Maverick City Is Not Diluting Gospel Music

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

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

Aaron J. Thornton / Stringer / Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ideas

Chatbot Cheating in Ethics Class

Myles Werntz

Contributor

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

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Books

Review

Christ Renews Our Minds, not Our Brains

Sharon Dirckx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Inkwell

Wisdom on Loving Your Craft

Interview by Christopher Kuo

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

Illustration by Inkwell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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News

A Christian Chess Detective Faces a Mathematical Stalemate

Emily Belz in New York

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further resources on understanding the P versus NP problem

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

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Church Life

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

Andrea Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A previous version of this piece was published on ChinaSource.

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Culture

Learning to Forgive the Country That Oppressed Mine

Ahrum Yoo

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

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

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Theology

Swastikas, Castes, and Nationalism

Marvin Olasky

India’s leaders meld religion and politics.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

(This is the last of a series. Earlier episodes are here, here, and here.)

Increasingly in Indian Hinduism, as in American evangelicalism, a religious path has merged with a political path. This year is the 100th anniversary of two events: the July 1925 publication in Germany of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the August formation in India of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, the National Volunteer Society), which became the largest Hindu nationalist movement.

Pairing the two may be unfair, even though the RSS bible, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?, came out in the 1920s with a swastika on the cover. Unfair, perhaps, because the Sanskrit word svastika means “good fortune,” and Hitler stole the symbol from ancient India. But Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, shows how “RSS was explicitly influenced by European fascist movements” and “its leading politicians regularly praised Hitler and Mussolini in the late 1930s and 1940s.”

That was then, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the ideological child of RSS born in 1980, is now. But Hindutva, the RSS belief that divides all people into Hindus and non-Hindus—“us” and “them,” with “us” superior—has only grown in potency decade by decade. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi is a BJP and RSS member.

Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism all oppose doctrines of racial supremacy. Judaism is the religion of a “chosen people,” yet the Old Testament makes clear the Jews weren’t chosen for merit. But as historian and political scientist Anthony Parel writes, the Hindutva idea is that a racially superior people, the Aryans, created Hinduism: “All Hindus claim to have in their veins the blood of the mighty race incorporated with and descended from the Vedic fathers. … India is to them both a fatherland and a holy land.”

Mixed up in the religious and the political is the sociological, with its most-remarked-upon facet: caste. The caste concept is as complicated as Hinduism itself. Originating in ancient India, the combination of religion, politics, and economics melded throughout the centuries, supplying a certain security but also limited mobility. Brahmins were priests, Kshatriyas warriors and rulers, Vaishyas merchants and farmers, and Shudras laborers.

Those at the bottom were sometimes called untouchables because their “betters” historically had no contact with them—but did allow them to touch dead bodies and remove human or animal waste. In the 1950s some among the low began calling themselves Dalits—“the oppressed.” Overall, caste discrimination has weakened under some political assault yet is still strong, especially in rural areas.

India also has about 25,000 subcastes roughly conforming to different occupational groups, as children followed in their parents’ footsteps. In farm communities, upper and lower castes have almost always lived in distinct neighborhoods, used separate wells, and could only marry within castes.

Village life simplified what could be maddening religious complexity: Each village and sometimes each house had its own idols, and Hindus could merely do what their castes or subcastes mandated. But with urbanization comes some choice: With many deities (or aspects of deity) to propitiate, what if a person chooses poorly? As in other cultures, astute politicians can play on anxiety. Those in power can use concerns about identity to protect their own positions.

Economist Jean Drèze, a Belgian who became an Indian citizen and a close student of India’s interplay of religion and politics, calls the Hindutva ideology “a lifeboat for the upper castes, in so far as it stands for the restoration of the Brahminical social order.” Dalit theorists and activists like Kancha Ilaiah warn about the danger of “Brahminical fascism disguised as Hindutva” and say those in power are stirring up fear.

