ideas in a culture which no longer has that common background of shared Christianity. Basically, it’s just an acknowledgment that Christianity (or any religion) doesn’t stop having intellectual vibrancy just because other forms of belief or nonbelief suddenly share its cultural space; there are modern expressions of the Christian tradition. Put that way, you have to question why scholars ever thought that wasn’t the case!

Within the Evangelical Revival, prayer becomes not just an act of reasonable devotion or duty but, as you write, “a struggle, a wrestling, a matter of life or death.” You further explain that “Evangelical prayer involves a transformation and transposition of self,” and that this is because evangelicalism’s sense of self involves “an experience of alterity and decentering.” How does prayer itself contribute to this kind of “intensified spiritual existence”?

I think all traditions recognized different forms and experiences of prayer, but they also privileged certain kinds as more prototypical. For the 18th-century mainstream, prayer tended to be something that composed and oriented the self. It’s all prayer as an action which places your thoughts and feelings into a structure that referred to God. For the evangelical tradition, prayer was not so much a “doing” as a state of “being”—and importantly, a state of new being.

So, prayer was a couple of things to the 18th-century evangelical. It was an invitation for a divine influx to make the self anew. It was also the language of authentic life breaking through from the depths of the soul, “an embryo of God, a spark of fire divine,” as Anna Letitia Barbauld puts it. And it’s also the record of the struggle of the sinner undergoing that transformation. It’s all much more dramatic than the mainstream account, because it’s about change in your whole existence.

In your chapter on the poetry of the evangelical William Cowper (most famous for his collaboration with John Newton on the Olney Hymns), you address the connection between the practice of prayer within the Evangelical Revival and “radical interiority,” or a sense of an authentic self. And you describe the decline of Cowper’s lifelong fragile mental health as, in part, “the failing of prayer.” Can you explain this connection? Do any of Cowper’s most popular hymns illustrate this connection?

William Cowper’s Calvinism has always been seen as a problem. The great emotional power of Wesley and the Methodists came from the controversial doctrines of sanctification, but what if sublime confidence in salvation was replaced with a potent assurance of your failure to be saved? Prayer comes in because a prayerful state was seen as one of the likely signs of election, and in finding prayer a tormenting struggle, Cowper feared he was encountering his own spiritual nullity. Yet the advice given to an evangelical struggling to pray was, in effect, to pray more—to pray for the power to pray. This became something of a tragic circle for Cowper.

It’s probably true, and perhaps understandable, that the most popular of Cowper’s hymns take more optimistic positions, but motifs of estrangement and inadequacy are still very much present: the melancholic nostalgia of “O for a closer walk with God,” or the “poor lisping / stamm’ring tongue” envisaged in the grave in “There is a fountain filled with blood.” The circular logic is also apparent in the rhetoric of love in “Hark, my soul, it is the Lord,” a poem whose beautifully tender images of care anticipate some of the quieter recesses of prayer in Cowper’s later long poem The Task.

For Anna Letitia Barbauld, a Dissenter whom you identify as “probably the most theologically literate writer” in your study, prayer is less interior, more social and physical (involving the act of kneeling, an act done in a physical and often communal space). How does that different understanding of prayer play out in her theology, practice, and poetry?

Barbauld is a fascinating figure, not least because she illustrates how poetry can not only express theology but contest it. This wing of 18th-century Dissent was increasingly embracing an ideal of prayer as solitary reflection: minimizing petition, suspicious of collective prayer, often privileging the wordless, and in some versions cautious about even addressing God. This trajectory just doesn’t make sense for Barbauld, and in her religious poetry she repeatedly evokes scenes of solo philosophical contemplation only to interrupt them with something much more intimate and direct. As her career progresses, I think she finds the most authentic religious passions are found not in a single mind reflecting on the infinite, but those generated through shared experiences within family or chapel. Elegantly, she writes in 1792: “We neither laugh alone, nor weep alone, why then should we pray alone?”

One of the most beautiful and memorable moments of prayer in all of Romantic poetry is the moment in Samuel T. Coleridge’s haunting Rime of the Ancient Mariner when a curse placed on the seafarer after wantonly killing an albatross is broken when he bursts forth in spontaneous prayer in response to seeing the beauty of sea creatures at play upon the water. What does this moment in the poem illuminate about the deep connections between prayer, poetry, beauty, and the limits and the power of language?

