Surprised by Questions

To pose a good question—like Sayers, Socrates, and Jesus—is to invite someone into a journey.

Magdalene Tower

I remember clearly where I was sitting when someone asked me a question that would change the entire direction and purpose of my life.

Ringed in the sunlight pouring through the bay windows overlooking High Street in Oxford, we sat in two chairs tucked into a dorm room in Oriel College. Across the street sat St. Mary’s Church, one of the oldest churches in all of England, resplendent in her architecture. Below, despite the hustle and bustle of traffic and pedestrians on the busy street, time seemed to stand still. The question hung in the air, like the scent of myrrh in a tomb.

You should never underestimate the power of a good question.

Question has at its root the word quest, and indeed, to pose a question is to invite someone into a journey. To answer a question is to embark on an adventure.

I grew up more than a little put off by the Christian faith. Any Christians I knew (or presumed I knew) seemed to be so offensively sure of themselves that I had to battle the urge to roll my eyes whenever one came near. They pronounced and announced. They professed and confessed. They judged and sniffed. They said things like, “here endeth” and “blessed assurance.” You could hear the echo long after turning off the television or leaving the church.

So I was completely blown away when, as an avowed agnostic myself (not quite an atheist, since I couldn’t disprove God), someone I actually admired and thought of as “cool” asked me a question I had never, in my quarter of a century of life, been asked.

He asked, quite simply, “What’s your take on God?”

As someone accustomed to the rush of a North American student life, I felt like a hummingbird that had just hit the glass hard; I was stunned. I had never been invited into a genuine discussion about God. I answered my friend. And the more I answered, the more he asked. (One day, he would ask me another very big question, but that’s another article.)

What amazed me was how sincerely he asked. Not rhetorical questions. Not snide ones. But genuine questions reflecting genuine interest in what I thought. He asked questions like invitations. As Sir Francis Bacon said, “A sudden, bold, and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man, and lay him open.”

Jesus, of course, was a great questioner. Pastor Eric von Atzigen identifies 135 questions Jesus asks in the New Testament. They all strike at the heart of who we are, what we believe, and how we order our loves. Consider the Gospel of Matthew alone, and the progression of the interrogative order:

“Why are you so afraid?” (8:26)
“Do you believe?” (9:28)
“Why did you doubt?” (14:31)
“Who do you say I am?” (16:15)

Where are you? Jesus continues to ask us on our Father’s behalf—echoing God’s first question to mankind in Eden. And we are given the dignity of our own response to the Good News. He knocks and leaves us to open the door.

A question is a hook, a fisher of men and women. How would I answer to this God of questions?

We are asking fewer and fewer questions as we read and learn today. Or perhaps we don’t know what questions to ask. We satiate our minds with so much filler that they seem to no longer hunger for the real thing.

In her preface to The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers writes:

The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns. … Particularly in the matter of Christian doctrine, a great part of the nation subsists in an ignorance more barbarous than that of the dark ages, owing to this slatternly habit of illiterate reading.

Illiterate reading for Sayers occurs when “words are understood in a wholly mistaken sense,” when “statements of fact and opinion are misread and distorted in repetition.” The result, particularly when it comes to understanding the Christian faith, is the popular mind’s transformation of it into a “confused jumble of mythological and pathological absurdity.”

Sayers’s concept of illiterate reading caught my attention on many fronts. First and foremost, it struck me as a (hopefully) thoughtful Christian, since Christians cannot help but be the most essential of all bibliophiles, with the Holy Bible as the foundational “word in stone” of our existence. Secondly, after three decades of teaching, I have to agree with Sayers’s observation that “it is common knowledge among school-teachers that a high percentage of examination failures results from ‘not reading the question.’”

As a constant pedagogical refrain, I find I must not only remind adult students how to pay careful attention to the question being asked but also how to respond to that specific question. Upon initial attempts, they either simply regurgitate all the “knowledge” they have crammed into their recent memory in the hope of making a minimum grade, or they respond as though they have not understood what was being asked of them in the first place.

Sayers continues to state how “teachers further complain that they have to spend a great deal of time and energy in teaching University students what questions to ask.” From pure need, I have taught entire courses dedicated to the art of asking a good question. A truly good question. The kind, as Francis Bacon says, that “lays a man open,” or that Jesus employs to turn us back on ourselves, rhetorically, facilitating a conversation between ourselves and our very own soul.

During my time studying at Oxford, I continued to be surprised by questions. Most learning at Oxford takes place in tutorials, where students gather in small groups to discuss readings and assignments with their professor in an intimate setting. Rather than gathering in a large, anonymous amphitheater or sitting framed in muted squares online, real-life tutorials provide a place for intense discussion.

In such a group, one is required to take full responsibility for one’s own thoughts or positions. There is no tossing a paper on a random pile that the professor will not even read. In a tutorial, a student is laid bare: If you haven’t done the reading preparation, you are woefully exposed. If you haven’t thought through your argument, your views are vulnerable to being dismantled.

Yet beneath this incredibly intimidating and even frightening experience runs the electric current of an even greater one: the exhilaration of an earnest pursuit of truth. When we are met with questions and moved to ask questions ourselves, something profound takes place: a shift from pride to humility, from heedlessness to alertness, from indifference to engagement.

The crux of the tutorial system is the ancient art of asking questions. The Socratic method, named for the famous teacher of Plato, involves the teacher leading the student, question by artful question, further up and further in to the heart of a matter—Socrates’s key to examining life and making it worth living.

This is the model I’ve continued to use in my own teaching pedagogy, and which I see flourishing at the North American campus of New College Franklin, where I now teach. At this small Christian classical school, students are deliberately unplugged during class. Away from devices and dependent solely on their own brains, they engage with their instructor and their peers by asking questions to seek out truth through the inductive and deductive processes. The entire curriculum is based on this intimate, personal method of truth-seeking together.

I have met self-proclaimed irreligious people who have not asked—or refused to ask—questions about doubting wisely, let alone questions about believing wisely. The plague is all the same: a lack of genuine curiosity, a lack of humility at the heart of true truth-seeking. And I have met believers who are afraid to ask questions of their faith—afraid that somehow their faith will be shaken or that they will be judged even for asking.

Yet we see how Jesus himself did not fear such questions. In fact, his refrain “Do not be afraid” would seem to apply to questions—perhaps more than anything. He honors the asking and points us toward the places where the asking leads.

I find myself agreeing yet further with Sayers as she claims, “A third distressing phenomenon is the extreme unwillingness of the average questioner to listen to the answer.” We all know the type of person—the one who listens to something you are vulnerably sharing, but who is only waiting for you to finish your sentence so he can jump in with the sound of his own voice.

Can we enact holy listening instead? The Bible gives us the answer to every conceivable question, yet often, we do not want to hear. The more we develop a robust relationship with God, the more we hearken to his voice in our hearts and trust his work in our lives.

In their choice to turn away from God, Adam and Eve did not respond to the true question being asked of them—they did not practice holy listening. They took the Serpent at his most literal; they took his word over God’s Word. And ever since, the consequent misapprehension has sent generation upon generation tumbling into suffering and, most of all, into fear.

Once I left Oxford to study in the “larger world,” it was now my turn to be surprised not by the questions but by the lack of them. As I taught or interacted at various other campuses, I found myself agreeing with Sayers: We are a culture of complacent readers, even accidental or haphazard readers. We take in information but do not ask for what purpose we are reading. We gloss over, but we do not listen to what the text has to say.

Our reading must model our faith. As followers of Christ, how can we become literate readers? How can we be emboldened to ask the questions that matter and yet also be willing to listen to the answer?

To return once more to Sayers here, she writes, “In the creeds of Christendom, we are confronted with a set of documents which purport to be, not expressions of opinion but statements of fact.” How does this shape our purpose in reading?

How does asking and answering questions lead us back to God’s Word, its reading and comprehension, and then its application—not as ambiguous maundering but with absolute and teleological purpose? And finally, how can such inquisitive reading be applied to the texts of our own lives?

It is through reading itself that we can come to better know the Father through the written word of the Son by continuously asking how we can know the way: by remaining hungry and thirsty, in mind and spirit, for questions of truth and the wisdom of God.

Carolyn Weber is a professor at New College Franklin and the author of Surprised by Oxford. She lives in the Tennessee countryside with her family and animal menagerie.

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Books

Review

Don’t Give Dan Brown the Final Word on the Council of Nicaea

Fred Sanders

Bryan Litfin rescues popular audiences from common myths about the origins of Trinitarian doctrine.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Baker Publishing

Christians aren’t trying to speak in code, but sometimes we can sound like it.

Consider, for instance, the simple matter of the year 2025 being the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in 325. Plenty of churches, schools, conferences, and magazines are celebrating by giving special attention to the Nicene Creed this year. Why not? It’s a round-numbered, landmark year and a great way to celebrate.

But if an interested observer happens to ask whether the Nicene Creed comes from the 325 Council of Nicaea, we have some explaining to do. Actually, the creed produced that year was different and shorter. But it’s symbolically important because it started the movement toward the better-known creed recited in churches across the world to this day. (Technically, it’s called the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed.)

That might sound like misdirection or double talk, but it isn’t. The year 325 and the “Nicene” creed written 56 years later really do belong together, and it all makes good sense, as long as you know the story that goes along with it. And by “story,” I mean a little bit of history and a little bit of theology.

In The Story of the Trinity: Controversy, Crisis, and the Creation of the Nicene Creed, Bryan Litfin cracks the code, leaps the language barrier, and delivers that history and theology. Litfin is a professor at Liberty University’s Rawlings School of Divinity, having previously taught for many years at Moody Bible Institute. Some time ago he began developing an engaging and accessible writing style, which he uses to great effect in this book about Nicaea.