Modi’s government is trying to establish Hindutva supremacy in two ways. One is by force, exemplified by building a massive Rama temple over the ruins of a very old mosque, which Hindu extremists destroyed violently in 1992. The other is by making Hindutva fashionable—and some coverage of India in the US contributes to that. Bloomberg Businessweek typified bubbly coverage of religion in India with its “Faith Becomes Fashionable: Sacred sites are increasingly popular as the government promotes pilgrimages and Instagram influencers help make religion cool.”

The news of “combining adventure tourism with religiosity” through a “$60 Billion Spiritual Travel Boom” was cute and colorful:“Priests in saffron-colored robes stand on the famous riverside steps … ringing hand bells, lighting incense and waving oil lamps in the 45-minute ceremony of lights.” The Modi government has pumped money into the Indian city of Varanasi, sacred because some Hindus think dying there is a shortcut to salvation. It now has a cricket stadium with floodlights shaped like tridents, Shiva’s favorite weapon.

In Varanasi, the Kashi Vishwanath Temple streams Shiva-centered rituals on YouTube and has new halls for hosting birthday parties; a two-mile overhead cable car; and an artificial intelligence chatbot, Nandi, named after Shiva’s sacred bull. A Starbucks is close to a spot where hundreds of bodies are cremated daily, with ashes scattered into the Ganges to aid the souls’ journey onward. Sunset tours in wooden boats cost only $2 per person, but some prefer travel by jet skis.

The selling of Hindutva has some carnival aspects, but the oppression of some Hindus and many Christians is serious. As P. I. Jose, author of Hindutva Palm-Branches and the Christian Resolve, told Christianity Today last year, “India has become infamous for lynching incidents and for the demolition of churches and other minority religious symbols. Fellow citizens and law enforcement personnel have attacked pastors, disrupted worship services, and engaged in rampant hate speech against religious minorities.”

The melding of political power and Hindutva, perhaps the most autocratic of the multitude of Hinduisms, seems to be intensifying. Jose’s bottom line: “In 1998, the RSS and its affiliated groups attacked tribal Christians. … Four decades later, Hindu extremists are 40 times stronger and more entrenched in the government and society. The whole state machinery and power is under their control. Democracy is on a ventilator.”

- More from Marvin Olasky

News

‘Without God’s Permission, I Cannot Go to Prison’

Angela Lu Fulton in Torrance, California

Missionary David Lin spent his 17 years behind bars translating the Bible and ministering to his cellmates.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Photography by Angela Fulton

On a recent overcast Sunday, a 70-year-old Taiwanese American man in a suit rose to his feet to worship in a high school auditorium in Torrance, California. Standing next to his wife, Cathy, and daughter, Alice, David Lin raised his arms and sang along with the young, casually dressed congregants of King’s Cross Church: “I’m gonna lift my hands / Till I can reach heaven.”

Though they appeared like any other close Christian family, the image belied the hardships each of them had recently endured. From 2006 to 2024, the Chinese government detained David as he served a life sentence on charges related to his missionary work in the country. Last September, the US government brokered a prisoner exchange that freed David and allowed him to reunite with his family.

After the service, Alice’s friends came over to shake David’s and Cathy’s hands, as they had asked God to grant David’s release for years. Pastor Russ Hightower expressed the privilege it had been to join the larger church body in praying for them and to see their prayers answered. “When you’re in the front-row seat to watch God do something so dynamic, it’s humbling. [It’s] joyful.”

David’s prison sentence left him emaciated, and it devastated his wife, daughter, and son. Yet while speaking over a meal of soup dumplings, David often laughed and joked, jumping into stories of miraculous healings and confessions of faith.

Had he ever questioned God during his nearly 20 years in prison? “I don’t have time for thinking about that,” said David. “I just follow God’s leading every day.” At times, he hinted at the horrors he faced inside the Beijing prison, but even then he pointed to God’s goodness. Alice noted that the family doesn’t know the full extent of the atrocities he experienced.

The one aspect David described as terrible was the toll on his family as they worried for his safety, dealt with the trauma of his imprisonment, faced the foreclosure of their home, and feared they would never see him again. Since his return, the family has been able to talk and laugh together again.

