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Global Methodist Bishops to Dance

The new denomination tussles over its authority structure—but also finds surprising points of unity. 

Global Methodist bishops join in singing.

Global Methodist bishops sing at the first General Conference, where delegates debated the shape of episcopal authority.

Christianity Today October 7, 2024
Global Methodist bishops at the convening General Conference.

Questions of bishops stirred controversy in Costa Rica. Amid the joy of the convening General Conference of the Global Methodist Church as the new denomination ratified and modified the provisional decisions of its transitional leadership, the episcopacy emerged as the one issue that could rouse serious disagreement. 

Who would be in charge of the new church? How many bishops would there be? How would they be elected, and how long would they serve? What would they do, specifically? How would the power and authority of the position be limited?

“There is a very collaborative spirit, but people have disagreements,” Asbury University professor Suzanne Nicholson told CT. “It’s always messy when you start something new.”

The Global Methodists debated the shape of the authority structure they would erect over themselves while they were in the process of figuring out and applying the lessons they learned from decades spent fighting in the United Methodist Church. There were, of course, theological and ideological reasons for their split. But for many of the people who left, the real problem, the deeper problem—the intractable, unresolvable, deeply frustrating, and hurtful problem—was the bishops. 

The bishops didn’t defend orthodoxy, Global Methodist ministers told Christianity Today. They didn’t maintain order or unity. They didn’t seem to be in touch with the concerns of congregations or to care about small, struggling churches, and they used their power to punish ministers they saw as troublesome (or just conservative). 

Many ministers have stories about being exiled. And far-flung rural churches with 20, 30, 50 people attending regularly recount with pain their realization that they were the places of exile—assigned only ministers who were being punished by the appointment.

United Methodist leaders see all this very differently, of course. And those who stayed in the denomination can offer alternative accounts of what happened. 

But among those who left, there is a consensus: It was bad. And it was bad because of the bishops. 

The new denomination, meeting for the first time, desperately wanted to avoid any possibility of repeating those mistakes. They debated the way to shape and structure the episcopacy to ensure better leadership.

The goal—everyone who spoke to CT agreed—was to set up an episcopal structure where the bishops are not bureaucrats responsible for administration of an institution, but shepherds fending off wolves and leading the church into green pastures.

“The main thing was an episcopacy that focused on teaching and preserving the faith,” said David Watson, New Testament professor at United Theological Seminary and lead editor at Firebrand. “We wanted to reshape the office for theology. If we don’t do that and there’s not something specific in Methodism we want to preserve, we’ve all wasted a lot of time and money.”

The Global Methodists built on other broad agreements as well. There was no debate about whether bishops ought to belong to a separate order of clergy, the way they do in the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican communion. The Methodists see bishops and other ministers filling distinct roles but sharing the same ordination. 

The General Conference legislation stating the episcopacy is not a separate order passed 315 to 3.

There was also broad consensus that the role should be temporary. The Global Methodists don’t want people to be bishops for life. The delegates in Costa Rica decided instead that bishops would serve six-year terms and would be limited to two terms.

“The fail-safe is term limits,” Watson said. “That’s very popular.”

But delegates did disagree about other things. One group proposed that each region of Global Methodists, which is called an annual conference, should have its own bishop. Others objected that would give the bishops too many day-to-day administrative responsibilities and they’d end up running the denomination in their region. They suggested that job be given to a general superintendent hired by the region, while bishops took responsibility for preaching and teaching in four, five, or even six regions at once.

Responsibility for a broader area would also promote more connections between Global Methodists, advocates for that plan said. 

One person proposed an itineracy system as another alternative: assigning bishops to one region at a time but then rotating assignments annually. 

Matthew Sichel, a deacon from Maryland, pointed to the Methodist history of circuit riding. He said the new denomination should bring that model back in its episcopal structure.

“Itinerancy is a gift to Methodists,” he told the delegates during the debate. “It gives you a chance to see God work through leaders you would never have known.”

The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by delegates. The General Conference ultimately decided to support what they called the General Episcopacy Plan. Bishops will not be responsible for administration but will be tasked with spiritual leadership. They will be over the whole church but divvy up regions between themselves, each taking about five annual conferences.

Sichel said he didn’t like that plan, but losing the vote didn’t bother him at all.

“These are not essential issues,” he told CT. “I’m willing to trust the General Conference.”

Rob Renfroe, president and publisher of Good News, the leading evangelical Methodist magazine, said he heard that sentiment a lot at the Global Methodist gathering. People would articulate their preferences but acknowledge disagreements and submit the issue to the discernment of the delegates.

“This is holy conferencing,” he said. “We agree on the bedrock theological issues. Jesus is Lord, Scripture is authoritative, and we want to reclaim our Wesleyan heritage. So we can trust the General Conference.”

Delegates also said they knew that they would have the opportunity to tinker with the authority structure in the future. They worried about the unintended consequences of the decisions they were making in Costa Rica but took comfort in the wisdom of delegates to come.

“The bishop thing is a work in progress,” said Jeff Kelley, pastor of a church in Nebraska. “I don’t think that this conference will settle it. We have to wade in the water.”

Since it is still a work in progress, the General Conference decided not to elect bishops to six-year terms just yet. They started instead with interim bishops who will work part-time and serve for two years.

The delegates spent a lot of time debating the details of the interim episcopacy, wrestling over how those candidates would be nominated and whether or not someone elected to a two-year term could be reelected in 2026. Some expressed concern that if more groups join the Global Methodists in the next two years when all the bishop’s seats are filled, it will be harder for those people to elect a bishop who represented them. The delegates decided that 50 percent of the interim bishops could be reelected but each would have to receive a three-quarters majority vote.

The delegates then nominated more than 20 candidates, all present among the nearly 1,000 delegates and observers in Costa Rica, and started voting. 

Delegates elected three candidates on the first ballot: Kimba Evariste from the Democratic Republic of Congo; Carolyn Moore from North Georgia, who preached about Acts 19 the first night of the General Conference; and Leah Hidde-Gregory from the Mid-Texas region. Then a fourth person won an episcopal position: John Pena Auta of Nigeria.

Balloting went on for multiple rounds after that without any names garnering enough votes to win. Ryan Barnett, pastor of First Methodist Church in Waco, Texas, went to a microphone and withdrew his name with praise for Hidde-Greggory, calling her the best Texas had to offer.

Then other candidates—mostly white men—started streaming forward to withdraw their names too.

“I thank God for the move of the Spirit,” said Stephen Martyn, professor of Christian spirituality at Asbury Theological Seminary, after seeing the vote totals for his name drop in three successive rounds of balloting. “It has been obvious. And it is a joy to withdraw my name.”

Other people in the room said they were pleased to not even be nominated. Some of the ministers at the convening General Conference had been accused of joining the Global Methodists just to grab power.

Johnwesley Yohanna, for example, has served as a bishop in Nigeria for 12 years. He had heard rumors that he was maneuvering for a leadership spot in the new denomination and joined not because he was trying to be faithful but because he wanted more authority and thought the new denomination would give him whatever he asked for. He said electing someone else as bishop allowed him to prove his integrity. 

“It’s done. I’m done. I kept my word,” Yohanna told CT. “We praise God in everything.”

Delegates elected Jeff Greenway, who served as president pro tempore of the Global Methodist Church during its transition period, as their fifth interim bishop. Finally, Kenneth Livingston, a Black pastor in Houston, was chosen. 

The six newly elected bishops joined two men already serving in the episcopal role: Scott Jones, a former United Methodist bishop from East Texas, and Mark Webb, a former United Methodist bishop from Upstate New York.

The final results were greeted by jubilant pandemonium in Costa Rica. The bishops-elect embraced family, friends, and each other, while the nearly 1,000 people in the room sang “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” 

Whatever disagreements they had about the authority structure seemed to melt with the joy as the six men and women filed onto the conference room stage with their spouses for a group photo.

A number of delegates said they were specifically encouraged by the diversity. They said the election showed that the “global” part of Global Methodism was not just a mask for conservative white Americans but a reality. And the new denomination also demonstrated its commitment to egalitarianism and the Wesleyan belief that the Spirit is poured out on “both men and women” (Acts 2:18).

“I’m proud of how that went today,” said Asbury seminary student Emily Allen. “Electing women—that meant a lot to me. And two Africans and a Black American—that sets us on a good path.”

As the Global Methodists rejoiced and praised their newly elected leaders, however, the delegates also found a surprising way to reassert the ultimate authority of the General Conference. Two pastors, Natalie Kay Faust from Nebraska and D. A. Bennett from Oklahoma, came forward with a motion that had not been discussed in any of the debates on episcopal authority, nor in any legislative committee.

“We would like to propose a Bennett-Faust motion, in the spirit of historicity of this celebration,” Bennett said. “Schedule time in the 2026 General Conference of the Global Methodist Church for bishops … to perform a liturgical dance to all 17 verses of ‘O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.’”

More than dozen delegates shouted, “Second.”

“Can we call them ‘out of order’?” Mark Webb asked Scott Jones.

But Faust pushed on, calling the motion a fitting recognition of the “spirit of honor for one another” among the Global Methodists.

“We have seen how the Spirit can move when we set our own personal pride and barriers aside and open ourselves up to new expressions of his leading,” Faust said. “This motion is encouraging our episcopal leaders to lead by example of Christian submission and connection to the movement of the Spirit.”

Webb said it was out of order, but everyone in the room just laughed at him. Jones said it should be referred to committee, but no one agreed. Delegates, instead, called for a vote.

“Do I have any friends to oppose?” Jones said.

He did not. 

The delegates voted by show of hands and the motion passed by an overwhelming majority. 

The new denomination will meet again in 2026 and hold its first full episcopal election, picking bishops for six-year terms that will focus on preaching, teaching, and spiritual leadership. And the first bishops of the Global Methodist Church will perform a dance to all 17 verses of the beloved Wesleyan hymn “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.”

News

Chinese Christians Want the Church to Adopt Children with Disabilities

After China banned international adoptions, some believers want the Chinese church to step up.

A boy basks in the sunlight from a window at an orphanage for disabled children in China

A boy living in an orphanage for disabled children in China.

Christianity Today October 7, 2024
China Photos / Stringer / Getty

Xiaofei Wang, a pastor’s wife at a house church in the Chinese port city of Xiamen, had long heard of families overseas who would adopt children with special needs from China. Some of these adoptive parents had limited finances and other children to care for, yet they were eager to bring another child into their home. She began to wonder, “Why aren’t there families in China willing to adopt these children?”

In 2014, Wang began volunteering with a Christian nonprofit that cares for children with disabilities inside a state-run orphanage. She was moved by how the nonprofit’s staff lovingly comforted and played with the children—some of whom had Down syndrome, hydrocephalus (a buildup of fluid in the brain), or imperforate anus (a birth defect where the anus is missing)—while also spending countless hours researching treatments for them.

“I once thought these children would be better off in heaven, but these volunteers believed that as long as a child is in God’s hands, they must care for him or her every single day,” she said.

From then on, Wang and her husband began to sense a desire to adopt a child with special needs, even though both adoption and disabilities are stigmatized in traditional Chinese culture. In 2020, the couple, who had no children of their own, decided to adopt a boy with Down syndrome, whom they named Zhuci (meaning “gift”).