The Story of the Trinity is under 200 pages long and is available in paperback for less than $20, which makes it the kind of nonintimidating object you might actually hand to a friend. But above all, you might recommend the book because of its high readability quotient.

Litfin’s authorial approachability starts with little courtesies, like showing how to pronounce a few hard words, explaining where key terms originated, and gamely admitting that paternity and filiation are “fancy words for fatherhood and sonship.”

His approachability extends to offering analogies for ancient geopolitical tensions in the church. For example, leaders in Roman Palestine and Syria may have defended Arius, who opposed the Nicene position on the Trinity, partly out of rivalry with metropolitan Alexandria. As Litfin writes, this might be like “a pastor today getting kicked out of New York City for what appeared to be conservative ideas. If those elite New Yorkers didn’t like a certain set of doctrines, that might be just enough reason for conservative Christians of Atlanta or Dallas to adopt them with gusto.”

It’s a loose analogy, and it may misfire for some readers. But it serves the purpose of inviting a broad range of readers into an imaginable historical setting, something like our own.

But Litfin’s commitment to readability determines a lot more than just these isolated features. It determines the shape of his whole project. He actively invites the kind of questions ordinary people might ask about Nicaea and its role in formulating the doctrine of the Trinity. In some cases, he channels these questions into chapter titles: Chapter 4, for instance, asks, “Does Yahweh Have a Son?” Chapter 6 poses the question “Maybe Jesus Is the Father?”

Similar thought experiments and queries appear throughout the book. As a theologian, Litfin must know that some of these are bad questions, but as a teacher he recognizes them as starting points for developing a better understanding.

Behind these decisions lies Litfin’s broad and generous sense of the obligations borne by anyone attempting to explain Nicaea at the popular level. It simply won’t do to open the book with some version of “Our story begins in 317,” when controversy first erupted between Arius and Athanasius of Alexandria, the church father known for articulating and defending the doctrine of the Trinity. In fact, readers don’t really enter the fourth century until the book is more than half over.

Up until then, we have not been creeping through the history of Christian doctrine so much as laying deep foundations in biblical theology. We get seven sprightly chapters on Old Testament monotheism, New Testament Christology, and eventually a few major figures like Tertullian and Origen—both Africans, as Litfin points out in an aside. Many of the key players in the early story hail from northern Africa.

Why so much biblical theology? Litfin doesn’t belabor the point, but he has obviously decided that what is at stake in Nicene theology will be compelling only against the backdrop of what the Bible says about God and Christ. The Story of the Trinity is not quite evangelistic, but it won’t risk leaving the foundations of the faith unstated while hurrying on to church history.

In fact, it comes close to offering a straightforward, disarming invitation to the gospel:

Are you ready to begin? Don’t worry; this won’t be a dry theological discourse that’s way over your head. Instead, in a step-by-step fashion, we’ll see how God has gradually revealed himself as a community of persons who eternally love one another, and who pour out their infinite love on the human race. To know God is to be invited into a community of perfect harmony and everlasting life. Who could ask for anything better than that?

Litfin is similarly gentle and patient (“Don’t worry”) with readers who believe in Jesus but aren’t already persuaded about the importance of creeds. The first chapter makes the case. In ten breezy pages, it asks and answers the question “What Is a Creed?,” starting with confessions of faith found in Scripture itself. Eventually, believers find themselves wanting more explicit accounts of how two core confessions—“God is one” and “Jesus is Lord”—go together. Nicaea offers itself as an answer. If theology is faith seeking understanding, creeds are confession seeking coherence and comprehensiveness.

The Story of the Trinity is a sweet chariot that swings low for a general audience. Does it also carry us home to theological precision? Yes, all things considered, it reaches remarkably high. Litfin writes for a popular audience but remains resourceful and responsible. At numerous points he includes stories and details that show he is not simply retailing widely available reports but has done the primary reading himself. He tucks the accounts of early church historians Sozomen and Socrates Scholasticus demurely into the endnotes; he offers quotations from the Theodosian Code, a collection of Roman laws made by its Christian emperors, to show how Roman leaders received the outcome of Nicaea.

The highest art is to conceal artistry, but Litfin slips in some little giveaways that let seasoned scholars know what he knows. One particular issue serves as a litmus test for whether a history of the fourth century is naïvely ignorant or critically credible. That issue is related to rhetoric from Athanasius, who famously taught his readers to label all defections from Nicene orthodoxy as “Arianism,” in reference to his chief opponent. That label certainly points to an important theological distinction, but Athanasius imposed it for decades on teachers who never claimed it for themselves.

Litfin nods to the “Arianism” problem: “Though we’ll use the term in this book for simplicity’s sake, it isn’t a very accurate expression. As it turns out, Arius wasn’t a key player in the decades after the Nicene council condemned him. Not many people wanted to claim his legacy, so he gradually disappeared off the scene.” It’s hard to imagine a defter handling of a historical stumbling point. Litfin makes it look easy.

While The Story of the Trinity doesn’t include original research (since that would be inappropriate for an introduction), it does display independent judgment. Specialists will quibble and gripe; it’s what they do. I winced to see Litfin perpetuate the myth of different “Trinitarianisms” in the Greek East and the Latin West. It’s a hallucination of outdated textbooks, and I doubt Litfin really believes it; he doesn’t let it mangle his reports about the theology of Augustine and of the Cappadocian church fathers, who defended the one Christian doctrine of the Trinity in diverse ways.

But advanced students of Nicaea should keep a sense of perspective about such things. If people ask you for a good, readable first book—in fact an only book—on Nicaea, there is a kind of madness involved in handing them scholarly staples like Lewis Ayres’ Nicaea and its Legacy (2004) or Khaled Anatolios’s Retrieving Nicaea (2011). Why not just send them to find R. P. C. Hason’s thousand-page opus The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (1988)? Why not tell them to learn Greek and Latin?

On the mean streets of modern life, I regret to inform you that the standard for knowledge about Nicaea has been set by serial fabulist Dan Brown. In the popular mind, the council was either an open democratic vote on whether Jesus is God (“What do you guys think?”) or an imperial power play by the Roman emperor Constantine. Apparently, people think the bishops gathered there invented the New Testament, colluding to suppress other testaments. I kid you not.

Into this present darkness Litfin has lobbed a lightweight light source, a highly readable introduction to Nicaea that helps Christians sound less like they’re talking in code. How great would it be if, when people thought about Nicaea, what came to mind was not The Da Vinci Code but the Theodosian Code? May it be. It is a great blessing to have at hand such a Bible-based, gospel-focused, basic introduction to the Nicene Creed and its theology.

Fred Sanders is professor of theology in the Torrey Honors College at Biola University. His books include The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything.

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Books

Review

Needing Help Is Normal

Agnes R. Howard

Leah Libresco Sargeant’s doggedly pro-life feminist manifesto argues that dependence is inevitable.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Notre Dame Press

Last year’s theme for chapel talks at the Lutheran university where I teach was “That Time I Asked for Help.” Most of these talks narrated a similar cycle: feeling a need, requesting help, and finding it ready. A few speakers confessed DIY dispositions or called out sins of self-reliance. Overall, the talks aimed to encourage students—who apparently don’t ask for help because they think they shouldn’t need it—to seek assistance from others.

That is a good lesson. But it seemed a surprising one to address to a population that looks to me fairly comfortable accepting aid, fresh as most are from 18-odd years of dependence on parents and quick as they are to avail themselves of college counseling and dining services, accepting due-date extensions or the occasional box of classroom donuts. Maybe their obstacle was not undue self-reliance but a misunderstanding of help itself as something narrow one accepts only in certain life stages (childhood), from certain authority figures (teachers or bosses), or after financial transactions (paying an Uber to take you to the airport rather than asking a friend for a ride).

A story Leah Libresco Sargeant recounts in her excellent book The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto echoes this misunderstanding. An elderly veteran was unable to visit his wife at a nearby nursing home because he could not clear his driveway after a sudden California snowstorm. When at last he conceded his inability to remove the snow by himself, the abashed post he circulated on Facebook—“I never thought I would have to do this. … This is very embarrassing for me to even ask for help”—drew eager neighbors with shovels and a tractor. To Sargeant, the man’s reluctance to ask for help reveals the “sustained, bitterly cold cultural climate” we inhabit.

Our cultural climate is bitter. But can it really be true that a 79-year-old man never before asked for help or received it? It seems at least plausible that his wife gave him some help, asked or unasked for, through years of marriage. It seems plausible too that the daily life of a septuagenarian might have been laced with helps throughout: a server who remembered his special coffee preference, the nurse gentle at a blood draw, the driver who yielded right of way at a four-way stop. It’s just that he didn’t recognize these acts as the help they had always been. “Help” instead had become exceptional, something uncommon and extraordinary rather than constitutive of existence.

The normal condition for humans is dependence—we start and finish there, and by gradations we depend on others throughout our lives. A system presupposing independence has a “false anthropology,” Sargeant writes. She argues that society should do better to recognize human need. She argues that women, sometimes treated as inferior because of bodily realities, should not have to “prune themselves” to win equality.

The hinge connecting those arguments most directly is women’s proximity to dependence. All humans start life by depending on a female body for gestation, protection, and nourishment. Assuming independence as a norm degrades all but especially women, because biology and culture regularly situate women in service of others. As women care for the young, old, or sick, they depend, in turn, on others to assist them.

Though humans are fundamentally dependent creatures, another fundamental trait—fallenness, sin, plain selfishness—motivates us to pretend otherwise. The fallout isn’t limited to women. But the reality of sex differences over centuries has produced distortions.

