The Next Gen Initiative

Casting a captivating vision of following Jesus for the next generation.

The Church is stepping into a new era—one shaped by a rising generation of leaders. Though Gen Z is often labeled the “least religious generation,” many aren’t abandoning faith; they’re searching for something real. The Next Gen Initiative meets them in this place and equips them to step into their calling.

Through CT’s Next Gen Initiative, part of One Kingdom Campaign, young believers are finding mentors, formation, and a vision for faithful leadership.

But we can’t do it alone. Join the One Kingdom Campaign and invest in tomorrow’s pastors, thinkers, and culture-shapers. Donate now.

See more of what God is already doing through in the next generation. Download The Next Gen Initiative brochure.

Culture

Christian Gamers Find Their People

Ann Byle

Video-game developers, speculative fiction authors, and table-top enthusiasts got together to play at an expo for “Christian storytellers in popular culture.”

Illustration by Kate Petrik / Source Images: Getty

Chris Skaggs remembers a day a decade ago when he presented a workshop on Christian gaming at the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) International Christian Media Convention. Not one person showed up. Plus, he says he got shade about his interest and work in the industry.

This past year, Skaggs spoke again at NRB’s media convention on the same topic. The room was packed. And no shade this time.

Skaggs is founder and chief operating officer of Soma Games, which makes adventure and interactive fiction titles such as The Lost Legends of Redwall series andThe Reluctant Redemption of Verity Lux. He’s also founder and executive director of the Imladris community, a nonprofit professional trade organization for game developers who are Christians.

The Christian gaming industry includes not just video games but also speculative fiction presented in game form, cosplay, film (a natural sideline for game companies), board games, comics, graphic novels, and other media. Once viewed with suspicion as the kingdom of the Devil—think the panic over Dungeons & Dragons—gaming now has a reputation as a valid artistic medium among many Christians, whether for educational, entertainment, or evangelistic purposes.

Nowhere was this more evident than at the first-ever Realm Makers Expo, a “fan convention featuring Christian storytellers impacting popular culture” held this summer in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Do you love science fiction and fantasy, but also make your spiritual growth a high priority?” asks the Realm Makers website. “Have you found that you’re a little too weird for the usual church crowd, but don’t exactly fit in with the sci-fi convention set either? Now there’s a place for YOU to find community with people a lot like yourself!”

Though the larger expo is new, Realm Makers has been hosting a writing conference for speculative fiction authors since 2013. Back then, the conference hosted about 60 people. This year’s combined conference and expo drew about 1,100 and featured workshops on developing platforms and negotiating contracts alongside workshops like Fight Scenes 101 and Comics: From Concept to Creation.

This year’s expo also intentionally coincided with the Christian Game Developers Conference (CGDC), which brought about 120 more people to Grand Rapids. Founded in 2002, the first CGDC drew about 30 people; its numbers have ranged between 30 and 70 from then on, so this year’s attendance represents a big jump. In total, there are about 2,500 in the CGDC community, “from missionaries in the field with an idea for a game to those working at the highest, AAA level of game development, from hobbyists to professionals, from those making only Bible-based games to those who are Christians in the broader industry,” said board president Brock Henderson.

Henderson is head of game development at Salvation Poem Project, the Christian media company behind the feature film Light of the World and the video game Clayfire, slated to debut in 2027. Clayfire offers an immersive fantasy world inspired by the Gospel of John, in which players “encounter saving grace and bring light back to the darkness—all while inspiring [players] to live their own lives for Jesus.”

With 3.2 billion gamers in the world, Henderson said, “the digital space is a whole new place to take the gospel to.”

A fraction of those 3.5 billion gamers showed up at Realm Makers Expo, where wizards, elves, various Star Wars characters, hobbits, and lots of folks wearing lace-up boots, belts, and bustiers wandered the aisles perusing dozens of booths and tables featuring game developers, spec fiction authors and publishers, universities with gaming majors, photographers, creators of dragon jewelry, and more. The conference’s Costume Parade showcased hobbits, wizards, Jedi warriors, aliens, and creatures of all varieties.

As I traversed the exhibition hall, it became clear how common it is for a given franchise to span books, films, and games, creating multimedia universes for kids (and adults) to explore. One corner booth showcased S. D. Smith’s Green Ember book series for middle-grade readers, in which rabbit heroes fight to save rabbit-kind. Two screens encouraged kids and adults (this author included, who couldn’t remember which buttons did what and started to get motion sick) to grab a handset and start playing Helmer in the Dragon Tomb, an interactive game that will release the same time as the book by the same name. It’s the 12th title in the Green Ember universe.

“Green Ember books have always been stories kids take with them,” said Smith. “They create art, play games in the yard, make up adventures. The game is another way for kids to access the story. We also hope it’s a gateway for kids who love video games to step easily into the reading world.”

Then there’s Lightgliders, an educational, virtual world for kids ages 6–12 created by Derek Holser and Zach Fay. In this case, what began as a digital product now has accompanying books. Bryce and the Lost Pearl, the first volume of seven, relates the origin stories of teenagers who come to alternative world Glideon from different places and times. “We moved into the books because of the opportunity we were given to expand the story. We call it Narnia for the digital age,” said Fay.

Today, the Lightgliders universe includes character creation, games, puzzles, virtual events, journaling, and Bible-based weekly activities, plus lessons and reflections emailed to parents or group leaders. Over 100,000 kids in over 100 countries have subscribed over the decade Lightgliders has been in existence. Holser said that “the game is designed as a way to redeem screen time for kids.”

Perhaps the most well-known of these franchises is Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga (first released starting in 2008 and re-released in 2020), now an animated television series by the same name. The Wingfeather Saga: Adventures in Glipwood video game, published by Angel Studios and developed by Soma Games, was released on the Roblox platform in March 2023.

“When it opened, the game was in the top five of Roblox games,” said Chris Wall, executive producer of the TV series. “It was important for us to help families and fans extend their experience with the Wingfeather world. With an interactive game, players can really get into it and wrestle with the same challenges the world presents.”

It wasn’t just video-book-game franchises for kids represented at Realm Makers Expo. Products that appeal to all ages were part of the scene as well. The Jake Muller Adventures, an audio-drama series complete with zombies and spiritual truths, appeals to older listeners: “The enemy comes to deceive, steal, and kill. Jake’s weapons are the whole armor of God.” Allies of Majesty, a role-playing game “of biblical proportions,” promises custom avatars, complete with a companion app.

Joe Bragg is creator of The Christian Board Gamers Podcast and the 4,600-member Christian Board Gamers Facebook community, where users comment on games they’ve played, gloat about purchases, and talk about new games they’re creating. The top games of 2024, according to Bragg, are, from fifth to first place, Draft & Write Records, Skyrise, Ezra and Nehemiah, River of Gold, and Forges of Ravenshire. He bases his ratings on everything from ease of play to “table presence.”

Bragg is also behind the organizations Meek Heroes Gaming and Love Thy Nerd, which “exists to be the love of Jesus to nerds and nerd culture.” “Gaming is continuing to grow,” he said, pointing to new collaborations (including with Realm Makers) and new products on the horizon such as “testimonial games,” speaking into real-life concerns like the joys and struggles of marriage.

“I want to start partnering with ministries that explore the game space. … [We can] help them test the waters,” said Bragg. “We feel like we’re entering a new season. God is lining up things such as ministries, investors, and collaborations. And there are warmer receptions to games that share faith.” With mobile game The Serpent & the Seed, for example, the creators hope that its players will “discover the supreme source of hope that is contained within the Bible’s pages.”

Yet it’s not all fun and games in the industry. Wingfeather producer Wall has experienced video games as an ongoing challenge for some faith communities. The church, he worries, has “given up on recognizing that the creation of art is an act of the kingdom of God. There is discomfort with mystery, the unexplainable and unresolved.”

Skaggs of Soma Games and Imladris said, “The church is way, way behind. It’s a great embarrassment to the church that I found ten Christian universities and colleges in this country with a gaming program with a total of about 400 kids, but one secular school down the street from my house has 600 students.”