Since then, they’ve seen Zhuci not only bring joy into their lives but also change their church’s view of the value of all people, including those with disabilities.

Wang and other Christians in China believe the church can play a unique role in adopting children with special needs, especially after the Chinese government banned international adoptions in late August. The news came four years after China stopped processing adoptions—most of which involved children with disabilities—due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Without this pathway for children with medical needs, thousands of children may face a lifetime of institutionalization.

Some Chinese pro-life groups and foster-care homes are working to mobilize the church to step into that gap. Others, like Wang, lead by example, adopting children like Zhuci and sharing their adoption stories. Yet Wang believes the Chinese church has a long way to go in championing these children.

“Our faith hasn’t yet been deeply touched by God’s love; we tend to value life based on societal norms,” Wang said. “We often want only healthy, typical children. Very few consider adopting a child with special needs.”

China’s history of international adoption is closely tied to the government’s one-child policy, which was in effect from 1979 to 2015. At the time, many mothers who gave birth to daughters or children with disabilities would abandon their babies for a chance to have a healthy son, as a preference for male children is common in Chinese culture. Having more than one child would lead to harsh fines, job loss, or forced abortions and sterilizations.

The large number of abandoned children led the Chinese government to open up international adoptions in 1992. Since then, families around the world have adopted 160,000 Chinese children.

In the past decade, things have changed drastically. The Chinese government has ended the one-child policy and is instead encouraging couples to have more children, as the country’s population is aging at one of the fastest rates in the world.

The number of abandoned children has also dropped as fewer people are having babies. In addition, more remote villages have access to ultrasounds, leading parents to abort babies with genetic abnormalities, as a doctor who brought orphans with disabilities to Beijing for treatment told The Economist. Young couples are also less superstition about disabilities and less likely to abandon a child with medical needs, the doctor added.

The ban on international adoptions—except for foreigners adopting stepchildren or blood relatives—is in line with these demographic changes and the government’s desire to grow its population.

However, domestic adoptions face their own roadblocks. Before 2021, only childless couples could adopt, and even they could receive only one child. Today, beyond the typical requirements that adoptive parents must have the financial and mental capacity to care for a child, they must also be at least 30 years old and have no more than one child.

Jonny Fan, founder of the Chinese pro-life group Children’s Day for Life, stated that beyond regulatory difficulties, there are also persistent cultural ideas about adoption to overcome.

“Traditionally, adoption has been seen negatively, often associated with a family’s inability to bear children,” Fan said. “Adopted individuals are frequently viewed as laborers within the home, lacking inheritance rights and even the ability to be recorded in the family registry.”

Fan noted that adoptions typically happen quietly. Relationships that lack blood ties are considered less secure, as some fear that adopted children will eventually leave the family to seek their biological parents. “Blood relations hold a sacred status in Eastern culture,” Fan explained.

This mindset extends to the church as well. In fact, Fan said, the strong negative connotation around adoption even impacted how the Chinese Bible was translated. In English, verses like Ephesians 1:5 use the term “adoption” to refer to believers’ new status in God’s family, but Chinese translations say, “being given the status of sons.” When Fan mentioned to one Chinese Christian that believers are adopted by God, the man replied, “How can we be adopted? We are children of God.”

Adoption plays an important role in Children’s Day for Life. The organization, which started in 2012 as a ministry within Fan’s church, sets up banners and passes out flyers each June 1 (China’s Children’s Day) to encourage women to keep their babies. Christians with friends or families with crisis pregnancies began referring mothers to the group. Members met with the mothers, discussed the life growing inside of them, and offered support to help them carry their babies to term. At times, this meant connecting them with couples willing to adopt the babies.

In total, Children’s Day for Life has helped more than 500 mothers, saved more than 200 babies from abortion, and consulted 30 families seeking to adopt these babies informally, Fan said. (Informal adoption, or taking in a child without going through the official process, is a common practice in China.)

For the past five years, the group has held a weekly “Life Open Course” online, which attracts about three dozen participants to discuss issues of life, procreation, ethics, adoption, and marriage. Last year, they read Adopted for Life by Christianity Today editor in chief Russell Moore. For many, the book was “their first time hearing biblical teachings on adoption,” Fan said. “Some indicated that their perspectives on adoption have been transformed.”

After the study, one woman pledged to adopt the baby of another Christian couple, who had found out through genetic testing that their baby likely had Down syndrome. The couple was facing overwhelming pressure from family members and their doctor to abort the baby. Despite the woman’s offer, they yielded to the pressure and chose abortion.

“Defending life and opposing abortion have always been a marginalized ministry within the church, and adoption is even more so,” Fan said. “Even my mother struggles to understand why I would ‘interfere’ in others’ family matters.”

When Fan heard that China was banning international adoption, he began developing new courses around the theme of adopting children with special needs. He hopes that Chinese Christians can begin to accept a biblical view of adoption and step up to care for these children. “The work we’ve been doing over the past decade may have been a preparation for this moment,” he said.

Owen Wong has seen the needs surrounding orphan care in China change over the past few decades. He’s a board member of Shanghai’s Love Home, a Christian nonprofit that cares for abandoned children, many of whom have severe disabilities that government orphanages are ill-equipped to care for. Started in 2000, the home has taken in nearly 100 children.

Yet in the past few years, the government has invested in its orphanages, upgrading facilities and adding rehabilitation centers, Wong said. It asked groups like Love Home to send the children back to state-run orphanages. At the same time, the government made it easier for Chinese couples to adopt by allowing informally adopted children to register for identity cards.

In response, Love Home began to shift its focus toward providing vocational training for orphans who have left their care setting, along with financial, psychological, and medical support for families adopting children with special needs.

Wong is the father of three, including two adopted children with special needs. At the Christian school where he is the principal, several families have fostered or adopted children. Yet they often face grave challenges. Families are overwhelmed by the realities of caring for children with medical needs, lack community support, experience financial strain from the medical expenses, and don’t know how to deal with the trauma that the children bring with them from their time in the orphanage. 

Wong found that about half of families who foster children with disabilities end up returning the children to the orphanage.

Yet Love Home has also seen success stories, such as Hannah Shi, a 19-year-old with severe spinal disabilities who graduated from Wong’s school, Wisdom Academy, and is now studying at Columbia International University in South Carolina. Shi aspires to become a special education teacher.

Wisdom Academy holds a Bible study group for adoptive families where they can share their struggles and joys. One family, on the brink of giving up efforts to adopt, found renewed strength to persevere as they took part in a year-long study of the Gospel of John with the group.

“For every orphan, having a home is the best outcome,” Wong said. “But for families preparing to adopt, the journey requires the support of the church, fellow believers, and society at large.”

The Wangs in Xiamen also faced various challenges on their adoption journey. In 2014, Wang cared for a six-month-old with a kidney cyst and an imperforate anus at the orphanage where she volunteered. Doctors didn’t think the baby would make it to his first birthday. Moved by compassion, Wang and her husband decided to foster the boy and give him a loving home for the remainder of his life.

The Wangs secured permission from the orphanage to take the baby home. They named him Benen, meaning “son of grace.” Despite the daily challenges of changing the colostomy bag attached to his abdomen, they found joy in caring for him. Yet after three months, the orphanage informed Wang that an overseas couple had decided to adopt Benen. Tearfully, they said goodbye to him.

In 2020, Wang and her husband sought to adopt a child with physical disabilities from the same orphanage. But at the time, all the children with normal cognitive abilities had been adopted, leaving only children with Down syndrome and cerebral palsy.

As they prayed and wrestled with this decision, the couple confronted their motivations. If we adopt a child with special needs, I must set aside all my ministry work to focus on this child, Wang thought. Am I doing this because I want to be seen as a pastor’s wife who does good things? Am I seeking praise from others? Or is it a genuine calling to love? Her husband grappled with concerns over other people’s reactions: What will people say? Will they think we wanted a baby so badly that we’d even adopt a baby with Down syndrome?

After more than six months of prayer and discussion, they decided to accept the first child recommended by the orphanage. It took four months to finalize the adoption, and they joyfully brought Zhuci home. At their church, many people were initially surprised that they would adopt a child with special needs. Yet getting to know Zhuci led church members to think differently when facing medical challenges in their own families.

For instance, in 2021, Ruth Wu finally became pregnant after she and her husband struggled with infertility for three years. Through prenatal tests, doctors suspected that the baby had trisomy 18, a chromosomal condition.

Despite their shock and sadness, the couple was inspired by Wang’s adoption of Zhuci and by John 9:3: “‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,’ said Jesus, ‘but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.’” To the doctors’ surprise, they decided to carry the child to term.

When their son was born, they found that the grim prognosis was accurate. The boy, named YoYo, had multiple deformities and was immediately admitted to the NICU. When the doctors deemed him beyond help, the parents brought him home and cared for him until he passed away after three months. “YoYo’s life was a miracle, a manifestation of God’s grace,” the couple wrote in a testimony posted on WeChat. “While many live long but burdened lives, YoYo fulfilled his beautiful mission in just a short time, shepherding God’s people and displaying His works.”

Today, Zhuci is ten years old. Although he speaks only simple words, Wang said her son fills their home with joy. He joins his parents in prayers and ends with a hearty “amen.” Wang has found that her pace of life has slowed down as she accompanies her son to the park or the beach, and she’s learned to rest in God’s presence. When frustrated or tired, she increasingly recognizes God’s compassion toward her.

In caring for Zhuci, Wang often remembers the Bible verses that she treasured while processing his adoption, such as Galatians 4:4–6, which reminds her that all Christian have been adopted into the family of God. “None of us were originally children of God, yet through faith in Christ Jesus, we are adopted as his children,” Wang said. “This divine love inspired us to make this extraordinary decision.”

News

Gordon Students Count Cells, Hoping to Unlock Cancer Mysteries

Cutting-edge microscopy research could explain why some get sick while others don’t.

Gordon College students research cancer cells using Two Gordon College research assistances work on immunofluorescence microscopy.

Two Gordon College research assistants work on immunofluorescence microscopy.

Christianity Today October 7, 2024
Courtesy of Craig Story

A lab at a small evangelical college in New England might not be the most obvious place for advanced cancer research, but Craig Story isn’t letting that stop him.

This fall, Story is teaching research students how to conduct immunofluorescence microscopy. Using stains, pieces of tumors taken from lab mice, and an extremely powerful (and pricey) microscope, Story and a team of undergraduate students at Gordon College are working to unravel the mysteries of why some people get cancer when others don’t, and why some respond better to treatment. 

“Immunofluorescence microscopy is when you are studying a particular protein and you want to literally see where it is,” Story said. “Is it found in the tumor? Is it found around the tumor? What could it be doing?”

As with all scientific research, there’s a real possibility that they won’t find the answers they’re looking for. If they do, their breakthroughs could help an untold number of people. But if they don’t, the work will still serve the Gordon College students working with Story, giving them invaluable experience and preparing them for careers in science and medicine.

Story says that alone would be a worthwhile accomplishment. 

He believes that medicine, by its very nature of addressing human suffering, is a pursuit that glorifies God. And the scientific method, with its commitment to truth and deep assumptions about the order of the universe, aligns with the Christian faith. 

“Christians definitely should be involved in medical research,” he said.