On the first page, Sargeant observes that as a woman, “I move through a world in which my body is an unexpected, unanticipated, somewhat unwelcome guest. It is as though women were a late, unanticipated arrival to a civilization that developed without them and their needs in mind.” Her observations carry undertones of surprise, implying that builders of this world neglected to remember women would need to use it too. She identifies dangers from poorly designed structures, like medical research tested only for male patients or car safety devices that protect male bodies and incidentally injure female ones.

In fact, some builders of this world not only did not expect women’s arrival but also precluded it, letting their female counterparts in as guests if at all. Earlier voices in American feminism faulted that bitterly cold hospitality, and we now live in its aftermath.

It is a testimony to their achievements that some women readers may feel surprised to stumble on this warp in the world’s shape. The design flaws Sargeant impugns arose partly through overconfident haste in efforts to reverse sexist exclusion, slotting women into educational and corporate and public spaces made by and for men.

Some institutions still demand that women neutralize their femaleness as a price of entry, Sargeant finds, and she critiques manners that discipline women’s menstrual cycles or lock lactation behind closed doors. Invisible breast pumps and pills to suppress periods may be marketed as considerate gestures but effectively become tools for “helping women be better men.”

Builders of the world Sargeant moves through today knew about the female physical capacity to nurture dependence. They realized that women have periods and feed babies. But they treated that capacity as debility. Priority given to autonomy codes dependence as negative, subordinating and submerging a great source of flourishing.

It seems to me that these world builders thought nonsensically about dependence; assuming independence as our default condition is an irrational judgment about ourselves. That miscalculation ushered in a cascade of others. Seeing help as unusual takes a trick of the mind that recasts it as entitlement or commercial transaction. A faulty definition of help minimizes and monetizes; it devalues care work and excuses some from caring on the grounds that “I don’t need help and therefore you shouldn’t either.” But humans need and take help all the time.

The problem with the world Sargeant navigates is not just that dependent bodies do not fit into molds made for independent ones—because in fact the molds were not made for independent individuals. They were made for individuals trailing support systems behind them, systems providing domestic, relational, and organizational assistance, often from women. These helps could be hidden in plain sight or taken for granted—an underrated figure of speech that stings in this case since whatever is taken is not received as a gift.

The key terms in this book’s title—dependence, dignity, feminist, manifesto—find relation to each other in ways that can repair faulty definitions of help. Dependence is a fact of human life. It is a feminist concern because denying it disadvantages women distinctively. Sargeant’s feminism seeks redress not mostly through balancing scales or leveling playing fields or valuing diversity. Instead, it goes beyond those, recognizing that women’s salient contributions to common thriving come through the biological fact of help.

That is the other hinge linking dependence and feminism: What humans can know by observing motherhood is a detail not to derogate but to claim as an ideal. What Sargeant makes manifest is the reality of human dependence and the good of serving it. Dependence is a basis of dignity as we embrace what we are and grow into service.

Sargeant also shows that dependence stimulates growth. Those who serve expand their capacities. Those who are served fill out the truth of our creatureliness. The body of all together, as community or church, grows through mutual aid. In Sargeant’s reimagination, even unglamorous tasks often classified as women’s work blaze into occasions of agency and virtuosity. Some of the most dazzling sections of the book feature Sergeant reframing tasks of repair or housekeeping as “refactoring,” finding radiant creativity in the mix of skill and care.

The book’s focus on women affords a conclusion important for men too. Appreciating dependence does not mean nodding its approval in a category of humane concepts nice for people who like that kind of thing. Sergeant beckons men to join in this nurture so they don’t miss out on “opportunities for connection and kenosis.”

The truth Sargeant makes manifest inspires her manifesto. For sure, there is a lot of work to do refitting spaces to be friendly for disabilities, encouraging young adults to befriend seniors, and handing babies to dads to hold. But a revolution is not requisite to get people to do these things. People already are doing them, as her pages illustrate.

What Sargeant invites is fundamentally a change of mind first before a practical set of actions. Her book appears in a series, Catholic Ideas for a Secular World, translating insights from Christian traditions to make them accessible to readers beyond. Her insight deserves an especially wide hearing, especially if Christians can proclaim it with right emphasis: less servant leadership as claimed by people more interested in the “leadership” part, and more outright service. Less self-sufficiency and more self-gift. We all bear dignity. We all need help.

Agnes R. Howard teaches humanities at Christ College, the honors college at Valparaiso University. She is the author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us about Being Human; her forthcoming book is Disoriented: Embodied Life in Strange Times.

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News

Died: John Huffman, Pastor Who Told Richard Nixon to Confess

Daniel Silliman

The Presbyterian minister and CT board member committed to serve the Lord and “let the chips fall where they may.”

Courtesy of John Huffman / edits by Christianity Today

John Huffman, the one minister who told US president Richard Nixon he should confess during the crisis of the Watergate scandal, has died in California at the age of 85.

Huffman was the minister of an evangelical Presbyterian church in Key Biscayne, Florida, where the president frequently went to relax in the 1970s with his close friend businessman Bebe Rebozo.

Nixon rarely attended church outside of the White House services that he closely controlled. He was always afraid a minister would use the pulpit to say something critical and embarrass him. But the president went to Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church when he was in town, partly because he was more relaxed in Florida and partly because he trusted Huffman, who had trained with evangelist Billy Graham and popular New York preacher Norman Vincent Peale.

Huffman had a reputation for being young, good-looking, fun, and “with it,” preaching sermons that were upbeat. But he also addressed sin from the pulpit and frequently spoke of the temptations faced by his affluent congregation on the sun-drenched Florida coast.

“Many of us today don’t want Christ around,” he said in one sermon, which was reported in Miami News in 1968. “We may pretend to worship him and call ourselves Christians but we don’t want to disturb the comfort of our lives.”

In 1973, the young minister grew concerned by reports that Nixon was preventing the investigation of underlings who had broken into the Democratic Party headquarters during the presidential campaign and bugged the office phones. Nixon appeared to be covering up a crime—a suspicion that was later confirmed by the secret recordings the president had made of all his conversations in the Oval Office and the Executive Office Building.

Huffman decided he would have to disturb the comfort of his own life and Nixon’s, saying something pointed about the need to confess. He knew it would be awkward and felt the temptation to flatter the president. Many ministers at the time attempted to use their access to Nixon to say something important and then quailed, choosing instead messages that were benign or fawning.

Huffman decided he had to speak up. He believed this was his responsibility as a minister and as someone with deep affection for Nixon.

“I really loved the man,” he told Christianity Today in 2024. “If I have a real, good friend—forget public life—if I’m his friend and he’s my friend, I hope he’s a friend enough to me to point out things, gentle, and help me be better. So that’s what I tried to do.”

Huffman told Rebozo that Nixon should “step before the nation and say exactly what he knew or didn’t know about the Watergate break-in and coverup, asking the forgiveness of God and the American people.” The businessman blocked him from speaking to the president directly. Then, when Nixon sat in a pew that Easter, Huffman preached on Acts 26 and how the Judean king Agrippa was judged for feigning ignorance.

Nixon fled the church without stopping to shake hands and retreated to Camp David. A year and a half later, he resigned in disgrace.

“Rebozo never forgave me, but Nixon knew I told the truth,” Huffman told CT. “Every human being is a human being. And every human being is afraid of being discovered.”

Huffman later served at First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh and then accepted a call to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in 1977, an ECO congregation in Newport Beach, California, where he pastored until his retirement in 2019. Huffman served on the board of Christianity Today from 1980 until 2015.

Former CT president Harold Smith recalled Huffman as an example of faithful leadership and a dear friend.

“John walked alongside me and the board during some of the hardest days to hit our ministry and publishing generally. His wisdom and well-timed words of encouragement got me through more than a few dark nights of soul, and kept the board ever focused on our vision and mission,” Smith said. “John consistently sought to walk and talk the twin watchwords of Christianity Today’s founder Billy Graham: conviction and love.”

Huffman was born to Dorothy Bricker Huffman and John Huffman Sr. on May 24, 1940. His father was an assistant minister at Park Street Church in Boston, where he worked under Harold J. Ockenga, one of the key institution-builders in American evangelicalism after World War II.

The elder Huffman, along with ministers Torrey Johnson and Billy Graham, helped found the evangelistic outreach ministry Youth for Christ the same year the junior Huffman was born.

Some of Huffman’s first memories included traveling with his father and his father’s friends on ministry trips and listening to evangelical leaders, including future CT editors Carl F. H. Henry, Harold Lindsell, and Kenneth Kantzer, talk at his parent’s table. In his self-published memoir, A Most Amazing Call, Huffman recalled being a child and walking on a beach in Massachusetts with Graham and hearing someone call Graham, then in his 20s, a “young whippersnapper” still “wet behind the ears.”

Huffman accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior at age five. At school, he told his teacher they should move his birthday celebration from May to September because that’s when Huffman had been born again.

The family moved to Wheaton, Illinois, when Huffman was a teenager and his father accepted the presidency of Winona Lake School of Theology in Winona Lake, Indiana. Much of the job involved traveling to raise funds from rich businessmen, including J. Howard Pew, “Colonel” Harland Sanders, Pierre du Pont, J. C. Penney, and Eli Lilly. The younger Huffman traveled with his father frequently and learned a lot, he told CT, about interacting with powerful people.

“You treat people with respect, but you don’t bow and scrape,” he said. “Never think a person is that much higher than yourself. We’re all equal.”

Huffman felt a strong draw to politics and dreamed of being an elected leader himself one day. He idolized the young, smart, scrappy, and aggressive vice president: Richard Nixon. When Huffman attended Wheaton College, he became president of the campus chapter of Young Republicans. His big project, as he later recalled, was bringing Nixon to campus to speak during the presidential campaign of 1960.