This is perhaps the most famous prayer in Romantic poetry. The first thing I would say is that in at least one sense I can’t tell you what this moment means. What Coleridge evokes is something uncanny and wondrous: It’s a narrative pivot around which the whole mysterious poem turns, but it is strangely depthless. Of course, critics have tried to interpret it: The mariner is having an ecological epiphany or facing up to the guilt of the slave trade or philosophically converted to the pantheistic doctrine of the “one life.” But, in effect, the point is its uninterpretability. It just falls, like grace.

As a young philosophical radical, Coleridge had been a full-blown rationalist Unitarian, but by the late 1790s he was beginning to feel the truth (his own words) of religious doctrines like original sin and the Trinity, although he couldn’t explain them and didn’t have a theology to account for their consequences. These poems attempted to fill the gap between what he could explain and what he was beginning to feel. In his late career, he would go on to attempt a “philosophy of prayer,” which tried to explain how prayer could be both absolutely valid but lie partly beyond the forms of human reason. The fact that some extraordinary lines in a poem of the 1790s could do what his theological labors of the 1820s couldn’t tells you a lot, I think, about the relation between prayer, poetry, theology, and language.

Why an English Professor Loves Ekstasis Magazine

A publication that sees beauty wherever it may be found.

Kelsey Bowse

Otto Selles

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from—my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.” C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Jane Zwart, an English Professor at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, believes that “language is a provision from God, given to us through creation.”

She began writing for Ekstasis magazine after the publication’s founder, Conor Sweetman, emailed her in 2019.

“He told me about the project, and I was really smitten with the aesthetics of it. It’s just beautiful, the photography and the way everything has its own vibe and space,” Zwart shares.

How Ekstasis Got Started

Conor started Ekstasisin Toronto, Canada after enduring a faith crisis that led him to search for beauty in writing, the arts, and media–until he found it, ultimately in the Creator.

“In the spiritual equation of goodness, beauty, and truth, my pursuit of beauty had taken center stage and I began to seek the experience of transcendence for its own sake,” said Sweetman.

After meeting Sweetman and hearing more of his story and inspiration, CT brought Ekstasis into its media portfolio in March 2021, a publication that attracts 10,000 readers a month.

There’s Poetry in the Air

Zwart, who has taught English at her alma mater Calvin University since 2005, fell in love with poetry as a child.

“I grew up in a house with two people who were English majors. My mom was an English teacher. It was sort of in the air.”

Zwart followed in their footsteps, eventually earning her doctorate in English Languages and Literature at Boston University.

Her favorite writers are Marilynne Robinson, Christian Wiman, Amit Majmudar, and George Herbert. Robinson’s Gilead is a book she reads every few years.

“There are so many stories about ministers that are horribly compromised or who are exploitative. I love that Robinson gives us a story of a minster who is a good, imperfect, and faithful man. I think that’s beautiful.”

When Zwart returned to Calvin University to teach English, she wanted to train students to read literature and poetry by looking for “traces of beauty”–to find broken things in need of redemption.

“To hold fast to this commitment, to read things faithfully–not just faithfully to the text, but faithfully to my faith,” she said. “That made me super excited to teach at Calvin.”

Writing for Ekstasis

In Zwart’s first Ekstasis piece, “On Questions and Answers,” she tells the story of one of her student’s objecting to lines from Emily Dickinson’s poem, “This World is Not Conclusion:”

“Faith slips — and laughs, and rallies — Blushes, if any see —
Plucks at a twig of Evidence — And asks a Vane, the way —”

Her student thought Dickinson’s poem pointed to a shaky faith, embarrassed by itself. Zwart challenged her student to look at the poem in a new light and see “that God’s providence is enough that you could strike out in any direction and find him.”

“I recognized a poignant, poetic spirit that wrote with clarity in areas that can be ambiguous and difficult to navigate like faith and art,” Sweetman said of Zwart.

Zwart also wrote for Books and Culture, CT’s bi-monthly review that engaged the modern world from a Christian perspective between 1995 to 2016. Some readers of both even suggest that Ekstasis fills a gap that Books and Culture once filled.

Bridging the Gap Between the Sacred and the Secular

When asked what Christian artists need in this pandemic, Zwart pointed to an Ekstasis article that explores “The Baptism of Christ,” a painting by 16th century Greek artist, El Greco.

“That’s a really good example of how art looked at from a Christian perspective is a provision for this particular time,” Zwart said.

She also explained how art can remind us “the things we can’t control are still not completely out of control because they’re held in God’s providence.”

Ekstasis offers theological commentary on respected writers in the Christian tradition like C.S. Lewis, and Flannery O’Connor.

“The things that come from the heart of Ekstasis are a heart for who Christ is, who the creator is, who the spirit is, and what that means about human beings,” she said.

Zwart explained that the magazine engages these traditional Christian texts with a spirit of love and respect, but also questions them and pushes them further, by considering their consequences in the world.