“I believe [that] without God’s permission I cannot go to prison, but God always protect[s] me,” David said. “I am very happy, even though I am suffering physically, that I see a lot of people go from nonbeliever to believer and a lot of people decide after [they leave prison] to become a pastor, become a teacher, and to preach the gospel.”

A call to China

Born in Taiwan, David and Cathy moved to California in the early ’80s, becoming US citizens and eventually settling in Huntington Beach, where David worked as a chemical engineer. Friends invited Cathy to church, and she and their two children began regularly attending. David, however, stubbornly resisted. He didn’t drink or gamble, he maintained, so he didn’t need God.

Then on Easter one year in the early ’90s, he watched the Christian film King of Kings with his family. He grew so upset that a perfect person would be crucified and die for people’s sins that he “cried out in my inside.” Unable to keep watching the movie, he went to bed early.

In the middle of the night, David dreamed that Jesus, Peter, John, and James came to him and taught him the Bible. A week later, Cathy’s pastor came to share the gospel with David. He told David that if he loved his family, he needed to worship the same God as them. David nodded in response, then suddenly felt the Holy Spirit descend on him, he later said.

As he began reading the Bible, he said the Holy Spirit granted him understanding of the text, and he began teaching and preaching the gospel to local Chinese immigrants. Within a year, he became less and less interested in his import-export business and started doing ministry full-time. When Cathy stressed about their lack of income, David responded that God would provide for all their needs. Alice said they lived frugally, eating cereal donated from church members and vegetables from their backyard garden. Eventually, Cathy took on a part-time job caring for the elderly.

“He has this faith, which is incredible, but a little scary if you’re his family,” Alice said.

In the mid-1990s, ministry donations funded David’s travel to China for about ten days every month to share the gospel. “Most people don’t know [what I am doing], including my family,” David said. “I know it’s a lot of risk, so when I go, I act like a businessman, but people don’t know I do missions.”

At the time, China was opening up to foreign countries, allowing Christians more room to evangelize. Through friends and contacts, he made connections in China, allowing him to share the gospel with military officers, high-level government officials, scientists, and school principals.

Chinese Christians started inviting David to preach in house churches, Three-Self churches, and missionary-led congregations. He baptized people, prayed for them, and saw God heal the sick. One time, he prayed for a scientist with a terminal cancer diagnosis. The next morning, she felt her symptoms relieved. Soon after, she and her husband became Christians. Another time, he baptized a government official in the bathtub of his hotel room, and the two became close friends.

David recorded sermons—first on cassette tapes, then on CDs—and over the years brought hundreds of them into China to hand out. Chinese Christians made their own copies and shared them with others.

Yet with greater influence came scrutiny. In 2002, two police officers followed David into his hotel. “You are a good person,” they told him. “We already listen to your tapes, but don’t preach the gospel here.” David made no promises—and gave them more tapes.

But the increased surveillance worried Cathy, who asked him to end his trip and come home. Yet David responded, “Don’t worry. God knows what he’s doing. God needs me to be there. There’s so many people who need to know his Word.”

Capture in China

In early 2006, David applied for an official ministry license from the Chinese government. Local authorities responded by asking him to come to the police station during a trip to Beijing in June.

During the meeting, David learned that the police knew of all the places he had visited and people he had met with during his trips to China. Afterward, they held him under house arrest for months at a hotel, where they continued to question him.

The government accused him of contract fraud for renting a building in Beijing in the ’90s to start a training center for local Christians. (Human rights activist John Kamm of Dui Hua Foundation, who worked closely with the Lin family, noted that this charge is often used to target people of faith.) At the time, the Chinese government approved of his plan and allowed him to apply for a license. “Later on, I realized that was their trap,” David said.

He believes the real reason for his arrest was that too many people listened to his sermons and came to Christ. Later, police told him that they had received a directive from the Public Security Bureau to arrest him. Even the judge assigned to his case asked him to appeal his conviction at a higher level court, because there was nothing she could do.