Nixon addressed a crowd of about 30,000, according to the Associated Press, and spoke about the importance of putting truth above private ambition.

Huffman had questions about how easy that was to do in politics. He felt the drive he saw in the vice president—an instinct to shoulder his way to victory—but was cautioned by a prominent evangelical to take care lest he waste his life or lose his soul.

Samuel Shoemaker, considered one of the best preachers of the era, warned him politics was a dangerous game with great temptations and it did not guarantee he’d accomplish anything of significance. Shoemaker, who was in his 60s at the time, urged young Huffman to consider following his father into ministry.

Huffman hesitated, even considering going into journalism and becoming a TV news anchor, but ultimately decided he was, in fact, called to ministry.

He attended Princeton Theological Seminary and took a position on the staff at Marble Collegiate Church, working under Norman Vincent Peale. Huffman met his future wife, Anne Mortenson, while traveling with Peale in Hong Kong. They were married in 1964, Huffman got ordained, and they accepted a call to the church in Florida.

It wasn’t his first choice, Huffman told CT. Or his second. Or third. But the congregation in Key Biscayne gave him a chance even though some members were concerned he was too young and others were worried he might be too liberal. He was, for his part, a bit disappointed.

“I thought I was heading into oblivion,” he said. “It was scary—and exciting.”

Huffman thrived in Florida, though, getting an opportunity to minister not only to the president but also to an island of young professionals who wanted to grow in their faith and a rotating cast of powerful people spending time on Florida’s beaches and golf courses.

He was careful to “just preach the gospel,” he said, regardless of who was in church, and to remember he was preaching to everyone, not just the most powerful person in the room.

“There may have been someone else in the congregation who needed to hear what I said more than the president,” he said. “You’re there to serve the Lord. That’s the important part. Let the chips fall where they may.”

The year after Huffman told Nixon to confess, he accepted a call to be pastor at First Presbyterian Church in downtown Pittsburgh, a prestigious pulpit at a respected and historic congregation. Decision magazine did a photo essay on the church while Huffman was there, naming it “one of the great churches in America.”

Huffman struggled a bit at the church, though, feeling caught in conflicts between denominational loyalists, transdenominational evangelicals, Presbyterian charismatics, and Reformed traditionalists. He fought with church trustees and had sometimes-weekly meetings with lay leaders who told him he was a disappointment.

After a few years, Huffman decided to accept a call to an unknown church in Newport Beach, California, known at the time as a sparsely populated sand spit with some rundown vacation houses.

People in Pittsburgh were shocked he would leave, Huffman later recalled. No minister in the church’s two-century history had ever left. Prominent evangelical leaders including Graham, Peale, and Ockenga warned him he would lose influence.

But Huffman prayed that he would be in the center of God’s will and accepted that the move was right. He ended up serving at that church from 1978 to 2009, when he retired. Then he joined St. Andrew’s as a member and continued to worship with the congregation until his death.

“I will never fully understand quite how it all happened,” he told CT. “But I can now say with full assurance that God knew precisely what he was doing.”

Huffman joined the board of Christianity Today shortly after moving to California. He helped steer the ministry into the digital age, backing president Harold Myra’s “print plus” plan to get CT online. He became chair of the board in 2006 and helped president Harold Smith manage CT’s response to the financial crisis of 2008, which “directly threatened” the existence of the magazine, Huffman recalled, and required the layoffs of 60 percent of the 165-person staff.

The ministry survived, and Huffman welcomed a new era of CT when Timothy Dalrymple became president in 2019. Huffman said he hoped CT would “remain strong” for years to come, “fulfilling for future generations the essence of the Billy Graham vision.”

His wife, Anne, and their daughters Carla and Janet survive him. The couple’s eldest, Suzanne, died in 1991 at age 23.

Correction: A previous version of this article said Huffman joined CT’s board in the late 1970s. According to his autobiography, he joined early in 1980.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Culture

Is This Heaven? No, It’s Banana Ball

Josh Lindblom

What baseball’s most amusing team gets right about joy in sports.

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

“Is this heaven?”
“No, it’s Iowa.”

That iconic exchange from the classic baseball film Field of Dreams captures something deeper than nostalgia—it hints at the possibility that sport, when rightly ordered, can brush up against the divine.

It taps into a deep longing we have for all the wrong in this world to be made right, including every field or court, pool or pitch. And maybe, just maybe, the Savannah Bananas are giving us a glimpse of part of the picture.

Exhibitions by the popular team—in sold-out professional stadiums or viral social media clips—are joyful. Fans dance in the stands, batters perform choreographed walk-ups, pitchers throw trick pitches, and kids run on the field like they belong there.

The Bananas are still highly skilled athletes, and their approach has clearly captured fans. Under owner Jesse Cole, the Bananas grew to a regional favorite with a massive waiting list, then to a national phenomenon, selling out major league ballparks on their national tour. The team played before their biggest crowd ever—81,000—at Clemson University this year.

With the lip-synching players and rump-shaking umpires, you could write Banana Ball off as a gimmick. I did at first. But then I realized that the Savannah Bananas weren’t out to replace the MLB. They’re reframing the game to engage more fans.

“Our goal is to spread joy and have fun. We want people to go home saying that they saw something that they have never seen before on a baseball field,” said Bill LeRoy, catcher, emcee, and captain for the Bananas. “We care so much about our fan’s experience and we think less about ourselves.”

Caring that fans feel joy, feel seen, and believe they belong: that’s not just good entertainment—that’s kingdom work.

Any good theology of sport begins in creation. When athletes run, jump, swing, or throw, they express something inherently human: bodies made for movement, minds made for strategy, hearts made for relationship and joy. Their activity reflects the delight of a Creator who watched his world unfold and called it “very good.”

But with the Fall, what God designed as a gift became an idol, and our games began to reveal our brokenness as much as our brilliance.

We commodify athletes, elevate winning above character, and measure value in stats and salaries. Youth sports became pipelines of pressure. Athletes became performers first and people second. What was meant to be joyful and relational became tied to ego, identity, and worth.

The good news is that God did not leave his world—or sport—broken. Through Jesus, he began his work of redemption, not just saving souls but renewing all of creation. The joy of play, the beauty of competition, and the relationships forged in sport are not meaningless distractions; they’re echoes of Eden and previews of restoration.

Seen through this lens, sport becomes a classroom of formation. Plenty of us have seen hints of God’s redemptive work in traditional sports: a coach calling out potential in a young player, a team rallying around a discouraged teammate, or an athlete competing with integrity.

I see it all over the Savannah Bananas, and Adam Wainwright, St. Louis Cardinals legend and an outspoken Christian, did too when he showed up as a guest pitcher for Savannah in July, when they turned Busch Stadium from red to banana yellow for two sold-out games.

Wainwright walked the field with Cole, the owner, beforehand. “He was looking up into the upper deck trying to figure out how to get players up there during the game so that every fan who attended felt important,” Wainwright said. “What I took away from the experience … was their overall love of baseball and their genuine desire to be great entertainers for the fans.”

At Banana games, joy is tangible and contagious. It points to the kind of unburdened life Jesus promises (John 10:10), where people live free from the relentless scorekeeping of a broken world. One fan told me after attending a game, “I haven’t laughed that much in years, and it was just a baseball game. Or maybe not ‘just’ a baseball game.”

Another fan described a young boy—maybe eight years old—walking out of the stadium holding his dad’s hand, still buzzing from running the bases with the team. He looked up and said, “Dad, I want to play baseball like that, where everyone’s smiling.” That’s not just a great fan experience; that’s formation. That’s a picture of sport shaping the heart for joy rather than fear.

The Bananas blur the lines between players and fans, creating a shared experience of belonging—kids running on the field, fans dancing with players, strangers celebrating together. This is a picture of biblical fellowship (Acts 2:42–47), where joy and belonging are shared, not earned, and where every person feels they have a place.

The players remind us that competition, at its best, is about partnership, not punishment. It’s about calling out excellence in one another, celebrating effort, and recognizing that even an opponent is a fellow image-bearer who can make you better.

When competition means domination or proving worth at someone else’s expense, it distorts the human heart. But if we understand competition as mutual striving together to become what we’ve been created to be, then opponents are not enemies but partners in growth. Iron sharpening iron (Prov. 27:17) isn’t about hostility—it’s about mutual development, about calling one another to higher excellence and deeper character.

It shouldn’t surprise us that this team includes plenty of outspoken Christians, players who see their platform as more than performance. They invest relationally, share their faith, and embody the good news that worth isn’t defined by stats or contracts but by grace (Eph. 2:8-9).

“For so long in my career, all I cared about was my stats and winning/losing. Baseball was my idol, where I found my identity, and where my worth came from,” said LeRoy, whose approach changed when he joined the team eight years ago after playing college baseball in Georgia.

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Learning to put other people first helped him move on quicker from his failures and focus more on Jesus. LeRoy got out of his comfort zone to take the mic, sing, and dance. “I had no plan of ever having these specific skills or this job,” he said. “I owe everything to God.”

Backflipping outfielder RobertAnthony Cruz posts pre-game prayers, holds team Bible studies, and organizes worship nights outside the Savannah stadium. The team’s high-energy singalong, dance-along soundtrack includes Forrest Frank’s trendy “Your Way Is Better” and Elevation Worship’s “Praise.”

They point beyond the fun of the game to the deeper hope found in Christ. Another player summed it up: “We want people to know they’re loved—not because they bought a ticket, but because they matter.”

The Savannah Bananas, for all their intentional focus on the joy of the fans, remind us that sport is about a bigger story. The Bible tells the story of a God redeeming every corner of creation, and sport is not outside of his concern. It is one of the arenas where his renewal takes shape.