America, he said, leads the world in gaming and is making a huge cultural impact. But in Christian gaming? No.

“Games will change the culture for better or worse, just like film did in the last century,” said Skaggs. “Yet in the church context it’s considered distasteful to game. There is grant money for other Christian art forms, but they say no to games. There is a barrier to this media.”

That barrier is multilevel. First there’s the often-misplaced desire to imbue gaming with what Skaggs calls “evangetainment,” making sure games teach Christian principles at the expense of their design. A few players may want that dynamic, “but it will never go mainstream and never influence the world for Christ,” he said. “We can’t slip a fish symbol on it and call it good.”

Christian game developers also need to produce more games more quickly—and that takes cash: “We need to make thousands, but the chokepoint is money.”

Skaggs encourages those who work in the secular gaming industry to consider adding churches to their virtual landscapes: “There are churches everywhere in every town. And what about spiritual people in your game? … There should be an underlying assumption in your work that Christians are there.”

Most fundamentally, “we need to be letting players know they are loved and valued in the church,” said Skaggs. “The huge thing Christians need to get is that gaming isn’t just a toy for kids. It’s remarkably social. … That component is reshaping everything.”

Gaming isn’t just sitting in dark basements; it’s meeting online and in real life, connecting both from consoles and around tables. It’s gathering together at a place like Realm Makers, where elves hug hobbits and swords are only for show, where the vibe, overwhelmingly, is “I’ve found my people.”

Ann Byle is a writer living in West Michigan. She is the author of Chicken Scratch: Lessons on Living Creatively from a Flock of Hens.

- More from Ann Byle

Culture

Revival of the Nerds

Jaclyn S. Parrish

On Twitch streams and in Discord chats, “nerd culture” ministers reach out to a demographic long misunderstood by the church.

Illustration by Abigail Erickson / Source Images: Getty, Adobe Firefly

A cloaked figure scurries across the screen, swords flashing. In a lower corner of the display, we see a shot of the gamer running the show. His audience appears as a string of text messages above his head, sporting handles like “tinysnorlax1” and “MarneusThrax.” The gamer is playing for a live audience—a typical day on the streaming platform Twitch, where an average of more than 2.24 million viewers concurrently watch streamers either chat live or play games like Path of Exile, League of Legends, or Minecraft.

But this is different. This is ministry.

The gamer is Dustin Phillips, associate and youth pastor of a small church in Tyler, Texas. Along with ministering to his in-person congregation, Philips also streams from his church office with the wholehearted support of his congregation. To folks like tinysnorlax1, he’s PastorDoostyn.

Right now, he’s playing the ninja-themed action-adventure game Sekiro and explaining how his viewers can learn more about his faith. A chat member has inquired where to get started in learning about Christianity, and PastorDoostyn has advised the person to read through the Gospel of John. “Look at me!” he chuckles over his headset as his character dodges assailants. “I’m just running around … trying not to die and telling people about Jesus.”

And he’s not the only one.

PastorDoostyn is part of a growing phenomenon we might call nerd-culture ministry. Like sports-ministry practitioners, these believers seek to offer the love of Christ on the common ground of shared interests. But instead of soccer goals, it’s The Elder Scrolls. And unlike athletes, this demographic often feels ostracized by the Christian community. “Because of the things that they enjoy,” PastorDoostyn explained, “they feel rejected by the church.”

A growing community of Christian nerds is working to change that.

For Christian streamers like PastorDoostyn, Twitch isn’t just a platform to publish content—it’s a place to build community. AkiAndFam, a family team of streamers (husband, wife, daughter, and son), have been streaming games like Destiny and Final Fantasy since 2019 with the goal to “create a home for people who don’t have one.” They’re honest and real online, both goofing off and sharing about their struggles.

The authenticity of the family’s interactions has created a vulnerable space for viewers too. During one stream, an anonymous chat member expressed recent suicidal thoughts. Aki (dad) and Momma Peach (mom) immediately stopped the game and focused their full attention on the participant, taking time to encourage the person and point the way toward appropriate mental health resources. The viewer left the stream encouraged and remains a thriving member of Aki’s “fam” today.

Nerd-culture ministry requires mental, emotional, and social endurance, not to mention a hefty dose of discernment. “Pastors know this,” explained Christian gamer JateLIVE, who works as a freelancer and streams 40-plus hours a week, “but I don’t think they know it at the level that I do, because I am playing games and talking to people all day.” Streaming requires nonstop conversation—talking with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people at once—on topics that range from Star Wars to mental health, all while trying to simultaneously scale mountains, battle sorcerers, and survive on alien planets.

Not all nerd-culture ministers are streamers. Charles Sadnick is the director of Beneath the Tangles, an anime ministry which “bridges the divide between anime fans and the Christian church.” The ministry’s blog, video, and podcast content celebrates the Japanese style of art and animation, making connections between the gospel and works such as Attack on Titan or Fullmetal Alchemist.

They also host a lively online community in the asynchronous chat platform Discord and even maintain several digital small groups that gather for Scripture study, prayer, and mutual encouragement. “We don’t want to be your church,” Sadnick explained, “but we also realize that we may be the strongest and most frequent Christian influence in your life.”

Then there’s Love Thy Nerd (LTN), which the website says “exists to be the love of Jesus to nerds and nerd culture.” In addition to maintaining a content platform and Discord community, LTN also holds regular mission trips to gaming conventions like Gen Con, where the ministry shows up not just to witness but to work.

“One of the really easy things we can do is come in and staff the booth[s], run demos, and help sell [game developers’] products,” said LTN president Bubba Stallcup. He believes these volunteer hours are essential to sharing the gospel with the gaming community. “We need to earn the right to speak this really heavy truth of the love of Jesus, … and they’re going to be far more accepting … if they know that I care about the things they care about.”

“Earning the right,” as Stallcup called it, is essential to evangelism in nerd culture. Church hurt, he said, is the largest challenge his ministry faces: “We as the church have at best marginalized and at worst demonized nerds and nerd culture.”

Some nerd-culture ministers think the fix for that marginalization is to start fresh. Matt Souza pastors XP Church, a fully online “church for gamers.” Like PastorDoostyn, Souza used to serve an in-person congregation in his offline hours. But after several years of pastoring by day and streaming by night, he hit a wall. Gospel presentations would take place in his chat, and he’d direct viewers to join local churches—only to hear someone had been turned away for showing up in a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) shirt. “If these gamers can’t find a church that they can go to,” Souza remembered thinking, “I’ll make one for them.”

XP Church isn’t alone. Lux Digital Church is “a digital church expression … created by gamers, for gamers.” Lead pastor Mark Lutz and his team started Lux in hopes of building something to “offer a lot of people who’ve been driven from the church.”

In Frankfurt, Germany, Philipp Bonin and his team have planted Nerch, which holds services both in person and online. Not unlike America’s “Western heritage” churches, Nerch is a plant designed to serve a particular subculture—but attendees are nerds, not cowboys.

The rhythms of XP Church, Lux, and Nerch are familiar: music, preaching, small groups, outreach. But sermons follow the style of a Twitch stream—viewers drop their comments and questions in the chat, and the preacher responds in real time. Small groups observe Bible study and prayer, then play games together afterward, much like an in-person group sticking around for small talk. Lux invites its email subscribers to play D&D with the same posture in which brick-and-mortar congregations hold church softball leagues, and Nerch does outreach at local cosplay conventions.

For many nerds, though, real-world worship still appeals, and Steve Valdez at SavePoint Ministries is here for them. SavePoint steps in where streamers leave off, connecting nerds with churches in their geographic areas. People who’ve had spiritual conversations in Twitch chats can connect with SavePoint and find congregations that are prepared to meet them at the door (and maybe compliment their Star Trek shirts on the way to the coffee bar).

Valdez reports that not being taken seriously by churches is his biggest hurdle, without question. Even when not contending with pastors who “still think that video games are for kids and that Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons are witchcraft,” his calls frequently get brushed off to a youth minister despite the fact that he’s seeking a church home for a married, 30-something father of two.