Ekstasis also offers commentary on music and works of art that aren’t considered part of the orthodox Christian tradition, according to Zwart. She said, “I also love finding things about R.E.M.,” a band famous for their Grammy Award-winning hit, “Losing My Religion,” from their album Out of Time.

Why She Loves Ekstasis for Embracing Mystery

Zwart was drawn to Ekstasis for its “humility that’s willing to accept honor and mystery, as well as look for answers.”

Her poem, “Echolocation,” was published in Ekstasis in Spring 2021. It tells the story of a bird Noah sent out from the ark to look for signs of life:

Noah launched birds//to see whether they would ricochet back//into his hands, vibrating with where they’d been. As with all prayers…. //his doubt flung//…over a rail into the void.”

“I think there’s an adventurous bravery, a sense that a perspective of faith shouldn’t narrow our vision but should change our vision,” Zwart said. “I think that’s something that Ekstasis is really living into, and it is really important,” she said.

Kelsey Bowse is a UX Strategist at Christianity Today. Follow Kelsey on Twitter @ kelseybowse

Theology

Fame Is a Fake Version of Friendship

Russell Moore

We long to be known and loved. But false community won’t get us there.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch

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

Unlike Macaulay Culkin, the ten-year-old who starred in the famous Christmas movie Home Alone, his younger brother Kieran Culkin turned down multiple opportunities to be a child star. He learned by observation that he didn’t want a life of fame—knowing it could lead to things like substance abuse, court guardianship battles, and the like.

We might be tempted to view the life choices of famous people like the Culkin brothers from a distance. But maybe we’re looking into a collective mirror. Today, fame is not just something that happens to stars, child or otherwise. Thanks to the age of social media, many of us are turning into mini-stars, with the only real difference being the size of our audience.

The recently leaked “Facebook Files,” which discuss the inner workings of the social media company, include data about the harm Instagram usage inflicts on the self-image of adolescents, especially teenage girls. Every child or teen faces a fear of judgment from their peers. They also fear being exiled from their social group. (This also why very few of us would ever wish to time travel back to our middle school days.)

However, the world of social media seems to heighten these dynamics—where almost everyone is followed by a kind of paparazzi, exposing and subjecting us to the approval or disapproval of our peers, acquaintances, and often complete strangers.

Philosopher Alain de Botton argued in his book The School of Life that one way to gauge your parenting is to ask your child whether they aspire to be famous. He says the quest for fame is different from other (equally risky) aspirations to acquire wealth, power, or pleasure. The desire to be well-known, he argues, is tied to “the intimate desire to be liked and treated with justice and kindness by people they don’t know.”

“Fame is deeply attractive because it seems to offer very significant benefits,” he writes. “The fantasies go like this: when you are famous, wherever you go, your good reputation will precede you. People will think well of you, because your merits have been impressively explained in advance.”

De Botton goes on to say that “the desire for fame has its roots in the experience of neglect, in injury,” adding that “no one would want to be famous who hadn’t also, somewhere in the past, been made to feel extremely insignificant.”

If I’m famous, the subconscious argument goes, I will be free from facing any rejection or judgment. Not only will my parents admire me, but I will have an instant and safe community. However, de Botton says, the exact opposite is true: “Fame makes people more, not less, vulnerable, because it throws them open to unlimited judgement.”

Fame has always been a draw for at least some human beings. One needs to look no further than the pyramids to conclude that. However, most people throughout human history began their journey of self-discovery in the presence of a very limited “audience”—consisting mostly of extended family, a larger tribe, a local village.

But today, impressionable young children are forming their identity through social media outlets, which encompass a much wider audience. Studies show that apps like Instagram are a risk to the psychological health of adolescents, and not simply because kids can be bullied online (although that does happen). Even when young people receive affirmation from this online collection of strangers, they will almost always seek to maintain that attention going forward.

That is, even when someone is “winning” at their social media game, the fear of falling becomes all the more intense—like a cherubic dimpled child star who worries he will not be cast when he becomes a gangly adult. This kind of pressure is bad enough when someone is pursuing a career in film, but it can be far worse when it comes to somebody’s life off screen.

The danger is there, not just for those who are crushed beneath the weight of others’ judgment, but perhaps even more so for the people who have learned coping mechanisms to protect themselves from social judgment. Some end up as trolls who want to preemptively lash out at those who might hurt them, while others can become almost sociopathic in their numbness to other’s opinions. Over time, they build a hard exoskeleton of cynicism, which can filter out not only the judgment of online strangers but also the counsel of real-life friends.