While under house arrest, David called his wife and family to tell them the government was holding on to his passport due to a misunderstanding, that he was fine and just needed some prayer. He’d come home soon.

Yet days turned into weeks turned into months. In 2007, the US Embassy called Cathy to say that David had been arrested and was going to court.

“We were completely blindsided,” Alice said. Up until then, they hadn’t realized the seriousness of the situation.

For the next two years as David’s case went through China’s judicial system, authorities held him in Beijing No. 1 Detention Center and did not allow him to communicate with his family. When David first arrived, he was so disturbed that prisoners were treated “like pigs” that he couldn’t eat for a week. Prison guards would whack the cell door with their batons and slide meager steamed buns or watery rice porridge through a slot in the door.

According to a foreign man who was held at the same detention center in 2009, each 25-by-15-foot cell housed 12 to 14 men. Half the room was “the board,” a raised platform that stretched from wall to wall, where the prisoners sat during the day and slept at night. Besides meals, short periods of free time, and viewings of the Communist Party–run news, most of the day was spent sitting on “the board.”

“But when I go there, I see the opportunity,” David said. “I forget what my pain is. I see the other people don’t know the Lord. So I just keep preaching for all the men.”

He claimed that every cell he stayed in, he’d pray and preach with the men, mostly other foreigners or white-collar Chinese criminals. Ninety percent of the inmates in his cell would become Christians, he said. Guards would then transfer him to another cell where inmates were fighting, and he’d continue to minister until that became an “outstanding room.”

A family torn

Meanwhile, back in California, Cathy feared what had become of her husband.

“When he was here, she could lean on him. He was her foundation,” Alice said. “Without him, she was lost.” (Cathy did not want to be interviewed for this article.) In her anxiety, Cathy became fearful, which caused conflicts with those around her. Her mental health deteriorated. “Of all the people in my family, the person who suffered the most is my mom,” Alice said.

Cathy took on more hours at her job, but she struggled to make ends meet. Not wanting to bother her children, she took out short-term loans to cover the mortgage, and as she fell behind on payments, debt collectors banged on the family’s door. Alice, who by then was working in another city, moved home to help care for her mom. Eventually, the bank foreclosed on their home, and Cathy ended up living with a church friend for several years.

In December 2009, a Beijing court ruled that David was guilty of contract fraud and sentenced him to life in prison.

The US Embassy told Alice that she could raise awareness about her father but it was risky, as it could anger the Chinese government and escalate the situation. Soon after David’s sentencing, China executed a British citizen on drug-smuggling charges, despite relatives’ claims that he struggled with mental health issues. Alice ultimately decided to stay quiet.

David didn’t seek an appeal, as he doubted it would make a difference—China has a nearly 100 percent conviction rate, and overturned decisions are extremely rare. Alice tried anyway, flying to China to find a lawyer to take on her father’s case. Despite Alice gathering, translating, and notarizing evidence to prove her father’s innocence, the court denied the appeal in 2010.

“I just had to accept there’s nothing else I could do,” Alice said. “We had to let go of that control and trust that God was going to take care of him [and] take care of us.”

In 2010, authorities moved David to Beijing No. 2 Prison, a facility for foreign detainees. Initially, the prison guards told David he couldn’t evangelize. Yet because he was fluent in both Chinese and English, they needed his help translating, giving him opportunities to speak with his cellmates about gospel.

He also spent his time in prison translating the King James Bible into Chinese. (His family sent him several Bibles, as well as a biblical Greek dictionary and an archeological encyclopedia.) It took seven years for him to finish the New Testament. He also wrote evangelism tracts for non-Christians. The prison guards took his Bible away from him three times, but each time they ultimately gave it back.

Matthew Radalj, an Australian inmate who spent five years in the same prison, told the BBC this year that inmates tried to reduce their sentences by reading Communist Party books or working in the factory. Yet they received infractions for “hoarding or sharing food with other prisoners, walking ‘incorrectly’ in the hallway by straying from a line painted on the ground, hanging socks on a bed incorrectly, or even standing too close to the window.” Punishments included food deprivation, restriction of calls to families, and solitary confinement.