Story, who has a doctorate in molecular biology, has been working at Gordon since 2002. He has been involved in cancer research since his last sabbatical in 2016, when he was granted a break from the classroom and got to spend some time learning the latest research techniques in a lab. He went to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and collaborated with Stephanie Dougan on her research studying enzymes and cancer cells.

He returned to Dana-Farber in 2023 with the goal of finding a project on the cutting edge of current cancer research that would also be suitable for students learning their way around the lab. He settled on immunofluorescence microscopy. 

Microscopy—using a microscope to examine biological samples—traces its roots to the scientific revolution, coming out of the Reformation and Renaissance in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, Story said. A Dutch Calvinist draper named Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek—who used a magnifying glass to examine threads—and a British “curator of experiments” named Robert Hooke began unlocking the secrets of cells using microscopes in the 1600s.

One technique van Leeuwenhoek experimented with was putting a dye made from saffron on a sample to see if different parts of the cell looked different when stained. It didn’t yield much interesting information at the time, but that’s the same idea that Story and his students are using to do their research today. 

Microscopes, of course, have vastly improved in the last 400 years, and the techniques used to stain cells have gotten a lot better too. Now, when the Gordon College professor and students peer through their microscopes, they can see a nuclear protein associated with cell proliferation and ribosomal RNA transcription, known as antigen Ki-67.

“What we’ve been doing is sectioning tumors from mice from the Dana-Farber lab, and then staining them for Ki-67, and then enumerating the number of cells that are positive for this particular antigen,” Story said.

Ki-67 can be used to identify cancer growth. Seeing how it spreads and comparing different tumors from different mice, Story and other researchers hope to better understand different immune responses. Someday, that could help develop more and better cancer treatments. 

Today, however, they’re mostly counting cells. 

Yayi Zhang, one of Story’s students, says the work can be a bit tedious. But it’s also really exciting. She doesn’t know what they will find—or what the techniques she is learning with Story will help her discover in the future.

“I can apply these techniques and skills in future work,” Zhang said, “so it’s wonderful.”

Pavinee Chaimanont, another student working with Story, called the opportunity to do the research “a blessing.”

“I feel like the techniques that I’ll learn from this research and the knowledge that I’ll also get is definitely going to be helpful in future cancer research that I’m going to be part of,” she said. 

The students work together and have become good friends in the lab. They also appreciate the chance to be mentored by Story. 

Naomi Montgomery said she took a class on cancer biology with Story and was excited to find out there was an opportunity not just to learn about what others had discovered but also to participate in the discovery process herself and help people. She was inspired, too, by how Story connected the work to faith. 

“He taught the research on cancer in the light of how we look at this as Christians,” she said. “It was really cool. I think that it is a big blessing to have not only classes like that but experiences like this here at Gordon.”

The equipment necessary for the research does not come cheap. Gordon has received two Mass Life Science Center grants—one about seven years ago, and one about two years ago. Gordon has also designated funding to keep the equipment up to date.

“One thing about scientific equipment is that it can become obsolete or outdated pretty quickly,” Story said. “For example, the $10,000 camera on our fluorescent microscope needed to be replaced recently after only about five years.”

While his students are using the microscope to count cells, Story is also thinking up new research projects and other questions they could tackle. He’d like to work more on pancreatic cancer in particular since it is historically one of the hardest cancers to treat.

“They’re the worst tumors, which in and of itself is interesting,” Story said. “Why are different tumors different? Why aren’t they all the same?”

The Gordon College lab could play a critical role in figuring it out.

“To be able to contribute even a small part,” Story said, “is super exciting.”

News

Gaza War Strains Bible Scholars’ Model of Christian Conversation

How Hamas’ October 7 terror attack and Israel’s response exhausted a group of evangelical Bible professors pursuing unity on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Minaret and Golden Dome of the Al-Aqsa Mosquein in Jerusalem close to the Western Wall with an Israeli Flag on a rooftop
Christianity Today October 7, 2024
Mlenny / Getty

When Jesus told the 12 disciples to shake the dust off their feet in protest of any town that did not receive them, it is easy to forget their mission was among fellow believers in Yahweh. Jews were speaking to Jews, and the message was simple: The kingdom of God is near.

But Jesus foresaw even greater opposition than rejection, according to Matthew 10. His disciples would be dragged before councils, flogged in the synagogues, and betrayed to death by their own brothers, he warned. “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.”

Christian discourse on the Holy Land conflict is often similarly contentious.

“A conversation is needed,” said Darrell Bock, senior research professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS). “People talk at each other, not to each other. But with the emotion and distance between the two positions, is it even possible to try?”

Not from what another Bible scholar witnessed when each camp gathers alone.

“Their conferences only preach to the choir,” said Rob Dalrymple, course instructor of New Testament and biblical interpretation at the Flourish Institute, the seminary for evangelical Presbyterians in the ECO denomination. “Nothing changes; it only reinforces how bad the other side is.”

Each academic belongs to a community traditionally associated with one or the other side of the Israel-Palestine conflict. DTS teaches dispensationalism, which anticipates the restoration of Jews to the Promised Land before the return of Christ. Presbyterians adhere to covenant theology, which interprets the promises given to Israel—including the land—as fulfilled in Christ.

The Jews of Jesus’ day also had factions. But while “shake the dust off” was the instruction given to disciples in the face of opposition to the gospel, to all who believed in him he gave a very different message in the Sermon on the Mount:

Take the log out of your own eye first.

One group of Bible scholars, Christians in Conversation on the Middle East (CCME), has “emphasized self-critique from the very beginning,” said Alicia Jackson, associate professor of Old Testament at Vanguard University, which is affiliated with a Pentecostal movement that is often pro-Israel. “And the heart of the group is to love each other despite our differences.”

But the challenge is immense—and sensitive in their communities. CCME had originally pledged to be private.

“I heartily agree on the need for introspection,” said Bruce Fisk, who is a former professor of New Testament at Westmont College and is married to a Palestinian with origins from Bethlehem. “But why would anyone advertise doubts, lingering questions, and ‘logs’ when they feel under siege? Trust is lacking; fear abounds.”

And thus CCME members strove to get to know one another first.

Discussions began between Dalrymple and Fisk in 2018, with Bock joining a year later. They recruited others with the same desire for healthy conversations and met for the first time at the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL) convention in San Diego, discussing how to expand the initiative. Candidates wrote a statement on how they viewed the conflict, but more importantly they told personal stories about how they came to care. Zoom meetings ensued, and each prospective participant endured the “hot seat” as they introduced themselves.

Eventually they discussed the issues in the Middle East.

COVID-19 caused the emerging group to cancel its planned in-person gathering in 2020. But the evangelical Institute for Biblical Research (IBR) approved their formation of a specialty research group the following year, called Scripture, Hermeneutics, and the Middle East. Seeking to connect biblical interpretation with Holy Land realities, CCME members made a three-year commitment to host a seminar at each annual SBL gathering, starting with Denver in 2022.

Once there, they first had lunch together to move budding online relationships toward face-to-face friendships. The session then proceeded in typical academic fashion, with interested colleagues listening to papers presented on the theme—“Israel Then and Now”—and the formal responses.

And they forged a Christian bond—until October 7 put everything to the test.

Theology: A Contact Sport

Forty days later in San Antonio, CCME’s 2023 SBL session packed out the room.

The theme was “Israel and the Church,” which included hermeneutical topics such as whether the now mostly Gentile body of Christ completes, fulfills, or supersedes the promises for Jews in God’s plan. But the theme was also political, asking if New Testament authors envisioned possession of land for ethnic Israel and whether the modern nation-state either implements or benefits from the Old Testament promises.

It was still an academic gathering—but one preceded by extensive email anguish.

The Hamas terrorist attack and subsequent Israel Defense Forces response had sent CCME communication into overdrive. Ordinary seminar planning gave way to multipage missives that took hours to write and read. Zoom meetings stopped as members became too involved with responses within their own networks, each trying to make sense of what happened, why, and what followed.

Fisk believed the Israeli response, strengthened by American evangelical support, was “wildly disproportionate and indiscriminate.” Bock spoke of urban warfare within an underground tunnel network and Iran’s role in provoking “masses of people who want to wipe Israel from the face of the earth.”

The conversation was heated, but participants’ commitments held. They offered apologies when language went too far and graciously thanked each other for their honesty. No one proposed canceling the seminar.

“This was the test,” Dalrymple said. “In light of what we were trying to do, we had to continue to love and respect each other.”

God was their glue.

“Prayer is so important when emotions are running high,” Jackson said. “We don’t reduce people to positions but sit together and validate each other’s pain.”

But after the conference, the pain continued. As the world debated casualty counts, cease-fires, and settler-colonialism, some CCME scholars confessed to being exhausted and depressed. Despite maintaining mutual esteem, they could not bridge the issues—as children perished in the rubble of Gaza and antisemitism seeped into popular discourse.

“Theology,” one said, “is apparently a contact sport.”

And it wore them out. Since January, apart from basic academic business to plan for the 2024 conference, communication has waned. Some lamented that everyone went back to their rhetorical corners. Others sensed progress and felt the discussion was more important than ever. They did not pretend they could solve the conflict, nor change each other.

But after once hoping to model a difficult conversation, they paused.

Wise by Human Standards

Jesus’ disciples often quarreled. Each time, he countered by emphasizing the importance of service—even to demonstrate by washing their feet.

But bickering is not these scholars’ problem, as they have honored each other consistently. Bock facilitated an article by Fisk in the DTS academic journal. Dalrymple invited Bock onto his Determinetruth website’s livestream, where he encourages the church to live up to its gospel calling. And Jackson commended her male colleagues for the warm welcome they gave her, which some women fail to experience in some evangelical academic contexts.

But prior to taking up the towel, Jesus stated in John 12 that unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it cannot produce much fruit. In reference primarily to his crucifixion, the comment was prompted—appropriately enough—by a Gentile request for an audience with the Jewish Messiah.

The CCME kernel of hope has not died, but conversation has hit an impasse. Shifting metaphors to the parable of the sower, has their seemingly buried seed of initiative found rocky soil, a scorching sun, or a dormant harvest yet to come?

Yet as first-century controversies swirled and believers feared being ostracized by their communities—the original reason for CCME’s privacy—Jesus told them to keep walking in the light, lest the darkness overtake them. And while he assured his listeners that he did not come to judge those who did not keep his word, failure to do so would condemn them on the Last Day (John 12:48).

These words include the Matthew 7 command to find the log in one’s own eye first.

A different spirit animated the church in Corinth, as members touted their favored theologians. Not much is known about the factions that backed Apollos or Peter, but Paul rebuked them by calling attention to their past: “Not many of you were wise by human standards” (1 Cor. 1:26). Similarly, CCME scholars remember that they were once far less informed about the issues than they are today.

Bock did not even know about his own Jewish heritage until age 13.

His parents had left Judaism, but his uncle would take him to synagogue when he visited his cousins in Oklahoma. Bock became a Christian in college and thereafter dedicated himself to studying the Jewish background of the Bible and the Second Temple Judaism of Jesus’ day.

During his doctoral studies in Scotland, he forged a friendship with Gary Burge, a leading US evangelical voice for the Palestinians. For the 40 years since then, they have discussed the conflict, and Bock—despite criticism—has spoken at the Christ at the Checkpoint conference, led by Palestinian evangelicals at Bethlehem Bible College (BBC). Yet his Zionist convictions are clear, and in 2018, Bock wrote Israel, the Church, and the Middle East: A Biblical Response to the Current Conflict.