Not all churches are so leery of their nerdy neighbors, though. Giles Hash of Disciple Gaming, for instance, works with local churches to set up tabletop role-playing game nights on their campuses, not only for youth but also for young adults.

Nerd-culture ministry has grown deep and wide enough that practitioners are beginning to meet in person for training and mutual encouragement. The Nerd Culture Ministry Summit (now entering its third year) gathers ministers like Hash, Lutz, Stallcup, and JATELive for several days of keynote presentations, breakout groups, and late-night D&D sessions.

Larger, more established parachurch organizations are beginning to pick up nerd-culture ministry tactics as well. The Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board held its first virtual reality (VR) mission trip, connecting an American church with an online community in Japan, with plans for in-person follow-ups to come. Jason Martin is a video game designer who volunteers with Youth With A Mission; his current projects include a cozy birdwatching game entitled Look to the Birds, inspired by Matthew 6:26.

Cru is regularly using gaming outreach methods at the college level, and its Jesus Film Project is making inroads into VR thanks to the help of Alexander Lyons, a digital-environment artist and 3D asset creator whose work is being used on platforms such as Roblox and VRChat. For Lyons, the colossal popularity of gaming makes such ministries a veritable necessity: “If gaming is the culture, that’s where we, the church, ought to go!”

And while many lifelong nerds are aging into their 30s and 40s, gaming ministry is still a lively phenomenon among teenagers and students. Brad Hickey, director of gaming at Dordt University, not only runs the campus Gaming Guild but also teaches courses such as “Engaging the World of Gaming,” which equips students to pursue their love of games in concert with their love of Christ. John Merritt, head esports coach at Warner University, is building this Christian university’s esports program with expressly redemptive intent. “To the gamers I’m a gamer,” he said, “that I might save some.” Satellite Gaming is running the ministry playbook in esports, putting on afterschool gaming groups in partnership with public schools.

For these younger players, the fallout from the Satanic Panic is lore, not lived experience. Satellite Gaming’s executive director, Jamie Harris, rarely even bothers using the word nerd with the students he serves, simply because the term isn’t meaningful for them. When the entire football team plays Fortnite, it’s hard to think of gamers as a target for scorn (or swirlies).

For adult nerds, though, past pain remains a barrier to the gospel. “Turn or burn!” protestors are fewer and farther between at Gen Con, but attendees remember when there were more. Nerd-culture ministers are familiar with this pain because they carry it as well. “Church was not fun,” recalls Momma Peach of AkiAndFam. “It was really painful at times. It was really hard. And I walked away from church for a very, very long time.”

In this context, explained Stallcup, a gospel presentation often starts with an apology for how the church has failed nerds and a commitment to do and be better. “It may not be my fault,” said Stallcup, “but it is my problem.”

Jaclyn S. Parrish is a geek and gamer who has written for The Gospel Coalition, Christ and Pop Culture, and Love Thy Nerd. She is working on a book about the theology of fun.

- More from Jaclyn S. Parrish

News

Where Refugees Were Seen as an Opportunity from God

Ken Chitwood

In Sweden, a church continues to advocate evangelism of Muslims, despite criticism from all sides.

Asylum seekers arrive at a train station in Malmo, Sweden.

Johan Nilsson/AFP via Getty Images

Joakim Lundqvist never thought he would be pastor to hundreds of people named Muhammad.

And yet, in the wake of Europe’s influx of asylum seekers from conflict zones in Muslim-majority countries including Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, he and his church, Livets Ord (Word of Life) in Uppsala, Sweden, saw their own dramatic increase in newcomers—many of them Muslim.

And many of them interested to learn about Jesus.

In the last ten years, Lundqvist said Word of Life has seen more than 900 Muslims convert to Christianity and 450 graduate from the charismatic megachurch’s Bible school.

Founded in 1983 by Ulf Ekman, the church has grown into a significant force within the charismatic movement, with thousands of members in Uppsala and international centers around Europe and in Russia, the Middle East, and Asia.

As debates around immigration in Europe have resurged in recent days, rhetoric remains emotionally charged across the continent. Populist voices continue to frame migrants—particularly Muslims—as a threat to European identity. Mainstream political leaders urge more nuanced dialogue with an appreciation for multiculturalism and respect for the tradition of human rights.

Lundqvist takes a different approach. He says the whole situation might just be “God doing a new thing.”

Though he personally feels there have been issues with Europe’s immigration and integration systems, he told CT that he also believes “inside every problem is a possibility. And the possibility here is the mass conversion of Muslims in Europe.”

A decade after a record 1.3 million migrants arrived in Europe in 2015, churches like Lundqvist’s have undergone massive changes, many of them welcoming asylum seekers and new converts from countries where missionary efforts have often been frustrated.

Lundqvist—who now serves at a Word of Life church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and another in Dallas, Texas, but continues to preach regularly in Uppsala—told CT that when migrant and refugee arrivals to the EU were at their peak, his pastoral team received a “prophetic word.”

Rather than complain about what they saw as “liberal immigration laws,” they felt called to embrace a “new wave of missions,” seeing “an opportunity for the Gospel” in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. Sharing the vision with their members, Lundqvist and other pastors got to work. No strategy was disregarded, no method not given a chance. They put up “Refugees Welcome” signs and hosted parties where they made gospel presentations. They engaged in street evangelism, targeting newcomers and the neighborhoods where they lived.

They also pioneered brazen mission initiatives in Muslim-majority countries. In one particularly controversial move, Lundqvist announced in July 2016 that the church would use drones to drop thousands of “pill box”-sized Bibles over territory controlled by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The tactic was criticized because of drones’ association with violent military intervention, but Word of Life’s mission pastor defended the move, comparing it to Bible smuggling during the heights of the Cold War.

The efforts, for all the controversy they courted, were effective, according to Lundqvist. “We found it much easier to share Jesus with Muslims than with everyday Swedes,” the pastor said, “to the point that 75 percent of those who accept Christ at our church are former Muslims.”

Across Europe, church leaders and missiologists say a notable number of Muslim migrants and refugees have embraced Christianity over the last decade. Explanations of the conversions run the gambit: some attribute it all to God, some to cynical attempts to game the asylum-system, and some to sociological factors, like the need to belong.

Reliable statistics are hard to come by. According to Duane Alexander Miller, an Anglican priest and scholar of contextualization and conversion at the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Madrid, some estimates may be exaggerated. Nevertheless, the numbers suggest something significant is happening.

“We are seeing more conversions from Islam to Christianity in the last 60 years than in all the years since the birth of Islam,” Miller said.

Even so, Miller urges caution. Not only are there questions around the reliability of the numbers cited and conversions in the opposite direction, but there are also other challenges, he says.

Discipleship, spiritual growth, and church rendition are often difficult. Attracting a large number of converts at a church is no guarantee that those people will continue in the faith in five, 10, or 50 years.

“Getting a person to convert or be baptized can be, relatively speaking, quite easy,” Miller said.

The strangeness of the new community, combined with pressures from family and friends, can take a toll on new converts. To Christians tempted to celebrate when they see big numbers or hear stories like Word of Life’s, Miller cautions, “It’s not a time to pat ourselves on the back; the work has just begun.”

Some scholars have also been critical of the conversions, pointing out that while Word of Life and churches like it present themselves as welcoming, they can also cultivate anti-Muslim attitudes.

Emma Sundström, a doctoral student in theology at Uppsala University, studies the conversion narratives—testimonies—of Muslims who have become Lutherans.

The testimonies are not all the same, she said, but vary a good bit by context. In East Africa, for example, converts often talk about the power of Christianity, miraculous healings, and how they saw prayers answered. In Europe, she heard far less about the supernatural.

“You get this sort of different view that conversion is about church being a place where they felt welcomed and found a home,” she said.

That is sometimes paired with aggressive criticism of Islam. This makes sense, Sundström said, as converts want to make it clear why they changed from one religion to another. On the other hand, it can also be because of the language coming from churches like Word of Life. She worries the social implications of rhetoric that makes it seem like all Muslims are bad.