We can expect more from sports. Every whistle blown, every base touched, every cheer from the stands can echo something eternal when rooted in love and joy.

What if success was measured by joy and growth, not just wins? What if parents and coaches helped kids love the game—and each other—well? What if athletes stepped on the field not to prove their worth but to live from it, free to create, compete, and connect as image bearers of God?

Josh Lindblom played professional baseball for 15 years. A father of four with a master’s in biblical studies, he currently serves through Pro Athletes Outreach and Congruency, helping players and leaders align with their purpose.

- More from Josh Lindblom

Church Life

The Pastor Who Rescues People from Japan’s ‘Suicide Cliff’

Kazusa Okaya in Shirahama, Japan

Yoichi Fujiyabu has spent three decades sharing God’s love to people who want to end their lives.

The Sandanbeki cliff in Shirahama, Japan.

WikiMedia Commons

Most people visit Shirahama, a resort town along Japan’s southern coast, for its sandy beaches and restorative onsens (hot springs). But some travel there because they want to die.

At a church close to Shirahama Beach, the piercing ring of a phone slices through the stillness of the night. “Moshi moshi?” Yoichi Fujiyabu answers. On the other end, a trembling voice whispers in Japanese: “Please … help.” Fujiyabu grabs his keys, jumps into his car, and speeds into the night. His destination: Sandanbeki, a majestic cliff overlooking Shirahama’s shores. It’s also one of Japan’s most infamous suicide spots.

The headlights cut through the suffocating darkness. There, a lone figure emerges in the beam. Fujiyabu steps out of the car. The ground crunches beneath his feet as he walks toward a shadow before him.

This scene is from the 2019 documentary The Pastor and the Cliff of Life and is one that Fujiyabu, the pastor of Shirahama Baptist Christ Church, reenacts over and over again, often in the wee hours of the night.

For nearly three decades, Fujiyabu has stood on the frontlines of suicide prevention in Shirahama. To date, he has stopped more than 1,100 people—he records the details of every person he has rescued—from taking their lives at Sandanbeki.

Sandanbeki is a five-minute drive from the center of town. Because the cliff is nearly 200 feet high and the ocean below it has a strong current, it is a popular destination for people wanting to die by suicide, as bodies are often swept away without a trace.

“It’s such a beautiful place, which makes the contrast even more striking,” Fujiyabu said as he guided me toward the windswept cliff on a hot day in late August. A breeze whipped in from the sea as sunlight danced upon the waves. Everything looked like a picture-perfect postcard until my eyes landed on a solitary stone monument, erected in memory of those who died by suicide at Sandanbeki.

As I walked toward the cliff with Fujiyabu, we came across a public phone booth. Most of these booths have vanished across Japan, but the town has kept this one operational so desperate people can call the Shirahama Rescue Network (SRN), a nonprofit run by Fujiyabu and his church.

Outside the booth, a large sign bears the words Telephone of Life along with a paraphrase of Isaiah 43:4: “You are precious and honored in my sight. I love you.” Under it, bold letters plead, “Please call us before you make [this] important decision.” The SRN hotline is the only number listed on the sign. Fujiyabu and his team have placed five of these signs in the vicinity, in hopes that people will reach out before deciding to end their lives. Inside the booth, a cross adorned with flowers hangs above a worn paperback Japanese Bible and a bright green telephone.

As we drew closer to the cliff’s edge, Fujiyabu pointed to several sites where people had jumped and others where he had pulled them back from the brink. Whenever he gets a call—about three to five times every month—and arrives at the cliff, his first task is to locate the caller. Once he does that, he tries to guide the person into the backseat of his car, away from the cliff’s edge, and listens to his or her story.

The public phone booth at the Sandanbeki cliff. Image courtesy of Kazusa Okaya.

These encounters are rarely straightforward. Some reject his presence outright or are hostile toward him once they are inside his car, often because they waver in deciding whether to take their own lives.

In such moments, Fujiyabu often drives slowly through the town, circling its streets until the person calms down and feels safe. Only then does he bring people to his house or to a dormitory run by SRN, as they have nowhere else to go after cutting ties with family members, leaving their jobs, and selling all their possessions.

Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and jeans, 53-year-old Fujiyabu cuts an athletic figure. His easy smile gives him an almost-boyish look. Yet behind his childlike grin lies a quiet determination and an unmistakable strength of will.

Fujiyabu first stepped into the Shirahama Baptist Christ Church as a young boy because a girl had invited him to attend a service. “It was an impure motive, just like most kids,” he recalled. As he continued attending church, he slowly began to understand the love of God. By the time he was 10 or 11, he became conscious of his faith in Christ.

He also developed a deep interest in relief work after reading the children’s novel Harp of Burma, which chronicles the story of a Japanese soldier who decides to stay and devote his life to tending the dead in Burma (Myanmar).

In elementary school, he tried to raise money for refugees living in Ethiopia and Cambodia. After months of effort, he managed to collect only 1,000 yen (around $7 USD), leaving him feeling powerless. Then, at a church summer camp when Fujiyabu was in sixth grade, his pastor preached on Acts 3. In the passage, Peter tells a beggar, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you” (v. 6).

“That struck me,” Fujiyabu said. “I realized that even if I didn’t have much to give, I could share the gospel.”

This moment planted the seed of Fujiyabu’s calling: to bring Christ’s message of hope to those in dire need. In many ways, this calling was also a natural outcome of his time in the Shirahama church community. He had grown up witnessing his predecessor, Taro Emi, build a suicide-prevention ministry at church. Emi started rescue operations at Sandanbeki in 1979, decades before Fujiyabu took on the role of pastor.

Fujiyabu recalled encountering people whom Emi had taken under his care. Once, he saw an unfamiliar woman weeping in church. Another time, Emi suddenly appeared with a small child who stayed with him for several months.

“I became a Christian because I saw the consistency between the gospel message preached at church and the way pastor Emi lived out his faith,” Fujiyabu said. “I thought, God’s love is real, and it is here.”

Shirahama Baptist Christ Church. Image courtesy of Kazusa Okaya.

As he studied pastoral ministry at Tokyo Christian University—Japan’s only evangelical higher education institution—Fujiyabu never intended to return to his hometown congregation. That changed when Emi asked him to return to pastor the Shirahama church. He offered a salary of 50,000 yen ($330 USD) each month, an amount way below the poverty line in Japan.

Fujiyabu thought Emi was testing him to see if he was up for the task. “But when I started working, I realized [Emi] was serious,” Fujiyabu said. “That really was our monthly salary. That really taught us to trust in the Lord’s provision.”

Fujiyabu began as Shirahama Baptist Christ Church’s associate pastor in 1996 and took on the senior pastor role three years later. At the time, the church was barely hanging on, as it only had roughly ten weekly worshipers.

Today, the church has more than 50 regular members, including people who have moved to Shirahama from around the world for work. Around 20 of them are people whom SRN has rescued from Sandanbeki.

At first, the church faced numerous conflicts between its old-timers and people rescued from the cliff, who tended to struggle with gambling or porn addictions, alcoholism, or mental health challenges. Items in the church would break or go missing. Some believers began saying they did not want to worship with these newcomers. Yet Fujiyabu repeatedly told them the church is a place for imperfect sinners and they needed to help each other in their weaknesses.

“I want my church to be like a zoo,” he said, adding that the kingdom of God isn’t tidy or polished.

Fujiyabu’s pastoral work extends far beyond Sunday services and dramatic late-night rescues at Sandanbeki. Early in his ministry, he realized that rescuing people from the cliff and providing temporary shelter was not enough, and he wanted to offer more concrete ways to cultivate individual and communal healing.

Besides running the dormitory, SRN also operates an array of businesses in town. There’s a takeout restaurant called Machinaka Kitchen, a company retreat center, a cleaning service, a farm, and more. These workplaces provide training and equipping for people rescued from Sandanbeki and generate financial income for the ministry.

The interior of Machinaka Kitchen. Image courtesy of Kazusa Okaya.

Fujiyabu also wants to help young people avoid seeing suicide as an option to take when they face challenges in life. The church offers an afterschool educational program and a distance-learning high school for those who drop out. Two years ago, they launched Noko Noko, a government-backed parenting center on the second floor of Machinaka Kitchen, to offer counseling for families in crisis.

Most of the infrastructure SRN and the church utilize comes at little cost. Fellow Christians and the local government rallied to support Fujiyabu’s ministry by donating building space or offering heavily subsidized rents.

Among SRN’s mostly Christian staff is Ching Khan Nem, a believer from Manipur, India. Nem first came to Japan to study English at Tokyo Christian University. In 2019, she visited the Shirahama church as part of a mission trip and had lunch with various people living at SRN’s dormitory. The atmosphere there felt very tense, and many of the people she dined with seemed “lifeless,” Nem said. “I felt deeply convicted that I wanted to serve here [and] bring joy and warmth into the lives of people in despair,” she added.

A year later, Fujiyabu invited Nem to work at SRN. Today, Nem is involved in multiple projects, including the distance-learning high school, an English-language program she helped start, the church’s summer camp, and Machinaka Kitchen.

“Fujiyabu pours his life into ministry and is willing to tirelessly work every single day for it,” Nem said of her experience working with the pastor. “People also criticize him for overwork, but that is just who he is.”

Fujiyabu isn’t fazed by others’ remarks about his ministry and work ethic. “People think I’m reckless because I just do what I believe is right, whether it seems plausible or not,” he said. “I’ve simply continued to do what God called me to do—listening to the needs of the town and its people.”

Japan’s suicide rate is the highest among seven developed countries, according to a 2018 World Health Organization report. While overall suicides in the country have declined for several years, numbers remain high, with more than 20,000 deaths annually. Youth suicide rates are especially notable: Last year, suicides by children and teenagers reached an all-time high with 527 recorded deaths.