David also suffered from malnutrition. Every month, the US Embassy officers would visit him, and he said they would cry when they saw how thin he had become. Nine of his teeth fell out.

In 2017, things took a turn for the worse. Inside the prison, David sensed China restricting the religious freedoms the prisoners had once enjoyed. Prison guards stopped allowing Muslims to fast for Ramadan. David could no longer pray or hold small worship gatherings on Sundays. Typically, around Christmas, the staffers David had befriended would allow him to lead a celebration with his fellow prisoners for two hours and would buy the prisoners hot cocoa and candy. But that year, they not only banned the celebration but also barred any mention of Christmas.

In December 2018, Alice received three urgent calls from her father. David worried authorities would confiscate his Bible translation, so he asked the US Embassy to mail his Bible, along with hundreds of handwritten pages of the translation and letters from his family, back to the US.

When Alice saw the Bible arrive at their doorstep, she realized it was her father’s way of crying for help.

“When he sent home his Bible—which was like a man in the desert sending home his one water bottle—we realized we needed to do something,” Alice said.

Fighting for her father’s release

A scientist by training, Alice didn’t know how to advocate for her father’s release. Yet through a well-connected friend, she met people who could help her: experts in Chinese law, human rights advocates, and government officials. Through church connections, Alice was able to get a letter about her father into the hands of then–vice president Mike Pence. In April, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom adopted David as a prisoner of conscience, raising public awareness of his case.

A month later, Alice met with Kamm of Dui Hua Foundation, an organization that advocates for clemency and better treatment for detainees in China. He looked up David’s case on a Chinese database and found that unbeknownst to the State Department, David’s sentence had been commuted to 19 and a half years in 2012. There had been two subsequent sentence reductions. He would be released in April 2030.

Alice was shocked.

For the first time in years, Alice had hope. “I didn’t know the [Chinese] system was … not an impossible wall to scale. There’s holes in the wall. There are footholds, when before I thought it was a sheet of marble,” she said.

The Dui Hua Foundation raised David’s case to the Chinese government 28 times and received several responses. US officials, including then–secretary of state Antony Blinken, California governor Gavin Newsom, and former national security adviser Jake Sullivan, also brought up David during meetings with their Chinese counterparts.

Every week, Alice sent out a prayer list for David’s supporters, which she looks back on as “a long list of how God kept providing and opening doors [as] miracle after miracle happened.” At times, she wondered if she should have tried advocating for her father ten years earlier when he was first arrested. Yet advocates and State Department officials told her that it wouldn’t have had the same effect, as the Levinson Act, which created the procedure to bring home unjustly held hostages, had only recently passed, and the political climate was different. “You can see that this was orchestrated by God, not man,” Alice noted. “There was no way I could have done it on my own.”

In the midst of her advocacy, Alice was diagnosed with cancer. She leaned on the support of her friends at King’s Cross. “There’d be times where I would be talking [to Alice] on the phone and she would say, ‘I just don’t know,’” said her friend Cherise Kaiser. “It felt like God really called us together in our friendship, and I said, ‘You don’t have to have the faith today. We’re going to have the faith for you.’”

The tumultuous US–China relationship caused additional stresses, as many times it seemed as if China was close to releasing her father only for the dynamic between the two superpowers to go cold.

Then on the night of September 14, Alice and her own family were visiting her mom in Orange County when she received a phone call from her contact at the State Department. “I have someone here who wants to talk to you,” the official said.

Tears streamed down her face as she recognized her father’s voice on the other end of the line. “I’m okay now,” he said, speaking to her from an airplane on the tarmac at the Beijing airport, a free man for the first time in 18 years. Alice handed the phone to her mom, who was sitting on the couch next to her.

Through private negotiations, the US had been able to secure David’s release in exchange for an unnamed Chinese national imprisoned in the US.

“It was a miracle that we never thought was going to happen, and it happened for us,” she recalled.