Word of Life has faced criticism for this. The church’s founder once declared Islam an “anti-religion” filled with violence and hatred. Though Muslims are monotheists, he claimed it is nothing like Christianity and Judaism. Ekman even said that Quran has no concept of peace or forgiveness—claims that Islamic experts and Muslims point out is simply untrue.

The church’s publishing arm has also released a book portraying Islam as a global threat and raising alarms that, because of declining birthrates, European Christians going to be replaced.

Word of Life has distanced itself from the publications, saying the church does not endorse every line it prints, and the congregation does not all agree on every issue.

Word of Life’s conversions have also been called into question, even by migration authorities arguing that conversions may be more about cultural assimilation or procuring asylum than genuine religious transformation.

As Word of Life continues its work in Uppsala, it remains a testament to the complexities and challenges of religious outreach in a multicultural Europe.

Miller defends the church and others like it. He said Christians working to convert Muslims is one of the complexities of multiculturalism, but people of faith should not have to shirk from the religious responsibility to evangelize.

“I’m not a polemicist, but Christians should, in good conscience, have the freedom to claim that Christianity is better than Islam,” said Miller. “They should do what they feel called to. It’s good to have a variety of approaches.”

The church maintains their mission is rooted in love. Lundqvist said Christians must be up front with what they believe, even if it offends. At the same time, he believes love will overcome any issues people might have with him or the Uppsala church.

“I think that’s the road,” Lundqvist said. “Be full of love for God and for these people. Then, even controversial elements will be less of a problem.”

- More from Ken Chitwood

Theology

Good Things on the Way

Russell Moore

Columnist

Russell Moore highlights CT’s critical mission in this polarized moment.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Pexels

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

I told all of you that the weeks from mid-August to mid-September would be kind of sporadic here, because my travel schedule right now is insane. But I think your patience will pay off, because I’ve been working on some huge projects—some I can tell you about now and some I’m not allowed to until just a little bit later.

I can now say that I am working on a new book, Hope Against Hope: Reclaiming Sanity and Meaning in an Age of Anxiety and Emptiness, with Nelson Books. I am really, really excited about this because it’s a lot of things that I’ve been wanting to say for a long, long time.

Like every other book I’ve written, it is grounded both in the conversations I’m having with people right now and what I see coming over the horizon, both in terms of challenges and possibilities. It’s about where I see the world heading and what we are called to do about it and through it, especially when the words Christian and hope seem to have lost their meanings. I have also signed a contract for another book, which I’m not allowed to talk about yet but will as soon as I can.

Like everybody, I go through fallow and dry times. But looking back, I can see that all kinds of ideas were coming together under the surface during those times that I wasn’t aware of. Then those ideas tend to come erupting to the forefront seemingly all at the same time.

It’s exciting for me but also frustrating when I have so much I want to say and create and don’t know how to get it all done. That has all ramped up lately. It’s the good kind of frustration where I am in a “flow” of creativity and want to keep it going, rather than stop-start-stop-start.

In addition to my regular column and weekly essays, the podcast has grown beyond what I can handle in ways that are surprising to me. We celebrated over a million listens this month, and I’m kind of stunned.

I started that podcast (originally called Signposts, which I prefer, but I lost the argument) as a kind of side conversation, back in the ERLC days, building off of The Cross and the Jukebox show from even further back in the Southern Seminary days. I thought it would be a place where a few people could listen in on conversations I wanted to have. It’s expanded far beyond that—and I am having fun with it while also frenetically trying to keep up.

We have some interesting new avenues for the show on the way—including one that, if it works out, will cause me to jump up and down with excitement, and I mean that literally. So stay tuned on that.

Plus, we have some fun new projects planned in the Resources area that I also can’t talk about yet, and I am trying not to leak them out to you because they are going to be really, really fun for me.

A few years ago, Tim Dalrymple asked me to take the title of editor in chief here at CT, and I said I would for a little while until I could cultivate somebody who could do (and enjoy) the parts of that that I hate. I said to him, “I’m a writer, not a meet-er.” I thought the person I would cultivate would be a younger journalist who is a news journalist, which I am not, but who would need some seasoning in theology, ethics, and cultural analysis. And then God sent me Marvin Olasky.

For those of you who don’t know Marvin, he was the titanic editor of World magazine for many years, and his blood type is ink. I would read World every week back when it was in its golden age, and I would quite often open up an issue with a low whistle and comment, “I can’t believe he is courageous enough to take on that.”

I wouldn’t have known then how to describe it, but after seeing lots of hacks for whom truth is a brand rather than a way, I do now. He was and is someone who sees truth as an objective reality outside of us, not the sum total of opinions of whoever is on our “side” (whatever our “side” means for people who say that Jesus is Lord).

I finally convinced Marvin to take the editor in chief parts of this role so I can expand all this writing and speaking without collapsing. I was able to sell it to the powers that be at CT by noting that they could get the best of both of us if they let me have it this way.

It took a while (over a year and a half), but I was persistent, and they are now allowing me to hand the day-to-day to someone who has proven he not only can do it but also can change the world (no pun intended) as he does. And I now have the title I want: editor at large and columnist, the language used for Philip Yancey during the days when his writing changed my life as a teenager.

The only thing that will change is that I will have the time and space to “create content” (to use a phrase I hate). That means that I will be able to write to you every week without wondering every Tuesday whether it is going to get done in time to send it, and we’ll be able, finally, to expand out the podcast offerings in ways some of you have been asking to happen. Jiminy Cricket is on my shoulder telling me not to give away some surprises that I’m excited to show you, since I don’t yet have permission to unveil them, so I will listen to him.

One of the passages of Scripture that’s been on my mind a lot the last decade is this one, from when King Jehoiakim burned the scroll on which Jeremiah had been dictating. I’m no Jeremiah, but I’ve known a Jehoiakim or two. And I identify less with the “weeping” side of Jeremiah than with his description of himself as having a fire in his bones (20:9) to express what he knows God has given him to say.

That’s why I always smile when I read the matter-of-fact way the Book of Jeremiah puts it: “Then Jeremiah took another scroll and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah, who wrote on it at the dictation of Jeremiah all the words of the scroll that Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire. And many similar words were added to them” (36:32, ESV).

“And many similar words were added to them.” In a time when people are scared to say what they really think, I am firmly convinced that that’s what is needed from those who believe that this stuff really matters. And I do.

So let’s do it—and bear with me as the scattershot appearance of this newsletter and the rerun or two of the podcast comes to an end, and I can whirl out the stuff I’ve been planning for y’all. This is the new phase I’ve been praying for, and I’m excited to get to be able to be both Moore and to the point!

Russell Moore is editor at-large and columnist at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Culture

Melanie Penn Sings the Resurrection Story

Interview by Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

The Broadway actress turned singer-songwriter talks about her new album and the value of sacred music outside of Sunday mornings.

Image courtesy of Melanie Penn

For a long time, Melanie Penn thought her voice would always be a vessel for music written by someone else. The classically trained Nashville-based singer-songwriter got her start in the early 2000s as a Broadway vocalist, performing roles like Sandy in a national tour of Grease.

Even after she became a worship leader at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan (led by the late Tim Keller), Penn saw songwriting as an intimidating undertaking, something meant for people with another kind of gift. Her gift, as she saw it, was singing.

But in 2005, Penn realized she was singing songs to herself throughout the day: her songs. She had lyrical and melodic ideas—lots of them—and she started to wonder if songwriting wasn’t so forbidding and mysterious after all. She reached out to Ben Shive, a Nashville-based producer and songwriter and now her long-term collaborator, to see if he would work with someone new and determined.

Twenty years later, Penn has found a home in Nashville, continuing to collaborate with Shive and a community of Christian musicians on projects like Anchor Hymns. Her 2017 Christmas album, Immanuel, was a musical study in perspective. Penn brought her experience as an on-stage performer to her songwriting, capturing the different voices and points of view of characters in the Christmas story.