Long working hours, social isolation, pressures in school, and stigmas surrounding mental health challenges are some of the oft-cited reasons for the East Asian country’s high suicide rate. Shame is another contributing factor, as Japanese culture implies that people should avoid becoming a meiwaku, or a burden to others. Family members often treat a person’s struggles, like job loss or crippling debt, as deeply shameful. Such stigma can drive some people to want to vanish from society altogether.

Evangelical churches in Japan have taken little substantive action in addressing the issue of suicide. Many hold the view that engagement in social work is characteristic of liberal Christianity, a criticism that Fujiyabu himself has faced from fellow believers and missionaries. In his view, though, the most pressing need for the gospel in Shirahama is how it can address the problem of suicide.

Most people in Japan rarely turn to the church when they need help, Fujiyabu lamented as we wound through Shirahama’s streets. “The church is irrelevant,” he said. “I wanted to change that. I wanted the church to be a place that mattered to the town.”

At Shirahama town hall, Fujiyabu introduced me to Itsuka Kiyomiya, the only social worker who oversees psychiatric health in its 21,000-strong population. “We consider SRN a vital social asset,” she said. “Even when the police find someone near the cliff, all they can do is provide money or temporary shelter. That’s why SRN’s work is invaluable.”

The partnership between town hall and SRN runs both ways. The authorities call the nonprofit when someone needs a place to stay long-term. In turn, SRN relies on Kiyomiya to connect people with the help or services they need, like unemployment benefits.

Yet the church and the town have differing perspectives on what restoration and healing look like. Many people eventually leave the church after they feel better, which Kiyomiya calls “true independence,” as people “no longer need to depend on the church.”

Fujiyabu smiled but disagreed: “I’m not too happy about that. I want them to remain, to be part of the church even after they’ve recovered.”

Fujiyabu recalled a recent example of what growth and healing in a Christian context look like. About three years ago, a man in his 40s was at a bar drinking and pouring out his troubles to the bartender when the latter responded, “You should try the church. There will be people there who will help you.”

The man, who had no prior Christian connections, went to Fujiyabu’s church, where the community welcomed him and persistently walked with him through his struggles. He started reading the Bible every day and became immersed in church fellowship. Today, he is one of the church’s newest baptized members.

Not every Sandanbeki rescue has had a positive outcome, however.

In 2000, Fujiyabu took in a frail young man who seemed determined to rebuild his life. Despite Fujiyabu’s caution against moving too quickly, the man insisted on finding work and soon secured a job. At first, Fujiyabu was hopeful, as the young man seemed to be managing well. But within weeks, the man started experiencing conflicts in his workplace and told Fujiyabu he wanted to quit his job. Fujiyabu urged him to persevere.

“That was when our relationship broke,” Fujiyabu said. “He felt I wasn’t understanding him.” The young man eventually resigned from his job and told the pastor he was returning to live with his parents.

Two months later, the police called Fujiyabu. They had discovered a man’s body with the church’s business card in his pant pocket. The young man had not gone back to his family but instead had ended his life.

The news devastated Fujiyabu. “It was my mistake,” he said quietly. He felt he had broken the young man’s trust by being too harsh toward him. For months, Fujiyabu questioned whether he could continue in ministry. “I realized that no matter how much time and effort you give, a person can still choose to end their life,” he said. “You cannot make that ultimate decision for them.”

It was Fujiyabu’s wife, Ayumi, who helped him carry on. The couple met at university, and Ayumi currently helps to run SRN’s afterschool education program and Machinaka Kitchen.

Yoichi Fujiyabu and his wife Ayumi. Image courtesy of Kang Tu-kyŏng.

In their early years of ministry, late-night calls from Sandanbeki would often interrupt family dinners. The Fujiyabus’ two children had to stay silent until the calls ended, and Ayumi eventually had to ask Fujiyabu to bring the phone into another room.

The family also had to learn how to live with strangers. Before SRN established the dormitory, everyone lived together at the church. The Fujiyabus would share meals with the people rescued from Sandanbeki, who would later sleep in the church hall or other rooms in the building.

Integrating family and ministry life is important to Ayumi. “I believe God created each individual, and within his plan he has sent them to our church,” she said. “That perspective makes all the difference.” As Fujiyabu wrestled with what next steps to take after learning of the young man’s suicide, Ayumi told him, “I have made up my mind. I will dedicate myself to this ministry.” Her determination became his turning point.

The people whom SRN rescues from the cliff currently live together in a church-owned dormitory a five-minute walk from the church. Although the number of guests fluctuates, around ten people live there for several months or years in some cases. They follow a fixed schedule that Fujiyabu hopes will train them to lead a disciplined lifestyle in preparation to reenter society.

Every day, residents start their day at 6 a.m. by praying in chapel, then spend the rest of the day cleaning, preparing food, and working in various SRN-owned services such as Machinaka Kitchen.

In the evening, each person writes a self-reflection in a notebook, which Fujiyabu reads and comments on. In his conversations with the people he has rescued, he focuses on talking about God’s forgiveness, grace, and mercy. “The key to change is to understand that God loves them,” he said.

As my day with Fujiyabu drew to a close, I dined with seven people—one woman and six men—currently living at the dormitory. Shimohira, a soft-spoken man in his mid-30s, shared about his past candidly with me. CT agreed to use only his last name, as cultural stigma around suicide persists in Japan.

Shimohira had spent years running from his failures and weaknesses and felt caught up in a relentless cycle of negative thoughts that pointed to only one escape: death. After Fujiyabu and his team pulled him from the cliff’s edge at Sandanbeki, he struggled to adapt to the strict routine of dormitory life. He frequently clashed with his roommates and bristled at Fujiyabu’s criticism of his shortcomings.

Over time, something changed within him. “I began to face my weakness[es],” Shimohira told me. “I started bringing my pain not to myself, not to others, but to God.”

Church was foreign to him, so at first he sat disengaged through morning prayers and Sunday services. Gradually, the sermons and worship songs began to speak to him. Fujiyabu baptized him early this year, and he now sings in the church choir.

“I began to see that God loved me even though I am weak,” Shimohira said. “I don’t know whether it will be this church or another, but I want to spread the work that I am doing here right now.”

The future of Shirahama Baptist Christ Church and SRN, however, now feels uncertain. Five years ago, Fujiyabu was diagnosed with a rare form of abdominal cancer. The chemotherapy he received caused debilitating side effects like chronic kidney failure. Some days, the pain is so great that Fujiyabu is unable to rise from his bed. His illness has forced him to make difficult choices, such as canceling the kids’ summer program.

Fujiyabu refuses to give in to despair. He wants to continue responding to Jesus’ love and encouraging people to know and believe in Christ. “I am hopeful because ultimately it’s not about me or the organization,” he said. “It’s about God.”

- More from Kazusa Okaya

Culture

An Ode to the Long Season

Marvin Olasky

Why fans love a game designed to break their hearts.

Brayan Rocchio and manager Stephen Vogt of the Cleveland Guardians celebrates Rocchio's walk off three-run home run to defeat the Texas Rangers 9-8 in ten innings and win the National League central division on the final day of the regular season.

Nick Cammett / Getty Images

Major League Baseball, what’s not to love?

A lot of people don’t love it, and for good reason. Some batters swing for home runs, even with two strikes, instead of trying to make contact and advance a runner. Some pitchers are just throwers, not artists painting the strike zone. Some $30 million players are whiners. Besides, football has more smashups, basketball a constant flow.

And yet, Major League Baseball’s regular season, with its relentless, day-after-day 162-game pace, is a test of character. That’s particularly true at season’s end, where after 161 games some playoff spots depended on the last day’s results: In the American League, for example, Sunday’s games made the Toronto Blue Jays champions of the east and the Cleveland Guardians winners of the central division.

To get another sense of closeness at the edge in baseball as compared to other sports, in the American League the best team won only 8 percent more games than the sixth and last team to make the playoffs, and 40 percent more than the worst team in the league. In the National Football League, by comparison, the best team won 40 percent more games than the lowest team to make the playoffs, and 367 percent more than the worst team in the league.

The song that still chokes me up at the end of each NCAA basketball tournament, “One Shining Moment,” is about one kind of tension:

The ball is tipped,
And there you are.
You’re running for your life. …
Time is short,
And the road is long.
In the blinking of an eye,
Ah, that moment’s gone.

But the MLB season, which started at the end of March, is not short: six months with “games” every day.

Little League events should be games. MLB contests are not. Savannah Bananas exhibitions are fun like an annual trip to the circus, but the season that just concluded required long diligence in the same direction. Paul thought lengthy competition was worth remembering. He wrote to Timothy about his hard season: “I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near.I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim. 4:6–7).

Two millennia later, two writers captured this sense of perseverance and persevered themselves. Roger Angell wrote at The New Yorker for over 70 years and died at age 101 in 2022. Bart Giamatti left the presidency of Yale University and became MLB’s commissioner in 1989 but served only five months. He died of a heart attack at age 51, eight days after banishing Pete Rose from baseball for gambling.

Sin affects sport as it does everything else, yet Angell wrote this in The Summer Game: Baseball “requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge. … Baseball’s clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a slow, green place of removal and concentration and in a tension that is screwed up slowly and ever more tightly with each pitcher’s windup and with the almost imperceptible forward lean and little half-step with which the fielders accompany each pitch.”

Is that tension bad, and should we shun the result: someone wins, someone loses? Paul drew from earthly experience when he wrote to the Corinthians, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize” (1 Cor. 9:24). A baseball season is not spiritual life or death, but it’s more than entertainment, for as Giamatti wrote to the Americans, “Winning is not everything but it is something powerful, indeed beautiful, in itself, something as necessary to the strong spirit as striving is necessary to the healthy character.”