There are no easy answers here, especially as we move toward the next phase of connectedness in the “metaverse” or its equivalent. But, as with most things, I believe the right response to the threat of social media influence is both individual and communal.

Each of us needs to learn how to develop a rightful biblical individualism, which is to say that God receives us into his kingdom not collective by collective, nation by nation, or peer group by peer group, but one by one.

The message “You must be born again” is not just directed generically to humanity or to the Pharisees, but to one particular Pharisee named Nicodemus—who was so fearful of losing status among his peers that he came to Jesus by night (John 3). Only when we realize that we personally stand before the face of God—and that we will each give an account before the judgment seat of Christ—only then can we be freed of the countless mini judgment seats that are formed around our lives on a daily basis.

But what frees us is not just the vision of a singular judgment seat but also the one who is seated in that place. It is the judgment seat of Christ alone. He is not someone who judges us on our impressive achievements, curated images, or status according to some social system. Jesus is the one who came looking for us in the woods—and then threw a party of rejoicing when he found us (Luke 15:3–7).

That’s why Paul could write to the Corinthians that he found it “a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court”—even his own judgment of himself (1 Cor. 4:3, ESV). Instead, he could entrust himself to the judgment of a Christ who truly knew him—a serial killer with religious zeal—and loved him anyway.

The communal side of the solution is realizing that kindness and community cannot be found universally or generically. Instead, we must look for—as Seth Godin puts it from a marketing perspective—the “smallest viable audience.” That is why Jesus placed us all into the context of a church body—a group of people that actually gathers around a table.

Alain de Botton rightly notes that “there is no shortcut to friendship—which is what the famous person is in effect seeking.” Indeed, there is not. As Christians, we know that true fellowship happens while gathered around bread and wine, confession and repentance, mission and service—coming together with a tangible group of people, in whose presence one can learn to love and be loved. There is no shortcut for that.

Maybe that is what the church uniquely has to offer the world right now—the message that you do not have to be famous to be known. You do not have to be perfect to be loved. You do not have to be proven right to be justified. Perhaps even child stars can become as little children again. And even in a metaverse, none of us are home alone.

Russell Moore leads the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today.

Videos

Heritage and Hope: Listening to Native American Christian Voices

A conversation with indigenous leaders on the power of faith, history, and culture.

The American church is incomplete when it overlooks the gifts and perspectives of its country’s native people. This CT webinar brings together a dynamic panel of indigenous Christian leaders to reflect on the blessings and challenges of navigating their Native American identity. What are key concerns for ministry leaders serving indigenous communities, and how should Christians respond to trends such as land acknowledgments or to recent headlines about the traumatic legacy of Native boarding schools?

Join us as we explore the history and spiritual issues shaping Native American communities today.

Our Panelists

Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley

Randy is an author, activist, farmer, public intellectual and wisdom keeper who addresses a variety of issues concerning American culture. He currently serves as Distinguished Professor of Faith and Culture at George Fox University/Portland Seminary and co-sustainer of Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice. He was raised near Detroit, Michigan, and is a Cherokee descendent recognized by the United Keetoowah Band. His books include Shalom and the Community of Creation, Living in Color, Decolonizing Evangelicalism, The Harmony Tree, and two forthcoming soon, Becoming Rooted and Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview.

Siouxsan Robinson

Siouxsan (Blackfoot and Lakota) is president of The Red Road, a ministry that exists to empower Native people and raise awareness about the history and current condition of Native American communities. Born on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota and raised on the Stand Off Reserve in Alberta, Canada, Siouxsan understands the challenges of growing up in a traditional Native culture while living in a contemporary world. She has a degree in psychology and a minor in political science and criminal justice from Middle Tennessee State University. She and her husband, Charles, have seven children and reside in Franklin, Tennessee.

Anna Ross

Anna is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe in North Dakota. She is a community leader with experience in community development and facilitating cross-community collaborations. Anna has a degree in American Indian Studies as well as Indigenous Nations Studies and is currently an instructor and advisor for the Ogimaawiwin Leadership & Management Program at Turtle Mountain Community College. Having worked in both urban and tribal Native communities, Anna recently returned to her home reservation with her husband, Roger, to plant Turtle Mountain Epiphany Covenant Church with the Evangelical Covenant denomination.

Terry M. Wildman

Terry (Ojibwe and Yaqui) is the lead translator and project manager of the First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament. He serves as the director of spiritual growth and leadership development for Native InterVarsity. He is also the founder of Rain Ministries and previously served as a pastor and worship leader. He and his wife, Darlene, live in Arizona.