Penn’s new album, The Rising (which released September 19), is a resurrection album. She’s adamant that it’s not for Easter alone, though it does invite listeners to inhabit the story from the perspectives of Peter, Thomas, Mary, and other biblical characters.

The Rising seamlessly blends story and worshipful reflection across tracks that range in style from intimate and folk-influenced songs to upbeat chamber pop. Penn takes moments from Scripture’s narrative—like Thomas’s encounter with the risen Christ—and expands them, inviting listeners to join with the disciple in asking for confirmation and assurance in the midst of doubt.

Penn spoke with CT about The Rising, her path from Broadway performer to singer-songwriter, and her approach to musical storytelling.

A lot of Christian musicians start out in Nashville. It seems to be where all of the action is, the place where performers have the best shot of getting a foot in the door. But you began in New York City in musical theater. Can you talk about your path from Broadway to the kind of songwriting you do now?

In college, around my junior year, I realized that I wasn’t going to have a career in classical music. I’m classically trained. I was singing opera, and my voice just topped out. There were things that my voice just wouldn’t do.

But I had good tone and clarity, and I was good with languages, so there were a lot of things going for me. And I loved musicals. So I decided to go to New York and try to make it on Broadway. For some reason I thought that would be easier.

I became an equity actor. I did a lot of cool stuff off-Broadway. I did a major national tour with Grease. But gosh, that’s a hard life.

Still, I really wanted to sing—though the through line in all of my early career is that I was always singing other people’s words. I thought that songwriting was for certain special people, and I put myself in the “non-special” category.

Once I realized that I was writing my own songs and that I might be able to do this, it was like I opened a pressure valve and all this steam started coming out. I just kept writing.

Ben [Shive] hates this story, but this is really what happened. I read an article in a magazine that said Andrew Peterson was the best Christian songwriter of that moment, so I got on Andrew Peterson’s website and saw that his latest CD was produced by Ben Shive. I messaged Ben on MySpace, and two weeks later I was in Nashville playing through demos.

When did you realize that you liked writing songs that center narrative storytelling? That’s been a hallmark of your music on Immanuel and now on The Rising.

I don’t use a lot of abstract poetry in my writing. I’m very direct. I like listeners to know exactly what I’m talking about. There are some artists who really dwell in the land of the abstract and they create a mood or vibe. But I want someone who is adjacent to Christianity to find my music and be able to understand it.

With Immanuel, I stumbled into this narrative style of writing by mistake. I wrote a song for the three wise men called “Follow the Star.” Then a couple of days later I wrote “Isaiah’s Song,” which is the first track of the album. At that point I didn’t even recognize that I was writing a Christmas album.

When I realized that I had this common thread, first-person perspectives from different moments of the Nativity, I was off to the races.

I so easily accessed what I had been doing on stage, which was inhabiting a character. I had been trained to see the world through someone else’s eyes and think about what’s motivating that person.

Your training has provided you with a broad musical vocabulary, which is audible in your eclectic style. What were some of the influences that you tried to bring to bear on The Rising?

The Rising is different from Immanuel because Ben and I cowrote all of the songs. This was a more collaborative project.

One thing we have in common is that we love the music of Stephen Sondheim. I’m obsessed with the way he does story and his lyrical richness. There are unexpected rhymes, slow reveals.

Sonically, I’m definitely influenced by the lush pop of the 1980s. Judy Collins is a big influence. And you can hear that Ben has really leaned into his gift for symphonic arranging over the past few years. He brings this sophisticated, orchestrated voice and sensibility to the music on the album.

How does the vocal storytelling you do in The Rising differ from the storytelling and acting you did on Broadway? Obviously there are some big differences between how you sing when you’re projecting for a big theater, but what are the similarities and differences when it comes to musically inhabiting these characters?

An album setting is so much more intimate. I’m always thinking about clarity, almost holding back. On a Broadway stage, it’s all about the money note. But I don’t think an album is the right place for that, at least for me. I want someone to hear my voice and find it calming, with a pure, gentle quality.

In a live setting, I can make things a little more exciting, leaning into moments when I can show off some vocal prowess and deliver.

Is there a song on The Rising that feels more personal to you than the others? Was there a character you identified with in particular?

Well, I’m an actress, so I found my way to identify with everyone. But the song for Thomas was the one that I very intentionally wanted to lift out of the narrative and give to a modern person who is doubting, for the deconstructed person who has walked away from faith.

Deconstruction’s not really a thing where I was living in the Northeast. But here in the South, I have met so many people who are deconstructing because they were all in on faith and Jesus, but then something happened. There was trauma, and they just can’t stay. They haven’t healed.

I wanted the song for Thomas to be for that time of deconstruction, Thomas sings this line, “I already lost you one time; I can’t do it again.” This is for that place of unbelief, wanting to believe, not knowing which end is up. At one point in the narrative in John’s gospel, Thomas says, “Let’s go to Jerusalem and die with him.” Thomas was all in.

You worked as a worship leader in Tim Keller’s church for a time. Did you ever consider gravitating toward writing worship music or pursuing a career as a worship leader at a different church?

I really like writing songs for people’s daily lives, as a way to relate to an audience outside of congregational worship. But then the question is “Where is the home for this?” It’s not for Christian radio, and it’s not for Sunday morning.

But I love writing this way, and I want to continue writing this way. I think the future for music like this is going to be in live concert experience.

The Rising is a whole work. A friend described it to me as an oratorio, and I love that description. It’s complete. It’s a journey. And I want to find settings to share it.

As someone who honed a gift for songwriting after thinking you didn’t have the ability, what would you say to people who feel a pull toward creating music but don’t see themselves as writers?

It never feels natural. It’s like going to the gym. It’s difficult work. I think we have to cut through this idea that if you’re good at making art, you just breathe and it comes out. That notion keeps a lot of people back because they start and it feels hard. Then they start to believe that they just aren’t good at it.

I ask for help. I ask God for help, and I say to God, “I’m available.” I do think there is a supernatural exchange that can happen and that God is willing to pour out skills, wisdom, and increased creativity. Asking is really important.

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the worship correspondent for Christianity Today. Her book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families, cowritten with Melissa Burt, will be released this October.

- More from Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

News

Church Discipline Is Still the Exception

David Roach

But it’s making a comeback in some circles, including among Reformed congregations that emphasize church membership.

Luis Quintero / Pexels

When a church member left her husband and moved in with another man, pastor Aaron Menikoff thought about the couple’s two young children.

“I wanted to be able to one day tell these kids that we did everything we could to save their parents’ marriage,” said Menikoff, pastor of Mt. Vernon Baptist Church in Sandy Springs, Georgia.

So Mt. Vernon Baptist initiated the church discipline process. Leaders asked the woman to live out her Christian profession by returning to her husband. Eventually, they excluded her from church membership when she failed to repent.

Since that case more than 15 years ago, the church has disciplined between one and three members each year—with the congregation’s support.

Church discipline “isn’t something that has been thrust upon me by a board of directors,” Menikoff said. “This is a body of Christ living out the Christian life.”

Menikoff’s church is not alone. While formal church discipline remains relatively infrequent in the US, it’s making a comeback in some circles, where pastors emphasize membership and position discipline as a form of care and restoration.

Church discipline proponents often cite Matthew 18:15–17 as prescribing the practice. In that passage, Jesus established the process of confronting a sinning church member three times, then excluding the person from their local congregation if they fail to repent.

Nearly one in six US Protestant pastors says their church “formally disciplined” someone in the past year, according to a survey released this summer by Lifeway Research.

“Formally disciplined” signifies following a set process for dealing with sin rather than a “one-off rebuke,” Lifeway Research executive director Scott McConnell said. Though the findings remain statistically unchanged from a similar survey in 2017, some ecclesiology experts see a shift in how certain churches and members embrace discipline as a crucial aspect of membership.

“There has been a slow and slight growth of it, especially in Reformed circles, in the last couple of decades,” said Jonathan Leeman, president of 9Marks, a ministry that seeks to build healthy churches. While pastors and seminary students seemed defensive about church discipline in the 1990s and early 2000s, he said, now they have become more open to the idea and want guidance on how to carry it out.