For those with a strong spirit, baseball is full of frustration. By “character” I don’t mean the ability to come up big in the clutch, exciting though that is. It’s more a batter not going small when he hits a line drive—but directly at a fielder.

Character is dealing with disappointment. Baseball is the sport that best reflects a fallen world in which a person can do what’s right—and life goes wrong. As Giamatti wrote, “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.”

And when a fielder makes an error? Angell wrote, “What really makes baseball so hard is [its] retributive capacity for disaster if the smallest thing is done wrong, and the invisible presence of defeat that attends every game.” Character is also bravely standing up when a small thing done wrong becomes crushing.

Angell described a postgame television close-up of a future Hall of Famer after the Boston Red Sox were one strike away from winning the 1986 World Series, then failed: “Wade Boggs, sitting alone in the dugout with tears streaming down his face …. I suppose we should all try to find something better or worse to shed tears for than a game, no matter how hard it has been played, but perhaps it is not such a bad thing to see that men can cry.”

The American League and National League playoffs begin Tuesday.

- More from Marvin Olasky

News

Black Clergy and Christians Grapple with Charlie Kirk’s Legacy

Haleluya Hadero

Many say the activist’s inflammatory statements on race should inform how we remember his life.

Charlie Kirk speaking on stage at America Fest 2024.

Josh Edelson / Contributor / Getty

Many Black pastors and Christians are contesting the fond memorialization of conservative activist Charlie Kirk within the political right and pockets of evangelicalism, saying they denounce Kirk’s assassination but can’t honor the legacy of a man who used harmful racial rhetoric.

The divide mirrors a national rift over how to remember the influential 31-year-old, who was fatally shot this month while speaking at a college in Utah. Kirk’s death sparked renewed fears about the rise of political violence in America and ushered in heated debates about the activist, a close ally of President Donald Trump who organized young conservatives across the country.

Supporters of Kirk, including some who spoke at his memorial service earlier this week, have lionized the activist as a martyr who died defending Christian values. But in pulpits, media interviews, and social media posts, many Black leaders and Christians are highlighting a litany of Kirk’s past statements they consider insulting, racist, and out of line with Scripture. That, they say, should also color how the country recounts and remembers his legacy.

“I agree (we need to) lament over his unfortunate, senseless and I’ll go so far as saying demonic murder,” said Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas. “We can all identify with a wife losing her husband and children losing their father.”

But, McKissic added, “we cannot overlook the fact that his remarks about race are unfortunate and reprehensible.”

Kirk’s critics point to several statements the activist made over the years including a comment he made while discussing crime on his radio show in 2023: In urban America, he said, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.”

That same year, Kirk said four prominent Black women who supported affirmative action—including former first lady Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—“do not have the brain processing power” to be taken seriously and “had to go steal a white person’s spot.”

Separately, a news story published last year quotes Kirk as saying Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful” and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “huge mistake” because it ushered in a “permanent DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) “bureaucracy.” While discussing DEI programs another time, he said he wanted a “cookie-cutter” pilot and not someone named “LaQueesha James.”

After the assassination, the Southern Baptist Convention released a statement of lament and a call for justice: Christians are “rightly grateful for Charlie Kirk’s public witness to Christ,” pro-life causes, and “a host of other moral issues.” Kirk, who founded the youth organization Turning Point USA, went onto college campuses, set up a table, and debated with students on a range of hot-button issues, including gender and sexuality.

“We rightly appreciate the profound impact Charlie Kirk has had on our young people, inspiring them to live with bold conviction and take righteous action,” said the statement, which listed leaders of various SBC entities as signatories.

But the SBC did not mention any areas of disagreement. McKissic, whose church loosened ties with the denomination in recent years, said that in 2009, the SBC passed a resolution applauding the electoral victory of former president Barack Obama while also criticizing some of his policies. He criticized the “double standard” on X, saying, “Along with the unanimously agreed upon lament, … why can’t you mention the areas of disagreement?” One SBC-affiliated pastor who has done that from the pulpit, though, has suffered backlash.

The most widely circulated criticisms of Kirk have come from progressive voices within the traditional Black church, which has historically spoken out on social and racial issues. Howard-John Wesley, senior pastor of Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, said in a sermon at his church that the activist “did not deserve to be assassinated.” But at the same time, Wesley said he was “overwhelmed” seeing the US flag at half-staff and honoring a man who had “spent all of his life sowing seeds of division and hate into this land.”

“How you die does not redeem how you lived,” the Baptist pastor said in a passionate sermon which received applause from the congregation. His statements have since made the rounds on social media, as have similar pulpit statements by other prominent Black pastors, including Atlanta’s Jamal Bryant and Frederick D. Haynes III, the senior pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas.

Others have taken a more subdued tone. The Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the largest Pentecostal denomination in the US, said in a public statement that comments on Kirk’s death “from individual leaders that do not reflect love, healing, and compassion” do not represent its official position.

“Even in moments of disagreement or division, the Church must stand as an agent of healing, a beacon of light and reconciliation. Our denomination’s voice is one of compassion, not condemnation,” said J. Drew Sheard, COGIC’s presiding bishop. Meanwhile, Patrick L. Wooden Sr., a COGIC bishop who oversees churches in three East Coast states, is encouraging people to do their own research into Kirk instead of listening to sound bites.

“Many times, some of those voices that you trust—they’re just simply not telling you the truth,” Wooden said in a video posted on his church’s YouTube page while recounting how Kirk had penned a supportive foreword for a book written by his son-in-law, John Amanchukwu. “He said this … about a Black man,” Wooden noted after reading the foreword. “That doesn’t sound like a racist to me.”

A subset of Black Christians say that they acknowledge Kirk has made racially harmful statements but that emphasizing it so quickly in the aftermath of his assassination also sends the wrong message.

“I’m disappointed in both sides and how they’ve responded,” Justin Giboney, a Black minister who leads a Christian civic organization called the And Campaign, told the rapper Lecrae on a podcast episode released this week. “Even if you look at it from the center-left of the church, I think we missed an opportunity, because one of the biggest parts of moral clarity is rightly ordering and prioritizing things.”

An honest discussion about Kirk and his statements needs to be had, Giboney said, but “the number one lesson the church should have wanted people to get out of this was that this was tragic, wicked, and it never should have happened. A lot of people on the left said that, but then they said ‘but’ real quick” so they can frame the narrative around his life.

Giboney concluded, “The problem is that it got very tribal.”

- More from Haleluya Hadero

News

A Sudden Death: Voddie Baucham, Who Warned the Church of Fault Lines

Kate Shellnutt

Known for confronting critical theory, moral relativism, and secular ideologies, Baucham died a month into leading a new seminary in Florida.

Photo courtesy of Voddie Baucham / Edits by CT

Popular Reformed speaker and author Voddie Baucham Jr. died suddenly after suffering a medical emergency on Thursday. He was 56.

Throughout his ministry career, Baucham appealed to the authority of Scripture while speaking of clashes between Christianity and secular worldviews around social justice, critical race theory, moral relativism, and religious tolerance. The father of nine advocated home education and family discipleship.

After serving nearly a decade in Zambia, Baucham was just a month into his first semester as president of Founders Seminary in Cape Coral, Florida, when he died. In a video with Founders Ministries president Tom Ascol, Baucham said he was excited to be “training men with sharp minds, warm hearts, and steel spines” in the new program.

Founders Ministries announced his death Thursday evening. The ministry asked for prayer for his family and quoted Psalm 116:15, which says, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (ESV).

I hoped never to have to make this post. Pray for the Bauchams. A warrior has died. https://t.co/4p9vjEzhfK
— Tom Ascol @tomascol (@tomascol) September 25, 2025

Baucham had undergone quadruple bypass heart surgery in 2021, flying from Africa back to the US for urgent treatment for heart failure. At the time, he said he was “in the final stages of a catastrophic event, and within an hour or so of death.”

After his death, leaders across Reformed and Southern Baptist ministries grieved online. Ligonier Ministries, G3 Ministries, Westminster Theological Seminary, the Center for Baptist Leadership, Doug Wilson’s Canon Press, Answers in Genesis CEO Ken Ham, and The Gospel Coalition all posted tributes.

“Voddie was a Reformed preacher who loved the truth. But note what you see in his sermon videos: tears. He had a soft heart. He loved his hearers. He knew the gospel’s power,” wrote author and professor Owen Strachan.

In his speaking and in books like Fault Lines, By What Standard?,and It’s Not Like Being Black, Baucham challenged Christians to resist cultural assimilation and defend biblical convictions in the public square. “The culture doesn’t dictate truth,” he frequently emphasized. “The gospel dictates truth.” In Family Driven Faith and Family Shepherds, he described Christian parents’ responsibility to disciple their kids. He stressed the importance of husbands and fathers.

Baucham’s message grew even more determined in the past decade as progressive Christianity, racial justice, and LGBTQ movements continued to swell. He argued that social justice was not interchangeable with biblical justice and that modern ideology around racism positioned it as a systemic issue rather than sin within the human heart.

Baucham wasn’t raised in Christianity and often spoke of God finding him when he wasn’t even searching. His mother, Frances, was a teenager when he was born in California in 1969. His young parents married quickly and briefly, but his father left by the time he was a toddler.

Baucham spent almost all of his childhood as an only child, living in south-central Los Angeles. His mother was hardworking and no-nonsense but also a Zen Buddhist who prayed regularly at home. When Baucham was 12, he and his mom moved to South Carolina to live with his uncle, a Marine who had served in Vietnam. It was the first time he could remember having a man in the house.