Jackson, meanwhile, “can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t care about Israel.” Her father taught her about the Holocaust as she imbibed A Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. His message was never political, but growing up in a Jewish community in Portland, Oregon, the family showed solidarity with the local synagogue to commemorate together the genocide against Jews.

Her heart was broken further by a visit to Israel in 2010 led by BBC’s Jack Sara, where she met Palestinian Christians who described their experience of Israeli occupation. Some of the evangelical leaders and their Messianic Jewish counterparts working for reconciliation remain her heroes today. Jackson, nonetheless, is a committed Zionist, believing the Jews’ covenantal connection to the land is eternal, with the prophecies foretelling a permanent restoration. But within this, she clarified that “God’s heart is never for violence.”

Such violence drove her colleagues from their original support of Israel.

Dalrymple grew up Southern Baptist, memorized dispensational end-times charts, and attended graduate school at the conservative Liberty University. Like many, he viewed the 1948 establishment of Israel as fulfillment of prophecy and its victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 as a miracle. Academic study moved him away from Christian Zionist theology, but it was not until a 2003 trip to Israel that he even discovered Christians existed in Palestine.

A second trip to Israel in 2008 introduced him to evangelicals at BBC, and their testimony of the realities of occupation brought him to tears. He witnessed firsthand how checkpoints constricted local movement, how the separation wall cut through family farms, and how Jewish settlements steadily confiscated West Bank territory—and he felt terribly guilty.

“This is because of people like me, who say God will bless those who bless Israel,” Dalrymple said of his thoughts at the time. “We are contributing to the oppression of the Palestinian people.”

There was no exact aha moment for Fisk, who also grew up dispensationalist. But his repeated travels to Israel since the early 2000s introduced him to the diversity of the people, though he went there simply to strengthen his lectures in New Testament geography. And as he developed concern for Jews and Gentiles alike, he aligned primarily with Palestinians in describing the conflict as “asymmetric and unjust.” 

With Dalrymple and other founding members, in 2018 Fisk launched the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East to help Americans discover the “best voices on both sides.” Under its auspices, he is near completion of an eight-volume curriculum for an irenic introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Dividing Wall

Background matters. “Wounds from a friend can be trusted,” states Proverbs 27:6, so only those with a known history of advocacy might dare to find the logs in the eyes of their own communities. And the scholars were cautious: No one wanted to speak on behalf of those in the land.

“Self-criticism is difficult because it is seen as a defection, and with stakes as high as they are, this is dangerous,” said Bock. “But as Christians, we are almost compelled to do it.”

The almost is purposeful. Since issues are complex, the word compelled may risk mobilization without the requisite humility. But with these caveats in place, “iron sharpens iron” as the Proverbs chapter continues.

Hearing other voices is critical, said Dalrymple, as feedback helped him discover a flawed attitude in his book These Brothers of Mine: A Biblical Theology of Land and Family and a Response to Christian Zionism, published in 2015. His critique at the time was that those of a dispensationalist perspective who view the land separately from other promises fulfilled in Christ betray a not-high-enough view of Jesus. 

“I didn’t mean it quite like that, but I wrote it,” Dalrymple said. “It was not fair.”

Jackson said that the Book of Ephesians anchors her in these difficult self-reflective conversations. Paul, unlike in his other letters, is not addressing a particular conflict but is calling believers into a deeper Christian life. Applied to the discourse on Israel and Palestine, Jackson cited the apostle’s emphasis on unity, the dividing wall of hostility, and the reality of a spiritual battle.

“My prayer is for the Holy Spirit to convict me of any attitude not in line with the love of Christ,” she said. “We have to be aware of the enemy at work while anchoring ourselves in Jesus’ victory on the cross.”

Both sides are reluctant to identify fault in their allies, said Fisk. But in Christ, both sides are still part of his spiritual family. His grand vision is to help everyone become less absolute in their assessment of the conflict, even as he struggles when his original side remains in staunch support of Israel. Rather than identifying logs in eyes, however, he said an easier task might simply be to forge common ground upon what each has learned from the other.

Conversation has helped Fisk recognize how much the specter of antisemitism haunts both Messianic Jews and Christian Zionists. Descriptions of the multiethnic nature of the body of Christ can risk downplaying the ethnically distinct role of the Jews. And while he maintains his position that Old Testament promises of land are fulfilled in Jesus, he has come to see a “handful of texts” in the New Testament that hint at territorial restoration.

But another problem with “logs” is the necessity of specifics.

“Many insist that they are willing to criticize Israel,” said Fisk, continuing with deliberate emphasis, “But. Never. Do.”

Legitimate Questions

For his own part, Fisk said that he is not studied enough in Islamic theology to comment specifically on the compatibility of Jewish and Muslim perspectives on the land. And he defended Christian Palestinians who, despite their long-standing commitment to nonviolence and denunciations of terrorism, grow frustrated when asked afresh to condemn—with specifics—each new atrocity.

But detailed critiques without firsthand experience—even from those who are highly invested—are difficult amid contested media narratives, Jackson said. She recognizes the desire for precision is legitimate and is not trying to evade it. But with settler violence, for example, the facts of what truly happened in any given reported event are sometimes hard to determine.

Yet the settlement issue helps identify logs in eyes, she said. Some Christian Zionists can label any criticism of Israeli government policies as lack of support for the Jews. Settlement expansion may not be a good idea, an attitude not uncommon among Israelis. And many who are pro-Israel tend to ignore or minimize Palestinian suffering. Though Jackson was previously aware of the disputed politics, dialogue with CCME colleagues increased her already deep compassion for both Jews and Palestinians and her burden to encourage Christians to love them equally.

Jackson’s biblical interpretation leads her to a unique position on the founding of Israel. In her view, God’s promised restoration of Jews to the land was not envisioned by the prophets as a conquest like the one in the time of Joshua, where inhabitants were removed from the land. But the horrors of war led to Palestinian displacement, and perhaps relations today would be much improved if Israel—or the surrounding Arab states—had facilitated their resettlement with citizenship rights.

Yet she reads the “dry bones” passage of Ezekiel 36–39 with consideration of how God often works in stages. The physical restoration of God’s people to the promised land precedes their spiritual restoration in the Messiah—land first, reform second. To Jackson, what is happening may be the beginning of a revival, for while Israel in 1948 included only a handful of Messianic Jews, today an estimated 30,000 live there. God regathered Jews and is now drawing more to faith in Yeshua.

“God’s heart is for Israel to dwell with the nations, for the blessing of the nations,” Jackson said. “What we see now is not the full expression of that vision, though it may be an initial phase.”

Bock also recognized how God’s shalom will eventually fulfill the Isaiah 19 prophecy of peace with a highway connecting Israel with Egypt and Assyria (modern-day Iraq) as joint peoples of God. In the interim, Israel’s existential fear is real and legitimate; while in a region that lives by “eye for an eye,” it is hard to ask for restraint. And the Bible does give clear examples of how God worked to remove entirely a source of antisemitic evil—see the commanded extermination of Amalek.

Nonetheless, Bock said Israel has not done enough to care for noncombatants, limiting food and humanitarian aid. The extent of destruction has been excessive, with not enough protection for civilian life. He said the overall policy of disproportionate deterrence, while understandable, contributes to a cycle of perpetual violence and deepens mutual animosity.

Such logs in eyes will not help Israel in the long run.

“The Christian contribution must be to pursue peace while balancing different biblical themes,” Bock said. “Our group tries to do so, for without understanding where people are in their perspectives, all moral appeals will fall on deaf ears.”

Dalrymple has seen such failures and sought to adjust. Like Fisk, he has come to appreciate how Jews experience antisemitism and Christian Zionists fear its spread. Advocating forcefully against systemic injustice can unwittingly trigger such feelings. He acknowledges some antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian camp.

And the argument that Israel has no right to exist remains, as a minority voice, believes Dalrymple. Though not a scholar on the subject, he said that settler-colonialist discourse painting Israel as the political or theological project of Europe is incorrect. It is “problematic” to deny Judaism’s historic sense of the land, as it is to overlook that Jews lived in Palestine before the Israeli state—others came subsequently as refugees, not resource-seekers.

“Too often we debate issues by setting up straw men,” Dalrymple said. “But with real people you learn to nuance and discover where something is heard as offensive. It sparks a response of ‘Ah, I see.’”

Does this mean that settler-colonialism language is a log in the Palestinian eye? Like the accusation of genocide, Fisk said, this is a question for lawyers—not biblical scholars. But after years of Palestinian believers exerting “heroic energy” to invite theologically like-minded evangelicals to hear their perspective—and largely failing—they have grown closer to politically like-minded allies among liberation theologians and in the anticolonial Global South.

“Time will tell if they come to regret these alliances,” said Fisk. “But they ask, ‘How can they see what the followers of Jesus cannot?’”

Soils of Response

It is a question both sides can ask—and repeatedly do. During Passion Week, in the John 12 passage Jesus quoted Isaiah 6 to say that God had blinded the eyes of his people. But while discussing the soils of response to his early ministry, in Matthew 13 Jesus referred to the Septuagint rendering of the same prophetic passage to say that from a calloused heart, the people had closed their own eyes.

Willful or otherwise, the popular gap on Israel and Palestine remains.

But most damning is Jesus’ warning to the Pharisees in John 9:41—“If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.” One would think a log would be obvious; human nature reveals it is not.

Isaiah’s commission, in fact, was to preach in such a manner that this guilt was laid bare—“otherwise, they might see with their eyes” (6:10). Understandably frustrated, the prophet asked, “How long, Lord?” (v. 11).

God’s response evokes images from Gaza and the border communities of Galilee and Lebanon, now including parts of Beirut:

“Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken” (vv. 11–12).

And the scholars of CCME—from different perspectives—continue their lament.

They have resumed planning for the 2024 SBL conference in San Diego, with participants including a Palestinian Christian and a Messianic Jewish rabbi. Jackson’s heart is for reconciliation. Fisk is confident his colleagues will defend him if he is mischaracterized, and he would do the same for them. Bock says that discussion is a success in itself. And Dalrymple finds hope that despite their distress, CCME extended its fellowship for an additional three years.

“The war in Gaza may end,” he said. “But the issues will not go away.”

Church Life

Latino Churches’ Vibrant Testimony

Hispanic American congregations tend to be young, vibrant, and intergenerational. The wider church has much to learn with and from them.

A group of Hispanic people worshipping.
Christianity Today October 4, 2024
Israel Torres / Pexels / Edits by CT

The common language of worship has a way of capturing the heart even when the mind cannot understand. I remembered this as I wiped my tears while Spanish-speaking Christians sang passionately around me at The Sent Summit conference in Orlando last month.

Though my tourist-level Spanish could not bear the weight of references to the divine, I knew the meaning of the song in my soul. Voices rang to the glory of God. Words I couldn’t translate expressed the depth of our depravity encompassed by his unconditional love. 

While we shared neither language nor ethnicity, my experience in worship with Latino pastors and leaders in America reminded me: This community, like every culture, is important to the kingdom of God. And the wider church has much to learn with and from these siblings in Christ about faith, community, and resilience. 