Still, the prevailing lack of church discipline is a vast shift from the norms of American church life two centuries ago.

In the antebellum South, Baptists excommunicated nearly 2 percent of their church members annually, according to Democratic Religion, a study published by church historian Gregory Wills. If that percentage prevailed today, America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, would force out more than 250,000 church members each year.

That level of church discipline seems absurd to a church culture focused on attendance and budgets, Leeman said. Plus, many Christians are scared away from the practice by horror stories of abusive church discipline—including shunning the person being disciplined, disowning a child, and allowing a pastor to unilaterally excommunicate someone.

But the decline in biblical church discipline remains striking, Leeman said.

“It’s not as if anybody ever stood up and said we need to stop practicing church discipline,” he said. Rather, “the practice gradually faded away as pastors became more interested in other things such as increasing numbers or remaining financially solvent.”

Over decades studying the United Methodist Church, Mark Tooley has seen occasional church trials for clergy misconduct but never formal discipline for a layperson. That aligns with Lifeway’s survey, which found Methodists are the least likely to indicate their church has “official policies in place for disciplining members.”

Such dearth of church discipline is a far cry from John Wesley’s practice of removing from Methodist rosters “people who were not abiding by Methodist standards,” said Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, an ecumenical think tank that advocates for the renewal of historic Christian doctrine in mainline denominations.

Christianity in the 21st century is “more consumerist,” he said. “We pick and choose our churches and move from church to church based on whether it meets our needs. No one is going to stick around for any potential disapproval, much less any disciplinary process.”

But can Christians in a consumeristic, attendance-focused culture learn to love church discipline again? Sam Ferguson says yes, and church discipline’s progress at the Anglican church he pastors in northern Virginia supports his claim.

“People respond well if it’s done initially in a very pastoral way, where there’s a good relationship and you are not immediately publicly embarrassing or shaming someone,” said Ferguson, rector of The Falls Church Anglican, a congregation of some 2,000 members located outside Washington, DC.

Three to four times a year, Falls Church Anglican starts the church discipline process, which they call pastoral discipline, with a member. That entails one of the pastors approaching a person with questions and concerns about their behavior—usually serious and persistent issues like marital unfaithfulness, refusal to follow the church’s directions in ministry, and chronic absenteeism from church.

The congregation’s team of pastors confirms any allegations, then confers about an appropriate course of action. After allowing time for repentance, pastors return to the sinning person with another call to repentance.

If the sinning persists, the church’s pastors collectively decide that the person is not a member in good standing and, in extreme cases, may not take Communion. They also provide the sinning member with guidelines for what it would take to restore their membership.

Few people have ended up being excluded from church membership at Falls Church Anglican during Ferguson’s pastoral tenure. Some members have been barred temporarily from communion, and some have simply left during the process of discipline and not returned. Church discipline observers say the latter scenario is relatively common in American congregations, especially those that begin practicing discipline without precedent or ample teaching on the topic.

Generally, Falls Church Anglican members have responded well to the initial steps of the discipline process. Also, if pastors ever hear reports of a crime or allegations involving harm to a minor, Ferguson said, the church contacts police immediately rather than only handling the situation internally.

Gaining buy-in for church discipline begins with explaining the meaning of church membership.

“If you become a member at our church, you can lead a small group, you can run for all kinds of leadership and volunteer roles, and you can vote for our vestry members, who have the authority to call the head pastor,” Ferguson said. “To do that, we expect things of you, both in terms of your theological affirmations and your way of life.”

Menikoff sounded a similar tone.

“When people hear that word ‘membership,’ what they think of is Costco or Sam’s Club or the Y—a manmade way to keep an account of who’s where. In reality, not only is membership a biblical word,”

Menikoff said, citing Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12, “but it’s rooted in the covenant community which is visualized by baptism and the Lord’s Supper.”

Not just any sin triggers church discipline in most congregations. Historically, church discipline has addressed sins that are verifiable (rather than attitudes of the heart, like pride) and from which a church member refuses to turn after multiple warnings. To trigger church discipline, a sin also should be “significant,” Leeman said.

“Significant is subjective,” he said. “But we know from both Scripture and existentially that some matters of the law are weightier. There’s a difference between a man selfishly eating all the ice cream in the house and a man leaving his wife for another woman.”

If church discipline continues to rise, its ascent may confound secular critics who say it makes church members vulnerable to attack. Ironically, Menikoff has found it makes believers feel secure.

“After we did one of our church discipline cases, we had a fellowship meal,” he said. “A young mother came up to me and said, ‘Thank you so much. I want to thank the elders for leading us in this direction. I feel safe here.’”

Menikoff’s conclusion: “She felt safe being in a church that took sin seriously. She didn’t feel like we were going to be going after everybody.”

David Roach is a freelance reporter for CT and pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Saraland, Alabama.

- More from David Roach

Books

Review

Anxiety Isn’t Unnatural—or Unfaithful

Wendy Kiyomi

Blair Linne’s memoir of mental illness shines light on why it occurs and how God can redeem it.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, B&H Books

“I am afraid because my body is not working right,” writes Blair Linne, a Bible teacher and poet, in her new book. “My mind is not working the way it once did.”

Anyone familiar with anxiety will understand the fear behind these statements. Anxiety disorder is a mental illness in which a person’s body and mind have heightened responses to threats that may or may not be real. Approximately a third of US adults will experience an anxiety disorder in their lifetime.

In Made to Tremble: How Anxiety Became the Best Thing That Ever Happened to My Faith, Linne gives a compelling account of how mental illness forced her to passionately search for God’s faithfulness.

Anxiety entered Linne’s life a few years ago, when she was in a car accident. Although she was not seriously injured at the time, she soon began having troublesome episodes of breathlessness, rapid heartbeat, sweating, trembling, nausea, and intrusive thoughts. She visited the emergency room; doctors told her everything was fine. But for months, as she tried to care for her family and teach in the church, she felt unsteady. At any moment, her vision might blur. Her heart might race. Her breathing might become ragged. Or her limbs might sink. But she couldn’t predict when.

The anxiety was generalized—her body perceived and responded to threats that her mind wanted to explain away. Many people express the unpleasant surprise of managing physical distress symptoms that won’t go away even when they “know better.”

Linne found little support from her church tradition. Many of us feel shame when sickness affects our minds, especially when it appears in our body or behaviors. Christians hold that the mind should be driving the bus, disciplining the body and its passions, not the other way round. Aren’t we commanded to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5) and “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom. 12:2)? What does it mean to lose rational control and struggle to curb our panic? Are we unfaithful? Are we already defeated?

On the contrary, Linne says, anxiety might turn our lives upside down, but it isn’t unfaithful. Denying the body’s real power to determine mental health is gnostic, not biblical. Anxiety is a natural and even expected way that human bodies express their createdness in God. Moreover, anxiety is an authentic concession to the fallen nature of the world. It can even be a way that God increases our awe, trust, and delight in him. Nothing is outside God’s redemptive purposes.

In Made to Tremble, Linne sets out to trace a theological path that can guide others caught in their own storms. It is a tricky mission. On the one hand, she wants to avoid the false message of religious do-it-yourselfers, who wave “jazz hands, glitter, and ‘you can do it’ banners,” and tell anxiety-sufferers to pray harder and “rebuke the devil.” On the other, she wants to honor the desire for spiritual answers for the suffering that comes with anxiety. She succeeds because she is a gifted theologian and a devoted follower of Jesus. Pastorally, she knows what she is about.

Humans are inherently “made to tremble,” Linne writes. All this means is that we are contingent beings completely reliant on our Creator and the environment he sustains. This basic fact is knowable by our waking minds: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7). It is also “understood” by our created bodies, which register God’s supremeness by instinct. “We’re more than animals,” a friend told me once, “but we’re not less.”