David’s immediate family booked the next flight to San Antonio to meet him as he arrived at a US military base. US officials kept quiet about his release, a stipulation from the Chinese government to help guarantee prisoner exchanges for three other wrongly detained American prisoners, according to Alice. (They were later released in November.)

Standing on the tarmac, Alice and her family watched as the plane carrying her dad landed. His gaunt frame appeared as he stepped off the plane and walked down the stairs.

Alice couldn’t believe it was her father. After nearly two decades, she worried about how he may have changed and was concerned that their interactions would be awkward. But once he reached them, he gave them a big hug, and they started talking and joking. “He’s still the same!” Alice remembers her mother saying, breaking the tension.

David then met his son-in-law and elementary school–aged grandson for the first time.

The following Sunday, David knew what he wanted to do: preach. So he went onstage at the First Assembly of God San Antonio, a church that had been praying for him, and preached his first sermon from the pulpit in nearly two decades.

Courtesy of Alice Lin

David Lin preaching at San Antonio the first Sunday after he was released.

Family restoration

Since returning home, David has been to the dentist to get fitted for dentures for his missing teeth and has started a fundraiser on GoFundMe for his personal expenses, as his long detention left him ineligible for full social security benefits.

Yet in many ways, he has picked up where he left off. He’s guest-preached at churches around the country that have been praying for him. He’s created a website for his ministry, Great King Ministry, and uploaded his sermons as podcasts to share with Chinese-language speakers around the world.

In June, David met with Kamm in San Francisco. Kamm described it as an “exceptional occasion.”

“After all he had been through, he wasn’t bitter. He wasn’t angry. ‘It was all God’s plan’ kind of thing—just amazing,” Kamm said.

Alice, whose cancer is now in remission, said that since her father returned, a cloud has been lifted. She’s able to hear her dad’s laugh again and receive his gifts of dragon fruit every time they meet up. Her greatest joy has been seeing her mom restored. Cathy and David are enjoying the little things together: eating dinner, taking walks, and teasing each other. Her mom recently jokingly complained that “now I have a full-time job taking care of your dad.”

“My life is complete,” Alice said. “To see things become whole again is such a privilege and a miracle to witness.”

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

Church Life

Shape up, Sheeple

Nadya Williams

Contributor

The church needs faithful sheep as much as faithful shepherds.

Illustration by Mark Conlan

One recent Sunday, our church service concluded with the song, “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us.” First published by British hymnwriter Dorothy Ann Thrupp in 1836, the hymn is simple and lovely, addressing Jesus directly and asking him to protect his flock: “Keep Thy flock, from sin defend us / Seek us when we go astray.”

The flock here is the people of God, the church both local and universal. And that makes us, its members, the sheep.

The Bible speaks of Jesus as our good and great shepherd (John 10:11–16; Heb. 13:20), but it also speaks of pastors and other church leaders as shepherds serving under him (Acts 20:28; 1 Pet. 5:2–4). And in recent years, American evangelicalism has paid close attention to these leaders of the flock. Our books and other media are full of advice for those who would like to be good ones and churches dealing with bad ones, intense debates over who is qualified to be a shepherd and how one may become disqualified from this role, and exposés of wolves in shepherds’ clothing.

These conversations are all necessary, to be clear. But what about the sheep? Most of us are not shepherds, and just as it is difficult to be a good shepherd, so it can be difficult to be a good sheep.

This is a reality that Augustine noted toward the end of his ministry: Just as there are good shepherds and bad ones, so it is with sheep. And the struggles we experience in these two roles are often connected: Some of the worst shepherds are people who never wanted or learned to be good sheep. They always sought the staff.

The image of Jesus as a shepherd lovingly guarding his flock has roots in the Old Testament as well as justifiably widespread use in the church. David’s Psalm 23 is a well-known reflection on this idea—from someone with actual shepherding experience. Jesus repeatedly used sheep and shepherding imagery in his parables (Luke 15:4–7) and other teachings (John 10:1–18).