After attending high school in Texas, Baucham aspired to attend the Air Force Academy but ended up going to New Mexico State University to play football. On the campus in Las Cruces, Baucham heard the gospel for the first time as a college freshman.

A leader with Campus Crusade for Christ, Steve Morgan, walked him through reading the Bible and answered his questions about God and sin. Within a few weeks, Baucham came to faith while crying on the floor of the locker room.

The next year, he transferred to Rice University in Houston and played football there with a towel saying “PHIL. 4:13” tucked into his pants. He preached on Sundays at a local church that several players attended. “I go for God in everything I do,” Baucham said, already a licensed Baptist minister as a college sophomore. “That includes football.”

The young preacher met and married Bridget Wilson the summer before his junior year, and they soon welcomed their first child. He ended up transferring to Houston Baptist University and joining a Southern Baptist church to get a scholarship. He wrote in his book Fault Lines that he asked the registrar two questions: “1) What is a Southern Baptist church? and 2) Where do I find a black one?”

Baucham went on to study at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and speak at several Southern Baptist schools and state conventions. Inspired in part by Promise Keepers’ calls for racial reconciliation and New Testament verses on Christian unity, Baucham put away the “Afrocentric T-shirts” he wore in colleges, stopped seeking out only Black churches, and started serving in spaces where he was in the minority.

Baucham taught and pastored at several Baptist churches in Texas and beyond. In his first book in 2004, The Ever-Loving Truth, he wrote that “diversity is not a biblical mandate. Nor is it realistic.” A CT review of it that year said such an assertion was surprising to see from an African American author.

Committed to homeschooling his growing family, Baucham also spoke out against Christians sending their kids to government-run schools. He called on Southern Baptists to leave public schools and to investigate whether local school districts promoted homosexuality.

Baucham planted Grace Family Baptist Church in the Houston suburbs in 2006. That year, he also visited Africa for the first time, staying with fellow Reformed Baptist pastor Conrad Mbewe during a conference.

Baucham visited another half-dozen times before moving to Lusaka, Zambia, with his wife and seven youngest kids in 2015 to help launch Africa Christian University. He served as the founding dean and a divinity school lecturer at the university for nine years before returning to the US last December.

In addition to taking on his role at Founders Seminary, Baucham led Wrath and Grace, a media ministry “confronting and creating culture for Christ,” and continued to speak at church events. He had scheduled a tour in Canada in October.

Baucham leaves behind his wife, nine children, and several grandchildren. His oldest daughter, Jasmine Holmes, is also a Christian writer and educator.

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Ideas

Why Many Black Christians Reject the Evangelical and Mainline Labels

Jessica Janvier

The history of a prominent church pastored by MLK in Alabama shows the reason African Americans often don’t embrace either term.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

(This is the third in a series. Here are the first and second articles).

Americans know a lot about Martin Luther King Jr., but the evangelical legacy of the church he pastored in Montgomery, Alabama, is a lesser-told story.

Like many African American churches, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (now Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church) grew from the evangelical tradition of the antebellum era. Yet the congregation’s history and development reflect the Black church’s complicated relationship with the movement.

For the third installment of this series, I wanted to write about why many Black churches with evangelical roots and beliefs don’t identify with the label today. I’ll be exploring that question through the story of Dexter, which has played a seminal role in American history.

The roots of the influential congregation date back to an enslaved preacher named Caesar Blackwell, who, during the Second Great Awakening, drew large crowds by preaching the gospel. At that time, spiritual life in Montgomery reflected the religious landscape of the country before the Civil War. The city had fervent revivals, a passion for evangelism, and Christian communities focused on spreading the message of the Cross.

Often, these practices crossed the color line. The number of Baptists in the city, for example, grew in part because of revival meetings that brought together white and Black people. Some interracial mission work emanated from the conviction that everyone was a sinner in need of God’s grace and saving redemption. But at the same time, Black people (and a growing number of Christians among them) were living under the bondage of slavery and racial oppression.

Dexter, for its part, began in Montgomery’s First Baptist Church, a white congregation that opened its doors to Black converts swayed by evangelical preaching before the start of the war. When Black congregants grew numerous enough to form their own congregation, they met with supervision in the basement of the church and, for the first time, elected their own leaders.

After the Civil War, newly emancipated slaves were encouraged by the 13th and 14th amendments and anticipated that old marks of inferiority, such as segregated church seating and white paternalism, would dissolve.

However, when leading postbellum theologians and white church leaders doubled down on racial hierarchy, a growing number of Black Christians left racially mixed congregations and formed their own churches. Among them were the Black congregants of First Baptist Church. In 1867, they established the first independent Black Baptist church in Montgomery. Then about ten years later, some members split off and formed Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The congregation soon selected Charles Octavius Boothe, a prominent and influential preacher, as its first pastor.

Boothe, born as a slave, was representative of the devout Black Baptist community around him as well as the leaders who shepherded Dexter in the decades to follow. He first encountered the gospel through his family, including his grandmother, whom white and Black people alike sought out for prayer due to her fervent spiritual life. Boothe’s family life, however, was interrupted when he was abruptly sold to a white man at the age of six.

Evangelical passion for sharing the gospel came in tandem with the harsh realities of slavery. Still, the true “gospel story,” Boothe said, “bound me to it with cords which nothing has been able to break.”

When the Civil War ended, Boothe dived into ministry as a part of his newfound freedom and became an ordained minister. This period presented an opportunity for the Black church to lead the African American community in establishing its own institutions, embracing racial uplift and planting churches that had all the marks of evangelical faith. Boothe joined with other newly independent Black Baptists and formed a convention that planted churches and sent missionaries throughout the war-torn South and abroad, both to share the gospel and to do works of charity.

After a short tenure as the head of Dexter, Boothe left to pastor another church and began serving as the president of Selma University. Dexter continued its “evangelical ministry” into the 20th century, church historian Zelia Evans said. But over time, the church’s theological scope widened with the advent of the Social Gospel.

The 20th century brought on fierce debates between theological modernists (who were often aligned with the Social Gospel) and fundamentalists. Those disagreements culminated in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, which ushered in a wave of denominational splits between the two camps. But for the Black church, things were more complicated. Black Christians saw both groups had something valuable to offer.

Fundamentalists like Dwight L. Moody sustained their passion for evangelism and their concerns for doctrinal faithfulness. But they were not as concerned with the bleak reality Black people faced in the post-Reconstruction South. Their disengaged response to the rise of Jim Crow laws and the uptick in racialized violence, supported by a segment of white theologians, was distasteful and hypocritical. As a result, a significant number of Black churches rejected the racial politics played by many fundamentalists while supporting the movement’s doctrinal opposition to theological liberalism.

Many of Dexter Avenue Baptist’s early 20th-century ministers attended Virginia Union University, a popular training spot for Black preachers that exposed students to the Social Gospel. When they entered ministry, some pastors—such as Robert Judkins and those who immediately came after him—advocated for racial equality while maintaining their evangelical orientation. They upheld the authority of Scripture and were bold about preaching the gospel, sending out evangelists and missionaries at home and abroad.

When the Civil Rights movement began to pick up around the middle of the century, the church was drawn further into the Social Gospel. Leaders like Vernon Johns and Martin Luther King Jr. emphasized America needed to overcome its centuries-long racial caste system. In their sermons, they never contested Dexter’s doctrinal commitments. However, they made it clear that orthodox beliefs alone would not improve their predicament as oppressed people. Black Christians, as a result, directly confronted racial injustices (including through a prominent boycott organized at the church).

As white evangelicals separated themselves from the fundamentalists in the mid-century, leading evangelicals like Carl Henry did disavow fundamentalists’ inability to call out the ills of society. But not everyone got on that train. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) rejected invitations from Black clergy to participate in civil rights marches or direct action campaigns. Meanwhile, the National Council of Churches, a predominantly mainline ecumenical body that currently includes some Black denominations, took them up on the offer. The result was that white evangelicals missed out on participating in Black Christian history during one of its most defining moments.

For many African American believers, the NAE’s approach to evangelical Christianity did not fully capture the ideals of faithfulness. Evangelicalism, as portrayed by those who proudly carried its name, strove for intellectual orthodoxy and a passion for evangelizing the world, but it only timidly applied that same faith toward social issues. Over time, organizations like the National Black Evangelical Association emerged to fill the void. But for the most part, African American Christians never came to embrace evangelical as a self-descriptive title.

In the decades following the Civil Rights Movement, evangelicalism’s association with political conservatism has not done much to convince the Black church to reassert its evangelical roots. Nor have the developments of new theological movements, such as Black liberation theology and womanism, that have created often unspoken factions within some major Black denominations. Nonetheless, studies, such as Marla Frederick’s Between Sundays, show that though many (if not most) Black laypeople do not identify as evangelicals, they embrace the authority of the Bible and the tenets of the wider evangelical tradition.

Today in Montgomery, the antebellum roots of the evangelical tradition still show at Dexter Avenue Baptist, which holds services every week. The church is affiliated with the Progressive National Baptist Convention, a denomination that emphasizes social justice and estimates its membership at 2.5 million.

The congregation did not make a representative available for an interview on its current-day activities. Its public-facing materials show an embrace of the “Romans Road” form of evangelism, faithfulness to the Scriptures, and Christ-centered charity work. Still, the modern-day descriptor of evangelical isn’t always a useful label for congregations that see racial equity as an aspect of gospel fidelity. The term may describe the church’s roots. But the contemporary understanding of the label in the US doesn’t describe its present.

Jessica Janvier is an academic whose focus crosses the intersections of African American religious history and church history. She teaches at Meachum School of Haymanot and works in the Intercultural Studies Department at Columbia International University.

- More from Jessica Janvier

4/15 EVENT

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