Although the book doesn’t cover medical research, I am fascinated by the animal nature of anxiety. Our brain, we believe, is the rational center that tells the rest of our body what to do. Interestingly, our gut is constantly sending other information along the vagus nerve back to the head—essentially calling the shots in the direction opposite of what we expect.

Doctors recognize our digestive system as our “second brain.” Food, movement, noises, smells, bacteria, hormones—even love and conflict!—all influence how our brain decides to act. Much of what we think, feel, and do, including anxiety, arises from what the gut says. Surely we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

The problem is that our bodies and the world are broken. The moment sin entered the world in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve were keenly aware of their vulnerability. Our body’s capacity to respond to an almighty, loving God, a capacity intended for our delight and his glory, became distorted. We now react to dangers and the reality of death; sometimes our bodies under- or over-react. Anxiety is one way that our bodies “speak” about living with sin in a sinful world.

Linne thus brings us coherently through the why of anxiety: It is not a personal failure but a natural consequence of having a disordered body within a disordered world. This sounds like bad news, but it can be a balm for the sense of fault that often accompanies mental illness. We want to know we’re not to blame. We want to know we’re not hopelessly lost.

She then turns to hope, which comes through Jesus Christ. He “suffered and trembled for us,” conquered death, and opened the way for us to be perfectly at ease with the Father. If God has so faithfully managed our worst fears, how much more will he be faithful in the lesser ones! A time is coming when all illness will be over: “Anxiety’s days are numbered.” If this sounds like an anxiety edition of the gospel, it is. Chapter 5 ends with an altar call.

Anxiety has a way of pitting us against our own bodies, but it doesn’t have to be this way. As Linne notes, we honor the body’s trembly nature by doubling down on God-ordained practices, like worship, prayer, and rest. We celebrate our embodiment with his gifts of nutritious food, sleep, nature, friendship, and family bonds.

Linne gives principles for when prayer for healing or against spiritual attack might be used—giving no guarantees, but equipping readers to take the Lord seriously at his invitation to pray boldly. Anxiety might be a time to concede our limitations and to learn new ways to cast our cares upon him. Linne recounts her petitions to God made minute by minute through feelings of heavy dread. “One of the most courageous things you can do,” she writes, “is ask Him for help.”

Anxiety is a kind of suffering, and suffering almost always whispers of failure. We shun it. Yet for Jesus, suffering was not a mark of failure but one of incomparable triumph. Those who suffer are precious to him; he will “consider their grief and take it in hand” (Ps. 10:14). Even if her prayers are not answered, Linne finds that Jesus is an attentive Savior and loving friend. She echoes Joni Eareckson Tada’s words from her 2019 book A Place of Healing: “He has chosen not to heal me but to hold me.” This is no silver lining, but pure gold.

I resonated with Linne’s insight that ministry to others is still possible and often even strengthened through mental illness. In managing anxiety, we may try to tighten control over as much as possible, but that is bondage. Amid seasons of anxiety, there is nothing more freeing than turning our spirits outward and inviting others into our life with God. Freedom of spirit in the face of physical limitation is compellingly Christlike. Linne turns the tables, showing that instead of anxiety leading to a diminished life, it can be a gateway to seeing hope and joy pour into a hungry world.

Anxiety symptoms—their intensity and confusion—are hard to describe. Linne falters on occasion by heavy reliance on various water and weather metaphors. While biblical and poetic—rough seas and rising waters often signify chaos in Scripture—too many images in short succession distract rather than illuminate. One paragraph went from ocean waves to an undertow to river rapids to pelting rain to a serene lake in a disorienting litany.

The book’s devotional cadence may inadvertently push readers toward a notion Linne critiques, that anxiety is best handled spiritually. The one chapter not focused on theological resources does mention other treatments, like counseling, medication, and lifestyle changes, but seems preoccupied with justifying them as spiritually acceptable. It may be too elevated for those trying to get relief from acute or long-term symptoms. A committed Christian friend of mine recently told me, “I only really got better when I treated anxiety as a purely physical condition.”

I understand the impulse for supportive theology, though, and I honor the outcome in Made to Tremble. The real story of a long-term illness is about making sense of one’s place in the world, and this is often a spiritual subject. Linne’s story of freedom in anxiety is a testament to God’s power and love, which shine through an experience that might have portended only sorrow. She has found herself carried like a lamb near the heart of her Shepherd, who holds his arms open to every one of us.

Wendy Kiyomi is an adoptive parent, scientist, and writer in Tacoma, Washington, whose work on faith, adoption, and friendship has also appeared in Plough Quarterly, Image, Mockingbird, and The Englewood Review of Books. She is a 2023 winner of the Zenger Prize.

- More from Wendy Kiyomi

Books

Kierkegaard Is for the Deconstructor

Haley Byrd Wilt

The missionary to Christendom is also a missionary to modernity.

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by Christianity Today

Plenty of young people may find Søren Kierkegaard relatable on the basis of his biography alone.

He once dug himself into debt during a personal crisis by spending too much money on books and coffee. He agonized over romance, unsure whether he was suited for marriage. He canceled his engagement—then he overthought and regretted that decision too.

Despair hounded him, as it hounds many of us. “I have just come from a party of which I was the soul: witticism flowed from my mouth, all laughed and admired me,” he wrote in his journal in 1836. “But I went (here indeed the dashes should be as long as the radius of the earth’s orbit)—————————————————————————away and wanted to shoot myself.”

Kierkegaard ultimately found a true path out of his despair: an absurdly hopeful, fiercely devoted faith in Jesus Christ. For him, Christianity was not an affair of cold reason or apologetics but a falling in love that should shape a whole life.

I think Practice in Christianity, his book exploring that idea (and published 175 years ago this week) will resonate with younger generations even more than the details of his life do. Of all his writings, Practice is perhaps the most urgent for modern, disillusioned people, especially those who have considered leaving the church in recent years due to doubt or disgust with the failings of Christian leaders.

I’m thinking of young people a lot like me: those who grew up attending church, then started working through serious questions about religion as adults while also watching some prominent Christians behave maliciously and transactionally in the public square.

Practice speaks to both concerns, first by laying out the existential requirements of Christian faith—we must either reject or believe the paradox of a God-man walking the earth, but we can never fully reason or study our way to faith—and second by painting a picture of earnest, untamed discipleship that bears fruit, a faith that won’t let young people down as their fallen institutions and leaders do.

Kierkegaard saw Practice as a judgment on Christendom more broadly but also as a judgment on himself, with the hopes that he could live up to the radical faith it describes. To avoid confusion, I’ll refer to him as the author, although he published this book under a pseudonym, “Anti-Climacus,” who represented “a Christian on an extraordinary level.”

Kierkegaard wasn’t just doing a bit, though. Practice was deeply meaningful to him. He privately described it as “the most perfect and the truest thing I have written.” And outside Scripture, Practice has done more than any other book to help me work out my faith with fear and trembling.

In Practice, Kierkegaard begins by asking, When we think about Jesus Christ, do we imagine him in glory, reigning over all things? Or do we envision him just as clearly as a human being walking dusty streets, an outcast who suffered and died in agony?

He argues the answer to that question reveals whether a Christian has truly become contemporary with Christ or is worshiping a false image of him.

“Directly there was nothing to be seen except a lowly human being who by signs and wonders and by claiming to be God continually constituted the possibility of offense,” Kierkegaard writes. “A teacher, a wise man, or whatever one wants to call him, a kind of miscarried genius who claims to be God—surrounded by a band of rabble.”

What madness to expect help from him! To follow Christ as his contemporary was to risk losing everything, to become an outcast like he was.

Would we do it?

Instead of reckoning with that question, being a Christian 1,800 years after Christ’s death and resurrection had become “as simple as pulling on one’s socks,” Kierkegaard writes.

“In Christendom we have all become Christians without perceiving any possibility of offense at an individual human being’s speaking and acting in terms of being God,” he continues. But “the God-man is the paradox, absolutely the paradox. … The understanding must come to a standstill on it.”