This language gave rise to a favored scene in early Christian art: Jesus as a tender shepherd carrying a found sheep on his shoulders. In her passion account in the early third century AD, newly converted Perpetua recounts a vision of seeing Jesus in a garden, looking like a simple shepherd. He welcomes her and extends to her a curd of fresh sheep’s milk cheese:

And I went up, and I saw a very great space of garden, and in the midst a man sitting, white-headed, in shepherd’s clothing, tall milking his sheep; and standing around in white were many thousands. And he raised his head and beheld me and said to me: Welcome, child. And he cried to me, and from the curd he had from the milk he gave me as it were a morsel; and I took it with joined hands and ate it up; and all that stood around said, Amen.

Perpetua was imprisoned and awaiting execution when she recorded this vision, her own retelling of Psalm 23 in a moment of intense fear and persecution. Yet with the Lord as her shepherd, she knows she is safe and thus unafraid, even of martyrdom—a “valley of the shadow of death.”

Her words and more recent uses of the shepherding metaphor, as in “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us,” reiterate that Christ is the one good shepherd of us all, and we are mostly called to be sheep. This is a theological truth but also a mathematical one: Even a large church may only have one senior pastor and maybe a few more elders and shepherding members of the staff. The average Christian is a sheep.

So what should faithful sheep do?

Before I answer, I must note that I’m not speaking to churches dealing with significant sin, abuse, or dysfunction. I’m writing for members of churches with faithful, well-intended shepherds who are themselves following the lead of Christ. For them, I’d like to offer three simple exhortations.

First and foremost, commit to your flock. We live in a flighty, inconstant, and noncommittal society, and that attitude has seeped into the church. Membership vows can help, but in practice, even Christians who consider themselves faithful members of a local body may not attend on most Sundays—let alone participate beyond the main service.

Only one in three Americans attend services in person at least once a month, according to Pew Research Center, and just 25 percent attend services at least weekly. Even these numbers may be too high, if respondents are overestimating their own constancy, as some other research has suggested.

Whatever the exact figures, and with all due allowances for unusual circumstances and constraints, monthly church attendance is not enough. This is not what it means to be a faithful sheep. Being in a flock means being together, relying on one another, and it is difficult to do this without forging a close connection by worshiping together weekly.

Indeed, the second characteristic of faithful sheep is that they look out for one another, both spiritually and in more practical terms. They act and even think together.

Groupthink gets a bad name in our society, and often with good cause. We even have a sheep-themed insult—“sheeple”—for people who don’t think for themselves but simply follow the herd.

But the kind of thick community life that produces the best version of groupthink is also key to the survival and flourishing of groups. It was a natural mentality for the ancient world, where the ability to work together could mean the difference between life and death. We see this in the description of the early church in Jerusalem: “All the believers were one in heart and mind” (Acts 4:32).

The premodern view of the self as part of a group no longer comes naturally to us in our hyper-individualistic culture. But the church is one place where we must still remember, as Jesus taught, that we are part of something greater, part of a community bound by supernatural bonds (John 13:34). To be faithful sheep requires us to work with one heart and mind for the good of our local churches and communities.

Last, faithful sheep keep faithful shepherds not only accountable but also well-supported. As members of a flock, it is our responsibility to joyfully serve our church community, care for the building, teach Sunday school, volunteer in the nursery, and organize care teams that minister to the sick and home-bound. The shepherd has a job, but so do the sheep—and I suspect that at least some of our epidemic of pastoral burnout could be resolved by greater involvement of lay Christians in the regular work of the church).

Comparing ourselves to sheep may not be very appealing, even without our culture’s use of the word as an insult. But God chose this metaphor for good reason, and Christ’s followers are still called to be faithful sheep. This is a calling that may be easy to overlook; indeed, we rarely think of it as a calling at all, certainly not the way we think of pastoral calling. Yet it is an essential calling, one necessary to the goodness and flourishing of the flock of Christ.

Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).

- More from Nadya Williams

4/15 EVENT

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In this series

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A call to China

Capture in China

A family torn

Fighting for her father’s release

Family restoration

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