First, while many American churches are suffering from an inability to reach younger generations, Latino churches are swimming against that tide. Aaron Earls of Lifeway Research has described Hispanic congregations as “newer, younger, and more effectively evangelistic than the average US Protestant church,” and he notes that “a majority conduct their services only in Spanish (53%), while 22 percent are bilingual.”

Young people in immigrant families in America often serve as teachers for their parents in a variety of ways, ranging from learning English to navigating the complexities of unfamiliar health care and educational systems. This dynamic makes younger people integral to the life of the church too. Latino congregations tend to be willing to embrace them not as passive recipients of the faith but as active participants in shaping it. Young Christians are called upon early to help lead worship, teach, and serve as translators.

This reverse intergenerational ministry, where young people tend to bring their families into the fold, demonstrates both the dynamism and complexity of faith that transcends age barriers. Having to navigate so many roles at young ages can uniquely equip Christians for ministry—but it’s also taxing and can be traumatic, marked by poverty, loss, and injustice.

“Gen Z doesn’t need to be reached; they need to be rescued,” one younger Latino leader told me during a gathering at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena in August. “It’s going to be messy.” This messy, beautiful process of integrating multiple generations is exactly what Latino Christian communities are willing to do. 

Pastors Josh and Noemi Chavez talked to me about what this looks like in their intergenerational ministry in Long Beach, California. “When I started pastoring, I was in my 20s. Thinking about young people was easy. I had to intentionally consider the older generation,” Noemi reflected. “Now, in my 40s, I have to intentionally think about the younger and the older. If the Great Commission is at the center of the vision and mission of the church, then as leaders we can lovingly shepherd the hearts of each generation and find joy in the expression of the gospel message.”

When successful, that witness creates a rich tapestry of faith that honors tradition while embracing newness and innovation. And many Spanish-speaking congregations are a cultural tapestry, too, serving as a gathering place for people from multiple countries with real differences in thought, expression, and, notably, political views. 

Contrary to popular US misconceptions, the Latino evangelical community is not a monolithic voting bloc. Hispanic voters in America hold a wide spectrum of political ideologies, including on immigration. Yet while many predominantly white churches are politically homogenous, Latino clergy told me they see a diversity of political views in their congregations.

This ability to maintain unity in worship is particularly striking and countercultural in today’s polarized climate, a valuable model of prioritizing faith and community over political disagreements. These Hispanic congregations are proof that it’s possible to debate politics and keep breaking bread together.

“The sent church is a diverse church,” Gabriel Salguero shared. “It is a reflection of the Kingdom of God.” With his wife, Jeannette, Salguero is the founder of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition and The Gathering Place Church in Orlando. For decades, they have shepherded pastors and church members from nearly every continent and walk of life, and he sees ideological differences as a strength, not merely an obstacle to overcome.

“The church needs this diversity, even diversity of thought,” Salguero remarked at the summit in Orlando. “If we’re all thinking exactly the same, we’re not all thinking.”

With a tapestry of generations and a range of varying views, what could possibly hold these communities together in Christ? The short answer is the Holy Spirit—and coffee.

While the service provides inspiration, the coffee afterward provides communion. After-service conversations over a cafecito, a café con leche, or pan dulce provide crucial opportunities for relationship-building and community formation. This is the space where those new to the congregation can become known, the young can connect, the elders can reminisce, and the pastors can provide holistic care. 

This commitment to being present with people in their everyday lives reflects a deep understanding of the familia cultural value, leading to profound care for others.

That model of care is ever more important as the broader church grapples with challenges of declining attendance, generational gaps, and cultural relevance. The Latino church in America reminds us that the gospel is not just a message to be preached but a life to be lived—in community, across generations, embracing diversity, overcoming challenges, and always open to the new things God is doing. 

“Hispanic churches continue to be a driving force in the revitalization of faith in the US,” Enid Almanzar, chair of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, told me after the summit. No church or ethnicity is perfect, of course. No community is free from the scars of striving to be more like Christ. 

Yet in these complex times, the Latino church provides a beacon of hope to believers in America and beyond as we seek to be the church that our world so desperately needs. Like Paul, writing to the Corinthians about the churches in Macedonia, I “want you to know about the grace that God has given” these fellow believers (2 Cor. 8:1) so you can benefit from their example of faith.

Nicole Massie Martin is the chief impact officer at Christianity Today.

Books
Review

Modern ‘Technoculture’ Makes the World Feel Unnaturally Godless

By changing our experience of reality, it tempts those who don’t perceive God to conclude that he doesn’t exist.

A painting of God on a smartphone with a cracked screen.
Christianity Today October 4, 2024
Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Wikimedia Commons, Pexels

In his 1996 novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, John Updike has a fictional Reformed Presbyterian minister feel his faith abandon him like an exhale, leaving his “habitual mental contortions decisively relaxed.” For this minister, the experience was one of relief, “an immense strain of justification” lifted “at a blow.” Unbelief, in this sense, is not so much a choice of the will but the relaxation of the will, with the mind clicking into an atheist-materialist position that feels reassuringly natural.

Many Christians today feel the “immense strain of justification” when measuring our theological beliefs against our everyday experience. We might be convinced God exists, but this mental stance conflicts with our surface experience of the world as a secular place where God’s existence is not obvious. It’s not obvious, at least, in the same way the coffee in your hand and the national election are obvious. Instead, belief demands mental exertion.

How come we often find atheism plausible—as an account that strikes us as somehow aligned to reality at a basic, intuitive level—even if we think it is incorrect? In Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age, Joseph Minich equips believers to grapple intelligently with the godless feel of the world around them.

Interpreting divine absence

In the book, Minich aims to bolster “persons motivated to maintain orthodox religious faith in our current context” by helping them “recognize the unique role that their will must take in the maintenance of their religion.” As he argues, this work of maintenance requires inhabiting our secular age theologically

Minich makes his case in a refreshing way. In recent years, there has been a steady stream of books on secularism, modernity, and disenchantment, but the bulk of these adopt a “history of ideas” approach, attributing these developments to Marxism or feminism or Hegelianism or Puritanism or late-stage capitalism, to name a few. Minich counters that these accounts, while relatively valuable, don’t tell the whole story. Ideas are not the only driving force of history.

As Minich argues, the root cause of our divine-absence discourse is phenomenological rather than ideological. In other words, it derives more from how we perceive the world than our theories about it. Supplementing the work of Charles Taylor, author of the oft-cited study A Secular Age, Minich agrees that our tacit experience of modern life has altered our view of reality.

The triumph of the Industrial Revolution played a pivotal role in this shift, ensuring that machines and modern technology would fundamentally shape our perception of reality. Over time, the Industrial Revolution gave rise to what Minich calls the “bulwarks of unbelief”: the background features of modern “technoculture” that (both consciously and subconsciously) render belief in God implausible (though not impossible) and atheism plausible (though not inevitable).

Minich’s entry point into this problem is how modern people interpret divine absence. As a phenomenon, this is nothing new. Ancient and medieval peoples experienced it (just read the Psalms, particularly Psalm 88), but they interpreted it differently. God’s perceived absence could mean, perhaps, that he stood in judgment over a person or people for their sin. Or it could mean that, like a trainer, he was leaving us to be tested. At any rate, God’s absence called for interpretation. 

Something happened in the hundred years spanning 1860 and 1960, Minich argues. In that period, the possible meanings of God’s absence shrunk down to one: God’s nonexistence.

In this regard, the ancients had the more logical approach. Minich asks, Why do modern people immediately and intuitively interpret God’s absence to mean he does not exist, when so many other explanations are available? Put another way, why is our first impulse to equate invisibility with unreality?

Part of the answer, Minich argues provocatively, is that our experience of what reality is has changed. As he sees it, modern technoculture mediates—and even distorts—our tacit sense of what is real. In consequence, God’s existence begins to seem (but only seem) less plausible than it really is. 

Since the Industrial Revolution, our engagement with the world has been increasingly filtered through technology. What is more, as our tools have grown in refinement, we rely on them not only to engage the world but also to exert a level of control over the world.

In Minich’s observation, technoculture makes the world “entirely subject to” our own “agency or ends” (emphasis added). In turn, this dynamic informs our sense of what is real and cultivates a default posture toward the world:

To put it bluntly, the [technocultural] world is a world for me. I do not find myself in a big, mysterious world suffused with agencies to which I am subject and around which I must learn to co-navigate with my immediate community. I find myself in a world almost entirely tool-i-fied, a world of my own (agentless!) subjectivity before an increasingly silent cosmos.

In technoculture, then, the idea of a supreme agent, God, fails to comport with our everyday experience. It does not even seem relevant. “In my judgment,” writes Minich, “the modern technological order tacitly communicates to us, day in and day out, that reality (the sort that actually concerns us), belongs to the order of the manipulable.”

Within this order, we can govern our lives with rational, efficient control, as when we adjust the thermostat, block a Facebook profile, or select a movie from the heap of options. But everything outside this “manipulable” realm hardly registers as “real” to modern sensibilities. No wonder that minds formed in such an environment will naturally equate divine absence with divine nonexistence.

Comings and goings

I have attempted to outline Minich’s argument, but this task is difficult. His book progresses in centrifugal rather than linear fashion, building like an upward spiral in a series of excursions. Here, we read about Karl Marx’s theory of labor. There, about the signification of the city in ancient cosmogony. Now, we consider Jacques Ellul’s concept of technique, and now, Martin Luther’s anthropology of hearing.

Shifts in style exacerbate the mental whiplash. On one topic, Minich waxes lofty and lyrical. On the next, his prose turns mind-numbingly technical. The central idea of the book, that modern technoculture obscures (and even distorts) our experience of reality, is reinforced with each spin of the narrative wheel, but the number and interdisciplinary variety of his arguments can be dizzying.

This makes it difficult to hold Minich’s work together or consider it in comprehensive ways. The saving grace is his appeal to the reader’s lived experience in technoculture. Some of his observations will resonate while others will fall flat, but you may find yourself nodding in recognition more often than not. 

Minich clarifies that he has not refuted atheism in some unanswerable way. At most, he has deflated it by showing how nonrational pressures make “atheist claims plausible” to modern minds.

But simply by raising the point that divine absence requires interpretation, Minich has accomplished something powerful. Beyond recommending some mental exercises to help us reattune ourselves to a reality that bolsters faith, Minich advances a particular theology of divine absence, which develops over the course of the book. 

He reminds us that God often makes himself scarce. History is full of divine comings and goings: smoking mountains one day, then centuries without so much as a prophet. Even before the Fall, God’s presence was not constant; he appears to have walked with Adam in the cool of the day and then withdrawn. We relate to God through his absence, it seems, as much as through his presence. 

In what would strike some readers as a twist, Minich reveals that he likes technology. The solution to the current crisis of divine absence, he thinks, is not reversing the clock and returning to a time when our engagement with nature and creation was more direct. Instead, he pushes us to inhabit our current moment theologically.

This involves a recognition, he writes, that “we are contingent creatures who develop. We mature. And we mature and change and are perfected by means of shifting circumstances and the trials that they bring.” Minich favors the analogy of child-rearing. For children to mature, parents must allow moments of controlled abandonment, permitting them to explore their world freely or be left alone with tasks. Understanding divine absence as one of God’s “parenting methods” helps us interpret this age of divine absence as a possible aid to spiritual maturity. 