To become contemporary with Christ is to see the possibility of offense—not “offense” in the sense we usually understand it, like doing or saying something provocative or hurtful. Kierkegaard is using the word more existentially, based on Scripture: “What is the offense, that which offends? That which conflicts with all (human) reason.”

Christ must always pose the possibility of offense, Kierkegaard argues, both because he was an individual human claiming to be God—his loftiness—and because he was God present as a mere human being—his lowliness.

The Gospels are filled with accounts of people who were offended by Jesus for those very reasons. Healing on the Sabbath, associating with sinners, claiming to be the bread of life: Who is this man to act as if he’s God?

Christ himself repeatedly blesses those who aren’t offended by his presence. But Kierkegaard sees the possibility of offense as intrinsic to Christ’s role as the revealer of hearts: “It is he who is the examiner; his life is the examination, and not for his generation alone, but for the human race.”

Indeed, to try to believe in Jesus as Savior without confronting the possibility of offense is to bypass “the death throes that are the birth pangs of faith,” Kierkegaard writes. It is to skip “the shudder that is the beginning of worship.”

I have a hunch, partly out of my own experience, that some of the young people who have struggled with faith in recent years are seeing the possibility of offense clearly for the first time.

This may be because many American Christians rely on apologetics to evangelize. It’s useful in many ways, but our debates about archaeology and Bible translations will never explain the beautiful mystery of the Incarnation.

I also think people who grow up in the church necessarily start with a childlike Christianity; children cannot really comprehend Christ’s lowliness. I loved Jesus as the king of the universe when I was a kid, and I was grateful he had rescued me. This was good news!

Still, I had little clue of Christ’s sufferings, and I knew even less about the state of the world. As I got older, I learned that for all its beauty, that world was also horrific. Christ definitely didn’t appear to be reigning over it. Why hadn’t he returned yet to make all things new? My God!—I could see the offense.

I had discovered Christ’s lowliness. It’s a lowliness that chooses, out of love, to suffer at the hands of evil people, even praying for them to be forgiven while he was dying, rather than conquering with a mighty fist. A lowliness that asks his disciples to do the same.

“From the possibility of offense, one turns either to offense or to faith,” Kierkegaard writes. For me, choosing faith, by God’s grace, after seeing the possibility of offense was like becoming a child again.

Kierkegaard feared that pastors in his time weren’t forcing the question. He laments throughout Practice that churches are more likely to focus on the risen, glorified Christ than the abased Christ—even though Jesus told his disciples to lead self-sacrificial lives like his own.

“There is incessant preaching in Christendom about what happened after Christ’s death, how he triumphed and his teachings triumphantly conquered the whole world,” Kierkegaard bemoans. “No, Christ’s life here on earth is the paradigm; I and every Christian are to strive to model our lives in likeness to it.”

By the same grace that helps us turn to Christ in faith, we can become more like him. Kierkegaard’s view of continually striving, with God’s help, to be like Christ out of love for him, reminds me of Paul’s letter to the Philippians.

“I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead,” the apostle says (Phil. 3:10–12). “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.”

That path is narrow, and the journey is hard, but it is the way to life. “He came into the world in order to suffer; that he called being victorious,” Kierkegaard writes. “Only the imitator is [the true Christian].”

For my disillusioned friends, this rigor and earnestness before God is exactly what many of them have been longing for: a church that truly imitates Jesus.

Haley Byrd Wilt is a journalist whose work has been published in Foreign Policy, CNN, and The New York Times, among others. She reports on Congress for the nonprofit news publication NOTUS.

- More from Haley Byrd Wilt

Inkwell

The Limits of the Think Piece

Peter Biles

We want black-and-white truths about how we should live. But most of the Bible isn’t written this way.

"Silvretta Mountain Landscape with Schattenspitze & Eckhorn" by Ignaz Dorn

In recent years, I’ve noticed a strange tendency in myself to read essays about the craft of writing and literature instead of engaging with an actual short story or novel. I constantly read both—books about books as well as the books themselves—but often feel more comfortable with the former.

But the problem with only reading think pieces about literature instead of literature itself is similar to the problem of enshrining a certain philosophy of food over a good home-cooked meal right in front of you. We need both, but we will go malnourished if we stay in one camp and neglect the other.

At the outset, I recognize the irony at play here. This essay itself is a critique of reading habits, which, at least in my case, often seem to favor think pieces and essays over stories and novels. I respect both forms of writing and do believe that a philosophy of fiction can lay a deep and maybe even an essential foundation in the writer’s approach to the craft.

For me, John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist and The Art of Fiction were extremely helpful and inspiring. But these books offer a different reading experience than Gardner’s pastoral novel Nickel Mountain. Why?

In fiction, the author is a backstage hand, invisible to the eye, while the essay writer remains obvious to the audience, like a speaker on stage or a seasoned Yosemite mountain guide. This difference in authorial presence accounts for a lot of the reasons we often prefer the forthright essay over a subversive short story or novel with ambiguous themes. In an essay, you usually know what you’re getting from the title and subtitle.

You click on an interesting title in search of an interesting article, and if you know the author, you read the piece because you trust the writer will guide you to satisfying conclusions. A typical internet think-piece (this one included) feels more like a direct address to the reader. It’s the writer saying, “Get in! We’re going to talk about the value of writing and great books! Here’s what it all means!”

It often feels preplanned. We’re in the writer’s hands and will be cared for. We may be in the Yosemite wilderness, but we have a seasoned ranger in safari shorts and a green handkerchief to explain to us how the valley formed, who free-climbed Half Dome, and what to do when a bear charges.

It’s entirely different, on the other hand, to be alone under a spread of stars on a sleeping mat, surrounded by hoots and growls.

Reading a think-piece essay at the expense of other forms runs the risk of dulling our appetite for fiction, not because nonfiction is bad but because a fictional story presents a lonelier kind of mental terrain. There may be no subtitle to a story. We don’t know exactly what we’re getting into. The author vanishes into a constructed world, inviting you to wade in.

Discomfort may be the price of this kind of plunge, but those who swim the channel seem to generally report happily. Literary essays tell readers to get in, the water’s fine, you won’t drown. Then the time comes to actually take a dip and tread. We get into unknown territory. We’re in a new world we’ve never been to. We follow the flashlight and plow into the darkness.

I went to an evangelical college, and my Old Testament professor once told the class, “Evangelicals really love Paul. Sometimes they forget about the other 90 percent of the Bible.”

He was pointing out a tendency among certain Christians to prioritize Paul’s epistles to various churches in the New Testament at the expense of the Old Testament narratives. These letters are wondrous, of course, and chock-full of wisdom, truth, and beauty. I return to them often.

But mainly, my professor was calling out a preference for declarative statements, theological articulation, and life application over stories, which tend to be more comfortable with mystery and open-endedness.

We want to be told the truth and how we should live—and we want it black and white. We want it in sound bites and simple directives, the meaning served clearly on a platter. There’s a place for such an address, for formulas and user manuals, but most of the Bible isn’t written this way.

Most of the Bible is narrative and poetry. It’s riddled with declarative statements about God’s character and how we should conduct ourselves, but they are couched within the story. Those parts of Scripture, in my opinion, are no less true or authoritative than Paul’s magisterial declarations in Colossians and Romans. In short, believers and the church need all of it—exposition, narrative, and poetry.

All this to say: Good stories don’t always offer their pearls of wisdom with open palms. A literary critic can uncover the pearls for us, or how she understands the pearls, but she can’t replicate the experience of our reading a story on our own. Literary criticism and think pieces are essential artifacts of social discourse. They aren’t the whole cigar.

Sometimes the explanation must give way to awe and wonder. We have to put down our maps and pick up our walking sticks. We have to swim the channel and trust that we can handle the depths.

But anyway, enough of this! Now go and read a breathtaking story. The water might be cold. It may even shock you at first. But it also just might wake you up.

Peter Biles is the author of four books, most recently the short story collection Last November. His writing has been featured in The Gospel Coalition, Plough, Dappled Things, and several others. He writes a Substack called Battle the Bard.

- More from Peter Biles

EASTER SALE

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