Renee Begay

Renee is national director of Nations, a campus ministry of Cru that seeks to honor and restore Native American life and culture with Jesus Christ at the center. Renee is from the Zuni tribe in Zuni, New Mexico. She and her husband, Donnie (who also serves with Nations), have three daughters.

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Wire Story

SBC Abuse Reckoning Spurs State-Level Reviews

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

A half dozen state conventions have proactively commissioned audits of their own abuse protocol as the national Executive Committee undergoes an investigation.

Julie Bennett / AP

Southern Baptist leaders in North Carolina have announced plans to proactively review their state convention’s response to the issue of sexual abuse.

The review, approved on Monday by the executive committee of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, will look at current policies and procedures for preventing abuse and responding when abuse occurs.

Todd Unzicker, the state convention’s executive director-treasurer, said leaders want to show churches they take abuse seriously.

“If our churches do not see us as a convention being proactive in this, mistrust will happen,” he said in a statement Monday.

North Carolina joins at least five other state conventions in addressing the issue of abuse at their annual meetings this fall. In recent weeks, state Baptist groups in Georgia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Florida, and California have set up committees or task forces to address sexual abuse. Attempts to set up similar responses failed in Mississippi and Missouri.

“I want to make clear that we as Georgia Baptists have zero tolerance for sexual abuse,” W. Thomas Hammond, executive director of the Georgia Baptist Mission Board, told the Christian Index, a Georgia Baptist publication.

The statewide responses follow on the heels of a bitter dispute at the national SBC’s Nashville-based Executive Committee over how to conduct an independent investigation into that group’s handling of sexual abuse in recent decades.

A national task force to oversee that investigation was set up this past summer at the annual meeting of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. But members of the Executive Committee disagreed about how transparent the investigation would be and how many details would be made public—especially conversations between Executive Committee members and staff and their lawyers.

Southern Baptist leaders had long resisted taking national action on the issue of abuse—in large part because of the autonomy of local churches. That began to change in 2019 after a Houston Chronicle investigation reported more than 700 cases of abuse in Southern Baptist churches. That led to a public lament and a change in denominational rules allowing the SBC to expel churches that mishandle abuse.

Two churches were removed from the denomination in February 2021 for employing pastors who had histories of sexual abuse.

While the small staff of the SBC’s Executive Committee has few direct connections with local churches, state conventions are much more likely to have close relationships with them. Even before the Houston Chronicle investigation, those state conventions were providing training and other resources for addressing abuse.

Nate Adams, executive director of the Illinois Baptist State Association, which has about 1,000 churches, said the state group has been helping churches with background checks and setting up best practices to create a safe environment for children for years. The demand picked up after the Chronicle report, he said.

“The Houston Chronicle report was a big raiser of public awareness for churches, and therefore, led to more requests for help in this area,” he said.

Adams said congregations don’t always know what to do if a case of abuse is discovered and call looking for help. They often feel betrayed if they learn a pastor or other leader is abusive and, if there’s an arrest, they have to deal with calls from the media or requests from police.

In the past, he said, churches had a tendency to keep things private and not report abuse.

“I think now, churches need to receive the counsel that you take this very seriously,” he said. “Law enforcement needs to be contacted immediately—they are equipped to handle this in ways that most local churches are not.”

In mid-October, the Rev. Joseph Krol, the pastor of a downstate Illinois church, was charged with grooming a 15-year-old girl from another Baptist church where he had formerly been a pastor. Illinois Baptist staff are assisting the two congregations involved as they work with law enforcement. The state association’s website offers a series of resources on preventing and responding to abuse.

At the California Southern Baptist Convention meeting in late October, Chris Cole, pastor of Redeemer Baptist Church in Paso Robles, California, proposed the state set up a task force to look at the issue of abuse.

Cole’s detailed motion, which included calls for an abuse survivor to serve on the task force, along with the director of the state convention, as well as for the involvement of experts, failed during the meeting.

A simpler proposal to set up a committee to look at the issue of abuse passed.

Cole, a veteran pastor who worked as a police officer for several years, said state Baptist groups lack a comprehensive strategy on how to deal with abuse. He said statewide groups—and smaller regional groups knowns as associations—are often on the front lines of responding to abuse at churches. But there is very little training on how to respond to cases of abuse and how to care for survivors.

Southern Baptists, he said, also are reluctant to tell local churches what to do—which makes it harder to address abuse.

“This is a long-term cultural mentality,” he said. “We don’t address these things. We don’t deal with them upfront and we think it’s better that way.”

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Our Panelists

Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley

Siouxsan Robinson

Anna Ross

Terry M. Wildman

Renee Begay

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