While I appreciate what Minich is getting at, the child-rearing analogy presents problems, as it could be taken to insinuate that Christian sanctification succeeds by maturing us beyond our need for God. Minich anticipates this reading and warns against it, but he must work against his own imagery. 

Perhaps a more congenial image comes from the Song of Solomon, especially as we follow the ancient Christian habit of presenting it as a romantic allegory of the church’s union with Christ, its bridegroom. In this poem, the bride searches the garden for an absent lover. She catches a glimpse of him through the lattice. He again vanishes, which only inflames her longing.

Here, Scripture depicts the lover of our souls as both absent and present. As he deliberately, even playfully, eludes us, he induces an agony of love. By his absence, he teaches us how to long, and so to receive his presence (when we have it) as a gift, not a given.

In this way, trust in God sustains us in his absence, assuring us that the withdrawal of presence need not represent a withdrawal of love. God is absent, but as we say in the Nicene Creed, “He will come again.” 

Blake Adams is a writer, editor, and trained historian.

Books
Excerpt

The Chinese Christian Who Helped Overcome Illiteracy in Asia

Yan Yangchu taught thousands of peasants to read and write in the early 20th century.

Three photos of people writing over a red background with yellow stars like the Chinese flag and a photo of Yan Yangchu on a pinkish tan background

Yan Yangchu (right)

Christianity Today October 4, 2024
Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

In 1918, Yan Yangchu (Y. C. James Yen) set sail from the United States for France despite the possible threat of submarine attacks during World War I.

The recent Yale University graduate, along with 40 other Chinese Christian students, had been invited by the YMCA to provide social activities for 30,000 Chinese laborers in France who were working in munitions plants, doing farm work, loading military supplies, and building or repairing roads.

The ship ahead of Yan sank, and the one behind was torpedoed, but his ship arrived safely. Reflecting on this event, he wrote:

They put their studies aside, and risked losing their lives to the enemy’s submarine attacks to come here to be servants of Chinese laborers … because their hearts have been treated and changed by the Doctor Christ; thus they all have high standards of social ethics, love their fellow countrymen, and want to serve them.

In the northern French city of Boulogne, Yan became so busy writing letters for dozens of homesick, illiterate men each night that he asked for volunteers who would be willing to learn 1,000 basic Chinese characters.

His eager students skipped their dinners so as not to miss class, even after digging trenches all day. Yan began writing and printing the Chinese Workers’ Weekly to give them practice reading.

After 35 of the 40 laborers passed the simple test of writing a letter home and reading the Weekly, Colonel G. H. Cole, who was head of the Chinese Labor Corps and had been with the Canadian YMCA in China for 12 years, ordered Yan to start literacy programs in other French cities.

Yan asked him to send the other Chinese YMCA students to Boulogne to observe his classes for a week. After they returned to their own camps, they started teaching the 30,000 Chinese laborers how to read.

Yan began to recognize the potential power of peasants to build a nation. He made a vow that upon his return to China, he would devote the rest of his life to the “release of the pent-up, God-given powers in the people” through mass education reform. Little did he know that his work would stretch beyond China and impact people around the world.

Yan was born on October 26, 1893, in Bazhong, a small town in northern Sichuan Province. His father, who was a scholar, poet, and writer, named his youngest son “Yangchu,” meaning “the start of the sunrise,” to convey the family’s desire to build a new China.

After his father accepted a job teaching Chinese to missionaries in the local China Inland Mission (CIM) station, the missionaries urged him to send ten-year-old Yan to a CIM school in Baoning, 90 miles from home. Founded by the English missionary Hudson Taylor, CIM is now known as OMF International.

The headmaster, William B. Aldis, did not lecture about the Bible to his students but set an example of a pious life for the 20 boys in the school. Although Aldis’s Chinese was difficult to understand, Aldis inspired Yan to become a follower of Christ.

After four years, Aldis encouraged Yan to attend a middle school run by American Methodists in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan. Afterward, Yan attended Hong Kong University, where he became friends with Fletcher Brockman, the national secretary of the YMCA in China from 1898 to 1915.

In the summer of 1916, Yan headed across the Pacific to Oberlin College in Ohio, but a Yale professor on the ship encouraged him to go instead to Yale because it had good teachers and libraries.

“The Christian tone here is high and inspiring—the chapel, the worship, the Christian professors, the Christian students make the whole Yale Christian in spirit and in practice,” Yan wrote to Brockman about his life at college.

After World War I and Yan’s time in France ended, Yan returned to the United States in 1919 to study history and politics at Princeton. Upon graduating with his master’s degree in 1920, Yan returned to China and married Alice Huie, daughter of a Dutch American woman and a Chinese pastor in New York City.

For several years, Yan co-led the National Association of Mass Education Movement (MEM), which organized literacy programs in several cities in China. One of the volunteer teachers who participated in this program was Mao Zedong, who later wrote his Thousand Character Primer that introduced Marx and attacked the militarists, bureaucrats, and capitalists.

Yan’s larger goal was to establish a comprehensive rural reconstruction program that would combine education, agriculture, public health, and self-government. In 1926, his family moved to Dingxian (now called Dingzhou), a county in Hebei Province south of Beijing. Yan began recruiting American-trained Chinese graduates in agriculture from Cornell or Ohio State University and convinced educators from Columbia University and a Harvard-trained political scientist to live in Dingxian despite offering small salaries.

When Yan and his colleagues first told the peasants in Dingxian that they had come to teach them how to read, the peasants laughed at them and said it was impossible.

But when the first class of peasants graduated, village heads asked for schools in their towns. By 1931, all 453 villages in Dingxian had their own schools, with 20,000 students taught by volunteer teachers.

Though Yan received many invitations to start literacy programs or county-wide experiments in other parts of China, he purposefully limited the program to Dingxian. He wanted to prove, by definite results, that they could advance the farmers’ education, health, agricultural output, and political participation there.

Life in Dingxian, however, soon went through a time of upheaval. The county was lost and regained seven times after Japan invaded northern China in 1937.

In 1940, MEM opened the National College of Rural Reconstruction near Chongqing, Nationalist China’s wartime capital. But relocating farther south did not solve the organization’s problems. Japan frequently bombed the city. Donors stopped offering grants. In the midst of this, 20 MEM families died when the boat carrying them—along with their personal items, MEM records, and equipment—capsized.

After the Pacific War ended in 1945, the Chinese Civil War escalated. Because of Yan’s success at rural work and his loose connection with the Nationalist Party, the Chinese Communist Party considered him a threat.

In December 1949, Yan and several family members moved to New York City. One year later, China’s Communist government dissolved the MEM office near Chongqing, two months after China entered the Korean War and the United States became an enemy country.

During this period, Yan was confronted with personal and political difficulties. His son, Fred, had remained in China and died during one of the anti-Western campaigns that followed the Korean War. The Chinese Communists accused Yan of being a slave to American imperialism and a conspirator with Chiang Kai-Shek, the Nationalist leader who had moved to Taiwan.

But Yan’s dedication to multifaceted rural reconstruction never faltered.

In the summer of 1952, he returned to Asia to establish the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM), building its headquarters in Silang, Cavite, about 25 miles south of Manila. He chose the Southeast Asian country because he felt that it had a Christian heritage and abundant resources and that its president, Ramon Magsaysay, was close to the people.

PRRM improved rural health by cleaning up the villages, setting up garbage sites, and providing basic medical attention. They set up showcase farms that grew dual harvests and promoted rural credit cooperatives. They educated the rural people and trained the youth to become local leaders.

In 1960, Yan founded the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), which was headquartered in New York but operationally based in the Philippines. He spent the next 30 years encouraging rural reconstruction in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central America.

When he stepped down as chair of IIRR in 1988, Yan left the Philippines and settled in New York City, where he died in Manhattan at the age of 97. He is buried next to Alice, who died in the Philippines in 1980.

While Yan never lived in China again, he was able to visit the country in 1985 and 1987 during a period of greater openness to the West. In Dingxian, he found out that his home had been converted into a museum, with an exhibition of his work in China and around the world.

In the 1990s, the Central Educational Science Institute in Beijing established the James Yen Association. More than ten volumes on Yan’s thoughts and approaches to rural reconstruction and development were published in China.

How did Yan press on despite facing so many obstacles?

“To build his health, he kept a regular schedule and retired before 11 every night,” wrote Wei Chengtung in an essay for the book Y. C. James Yen’s Thought on Mass Education and Rural Reconstruction: China and Beyond. “To build his spirit, he prayed every morning and took time to think, to plan, and [to] do systematic research.”

He also enjoyed singing hymns that focused on the cross and found guidance from reading devotional literature, such as the writings of St. Catherine of Siena.

Yan’s love for Jesus and for the poor attracted others to join him in the vision that he felt God had given him. American missionary Gardner Tewksbury pointed to this attribute of Yan in a 1968 tribute titled “My Friend Jimmy Yen: A Glimpse into the Personal Life of One of the World’s Most Remarkable Christians.”

“The call is for those with the Christ spirit, who like the Good Shepherd know and love their sheep and stand ready to lay down their lives for them,” he wrote.

Stacey Bieler is the author of “Patriots” or “Traitors”? A History of American-Educated Chinese Students and coeditor of three volumes of Salt and Light.

This excerpt was adapted from Salt and Light, Volume 1: Lives of Faith that Shaped Modern China, edited by Carol Lee Hamrin and Stacey Bieler. Copyright © 2009 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

News

Evangelicals Struggle to Preach Life in the Top Country for Assisted Death

Canadian pastors are lagging behind a national push to expand MAID to those with disabilities and mental health conditions.

An empty hospital bed in a dark room
Christianity Today October 4, 2024
Stockbusters / Getty

Canadian Christians increasingly find their pro-life values in conflict with their nation’s rapid acceptance of medical assistance in dying (MAID). Many say churches could be a refuge in Canada’s pro-MAID culture, reminding people of human dignity and providing community supports that can help them resist the lure of MAID.

But chances are, most Canadian Christians haven’t heard their pastors discuss MAID—and clergy, despite their pro-life convictions, are likely still learning about the laws that legalize the ending of life.

The few evangelical pastors who have addressed the issue directly have seen an almost immediate impact in their congregations. But most haven’t kept up with the legal landscape for MAID or have waited to speak out.

“I think one of the strongest reasons why MAID has a lot of traction generally in our society is that nobody wants to talk about death,” said Jeff Gullacher, a pastor in Alberta who began addressing the issue in his church earlier this year. “Everyone just wants to kind of sweep it under the rug and keep it as sterile and as short as possible.”

MAID was legalized in Canada in 2016. Amendments that passed in 2021 removed the criterion that a person’s death be “reasonably foreseeable” and allowed for the eventual legalization of MAID for individuals whose only medical condition is a mental illness.

The current law allows people who have “grievous and irremediable” illnesses, diseases, or disabilities and are experiencing what they consider to be unbearable physical or psychological suffering to be eligible for MAID—even if their death is not, in the law’s words, “reasonably foreseeable.” By the end of the month, Quebec will authorize patients to approve their own MAID requests in advance.

Heidi Janz, a specialist in disability ethics, has spent years lobbying against MAID laws because of the way they devalue people with disabilities. She is waiting for evangelical Canadians to join the fight.

“The silence has been deafening,” said Janz, who has multiple disabilities and uses a voice synthesizer to deliver public statements, including testimony before parliamentary committees.

Earlier this year, she spoke at a Christian conference in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, urging Christians to do more to support people with disabilities so they do not die by MAID.

Janz was hoping churches would call her afterward, inviting her to speak to their congregations. They haven’t. And she rarely sees churches publicly opposing MAID or being concerned about how it endangers already-vulnerable people.

“We’re just collectively shrugging our shoulders,” she told CT. “I think we’re going to have a lot to answer for.”

The use of MAID, sometimes called euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide in other jurisdictions, has surged in Canada, where 44,958 people have died through the provision. The number increases each year. In 2022, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 13,241 people died by MAID in Canada, accounting for 4 percent of the country’s deaths that year. Final numbers for 2023 will be released later this month, but projections put last year’s total around 17,000.

Canada is widely regarded as having some of the most permissive MAID laws in the world. For example, in American jurisdictions that have legalized the practice, patients cannot be prescribed lethal drugs to end their lives unless they have a terminal illness and a prognosis of six months or less. They also must take the drugs themselves.

Canada, however, has never required a time-based prognosis to determine someone’s eligibility for MAID. The drugs used in MAID are most often administered intravenously—in 2022, fewer than seven Canadians who died by MAID took the drugs themselves. In 2027, Canada plans to extend eligibility to people whose sole medical condition is a mental illness.

As MAID becomes more common, pastors are often at a loss to know how to address it with their congregations—whether during sermons or with individuals who are considering it or are grieving the loss of someone to MAID.

“The numbers are just now getting to the point where pastors are noticing that people in their flock are choosing this, and they’re really unsure how to deal with it,” said Larry Worthen, the executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Association (CMDA) of Canada. But he’s received more invitations to speak to pastors across the country recently.

Many denominations do not have clear guidance about how clergy should respond when their congregants are considering or opting for MAID, said Gloria Woodland, director of the chaplaincy program at ACTS Seminaries of Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia.

Woodland teaches an eight-week seminary course about MAID that is being offered to churches throughout Canada. She also speaks to pastors. She begins by reviewing the law and how it’s changed since it was first enacted.

She said pastors may not know, for example, that people who are approved for MAID in cases where their deaths are seen as reasonably foreseeable no longer have to wait ten days between when their requests are approved and when MAID is administered. This means it is legally possible for someone to die by MAID on the same day they are approved for it.

“What I’m finding is the majority have not gone any deeper than what they’re hearing on the news,” she said.

When pastor Deric Bartlett decided to preach two sermons about MAID last year, he readied himself for criticism. Between 800 and 1,000 people typically attend his Baptist church—City Centre Church in Mississauga, Ontario—and not all visitors are friendly to the church’s teachings, he said.

Instead, he received more positive feedback than usual, including from one attendee who said the teaching had convinced them not to pursue MAID.

Other pastors reported similar experiences. Last February, Trinity Baptist Church in Sherwood Park, a suburb east of Edmonton, Alberta, hosted a seminar by Margaret Cottle, a palliative care physician and pro-life advocate.

The seminar was originally intended for the congregation and anyone they wanted to invite, said the church’s lead pastor, Jeff Gullacher. But when leaders of the church’s denomination, Canadian Baptists of Western Canada, heard about it, they offered to help the church livestream the event and make it available to people outside the congregation.

Gullacher received positive feedback across the denomination, he said. He has also heard of people who no longer support MAID after hearing the presentation.

Gullacher has not preached a sermon directly on MAID, he said, but the church has offered a series of classes on topics related to death and dying, including wills, estate planning, and decluttering. They’re also planning to use the curriculum Dying with Christ – Living with Hope, which was developed by CMDA Canada to help churches discuss MAID in small groups.

But while pastors say they’ve received positive feedback on corporate teaching about MAID, knowing how to respond to people considering MAID or grieving a death caused by MAID can be more challenging.

Cottle, who speaks to churches regularly, has no doubt that MAID contradicts Scripture’s teaching. “There isn’t any nuance about whether or not we should be doing medical killing,” she told CT. “The nuance comes in, How do you live as a faithful Christian in a society that thinks that medical killing is a good idea?

In her courses, Woodland has Christian chaplains and pastors consider how they would respond if one of their congregants chooses MAID or whether they would agree to be present if someone asks them to be there when MAID drugs are administered.

Regardless of what they decide about those situations, Woodland said they need to be available to families who are grieving after a MAID death. She encourages pastors and chaplains to seriously consider what it means to value the inherent, God-given dignity of people in the face of MAID.

“If you believe in the sanctity of life, then you believe in the sanctity of life regardless of the situation,” Woodland said. “As a pastoral worker, our role would be to hold the hope for that individual, to hold the hope for them while they can’t hold hope themselves.”

Evangelical leaders say faithful Christian witness in a society that celebrates MAID means being prepared to take care of people in vulnerable situations—and admitting where the church needs to improve.

According to Health Canada, the number one cause of suffering cited by people who died by MAID in 2022 was “the loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities.” Eighty-six percent of people who died by MAID cited this as one of their underlying causes of suffering. Over one-third (35%) of people who died by MAID reported feeling that they were a burden to their friends, caregivers, or family; another 17 percent cited loneliness.

Churches and other Christian organizations are well equipped to offer answers and hope in the face of these existential concerns, said Julia Beazley, director of public policy for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, an organization that has publicly opposed MAID for years. Many pastors and churches have reached out to the group for information.

“We believe the proper response to the suffering of our neighbors is to respond with care and compassion, to journey alongside those who are struggling or who are nearing death with tangible support, relational support,” she said. “As Christians and as a society, we should do what we can to alleviate the suffering, not eliminate the one who suffers.” 

But Beazley acknowledged churches still have a long way to go, particularly in responding to the needs of people with disabilities and in countering the ableist assumptions in MAID law, which says life with disability is not worth living. Many churches are grieving the fact that for people with disabilities, it’s often easier to find support to end their lives than the support they need to live their lives.

“We need to be teaching loudly and clearly that every person’s life has meaning, value, and dignity,” Beazley said.

At St. Hilda’s Anglican Church in Oakville, Ontario, Paul Charbonneau and his congregation are trying to practice valuing human life from conception to death. Members have sat with people who are dying at home, giving relief to their caregivers. They pray about MAID during worship services, and the church has hosted several seminars about the topic.

The church is part of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC), which is itself part of the Anglican Church in North America. Along with being the rector of St. Hilda’s and a chaplain at a local hospital, Charbonneau is the executive archdeacon of ANiC. The denomination has told clergy that they cannot be present while MAID is being administered—even to pray for the dying person or their family.

Charbonneau agrees with this approach and also practices it in his capacity as a hospital chaplain. “I don’t want to be seen as complicit in any way,” he said.

What he does want to do is encourage Christians to speak out against MAID and to show people in vulnerable situations that lasting hope is found only through a relationship with Jesus.

He doesn’t see Canada’s acceptance of MAID waning any time soon. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle once this thing is let out,” he said. The speed at which MAID deaths have increased and laws have changed has left many pastors feeling ill-equipped about how to respond, he said.

But the more he watches acceptance of MAID grow in Canada and elsewhere, he said, “The more I’m convinced that Jesus is the only way that we’re going to be saved, and it’s the only way our culture can be saved.”   

Ideas

No More Sundays on the Couch

COVID got us used to staying home. But it’s the work of God’s people to lift up the name of Christ and receive God’s Word—together.

Christianity Today October 3, 2024

It is Sunday morning and quiet throughout our house. The first morning light is slipping through our blinds, just enough for my husband to read his Bible and for me to write. The only thing I hear is our coffee percolating. Sunday mornings are easily the most peaceful time in our otherwise noisy, demanding schedule.

During the pandemic with churches closed, we learned to savor Sunday mornings as especially convivial and serene. After a couple quiet reading hours, my husband, Chris, would prepare breakfast. Our three children would tumble out of bed around 11 to pancakes or waffles, eggs, and bacon. Then Chris and I would head out for a walk around our neighborhood, waving at neighbors. On more ambitious weekends, we’d take to hiking trails. 

When struck by convictions about missing church, Chris and I would wake the kids a bit earlier, around 10:30. Though they were only really losing 30 minutes’ sleep, they’d make a grumpy little show of it. We’d file into the living room, sit on our green couches, and take in some spirited preaching by a local megachurch pastor. Megachurches had an advantage during the pandemic, easily pivoting to sleek broadcasts while many smaller churches struggled to improvise.

After the pandemic faded away, though, we found our new routine difficult to break. Attending church in person now feels like a series of sacrifices. We have to wake the children at 9:30 to get them fed, dressed, and out the door on time.  All this bustle means Chris and I get less peace, less quiet, less reading, and no leisurely morning walk. It’s 8:09 a.m. now, as I write this. To get to church this morning, I’ll have to stop writing in 30 minutes.

Reader, I don’t want to. I do not want to make these little sacrifices. Sunday mornings are restorative when they are quiet and leisurely. They are good for all of us.

Or so I once thought, but no longer.

The pandemic had far-reaching consequences in our society, especially for young people—including my children. My smallest had her kindergarten year disrupted so that when she finally returned to school in person, she struggled to make friends. My middle child’s online elementary school didn’t prepare her for the very different demands of middle school. And my high schooler spent too much time online, imbibing geopolitics and national news in ways that left him stressed and cynical.

Sundays at home did renew our individual energy and family life. But they also exacerbated our sense of disconnection from community life. Staying in meant we got more and more of our information from screens—which in turn presented the world as increasingly fractious. 

By staying home as a family on Sundays, I realized, I was subtly and unintentionally telling my children that the world was too tiresome and too fraught to engage on the weekends. I was modeling the idea that we could retreat, even from life together with fellow Christians.

Our children took note. Initially, they complained that they saw less of our friends, but then they began to communicate a growing distress about public life. They told me their worries about school shootings, the prospect of a military draft, friends moving away, and disagreements within our extended family over politics. For a variety of reasons, each of my children grew more ambivalent about relationships in our family, church, and schools. Our withdrawal from church fed into other kinds of retreat. Looking back, this trajectory seems designed to produce a collective depression.

Upon reflection, the most spiritually formative time in my life bears some similarities to this one.

I was a couple of months shy of twelve years old when my littlest sister died from a heart condition. Shortly after she passed away, my dad built our family a new house. Moving into this house meant that I had to leave my school and church, which were too far from our new neighborhood.  When I began seventh grade just a few months later, I was overwhelmed by grief and had no cousins, no church community, and no school friends around to help. I’d never been so profoundly alone before this experience and have never been so since.

Mercifully, we joined Westover Hills, a vibrant, 400-person congregation that embraced our family at the lowest point of our lives. Though our grief felt isolating, we still attended services every Sunday morning and night, and every Wednesday too. Soon, our family life was structured by our church participation. My dad joined the orchestra, my mom, the choir. I joined the youth group and my younger sister, children’s church.  

When I look back now, I see my family was hobbling along, doing the best we could under the circumstances. But I also see choir members’ mauve robes with cranberry accents, their arms lifted and eyes closed in worship; deacons with broad shoulders and smiles; friends with cars, picking me up for a Friday youth game night. The people of Westover carried us through the most trying time of our lives with their faithfulness, their voluntary good cheer, their testimonies, and their prayers. They were not just our church but the church, helping us to keep our faith when our hearts were broken. I remain so grateful to them, and I always feel deep down that Westover Hills of the 1990s is the community I am truly from.

Westover came to mind when my husband recently announced that we really need to return to church, in person and for good. No more Sundays on the couch. 

We committed to going to the same church we’d been watching online, at least for a while. We couldn’t risk losing momentum by going church shopping. We needed the structure, the regularity of church every Sunday in person. The megachurch would suffice.

This church is 22,000 strong, and in our service, there are about 5,000 people each week. This is a massive number of people. I feel like an ant when we walk in and even more so when we try to walk out, a process that brings the word “stampede” to mind. Two weeks ago, we waited 30 minutes to exit the parking lot. 

There are so many little inconveniences in our Sunday mornings now, and they add up—to work. It is work to wrangle everyone, including myself, into the car, into the pew, and then back home again.

But we have a totally different experience of church in our actual pews. Our pastor preaches the same sermon in real time and online, so it isn’t the sermon that’s different. It’s the palpable participation of the congregation that makes the greatest difference. 

In person, you can hear and see how the preaching lands with fellow believers. Three weeks ago, I heard a man say, “You better say that again”—emphatically, in a baritone staccato—when our pastor preached a salient point. 

Another time, a person directly in front of me spent three minutes intermittently nodding her head in agreement during a section of preaching about surrender. She sat with her smallest girl right next to her, almost in her lap, and three boys right beside them. When our pastor landed a point, she nodded. He repeated or extended an idea, she nodded again. Later, the pastor asked, “How many people here have ever felt they are not worthy of a calling they feel God has placed on their lives?” Hands went up all around us. 

A few weeks ago, more than 200 people were baptized. From our seats, we could see their bodies dipping into water on the main stage. We watched their faces in detail on the big screens, televised next to the words of the worship song we were all singing.Another person went down into the water; she came up smiling. She lifted her arms in triumph and the congregation swelled with cheers—a roar of celebration.

I would have seen none of this online: not the nodding, not the hands, not the vulnerability to say, I struggle with a sense of unworthiness. I might have seen the same person get baptized on my screen, but I wouldn’t have been there to raise my cheer with the congregation. 

Now I realize, we make the event an event. The congregation, the laity, together, responds to ideas, to baptisms, to the need for prayer, and to the opportunity for praise. We model vulnerability and faithfulness for each other. Without our voices, our nodding heads, our cheers and encouragement, church does not happen. We don’t hear much about liturgy in a megachurch like this, but the word comes from a combination of Greek words for people and work. And it’s true, it takes work to get to church on Sunday and participate—but it is our work to do. Only we can do it.

Since recommitting to church in person, my children seem more sure of the world. They’re still aware of its troubles, but they have a visceral knowledge of what a life-giving community feels like and what it means to take heart, together, because Christ has overcome the world (John 16:33).

This is not knowledge I alone can give them. I can teach them, and a pastor can preach to them, but only a community of believers can cocreate the context in which our teaching and preaching make robust, embodied sense. Every time my children hear someone encourage the pastor, cheer on a fellow congregant, or lift their voices in earnest praise, they see that God has been faithful to real, live people. God grows more and more visible, more and more plausible, as they witness worship in real time. 

As I look back on our season of withdrawal, I feel a new sense of responsibility. People go through trials, individually and as families. We reach breaking points. We sometimes weather grief and get stuck in sadness. It is the work of the laity to come together, to lift up the name of Christ, to receive God’s Word, to bear each other’s burdens (Gal. 6:2) and foster each other’s faith as they—we—heal and grow closer to God. 

I want to do my part.

Erica Bryand Ramirez is a sociologist of religion who teaches Christian History at Baylor’s Truett Seminary. She lives in San Antonio with Chris and their three children. 

Culture

What Would Lecrae Do?

Why Kendrick Lamar’s question matters.

Kendrick Lamar and Lecrae on a colorful background.
Christianity Today October 3, 2024
Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

For the first few minutes of Kendrick Lamar’s new song, I only half listened, nodding in time to the hypnotic beat while responding to emails on my laptop. Then came the line that made me sit up and stare bug-eyed at my husband, who was listening beside me on the couch.

“Did he say Lecrae?” We kept listening. A few minutes later, Kendrick said the name again. My mouth dropped open. When the song ended, we played it from the top, this time listening carefully.

The untitled track, released on Instagram on September 11, expresses the acclaimed rapper’s weariness and disgust with the contemporary hip-hop world and the music industry at large. In the song, Kendrick feels jaded by the machinations of the very system in which he has found exceptional success. He has received 17 Grammys, 29 BET Hip Hop Awards, and a 2018 Pulitzer Prize. His Drake diss track “Not Like Us” broke multiple streaming records, becoming so popular that, earlier this year at a sold-out Los Angeles arena, he performed the song to roaring applause five times in a row. Kendrick was recently announced as the headliner for the 2025 Super Bowl Halftime Show.

But instead of celebrating any of these successes, Kendrick spends all five minutes and six seconds of his new song venting his contempt for an industry full of people who “parade in gluttony” and “glorify scamming.” He describes a “culture bred with carnivores,” rife with liars, mercenaries, and cowards whose money emboldens them to make “nasty decisions.” His lyrics are equal parts searching and vengeful. In a repeated refrain, Kendrick pleads for God to give him life, peace, and forgiveness—to “draw the line” between himself and the peers whose wickedness he despises.

Elsewhere, his words turn violent, calling for the “village” to burn down, for heads to crack, for “agony, assault, and battery.” “I think it’s time to watch the party die,” Kendrick repeats again and again. Things are so irredeemably corrupt that he suggests the only solution is destruction, Great Flood style.

The rapper doesn’t waver from his verdict until the final verse, where he asks the question that made me sit up and stare: “Sometimes I wonder what Lecrae would do.”

Lecrae, of course, is the Christian rapper Lecrae Devaughn Moore, whose career began in the early 2000s and whose frequent collaborators have included Andy Mineo, Trip Lee, Sho Baraka, and Jackie Hill Perry. Most of Lecrae’s early work is explicitly theological, with songs like “Don’t Waste Your Life” (“We’re created for him / Outta the dust he made us for him / Elects us and he saves us for him”) and “Tell the World” (“You hung there bleedin’/ And ya’ died for my lies and my cheatin’ / My lust and my greed, and / What is a man that you mindful of him?”) garnering him widespread acclaim in the evangelical world and ins with the likes of John Piper, Tim Keller, Tony Evans, and Judah Smith.

Later, with albums like Gravity (2012) and Anomaly (2014), Lecrae moved away from overtly theological lyrics, instead weaving his faith into songs about identity, relationships, race, and class. In more recent years, he’s written extensively about experiences with corruption, hypocrisy, and racism within the church that resulted in a severe crisis of both faith and mental health.

Still, the core of Lecrae’s music remains his relationship with God and the church. Although a highly successful artist in his own right—with BET Awards, Grammys, and several No. 1 Billboard hits—his audience has always been, perhaps always will be, much smaller than someone like Kendrick Lamar’s.

And yet—his influence matters. Lecrae and Kendrick struck up a friendship early in their careers after the latter released his theodicy-themed track, “Faith.” Kendrick has long been vocal about his relationship with Jesus, and though some have questioned his orthodoxy, his faith remains a central theme in his music.

“Sometimes I wonder what Lecrae would do / F— these n— up or show ’em just what prayer do?” Kendrick wonders. Faced with the same seemingly irredeemable industry, would Lecrae pursue some form of vigilante justice—visceral, instant, immediately satisfying—or the slow, patient route of prayer? Moments later, after a fresh round of denunciations, Kendrick repeats the question: “I mean—[I] wonder what Lecrae would do.”

Perhaps Kendrick has read Lecrae’s memoir, released in 2020, detailing the rapper’s struggles with childhood trauma, depression, and a crisis of faith after the evangelical church’s cold response to a string of police killings of unarmed Black men.

Or perhaps he’s listened to Lecrae’s 2022 track “Deconstruction,” in which the rapper describes hitting rock bottom until a midnight encounter with God broke through the fog of despair.

In both works, Lecrae details a process of healing marked by weakness and surrender, a slow, steady journey entirely dependent on the love of God and others. It’s a stark departure from the brute force and willpower Kendrick finds so attractive. And it’s clear that both Lecrae’s art and his life have been compelling enough to make Kendrick take notice.

As a writer whose work revolves around my Christian faith, I often find myself discouraged, imagining I am destined to obscurity. When peers publish bestsellers or have their books adapted into movies, I find myself wishing my work was more like theirs, addressing Zeitgeisty themes like race, sexuality, or climate anxiety from a primarily agnostic worldview.

Instead, I find myself compulsively writing about spirituality—specifically, the conundrum of being a rational person whose life trajectory has been shaped by supernatural experiences. Sometimes I even feel resentful at my religion, as though it’s a restriction on my art, relegating me to a lifetime of limited reach at best, and irrelevance at worst.

So to hear one of the most talented and decorated rappers alive name-check an artist whose work has revolved around Jesus was deeply heartening. What moves me is not the idea that someday my own work might be noticed by someone more famous. It’s the thought that a sincere, intelligent, and profound artist like Kendrick Lamar, someone who’s seen no end of good ideas and interesting art, might find something in straightforwardly Christian music that gives him pause, that makes him reconsider.

Art that gains this sort of traction must do more than present accurate theological facts or insist on the supremacy of a “Christian worldview.” It must be prophetic.

Prophetic art is art that reveals truths heretofore unrecognized, unseen, or inaccessible. To be recognized as prophetic is one of the highest forms of praise an artist can receive. It’s a word that’s been used to describe Kendrick Lamar, who cunningly folded a lament about toxic drinking culture into his “club-banger” track “Swimming Pools” and spares no one in his excoriating analysis of anti-Blackness in “The Blacker the Berry” (“You hate me, don’t you? / I know you hate me just as much as you hate yourself” and “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street / When gang-banging make me kill a n— blacker than me? / Hypocrite!”)

I would argue that “prophetic” is a fitting description for Lecrae’s work as well. Throughout his career, Lecrae has used his music not only to preach the gospel but also to engage his audience with uncomfortable truths about everything from religious hypocrisy (“Bookstore pimpin’ them hope books / Like God don’t know how broke looks / And telling me that I’m gon’ reap a mil’ / If I sow into these low crooks”) to the entrenched racial biases that mar white America’s practice of Christianity (“Right before the fall of 2015, I was all off / It involved killing Michael Brown, had me feeling down / Tweeted ’bout it, Christians call me clown … spoke about my pain, I was met with blame / ‘Shame on you, ’Crae, stop crying, get back to Jesus’ name’”).

Prophetic work is more than just eloquent or insightful, and it doesn’t always find commercial success. It is born of an abiding connection to the Spirit of God—the type of connection that empowers us to create honestly and courageously, even at risk to our comfort and reputation. To make prophetic work is decidedly not to change ourselves to fit the Zeitgeist but to maintain fidelity to the unique questions, ideas, perspectives, and modes of expression God has placed within us—and to make our work unto the Lord, the source of all wisdom and prophecy.

Only then can we contribute something to culture that doesn’t already exist—something capable of causing the Kendrick Lamars of our own disciplines to wonder what we would do.

Christina Gonzalez Ho is the author of the audio series The Last Two Years and the cofounder of Estuaries

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